Free Into the Rift by Cynthia Garner

being hatched, and by whom? To-bias hadn’t told her from whom he’d gotten the device, just that the person had been mad with ambition.
    Tori picked up the black apparatus and brought it closer to peer at the small knobs. She couldn’t discern any labels or hash marks on the casing, nothing to indicate what function each knob had. She needed to get a magnifying glass to tell for sure.
    The more she studied this thing, the more intrigued she became. It really was an ingenious contraption created by an imaginative and clever inventor. What had been his intention behind building it? Had he meant to make mischief? Or had his plans been more altruistic than that?
    A quick rap on her bedroom door was followed by the door swinging open. Rand poked his head around the edge. “Good morning. You went out early. Or is it that you came in late?” His head tipped to one side as if he were considering a complicated brain teaser. “Oh well, no matter. What’s that?” he asked, his gaze on the device in her hand. He came into the room wearing jeans, his chest and feet bare.
    “Rand!” Tori closed her fist around the object in question and fought the urge to hide it behind her back. She wanted to deflect him from the device, not call attention to it, and putting her hand behind her back would make him all the more curious.
    Lifting a hand, he lazily scratched his chest. His mouth opened wide in a huge yawn.
    “You can’t just barge in here. You need to wait for me to tell you to come in.” She scowled at him. “What if I’d been getting dressed?”
    “Then I’d have seen bits of you I don’t necessarily want to see,” he said. Tori had lost her East End accent long ago, but even after all these decades, Rand’s tones still held the flavor of his British human host. He stuck his fingers into the front pockets of his jeans and hunched his shoulders. “I dare say I’d have recovered from the shock eventually.” He glanced at her hand. “So, what is that?”
    Though she was certain she could trust her brother, she was duty-bound not to divulge the secret. She liked Tobias. More than that, she admired him. She wouldn’t betray his trust in her. As nonchalantly as she could, she replied, “It’s just an MP3 player a friend asked me to try to fix for him.”
    Rand raised his brows, skepticism shadowing his eyes. “And why would he think you could fix it?”
    “I was a radio communications technician back in the day. I’ve kept up with all the new gadgets as a hobby,” was all she offered. She didn’t want to talk to him about serving as a communications officer in the American Army during World War II. If he was as pacifistic as he’d been before their Influx, he wouldn’t approve. She was sure he’d felt right at home during the sixties. Hell, he probably started the whole “Make Love Not War” movement. He would overlook the nobility of the cause, and right now she didn’t want to get into an argument with him. Not when they’d just found each other again.
    It was time for a change of subject. “So, what do you think of Arizona?” She kept her eyes on him and her hand wrapped around the device. It wouldn’t do for him to get too close a look or he’d see it wasn’t an MP3 player. She kept her voice cheery, hoping to distract him. “I mean, I know you’ve been here only a few days, but how do you like it so far?”
    Her brother looked like he wanted to pursue the other topic, but for now he let it drop, for which she was grateful. While ordinarily she had no problems discussing her job or, in this case, a special assignment, this situation was different. He was her brother, and she didn’t like being deceitful with him. She wanted him to feel like he could trust her because maybe, just maybe, he’d be more inclined to stay. But if he thought she was being disingenuous with him, it could be all the encouragement he needed to leave.
    “I don’t know,” Rand said. His shoulders hunched further. “I