Free An Officer’s Duty by Jean Johnson Page B

and brand-new looking. Leuron frowned at him. “You said you went and bought those shoes yesterday, ’cause you just found out they were comin’ apart at the seams!”
    “How would
you
know anything like that?” Luke asked, eyeing Ia warily.
    “I was out jogging at that hour,” Ia told him. “You had your hood up, but the streetlamp showed your face when you straightened and turned down Settler Avenue. I have a good memory for faces…and you looked rather furtive when you left the church.”
    “You’re crazy,” Luke protested. “Okay, I’ll admit I did stop in and use the restroom, but that doesn’t make me a Church
skut
! It’s all just coincidence!”
    “It doesn’t take much to put all that together,” a girl named Diselle muttered. Ia remembered her from over two years ago. “Looks pretty damned suspicious to me, too.”
    “I trust Ia’s judgment, Luke,” Rabbit told him, moving up and patting his arm. “You might as well follow Cassia and help her feel better about her decision to leave us. She’s probably feeling pretty bad right now.”
    He gave Ia and the others—the ones who had been around longest—a dismayed look, then frowned and shook his head. “She’s right. You
are
mad. You’d turn on one of your own just because of some…?”
    Rather than finishing that statement, he shook his head a second time and turned to go collect his own things.
    Zezu looked like he would protest. Ia held up two fingers, cutting him off. Rabbit’s own solemn look kept the others quiet. A moment after Luke passed through the door, it opened again, admitting the Solarican waitress from the hallway. Balancing the serving platter on shoulder and hand, she eyed the cluster of youths.
    “Wherrrre do you want yourrr food?” she asked Ia.
    “Third table on the far left, the empty spot next to the pink bag,” Ia directed her. Again, Zezu started to protest, and again she held up her fingers. Only when the waitress had left, shutting the door behind her, did Ia lower her hand. “
Never
argue about our business in front of outsiders.”
    He frowned. “What is this, some sort of cult? Is that what that ‘blessing’
shakk
was all about?”
    “More like a resistance movement, albeit in the preplanning stages,” Ia corrected him. Stepping forward, Ia pressed her hands against his and his cousin’s foreheads. “Watch, and learn.”
    Both shifted to move back, but it was too late. With a simple touch of her fingertips, Ia pulled them onto the timeplains. Since both young men were close friends as well as cousins, it was economical to show both of them at the same time. It would also reassure them that they hadn’t hallucinated, since they would later be able to compare notes.
    This time, it wasn’t a fade or a flip. It was a snap, and a mental yank to get them up onto the grass. Zezu blinked and looked around. Ia was no longer touching his forehead; instead, she gripped his hand. She did the same for his cousin Leuron, immersing both of them—all three of them—firmly in the timestreams, making this moment as real as she could for them.
    “What the hell?” he gasped, peering around the undulating, sepia-toned prairie, with its Earth-yellowed grasses and crisscrossing streams.
    “Where did the restaurant go?” Leuron demanded. He rubbed at his chest. “Man…my heart is racing!”
    “It’s still there,” Ia reassured them. “And your heart—the real one, in your real body—is actually only beating once for every two or three minutes you spend in here. It’s all relative.”
    “And where is here?” Zezu demanded, glaring at her. “Take us back!”
    “Not until you’ve seen what Rabbit and I are really doing. What we’re working for. As for where we are,” Ia stated, lifting her chin as she looked around, “welcome to my world. Everything you’re seeing right now is what I see…and what I see, gentlemeioas, is
Time
.”
    The word rumbled across the plains, grumbling and echoing like