Free Kicking Ashe by Pauline Baird Jones

answers. She stepped out, a bit surprised to find the room empty. She dumped the towel in the low-tech laundry basket, pausing to make sure it didn’t do anything more than just sit there. This was indeed an odd, primitive place, even if it was merely a camp.
    She’d done something called a camping trip with some Earth cousins when she was very small. Uncle Istah had a portable plumping unit he wished them to try. In her memory, it had been deemed most satisfactory, though her mother might have been trying to be polite. Her plumbing standards were very high. Ashe did not ponder her mother’s reaction to this place because she knew it would fall in negative range and because she wanted her mother like a little girl. Wouldn’t take much to have her fetal and sucking her thumb.
    Tired continued to drag at her as she padded to the cubicle that held the borrowed clothing. Her knickers dried during the short walk, so there was no hindrance to dressing, if she didn’t count her utter and complete exhaustion. She sank to the bench, pulled on the shirt and got the pants up to her knees before she ran out of steam. The curtain wavered a bit and she blinked, trying and failing to clear her vision.
    You need to get moving. We need sustenance.
    Sustenance. Right. Give me a minute. Her lids drifted down…
    If you sleep now, you will not waken.
    Maybe that’s for the best. We shouldn’t be here. We should be…somewhere that isn’t here.
    What if we are exactly where we should be?
    You’re just saying that to give me a reason to get up and go eat. It kind of worked because her lids lifted, though only partly. The curtain hung straight and still, silence inside and out. What if everyone had gone and left her alone in this place? She felt alone. The smell of the water and the soap she’d used lingered in the air. Her mouth felt fresher after the toothpaste, though that might be because her tongue was desperate to taste something. The structure felt warmer with the addition of moisture from her shower.
    Someone in the last time line betrayed the Keltinarian people, betrayed him.
    Surprise straightened her mushy spine. The Constilinium. Her brain replayed images of the red energy trails staining the time stream in places it shouldn’t have been.
    Someone supplied it to the bad guy.
    Would have been nice to know who the bad guy was before getting hosed by the time tsunami. But if we fixed time, that shouldn’t matter.
    Time isn’t—
    —tidy. She’d gotten the memo about a hundred million times. On the other side of exhausted, she knew that food and rest would help. Which meant standing up, pulling up her pants and facing this world once again. And if she didn’t do it soon, Lurch was liable to over-deplete himself trying to help her. What doesn’t kill us makes us strong. She braced her hands on the bench and pushed, was a bit surprised when she made it upright, pulling her pants up at the same time, so she wouldn’t have to take on gravity again by bending down. She slid her feet into the sandals waiting under the bench, used the faint glow of virtue to get out of the dressing cubicle, rode it all the way to the tent flap. It might as well have been a wall, but luckily fingers not hers pulled the flap back.
    Calendria peered inside. “Are you well, Lady?”
    It was easier to nod, not that easy to step out into the wider compound. Everything looked a bit distant, a bit indistinct at the edges, though she did note that Shan was not in sight. That should have been relief, but he was the only familiar face in this place, which left her conflicted instead of relieved. From the clarity on the other side of tired, she realized that Shan wasn’t really familiar and that she not only wasn’t at the top of her game, but the bottom of her game was a fading goal. Was she lost from time, not just in time? If she were, then there would be no one riding the stream to her rescue.
    We will rescue ourselves.
    The bracing assertion helped as