Free Dragon Sword by Mark London Williams Page A

their music?”
    “ Can’t say. I’m not the pilot. But
it seems to have adapted p-chw! to you. Tk-tk-tk! What did you use for my atomic structure, since most of my atoms
were here with me?”
    “ A bit of the eggshell that hatched
you.” And here he seemed to grow nostalgic.
    “ Ah, yes. They always save our
shells. Do you have anything klng! of Eli’s?”
    It was that question that led us to
Eli’s father. We thought the laboratory would be a logical place to
start the search for our missing friend. Until K’lion modified his
position.
    “ Sandusky-sire won’t be there,” he
said. “They keep driving him out of his nest.”
    “ Then how will we find Eli if we
can’t find his father?”
    “ We can find the sire,” K’lion
said. “He’s not lost kww! in time. Just in sorrow. Pop us
into Dimension Five, Thea. We should skip-jump through and arrive
at night.”
    “ Arrive where?”
    “ I hazard guesses.” And he set the
controls for some terrestrial coordinates.
    We disappeared briefly into the
Fifth Dimension — so quickly that there was no napping or ship
music. When we reappeared, the moon was out.
    We were above a low range of
mountains. It was cold, but there was a campfire burning. Eli’s
father, Sandusky, sat next to it.
    He looked up at us and smiled a
little. “You got out, K’lion. That’s good. And you, Thea.” He stood
up and took my hands in his. “You’re back.”
    “ I don’t know if I am back,” I told
him. “I might just be visiting.” Then I realized he had no
lingo-spot and couldn’t understand me. K’lion would have to speak
for us both.
    “ How’d you find me?” Sandusky
asked.
    “ Factored in the heart,” K’lion
said. “Knew about the satelli-T-T-T-e overhead. Knew you’d want to
stay away from the lab awhile, even Wolf House, if they could
monitor you. But knew too you would not want to forget. Charted
perimeter of the satellite’s surveillance grid. And decided you
would be just outside it, unseen but seeing.” K’lion pointed down
the ridge, and there below, in the distance, in the Valley of the
Moon, was a glimpse of the Wolf House ruins.
    Sandusky sipped something from a
round, metallic cup. “Eli’s gone, K’lion.”
    “ I know.”
    “ Back in time someplace, like his
mother. He thought he could find her and bring her back home. It’s
been almost a month, and there’s no sign.”
    “ Me and Thea wish to fetch-get
him.”
    “ How?”
    “ Tell us when he is.”
    Eli’s father smiled at this.
Momentarily. “I have reason to believe Eli’s mother might be in the
city of San Francisco, during a period of one of our worst Earth
wars. Eli tried to go back to find her. I hope…he’s someplace
safe.”
    Then he looked at me. I believe he
knew I could understand him. “The slow pox is getting worse here.
They’re talking about quarantines soon. …I hope we haven’t done
something terrible by breaking apart time like this. Not just ‘we’
as in all people. But ‘we’ as in my family, specifically. As in me. Specifically.” He sipped again from his cup. “It doesn’t
feel like anything…can be controlled anymore.”
    Slow pox. The epidemic that was
raging in my city of Alexandria when Eli and K’lion first appeared
out of time. Apparently the authorities here wanted Eli to
deliberately bring a sample of the disease back, so they could
study it. Mother always said the only reliable part of an
experiment was its unpredictable side. The virus
escaped.
    It appears the very act of creating
virus cultures from the scrolls and animal skins they brought
forward in time created the same epidemic that compelled them to go
look for the virus in the first place. Like a big circle, or the
giant mirrors in Pharos’s lighthouse back home, endlessly
reflecting each other. But I wanted to tell Sandusky his time
experiments brought good results, too. If Eli had not come back in
time, they would have surely taken my life when they took Mother’s.
I have