Free Nomad by JL Bryan

expanding his own power.
    Monster , she thought. You'll be dead this time tomorrow.
    After his cross-country practice, Logan and some of the other runners returned to his residential hall. Later, he rode in a silver Lexus sport-utility vehicle, driven by one of his friends, to a climbing gym in town. Apparently not exhausted from the miles he'd run earlier in the day, Logan spent two hours climbing the steep walls, as though he had an inexhaustible fountain of energy within him.
    Raven wanted to be careful and methodical with her mission, but she felt a single day of reconnaissance was enough. The future Secretary-General didn't have any special security around him now. If she waited too long, her pursuers from the future might locate her, and life would get very complicated.
    Tomorrow, she told herself.

Chapter Eight
     
    Raven rented a cheap room at a dank, rundown hotel in New Haven. The clerk was rude and blew his cigarette smoke in her face while she checked in, but he took cash and didn't ask for identification, and the hotel was in walking distance of the Yale campus.
    Her room was dim and narrow, with a foul-smelling green carpet. She locked the door, drew the window curtain, and took the steel cube from her backpack. She sat on the creaky, sunken bed. The microscopic devices built into her sunglasses could access the networks of 2013 and pull present-day data for her, but they seemed to have no memories of the future. On the other hand, the cube was full of future data.
    She flicked through more videos from her own time, the war-torn cities, the political prisoner camps. They prompted a flood of memories, and she lay back on the sour bed and closed her eyes, one hand on her pistol.
    She remembered her friend Kari taking out the concrete face of a heavily guarded building with a rapid-fire rifle full of plastique rounds. The time-travel lab was inside a defense research facility, a former missile testing ground deep in the Utah desert. Raven and Kari were among the team of revolutionary fighters entrusted with the most critical mission of all, the one that could finally topple the regime.
    In the desert sky, drones operated by other revolutionaries would distract the base's air defense system while the ground team made their attack. Nobody on the ground team was older than twenty, but all were hardened veterans with years of heavy combat experience. None of them expected to survive the ambush except for Pascal, an experienced assassin who had spent weeks preparing to travel back through time and kill the dictator long before he came to power. The entire course of history would change.
    Raven and the other foot soldiers were there to open a path into the lab for Pascal, then to shield him while he operated the time-travel device.
    Another, closely related memory emerged from the deep, from several weeks before the attack on the time-travel facility. An old friend had come to see her. She'd been saddened at the sight of him--dirty and tangled gray beard, his threadbare coat, one leg in a cheap, flimsy brace. He'd coughed violently as they spoke, and each time he'd coughed, he'd wiped his lips and pretended nothing had happened, though it left a thin smear of blood on his hand. Medical care was difficult to find for those on the run from the regime, and black-market clinics were expensive.
    His name was Colin Taggart, and he'd once been a good friend of her father's, back in the forgotten, brighter world of her childhood.
    Raven had been living in a squat outside San Francisco with Kari and a few other friends. The shack was cobbled together from wood and sheets of tin, with electricity from the informal pirate grid that ran through the slums. Water and cooking gas had to be purchased from street vendors with cash or barter.
    She hadn't seen Taggart in years, and he'd clearly not been well in the intervening time. He'd arrived at their barricaded front door alone, leaning heavily on a tree limb he used as a walking