Adam's Journey (The Aliomenti Saga - Book 8) Read online

  And as he said, he thought Genevieve would enjoy the outcome.

  He glanced over at her. Genevieve had one hand on her forehead, her eyes were closed, and she had leaned forward slightly.

  Adam frowned. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “That… that was… that really seemed more intense than the other… moves. Through time.” She clenched her teeth as she spoke. “I feel really… dizzy.”

  Adam chewed his bottom lip. He’d not noticed the displacement sensation much at all on the hops forward through time, but those had never been more than a few years in length. He realized that she’d only experienced jumps two years or less in length overall thus far, and given that they’d just moved forward eight years… she’d be experiencing a sensation far more powerful this time.

  The sensation reminded him of teleportation, and for him, there was no negative impact. He regularly teleported between safe zones, but for many miles at a time, probably the equivalent of fifty or more years of time travel.

  Genevieve had never teleported, and had thus never trained her body physically to deal with the sensations. Most who learned teleportation started moving just a foot or two, then a zone, then to the farthest spot they could see, and so forth, building up both their strength and skill, but also becoming accustomed to that displacement sensation.

  And she’d never gotten that type of practice. “It’s caused you problems when we’ve done the other moves, too, hasn’t it?”

  He could see the strain on her face as she struggled to admit the truth. “Yes.”

  He sat back against his seat, exhaling deeply. “I need to think about this.” He turned to face her. “Let’s see if I can remove the sensations a bit. I’ll need to… dig around inside your mind a bit. Is that okay?”

  She snorted, then winced; the move aggravated the dizziness anew. “It’s not like I could stop you.”

  “Genevieve, I won’t do it if you don’t want me to.”

  She nodded once, slightly.

  He started by sending in Energy, focusing on loosening the tension in the muscles in her head, then moved to the fluid in the tubes in her ears. She’d described the displacement as being comparable to dizziness, and so he focused his Energy there, found the fluid and tiny hairs to be highly agitated, and set to work soothing them.

  After a moment, she opened her eyes and sat up straight, surprised. “That’s much better. Thank you.” She turned to face him. “Why was it worse that time than the others? With those, it wasn’t as intense and faded quickly.”

  “We moved forward eight years this time, rather than two. There’s a greater amount of energy involved the more time you move through. That should mean that the sense of displacement and potential problems with dizziness go up very quickly with each year we add to our move. Each person’s sensitivity to that type of sensation is different.” He shrugged, and offered a wry grin. “Lucky you, you have an unnaturally high sensitivity to it.” Which would be a problem going forward, quite literally.

  She studied his face, detecting the doubt in his mind, and he nodded at her. “Trust what you’re hearing and reading from me. Your skills are strong enough now that you should be able to tell me what I’m concerned about.”

  She chewed her bottom lip for a moment. “There’s something about that… sensitivity… that’s a big problem? For the future?”

  “Correct.” He frowned. “We just traveled eight years into the future and it was quite a difficult experience for you. We must move over one thousand years into the future to get back to when I began. This machine can’t move the whole distance at once. I traveled back and moved two hundred years or so each hop.” He watched her face as she processed that information.

  She thought about it for a moment before recognition dawned on her face. She shuddered, then frowned. “That’s going to be… difficult for me. Isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “We’ll figure something out. As for the moment, we’ve arrived several hours before we need to do anything, so I’m planning to get a bit of sleep. I’m hoping I wake up with some good ideas for the final stretch of the journey back to my time.” He nodded at her. “I’d recommend you do the same.”

  He set the alarm chime on the dashboard and nestled back against the seat back, falling asleep almost instantly.

  His mind seemed predisposed to reminding him of the horrific attack on his mother, replaying the instant where the artificial sword punctured her skin and muscle tissue, where she fell to the ground, almost covered by the tall, swaying grasses that abounded in the open field, blood streaming from front and back, eyes wide with shock and her face pale. He’d consciously avoided acknowledging what had happened during the incident, keeping his concentration on ensuring that the fake blade did the minimal amount of damage necessary to keep appearances up. He’d known it was coming, knew she’d survive, and that kept his mind off what had happened.

  Until now. Until he needed to sleep and prepare for one final intrusion into the world of his parents’ distant past, the final nudge required to keep his history as it was meant to be, to ensure that, centuries hence, his parents would welcome him into the world as their only child.

  He woke, breathing heavily, sweat pouring down his face. He sat up and, in a habit born of centuries of life, used his Energy to both calm his mind and breathing while simultaneously burning off the moisture wetting his skin. He turned his nano-based suit mesh-like to allow the cool air of the cabin to brush his skin. He then took one final deep breath and glanced at the time. He’d woken up an hour too early.

  He sighed and turned toward his bag and found Genevieve holding the journal out to him, a frown upon her face. No, not a frown. She looked… sick? Angry? “Bad dream?”

  “You could say that.” He took the journal and started flipping through the pages to the final section, his eyes flicking back to her, trying to read her emotions via empathy and failing because her emotions were so… scrambled.

  “Did you know you talk in your sleep?” There was something… ominous to her question. She managed to convey in her telepathic words a sense of foreboding, as if there was something she’d learned that would cause problems. She generally managed to send words and he’d sense her feelings about the conversation separately; in this case, she’d managed to modify the telepathic tone to make the empathic readings unnecessary.

  Odd.

  “I do?” He wondered why that insight might be so interesting to her. He could think of only one reason she’d raise the question. “Did I say something… interesting?”

  “You kept saying ‘don’t hurt her’ and ‘don’t die, Momma.’” She folder her arms across her chest. “You told me your mother was alive in your future. Why would you be having nightmares about her death?”

  “She isn’t dead.”

  “You seemed incredibly concerned about that possibility with your words as you slept, though.” She leaned in a bit closer, eyes fierce and unblinking. “It was as if, in your dreams, you were reliving a near death experience for her, as if you’d just watched her nearly die.”

  His empathic skills were far too refined to mistake a bluster designed to draw out information for something stated with the confidence of true knowledge. He couldn’t deny the truth at this point, not without violating his own rules of Energy use. “Brutal thing to see.”

  She leaned back against the seat, facing forward, shaking her head. “Adam and Eva? That’s… I can’t even fathom that.” She offered a faint laugh. “It does explain why all of the steps you took were so focused on the two of them, though.”

  “Only the last was focused on her. The others were focused on my father.” He scowled, wondering why he felt the need to be so defensive, or why he felt the need to offer the final counter to her comment. “And your daughter.”

  “Mmm hmm.” She laughed. “If I’d known who your mother was when I first met you I probably would have tried to kill you in your sleep. Eva… she pushed Adam to leave the village, and she certainly was no fri
end to my Lizzie before I… left.” She swallowed once, and he sensed she was having her own flashback to a death scene she’d consciously avoided watching. “But from what I’ve seen, from what you’ve told me, she’s… changed. For the better. Perhaps even become someone I could… like.”

  “I didn’t expect that you’d take the news well when I first arrived here, but I’m glad you figured it out. And that you’re… not going to try to kill me in my sleep about it now.” He sighed. “In the future I’ll return to, you’ll now be only the third person who knows my mother’s identity.”

  She looked baffled. “I don’t understand.”

  “Eva referred to Adam as her brother. Adam referred to Eva as his sister. Though they were separated for quite some time, that… relationship idea stuck with those who’d known them longest and best. When Hope—sorry, Elizabeth—would tell her rare story about those times, she’d mention Adam and call him Eva’s brother, for example. My parents never bothered to correct anyone about that. And since I was so obviously Adam’s son…” He glanced at her, realizing that the comment made no sense to her. Yet. “This is not my natural appearance. When we get back to the future, I’ll change back to look like my normal self. Most people think I look like my father’s identical twin.”

  She sat back, so suddenly that he thought she might hurt herself. “Oh my.”

  “Yes. Thus, while I couldn’t deny who my father was… well, everyone just assumed that my father and I lived with his sister, that my mother was probably a non-immortal woman who’d died years before they met me.” He glanced at her. “With all that, if they learned who my mother was now… what would they think?”

  Genevieve shook her head. “He rejected her obvious interest by telling her, in front of several others, that he wasn’t interested and thought of her like a sister. We… well, we weren’t always nice, and whenever she’d look at him we’d start joking, telling her that she wasn’t supposed to feel that way about her brother.” She shrugged. “All of us knew they weren’t related, but it became enough of a joke that it probably sounded like a claim of an actual family relationship.” She frowned. “I can’t believe that joke persisted so long that you’re actually afraid of telling people she’s your mother because they’ll think you’re the son of siblings.”

  He felt faint. The lie his parents allowed to persist through the centuries, the one that kept him from acknowledging his mother… it was joke, a story known to be false by everyone who’d first heard it? “But everyone I know in the future knows it to be true.”

  “Everybody now knows it’s false.” She looked sympathetic.

  He walked through it, walked through the story. The original villagers knew the truth. Perhaps the newcomers heard the “joke” as fact, because they’d only started bringing in large new batches of residents after his father left. Those newcomers would have no reason to suspect that the phrase “brother” was anything other than a literal, familial relationship. When Will Stark first met Eva and Hope, both referred to Eva having a brother who was no longer living in the village, but they still used the term. He suspected Hope, still a young child, couldn’t distinguish between the truth and cruel taunts, and thus believed the term to be factually correct. Eva never bothered to fill Will in on the truth. Adam had no reason to mention it, for he believed that Eva was either dead or that he’d never see her again.

  And Will never corrected the lie… because he never knew it to be anything other than the truth.

  And thus, the entire first generation of the Aliomenti, born on the ashes of the North Village, never knew the truth and perpetuated a lie that lived on to this day.

  He shook his head, masking the huge emotional turmoil inside. “My entire life has been lived around a lie that the originators saw as nothing more than a joke.” He looked up at her, uncertain whether he wanted her sympathy, or to scream at her for helping to create that story to begin with.

  She offered a sympathetic look. “Why not just tell people the truth? It’s not like it mat—” She frowned. “Oh. Now I see the problem. If you tell them who your mother is first, then they believe your parents are siblings, right? That’s… rough.”

  “And if I tell them they aren’t siblings they might think I’m lying, to cover up that detail.”

  “Your friends include my daughter, correct? I think you should tell them the full truth. They may be surprised, but if they trust you, they will accept the truth. And you are friends with the man who came back in time as well, the one who tried to save Eva? He will have met both of them and know they look nothing like siblings. My daughter will realize the truth as well. Do it, my friend. You need to let this burden go.”

  He knew she was right, and yet… “It sounds simple. But I’m afraid to take that step.” He sighed. “I guess that makes me a coward.”

  “You are no coward, son of Adam.” She shook her head. “No coward would undertake a journey of such magnitude to save the lives of his parents; a coward would see only the risks to himself and deem it most prudent to let his history unfold in the past where it belonged. Only a brave man would risk everything so as to leave nothing to chance.” She tilted her head. “If there is a good woman in your life, tell her first. She will make clear that you have nothing to fear from the truth.” She offered a faint smile. “Don’t let my Lizzie still believe the lie of her parentage. I died before I summoned the courage to tell her the truth, and now I learn she still believes that monster is her father. My cowardice still lingers over her so many years later.”

  Adam sighed. “Speaking of fathers who have many moments that make them seem like monsters… I should let you know what’s happened in the past eight years.”

  He told her of his father’s razing of the village and the deaths of all those inside, save for Arthur and Will. But this time, he said, it was different; this time he did it not for vengeance but to protect an innocent man: Will Stark, who Arthur had set up to be his next victim.

  But he’d still murdered dozens of people in their sleep.

  Genevieve’s eyes widened, the look of a woman who wondered just how she’d managed to love two men capable of such evil.

  ~~~51~~~

  1029 A.D.

  He moved through the now familiar routine. Checking his Energy Shield. Activating the exoskeleton around both of them, taking care to build separate pods for each of them. Testing the wireless radios. He mentioned to Genevieve that from this time on, it wouldn’t be possible to use Energy outside the sealed time machine without guaranteeing they wouldn’t be noticed.

  He deployed one of his final Energy Eaters before opening the cabin lid and floating them out into the sky, and used the remote to make sure the lid remained closed.

  There were people around now who could fly. One couldn’t be too careful.

  They descended through the tree canopy, and he heard Genevieve gasp. Though he’d told of the razing of the old village and the changes they’d made in building it anew, it was still quite the change from the place she’d lived so long.

  He found himself impressed as well.

  Once they’d spent a few minutes observing the changes and noting all the construction projects, the wireless earpiece buzzed. “What are we doing here?”

  “One last bit of cleanup work.” They floated out of the village and into the surrounding forest, stopping as they reached the small clearing where two small gravestones rested side-by-side. “When I first met you, I told you that I made my father forget that Elizabeth is his daughter, because remembering put him on the verge of suicide.”

  “And I told you that you should have let him kill himself,” Genevieve murmured.

  “Have you changed your mind?”

  She paused. “It’s a difficult question to answer now. Abandoning his daughter rather than staying and fighting for her—physically, if necessary—and then… then… then, well, murdering everyone in his original home and then returning here and doing the same? It’s difficult to argue that his life is worth spari
ng when he killed so many.” She sighed. “I know you’ve said that allowing all of this to happen is necessary to keep your future intact. I just wonder if that future was worth keeping him alive. I know that doing so seems to keep my Lizzie alive. And I know it’s very important to you. But… I don’t know. I just don’t know. He’s done such awful things.”

  “He’s done doing awful things.” He paused. “He lived a life of deep remorse later, always looking for chances to make sacrifices for others. His form of repentance. It’s why he took the death blow meant for Hope rather than moving her out of the way. Offering up his own life as payment for the ones he took.” He smiled ruefully, though she couldn’t see it. “I admit bias in this case, but I do believe the greater good has been served. If we’d let him die, by his own hands or another’s, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Genevieve didn’t answer.

  He watched for a time. “You asked why we’re here. My father, at this moment, does not remember that he is Elizabeth’s father. He believes only that she is a charming little girl treated poorly by many, including her father. Today is the day that his memories become unblocked, when he remembers the truth with absolute certainty. The memories of today were always powerful with him; he could recite the date and time and location without hesitation, centuries later. That’s why I’m here. Because I’m the one who blocked the memories, and I’m the one who will unblock them. And then he will have to live with the ramifications of his memory, and reconcile that against his actions over the past twenty years.”

  “You mean that he’ll have to deal with the fact that he abandoned his daughter, galavanted across the land in a quest for revenge against people who didn’t deserve his thought or consideration?” Genevieve’s tone betrayed her bitterness. “Will he understand that? Will he feel remorse?”

  “He will. And he already does, for the parts he understands. He struggles to sleep most nights because he dreams of the day he slaughtered everyone on the island, and wakes wondering if he should kill himself to stop the dreams. He doesn’t, because he thinks that reliving the past is his form of punishment. He remembers he killed the villages, though he feels less guilt about those. He sees it as justice rendered against people who believed they murdered three innocent women. But in rendering what he considered justice, he spared the innocent man—Will Stark—and the man most guilty—Arthur. He kept Arthur alive because he knew all too well the pain of living with your misdeeds.” He grimaced, though Genevieve couldn’t see him. “I’m not sure Arthur feels any of the guilt my father does, though.”