The Last Qumranian

Chapter 2

2

Deborah blinked against the glaring blue flash on the center platform, taking a moment to remind herself that this was supposed to happen. Lukas, the steel table, and the quantum orb were gone. She punched in the new timing sequence to count down five minutes. Licking her lips, she turned to her brother at the next console over, and Ben met her wide-eyed gaze, looking as pale with anticipation as she felt.

He cleared his throat. “Watch the monitors,” he instructed the team. “Look for any anomalies in the web field, even if it seems insignificant. Deborah, everything looking good on your end?”

She glanced back down at her screen, the numbers working in her mind almost as quickly as they sorted themselves out in front of her. “Yes. All the readings are consistent and still within the viable range.” And still, even the hard proof before her wasn’t enough to combat her racing heart or the fact that her sweaty fingers had nearly slipped on the control keys. If they’d made even one mistake—one tiny miscalculation—they could have just sent Lukas anywhere in space and time… or nowhere at all. That thought was agonizingly unbearable, so she forced herself to focus instead on the timer she’d started again at zero.

The lab had never been so quiet, the unspoken tension quivering in the air like a web spun between each one of them, caught in a soft breeze. When the timer reached twenty-eight seconds, Deborah opened her mouth to announce it, but Ben beat her to it.

“It should be right—”

The huge globe of blue light burst into existence around the central platform, blinding Deborah again with another twinge of heart-shocking cold that gave her goosebumps beneath her long-sleeved top. Just as quickly, the blue faded into a warmer amber, shrinking in on itself until the light disappeared completely and revealed their results.

Lukas looked over his shoulder at them with a grin. “How’d we do?”

Mark let out a whoop of triumph, nearly making Deborah leap out of her own skin. Ben gave a surprised chuckle, and then Lukas erupted into his own burst of laughter.

“All right. First part’s over. We’re not done yet, people. Someone help me clear the table and the machine off the platform. Gotta be ready for the next stage.”

“I got it.” Ben left his station at the console, nearly skipping toward the platform in his excitement.

Lukas slowly slid his hand out of the quantum orb, giving the circuitry time to uncoil from his fingers. Their lights dimmed and faded, but the orb maintained its swirling effect. Together, the men lifted the table from the platform and eased it off. The quantum orb trembled in its cradle bolted to the table, but it held even when Ben’s back foot didn’t take the full step off the platform and his heel bounced against the edge of it.

Deborah took in a sharp breath, feeling lightheaded and nauseous. But her cousin and brother safely delivered the steel table to the lab’s tiled floors, and everyone fixed their eyes once more on the platform.

Lukas offered her a ridiculously overconfident wink. Then he clapped a hand on Ben’s shoulder, shook him just a little, and waited. When the timer reached the five-minute mark, the blue glow erupted a third time to engulf the platform. Deborah turned her head against the glare; the next time they used this machine, she better remember to bring a heavier jacket against the instant drop in temperature. This time, the web field remained around the platform, though the light dimmed slightly to reveal what was inside. There stood Lukas, his hand in the quantum orb upon the table. She glanced quickly from the newly arrived version of him—the Lukas from five minutes ago, looking a bit shocked and yet still entirely certain—to the Lukas of the present with his hand on Ben’s shoulder. The two identical figures grinned at each other and waved like children catching sight of their best friend, and then the entire web field vanished, leaving nothing behind but the cleared, empty platform.

The silence in the lab was deafening. Lukas turned around to address the team, opening his arms in mock insult. “What, you can’t handle two of me in the same place at the same time? C’mon, people. There’s your proof. We warped time.” He paused, then shook his arms again and shouted, “We can control time!”

The team burst into cheers all around them, and Deborah found herself laughing hysterically, burying her face in her hands. She vaguely heard her brother mutter, “Maybe we should have had you step out of the lab. I don’t know if we calculated all the risks of two of you in the same place—”

“It was only thirty seconds, Ben,” Lukas replied. Deborah lowered her hands from her face to watch the exchange. Lukas had his hand on Ben’s shoulder again, leaning in until their foreheads almost touched. “Thirty seconds of success. Life-changing success.”

Ben seemed to finally catch the contagious excitement churning through the lab and his frown of concern melted into a goofy grin. “We did it.”

Seeing her brother relax made Deborah feel even better; what they’d just done was nothing short of a miracle, and despite all the work they still had ahead of them, this changed everything. Taking a deep breath, she lifted her gaze in a silent prayer of thanks, then froze. Something shimmered in the air between Lukas and the platform—a wavering, slightly skewed, humanoid form. She blinked and looked again, but it was gone. Maybe they should wear protective eyewear next time against the glare of the web field.

The only other woman on their team appeared beside Deborah and nudged her with a shoulder. “They’ll be getting drunk tonight and raving about this for the next twenty-four hours.”

Deborah turned to her with a wry smile and folded her arms. “That doesn’t sound too bad. I think they deserve it.” Laughing, the woman walked around the console to shake hands with the rest of the team.

“The next thing we do,” Lukas started, speaking to them all, “is to send the data to the Circle of Elders. We still have to collect it all. Sort it out into analyzed evidence. I would have invited them to join us today, but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.” That brought a round of relieved laughter from the team.

Deborah watched her cousin in his element, directing and congratulating, encouraging everyone on the enormous breakthrough they’d just witnessed. She couldn’t believe this day had finally come, and she couldn’t wait to get started on their next steps for securing the safety of the future—everyone’s future. The prospect of what that might mean brought her earlier conversation with Ben and Lukas to mind. With the manipulation of time at their fingertips came so many other possibilities for technological advancements—for real defenses to be built, greatly superior medical capabilities, boosting agricultural production. Why would they have to use it against so many people Above when they could put it to use for the greater good of every living soul on this Earth?

She blinked, seeing the wavering outline of a human form oscillating in the air again just above her cousin, only this time, it was larger. Lukas seemed oblivious, as did everyone else, so caught up in their excitement. But it had been too much time since the glare of the web field for this to be a retinal afterimage. And it was moving.

Trying to both listen to Lukas’s speech and watch this strange new image at the same time, Deborah found herself wondering if this was one of those risks Ben had seemed so concerned about. She glanced down at her monitor again, scanning the data, flipping through what they’d already captured. Their system had caught absolutely nothing outside the normal ranges.

“This is the single greatest invention in the history of mankind,” Lukas said, then lowered his head and looked each of his team members in the eye. “I am so proud of all of you and the years of work you’ve put into this—” He stopped, as though someone had pressed pause on the entire moment. The victorious scientists all looked at him with eager anticipation, smiles widening at what had to be another of their team leader’s many gags. But it went on just a second too long and it looked like Lukas had stopped breathing.

“Lukas?” Ben asked, leaning forward to catch his cousin’s gaze. Lukas let out a thin sigh and lowered his hands by his side, but he stared blankly ahead. “What’s going on?”

Lukas brushed past him and walked stiffly through the ring of scientists who had just been listening so intently to his celebratory speech. He moved around Deborah’s control console and stopped beside her to open one of the drawers at hip level. His fingers wrapped around the red globe of the energy phaser kept for security, sliding it effortlessly into one of the side pockets of his gray pants.

“What are you going to do with that?” Deborah tried to whisper, feeling herself tremble when she wondered if he’d changed his mind about the protocol with the Circle of Elders. Had he seen something when he jumped through time? But this wasn’t Lukas; she leaned forward to try to get him to look at her, but his gaze slid across her face as if she didn’t exist at all. This close, the sight of his eyes horrified her—glazed over without the natural shine of alertness; darkened as if covered by a thin black veil.

When he stepped in front of her, focused intently on her command console, Deborah was too stunned to resist the force of his body nudging her aside. “Lukas?” she said again, then jerked her head up to find her brother. “Ben, something’s wrong—”

A whirring tap came from the command console. Lukas’s fingers moved with inhuman speed across the keys, his hands blurring in her vision. Deborah’s stomach dropped as if she’d just fallen down into a great cavern and she could only stare.

“What’s going on?” Ben called, but Deborah couldn’t answer. She could barely even breathe. “Deb? Lukas?”

Lukas turned and headed back around the console, completely oblivious to his cousins’ concern. The other scientists watched him in confusion, and then he approached the steel table and the quantum orb resting there. He plunged his hand through the membrane, bringing the circuitry to life again.

“Hey,” Ben called. “We haven’t—”

The circuitry lights pulsed around Lukas’s hand in the startup sequence. Ben ran toward his own console and vaulted over it, sliding on the floor and catching himself with a hand on the console’s edge. He typed furiously at the keys, though to Deborah he seemed impossibly slow now after what she had just witnessed.

That thought sparked her into action, her terror momentarily forgotten when she realized what was about to happen. “Get away from the table!” Most of the team had already backed away by this point, but Mark had been too focused on Lukas’s odd behavior. With a low hum, the first-stage web field blossomed from the center of the quantum orb. It enveloped Lukas and washed over Mark’s rigid form, which blistered out of existence, leaving a metallic stench mixed with burnt hair and charged flesh.

A woman shrieked, and Ben shouted from his console, “Deb, he’s set it for 4 B.C. and the sequence is locked. I can’t get in. I don’t know—”

“Lukas!” Deborah’s throat burned with the force of her scream, but even that did nothing to get his attention. He didn’t turn back to look at any of them before the freezing blue explosion of the web field seemed to take all the air out of the room, and then he was gone.