Shadows Out of Time

She discovered that if she concentrated while touching the shard, she could guide what she saw within the grid. At her command, the grid filled with images from her own life. The choices she’d made. Every path she’d taken. She saw a group of six Mi-Go winging through space, carrying two cylinders, Sean’s brain in one, hers in the other. She watched as a burning red ribbon streaked and twisted across space until it struck the Mi-Go carrying her cylinder. The spatial anomaly. The moment that had untethered her consciousness from linear time and ultimately brought her here. She couldn’t bring herself to look beyond that. She didn’t want to relive her time on Yuggoth. If the Mi-Go had given her a new body, it meant at some point she’d stopped resisting and had cooperated with them. She couldn’t watch herself do that.

She watched her family instead, her mother and father and kid sister, none of whom knew what happened to her. She saw them get the news that she’d gone missing, and later, when the authorities gave up the search and declared her dead, her family’s grief was so powerful she wanted to cry along with them. Only, she couldn’t. The Mi-Go had built this body for her, and they didn’t understand human emotional responses like crying.

She watched Sean’s timeline, too, until it became too painful. She couldn’t bear to see his empty-skulled corpse on that surgical table again.

She didn’t know how much time passed as she sat upon the dead sentry’s throne. Days? Weeks? There was a delicious irony in the fact that time had lost meaning for her. Her artificial body didn’t age. She didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep, so she never had to take her attention off the grid.

Eventually, two Mi-Go entered the temple. One carried a brain cylinder, the other a variety of mechanical equipment. She watched as they placed the cylinder on the floor and hooked the equipment into the three sockets: the lenses for eyes, the metal disc for hearing, and a speaker box for speech. Their job complete, the Mi-Go left.

“Hello?” a scratchy, electronic voice came out of the speaker. Rows of lights blinked on the side of the box in time with the words. “My name is Professor Joseph Vaughan.”

Vaughan. So he’d finally gotten his wish. She jumped down from the throne. As soon as she let go of the shard, the web of images between the stalagmites vanished.

“Great sentry of Arneth-Zin, I’ve come a long way and beg you to have pity on me,” Vaughan said. “I beseech you to open the seams of time and let me return to the point where I lost my wife and children. Please, give me the chance to set things right.”

She squatted over the cylinder, making sure the lenses could see her face clearly. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“What — what do you mean?” Even in his artificial electronic voice, she could hear confusion and fear. Good. He deserved to be afraid. “Aren’t you the sentry?”

“No,” she said. “It’s me. Emily Bannerman.”

Vaughan said nothing.

“Surely that much time hasn’t passed,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he said. “You know me? We’ve met?”

Emily let out a bitter laugh. He didn’t remember her. That was how little she’d mattered to him. He hadn’t cared who she was or what future he was stealing from her when he gave her to the Mi-Go. She’d been nothing but a means to an end. His ticket to Arneth-Zin.

“This can’t be happening,” he said. “Tell me you understand the pattern of time! Tell me you know where the seams are!”

She shrugged. “I’m as in the dark with this time-travel shit as you are. I can only change my own timeline, not anyone else’s.”

“You — you can change your timeline?” Vaughan’s electronic laughter came through the speaker, an eerie, grating sound. “I knew it, I knew it was possible! You must show me how!”

She supposed she could. She could consult the grid for the whereabouts of the spatial anomaly. He could find a way to pass through it as she did and gain the ability to change his timeline. She could even teach him how to control it so it didn’t overwhelm him.

But why would she help the man who’d done this to her? “Sorry,” she said. “If it’s any consolation, I know how you feel.”

She undid the latches at the top of the cylinder.

“Stop. What are you doing?”

“I understand you better than you think, Professor Vaughan. I know what it’s like to have someone you love taken away from you. I know what it’s like to carry that terrible emptiness inside. You want nothing more than to be with them again. I can help with that.”

She lifted off the lid. Inside, Professor Vaughans’s brain was suspended in a thick, viscous liquid.

Vaughan’s voice came through the speaker pitched with new hope. “So you will show me how?”

“No,” she said. “But I can reunite you with your family another way.”