Variables of Sky: Guardian, #2

By Maree Brittenford

Sometimes running and hiding is the only logical reaction to an overwhelming threat. Amy isn’t ashamed to admit that’s what she and Sam have done.

But no where is safe, and Amy if forced to make hard decisions. Will she keep running or will she face the threat head on?

There is no easy answers, especially when it's more lives on the line than Amy knows. Can she save them all? Can she even save herself?

Variables of Sky is the second book in the Science Fiction adventure series. Be sure to check out Echoes of Azure to find out how it all started.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maree Brittenford
• Release date: Feb 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386381419

Book preview

One

The pain is gone.

No—not gone, but I’m floating far distant from it. I open my eyes slowly, every sensation feeling profound. I feel the texture of coarsely woven sheets gone soft with frequent use, see a rough wood ceiling, and smell the calming scents of lavender and rosemary.

I lift my hand, and it takes a shocking amount of effort to make the simple gesture of bringing it to my side and laying it over the place where I was shot.

I feel the bulk of bandages.

Distant pain, dressings and bindings, herbs. Someone has taken care of me.

I’m safe.

A noise on my other side has me ponderously turning my head to look. Sam lies sleeping next to me. It’s hard to think, but I try to remember. Is it normal for him to be there? Sleeping right beside me? It doesn’t seem quite right. Seeing him makes me feel happy, but it also feels slightly out of place. Everything feels out of place.

Sam, I say, and his eyes shoot open.

Amy, he says, studying me carefully.

Why are you in bed with me?  He presses his hand to my forehead, and his face relaxes into a smile.

You don’t remember wrapping yourself around me like a python and begging me to never leave you? Although to be fair that was right before warning me about the elephants who were trying to climb out from under the bed.

That sort of sounds familiar, actually. Strange dreams break open in my memory. I remember elephants with a particular, surreal clarity.

His fingers brush my cheek with careful gentleness. You’ve been really sick. Your wound got infected, and you’ve been screaming and feverish. I was scared.

I feel weird, sort of floaty.

Sam grimaces. Yeah, some of the herbs you’ve been given aren’t exactly legal. At least they aren’t where we’re from. You may be a bit high.

Oh. I’ve never even had more than the few sips of wine my parent dispense on special occasions. And now I’m high from undetermined drugs. It’s not as exciting as I’d imagined.

Can you tell me how you feel?

Like my brain isn’t working right. Everything is slower. And I know I’m in pain, but I don’t care? It’s hard to explain. You’re not missing much. I feel stupid.

He touches my face again, and I turn my head to chase the sensation. That feels nice.

Yeah. I’m gonna go get Rachel, okay?

He doesn’t wait for a reply before he’s up and out the door. Rachel? She’s here? I muddle through my memories, trying to put everything in place. I remember being kidnapped and locked in that room with Sam, and then getting out the window, escaping, running, being shot.

Rachel was there afterward. I think. It’s not the clearest of memories. Mostly I remember pain. And then they left me and Sam alone in the forest. Beyond that it’s a collection of confusing images, like remembering a dream. Except I remember my dreams more clearly.

Sam comes back with a pretty Latina in her early twenties, who looks eerily familiar.

Rachel, how did you get older than us? I blurt out. Sam grins widely.

She’s a bit uninhibited. I guess it’s the effect of whatever you gave her?

The Rachel woman nods absently. Yes, stop worrying. I’m very careful—I don’t want to see my patients becoming addicts. Sam shakes his head a little and comes around to my other side. Okay, she says to me, would you like to try to sit up? I have some soup for you to eat.

My stomach squeezes hollowly at the thought of food, and I try to help as Sam slides his arm beneath me and eases me forward so the woman can pack pillows behind me. Relax, I’ve got you, he says, and, since I’m weak and useless, I don’t have a choice but to let him.

Where am I? I manage to ask once they have me situated and I’m cautiously spooning soup up to my mouth. I don’t quite have the distances right, and I slop some down my chin. Sam takes the spoon from my hand and feeds me. I think that should be embarrassing, but I can’t seem to care.

This isn’t a hospital, I add after a few spoonfuls.

I’m the local curandera, a sort of a traditional healer. Your friend brought you to me. Do you remember being shot? You would’ve died without surgery. It was still a close thing. You were lucky it hit your spleen, that’s still bad, but a bit more in any direction and you would’ve been in a lot more trouble. I look at Sam, feeling helpless and confused. I feel like I’ve woken from an enchanted sleep to find myself years in the future. But Sam is the same. Perhaps he’s been enchanted too.

He grins at me. Enchantment is your first guess?

I struggle with my gluey brain. Not enchanted, but something... Sam is so pretty when he smiles like that. I’d do anything for him when he smiles at me like that.

Okay, Sam says. You’re just saying every thought you have out loud aren’t you? How about you eat. He offers me another bite. In a few more mouthfuls it’s all gone, and I’m exhausted.

I let them ease me back down, and I fall asleep.

This pattern repeats frequently over the next few days. I wake, eat and talk a little, and then fall back to sleep exhausted.  Along with embarrassing assisted trips to the toilet in the small adjoining bathroom and the pathetic shame of needing help to bathe, that’s all I do.

It gets more painful when the Rachel woman decides to cut back on the medicines, but my brain is finally clear.

I guess a bullet wound isn’t something you can just tape up and forget about, no matter what happens in the movies.

I wake one day with the memory of how I got here finally clear in my mind.

Sam looks over his shoulder, making sure we’re alone. Tell me then.

We used that stone from my necklace. Jill put it in a device. It brought us here. To, I pause and gulp. To a different world. Where everything is the same, but different.

Yeah. We’re in a genuine parallel dimension.

I remember parts of that night, but mostly I remember fear and pain. You left me alone in the forest. I hurt so bad, I thought I was going to die.

His eyes dart away. I had to. I’m sorry. But I had to get help for you. You were bleeding, and I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere fast trying to carry you, and it probably would’ve hurt you worse. Luckily I was able to get here and get you help.

I know it’s not Sam’s fault. Jill had refused to take me to a hospital because I had a bullet in me, and had simply bandaged over the wound and sent me spinning into another world.

Rachel did surgery on me? It hadn’t occurred to me to question that before now, but if I needed surgery someone had to have done it.

She tried to make us go to the hospital, but we couldn’t. You get why, right? He looks pained, as if he’s still not sure that was the right decision.

I take his hand. I’m alive, and we’re safe, so you made the right choice.

He sighs. Anyway, she called in favors or something, got a doctor to come here to do the surgery. It’s probably why you got such a horrible infection—it’s not like this is as clean as an operating room in a hospital, and it was a long time between when you were shot and when you actually got the surgery. I’m sorry. You almost died, and it’s my fault.

You took care of me. Thank you.

He shakes his head, guilt written across his face.

I don’t know how Sam knew how to find this world’s Rachel and got me here, and I don’t ask. I’m sleepy and he looks miserable, and so I let the subject drop.

Two

Once my recovery gains momentum he starts disappearing for increasingly long periods of time. Working, apparently. I never thought life in an alternate dimension would be so mundane. I lie around ‘working on healing,’ and Sam actually works for an income.

Rachel deserves to get paid, he mutters when I ask him about it, and I’m ashamed once again by my helplessness. I know he feels responsible, that me getting shot was his fault, and this is his way to try to make that right, but it’s hard to be so dependent.

It’s strange enough to be dealing with parallel world Rachel, but that’s just the beginning of the oddities here. While some things, like people’s ages, are slightly ahead of us chronologically, this world is well behind us technologically.  Rachel’s small house is shockingly low tech. She has electricity, but mostly she heats and cooks with a small wood stove. At first I thought it was a personal choice—I mean she practices traditional herbal medicine (although, to my relief, I learned that she also has more formal medical training), so perhaps she simply preferred to chop wood to heat her house.

Nope. It feels like the technological level in this world is about equal to the 1960s or ’70s in ours. I can’t pin it more exactly than that—I should’ve paid more attention to modern history, I guess.

Sam has easily found work repairing televisions, similar to the funny-looking black and white thing in a faux-wood case that Rachel has sitting in her front room. She talks like it’s the exciting new thing. And apparently no one is shocked or concerned by a boy who’s not even sixteen being out of school and having a full-time job. It suits him though. He never liked school. And he gets to spend all day up to his elbows in TV guts. He says they’re foolishly simple to repair, and he doesn’t know why anyone even pays him. But that’s one of the few times I see him smiling.

It takes far longer than I hoped, but finally I’m well enough to move. To the place that Jill had originally intended for us. The home of our parallel-world doubles.

Rachel takes me there herself.

I’m going to miss her. I like her. She’s sensible and practical, and very much like the Rachel I knew in my own world. It must have been shocking when a kid who looked just like her old schoolmate showed up at her door with a bullet inside her. But she calmly saw to the emergency first, and left all the awkward questions till later. She must know that there’s something sketchy going on with us, but she pretends to believe that Sam is Alex, the cousin of this world’s Sam, and I’m an undefined person who couldn’t go to the hospital even though she could’ve died.

The truth is probably less believable.

Is this the person my friend Rachel will grow into? I wonder even more about my double, the woman I’m about to meet. Is she my future?

The Sam and Amy of this world are, like Rachel, somewhere in their early to mid twenties. Jill met them on her travels, it seems, and—oh—they’re married. Which, yes, it’s weird. They live on a little farm a few miles outside of town, in a small collection of buildings hemmed in by forest. Something sparkles as we drive up.

I squint and try to make out the source of the flashes of light.

What is that? I ask, leaning forward to see more clearly.

The greenhouses. The shiny blob transforms into an odd glass structure as we round the little group of buildings.

What for?

Plants. Melly grows all through the winter. She keeps me supplied with a lot of herbs.

Melly is—me. Or the other me, rather. It’s convenient that she hasn’t abbreviated Amelia to Amy like I do. Sam has no such luck. He’s been going by his middle name, Alex, since he landed us here. I don’t like it much. In my mind Alex is the version of Sam who belongs to Jill, and calling Sam by that name makes me uncomfortable. Perhaps I’ll just avoid calling him by name. I haven’t seen him for several days, so I may not have to call him anything at all.

My alternate-world double looks as uncomfortable as I feel. We shake hands reluctantly—I know I’m wondering if some sort of paradox will occur and destroy the world (never mind that I’ve hugged Jill many times and nothing terrible has happened), and maybe Melly’s thinking something similar.

But it’s okay—once again the world doesn’t end because of me.

Rachel leaves—she has work and a life outside of caring for me, after all, and, again, I feel guilty about taking so much of her time. I can’t even pay her—I have to rely on Sam for that. How do you thank someone who saved your life?

I’m left staring at my double across the rough wooden table in the kitchen of the three-room cabin.  She looks like Jill, but not. I suppose she looks like me too, but she mostly looks like herself. Her face is softer, freckles dance across the sunburned skin of her nose (not sunscreen-pale like mine), and her dark hair is in a practical braid. She looks happy and content, with none of the lingering sadness that Jill so obviously wears.

She offers me tea, and we sip in silence.

I suppose this is one of those situations where I really can treat someone how I’d like to be treated, and it should work out well.

I snort a laugh and then smile at her. Maybe this won’t be as weird as I’d imagined. I guess so.

Are you interested in botany?

Like plants? No, not really.

This is clearly not the right thing to say, because she frowns at me.

Perhaps you’ve just never had the opportunity to learn. Come on, let me show you my gardens and greenhouse.

I am curious to check out that odd glass building, so I’m happy enough to follow her outside.

She leads me through the garden beds first. They stretch for at least an acre, a complicated but orderly looking arrangement of rows and trellis’ and raised beds of vegetables like cabbages and cauliflower, broken by hedges which Melly names off for me—rosemary, lavender, and blackberries.

Wow, this is huge! You do this all yourself?

Pretty much. Sam spends a day or two helping with big planting or harvest days, but for the most part it’s all me. I keep us fed almost completely from here. We buy things, of course— meat, dry goods—but almost all our fruit and vegetables are grown right here. And I have a good business selling the rest. Sam. Not my Sam, other Sam. I have to get used to that.

I look around me more carefully, wondering what kind of hardship our sudden appearance will bring these people. They can’t have stored enough food to feed double this winter. I’m understanding Sam’s rush to bring in income.

She leads me into the greenhouse before I can ask what else we can do.

The place is even stranger on close examination. Instead of being made of panes of glass it seems to be made of...

Windows?

Melly smiles proudly. Yes, isn’t it clever? Sam saves windows wherever he can get them. He even has some of the other tradesmen around town setting them aside for him whenever they take them out of a building. Then he adds on a new section when he gets enough. It’s cheap, and it’s really practical. I can easily control the temperature just by opening some windows. She smiles dreamily. Sam built this first room for me as a wedding present. It’s that same dreamy look that Jill always got when she talked about her husband—but of course Melly doesn’t have the overlaying sadness that Jill carries.

It’s strange to see. This version of me going all dreamy eyed over Sam. I try to put myself in her place, and it makes me feel itchy and uncomfortable.

It’s not that I can’t imagine Sam doing something like that—it’s exactly what he’d do— but for me to go all heart eyed like that just feels creepy. I have to keep reminding myself that they aren’t us. They have led different lives, and have made different choices. Still, it’s unnerving to find versions of us who are madly in love with each other.

Is there something wrong with me that I’m not in love with Sam?

I know you said you’re not much interested in plants, but I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me out with my work, Melly says.

Oh, sure. But I was thinking that I’d be better off working with Sam, uh, my Sam. I don’t know anything about gardening, but I’m pretty good with electronics.

Melly frowns with confusion. You want to repair those televisions? That’s probably not a good idea. She leads me off between the rows of tables before I can ask why, and I follow, feeling unsettled.

Why isn’t that a good idea?

Three

Melly keeps me busy for the rest of the afternoon, showing me around. I don’t do anything strenuous. Rachel had left strict instructions about that— no lifting, digging, or axe swinging. It was as if she knew all the things that Melly would be doing.

All I really do is follow her around and chat, and help prepare dinner, which is a bit more involved than at home, since the only energy source in the cabin is fire. No electricity out here. Oil lamps sit around the room for light, and even water is heated in a small tank attached to the wood stove. You need to be careful about using too much at a time, because it empties the tank, and the water goes cold.

As you can imagine, everything is more involved.

I wonder out loud how hot it gets in here during the summer.

Oh, I move out to the summer kitchen, Melly tells me, pointing out the window to what I’d thought was an area for barbeques or something. Cooking outside in summer seems practical. In fact, everything I see around the little farm is laid out thoughtfully and makes the best use of available technology. Melly tells me that they have a generator because lines don’t come out this far, but they don’t use it much. Sam Perez-engineering has rendered it almost unnecessary, it seems.

The bathroom is more of the same. It’s a small lean-to off the back of the house with a cast iron tub and basin. The water heater is what worries me. It’s called a ‘chip heater.’ It’s a little firebox with a reservoir on top, and you burn chips, or small pieces of firewood, to get the water hot, and then drain it into the tub, to mix with cold water so you can bathe. It’s the same basic principle as the kitchen water heating system, but this has an open flame, and I’m not sure I should be trusted alone in a room with a fire, but I guess I’ll have to get used to it if I want to get clean. And of course there’s the toilet. It’s essentially a hole in the ground, in its own little building, a suitable distance from the house. Joy.

I suppose you’re used to all the modern conveniences? Melly asks casually, after explaining how to cook on the wood stove. (Since you can’t turn down the heat, you control the temperature by moving the pots and pans closer or farther from the top of the fire box).

I shrug, feeling embarrassed. I don’t want to suggest that her home is inadequate, especially when it’s so intelligently designed. I’d guess from looking around that her Sam has had his hands on almost everything, tweaking and modifying to make everything more functional.

I grew up in town, she explains. We had an indoor bathroom, electricity, fancy clothes, and store-bought food. I learned that those things don’t lead to happiness. Life here might be more labor-intensive, but I’m married to a man I love and have wonderful friends. She does exude contentment. Even having her home invaded by strange kids from another world doesn’t seem to phase her.

You don’t get along with your parents? I ask cautiously.

She sighs. I suppose I’ve always been a disappointment to them. Not the pretty butterfly they wanted in a daughter, not good in social situations or excited about parties and fashion. I was allowed to garden because it was supposed to be a ladylike hobby, tending roses and such, but I was too fond of digging around in the earth and experimenting with grafting instead of cutting flowers and making herb sachets. And of course there’s Sam.

They don’t like him?

She’s silent for a moment. I’m still trying to understand what you are to me. Jill, she was like a wonderful older sister when she appeared here a few years back. She seemed to understand exactly what I was going through and helped me a lot. So I was expecting to feel like that with you. But you haven’t lived the same life as me, have you?

I don’t know. Perhaps I am different. I seem to be the only version of myself with strange visions. What went off track with me? Was my mother exposed to some toxin while she was pregnant? But then there is my strange connection to Sam. It’s clear that he’s special, and that he and I are linked in some way.

What was it like, where you’re from?

I’m not sure what to say.