The Time Shifters Chronicles Volume 1

By Shanna Lauffey

An ancient people who can move through time or space... but not both at the same time.

Akalya of the Harekaiian must discover who is behind the hunt for her people, when no one should have known they existed.

A secret that never should have been revealed... and a man who is obsessively hunting down that secret.

The Time Shifters are in danger. Someone wants what they have and they're willing to kill if necessary to get it. A time travel Mystery... and a time travel love story replete with time travel Physics.

The Time Shifters Chronicles will take the reader through an exciting journey through time and space with Akalya, a nomadic spirit who only wants to live invisibly among the ordinary people of Los Angeles. Through an apparent accident of fate, she becomes the only one of her people who can save them from the enemy who hunts them and she must risk everything, even her life, as a sacrifice for the greater good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Golbin Publishing
• Release date: May 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463099599

Shanna Lauffey

Shanna Lauffey is a native Californian currently living in Europe. She spends her time between homes in Sweden, France and the UK. She writes Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance in her spare time between attending university and travelling.Her first novel, She-Wȕlf, was released 1st January 2012. A Science Fiction series involving time travel is in progress.

Book preview

Chapter One

My people live invisibly among you, though each of us disappear within the multitudes of humanity in our own ways. For some it is easy to fade into the crowd. We serve you in shops, or better yet, in restaurants where people come and go frequently and government surveillance of income is more difficult to track.

Some of us prefer to live off-grid, although it is becoming more challenging to remain unnoticed in a world dominated by documentation and records. We have often been mistaken for Gypsies or hippies, partly because of the colorful silks and velvets that we wear. These are always in blues and purples; colors that make the eye turn away in distant focus.

It is by these colors that we first recognise others of our kind when we cross paths. Few of us know each other well. We drift. We make friends, then move on. Like many people who pass through the lives of others, we are easily forgotten.

Many choose to slide into the past, to times when individuals were more easily overlooked. Yet the excitement of the present sits more naturally, even for a Time Shifter.

We can shift through time or across distance, but never both at once. It would make us easier to track, though we never thought that a time would come when anyone would think to track us.

We were wrong.

At first we thought it was the government. The military in particular is always looking for special abilities to exploit. But as more of us were taken, we wondered... Did someone wish us harm? How did they know of us? Discovering answers to these questions quickly became essential to our survival. We had little time to find them as our numbers began to thin too quickly... far too quickly...

September 2015, a Moroccan restaurant in Los Angeles

Akalya reached for a handful of Bastilla, her favorite delicacy among the fragrant Moroccan dishes that covered the table. The powdered sugar that covered the pastry stuck to her hands as she savoured the contrast between its sweetness and the spicy chicken filling within the succulent pie. Her companions, Jon and Alice, talked between themselves, enjoying the exotic atmosphere as they sat cross-legged on cushions at the low table. Dim candlelight reflected moving images, like dancing fairies across the rich fabrics that covered the cushions and the brightly patterned walls that surrounded them.

Jon and Alice were Memlekel, ordinary people. They wore jeans and casual shirts, yet reeked of office polyester with their plastered false smiles and short-cropped hairstyles. Jon wore his neatly trimmed in almost a military cut so that the sandy color was hardly detectable except on the top where a generous wave belied the effect, while Alice’s soft brown curls fell just below her ears. They did not know about the Harekaiian people, or that their waitress as well as the chef were of Akalya’s kinship. Akalya had noted two others of her kind at a table by the opposite wall. Drifters probably, yet some instinct always drew them to places where others could be found.

Akalya did not know their names. She could not be sure if their paths had crossed before. The effect of the low lighting and the colors that they wore produced the desired result, even on their own kind. The eye focuses rich blues and purples at a distance. Reds and yellows would draw attention as they made the eye adjust so that things appeared nearer, allowing the cooler colors to dissolve into a haze of background. Even Alice’s soft pink top and Jon’s ivory shirt drew the eye away from the shorter wavelengths near the indigo end of the spectrum, as in Akalya’s long, dark blue/purple skirt and shawl, and her deep purple satin Gypsy blouse.

It served both as disguise and as an identifier to their own kind. It had never occurred to any of Akalya’s people that a day would come when some among the Memlekel would recognize the mark of the Harekai.

A fracas just inside the kitchen began to draw attention. Akalya had witnessed the capture of illegal aliens in restaurants in Los Angeles before. It was a regular feature in certain establishments. The shouts and kitchen doors flying open sounded very much like such a capture. The ethnic table cleaners would put up a nominal fuss, then allow themselves to go along with the inevitable. Usually they were Mexican. The border crossers kept their full pay checks in their pockets for such eventualities and would often return in time for their next shift. Still, the scuffle brought a little diversion to the onlookers. Akalya saw two men dragging a captive into the main dining room, only the captive was the chef, a Harekai, and the captors were not wearing uniforms.

She did not stop to think as the couple across the room were assaulted next by two more men that burst through the doors from the restaurant kitchen. Akalya did not even observe the protocol that usually kept her people safe; never shift where you might be observed. It was only a slight distance jump. A new customer had opened the door to the street and the shift to just outside at that moment would appear as if she had moved very quickly. Then she made another jump to just beyond view of the glass door and she was free to shift through time. By some fluke, the street was empty of onlookers... perhaps because it was a Sunday.

It was one of the oldest streets of Los Angeles and would not be so unpopulated often. Although she did not expect that any pursuer could follow her, Akalya shifted forward instead of back. Skipping a day would not bring any great consequence, except that her trail would grow cold in that time. Choosing a time in the darkest part of the morning just before dawn would make anyone who saw her suddenly appear believe that she had been there all along and had only just caught their eye. People easily believed whatever made most sense to them.

She walked then, thinking hard about what to do. Akalya had only a few friends among her own kind in the area. She must contact Gaye to warn her. After walking far enough to duck into an alley where a trash dumpster could hide her presence, she shifted forward a few hours more so that Gaye would be awake. Then she walked carefully out of the alleyway and lost herself amidst the crowd of busy people going to lunch from their respectable office jobs. She stepped onto a bus that was heading towards Manhattan Beach to put some distance behind where she had last been seen. If there were some way of tracking shifts, a little mundane travel would cool the trail.

Akalya got off the bus when it stopped in a familiar area just past El Segundo and entered a small diner that she knew had a back door. She watched the people around her carefully as she made her way to a public phone in a partially concealed hallway in the back.

To her relief, Gaye picked up the phone after just two rings.

Hello?

Gaye, I saw three people taken away last night. Wait, it was the night before. Have you seen anything suspicious?

Akalya?

Yes. Let’s be careful about names in case your phone is tapped. I’m on a public one. I sound paranoid, don’t I?

Well yes, but if you actually saw...

Is your house still up for sale?

Yes. Gaye laughed a little as she admitted it. I thought I would try selling it on Ebay, just for a laugh since no one was making an offer. Can you believe that some joker actually offered sixty-nine cents for it?

Akalya began to relax a little for the first time since the interruption of her Moroccan meal. She even began to regret the loss of the rest of the Bastilla.

Maybe I should make an offer for it. What would you say to...

She had been about to say, a fiver as a joke, but the conversation was suddenly stopped by the sound of Gaye screaming and scuffling noises that suggested that she was being attacked.

This time Akalya was going to have to take a risk. She could not let all of her people disappear until she was the last one to be hunted down. There was no doubt in her mind that she would be as much a target as any of the others. She reached her consciousness through the telephone, grasping the familiarity of her friendship with Gaye and mentally followed her to wherever they might choose to take her. Once the attunement was established, she hung up the telephone. Whether they, whoever they were, would have the ability to sense or follow an attunement was impossible to know, but she had to try. She could not sentence herself to a life of running and fear any more than she could abandon Gaye to whatever fate awaited her at the hands of her captors.

Distance jumps felt different than time shifts. Akalya was sure that was part of the reason why only one could be accomplished at a time. It was an odd feeling, as if she were standing in the place of origin and then like a double exposed photograph, was also at the destination. This time, the destination was unknown so she could only initiate the shift, then wait and see. Akalya didn’t know what a Memlekel would see if one of them were to walk into the back hallway of the diner and observe her standing by the phone in mid-shift. She tried to look as if she were patiently waiting for someone to call back, hoping that she at least appeared corporeal, or not at all.

Her sense of time was nonexistent in the process of a distance shift, but she knew that the driving time to the beach was no more than half an hour from Gaye’s house. Akalya’s sense of direction told her that her friend was definitely moving west. The ocean would halt their progress eventually. Her visual impression of Gaye’s position was dark during the transport, but Akalya saw in her dim vision of Gaye’s perceptions that a hood was removed from her just before she was taken into a portacabin situated on the upper beach near The Strand. Akalya saw it all as if in the incorporeal images of a dream, yet she recognized the area and especially the Redondo Beach Harbor in the background.

Perhaps the kidnappers are amateurs, Akalya thought. They might not have been aware of her ability to attune to another of her kind, but a professional kidnapper would take the victim inside before removing the hood to keep them ignorant of their location, unless they were concerned about onlookers in a public place... or if they were setting a trap.

There was no time to consider the latter. Akalya shifted as she saw the captors leave the room where the captives had been shoved inside. She placed herself in an alcove behind the wall where the door opened. If they re-entered suddenly, she would have a moment to shift before they turned and saw her. There were eight Harekaiian standing before her. Four from the restaurant, Gaye and three others that Akalya did not know. They recognized her as Harekai immediately and said nothing, looking at her with haunted eyes. Why don’t they simply shift out? Akalya wondered.

We can’t shift, Gaye said quietly. They’ve done something, I don’t know what.

Akalya reached forward and took the hands of the Harekai closest to her. The others quickly joined hands as well so that they made a circle. All of them closed their eyes and tried to sink into the shifting consciousness.

Akalya, automatically attuned to everyone in the circle by the physical contact, then recognized that a barrier was preventing them from completing the shift. An intangible interference felt as if it were blocking the mind-shift that preceded the physical movement. She took the lead, attempting to shift herself and pull them with her. First she tried a distance jump, visualizing The Strand just above their location. With her eyes closed, she brought the image of a particular spot next to a lamp post to her mind and tried to feel herself there. The pull to shift was present, but her charges pulled her back like eight sets of efficient emergency brakes. Despite their willingness to follow, another force prevented them from reaching the level of vibration required. She tried again, but the result was the same. The attempt had a moment of anticipation quality like a broken starter motor on a car that whines just on the edge of turning over, yet never quite sparks. Her charges were dead weight, too anchored to take with her.

The door opened. People rushed in, perhaps three of them. Akalya had stepped back into her place of concealment and could not see around the door to be sure whether there were more, but those she could see immediately turned and saw her. They had clearly known of her presence. There was no choice. She would have to escape quickly and come back for the others another time. Hoping against her own doubts that the dampener effect was not a feature of the room rather than something inflicted on the individuals within, she let go of her charges both physically and mentally and shifted out. One of the Memlekel tried to physically grab her, but she faded to elsewhere as his hands reached around her. Even in the twilight world of mid-shift, Akalya felt relief that the shift had worked, albeit a little more slowly than usual.

There had not been time to assess very much about her would-be captors. Though they wore no insignia, they had been dressed identically in black cargo trousers and T-shirts, so perhaps it was meant to be a uniform of sorts after all. The one who had reached for her had dark hair like her own, but wore dark sunglasses so that she had been unable to see his eyes.

He had been a little taller than her and she had sensed... something. She wasn’t sure what. She only knew that she was glad that she had shifted before he had been able to touch her.

Chapter Two

To run in fear holds no glamor, yet I did not travel far. To free those of my kind who remained captive seemed somehow required. I did not know why, nor did I stop to think. There was no time...

With no knowledge of what technology had been used to trap my brethren, I had no way of guessing how closely the captors might track my shifts. I was never good at distance anyway. I shifted back forty years, taking my chances that the location would not bring a sudden reminder of solid rock that would later be removed for development. The memory would have been brief as I died within the crystalline structure. To my relief, the gamble was won. I stood on a beach for a flicker of a second, noting the close proximity of cliffs made from natural erosion.

I shifted the distance up to The Strand. It was here that I felt most at home, remembering a time when I knew this place well. I made several time shifts then, forward and backwards to confuse the trail. Whether it would make a difference I could not know, but it seemed to me that it must. Then, I placed myself on the beach a little distance away behind a lifeguard shack where I would not be visible from my last point of departure and walked a little way, hiding under the pier.

That was when I shifted forward again, this time knowing absolutely that my hiding place would still exist at my time destination. The time I chose was only a few minutes before the present as I knew it. I watched my pursuers as they entered what I could now see was a construction portacabin on the beach, a moment away from discovering my presence within.

I could only hope that they wouldn’t think of the ruse I had used to double back to a moment before my departure as I attempted to formulate a plan.

Akalya tried to think hard about the resistance she had felt as she had attempted to bring the others out of the portacabin. There had to be some clue as to how the shifters were being contained. She speculated on the fact that she had been able to shift out normally, so it couldn’t have been anything that affected the portacabin itself, like sound waves or a dampener of some sort, unless something had been done to the captives first to make them susceptible.

Thoughts went through her mind that strained her knowledge of electrical and mechanical Physics as well as radio and microwaves. She thought of the crystals in cell phone technology, but people who might have had phones in their pockets had been close enough to her in the portacabin that she would have been affected equally.

She needed to question the captives. It would not be easy with their captors aware that a rogue was shifting freely outside of their contained prison. They would surely watch for her and lay traps. The question was, what kind of traps had they already used to capture several of the Harekaiian?

The captors approached the cabin door. Akalya could see them better now from the outside. She counted five, recognizing the four who had made the captures at the Moroccan restaurant and the dark haired one that had nearly grabbed her in the portacabin, a minute or so from now. For the moment, they didn’t appear to suspect that they were being observed. The dark-haired one appeared to be in charge, issuing orders to the others that Akalya could not hear. There was nothing remarkable about any of the lead captor’s companions. The four of them had varying shades of medium brown hair, ranging in length from just above the ears to just below, while the dark-haired one wore his longer, just above shoulder length. Not military then. All of the captors appeared to be lean and fit, as if they participated in some form of physical training. There was something in the way that they moved, as if they possessed far more strength than ordinary movement required.

There was no point in waiting for the minute it would take for them to discover her presence. She would only see herself appear up on the Strand and then disappear again as they ran outside in pursuit. Fascination for watching her own apparations had thinned many years ago. Akalya shifted back, just half a day so that she could observe the portacabin in the darkness of night, just twenty-four hours before the raid on the Moroccan restaurant would occur.

This, at least, they would have no way of anticipating. Whatever their movements or plans, Akalya was reasonably certain that they could not yet know that a rogue would escape their raid on the following evening. She approached carefully, reaching out her senses towards the unseen room. Her brief exposure to the captives had given her some sense of their presence, though it was significantly less certain than an actual tag. There were fewer presences within, but all of them exuded familiarity.

With a vision of the inside of the room in her mind, Akalya performed a distance shift, placing herself again in the alcove behind the door. Three pair of eyes turned towards her as she apparated. She recognized three of the captives from the night to follow.

I was here briefly tomorrow, she explained. Why is it that you cannot shift out?

A woman wearing a dark green pullover under a midnight blue poncho that partially covered a long, deep purple skirt collected the presence of mind to answer her first.

The one with the dark hair like our kind... he can tag. Only instead of following, he can prevent us from shifting.

Akalya cocked her head, a confused expression playing on her smooth features.

Is he Harekaiian?

The other two captives, nondescript men wearing nondescript gray and blue clothing, looked at the female captive, then to Akalya. They were clearly of her people as well, but they had no answers. The woman only shook her head in bewilderment, but one of the men tried to impart what few facts he had to share.

I have never heard of such a skill; to prevent the others from entering the warp. If he is of us, he is mutant... or perhaps a different strain. He is not like us. Whatever you do, don’t allow him to touch you.

Akalya nodded, then tried the door. It was locked securely. Simply walking out of the room was not an option. Even if it were, that would not change the fact that the captives had become unable to shift.

Has he said what he wants with our people? Have you asked him?

The woman shook her head.

He will not speak with us. The others command silence, but we have tried to ask questions and the dark one always walks out of the room, never acknowledging that he heard.

Akalya thought carefully. A plan began to form in her mind. It would be risky, but the only way to untangle the dilemma was to obtain more information. The dark-haired man would have to be made to talk, and his avoidance of his captives when they tried to speak to him suggested that there was a weakness that might be exploited.

The sound of a key entering the lock spurred Akalya into quick action.

I need time to think  I’ll be back. She shifted to the lamp post on The Strand before anyone could enter to see her, then she shifted again, to a time that they could not follow. This time it was a fifty year shift, to a time when Akalya had been growing up on this very beach. She had chosen mid-day, on a Tuesday. This Tuesday was special to her, as it had been the day after Jack had moved out of the balconied house on Shell Street in El Porto.

El Porto Beach was at the northern most end of The Strand. It would eventually be swallowed up by Manhattan Beach just south of it, so that the beach communities lining The Strand would consist of just three small cities; Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo Beaches. El Porto was nothing more than a small patch of small roads west of Highland Avenue and too close to an oil refinery. The crude oil from the tanker ships washed up on the beach regularly as greasy white foam, accepted by the locals as an inevitability in an age before concern about pollution of the oceans had become part of the collective consciousness of the beach communities. Children were still allowed to swim freely within the oil and salt of the crashing waves.

The lamp posts on The Strand were an older style. They made for a good anchor point in a place that had changed little in more than four decades. Some of the houses had changed and the world beyond the pedestrian walkway was subject to the ravages of property developers, but The Strand itself remained very much as it had been when Akalya had ridden her first bicycle across the slabs of concrete on the only flat surface near the beach.

In time a bicycle path would be added to the sandy beach just beneath The Strand, but the pedestrian causeway would continue to be maintained much as it was now. With the time shift, more subtle things changed. Some of the beachfront houses had been rebuilt in Akalya’s natural time from the older versions that she could now see. The plants that grew on the rise from the beach to The Strand were different. Akalya remembered the blue and pink flowers of the succulents that she had climbed up through more than once as an active nine-year-old.

On the other side of the beachfront houses was a small road, and beyond that, houses and apartments were situated on a steep hill that had provided for many thoroughly unsafe rides down and across the small road, sitting on a skateboard. Akalya remembered her young life on Shell Street, and the balconied house where a man named Jack used to sit out in the evenings and play guitar. Akalya had missed Jack’s easy presence and his music when he moved out. No one had ever seen the new tenants move in. No one ever saw them come or go. Now she understood why.

Akalya reached into one of the deep pockets of her purple velvet skirt and pulled out a flat leather wallet. She smiled, remembering the many times she had shifted back to this time so that she could sit on the roof of one of the beach houses and once again enjoy the peaceful atmosphere of her childhood home. She had no guess as to how many times she had shifted here to listen to Jack sing from the balcony while the gulls cried and the soft crash of the ocean waves mixed with the scent of salt and oil that she associated with this time and place.

The visits had been frequent enough that over several visits, she had taken the trouble to establish a local bank account so that she could have access to money with the right dates printed on it, in case she wanted to enjoy a soft ice cream or a hot dog from the vendor on the beach. She had even allowed the money to collect so that she might stay for an extended time if she should choose to do so.

That time had come, though not for the relaxing vacation that she had envisioned. She flipped open the wallet and found the appropriately dated driving license that she had obtained in order to open the account. It was time to rent a property and set up a safe house, far away from those who were capturing her people in her own time.

If she was any judge of age, the four Memlekel were not yet born. Though she would have been guessed by most bystanders as no more than thirty-five years of age, Akalya was actually nearly sixty. The Harekaiian did not age as quickly as ordinary men and women. Perhaps, she speculated, that might prove to be a motive for the captures. Men had chased after the quest for eternal youth for centuries, though slower aging was a far cry from not aging at all.

That was when a plan formulated in her mind. Somehow the captors had learned the identities of several of Akalya’s people. If she could learn the captor’s identities in return, she could trace their backgrounds and perhaps learn how and when they had been recruited to track her kind. There would be risks involved, not least of all because the dark-haired man might well share some or all of her abilities, but she did have the advantage of time shifting at her disposal. She guessed that the reason the man had refused to speak with his captives was that he wanted to avoid being tagged, though his touch was somehow responsible for their inability to shift.

A mutation perhaps? Harlan, one of her kind who had studied Physics, might have been able to concoct a theory. Akalya made a mental note to pay a visit to him in her travels. But first she had an apartment to rent, and for that she would need money.

She walked up to Highland Avenue where she knew she would find a branch of the Bank of America. ATM machines would not come into popular use until 1972, and Akalya’s safe house was situated in 1965.

Chapter Three

I tore a page from my past and stepped back into a haven where I felt safe, or at least as close to secure as any place can be for a nomadic people that slip through time and space.

It was reasonable to assume that they, whoever they were, would move the captives now that they knew that someone knew where they were. I had managed to tag Gaye with a trace that would hold for some time, but this presented new dilemmas.

Traces were seldom used and the physics behind them is little understood, even by us. I had only to gently touch her shoulder and the connection had been made, expanding on the tag I had placed on her through the telephone when it had all started. If I wished to find her through a change in space or time, I now needed only to visualize her as I sank into the mental process of performing a shift.

The danger was that no one knew what would happen if one of us tried to follow someone who had shifted to another place as well as another time since the tag had been set. The limitation of doing one or the other was unlikely to change. It was one of the reasons it was little used. Some speculated that whichever path provided least resistance would result from the follow-shift. Others feared that the attempt at doing both time and space at once would trap the follower in some form of limbo, drifting between spaces and moments in an immeasurable eternity.

The other danger was that there was no way to predict what sort of circumstances the other person might be found in. In this case, I could easily be walking into a trap and find myself unable to shift out of whatever enclosure or field was keeping the others captive.

Akalya had seen the inside of the house only once as a child. Her parents had socialized with other tenants on Shell Street, as all of them were waitresses or bartenders. The easy, relaxed way of life in a beach community appealed to many types of nomad.

They all had their own stories. Some had fallen into casual work arrangements and simply didn’t make the effort to do anything else. Jobs were always available for serving staff. Any place they chose to go would be likely to provide quick employment, as well as the convention of tipping which the government had not yet worked out how to tax in 1965.

Akalya entered her new premises with a key provided by a rental company she had found on Highland Avenue. Perhaps it had been fate that took her steps past the real estate agent on her way to the bank, but she had recognized the photograph of the balconied house in the office window right away. She had withdrawn enough money to cover the rent and the security deposit that was stated on the ad in the window and had gone straight in and rented the house on the spot. She didn’t care that it hadn’t yet been cleaned.

The rent had seemed cheap at first, until she remembered that only the houses right on The Strand had been pricey back in those days and that the economy had been very different then. Leases had not come into common use either, so she was free to rent on a month by month basis. She speculated on whether to seek employment locally or to keep up the rent payments in other ways. When it came to obtaining money among her people, ‘other ways’ could take many forms.

Restaurant staff would often come and go with a frequency that allowed the Harekaiian to disappear within an ever changing panorama of the lower spectrum of the working classes where faces were seldom remembered, if even recognized as human at all. It was an old stand-by and she nearly applied for a position as a bar waitress at the Sea View Inn, which was an atmospheric little bar on Highland Avenue not far from the top of Shell Street. Then she decided that she didn’t have time to attend a job when she had much to do elsewhere, and elsewhen. Selling old coins that she could slip back and acquire would be enough to maintain the rent for a few months.

The massive living room had beautiful, dark hardwood floors. A pillar in the middle of the room helped to keep the roof up over such an expanse. Akalya speculated that houses had long since ceased to be designed with so much space in her own time. She walked through the property, noting an average sized bedroom, a small bathroom with no tub, but an enclosed shower, and a good sized kitchen. Apart from the size of the living room, the layout was much like the house she had lived in as a child further up the street.

The other primary difference was that where her house near the top of the hill had front and back patios, Jack’s house was built on multiple levels. The steep incline of the street might have posed some interesting challenges to architects who presumably designed the beach houses. Jack’s house had a lower level garage as well as stairs to the roof where the fireworks over Redondo Beach Pier could be easily seen on the 4th of July. Akalya had fond memories of the one occasion she had joined the adults for the yearly roof party. Usually she climbed as far out on the rock pier as possible with the other children to get a closer look at the bright sparks of light. It was a wonder that none of them had fallen and been injured, perhaps even killed in the darkness over the lapping waves that crashed against the rocks. The only danger that had ever concerned them was the possibility of getting pinched by the crabs that made their homes among the rocks of the promontory.

With the advantage of time on her side, Akalya decided to enjoy the house that she had always envied. She walked out onto the balcony, running her fingers carefully over the faded greenish-blue paint on the wooden hand rails. She wished that she could play guitar, like Jack, though she would have been too shy to perform for the whole street as he had done. She wondered where he had moved to and whether he still lived in her time, though he would be about seventy-five if he had lived that long. She wondered what the rest of his young life had been like and whether he had retained that free spirit that she had admired when she watched him sing. It occurred to her then that at the impressionable age of nine, her ideal of the perfect man had been formed by a guitar player who wore his dark hair below his ears and sported a closely trimmed beard. Sitting and playing his music on the balcony most evenings wearing cut-off jeans and sandals, but no shirt, he had represented the sort of freedom that would later come naturally to Akalya as she learned the nature of her people and why they lived as they did.

Akalya turned, observing the textured stucco walls that she associated with the quaint houses of El Porto. In her own time the walls had become smoother, which she felt lessened their character. This was a house for an artist, so like her friend Vivian’s house just two doors up the road. Some of the houses of Shell Street had been made for a time when musicians and painters could gather in such small communities and find the sort of space that embraced their nature. Akalya thought of her childhood friends; Vivian who lived across the road from her old house and Jeannie who lived two streets away. They were Memlekel, but they had been her closest companions when she had first been discovering her ‘different’ nature.

The hints had been present for some time, but it was only when she had come close to being killed that she suddenly realized that she was different. She had thought as she sat on a skateboard at the top of the hill that she would need to put her feet down and stop this time, rather than hurtling across the road to run into her friend Jerry’s garage door. She instinctively put her feet down to stop the skateboard just as a car that would have killed her zipped past on the road at the bottom. It occurred to her then that her friends would not have known to stop themselves. She had been unshaken by the incident and simply carried the skateboard back to the top, knowing that no car would be there when Vivien reached the bottom for her turn, which was next. Akalya had carried on playing with her friends, but a window of her mind had opened and she knew from then on that she knew things that others did not, and would grow into abilities that she did not yet understand.

Had she told her mother of her newfound awareness on that day, perhaps she would have been taught her skills sooner. Instead she had been left to discover them on her own, while the adults in her family attempted to lose themselves in the mundane world of waitresses and bartenders and far too much drink.

Akalya stepped back inside the empty house, letting her ruminations fade back into the faded realms of memory. The trouble was, she remembered far too well. In the meantime, she needed some form of furniture for the house, though it was likely to be sparse. Collecting things had never featured in her nomadic existence. A functional chair and perhaps a small table would do, along with something to sleep on. She was, after all, only a short term visitor to this time and place.

Akalya sat on the floor and shifted forward in time to the early morning hours of the following day. She knew where to look for furnishings that would be left unattended long enough for her to grab hold of them and shift back to the spacious living room, now that she had a visual impression of it.

Some might call it stealing, but the items would never be missed when she returned them back to their origin when her business here was finished. She would have to be careful not to spill anything on the items she borrowed.

Chapter Four

It is difficult to believe in anything spiritual when you have too much science, yet I have seen things that defy explanation by what is known. One of our people, Harlan Edmundson by name, achieved a university degree in Physics, using his ability to attend concurrent classes in his quest to understand why we are what we are. His conclusion came from Biology instead; that we are the next stage of human evolution. Effectively a mutation in thought wave control that will spread as the random manifestations breed further into the greater population and advance humanity to a higher level.

Personally I think he watches too much science fiction on television. As much as his theory seems to make sense, such a leap strikes me as unlikely in a world where a very large portion of the population still wallows in intentional ignorance and seeks ways to bring pain to their fellow man to assuage the pangs of their own self perceived inadequacy.

Somewhere in this imperfect world, the dark-haired man who had the power to interfere with shifters had probably been born by 1965. Like my own childhood self, he would be growing up in a world not yet ready for such abilities to manifest. He was the key to unlock this mystery. My task now would be to follow him through time, to seek out answers.

With a base of operation established, I set out to find the answer to the most important question; Why.

Akalya cast her eyes over the new items around the living room, memorizing every detail. She had kept her acquisitions simple; a large upholstered chair covered with a brick-red colored cotton fabric dominated the room. Next to the chair was a small mahogany end table that would serve most purposes. Eating would have to be done from her lap, but it wouldn’t be the first time that she had lived in such casual conditions.

She walked over to the chair and ran her fingers over the soft fabric, so unlike the artificial nylon or polyester based fabric on most furniture in her natural time. She thought to herself that the world had lost something when it had moved away from natural fabrics. The rest of the room remained empty, apart from a blue ceramic vase that stood on the mantel-like shelf that ran along the wall next to the door to the balcony. It had been her one indulgence. She had seen it in the used furniture shop where she had found the table and admired the delicate shaped ceramic flowers that decorated its curved side in shades of pink and green. Other than these items, all she had acquired was a simple mattress to throw on the floor in the small bedroom. She would need some basic household items, but she knew the dangers of shifting continually until she reached exhaustion and decided that the few furnishings would suffice for the moment.

She had saved as much energy as she could for the shifting to come. With her impressions of the room established, she shifted back down to The Strand, placing herself near one of the old lamp posts so that anyone passing would assume she had been concealed behind it. She took a moment to observe the early morning beach life. An occasional walker could be seen on The Strand. A pair of old people with metal detectors searched the beach near the waterline for lost coins. Behind them, Akalya could see the surfers sitting casually on their boards as the swell of small waves passed under them while they waited for that legendary seventh wave that would be big enough to give them a good ride. El Porto wasn’t a big wave beach, but it provided sufficient sport for the young men who lived locally. The sport had not yet spread to many young women.

Akalya walked along The Strand. Walking all the way to Redondo would be too far after her busy morning and would tire her, but she needed time to think of where to place herself for best advantage for her task. She needed to anticipate where the kidnappers would likely pass and to find a vantage point well away from the spot where she would manifest during their encounter with her on the day of Gaye’s capture. She had always found walking very meditative and conducive to thinking.

The early morning salty sea air relaxed her, as it had always done. The gentle crash of the waves and the cries of seagulls as they floated on the soft breeze drew her into her thoughts in an agreeable manner. She smiled a little as the familiar sights, sounds and smells assaulted her consciousness. Even the slight tar scent of El Porto sand as the rising sun released its fragrance brought pleasant associations of a part of her childhood that retained the best memories from an ever-changing life.

When she had walked as far as the Manhattan Beach pier, the small parking lot next to the street entrance to the pier reminded her that the kidnappers would have to park the van in which they transported their captives somewhere near the construction shed. With just a little trepidation, she shifted her mind forward a few years so that she wouldn’t leave a trail directly to her base of operation, then distance shifted to the spot on The Strand where she would have a clear sight of the shed in her own time. A slight shudder passed through her as she observed the scene that had become associated with the kidnappings.

Once again, Akalya had chosen a time early in the morning so that there would be few people about. She considered whether to walk over the area and try to determine where they would have to park, then she noted that Redondo Beach had changed most out of all the beach communities and decided that she would have to shift forward again, closer to the time.

She chose the late evening on the night before the abductions. The change was jolting on an emotional level. The area had changed drastically. Even the rock pier had been altered in its course and no longer had the narrow cement path that had allowed herself and her friends to walk out further than was probably safe. Her interest, however, was in the placements of parking lots and nearby buildings. The parking lot, at least, was obvious. The one for the pier was practically on the beach itself. There weren’t even any steps between the hard surface and the soft sand. They would almost certainly bring the captives there.

Right at the end of The Strand, some of the old beach houses had been converted into apartments, or completely replaced by newer buildings, in a relative sense. The one she chose had probably been built in the 1970s. Several of them still had the flat roofs that served as observation decks in seaside houses. The rooftop she chose was third from the end from the parking lot. It had a low wall where she could conceal herself adequately. The building itself was a brick red two-level affair with a sand-colored balcony front that made the building look as though it had been cobbled together from two separate previous structures. The architecture was asymmetrical in places, with the balconies jutting out in a sharp triangular design. It seemed to Akalya more artistic than practical, but it was ideally placed for her purposes. Sound carried near the beach. The low wall would provide cover, and choosing a rooftop further from the parking lot than the end building was prudent, in case her quarry should think to look up.

Akalya was beginning to feel very alone. She had not spoken to another living soul since her brief exchange with the captives, apart from the rental agent in 1965. She was beginning to feel the strain of the situation and of having the responsibility thrust onto her with no one else among her own kind with whom she might consult. She began to wonder if she should have slept by now.

One of the ever present dangers of consecutive shifting was that it was easy to lose track of your individual biological time. She tried to calculate when she had slept last. Somewhere in the midst of mentally tracking her movements since her meal at the Moroccan restaurant on the following evening to come, she drifted into an uneasy sleep.

Chapter Five

To understand the reasons why we must choose between moving through time or space on any given shift is simple... if you happen to have a degree in Physics. For most of us, the understanding must come through practice and can be difficult to put into words to teach the young.

Basically, the same mechanism is used to move through time or space. Just like currency, you can only spend it once. Unlike in science fiction stories, we cannot move beyond a limited string of time. One of the Harekaiian cannot travel in the past beyond the point of his own birth; he cannot travel in the future beyond the time allotted for him to die, though our lives are long. We are also tied to our own time and will revert to it eventually, sometimes inconveniently when we sleep if we are overly tired. Shifts are inevitably a temporary condition. We perform them as a tourist along the warp of our time of existence and must return to the point of origin.

Moving through distance is also limited to what we can see or visualize clearly. Though the process is much as modern scientists understand wormhole Physics, the knack for warping a millisecond of time so that we occupy a space at two different points simultaneously is essentially the same as warping through our timeline.

Time and space are intertwined, else a time shift of more than a day or two would result in the Shifter appearing at a point in space where the place he had been standing on planet Earth before the shift would leave him floating in the vacuum of outer space. There is no question that shifts of less than two days either direction are easiest. Even for such a short span, the traveler’s point in space must be accommodated in the warp of the time string, else we would come out in a different location as the Earth turns and follows its orbit around the Sun, perhaps even inside solid rock. Thus we can do one or the other, but not both at once. A shift in time requires that we anchor to a gravitational point, thus in effect we have already moved through time and space at once and cannot further choose to move our gravitational location when we enter the warp.

How shall I explain the warp...

To enter warping is a mental process in which thoughts are sped up to a wordless velocity and the electrical field of the body begins to vibrate, oscillating between two different intertwining wavelengths that quickly cause the warping of the time continuum so that the Shifter can move freely between one