Page 48 of Borrowed Time

I nodded. “And when she did so, it was sort of as if she created a little bubble of time for herself and everything else caught up eventually. But my gift doesn’t seem to work that way. Or rather, I was working with much larger spans of time, even when I first started out. To everyone else, it just looked as if I’d disappeared.”

“Until they, too, caught up with you,” Jeremiah observed. “What happened when you moved into the past?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

Maybe the slightest flicker in his black eyes. “You always sent yourself into the future, never into the past?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Which makes me wonder exactly what’s going on now — first that I went back into 1926, and then here to 1884. It doesn’t make much sense.”

He was silent for a moment, fingers still touching his chin, as though that somehow helped him think. “Did you consciously avoid traveling to the past, or is that something which seemed to happen naturally?”

“A little of both, I suppose,” I said. Since I’d analyzed the problem enough over the years, I hoped I might be able to provide at least a little helpful information. “That is, when my gift first appeared and I was doing it more or less inadvertently, I always went forward. And then when it became clear that I couldn’t control the amount of time I traveled, I locked it all down as best I could. Maybe it was just a subconscious belief that I could cause a lot more trouble by traveling into the past than I could into the future.”

“Even though your mother did that very thing in order to save your father.”

Jeremiah’s tone was completely even as he spoke those words, so I couldn’t glean much from them. Even though he’d known he could never be with her, for a variety of reasons, did it still sting that my mother had chosen Robert Rowe over him?

Another question I’d never ask, that was for sure.

“Even though she did that,” I said, then went on, “Or maybebecauseshe did. She went back in time to fix a very specific problem, but she still wouldn’t have succeeded if it hadn’t been for your help. My father would have died and become a ghost, and I and my brother and sister would never have been born. It just seemed as if there was a lot more space for something awful to happen if I went into the past. At least when I traveled into the future, I might have scared my family, but I couldn’t change anything that had already happened.”

“That makes some sense, I suppose,” Jeremiah said. “It still doesn’t explain why you moved into the past both times you were injured — first, when you got that knock on your head when you tripped and fell in that mine shaft, and then when you came here after being shot. There must be something else involved beyond merely losing any conscious ability to control your talent.”

Again, what he’d just said sounded sensible enough to me, but I had no idea why I would have gone into the past rather than jump ahead, the way my gift usually did when left to its own devices.

I shrugged, since I didn’t know how else to respond to his comment.

Some men might have been annoyed by such a noncommittal response, but Jeremiah only looked thoughtful.

“When was the last time you consciously used your talent?”

“About eight years ago, when I was fourteen,” I replied promptly, since that day was engraved on my memory for all time. Or rather, the day the past had caught up with the present, and my mother had sobbed and held me tight, as though she never intended to let me out of her sight again. Traveling into the future was an odd experience, since for me, I felt as if nothing much had happened, that I hadn’t shifted from my present reality at all. It wasn’t until I heard from my family that I’d been missing for hours…or, on that one notable occasion, for two weeks…that I realized I’d gone anywhere at all.

By this point, Jeremiah was leaning forward in his chair slightly, hands resting on the blotter on the desk in front of him. “And what did you do to keep yourself from using it after that time?”

“Sheer willpower, I guess,” I said. “I sort of stopped myself from thinking about the future very much and did what I could to stay focused on the present.” I stopped there and gave him arueful smile. “I suppose a lot of self-help experts would say that’s a good thing, that it’s always better to be in the moment as much as possible rather than getting lost in the regrets of the past or wasting a bunch of time thinking of eventualities that might never happen.”

If that had been Seth sitting in front of me rather than Jeremiah Wilcox, my comment might have elicited a question as to who exactly “self-help” experts were. However, theprimusdidn’t ask any questions and instead remained silent for a moment, clearly thinking over what I’d just said.

Then he sat up a little straighter. “I would like you to travel five minutes into the future.”

I blinked at him. “You make it sound so easy.”

“I think it is…if you’ll let it be.”

About all I could do was lift an eyebrow. His generation might have been born a hundred years before self-help was even a thing, but what he’d just told me sounded a hell of a lot like what some kind of personal growth guru might say.

Before I could utter a protest, though, Jeremiah continued. “That is, I think you’ve built such a wall around your talent that you’re utterly out of touch with it. Because of that, you no longer have any idea how it even works. So, let’s go back to the basics. Five minutes. That was your mother’s original talent, and I believe it’s the basis of yours as well, even if your gift is of vastly greater scope.”

I wanted to argue that my mother’s talent had a hell of a lot of scope, too, considering she’d used it to time travel to Flagstaff more than a hundred and thirty years in the past. On the other hand, though, she’d come here for one very specific purpose, one she trained for like someone training for a marathon.

Just because you were really good at running twenty-six miles didn’t mean you’d be able to effectively jump hurdles.

“What happens if I go three days into the future?” I asked, unable to keep the plaintive note out of my voice.

“Then I suppose we will all catch up with you eventually,” Jeremiah replied. He didn’t look particularly perturbed.

Well, of course he wouldn’t. Now he knew a little more about how my talent worked, and that meant even if I vanished in front of his eyes and didn’t come back in five minutes, he knew the world would meet my time-traveling self at some point.

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