Thin Air Page 0,22

The fuzzy pink sweater rode up, revealing a tattoo on the small of her back. Some kind of little gray alien dude waving hello. That implied a sense of humor. Maybe she wasn't a bad kid, after all.

And maybe you're crazy, part of my brain reminded me. I didn't like that part. I wished to hell it would shut up.

I half dragged Cherise through the snow to the tent. She seemed barely capable of staying on her feet, even with me taking most of her weight, and I was glad I hadn't hesitated about it too much longer. She was hardly breathing.

Getting her through the narrow tent opening was an engineering problem, but I managed, and soon I had her settled, wrapped in two thermal blankets, with heat packs warming her core temperature. In the light of the battery-powered lantern, Cherise looked ghostly, like the living dead. Which, I thought, might not be far from the case.

She didn't say anything for a long time, and I didn't, either. I couldn't think what questions to ask, and obviously she wasn't compos mentis enough to be coming up with conversation on her own. When she finally did speak, it wasn't anything I expected her to say.

She asked, "Where's Imara? I thought she'd be with you."

Imara. I suddenly felt short of breath and I wished David were here. No, I didn't wish that, because I didn't want to think about what he'd be feeling at the sound of that name. This was all hard. It was hard not knowing, but it seemed to get worse the more I found out. Maybe ignorance really was bliss.

Cherise was shaking again, but I figured that was good; shaking meant her body was trying to warm itself, which meant she was coming out of shutdown mode. "Imara? Is she okay?"

I remembered the agony in David's eyes, and again I just knew there was something there it would be better if I never had to face. "Where's Kevin?" I asked instead, because I figured that if he'd recovered from whatever crazy spell he'd been under, he was in the same boat as Cherise...freezing to death out there.

Cherise seemed to try to remember. One second. Two. Two and a half, and then I saw comprehension flood her expression. Then get driven out by fear. "I...I don't know," she said. Her voice was high-pitched with sudden panic. "Jo, we were in the forest. He was showing me...showing me how he did the fire stuff, and it was really cool, you know. He was proud of himself, and he was saying we could help people..."

I nodded. Not that I really understood. "And then what happened? Cherise, can you-"

"I don't remember!" she said. "We were there, and everything was fine. We were doing fine, and..." Something darted through her expression like an electric shock, and her eyes widened. "There was someone else. She came out of the forest. She was...there was something..." Her voice failed, or at least her vocabulary. She shook her head, sniffled, and wiped at her nose. I dug in the backpack for a travel pack of tissues and handed one over. It took her the now-familiar couple of seconds to see what was being held in front of her face, and then she clumsily grabbed it and honked. She sniffled some more, and seemed better. "Something bad happened to us, didn't it?"

I had no idea, but it seemed pretty likely she was right. Something very bad indeed had happened to her and Kevin. The problem was, I had no idea if it was still happening, and if it was, what that meant for my own safety.

I watched her like a hawk, but Cherise didn't display any special powers, monomaniacal or otherwise. The lag time didn't go away. She napped for a while, lulled by the warmth returning to her body-yeah, I knew how that felt-and when she woke up I broke off some energy bar and shared it with her, washed down with plenty of water. I noticed her fingernails. She'd been out there scraping her way through the forest, but once upon a time she'd had a nice manicure. Her skin had that well-lotioned look, too. No wrinkles. A smooth, flawless complexion. She'd had better hair days, but I had the feeling she'd clean up fine.

So what was going on with her? What did her missing time signify, and how did that relate to my missing time, if at all? And why was she Time-lag Girl?

As if