RSS06 - Not Your Typical Beach Episode
As the Miata purred along the Highway, Xironi pulled her backpack into her lap and fumbled with the zippers. Carda watched out of the corner of his eye as Xironi pulled out a small plastic box, and her little floating disk-robot.
She parked it in midair and said, “Esca?”
“Yes, Miss Xironi?” said the disk.
Xironi opened the plastic box, revealing rows of small plastic chips. “I need you awake for this.”
Indal sat up straighter in the back seat, staring at the robot. “You have an Unrossi?” he breathed.
“Yes,” said Xironi absently. “She’s still only a Diega, though.” She pulled out several chips, inspecting the writing on each.
Michelle looked at Indal. “What’s that word you just said?”
“Unrossi,” said Indal.
“Yeah, what is that?”
“A sentient robot,” said Indal, as if everyone should knew this. “From the world Unross. I’ve never seen one.”
“Hello there sir,” said Esca in her little girl voice. “I’m Esca. What’s your name?”
“Indalrion Tachyon,” said Indal, a foolish grin slipping across his face.
“Nice to meet you,” said Esca. “Xironi, are you hurt?”
“Not for long,” said Xironi, finding the chip she sought. She reached up and pushed it into a slot on Esca’s side.
A small blue light blinked on Esca’s side. “Accessing,” she said. “Healing chip loaded. Shall I use it on you, Miss Xironi?”
“Yes please,” said Xironi with a relieved sigh. Esca floated down and began to trace a blue beam of light along Xironi’s arm.
“Wait, that thing can heal people?” said Carda, glancing over at Xironi and Esca.
Xironi nodded, eyes closed.
Carda glanced over his shoulder at Indal. “Well, Mister Encyclopedia, what do you know about these Unross robots?”
“Mister Encyclopedia?” said Indal, bristling. “If you’re going to make fun of me…”
“I wasn’t making fun of you!” said Carda. “I just wondered if you knew…”
Indal folded his arms and stared out the window without answering.
Without opening her eyes, Xironi said, “The Unrossi are a whole world of sentient robot creatures. All they care about is collecting knowledge, so they send out their smaller models to other worlds.”
“I’m only a Diega,” said Esca. “That’s like a baby. The other stages are Quad, then Emel, then Bio.”
“And they’re friendly, right?” said Michelle, watching the floating robot.
Carda thought he saw something move in his rearview mirror. His eyes flicked to the mirror, but there was nothing there.
“Of course we’re friendly!” said Esca, sounding offended. “Just don’t try to attack an Unrossi is all. Everybody knows that.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Carda, keeping an eye on his mirror. “Really strong defenses or something?”
“We just Unmake you,” said Esca cheerfully. “There’s no reason to get violent.”
“What does that mean?” said Michelle, shrinking back in her seat, away from the robot.
“Just what it means,” said Esca. “We force apart the bonds holding your atoms together. It’s completely painless and instantaneous. I can’t do it, but the older Unrossi can. It’s only a last resort, though. After all, who would attack an Unrossi?”
Something moved in the rearview mirror again. Carda thought he saw a hazy blue shape behind them, but by the time he turned his head to look out the rear window, it had vanished.
Xironi’s eyes were shut and she missed this, but Indal and Michelle looked back, too. “What?” said Indal.
“I keep thinking I see something behind us,” said Carda. “Do other people use the Highway?”
Xironi sat up and peered backwards, too. “No,” she said, eyes widening. “You opened this portal to a point in the past, remember? Only Striders of Chronos can get to this version of the Highway.”
Silence descended over the car’s interior. Everyone except Carda twisted around and stared out the rear window. Carda tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
Everyone saw it at the same time. The shape of a car outlined in blue flickered into being for a second, then faded away. Everyone gasped.
“What was that?” said Xironi.
“A ghost car!” exclaimed Michelle.
“It may be a chrono echo,” said Indal, sounding doubtful. “Possibly of one of our own past or future journeys down the Highway.”
“That wasn’t my car,” said Carda. He was accustomed to identifying cars with a single glance, and knew their front, back and side profiles the way most people identified other people. The last time he had seen that car, it had been rolling down the race track, smashed by other cars. “It’s a Firebird,” he said, hardly opening his mouth.
Xironi and Michelle both looked at him. “Rayn’s car?” they said at once.
“It can’t be,” said Carda, watching his rearview mirror. “He was in a really bad wreck the night we left.” He caught Michelle’s eye, and saw a look of horror cross her face.
Indal nodded. “I wondered who had wrecked that night. Was this Rayn a friend of yours?”
“Not really,” said Carda. “He’s tried to take me out before. And, well, he didn’t… survive the crash.”
There was a nervous silence.
The ghost car reappeared, and disappeared again just as suddenly. Nobody said anything.
“Oh, come on,” said Esca suddenly. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. It must be an illusion.”
“But why is there an illusion of a dead guy’s car behind us?” said Xironi.
“I don’t know,” said Esca. “You could let me load the jet chip.”
Xironi’s ears pinned back for a moment, but she heaved a sigh and opened the chip case again. “Fine, fine.” She extracted a black chip and swapped it for the green healing chip in Esca’s slot. Then she rolled down the window.
Esca’s blue light turned red. Then she whisked out the window and screamed back along the highway, sounding exactly like a jet engine. She vanished into the darkness in two seconds. Five seconds later she reappeared, traveling like a missile. She passed the Miata and disappeared into the distance ahead of it.
Carda whistled.
“I don’t let her use the jet chip much,” said Xironi wryly.
“How can a chip allow a robot to move so fast?” asked Indal.
Xironi shrugged. “They’re all elementalist-infused chips. I got them with Esca when I turned five.”
Esca flashed past the Miata, circled around it, and whisked in the passenger window again. “I saw the car,” she reported. “I don’t know what it is. It’s all made of lines, and there’s a guy inside it. But he’s all in black so I could barely see him.”
Indal was spluttering in the back seat, “Elementalist-infused…?”
“Oh, and we’re almost to the Moros portal,” said Esca, ejecting the jet chip into Xironi’s hand. “It’s on the left.”
Carda slowed down, peering over his shoulder. A car made of lines with a person inside of it? He thought of Rayn passing the green flame over his car, establishing spatial nodes. Had he somehow copied his car? But he had died in the wreck… hadn’t he? Or had it all been a trick? And if only a Strider of Chronos could get to this version of the Highway…
The portal appeared on their left, shimmering a cool blue. Carda braked and pulled up to it, and looked cautiously through.
“Looks like Hawaii,” said Michelle, leaning forward.
Beyond the portal was a white sandy beach, blue ocean, and palm trees.
“Now this is more like it,” said Carda, grinning. He slowly pulled through the portal.
Rayn had arrived in Moros half a day before Carda. He first consulted his black crystal as to the whereabouts of any living things.
The crystal pinged, placing a dark blot in Rayn’s consciousness. There was something useful on this first island.
Rayn Strode across the island. The island was about fifty miles long, and dormant volcanoes rose in the interior, surrounded by jungle. The blot on his consciousness shrank and sharpened as Rayn drew closer to it. When he finally located the creature, he saw it in his mind as clearly as his eyes beheld it.
He rubbed the crystal and grinned to himself. This would be good.
Carda drove across the beach, feeling his car sink and wallow in the sand. If he stopped, the Miata would be stuck. “Is there a road or something I can get to?” he asked.
“I think there’s one further inland,” said Xironi, craning her neck to see up the slope above the beach. “Can we get up there?”
“I’ll try.” Carda turned the wheel, coaxing the car up the slope, hoping for some sort of road.
The higher they ascended, the drier and more powdery the sand became. Finally the Miata gave a final bounce and settled into the sand, wheels spinning. Carda snarled and jammed it into park. “Everybody out.”
“This is good strider training,” said Xironi as everyone climbed out of the car. “How to move a large heavy object and all that.”
“Let me guess,” said Carda, inspecting the front wheels, which were buried to the hubcaps. “I just use the Force.”
“Shh,” said Michelle suddenly.
Carda and Xironi looked up. Michelle was standing by the rear of the car, staring up at the mountain in the island’s interior. Indal stood beside her, fingers crooked oddly, as if trying to catch a dangling string. Carda and Xironi followed their gaze.
A large object hovered in the air a mile away, blue and misty in the humid air. At first Carda thought that it was a flying saucer, for it shifted from side to side in midair as he looked at it. Then he realized that it was not saucer-shaped. It was more like an upright oval, with a shimmer to either side of it to indicate wings.
Then Carda recoiled. “Is that a really big bug?”
“It’s watching us,” said Michelle.
Carda shuddered. “Oh gross. Maybe we should go back to the Highway until it leaves.”
Xironi shaded her eyes and stared at the hovering insect. “Oh no. Not one of those.”
It turned and dove toward them, rapidly growing larger and clearer. It looked like a giant green beetle, and the sun picked out orange and blue iridescence on its belly and wing-shields.
“Get down!” yelled Xironi, leaping at Carda and forcing him flat. As he dropped to his belly, he yelled at Michelle and Indal, “Drop, you two!”
Indal ducked behind the Miata, but Michelle just stood there, mesmerized by the approaching beetle. Indal grabbed her arm and tried to pull her down.
With a deafening buzz the beetle swooped over them. Carda glimpsed thin, thorny legs and felt the blast of wind from its wings. The two front legs grabbed Michelle around the waist, then the insect lifted off and buzzed down toward the ocean.
Carda leaped to his feet, yelling, “Michelle!” Her only answer was a fading scream.
Xironi jumped up and said, “Carda! Green fire!”
He flicked his wrist and held up his left hand, rippling with green fire, pale in the daylight.
Xironi grabbed his right hand and said, “Now stride!” She took a step after the bug…
…and skipped ten feet forward, dragging Carda with her. “Short teleports,” she said, eyes fixed on the bug.
They took three more ‘steps’ and reached the shoreline, but the beetle was flying out over the ocean, making for another island in the distance. “Xironi, it’s water!” Carda exclaimed.
“Run fast,” said Xironi.
And they did.
Xironi teleported with each step, barely setting foot on the water’s surface. At first Carda couldn’t keep up, and sank up to his waist between hops. Then he began to learn how those teleports felt, and timed them with the fall of each foot.
Then Carda and Xironi were Striding across the ocean, twenty or thirty feet to a stride. They gained steadily on the beetle. Carda could see Michelle in its claws. He was terrified that it would tear her in half, but she seemed to just be riding along, clinging to the thorny legs with her hair streaming in the wind.
They Strode underneath the beetle, then Xironi tugged Carda’s arm and said, “Get on its back!”
Carda looked up at the beetle and envisioned its back, and his next teleport set him atop the bug in the screaming wind, between the throbbing wings. He dropped to his knees to keep from being blown off, and grasped the sleek fur that covered the thorax. Then he shuddered in revulsion. Bug hair.
His hands encountered something cold underneath the hair. He reluctantly glanced down, wondering what other revolting thing he might see, and saw a gleam of silver. He prodded it. It was the head of a bolt.
A bolt?
Xironi appeared beside him in a green flash of flame. “It’s mechanical,” she yelled triumphantly. “We have to find how to get into the cockpit.”
“While we’re over the ocean?” Carda yelled back against the wind. “What if it crashes and kills Michelle?”
“You’re a Strider of Chronos!” said Xironi. “Stop time!”
Carda held up his right hand and summoned lightning, then threw it down at the beetle, the way Indal had taught him. When it turned into a string, he pulled it hard.
The roaring wings halted, and so did the rushing wind in Carda’s face. Xironi still sat beside him, frozen in time. Carda made a note to learn how to include other people in time-stops, and plunged his hands back under the bug’s hair. He found more bolts that ringed the top of the thorax. After a moment he discovered a latch where the thorax joined to the abdomen, and flipped it open. The top of the thorax popped open. It was a round hatch door.
Carda peered down inside the hollow abdomen. Three feet below him was a glowing screen, a control panel covered in buttons and dials, and a flight yoke with a young, dark-haired man sitting behind it.
Carda swung down inside the cockpit and inspected Rayn in surprise. “I thought you were dead,” he told Rayn, even though Rayn could not hear him because of the time stop. Then Carda examined the control panel. The beetle’s course was marked in a red line, aiming for that island in the distance. Also shown was the pressure of the front claws. Carda saw that they were set to ten percent, so as not to harm Michelle.
He found the dial that controlled the claws, and set the pressure to zero.
Then he reached out through space with his left hand, grabbed the island, and yanked.
The beetle jumped two miles and appeared over the new island’s beach. Carda teleported outside, lifted Michelle out of the claws and set her on the sand, then did the same for Xironi.
Then he finally released the time thread he had gripped in his sweaty right hand all this time.
The girls gasped in shock as they found themselves on the ground. The beetle roared across the beach and crashed into the trees, snapping several of them in half before finally grinding to a halt. Its wings gave a half-hearted buzz, then stilled.
Carda wiped his hands on his pants, grinning. “I totally rock.” He turned to help up Michelle and Xironi.
He froze. He felt like a giant, cold hand had grasped the top of his head. Slowly it turned his head until he was looking at the mountain in the center of the island, and he saw that it was not a mountain. It was a black crystal the size of a mountain.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Xironi and Michelle were being forced to look at the crystal, too. Xironi moaned, “I was only kidding about the Nightmare Crystal! I didn’t really want to look into it!”
Carda felt a strong urge to walk toward the crystal. His feet took a few hesitant steps across the sand. He tore his eyes away from it with an effort, and saw that the girls were following him. “What’s happening?” he said. “Why are we having to go to it?”
“It’s the Nightmare Crystal’s compulsion,” said Xironi. “As soon as you set foot on this island, you’re compelled to look into the crystal. That’s how its magic works. Did you bring us here, or was it the bug?”
They continued to walk toward the crystal, free to talk, but not to change directions.
“Uh, the bug’s pilot, actually,” said Carda. “Rayn was in there.”
“Rayn!” exclaimed Michelle. “I thought you said he was dead!”
“I thought he was,” said Carda. “But he’s a Strider, so I guess he faked it.”
Xironi looked at the fallen bug as they passed into the trees near its resting place. “If he’s awake in there, he’ll have the compulsion on him, too. This will be fun.”
“So, why is it called the Nightmare Crystal?” said Michelle, discovering in dismay that she had to scramble over a boulder, since she was compelled to move forward in a straight line.
“I’ve never looked in it, so I don’t know,” said Xironi. “Grandpa says you get a good look into the nearby worlds and the nearest potential futures. It’s the only way a Strider can time-scry. But it’s supposed to be really… unpleasant.”
“Let me guess,” said Michelle. “It’s like a nightmare.”
“Gee, I wonder!” said Carda, leaning sideways to avoid a tree branch that his feet seemed determined to carry him into.
They came to a rocky slope and scrambled up it, sometimes dropping to all fours to keep from sliding back. Carda reached the top first. He could see the crystal’s smooth black side over the trees ahead of him. He guessed it was only about five hundred feet away, but the steep terrain and trees made the hike difficult. They kept moving toward it.
There was a rustling to their right, and Rayn appeared, pushing through the brush with a grim expression. There was an ugly purple bruise on his forehead, and he snarled at Carda. “You wrecked my beetle.”
“You kidnapped my sister,” Carda snarled back.
Their routes toward the crystal kept them fifteen feet apart, or the two would have attacked each other then and there.
“Seriously, Rayn,” said Xironi, “I’m surprised you didn’t go for me.”
“You ducked,” said Rayn. He looked at Michelle. “I don’t even know your name. Why didn’t you duck?”
“I’m Michelle,” she said, “and I was kind of hypnotized. I like bugs, and it was pretty.”
“Don’t talk to him, Mish,” snapped Carda. “He’s scum.”
“Me?” said Rayn in outrage. “Who caused my wreck, may I ask?”
“You did,” said Carda. “I just got out of the way.”
“I was trying to stay clear of your moronic little car,” spat Rayn, ducking under a palm frond. “Fat lot of good it did me.”
“But that doesn’t matter, since your car is a ghost one now,” said Carda.
Rayn’s eyes darted from face to face. “How did you know about that?”
“We saw it on the Highway on our way here,” said Xironi. “You must have moved fast to beat us here.”
“I don’t know about you, but I tessered,” said Rayn. “You mean there’s a Highway where you have to DRIVE from world to world?” He snickered.
Carda glanced questioningly at Michelle and Xironi. “Well, it was your car, Rayn. Who was driving it?”
Michelle stared hard at Rayn. “Obviously not him.”
Rayn kept looking at Michelle. “Why are you even here, Michelle? You’re not a Strider.”
“I wanted to come,” she said with a shrug. “By the way, kidnapping a girl with a giant beetle is not the best pickup in the world.”
To everyone’s surprise, Rayn flushed and looked at the ground.
They entered a thick grove of trees, and further talking was cut off by rustling, ducking, and many grunts and squeals as twigs scratched and pulled hair.
At last they emerged in an open grassy space, and stood at the foot of the Nightmare Crystal. It was shaped vaguely like a pyramid, but with irregular sides. It was more than a mile across, but only perhaps half a mile high. The compulsion drew them southwards along its side, until they came to a diamond-shaped tunnel cut straight into the crystal.
“We have to go inside it?” cried Michelle. “No way!”
Xironi stopped dead, eyes widening. “No. I’m not going in there.”
Carda and Rayn stopped, as well, but Carda felt pressure building inside of his skull the longer he stood still. He grasped the sides of his head, wondering if the crystal could make his brain explode. He staggered forward a step to ease the pressure. “I don’t think we have much choice.”
Rayn grunted, and Carda looked up. Rayn wore a large crystal around his neck the same color as the Nightmare Crystal. It floated out straight, and seemed to drag Rayn along by the string around his neck. Carda looked back and saw Michelle and Xironi also walking stiffly after them, resisting at every step.
“Really, why do we have to do this?” said Carda, and plunged into the tunnel.
The tunnel ran all the way through the crystal in a straight line. Light shone in at both ends, and illuminated all sorts of secret depths and lights inside the giant crystal overhead and all around. Carda was reminded of pictures he had seen of ice caves inside of glaciers. It was like sculpted glass. There were many different colors, as well: velvet purple, midnight blue, sea green, rose red. “This isn’t so bad,” he thought, looking around.
Then he was in outer space.
He floated in a dark void among a billion stars, watching a galaxy revolving on its axis. As Carda watched, the galaxy suddenly began to collapse in on itself, a growing blackness at its center spreading out toward the edges. It looked like the stars were falling into darkness like sand through an hourglass. Carda hurtled toward this galaxy-wide blackness with a silent scream.
He fell into it with a burst of light and rippling darkness, like diving into a pond. He sank, feeling oddly boyant, and looked around. He was on the backside of the universe. In front of him was a flat pane of glass with stars and galaxies painted on it. But in the watery expanse with him, behind the glass, floated an amorphous mass that glowed faintly green and purple, trailing stinging tentacles as fine as hair. A jellyfish.
As he watched, the jellyfish floated toward the pane of glass and brushed its tentacles against it. The painted stars came free and sank into the tentacles, where they fell to pieces and vanished as the jellyfish devoured them. One of those tentacles floated toward Carda and touched his cheek.
Pain exploded inside of his head. Blind, he fell to his knees, throwing his arms over his face to push away the tentacle.
He smelled grass. Birds sang all around. He slowly lowered his arms and squinted. His head still hurt, but it was fading. The light was awfully bright after being in the darkness of the Nightmare Crystal, but his eyes were adjusting. Had the pain been from the vision, or from stepping out into the sunlight?
He stood up and whirled to face the crystal. The compulsion to enter it was gone. What had he seen? A jellyfish eating stars? That made no sense. Maybe it meant something.
Michelle and Xironi stumbled out of the crystal, clinging to each other’s arms, eyes wide and blank. As soon as the sun touched their faces, they reacted as Carda had, and threw their arms over their faces. Carda rushed to them. “It’s okay! You made it out.” He looked around for Rayn, but there was no sign of him.
“I never want to do that again as long as I live,” said Xironi through clenched teeth.
“I want to go home,” whimpered Michelle.
“Did you see the jellyfish?” asked Carda.
Xironi opened her eyes a crack and lowered her arms. “Jellyfish? No, it was a sword.” She looked down at her chest, and touched her breastbone. “It was stuck in me, right here.”
“I thought I had been split in two,” said Michelle shakily. “One half still knew I was Michelle, and the other half didn’t have any memories at all, and it was so sad. And the Michelle half was so cold and empty.” She hugged herself and shuddered.
“Just nightmares,” said Carda, trying to convince himself. “Xironi, does any of that stuff ever come true?”
“I don’t know,” she said, still rubbing her chest and shuddering.
Carda guided them away from the crystal, not wanting to stand any nearer to it than was necessary. “I guess we’d better teleport back and dig out my car.”
“I hope Indal’s all right,” said Michelle shakily. “You guys left him behind, didn’t you?”
For some reason, Carda’s insides lurched at this thought. “You don’t think he’d transform, do you?”
Nobody said anything. Xironi reached out into space, one hand blazing green, and yanked them all through space back to the original island.
Carda’s red car still sat in the sand, the rear wheels buried to the hubcaps. Indal was nowhere in sight, and it was eerily quiet. Carda started forward. “Where do you think—”
Xironi grabbed his arm. “Shh. Something’s wrong.”
Carda peered closely at his car. It looked empty and normal. “Maybe Indal went up to the trees for some shade,” he said, for the sun’s heat reflected from the sand and it was uncomfortably warm.
Michelle knelt and burrowed her hands into the sand. Then she said, “They’re underground.”
Xironi and Carda stared at her, but there was no time to ask how Michelle knew this. The sand at their feet bulged upward in a mound three feet across. The three of them scrambled backwards, Carda summoning lightning and fire.
A pair of tooth-lined jaws emerged from the sand, and there stood one of the monsters that Carda had last seen the night he met Xironi. “Stream-rip beasts!” he exclaimed. As it charged, he flung a strand of lighting at it.
To his horror, the beast caught the lightning in its teeth and swallowed it, growing still larger. It snapped at his legs. He kicked it in the nose and jumped backwards. Then Xironi charged in and aimed a savage kick at its nearest eye. The beast flinched sideways.
Out of the corner of his eye, Carda saw an animal leave the trees in the distance and gallop toward them. Then he realized that it was Indal the werewolf. He ran amazingly fast on all fours, and carried a small white object in his mouth. Esca.
“Indal!” shouted Michelle, waving. “Over here!”
Indal waved his tail at her, but he was intent on the stream-rip beast. As it charged at Xironi and knocked her sideways, Indal jumped over it and dropped Esca at Xironi’s feet. Then he jumped on top of the beast’s head and sank his teeth into its eyebrow-ridges.
Xironi snatched up Esca, who said weakly, “Hi Miss Xironi. Point my port toward the beast, please.”
Xironi obeyed, and Esca shot a bolt of blue light that burned completely through the beast’s head. It gave a shuddering cry and collapsed to the sand, Indal still biting it. He leaped off and stood up, wiping blood off his jaws, as the beast shrank to the size of a housecat, then vanished in a swirl of green smoke.
Carda turned to Indal, his hands still alight with time and space powers, and lightly punched him in the shoulder with both hands. Indal snarled, then transformed back into a human, looking relieved. “Thank goodness you came back when you did!”
“What happened?” said Xironi faintly, hugging Esca to her.
Carda helped up Michelle, and they moved to stand under the scanty shade of two nearby palm trees.
“I tried to follow you,” said Indal, “but I’m afraid you sadly outclass me when it comes to chasing monsters. I glanced up your timeline and saw that you’d be back soon. Unfortunately, it made me transform. I decided that I might as well be useful and dig out the car for you. I have the other back wheel completely out, you just can’t see it from over here.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Carda.
“Then Esca told me that someone was coming,” said Indal. “I looked up, and there was this man down on the beach. He was wearing a black suit, and I remember thinking he must be really hot in all that. Then he said something, and one of those beasts appeared.” Indal scowled at the pile of sand where the stream-rip beast had emerged. “It went after Esca, for some reason. I had to fight it for her. Then you all came back.”
“Esca has latent spatial powers,” said Xironi, stroking the robot’s top and examining a deep split in her casing. “She probably attracted them first.”
“Who was this man?” said Carda, thinking that he probably already knew. He glanced at Michelle, and she raised one eyebrow.
“I didn’t recognize him,” said Indal. “When I looked around later, he was gone.”
Everyone glanced around the beach, and uphill at the trees, where anyone could lie hidden and watching.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Carda.
The previous weekend, Rick and Sera were cleaning up from their barbecue and talking quietly.
“They’re nice kids,” Rick was saying. “But they have a lot on their shoulders right now, Carda particularly.”
“I feel sorry for them,” said Sera, rolling up a bag of chips. “They remind me of another Strider of Chronos I once knew.”
Rick smiled and slipped an arm around her waist. “Back then, the only thing you gave me was a hard time.”
Sera put her arms around him, but further smooching was interrupted by a knock on the sliding glass doors leading to the back yard. Rick and Sera turned.
Carda stood there, waving. He was dirty and smudged, and wearing different clothes than the ones he had worn to tbe barbecue.
Rick rushed to the door and opened it. “Carda! Back so soon?”
“Howdy Rick,” said Carda. “We came back a week to get some repairs and advice.”
Rick looked over his shoulder. Carda had parked his Miata in the alley behind Rick’s yard, and through the open gate, Rick could see Michelle, Xironi, and an unfamiliar young man climbing out.
“Sera, don’t put away the leftovers just yet,” Rick said.
