Promoted image: The Promised Land, by DreadJim (with permission)



"What is that?"

All three of them looked at the small, pinkish thing inside the time machine. The machine's towering components, the 'devilfingers' reaching up from below, always seemed to grab at whatever was inside the platform of the machine, but with an object as small as this one, it seemed less grotesquely frightening, and more, well, plain silly. There was an outright Monthy Python feel to it.

"Ham," answered Thomas with a smile as broad as his face. Ida just turned to look at him in disbelief. "I know it's ham," she replied, "but what is it doing in my time machine?"

Not unlike a Bond villain, Misha swiveled the big command chair of the machine around. Unlike a Bond villain, he really had no need. Ida could see his face just fine. "Don't go all possessive on us, Ida. This is a much better idea than it looks. Tell her, Thomas!"

Walking around the circumference of the machine, making sure not to trip over the carefully placed cables that he had sorted out and even labeled carefully to improve his understanding of their function, Thomas knelt down next to the platform, his hand extended in a very pedagogical fashion, like some nature documentarist trying to show the camera a delicate bird's nest. Except the nest was a rather large piece of discount ham.

"Look, every time you went three years back, you got badly hurt. If you ask me, we got damned lucky that was all. You could have been fried, you could have been splatted, you could have been cut to shreds. We have literally no idea what we're sending you into."

Ida nodded, but with a rather tiresome, nearly sarcastic smile on her lips. "I got back to the 90s alright, didn't I?" Her smile faded when Thomas stood up with a deep sigh. "I still say lucky on that one. The fact that this Kristoffer guy had actually planned ahead and gotten some good rocks to use as targets for, what, a small stretch of desert in Texas, that's just not going to be something you can depend on in the long run." As he spoke, Ida wiped the somewhat meanspirited smile off her face. He was right, she was wrong, and she knew it. She really did want to be right, though. Being right about something really strange would be nice, for once.

"Anyway," continued Thomas, "we send the ham through time, using the destinations we have access to. It's not a lot, but we can make a lot from it. If the ham comes back intact, we send Charlie Sheen through."

Ida made the typical about-to-speak face, blinking rapidly as an instinctive reaction to her confusion. "Charlie Sheen? You're sending... an actor?" She followed Thomas closely as he walked over to a spot that had been dug out from the rock foam that, in spite their work, still filled much of the secret basement. From the small niche, he pulled a cage with a fairly large rat. "That's just disgusting, Thomas," Ida sneered, frowning so hard her cheeks actually strained a bit. "It's a mouse, not a rat," Misha remarked from the chair, as if that made it much better. "Everybody has mice, Ida. Some just don't know it." "I live in a concrete basement filled with hardened foam," she countered, making Misha actually laugh a bit. "Well, rules and exceptions, Ida. Rules and exceptions."

Thomas put away the oversized mouse and handed her a set of goggles. It felt uncomfortable and strange for her to watch someone else go through the time machine. She had seen it before, but after having become the main time traveler in their improvised little outfit, she was beginning to feel very personal about the machine's use. Possessive, as Misha had put it.

From the command chair, Misha plotted in the few instructions he knew how to, from back when the four time travelers had still been with them, and he had been nosy enough to learn from observing them. Rushing a bit to get the goggles on, Ida winced as it caught multiple hairs on her head, even now that she had cut it down enough that she could pass for an awkward boy if she wore the right clothes. In the end, she opted to simply hold the old and cracked welding goggles over her eyes manually, as the machine began to howl and wail, its devilfingers visibly splitting into their myriad parts in the powerful magnetic field that held them together. The swirling glow inside the roughly spherical field of effect between the fingers grew in strength, and she could feel it in her stomach as the machine began to pulse, making time flow just a teeny bit irregularly around them. Anything more, and human blood circulation and heart rhythm might go haywire. The machine was designed to be harmless to spectators, but nobody had cared to make it feel harmless!

The whole spectacle soon rose to a climax, sending a flash through the relatively small basement, making the rock foam that covered walls and ceiling outside the reach of the time machine crackle and break here and there. It helped with the whole cleanup issue, but it was a bonus, not a tool. The time machine was for sending her through time, or anyone else that fit the bill. Or, in this case, for destroying ham.

All three members of The Embassy looked at the sizzling pieces of ham scattered around the machine, most of them in a small pile in the middle of the platform. "I guess I was lucky," mumbled Ida, staring at the destroyed ham. Then she looked up at the two young men standing near her. Both of them had expressions that shouted "I told you so" louder than their voices ever could.

"This was a test," said Misha calmly. "I sent it very far into the future, expecting it to be destroyed. I wanted to show you the point of it." Silence filled the room, along with the smell of self-cooking ham, as she looked at him with a mix of amused surprise and plotted vengeance. "How about we try something less risky?" he asked. Ida nodded.



The first thing to impact her was the air. She gasped, even before she landed firmly on the ground. As usual, the machine had sent her out at what she considered to be an angle, meaning that even though she stood perfectly still in the thing, she arrived as if shot out of a circus cannon. It was a rough landing, but she had learned to roll with it. Quite literally.

But the air tasted foul. Dry and with powerful hints of smoke in it, even a metallic aftertaste in the mix. Still curled up sligthly from protecting herself against hard blows to the head, she stretched out, letting the steam escape the strategically placed flaps in her jumpsuit. Opening her eyes, by force, to check that nobody was around, she loosened the leather straps that held the front of the jumpsuit closed, allowing even more steam to escape her body. Arrival was painful and, she suspected, unhealthy for her body, but at least she had the procedure fairly accurately down at this point. It took her only a few minutes, spread out on the ground, to adapt to the local climate, and to have her body regulate itself to a more normal condition.

She was at the old school building, the one used to secretly house her Embassy of Time, the meeting place she had put together for those who did not belong in the time they were in. They had quite a few passing through these days, even though the large buildings still seemed like overkill, but then again, nobody else was using them. Well, nobody else was using them in 2015. This was, according to Misha's understanding of the time machine, 2040. He had picked a year as far away as he dared, still wanting to take things slowly as they reached farther and farther into both past and future. The time travelers they had worked with before the incident in June 2015 had skillfully used the machine to hit both ancient past and distant future, but they had training and experience. She, and the ones helping her, had neither.

As she stood up, she spat, several times. There was a feeling of having eaten or drunk something foul, something that left a series of bad tastes in her mouth, and concentrating on anything else was a bit difficult. Without looking, she pulled a strap at the hip of her jumpsuit, and all her clothes got dragged to the same spot at the hip. The violent heat of the machine, or rather, of the trip through time, would ignite anything flammable on her body, so all she wore was the fireproof jumpsuit. It was in no way high fashion, but it was that, nudity, or having her clothes ignite on her body. She had tried all three options at this point, and the jumpsuit was by far the prefered way to handle the trip. Still, she kept the suit on, satisfying herself with tying the clothes into what constituted a leather bag. None of it had been damaged, having been away from her energy-drenched body and spread out enough to cool almost instantly. But changing right away seemed not just vain, but a bit foolhardy. She was pressed for time, ironically, and she would.......

Something was very wrong. As her eyesight began to improve, her eyeballs cooling down to a normal room temperature, she realized how different things looked. This was where she had picked up the rock that was used as a clumsy target through time, meaning she had appeared where that rock would be in 2040. And she recognized the contours of the area around the school. But there was something definitively wrong about it. Colors and shapes, all that she got at a first and mildly speaking distorted glance, seemed to fit nothing she had seen back home. Vestenskov, the small community around the old school buildings of The Embassy, was nothing more than a cluster of fifty or so homes, many of them empty. While she had to accept the fact that 25 years would change the landscape, this was not what she had expected, not at all.

What she did put on right away were her socks and shoes. The shoes were showing signs of prolonged time travel, the rubber soles clearly twisted and distorted at this point from the flash heat. But as she did, her still adjusting eyes, along with the sensation in her feet, noticed something very wrong with the ground on which she stood. It was dusty and dry, like coarse sand. This was southern Danish farmland in 2015, some of the best soil around. But it felt more like someone's badly neglected dirt driveway right now.

With the outlines of the surrounding shapes hardening, it became increasingly clear what was wrong. Everything was too... low. Light flooded in from a sun that should have been struggling with shades, the light blocked by trees and buildings. But the light flowed far more easily through to her. She was on the west side of the abandoned school buildings, but light came from the east, and she wasn't covered in shadow as she should be. The brightness and brownish color of the light did nothing to help her see any better, and with her hands, she began trying to best shield her eyes.

The school was all but gone. The buildings from 2015 were nothing but rubble, and even then did not look right, as if they had been torn down, rebuilt, and torn down again. On the bright side, she could see farther than she would have, had they been there to block her line of sight. On the less bright side, everything around her looked much the same. Buildings were numerous, far moreso than in 2015. Someone had built a lot of new houses in Vestenskov in the two and a half decades between her time and this. Well, 'houses' might be the wrong term, seeing as the rubble left behind contained walls too long and, looking from her perspective, too thick to be mere homes. They looked industrial, large concrete chunks with minimalistic shapes. Built for practical use, not aesthetics. In fact, some of what she saw gave her a distinct military feel about them. And not a peaceful one.

The ground felt strange to move on. As she walked slowly from her point of arrival in this time, it felt like walking on gravel, or on a beach devoid of fine-grained sand, nothing but jagged bits and pieces to cut a toe on. Her shoes kept her from cutting anything, of course, but the feeling of the ground was still uncomfortable. Physically, it didn't feel like walking on glass, but something inside of her made the comparison, nonetheless! She wondered how Charlie, the mouse, had dealt with the place. Once Misha had set the time machine for this far closer point in time, and once the second ham had made it here and back in one piece, they had sent the mouse here. It had been tied with a leather strap to the ham, causing it to stay close both because it had to, and because it liked gnawing on the ham. Charlie had come back in one piece, although not that happy about the trip. Then again, the two boys had named it from the infamous Charlie Sheen rant, and tiger-blooded warlocks had no business complaining about a little bit of time travel.

The street outside was in no better shape than the buildings alongside of it. House upon house had been violently demolished, leaving just uneven foundations beneath, and the road had been torn up. It didn't look like an intended destruction of the road, as opposed to the buildings, but more like an extreme consequence of wear and tear. Chunks of asphalt were broken off and now lay tilted in their place, sticking up like shards of glass in a pile of trash. They looked about as filthy, too! There was a strange atmosphere of post-apocalyptic wasteland to it, but nothing seemed to have been destroyed by outright explosions. It more looked simply as if it had been used to death. Buildings, road, the strange and thick walls, all of it.

Plants fared little better. There were a few tree trunks visible in what would be gardens back in 2015, and Ida could make out the outline of lawns both big and small from that time. But nothing grew well. Weeds stuck up here and there, but they looked sick and frail, as if they were in a constant battle against unseen forces just to stay alive. And that taste in the air! She spat again. She had brought along the hardened flask that Thomas wanted to test out, and it had survived the trip just fine. The water inside, which had been frozen to ice before the trip, was now warm and rather distasteful to drink, like a bland and poorly heated tea, but she still took a sip of it. Anything to clean out that disgusting taste in the air!

As she walked down the road, however, something in the changed. Like a smell wafting through the air, everything became tinted with a sense of moisture. The air remained dry as smoldering coals, but there was a sense that somewhere near, another air, more humid and rich, was escaping. As Ida passed by what had once been the retirement home on the edge of Vestenskov, a thick aroma of plantlife joined the humid scent. She had never before realized that leaves themselves had a scent, that they could be smelled. But in the complete absence of them, she had definitely noticed it, and when the aroma came floating back, even in such a lessened state, she could in no way ignore the fact. Still, the source eluded her. The retirement home still dominated her view to the north, but south of her, there was nothing but dry wasteland where, in 2015, fertile fields had stretched on forever. Stopping for a moment, she decided to cross the broken and jagged asphalt road.

In her hand, the soil of the dead fields felt as dry as she had expected. It clumped a bit, just as fertile soil would, but broke apart under the slightest bit of pressure. Dry roots and branches, tiny bits of plant matter mixed into soil to make it more durable and add other advantages, were nothing but dehydrated twigs in the clumps, snapping or even crumbling to flakes and dust at a touch. And yet, plantlife could be sensed in the air! She saw none on the horizon, only the rolling hills of pale brown, so continuous that the light blue sky seemed to soak up a bit of the color itself, the same effect that had made her think the sky was actually half brown when she arrived. Like a desert or flat plains of snow, the nearly unbroken color played tricks on her eyes and mind, making her see traces of it in the skies above it. Looking to her right, what she would figure was west, she saw the rubble of houses big and small, with long-dead trees mighty enough to not erode away quickly dotting the landscape around them. The thick wall ran through them, looking as if it had once meant to enclose a large part of Vestenskov, but had failed in its efforts and died along with the rest. To her left, the east, there was more dead fields, a few lines through them suggesting that there had been other walls attempted.

And then, she turned back, looking at the retirement home that she had walked beside. Standing now across the street, the angle on her point of view changed, and she began to spot what was behind the cracked and partially crumbled building. A wall, the same shade of dark sandy brown as the failed walls she had already seen, rose just high enough to become visible over the top of the lowest ruins of the retirement home. Not even thinking before she acted, Ida ran along the retirement home, staying on the opposite side of the street, and passed by the end of it quickly. Vestenskov ended about there, the only things spreading farther out being barely noticeable foundations of houses that had once stood there. And without the retirement home blocking her view, she could see clearly to the north.

It looked like a fault in the landscape, as if a crack in the ground had raised a part of the countryside itself. Stretching on forever to the west, it had a rough, winding end near the road that led out of Vestenskov and towards the city of Nakskov to the north. A wall. Dustbrown and uneven like a cliffside, angular protrusions and variations scattered along it, the wall stood as tall as a house might, though from the distance, Ida could not make out anything more exact than that. And that alone was terrifying to her, the fact that it was too far away to be seen clearly, but big enough to in no way be overlooked. Had it continued to the east, it would have not just blocked her passage north, but cut the very landscape in two.

What happened next was a blur. She felt the impact in her side, as something hit her, something large, squarely in her ribs. She had unwittingly held her left hand up to shield her eyes, and thus exposed her entire left side to anyone or anything bent on hurting her. Now, something did!

As she landed, the old ruin of sidewalks cracked beneath her and threw up chunky dust into the already dry air. Her right shoulder, taking much of the blow from the landing, screamed of pain, but not of having been broken or otherwise badly damaged. On her side, she could still see the tip of the wall behind the ruins of the retirement home, but her vision was partly blocked by an arm supporting itself against the ground of crumbled sidewalk in front of her.

"Stay quiet," a whispering voice hissed at her, and she did. She was still pinned down, and twisting her head to the left enough to get a view of her assailant hurt her neck. She could see the arm, covered in a thick jacket, and the left shoulder above it. All of it had a scent of sweat and dirt about it, like someone pulled out of a mudpit and drying in the sun. Even though she had never encountered anyone pulled out of mudpit, of course, but she could imagine the smell might be similar. It was not one that she would come to miss, she suspected.

As seconds passed, Ida didn't move, nor did the voice on top of her. Pressed against the cracked sidewalk, she felt extremely uncomfortable, but there was an urgency to the voice, something that sounded far more like a warning than a threat, and the person did nothing else. Finally, she felt the pressure fade, as the person on her slowly stood up. Or rather, as that person moved away. Looking down towards her own feet, Ida saw the woman more slide off of her than stand up, keeping a crouched pose, looking towards the north and the wall as she did. Catching the hint quite clearly, Ida herself balled up on the ground before getting up, staying hunched and low to the ground, knees bent and head down.

Silently, the woman gestured to her to follow. Her eyes kept shifting back and forth between Ida and the wall to the north, as if it was only a few meters away. It was not. It was far enough away that even getting to it seemed like a challenge, the flat roads of Ida's time now reduced to splinters and shards of asphalt. That the woman showed fear of something so distant, and so immobile, seemed outlandish, and ended up making Ida afraid of it, too.

"Who are you?" asked Ida, her voice dropping from low speech to barely audible whisper in the range of only those three words. The woman just kept making gestures for her to follow, as their crouching bodies hobbled along the road and back into Vestenskov. She was wearing a thick coat, not a jacket, the length of it reaching down and scraping along the ground as she snuck along the road. It had a faded green and brown color, making it look half like an old military coat, and half like a cheap bathrobe. Ida hadn't noticed it before, but the air was fairly cool, considering the powerful sun and minimal wind. Her own jumpsuit, the leather straps in front pulled tight before she started exploring, had done an astounding job at keeping her warm, perhaps helped a bit by the heat that still lingered in her body from the trip through time.

Their destination, it seemed, was a house not far into Vestenskov. Technically, it was in the north, making it the small sibling hamlet of Rarup, but the distinction between many of the small towns around Nakskov was often hard to discern, unless you happened to have grown up in that particular little town. The house itself was little more than a ruin, like most of the ones around it. A tarp, looking like something taken long ago from a military surplus store, covered the inside, or what would have once been the inside, of some of the house. Ida immediately noticed that the tarp was concealed from the road by the one standing wall of the ruin, as if it was hiding there from anyone passing by. The woman, still not saying much, now walked almost erect and straight towards the tarp, and Ida silently followed suit.

With her dark brown hair and slightly brown skin, the woman somehow seemed to belong to the land around them, her palette strangely matching the landscape. In a way, she could have sprung from the dry earth itself, and Ida would have only been slightly surprised by the idea. The coat, the worn leather boots, and what Ida could see of her pants from behind her, all of it were mere nuances of brown. Whether it was a habit, a choice, a lack of options, or a strategical necessity for hiding in a dustbrown landscape, it had the effect of the last. Convincing herself that this was why she hadn't spotted the woman before she fell on her, Ida tried to reconcile herself with the fact that she had completely let down her own guard. She had no intention of making that a tradition.

The woman pushed a corner of the tarp aside. "We have a straggler," Ida heard her say inside the tarp, before she herself ducked through the same corner. Inside, surprised a bit by how well the sunlight fell through the tarp, she instantly spotted three others, clad much like the woman. Two of them, a very young blackhaired man and a blond woman no more than in her twenties, were sitting on the ground, on either side of a small wooden table, or the elaborate board for a game, looking at little pieces of paper. The third was sitting at a small chunk of electronics, headphone over one ear. A slightly older man, maybe mid- or late-fourties, his face so tanned she had to judge by his light hair and facial features that he was not middle-eastern or south-asian. They all looked up as the woman entered. The two young ones looked fairly calm, but the older one instantly had a dark, distrustful expression on his face.

"And you brought her here why?" the older man asked. The younger ones looked at him with complete calm, despite the angry tone in his voice. Ida was a bit frustrated that the woman kept her back to her, preventing her from seeing on her face how she reacted. "Because she's a kid, and I don't think the wallies are using kids as spies," she said, her voice showing signs of dislike towards the man, or just some level of frustration with the question. "I was a kid once, too, Badger."

Ida stood perfectly still, letting the woman and the man, Badger, deal with as much of the confrontation as possible. As it turned out, there was little more to say, although even from behind the woman, she could see that the two were sending each other displeased looks. "How old are you, kid?" asked the man in a very unfriendly tone. "Fourteen," Ida lied. Her scrawny build and short stature made people constantly misjudge her age, but in this case, she hoped to play on it. If being a kid, as the woman had said it, would make anyone more lenient towards her, she saw only a benefit in it!

The man made a few grumbling noises, nodding slowly as he looked up and down her. "Where'd you get the outfit?" he asked, sounding none too impressed by the jumpsuit on Ida. She shrugged. "Parents gave it to me, thought it would be practical." "You stand out," he snarled, even before Ida had answered him fully. "Why are you here?" Ida just looked at him, not knowing exactly what to say. Her eyes then shifted to the woman, who was now turned so that she could look her in the eyes. While the man was tanned dark, the woman looked at least partly southern, maybe Egyptian or from that region. Ida simply folded her arms and looked down at the ground uncomfortably. "Huh," the man grunted, "another jumper." The woman knelt down, putting her eyes just below Ida's. It was something adults did to talk to children, and it seemed out of place with Ida, even if they thought her to be 14, but she played along. "Did you escape a transport?" she said with a soft, almost caring voice, and Ida just nodded, hoping to have her fill in more blanks. Silence, especially from a young person, was a more effective weapon than she had thought just a few years ago.

"Welcome to the club," a voice said from the back of the tarp. Ida tilted her head and saw the young man now looking at her. The young woman still had most of her attention on the paper on the small table in front of her. "Pidgin here jumped a ferry near Langeland," said the older man, not lifting his eyes from whatever he was doing. "Damn kid swam to shore, maybe half a kilometer. Survivor, that one." Ida smiled shyly at the younger man, who slowly got up from his awkward seat on the old floorboards. "I'm telling you, Wally's getting more and more careless. Next those camps are just gonna go pop and fizz, and we'll have scanners flooding the deadlands like locusts."

The slew of terms clearly not from her own time made Ida worry that she was showing her ignorance and thus blowing her cover. The one thing that kept her calm was the confidence that none of them would think that she was a time traveler, but that didn't mean that ignorance would make her look less suspicious. "Pidgin?" she asked, choosing the one thing that seemed warranted to be confused by. The young man in the back, now on his feet, waved with a smile. "That's Pidgin," said the woman, "and you got Badger's name. I'm Gopher and that's Carp in the back." The young girl waved as the woman spoke her name. Or, as Ida greatly suspected, codename. "Who are you?" she followed up. "Marie," Ida answered, keeping to a name she felt comfortable pretending to be her own at this point.

Squeezing past the woman, the young man, Pidgin, stretched out his hand to Ida. Ida hesitated, then unfolded her arms from across her chest and shook it. "Maybe you could help us get a better idea of Wallywood? I mean, depending on what you saw?" Ida just stared blankly at the guy. "Wallywood?" she asked, forgetting for a moment that her ignorance might not be as natural here as she thought. But Pidgin just laughed. "Sorry, I don't even know where you're from. Wallywood's the big walled city you might have seen to the north." Ida just nodded, slowly. "Get it? Wally, Hollywood, walled city?" Ida nodded even slower. "Yeah, I get it," she said, restraining herself from asking him not to think of her as a complete imbecile. He clearly meant no harm, and his youth might be working against his better judgement. Even if he was definitely older than her. "Wally makes walled cities, and all the little wallies work for him," she added, speaking in a low tone as if to make it sound like she was just stating common knowledge. In fact, she was betting on an interpretation of their jargon. From the lack of anyone correcting her, she had clearly gotten it right.

"But why here?" she asked. She dearly hoped she only sounded curious about it. "'Cause it's a bottleneck," Badger said, jumping into the conversation. From the sound of his voice, a bit against his will. "Swedes and Norwegians are going south, away from the spreading ice, and everything is starting to crowd up. Everybody wants to go to southern Europe or Africa, to follow the climate, but this is island territory, so things are blocking up. Now they think they can just wall themselves in and use our land to feed themselves. But don't worry, we've got something else to show them."

The sound of his voice, both in tone and speed, and the way he enunciated the different words, made Ida uncomfortable. He was covering up anger, but that was not what worried her. It was the confidence with which he covered it up.

Pidgin guided her to the small table, where Carp was pushing pieces of paper around. As she got close, Ida realized that it was not paper, but little screens, flimsy thin and the size of regular A5 and A6 sheets of normal paper. On the screens, text shifted around as she pushed them about and tapped on them here and there. "We're trying to map out their operations," said Pidgin. "It's really more of a kind of busy work while we wait for instructions." Ida looked at the little screens, trying to catch text and the many tiny images, but it moved too quickly and there was too much. It was written in Danish, that much she noted. Somehow, she had expected English.

"Where'd you jump your transport?" he asked, and Ida felt a sudden sense of panic. "I... I'm not sure. We couldn't really see much from inside, and I wasn't looking. It was just, you know, a spur of the moment thing." Luckily, Pidgin just nodded. If she had learned anything, it was that most of what people did, regardless of the situation, was based on either habit or sudden impulse. She banked on the latter.

"How many are inside the wall?" she asked, her voice slow and full of worry. "Fourty thousand, give or take." Ida's eyes widened at his answer. That was just under what she knew lived on the entire island of Lolland in 2015. That wasn't a camp, it was a city unto itself. "Third largest in Denmark," he added, "about half the population of the one at Copenhagen." Ida could barely feel herself breathe.



Night came strangely sudden. The sunlight which would usually redden and fade seemed to instead just disappear when nighttime finally came around. And the cold came with it, much more than Ida's jumpsuit would handle. She considered changing into the clothes she had in the makeshift leather bag at her hip, but Misha still had no clear idea how long her trips would take. If she was surprised by the end of the trip, she would have to change back, to avoid her clothes catching fire upon her return to 2015. That didn't seem like a very practical option.

Instead, she managed to borrow a spare blanket, although Badger grumbled greatly about the idea. Gopher, the woman, seemed a more considerate person, but it was fairly clear that Badger was in charge. There was no rigid military hierachy, or at least they didn't act as if there was, but his words carried undeniable weight around the tiny camp. What disturbed her most, however, was the way Badger had pointed out strictly where she was to sleep, and warned her not to leave that spot for any reason, any reason at all!

Her conversations with Pidgin before nightfall had given some hints about the place, even if she couldn't ask anything plainly. Something made the north of Scandinavia freeze over, and people fled south, trying to get through Denmark and into mainland Europe, from where they could seek out a warmer climate. Some of the cold had come slowly, but sudden shifts and unforeseenly harsh winters had sent people on the run in greater numbers over the last few years. Half of anything north of Stockholm, which meant chunks of Russia and Canada, as well, was all but devoid of human life at this point. And the flood of people had created opposition down south, blocking the chain all the way to the source. Now, places like Nakskov were filling up with people trying to move south. And the cold was ruining harvests as far south as Ukraine and the northern US, while southern deserts were starting to bloom and turn fertile. It was nothing but a slight shift in global weather, but in its wake, public chaos was beginning to follow.

Now, she sat in the corner of the little camp, the edge of the tarp close enough for her to touch with her fingertips. It had occured to her that she had never returned to the time machine while asleep, and the thought left her feeling a bit dismayed. The issues of time travel were problematic enough as it was, without the added idea of not even being awake to deal with them!

When the sounds came, she had no idea if she had fallen asleep or not. It was still the dead of night, no light to be seen anywhere. The modern world had no idea what true darkness was, she knew that much. Her friends back home had described things as being pitchblack before, only to continue their stories with how they could make out things here and there in the supposed darkness. This place was pitchblack at night. She couldn't tell from sight alone if her eyes were even open, unless she looked up at precisely the right angle to spot a sliver of starlight seep through the tarp. But the sounds were clear enough.

Between the low grunts and whispering voices of the four in the tiny camp, she caught the sounds of something outside. Wheels, big wheels, rolling slowly in the streets. They sounded like the wheels of tractors, aside from how many of them there seemed to be. Had they been on a regular road, she might have missed them, and they might likely have gone by faster. But the cracked and uneven road outside was not fit for normal transport, the grinding noise of broken asphalt being crushed even more by weight upon it making a disgusting sound, like placing your ear right against the mouth of someone eating a big handful of potato chips.

What she noticed most, however, was when the shuffling and whispering of the four campers became hasty footsteps, then began to leave the camp through the tarp near her. Making use of the darkness, she quietly slipped out when the last bit of hustle and bustle near her had faded. Cautiously following the sounds of them, making out only slight silhouettes against the starlight of the cloudy night sky, she managed not to arouse suspicion. At every stop they made, she froze, close to the ground, staying unseen in whatever way she could.

On the road, visible in the light of the covered lamps on them, trucks were moving east, following the road that would lead them to the eastern corner of the wall to the north. Ida had to concentrate to keep a clear map in her head, unable to make out more that haphazard contours of ruins and landscape against the weak light from the half-shrouded stars. But the direction was impossible to mistake, there were no other logical destinations for the small convoy than that wall.

No doubt keeping their own flashlights, if they had any, off in order to stay hidden, the four animal-themed tarp-campers began talking amongst themselves. In the dark, Ida dared creep all up to them, having them think that either she wasn't there, or that she was one of their own. To her surprise, none of them reacted the slightest as she hunkered down not an arm's length away from where she heard them whisper to one another. "Convoy, three trucks," said what sounded like Badger. "I hear people inside, low voices," answered a female-sounding voice she didn't recognize, presumably the Carp girl. "Blow them," Badger's low growl added, sounding angry even when whispering. There was a moment of silence before Gopher added to the conversation. "Take the sides, the wheels will be lost and most inside will survive. They could get here, they can get back."

As the group spread out, the words echoed in Ida's mind. The wall not that far away surrounded thousands upon thousands of people. And yet the violence so explicit, and the deaths so implicit, in the words seemed to not fit, like a piece of a puzzle falling in with the wrong puzzle set. Her heart pounded as she reached down to pick up a stone, not large but not entirely small, either. Her fingers found it, her eyes doing nothing in the darkness.

In the dark, the trucks themselves were hard to aim at, but their covered lights stood out like literal flares in the equally literal darkness. Without seeing her own hand in front of her, she had mainly hope and instinct to guide the throw, but a loud clank could be clearly heard as the rock hit a truck, and even the thud of the rock hitting the cracked road and rolling a bit. It was not an impressive sound by any measure, but the lights immediately turned on on every truck! Shadows formed a mosaic of darkened shades across the landscape, and she could see each of the four react instantly to rush back before the convoy could respond. With only a second to spare, or even less, Ida dove down behind the nearest piece of rubble as the convoy sped up, the sounds of footsteps coming loudly from the trucks. With her back against the remnant of a wall, she watched the four scamper back behind the tarp. Her adrenaline pumped, her head growing dizzy, as sounds from the road kept ringing out, feet moving and metal hitting metal as someone walked to closely to the trucks or even actively banged on their sides. The convoy moved a little faster, but still not fast, and she soon dared to peek out from her hiding spot. When Gopher finally left the tarp camp to see what could be seen, she found Ida sitting against the other side of their standing wall.

"You okay?" she asked Ida, who was curled up against the wall, arms wrapped around herself to keep the cold out as much as possible. Ida nodded. "What happened?" she asked Gopher, doing her best to sound ignorant. Gopher first sighed, but then the sigh turn into an angry grumble. "Something set them off. Now there's perhaps another fifty people added to the growing nest." As she spoke, Ida listened to every word and shift in tone, searching for what she feared she wouldn't find. From the other side of the ruin wall, from inside the tarp, she could hear Badger struggle to not yell in anger. "We'll give it time," said Gopher. "The convoy moves slowly. Once they calm down from the senseless spook they just had, they'll be vulnerable and still nearby." Ida nodded, again. She had agreed to avoid attention before, but she now agreed more out of fear.

"I'll do it," she finally said, her eyes trying to peer out through the darkness. There was no use in looking at Gopher, the small camp had no lights and wouldn't have had them on if it had. Every point brighter than the deepest black would stand out like a beacon in the darkness. "I got away from them, I can handle them." There was a strange sound from Gopher, as if she felt nausea or an ache. "Marie," she said, speaking slowly, "these are not people like you or Pidgin in those trucks. These people are pouring in from outside to feed off what is ours." She stopped, possibly waiting for Ida, or Marie, to respond. She said nothing, her eyes still fixed on the darkness. "These are not people to be rescued. They are people to be kept out. You cannot sympathize with them, even if you put their lives in danger." Although she instantly felt silly, Ida nodded understandingly in the dark, before realizing that she was, for all intents and purposes, invisible to Gopher. "I know," she answered.

Walking on the cracked pavement of the damaged road was bad enough in the day, but in the dark, it was close to impossible. With only the lights of the trucks to guide her by, Ida more skated her feet along the ground, lifting them only enough to not be held back by friction as she felt the road in front of her with a foot for every step. And still, she caught up with the convoy.

At the bend in the road, where it turned from eastbound to northbound, she finally got within reach of it. The back of the last truck, the one part of it that was entirely unlit, rolled slowly forward like a slow, black monolith against the faintly starlit sky that she could now see around it. But rather than catch up entirely, she found her way to the side of the road, placing a small satchel by the wayside and reaching into it to push the button as Gopher had instructed her to. Only then did she fully catch up to the truck, using the newfound illumination on its side to walk at a regular speed. And after waiting only seconds, she slammed her hand against the side of it.

As if she had hit the button for it, a single soldier immediately popped out the door in the front of the vehicle, a single pistol brandished from before he even exited the door. Ida made no hesitation and folded her hands behind her head, dropping to her knees. While the only lights anywhere near her continued to roll by, the soldier stepped up close to her, the gun aimed directly at her. "I got dropped by a transport," she said, and repeated it immediately, twice. The grinding sound of the trucks against the splintering asphalt made it impossible for her to hear what the soldier said over his radio, but the last truck halted for just long enough to have him pat her down roughly, and lift her up for someone inside to pull in.

The inside of the truck was nothing but people, sitting in three rows and with two extra rows on welded-in shelves above them. Two armed soldiers, holding only the same pistol as the one that had let her in, stood on either side of the door in the back of the cargo hold. The one who had lifted her in began to speak, but she interrupted him before the door even closed behind her. "You have armed people trying to stop the convoy," she managed to say, intending to say more. But before she could add anything, the hollow boom of the explosives she had set by the road rang through the steel walls of the truck.

With sounds erupting from outside the truck, loud enough to make their way faintly in, the two soldiers inside immediately started telling people to calm down. The place was not well-lit, but it was lit, and Ida could quickly make out three children breaking into tears.



The man was old, perhaps in his late sixties, perhaps older. He was in good physical condition, or at least appeared to be, and his white hair was neatly trimmed. As he spoke, he made an effort to sound Danish, up to and including the monotone accent that marked the language. But he wasn't Danish, and it showed, in both his speech and in the way he moved and acted. Too much emphasis, too proper, too careful. The way he stressed the vowels of each word made Ida think Swedish.

"You knew that there were armed people out there?" he asked, and she calmly nodded. "You saw them?" She hesitated before answering, thinking how to explain it in a way that made her seem neither crazy nor a threat. "They held me in their camp after finding me," she ended up answering. Whether the man accepted it or not was impossible to tell, his face never changing from strict but emotionless. "And they asked you to blow up the convoy?" She nodded again. "Why did you disobey them?" The question startled her a bit, seeming logical. "I've encountered people like that before. I was taunted for my dark skin and the color of my hair as a kid." The man clearly reacted to her calling herself a kid. In his eyes, she was practically a baby, she briefly thought. "They want to sound like heroes, but really only want to hurt people they consider outsiders." She watched as the man sat straight up in his uniform, the edges of it slightly crumbled and a stain to spot here and there. He had been in that uniform for longer than he should, maybe days. That much was obvious, even if he made the best effort to seem unaffected by it.

Leaning back a bit, breathing a heavy breath, he looked at someone behind her, and she didn't feel the courage to turn in her chair to look. "Look, Marie, we have a lot of people here, so it's going to be a while before we can send you anywhere. We're just trying to process the ones we have." He was about to say more, but Ida cut him off. "No need, I can wait." The look in his eyes would have been amusing, had the situation been less grim. Utter confusion, as if she had claimed that aliens would pick her up in an hour.

As she stepped out the door of the large tent, the sun hit her like a shockwave, causing her to pause and stagger back a little. She had been brought to a very simple building, little more than a steel box with a door in it, and held under guard for the remainder of the night. It was close to noon now, and the sun was shining from a cloudless sky. The tent of the officer, his rank having slipped her by and not been marked on the naked table in the tent, was based at the end of the enclosed camp, in a part that was still only tents and open areas. Beyond it, prefabricated buildings so standardized that they could have been nothing but lines of mirrors showing the same building again and again, reached on forever. From where she stood, the skyline of Nakskov should have been visible, but the wall around the place kept every sight from outside hidden behind the thick, brownish construction. The few things that broke the panorama of standard living box after standard living box was little square bunkers, two stories tall and looking uncomfortably cramped, build from the same stone-like, brownish material as the wall. In the distance, perhaps as far away as the north end of the enclosure, was a large, multy-story building, ridges in its side and what looked like an open garden at its top. Except she could see no garden plants up there, but that could be because of distance.

"Water," said a voice beside her, and she looked up at the same soldier that had exited the truck that same night. He looked young in his physique, but his eyes were heavy with a lack of sleep. He was still in uniform, but had no weapons on him, telling her that he was probably looking to find his bed and get that sleep at that very moment. "It's a water basin, for storing any water that can be filtered from rain or the bay near Nakskov." She looked across the massive camp at the giant, equally sand brown building. "It's at the bay?" she asked, feeling both amazed and a little stupid for not understanding the scale of things. But the soldier just laughed. "Only halfway. They dug a river to get the water here." And with those words, he gave her a weak pat on the shoulder, then half walked and half stumbled on his way towards another large tent.

While people walked by her in the early noon sun, Ida just stood in place near the old officer's tent, staring out across the thousands of people gathered in the makeshift streets. As they passed her by, she heard Norwegian and Swedish words, but with what she imagined to be Finnish and other Nordic languages popping up here and there. Most people had the fair skin and brown to blond hair she was used to, with darker skins and other haircolors mixed in just enough to both be obvious but also stand out a bit. Nobody paid any significant attention to her as she stood there, not moving, her mouth open just enough to make her no doubt seem a bit less than intelligent. Even when the little colored dots began to form around her, she only sluggishly moved out of public sight, stepping around the old man's tent and into an unseen spot between the tents. Calmly, slowly, she reached down and took off her shoes and socks. The dry, metallic taste of the air remained in her mouth as she closed her eyes and heard the sound of thousands around her mix with the crackling hum of shifting atoms making colored sparks in the air.



She instantly fell to her knee and placed her hands in the sprinter's pose that kept her balanced and supported, while her legs trembled from the shock of the brutal trip back. She barely even registered the thunderous pop of the hardened flask that had its contents flash-boiled and shot its top part open to vent the steam. Breathing deeply and fast, she fought to replenish the oxygen in her blood while cool air from the experimental setup of fans around the time machine did its best to help disperse the heated air brought out and back with her.

"I'm good, I'm good," she said in a low voice when she saw Thomas' feet approach the platform. "I'm okay, just... I'm okay." As the red glow in her field of vision subsided, she slowly rose from the crouch, standing up to look around. The puff of steam from the flask had already scattered into a thin mist near the machine, almost as if meant for dramatic purposes. The jumpsuit had survived the trip back, not a mark on it other than from what it had endured in 2040. The bag formed by the leather straps attached to her regular clothes was still at her side, and as she opened it clumsily, she found no signs that the clothes inside had become hot enough to catch fire. She was okay. She was okay.

Legs still trembling a bit, she stepped off the platform and onto the concrete floor, feeling the cool surface against her bare feet, the chill helping further to cool down her pounding bloodstream. She had to close her eyes again, though, as the walls seemed to close in on her, the shift from the vastness of the walled enclosure to the small room being more than her brain could quickly handle.

"So," said Misha after a bit of time had passed with her still on the cool floor, "what was the far-off year of 2040 like?" His voice only barely managed to mask a sense of pride in having sent her that far into the future, an early record in their work to expand the capabilities of both themselves and the time machine. She opened her eyes, still looking down, and instantly spotted a piece of exploded ham hiding under a large cable.

"Different," she said, the images still racing through her mind. "Very different." Her eyes still adjusting to the small basement, she looked around. Copida was in the rock foam tunnel, digging out pieces at a slow but steady rate. Misha was in the command chair. Thomas stood well outside the working area of the machine, arms folded across his chest in spite of another ham in his hand, ready for new tests with the machine.

"At least, I hope it was very different," she added with a hushed voice.