Author's Note: This was an interesting venture. I wanted to be able to tackle whatever was happening for Jiya, so this is my take on it. And as an aside (that's a lot of A words in a row) Jiya is freaking hard to write for me. Regardless, I hope you enjoy this chapter!
Chapter 11
Jiya
One moment Jiya was begging every deity in existence to keep Rufus safe on this jump as she watched the hatch close and the lifeboat start up. The next moment she was falling. She was distantly aware of her physical body falling to the floor and Agent Christopher anxiously asking if she was okay, but she couldn't respond. But it wasn't only her body that was falling, she had an odd sensation of feeling her consciousness tumbling down a black hole of…time?
Memories went flying past her, as if she was watching her life in reverse as an outsider. Like a VHS on rewind, she couldn't hear any of the sounds and the images were choppy with tracking lines shooting through them. She saw Rufus telling her he loved her, while she lay unconscious in arms. Placing the tracking device behind Lucy's ear as she worried about whether Rufus cared for her or not. The day that Flynn stole the mothership. Getting the job at Mason Industries. Graduating from college at the top of her class, with her parents cheering her on, her mother with tears streaming down her cheeks. Winning a national physics competition in high school. Getting bullied in middle school for looking "different" and going home crying with a bloodied nose. Riding her first bike. Taking her first steps. Crying in her crib as an infant.
Just as suddenly, she was slammed into another scene. It was like watching a movie, she could clearly see the interior of the lifeboat. Both Rufus and Flynn were reeling slightly, as they unbuckled their seatbelts.
"Just to be clear, we are not on the same team," Rufus grumbled at Flynn as he pushed past him to open the hatch. "I'm only working with you because I have to, not because I want to. If you get yourself hurt you can rescue your own damn self and get back to the lifeboat. I'm not coming back for you."
"Duly noted," Flynn muttered with a raised eyebrow, following behind him.
Jiya tried to shout, calling Rufus's name desperately.
"Rufus? Rufus! Can you hear me?"
He paused briefly at the open hatch, looking around. "Did you hear something?"
Hope flared within Jiya, as she started shouting louder.
Flynn's eyebrow arched even higher. "Am I to presume your spidey senses are tingling?" He asked sarcastically. "Or perhaps, you're just having a psychotic break."
Dude, the guy has some epic caterpillars for eyebrows. And she thought she had eyebrow game. He knocked hers right out of the water.
Rufus glared at him, as he shook his head and stepped out of the hatch.
Jiya wondered at the lack of noise around her. She had never realized the sheer amount of noise pollution that was present in her current time. There were no sounds of traffic in the background, no electronic hums. It was disconcerting, she felt like she had stepped into an alien world. Her view was muted, as if someone had put a sepia filter on everything she could see.
"Jiya. Come on. I need you to wake up, Jiya!"
Somehow, in the back of her head, she saw the farmhouse at the same time. She could see herself lying on a bed, with Agent Christopher bent over her, shaking her shoulders, insisting that she wake up. She watched as the agent left the room and came back with a cup of water that she splashed on her face, to no avail. She felt rather indignant and ignored her pleas to wake up, turning back to the scene unfolding before her.
Something was missing from the image in front of her. She recognized San Francisco, barely, due to the landscape, but something seemed off. Jiya gasped suddenly as she realized the bridge was gone. As if it had never existed.
What the hell? Last time this happened to me, the bridge was at least under construction.
She vaguely recognized she should probably be panicking at this point, but her scientific mind was too curious to explore what was happening to be truly frightened at the moment. Besides, she wasn't in pain and she was with Rufus instead of worrying about him behind a computer screen.
"Alright. So where do we start?" Rufus asked Flynn.
Flynn grunted. "We start by walking to the Oakland pier. You couldn't have landed any closer?"
"Well, soooooor-ry. See, the lifeboat here doesn't have that whole invisible cloak magic that the mothership does. Had the mothership not been stolen by you, maybe, just maybe!, we could be traveling in a bit more style and Rittenhouse could have the disadvantage of the giant, hulking, metal death-trap that the lifeboat is!" Rufus snapped.
Jiya groaned. This was going just splendidly. As much as she loved the guy, she wished that Rufus would pipe down and get with the program.
Flynn half rolled his eyes in exasperation and began walking, leaving Rufus to catch up to his long-legged stride.
"According to Lucy's journal, the ground-breaking ceremony takes place in two days. We should start with that," he commented when Rufus finally caught up.
"Have I ever mentioned how creepy it is that you somehow know all of our futures?"
Flynn shrugged. "It's helping us out now, isn't it?"
Rufus apparently couldn't argue with that and just tipped his head toward him as if to say, "Point to Flynn."
"So what does Lucy's journal say about this jump anyway? What should I expect?"
"Rittenhouse jumped to August of 1933 first and destroyed the steel that was being stored in Alameda, hoping that the combination of that and the McCormick Steamship collision would be enough to put them off from continuing the construction of the bridge. They jumped back to our timeline, found out that it wasn't, and immediately jumped to the time we're in now."
Rufus just stared at him for a couple of beats. "You mean, they've already been out here once, did their damage, came back, and left again. All in the time it's taken us to do this one jump?"
"Well, to be fair, they used Lucy's kidnapping as a distraction to allow them to do this. Plus Wyatt and Christopher wasted extra time breaking me out. You should really get on finding an A-bomb to create a battery for the lifeboat, like the mothership. Would save you some time."
"This isn't the mothership, you can't just configure a nuclear bomb into the lifeboat."
"I'm sure Anthony could have figured a work around."
"Anthony is dead. You killed him."
"Huh. So I did. Looks like I picked the wrong pilot." Flynn lifted a shoulder carelessly as he picked his way through the brush.
Jiya bristled at that. She hadn't had any interactions with Flynn in the past until today, but it looked like all the stories about his callousness were true. The expression on Rufus's face was somewhere between incredulous and murderous.
"You're right. It was a waste of time. I'll make sure to tell them that as soon as we get back. I'm sure they'll appreciate the sentiment," Rufus responded hotly.
Flynn ignored him as he continued on his path to the pier and soon they fell into a rhythm that couldn't be described as companionable, but at least they weren't throwing verbal jabs at each other. Jiya would have never believed it if she hadn't seen it herself.
As they walked along in silence, she withdrew into herself, contemplating what on earth might be happening to her. She had heard the stories of pilots coming back in pieces after jumping to a time when they had already existed.
Did something similar happened to me, just not as extreme? Maybe having four instead of three passengers caused some sort of damage to my molecular make-up, somehow fusing it with the aspects of the machine that allows it to jump in time? Did I somehow pull a Kurzweil and create some reverse-singularity shit? Why wasn't anyone else affected? And how am I able to be in two places at once?
If she somehow bonded with the machine though, how was it possible that she was able to see Rufus this far from the lifeboat?
Maybe I merged with Rufus, Wyatt, and Lucy too? Ew.
Jiya shuddered as she contemplated what that might mean if she just popped in on Lucy and Wyatt when they finally decide to do something about all that sexual tension between them. She tried concentrating all of her focus on where the two of them might be, but remained where she was, much to her relief. Not that it didn't mean it wouldn't happen in the future, seeing as how she didn't actually have a clue what was happening to her.
Testing whether or not she could wander off on her own was next. She ventured away from Rufus and Flynn, but it was like she hit an invisible force field after about ten feet.
Okay, so I'm definitely tethered to Rufus somehow. Is it just the people, or is it the machine as well?
She took a deep breath and pictured where they had left the lifeboat. With a sudden burst, it was as if she suddenly had a multi-monitor set up in front of her, but a multi-monitor system that also had a virtual reality component which allowed her to step into any of the scenes at any time. Or at least, her consciousness could step into any of the screens, not her physical body. One screen displayed the scene at the farmhouse where Agent Christopher let out a worried sound as her physical body had another seizure. The middle screen showed the lifeboat sitting in the field where they had landed, a curious deer cautiously grazing near it. A third screen showed Rufus and Flynn continuing down their path in a tense silence.
Jiya wondered about the mothership as well. She had seen the bridge while it was under construction, not when it hadn't existed altogether. Flynn had mentioned that Rittenhouse had tried to sabotage the construction site first, to no avail. Was that what she had seen while she was still in the hospital? The CPUs between the mothership and lifeboat were linked, maybe that explained it. She closed her eyes and tried to picture where the mothership.
*pop*
Her eyes flew open as a fourth monitor appeared. She couldn't see the mothership itself and she imagined that Rittenhouse had engaged the cloaking mechanism, because they had landed the mothership in the freaking middle of San Francisco. That took some serious ovaries. She saw Emma emerge from a nearby building along with an older blonde woman who looked vaguely familiar.
Lucy's mom maybe?
A third person stepped outside of the building and Jiya felt herself stiffen.
Holy crap! That's that Terminator guy! The dude who took Wyatt's place when they took out Capone. What was his name? Something Sullivan. Caleb Sullivan. Shit. This can't be good.
She stepped into the scene to get a better idea on what was going on.
"Are the charges set?" The older woman asked briskly.
Sullivan nodded curtly.
"Good. We got lucky when Logan didn't follow us on the last trip, but I'm sure they sent someone after us on this trip. You and Emma head out to the piers and watch for them. If you see them, kill them. Use whatever means necessary. I'm going to see if I can catch up with Michael O'Shaughnessy to see how far he's willing to go to keep this bridge from being built."
Emma and Sullivan acknowledged the woman silently and entered a nearby car. Jiya tried to follow them, but hit the end of her damned tether again. She panicked for several moments, desperately needing to get to Rufus to warn him somehow, before calming herself down for a few deep breaths.
You're not stuck. You can get out of this scene. Just remember to breathe. Think about looking at a multi-monitor system.
Jiya closed her eyes and concentrated on thoughts of Rufus and found herself once again gazing at four different screens, grateful that she seemed to be getting some type of grasp on her situation, whatever it may be. She did a doubletake when she saw Flynn and Rufus. Somewhere along the way, they had found a new wardrobe. She swooned slightly when she got a closer look at Rufus in a pair of high-waisted, tapered trousers, a white bush shirt, and a tweed jacket that emphasized a distinct V-shape to his body. A newsboy cap completed the look. History may not have been kind to minorities, but its fashion sense was at least stellar. She tried yelling his name several times to no avail. She suddenly empathized with every character in every book who could see the future, but couldn't stop it from happening. Desperately, she took a closer look at the scene and realized they were arguing. Again.
"It wasn't enough that we had to steal their clothes? We had to steal their money too?" Rufus asked pointedly.
Flynn enunciated his words slowly and carefully, as if he was talking to a small child. "How exactly were you planning to get to San Francisco from here? By swimming? We have to get across by boat. Even if we were going to take the ferry, we would still have to pay a fare. You've been chasing me across time for months now, you know as well as I do that our currency won't pass for money here."
"Whoa. Back up. We're not taking a ferry?"
The former NSA agent rolled his eyes heavenward, as if asking for divine intervention. "If this is a trap set by Rittenhouse, where exactly did you think they'd be waiting for us? I, for one, don't intend to make it easy on them. I plan on chartering a small boat and mooring somewhere other than the main harbor. And contrary to popular belief, I don't actually like stealing things and murdering people when I don't have to, so if I can pay someone for the use of their boat, then I will."
Jiya heaved a huge sigh of relief, silently thanking Flynn for his presence of mind. She still feared for their lives, but at least she knew they wouldn't be walking straight into Rittenhouse's trap. They were safe. For now.
