Chapter Seven: A Brief Reprieve leads toward Disaster

The mountains were wonderful. The air was clean and pure. The view was intoxicating and the water was clean and cold.

Jubilee reveled in it and loathed it. It was not her first choice.

But things were better now than they had been in a while. Or so she thought.

She spun quickly as she heard the stick break behind her. She whipped around. She could see no one but she could hear the running feet.

"I can hear you!" She called out.

And the running stopped.

She followed the trajectory of the sound.

It was heading toward her camp. She tore at a run, her jaw set, toward her humble home. She rounded the boulder and ran right in to a man carrying a bucket of water. The man went down. As he was falling Jubilee could see the white rail fences of a farm behind him. A woman sat on a washtub that had been overturned for that purpose. Two children giggled at her feet, playing a game like marbles with small pebbles. One of the children looked up at her and smiled.

But before the man could finish his fall he began to fade. He wavered in and out of color and negative and then he was gone, as was all trace of this other world.

Jubilee fell back and hit a tree that was so close she must have run through it to get here this quickly. She pulled her hand up to her chest in shock only to discover she was drenched.

"What the?" She wondered.

Meanwhile in a dimension once removed, a mother taps her son and tells him it's not polite to stare when daddy drops his water bucket.

The boy just giggled and looked back to his game.

So why was your shirt wet? She wondered again as she told herself it was all in her head. She wrung the shirt hard again, then unrolled it and pulled it back on.