Author's Note: Wheee I had way too much fun with this chapter xD
Chapter 8
Rey blinked, swaying a little. She drew her staff slowly from its holster, looking around. The sidewalk beneath her feet was the same, and so were the houses that surrounded her. But everything was—different. A cloud skittered across the sun—the sky had been perfectly blue before. The street sign cast a long, distorted shadow into the street behind it, and the sides of the houses were dark with early-evening shadow.
She took a careful step forward.
"Hello?"
Her voice echoed down the street, and faded away.
She took another step, past the sign with the words Falling Star Lane scrawled across it in jagged letters.
"Hello?"
The only answer was the lonely echo of her own voice.
She blinked, pressing her fingers to her temples. Her head still spun. The others—they had disappeared. Everything had changed, just a bit. It felt as if the entire world was off.
She opened her mouth to call out again, and then shut it. If no one had answered the first two times, no one was going to answer now.
Well—she was on her own until she found them. So she might as well do a little scouting.
She took in every detail of the neighborhood as she walked forward. The only sound was the pat of her footsteps on the concrete, which echoed a bit off the sides of the houses. Siding lay in strips in the shadows, peeled from the walls, and glass stood up in shards and triangles from the windows.
Had anyone ever lived here?
She drew her staff as silently as she could—the slight swish as it slipped from its holster seemed as loud as a searing blaster-shot—and glanced into every corner, her senses on high alert. Places like this, ruffians liked to hide in the shadows and attack unprepared wanderers. Her fingers tightened on the cool metal of her staff. Well, she wasn't unprepared.
A heavy silence hung over the neighborhood. Too heavy.
As if the silence itself was alive.
The moment she articulated the thought to herself, she snapped into instant alert. A presence. This was more than just the silence of an abandoned neighborhood. There was something else here. Like the creatures from the Revolution, beings that could press themselves in on her and force their way into her thoughts. But this one was—different. She didn't know how. But it was different, somehow.
She knew one thing, though. She didn't want it to detect her.
She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to focus on putting up some kind of barrier. She didn't know what she was doing and she didn't even know if she could do it, but that didn't mean she wasn't going to try. The Doctor had said something about telepathic abilities, and her resistance of the nanotransmitters was some sort of evidence of that, she supposed.
She didn't want to think about the implications of that. But she might as well use it.
Keeping her thoughts carefully shielded, she started forward again. She should go back. She should turn around and run. Everything in her screamed at her to run, to get away from this cursed place. But she didn't. She kept walking, focusing her senses on whatever being she had felt, each step bringing her closer.
Perhaps the Doctor's reckless curiosity was rubbing off on her.
She came to a stop in front of a house, the whole neighborhood seeming to warp around her, everything focusing in on this house like a spiraling tunnel. This was it. Whatever was here, it was in this house. She didn't know how she knew. But she knew.
She took a step forward, setting one foot on the porch.
According to my readings, this is the epicenter.
The Doctor's voice echoed in her mind and she drew in a sharp breath. It was the same house. Looking at the half-broken door, the creaking porch, she knew it was. The epicenter…..
Her head spun with the thought of it.
Her fingers closed around the doorknob and the hinges squealed as she opened the door. The sense that assaulted her nearly knocked her backwards.
A familiar presence. Something she knew. She didn't know what, but she'd felt this presence before. And it was in agony. Whatever it was, it was screaming, crying out—it was twisted.
She took another step forward. She should run. She should really run.
But she didn't. Something was calling out to her, desperately. Something that needed help.
Dust floated the air, displaced by her footsteps, and an early-evening sunbeam lanced through a dirt-streaked window. What had once been a couch had fallen into a state of nearly unrecognizable disrepair. Wallpaper peeled from the walls—
Wallpaper—
Peeling wallpaper—
She darted forward, drawing in a sudden sharp breath. She knew that wallpaper. She had seen—
She had seen her name written there.
She ran her fingers over the peeling wallpaper, leaving a swipe in the dirt. Nothing. No message. No name—
No. No. Surely not. That was impossible. Her head spun with the thought of it.
She looked around quickly. Who else was going to write the message, after all? She would never have ended up here if hadn't been for that message. Was there something, some board or random tool or—oh! The screwdriver! She still had that screwdriver in her pocket!
She pulled it from her pocket and smoothed the wallpaper up against the wall, her heart pounding in her ears. This was completely impossible. Completely crazy. Scratching the tip of the screwdriver down the wall, she etched three letters into the wallpaper.
Rey.
She took a deep breath. The scratching of the screwdriver was loud in the heavy, pressing silence. He is the Doctor. March 2, 2018—
Something brushed at the back of her mind and she shivered, slipping the screwdriver silently into her pocket and turning. It was that presence again. Not the familiar one. But the one she had felt earlier, the one she had tried to shield herself from—
She turned and ran.
"It's been an hour." Edward glanced at his wristwatch and his voice was dull, flat. But there was something hidden behind it, something that sounded like—memory. Laila looked at him. His wife—
This was exactly what had happened.
He had searched for hours. And she had been gone.
"I think I know what could have happened." The older man who called himself the Doctor spoke—the one with the leather jacket. It was all very strange and she wasn't certain she understood it. But his voice was serious, dark even, and something in it made her freeze and stare at him. "And I can only hope I'm wrong."