Travelers

No one ever seemed to notice the lightning.

It isn’t normal lightning, heralded by ominous dark clouds and trailed by thunder. Instead, it is simply a bright flash of light, and most normal people just blink their eyes and wonder if they saw what they thought they saw, shake their heads, and then go about their day. They may think that they’ve been out in the sun too long, if they think anything at all.

Normal people are good at ignoring things that don't fit into their worldview. And they always ignore the man left behind after the non-lightning lightning fades.

Daniel stumbles to the nearest bench, where he watches and–more importantly–listens to the people going by. He seems to have landed in a park, which is a small mercy. After a moment, he pulls his phone from his pocket.

Four reception bars. Another small mercy.

He dials the number that he memorized long ago. It rings for an inordinately long time before being picked up.

“Oh fuck no,” says the voice on the other end.

“Nice to hear from you too,” Daniel replies.

The voice, whom Daniel has always known as Shade, sighs dramatically. “So, where are you now?”

The park is surrounded by tall buildings: metal, not stone. The architecture is not specific, but there is a newness to it. These buildings have been here for decades, not centuries.

“United States. A city in the Midwest, I think.”

“Hold on.” Shade mutters under his breath as he pulls the phone away and taps on it. “Yeah, location finder is picking you up. You had to make this difficult, didn’t you?”

“Why, where are you?”

“Europe. Germany, to be precise. And there’s this disease going around that’s making travel more difficult. You go hole up. I’ll get to you eventually.”

“Date?”

Another dramatic sigh, but after all these years Shade knows that Daniel’s talent is not precisely accurate. “February 29, 2020.”

Well. “See you soon, then.” Daniel disconnects.

A few quick taps on his own phone tell him that there’s a hotel about half a mile away. He sets out walking. As a bonus, he finds a bodega and swings in to pick up snacks. He’ll need the calories later. The fatigue is starting to pull at him, and he has to push through the brain fog and remind himself to grab the correct wallet and then flip through the cards to find the right one for this decade.

He’s lucky he has Shade to arrange such things for him. It’s not the first time he’s had that thought, and he knows it won’t be the last.

A short time later, he’s snuggled into a king-size bed, luxuriating in the softness of the hotel’s sheets and the comforting weight of the blankets as his body sinks into recuperation.

2020. And the start of the year, at that. Not what he was aiming for. Not a year he ever intended to visit, for any purpose.

“Oh fuck no,” he thinks before sleep claims him.

#

Three days later, he is able to leave his room and meet Shade for a late breakfast in the hotel’s cafe.

“So,” the older man–though he actually looks younger than Daniel–asks over omelets and mimosas, “what brings you to 2020?”

“Nothing,” Daniel replies. “I was actually aiming for 2024.”

Shade raises one eyebrow but doesn’t say it. Not yet. Instead, he modifies his question.

“What brings you to 2024, then?”

“Adria Coombs.”

“And who is Adria Coombs?”

“Nobody, yet. Still in art school, and I think she’s working as a waitress right now. But in four years, she’s going to paint a portrait.” He thinks about naming the subject; it’s a name Shade would recognize. He decides against it. “And her painting will go viral, and she’ll be the new art darling for her innovative use of tone and texture. Her exhibition opens at the end of the year, and it’s the social event to be seen at.”

“So this is a money-making venture?”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with supporting a young artist by buying a few works, especially when you think they’ll appreciate in value.”

“Appreciate, sure.”

“Maybe they’ll appreciate a lot. Maybe by millions of dollars. You never know with art.”

“Well, you know.”

“I may have some insight, yeah. But I want to see the exhibition too. It was–will be–by all accounts, transformative.”

“You just want to say you were there.”

“Of course. There’s nothing wrong with that, either.”

Shade shakes his head but doesn’t overtly disagree. “Anyway, 2020.”

“Yes. 2020.” Daniel pulls out the battered notebook that he is never without. He flips through it, double-checks some entries, and then starts a new page.

“Australia had a bad fire season,” Shade starts. “The wildfires were so bad they were visible from orbit. Some pop star got robbed at knifepoint a couple weeks ago, and a big movie producer was convicted of sex crimes. The president of the United States is–”

“I know who he is,” Daniel mutters, and he ignores Shade’s side-eye.

“Right. And the big news is this virus out of China that’s spreading across the globe. No one’s using the word ‘pandemic’ just yet, but it’s probably coming. They’re even talking about doing a stay-at-home order for a couple of weeks, just to give it a chance to die down.”

Daniel dutifully makes his notes, but he knows more about this year than he’s ever going to admit to Shade. “It’s nothing you need to worry about, though,” he says instead. “You’re immortal, remember?”

“I’m not immortal, you idiot.” This is a conversation they’ve had before, but it’s done the trick and distracted Shade. “I just don’t age. You know that. I can still get sick. I can still walk in front of a bus or fall off a roof, and then where would you be?”

“Out of luck, of course,” Daniel replies evenly. “And just what are you up to now?”

“Nothing,” Shade answers. “I guess I’m between projects. It’s not like I need the money. Why not sit at home and think?”

Daniel pauses his writing and takes the opportunity to chug his mimosa. He’s carefully considering his next words when Shade opens his mouth again and says what he almost said earlier.

“So, 2020? Four years? You usually don’t miss by that much.”

“It wasn’t even that far of a jump. Just twenty years,” Daniel says. “I was coming from–”

“Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Okay. Sheesh.” Shade has expressly forbidden Daniel from talking about their meetings, either in the past or the future. Daniel knows he’s not averse to hearing about world events, and he’s even profited off tidbits Daniel has given him. But Daniel avoids talking about Shade’s personal timeline at all costs.

He shakes his head and chalks it up to his brain still shaking off the jump fatigue. “Anyway, as I was saying, it was a relatively short jump, but it was hard. Harder than normal. It’s like my body was trying to throw me off.”

“Or maybe you’re just getting old.” Shade’s grin is as warm as a shark’s and has just as many teeth.

Daniel just shrugs. “Could be.”

“So I presume you’re not hanging around too long then, after you’ve recovered? Why waste four years, when you can just blink away?”

The bitterness that Daniel hears in that statement makes him look away.

#

In his darker moments, Shade thinks of Daniel as a parasite.

It’s not true, of course, and he knows this. Thanks to Daniel, he’s been in the right place at the right time more times than he can count. He spent both world wars in South America, uninvolved and able to ride out the global economic uncertainty. He rode the 1929 bull market hard and cashed out that summer, before the crash, considerably expanding his fortune. Time and again Daniel has dribbled information that Shade has used to good effect.

And in return, Shade manages the jumper’s accounts, ensuring he always has ready access to food, shelter, funds. But it’s often years between visits, years of drudgery to make sure Daniel is comfortable for a few weeks or months before he’s off again.

They are both time travelers. It’s just that Shade is only traveling through time in one direction, and he does it day by day. As he looks at the man across from him, who blips in and out of his life, who skips the day-to-day travails, the jealousy tastes like bile.

#

Daniel can tell immediately that Shade’s in one of his dark periods.

He knows that, when you’re half a millennium old (at least; Shade has never told Daniel his exact age) that your moods tend to ebb and flow. He always makes note of such things in his journal. He feels that if he were ever to carefully correlate the timeline–and he hasn’t, because he’s not that type of person–those dark moods are becoming more frequent and longer-lasting as this century wears on.

Daniel met Shade for the first time in 2083, when they were both at the Institute. Shade’s sly smile and bemused glances spoke volumes that Daniel didn’t realize at the time and has only slowly come to understand.

Shade met Daniel for the first time in 1588 in Italy. At least, that’s the first time that Daniel knows of. It’s possible he may travel further back some day, but it would have to be for a very compelling reason. For one thing, any further back trends into the middle ages, the dark ages, and Daniel has no interest in tempting fate there. And a small part of him, that he will barely admit even to himself, is afraid to find out just how old Shade is. He does not want to visit a time or place where Shade isn’t.

“You can call me Shade,” the older man had told him with that sly, knowing grin the first time they’d met.

Shade has a real name, of course. He has several real names that he rotates through as needed, and Daniel knows most of them. But the vagaries of time mean that Daniel will never be exactly sure which name is in use. After all this time, he’s come to think of “Shade” as the real name.

Shade: another word for ghost. And the cool shelter beneath a tree.

And now that ghost, that shelter, that constant through the years, is in a dark place. Why not sit at home and think? he’d said. But Daniel knows the truth. What he’d meant was, Why not sit at home and brood?

Shade always needs something to do. In the time Daniel has known him, Shade has been a painter, a sculptor, a cobbler, a lawyer, a farmhand, a doctor, a banker, and a livery groom. There are likely even more professions to fill the gaps of ten or twenty or more years. Though he doesn’t need the money, Shade needs the work, or his thoughts turn inward and he starts to feel the weight of the years.

And that’s a problem, now, at the dawn of 2020.

Daniel knows what’s coming. He knows the difficulty and the isolation that everyone in the world will soon face. And he wants to skip it. He so very badly wants to jump forward, to the long relaxed sigh that is 2024, the celebration after the years of pain.

But then he sees Shade’s glower, and he knows the pain that is already hiding behind those eyes.

“No,” he says, finally, with his own internal conflict of resistance and resolution. “I think I’ll stick around a while.”

#

By the time Daniel has recovered enough to leave the hotel, Shade is unable to return to Germany. Travel restrictions have tightened as the virus has spread. For a man of his means, anything is possible. But Shade likes to lay low and keep out of the spotlight, and there would be too many questions and too much red tape involved in a private flight just now.

So Shade reluctantly tells Daniel that he has a secluded cabin on a small lake a few hours north of the city they are currently in. The residents of the nearby small town know Shade as the eccentric, wealthy, but overall acceptable man who occasionally shows up and is not shy about spending money on the local economy.

Daniel reluctantly admits that there will be a lockdown–he does not give a time length–and agrees that the cabin would be the perfect place to settle in for a while.

As they roll up the driveway later that day, Shade’s SUV loaded with weeks of groceries and supplies, he realizes that naming this place a cabin is akin to naming Lake Superior a puddle.

Daniel has his own suite of rooms with its own kitchenette, though–with the restaurants in town temporarily closed–Shade has hired a local chef to prepare a nightly meal for them. They share a gaming room, an entertainment area, and a library, but there are whole days that Daniel does not see Shade at all.

And every morning, Daniel drinks coffee on his balcony and watches the sun rise over the lake.

It’s a beautiful lake. But it’s just a lake. And it’s the same lake, every day.

Every sunrise.

Shade has seen many more sunrises than he has. Daniel has to keep reminding himself of that.

Everything inside of him wants to jump. It’s been a month, and every fiber of his being screams at him that he’s been here long enough. There’s a whole wide world of time to explore, and every morning he watches the sun rise over this same lake.

But Shade needs a job, Daniel tells himself. And even if that job is babysitting a delinquent time traveler during a global pandemic, it’s still a job.

And it’s all that Daniel can do.

#

“Let’s go kayaking today!”

Shade looks up from his eggs Benedict. Daniel has long since finished his breakfast and Shade can feel the energy vibrating off him.

“Go right ahead. Paddles and life jackets are in the boathouse.”

“Come on, come with me. The ice is finally out of the lake, and it’s a good day for it.”

“You go ahead,” Shade repeats.

“But…”

Shade waits silently until Daniel reluctantly finishes his thought.

“But I’ve never been kayaking before.”

Shade has to put down his fork. He can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You’re serious? You watched the Rialto Bridge being built in Venice, you saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, and you were in Cape Canaveral when the first space shuttle was launched—but you’ve never been kayaking?”

Daniel just shrugs.

“Well, kayaking’s not difficult. You dip one paddle in the water, then you dip the other one. Repeat until you no longer want to be kayaking.”

“But it’s no fun by myself.”

“How do you know? You’ve never done it.”

“Shade.” All the mischief is gone from Daniel’s expression; his face is completely serious. “Please. I want to spend time with you. It would mean a lot to me.”

Shade sighs and eats his last bite of egg. He wants to refuse. He’s not sure why Daniel is so insistent. But he has no good reason to say no. Here, in the middle of the woods, in the midst of a pandemic, with the world in quarantine, it’s not like he has anything better to do.

“Fine,” he says simply.

#

Daniel was not wrong; it’s a good day to be out on the lake.

The sun is shining and the breeze is just strong enough to cool them while barely ruffling the glassy surface. The new leaves of the aspens surrounding the lake whisper in that same breeze. To Shade, who spent a decade captaining a galley across the storm-tossed Mediterranean, this is not an exciting escapade. He does, however, admit that it is pleasant.

Daniel gives a whoop from up ahead, acting for all the world like this is a high adventure. He’s caught on to kayaking quickly enough to make Shade suspicious of his earlier claim. As the little idiot slaloms around a shallow-water buoy, Shade has the distinct feeling he’s been played.

It diminishes his mood a little, but the question remains: why would Daniel act like this?

Daniel’s laugh rings out across the water. Such exuberance, from a grown man, is unseemly.

“Daniel!” Shade calls out suddenly. “Just how old are you?”

He meant it as sarcasm, but Daniel pauses to give it serious thought. “Mid-thirties. Thirty-five, I think.”

“You think? You don’t know?”

Daniel shakes his head. “I mean, I keep track of roughly how long I’m in a place, and I add weeks together. But it’s not like I’m there for my birthday every year. I don’t keep track of specific days. I have better things to do.”

Somehow this news is even more appalling than Daniel’s behavior. Shade knows exactly how old he is: how many years, how many weeks, how many days. And even though the years have blurred one into the next, Shade can’t ever remember being that young.

One question burns in him suddenly. He’s always avoided asking it; he’s never been sure that he really wants the answer. But now, in this moment, he must know.

“When do we meet?”

Daniel swings around and just stares at his friend.

#

As Daniel feels his kayak bob on the gentle waves, he is uncertain what to say. “Are you sure you want to know?” he asks eventually, quietly. “In the past you’ve always said–”

“I know what I’ve said. But I’m asking now. Yes.”

Daniel slowly brings his kayak around and pulls up alongside Shade, and both men stare across the lake.

“2083,” he says. “You found me.”

“Sixty-three more years…” Shade mutters. He looks like he might cry. “I’m not going anywhere for sixty-three more years.”

“We don’t know that.” Daniel is completely serious. He has to be careful, but he owes his friend–his mentor–the truth. “I mean, I hope you stay safe. But we don’t know if a time paradox is possible, or what happens if you cause one. They’re studying it, but there’s no easy or moral way to experiment.”

“They?” Shade seizes on the word. “They who?”

“The folks at the Institute. And before you ask, that’s where we meet. It’s a place for people like us.”

He doesn’t need to define it any further. Shade blinks, and Daniel sees an emotion he can’t describe dawning on his face. “There’s more of us?”

“Yeah. Not many. But there are.”

“How much…how much are they like us?”

“There are different abilities. Some psychics. A firestarter. At least one other jumper, but I’ve never met him. We’ve never been in the same time at the same time. And…a couple of immortals. Non-agers. I’ve only met them once, ever. They keep to themselves.”

“And you’ve never told me this.”

“You never asked. You specifically said you didn’t want to know about this kind of thing.”

Shade’s mind is obviously spinning. He seems lost in his thoughts, but the questions keep coming. Daniel has never seen him look restless before, but he fidgets with the paddle.

“And this Institute–they study…gifted people?”

“Only with full and voluntary cooperation. That’s a cardinal rule.”

“How do they find them?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe by looking for metadata on weird phenomena? I honestly have no idea. You found me. But…research is only part of what they do.”

“What else?”

“It’s…a sanctuary.” Daniel had never intended to tell Shade about this, and he’s having trouble finding the words. “The people who come there, who they find. Sometimes they’re in a bad place. In their heads. There are counselors and doctors. It’s a place to heal.”

Daniel knows that Shade needs such a place. And he needs it now, not sixty-three years in the future.

“An asylum.”

“A sanctuary.” Daniel desperately wishes he could bring another person with him when he jumps. It’s not the first time–by a long shot–that he’s had that thought. And he’s tried, but it has always ended badly.

Shade suddenly sits up, places his paddle in the water, and shoves off. “What’s the name of this place?” he calls over his shoulder.

Daniel catches up in a flurry of splashes. “I don’t know. We always just call it the Institute.”

“And when is it founded?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“How can you not know these things?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t. It’s not like the Mayo or Johns Hopkins or one of those big medical centers everyone knows about. It’s quiet, under the radar. Most gifted people don’t want others to know about them. We just call it the Institute. And I was only there once.”

Daniel’s not quite telling the truth. He has only stayed at the Institute once, in 2083. But he’s looked for it each time he’s jumped. It’s almost a shadow organization, but there are ways of finding it. He knows it does not exist now. He also knows it will exist ten years from now.

That look that was on Shade’s face earlier–he recognizes it now as a mixture of desperation…and hope.

He’s very worried about what he might have just caused to happen.

#

Shade spends most of his time cloistered in his suite. He doesn’t talk about what he’s doing in there, but Daniel can hear muffled conversations happening in the office, and he has a pretty good idea.

First, Shade would have tried to find the Institute. And he would have found out that it doesn’t exist.

Yet.

Shade has contacts around the globe gleaned from five hundred years of business deals, degrees in every discipline imaginable, and more money than he could ever spend.

Daniel knows what Shade thinks of him, that he is flighty and irresponsible. And Daniel would never deny that, and he would also admit to playing it up a bit, just because he can. But Daniel has a serious side too, and he’s spent a lot of time with Shade over the past half-millennia.

Shade needs a job. He needs something to do, something to look ahead for. If he’s not looking ahead, he spends too much time looking back.

Now he has something to look ahead for, to create and build and shape, for at least the next sixty-three years. Daniel’s not sure if this new industriousness is an improvement over the bitterness of a few months ago. It seems to be, on the surface, but Daniel is all too aware of how easy it is to get lost in a rabbit hole.

He’s also not sure if he’s created a time paradox or if he’s set in motion events that were supposed to happen. There’s no way to be sure until he jumps forward again. And maybe someday he’ll go back to 2083, or even a little forward to 2084, and find Shade and they can each discuss what happened here, both free of secrets.

Maybe someday. Not today. Not any time soon. He’s not sure he wants to know.

Daniel feels an obligation to stick around. He said that he would. And he’s worried about what Shade is doing; he dithers between interfering and letting events flow, and he’s not sure which would be better. He’s also not certain this mania is better for Shade than the dark mood he was in. Both seem dangerous in their own way, and Daniel has never been one to delve too deeply into his own thought processes, much less those of others. There are days when it feels that he is trying to manage Shade just as much as Shade is managing him.

But he knows that when Shade does emerge for dinner each night, his manner is easier, the lines around his eyes are lighter, and his laugh is quicker.

And so Daniel stays.

#

Shade is self-aware enough to know that his mood ebbs and flows and that the reasons for it are complex. He does have a degree in psychology, after all.

He also knows that he is happier when he has a project in his life. He’s had so many hobbies in his lifetime, he’s lost count. Most of them have been diversions at best, a new skill learned and mastered and then forgotten. It’s been decades since he had a project he could really sink into and lose himself within.

The hubris of what he’s contemplating is not lost on him. It’s one thing to buy stock or remove himself from danger due to a tip from the future. It’s another thing entirely to create from scratch something he’s been told about, to shape it so it grows into what he wants it to be, decades from now, and to wonder all the while if he’s irreparably changing the future for himself and others like him.

He’s going to do it anyway.

Maybe his Institute is not Daniel’s Institute. Maybe they will be separate entities someday, maybe they will combine, maybe they are one and the same. Daniel does not know, and so Shade is charging full speed ahead.

It does not all go smoothly, of course. Shade has founded businesses before, and he knows well the roadblocks to avoid. But his idea, while simple in the abstract, is complex in the details. In these early stages, as he plants the seeds that will grow into the foundation, he reminds himself to stay optimistic and to look forward.

It helps. The world being what it is currently, and his mood being what it is currently–it helps.

Late in the summer of 2020, Daniel tells him that the politics of this election year are about to get nasty.

“It’s already nasty. It’s an election year,” Shade replies.

“Yeah, well…this is an election for the history books. The whole country’s losing its mind, and it’s going to get worse.”

Shade’s seen all manner of riots, revolutions, coups, and regimes. He does not think this country will get that bad, but he understands that Daniel is worried. “What do you recommend, then?”

They move to New Zealand.

Information flows freely around the globe these days, and Shade can continue his work anywhere. He asks Daniel to join him, to help him, but the younger man refuses. In a strange reversal of their earlier roles, Daniel wants to know nothing about the plans that are being laid.

And so Shade continues to work through all the world’s troubles.

#

The exhibition is not classy and dignified; the atmosphere is more nightclub than art show, more influencer than artist. It makes Shade feel old.

Well, and so. He is old.

He is somewhat amused by the fact that Daniel whispers to him, in passing, that it makes him feel old as well.

They make their way to the artist, and she squeals with delight, recognizing and remembering the two men who had visited her booth at a craft show the year prior and had loved her work so much that they’d bought eight paintings.

They do not tell the artist that tomorrow they will sell six of those paintings for ridiculous sums of money. The other two will stay in the climate-controlled vault Shade has stored them in. Daniel doesn’t remember hearing Adria Coombs’ name sixty years from now, but he hadn’t been looking into art then either. She may just be the moment’s media darling; a hundred years from now, her art may be next to worthless, or it may be worth a fortune. They’ll keep the two paintings to hedge their bets.

Daniel snags a glass of champagne and pulls Shade into a quiet corner. “I’m leaving,” he says.

Shade nods absent-mindedly. “Send the car back when you get to the hotel, then. I’d rather not take the subway this time of night.”

“No,” Daniel says meaningfully. “I’m leaving.”

Shade immediately knows what that means. So soon? he almost asks, and then he catches himself. They’ve spent nearly five years together. It’s the longest, by far, they’ve ever been in the same time.

Somehow, looking back, it doesn’t even seem that long.

“When are you going?”

Daniel could tell his friend that he is going forward. He could say that he has wrestled with the dilemma of what Shade has been doing so many times over these past years. He could say that, though part of him wants to run away, a larger part of him is curious about what Shade has done to the timeline, and he just has to see the Institute for himself. He could say that he has no idea, for once, what he’s going to find in the future, and the prospect is a little frightening and very intriguing.

He doesn’t, though. Daniel just flashes that impish grin that always has always infuriated Shade in the past. “I thought you didn’t want to know,” he says lightly. “You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”

Shade just shakes his head and reaches for Daniel’s hand. “You take care of yourself.”

Daniel grabs Shade’s hand and pulls him into a hug. Shade startles and then hugs his friend back.

They’ve come to know each other well over these past years. No words are necessary. Still, Daniel pulls away and, serious now, searches Shade’s eyes.

“Are you good?” he asks.

Shade considers for a moment. “Yeah,” he finally says, and he truly means it. “I’m good.”

Daniel nods, grins, and gives a flippant salute. Then he turns and walks out the door.