Saving Grandpa pt 2- Vanishing

My heart pinches. “You’re an anomaly living outside a timeline.”

This also means I won’t end up with Juan. If I never met him, why do I still remember him?

My would-be grandson shrugs, and the nonchalance contradicts the passion in his light brown eyes. “Gwen disappeared. I think the only thing that keeps me from vanishing is my determination to fix this and the possibility that I still might.”

I bite my lip. “Saving your grandfather will solve everything?”

His mouth draws a thin line, and his foot scuffs the floor. “Specifically, you saving Grandpa. I’ve done the calculations so many times.” He grabs at his hair. It sticks up even when his fingers fall away from it to trail down either cheek. “When I returned to the Outer to search for Gwen, a tyrant was pushed into the Inner. He conquered it, and those he can’t drug into mindless compliance he keeps in stasis. That’s what you have to save Grandpa from.”

I’m lost in a sea of images. A fairy tale reels through my mind where I am the valiant princess who rescues my Juan, cape waving in the wind. Our first kiss of true love breaks the curse on the land, and the universe is set aright.

“Will you come?” This Juan’s eyes glitter with hope as he holds something out to me.

I wrinkle my nose. “What is that?”

“A helmet.”

It looks like a longhorn’s skull with a mane of eagle feathers and smells as bad as the carcasses it was likely taken from.

“It’s gear that’ll let you cross to the Inner. You invented it.”

He shoves it down on my head. I gag, stumble backward, and hit the door hard enough that it dents.

Future generations of employees will ask, “What’s that?”

“That is the stamp of Gabby’s butt,” they’ll be told. “It holds the world record for breaking the most things.”

With some difficulty, I find my balance and slide the skull up so it no longer covers my face. The feathers trail to the small of my back. Some of them glow azure.

I prop my hands on my hips. “I wouldn’t invent something that looks so macabre.”

Juan pulls a second helmet from a pocket that doesn’t look capable of containing anything larger than a flash drive. He flips it on his own head and leaves the mask up like mine. “The way the calculators look wasn’t your idea. You made them as necklaces to match the translators.” He tugs at the earring on his left ear, breaking off the lower section as he steps toward me.

I retreat, but the dented door prevents me from going more than two paces. As he brings the metal feather to my ear, I wince. “Wait! What—”

It doesn’t hurt. My ears aren’t pierced, but the earring latches on painlessly. Juan’s hands withdraw, and every sound has an odd echo, even the pounding of my heart.

“Grandpa modified the calculators’ design because he wanted our border patrol to look intimidating.”

“That it does,” I say with a grimace as he slides the skull down over his face.

It muffles his voice. “Give me your hand.”

I start to but pause. “When we enter the Inner, someone will get shoved into the Outer, right? What if they end up in a pre-historic era? What if they change this whole timeline?”

“They’re doped up zombies over there, incapable of doing anything without someone telling them to.” He grabs my hand.

I pull back but can’t escape his grasp. “And the tyrant? What if we push him in the past?”

“Then we pop back over, and he’ll be sucked back to the Inner.”

“It’s that convenient? We’d pull back the same person we displaced?”

He answers a beat too late, pitch a bit high. “Yeah. Now let’s go.”

Head down, he sprints across the room. I slip free just as he crashes into the grooming station, head first in the tub.

“Juan!” I scrabble at his shoulders. One of the helmet’s horns is wedged in the drain.

“Mommy, what kind of animal is that?” a kid shouts, pointing through the window.

I wish I could disappear.

And I do.

Continued in pt 3- Inner

Thank you for reading!