the Travelers (Prologue)

         Amidst the sea of pulsing hearts, traveling feet, and wandering eyes, one pair of eyes that wandered, wandered onto a stranger. The eyes they met were peculiarly familiar, striking a memory, like a flickering note up inside her. She wondered who he was and why he made her feel so uncomfortably known, so equally familiar and exposed. His eyes left hers quickly, but as she turned and continued walking, she felt them return to her back and stare her down the hall. All the way up the escalator and onto the busy city street, she wondered who those eyes belonged to, those clear green eyes with flecks of murky brownish-red, so distinctly remembered and forgotten, like recognizing déjà vu but unable to retrace the steps between then and now.
         All the way home, she felt the eyes, though she knew no one was behind her. The drawing light peaking faintly out from behind the mountainous horizon flashed against something shiny; she couldn’t quite make out the distinction between the shining and the leaves around it, and before a deeper analysis could be conducted, it had gone. Her feet clapping against the pavement made the only sound on the lane to her home, right outside the city. She could hear a whirring, like a whistling of wind through the trees, but there was no wind. Then, after a moment of gentle whirring, there was nothing. It had hardly been a noticeable moment; the only reason she had, in fact, noticed it to begin with was that she was slightly paranoid and had risen senses prickling her subconscious. But now, there was nothing uncomfortable about the air, no suspicious eyes to meet her own, no flashes of shining light, no whirring of the leaves, abandoning her to a thick, empty silence.
         She felt, for some strange and unknown reason, as though she should be sad and felt slightly disconnected from herself, but after a moment’s worth of erasing, she had forgotten entirely about the discomfort of feeling as though you’re in someone else’s skin and continued walking down the quaint lane until she had reached her home.


         The whirring of a simple mechanism landed Roman Martel back in his own time period. He felt a lurch that had joint roots in the physical trauma that is time traveling, and the admittance and recognition of the past in a joltingly interactive way. A familiar voice greeted his newfound presence.
         “Did you see her?” called the owner of the voice from far above the landing platform. “Was she there?” The owner, a squat woman with curly hair and very red lips, begged answer.
         “Yeah,” Roman muttered to himself, his eyes drifting out of focus. After just a moment of such nonsense, he recalled his senses and cancelled the “non” of them, replying sturdily, “Yeah, I did.”
         “And…?” the woman asked again, firmly smashing her fist into the detoxification button as she said it. After a moment of spraying and whizzing and flittering of tiny machines and spray ducts lining the landing port, the large door between the port and the upper observation room glided open. The small woman made her fast way down the stairs, across the hall, and through the hatch into the port. She waited expectantly for a further and more satisfying explanation.
         “And…? What? What do you want me to say? Yes I saw her…she looked…young…but like herself. Is that what you want?”
         “Don’t get snippy, Roman,” a smoother voice said from behind the still clearing mist of the detoxification process. “She just wanted to know what it was like to see her… We all wanted to know.” Roman turned away from the source of this new voice, his eyes were dark, quickly losing the light that had been rekindled when meeting her eyes. “You’re not the only one who misses her.”
         A weakness appeared in her voice that Roman had clearly not anticipated. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning back to her. “Come on,” he added a few moments later, “Let’s go to the café and I can tell you all about it there… Time travel takes more out of me than I’d remembered.”
         “It has been a while since you’re last trip, hasn’t it? What has it been now,” the squatter of the two woman interjected, scattering mental fragments left and right as she searched for the one obscure time figure. “Five years?”
         Roman’s eyes again turned a darker, colder shade of green, but it was not him who answered. “Five years, three months, one week, and three days,” the tall, smooth-voiced woman replied. Her eyes, too, had turned dark. For a moment her and Roman’s eyes met, understanding lighting a path between them.
         “Come on, let’s eat,” he replied firmly. The darkness had been replaced by the kinship of friends who still recognized his face. There was a look that haunted him though, as he walked down the halls of the old station with his two best friends: the look of a friend who had never yet seen him before. It was the first time he’d seen Audrey’s living face in over five years, and she hadn’t recognized his existence.