Read Online Steamrolled by Pauline Baird Jones - Free Book Online

envied Robert. He asked questions so easily. Perhaps his life had delivered better answers than hers.
    Carey shrugged. “I didn’t—” Robert looked at him with intent. He shrugged again. “There is a kind of depression on one side. I might have pushed it.”
    Robert’s fingers were long and confident. Could fingers be confident? They were cared for, but pale, like he’d been out of the sun for a while. The fingers stopped, one of them circling something on the side of the box. The box kicked up the vibrating, adding in a high-pitched whine.
    “Everyone get back out of the center,” Robert ordered, with unexpected authority. His arm went around her waist, half lifting her, half sweeping her to the edge of the room. He could have released her then, instead of keeping her clamped against his manly side, but he didn’t.
    She liked being swept, and she really liked being clamped. The moment called for gazing, so she tipped her head back to gaze. He didn’t seem to know what the moment called for. The now empty center of the room had his attention, while the box kicked up the vibration some more.
    It was about then that she realized it wasn’t just the box. It was the whole building.
     

FIVE
     
     
    Ashe arrived in time to see the Council settling, with an obvious awareness of their importance, into their seats on the raised dais.
    They are all physically present.
    Usually the Council preferred to use their personal time zones, which allowed them to exist here and there—wherever their “there” was, something to do with monitoring across time or something. Without the flash of the inter-dimensional travel, their lack of what her Earth cousins called star power, was even more obvious. Maybe they were supposed to be pedestrian. A few petty bureaucrats might be awful to work with, but perhaps they’d limit each other’s potential for damaging time. Negatives canceling each other out? Since they had to be petty, it was a pity they weren’t pretty, despite the historic Gadi love of it. They ranged from the merely bland to the seriously ugly.
    It is possible that their lack of pretty is what drove them into Council work.
    It made a kind of sense.
    They know something is wrong.
    The comment by Lurch flowed from the obvious fact that it was highly unusual for all the Council to be physically present on the base, let alone be present to brief a slew of low-level trackers. Their expressions showed only majestic—as their uninspiring visages could manage—unconcern. No sign anyone noticed the tremors shaking the outpost or that they heard what sounded like thunder outside. A tremor hit the base hard enough to bleed through the shields, throwing it out of phase for several seconds. It almost knocked Ashe out of her “please underestimate me” pose. Okay, someone had to see that. At least tell me someone felt it?
    Do I have to tell you again that you have an unusual sensitivity to time?
    I’ll replay it with your patience lecture later. The high ceiling and stone everything chilled the air, but what sent ice to her core was her sense of time spiraling in strange ways out in the wider universe while the Council straightened their robes and got comfortable in their seats. Her time senses were going crazy, her gut telling her things she didn’t think it could. I think you are right.
    She felt Lurch’s surprise. About what?
    He didn’t have to feel so surprised. She’d admitted he was right at least once before. This time disturbance. I think it’s both. I think it might be natural and unnatural.
    You can feel the difference? Now he felt intrigued.
    I think so. It felt like two currents coming together, with an odd, uncomfortable turbulence where they bumped against each other. It was a sense, an instinct, more than real knowledge. Despite the buckets of data transferred into her brain when she made cadet, Ashe worked mostly from her instincts. She hadn’t been here long, but she’d already figured out that much of