[Fiction] Racehorses

[Jager]

Jager logged off. He had lost the bet - the faint hope really, and sent the proper amount the winner's charity of choice. There was no sense of satisfaction form the other side that he could sense. Timeslip was on the run.

The Knights had stepped forward on this. It would only be made worse when Sean's contact with the accused came out, and it would. Everyone would want to dissect this case and there were too many vested interests to see the trial system fail for novas for any kind of a fair hearing.

It was a forlorn hope; a desperate hope that Jager could track her down in anything like a worthwhile time, but he felt the compulsion. Jager let his personal handler know what he was doing and that he would be leaving the Knights yet again. He regretted doing this, but something had to be done - or so he hoped.

When Jager left close confines of downtown Chicago his civilized demeanor was shed. He was once again the man he had grown up being, focusing his essence on being a hunter of novas. He was once more a betrayer of his own kind and chasing a betrayer of their combined destiny.

[Timeslip]

Faster.

The thought pushed everything else aside in Timeslip's mind, as she raced toward the heavens and an uncertain future. Behind her, she knew, the world was coming back to life; her run between frozen seconds could only last so long, and she had needed to use so very much of it just to escape the labyrinthine courthouse.

Faster.

Home - or more accurately, her new home - was across an unimaginable void... a void that might as well have been a million lightyears, with the effects of the Utopian's disruption still holding tight around her like a strait-jacket. She could feel its touch ebbing, could start to stretch her fingers into the multidimensional river... but it was still out of reach, and the starscape Terat knew that her only hope was to keep out of the hands of the hunters long enough to finally step across to home. To Yokiko.

Memory of her tiny daughter flared bright across her mind, and if there had been any lack of urgency before, it fell away completely now.

Faster.

With a surge of power, Timeslip roared past the sound barrier, leaving a sonic boom in her wake.

[Jager]

He knew the clue that few others knew. This was a race about time, not distance - the time it would take for TimeSlip to work free of her shackles and leave this section of time/space behind for something greener, and far, far safer. People felt comfortable thinking about distance; about hideouts, safe houses, and transfer points, but Jager didn't feel right about any of those. Who would be prepared to help her?

If the security detail had done their jobs, no one inside the Movement was ready, or willing. This felt like a mad dash, not some planned escape.

Long had betrayed her and Jager was sure that the price he would exact would be too high for her.

Sean ... Sean inflicted pain on himself with the women he chose, but this was a mutual destruction pact. Sean was too much in the public eye and most assuredly, too much under official scrutiny.

TimeSlip’s close personals were too thin - this side of the veil anyway and led him back to the mad dash for time, not distance.

The advantage about being a lone hunter in a sea of arms raised against her was that he could see and sense which routes they were cutting off for her, but the biggest advantage was that he didn’t have to listen to other people’s clatter. When the trail marker came in, nothing more than a freak atmospheric disturbance to most, Jager knew he had her. He took off after her with every ounce of speed he could muster – but it wasn’t enough. He had to dip deeper down still, even though he knew this would alert her (most likely) to his presence. Jager slipped out of time to push himself ahead – to keep up. Jager was the swifter by a hair and more enduring, plus he hadn’t spent the last month in a holding cell and a month before that giving birth and recovering.

Evan as Jager pushed himself harder after her his senses warned him that his time to catch he was slipping away. He still didn’t warn anybody, though the help would have ended things abruptly enough. Jager wanted this to be something accredited to the Knights and no other. Besides, he didn’t want people to see him like this, so mono-focused and driven; some would say inhumanly so. Jager worked hard to keep his inhuman side away from the public eye. In a way, Jager was also running from his own aberrated self – the one he kept locked away.

[Timeslip]

Even focused on her headlong dash, even at this distance, the flare of the massive node behind her washed over Timeslip in rolling waves that far exceeded her own supersonic speed. A knot tightened in her stomach and a rare bead of sweat formed on her brow; she knew the feel of that powerful quantum signature well enough to know exactly the nature of her peril.

Jager, the Hunter, was on her trail.

With effort spured by desperation, she forced quantum through her node in ways that far exceeded anything resembling a safe limit. Still, the effort was rewarded, as the land far below no longer crawled past, but slipped away beneath her at a dizzying speed, and a second, hypersonic boom sent shock waves into the face of her relentless pursuer. The Mississippi Delta went past in a blink; Cuba and the lesser islands of the Caribbean rolled away beneath her.

And yet, she could feel that even now, as she neared the Venezuelan shore, Jager was closing the gap.

The Mistress of Time was running short of moments.

[Jager]

Everything she had ... running flat out ... and he was gaining. Jager could not forget the foundation of this race though - time, not distance. He was closing the distance but she kept buying a little more of that time. Gone was the assurance that her shackles would hold; now it was an if they will hold for only a few more seconds.

Then Jager cut through the time-sight and visually saw her. She was still some great distance away, but now, for the first time he let confidence seep into his heart. It could be a fatal flaw, because he didn't have her yet, but it also drove him on harder. Again he blinked out of perceived reality and pushed himself forward carefully through time/space toward his quarry. He was going to catch her. All he had to do was narrow down the final angle of her out temporal displacement and she was his.

Inside his head, a node was throbbing from the over-use. Jager's body wad covered in a fine sheen of sweat as his biological functions shared the strain his quantum need were place on him. In the back of his mind, that little voice was warning him that no quarry was as dangerous as when cornered, yet he pressed on. The concept of that threat kept growing in his mind and it awoke an old fear, not yet heard, but soon to be screaming its own warning. Jager feared time manipulators even though he himself had learned to manipulate his own time. Jager was hurdling back toward that fear full on with Timeslip - someone with immense power and a bottleneck of fear all her own.

[Timeslip]

A black comet flashed above Caracas, followed by a rocket of gold and blue, as the two shot inland. In a blink, the Orinoco was behind them; deep jungle bore ancient and silent witness to a closing gap between the hunter and the hunted.

Suddenly, it was as though a heavy veil was removed from Timeslip's eyes, as the infinite threads of infinite worlds stretched once more before her. She funneled quantum to reach out to those threads... and in doing so, her headlong flight slackened, just a bit. Before she could make the transition, a hand like steel closed around her ankle, and her effort to step between worlds stumbled.

Jager had her.

Panic and despair flooded through her soul; after this, Timeslip knew, she would spend the rest of a horribly shortened life as a prisoner. She would spend it in a haze of Mox and drugs, her godlike powers only a faded memory. She would spend it in a dark hole under constant Utopian scrutiny.

She would spend it without Yokiko.

"Yokiko," she whispered, her voice lost to the slipstream. And she made a decision.

Held as she was within the unyielding grip of Jager, she could not cross between worlds; at least, not alone. As the two cascaded across the Brazilian sky entwined like lovers, night and stars suddenly enveloped them like a velvety shroud… and then, they were gone.