By the time school started, Anna had run five miles, performed pull-ups and push-ups until her arms gave out, and listened to an introductory tour of special relativity. She also rode her bike the three miles to school. By first period, her legs were rubber, and her hands began to cramp as she wrote. By second period, she had dozed off in the back of the room.
“Psst,” someone whispered somewhere deep in her sleep.
Anna’s eyes flickered.
“Psst. Armstrong,” the voice said more insistently. “You’re drooling.”
Anna’s eyes snapped open, and the sounds of the classroom and the bright light from the windows came flooding in. One seat to her left, Scout was silently holding back laughter. His lips were shut tight and curled up in a smile. He pointed to his chin, then at Anna.
Anna reached up and felt the trail of drool that led from the corner of her mouth to her chin to the puddle on her desk below. She quickly wiped her face with her forearm, then shut her eyes and prayed for the day to end.
Anna spent the rest of the day stuck between two worlds. She would be mid-conversation with Lula or Fiona when Mara buzzed through on the iCom. No warning. Just boom. Mara’s voice appeared in her head unannounced, giving orders or directions or new things to learn. And suddenly, Anna was forced to parse two simultaneous conversations and not look crazy in the process. No one else could hear Mara over the iCom. No one could see the lights or the holographic images projected above Anna’s wrist. Mara said that was because the light signals and audio waves from the iCom were beamed directly onto Anna’s retina and eardrums. To Anna, it felt like she had an ever-present imaginary friend.
That night, just before sleep and in the darkness of her room, Anna received another call on her iCom. This time it was to play a game—at least that’s what Mara called it. The rules were simple: All she had to do was stare at a small glowing sphere that floated six inches above her iCom. Any time her mind wandered, or if she tried to focus too hard, the sphere of light would fade. The best she could muster that first night was thirty seconds of uninterrupted focus, which she accomplished just before collapsing on her bed asleep, still in the clothes she wore to school earlier in the day.
So this is what boot camp feels like, Anna thought when she woke up on the second morning. As Mara barked orders, Anna began to fantasize ways of disabling her iCom, like putting the iCom on mute or cutting her arm off. She ached in places she didn’t know could ache. It was a new dawn, a new path to run, and a new lecture on the nature of time.
By the end of the fourth day, people began to notice the odd behavior. Anna had ditched the bike and begun running back and forth from school instead—through the muscle aches, past the farm fields and irrigation lines and odd looks from farmers as they watched this strange new girl sprint home. One farmer even stopped his truck and asked her what she was running from, his face concerned. At home, Uncle Jack had noticed the quick spike in her appetite and predicted a growth spurt would be coming soon. Armstrong women tended to be on the tall side.
As the week rolled on, Scout volunteered as Anna’s training partner and rode his bike along with her as she ran back and forth to school. Fiona and Lula joined soon after and the four became a familiar sight, a caravan of friends along the one-lane roads outside the town of Smartt. She wanted more than anything to tell her friends the truth—that she was actually wearing something called antigravity boots, that she’d been hiding a great secret and would be searching for wormholes sometime soon—yes, wormholes to other dimensions with her new friend from the future. But she was good at keeping her promises, even though she wanted to burst. It was the single hardest thing she’d done, harder than all the workouts, lectures, early mornings, and sleepless nights combined.
Mara began to change the cadence of Anna’s morning runs. “Sprint . . . now slow your pace . . . jump . . . sprint . . . jump.” She broke down why these movements were necessary—how they were perfectly calibrated to maximize Anna’s conditioning and endurance. Anna was sure it was to maximize her irritation instead.
Each day Anna asked when they would meet again. And each day, Mara responded with the same answer: “when you’re ready.”
New movements and exercises were introduced. Some to develop focus. Some to improve flexibility and boost strength. Some to increase visual acuity, which Anna didn’t even think was possible. Each movement had a purpose, and Anna performed them without fail, even though she felt and looked awkward, like a girl trying to put out a fire.
“Up, down, back and forth, focus, focus, focus.” New things to learn and paths to run. She was given a crash course in classical physics the first month, then ventured into subjects no schools would teach for more than a hundred years: reshaping neural networks in her head and allowing for brand new connections. The days melted into one another as the end of school drew near. Temperatures rose and fireflies emerged, and the spring crops carpeted the fields in a bed of green.
Anna didn’t notice the changes at first. They were subtle. But she soon found she was able to easily do pull-ups without the help of the wooden crate. She could run, even sprint, for miles without losing her breath. And the daily aches were long gone. She noticed lean muscles and cuts in her arms and legs that were never there before. Even her face began to look different, older.
The changes weren’t just physical. She could now focus for extended periods of time, keeping the sphere of light suspended above her iCom without faltering. The world had slowed down for her, too. Things that had once moved by in a blur now came into focus—the flap of a bird’s wing or the gait of a running horse. She remembered hearing about baseball players who could see the individual threads of a baseball spin as it left the pitcher’s hand. And somehow over the weeks of training she had developed a similar ability.
Two months in, she no longer asked when they’d meet again; she no longer saw her training as a task to get through but just the way things were. A constant in her life, just like Mara’s voice over the iCom.
Anna hadn’t physically seen Mara in almost nine weeks, but over that time she learned to understand her quirky sense of humor and timing. She had grown accustomed to Mara’s constant presence. Like clockwork, she knew when to expect Mara’s voice over the iCom. So on that morning before the last day of school, when Mara failed to contact her as scheduled, Anna had a feeling something was wrong.
Mara hadn’t called all day. No signal. No orders. No new course to run. The anxious feeling that started as a hollow pit in her stomach earlier that morning became a full-blown panic attack by evening.
Anna sat out on the front porch with her Uncle Jack as the sun set and the night sounds came out in full chorus. Fireflies circled the oak tree in the front yard like strings of Christmas lights. She tried to read a book but found herself stuck in a loop on the same paragraph for almost fifteen minutes. Her uncle sat across from her, pencil in his mouth and all his attention focused on the sketchpad in his lap. The porch light cast long shadows across his face.
“What are you working on?” Anna asked, trying to distract herself.
“I’m just doing a little math. I’m trying to figure out how much carbon we can sequester, or capture, over the course of a year,” Uncle Jack said. “Want to double-check my work?”
Uncle Jack handed over his notebook. On the left side of the page was a systems diagram with inputs and outputs. On the right, a lot of really sloppy handwriting.
“It looks like you sketched this with your feet.” Anna smiled.
“Don’t grade me on neatness, just let me know if it makes sense,” Uncle Jack laughed.
“The diagram makes sense, but—”
The sound of crickets stopped as if someone suddenly flipped off the volume. The air felt charged. A dry breeze rustled the leaves, but there were no other sounds except for the slight squeak from the porch swing. Herbie, who had been sleeping next to Uncle Jack’s feet, started to whimper and looked nervously toward the horizon.
Uncle Jack and Anna exchanged a puzzled glance. From across the lawn, the fireflies started to blink in unison, on and off and back on again, like Morse code.
“That’s strange.” Uncle Jack rose slowly from his chair.
Anna felt it first: a static itch that raised the hair on her arms. She instinctively looked down. Uncle Jack must have felt it too because he was absently rubbing his arms.
“You feel that—”
Uncle Jack was cut off by a deep rumble like distant thunder, followed by the sound of a horn—a sound so deep Anna could feel it in her bones. She put her hands over her ears in surprise. The horn blast changed pitch, deeper now. It seemed to come from everywhere. The sound of two ocean liners ramming into each other. Twisting metal. Herbie began to howl in harmony.
Uncle Jack grabbed his mobile phone. He tapped on the screen and then paced back and forth waiting for the person on the other line to answer.
“Hey, RG. RG!” Uncle Jack shouted into the phone. “Are you hearing this?”
“Yeah, [static]. Everyone [static] hearing it.” Dr. Gloria’s voice on the speaker could barely be heard above the sound.
“Is it a weather event?”
“We have our drones out, but we’re not [static],” Dr. Gloria shouted above the noise. “Wait—we’re getting some crazy barometric readings! Holy cow! Sensors in the northeastern fields just dropped below twenty-six.”
“That’s impossible. There’s not a cloud in the sky,” Uncle Jack shouted back. “Can we track the origin?”
“Not yet. What the heck [static], Jack?”
“I don’t know, but I’m heading over to the lab right now. Maybe the AEDT can identify where this is coming from. Call me back if you find anything.” Uncle Jack tucked his phone in his pocket and looked down at Anna.
“Stay put. I’ll be right back!” Uncle Jack shouted as he bounded down the steps.
Anna watched her uncle run in a full sprint across the yard and out toward the barns. Just as he faded from view, her iCom flashed blue. The first sign from Mara in over a day. Anna waited until she was sure her uncle was gone.
“Mara! What’s going on?!” Anna shouted into her wrist.
“The sound? It isn’t me. Not directly,” Mara said, her voice clear and sharp in Anna’s ear.
“What do you mean, not directly?”
The horn blast began to trail off, followed by a rolling echo that she could almost see dissipate across the valley. Anna heard shouts from some of Uncle Jack’s team. People were scrambling under the barnyard lights. Some were quieting the horses who were agitated by the trumpet blast.
“That was one of those tears in space-time you talked about, wasn’t it?” Anna asked.
“I’ll explain tomorrow. Wait for my call.” Mara paused. “Based on what happened tonight, this phase of your training is over.”