When All is Null and Void

Chapter Seven

"Will I be able to do that?" Caleb asked. He took a sip of his soup, which was surprisingly delicious.

"Probably not," she replied without batting an eyelash. "Both my mother and father were Timewalkers, so I don't need to wear a ring."

Caleb glanced at her right hand. "But you're..." He pointed.

"That leads me to what I find important to discuss." She used her forefinger and thumb of her left hand and slid the ring off her finger. The change in her was instantaneous. Lines creased her facial features, dragging down her immaculate skin. Gray hair poked down from her head scarf, and her fingers were sharpened by what had to be an intense form of arthritis.

"Wow," Caleb said, which probably wasn't the thing to say to a woman who'd aged thirty years in a matter of moments.

"The Void, which you experienced yesterday, is leaking into our world. It has been for a while, and I'm afraid it's my fault." She replaced the ring on her finger, and the creases marring her face smoothed. She was young again, and Caleb felt as if his eyes had been playing tricks on him. Had it been a trick of the light?

"So why do you need me?" Caleb tried not to sound too hopeful, but the situation seemed as if he had something to offer. For a moment Caleb wondered if he'd somehow been transported into a book, and he couldn't deny his heart was racing.

"I've been testing boys for three years now, seeking someone who wouldn't be affected by the Void. Neither I, nor my son Titus—you've met him—are affected by the Void, but we are already born as Timewalkers. You are not a Timewalker, and yet the Void cannot harm you."

Time slightly in Rhea James' grip. She didn't seem fatigued, but holding time in place could not have been an easy task. Caleb wondered if the entire earth had frozen, if she simply stopped time in her presence, or if the entire universe had stopped revolving around its axes. Was that even possible? "How do you know I'm this person you're searching for?"

"The serum I injected you with was something I developed. You were not pulled into the Void, but your consciousness was. The Void affects the deepest parts of who you are. Many of my Timewalkers who collect artifacts for the Museum are contracting a sickness by the way the Void leaks into the world. I had to see if you were susceptible."

"So you infected me with a virus?" Cold flooded into Caleb's hands and feet. His stomach clenched, unsettled by what Rhea had said.

"No. You're not a Timewalker--at least not yet. Once your ring is activated, then you'd become susceptible to Void Sickness. Except, you're not. You're immune to it."

"How?" Caleb asked.

Rhea shrugged, a frown toying at her lips. "I don't know." She looked down at the bowl of soup in front of her, pushed it away. "What did you see while you were asleep?" she asked. Her voice had gained a conspiring, quiet tone, as if she didn't want the people around them to hear her. Could they still be listening?

"I saw two people my age?" Caleb started. That part was vague to him. The beast had arisen in his mind first, but something told him he needed to start from the very beginning. The way Rhea's eyebrows lifted, interest written all over her face, Caleb knew he'd chosen right. "A boy and a girl, and they were in this cave sort of thing? They were feeling along the walls and found a, like, a chamber thing. The boy...he tried to cut his hand, but it kept healing, and then the girl took the knife thing and cut herself, except it didn't heal. When her blood fell on this sort of shrine thing, there was an earthquake and..." His breath hitched. "This monster rose up from the cracks in the ground and... I woke up."

Rhea nodded her head. She seemed hesitant to ask, "Who were the boy and the girl?"

"Figments of my imagination?" Caleb squinted to remember. "The boy was named Carter? Alia was the girl."

Rhea's demeanor sifted through three different emotions in a less than a second. Caleb couldn't be sure if it had been joy first, but fear followed, and the last was a cold, impassive sort of anger. Or was it sorrow? He didn't know what they meant, but Rhea nodded. The restaurant came into motion once more, and Rhea stood. "I will see you in two weeks. You're going to be studying with Alexander Pendergast. We will arrange for your current guardian to forget you, and she will be compensated well." She smiled, and then she was gone. A stack of bills lay on the table, though Caleb hadn't seen her place them. The man next to him finished taking his sip of the soup. Caleb only realized he'd been staring when the man glared.

Standing, Caleb walked out of the restaurant, dazed and somehow deeply shaken. He wasn't sure if what Rhea had shared made him more or less excited. Rhea had seemed to only make Timewalkers an even more confusing topic. He walked back to the school, just as the bell rang to signal the end of the current class period.