Chapter Twenty-One - Construction

Alice pointed towards the wall. The person listening in to them was just behind it, crouching in the shadows and entirely out of view. That made them all the easier for Alice to notice, however. If someone wanted to hide from her, then they'd best do it while out in the open, while not casting any shadows, or feeling any emotions.

This person--they felt like a girl, emotionally--was scared. She was verging on being terrified, and yet Alice could feel the girl working to smother her fear with an impressive resolve.

"Hello!" Crystal called out.

"Shush," Koschei hissed. He looked around, eyes darting across the yard. There were a few containers around, and he started towards one of them which was opened on both ends, enough so that they could hide in it. "Don't stay in the open," he said.

"It's just one person, right Alice?" Crystal asked.

"It is," Alice confirmed. "A girl. She's armed, I think, but is afraid to use her weapons on us."

That last was a familiar fear. A lot of people who had never killed felt a certain level of fear, or maybe it was respect? They were sometimes more afraid of killing someone than they were of fighting that person in the first place. It was a weakness she'd encountered in plenty of mooks in the past.

"We don't need to run," Crystal said to Koschei.

"Sticking around when there's a person you don't know in the Zone is a quick way to die," he said. "They could be waiting here to ambush us. I don't know how you noticed someone, but your noticing them might discourage them from springing their trap."

"It's not a trap," Alice said. "They were surprised to see us showing up."

Koschei looked at her. He was clearly suspicious now. Not that she particularly cared to hide what she could do, but she did acknowledge that it wasn't something normal.

"Maybe we can say hi?" Crystal asked. "It never hurts to be polite."

Koschei clearly didn't like the idea as much as Crystal did. He wanted to move on, to get away from anything that might be a threat, and Alice understood his viewpoint. Anything that he wasn't familiar with could be a threat, and threats in this area were often lethal.

An unknown person skulking about? They might be here to kill Stalkers. They might be an ambusher. They might be armed or equipped with items like Koschei had, that would let them bend physics over their knee.

"Alright," Alice said. "Let's keep moving then."

"Bye mysterious stranger!" Crystal called out. "See you around!"

They continued through the space, and Alice noticed that they were crossing the open area diagonally, heading to the left. Basically, they were veering off in the same direction they had entered the warehouse from.

"Why did we go through that warehouse if we're just going to walk around it now?" Alice asked.

Koschei shook his head. "This isn't the same warehouse we went into."

"It isn't?" Crystal asked as she glanced back. "It sure looks like it."

"If you were to stand here for a day, you would see us entering the warehouse in the morning," he said.

Alice spun around, facing the man. "We travelled back in time?" she asked.

"By a day," he said. "You can only use the warehouse once every... time you enter the Zone. Somehow, the Zone knows. Doing it twice does nothing otherwise.

"Why didn't you tell us?" Crystal asked.

"Because people are stupid about it," he said. "And I should add, now that we're on this side, you can't go back and change things."

"You can't create a paradox?" Alice asked.

He shook his head. "If you do, you just disappear."

Alice and Crystal glanced at each other. There was no way that either of them would have missed that there was another version of themselves out and about. There were contingencies for this. They had fought evil clones too many times not to know how to deal with them.

One of their friends and teammates, Magical Girl Screaming Bioplague, had changed all of their genes by a tiny fraction, ensuring that any cloning attempt would fail, but there had always been people with the resources to find genetic material from before that change.

In any case, Alice stretched her powers out and bumped into her past self.

She now remembered being bumped into and being confused.

"So, uh, what happens if we cause a paradox anyway?" Crystal asked. "Like, if you shoot yourself before entering the warehouse?"

"Who would be stupid enough to do that?" Koschei asked. "But, in any case, the warehouse will make you disappear. One moment you're there, the next you stop existing. So stop questioning things and let's keep moving. There are good reasons why I made us cross over."

Alice sent her past self a kindly worded message, writ in shadows, warning herself that there would be some point in the near future where she'd be sent back into the past and not to worry about it.

She paused, remembering how she'd worried about the message anyway, then sent a more sternly worded message of the same nature.

It would do.

The strange sensation of misplaced nostalgia washed over her. She could also feel something else, a power reacting to what she'd just done. The paradox had been noticed, and time wanted to correct it.

But this wasn't a strong power. It was a fraction of a fraction, a tiny sliver of Megan's abilities trying to do something on its own. Alice batted it away.

"So, why did we use the warehouse, then?" Crystal asked. "Being a day in the past is nifty and all, but it's not like it helps that much, right?"

"It does two things," he said. "It gives us information about the weather for the day, because we've lived through it already. We know that it'll be windy, but not too cold, with no rain. We also know that we didn't hear any large fighting in the distance, so we'll be safe for a small amount of time, at least."

Alice nodded. That made some sense. Megan was good at scouting ahead for them this way. It was always interesting when the girl they'd dubbed Future-Megan popped up as well. She looked to be in her late twenties, or early thirties. A more confident, brash and charismatic version of the Megan they all knew.

A few of the girls had crushes on Future-Megan, which annoyed Megan to no end.

"It also gives us one more day to travel before the next storm hits," Koschei said. "You never want to use the warehouse to go back a day if the previous day had a storm. You don't want to use it when there's a storm active either. But in this case, we only buy ourselves time."

"I'm guessing that the storms are a lot worse here?" Crystal asked.

"They are worse in the Zone, yes," he said.

They'd reached the edge of the yard by then, and Koschei pointed to a part of the fence that could be moved aside with minimal effort.

"Is our new pal following?" Crystal asked.

Alice glanced back. She could feel the person they'd almost encountered still. They were moving along the length of the fence, heading in the opposite direction, at least for now. "Doesn't look like it," she said.

"I won't ask how you know that," Koschei said. "But in the future, if you notice someone like that again, you let me know."

"I can do that," Alice agreed easily enough.

Koschei nodded, then gestured off to the right. Past this trainyard was a small space with several short buildings filled with storage units. "Through here," he said before taking the lead. The man started tossing nuts and bolts ahead of himself again, catching them with a pull of the cord they were laced to.

There was an anomaly in this yard as well, though it was just a sphere of empty ground, without even grass growing within it that they circled around.

Past the storage yard was a space that looked to be under construction. There were holes dug into the ground with some pipes laid into them, several trucks parked around and little mobile-homes with logos from at least three different construction companies. A building was to one side of the yard, looking rather new and modern, and next to it the skeleton of several others, including a large cement-lined pit where Alice imagined another building would have gone up by now if the Zone hadn't appeared.

Alice couldn't help but glance back one last time before they continued on. She could still feel the girl. Now that she had focused on her, it was hard to just ignore her completely. She was scared, and yet pressing on.

It wasn't every day that Alice met someone so brave.

***