The TRG hummed in my hands like it had been waitin’ on this very patch of road all along.
That sound weren’t loud. Matter of fact, it was soft enough a man might’ve missed it if he weren’t standin’ at the raw edge of his own life. But I heard it just the same. A faint electric thrum under my fingers. A tiny, unnatural stirring from inside the black frame, like some caged thing had opened one eye and taken notice of me. The lenses darkened, then caught a shimmer under the blinking red light. Not red exactly. More like oil on water with moonlight caught in it—colors there and gone before a man could name ’em.
I lifted the goggles and settled them over my eyes.
The world changed all at once.
The present did not disappear. That was the devilish part. I could still feel the night wind on my face where the padding didn’t seal. I could still hear movement of military soldiers behind me, the dust off the shoulder, the dry mesquite and old summer heat baked into the blacktop. But through the TRG, all of it got skinned over by that faint blue geometry I had come to know too well. Thin lines. Tiny ghostly symbols. A grid laid across the world as if the machine were measurin’ creation and findin’ it waiting.
My thumb found the dial.
One year minus one day.
I turned it careful.
The whole intersection shivered.
Not with a physical shake. The road under my boots stayed still. The blinking red light above kept flashin’ in the same lazy rhythm. But through the TRG, time began to pull backward like a rope being reeled in by invisible hands. The paved road darkened, then lightened, then shifted tone. Shadows moved in impossible directions. Faint tire marks vanished from the shoulder. Grass along the ditch stood straighter where rain and wind had not yet had their way with it. The stop sign near the far shoulder lost one fresh scrape and took on an older one. The whole place peeled backward in layers so smooth it made me feel sick.
I gritted my teeth and held steady.
The intersection went on unwinding. Not fast enough to blur—fast enough to unsettle. The red light itself seemed younger somehow, its paint brighter, its pole less weathered. Even the little loose gravel around my boots changed shape as the machine walked the road back through time. The sound inside the earpieces shifted too. Wind reversed into older wind. Distant engines came and went backward in little swallowed murmurs. Somewhere a dog barked in reverse like the world had taken leave of all sense.
Then the motion slowed.
The machine found its mark.
I knew it before I looked at my watch. Knew it in my bones the way an old lawman knows when a room’s mood has changed and trouble is a coming. Time settled into place around the intersection with a soft pulse in the goggles—one little thud at my temples like the thing had locked onto the moment.
The past reformed around Sparkwood and 21.
And there she was.
Hannah’s car sat at the red light.
Seein’ her took my breath away, and I forgot every rifle behind me.
Her blue sedan looked so ordinary it near broke my heart worse than any wreck ever had. Headlights on. Paint a little dusty. Driver-side mirror still hangin’ crooked from where I had once clipped the garage and blamed it on bad parkin’ when it had really been me rushing to work. The dashboard cast that soft greenish glow I knew by heart. The car was stopped right where it should be, patient and still under the red pulse of the light.
And inside it sat Hannah.
Lord Almighty.
She had both hands near the wheel but not tight on it. Her shoulders were drawn up just a little, not with fear exactly, but with strain. Her hair fell forward over one side of her face in that soft golden way it always had when she leaned down to think. The dash light caught her cheek and the line of her jaw and the little crease that used to show between her brows when something heavy had got hold of her mind. She looked alive in all the little ways memory never quite gets right. Not polished. Not idealized. Real. Breathing. Blinking. Beautiful in the way that she was and no one else could be.
I felt something in my chest give way.
I had spent a year rememberin’ Hannah in fragments. Hannah laughin’ over coffee. Hannah cryin’ at the kitchen sink. Hannah in church dress and Hannah in boots. Hannah leavin’. Hannah dead. Memory had turned her into a thousand broken pieces I carried around like nails in a coffee can. But this—this was her whole. This was not funeral-home stillness or old photographs or my own starved imagination filling gaps. This was my wife under a blinking red light on a Texas road, alive as the wind and trouble and the blood in my own veins.
I couldn’t speak.
Behind me the Army did not matter. Masters did not matter. Mari’s pleas did not matter. The whole world fell away till there was only the hum of the TRG and Hannah at that stoplight.
She did not drive on.
That was the first strange thing.
The light blinked red over the empty crossing, and any ordinary body on an empty county road would’ve looked left, right, and rolled through after a beat. Hannah didn’t. She stayed there. Still. Thinking.
I watched her close through the lenses, afraid even to blink in case the machine betrayed me and snatched the sight away.
Her fingers shifted on the wheel. Then one hand slipped off and rested in her lap. She stared ahead through the windshield, but not like she was lookin’ at the road. More like she was seein’ some other place entirely. Some thought had her by the throat. I could tell that plain. Her mouth moved once without sound, as if she might’ve been rehearsin’ words or answerin’ somebody not in the car. She drew in a breath I could see in the rise of her shoulders, then let it out slow.
The red light blinked again.
Still she did not move.
The longer I watched, the more I saw that she was wrestlin’ with something deep. Not indecision in the plain sense. This weren’t a woman wonderin’ whether to turn left or right. This was heavier. Her eyes lowered a little, then lifted. She looked almost sick with thought. Torn up inside. Like a hard thing had come to a point in her and she did not yet know whether she had the strength to do what came next.
A thousand possibilities rushed me all at once.
Was she headed somewhere she did not want to go?
Had she already made up her mind about somethin’ and was trying to hold to it?
Was she angry?
Was she afraid?
Was she thinkin’ of me?
That last one hit me worst.
Because there, under that blinking light, she looked exactly like a woman standin’ at a crossroads in more ways than one. A woman deciding. A woman fighting herself. A woman maybe not nearly so finished as I had told myself she must have been.
My body flushed. The padded seal of the goggles warmed with it. My pulse thudded in my ears so loud it near drowned out the faint audio the TRG was feeding me from the past—engine idle, a far-off hum from some vehicle not yet close enough to matter, the tiny restless movement of Hannah inside the car.
Then she shifted again.
Just enough to lean a little nearer the dash.
The dashboard glow lit more of her face. I saw the shine in her eyes. Not tears exactly. Not yet. But a pressure behind them. A woman holdin’ the line against her own heart.
“Baby,” I whispered before I knew I had spoken.
The word died in the goggles unable to reach her time.
Of course it did.
She could not hear me. Could not feel me watchin’. Could not know I stood just yards away in another time with every regret I ever owned hangin’ off my bones. She just sat there in that suspended little pocket of life, held between red light and decision, and all I could do was look.
I reckon that was the cruel genius of the TRG. It gave a man sight without touch. Nearness without presence. Mercy cut with torment.
Behind me, somewhere outside the machine, somebody shifted boots on gravel. I dimly heard Mari draw a breath like she might say my name. I did not turn. I could not. Every part of me was chained to the sight of Hannah at that wheel.
She was still there.
Still not moving.
Still wrestling.
And a terrible understanding began to creep over me that whatever had held her at that blinking light was no small thing.
I took one slow step closer.
Tune in next week for Chapter 8 – Part A. Take Advantage of this limited offer from Creation Press. The first 100 free subscribers will automatically be upgraded to a paid account for one year.