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Riley Velez dragged the piece of charred limestone across the cave wall, the same repeated movement now muscle memory.
She couldn’t forget to do this task, the most important task of her day. It was the only thing keeping her tethered to her humanity. She counted the vertical lines, grouping them into blocks of seven, those blocks into groups of fifty, despairing slightly when she closed off another group of seven.
One thousand and ninety-nine marks.
One hundred and fifty-seven weeks.
Just over three years.
Her arm dropped, the limestone clattering against the dirt floor. Riley didn’t have the strength to pick it up anymore, and so she let it roll until it hit a rock, lodging itself in place. She slid down the damp, cold wall of the cave, pulling a tattered, blood-stained piece of animal hide righter around her shivering shoulders.
The end is near.
She was dying, and that wasn’t just her panic taking over, but the certainty of a girl who had spent the last three years alone, fighting to just stay alive, unsure where she’d fallen in the space-time continuum.
When she stepped into the red light of the aurora with Josh, she’d expected to end up back in time, to when the first pilots had been sent down here, but instead, they’d been torn between two different times, or at least, she had assumed so.
And not the worst assumption that the aurora had killed Josh off.
She’d worked out that the aurora had sent her to some time before their sinkhole – she’d managed to navigate back to the clearing, not too surprised to have seen it empty (after all, this was supposed to be back to when the initial trail occurred), but when she had trekked to where everything was supposed to have started, that area was now destroyed, flooded over.
Seven years. That was how long had passed between the final data from the initial pilots and the sinkhole. And she had no way of knowing where in those seven years she’d fallen.
And so, there was no way over or under the issue – she had to go through it.
She would just have to, worst-case scenario, survive for seven years.
So far, she’d survived nearly half – just over three years had passed, three years entirely alone.
She used everything she had learnt in the time since she had fallen through the La Brea sinkhole, and kept herself alive, kept herself going, knowing that every day she pushed through, she was closer to getting to the time when the sinkhole occurred, and everything began.
You can give everyone a jump start, she thought, not sure how the mechanics of the warped time would work – would another version of her fall in through the new sinkhole? Would the survivors remember everything that happened in their future? Or would they be clueless and have no knowledge of the fact that they’d done this before, that most of them had indeed survived the falling through the sinkhole?
Her mind hurt just considering the what-ifs – she couldn’t afford to spend much time on such ponderings.
She shifted, wincing in pain when a jolt of pain shot up her leg – she had managed to slip whilst foraging, landing oddly, certain that she had at least fractured, if not broken, her leg. She had spent the last week hobbling, rationing the supplies she already had, barely mustering up enough energy to replenish her water supplies, and almost slipping in the river this morning.
Maybe that would have been a more or less peaceful way to go.
Her supplies would last another three days. In three days, she’d still not be fit enough to scavenge or hunt the small game she relied on.
She looked out at the clearing, where everyone had first fallen, almost willing the sky to open and send her the La Brea survivors, to send her Josh, to send her her father, hell, she’d take anyone right now.
She apologised aloud, her whisper echoing in the cave, but she wasn’t too sure to whom, and for what she was apologising – she’d survived three years utterly alone. That was feat enough in itself.
She closed her eyes, letting her head loll to the side, this time not worried if she didn’t wake up, for it meant she wouldn’t have to plough on another day with pain and worry and exhaustion as her default operating mode. There was, after all, so much stress a body could take, as she was sure she had surpassed that limit months ago.
*
A snap of a twig echoed at the mouth of the cave, and Riley’s eyes snapped open, grabbing for the makeshift weapon she’d draped over her knees, knowing full well that it would bring her seconds, at most, in the state she was in.
“Hello?” a voice called out, and Riley was certain she stopped breathing at that second because surely… was that really?
“Hello?” the voice called again, the voice deeper and rougher than she remembered, but the cadence of that voice – that was unmistakable.
“Josh?” she got out, barely a pipsqueak, the steps now louder as they approached her.
Woah. Josh looked not a day older than when she first saw him in the clearing. And yet, coming to this cave, to find her, was a plan they’d agreed to only once they’d fallen down the sinkhole.
What a wonderful and weird paradox.
“Riley,” he breathed out as he spotted her, her features much older now, more weather-battered and defined, but it was her – he would never forget those eyes, no matter how much time it took him to get back and return to her.
He gently reached for her hand, and Riley immediately spilt tears, leaning in to embrace Josh as tightly as she could, despite her pain.
“You… It’s really you… You’re not a hallucination,” she got out, and Josh couldn’t help but respond in jest.
“You… you hallucinated about me?”
“Forget I said anything,” she told him as he settled back, taking note of Riley’s situation, “But tell me, you remember everything, yes?”
“Yes, everything. I remember it all. But ask me later,” he said, embracing Riley tightly once again.
“I’m so glad you’re here, and you’re alive… If you hadn’t…”
“I know. But listen, this time, we have the advantage. We need to do what we initially came here to do, okay?” she said, trying to get up to her feet.
“Only after you let your dad treat you, okay?” Josh pointed out, and Riley just huffed, knowing he was right.