The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

Denes was lost somewhere in time, deposited at an unintended and unexpected point in the timeline. Or perhaps—Aurora closed her eyes and shuddered at the most awful possibility—perhaps he had not materialized at all, and was truly lost, atoms scattered to the ends of the universe.
    Aurora hung her head and whispered, “Denes, Denes,” but there was no answer. Looking down, however, she realized she was standing in a pool of artificial light. She snapped her head up and saw old-fashioned lights on poles lining the street. She looked out opposite the museum, at the nearby buildings and the traffic signals and the vehicles passing by. It was wrong, all wrong. Why, it looked like something out of a history vid.
    Then the second hit came: She was not in Nuevo Angeles at all! She was in old Los Angeles, before the Eli Event, before the great quake, before the revolt, before the Reorganization. Old Los Angeles! But how old? What year?
    Aurora’s knees began to buckle; her vision blurred, she weaved unsteadily on her feet. She found a concrete bench and sat, rather jarringly, and fought to regain focus. Frantically she began to punch buttons on her callback unit. There was no wave signal, no carrier at all, which meant that Pan-Li had shut down the temporal relocator virtually in mid-jump. She sighed heavily, sadly. It did not look good. Simultaneous relocation, the interrupted jump—Denes was almost certainly lost, and she was lucky even to be alive. Aurora looked around. She knew where she was, but there was no telling when she was.
    Without a carrier signal, she could not contact Pan-Li and Lucinda, and of course with the relocator shut down, they could not search for her. Even with the relocator in full operation, if they had no idea to where and when she had been relocated, they might possibly find her after years of searching through time—or, more likely, they would never find her at all.
    Her mind raced, fighting despair. One chance. She was in old Los Angeles. Perhaps, perhaps… This time, she accessed her arm unit’s communication console, and entered the only other callback code she knew besides hers and Denes’s. It would be a miracle if it worked. She pressed the “Contact” button and closed her eyes, hoping against hope, longing to hear from the one person who might save her, needing that miracle right now more than anything in the world.
    No response. Seconds passed with agonizing slowness. Aurora choked back a sob. More seconds dragged by. Nothing.
    “Aurora?” Arty suddenly said. “I thought you were going home. Where are you?”
    “Oh, Arty,” Aurora cried with relief. “Arty, you’ll never believe me.” She blurted out her situation in short, terse sentences, stumbling over words but rushing on to get across to Arty just what had happened.
    “Okay,” Arty said when she was finished. “Okay, try to stay calm. I’m sorry about Denes, but don’t write him off; maybe he’ll turn up. Also, I have some news myself. I’m at Dr. Wheeler’s place. I just saw a guy—I’m pretty sure it was that Lokus character—break into his apartment. The bastard was actually going to shoot Wheeler, but I waved my old pistol at him and he spooked.”
    “Is Dr. Wheeler all right?” Aurora asked breathlessly.
    “Yeah, he’s okay.”
    “Thank you, Arty. You’ve at least prevented Lokus from murdering one of the people who may be able to stop this event.”
    “But I need to get to the airport and look after… you know. The kid.”
    “Yes,” she agreed, “you must do that.”
    “So you can’t go home now, is that it?”
    “No, not at the moment, but I’m sure Pan-Li and Lucinda will get the relocator back online soon,” she lied.
    “Right. Meanwhile, we both know where this showdown is going—assuming we all live long enough to get there—so I suggest you make your way to the Eli computer center while I head for the airport.”
    Aurora considered this. “Yes, yes, that makes sense. If I can’t go home, I should be wherever I can help, and that would be the place. I can use my arm unit to get a fix on the location. I’ll get there somehow, even if I have to walk across this, this…” She looked around her, searching for the appropriate words to describe the bewildering, frightening, ancient city in which she found herself, but nothing her mind could conjure up seemed to fit. She had no precedent, no frame of reference, for it. She finally gave up and said simply, “Be careful,