The Cube Read online

  Guardian of the Present: Book 1

  THE CUBE

  By Melissa Faye

  © 2018 Melissa Faye

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Thank you for reading!

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  About the Author

  Appendix A: June’s Rules for Time Travel

  Chapter 1

  I squealed and dropped my soldering iron, then immediately grabbed it before it could burn my university-issued desk.

  “Ah! Ah! Ah!”

  The desk was saved, but the middle finger of my left hand was not. I shook it in the air, silently cursing my clumsiness. I could already see a red welt forming where the soldering iron burned me. I sucked on the edge of my finger and surveyed the damage to my project.

  A thin trail of smoke curled upwards from the circuit board I was fiddling with. It was burned beyond repair. That’s what a split second’s fumbling with a hot soldering tool could do.

  My roommate, Honey, leaned her head in the door.

  “You ok, June?” Everything about her matched her name. She had wavy, dirty blonde hair like honey, and her personality was just as sweet. She gave me a mischievous grin when she saw the soldering iron.

  “Jewelry making,” I mumbled, still sucking my finger. Honey clucked her tongue.

  “You should be more careful when you’re making...jewelry.”

  Honey knew it was a lie, and I flushed red. We only met earlier in the week when we moved into our dorm at the City University of Technology in Manhattan. We lived in a four person suite with two doubles, one of which I shared with Honey, and a common area. On the first night of school, Honey asked me what I was doing at my desk. I was taking apart an old computer from the thrift shop to see what spare parts I could salvage for my latest invention. That’s when I decided to tell everyone I made jewelry out of machine parts. The only problem was that I didn’t have any actual jewelry as proof. Honey was immediately skeptical, but after a few days of poorly answered questions, she stopped asking. At least she didn’t mind the smell of burnt metal.

  This was the first time I lived somewhere other than my grandparents’ house since my parents died on my eighth birthday. Not that I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ home. For the last nine years, I spent most of my free time (and some of my not-free time) scrambling around the five boroughs of the city, fighting time travelers who threatened the natural order of things in my own Present. Time travelers loved to break Rule 2 of June’s Rules for Time Travel: Don’t change anything. Travelers could mess with the timeline, and the consequences were unpredictable. And I didn’t like that.

  Fortunately, very few of these travelers broke Rule 1: Don’t try to take over the world. Really, that hardly ever happened. Once when I was eight, I had to save the President. Scary for an eight year old, but I managed. No one noticed except for my next door neighbor, and he was mostly amused.

  Fighting off time travelers was my job. Not because someone told me to or because of some kind of birthright – I protected my present time because no one else was doing it. And I could. The problem was that it took a lot of time and made for a very strange adolescence.

  This year would be different. I had three suitemates, and I had to keep up appearances. There was Honey, my roommate, whose charming personality made her instantly popular. Then there were the two girls who lived on the other side of our shared common room. Lacey was the quietest out of the four of us and always wore her hair in two long black braids. She had a nervous energy like a mouse waiting for the cat’s return.

  Lacey’s roommate, Marlene, was the opposite. Her voice, her personality, her clothes, her makeup: they all screamed out to the world that Marlene was here and she didn’t care what people thought. When we met on that first day of college, she told me as much. She had a pixie cut dyed purple, and a line of bangles on her wrists that matched perfectly and clanged against each other when we shook hands.

  “I don’t like messing around. I don’t care what people think.”

  She said it exactly like that right when we met. I admired her candor.

  I was no stranger to people with colorful haircuts. I knew from meeting so many travelers that there would be a few decades in the future where that was the style. I saw plenty of travelers visiting my Present with a range of strange fashions. They stuck out like turtles at the derby. They were the easiest to catch and send home because they weren’t supposed to be here in the first place.

  “I think we have a class together.” Lacey popped her head into mine and Honey’s room next. “The Art of Engineering?” She delicately held out her printed schedule for me to see. “Monday morning. 8 am.”

  I pulled out my schedule to check.

  “Yup, I’m in that one.” I had a slight advantage when it came to engineering: I spent the last nine years taking apart the technology travelers left behind and using it to keep them out of my Present.

  “What happened?” Lacey wrinkled her nose at the smell of the burnt circuit board.

  “Dropped this!” I held up the soldering iron and my burnt finger.

  “Making jewelry again?”

  “Mhmm.”

  Lacey shrugged and went back to her room.

  This year, I would have friends. I would go to all my classes. No more running around chasing time travelers at all hours. I even designed a new calendar program for my tablet to track my time and eventually maximize my Present-guarding efficiency. No more nighttime bike rides across the city to send home travelers who were visiting my Present for their honeymoons with no thought as to how it impacted our lives. Or how it made me late for my math finals. From now on, I’d take on only the most serious cases. Then I’d go to class with Lacey. And maybe let Marlene dye my hair.

  My hair was a deep, dark brown. I could use a change.

  On Thursday evening, I sat in our common room with Lacey and Honey to watch television and gossip about the other students in our dorm. A commercial came on that we’d seen three times already. It was for a new reality television program called U Before I, and it looked to be exactly the right amount insane that we had to see it for ourselves. A dating show mixed with...philanthropy. We couldn’t tell for sure. There were girls and guys sitting in a hot tub and hidden cameras that caught secret affairs in the dead of night. Then the same competitors volunteered at an after school program for blind children. But Sunday night at 8 pm EST, we’d find out how this show could possibly exist. I even put it in my new calendar.

  Honey and Lacey were debating going to a frat party later that evening. I frowned when I felt a familiar buzz in my pocket. I had a special vibration for my friend and mentor, Ridge. Three quick staccato buzzes meant he had something important to tell me. Or his microwave wasn’t working again. One of the two.

  Bzz bzz bzz. I checked his text.

  Check this out – traveling?

  He included a link to a video clip from the evening news. It was a public interest story: a man won the lottery three times in one month, earning him over thirty million dollars. I let out an irritated sigh.

  “What’s wrong?” Hon
ey asked. “You coming tonight?”

  I looked back at my phone. The reporter was interviewing the lottery winner. He was tall with an enormous crop of pink, curly hair that flopped against his face as he gesticulated wildly.

  Travelers were usually taller than average. Ridge and I figured it wasn’t evolution as much as it was a natural consequence of nutritional developments that happen over hundreds of years. Travelers were also more fit than the rest of us. After all, we were taller and faster than our own ancestors. The ones who came to my Present were also notable for winning lotteries, making huge sums of money on the stock market in a short period of time, and using future technology in front of people who found it shocking.

  Such a pain.

  My face would heat up when travelers looked at me with a hint of condescension. I was short, around 5’2”, with a petite figure. One traveler called me “cute” when I was in high school and I slammed my foot down onto his before zapping him back to the future.

  “What? Frat party? Yeah, I’m in.” I paused the newsclip on a clear picture of the man’s face and took a screenshot. I could find him and send him home in an hour or two. I plotted it in my calendar. Send Pink Haired Lotto Winner Home. “I just have to run an errand first, ok?”

  I ran into the bedroom to collect my gear. My messenger bag held my most commonly used tools – my Some Gun, Ridge’s Map, my tablet. I was overly protective of the bag, and after asking about it a few times, my suitemates gave up. They had other things to worry about besides my strange attachment to an old brown bag.

  This old brown bag featured a compartment with a small zippered traveling case that held a variety of large programs on flash drives. Right now I needed the flash drive I supersized to hold the largest program I ever created. I invented it in middle school, and although I needed to update it constantly, it was one of my most useful tools.

  I snapped the attachment into my tablet and sent the screenshot over from my phone. I opened up the Face Finder program. It pulled up video feeds from all over the city so I could locate anyone using a picture of their face. The program could find a traveler anywhere in the city in a matter of seconds thanks to advanced technology from the 22nd century. The news anchor said this man was in the Bronx. Face Finder gave me his exact location near Yankee Stadium. A security camera from his corner showed that he entered his apartment two hours ago and hadn’t left since.

  “I’ll be right back!” I called to Honey and Lacey as I pulled my bike from the corner of our common room and left the dorm.

  Summer in New York City. The days were long and hot. Even now, after sunset, I felt the humidity drape across my skin. At least I didn’t need to get into the subway. The crowds and smells down there made the heat even less bearable. Riding my bike up through a park and across the river provided me with a little breeze, and at least I knew the roads with the least congestion.

  I grew up in Queens riding my bike all around our neighborhood – to school, to see friends, to the park or a store. Riding in Manhattan wasn’t too different. A little more dangerous. Drivers cared less about my personal safety and emotional wellbeing. There was more cursing, and more car doors foolishly opening right into the bike lane. You had to be a little more aware of what was going on around you, and bikes were stolen more frequently than they were in my grandparents’ neighborhood.

  A U-Lock should have been good enough to keep the bike safe, but people would steal any part of a bike that wasn’t locked down. A few years back, I invented a small addition to my U-Lock. A thin round sliver of silicon, barely noticeable, at the base of the lock. When I pressed my thumb to it, the upgrade kicked in. My upgraded U-Lock, though, added an extra element of danger for potential thieves. When it was turned on, if anyone besides me touched any part of the bike, they received a small but noticeable shock. A single press of my thumb to the sliver turned the upgrade off.

  I arrived in the Bronx in record time and locked my bike to a street sign. I found the traveler’s address and studied the list of names at the door. The news report said the man’s name was Joel Regalton. He must have been living in my Present for a while, because his name was actually written next to one of the buzzers. 3B. I pressed the button.

  “WHO IS IT?” a voice yelled through the intercom. Travelers always presumed our 21st century technology was inferior to their own. Technically, they were right, but I still didn’t appreciate the attitude. The intercom made his voice sound like it was coming through an old timey radio, but I could hear him just fine. I cleared my throat and leaned into the speaker.

  “Hi, my name is Marcia Stanton from New York News 1,” I said in my best impression of an enthusiastic young reporter. “We wanted to follow up with you about the story that aired tonight. Our viewers responded so positively already. They all want to learn more about you!”

  Bzzzzz. The door unlocked.

  As I walked up to the man’s apartment, I took my Some Gun out of my messenger bag and stored my tablet safely inside. The Some Gun had several options that would work here – Stun. Cage of Light. Back-U-Go. That’s why Ridge named it the Some Gun – it did some stuff. Then when I added more functions, it would do some more. I invented it when I was much younger, when Ridge could get away with giving my creations childish names. I found them funny back then. Years later, the name still stuck. I wanted to update it, but every time I tried a new name, Ridge refused to use it.

  I clicked over to the Stun option. Ridge always pestered me about safety. “It’s more important that you don’t die than it is for you to send the travelers back to their Present, June,” he’d say.

  I knocked on 3B and sang to the traveler with my Marcia Stanton voice.

  “Joel? It’s Marcia!”

  I heard footsteps approaching the door and ducked out of the way of the peephole. I aimed the Some Gun at the crack as Joel slowly opened the door.

  “What are you –“ He backed away from me into the center of his near-empty apartment. For a lottery winner with thirty million dollars, his place was tiny. It was a dingy studio with a twin sized bed in one corner and a used couch and old TV in the other. I guess he hasn’t used any of that money yet.

  “Rule 3-A of Time Travel,” I recited. “Don’t do anything for financial gain.” I inched towards the man carefully while keeping the Some Gun aimed directly at his chest.

  “Time – what?” he stuttered. “You aren’t Marcia. Who are you?” He looked me up and down, sizing me up. “What are you doing here?”

  There were a few types of travelers I saw all the time, and Joel Regalton, or whatever his name really was, fit one of the stereotypes perfectly. He had some debts to pay off, so he either applied for or stole a pass to use a time travel machine and came back to grab some easy money. A traveler could access winning lottery numbers from the past without much trouble. Then he could go back to the future with his earnings. The smart ones set up an account at a bank in their names. As long as they knew the bank still existed in whatever time he was from, he’d be set.

  Joel’s clothes were bright and outdated; he hadn’t planned well. That meant this was a last ditch effort to save himself from whoever he owed. He hadn’t done any research about my Present.

  “You don’t get to come to my Present and steal,” I continued. “Hacking the lottery is crime. And changing my Present like this violates Rules 2 and 3.”

  “What rules, kid?” Joel stood up straighter, as if he suddenly had more confidence now that he had a good look at his aggressor. “What do you care where I get my money? I’m not hurting anyone.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Lottery-winning travelers did put my Time Travel Rules in question. They were stealing money, and it was illegal, but it was a victimless crime. I made a mental note to discuss this with Ridge again. Maybe I could add this to my list of “Don’t Bother” crimes that would free up more time for college.

  I sighed. I knew what Ridge would say without even asking. If I let one guy get away with this, dozens more would follow.
If I let one guy make a change in our Present, there was no telling how it would impact the timeline.

  Joel looked around his apartment. As I suspected, he had no plan. No weapons. No fancy technology. Just the ear cuff he could twist to return to his own Present. He stepped forward.

  “Maybe I could give you some of the money?” His tone dripped with manipulation and flattery. I could see how he’d get away with borrowing more money than he could pay back. He was a charmer.

  “You know, you could buy yourself some nice things with that much money,” he continued. “Jewelry. Girls your age like jewelry, don’t they? Especially the pretty ones.” He looked at my necklace, the only jewelry I ever wore.

  “You’re only wearing that little locket. Maybe you need something nicer around your neck? Diamonds? Are diamonds in style?”

  I placed my finger on the trigger and squared my shoulders. The locket belonged to my mother; it was a gift to her from my father. I didn’t like this idiot talking about it.

  “Not interested in jewelry, huh? What about getting yourself a new phone. Hell, a new house! A mansion. With a pool. Why get yourself a diamond necklace when you can have your own mansion? Think big, that’s what I should have said.”

  I chuckled again, and in that moment, he lunged.

  Chapter 2

  Joel knocked the Some Gun out of my hands and I fell to the side. I stumbled but regained my balance. I put up my fists.

  I started taking martial arts classes many years ago, and I knew all the employees at my gym by name. Head trainer Tony’s wife just had a baby, Diana. Born a few weeks early but perfectly healthy. I helped plan the baby shower.

  I was seventeen and small, but I could fight.

  Joel swung at me, but I ducked out of his way and leapt to his right. I hit back, landing a blow on his chin before he pushed me aside. I edged towards the Some Gun. Joel was closer and eyed it briefly before swinging again.