See part one for explanation and disclaimers. Hallmark & James Gurney still own the characters and I’m still not profiting from this. Hope you’re enjoying this. Still recommended for teens and up for action/violence and mild language.

8

“Please, Mom…”

This time, Karl didn’t resist the pull of the blue visions. It was too important. When the images formed within his mind, he concentrated on them whole-heartedly.

Karl had been looking forward to this day since he was old enough to understand that his dad’s job involved a lot of travel to all kinds of places the child had only heard of in Social Studies. Dad always brought him gifts when he returned from these trips, and had envelopes full of pictures---everything from the Eiffel Tower to the Great Wall of China, with Dad posing, sometimes alone and sometimes with people in suits. Some of the pictures showed Dad standing in front of his airplane. Karl knew that traveling to far off places and business suits were part of the lives of rich and important people. If his father flew off to such places and hung around such people, his work must have been important as well. Plus, his father flew his own airplane, just like fighter pilots in the movies.

He had grown up in hero-worship of his father, Frank.

Karl was eight-years-old the summer that his father finally thought he was old enough to come along on one of these business trips. With much begging and puppy dog eyes, the boy had finally got his mom to agree.

“Italy is a long ways away, Karl, I don’t know…”

“But, I’ll be with Dad.”

Mom turned from the piles of paper on her desk just long enough to give him a look that said clearly that her ex-husband’s presence didn’t do one thing to reassure her. “Karl, it’s three weeks. That’s a big piece of your summer. You won’t be able to play softball.”

“I’ll go out for the team next year. Please, Mom?” Why wasn’t ‘please’ enough? Didn’t she see how important this was to him? Karl only saw his father a couple of times a month as it was. Spending three entire weeks with Dad…well, he hadn’t done that since his parents divorced, and even then, they’d had to include Karl’s stupid half-brother in most of their activities.

Mom saw Karl’s pout and mimicked it. “I’ll miss you too much.”

Karl groaned, as always, at the mushy stuff. Mom was always mushy about stuff like this. “It’s only three weeks. I’ll call every day. I’ll send postcards. I promise. Please, Mom?”

She dropped the words Karl didn’t want to hear then: “Is your brother going?”

The boy made a face. “Why does he have to go?” It was bad enough Dad had to divide his free time between Karl and his half-brother since David had moved with his mom to Utah. Karl didn’t want his half-brother sticking his nose into Karl’s time with Dad. Dad had promised to show Karl the Tower of Pisa and teach him how to fly the plane---this was his time with Dad.

He knew from Mom’s reaction that he’d said exactly the wrong thing, but he didn’t know why. Karl stared back at her, unapologetic. Then he tried again, this time with a phrase his teachers used when they wanted him to do something boring: “It’s a good opportunity to learn.”

Mom fought hard not to laugh at that. “Pretty good psychology, there, kiddo.”

Hope! “Does that mean I can go?” Karl asked.

“I’ll think about it.”

Which always meant ‘yes’. “Thanks, Mom!” Karl bear-hugged her.

Dad was there, larger than life, checking the engines of the airplane, when Karl’s mom drove her son to the small airport. Frank Scott greeted his younger son with a wide grin, but didn’t wave since he had one hand on an engine and the other was grasping a wrench. Someday, Karl vowed, he was going to know how to fly just like his dad and how to fix airplanes just like him. He was going to have an important job like his dad, too.

“Dad!” Karl was out of the car before it had come to a full stop, oblivious to Mom yelling at him for his recklessness, and dashed across the hanger.

Dad set down the wrench and wiped his hands on a towel---which didn’t help much, since the rag was already sodden with engine grease. He finally used a clean patch on his coveralls to mop the oil off his hands before greeting Karl with a hug. “There’s my boy! How ya doing, kid?” Dad frowned at Karl’s long blonde locks. “You need a haircut.”

“Da-ad…” Karl rolled his eyes. “Short hair is not in style.” If he showed up at school this fall with hair that wasn’t at least down to his ears, he’d get beat up just like the mouth-breathers and chess club geeks.

His father wasn’t impressed. “We’ll talk about it.”

“I’m not cutting my hair,” Karl insisted.

Dad’s chuckle signaled Karl’s temporary victory in the argument. “How’s your mom?” He waved in the direction of the car. Mom waved back before driving away.

“She kept hugging me all day yesterday.” Which was why Karl had asked her to just drop him at the gate instead of walking him to the airplane. The last thing he wanted was Mom hugging and kissing him in front of the guys in the hangar. It wasn’t cool at all. “I’m supposed to call her every day. Why do girls get so---“

“Emotional?” Dad supplied the word. He took Karl’s bag and stowed it in the plane. “Someday, you’ll appreciate them, son. So, ready for your first flying lesson?”

Ready? Karl had hardly slept during the last week, he was so looking forward to it. “Ready!”

Frank gave him a serious frown. “You didn’t tell your mother about the flying lessons, right?”

“Dad, I’m eight years old, but I’m not stupid.”

Dad tousled his hair. “Good man.”

Friends? He and Dad were friends? That couldn’t be. Karl’s conscious mind couldn’t wrap itself around that notion. Dad whom Karl had nothing in common with? Dad whom Karl could never make proud of him? No way. Jack was the one who was Dad’s co-pilot and best friend. They were the team. Karl had been the son who hated sports and sat in the back of the plane and in the hotel rooms reading books.

Hadn’t he?

Karl’s good spirits lasted the first two hours of the flight, during which time Dad let him hold the controls, gave instructions---greatly simplified---on the various instruments and use of the radio, all the while scaring the bejeezus out of the kid with stories of some of the more harrowing flight experiences he’d survived. “…and so there I was, gliding towards Sac Exec on fumes with a dead stick, in the fog mind you. Not exactly your ideal landing conditions.”

“Did you belly land?” Karl was engrossed, wide-eyed, in the story.

“Not that time, but there was a training flight in Miami-Dade when I was not much older than you---they could see the sparks flying a mile from the airport, I’m told…” Dad’s tale was interrupted by the flight controller’s voice on the radio. Since Dad was wearing the headphones, Karl could hear only his side of the conversation and the garbled words “…cleared for landing on runway B…”

Cleared for landing? Karl was confused. They hadn’t been flying long enough to be in Italy. He hadn’t even seen the ocean yet. “We’re landing?”

“Got to pick up your brother before we catch our flight in L.A. Let me take the controls now.” His attention focused on the approaching airfield, Dad missed the scowl darkening his younger son’s face.

“Why is he going with us?” Karl pouted, arms folded across his small chest.

“Because we’re a family, Karl. You’re both my sons and I love both of you and I want us to do things together. Understand?”

“Yeah,” Karl didn’t, but there wasn’t a thing he could do now except sulk until they touched down.

Once the plane rolled to a stop and powered down, Dad finally turned to Karl. “You going to come say hello?”

No way. Karl may have to put up with his brother horning in on his time with Dad, but he wasn’t about to budge from the co-pilot’s seat. David was going to sit in the back…in fact, Karl decided that his brother could sit in the back on every flight for the rest of their lives if he were going to insist on coming along. Karl leaned back in his seat, determined not to move. “I can say hi in here.”

“Let me rephrase the question: Get your butt out of the plane and come say hello to your brother…now,” Dad ordered.

He obeyed reluctantly, trudging a few feet behind Frank as his father crossed the field toward a small hangar. Karl almost didn’t recognize his brother. He hadn’t seen David since---well, since the beginning of the previous school year. His brother was in the hangar, using his suitcase for a chair since all the available benches were covered with plane parts, reading a book and didn’t look up or stand until dad called, “David!” His brother had grown at least a foot taller and his curly hair had been buzzed short, Karl noted with a satisfied smirk.

“David…damn, you’re gonna be taller than me before long,” Dad said in greeting. “How are you? Where’s your mom? And Kevin?” Dad made a face at the name. Karl wondered who ‘Kevin’ was and why Dad didn’t seem to like him.

“Fine, sir. They’re home, sir,” David answered glumly, unsmiling and seeming downright apprehensive. It was obvious he didn’t share Karl’s eagerness for this family trip. Big surprise there, David never wanted to do anything Karl and Dad liked to do. He’d be driving Dad nuts before they even got to L.A., Karl knew. Dad, naturally, had to initiate the hug.

“’Sir’? What’s with ‘sir’? I’m not your drill sergeant, I’m ‘Dad’ remember?” Dad brushed a finger over the boy’s close-shaved temple. “Or did you join the Army since the last time I saw you?”

David pulled back a bit at the contact. “No, Sir.”

Dad sighed. “Okay, we’ll work on the ‘sir’ thing. Karl, say hi to your brother.”

Karl deadpanned, “Hi to your brother.”

David rolled his eyes. “Oh yeah, this is gonna be a fun trip.” He picked up his suitcase and blew right past Karl.

“Nice hair, geek,” Karl fired.

“Shut up, troll,” his brother fired back.

“Boys,” Dad warned. He took David’s bag, frowning at the weight. “What’s in here? You mom pack an entire pharmacy in here?”

“Books,” David answered.

Karl snorted, “Figures.”

“You don’t need books for vacation,” Dad said.

“It’s my summer reading list.”

“Geek,” Karl repeated.

“You’re going to have too much fun to read.” David glanced sidelong at Dad, not at all happy to be ganged up on by the duo. Dad tried again, “You like to fly?”

Sensing his co-pilot’s chair was in jeopardy, Karl acted: He ran for the plane and jumped into the shotgun seat, then gave David a triumphant grin that dared him to protest.

“No,” David said.

Dad was astounded. “How do you not like to fly? What’s the matter, you scared of planes?” he picked.

David’s ears were going red. “I don’t like heights.”

“Since when?”

“Since always.” David’s tone said ‘you would know that if you paid attention’.

Dad patted his shoulder. “You’ll like this, trust me. I’ll make a pilot out of you yet.” He waved the boy towards the rear seat of the plane and secured David’s suitcase.

“Don’t count on it,” Karl heard his brother mumble.

“Tell him about Miami-Dade,” Karl suggested.

It was David Barrett all right, no room for doubt this time. In the visions, his hair was shorter---sometimes buzzed short, sometimes a bit longer and curly---and the growth of beard he had now was absent. His eyes were not brown in the visions; they were exactly the same color and shape as Frank’s. Still, Karl recognized him at once. In some of the visions, David was wearing the bronze-orange skybax rider’s uniform and gear instead of the black coat he favored now.

And there was no Jack. Karl’s mind fixated on that point.

There was no Jack in that lifetime…David was his brother, no room for doubt about that either...and they didn’t have a kid brother. Frank had stopped having children when just being a part-time parent to Karl and David had taken everything he had mentally and physically and financially.

Where was Jack? Karl had to know, tried to will the Tohma Faiere to answer that question. What happened? How did reality get so screwed over?

New visions formed even as the image of the airport and plane faded…

Distantly, from somewhere beyond the blue-hued images, Karl heard Noree’s voice: “Put him on the cot…we need to break the contact with the faith stone.”

Not yet, not yet, not yet, Karl mentally begged. He still hadn’t figured out what happened to break the timeline…

*

This time, Marion was prepared. As soon as the light of the Tohma Faiere faded and Karl sagged, unconscious, she and Noree were there to catch him. Together, the human and the saurian maneuvered him back onto the small cot. Marion pulled the faith stone from his hand to break the trance and shook him: “Karl?”

No response. She hadn’t expected one, but she tried a few more times to wake him before giving up. His eyelids still fluttered and his hand twitched; apparently whatever the Tohma Faiere was showing him hadn’t fully played out even though he was no longer in contact with the stone. She brushed the bangs from his eyes and left him to rest, trying not to despair and praying Karl got the answers they needed from this attempt. She didn’t want to test the limits of how much exposure to the faith stone he or David could take.

There was something that needed to be done, and Marion could not put it off any longer. “Noree, would you ask Romana to bring Jack to the Sanctuary? Tell her to go as quickly as she can. I believe he’s at the tavern right now.”

The Keeper bowed, solemn. “Of course.” She slipped from the private chamber.

Marion draped a blanket over Karl, then settled herself into a chair. The knowledge that she might have just summoned Jack to his own erasure from existence was more than a little troubling. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but Karl’s words replayed in her memory: Karl had seen David as his brother. We didn’t have a brother named Jack.

David was---is---Karl’s brother. Or perhaps his half-brother? They were both Frank’s sons? Was that even remotely possible? Maybe. Marion looked to her own intuition, as she always did when she needed truth. Her heart had never mislead her.

Marion had sensed something---familiar---the first time she’d seen David on that beach, hadn’t she? And David? He’d protected Marion from Gabriel Dane when he’d had no reason to do so that day. If she had been part of Karl’s life in the other timeline, and Karl had said she was, then David must have been her friend as well. David had the intuition---the empathy---required to form a connection to that wild pterosaur. 'I heard it in my head. It said its name was Freefall,' David had told his friend Al. He’d gone so far as to defy the Outsider hunters by protecting the pterosaur. It was the same empathy that Marion used to communicate with the saurians. Perhaps it had been that intuition that allowed both of them to sense a truth that day---a truth the Tohma Faiere had nearly erased.

That intuition must have lead David back to his family, his real family, despite the alteration of the timeline. He’d gone out of his way to frequent the Scott Tavern even when running afoul of Karl was always a risk. And Frank? Yes, surely he must have been father to David as well as Karl. He’d been protecting David against Karl’s wishes in this timeline all these months…even telling Karl about the rendezvous in Zuru had been an action meant to prevent David from killing himself trying to cross the Razor Reef in that submarine. It might have been the actions of one friend looking out for another…or those of a father looking out for a son, a son from a lifetime neither remembered.

The Tohma Faiere had glowed for both David and Karl because they had both been present when it was used. Marion had assumed they’d both been present because they’d been fighting for the stone, that David had stolen it in the real timeline and Karl had stopped him. She’d been wrong. They had both been present because they were together because they were family.

Yes, that seemed right somehow.

Marion hoped that intuition would help David accept the truth of what had happened. Karl was having a hard enough time dealing with the truth, and Marion was only beginning to see it, and they had the benefit of actual faith in the Tohma Faiere’s powers to help them believe what had happened. She had a feeling David was going to be harder to convince, being more distrustful of Dinotopians and their beliefs.

Then there was Jack. What were they going to do about Jack? What if Jack hadn’t existed in the other timeline? Marion could make difficult decisions; she would have to if she was to be matriarch, but consigning the boy to oblivion to correct the timeline? She didn’t know if she could do that.

She closed her eyes, weariness settling in as the unending stream of questions weighed on her mind.

“Matriarch!”

At the weak cry, and a thump like the sound of a body falling, Marion was on her feet immediately. She ran out of the room, following the hallway in the direction from which the call had come. Immediately, the sweet scent of burning roots and herbs filled her nostrils. She remembered that smell: it was the same odor she had smelled when she’d found Noree and the saurian guards unconscious the day…

…the day David Barrett stole the sunstone!

Marion knew what she’d find before she reached the room where they’d left David. His two saurian guards and Noree were sprawled across the floor, a bundle of roots still smouldering near them. She didn’t break her stride even long enough to confirm that they were unconscious or that David had escaped. She didn’t need to: One guard was snoring loudly, and the door to the chamber hung wide open, revealing that the room was now empty.

There was no point in calling for help. Romana had gone to get Jack and Karl wouldn’t recover from the effects of the Tohma Faiere for several minutes at least, more likely for an hour. Anyone else in the Sanctuary would be saurian, and temporarily paralyzed by the smoke bomb by now. David was probably already up the stairs. By the time anyone came to help Marion, he’d be on his way to the coast.

Marion ran for the stairs. She ran for all she was worth.

When she reached the covered stairway, there was no sign of him. With the roar of the waterfall on the other side of the enclosure, there was no chance she would hear his footsteps on the staircase---or that he could hear her shouts. Nevertheless, she yelled, “David!” and barreled up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

She was halfway to the top of the long stairway when something made her stop. She hesitated, undecided. She looked up at the archway that led to the streets of Waterfall City. Then she glanced down, towards the bottom of the stairs and the exit that went to the river below the falls.

Then Marion turned and ran back down the staircase, out the door, and into the forest.

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