Excerpt from Voyageurs

Here's an excerpt from Voyageurs, the next book I will put through the query process:

(Wanda and Harold met me just outside the soup kitchen, on the cracked sidewalk, negative two years from my natural time -- 

"What now? I groused. "I was just about to eat lunch at the Mission."

"Don't be a bitch," Harold said loftily, as Wanda looked down her nose at me as if I'd crawled out from under a rock. "We've got an experiment we need you to do."

"Why me? I'm a Junior Birdman. You're the King." I knew, deep down, that I would do whatever Harold dared me to.

"You're faster than I am. I need someone fast to do this. I bet you can't do it, though." Harold examined his hands, probably for invisible dirt specks, as I'd never seen him with his hands dirty. 

"You bet I can't do what?" I demanded.

"Change the outcome of that game over there." Wanda interjected in her haughty voice. 

"But that won't work!" I groused. "The rock principle will keep it from changing. You can't change time."

"I'm going with you," Harold reassured me. "We're jumping a minute into the past to that shell game over there and you're going to tip over the right cup so the mooch sees he's getting conned."

I protested. "By 'we', you mean me. How would I know where the ball landed?"

"You know," Harold gritted his teeth. "You always know. I've seen you run that game."

"You can't change time. I try to change time and the cup won't tip over. It always works that way."  I'd tried it -- I could win the game with data I'd gleaned from the future, but I couldn't change the outcome of the game itself.

"But what if I change one or two other things at the same time?" Harold smiled, and I felt his charm dissolve my reluctance. "How would the timeline know which event to change? With one or two other changes at once, I hope to confuse things so that you can tip the right cup and ruin the game."

"But what about crossing ourselves?" I demanded. "I only get what -- four minutes before crossing myself kills me?"

"You'll have to do it quickly, I guess," Harold shrugged. "Unless you don't think you can -- "

"Alright. I'll do it." I always knew I would.

We jumped to three minutes before the start of the round, and Wanda came with us as witness. She and Harold stepped back while I walked up to the game, which involved a mooch and a grifter as we called victims and fraudsters on the street. 

I needed to reach in and tip the cup with the ball under it at the exact moment that the mooch would guess the whereabouts of the ball -- and jump before the grifter caught my wrist and took me behind the nearest building to beat me to a pulp. I wondered why Harold would subject me to that risk, or the risk of crossing myself and being crushed. But he had faith in me ...

One exhilarating moment later, I tipped the cup, revealing the ball to be in a different cup than it appeared to the mooch, and I jumped back to my present time without dying. I bent over, gasping and laughing.

"You're the best," Harold clapped me on the shoulder. "I knew you could do it. I think we should make a game of this. Call it -- Voyageur. Like Traveller, but provocative."

Then we blinked out of sight before the irate con artist reached us.)