"Car!"
The game dissolved off the street and onto the sidewalk. A red Cadillac came slowly across the chalked baseball diamond and continued down the block, then everyone ran back and took up there positions.
"Play ball!" Henry yelled imperiously. He never played, but he loved being the ump. At just under five feet tall and 130 pounds he looked the part.
The bases were loaded and Miranda was up. She was the star player on a team of boys, facing another team of boys. Her brother Jim was the pitcher. He glared off the mound chewing two fingers of gum like a wad of tobacco.
Nick on second base started jumping up and down. "Come on Meerkat! Bring us home! Meerkat, Meerkat, Meerkat!" the other boys took up the chorus as Miranda stepped up to the "bag" drawn in blue chalk on the asphalt.
Miranda smiled gamely and swung her bat up like the Babe, indicating the far right field and the Schoner's house, with it's unmolested windowpanes.
Jim spat. He peered toward home plate and seemed to reject several silently communicated suggestions. Mitch, the catcher, was 8 and the youngest player on the field. He didn't know any hand signals, but enjoyed pretending, so he just flailed the fingers of his ungloved hand at random until Jim gave a nod.
Jim wound up his throwing arm, looked pointlessly, but with panache, right and left, even though stealing was not allowed, and rocketed the ball.
Things went into slow motion, as they always did when Miranda batted. She watched the ball twist in midair. She prepared to swing at it, but it began to curve, up, to the right. Miranda saw the stitches as they came up to her face, filling the vision of her left eye with...pixels...
The blackness came and a diminishing echo escorted her to unconciousness. "Meerkat, meerkat, meer...".
"She's coming up."
Hector turned away from the EKG and down at Miranda's still young face. A screaming ache tore through his chest, but he supressed his reaction and forced the warm smile he wore every time a displacement ended.
Miranda's tired eyes opened and she took stock of the room. Her gaze met Hector's, and she returned his smile. For her, as ever, it had been only a moment. They embraced.
"How long?" Miranda whispered.
"Almost a year." Hector whispered back. He could feel hot tears intermingle where their cheeks touched.
Miranda ran her hands with concern over Hector's gaunt face. "Are you alright?"
Hector nodded and lied. "Just under the weather. Did you find it?"
Miranda looked away. "I'm sorry Hector. I get lost in there."
Hector let the air out of his pained lungs. He had so hoped she would have it this time. Not just for the world, humanity, but for himself. He dared not jeopardize the mission, but he so longed not to be alone.
"You should take a longer break this time."
"There's no time for a break darling - the world can't wait. Another year. That puts us at, what?"
"Sixteen." The word tasted of bile in Hector's mouth.
Another tear streamed down her face as she repeated the astonishing figure. "Sixteen years. I'm sorry Hector."
No children. No family. No life beyond the mission. They'd given it all up to find the password, lost in time, behind which the solution to the world's dillemma waited. Only one try left of the original 3. Any false move, and auto-deletion, doom.
There was no point rehashing the why of it - that had been Miranda's father's way. That he would place one final puzzle between damnation and salvation was no surprise to those who knew him. A genius, a savior - an asshole.
Miranda's subconcious journey was a final, absurb hail mary, staged by a world with nothing left to lose. Displacement returned her to an internal past in search of an answer that might not even exist, and in doing so she gave up her own life, piece by piece.
Hector coughed. He tried to stop the slide into wet hacking, but could not. Before long he was bent over at the waist, his hospital glove covered in a thin film of bloody sputum.
Sitting up in the bed, Miranda reached for him. She eyed the other nurses suspiciously as she rubbed Hector's back until the fit ended. "Hector?"
Face still to the ground, Hector cursed his frailty. Slowly, he straightened up and motioned the others out of the room. In the ensuing silence, he wondered ruefully whether his cough might have ended the entire human race.
"Miranda..." Hector began, but could not bring himself to say more.
Miranda remained outwardly calm but her mind was in motion. She knew. "How long?"
Each syllable seared, the glowing end of life's cigarette snuffed out on his heart. "Six months, at most."
They both stopped then and in their mutual silence each had an answer. No displacement had taken less than six months. The average was eight, but the last five had been much longer.
They embraced once again as an air of finality settled around them both.
"Oh Hector."
"Oh shit!"
Jim ran headlong toward home base. "My dad's gonna kill me! Miranda?!"
The voice came back to her through a haze of darkness. Miranda opened her eyes and was no longer on the hospital gurney, looking up at Hector's thin face after their week together. Suddenly there was natural sun reflecting off young leaves, and a boy's face she could hardly recognize as her brother Jim.
"Oh thank Christ, Miranda are you alright?" Jim helped her up by the shoulders as the other boys gathered around wearing worried expressions. Mitch had run away.
Miranda could hardly feel the residual effects of the impact. She was imbued with the same overriding sense of purpose she always had at the start of a new displacement, and she was determined to act quickly.
"Where's dad?"
Photo by Silver Spoon (Own work) [CC0 - Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons