Raven Rise Read Free Page A

apartment. Everyone within three sectors was evacuated in minutes. The pipe was repaired and he returned home within the hour. Chelsea was an efficient place. If there were any real danger, Patrick felt certain he would know about it.
    But what was the foul smell?
    It was a Tuesday. Patrick had to be at work by eight. He was a teacher and the librarian at Chelsea High, five levels down from his apartment. He could make it from dead asleep to his classroom in fifteen minutes. Ten if he pushed. It was early. He didn’t need to push. He needed to find out what the putrid smell was. He sat up in bed, took a good whiff, and hacked out a cough. The smell tickled the back of his throat. He ran his hands through his long brown hair and scowled. The odd smell gave him a bad feeling that went beyond the throat tickle.
    Patrick was the Traveler from Third Earth. He had already experienced the shock of seeing his territory change once; he didn’t want to go through it again. Events in the past had been altered, creating a ripple of events through time that led to the creation of a race of humanlike automatons called “dados.” One day all was normal; the next day Patrick woke to find these robots were suddenly part of the normal fabric of Third Earth life. They functioned as efficient worker bees who served the people of the territory. The dados may have been handy, but they were wrong. It wasn’t the way things were meant to be. Bobby Pendragon and his acolyte Courtney Chetwynde went back in time to First Earth to try and prevent the events that would lead to their creation. Had they succeeded? Did this odd smell have something to do with the past having been changed yet again? Was this foul odor a good sign? It sure didn’t smell like it.
    â€œHello?” Patrick called out nervously.
    He lived alone, but on the “new” Third Earth, he had a dado servant who made him breakfast and washed his clothes. Patrick thought it was creepy and cool at the same time. As much as the dados shouldn’t have existed, he had to admit that it was pretty nice to have a machine handle the more mundane chores around the apartment.
    There was no answer. Were the dados no more?
    Patrick decided to call his school to see if anybody knew what the strange smell was all about. He reached to his bedside table for his telemonitor, but his hand hung in the air. The device wasn’t there. Patrick quickly looked to the floor. Had he knocked it over in his sleep? No. It was just…gone. The hairs went up on the back of his neck. His pulse quickened. Something was definitely wrong.
    It was then that he noticed a faint sound. It wasn’t distinct or specific enough for him to guess what it could be. It was more like a distant rumble of white noise. Harmless, except for the fact that the sound in Chelsea was totally controlled. Nothing as intrusive or annoying as white noise existed in his home, or anywhere else on Third Earth for that matter. The only place he’d heard anything remotely like it was on a recorded bit of history that was stored in the massive computer data files of 5014.
    Patrick forced himself to stand up. He shuffled slowly toward his bedroom door, fearing what he might find on the other side. He reached for the silver-handled doorknob, grasped it tightly, took a breath, and pulled the door open to see…
    It wasn’t his apartment. At least it wasn’t the apartment he used to have. There was nothing unusual or sinister about the place, other than the fact that it wasn’t his. The furniture was different. The paintings on the walls were different. The appliances in the kitchen were different. For a moment he wondered if he had accidentally entered the wrong apartment the night before, but quickly dismissed that as being idiotic. There was less chance of that happening than all of history being transformed by Pendragon and the other Travelers. That’s how strange the reality of his life