Erasing Time Read Online Free

men wouldn’t let her go back for that reason. Perhaps she already knew too much.
    Echo still had hold of her hand. He slowed his pace and let Jeth and Taylor pull farther ahead. “While a med helps your sister,” he said in a hushed tone, “one of the Strainer scientists will speak to you. If you can, don’t let him know that you’re twins.”
    With Taylor’s differing hair, eye color, and makeup, strangers didn’t usually pick up on the fact that they were identical twins. Echo had.
    “Why?” Sheridan asked.
    “Let him believe you’re two separate people.”
    “We are two separate people.”
    “You have the same DNA,” Echo said patiently. “To the scientists, that makes you one person. If they think the Time Strainer malfunctioned so badly it brought two different people, maybe they’ll hesitate before using it again.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, but the intensity in his eyes emphasized his words. “You need to understand—the Time Strainer is dangerous.”
    “Oh, I understand,” she said. “I was the one who was just sucked into a gigantic electric crevice. If you know it’s dangerous, why are you helping the scientists with it?”
    “I’m not helping them,” he said. “I’m helping you understand what they say.”
    Sheridan glanced at Taylor, worried that if she didn’t keep her sister in sight, she might disappear altogether. “What language do the scientists speak?”
    “English.”
    Sheridan considered this. “I’m pretty sure I know English, and they weren’t speaking it.”
    Echo shrugged shoulders broad enough that her high school football team would have loved him. “Language evolves. If someone from Shakespeare’s time had visited your day, would he have understood you?”
    She supposed not but didn’t answer his question. “How come I can understand you?”
    “My father and I are wordsmiths—historians who’ve studied the progression of the English language. I specialize in you.”
    Her gaze shot to his face, trying to make sense of that. “You … you what?”
    “I mean, your age,” he corrected. “I specialize in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
    “Oh,” she said, relieved. “I was about to be seriously creeped out that there were historians specializing in me.”
    He gave her a sheepish grin. “There might be some. I can only speak for myself. So far, I’ve never specialized in Sheridan Bradford.”
    Jeth stopped in front of a white door, waiting for Echo and Sheridan to catch up. Taylor had opened her eyes and was looking around in confusion.
    “You’re all right,” Sheridan told her. “Well, sort of.”
    When Echo reached the door, he pushed a button on the wall, and the door slid open to reveal a large room. A bed was set up in the far corner. Instead of a headboard, a large computer monitor perched above the pillow. A cart sat next to the bed, full of things that were probably medical equipment. Two men were in the room. One stood by the cart; the other sat at a shiny black table near the door. Chairs connected to the table with large black bars, so they stood suspended above the ground without legs. She’d seen chairs like that at fast food restaurants.
    McDonald’s must have set the standard for interior decorating in the future.
    Well, that explained everybody’s hair anyway.
    Echo led Sheridan to the table. She sat down while Jeth helped Taylor into an adjoining chair.
    The man who’d been at the cart came toward them, his gaze on Taylor. “Wet es har kon de-ce-own?”
    Wet es —“What is.” She tried to follow the rest of their conversation but caught only a word here and there.
    After a few moments of talk, the med went back to the cart, opened a drawer, and took out a syringe with a long needle.
    Perhaps these people took their mistakes seriously. Sheridan thought of the dog pound and how the workers put unwanted animals to sleep. Is that what she and Taylor had become, unwanted animals?
    She must have gasped, because