Read Erasing Time for Free Online

but she didn’t turn away like she normally would have. “When you said you’d protect me, who did you mean from?”
    “Anyone you need protecting from.” He gave her a smile, and it felt like a prize. “Did you have someone in mind already?”
    “Yes. Everyone who totes around needles.”
    He ran his thumb across the back of her hand. “You’ll be fine now. No need for more needles.”
    She was a long way from fine but didn’t say so.
    “Are you hungry?” he asked. “There’s a foodmart here in the Scicenter.”
    Sheridan shook her head.
    He gave her hand a squeeze. “The food isn’t bad here. A lot is similar to what you ate.”
    “I don’t think I could eat anything right now.”
    Echo looked at her for a few more moments—still studying her, she supposed. “They say people in your time kept animals to kill so they could eat their flesh.”
    And apparently people in 2447 were strict vegetarians.
    He was not going to understand the lure of pepperoni or cheeseburgers, or her personal favorite, bacon. She didn’t feel like she had the energy to explain protein needs to him, but lies didn’t sit easily on her tongue either.
    She chose an answer that didn’t implicate her. “My family lived on an acre of land, and we had two horses.” She hadn’t thought to miss them until now, and it hit her with a stab of pain. Breeze and Bolt were gone too. “We also had a dog named Georgie. We never would have eaten any of them, though.” Georgie, however, had caused the death of a few stray sparrows, at least one mouse, and whatever it was they put in Alpo.
    “Tell me,” Echo said, “how many animals from your time period talked?”
    Sheridan’s gaze darted to his eyes to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “None. Why would you think animals talked?”
    “We have documentation—movies, pictures, stories—that show some animals spoke....” He let the sentence drift off, puzzled.
    “Echo,” she said, “have you ever tried to talk to an animal?”
    “Animals are extinct. The flesh eaters of your time killed them all.”
    She stopped walking, and his hand pulled away from hers. “No. That can’t be right.”
    “I would have liked to see them,” he said, stopping too. “We have programs with computer-generated animals in the Virtual Reality center, but it isn’t the same.”
    Sheridan shook her head—short, quick denials. “People loved animals. We kept them for pets. And we couldn’t have killed all of them. We tried to get rid of mice and rats, and it was impossible.”
    “They’re all gone,” Echo said. “Even the rats.”
    She folded her arms across her chest. “You’re wrong. Just like you’re wrong about animals talking. They didn’t.”
    His eyebrows drew together. “We have stories dating back thousands of years. Aesop’s fables. ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ Your time period had Bugs Bunny, Winnie-the-Pooh—”
    “Those are just children’s stories.”
    “Yes, but adults told them to their children.” He cocked his head. “Do you expect me to believe that for generations, across human culture, parents routinely lied to their kids about the communication capabilities of animals?”
    “Yes.”
    He raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
    “Oh, come on,” she said. “Who would hire three pigs to work construction jobs? They couldn’t hold hammers with their little cloven hooves.” She let out a frustrated sigh. It was unbelievable, really, that she was standing here discussing pig careers. “Don’t you have any nature shows from our time period? Maybe a National Geographic magazine or two?”
    Echo took hold of her hand and resumed guiding her down the hall as though it wasn’t worth arguing about. “Only the records that were transferred from silicon to holographic memory were preserved over the centuries. Unfortunately, most of your programming was destroyed during the information wars of the twenty-third century.”
    “Information