Page 1 of Hot Zone

One

Her entire life had come down to this moment. Tessa stepped into the time-travel chamber and closed the booth’s curved door. Deep silence surrounded her. The lab staff stood outside, watching her through the clear quartz panels, holding their collective breath as she settled into the comfortable recliner chair.

Outside the booth, Dr. Athena Carswell did the same. Tessa watched the professor sink deep into her chair and don the crownlike brain-wave amplifier that would allow her to fling Tessa back in time more than two thousand years.

Calm suffused Tessa. Profound relief. Finally, an end to it all. A goodbye to this life one way or another—either by succeeding and leaping into a far-removed past or by failure of the jump and death. But either way, Tessa Marconi, weird kid turned psychic adult, was done with the mortal coil of the twenty-first century.

The hair on her arms stood up a moment before her skin began to tingle. The sensation built from mildly uncomfortable to an annoying itch to tongues of agony. It might have made a lesser person scream, but she embraced the pain.

She became aware of a subliminal hum—Athena Carswell’s breathtaking brainpower weaving a psychic bubble around her. The power swirled dizzyingly, and Tessa felt faintly nauseous. Don’t fight it. Ride the wave. Previous time travelers had reported becoming ill, and it was possible that a few had even died because they’d failed to properly surf the time currents.

Athena herself looked to be an oasis of calm, as relaxed as if she were taking a nap. The only incongruity to the picture was the odd-looking headband she wore. Tessa didn’t know the details, but the contraption’s twin quartz crystals transformed the professor’s thoughts into this crackling pocket of energy.

The lab seemed to waver and shimmer, and Tessa belatedly squeezed her eyes shut tightly. It was important that her brain receive no extraneous input that could anchor her too firmly in this time and place.

Any second now, the bubble would be complete and she would land in the past—twenty-five hundred years ago on a mission so important it might very well help determine the future of mankind. A nimbus of light built around her, bright enough that she had to restrain an impulse to lift her hand to shield her closed eyes. Her body started to feel lighter.

Ready or not, here goes nothing.

Abruptly, a new sound intruded upon Tessa’s unnatural detachment—an earsplitting jangle of noise that startled her eyes wide open. Athena lurched in her armchair, jolted out of her trance. Alarm exploded across the scientist’s features.

Not good.

The bubble around Tessa abruptly radiated a heat so unbearable she feared she might burst into flame. Frantically, she squeezed her eyes shut again.

Someone screamed, “Noooo!”

And then everything exploded around her.

Alexandra Patton, psychic medium and soon-to-be time traveler herself, raced across the lab toward Athena, shouting over the earsplitting alarm klaxon. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Fire alarm!” one of the lab techs shouted back.

Alex frowned. “A fire? Here in the lab?”

The tech shook his head. “The computers are fine.”

Alex lunged forward to help Professor Carswell struggle weakly to her feet. She steadied the scientist and they both rushed over to the complex panel of monitoring equipment, which was flickering ominously.

“Did you see her go?” the professor bit out.

Alex glanced at the empty transit platform. “No. I was distracted by the alarm. Why? Was something wrong with the jump?”

“I don’t know. There was a disturbance in the time flow—”

The lab’s door burst open. Alex whirled and snapped at the guard stumbling into the room, “I thought there were supposed to be no intrusions in this lab under any circum—”

A cloud of black smoke billowed in, carrying with it a fireman in full gear. He shouted through his Plexiglas face mask, “Clear the building, folks. Immediately.”

“How close is the fire?” Alex asked sharply.

The man beckoned urgently with a gloved hand. “Let’s go! One of you grab the back of my coat and the rest of you hang on to each other. The smoke’s too thick to see through. Hold your breath and stay low. It’s not far to the emergency exit.”

Alex grabbed on to Athena’s lab coat while the professor snatched at something on the way past her armchair, tucking it inside her clothes.

They stumbled out into a darkness so thick and oppressive Alex literally couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. It smelled awful, a noxious mix of burning wires and sulfuric stink. The smoke made her eyes water furiously, and long before they reached the exit, she was coughing violently. Thank God the guy had told them to hang on to each other. She clutched Professor Carswell’s jacket grimly and staggered along behind her boss.

They burst outside, gasping for air. Alex fell to her knees, her eyes watering copiously while she coughed up a lungful of smoke. A half-dozen blurry black shadows sprinted past, heading into the building. Must be more firemen, or maybe they were spirits of the dead. God, she couldn’t wait to get back to the peace of the tall-grass prairie, her refuge.

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