We'll Meet Again (Original Book)

|8| Villains

Jocasta paced around the lab and Tedric approached Nathalie who was searching maniacally through every single note that she had made about him in the past months. There was only one explanation – the person who had managed to escape Tedric's sight was someone like him. But in all their records, nothing suggested that somebody like that existed. Only one Garner per generation could be born with the ability to time and space travel and that was usually when the previous gifted Garner was dead. There was no way there was another out there.

"I don't have time for this," Jocasta stopped pacing around and turned at her cousin who was standing by her lab counter. Tedric was standing behind her, peeking at the contents of her numerous notebooks and stray papers. "If you find something, let me know."

"I don't think I have the answers, Jo," Nathalie's voice shook. Failing to provide answers on a subject that she had already wasted too much time and resources researching, was a testament on how unfit she was to be calling herself a Burgess. Any other Burgess would have had the answers to everything about Tedric's ability by now.

Nathalie had barely figured out how it worked.

"If you don't have any answers, then what the hell have you been doing all these months?!" Jocasta scoffed. "It's not rocket science!"

"No," Nathalie slammed closed one of her notebooks and she glared up at her cousin "it's Biological Quantum Entanglement. Give me a damn break."

"You're a Burgess. Either try harder or if you can't handle it, assign Mr Garner's project to someone who can," Jocasta stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind.

Jocasta was right. Nathalie could not handle this. Physics and Mathematics weren't her expertise especially Quantum Physics. Genetics were her expertise. She could research anything biological, but she had let that go and she was here now, stuck with something that she could barely understand.

She was a Burgess, and with that name came expectations. Who knew that the burden of a single surname could be so grand? All Burgesses were supposed to be the epitome of intellectual perfection. Nathalie was supposed to have figured it out by now. How can anyone figure out how a single man could literally summon a portal out of thin air into any universe, at any time and date with such precision?

Tedric had something in his blood that no human had. At first, she thought he was sick. It had looked like viral particles under the microscope, but it wasn't a virus, neither was it a bacterium, nor a fungus, not even an archaeon. It was something entirely different that carried double-stranded clusters of genetic material that was unlike anything she had ever seen. It was a structure made of an entirely different type of bases, and she was pulling her hair trying to figure it out.

But even then, a Burgess should have figured it out by now.

"Don't you think your cousin is being a little harsh?" Tedric glared at the door Jocasta had walked out from.

Of all people, he was fed up with having an entire family expecting too much from just one child. He used to be exactly where Nathalie was right now. The miracle child. The one who was going to figure out everything and make grand contributions to showing off the family name. The child that everybody relied on.

"No. She's right..." Nathalie shut another notebook and pulled out another. She began searching through her endless, indecipherable notes. "I need to work harder."

"Nat-"

"It's fine."

Tedric took her hands off the messy pages of the notebook that she had pulled in front of her, and he urged her to turn and look at him. Dark blue eyes met his own, but not for too much. She tore her eyes away fast enough. Nathalie bit her lip and looked down at his warm hands that were still holding her own. Tedric parted his lips to say something, but nothing came out.