West (History Interrupted Book 1) by Lizzy Ford Page B

I didn’t think he sent me here for me to die before I had a chance to change history the way he wanted. I purposely didn’t think about what I had learned, that there might’ve been other girls sent back before me.
    I drew a deep breath and moved towards the cave, pausing in the open entrance.
    It was larger than I expected, extending a good thirty feet into the canyon wall, and stocked with barrels and crates along the back wall.
    A Native American man sat on a wooden box towards the back, staring at me with a mix of puzzlement and intensity. A glow flared around him briefly, the way it had at the market.
    “Running Bear?” I called uncertainly.
    He rose, tense, with one hand clenching a bloody knife and another a rabbit he was skinning.
    The flickers of memories were faint, jumbled with the insistent whisperings and dream-like images emanating from everywhere in the cave. The chips were confused again, unable to read him clearly but reading the cave itself.
    Not Running Bear. The man was an identical twin. The scar running down one side of his face marked the difference between the two men, along with the odd intensity and cold eyes. Running Bear hadn’t been happy to see me at any time our paths crossed, but this man was … hostile.
    The historical chip was telling me about the massacre that he would commit, the same tale it told me about Running Bear. I realized with some dread that it wasn’t able to tell the difference between the two men. In fact, there was nothing anywhere in my mind that mentioned there being twins, as if the knowledge was either never recorded or lost somewhere in history.
    But the visions of blood and shadows, of anger and hatred, belonged to this man. This was the man I could see starting a massacre.
    There’s something very wrong with him. My empathic memories were scrambled and overwhelmed by the cave, for there was more than one source to the whispers, and they were spread around the cave, as if …
    Dead. There were people buried in this cave, people whose lives had ended violently, right here, by the man whose mind was too tangled for me to read. Why hadn’t Carter told me I could read objects and places in addition to people?
    “Who are you?” I whispered.
    “Fighting Badger.” He was studying me. “How did you find me?”
    “I, uh …” There was no explaining microchips and a mental map. My eyes went to the floor of the cave, to the places where the dead lay. I had the sense of disconnecting with the world around me, of watching rather than existing.
    How was it possible for me to sense something like that? Had Carter put something else in my head that let me read objects and places, or was this empathic memory chip much more powerful than he let on? Was this what he implied about the chip when he said it was experimental?
    How was I able to read dead people?
    “You are a spirit,” Fighting Badger voiced quietly.
    I shook my head, struggling to focus with the whispers and images. A small part of me was warning me to run, telling me I should fear this man and place, that they were both evil in a way I didn’t know existed before tonight.
    “You must be.” He followed my gaze to a random spot in the cave, where the whispering was loudest at the moment. “Only a spirit can hear others.”
    “You can hear them, too?” I asked, surprised.
    “They are loud tonight.” Fighting Badger tossed his rabbit and knife down then wiped his hands on his pants. There was an emptiness to his eyes. Though I wasn’t a superstitious or religious person, or someone who really thought twice about souls and the afterlife, I experienced the strange sense that this man had no soul.
    “They are.” I swallowed hard and shifted feet. He was built like someone who tracked, hunted and killed his own food, the opposite of the comparatively pampered life I lived, which meant I wasn’t going to get far if I made a run for it. “You are not a ghost and you can hear them.”
    “I hear them