Meeting Callan

The meeting that changed her life and the fate of the world.

The Time Shift Chronicles

Written and illustrated by Jessica Abrahams

Meeting Kate

My name is Jessica Abrahams, and Kate has asked me to tell her story in words and images so

that people get the facts rather than the whispered stories that change over time and with every telling.

There are already enough stories about Kate Daniels.

I have heard people swear that she walked through walls, that bullets passed straight through her,

that she could appear behind you before you had even seen her coming. I once heard a man insist

that he had watched her kill twenty Sentinels with a sword without getting a drop of blood on her.

Kate thought that one was particularly funny.

Some of the stories are true. Some are almost true. Others bear very little resemblance to

the girl I know.

So this is her story.

Family

I’ve written a lot about what Kate can do. About the Shift, her training, the battles she fought and the stories people tell about her. But none of those things really explain Kate.

For that, you need to know about the people around her.

Callan taught her how to survive and fight and, more importantly, when not to. Alison was her female role model and gave her somewhere she could simply be a girl. And Ted, of course, was always Ted. Together they became something Kate thought she had lost forever. A family.

Kate once told me that some of her happiest memories were of Meadow Lake. Looking at them here, I think I understand why.

Perhaps that is a good place to leave her for now.

Ted and Shiuri

If you want to understand Kate, you need to understand these two.

Ted came first. He was given to Kate when she was born and has been with her ever since. When she left home at ten, she took very little with her, but Ted was the first thing that she reached for.

He has survived everything Kate has survived.

Shiuri came much later.

She is a four hundred year old katana, given to her after years of training with Callan. By the time I met her, Kate could use Shiuri with a speed and precision that was genuinely frightening to watch.

I've drawn Kate with Shiuri several times. People tend to notice the sword.

I tend to notice Ted.

One represents the warrior Kate became.

The other is a battered little bear that has been with her since before any of this began and one of the few things that keeps her grounded and sane in this insane world that we live in. Ted, and Callan are her anchors in life.

Meadow Lake

Kate learned to fight at a place called Meadow Lake. Callan took her and Alison there a few weeks after they left Spanish Springs. It was isolated, high in the mountains and far enough from anyone else that Callan could train them without attracting attention.

Kate was ten years old when they arrived.

Callan started with the basics. Fitness, balance, movement and how to fall without hurting herself. Then came unarmed combat, firearms, knives and eventually the sword.

I asked Kate once how many hours Callan made her train.

She looked at me as though I had asked a particularly stupid question.

“All of them.”

Apparently that was only a slight exaggeration.

Callan understood something about Kate very early. The Shift gave her an extraordinary advantage, but an advantage was useless if she didn't know what to do with it. So he trained her outside the Shift first.

Again and again.

The Shift

Kate calls it the Shift.

She discovered it when she was six years old, although discovered is probably the wrong word. It simply happened. One moment she was in our world and the next she wasn't.

Kate can step outside normal time.

When she Shifts, the world around her becomes grey and completely silent. Everything stops. People, vehicles, falling objects, even bullets hang motionless. Kate, however, can still move.

From our point of view, she disappears.

Kate has trained herself to remain in the Shift for roughly ten minutes before exhaustion forces her back. When she returns, no time has passed here. To anyone watching, she can vanish from one place and reappear somewhere else almost instantaneously.

The Shift does not make her invulnerable. It does not make her stronger. And it certainly doesn't make what she does painless.

I think that is important.

By the time I met her, Kate used the Shift with the precision of a weapon. She could judge distances, count seconds and move through a battlefield while everyone else remained frozen around her.

But on 2nd May 2052, when she left her home in Spanish Springs with Ted, she wasn't a weapon. She was a frightened ten year old girl who bravely stepped out of her home into the world that the Construct had just thrust upon us.

Leaving home

After the Construct took over the word Kate was forced to leave her home to go and look for her parents.

The world was in chaos and there was fighting in the streets.

A brave, frightened little girl and her Teddy bear searching for Mum and Dad.

Every movement had to become instinctive. Where to put her feet. How to hold a weapon. Where to strike. When to move and, perhaps more importantly, when not to.

Then he taught her to do the same things inside the Shift.

By twelve, Kate was training in Taekwondo and Battōjutsu as well as firearms and fieldcraft. Callan was relentless about technique. If her stance was wrong, he corrected it. If her grip was wrong, they started again. If she got something right once, she did it another hundred times until getting it wrong became difficult.

Kate complains about this whenever she tells the story.

She also remembers every lesson.

I've never been to Meadow Lake, so this drawing is based entirely on Kate's description of it and of Callan.

When I showed it to her, she stared at it for a long time.

Then she pointed at Callan.

“He'd tell me my left hand is too high.”

I asked if it was.

She looked at the drawing again.

“Yes.”

Morning Workout

The morning after I met Kate, I was privileged to watch her morning workout. I’d heard the stories, of course, but watching her was something else entirely. Shiuri seemed almost alive in her hands. She spun the katana around her body, changing direction in an instant, the blade sometimes moving so fast I could barely follow it. Every movement was controlled and precise. A beautiful and deadly weapon, wielded by a hauntingly beautiful girl who was so, so fast.

Mayhem with pigtails

Even at the age of twelve, Kate’s ability to unleash mayhem and destruction on the Construct was the subject of stories told throughout the Resistance and beyond. Sentinels destroyed, facilities left burning, impossible missions somehow survived.

Some called her a hero. Others called her a murderer, even a butcher. There were people who feared her almost as much as they feared the Construct.

But stories are easy when you’re somewhere safe. If you had a Sentinel coming at you with its blistering speed, intent on killing you, you wouldn’t be calling Kate a murderer or a butcher. You’d be praying she was the one standing in its way.

And beneath the growing legend, she was still a twelve-year-old girl who carried her teddy bear wherever she went.

The cost

But there’s a cost to being a hero.

Kate once tried to explain to me what the Shift does to her body. She said the closest comparison would be running two marathons in ten minutes. Her body may have stepped outside normal time, but it still pays for everything she does there.

The longer she stays in the Shift, the worse it becomes. The edges of the Shift world begin to close in on her, her muscles burn, her strength disappears and exhaustion can hit her almost the instant she returns. Push it too far and she becomes sick, disoriented and can eventually lose consciousness.

And yet, when the fighting stops and everyone else is counting the dead and the damage, Kate rarely complains.

She finds somewhere to sit, puts Ted on her lap, closes her eyes and waits for her body to forgive her.

Kate's Law

Soon after I met Kate, I asked her how she managed to stay sane, given some of the things she had been forced to do.

She told me that when she was twelve, she had been forced to defend herself against three men. Afterwards, she realised that she needed rules. Something to remind her where the line was between doing what was necessary and simply killing.

That was when Kate’s Law was born.

She has added to it over the years, as different situations forced her to decide what kind of person she wanted to be.

I think these five rules probably tell you more about Kate Daniels than anything I could write about her.

I first met Kate when she was on her way north to Seattle. We had been told she was coming

and tasked with providing her with fuel, food and anything else she needed for the journey.

By then, of course, I had heard of Kate Daniels.

Everybody had.

I had expected someone imposing. A hardened soldier, perhaps. Someone who looked as

though she belonged in all those stories. Instead, this small fourteen-year-old girl climbed

off a Harley motorcycle. She was dirty, tired and carrying enough weapons for a small war.

And she had a teddy bear strapped to her.

That was my first sight of Kate Daniels.

She stayed with us overnight, which gave me an opportunity that I hadn't expected. I talked

to her. I watched her train. And, eventually, I decided to draw her. That first drawing is still one

of my favourites, although I don't think I captured her properly. I drew the girl standing in front

of me, but even then there was something about Kate that was difficult to put onto paper.

She could be completely still and yet somehow give the impression that she was about to move.

Later that evening I began writing down our conversation. I didn't know it then, but that was the beginning of these Chronicles.