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.

The Time Shift Chronicles

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.

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.

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.