by Julie Cross
“The computer thing,” she said, remembering the reason she came in here in the first place. I waited while she swiped a tiny black device from the floor. “And just so you know, I didn’t exactly hate making out with you.”
“Really?” I asked, following her back outside.
“Really.”
Both of us were quick to shift gears, scanning the area and counting heads.
“You all right?” Dad asked us when we had reached the group again.
“Yeah, we survived.” I glanced at Adam then back to Dad. “Is everything cool? With Adam?”
Holly handed over the black device Adam had requested from his tent and he hurried over to Dad to explain. “So, I’ve got pretty much every file in the Eyewall system copied here. All the experiment data, all the results, and everything they’ve done to build their utopian world—”
Dad lifted a hand to cut him off. “It’s okay. We’ve actually got most of that already.”
Adam’s jaw dropped open. “How? I went through hell to get this and I was on the inside for six months.”
Dad glanced at Emily, and that was when I remembered her scribbling down data not just from my journals but also from the Eyewall systems. “It’s a long story,” he said with a sigh.
Grayson jogged over to us and proceeded to tape a tiny metal chip to the inside of both our wrists. I recognized the device because it was identical to the memory card Blake had extracted from his foot days ago. From the corner of my eye, I saw Holly wrinkle her nose. I wasn’t too thrilled about attaching something that had been under another person’s skin to my body either but at least we didn’t have to insert it under our skin, just close to a major vein to allow it to register a beating heart.
“You can tape it to your chest if you prefer, just do it quick,” Adam said from Holly’s other side. He lifted his T-shirt to display the tiny metal piece resting over his heart.
The metal poked my wrist and I immediately decided the chest was better.
“Here, let me help,” Holly said, taking the supplies from my hand. “Hold your shirt up.” She gently moved my free hand aside and I lifted my shirt again. She managed to pull the tape off without too much pain. A shiver went up my spine when her fingers pressed against my chest, finding my heartbeat before securing the tape in place. Pink crept up from her neck as her fingers continued to drift over the scar on my chest. “It looks good … I mean, it’s healing really well.”
Holly’s eyes met mine, her face even more flushed than a few seconds ago. She wasn’t Agent Holly right then, she wasn’t looking at me with the same scrutiny and skepticism as her trained-agent persona would. But it wasn’t 007 Holly either.
She was just Holly.
Adam cleared his throat, causing her to withdraw her fingers from my skin and me to drop my shirt back into place. I stepped away from them and walked over to Dad. “What’s the plan?”
“Set up camp over by Adam’s tent,” he said, glancing at Stewart’s sleeping body. “Not much choice with comatose team members. We’ll have to wait until they come to.”
* * *
A couple hours later, I sat in a newly set-up tent with Adam, Holly, and Courtney, waiting out the hottest part of the day in the shade.
“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” Adam said, sifting through a pile of notebook papers Emily had filled up the other day. We’d brought them along at Emily’s insistence. “That kid must really be overloaded. Apparently another version of me wrote notes in Jackson’s journal?” I nodded to confirm this. “And Emily’s copied my handwriting perfectly.”
Holly and I both reached for the page Adam had just discarded beside him. Our fingers brushed and she slid it in my direction and reached for another page. I recognized the journal entry right away. It was mostly my handwriting, but experiment results were written across the bottom in Adam’s writing using his code. I slid beside Adam as I scanned the page.
I laughed. “Oh God, I remember this experiment.”
He leaned in and read over my shoulder. “So what happened? My other self didn’t record any definite results.”
Before I could answer him, Holly jumped to her feet, looking a little spooked or just jumpy for some reason. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I’m gonna get some water.”
Courtney stood up, too, brushing dirt from the back of her jeans. “I’ll go with you.”
I turned my attention back to Adam, who appeared to be eagerly waiting for my answer. “Do you get the whole half-jump concept?”
“Bits of it,” he said. “But not completely.”
I went on to explain how my body stays in the present, how hardly any time passes in the present even if I’m years in the past and hanging out there for hours at a time. And how sensations like pain and heat and cold are dulled in the half-jump.
“Once, I missed the target and ended up in the middle of traffic,” I explained. “This semi ran right over my leg and I heard the bones break. It was so nasty and it hurt like hell. Of course, I jumped back right away and was practically dying, but my leg ended up being fine.”
Adam pushed his glasses up on his nose. Sweat from the noon-hour heat had caused them to slide. “Seriously, dude?”
“Well, I had a faint purple bruise for a few days but that’s it.”
“That’s insane.” His forehead wrinkled with that look of deep concentration, and it was so familiar it made me feel like I’d gone back in time and everything was how it used to be. “So it’s not complete invincibility, right?”
I laughed. “Right. And that’s exactly what your other self was so fascinated with.”
He flipped furiously through more pages. “Okay, tell me about this experiment.”
This morning’s fight and the emotional drama with Holly had taken a toll on my body. I stretched out across one of the sleeping bags, resting my hands behind my head. “After I survived the leg-crushing incident, we both had a few new ideas that included putting me through physical peril of some kind in a half-jump just to see what I came back with in the present.”
It was so strange to think about those months experimenting with the original 009 Adam, hooking up with Holly, and feeling almost completely carefree. I had virtually no responsibilities, no real life-or-death concerns other than figuring out what the hell was wrong with me. But meeting Adam, messing around with time, hanging out like I wasn’t a freak, made this worry dissolve pretty early on.
I remembered this experiment more clearly as I recounted it to Adam now. It had been mid-August of 2009. We were sitting in the TV room at my apartment. Dad was working so we were alone. Having swiped a bottle of Crown Royal from Dad’s stock, both of us were failing miserably at our attempt to beat our previous high scores on Halo and that was when the more colorful ideas began to evolve.
Adam had tossed his game controller and picked up the newspaper. “This is awesome!”
I glanced over at the article he’d been reading. “Eighty people got food poisoning from bad sushi in the East Village. What’s awesome about that?”
It only took me a few seconds to catch on to his train of thought. By that time, we’d been doing this type of thing for nearly five months and I knew how Adam thought. Well, mostly. “When did this happen?” I asked.
“Between seventy-two and forty-eight hours ago.”
I jumped to my feet and started pacing in circles around the coffee table. “I can’t do seventy-two hours yet, but I can manage forty-eight.”
“Dude, we gotta do this!” He had already retrieved the notebook from my camp bag and was jotting down theories and details.
“No one died, right?” I asked.
“Not so far.” He shrugged. “I think they puked a lot.”
“Okay, so I go back two days, eat the tuna roll at the joint in the East Village,” I recited. “And then what?”
He looked up from the notebook. “I guess you’ll have to wait since food poisoning isn’t instantaneous. What do you hav
e going on tomorrow, just in case?”
I flopped down on the couch and started up another game of Halo. “The Mets game with Holly. I can cancel.”
“Don’t cancel,” he said, and something in his tone made me look away from the game for a second before turning back.
I shrugged. “Holly’s cool. She’ll be fine with it.”
“Uh-huh.” He leaned down closer to the notebook page as if his drunken haze made it harder for him to read his chicken-scratch handwriting.
“What?” I asked. “You know she’s not going to get pissed and go all crazy girlfriend on me. She’s not like that. We’re not like that.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“That whisky is messing with your head, man.” But somewhere in my head I knew what he was trying to tell me, I just hadn’t wanted to put it into words out loud. Not yet, anyway. “So I won’t cancel, then. Besides, I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
I’d had no problem making the two-day back-in-time half-jump and no trouble getting my spicy tuna roll down, but the following morning, about two hours before Holly was supposed to come over so we could go to the game, my head was buried deep in the toilet. I was so sick that I couldn’t even leave the bathroom to retrieve my phone and call or text her to warn her not to come over. Which is why when she walked into my bedroom and heard me barfing for like the hundredth time, my entire body had been covered in sweat and yet I lay on the bathroom tiles shivering, my head spinning.
“Oh my God,” she’d said. “Are you hung over?”
I’d managed to shake my head and croak out a few words. “Bad sushi.”
My eyes barely stayed open as she flushed the toilet, grabbed a washcloth, wet it, and pressed it against my forehead. Taking care of each other wasn’t a usual kind of date or activity for Holly and me. “You should go,” I said. “Don’t think I can make it to the game.”
“No kidding,” Holly said. “But I’m not leaving you like this.”
I couldn’t protest because I was too busy clawing my way back up to a sitting position so I could hurl into the toilet again. I managed to stand and lean over the sink, fumbling with my toothbrush, trying to get the vomit taste out of my mouth, hoping that would help my subconscious to stop thinking about puking again. The second I started to sway, Holly wrapped an arm around my waist to steady me.
I could only barely remember the details of her helping me to my bed, putting a small trash can beside me that I could wrap my arms around. Eventually, I talked her into retrieving my phone so I could call Dr. Melvin and tell him that I needed him to come save me from my sushi poisoning. Holly sat beside me, pressing the cloth to my forehead, not making even one comment about how only spoiled rich kids have doctors who did home visits.
Dad had shown up before Dr. Melvin, and at that time, Dad made Holly pretty nervous so she left shortly after.
* * *
“So, you do have results for that experiment?” Adam asked after I’d finished the story.
“Nothing factual.” I laughed under my breath. “It turns out that three days before I started getting sick, I ate at this burger joint that turned up as having some kind of E. coli outbreak. So there’s no way to know for sure.”
“You could have done blood work or stool samples!” Adam protested. “If it was E. coli, it would have showed up.”
“Yeah, I was too sick to call you for like a couple days and Dr. Melvin gave me an antiemetic and an antibiotic shot right away. The meds worked so he didn’t need to investigate further. Maybe he did draw blood while I was out of it. We could ask Dad but unfortunately none of that happened to this version of Dad.”
Adam grinned at me sheepishly. “I’m guessing you didn’t feel like trying again?” I shook my head. “Yeah, I don’t blame you. My other self must have been too drunk to gather the proper preexperiment data and make sure there wasn’t any potentially spoiled food in your three-day history?”
“That would have been hard to know for sure, right?”
“Probably.” He set the loose notebook pages aside and his face turned more serious. “So, like the thing with your not being able to ask your dad because he’s never had that memory, it’s the same with Holly? She’s never lived that day either? You lost all that?”
I sat up and looked down at my hands. “Right.”
“Does Holly know about this stuff?”
I relayed the events of the last couple weeks to him and explained (leaving out what happened with Carter because I promised her I wouldn’t tell) how she’d been having the flashes of 007 Holly memories. Then I had to explain 2007 to him.
“So that’s the visions I’ve had!” he said. “World B. That’s been confusing the hell out of me.”
“Not just you,” I said. “Even Stewart thought she’d been given memory-modification drugs.”
“I had a feeling time travel played a part in those visions but I had too many missing pieces to fully understand the different types of jumps,” Adam said. “It feels really good to have the rest of the puzzle.”
“I’m sorry you got all wrapped up in this Eyewall, time-travel, world-destruction shit. I never wanted this to happen.” I looked over at him. “But I’m glad you’re here, despite the circumstances.”
Adam tossed a meal bar in my direction, smacking me in the forehead. “Like before when you were screwing around with Holly, drinking and partying way too much?”
I threw the bar back at him, laughing harder than I had in a long time. “You were one hundred percent on board with my life choices.”
“Yeah, that does sound awesome.” He leaned back against the side of the tent. “Well, not the screwing-around-with-Holly part. Would have been cool to actually make it to college, especially MIT. Seems kinda trivial now, doesn’t it?”
“Unfortunately.”
We were interrupted by someone’s arm poking through the flap of the tent. We both watched as Jenni Stewart fully emerged. “I’m awake, bitches! What’d I miss?”
Her eyes traveled from me to Adam then back to me. “Okay, apparently quite a bit.”
I scrambled to my feet and rested my hands on her shoulders. “You okay? Are Mason and Sasha waking up, too?”
“Yes and yes,” she said, nodding toward Adam.
“Right.” I turned around to face him. “Adam this is Jenni Stewart. Stewart, this is Adam Silverman, my friend from many timelines.”
“Glad you’re not dead,” she said before snapping her attention back to me. “Explain. Now.”
Before I could even open my mouth to speak, shouting from outside the tent stopped me. The three of us looked at each other and then tumbled out the entrance and into the stifling heat.
Dad and Holly both stood with pistols pointed at the same target. My gaze traveled outward, finally identifying what had sent them reaching for defense weapons.
Chief Marshall.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DAY 16. AFTERNOON
I raced to get in front of Dad and Holly, my gun raised toward the man who’d managed to deceive me like no other. My hands held steady, no sign of trembling at all. The need to protect Holly, Dad, and the others destroyed any trembling weakness left in my body. I gave one second’s thought to obtaining information from Marshall versus risking the people behind me. No contest. My training kicked in and I aimed. One to the head. One to the chest. My finger touched the trigger.
“Stop!” Stewart leaped in front me, her lean, dark arms spread wide.
At my touch, the bullet left the gun, now heading straight for Stewart. I jumped, taking her body down, shoving her out of the way. The dry dirt puffed around us.
“What the fuck, Jackson,” Stewart said, coughing at the dust.
I rolled off her to my knees, looking for Marshall.
He’d moved and appeared unhit and unresisting.
“Wait. Let Chief Marshall explain.”
“Damn it, Stewart, he was your trusted source?” I trained my gun again.
Adam ran forward. “Wait.
”
Chief Marshall sauntered closer, his arms resting at his sides, no weapon in sight.
“Don’t move,” I said.
Chief Marshall stopped. “I orchestrated this escape plan.”
His hated voice reminded me how much I had never liked him, and that was before I’d seen him murder an alternative version of myself.
Dad’s weapon stayed up and his gaze flitted to Stewart. “He’s your secret source? I trusted you! We all trusted you! What were you thinking?”
I stared at Adam, who’d placed himself in front of Marshall. “Not you, too.”
“He can time-travel,” Adam explained.
“Yeah, I kind of figured that when I saw him vanish after murdering the other me and Healy,” I snapped.
“He can time-travel like the originals.” Stewart pointed toward Grayson and Blake, who had just appeared outside in our little battleground. She climbed to her feet, swiping at the dust on her pants, then proceeded to point at Lonnie and Sasha as they too emerged. “He’s one of them.”
“Shit,” Mason said, joining us from one of the tents, his voice still groggy from the laser-induced coma he’d been in. “Marshall.” He drew his gun and moved to Holly’s side.
He can time-travel like the originals? This means … “So Thomas and Ludwig figured out the secret formula for perfect, synthetic time travelers,” I said.
Dad shook his head at Stewart. “He’s talked you into leading us right to them. Right to Eyewall headquarters.” He sounded pissed at her and at himself.
“There’s probably some kind of weird-ass experiment being performed on us right now,” Mason added. “Like this whole journey is testing us so they know exactly what we’re capable of, what we can potentially do for them.”
“He’s not an experiment! He’s an original,” Adam shouted.
Grayson shook his head. “Impossible.”
“There’s no record of any others,” Lonnie added.
“That’s not completely true.” Blake stepped up and held out his hands for everyone to calm down. He looked right at me and then at Holly. “Frank. Remember Frank? He was on Healy’s committee. He had another time traveler working for him. Before he was thrown in jail, he’d set something in motion. A project to fight Eyewall.”