by Julie Cross
“Something he named Project Tempest,” Marshall said, moving closer.
“Don’t move,” Dad snapped to Marshall, who paused. “Who the hell is Frank?”
“He worked for the government when time travelers were first identified,” I explained.
“When Frank figured out that Ludwig had done something to Healy to get him and the committee to agree to support Project Eyewall, he sent me on a mission to find Dr. Melvin in 1953 and try to convince him never to write down his cloning theory,” Blake explained.
Grayson scratched his head. “I remember that part. But I don’t remember the part about any secret time traveler.”
Blake’s eyes dropped to the ground. “I thought maybe you knew already and that’s why you wanted my memory files hidden in a new location.”
Grayson stepped forward, looking more angry than I’d ever seen him. “But you had no problem letting those files play aloud for these two?” He nodded at me and Holly.
“Only because it didn’t matter anymore,” Blake said. “Either we’d still be trapped inside the force field or we’d get out and then I’d … I’d…”
Grayson’s eyes narrowed. “You’d what?”
“Blow up Eyewall headquarters with the bagful of explosives I brought along,” Blake finally answered. The guilt dropped from his voice. Only pure defiance remained. He was obviously dead set on this plan and I had no idea explosives were among the supplies we’d carted across the boundary lines this morning.
Everyone except Stewart and I started talking at once. Stewart already knew about Blake’s plan, though I don’t know how this worked into her secret source we’d all been counting on. Marshall. Jeez, Stewart.
“Enough!” Dad finally shouted to stop the chatter. “Obviously, there’s a lot we need to piece together. Holly. Mason,” he ordered. “Restrain Chief Marshall so we can question him properly.”
Marshall didn’t resist as Holly and Mason gathered supplies and then tied his hands behind his back and his ankles together. If only we had an ocean to dump him in. And a couple of cement blocks.
After Holly had finished her job, she turned to Adam, her defenses way up despite her earlier elation at seeing him. “Why are you defending him? What do you know that I don’t?”
Adam’s exasperated sigh made it seem like the answer should be common knowledge. “He’s the one who put me undercover at Eyewall headquarters. How the hell do you think I got to the year 3200?”
That was a very good question. One that got interrupted before I could interject.
Courtney and Emily were the last to join the makeshift court trial, and to everyone’s surprise, Emily was more than delighted to see Chief Marshall. She ran to his side. “You came! I knew it was you helping Jenni! I just knew it.”
“Why do I feel like I know absolutely nothing?” Dad whispered to me.
“You and me both.”
“Are you actually planning on giving me the opportunity to explain myself, Agent Meyer?” Marshall said, and it was like we were back in France again, performing a simulated training mission, Marshall pacing in front of us, giving orders and warnings, never glossing over the bad stuff.
Dad tucked his gun into the back of his pants as Holly and Mason ushered Marshall into a portable folding chair and strapped him to it. Dad moved in front of the bound man and crossed his arms over his chest. “Fine. Explain.”
“First of all,” Marshall said, calm as anything, “you should all know that President Healy—Senator Healy to some of you—had been gone for some time before I finally put him out of his misery. He was merely a vessel left for Ludwig to control and use.”
My mind flashed back to the last time I saw Healy, before the vision or half-jump, before I came to the year 3200. It was like someone was inside him, trying to claw his way out. I had relayed this to Dad and Grayson after waking up from my near-death experience.
“They got me…” Healy had whispered. “Mind control.”
Marshall’s eyebrows lifted as if he knew I was remembering Healy’s strange behavior, his mention of mind control. Did he know about the perfect utopian future and the conclusion I’d drawn about the peace that emanated from every one of those people?
“Cloning isn’t the only invention Project Eyewall has perfected,” Marshall said.
I faked calm, like a good agent. “That doesn’t explain why you killed the other me. Or why you were Healy’s right-hand man.”
“I’m sure you’re familiar with the term ‘double agent,’ son,” Marshall said. “I agreed to help Healy, which meant I was essentially helping Ludwig and Thomas. I provided a time traveler to perform alterations for them and they agreed not to ask who aided me.”
“But it was just you doing it, right?” Mason asked.
“Correct.” Marshall looked at Emily. “And this child.”
My fists tightened and I put the safety on my gun before I acted on my anger. “You used a little kid for your missions? That’s twisted. You’re as bad as Thomas and Ludwig.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Emily protested. “I found him. I wanted to help.”
Dad rubbed his temples and sank onto an empty chair. “This is getting way too complicated. I have no idea what the hell we’re doing.”
Tension settled on top of everyone after hearing Dad’s confession. He had a point. A very good point, but we were all so used to Dad’s holding it together. Maybe he’d just done this too long. I felt like I’d been fighting this battle forever so I couldn’t imagine how exhausted Dad must be.
“Let me start at the very beginning, Agent Meyer,” Marshall said. “I was born the same year as Thomas. However, my time-travel abilities emerged even earlier than Blake’s. I was eleven years old. My schoolteacher contacted the authorities and Frank showed up. Grayson and Lonnie had already been discovered by that time and made into public figures. Unlike Blake and many of the others, I had no family to my name. I’d lived almost my entire life in a military-academy school as a scholarship student. Before that, I was in foster care. Frank took one look at me and he couldn’t bring himself to take me into the capital. He couldn’t turn me in to the government at my age, with no family to help me make the choice to leave.
“Frank explained what the government would expect of me if I turned myself in as a time traveler and threw out my options. I could go to the capital or he could erase what happened and help me hide. I wanted nothing to do with the government after years in the foster-care system and then more years training for the military. So for me the choice was easy. In the end, Frank adopted me and enrolled me in another school.
“He didn’t ignore what I was though. He taught me everything he knew about the future, about the fight ahead. When I was finally ready, I began my own search, my own missions into the past. I found Agent Meyer, a young boy who’d stumbled upon the existence of time travelers in the 1950s, and saved him from a deadly fate. After learning of Dr. Melvin’s discoveries and the scientific advancements that a young Scottish woman named Eileen Covington had made regarding time travel and genetics, I brought them on board and formed a team in the late eighties. Frank continued to pass along information to me that he’d received in his committee meetings. His early concern came from the Tempus Gene Project. I kept an eye on each and every child from the project and made sure to bring them on board before the other side tried to use them. Agent Sterling and Agent Kendrick were among those children.”
“Wait, what?” Mason said. “I’m a product of something?”
We all ignored him for now because Marshall’s story was getting too interesting and making too much sense to deal with Mason’s whining identity crisis.
“My number-one goal, above anything else, was to keep my ability a secret,” Marshall said. “The second I revealed myself, everything would crumble.” He glanced at Emily. “I know that because of Emily. She paid me a visit when I was eighteen and said those exact words. She also informed me that Jackson would suffer an injury when traveling to this
year. Then when I came across Mr. Silverman sneaking out of Eyewall headquarters, he’s the one that hypothesized with me, coming to the conclusion that I had to eliminate the other version of Jackson trapped in this timeline in order to keep the Jackson sitting here with us today from dying.”
My mouth fell open. “What? Adam, you told him to do that? Why?”
“Yeah, I haven’t exactly had a chance to explain that to them yet,” Adam said to Marshall, then turned to me and Dad. “It’s a long, complicated theory that I’ll refrain from explaining but it came partially from data Thomas acquired from Eileen Covington.”
I knew how much Dad was probably hurting, hearing Eileen’s name dropped several times into the conversation like a piece of history or data and not a person he loved.
“The other piece of information I acquired from Emily is the role this young lady played in nearly every one of your near-deadly screwups.” Marshall turned his gaze to Holly and then back to me. “Which is why, after you took matters into your own hands and traveled back three months in the past to erase your relationship, I decided to make sure she wouldn’t be a threat to your future missions. Same with Mr. Silverman.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, moving closer to Marshall.
He looked me right in the eye, no fear or hesitation when he said, “I orchestrated her involvement in the organization trained to kill you. Same with Mr. Silverman.”
Red. Red was all I could see in front of me and behind me and all around me. He did that? He put Holly and Adam in the CIA? It wasn’t Thomas or Ludwig or Healy. It wasn’t even the enemy.
I lunged for Marshall, knocking him backwards in his chair and wrapping both my hands around his throat. He was completely defenseless against me with his hands and feet tied up, his body strapped to the chair. The pressure I put on his neck caused his dark skin to redden, his eyes to bulge.
Stewart and Adam both jumped on me, trying to stop my attack, but they had nothing on the intense fury I felt. It wasn’t until I heard Dad’s voice above the pounding blood in my ears, “Jackson, no! Not like this,” followed by Courtney’s heart-wrenching plea, “Jackson, don’t! Just stop,” that I finally loosened my grip. Adam and Stewart both tugged me away and pushed me toward Holly, who just stood there, mouth hanging open.
Dad was the one who stepped forward and returned Marshall to his former upright position. Marshall didn’t look shaken at all, but his voice came out strained when he spoke again. “Agent Meyer has never been able to see what I clearly could from a very early age. He raised a selfish, spoiled, hardheaded boy who would develop powers strong enough to destroy the world. Do you know how dangerous you are, son? The cage in that warehouse was probably the safest place for you.”
“It was your choice to allow him to join Tempest,” Dad said, his voice furious. “He would have stayed away completely if it wasn’t for your permission.”
“And leave him to run off with Silverman, opening portals into another timeline with their experiments. Not to mention involving Holly, another innocent civilian. At least I made sure she had skills to defend herself. You and I both know he wouldn’t have stayed away.”
I stared at Marshall for a long time, replaying so many events that had happened since I made that first jump to 2007, while questions flew from everyone else’s mouths.
Dad was guilty of some of the same things Marshall had accused me of, except his job had been to protect me at all costs. My job had never been to fall in love with Holly and to be part of her life or even to protect her or get myself trapped in the year 3200 to be able to see my dad again. Everything I’d done had been personal. Even opening up the alternate universe, World B, had been because I couldn’t bear to watch Holly bleed to death in 2009. And when I finally made it back to 2009, I didn’t have to take Holly on a little romantic weekend to Martha’s Vineyard. I could have ditched her and taken off. Kept Thomas from ever throwing her off that roof.
Then in the NYU bookstore, I told myself I’d gone over to the aisle she had been in just to make sure she was okay, but really I wanted to see her again. I didn’t have to engage in more conversation with her at Healy’s ball either, after that fifty-thousand-dollar dance. I didn’t have to climb inside Adam’s car and steal his CD, stupidly leaving my fingerprints behind.
“He’s right,” I said, interrupting a verbal feud. I sank into the empty chair Dad had occupied a few minutes ago and rubbed my hands over my face, removing sweat and dirt in the process.
All eyes turned in my direction. I dropped my hands and looked up again. “Marshall’s right. I would have given in eventually. If I hadn’t run into Holly again in New York, something else would have triggered it and I would have inserted myself right back into her life again. Adam’s, too.” I turned to face Holly. “I’m so sorry. I know this doesn’t help, but for what it’s worth, if I could fix it right now, if I could go way back before we ever met, I think I’d finally be strong enough to let you go.”
Dad’s hand landed on my arm, “Jackson…?”
I shook my head, wiggling out of his grip. Before Holly could do anything more than gape at me, I swallowed the lump in my throat and turned my eyes back to Marshall. “We do need you. I get it now. I can’t see the big picture and you can.”
“It’s not that you can’t see it,” Marshall clarified, “it’s that you choose to put your personal concerns above the big picture.”
I nodded. He was right. “Blake wants to blow up the Eyewall headquarters and I want to help him. Is that big picture enough for you?”
“Yes,” he said.
My eyes met Dad’s.
“Are you sure?” Dad asked.
“I’m sure.” I paused and swallowed. “We need Marshall. Let him go.”
“Untie him,” Dad said to Mason and Stewart. “Unless anyone else objects?”
We waited for a few moments, and when no one spoke, Marshall was freed and stood in front of us like he’d done so many times during training. He shook out his arms and shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s pack up and make our way to headquarters. We’ll formulate a cohesive attack plan on the way.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later, we were hiking through a giant field, the hot sun beating down on us. No one jogged too closely to Blake and his bag of explosives. I adjusted the heavy straps of my bag and took the bottle of water Courtney passed me. After the lukewarm wetness hit my throat, I took another bottle and carried it over to Blake. After the short break, Marshall, Dad, and Grayson took the lead and I hung in the back, mentally drowning in my own world of self-doubt.
“If we’d had a little more time, I would have gotten around to telling you more,” Adam said.
I looked sideways, only just realizing he was beside me. “It’s all right. I understand. You couldn’t tell anyone about Marshall. Keeping it a secret was more important than staying on my good side.”
“True,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think the guy’s a total robot. He is. And a lot of good wouldn’t have happened if you or your dad were like him. It’s just the way it is. That’s the system that has to exist in order for us to succeed. We each have our own mission, our own stake in this.”
“I guess.” I shook my head, kicking dirt up as I walked. “I still wish I could have managed to keep you and Holly out of this.”
Adam spread his arms out wide, turning sideways to grin at me. “Well, I’m here, so deal with it.”
I managed a short laugh. “Okay, okay. Fine.”
“Thank God!” Adam said, lifting his hands to the sky. “Your brooding, brokenhearted-lover routine was getting a bit annoying.”
I shoved him hard, watching him stumble forward into Stewart, who turned around and caught Adam. “Junior could win an Oscar for his brooding.”
I rolled my eyes. “Shut up, Stewart. Besides, you know we share the loyalty curse.”
“True,” she said with a sigh. “Very true.”
“But we’ll get to test that theory soon, right
?” I pointed out. “No failing at the destroy-Eyewall mission to save my ass.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Junior. I’m not that fond of you.”
My eyes traveled to Dad and Courtney and eventually to Holly and my stomach was already twisting in knots. Was I loyal enough to this mission to risk survival? Would I screw up again to make sure Holly or Dad or Courtney or Adam or Emily was okay? I guess there was only one way to find out.
CHAPTER TWENTY
DAY 19. LATE EVENING
I stood outside Eyewall’s electric fence, huddled in the evening cold with Blake and Marshall. I was trying hard not to think about Dad, Holly, and Adam right now, tiptoeing their way to the gate and gaining access for all of us after Adam performed his computer magic and hacked into the system. We were all counting on the Eyewall guard chips attached to our bodies to help us fly under the radar for a while. Adam and Emily had both said it wasn’t uncommon for Eyewall guards (aka time-travel-clone experiments) to teleport somewhere and have to return to headquarters on foot due to their brains needing a rest—something I could totally relate to from my own time-jumping experiences.
Three days of planning this mission, three days of walking and sleeping outside, and we were all mentally and physically fatigued, not to mention battered and bruised. I knew Holly had sprained her ankle during that fight when we first stepped outside the force field, I’d seen her limping toward Adam, but she refused to admit the injury existed and had kept on walking with a determined pace for the past three days. Adam said it was the former gymnast in her that knew how to push through the pain. She and I had hardly spoken since I’d given my guilt-ridden public apology, but there was no more tension. She’d sat with me and Adam and Stewart or me and Courtney and participated in conversations with none of the hot-and-cold mood swings I’d seen since arriving in the year 3200. Maybe it was the last memory-gas episode or Adam’s arrival that finally got her to break through that barrier between her and everyone else.