by Julie Cross
“I always assumed that Emily and I would meet when I’m, like, forty or something. Past August of 2009 when I first met her. I never imagined it’d be before that date,” I said, trying to read over Kendrick’s shoulder.
“Do you want to know something really strange?” Kendrick asked, closing her notebook.
I laughed. “You mean something else strange?”
“She has your fingerprints. No two people have the same prints,” she said. “I checked it, like, twenty times, running it through the computer program. I’ve never heard of anything like this.”
I stared at Emily, my mouth practically hanging open. “It’s like she doesn’t even have her own identity.”
“And she’s a girl and doesn’t even look like you … except the eyes.” Kendrick’s gaze was fixated on the side of my face and she lowered her voice. “What did they do to make her? I can’t even fathom it and I can understand quite a bit when it comes to science and technology.”
I watched Emily’s chest move up and down taking tiny little-kid breaths, her lips moving, forming words without any sound. “It’s not like she’s a robot. A person is a person, right?”
The question was too ambiguous for Kendrick to answer. I knew that, but I asked anyway. Finally, she stood up and walked toward the door. “I think we should stay here tonight. Changing her surroundings might be a little traumatic.”
“Agreed,” I said, tearing my eyes from Emily to glance at Kendrick leaning against the doorframe. “What about Michael?”
She shook her head and her eyes filled with tears. “I told him … I told him we were leaving tonight. For France.”
“But—”
“I already said good-bye, Jackson,” she said firmly, pulling herself together. “I just can’t … He’s everything … everything I lost when my parents and Carson were killed … and I’m gonna lose him, too, if I’m not careful … It’ll happen, won’t it?”
I remembered how much I appreciated Agent Collins’s honesty when he admitted Holly was in grave danger, and I knew Kendrick needed the same from me.
“Yes, it’ll happen.”
She sucked in a breath and then nodded slowly. It killed me to watch this happening, like it had for me. Her heart just shattering into a million pieces, way too many for anyone to be able to put it back together. She was ruined. Just like me.
My feet moved across the room without any conscious thought and I wrapped my arms around her. She only stiffened for a second before breaking down and crying into my shirt.
“I’m not going to come back,” she said. “I can’t go back to him … It’s too risky.”
I squeezed her tighter and said the only words I could offer, “We’ll help … me and Stewart. We’ll come up with a cover … get his name out of the database and off any radar. I’ll use time travel if I have to.”
She laughed through her tears and gave me one last squeeze before letting go. “Thank you.”
“We’re in this together now, right?” I joked. “Now that we’ve broken nearly every CIA rule.”
She gave me a half smile. “I really need to take a shower. Will you keep an eye on the little one?”
“No problem.”
I got the sense that even Kendrick wasn’t sure Emily was on our side. And yet, like me, she had trouble seeing past the child in her. Good or evil, she was still just a little kid.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
JUNE 21, 2009, 6:05 A.M.
Last night, I fought to stay awake. Around five in the morning, I dozed off for a little while and woke up to the sound of pages turning frantically. I figured it was Kendrick writing more notes, but then I saw her stretched out across the end of the bed, sound asleep. Stewart was sprawled out on the floor, also asleep. Her laptop rested in front of her, still turned on.
That was when I saw Emily, sitting cross-legged on the bed, eyes zipping over Kendrick’s notebook pages. I walked slowly toward her and tugged the notebook off her lap. She jumped and glanced up at me with big eyes, before sliding back until she ran into the headboard and couldn’t get any farther away.
“It’s okay,” I said, sitting down by Kendrick’s feet. “I’m not gonna hurt you. None of us will.”
She pointed to the numbers written across the top of the notebook. “Is that right?”
“You mean the year? 2009?” She nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”
This seemed to stun her too much for her to look scared again. My eyes traveled to the needle lying on the bed. The needle connected to the IV that should have been connected to her hand. She caught me staring at it and picked it up, placing it in my hand.
“That solution has impurities. I can smell them,” she whispered.
At first I thought that statement was a little weird, but then I thought about it, like, what would I think if I went back two hundred years and someone handed me a glass of water? I’d smell impurities. Notice things that people from that year wouldn’t think twice about.
“Are you hungry? I can make you something to eat,” I said, hoping this would get me on her good side. I got a tiny little nod. “Great. Let’s go to the kitchen.”
She snatched the notebook out of my hands and climbed off the bed, following close behind me. Kendrick had dressed her in one of my T-shirts and it hung down to her knees.
The notebook was clutched to her chest, with a death grip I knew better than to test. But she let me steer her toward the table and she sat in the chair I pointed to.
She nibbled on more pita bread and Gatorade while I sat across from her. When both her hands were occupied, I took a chance and stole the notebook back. She dropped the bread and reached for the spiral end, catching her fingers between the wires. The look on her face was so desperate, I released the notebook immediately.
“I just … don’t understand,” she said. “I need to read something … data. I like to read data.”
The way she explained it, you’d think I’d taken her mother away or something. Suddenly, I had an idea to provide Emily with some concrete evidence. I opened the junk drawer to the right of the kitchen sink and riffled through it, tossing random items onto the counter until I found a black ink pad, half dried-up but still usable. I grabbed a plain white sheet of paper and the ink, setting it down in front of us. Slowly, I pressed my thumb in the ink and then against the paper, leaving a black fingerprint. I slid the ink pad toward Emily and she stared at me for a long moment before lifting her hand. “It won’t hurt you, I promise.”
She nodded and made her own mark next to mine. I watched carefully as she leaned forward, practically touching her nose to the page. I gave her the small magnifying glass attached to my pocketknife to help with the examination. “It’s … it’s the same … We’re the same.”
“Yes.” Another idea came to me, and I ran from the kitchen to retrieve my bag and lockbox. I showed Emily how it read my fingerprint and then opened, revealing my journal and Holly’s diary along with some other personal items. She repeated the same move—opening the top and then closing it again—at least ten times. Then she reached her hands out to touch my face, almost like Eileen had done that one time. We were nose to nose for several seconds before she finally whispered, “But you look different?”
“I know … I don’t understand it, either. Actually, we were hoping you might know something.”
She sank back into her chair, looking less afraid, less tentative. “You’re not like them … They hate that you’re not like them.” She swallowed hard, eyes meeting mine. “They hate that I might be like you.”
I could only assume she was talking about the EOTs, about me being more emotional, more human. And someone must have told her, maybe out of anger, that she was acting like me … the person who shared her fingerprints. Her identity, in a way.
Emily pointed to the notebook again. “Can I read it, please?”
“It doesn’t belong to me, so maybe we should wait until after Lily gets up?”
“She has two names?” Emily asked. �
��You called her something else last night.”
“Kendrick is her last name.” I paused for a second before asking, “Do you have a last name?”
“No … only numbers.” She eyed the refrigerator wistfully. “Do you have chickens?”
“Uh … not in there … not live ones, anyway.”
“I had a chicken. He lived with me, but he got sick and died.” She looked down at her hands and sighed. “He was the last one.”
“The last one?”
“Extinction?” she said, as if talking to someone much younger than herself. “Dead species?”
“There’s no chickens in the future?” I asked.
Curiosity filled her expression, leaving no room for the fear from earlier. “No … but won’t everything die out eventually?”
“I don’t know … will it?”
“How old are you? How many names do you have?” she drilled.
“I’m nineteen … years … as in three hundred and sixty-five days times nineteen years.”
She picked up the bread and started eating again, but I didn’t miss the tiny roll of her eyes. “A year is three hundred sixty-four and one-quarter days. And where I’m from, time movers record their age in days. Year of birth is nonessential.”
“Nonessential? Do all eight-year-olds say ‘nonessential’ where you’re from?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never met any others my age.” She shrugged. “If you have chickens, then you have eggs?”
“Yeah…” Why? Do they worship chickens in the future? “Do you want me to make you some eggs for breakfast? Or are you planning on raising a chicken farm in this apartment to keep the species from dying out? Is that the mission that brought you here?” I asked.
Then she did something I hadn’t expected … she laughed. “You can’t raise chickens in here. Where would I take them for a walk?”
“Central Park?” I suggested before getting up to pull the egg carton out of the fridge.
Emily followed me and examined each egg carefully before letting me crack it into the bowl. “They look exactly the same … All those years and it won’t change.”
A few minutes later, we both had plates full of scrambled eggs and Emily was practically inhaling them. I hoped Kendrick would approve of this food choice for her. If not … well, it was too late now.
“When did you meet me, before? How old was I?” she asked.
“You were eleven the last time I saw you.” I rolled my eyes at the patronizing look she had just given me. “You do the math and figure out how many days that is.”
“I like math,” she said. “We don’t call it math, but I read about that in history data.”
“What do you call it?”
“Either logics or number tech … sometimes origins and angles.” Her feet swung back and forth, not even close to touching the floor. “‘Tech’ is short for ‘technology.’”
“Yeah, I figured that.” I took a deep breath before plunging into the lecture I knew I needed to give her. “Emily, you’re gonna have to be careful with what you tell us. It doesn’t mean you can’t answer any questions, but some information can cause more harm than good. Does that make sense?”
“I understand,” she said, nodding. “I shouldn’t have told you about the chickens, right?”
“I’m not sure. It doesn’t really bother me, but I’ve seen more than Lily or Jenni … I’ve time-traveled. So it’s different for me. You can tell me a little more than them, but not everything, okay?”
“Because we’re the same.” She smiled, looking up at me. “I always wanted to meet you. Everything I heard was bad, but I just knew you weren’t … You couldn’t be, or they wouldn’t have used you to make me.”
So she knew how it had happened. She knew more than I did about it. What a weight for a child to carry. And to be told one thing and decide on her own that she didn’t agree, at such a young age … that level of freethinking was unbelievable.
I held up my thumb with the ink still on it. “Yes, we’re the same.”
Kendrick came jogging into the kitchen, looking half asleep, half frantic. She stopped when she saw us and tightened the tie of her bathrobe. “Thank God … I saw the IV line had been pulled … You’re eating eggs?”
“She asked for them … I wasn’t going to say no. Emily’s got a chicken obsession.”
Emily giggled again and Kendrick looked at both of us and shook her head. “Eggs are fine. Anything she wants is fine.” She squatted down in front of the little girl, looking her over carefully. “You look so much better already. You’ve got some color back and your cheeks aren’t as sunk in.”
It was Stewart’s turn to come stumbling in, sleepy-eyed. “She does look better. Don’t forget, we have gummy vitamins.”
I gave Stewart a little smile, knowing that was as good as an apology for her outburst last night. A peace offering. I grabbed a bottle of vitamins and fished around for two. “Look, I think this one’s supposed to be a chicken.”
Emily laughed again and examined the little gummies resting in my palm. “Those look just like micro-meals—” She stopped abruptly and glanced at me, her eyes growing bigger. “Sorry. I’m not supposed to talk about that stuff.”
Stewart held up a small Gap bag and removed a blond-haired doll. “I found this last night … you know … downstairs. There’s a dress and another outfit that would probably fit the mini-time traveler.”
I took the doll from Stewart and stared at it for a long minute. “This was Courtney’s. Lily … that’s her name.”
Kendrick stood beside me, touching the doll’s dress. “It’s an American Girl doll. I had this one, too. Obviously, I’d picked the one with my name.”
A tiny black mark on the plastic arm caught my eye and I started laughing. “I strapped her to a Lego mine full of dynamite once and then wrote Courtney a ransom note.”
Kendrick snatched the doll from my hands and handed it to Emily. “Keep Lily away from Jackson, would you?”
She took Emily into the bedroom to give her some real clothes and left Stewart and me alone in the kitchen. “Is that all you found, downstairs?”
“Yeah.” She stared at me for a long, uncomfortable minute. “I think Collins was right … about being careful not to be too accommodating to Agent Flynn…”
I let out a frustrated breath. “I figured you’d agree with that.”
“Would you just let me finish?” she snapped. I immediately nodded, waiting for her to continue. “It’s about Holly … I checked up on her yesterday, like I said I would … and when I said she was fine … when I texted you yesterday … I may have left out a few details.”
My stomach started doing double flip-flops. “Like what?”
“Let’s just say … I think you should keep an eye on her … from a distance … not interference, or you’re both dead.”
Regret was written all over her face, but I didn’t know if she regretted not telling me sooner or caving and telling me now. Either way, I was grateful that we had become close enough for her to go against her better judgment for my benefit. “Thanks, I owe you.”
“Uh … yeah, you do.” She glanced at her watch. “I tapped her phone again. Blondie should be at the NYU library later this afternoon and you should be there … regardless of what’s going on with this freaky clone kid.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know why … but it feels like everything’s connected … Holly, Agent Collins having that picture, Emily, your dad and his MIA status, Marshall gone, too. I can’t put my finger on it, but any second now, it’s just going to snap together somehow.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, putting an arm around her, squeezing her shoulders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JUNE 21, 2009, 7:00 P.M.
After spending most of the day doing my assignments and covering for Kendrick so she could stay with Emily, I wasn’t able to look for Holly until evening. I checked the NYU library for Holly like Stewart had suggested. I saw the back of her head
as soon as I entered the section where she always sat, according to the reports. But Agent Carter’s voice stopped me before I could get any closer. I pulled my baseball cap farther down over my eyes and dove behind a shelf.
My phone vibrated and I quickly read the text from Stewart: Is she there?
Yeah, but so is Carter.
Damn. Take him out if you can. Only if he’s alone.
Stewart texted me seconds later, before I had a chance to reply to the last message: I’ll head your way now. Let me know if Carter leaves the building and I’ll take care of him.
“You’ve got two strikes, Flynn … don’t screw up tonight,” Carter said.
Tonight? What was happening tonight? Another mission?
“I’ve got the computer robot dude monitoring me. I don’t see why you need to be here,” Holly snapped.
I peered through the tiny space between the top of the books and the shelf. Holly had a laptop open in front of her and books and papers strewn all over the entire six-person table. She and Carter had their backs to me, his chair right next to Holly’s. “And I heard you got a D on your last calculus exam. If you’re really nice to me, maybe I’ll tutor you.”
I had to fight off the disgusted groan I so badly wanted to let out.
“I’m only allowed to sleep three hours a night. How do you expect me to pass any test?”
I sent another text to Stewart: Have you ever done sleep-deprivation training?
Yeah. It’s hell.
Agent Carter leaned closer and Holly’s entire body stiffened. The reaction didn’t just make me angry, this time … it worried me. A lot. Agent Collins had warned me life would be bad for her, but Stewart hadn’t said anything about Carter this morning.
This must be what she had been keeping from me.
Holly furiously typed something on her computer and then turned back to the notebook in front of her.
“I’ll tell you what, Flynn,” Carter said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “You do something for me, and I’ll let you off for the night.”