Death Thieves

by Julie Wright

  After a few more minutes of conversing, I figured Jay, with his conspiracy theory mind, could be friends with someone like me. If I ever decided to ditch the future, I’d ask if he wanted to come with me.

  We ate, talked, and were joined by several others. An eighteen-year-old girl, named Mita Sarin, had been in a biking accident in India. She was stunningly beautiful but still looked incredibly shaken over her day’s events. A twenty-year-old guy named Henry Woodard from London had been hit by a train while listening to his MP3 player. He seemed relieved and relaxed to be involved in an option that had nothing to do with a train. Apparently, a couple of the teens in the room had been the victims of actual kidnappers—people who had taken them to hurt them and kill them. All of those were grateful to the soldiers who’d saved them, grateful to be anywhere but where they’d been, grateful to Professor Raik for giving them a second chance to live.

  There were a few more hiking incidents, a few drownings, a few bombings, many car accidents, motorcycle accidents, and fires. There was even one guy who said he’d been killed in a bowling accident. I didn’t bother to ask him what such a death might actually entail.

  These were only the ones around me. There were a lot of people I didn’t talk to, a lot of stories I didn’t know. But I felt torn with every new story.

  Most of the people praised Professor Raik for being life and salvation. Others were too traumatized from the day’s events to make any judgment, and a very small minority seemed genuinely ticked off to be where they were.

  “How many of us are there?” Jay asked. Once he put the numbers to how long we’d all be waiting for the professor to talk to each of us, everyone in our circle let out a collective groan.

  Kathleen tapped my shoulder. “Miss Rae. Professor Raik will see you now.”

  I stood, met Jay’s eyes, and found courage there. I took a deep breath and followed Kathleen out of the room.

  She led me down the hall to a plush office filled with extravagant woodwork and lots of oil paintings. I recognized a few paintings and figured they must be copies, since the originals were supposed to be in museums. Professor Raik sat behind a large, imposing desk, his hands folded neatly in front of him. When I fully entered the room and Kathleen closed the door, leaving me alone with him, he stood and extended his hand.

  Even more cautiously than I had with Jay, I took his hand and shook it.

  “Miss Rae. It’s a delight to meet you. The reports of you were excellent. Excellent,” he repeated, and then pulled his chair in under him as he sat. “Please be seated.” His arm waved toward the chair next to me. I sat down.

  “Did you not find your new wardrobe to your liking?”

  “It’s fine, I guess. I’m just comfortable this way.” I picked at the loose threads in the knees of my jeans. When he noticed, I forced my hands to sit still in my lap.

  “You experienced a lapse in time from the moment you were taken from your time and the moment you arrived here. I’d like to hear about your travels in the interim between times.” He settled back, his hands clasped together once again on the desk in front of him.

  What if Tag told them something different from what happened? How would I know? If they hadn’t already killed him, they might after I say something stupid. My heart pounded so hard, I was sure if I looked down, I’d see the thump against Winter’s shirt. “I’m sure Tag can tell you better than I could. He’s a lot smarter than I am.”

  “That’s not true at all. Yes, Taggert is intelligent, but we know you are also very intelligent, more so in many ways. You are the elite. Taggert is only a soldier. Naturally, your viewpoint is valued differently.” He emphasized Tag’s full name, insinuating that my shortened version, Tag, might be too familiar and therefore inappropriate. And Professor Raik may as well have said outright that a soldier was of far less importance than a pure-blooded student from the past.

  “The weather was bad.” I tried to remember what Tag had told the general with the red hair, and remembered how Tag had refused to say anything at all to the driver. Tag had said he would only give information to the professor, yet he had given information to the general, too. I wondered if he did that on purpose just so I could hear, just so our stories were the same. “The Orbital didn’t work right because of the weather, and we ended up in the middle of the Rainier volcano explosion. It was a mess! Tag saved my life for the second time when he got us out of there. The Orbital wasn’t working at all then. I thought we were really going to die, but Tag made it work.” I used the name Tag as much on purpose as Professor Raik had used Taggert. It was the only power struggle I dared to engage myself in with this man.

  “What happened then?” Professor Raik didn’t blink, didn’t move. A fly could have landed on his nose and the professor would likely not have noticed it.

  “We ended up in another time—sometime in the future. The Orbital still didn’t work and we were hungry and tired. Tag took care of me. He found us a place to lie low and get rest and food while he figured out the problem with the Orbital. As soon as he fixed it, we jumped here.” I nodded, more to myself than to him, thinking surely I said nothing too incriminating. Surely my story had to match Tag’s enough to clear him of anything wrong.

  “Did you get to know Taggert very well?” He no longer put the emphasis on the name, likely thinking I was too dumb to take the hint.

  “No. He never would talk about himself.” That bit of truth bugged me. He hadn’t ever talked about anything personal. He never gave any hint as to the person he really might be, except for acknowledging that he’d cried while reading A Sliver of Midnight.

  “But you like him.”

  “I respect him.”

  The professor mulled that over before saying, “So if you didn’t talk or discuss things, what did you do to pass the time?” Professor Raik now leaned back in his big chair as though merely curious. But his eyes sharpened, and fear shivered through me.

  “The house had a library. We read books.”

  This information took him off guard. “Books?”

  “Yes. We read books.” I smiled—or tried to. My nerves were so strung out; the smile might have looked more like a wince.

  Professor Raik cleared his throat. “I see. Well then, good. A packet for you will arrive at your dorm room tomorrow. It will list classes that are available, so you can enroll in the university. We expect great things from you and your fellow students. You will have two days to acclimate and get the enrollment forms filled out. School will start Monday.”

  I waited. He seemed done with me, but I waited. Where was my ring? Surely he’d give me a ring. Everyone else had come back with one.

  “That will be all, Miss Rae.” He pushed up off the desk to a standing position and smiled his running-for-congressman smile. “A pleasure to meet you.” He shook my hand again as he ushered me to the door.

  I stopped at the door, thinking fast, trying to stall for time in case he’d forgotten that one important part of this meeting. “But sir? What day is today? If classes start Monday, what day is today?”

  “Today is Friday,” he answered.

  “Oh. Okay then. Thanks.” I hesitated, but couldn’t think of anything else to say. Frustrated and uncertain what to do next, I grabbed the door handle wondering if it would open for me even if I didn’t have the ring. My bedroom door opened, so it might.

  “One more thing Miss Rae.” Professor Raik turned and went behind his desk.

  I tried to contain my desperation for whatever he might be getting. It was so important that he not know I anticipated anything, suspected anything, or planned anything. I’d decided no one could read my mind. If they could, I’d be in jail already.

  “It’s a gift from the Amerio regent to welcome you to the future.” He held out a small wooden box on the palm of his hand.

  “Amerio?”

  “The regent running our continent.”

  “Oh.” I reached for the box, working hard to keep my hands from trembling. “What is it?” I hop
ed the question sounded innocent enough.

  “Open it.”

  I did as instructed. “Oh. It’s a ring.” I hoped I sounded surprised.

  “Yes. Put it on.”

  I did as instructed and then examined it on my hand. I put it on my wedding band finger like Tag had worn his. Professor Raik didn’t say that it mattered what hand I wore it on, but it fit best there anyway.

  “It’s an identification ring, or an IDR. Blood samples were collected from you, and your genetic code was fused with the ring. You cannot use another’s ring because it only functions when in contact with the living DNA it’s fused with. It’s a means of communication, identification, entertainment, it is our monetary system. If you enter a store, you need not burden yourself with a purse, or a pocket full of clunky coin and paper. Your financial accounts are tied to your IDR. Shortly, we will give instructions on how things work here. The ring will be better explained then.”

  “It sounds complicated. I’m glad we’ll get some instructions. Thank you.” I smiled and left the room, careful to shut the door behind me. My smile dropped as soon as the door clicked closed.

  What he hadn’t said interested me more than the things he had. It occurred to me that the ring would be traceable. If a door opened for me with the ring, then it stood to reason there would be a log kept of that door opening. By giving us the rings, they would be able to track us, keep tabs on our comings and goings. The ring was like an invisible leash on a dog.

  Stupid! And here I’d been thinking the ring would grant me freedom. Where was my brain? I glared at the ring, even the fact that it was possibly the most beautiful piece of jewelry I’d ever seen, I wanted to throw it out the window. Tiny suns and moons chased one another around the wide band.

  “All the scroll work and pictures are encoded with data. So it’s functional as well as beautiful.”

  Startled, I looked up to see Kathleen who’d come to collect me and escort me back. “Is everyone’s designed differently?” I asked. “How would they know what size to get?”

  “While the soldier collected data on you, he sent it back to be processed. They knew the symbols you felt connected to and tried to emulate them on your ring. Personalized IDRs are very expensive, and Professor Raik and the regents wanted you to have the best.” She started walking behind me, herding me forward.

  I didn’t like having been spied on but appreciated how closely the suns and moons on the ring matched those on the quilts that belonged to Winter and me. Tag must have known how much I would miss them and, in his own way, tried to recreate them for me.

  The rest of the day offered no time to escape or plan for escape. Though Professor Raik’s time spent with each student became markedly shorter—less than a minute in some cases, it still took forever. After half of us had received our rings, they sent us to the auditorium. The other half was taken to a day spa of sorts, which gave pedicures, manicures, massages, and had steam rooms. They were much more comfortable while awaiting their rings that way. Eventually, we switched places with them, and we got the royal treatment while they learned about their new world.

  For all of Professor Raik’s understanding that we needed time to rest and mourn, he hardly gave us time to breathe. We were tossed from one seminar to another, learning about the technology of the future, learning we each had what they called lapdesks in our rooms to do our homework on. They didn’t mention implanting hard drives into our brains, but they likely would sometime later, after we’d acclimated to our new environment. Jay stayed close the whole day. So did Alison and a guy named Eddie, who seemed to have taken a liking to me throughout the afternoon.

  After the spa treatments and the seminars, we had dinner. The dining hall was set up like a fancy five-star restaurant in that the room was filled with round tables and real cloth tablecloths. But it also had a buffet-style line for us to go through so we could pick out our food from pretty silver trays. Then we could seat ourselves at the various tables.

  By the time the people in charge left us to ourselves, I was exhausted and unable to think well enough to devise a plan out of the building.

  The next day, the packets arrived for Alison and me. The packets were not at all what I’d expected. We each received a slip of paper with a code that granted us access to the lapdesks, which were run by the pulse power from our brains and rings. The actual “packet” of information had to be accessed from their internal servers. Everything was digital as far as the “paperwork” they wanted us to fill out.

  The lapdesks weren’t portable like the laptop from my time. They were permanent fixtures of my room. The portable computer came from the ring, which could be projected to any surface or viewed through a fancy set of glasses Professor Raik gave us.

  I chose the classes, ate the meals, attended the lectures, and felt frazzled by the fact that I was kept so busy, I couldn’t focus on how to check on Tag. I could come back and be the dutiful student as soon as I knew he was okay. I kept thinking about the words that the general had said, “has been silenced.”

  In what ways could they have silenced Tag?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Three days later, I still had no clue how to get time to myself, and no clue how to beat out the IDR and entry sensors on every building in the world. Inoculations had been nightmarish. They sent us down an assembly line of nurses who held tools that looked like Paul’s nail gun. Each nurse slammed the gun into our biceps, forcing dissolvable needles and random cures to diseases I hadn’t even heard of into our flesh. The nurses called the needles inserts. They said that it worked the same as a regular needle from our times, but that these were far more sanitary. I left the assembly line with a ridge of inserts under my skin that the nurses promised would be gone by morning. It hurt a lot.

  Monday morning found me with no ridge on my bicep and rushing along with everyone else trying to find the room for my first hour of university in the future.

  “We should go to the library.” Jay suggested this during lunch. We had two more classes after lunch and then several hours to ourselves before dinner. The library! And a few hours that belonged to me. Tag had said he lived behind the Coliseum Library. I might be able to get close enough to the barracks to find out what happened to him.

  I readily agreed to go with Jay, and Eddie readily agreed to accompany us. Eddie frowned at Jay as though somehow Jay was trying to ease in on Eddie’s territory. Eddie’s attitude irritated me.

  “I’m not your girlfriend,” I told him as we walked along the garden tunnels, which I had learned were officially called the sky gardens. Jay snickered. Eddie glared over at Jay and acted offended I’d suggest that he thought anything different.

  “Of course you aren’t. We haven’t even been on a date yet.” He stretched his neck as though his collar might be too tight.

  Jay coughed into his hand and smirked at me with an eyebrow raised.

  Eddie was from the year 1962. He’d been about to go off to Vietnam and found he’d been too afraid. So he’d shot himself instead. He’d meant to shoot himself in the foot or something like that, nothing that would kill him, but with his inexperience with guns, he made a mess of his face instead. Eddie had a habit of looking at himself in mirrors as we walked by them. I wondered if he was doing it to verify to himself that his face really was just fine. He hadn’t actually volunteered the information about dodging the draft to anyone but his roommate, James. James had been the one to gladly share that information with everyone else.

  Once we were out several buildings away from the dormitories, Jay took a deep breath and grinned. “Smell that, guys?”

  “Smell what?” Eddie asked with a bite to his words, obviously still not happy over Jay laughing at him.

  “Freedom.” Jay turned his grin on me. “What do you think, Summer?”

  A tightening in my shoulders seemed to ease the farther we moved from the dormitories. “Definitely freedom.” I had almost become used to the way the ground felt as though it swayed under my feet.
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br />   “Did you know the city sells the produce in these sky gardens to the restaurants and grocery stores? They take the profit and do, well, who knows what the government does with profits from anything. I think we should try one of those restaurants out. We should see if the government is any good at farming.” Jay seemed to be the type of person who wanted to try everything.

  I wanted to argue. The urgency to find Tag, to make sure he was okay overwhelmed me, but would my hesitance look suspicious? Besides, Jay’s idea had merit. It might be smart to figure out the workings of the world we now lived in. “They did say in our packets we had a spending account. We could get a fruit bowl or a salad or something. Well, you can get the healthy stuff they call produce, Jay. I want a doughnut.” I agreed.

  Jay wrapped an arm around my shoulder and rubbed his knuckles on my head. “Exactly. If anyone asks, we can tell them we’re doing research.”

  Jay and I turned right, and started walking toward where we knew shops would be. Eddie stayed exactly where he was. “What about the library?” He called from behind us. His voice had an annoying whine to it. Both Jay and I grunted at the noise.

  “C’mon, Ed. We’re still heading in the direction of the library. We just want to make a stop or two along the way.” We kept walking. If Eddie wanted to come with us, he could catch up.

  Figuring out my spending account was almost as important as finding out what had happened to Tag. Figure out the system. That had always been my way. Tag had mentioned I wouldn’t have to figure out the system anymore—that I wouldn’t have to cheat it anymore, but old habits die hard. Having Jay with me made it seem less like outright mutiny on my part and more like a prank.

  We found a grocery store and went in. I held my breath as I waited to see if the door turned green or red with my approach. The green glow appearing around the door frame actually startled me. Jay’s grin widened.

  “Good to know that works,” he muttered under his breath.

  Eddie scowled as we went in. The people we passed cast startled looks at us. We definitely stood out with our naturally colored hair. A few girls in the New Youth wanted to dye their hair and enjoy the style of the future. A few guys wanted advertisement tattoos, but we were told we needed to keep ourselves separate from the others. Dyed hair and tattoos were strictly off limits to us.