Tomorrow

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  I didn’t once turn my mind to Kinnari in Chicago with Latham. I had no idea anything had gone wrong until I woke up to the sight of my sister staring at me from a spot right next to my window.

  Early morning light was wafting into my room, but I thought I must have been dreaming. Her eyes didn’t look right. They were cold and barren, like Seneval’s had been at the end.

  “I’m sorry,” Kinnari said, bursting into tears. “I shouldn’t be near you. I just came to say goodbye.”

  “What’re you talking about?” It wasn’t a dream after all. My sister was unravelling in front of me. I’d never seen her look this upset, not even when we’d lost June.

  “I have something,” she cried, backing away from me. “There was an outbreak at the concert. People acting in ways I’ve never seen.”

  I sat up fast. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive.” Kinnari had begun to giggle. She scratched at the side of her face so harshly that her nails left two jagged red lines at her temple. “I’m sorry.” She bit back her breath with a gasp. “It’s hard to control. I can feel the sickness squirming inside me.” She distanced herself further, her heels squeaking on my floor. “They quarantined the entire state of Illinois. They’re going to try to kill everyone to make this go away.”

  “They won’t do that,” I argued. “The scientists will cure you.”

  “No, no.” Kinnari laughed manically. The sound sent a shiver down the back of my neck. “You don’t understand. If it wasn’t for Latham, the Ros would have us now.”

  “Just to treat you. Not to hurt you.” She was acting completely irrationally and I needed to calm her down. Besides, I never thought the government would take it that far. The Denver terrorist deaths were an anomaly; them aside, the scientists had had the terrorist-engineered Mossegrim virus under control for years. Even the newest strains could usually be cured if the virus was detected within the first forty-eight hours. Whatever Kinnari had, reason told me there was a fair chance the scientists could heal her.

  “No, no, you’re not listening,” Kinnari hissed. “They’d be chopping us up into tiny pieces if they had their way and maybe they’d be right.”

  “Have you talked to Rosine and Bening?” I slowed my words to counter her panic.

  Kinnari shook her head with an abandon that sent her hair twirling in multiple directions. “You do it for me. Tell them I’m sorry!” She ran out the door and into the hall, me bounding out of bed to chase after her.

  “I’m sorry,” she kept screaming. “I’m sorry.”

  And none of it was her fault. All she’d done was go to Chicago to see a concert.

  I knew I’d be able to catch her. I had longer legs and on top of that, she was sick. But Kinnari made it easy for me when she flipped on the stairs, landing in an awkward arrangement of her own limbs on the first floor. She winced and cradled her hand like it’d been broken or sprained. As I caught up with her she shoved her face towards the hardwood floor. “Don’t get close,” she shouted.

  I heard footsteps charging down after us. The commotion must have woken Rosine and Bening.

  “Stay away from her!” I yelled, twice as loud as Kinnari had been. I hadn’t listened when she’d said it to me, but now that my mothers were at risk, I needed to keep them safe. “She’s infected with something. She was at the Hendris concert in Chicago. The terrorists must have released a new virus.”

  Rosine tried to edge past me but I held her back. “We can’t, Mom. We don’t know what she has. It’s not safe.”

  “He’s right,” Bening said. “Kinnari, honey. I’m going to get in contact with some people who will help.”

  “No one can help,” Kinnari said into the floor, her voice guttural and strained. “It’s got me and it won’t let go.”

  “That’s just the virus playing tricks with you, honey,” Bening said, stepping down to stand beside me but keeping her distance from my sister. “Don’t listen to it. You fight, okay? Don’t let it tell you what to think.” Maybe inwardly Bening was in a state of panic, but you’d never have guessed it. Outwardly, calm always prevailed. She wouldn’t have known anything about the nature of the virus yet—how it would spread at light speed, how the scientists wouldn’t find a cure fast enough and the government would be forced to kill its own infected citizens to stop the plague’s transmission—but she was already making pronouncements like she was a bona fide expert.

  “Okay,” Bening continued soothingly, “this is what we’re going to do, Kinnari. You try to get up for us if you can, but don’t run. If you run we’ll have to chase you and you know what could happen if we get too close. We could get sick too.”

  “I know,” Kinnari choked out. “I’m sorry.”

  Rosine’s eyes were red-rimmed. “It’s okay,” she chimed in. “We’re all going to be fine. Just listen to what Bening tells you.”

  “Right.” Bening laced her fingers and squeezed. “Kinnari, you stand up slowly for us and walk a couple of paces into the hall. Then we’ll file past you so that you can turn around and go up to your room.”

  Kinnari whimpered. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the virus or her aching hand. It was painful to watch my sister struggle to her feet and shuffle away from us. Bening grabbed my shoulder and pulled me towards her. The three of us forged a wide path around my sister, whose limp hair was hanging in her face, her injured hand held out delicately in front of her.

  A low, moaning laugh slithered from her mouth. In the past there would have been people who’d described the sound as unholy.

  “That’s perfect,” Bening praised. “Now you go to your room and lie down, all right?”

  Kinnari raised her head, her eyes landing squarely on mine. There were beads of sweat on her forehead I hadn’t noticed when she’d been talking to me in my room. Fever setting in. “I’m glad you didn’t come with us,” she said, lucid for a moment. With that, she passed out, knocking her head on the floor underneath our feet.

  I automatically bent to pick her up. Bening yanked me back so hard that my elbow thumped against the floor just like Kinnari’s head had seconds earlier. It was Bening, too, that sent for an on-call domestic Ro to move my sister upstairs. When Kinnari woke up later she was worse, and the biologists Bening conferred with had dire news. Two biological weapons had coupled to create a bastard son, a catastrophic plague that could wipe out most of the U.N.A.’s population. The sickness was rampaging through the streets, changing the infected into people we didn’t recognize. There was no cure in sight and nothing we could do for my sister.

  The knowledge emptied me out. We were going to lose her.

  I stayed home from school, venturing back and forth to Kinnari’s room to stare at her from my side of the force field, my blood running cold at the sight of her. I didn’t understand it then, but now I realize that Kinnari’s apology wasn’t for what she’d done—it was for the horrific things she knew she could soon be capable of. The nightmare creature that she’d turn into. Beyond psychotic, beyond anything you’d want to think about.

  I don’t want to think about the specifics now, either. How she curled up in the corner of her room, scratching the skin from her arms when she thought we weren’t watching, and how she charged the force field to try to reach us when she saw that we were. How my mothers couldn’t get another dog license after June was taken and had bought my sister a bird instead. How no one had thought to ask the domestic Ro to take the bird out of Kinnari’s room until it was too late and she’d crushed its tiny head and yanked off both its pretty yellow-and-blue wings.

  My sister slipped away from us while in plain sight, her heart still pumping blood and her mind seething. I mourned Kinnari even as she lived, my loss just one of millions. Across the nation, Toxo was swallowing us one by one, tearing families and cities apart, pulling them under and trampling them into bone. The government had no choice except to take grave action. They could order the infected put down or ultimately watch us all die, the U.N.A. drowning in plague.r />
  The solution made me sick. But it was the sole solution. Like amputating a gangrene limb to save the rest of the patient.

  The past doesn’t want to let go, but the future demands to be born. Only sacrificing what had already been lost would save tomorrow. No one should have to face such miseries, but the next day the SecRos came for my sister like they’d begun to come for everyone who was sick with Toxo. A part of me died that day. But neither my mothers nor I tried to stop the Ros. We knew it was already too late. There are things you can’t stop, and things you can.

  The last thing I remember is Bening telling Rosine and me that the three of us were going to be evacuated. She didn’t say where we were heading and I didn’t ask. I was too broken to care.

  And soon, the entire time I’d known as home was history, and my sister and everyone else I’d known were history along with it.

  Ten: 1986

  “Where is she?” I ask, my hands on Minnow’s throat. “Where did they take her?”

  “Who?” he asks, struggling against me.

  “Freya Kallas. Where the fuck is she?” I crack his head off the sidewalk with enough force to make Minnow wince and stop struggling. Meanwhile, cars are sailing past in the street. I glance up at the flow of headlights, thinking that it will only take a single driver or passenger to report me. The police are probably already looking for me, anyway. We need to get away from the road.

  “Get up,” I command, jumping to my feet and forcing Minnow up with me. “Don’t try anything. I have a gun.”

  “You don’t need a gun to get me to talk to you,” Minnow says. But I keep pulling him along, searching out an alley to yank him down—somewhere I can take a few minutes to question him thoroughly. So far all of the dilapidated buildings around us line up shoulder to shoulder, dirty bricks meeting grungy cement.

  I know Isaac never gave me any reason to distrust him. He even helped me get out of Wyldewood so I wouldn’t be framed for Seneval’s murder. Or so he told me at the time. I don’t know what to believe now, except that Minnow’s presence in Vancouver can’t be a coincidence. His father’s David Bruck Monroe, one of the most powerful men in the U.N.A. And Minnow remembers me. He hasn’t been wiped. For all I know he’s the one who had Seneval killed and then pulled the necessary strings to get sent through the chute, away from the crime.

  “I have a room not far from here,” Minnow volunteers, his face more sad than afraid. “We can go there if you want.”

  “How can I trust you?” I ask, glimpsing a small parking lot across the road on my left. Half of the eight spots are filled. If we hunkered down beside one of the cars, it would be tough to see us from the street. “You could have a bunch of guys back at your place waiting to take me out.”

  “Nothing like that. I’m not with the people you’re talking about.”

  “That’s exactly what you would say, though, isn’t it?”

  “What is it these people have done to you and Freya?” Minnow sounds clueless but I’d be an idiot to take that at face value. In 2063, he made a habit of fooling people. The question is, was he ultimately tricking the warren, who seemed to have absolute faith in him, or was it the U.N.A. government he was faking out? “Why would they take Luca Kallas’s daughter?”

  I push Minnow into the street ahead of me when I see a break in the traffic. He doesn’t fight me; he’s anticipated where we’re going and walks willfully towards the parking lot. “I know you won’t believe me when I say this,” he says, “but it’s good to see you. Official records say you and your sister were infected with Toxo and euthanized.”

  “She was,” I admit. “They sent me back here.” On the other side of the road we stumble into the lot together. I pull Minnow around the passenger side of a black Pontiac. “Sit down,” I command. “Tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “Same as you.” Minnow kicks at a pebble as he settles himself on the pavement. “Surviving.”

  “Not the same as me. You knew who I was. Only the directors and the people working for them aren’t wiped and covered before they’re sent through the chute.”

  “Not if you came the way I did.” In the darkened lot I can’t read Minnow’s eyes. “If I really meant to run I could’ve disappeared already. I’m not your enemy.”

  I don’t know that. “You’re the only thing I have right now. I’ll do anything to find her.”

  Minnow stares at the moving shadows on the wall across from us created by the car lights on Powell Street. “It’s a dangerous way to feel.”

  I’m crouching, balancing on my toes and ready to make a move at any second. “If you want me to believe you, start talking. This is taking too long.”

  He pulls up his hood and rubs his mouth. “I’ll tell you what I know if you do the same.” I nod in agreement. “Some time back, the warren received a communication from a group of people who had travelled through the chute in 2071.”

  “When was this—the communication?”

  “The first was in September 2063. Just after Toxo hit.”

  “Just before you arrived here, you mean?” I keep my hand on the zip of my duffle bag, in case he decides to run after all. It wouldn’t help me to shoot Isaac dead but I have no issue with aiming for one of his arms or legs.

  “No, no. I only arrived a few days ago.”

  I feel the ground disappear beneath my feet for the second time today. Minnow just came from the future. He knows the outcome of Toxo. Maybe he knows what happened to Bening too.

  “You were just…just there—the U.N.A?” I stammer. “What year was it when you left?”

  “2065. January first.”

  I motion with my hands. “Tell me—the communication.” He needs to talk faster. I have to hear this, but Freya’s still missing.

  As Minnow clears his throat a burning craving for a cigarette blasts through my cells. Even a couple of drags would help me concentrate.

  “The communication came through at the very top levels of the warren,” he explains. “It’d taken this group a very long time to work around gushi defences.” The U.N.A. ran gushi like a fortress. No civilians from outside the country’s borders could communicate with anyone inside them. “They’d hoped to get through to us before the Toxo outbreak, but failed. Their larger warning, though, was about the time they originally came from. They said on September 19, 2071, a group of Doomsday cultists in France gained control of the country and its arsenal, firing nuclear warheads at the U.N.A., China, Russia, and then at themselves.”

  Nuclear destruction. That’s what everyone in the U.N.A. feared for a long time. It’s what even the people of 1986 fear. And still it feels like a shock to hear Minnow say it. That’s how the world ends: We poison ourselves with a rain of bombs.

  “The first U.N.A. bomb was shot down by DefRos off the coast of New York,” Isaac continues. “But there were many others on the way. Warnings went out to key government and defence personnel. Up North, in Lake Nipigon, your mother and her team were ordered to retreat to the underground shelter that had been built there decades earlier.”

  “My mother?” I repeat urgently. Bening. “She survived the Toxo?” After Freya and I found out the truth about our identities, it was clear that Bening must have been one of the main scientists secretly researching the chute. That would’ve made her indispensable to the U.N.A., like Luca Kallas was. It would’ve given Bening the pull to have me sent back in time, saving me from Toxo. She could never have guessed that I’d remember my real identity and be hunted for it.

  Minnow nods. “I saw her just before I came back. She was one of the people who sent me through the chute. She relocated to Northern Ontario permanently after you and the rest of your family had supposedly succumbed to the plague, and it seems that in 2071 she was still there.” Isaac pats the back of his head, probably feeling a growing bump from the whack I’m already starting to regret. “Your mother and her team made their own local broadcast informing people in the area of what would be catastrophic radiation levels once th
e bombs dropped, and urging them to come to the Nipigon shelter. Because their remote area wasn’t a primary target, Nipigon had more time to evacuate than lots of other areas. Your mother and her team went out in rescue choppers searching for families they could save. And they did save people. Probably quite a few at the shelter, but they sent families with children through the chute. The survivors came through in Western Australia on February 9, 1993, most of them settling permanently in New Zealand.”

  I’m not surprised to hear of Bening saving so many people. It was like she was just waiting for the moment when she could make the greatest difference. Now she has. For a moment or two my stomach puffs up with pride.

  But Minnow hasn’t finished yet. “The survivors who communicated with the warren were only children when they were sent through the chute,” he says. “They said they’d hoped this time things would be different, but as they saw event after event, including the Toxo virus, unfold in the same way it had before, they felt they had to warn us.”

  It’s such a wild story that I can’t doubt him. People tumbling through time, from a point in the future that even I haven’t seen yet, in the hopes of avoiding disaster. Insane. It makes me feel like a speck of dust caught in the wind. “But I still don’t understand what you’re doing here,” I say. “How can you stop a 2071 nuclear disaster from 1986?”

  The rain’s getting heavier, trickling down my forehead and my neck. I slick my hair back and listen to Minnow reply, “Not prevent. The causes of the attack are too many and convoluted for that.” He pauses, scraping his shoe along the pavement. “Our plan was to evacuate as many people as possible. It took us over a year to get key people into place in the Nipigon facility. The warren have undercover people in various government sectors but the chute was top secret. We knew they were hiding something big but we didn’t know how big until the 2071 survivors got word to us. They didn’t trust the government who would’ve left them to die the first time around, and so they came to us. When everyone was in position we forced your mother and her team to begin sending people back.”