Loop

by Karen Akins

  “Obviously,” Charlotte went on, completely oblivious to my meltdown, “we haven’t told Finn and Georgie about their father’s ability yet. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t either.”

  Seriously? I mean, it wasn’t my place to judge. When I was eight, my mom had picked up a bunch of pamphlets at the doctor’s office (“So You Think You Might Be Time-Traveling?”) and laid them on my bed. That was her way of having the talk. Even though I knew … what to expect, it threw me for a loop. I was an early bloomer. At eleven, the blinkies started, little micro-Shifts a few seconds and minutes back before synching up to real time. After three days straight of me complaining of wicked déjà vu, Mom clued up and took me to get microchipped. But then again, by my time Shifters hadn’t had to conceal their identities for almost half a century. Maybe keeping your kids in the dark was normal in their time.

  Hard to know anything that was normal for Shifters this far back. It wasn’t like we could ask them.

  “When are you from?” asked Charlotte, as if she were inquiring about the weather.

  “I … I’d rather not say.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. John and I have been married almost twenty years. I’m the model of discretion.”

  I shook my head. Charlotte didn’t press further.

  My mission timer beeped, one hour. A fresh wave of panic crashed over me. I had one goal now. Finish this midterm and finish it fast. No red flags in my report, and I’d be in good shape to do a different delivery for Leto on my next assignment.

  “Do you come to the twenty-first century often? You’re always welcome here.” Charlotte pointed up at the lights.

  “Umm, no.” I glanced at the door. I had to get out.

  She must have thought I was looking at the Haven Beacon. She flicked it on and off a few times in an absentminded way. “Not even sure why we keep this thing around—more sentimental than anything. John’s gotten out of a few sticky jams thanks to the Haven. But I’m surprised you even knew what it was.”

  “Pre-Schrödinger Elements of Shifting,” I said without even thinking. Apparently, I was on track to throw out every Rule of Shifting on this trip.

  All of her light flicking had started to give me a headache, which was soothing in an odd way, since my head typically throbbed by this point in a mission. The lack of Buzz still disturbed me. It was weird enough on its own but combined with all the other inexplicable elements of this mission. Of all missions.

  Charlotte’s voice turned wistful: “I’ve always wondered if—” But I didn’t get to find out what she’d always wondered. A door on the other side of the house banged open. A few seconds later Finn stomped into the living room. Georgie trailed at his heels talking eighty light-years a minute.

  “So when she sat down next to you on the bus, did she gloss over the fact that she had a weapon?” Georgie snorted in laughter. “Oh, oh. Or did she make up a bunch of lies about where she was keeping it? Did you catch that one? It was subtle. Makeup. Wait, wait, I have one more.”

  “Georgie.” Charlotte shot her a warning glance. “Why don’t you put away the groceries while I start dinner? And, Finn, you can help Bree with whatever it is she needs to do.”

  “You want me to what?” he said.

  “Go and help Bree.”

  “Help her do what?” Finn asked. He, Charlotte, and Georgie stared at me, waiting.

  I shook my head. No help. But then my QuantCom let out a shrill chime. I’d lost five more minutes. And it was getting dark outside. I didn’t have a choice. This was their property. They’d know where it was.

  “I need to lay something on top of Muffy van Sloot’s grave.”

  It was like I’d nominated Finn to run for Governor of the Moon, the looks they all gave me.

  Charlotte regained her composure. “Did you say ‘Muffy’?”

  Georgie lost it. “What the bleep is a Sloot?”

  “I told you she was psycho,” said Finn.

  chapter 3

  TEN MINUTES OF BRIBES, dirty looks, and death threats later, Charlotte shoved Finn out the back door behind me, flashlight in his hand.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he said, shining the light down their deck steps leading to the small cove. Even though none of them had heard of Muffy van Sloot, Finn would help me look for her grave anyway.

  Sand and wiry sea grass surrounded us on all sides. A chorus of cicadas crescendoed to a hissing roar, then dropped to a whisper. In the twilight, every shadow could have been a grave marker. A disinterested brush of Finn’s flashlight beam revealed each of them to be nothing more than a large stone or piece of driftwood. The only bones I found were brittle little fish ones. If anything, my increasingly frenzied and fruitless search seemed to amuse my tour guide.

  After circling the cove twice, I gave up. Dusk had descended like a curtain, and I was forced to admit it was an improbable spot for a grave, be it human or feline. I would have killed to use my flashlight, but somehow bathing the cove in a sun-grade spotlight didn’t seem prudent.

  “Satisfied? Because I’m starving.” Finn started walking several feet in front of me.

  There was no way that kid could be more annoying.

  I turned my attention back to the task at hand, pulling the mission package out of my pocket and loosening the seal. I didn’t normally look at deliverables early. Then again, nothing about this mission had been normal. Maybe the package could give me a clue about the grave’s location.

  “What’s that?” asked Finn.

  “Nothing to concern you. Can I borrow your light?”

  “Yes, but wouldn’t that make it concern me?”

  “Fine. Just hand it over.”

  He tossed it to me, and I opened the box, then dumped the contents into my hand.

  “Rocks,” we both said at the same time.

  “Wait, so we’re looking for a grave for you to put rocks on?”

  I leaned in for a closer look. Maybe they were gemstones or precious metal. Nope. Garden-variety colored pebbles, like the ones in my fish tank at home. This was hopeless. Nothing about this assignment made sense. And yet my future hung on it.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “That makes two of us.” Finn snatched the flashlight and pointed it toward the house. “Can we go get dinner now?”

  I followed behind him like a forlorn lemming, still clutching the rocks in my hand, more confused than ever. With every blip of the mission timer, my chances of completing the assignment diminished, but I couldn’t see anything at that point. Continuing the search was pointless. I’d run out of time to contact Leto’s buyer.

  Almost every light in the Mastersons’ house was on. The back of their home was all glass, and from a distance it looked like a sliced-open dollhouse, its contents laid out for all to see. Georgie was up in her bedroom bouncing around with earphones on. Charlotte flitted from cupboard to oven in the kitchen.

  On the bottom level of the deck, Finn stopped. He leaned against the railing and removed his shoes to shake the sand out. I did the same. A new motion in the house distracted me, and I looked up in time to see a tall man with graying dusty brown hair enter the living room from the front door.

  “Oh. Good. Dad’s home.” The words came out of Finn’s mouth, but no joy accompanied them.

  I stood on my tiptoes to get a better look at John. So this was the Shifter. Finn started up the stairs, but I didn’t follow. Up to this point, my actions were defensible. (Well, maybe not the gun thing.) If I went back into that house, there would be no pretense at that point. I was curious, yes, but it wasn’t worth breaking The Rule. If Institute officials found out, they’d come back to question John about our interaction and he’d tell them about the hostage thing. My every mission after this would be under close scrutiny. There was no way Leto would ever hire me to do another delivery. It wasn’t just my mother’s bills that needed paying. There was my tuition. Our house. I could lose everything.

  Then again, I’d never get another chance like this. To tal
k to an actual Shifter.

  No! What the blark was I saying? I couldn’t go in there, and that was that.

  Charlotte must have heard her husband’s entrance at the same time Finn and I saw it. She turned the stove off and tossed her spoon in the sink. I looked away, not wanting to witness some passionate private moment between the couple. But Finn just tilted his head to the side.

  “Bing, bing, bing,” he said drily. “Round one.”

  I looked up and could see what he meant. Far from a loving embrace, Charlotte was laying into her husband. Her words weren’t audible, but the angry tone was. She pointed this way and that, toward the cove, the foyer. At one point, I swore I lip-read the words “Haven Beacon.”

  “I’ll just stay out here and keep looking,” I said. “It looks like your parents could use some space.”

  Finn shrugged. “They’ll stop when we go in. Always do. Usually, they shut themselves off in their bedroom. Mom must be especially POed for some reason.”

  “They fight … often?”

  “I think my dad’s having an affair,” said Finn matter-of-factly.

  His frankness took me aback, to suspect his dad of something so reprehensible. My mom and I had always shot straight with each other. She never sugarcoated anything—the sad state of our teensy bank account, exactly what she thought of my bikini choice, why it was only the two of us. And I’d told her everything, too, before the accident. Sometimes, even now, I would press my lips to her unhearing ears and whisper the silly nothings that she collected like a magpie.

  “What would make you think—?”

  “He’s always gone,” Finn said. “Always brings Mom expensive gifts—all that artwork—after he’s gone the longest chunks of time. He uses his surgery schedule as an excuse, but I don’t buy it.” He dug the toe of his sneaker into the crack between the deck’s planks.

  “That doesn’t mean he’s having an affair.”

  “Two months ago, I walked in on one of their arguments, and Dad was saying something about, ‘We have to tell the children. They deserve to know the truth about me.’ And Mom was all, ‘They’re too young; let them have their innocence.’ Any other ideas what that could mean?” His stare dared me to refute his theory, and when I met him with silence he said, “Didn’t think so.”

  “Maybe it’s not what you think,” I said. “There could be a simple explanation.”

  Okay, maybe not that simple.

  Back inside the house, Charlotte planted her hands on her hips. She stamped her foot and ran her fingers through her hair.

  “We can go in soon. After she gets a few good stomps in, she loses steam.” He looked down at his watch, then back up at his parents. “I’d say give them another three minutes or—”

  But he didn’t finish his thought.

  Because his father had disappeared.

  Finn’s mom’s reaction was immediate. Charlotte clenched the air where her husband had been and stomped her foot so hard the heel broke off her pump. She grabbed the shoe and threw it across the room at the sofa. Then, with a dramatic huff, she tucked her hair behind her ears and hobbled back into the kitchen to resume cooking.

  Finn’s reaction was … delayed. His shoulders sagged. His unblinking eyes stared past me, past the house, past the world he thought he knew. Then, he staggered backward as if a great invisible hand had shoved him. A bucket of shells tripped him on the lowest step of the deck, and he landed in the sand with a thud.

  “Did you see that?” His shaky finger pointed at the empty living room.

  Hmmm. “That very much depends on what you saw.”

  “My dad just … just … evaporated.”

  “Okay, then, yes, unfortunately we did see the same thing.”

  I reached down to help Finn up, but rather than take my offered hand, he crab-crawled away from me across the beach. The abandoned flashlight fell at an angle that twisted his already-terror-filled face into something grotesque.

  “You know something!” he yelled.

  “Why don’t you go back to the house and—”

  “Where’s my father? What aren’t you telling me?” He moved farther back. “What are you, some kind of alien?”

  Now this was getting ridiculous. I hadn’t asked for this stupid mission. Some random person in the twenty-third century with a weird penchant for aquarium pebbles must have stuck his finger down on my name by chance, and I’d been assigned. But I hadn’t signed up for this. Finn wasn’t even the one who had anything to lose. My mother’s life depended on this.

  “Look, it’s not my fault your dad’s a Shift—”

  Double dang. I needed to keep my big mouth shut. I fingered my QuantCom and debated triggering an emergency fade right then and there. Let Finn think I was an extraterrestrial or abducted by one or whatever his brain wanted to come up with.

  “He’s a what?” Finn sat up on his knees and inched toward me. “What happened to him? You know.”

  “This is a conversation you should be having with your parents.” Like five years ago. “Not with some girl you just met.” Like five minutes ago.

  I turned toward the beach.

  Finn jumped up and grabbed me tight around my wrist. “I’m asking you.”

  My self-defense training kicked in before I could register what was going on. I twisted my arm around his, kicked his legs out from under him, and slammed him to the ground. His Adam’s apple bobbed against my fingers as they circled his throat. Finn didn’t even fight; he simply lay there, stunned.

  “Are you going to kill me?” he choked out.

  Enough. “We’re going to talk to your mother right now whether you like it or not.”

  I yanked him up and dragged him behind me like a limp doll. The house was dead quiet as we entered. I pushed Finn toward the kitchen. Charlotte looked up as I finally managed to shove him all the way through the swinging door.

  “Did you have any luck?” Charlotte asked with artificial brightness.

  “M-m-om,” stammered Finn, “what … what happened to Dad?”

  Charlotte threw the towel she held onto the counter, turning on me. “I can’t believe you told him!”

  “And I can’t believe you haven’t invested in curtains,” I snapped. “Finn saw him Shift through the window. I didn’t say anything.”

  Charlotte put her hands to her mouth. “Oh, pumpkin. We never meant you to find out this way.”

  “Shifting? What the he—?”

  His mother held one finger up. “Language.” One of the pots on the stove boiled to the top, and Charlotte ran to turn it down. “Watch me burn dinner on top of everything. Now,” she said as she turned back to Finn, “how much has Bree told you about time travel?”

  Finn’s knees crumpled under him, and he sank onto a chair at the kitchen table.

  “Uh, nothing,” I said.

  Charlotte’s eyes clouded with tears as she looked at her son. She waved me out of the room and shuffled toward Finn like he was an animal licking its wounds.

  Relief swept through me as I scurried into the living room. It didn’t last long. My mission timer let out a squeal. Less than fifteen minutes left. What was I going to do? I had turned to the door for a last-ditch attempt at finding the grave when a pudgy yellow Labrador retriever wandered into the room from upstairs. He snuffled the air and wandered to my side, shoving his muzzle under my hand. His collar said “Slug.” I gave the top of his head a tentative pat, then shooed him off. He turned his nose up into the air and tottered toward the kitchen. He pushed the swinging door open with his nose.

  Finn’s shout rang out: “So it’s genetic?”

  “Yes, but…,” said Charlotte.

  “When were you planning on telling me? Or were you waiting for me to wake up some morning stranded in Ancient Mesopotamia?”

  Someone sure thought highly of himself. Personally, I didn’t know any Institute students who’d gone back much further than the sixteenth century. Mom had been Shifting how long, almost thirty years? And she rarely vent
ured past the Dark Ages. But even if this upstart toot did have the Shifter gene, I highly doubted he’d go back more than seven seconds his first Shift.

  I turned back to the door but paused. Everything past the edge of the deck was buried in darkness. Maybe I could find a brighter flashlight. I trotted off to their foyer. Their art collection really was amazing. Upon closer examination, it wasn’t worth millions—it was priceless.

  “The van Gogh’s fresh out of storage.”

  I whipped around, clutching at my heart, to face the voice. Finn’s father sat on a stool in the far corner of the room, eyeing the paintings thoughtfully. The resemblance to his son was striking. The changeable stuff, hair and glasses, was different. But the features that stuck around—a strong chin, deep-set eyes, square jaw—they shared.

  “It drives Charlotte crazy that I refuse to bring them back with me. I purchase them in the past and store them. She’d rather have them in pristine condition than brittle with age, even if well preserved. I keep telling her it’s time that makes them authentic. It’s one of the few things I put my foot down on.” His weary gaze fell on the kitchen door, which practically vibrated with muffled yelling. “Wish I’d done the same about telling the kids. I’m John, by the way.” He reached out his hand.

  I looked at it like it was a live snake. This was it. If I took that hand, if I spoke to him, I was officially breaking The Rule. The Rule that was in place to protect him … and me. And if I somehow let it slip that I’d interacted with him, I’d lose everything.

  “Bree,” I whispered.

  “It’s nice to meet you.” His hand was calloused but warm. “Charlotte mentioned you’re a student.”

  “Ummm…”

  “I’m sorry.” He took a step back. “Are my questions making you nervous? You probably don’t meet too many Shifters from before your time.”