by Karen Akins
Dr. Masterson had been quietly staring at me the whole time. He put his hands in his pockets and sighed. “So you’re the one who started this whole mess.”
I blinked. And he was gone.
chapter 8
“WHAT MESS?” I ASKED.
Charlotte looked from Finn to me as understanding dawned on her face. “Is this not our Bree?”
“She’s still my Bree,” said Finn in a murmur.
I ignored him. “What mess?”
“Why don’t you sit down and have some tea, dear? We’ll get this worked out.”
“There’s nothing to work out. Just tell me what—”
A chirpy noise interrupted me. Charlotte pulled her phone out and grimaced.
“I have to go pick up your aunt. One of the ponies pooped on her shoe.” When Charlotte saw what must have been a look of sheer incredulity on my face, she placed her hand on my cheek. “It will take some time to explain, and I want John to be here. Why don’t you guys go get some air? You can pick up the pie from Ella’s. I’ll call Finn when I’m back.”
* * *
And that was how I came to be driving along a deserted beach access road in Finn’s shiny Porsche SUV, a new one since the last time I’d been there, with a rhubarb pie in my lap. One of his hands rested lightly on the bottom of the steering wheel, the other draped over the back of my seat. He wasn’t quite as annoying as I remembered. His stubborn streak still aggravated me, and I was pretty sure if I peeked into the glove compartment I’d find a stash of action figures. But, all in all, it was a pleasant drive.
“So the blood thing. Your dad’s really a surgeon?”
Finn nodded. “One of the things they never lied to me and Georgie about. They just failed to mention most of his surgeries take place before he was born.”
“Why would your father say that about me causing some mess and then disappear? I mean, seriously?”
“He has a habit of doing that. The poof. Trust me. It’s not you.” Finn pushed his sunglasses up his nose, and for a fleeting moment he looked like a movie star.
It was hard not to feel flattered. But I also felt like a bug squished under a microscope, the way he glanced—no, gazed—over at me every twenty seconds. I twisted my or, rather, Mimi’s mission package in my pocket. It was a packet of seeds (or, as I liked to call it, the Baggie o’ fail) for Botany. Apparently some great-great-great-something relative of a woman named Agnes Wellesley of Westvale, Maryland, was dying to know if their heirloom tomato seeds were an exact genetic match to hers. It didn’t matter, not really. I could go scan a packet of seeds at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store we’d passed back there and pretend they were Agnes’s. She’d never know, and her great-great-great-something relative who would still find these seeds stuffed in an old box or book would still wonder if these were the genetically identical variety of seeds as this Agnes woman had, who would …
Chicken–egg.
No one likes a temporal loop migraine.
The fact is no one understands temporal paradoxes, not fully. NonShifters hold them in morbid fascination. Shifters simply try to pretend they don’t exist. We all spout the Doctrine of Inevitability because it makes us feel better, but at the end of the day the important thing is the universe has neither exploded nor imploded. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.
I wasn’t even really sure why I was still here.
No, that wasn’t true. I was buying time while I figured out how to handle the Leto situation. And that situation had gotten a lot more complicated now that I knew my future self had already come and gotten the flexiphone. Try as I might, I couldn’t fathom any reason why she’d do that, I mean, why I’d do that.
Plus, it drove me bonkers not knowing what Finn and his parents knew about my future. I wasn’t sure who I was angrier with—Finn for clamping his lips shut every time I asked him anything but a trivial question (and still a little bit for clamping those lips on mine), John for Shifting away, Charlotte for pretending this was all a big misunderstanding, or Future Me. For dragging me into this sinkhole of what-the-crap-is-going-on.
Finn opened his mouth like he was about to say something but then snapped it shut.
“What?” I asked, using the seed packet to fan myself.
He adjusted the air vent to blow in my direction. “I covered for you, you know.”
“Huh?”
“After you first came here, when I was fifteen, that Monday when I got back to school, they called me into the office and asked me a bunch of questions about a girl who wasn’t supposed to be on the bus. I didn’t know how your whole school assignment thing worked, but I figured you needed people asking questions like you needed a hole in the head. So I made up a story about you being my cousin and running into you in Williamsburg and saving your parents a drive.”
“Thanks.” I meant it.
“Look, I’m not trying to keep anything from you, Bree.” He looked over at me, and I had a sudden urge to touch his face. I sat on my hands instead. He looked back at the road. “I have a lot of unanswered questions, too. I still don’t know what prompted you to come here a year ago. But I’ll answer what I can.”
“Okay, how many times exactly have I been back?”
He turned red. “Do you have to start with that one? I don’t want to tell you about your future.”
“Humor me.”
“Look, don’t you have a rule against that or something? Start with another one.”
“Did I come back more than once?” Oh my gosh. Of course I had. His family knew me on sight. “Twice?” But how?
“Pass.” His stony gaze told me arguing would be futile.
Okay. “Did you ever find out who Muffy van Sloot is?” Maybe she had something to do with my future self coming back.
“Muffy van Snoot?”
“Sloot. The grave I was looking for. There’s no record of anyone by that name on this island. Ever.”
“Sorry. I haven’t run into anything about her. I was a bit preoccupied after you left, convinced I was going to start hopping around time and space at any moment.”
“But you didn’t? You’re not a Shifter?”
“Alas, no. It would seem Georgie won the genetic lottery.”
I scowled. Zero for two. “But there wasn’t any record of you or your family either.”
He shrugged.
Zero for three.
“So you not existing doesn’t wig you out?” I asked.
“My family stays pretty low on the radar, what with the whole Shifting thing.”
That wouldn’t be enough to keep any trace of them off the database. A library card. A school sports team. Shoot, his driver’s license would show up if nothing else.
“Okay, so this thing I asked you to do, did it have to do with school? Or someone named Leto?” Maybe I confided my plans to Finn for some … unfathomable … reason.
“I really can’t talk about it. And frankly, you didn’t tell me much about the future,” he said. “We, uhh, we spent a lot of time not talking, if you are picking up what I am throwing down.”
“Consider it picked up. Or better yet, why don’t we leave it where it is? On the ground.”
I turned and stared out the window. He really wasn’t going to tell me anything. Erg. I might not be able to do anything to change whatever my future self told him, but I had a right to know what it was. I needed to know what it was. Leto Malone didn’t mess around. Finn simply needed a little encouragement.
I slipped my QuantCom out of my pocket and pretended to check some settings. Finn was too busy singing along to the blaring radio to notice the small metal doohickey pop out of the top, where the winder would be on a real pocket watch. With a cursory glance at the screen, I adjusted the intensity down to the lowest setting. Just a teensy warning zap to get his attention. A nifty feature, the stunner.
“One last chance. What did Future Me tell you?” I asked.
“One last—?” The ocean reflected in his sunglasses, all pearly and swir
ly, as he turned to face me and switched off the radio. “Bree, we’ve been over this. We can discuss this with my parents. Later.”
“Well, I say there’s no time like the present.” I reached over and tapped the end of the QuantCom against his shoulder. “Now how about those answers?”
When he didn’t respond, I repeated the question. When he still didn’t respond, I nudged him on the arm.
“Finn?”
The muscles under his shirt tightened. His legs stretched and stiffened. His teeth gritted into an angry grimace.
Why was he—? I looked down at my Com. Buh-lark. I meant to set it on “mild,” to give him a little jolt and scare him into shooting straight with me. It was on “max.” Crap, crap, crap. I hadn’t meant to immobilize the poor guy.
We lurched forward in a burst of uneven acceleration, and the state of Finn’s neuromuscular system became the least of my worries. The SUV careened toward the side of the road. Its tires caught the mixture of sand and loose gravel on the shoulder and fishtailed. I grabbed the steering wheel and wrenched it around, a difficult task with Finn’s death grip on it. The road hairpinned a hundred yards ahead. No way I could steer through that curve with Finn seizing like a landlocked fish in the driver’s seat. Crap! We were going to die!
Stay calm. Maybe I could off-road it. A grove of trees grew to our left. The beach stretched out to our right. Nope. I’d have to take my chances on the road.
A light flashed in the distance and blinded me for a second. The sun was glinting off something. The square frame of a moving truck came into focus as it rounded the sharp curve ahead.
Oh. No.
Finn’s mouth was clenched, but I could tell he was trying to say something. All that came out was a guttural grunt.
“Brrrrr…”
He couldn’t even get my full name out.
“Hang on,” I said, unbuckling myself and leaning down to pull his foot from the pedal. Our speed dropped a little, but the foot wouldn’t budge far. “I can’t get it loose!”
The oncoming truck’s horn blasted again as we veered into its lane.
“Okay, beach it is.” The wheel protested as I tugged it around. We spun through the gravel onto the sand.
“Brrrrr!”
“Kind of busy now, Finn.” The sand slowed us further, but not enough. Ocean filled the whole windshield, and I froze. We were headed for the water.
“F-f-f-inn.” I clutched his hand so tight, it was as if I’d been the one hit with the stun gun.
“Brrrr…”
This was it. I was going to die in an overpriced status symbol with a crazy chronostalker whose father was convinced I was some Jezebel who had caused … well, I didn’t know what, but it couldn’t be good. And none of it mattered, because I was about to drown.
It was all my fault.
No. Future Me’s fault.
And that was all it took. It was like her voice filled my brain: This isn’t how you die. Get out!
No time to think. I unbuckled Finn’s seat belt, reached over him to unlatch his door handle, swiveled my leg over, and kicked the door open. Prying Finn’s fingers off the wheel, I wrapped my arms around his torso. The sound of my own heart thundered through my ears. Against my chest, the kathump of Finn’s, each beat matching my own racing rhythm.
“Unhh.” I shoved off from the middle console like a coiled spring as the front tires hit the waterline.
Our tangled bodies scraped a shallow trench through the wet, hard-packed sand and skidded to a halt. The car decelerated rapidly with Finn’s foot off the pedal, but it was too late. With a shoosh, it rolled up to its roof into the water. Each wave sucked it deeper and deeper.
The left side of my body felt like it had lost a grudge match with a loofah. Blood seeped into the corner of my eye. A gash on my foreheard stung like the devil. Finn didn’t seem to have any major injuries. I rubbed his hands and feet, trying to return sensation to them. He lay next to me like a clump of kelp.
“Brrrr…”
“It’s okay. We’re safe. I got us out.”
“Brrrrr…” Finn started to wiggle his fingers and bent his knees to the side. A cough rasped its way up his chest and out his loosening jaw. “Brrr-ake.”
A moan escaped as I collapsed onto the sand next to him. I could have stepped on the brake. We lay there side by side staring at the clouds overhead as his arm and leg twitches subsided.
“I’ve never driven before,” I said after a few minutes of silence.
Finn lifted himself up on his elbows and grimaced as he touched a raw spot on his cheek. “And you never will again.” He sounded like he’d inhaled as much sand as I had lodged down my bra.
“I’m so sorry. For your car. For … zapping you.”
“Why again did you do that?” He rubbed the back of his skull, feeling for bumps, his movements still stiff.
“All your answers to my questions have been so cryptic. I was trying to get your attention.” By stunning him? the little voice shouted in my head. I had just violated every rule of Shifting ever. Including the ones that hadn’t been written yet. I suddenly found myself fall-on-my-face grateful that he didn’t exist in any of our data systems. Because this little stunt was beyond review board. Beyond expulsion.
Finn stared at the bubbling spot where his car had been. “You wanted my attention? I’d say you got it.”
“I didn’t mean to turn the stunner up that high. It was supposed to sting you, to make you listen. I can’t believe I wrecked your car. I’m so, so, so, so sorry.” I buried my face in the sand, a bad idea given my wound. “Oww!”
Finn reached over and drew me close.
“Shhh,” he said. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have provoked you earlier.”
“What? Stop it!” I pushed him away. “I drove your blarking car into the blarking ocean. I could have killed us both. Yell at me. Blame me.”
An infuriating laugh filled the space between us.
“How is this funny?” I asked.
“It’s not, but you know that thing you said earlier about investing the penny?” He shook sand out of his hair and pulled his shoulders into a sheepish shrug. “It’s kind of true. We’re not hurting.”
One final bubble glugged to the surface where his Porsche had been.
“I guess I could pay you back in stock tips,” I said. A hint of a laugh, more shock than anything, came out. The sun melted toward the horizon. I took off my shoes to shake the sand out.
“You don’t owe me anything.” His hand inched its way toward mine. A wave lapped high on the shore and reached my toes, an excuse to hop up.
“So back to my questions.”
His shoulders shook in a silent chuckle.
“You still won’t answer me?”
“Not won’t, Bree. Can’t.”
“You can’t remember what I said or did a year ago that apparently changed your entire outlook on life?”
“No.” He stood up and brushed sand away. “I can’t talk about it, at least not right now.”
“Sounds kind of paranoid,” I said.
“This coming from the girl who attacked me with a freeze ray gun?”
“It’s not a ray gun,” I mumbled. “More a … nerve disrupter.”
“And yet that doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Look, just tell me. Obviously, I’m going to find out soon enough.” So there.
“I can’t.”
“You mean ‘won’t.’”
He tossed his hands in the air. “What I mean is you made me promise I wouldn’t tell you!”
Finn took off walking up the beach toward the road without a syllable of explanation.
“What do you mean by that?” I scrambled after him, stumbling over the tire track mounds. My legs were so much shorter than his, I had to take two steps for every one of his long strides.
“What do you think I mean?” He turned around and looked at me like I was somehow the crazy one. “Future You must know about this trip. She didn’t
want me to tell you what she asked me to do.”
“That does not sound like me.”
“Y’know what?” he said as he took off again. “I don’t think you sound like you.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look, I’m trying stay positive, but you’re making it really hard.”
“Oh, thank you for reminding me! Everything is Bree’s fault … I almost forgot for all of two minutes.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” His pace slowed, but he didn’t turn to look at me.
“Then what are you saying?” I jogged forward to catch up with him and put my hand on his shoulder.
He flinched away from my touch.
“What I’m saying is, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what could possibly happen in the next however many months or years of your life that sucks some of the shrew out of you.”
My breath turned to cotton in my throat. Snappy comebacks raced to the end of my tongue. Most involved his lack of kissing skills and love of action figures. But they all dissolved on the tip before I could blurt them out. Angry tears brimmed my eyes.
Finn put his fist to his mouth. “I didn’t mean that.”
He reached out to me, and I bristled away.
“I get it.” I’d had enough. I wiped my face with my shirt and strode past him.
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes.” Finality pounded in my voice. “I do.”
* * *
Finn knew a shortcut back, and he kept his yap shut on the walk home. The silence, awkward as it was, gave me a chance to mentally sift through the bizarre situation I’d somehow gotten myself into. What I knew: Apparently, at some point in the future I would return to visit the Masterson family. I would, umm, become friendly with Finn for some reason that would surely make sense at the time. It certainly didn’t now. I’d take Leto’s delivery with me. And I would ask for Finn’s help with something. What I didn’t know: everything else.