by Helena Maeve
“Sure,” Eve agreed. “It’s just a building, right?”
What it contained—corpses or empty cells—could be an indicator of how far back they had gone. Once they knew that, they could focus on somehow getting back to Missouri.
Eve forced the lock with her bare hands, twisting and pulling until the weak link in the chains fettering the front gates gave way. The grates squeaked as she pushed them open. It was an awful racket, like nails on a chalkboard, but Eve winced for fear of being overheard more than anything else. She stiffened with the expectation and cast around for a sign that soldiers were crawling out of the woodwork to arrest them.
Nothing stirred, not even the swiveling three-sixty security cameras.
“I’m gonna go with abandoned,” she said and stepped into the grounds.
When she had left the Briars four years before, she had promised herself never to return. Part of that was guilt for what she’d done, but a far bigger reason was the fear of being thrown back into a cage again as punishment. The researchers had been no gentler with her because she was there willingly than they had been with the shifters who had entered the program to escape a prison sentence. As far as their handlers were concerned, fraternization was to be avoided at all costs. The test subjects were given numbers and banned from addressing each other in any other way.
Eve tied a bow around the thought and shelved it away. She was going to need a clear head for what was to come.
With Neil trailing a step behind her, they entered the main building. The doors were unlocked. Not surprising, if the facility hadn’t been opened yet. Eve remembered the security lights flashing red as she had loped up the steps to freedom, but that might as well have been a lifetime time ago. Power seemed to have been restored in the meantime. Unflattering fluorescent lights glared down on them from above, throwing the grime on Eve’s jeans into sharp relief. Strange, how little things like that could still bother her after all this time.
They were in a room decked in flat screens and multiple keyboards. Filing cabinets sat against the far wall, with a server room sectioned off behind a glass wall. At the center of the main chamber, a glass-walled chute stretched vertically into the crust of the Earth. There was nowhere for it to go upwards, but Eve remembered many levels below.
A howl rang out, abruptly shattering the tomblike silence of the facility.
Eve jumped, felt Neil do the same.
“What the hell was that?” he gasped, voice raw with panic.
“I-I don’t know.” She did know. It was coming from underground, from the elevator shaft. Her skin prickled as she took a tentative step closer to the steel doors. The cabin wasn’t there and there was only so much of the lower levels that she could see through the glass-walled shaft.
Suddenly, she glimpsed movement below—the silo was slowly rising to the surface. It couldn’t be empty, the pressure sensors wouldn’t have activated.
“Run,” she hissed. “Hide somewhere, go!”
When Neil didn’t move fast enough, Eve seized him by the arm and pushed him behind a desk, the two of them huddling like refugees. They were barely out of sight when a hiss of pistons and hydraulics eased the elevator to a stop. The doors opened. Eve couldn’t see much around the desk and she didn’t dare raise her head, but she could make out grayish limbs juddering in and out of view like a super-imposed image or a poorly developed photograph.
She was most definitely not glimpsing a panicked, younger version of herself scrambling to make her way to safety, convinced that she had killed her friends and family in a fit of uncontrollable rage. That might have made sense.
She looked away when the now-familiar light of an open rift spilled into the room. Its harsh, unyielding pull was etched into her bones by now, but this time the fracture was too far away to reel her in.
“You can open your eyes now,” Neil whispered, his breath gusting across her cheek. He looked no worse for wear, though his smile was tight with tension. “Was that—?”
“Yeah,” Eve said, not bearing to follow the thought to its conclusion. “It was.”
She righted herself slowly, aware that they were standing above a massive grave now. Her mind still refused to compute what she had seen. It made little sense. Her instincts didn’t have that difficulty.
“I think I’m down there.”
“What?” Neil balked. “No, you’re right—”
“No, I mean… Me of four years ago.”
“You think this is the past?” Neil asked, quickly catching on. “But that would mean there was someone else here. That man—”
“I have to get down there.” To save myself. She should’ve read more science fiction when she’d had the chance—or at least paid attention in physics class. Too late for that now.
She scrabbled to her feet, dusted herself off and, despite her better judgment, reached back to seize Neil’s hand. He offered it easily and their palms slotted together like puzzle pieces.
“How does this still have power?” Neil wondered aloud, his voice echoing around the small, blast-proof cabin. There were other elevators. Eve remembered the ones into which they’d wheeled her when she was strapped to a bed best of all. She had taken the stairs the last time she’d been here, for fear of yet another cage closing around her.
“I don’t know” was a poor answer, but it was the only one she had.
The doors opened with a muted hiss and Eve braced herself for the sight of goons with AK-47s on the other side. She breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t see any. Her heart was jackhammering. She realized somewhat belatedly that she had yet to release Neil’s clammy hand. He didn’t seem to mind.
Don’t let go, he’d said when they were caught in the rift. Eve was willing to accommodate. She wouldn’t dispel the mystery of the fleeing, blue-eyed stranger if Neil hadn’t figured it out himself.
The elevator only went down to the topmost underground level, but it was low enough that she could scent filtered air and plastics where before there had been a faint odor of wet grass. It wasn’t enough for panic, but unease gained ground faster than she would’ve liked.
“The last time I was here, the bodies were in the bull pen down below…”
“Okay,” Neil said. “Let me take the lead. It’s this way?”
Eve nodded. She wanted to remind him that he was in no shape to play action hero, but for some reason, the easy dismissal just didn’t follow. It was a kindness to be here with someone she trusted—and she did, for the most part. The man he was these days couldn’t be the one who killed her, whatever lies the oracle whispered.
Ahead, Neil rounded the corner and stopped abruptly in his tracks. “Oh gods…”
“What? What is it?” Eve made to push past him, but he turned, grabbed her by the shoulders.
“You don’t want to see that—”
“See what?”
Neil swallowed hard, gaze shimmering with sorrow. “Your pack, they’re— Eve!”
She wrenched free of his hold with very little effort. She had always been the stronger. One step, two, then she was around the wall, in full view of the penned carnage that separated the indoor recreation area from the rest of the facility.
“I’m so sorry,” Neil said, at her back. He sounded like he meant it.
“I’ve seen it before.”
The shock of those first minutes, the awareness that the only way she could have gone through something like that and lived was if she’d perpetrated the slaughter herself was overwhelmingly familiar. Eve locked her knees to keep from crumbling. “I woke up in solitary.”
“Why?”
“Because I refused to shift on command,” she explained, smiling wryly. “What, did you think I was a model patient?”
“I didn’t think there was anything about you that needed fixing,” Neil said, ignoring her attempt at gallows humor. “That’s why I didn’t want you to go in when you first told me about the Briars…”
Eve remembered that fight. It had been legendary, like m
ost of their spats. “You called me spineless,” she remembered, casting around the limp, silent bodies of so many of her kind. “I didn’t like that very much.”
“Yeah,” Neil sighed. “But if you wanted to leave—”
“I couldn’t.” She had to look away from the glistening blood. The smell of viscera was hard to ignore. It choked her, made her want to retch. A minute ago she’d been worried that she was about to pass out from hunger. Now she couldn’t be happier to know there was nothing but soda in her belly to heave. She gave Neil’s fingers a press. “Come on. I want to see if that son of a bitch finished the job this time.”
The oracle’s puzzling input had done little to unravel the tangled yarn of what she and Neil had just lived through, but Eve had hold of the loose threads now. She only needed the courage to pull them apart.
“Okay… Which way is forward?”
“Through there.” Eve pointed to the grates that separated the hallway from the isolated rec-room. Beyond it lay the cells—two hundred, in total, of which fifty or so had been occupied by her pack.
“I don’t think—”
“I’m fine,” Eve insisted. “I promise I won’t freak out.” She felt sad more than she felt scared. Dead things couldn’t hurt her.
They ventured forward hand in hand, separating only when Eve had to twist open the locks—or try to, because they didn’t give way however hard she struggled.
“Let me give it a shot,” Neil offered. He pressed a hand to the concealed gears and levers, digging his fingers into the hard steel. With a wince and a tug, the latch pulled free.
“Handy.”
“Thanks,” he drawled, looking as though she had congratulated him on being able to draw a stick figure. He was no more immune to conceit than Eve. That was strangely reassuring.
She took the lead this time, retracing the steps she had taken when she’d escaped with an odd sense of purpose. If the cell door is open, then I killed them. If it’s not— She didn’t allow herself to complete the thought.
It was a hard thing, to wind her way between the ravaged, broken corpses of the people she had once called family. She hadn’t seen them for an age, but they looked just as her memory reported—as still as the stump of a tree. She tried to avoid stepping into the puddles of blood, but it wasn’t always possible. Her boots stuck to the ground—had there been footprints when she escaped? Eve searched her memory, but it was no use. Some details had been lost in the frenzy of the getaway and all the hyper-vigilant journeying since.
She had returned to St. Louis because she didn’t fit in anywhere else. It wasn’t a good enough reason to want so desperately to return that she wound up retracing her steps to the most awful experience of her life.
“Eve, look—” The urgency in Neil’s voice cleaved through the pity party.
One of the hallway monitors was still in use. It had no other purpose except to inform the floor guards which cells were active—that is, which cells were full with inmates. Eve was sure that the panel had been dark when they’d walked into the rec-room, but it had lit up in the meanwhile. A single red dot gleamed where the solitary confinement cells were supposed to be, at the bottom of the well.
“That must be you, right?” Neil asked. “You were locked in when it happened, Eve. You didn’t do anything—”
She remembered that sentiment, too, the panic that had woken her as though from a dream. Had she paced the cell, waiting for the door to slide open? Only one way to find out. “I’m going down there,” Eve said and started toward the stairwell with a sure step.
She could sense Neil close on her heels, but it was the swell of blood whooshing against her eardrums that kept her company as she trooped down the stairs.
Solitary confinement cells could only be opened from the main control room above ground or from a lever in the wall, a mere six feet away from the cell door. Thoughts of coming face to face with her younger self weren’t enough to slow Eve’s progress.
A faint thumping of fists against steel let her know that she was getting closer. With one final, brutal punch, the clamor desisted and the hallway was once again restored to silence. I’m getting tired.
Eve jammed her claws under the wire-mesh panel and ripped it out of its screws with a vicious tug. She heard Neil test the handle of a supply room door not three feet away. It gave way easily—it was the perfect hideout—so Eve gave a twist of the lever and watched as all the doors on that level slid open with a mechanical, grinding noise.
Inside her windowless four foot wide prison cell, Eve abruptly ceased her pacing. She reached out through the invisible threads that bound her to her fellow pack-mates, at first, but there was no answer. It wasn’t until she set foot outside that she scented the foul odor of death and decay.
She sped past the supply room without a second glance. She did not recognize her own scent, or hear a second heartbeat over the squeak of her rubber-soled slippers.
The door was locked, Eve thought, four years later, from behind the supply room door. The door was locked.
* * * *
Neil held out his Milky Way—technically Eve’s Milky Way, but she wasn’t feeling very territorial about her personal effects these days. “You have to eat,” he insisted.
“I’m not hungry.” She had hunted the night before—four years from now, in Paris—and munched on chocolate for her breakfast. Two raw pigeons and a Mars Bar were enough to keep her from wasting away until she got somewhere more permanent, more secure.
They had made their way to the surface soon after Eve’s younger self had bolted out of her cell. I didn’t linger, Eve remembered, confident that there was no risk of a run-in.
Neil had trudged as far as the little stream that ran through the nearby meadow before he’d declared himself exhausted. Eve wasn’t convinced that they hadn’t stopped because he wanted to give her a moment to regroup, but if that was the intention, she could forgive it. She needed to get her bearings.
“I can give it another shot, you know,” Neil said after a lengthy pause. “I can try to open another rift.”
“Yeah? And send us back into the Pleistocene?”
He shrugged. “I can’t promise anything as far as accuracy. I don’t even know why we wound up here. I did everything the oracle told me, I thought about—”
“It was me,” Eve interjected. She scraped her boot against a smooth-polished rock, watched as mud and congealing blood peeled away in clumps.
“I don’t blame you.”
“Good,” she said, cutting him off before he mentioned a ‘but’. “I say it’s too chancy. Four years isn’t that long, we can wait it out.” Play house in the meantime. It sounded ridiculous in her mind, never mind when spoken aloud. Eve winced.
Neil folded the candy wrapper in his hands and stuck it into a pocket of her backpack. “You don’t want that any more than I do. Besides, there’s a lunatic future version of me who’s causing all sorts of havoc. I’d rather set the record straight if at all possible.”
It hadn’t occurred to Eve that he knew. “This isn’t your fight,” she said, the conceit as useless as it was palpably false.
“Really?” Neil chuckled mirthlessly. “That’s weird, because I hear I’m supposed to kill you. Maybe you’re okay with that, but I’m not. It should at least be my choice—”
“Hey, hey…” Eve bridged the distance between them, taking his cheeks in her hands. Neil looked haggard and angry, a whiskery two-day beard darkening his chin and jaw. “I’m not worried about that. The oracle’s been wrong before.”
“Not like this.”
“Look behind me and tell me that’s not getting it disastrously wrong,” Eve challenged. “She’s just a fortune-teller. She said it herself—sometimes she gets only part of a story. She doesn’t know how to connect the dots.”
The thought of Neil hurting her was frightening and because it was frightening, she had to dismiss it.
He captured her hands in his and brought her knuckles to his lips. “I can
’t help wish I’d left you alone…”
“You did. I attracted a pesky poltergeist, remember? Not your fault. If you have to blame someone, blame that ugly-looking monster.” Eve heaved a breath. She wished she could say she’d been happier when the knowledge of what was really causing the rifts had rested only with her. She hadn’t been. If either of them could figure this out, it would have to be Neil.
“You still want to try to take us back?” she asked warily.
It was a hefty proposition, but maybe if the two of them worked together, they could get it right this time.
Neil nodded. “What do you remember about the night we left?”
“Not much.” Eve crouched beside him, her wet boots squelching as she moved. “If you were part of my pack, I’d try to tap into your memory—I remember rain and your brother glaring at me,” she said, closing her eyes. “The bread factory smelled musty, didn’t it? I kept waiting to see another ghostling show up to take a bite out of me—”
“The machines were running,” Neil murmured. “It was an awful racket, like an airplane engine.”
Without telepathy, there was no simple way to create an identical snapshot of the experience to share between the two of them, but what they could do, however clumsily, was focus their minds on the evening’s events. Eve grudgingly agreed that the oracle’s advice had proved true in this regard, but that didn’t mean the rest of what she’d said had anything to do with reality.
It was a flimsy, obstinate sort of excuse, but it was all Eve had to reassure her as the rift opened up around them, engulfing them in its alluring warm light. Exhausted as he was, Neil didn’t release his grip on her hands for a bare instant.
The light built in both spread and intensity, quickly erasing all semblance of stream or grassland, and blotting out the mountain peaks rising like watchtowers all around them. Eve thought of the rain, of the branches scratching against Neil’s living room window. She thought of Felix’s blood marring her hands.
She thought of the bread factory tinged with the warm, musty aroma of mass-produced baked goods. Each flash of vivid recollection became a scene in a silent movie playing on repeat.