by Dunn, Pintip
There. I’ve said my piece. Now I’m balanced at the juncture of two major branches. Either he’ll lead me to Callie—or he won’t. Clearly, I won’t be able to follow without him knowing.
“I have the antibiotic,” he says. “Why do you need to be there?”
I blink. “She’s exhibiting the same symptoms as my mother and a bunch of other recipients of future memory. I’m not at all sure she’s got a simple infection from a knife wound. And if she doesn’t, well…we’ll need to figure out how to get her the amber formula she needs.”
“And that’s all?” he asks skeptically.
I open my mouth and then snap it shut again. Damn the Fates, that’s not all. I just met this guy. How can he know me so well?
The truth is, I’ve wanted to meet Callie all my life, first because she seemed so loving when she picked up Jessa from school. And then, because of the action she took that rocked the world.
Ten years ago, Callie received a future memory, which showed that her future self would inject a syringe into Jessa’s chest—and kill her. Instead of fulfilling that memory, she chose to stab the needle into her own heart, sending herself into a decade-long coma. Callie’s name became a rallying cry for the Underground, the people who were rebelling against ComA and their persecution of individuals with psychic gifts. To them, her action proved that the future could be changed.
But that’s not precisely accurate.
When a future memory is sent to the past, all it does is lop off the majority of a person’s branches, leaving only a few possible pathways. So, sending a memory is an attempt to “fix” the future—but it doesn’t guarantee it.
In Callie’s case, the path she followed existed in fewer than one percent of her futures. It was her extreme love for her sister that allowed her to find this path and take it.
And so, Callie is extraordinary not because she did the impossible, but because she took an action all of us are capable of. We just have to be strong enough and brave enough to seek out the right path.
She inspired everyone around her—especially me. She made me feel like I could be more than just my name, more than what everyone else perceived. And now, I need her example more than ever. Especially if the chairwoman fulfills her future of genocide. Especially if my dreams of the apocalypse come true.
“I didn’t plan on torturing my mother,” I say in a low voice. “But I did, and that changed everything. It changed me. You see, all my life, I’ve been loyal to the chairwoman’s potential, to who she could be if she would only make the right decision. But in that moment, I realized I couldn’t do that anymore. I had to see who she really is. Here. In this timeline. Despite all the futures I can see—” My voice hitches. I stop and try again. “Maybe because of the futures I can see, I don’t know who I am anymore. If I ever knew. Like me, Callie also chose a pathway that changed everything. Now, I’m not equating my action to hers. But I’m hoping being around her will help me figure out my place in this world.”
I close my eyes. Maybe all this angst is pointless, since I won’t be here much longer. But before I die, I’d like to understand the life I’m leaving behind.
Two seconds pass. And then four. I peek up at Ryder to see if he’s even listening, and he’s nodding. “Okay,” he says.
“Okay?” I repeat, hope bubbling in my chest.
“Yes. Okay.” He gets to his feet and offers me his hand. “If this was the final test, then you passed. We all worship Callie, although when you meet her, you’ll see she’s more like an annoying big sister than any kind of saint.” He wraps his fingers around my wrist. “But anyone who looks up to her as much as I do has got to be okay.”
I can’t help it. I make a face. “Gee, are you sure? There have got to be some other tests you can put me through. Like, you can make me go swimming with the sharks during dinnertime. Or jump out of a stealth copter without a parachute. Or—”
He laughs, a deep and low rumble in his chest. “Come on. Let’s go find my family.”
He tugs, and I try to stand. Only, I must’ve stepped on a weak part of the ground. Because, all of sudden, the dirt is crumbling, and I’m falling, slipping, sliding, as the earth opens up from underneath me.
14
Thud.
I hit the ground with my shoulder, and the impact spreads through my body. Ow, ow, ow.
“Olivia, are you okay?” I hear Ryder’s panicked voice above me. “Oh Fates. Please tell me you aren’t hurt.”
Slowly, I sit up, coughing from the dust that’s been stirred up. I shake out my arms and legs, wiggle and twist my back and torso. At least I can move everything.
“I’m fine,” I croak out. It’s dark all around me. The only illumination comes from the meager amount of sunshine creeping through the hole, but Ryder’s head blocks most of it. “What is this place?”
“No clue,” he says. “The floor must’ve given out. This was Mikey’s hut back in the day. Maybe he had a hideaway dug out underneath. If so, he never shared it with me.” He inhales sharply. “Okay. Move over.”
“What?”
“I’m coming in.” He dangles his legs through the opening. “If this is my dad’s secret hideout, then I want to see.”
“Are you serious?” I ask incredulously. “What if we both get stuck in here?”
“We’re not going to get stuck.” I can almost hear the eyes rolling in his head. “The floor’s at most a foot above your head. At worst, I’ll hoist you onto my shoulders, and you’ll climb right out. But probably, there’s a way into and out of that room.”
His legs disappear from the hole, and I hear rustling, as though he’s digging through his backpack. And then he drops headgear with a light attached through the hole. “Put that on and tell me what you see.”
I slip on the headgear, and a thin beam of light slices through the darkness. I turn in a small circle. “It’s a smallish room. Maybe five feet by five feet. Smooth stone walls like a cave. How in Fates did Mikey dig a cave under his hut?”
“More likely, he had his hut built over the cave. He was the founder of Harmony, you know. He could’ve done anything he wanted. Keep going.”
“There’s writing all over the walls. Crammed into every available space.” I twist my head, and the light swings with me. “Aha! Some kind of handle on the ceiling. A ladder leads up to it.”
“Perfect. Make some room.” A moment later, he jumps down beside me. The cave, all of a sudden, seems a whole lot smaller.
I’m staring right at his chest. He’s at most six—no, maybe four—inches away from me, and my mouth goes dry. The scent of evergreens wraps around me. We both took long showers at Potts’s cabin, but he shouldn’t smell so good after a long day of hovering. It isn’t right.
I feel like a bat with echolocation, sending out waves to determine where every inch of his body is in relation to mine. His thighs to my thighs, his biceps to my shoulders, and his mouth… Oh Fates, if I looked up, there would be a direct line running from his lips to mine.
“Olivia,” he says. My name. Just like that. Four distinct syllables, in his low, caressing voice.
My eyes flutter up, snagging on every ridged part of him. The perfectly sculpted chest, the sharp lines of his jaw. He looks almost unreal, like he’s a statue carved out of warm, living stone. Jessa talked about him all the time—but other than a quick aside about how the girls at school would set his image to run across their holo-screens, she never mentioned his looks. Is it possible that she never noticed?
I realize, all of a sudden, that he’s gone perfectly, utterly still. His breath thunders in my ears, ragged and uneven. “Olivia,” he says again, in a strained voice. “You’re standing too close to me.”
I blink. Huh? As the meaning of his words seep in, my cheeks burn. Oh Fates. He doesn’t want me this close. He thinks I’m invading his personal space.
I scramble backward so quickly I stumble over my own feet. I keep going until my back is pressed against the cave wall, and that still isn’t f
ar enough.
“I told you to make room for me,” he says, as if this makes everything better. It doesn’t. This rational explanation just makes things worse.
Clearly, he doesn’t think of me like that—whatever that is. I’m just a girl to him, someone he’s going to execute in three weeks. Fates, I practically had to pry out the miniscule amount of trust he’s deigned to give me. Even then, it’s cautious and grudging. And it’s in danger of evaporating if I accidentally look at him the wrong way. Of course he doesn’t want me close. Why would he?
It’s not like I’m Jessa. Not his childhood friend, not someone with whom he had years and years to build up respect. I’m sure he wouldn’t tell her to back up. But then, I’m not as brave as her, not as pretty, not as smart.
And I’m absolutely not going to do this right now.
With a forced casualness, as though he didn’t just reject me, I hand him the headgear. Automatically, he reaches up to his head, his fingers moving as if he’s adjusting something.
Except nothing’s there.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Oh.” He drops his hand, looking startled and then sheepish. “Um, habit, I guess. I usually wear these magnifying goggles, but Mikey persuaded me to leave them off for my trip. Of course, we didn’t expect for me to be arrested.”
The gesture triggers something inside me. I’m reminded…of Danni Lee, the girl who earnestly explained her metaphor for life to someone who wasn’t there. Ryder couldn’t be getting sick, could he?
Nah. It’s probably just what he said. An old habit.
And yet, I can’t quite stifle the chill that runs down my spine.
Pushing my uneasiness away, I squat in front of the wall in front of a patch of writing, where Ryder’s flashlight is pointing. The letters lack the clear, crisp edges produced by our auto-writers; instead, they appear to have been produced by hand. Moreover, the ink’s not the black I’m used to, but a warm, toasty brown, almost like the color of…
“Walnut ink,” Ryder says, as though he’s reading my mind. He crouches beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. “That’s what we had to use out here in the wilderness.”
I refuse to notice his touch and wrench my attention back to the wall. The writing appears to be a series of equations. Other than “e = mc²,” they all look like gibberish. But then, my education was unconventional at best. My mother’s former assistant, MK, gave me a few lessons over the years, but the chairwoman didn’t want a whole stream of tutors visiting me in isolation. So my schooling basically consisted of me meandering through whatever interested me at the time—usually the literature of the ages. Of course, the hundreds of books I’ve inhaled don’t help me now.
“Do you recognize any of these symbols?” I ask.
“A few.” He pauses. “I couldn’t tell you what they mean, but these equations look a whole lot like the ones we studied in my Advanced Physics Core. In the Time Travel unit, to be precise.”
“Was Mikey building a time machine?” I squint at the scribbles again. And I thought T.S. Eliot was hard to decipher. “A machine no one knows about. Is that why he needed this hideaway?”
“Maybe,” Ryder says. “I wouldn’t put it past Mikey to build a secret contraption. Except…a time machine already exists. It was invented over twenty years ago, when Preston used it to travel to our future.” He tenses, as though he’s said something he shouldn’t.
“Jessa told me,” I say quietly. “She told me everything. How she discovered Preston is her father. How she and Tanner time-traveled to the past. How you all woke Callie from her coma.”
He nods stiffly. Great. Now, he’s mad that an outsider knows so much about his tight-knit community.
Sighing, I retreat to a corner and stare at another meaningless scribble of letters and numbers. What am I’m looking for? If something’s important, will I be able to recognize it? No clue. Still, I methodically scan first one row and then another. I turn to a section of the wall—and my breath catches in my throat.
The equations give way to a set of drawings. A stick figure stands on one side, with a series of lines emanating from him. No, not just lines. Branches. Branches of potential futures. When I was a kid, I would sketch out exactly these diagrams, again and again, as I tried to explain to the scientists how my precognition worked.
But this drawing differs from my sketches in a major way. A section of the branches is boxed off. Next to the box is another diagram, showing the enclosed area in greater detail. A sort of window is rendered in between two of the branches. An arrow is drawn through the window, with a smattering of stick figures walking through the opening.
I frown and then frown again. The typical depiction of a timeline moves horizontally from left to right—past, then present, and then future. This enlarged diagram shows a line that moves vertically between branches. It doesn’t make any sense. Unless…unless…
The line represents people traveling from one branch to the other.
My blood runs cold, each individual drop freezing and falling from my veins. “Oh dear Fates,” I whisper.
Ryder is at my side in an instance. “What is it, Olivia?”
“It looks like Mikey’s building something, all right, but it’s not a time machine,” I say, not sure how I’m forming the words. “I think he’s building a…a…realm machine.” I glance back at the drawing, at the line of people walking through the window. “Something that allows you to travel from one parallel world to another.”
15
My mind whirls, the thoughts so loud I can’t hear anything else. The implications so glaring I can’t see anything else. Mikey…a realm machine…but oh Fates, one like we’ve never seen…one that could change our world forever.
“Breathe,” Ryder says gruffly. He pushes my head down. “Between your knees, Olivia. I can’t have you hyperventilating on me.”
That’s when I realize my breath is keeping time with my thoughts. Huff and huff and huff some more. Faster and faster like an engine revving to life. My heart’s trying to drill a hole through my chest, and I can’t feel my fingers. Any of them. Not my pinky, not my thumb. Even my palms have gone numb.
Yep, the classic signs of a panic attack. And one of the reasons I retreated into isolation to begin with: so that I could learn to stop such attacks before they begin.
Deliberately, I sit up and try to slow my breathing. Ryder takes my hands and rubs them between his fingers. A warm, tingly sensation begins to seep back in.
“Count with me,” he says. “Don’t take another breath until we get to five.”
We count to five. And then again. And again. The feeling in my hands returns all the way, and I’m acutely aware of the calluses of his palms brushing against my skin.
“…three…four…five.” I lift my head as we finish counting the last set. Our lips move at the exact same time, saying the exact same words. It’s unnerving as Limbo, but nice, too.
“You, um…you’re good at this,” I say. If we weren’t already in a hole in the ground, I’d want to dig one.
“Angela used to have panic attacks,” he says, completely unfazed. “Especially when she would relive her future memory of watching her baby girl crawl off a cliff. From the time I was six and came to live with her and Mikey in Harmony, I would hold her hands and count just like that. She said I was her lifeline.”
“You probably were,” I murmur. I can just imagine him. A little boy with skinny arms and an oversized head, vigilantly counting with his adoptive mother. And it makes my heart feel too large for my chest.
“You want to tell me what you’re thinking?” he asks.
I take a deep breath. I’m not used to this. Confiding my thoughts to someone. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how much detail I can go into before I lose his attention.
“I’ve always had a window into these parallel worlds,” I begin haltingly. “I don’t get to live them, I don’t get to try them out, and neither does anyone else. Because that’s all it�
�s ever been: a window. A glimpse into all these possible futures. We have access to only one world, to one timeline, and that’s this one.” I lick my lips. “Do you understand how dangerous a realm machine is? If Mikey has actually invented one, we could cross between worlds. You wouldn’t have to go back in time to fix your mistakes; you could jump to a new time stream altogether. Can you imagine what would happen if people started jumping between worlds? It would destroy our time stream and render it meaningless. Render us meaningless.”
He rubs a hand over his head. “Yeah, I see what you mean. But it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it won’t ever happen. These are just preliminary calculations. Maybe Mikey’s abandoned the project. Maybe he found it was impossible in practice. We can’t worry about what we don’t know.”
Inexplicably, I think of Danni Lee and her theory on living. Like a moth to a flame, she said. In other words, focus on today. Live for what is real and actual and true—not for something that might never come to pass.
Such as the realm machine. My precognition cuts off too early. I can’t accurately assign a probability for whether such a machine will ever be invented. So I can’t let its possible consequences run me into the ground.
Wordlessly we climb the ladder and exit through the trap door. Ryder plops a helmet onto his head, looking impossibly cute.
“Have you…changed your mind about me coming with you?” I venture.
“Why would I change my mind?”
Because I’m not the kind of girl he’s used to. The kind who makes big moves and saves people. I’m better suited to the shadows, and I’m a few quick breaths away from a panic attack at any moment. As he witnessed.