Timewise

by P. K. Gardner

  Ty turns around in his chair. A girl stands over him, hands folded across her chest. She's wearing a baggy pair of blue jeans with a hole in one knee, a black tank top that only serves to highlight the extreme paleness of her skin. She has red hair, cropped short and feathered. It sticks up in random tufts that look more like bedhead than an artful hairstyle. But it's her eyes, not her hair or the scowl painted on her face, that catch him — green eyes with dark circles under them that look more like bruises than sleep deprivation.

  "I'm Tim Langerhanz," Ty lies, standing up to offer his hand.

  She stares at it but doesn't shake it.

  "Ivy Lane," she says and sits down.

  Ty doesn't so much as sit back down as collapse into his seat, hitting the stiff metal chair with enough force to bruise his bottom.

  "So, Tim," she says. "Why haven't I ever seen you before?"

  "It's a big school," Ty croaks. His voice sounds funny, strangled almost because Ivy Lane is sitting right there, next to him.

  She looks different.

  (he hadn't recognized her)

  Five years does that to a person. Her braces are gone, her body has filled out and the smile has faded from her lips. "Take a picture, Langerhanz," she drawls. "It'll last longer."

  "I wasn't around too often," Ty says. "Took a bunch of academy classes. Building that resume, you know?"

  Ivy's frowns at him. "Weren't you in my ninth grade bio class? Mr. Smith taught it."

  "Can't have been me," Ty answers. "My family moves around a lot. I was here in middle school. Just moved back this year. Never heard of a Mr. Smith teaching bio."

  "That's because his name was Mr. Daniels," Ivy replies, scratching her neck. "I don't know where my head is today. Must have mixed you up with someone else."

  Ty's eyes go wide. The scrubbing isn't holding. Mr. Smith, a vague sense of familiarity. It is all supposed to be gone. But here is Ivy, sitting next to him, staring at him like she knows him. It's all he can do to grit his teeth and lie instead of falling back into their comforting old repartee. It's been five years and he only just now is realizing how much he's missed her, how much he will always miss her.

  How he misses her right now even though she's sitting next to him.

  "So, Tim," she says. "Play any sports?"

  "No," Ty says. He's trying not to look at her because if he starts, he won't be able to stop.

  "Yearbook?" she tries.

  "Nah."

  "Come on," she says, "I know I've seen you before. You must have done something. Band? Orchestra? Journalism? Art show?"

  "Nada and nothing," Ty says. "Acorse, I'm a boring guy."

  "Where are you from?" Ivy asks, wrinkling her nose. It's an old habit of hers, one that makes her look like the Ivy he knows rather than this stranger. "You've got an accent."

  "Really?" Ty asks, evading the question. "Never thought I picked one up."

  "It's funny," Ivy says. "Can't quite place it."

  "I'm from bits of everywhere," Ty says. "You know how it is."

  "Military family?" she guesses. "You've got the haircut."

  Ty reaches up self-consciously to touch his hair. It's long by Timewise's standards, long enough to touch his ears. Ty always thought a real military cut was almost a head shave, but in this time period the style is long and floppy. He doesn't fit the bill. "Been trying to grow it out," he lies. "Sneaking it long as I can. Few days and Dad'll get on me."

  The principal gets up on the podium and starts talking about graduation procedure, sparing him further questions. She's a small lady with wild curls and a high-pitched, excitable voice.

  Beside him, Ivy is half asleep within ten minutes. In fact, the whole of the student body seems extremely adept at tuning out the principal's bubbly chatter.

  Ty, on the other hand, is on high alert. Roughly a week from now, there will be tikkers all over the place. One of the localized single-day battles that have always and will always be fought. But if the disturbances are spreading, pervading the surrounding time as well, that means the tikkers are getting bolder.

  Ty is starting to sweat. He's gotten so used to the pervasive cold that comes with the slips he's stopped noticing it, but this clammy, stifling heat is something new. He wishes he could take off his jacket, but he can't without flashing his stunner to the general population. He'd rather not incite a panic if he doesn't need to.

  "Now," says the principal, "this system works on key names. When we say the name, the next two rows will stand up and begin filing out in an orderly fashion. Now, guys." The principal claps her hands together. "I know it's a lot of work, but if we just get it right, this is going to be a fantastic ceremony we can all be proud of. But before we get to the names, we're going to try filing into the auditorium. After that, we'll go through the key names and have a trial run of the ceremony. Isn't this exciting?"

  The student body lets out a collective groan, but Ty doesn't mind so much. There was nothing like this when he graduated from the Timewise Academy. Just orders on his bed one day saying he'd been determined field ready and that he should report to Spenser Peabody for his assignment. This is better. There's a lot of muttering as the students file out of the auditorium but the ghost of Ty's smile doesn't leave his face.

  "I'd say she was a Nazi if she wasn't so perky," Ivy mutters under her breath. "But hey, graduation is for the parents more than us, right?"

  Ty sniggers but before he can answer, he feels it again: cold's icy fingers snaking down his spine, plunging through the extra layer of his jacket. He shivers violently, teeth chattering.

  "What's the matter with you?" Ivy asks. "You look like you're about to pass out."

  Ty takes a breath to steady himself. It doesn't work.

  This must be the temporal disturbance Spense warned him about.

  "I'm fine," he says. "It's just. . . I need to get out."

  He breaks abruptly from the procession, forcing his stiff limbs into action. He leaves the gym. The cold is intensifying, freezing him slowly. He reaches clumsy fingers into his jacket pocket and withdraws his stunner, finger poised on the trigger.

  He just needs to find out where the damn tikker is hiding.

  Save for the graduating seniors, the school is empty. Ty is thankful for that much at least. The chatter of the students fades to the background as he weaves his way through the familiar halls, scanning for a flash of blue.

  A banner over the senior locker bay reads: Seniors! 1 Day Left! Nobody bothered to tear down either poster, and Ty feels a sudden unease. You're running out of time, Tyler, the poster seems to say. Everything's unfinished.

  He hears a clattering behind him and jerks around only to find Ivy standing right in front of him, staring cross-eyed at the gun trained on her forehead.

  "Ivy?" Ty says, "The hell are you doing here?"

  "Following you," Ivy chokes. Her whole body seems to flinch away from him, from the stunner. She scrunches up her face, as if anticipating the shot.

  He should shoot, he realizes. He should pull the trigger and knock her out. Someone will find her soon and no one will be the wiser. It will be better for all of them.

  (but it's Ivy so he can't)

  Ty drops the stunner. "Get out."

  She doesn't relax. "Why've you got a gun, Tim?"

  I'm not Tim, he wants to scream. I'm Tyler Smith! You should remember, but you don't! I remember everything. I know what your favorite movie is and what your hair smells like and what makes you laugh and. . .

  "None of your business," Ty snaps. "Best if you get moving along."

  "You're not a student," Ivy says, eyes narrowing in suspicion. "I know that much. If you were a student, I would have seen you around before."

  "I'm not a student," Ty confirms. To assuage her panic, he reaches his frozen fingers into the inner pocket of his coat and pulls out his badge. "I'm with the Timewise Agency. Official business. Undercover."

  "Timewise?" Ivy says. "I've never heard of Timewise."

  "Trust me. T
hat's a good thing."

  Then Ty sees it. The tikker. Down in the senior locker bay, staring at them with its voluminous black eyes glinting in the dim light.

  "Ivy, you need to leave," Ty says. "Get back to graduation and forget me."

  "Tim," she says, staring at the tikker behind him with those wide green eyes. "Tim, what's that?"

  Ty seizes her face, a hand pressed to either cheek, and steers her gaze back to him. "Ivy," he says. "I need you to get out of here. I need you to run. If you don't—"

  He trails off, the unfinished sentence looming in the air like the poster in front of them proclaiming, Seniors! 1 Day left!

  The tikker is moving toward them.

  "Run," he tells Ivy, ice pumping through his veins.

  She stands still, staring at him openmouthed, like a statue frozen in time forever.

  "Run!" Ty roars.

  Ivy stumbles into action, spinning around so fast she trips and has to catch herself before she hits the ground. She's running back to her normal life, away from time travel and tikkers.

  She's running away from him.

  Ty hoists the stunner, taking careful aim at the tikker. He fires. The tikker shudders violently and collapses to the floor. Ty holsters the stunner, pulls his switchblade from his pocket and moves toward the unconscious tikker.

  He doesn't like that the kills in this war have to be up close and personal, doesn't like the feel of the slick yellow fluid that functions as the tikker's blood. But this is his life now. If he weren't here, who knows what would have happened to the students at the graduation rehearsal. Who knows what would have happened to Ivy Lane.

  He slices the tikker's throat open with relative ease and the thing's yellow blood oozes everywhere. Ty has to get back to Timewise now and send a scrubber to take care of the corpse. He needs to let Spense know there are tikkers abounding.

  (where there's one, there will be more)

  Not once does he turn back to look at Ivy. She's not part of his life anymore.

  Ty starts counting the days. It's an almost unconscious tick, a running calendar in his head that marks each day relative to when it should be back home. No one at Timewise has birthdays. The students were all pulled out of their personal timelines at different points and thrown into the future where the dates have no meaning.

  So Ty counts. Not out loud, not even on paper. He just keeps a running tally in his head, a tick mark for every sunrise.

  He turns fourteen on February 14, Valentine's Day, except his birthday is in September. He turns fifteen two weeks after he graduated from the academy and they put him into field operations. He turns sixteen in the hospital after an injury sustained in a fight with the tikkers. He turns seventeen the day before Zane disappears. He turns eighteen the day after Zane goes rogue.

  On his sixteenth birthday (which is three hundred and ninety eight years, four months and two weeks after he should be celebrating his sixteenth birthday) he wakes up in the medbay to find Zane asleep across from him. Zane's got his feet propped up against the bed and his arms folded across his chest. His left arm is in a cast, a white plaster sheath that looks like a streamlined version of the 2007 casts Ty knows. Zane's eyes are shut and his clothes are rumpled but he looks alert even when he's sleeping.

  "Zane," Ty mutters. His head feels foggy, stuck in the clouds. Concussion, he remembers. I have a concussion and Zane got us out. "Come on, Zane. Let's go."

  Zane responds by letting out a loud snore. Ty has to grin because the perfect soldier persona Zane wears evacuates when he snores. Grinning, Ty reaches to his sleeping friend and pokes him lightly on the leg.

  Zane's feet fall from the bed, hitting the ground one after the other with echoing thuds. His hands appear from the depths of his jacket, the right one clenched around the handle of his switchblade. He flips it open with a metallic whoosh.

  And that's all before his eyes even open.

  "Zane!" Ty hisses. "It's me. It's Ty!"

  Finally, Zane wakes up. His eyes look darker than usual. Almost black instead of brown, like the eyes of a tikker shining out from his friend's face.

  Ty tries to back away from him but there's nowhere to go. He's in a hospital bed with only thin white sheets and a metal bed frame between him and the knife.

  Then the moment is gone. Zane grins sheepishly and flips his switchblade shut. There are faded bruises over his left eye and a cut running down his cheek. "How goes it, Zane?"

  His smile is uneven. That's nothing new. Zane's grin has always looked like an imitation of the real thing, but it seems more pronounced today.

  (or maybe that's the head wound talking)

  "You almost died," Zane says. "Few ticks later and you'd be lane up right and proper."

  "I'm still here," Ty says. "Banged up, yeah, but still here."

  Zane looks down at his hands. He's twirling his switchblade absently, 'round and 'round in an abstract but fascinating pattern.

  "You got us out," Ty says. "That's what you should think on. Us and that family."

  Zane's eyes lock with Ty's, and Ty thinks he reads despair in those black depths.

  "Sometimes," Zane says slowly, "I think on it all and wonder if we're making a difference. How many people get lane up without us being there? Before we even notice something's amiss?"

  Ty is quiet for a long moment because he doesn't remember Zane ever talking like this before. He doesn't remember anything but the straightlaced operative who follows orders and doesn't ask questions. This Zane is someone new, peeking through the shadows of the Zane that was. "You never told me any of that before."

  "Never asked," Zane says and gives another dry laugh. "No one and nadie ever asks and I think that's what's wrong with this place. No one ever asking." He leans back in his chair and folds his hands behind his head, the white plaster of his cast pressing against the base of his skull. "Wish we could change it."

  "Zane," Ty says delicately. He's starting to feel the headache, the aftereffects of the concussion beating like drums in his head. This kind of talk is dangerous. "You know we can't. No way we could go back and tweak everything to make it perfect."

  "Don't need to be perfect," says Zane in that adaptable accent of his. Today the rounded edges of Timewise-style phrasing stand out. "Just want to be able to save a girl in trouble and not have to worry on what happens should the girl live. Saving a life shouldn't be wrong. Just once I want to be a hero without mucking everything over."

  Ty doesn't say anything because there is nothing to say. They've all wanted that. While Ty has seen tikkers plowing through people with blue lightning sparking in their hands, he's also seen people fighting people. A girl with her throat slit after a drug deal. A random shooting on a college campus. A man beaten to death in a bar fight.

  To watch tragedy unfold when the past is at your fingertips is infuriating. But rules are in place for a reason.

  The past is not something to be changed. It's something to be protected.

  Zane snaps out of his reverie, leaning forward. "Near enough died yourself, Ty. Don't much want you to be a statistic."

  Ty forces a smile, but he knows it must look as fake and empty as they come. "I'm hard to kill," he jokes. "Not hard to take down, but hard to kill. How long was I out?"

  "Three days," Zane says. "Surprised you kept upright. Slipping while concussed was not our best idea."

  "Three days," Ty repeats and then his face splits into a real smile. "Age sixteen today."

  Zane asks, "You managed keeping count?"

  "Sure," Ty says. "Ever since I came here, I've been counting. Not my real birthday but three hundred and sixty five days is real enough. Don't you keep count?"

  "It's not like you're getting a party," Zane says. "Elsewise, we'd have ops off drinking all days of the year."

  "You're serious," Ty says, wincing as he straightens in his bed. "No one keeps track? You've got to know. C'mon, Zane. How old are you?"

  "Age eighteen, thinking on it," Zane says, frowning. "Maybe nin
eteen by now. Figure me I'm not twenty. . . Don't think I'm twenty."

  "You honestly don't know?"

  "No use keeping track," Zane says, rubbing the back of his neck with the hand not in a cast. "Just a date. Just days. Just time and what's time when you can slip straight through it?"

  Ty thinks of what Val Teasley told him. Zane Tucker hasn't been present on a February 15 since he arrived at Timewise.

  Dates are important. No matter what Zane says.

  "Glad you got through," Zane says. A beam of light spills in from the window. It hides the hollowness in his eyes and makes him seem younger. Zane has freckles, extremely faint against his skin. They splatter his cheeks and draw attention from his crooked nose and the cut on his cheek. "Don't know what I'd do if you got lane up, Ty. I'd have to break in a whole new partner. Most of them don't last near as long as you. Keep breathing, Smith. I'll get to the paperwork."

  "Sure," Ty says. "No complaining from my way."

  Zane laughs and ruffles Ty's hair. "Good to have you with us again."

  When Tyler Smith is eleven years old, he has his first kiss.

  Four friends are in the basement of his house: Tyler, Sydney King, Bryce Benson and Ivy Lane. Sydney, with her long dark hair and wide blue eyes, just moved in down the street and is older than Tyler by six months. Bryce, who's in Tyler's physical education class, makes up for being unathletic by being a smartass. Ivy is in the awkward phase between child and adolescent. She's got pimples spotting her face, braces covering crooked teeth and limbs that have grown too fast, too soon. There's the barest hint of a curve to her hips and chest, but Tyler barely notices because she's Ivy. She's his best friend and has been for as long as he can remember.

  Tyler himself is remarkably short for his age, underweight with buzzed-off hair, big ears and a wide smile. He gets taken for younger than he really is.

  "Truth or dare," says Sydney.

  The four of them giggle. Ivy crosses her hands over her chest and says, "Dare."

  Sydney smiles back, first at Ivy and then at Tyler. That makes Tyler nervous because Sydney's the mature one. At the ripe old age of twelve, she knows things they haven't quite discovered.