Timewise

by P. K. Gardner

  He pulls away from her all too soon. She's swaying as if in an unseen breeze, lips still slightly parted, eyes closed. Her hair's askew; her face is flushed.

  "Get out of here, Ivy," he mutters. "Just trust me."

  And that's how Ty leaves her.

  (he hasn't felt this cold in a long time)

  "I don't buy it," Ivy says, sitting across from him in the school cafeteria one day. "You say you were in town with Bryce, visiting his stepdad, and I don't buy it."

  "There's nothing to buy." Tyler picks at the unidentifiable meat on his plate. "Me and Bryce went into town. I forgot to tell my mom. She got worried."

  "We've known each other for a long time. Right, Tyler?" Ivy says.

  "Forever," Tyler says. "Maybe longer."

  "Yeah," Ivy agrees, leaning toward him over the cafeteria table. Tyler can smell her floral shampoo and feel the heat of her breath on his face. Almost instinctively, he leans closer to her, so that their noses almost touch over the table.

  "Tyler," she whispers.

  "Yeah, Ivy?"

  She flicks his forehead. "That means I know when you're lying."

  He shrinks back from her as if burned. He can't tell her the truth. That he can travel in time and got stuck in 1989 where his dad was still alive and neither Ivy nor Tyler existed yet. No, the lie is more believable.

  He's given the same story to the cops and his mom. He'd called in all the favors Bryce owes him, feeling lucky that Bryce's stepfather had been too drunk to refute the claim. He didn't tell Bryce what really happened and Bryce didn't ask. Tyler's covered for him before. They're even now.

  It's only Ivy who refuses to believe him and spots his story for the bullshit it really is.

  "It's the truth," Tyler lies. "We went downtown. Listened to street musicians, bummed around town. Nothing exciting."

  "You're lying," Ivy says.

  Tyler has to wonder how she can tell. His mom can't, his sister can't, none of his teachers can. Just Ivy, who can pick up his invisible ticks and read him like a book.

  (maybe it's because he's never lied to her before)

  "Ivy, I—"

  "You what, Smith?" she snaps. "You can't tell me? It's not all that hard. Certainly not rocket science. Just a few little words and we're back to normal. You can't have possibly done something so bad, you can't even tell me about it. What happened to trusting each other, Tyler? What happened to no secrets?"

  "Ivy," he pleads.

  "I don't like liars, Tyler," she says. "Never have and never will."

  "I can't tell—"

  "Two days," Ivy says, interrupting him. "Tyler, you were missing for two whole days. Your mom was going mad. Cops were at my house asking what happened to you. We all thought you were dead and now you show up again and you're lying and you won't even tell me why." Tears pool in her eyes and the thickness to her voice tugs at Tyler's heart and doesn't let go. "And you know what? If you won't say a thing, I'm not sure I can ever trust you. So, please Tyler. Tell me. Where the hell were you?"

  "Ivy," he starts. The truth about time travel and paradoxes is hanging on his lips. He opens his mouth to speak. "I was with Bryce Benson for the weekend at his dad's house. We went into town, stopped for ice cream and that's all there was to it."

  She shakes her head. A loose strand of hair falls into her face, covering one of her eyes. She pushes herself away from the table and stands up.

  "Goodbye, Tyler," she says. "If you ever feel like telling me the truth, I'll be around. Until then, don't bother talking to me."

  She stalks away. Tyler stares after her, cementing her every movement and every step in his memory. He fears he might never see her again.

  Two days later, he runs into Zane and the tikker in the school hallway. A week after that, Ty is gone from his own time for good.

  The memories of his life before Timewise will become shrouded in mist until they're almost unreal.

  But this moment will remain etched in his memory: Ivy walking away from him over and over again until it's happening every second of every day.

  Forever.

  "It's not a gun," says the professor as the academy students eye the weapon with suspicion. "Keep that in mind. This is not a gun. Carrying a gun pastside would be illegal. Not to mention ill-advised."

  They are in the courtyard outside Timewise's main building. The walls from the building surround them on all four sides, tall and gray and stretching up toward the heavens. Ty feels claustrophobic. He can see the sky but it's the same color as the buildings, pollution from four hundred years obscuring the blue. It makes him think the horizon is an illusion, that the only thing that is real is Timewise. He'd been outside in 2401 only once. The streets were cluttered with people, not quite as many as his own time, but a good number all the same. Ty hadn't been bothered so much by what was different, but more by how much was the same.

  Four hundred years and there are no significant improvements. Sure, the subtleties of the language are different but the conversation – all about the mundane – is the same. It's what he's been listening to his whole life.

  There have been no important inventions since Ty's time. No one lives off planet. Cars can't fly. Transportation is still way short of the speed of light. And Ty's pretty sure food has less flavor because of years of genetic manipulation.

  According to Timewise, it's all because of the war. The conflict with the tikkers that started in 2013 caused the human race to divert all funding into an international effort to fight an unknown enemy. Later, after Timewise assumed the burden of the war, the money that should have gone toward humanity's progress went to Timewise.

  "It's called a stunner," the professor says.

  The gun is sleek and silver with a simple trigger mechanism and some sort of a dial toward the top.

  "When you're on an op, the stunner's the only weapon you'll be bringing pastside," the professor says. "Not even the high setting has a lasting effect on humans, just knocks them cold for a spell. They wake up, assume they hit their head and no one is the wiser. It has more or less the same effect on tikkers. Stunner knocks them cold and there's your chance to finish them."

  "What are you talking on?" Stace asks, picking up on the vagueness of the statement even before Jones manages it. "Finish them?"

  The Professor takes a deep breath and adjusts the collar of his jacket. It is a cold day outside. They're all cold days. Ty can barely make out the sun through the haze. "The only other standard for an op is this."

  He pulls something out of his coat. From the distance, all it looks like to Ty is a black hunk of plastic, about as long as a comb. Then he flips it open and it's a knife with a six-inch blade, gleaming in the dim light of the courtyard. Ty can tell it's razor sharp without even asking. The professor delicately folds the blade back into the handle and returns it to his jacket.

  "Since the stunner is incapable of finishing a tikker, use of a switchblade enables permanent disposal," he says. "The prescribed means is an incision to the jugular."

  "We slit their throats?" Stace asks, disgust evident in her voice.

  Ty has to agree. Four hundred years pass and the only surefire way to dispose of an enemy is up close and personal? He would have thought the future would be less barbarian, more impersonal.

  The professor coughs, embarrassed. "Ops can't go changing events. The stunner makes for the means of immobilizing tikkers. The blade ensures no killings not planned and sanctioned by Timewise. Can't have people wiping out ones apposed to live. Stunning natives isn't best way to go about things, either." He claps his hands briskly. "So here we stand for training with novice agents. The best way to get efficient is target practice. Trigger's simple to figure. You'll find some quirks to the weapon that take some getting used to."

  He gestures to the stone table in the courtyard complete with twenty-five stunners all laid out in a row. "Can every student grab a stunner?"

  Hesitantly, Ty follows the rest of the students to the table. He doesn't like guns. They
make him think of his father, dead on the kitchen floor, leaking blood from a bullet hole in his head. No matter how much the professor insists the stunner isn't a gun, it still looks like a gun, still feels like a gun.

  "Each stunner is set to weak," the professor says. "Hitting a human should give five, maybe ten minutes of unconsciousness, but nothing lasting."

  Ty exchanges a look with Jones.

  The professor smiles. "Best ways to do this is a challenge. You may test the stunners on each other. Last one standing gets victory."

  The silence in the courtyard is so profound that Ty has to wonder if he's dreaming. Then beside him, Jones Longwood crumbles to the ground, unconscious. Acting solely on reflex, Ty whirls around and pulls the trigger.

  The professor is right. There is a delay from trigger pull to stunner fire. His aim is terrible. He misses the guy he was aiming for and hits Stace Lemond square on. She collapses, too.

  The battle is on then. Students all around Ty drop to the ground, but the joy in the air is unmistakable, like they're twelve-year-olds playing the world's most intense game of laser tag. And they are kids, Ty realizes with a start. They're kids playing at war but no one except Ty can see it.

  Leaning against the side of Timewise's building, the professor surveys the scene with detached amusement.

  Ty thinks that's the worst part.

  It's started.

  The war has started.

  Ty sees Annie out of the corner of his eyes, stunner out and at the ready. Her hair's come half out of her ponytail, the knotted remnants of it hanging on either side of her face. Her clothes are streaked with tikker blood and her own blood. She looks fierce, terrible, but beautiful in her own way. A tikker's body is face down on top of Mrs. King's immaculate buffet table, leaking yellow fluid into the potato salad. Chaos abounds. Sydney is screaming, her pristine white dress caked in dirt and blood. Her face is red. Her perfect teeth glint in the sun.

  He thinks he spots Jones Longwood, Val Teasley and Zane Tucker, but it can't be Zane because his ex-partner is locked up back at Timewise if the Procedure hasn't killed him already.

  "Everybody out!" Ty bellows. "Everyone not from Timewise get out right now."

  "Help," someone croaks at his side, hands clutching at his jeans. "You've got to help me."

  Ty brushes the hands off without looking to see their owner. He counts tikkers: four, seven, thirteen. "You've got to get out!"

  He fires off a round from his stunner. He sees Annie pulling out her switchblade. The civilians are starting to roust themselves into action. Bryce picks up a folding chair and swings it full force into the back of a tikker's head. He's moving toward Sydney when a stray shot from a Timewise stunner catches him in the back of the head. Bryce collapses, unconscious, to the grass.

  Ty forces his numb limbs into action, moving on autopilot now. He spots a tikker with its hand extended, blue lightning gathering on its palms. The lightning crackles through the air before Ty can squeeze off another round of his stunner.

  "Tim!" someone screams. "Tim!"

  It's Ivy. Ivy, stumbling through the chaos. Ivy, who is due to die any minute now. Ivy, who is only out here because of him.

  She doesn't even see the tikker behind her.

  Ty takes off at a run. His vision tunnels, his muscles scream. She's going to get lane up right here, right now, right in front of him. If that happens, he has nothing left.

  He crashes into her at full speed, toppling them both to the ground. The blue streak of lightning whizzes over their head, singing the ends of Ty's hair.

  "Are you insane?" he hisses at Ivy.

  "I was looking for you," Ivy says.

  Ty doesn't respond to that. He can't, because Ivy is here and she's alive. As long as she's beside him, he can do anything. He scrambles to his feet, pulling her up with him.

  "Run!" he tells her. "Run! Let's go!"

  He links his hand with hers and they're both take off, racing through the carnage, through tikkers and Timewise and stunners and lightning, through terrified graduates and disregarded burgers.

  "Ty!" Annie Gallagher screams at him, but she doesn't follow, can't follow. She's locked in battle and Annie doesn't turn her back on duty.

  (not like him)

  Ty doesn't let go of Ivy's hand until they're three blocks away. They're both breathing heavily. Sweat drips down Ivy's brow, but Ty is still shivering from the temporal instability. The screams are fading into the distance.

  Ty looks up at the sky. The sun is shining, birds are singing and flowers are in bloom. The grass is that rich green color that happens before the blistering heat of summer. And Ivy Lane is alive.

  (Ty is good as dead)

  He runs his hands through his hair as the seriousness of his predicament hits him full force. He has broken the law, the single most sacred law in the whole of Timewise.

  Don't interfere with the natural course of events.

  However, there's no apocalypse. Time has not split itself on its seams because Ivy is still breathing.

  Ty thinks of Jones Longwood lying in the bed across from him. I think time is a hell of a lot more flexible than we give it credit for.

  "They'll get here soon," Ty says.

  "Who will get here soon?" Ivy asks.

  "Timewise," Ty says, pacing frantically. "Oh, I'm sunk now. That's it. That's the end of me."

  "You saved my life," Ivy says.

  And that is what would damn him, Ty thinks, condemn him to a life on the run, moving through the timelines like Zane until Timewise finally catches up with him.

  And Timewise will catch him.

  How long does he have before Annie turns him in? More importantly, how long before Timewise reacts? They know exactly where he is, exactly when. If the tikkers have a block on this day, it might buy him a little time, but not enough, not nearly enough. He has to move – has to move now and has to move fast. He needs to build up a buffer between him and them.

  "You saved my life," Ivy says again.

  "And I'd do it again," says Ty. "Crissakes, I wouldn't even have to think before I did it again."

  "What happened back there?" Ivy asks. "What the hell was that?"

  How can he explain the neverending battle that only lasts a day? What can he say about time travel and tikkers and Timewise that would make sense? How could Ivy understand Tyler plucked from 2007 as a scrawny, naive kid only to return a hardened operative of the Timewise Agency in 2013?

  "I need to get out. They'll find me elsewise. Skorry, Ivy." He touches her hair, then her cheek. "I wish I could—I'm sorry."

  He turns abruptly, shoving his hands into his pockets and stalking down the deserted street.

  "Tyler!" she calls.

  He freezes. She shouldn't be able to pull his name out of the air, like she actually remembers him from before. He's been scrubbed, erased from this era. He should be nothing but a phantom, a ghost who doesn't truly exist.

  "Tyler!" she yells again. "That's your name, isn't it?" She sounds like she's on the verge of tears. "You're Tyler Smith." She chokes out a sound that's half-laugh, half-sob. "You got tall."

  He doesn't turn around. He can't look at her because if he does, he's sunk. This is the last thing he needs after the business with Zane.

  "Tyler?" Ivy says again and he can hear the tears in her voice

  If he looks at her now, he'll never be able to leave. He's not sure he can function outside of Timewise, not sure he can live a normal, linear life.

  "Ty," he says without turning around. "It's just Ty now."

  PART THREE

  (Present)

  Ty slips before he consciously makes the decision to run. One minute he's in 2013 walking away from a sobbing Ivy Lane and then he blinks and it's nighttime. A different time than he just left but the same place. He blinks again, disoriented.

  A commotion is coming from one of the houses, his old house with its redbrick front and its manicured lawn. The lights are on. Two men barge out the front door. To Ty's surpris
e, he recognizes both of them.

  The first is his father, standing in blue pajama pants a size too big and a white T-shirt that's a little too small. The second is Spenser Peabody. Quite a few years younger than the Spense Ty knows, but still unmistakably Ty's boss. Ty ducks behind a tree before they can spot him.

  "You have no right coming here," his father hisses. "This is my family, my house, my home. You don't get to come back after five years and expect me to leave with you."

  "It hasn't been that long for us, John," Spense says, running a hand through his blond hair. "Crissakes, we thought you were dead."

  "As it turns out, not so much," his father answers. "And the name's Garrett now."

  "Been going by your cover?" Spense asks. "John, this isn't you."

  "It didn't used to be," his father says. "But you left me here five years and I grew up. Got a wife I love and a little girl I adore. Going to have a son in a few weeks. That's not something you can ever have at Timewise."

  Ty peeks out from his hiding spot. Spense is dressed the same as always in sneakers, dress slacks, a T-shirt and a blazer. But he looks softer in the face, somehow more innocent. This Spense hasn't been beaten down by the weight of command, hasn't yet sent people to their deaths.

  "John, you can't stay," Spense says. "You're not supposed to be here."

  "Why not?" Garrett retorts. "Five years gone and nothing's happened: no tikkers, no temporal disturbance, nothing and nada. The world won't end if I don't go back."

  "John," Spense says, but he catches himself. "Garrett, look–"

  "I don't care what you say, Spense. I've got a life here," his father says. "I'm not going back. That won't change. No matter how many people they send for me, that won't change!"

  Spense starts to say something, thinks better of it and scuffs the ground with his foot. "Hell, John," he says finally. "They won't be hearing from me. Easier to leave you dead. Less paperwork."

  His father laughs and pulls Spense into a hug. "Gonna miss you, man," he says, his voice thick with relief. "Thanks."