by Pintip Dunn
“No. They picked her up a few days ago, just like you saw. But not because of some test.” She rubs a hand across the back of her neck. “The reason your sister was arrested is because she’s your father’s daughter.”
37
Time stands still. The insect stops flitting, the water pauses mid-drip from the faucet. My heart hangs in a vacuum between beats. And then I hear the vibration of the bandage around my ankle again.
“What did you say?” I whisper. “Did you say Jessa and I have the same father?”
My mother touches my face. “She looks just like you. I thought you’d guessed. I thought that’s why you pestered me so much about your father coming home.”
I push her hand away. No. I’m not letting her off that easy. “You lied to me. You told me Jessa had a different father, and I believed you.”
She winces, as if I’m throwing pebbles at her instead of accusations. “I had to tell you something. You wouldn’t stop asking questions. You wouldn’t drop the subject. What was I supposed to do?”
“Tell me the truth!” I dig my fingernails into my palms. “Do you know how much I wanted my father? I thought if I was good enough, if I behaved perfectly and followed all the rules at school, he would come back to us. But he didn’t.” I open my palms. Little crescents decorate my skin like a henna tattoo. “Now you tell me he was here after all. Didn’t he want to see me, at least once? Didn’t he care how I turned out?”
“Oh, dear heart,” my mother says. “Your father loved you so much. He would be so proud to see how you’ve grown up.”
“So why didn’t he come see me?”
“He couldn’t.” My mother lowers her hand as if to pick up her mug, but I’ve already thrown it into the sink. “You know your father was a scientist. In particular, he studied the displacement of physical bodies in space.”
I make a face. I’ve always known my father’s profession, and it’s never bothered me. But that was before I was locked in Limbo. Before Bellows treated my brain like his own personal experiment.
“Callie, he was a lab rat himself,” my mother says, as if she can hear what I’m thinking. “That’s what I meant about FuMA taking Jessa. They’re so desperate to find the Key they’ve started detaining the offspring of every person with known psychic ability.”
Bellows’s words about my father echo in my mind. The information is classified. If your mother didn’t tell you, I cannot divulge it.
Nausea rocks my stomach. I thought the scientist was lying. I thought he was just trying to upset me.
“What was Dad’s psychic ability?” My voice is low, like it’s trying to hug the floor. “Could he send memories, like Jessa?”
“No. He could teleport his body from one place to another. He thought by studying himself, he could figure out how to move his body into a different time altogether.”
“You mean time travel.”
“Yes.” My mother jostles my mug, and tea splashes onto the table. She pushes her fingers through the liquid. “When the first future memories arrived, the scientific community was beside itself. They felt it proved that time travel was possible. What are future memories, after all, but memories sent back in time? Your father became obsessed with the idea. He felt his psychic ability made him uniquely qualified to study this field. He was convinced he would pioneer a new frontier of science.”
She takes a shuddering breath. “So he decided to send his body to another time. I begged him not to go. The scientific knowledge wasn’t there. We couldn’t ensure he would come back safely. But he said the price of knowledge is risk.”
The pain around her mouth is so deep I shiver. This is Mom. She’s not supposed to look so lost, so helpless. She’s supposed to hold our family together. Except we’re not a family anymore. We’ve been ripped apart, flung to different corners of the world. There’s nothing left for her to hold.
“I’m sure you can guess what happened,” she says. “He sent himself to a different time, and he never came back.”
“But he must have come back, at least once. Because of Jessa.”
My mother shakes her head. “No. I never saw him again after that day.”
“But then how…?”
She sighs, intertwining her fingers together. I think she’s going to brush me off again, like she has so many times before. But she doesn’t. “You know how I always said I never got a future memory?”
I nod.
“Well, I lied. I did receive one, but it wasn’t good. FuMA had no way of tracking the memories back then, so no one even knew I’d gotten one. I thought I had a shot at changing it. I distanced myself from friends, stopped associating with the Underground. All in hopes of altering my future.”
My heart begins to pound. “Did it work?”
“Yes. In a fashion. That person I knew who changed her future? I was talking about me.” The shadow of a smile crosses her face. “But I wasn’t entirely successful. A version of my memory came true a few days ago.”
I’m pretty sure I don’t want to hear this. Whatever her memory is, I’m pretty sure it will devastate me, like all the other bad memories I’ve heard. But ignorance is no longer an option.
“What was it?” I whisper.
“I was standing in the doorway of our house, reaching out my hand, but grasping nothing, screaming at the top of my lungs with no sound coming out. I watched as FuMA came and took my babies away. My twin daughters. Seventeen years old.” She cups my chin, tilting my face from side to side. “Both with this face.”
The chill begins in my stomach and spreads outward to each of my organs. Lungs. Heart. Brain. “I don’t understand.”
“I thought I could circumvent the future,” she says. “They took you away because somebody somewhere received a prophecy that the Key to unlocking future memory lies in a pair of twins.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “So I tried to cheat Fate. I thought if I didn’t have twins, FuMA couldn’t take my babies away.”
I can hardly breathe. “What did you do, Mom?”
“You and Jessa shared the same womb. I had her fertilized embryo removed and stored until I thought it was safe, six years ago. I thought enough time had passed.” Her shoulders move, as helpless as a kite blowing in the wind. “I guess I was wrong.”
38
I limp into Mikey’s old room, where I’ll be sleeping for the night. He’s been gone five years, but a row of medals still hangs on the wall. The air has the strong chemical smell of furniture varnish, and his shelf overflows with old-school textbooks from before the Boom. Textbooks made out of actual paper, rather than the digitized kind.
Logan waits for me on the twin bed.
Twin. As in, two embryos in the same womb. As in, me and Jessa. My mind’s still spinning. No wonder we look so much alike. No wonder we’ve always been so close.
I bite my lip to keep my emotions under control.
“Does my mom know you’re in here?” I ask.
He grins. “She said I could have an hour with you, and then you needed your sleep. She also said I’d better keep my hands to myself, or she’d banish me to another dimension.”
“She could probably do it, too.”
“I know.” He reaches out and touches my plant bracelet, and for a moment, he’s the only thing that matters. His hair has dried, but the little spikes remain. The cozy material of his pajamas invites me to snuggle into his arms and stay forever.
Except I can’t. Tomorrow, I’ll go to FuMA and rescue my sister. We’ll go back to Harmony, and he’ll stay here in civilization, continuing his old life.
The pressure builds behind my eyes. Blinking rapidly, I turn and study the awards decorating the walls. “These are science fair medals,” I say, trying to keep the tremors out of my voice.
“Yeah. Mikey’s always been consumed by the idea of time travel for physical bodies. You know, black holes, Gödel funnels, that kind of thing.”
Just like my father. A wave of sadness hits me. Before it can overwhelm me, I take a textboo
k off the shelf and page through it. Little strips of paper flutter to the floor, and handwritten notes march across the margins. I read one of the notations and frown. Instead of a student’s elementary thoughts, as I expected, the page contains complicated equations, theorems, and proofs.
“How old was your brother when he was arrested?”
“Same age we are now. Why?”
I hand him the open textbook. “I never learned any of this stuff in school. Did you?”
Logan squints at the equations. “I told you, he was kind of a science geek.”
I pick up another textbook and flip through it. More notes in the same handwriting. More equations I don’t understand. I look through another, and it’s the same. And then another. Soon, the entire shelf of textbooks is scattered around my feet.
He grabs my hands. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
The rough skin of his palms rubs against my knuckles. “Did you ever think that Mikey wasn’t meant to run? Maybe he was supposed to stay in civilization and become a great scientist. Maybe he would’ve gone on to discover the Key, and maybe without him, they’ll never find an answer to future memory.”
“I suppose it’s possible.” He continues to hold my hands. “But so are a million other scenarios. What difference does it make?”
I pull out of his grasp and collapse on the bed. “Because if that’s not it, and there’s nothing stopping the scientists from discovering the Key…” I crumple the comforter in my fists. “Then I think I know why my future self kills my sister.”
Logan doesn’t say anything for an entire minute. He sits on the bed and rests his elbows on his thighs. “Go on.”
Taking a deep breath, I mimic his position, going through the logic in my head. I know I’m right. I have to be. It’s the first scenario I’ve come up with that makes any sense.
“FuMA has started arresting sets of twins to study. And I found out Jessa and I were supposed to be twins.”
I tell Logan about my mom’s memory and how she removed my sister’s embryo and implanted it again six years ago. “And then there’s my future memory. I know I kill my sister, but I don’t know why.” I shake my head. “I’ve been going over this again and again. Whatever the reason is, it’s got to be big. I know myself, and I don’t care which future version of me is out there, I’m not going to kill my sister because I’m upset or to spare her a little pain. It’s got to be bigger than that.” My sweatpants are fraying at the cuffs, and I grab one of the longer threads and pull. “It’s got to be something that affects all of humanity.”
I take a deep breath. “So what’s the one thing our world’s built around? What is FuMA so anxious to discover they’ve been disregarding civil liberties left and right?”
“Future memory,” he says.
“Exactly.” I wipe my palms across my thighs. “I think Jessa’s the Key the scientists have been searching for. She has such a unique ability. She can send whole memories into my mind, not just telepathic messages like you and Mikey. It’s not such a stretch to think she’s the one.”
“Oh, wow.” He flops down on the bed and looks up at the ceiling, where the teenage Mikey had rigged up a light show of the galaxy. “So you think you kill Jessa to prevent future memory from being discovered? Why would you do that?”
“Something bad must happen in the future.” I lie down next to him. “Future memory must somehow be responsible for something so devastating, a future me decided she’d rather kill Jessa than live in that world.”
He turns his head, and our eyes meet, six inches apart. I hadn’t planned on telling him this next part, but no matter what happens tomorrow, I want him to know I tried my best to do the right thing.
“Logan, I’m going to rescue my sister tomorrow. But before I do, I’m going to look for some answers. I need to find out what happens in the future. I’ll never find any peace otherwise.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “But Chairwoman Dresden said the information came from a precognitive. Not like Jessa’s ability to see a couple of minutes into the future. But a real precog who can see years, if not decades from now. I have to assume the precog’s one of their subjects in the lab. I’ll start there and figure it out.”
He lifts his hand to trace the bones in my face. My eyebrows, cheekbones, jaw. “Let’s say you do find your answer. What if it makes you change your mind? What if you decide to kill her after all?”
I cover his hand with mine. “You once told me knowing my future doesn’t take away my free will. I guess I’ll have to trust myself.”
He sits up abruptly. My cheek burns from the absence of his touch. This is it. The moment he wishes me best of luck. Whichever future I choose, it has nothing to do with him anymore.
But instead of standing and putting more distance between us, he stares at his feet in the dim light.
I bite my lip. I’m not going to cry. I’ll accept his well wishes and thank him. He’s the most decent boy I’ve ever known. The most decent boy I will ever know.
“I want to help you tomorrow,” he finally says.
I shake my head. “Logan, don’t—”
“If you can take on FuMA, if you’re willing to go against your very destiny, then surely I can go against my brother’s wishes.”
“It’s not about what you can do. It’s about what you want.”
He picks up my hand and runs his thumb along my palm. “I never told you why I came after you. After we said good-bye in the woods, after you tore through the trees like something was chasing you.”
That’s right. He and the floating stick had miraculously shown up, just when I thought Betsy was about to take a bite out of me. “Why?” I whisper.
“Sometime in the future, in this world or a different one, my future self was wise enough to send me a message. He was telling me, this is what’s important. Go after it. And for a while, I ignored him. I let guilt cloud my decisions. I submerged what I wanted under other people’s desires.” He presses his lips over my knuckles. We stay like that for a moment, his mouth warm on my skin. “But I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m not leaving you, Callie.”
“What about the backpacks?” I ask, hardly daring to breathe.
“We’ll figure it out. If I have to, I’ll make the trip to the meeting point every few days to leave messages for the Underground. I’ll return to Harmony, give you a kiss, and go right back again, if that’s what it takes.” His eyes are intent on mine, and I couldn’t look away, even if I tried. “That’s how important you are. It took you walking away to fully understand what my future self was trying to say. I love you, Callie. I think I was always meant to love you. My future memory hasn’t come true yet, and I want it to. I want you by my side for the rest of my life.”
I fly into his arms. “Oh, Logan. I love you, too. So much.”
I should argue with him. I should try to convince him to stay. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past couple days, it’s that we can’t live our lives in fear of the future. We have to make the right decision, for today, and trust that tomorrow will work itself out.
He kisses me, and it’s everything I’ve ever needed. Gloves for my fingers when winter roars. Dried fruit in a tin when starvation creeps. Hope in a world that’s fallen apart. It’s a kiss from Logan. My Logan.
I didn’t realize until now just how much I’ve been holding back. Knowing that Logan and I were destined to be apart, I had put up a wall. In that moment, with that kiss, Logan breaks through. Down crashes the glass and steel. This kiss feels unlike any before it, because, for the first time, I’m able to truly give myself to him. There are no future memories or backpacks keeping us apart. I feel Logan’s love like I’ve never allowed myself to feel it. And when he pulls away from the kiss, my body cries for more. A lifetime’s worth. No matter how often he kisses me, I’ll never stop wanting. Never stop needing. Never stop loving.
Later, when my body settles onto solid gro
und, I cuddle into his chest and listen to his heart. I try to match our heartbeats, but mine dances all over the place, while his marches steady and strong.
“I’m going with you tomorrow.” He traces his fingers across my face, as if daring me to disagree. “If you can fight the future, then I can let go of the past.”
My heart leaps. I hug him tightly, and the buttons on his pajamas jab me in the chest. I’m still terrified of tomorrow, but with Logan by my side, what could possibly go wrong?
39
“Wake up, Callie. You’re going to be late.”
I groan and roll over. I’m about to go back to sleep, and then I remember.
Flinging the pillow off my face, I sit up and squint at my mother. Sunshine floods into the room through the open blinds, and for a moment I can’t see anything but the blur of a figure. Then my eyes adjust and I see hair slicked back in a neat bun and a white button-down tucked into navy slacks. My mother holds my silver jumpsuit in one hand and a long auburn wig in the other.
“I forgot for a moment,” I say. “I thought you were waking me up for school.”
“I wish I were.” Mom plops the wig on my head, tugging it this way and that. “Good. I knew it would fit perfectly.”
I grab a fistful of the wig. It’s slick, like extremely fine strands of plastic instead of hair, and a few shades darker than my own. “Where did you get this?”
She sits on my bed and motions for me to turn around. Once I do, she braids the wig with quick, sure movements. “When your father sent himself back in time, he took off his clothes and shaved all the hair from his body. The scientists thought it would be easier to push a body through spacetime if it left the non-essentials behind.”
She winds an elastic band around the end of my braid, and I turn back around. In the glare of the sun, my mother looks old. Her skin has always been tissue-paper soft, but now I see a million tiny creases in the lines around her mouth.