His eyes stay on the screen. ‘I’m not going to turn you in, Scout.’
‘I know, but you can’t tell anyone. Not your folks …’ I breathe in. ‘Not even Boc.’
Mason turns to me as he registers what I just said, a tendon stretched in his neck. ‘Listen, I get it. The whole reason we noticed those gaps on that woman’s history map was because we were checking the grid for illegals. But this is different. I can talk to him –’
‘No! Please, don’t do that. It’s just …’ I’m on the verge of letting it all pour out. That guy is a double-crossing snake. But again, I hesitate. I’ve only just told Mason who I really am; but Boc’s been Mason’s best friend for years.
Mason rests his hand on my shoulder and I realise my thoughts must be written all over my face. It’s even worse now that I know how easily everything could unravel again.
‘Hey,’ he says gently. ‘I knew there was something weird about your chip, but I had no real idea what was going on. And you had the guts to tell me anyway. That’s pretty big, Scout, trusting me like that. I’m not going to give you away.’
I almost throw my arms around his neck when he says that. Thank you, thank you, thank you. But I hold back, sit on my hands. We still have a long way to go.
Mason lets out a sigh, his shoulders sagging slightly as he scrunches his nose at the comscreen. ‘Back to square one, I guess. No way to compare our time in the sinkhole if you don’t know how to skip. Zero chance of synching our returns.’
‘Actually, we’re a long way from square one.’ I try not to bubble too light as I speak, he’s going to love this. ‘If you want to synch a skip, we can do that. And more.’
‘You just came clean about avoiding me because you’re not the woman in the cave. Now you’re saying you know how to synch a skip?’
I tell him everything.
I’ve been speaking for a while when Mason’s eye go wide. ‘You know about my brother?’
‘Yeah, you told me about him.’ My nose scrunches. ‘Or at least, another version of you did. On the roof of this house, actually.’
‘Wow,’ he breathes. ‘I mean … I thought it might be possible, but I never even imagined … I mean, not like …’ He breaks off and grabs my hand. ‘Sorry. Keep going. Tell me absolutely everything.’
The warmth of his skin against mine makes me smile. I pick up again where I left off. One step at a time, I talk Mason through it all, describing the domino effect that led to the ten-year jump, and the moment we were both caught in the streets outside Sunshine Hospital.
It’s not easy, living through it all over again: my voice choking as we reach the description of Amon’s body slumped in the trolley. Echo’s sob as she pushed her palms against her eyes. Dust streaked with wet lines on Mason’s face. And then, in 2089, the moment when I heard that Mum had died, and watching Mason slump to the ground after being jabbed with the massive blue glowing syringe.
It’s like being dumped by wave after wave, each pushing me deeper as I struggle for air only to be chased by the next. But beneath each surge lies something deeper: an undercurrent simmering so hot that I end up pacing my way to the middle of the room. I can’t sit still anymore.
When I explain that I escaped arrest by jumping ahead, I skip the part where I worked out that Boc turned me in. That’s the only detail I don’t explain to Mason. Am I saving it to use against Boc when the time is right? Perhaps. But as I talk, pausing here and there to answer Mason’s questions, something in me stills. It’s not quiet. It’s the opposite of peace, it’s simmering anger.
Because I realise that Boc is the cause of the whole mess, the first domino to fall. He’s the reason we were time skipping in front of freight trains, and the one who talked Mason into disabling the safety sensors. It’s Boc’s fault that Mason was tagged for arrest. And if not for Boc turning me in, I would have been here when Mum faced the fire.
I don’t even care that none of that has happened yet. Maybe in this reality, it never will. But even if everything is different from now on, I know now what Boc’s capable of doing.
He still did it, even if he didn’t do it here.
I’m not sure what Mason would say if I told him that his best friend turned me in. Maybe he’d try to explain why Boc would do something like that. Or maybe he’d want to ask Boc about it, and I can’t chance that. I can’t risk Boc having that power over me by letting him hear I stole the chip. Not again. I don’t want an explanation, anyway.
I want payback.
We don’t speak for a while after I finish explaining everything to Mason, both churning through completely different ideas. Am I really the type of person who’d get revenge for something like this? But after seeing Amon slump on the tracks, facing a world without Mum, it’s not just about revenge; this is a matter of life and death. Dealing with Boc is the only way to be sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Now that I’m thinking this way, it’s easy to work out what to do next. I already know how the Feds will react once they realise that time skipping is possible. They’ll be desperate to catch someone who can skip. What if, this time, it looks on the grid as if only one person knows how to time jump?
What if I set it up so that this time, the Feds come for Boc?
Mason’s been staring at the space between us so long that I’m beginning to wonder whether he’s forgotten I’m here.
He swallows and shuts his eyes. ‘Sorry. I’m not … this is a lot to take in,’ he mumbles. ‘You’re talking about stuff that’s so far beyond anything … and I don’t … I just need time to process.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Why did you find it so hard to tell me just now?’ Mason asks. ‘That you’re illegal, I mean. If we were so close … if we become so close …’ He frowns. I get it, we have no natural language to describe what’s going on.
‘I don’t know. I was thrown, I guess, once I realised you were … that you don’t know me so well, here.’ I’m scared of Boc turning me in, but I’m also scared of Mason looking at me differently. That’s the real reason, I think, now that I’ve come out and said it. ‘And I knew already how you’d react …’
I’m fumbling through ways to explain when Mason’s mouth kinks. ‘I was a jerk when I found out you were illegal, wasn’t I?’
A chuckle escapes. ‘Well, not after a while.’ The massive jerk was Boc. ‘Once you got your head around it, you were pretty cool actually.’
For some reason that makes him snort, a quick glance my way. ‘Sure you’re not talking about someone else?’ But I can see he’s curious. It’s as if I’m suddenly mysterious all over again. Different from when he thought I was the woman in the cave, but now with a new kind of mystery that’s all my own. I like it.
Mason makes his way back to the couch and rubs a hand over the back of his neck. ‘You realise I’ve never seen anyone skip before? All this talk about ten-year jumps, and I’ve never jumped more than ten minutes … I’ve never had a chance to try to synch with anyone.’
‘Well.’ I stride to the centre of the room, rubbing my palms together. I spin around to face him. ‘That, at least, is easy to fix.’
His eyebrows go up. ‘From standing?’
‘Sure.’ I forgot how much we haven’t done yet, how far we have to go. ‘Do you want to try a standing jump now?’ I think back. ‘You’re close to working it out anyway. Or we could start by sitting and synch our return? We should be able to make a clean minute straight away.’
‘I, um … yes. And yes. Let’s try it all.’ He runs his fingers through his hair and glances around the room. Nervous? But excited, too.
We both are. This is going to be fun.
I’m not sure if it’s because I know what I’m doing this time, or because Mason’s heard all that he’ll learn to do, but soon we’re synching our returns as clean and sharp as when we were practising in Footscray Park. One minute at first, then straight into five, returning in tandem then reacting at the same time with gasps and cheers, mirror-imag
e versions of each other.
We still have the whiteboard set up, just like we did when we first began skipping together, but soon Mason wants to try a standing time skip. He’s sitting beside me on the other side of the whiteboard, about to stand up, when he hesitates.
‘The first time I saw you jump from standing …’ I point as I say it. ‘You were behind the couch.’
‘Oh … okay. Good.’ He heads around to the back of the couch, takes a breath, and disappears.
I’m already sitting beside the whiteboard, my shorts and shirt back on, when Mason comes back.
He wobbles then cracks up as he regains his balance. ‘This is amazing.’
‘Do you find it easier to jump?’ I ask. ‘Now that you’ve heard … like what you’re going to learn?’
‘Definitely. But you know what helps more than anything?’ He’s still standing behind the couch, his chest flushed from jumping. ‘The way you describe being lost in the sinkhole and then making it out … that freaking terrifies me. And now I hear it’s the key to rewinding your timeline? It’s spinning me out, to be honest.’ He leans his forearms against the back of the couch. ‘The very thing that used to scare me most, it’s exactly what I’ve been searching for …’
I lean forward. ‘So you think you understand what happened to me?’
‘Not for sure. I’m still getting my head around it. But I –’
‘Explain it to me?’
‘Okay.’ Mason pulls on his jeans and comes round to sit on the couch. ‘Time travels forwards, right? Rivers flow in one direction. It’s no accident that we only learnt to go forwards when we skip. That’s the way the world works. People are born, we live, we die. It doesn’t happen in reverse.’
‘Like the domino effect?’ I shuffle on my knees until I’m closer to the couch and sit on the floor with my arm resting on the seat next to Mason.
‘Sure. And I don’t think your body physically travelled back in time. I suspect that it reappeared in the same timeline as normal, but is perhaps in a coma or struck with amnesia or something. But here’s the thing …’ Mason repositions himself on the couch so that he’s facing me. ‘Time doesn’t exist inside the sinkhole. So it’s not ruled by cause and effect. That makes me wonder: once you lost your way, you weren’t trapped by everyday perceptions anymore. You weren’t held back by your expectations of what’s possible.’
‘So getting lost, forgetting who I was … helped me come back here?’
‘Yeah, at least, that’s what I suspect. When you boil down the equations of Relative Time Theory, time stops being a straight line. It isn’t a single river, exactly, more like a whole network of streams. Each moment contains an infinite number of possibilities. And it’s our choices that make one of those possibilities become a single actuality.’
‘Right, ah … okay.’ Not that I get any of that. ‘So … the blue goop in the injection. You’re saying that didn’t make this happen?’
‘No, the opposite. I’m saying that a rewind might never have been possible without it. Now that I hear what’s happened to you, I think our perceptions of reality would always stand in the way.’ He slips off the couch, beside me. ‘I need to find out what was in that syringe, and how it worked. And Scout … you hold the key.’
Mason pulls a folded whitesheet from a drawer under the coffee table and grabs a pen. ‘We need to work out what was in that drug. Tell me everything you remember about that final skip.’
Together we go over it all again, somehow ending up with more questions than answers. What was in the drug? What was it designed to do? The way the police reacted when Mason slumped, I don’t think they expected that to happen. Did they plan to send me here, or was it an experiment gone wrong?
The worst part is that, as far as we know, the drug doesn’t even exist yet. From what we can work out, the police here don’t even know that time skipping is possible. Mason’s been searching for clues about Relative Time Theory in their servers but no matter how deep he hacks in he can’t find any hint that government scientists are studying it at all.
The fire, at least, should be easier to deal with. We know when the fire starts, sort of. And we know that the fire sweeps through the north of the city. If we keep a close watch, we’ll be able to report the first smouldering before it burns out of control.
No danger to citizens, no risk for Mum, and no damage to the water-treatment plant. And no exposure for anyone who knows how to skip; warning the authorities about the fire has to happen without giving them a reason to target any of us again.
If everything goes to plan, no-one will ever know what might have been.
Except us.
A couple of blocks away from Mason’s house, I pull over to the side of the bike path and check for Boc on the grid. Good. He’s at the climbing centre, not sitting around thinking he’s some sort of hero looking for illegals.
I trigger the shortcut to the blocking script that I set up this morning and scroll back to the past hours in Mason’s garage. You can clearly see the gaps where Mason’s chip disappeared from the grid when he jumped, so I use those gaps as a guide and match a series of fake gaps to my timeline, rewriting history, like Alistair did with Mum. If Boc goes looking he’ll see exactly what he expects to see, as if I was jumping with the chip in my wrist, rather than realising it stays behind, tucked in the pocket where I keep it these days.
As soon as I get home, I fire up the comscreen and start writing the new code. Or more like rewriting. Mason already developed a linking code in the other timestream which he used to hide his parents’ time skips from the grid. I didn’t see any of the script but I know he got it working, so that’s a start.
It’s the exact opposite of the blocking script, but just as useful. At least, it will be if everything goes to plan. When the time is right, I’ll use it to remove all the gaps on Mason’s timeline on the grid. And mine. Echo and Amon don’t know how to skip yet, but I can keep an eye on them. To anyone watching the grid – like the Feds – it will look like we’ve never time skipped in our lives.
It’s easier to write my own version of this code than the other one, simply a matter of linking either end of each gap so it looks as if Mason was sitting in one spot. I test it once or twice to make sure it works, then clean up everything I’ve done.
It’s working, but I’m not ready for it yet. Boc still thinks I’m the woman in the cave, so for now I’m safe. But as soon as he does his first skip, I’ll be ready.
He won’t even know what hit him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MY COMPAD BEEPS late on Saturday morning: Sorry to bother. It’s Kessa. Want to meet up sometime? Maybe head to the park?
It brings a full-on deja vu, the way I felt when I saw those words, a total burst of possibility. I even recognise my own thought process as I form a reply: Sounds good! Looking forward to it.
Just like last time, we meet at the park near the school and settle into the same bench seat overlooking the playground and surrounded by high-rise flats.
The park is busy with citizens getting on with their lives, a distraction from the fresh awkwardness between us again. Other than waiting in line during the ID photos for school last week, we’ve barely spoken since we used to meet at the park when we were six years old. At least, from Kessa’s point of view, we haven’t.
As she finds a place next to me, I take a nervous breath, thinking about how it felt to admit to Mason who I am. All my life I’ve been scared of people looking at me as less, unworthy, but I’m tired of being scared. At least if I admit the truth, my secret loses its power. I gain control again over who I am.
And after seeing what happened to Mum in the fire, I don’t want to keep time skipping a secret from anyone I care about. For all I know, the truth I share might help keep her alive.
Kessa starts telling me about her twin Malena, who only made it into a tech school, so I nod and listen as I watch the parents and kids in the playground. At the back of my mind I keep thinking about the way she
was when I saw her in 2089, her face drawn and thin. The way she couldn’t answer with a yes when I asked if she was happy.
She finishes talking about her sister, leaning both hands on the edge of the seat and swinging her legs underneath. Kessa smiles when I glance her way.
‘Remember when we used to play shops with the polychips?’ I ask, nodding at a couple of little girls near the playground’s shop window.
‘Carrot sticks and apricot balls, right?’
Two kids race up for the same rotating swing and get into a small tug-of-war before one of them gives up and sulks away.
Kessa smiles. ‘And the swings? Acting like we couldn’t hear Mum yelling at us to give someone else a turn.’
‘But we had to wait so long to have both of them free at the same time!’ I say.
‘I know!’ A shared grin, partners in the memory. ‘The injustice, right?’
When I glance over at Kessa again her smile is sinking and threatening to fade. I know what she’s remembering. Around the time of our obsession with the swings, she asked if I wanted to do a friend link.
Automatically I cross my arms and tuck my feet under the seat, so used to hiding who I am. With no chip, of course I had to say no.
But things are different now.
I position my feet on the ground, reminding myself of the words Kessa told me not so long ago: I wish you’d told me …
I press my lips together and check for cameras or mic towers around us. Take a breath. ‘Remember when you asked me to do a friend link when we were kids?’ I ask, testing.
Kessa nods.
‘About that …’ I’m standing on a cliff, about to jump off. The part that scares me the most is the fact that once I tell her, she won’t have the choice not to know.
I take a breath, and jump. ‘I wanted to do a friend link … and I would have loved to do it,’ I say quietly. ‘If I could.’
And I wait, because I’ve just shown her a door. It’s up to her to decide whether to go through.
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