by Pintip Dunn
I try to wet my mouth, but there’s no saliva. “I don’t understand,” I croak. “How come she’s not dead? I felt our bond sever. I felt it.”
Preston lowers my sister’s wrist. The impossible has happened, and yet he looks neither relieved nor joyful. Instead, his brows are creased, and his lips are tense. If I’m reading his eyes correctly, I’d say he’s…scared. But that can’t be right. Why would he be afraid?
“I told you Callie could only latch onto someone whose genetic thread was a psychic match.” His voice is soft, and I shouldn’t be able to hear him, not as well as I do. But the room is a cavern, and every word, every syllable pierces into my mind. “Your thread was the best match, since the two of you are twins. But there are other genetic threads. Other possible matches. Maybe they aren’t ideal, but in a pinch, they’ll work.”
I blink. “You mean my mom was here?”
“No, she wasn’t.”
My lungs contract. My mom is our only living relative. Our only genetic match. Unless…unless…
“There’s a third child,” I say breathlessly. “Another embryo we didn’t know about. I have another brother or sister?”
I rise onto my toes, about to take flight, but he shakes his head. “No, Jessa. You have no other siblings. Your mother only ever had two embryos in her womb, and you and Callie were it.”
I crash back down. “Who is it, then?”
“I…” He looks up, as if the answer’s etched into the ceiling.
I freeze. He’s always seemed familiar to me, although I’ve never been able to place him. This must be the reason.
Quickly, I cross to the computer terminal, understanding but not. I’ve watched Tanner enough times that I know exactly how to curve my fingers around the keyball. Exactly what sequence of keys to press.
A holo-monitor appears in the air, one that measures the patient’s psychic powers. Green dots throb in the shape of a horizontal figure—Callie. Next to her, much weaker orange dots pulse in a vertical shape. Preston. A string of lights connects the two figures. It’s not as thick or layered as my thread was—but it’s there.
“You,” I say breathlessly. “It was you. You saw her body failing, so you offered her your psychic thread. She latched onto you.”
He hesitates and then nods. “It wasn’t my first choice for any of us. You have to understand that. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. But when it became clear that you wouldn’t get to her in time, it was either this or let her die.” He looks up, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I could never let Callie die. So long as there is breath in my body. No matter what I have to sacrifice.”
He loves her so much. More than as a subject or a patient. As much as my mom or Logan or me. Still, I don’t understand. I don’t know who he is. “But why? Why does she mean so much to you? Who are you?”
He comes around the stretcher and tentatively picks up my hand. His fingers are warm and firm. They wrap around my knuckles the way a nest cradles a bird’s eggs. I’m reminded of the secret communication between Callie and me, how she would squeeze my hand three times to let me know that we were safe.
And then, he looks straight into my eyes. “Jessa, I’m your father.”
34
My long-lost father. Preston. One and the same? No way. What kind of game is he playing?
I tug away my hand, and a sound escapes my lips, so short it doesn’t even qualify as a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not my father. You’re barely older than me.”
“I’m thirty-one,” he says gently. “That makes me fifteen years older than you.”
“That makes you Mikey’s age. Four years older than Logan. Four years older than my sister. So let’s not discuss this any further.” I back up a few careful steps. I don’t know who he is, but based on what he’s saying, he might be unstable. “Mom never talks about my father, but Callie used to. She told me all sorts of stories because she wanted me to know him, too. He wasn’t some kid. He was this great scientist who time-traveled to the future and got stuck there—”
I cut off and look at him. Really look at him. Before I left civilization, my mother used to wear a hologram of my father around her neck. I haven’t seen the locket since I’ve been back. Maybe the reminder was too painful after her entire family was wrenched away. I don’t know. I do have a fuzzy recollection of my father’s picture. The jet-black hair, the smooth brown skin, eyes that come to a crease at the corners. Could it be? Oh. Dear. Fates…
“You time-traveled here? To this future?”
He nods. “Just a few months ago, I said good-bye to your mother and four-year-old Callie.” He rubs his forehead with long, slender fingers that might’ve held a yellow stub of a pencil, once upon a time. “She was such an angel. That soft curve of her cheek, that button nose. I could watch her sleep for hours. In fact, I did, because she got in the habit of sleeping in our bed. I would wake every morning with a foot in my face.” He looks at me. “You didn’t exist yet, but, uh, I bet you were a cute baby, too.” There’s a pause, as awkward as it is long. “I, um…. I’m sorry I missed it.”
I can’t believe this. I wouldn’t believe it, except he’s right here, right in front of me. With the hands I’ve heard so much about. With the eyes that peer back at me when I look in a mirror.
“So it actually worked,” I say wonderingly. “Everyone assumed that bits and pieces of you were stuck in different times. Your head in the pre-Boom era, and your heart in the next millennium. But that’s not the case. You’re here, and you’re whole and intact. Who knows about this? Tanner? Mikey?”
“You’re the first person I’ve told.”
“But why?” I ask. “This is huge! Whatever experiment you did in the past, it worked. TechRA would go crazy over this technology.”
“That’s precisely why I haven’t said anything,” he says slowly. “This discovery is so big, we have to be careful who we tell—and how. If the information gets into the wrong hands, there could be complete chaos. We could mess up the space-time continuum. It’s not a decision I want to make alone, so I was going to wait until I returned to my present.”
“Except you never came back.” My voice is stiff. I can’t help it. If he’s telling the truth, then not only is he my father, but he is also the man who deserted us. “Mom’s been pining for you for twenty-three years.”
“I always planned to return.” His Adam’s apple moves, and he walks back to the stretcher, back to Callie. Maybe he feels safer with someone who’s not awake. Or maybe he just feels more comfortable with the girl he considers his true daughter. “From your mother’s perspective, it would’ve seemed like minutes after I left. She was never supposed to have time to miss me.”
“Well, she did. And so did Callie,” I say, my anger building. “I was only six back then, and I wasn’t supposed to know any better. But I was old enough to notice when the conversation stopped, when the air felt so heavy it pressed down on my shoulders. I noticed when I woke up in the middle of the night and I heard sobbing. I didn’t know if it was Mom or Callie, but does it matter? You broke both their hearts.”
He drops his face into his hands, and his shoulders vibrate in a strange, seizure-like way.
Oh Fates. He’s crying. This man—the father I’ve never met—is crying. Is his heart broken, too?
My anger shivers and then pauses, like someone’s frozen a frame of a hologram. “Just go back to them,” I plead. “There’s still time. There’s always time. Maybe Callie will still end up here, like this, but at least she would’ve had you for a few years.” I lower my voice. “You could’ve helped Mom get through the loss of her firstborn.”
“I can’t,” he says helplessly.
“Why not? You could just tell a couple of the other scientists. Whoever you trust the most. I’m sure they’ll help you figure out a way to go back. If you love Mom and Callie, you would try.”
“You don’t understand. It’s not the mechanics that’s the problem. I know exactly how to go ba
ck. But it’s precisely because I love them that I can’t.” He picks up Callie’s hand, but he doesn’t need the physical touch to prove their connection. Behind him, on the holo-monitor, the string of lights joins their bodies. Unarguably. Irrevocably. “Shortly after I arrived in this time, I learned that my precious Callie was lying in a coma. I learned about the existence of another daughter: you. Most importantly, I heard about your absentee father, the one who had gotten himself stuck in another time.”
Behind him, the string of light glows brighter. Its circumference grows thicker. “You can imagine how shocked I was. I had every intention of going back to my time, and I couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. Still, I was determined to return. I didn’t want to leave Callie like this, however, drifting endlessly through time. My plan was to stay a few months, anchor her firmly to the present, and then go back.”
He holds out a hand to me. As if called by a magnet, I go to him, so that the three of us are connected, hand to hand. But I don’t look behind me. I can’t bear to see what’s not there—the absence of any psychic thread binding me to either of them.
“You showed up and entwined yourself with Callie, and she was stable, more stable than she’d been in the last decade,” he continues. “I thought this was my cue to return. I’d been gone six months, and I missed your mother. I missed little Callie. I wanted to go back and be with you from the beginning, from the day you were born. But then, you didn’t come to rejuvenate your bond, and Callie was fading, fast. I had no choice.” His face crumples, and lines of grief spread around his eyes and mouth.
That’s when I get it. I get why he looks so sad; I get why he’s aged beyond his years. “Callie. She’s the reason you have to stay. She’s the reason you can never go back.”
“Yes,” he says softly. “Now that she’s transferred her bond to me, she and I are inextricably wound together. If I leave this realm, if I go back to my time, our bond will be severed. And she’ll die.”
35
The next morning, I wake on a thin mattress on the floor in Preston’s apartment. Another mattress, another floor. I should be used to it by now. But I miss my bed. I miss my hoverboard. I miss Ryder and even my mom.
Not that I’m uncomfortable here. The warmth from the heated floorboards seeps through the padding, and the hum of the life-support machines soothes me. Like crickets in the woods, it acts as background noise to lull me to sleep. More importantly, the hum means that there is a life to support.
I rise onto my elbow and look at the bed next to mine. A stretcher, more accurately, surrounded by a dozen blinking machines. Callie.
She’s alive, but we couldn’t leave her in the cavernous room with the other dreaming bodies, not when Chairwoman Dresden thinks she’s dead. She had ordered Preston to take away Callie’s body, and he obeyed—just not in the way she expected.
Tanner helped us move Callie to my father’s apartment, just a few doors down from his in the scientific residences. He helped us set up the life-support equipment. He would’ve stayed and helped even more—but after taking one look at my face, Preston sent him back to his apartment for the night.
“Hey, sis,” I say. “It’s fun spending the night with you again.”
The greeting simultaneously makes me laugh and tear up. When I was a kid, I used to beg her to stay with me the whole night through, to curl her body against mine on the single mattress. Because I was scared of the dark—and also because I just wanted to be close to her. Those are my favorite memories. The two of us, whispering in the night like best friends and contemporaries, not sisters who were eleven years apart.
In retrospect, I realize that Callie was probably just pretending we were equals. What counsel could a teen like her want from a kid like me?
Still, it was nice of her to pretend. I grab a tissue from the compartment set in the wall and dab at my eyes. Fate is cruel. Her reach is long, nearly all-encompassing. I thought she was mean enough when she showed Callie a vision of her future self killing her little sister. But now, she’s wielding her power even on those who skip through time, attempting to avoid her.
My poor mother. For the first time in years, my heart shifts, melting some of the frozen bars encasing it. I judged her so quickly for everything she did to me. Never once did I attempt to understand her. Her true love left for an adventure through time—and never came back. Can I fault her for clinging to the hope of his return—even at the expense of her child?
Yes, I think emphatically. The old resentment rises, but then it floats away like pollen on the breeze. I’m no longer mad at my mother. I just feel sorry for her.
I change into a TechRA uniform Preston filched from the supply closet and pad into the eating area. My father’s already there, preparing coffee in the Drinks Assembler.
“Good morning,” he says. Even those two words sound stilted, like he’s not sure how to handle our relationship now that I know about it. He hands me a mug, keeping one for himself, but they feel more like life preservers. Objects we can each hold onto while we navigate these unknown waters of father and teenage daughter. “Sleep well? Were you, um, scared sleeping next to Callie’s unconscious body?”
“Nah. Callie couldn’t scare me, even if she were a zombie or a ghost.” I wrap both hands around the coffee mug. I’d wrap my legs around it, too, if it were big enough. “Thanks. For letting me stay. You didn’t have to. I mean, we don’t really know each other.” Fates. Why is this so hard? Preston is my father. My father, even if we only just met.
“Of course. You can stay with me anytime.” He clears his throat and then clears it again. But no amount of guttural searching will uncover words that don’t exist.
We both sip our coffees. I desperately try to think of something to say. We have an entire lifetime to catch up on—and yet, my mind remains stubbornly blank.
“I talked to Mikey last night,” Preston finally says in a rush. “The riot’s dying down, but tempers are still strong. A ring of people has staked out his house, complete with collapsible tents and portable meal assemblers, barricading him in so that he can’t go to work.”
I drink the last bitter dregs of the coffee, struggling to figure out how I feel. I should feel sorry for Mikey, but he hid Callie’s existence from me. He authorized Olivia’s kidnapping. He keeps more secrets than a safe. His intentions may be good, but he’s no longer the man I used to know. Maybe he never was.
“You can stay here until it’s safe,” Preston continues. “Even beyond that, if you’d like.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to impose. I could go somewhere else—”
“Jessa, I’m your father.” We both freeze at the words. He’s said them before. I just thought them a few minutes ago. But this time, in this context, the utterance takes on a different meaning. It no longer refers to the biological relationship but to a social one. An emotional one. A relationship for which I’m not sure either of us is ready.
“I’m your father,” he says again, more firmly this time. “You’ll always have a home with me. Besides, where would you go? Next door, to Tanner’s?” His voice rises. “He’s a good scientist, I’ll give you that. As my assistant, he would be trusted with my life. But as my daughter’s suitor? You are not to spend a single minute alone in his company, you hear? I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
“First of all, he’s not my suitor,” I say tightly. “He might’ve pretended to be, but it’s not true. It was all for show. And second, are you seriously going to try and tell me what to do? You haven’t been in my life for sixteen years, Preston! You weren’t here when I had to escape to the wilderness. You weren’t here to help me negotiate my arguments with Mom. You haven’t earned that right.”
His jaw firms. “You’re still my daughter.”
“Only in name. Only through blood.” I stop, my breath coming in large puffs. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. None of us were to blame.”
He looks at me, his eyes pulling down at the corners. My heart aches. I wish he’
d been the first one to hold me after I was born, his tears wetting the receiving blanket. I wish he’d made sand turtles with me at the beach. I wish he’d placed me high on his shoulders, so that I could feel like I was taller than the world. But he didn’t. He won’t. And we both have to live with that.
“Don’t worry,” I say, my voice softening. “I don’t even want to talk to Tanner, much less touch him. My virtue is perfectly safe as far as he’s concerned.”
The coffee mug stops halfway to Preston’s lips. “What did he do?”
“What didn’t he do?” I retort. “He invented future memory. He endangered Callie’s life. He betrayed me.” Now that I’ve had a full night’s rest, now that I’m no longer shattered by the thought of Callie’s death, the anger rushes to the surface again. “I trusted him, and this entire time, all he cared about was using me to advance his career.”
“I don’t know.” He plunks down the mug. “I’m not a fan of those looks he gives you, but I think he truly cares about you.”
Maybe he does, the voice inside me says. Think how gentle he was when you fell apart. Think how he looked into your eyes and told you his feelings overwhelmed him.
I push away the voice, confused. I’m pulled in so many directions, I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how to feel.
I do know this: I’d rather put my energies into the man who is inextricably twined in my life. “I don’t want to talk about Tanner. I want to talk about you.” I take a few tentative steps toward Preston.
I may not know him, but I want to. I want to understand him, his thoughts, his feelings. I want our relationship to be real, not just in name but also in meaning. Time, as we both well know, might be even more fleeting than the scant number of minutes we do have.
“I’m sorry you’ve been handed this fate,” I say. “It can’t be easy.”
His eyes widen, and all of a sudden, his cheeks are wet, as though the tears have sprouted from his skin. “Don’t misunderstand me, Jessa. I would do anything to keep Callie alive, and I’m happy to be here now, with you. But I can never have my family back. I don’t get to grow old with the woman I love. I don’t get to see my little girl—I mean, both my little girls—grow up. My future is your past. You’ve both been through incredibly tough times, and I wasn’t there to help you.”