by Pintip Dunn
I press my fingers against my temples, struggling to wrap my head around it. “So we were always here. We were always part of history.”
He steps backward, and his elbow knocks into a tray of black data chips. I’d thought we were in a supply closet, but upon closer examination, I realize every last tray contains black chips. There must be thousands of black chips in here. Maybe even millions. We must’ve stumbled into some kind of memory bank. How many future memories were received and recorded before my sister messed up the system?
I shiver, and Tanner runs his hands along my arms. Even with the synthetic hair over his mouth, he is ridiculously attractive. Almost without thinking, I reach out and straighten his mustache. My fingers linger on his mouth, and I can feel his hot breath against my hand.
For a moment, we stand perfectly still. My heart pounds a bass line in my ears.
“Were you able to say the jingle to her?” he asks. Each word moves his mouth against my fingers. I like it. I want to keep my hand there, and if we were anywhere other than the past, maybe I would.
Reluctantly, I pull down my hand. “No. I was frozen to the spot. I probably could’ve moved. I could’ve broken through the resistance of Fate, but I didn’t. It just wasn’t the right moment.”
“When else?” he asks. “It’s not like we have a lot of opportunities left. Olivia shows them the vision. Callie walks down the hallway. She stabs herself.”
My eyes widen. “That’s it. That’s when I’m supposed to say the jingle. After Logan and I jump down the laundry chute. Before the people who inject the antidote arrive. There will be a few precious seconds when she’s drifting in and out of consciousness. I can go to her then.”
“Any idea who injects her? Her file claims she was given the antidote at the two-minute mark. Enough to save her mind but not her body. But it never says who administered the antidote.”
“It’s got to be that guard, William. Right?” I wrinkle my brow. “Or maybe my mom?”
“Negative. Your mom had no idea Callie was even in a coma until a couple of weeks ago, and Mikey and I have quizzed William hard. He insists he had nothing to do with the antidote.”
It hits us both at the same time. I feel like all the oxygen has been sucked out of the air. “Oh Fates, Tanner. What if it’s us? What if we’re the ones who are supposed to give her the antidote?”
He nods rapidly. “It makes sense. That’s the part we never understood. Nobody else even knew they were there. How could they have gotten her the antidote so quickly? It’s got to be us. Especially since we’ve been a part of everything else.”
“But we don’t have an antidote,” I screech, whipping my head wildly around the closet, as though expecting one to materialize. But we’re still in a memory bank full of black data chips. No syringes filled with red liquid anywhere. “We can’t use the one Callie had because she smashed it on the floor. If we attempt to intervene, we’ll change the course of history.”
“I have an idea.” Tanner checks the wrist com my mom lent him. “We have fifteen minutes before Callie walks down that hallway. There’s time, but we have to hurry.”
Abruptly, he turns and walks out of the closet. I scamper after him. “Where are we going?”
“To get the antidote.” He strides down the hall. I take two steps for every one of his. “The system hasn’t changed much in the last decade. If the formulas are still kept in the dispensary, then I know exactly where we can find another antidote.”
We pass the shattered ceramic pot, the trail of soil, the broken plant stalks. My steps falter, and I stop. The mess is still here. Nobody’s cleaned it up. Nobody will until after Callie walks down this corridor again.
Tanner looks over his shoulder. “Coming?”
I nod and hurry after him. And pray to the Fates he knows what he’s doing.
48
Two flights of stairs and three corridors later, we walk into a chilly, oversize refrigerator. The dispensary. Thirty degrees cooler than the rest of the building, housing racks and racks of needles in every color of the rainbow. And many more colors that never existed in nature. Cotton-candy pink and fluorescent yellow and neon green. Everywhere I look, I see needles. The racks extend from floor to ceiling and are stacked ten deep. I feel like I’m in one of Eden City’s virtual theaters, staring into a set of reflecting mirrors that go on forever.
Tanner walks to the computer terminal, scans his fingerprints, and begins tapping on the keyball. “Good thing I’ve studied Callie’s case half my life,” he mutters. “I have her entire file memorized. I know the name of the antidote: Formula X9453. I even know her dosage.”
I wrap my arms around myself. It’s so cold I can see my breath in the air. “Are they going to wonder, a few days from now when they inspect the records, what a six-year-old was doing dispensing this antidote?”
“Yes.” His fingers pause, for an infinitesimal moment, over the keyball. “I turned out okay.”
“Wait a minute.” There’s something in his tone, something both raw and resigned. Something that makes the hair stand up at the back of my neck. “You know what happens. You know what happens to your six-year-old self because of this.”
He curls his hands into fists. “Got it. The formula’s located in row AA, rack 9.14.”
He starts to walk down the dispensary. I grab his shoulder. “Don’t change the subject.” I need to know what happened to him. It may be in the past; there may be nothing I can do to change it. But I need to know. “What did they do to you? As a result of your fingerprints just now.”
He stops moving, but he won’t look at me. “You know what they did, Jessa. The same thing they did to you, except mine lasted longer.”
My heart drops. “This? This is why they tortured you for six months?”
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to. The look in his eyes scares me. If you sliced it up, you would see layer upon complicated layer. Of things too dark and dreary to discuss on a flimsy platform five stories up. To discuss anywhere, really, except right here. Right now.
“How did the torture stop?” I whisper.
“I finally convinced them I had no idea how my fingerprints got logged in the system. Which was true. I really didn’t know, not until this moment.” He shrugs, and even that small movement looks painful. “When they started scraping me off the ground every day, because I was too spent to hold myself up, they concluded I was telling the truth. They came up with a couple scenarios, equally far-fetched. In one, somebody succeeded in impersonating me and breaching the virtually un-breach-able FuMA security system.”
“And the other?”
His lips curve. “A future Tanner travels back in time and breaks into the dispensary. Totally out there, right? Strains the imagination, doesn’t it?”
I try to smile, too, but I can’t. What his six-year-old self is about to endure robs all the smiles—real and fake—out of my heart.
“Tanner, I’m sorry.”
“Let’s not talk about it.” He resumes walking around the room. “Come on. Let’s find the antidote and get out of here.”
He stops at the appropriate row and presses a button to rotate the racks, stopping at the ninth one. He counts down fourteen trays, and there they are: a dozen glass tubes with a red formula swimming in the barrel. The antidote.
He removes one tube and places it into a machine on the far wall. He taps in the proper dosage, and the machine automatically fills a syringe.
I lick my lips. “Is one enough? What if something goes wrong?”
He hesitates. Removes the syringe and checks the safety cap. Puts the needle in his pocket and looks around the room. And still makes no move to prepare a second syringe.
That’s when I get it.
“They punished you more for a second syringe, didn’t they?” I ask. “Of course they did. The more formula that’s missing, the angrier they’re going to be. Forget I said anything. One antidote is sufficient.”
He takes a deep breath. “No, yo
u’re right. We came all this way. We’re not going to mess everything up just so I can have a few less torture sessions. We’ll take two—”
“Tanner. No. We don’t need it. I was just being paranoid.”
“We don’t know what we need. In the past, I was punished for taking two syringes of formula. So we’ll take two now.” He taps the machine, and a second syringe is filled. He holds it out to me. “Here, you’d better keep this, just in case.”
He meets my eyes, and I tumble into their depths. My heart expands until it fills my rib cage, until it presses against my lungs. I can’t breathe for fear that it might pop. I don’t know how I could’ve ever thought he was a jerk. How I could’ve thought him arrogant and selfish—when the opposite is true. Tanner Callahan is the most selfless boy I’ve ever met. I don’t know if he can change the future, but he’s picked up my heart and moved it to a different plane. No matter how this turns out, my life will be changed forever, knowing what he’s done for my sister. Knowing what he’s done for me.
I take the needle from him.
And then, the door whooshes open and somebody walks into the room.
49
“Oh, good. I was hoping someone would be here.” A commanding voice floats into the room, colder than the air. Colder, even, than icicles.
I stiffen. My back is to the door, but I don’t need a visual to confirm her identity. Just our luck. Chairwoman Dresden.
“A little help, please? I have an important meeting to attend.”
My heart gallops out of my chest. I exchange a we-are-so-screwed look with Tanner, and then he smooths his fingers over his mustache and shuffles forward.
She’s not focused on me. At least not yet. I walk to the last rack and pretend I’m terribly busy cataloging something. Anything.
Since my face is so similar to Callie’s, she’d recognize me in an instant. Tanner’s got ten additional years and a mustache. He just might survive her scrutiny.
“Are you new?” she demands. “I don’t recognize you.”
Or not.
“Yes, ma’am. Just started last week.” His voice trembles, but that’s to be expected. Dresden would be suspicious if one of her employees wasn’t afraid of her.
“Fine, fine.” I hear, rather than see, her hands waving in the air. “I have a standing order. You’d better get it memorized because I’m not going to put up with your incompetence every week.”
The computer hums, as if Tanner just booted up the terminal.
“You fool.” She’s an entire room’s length away, but I swear I can feel the drops of her spittle spraying my back. “My prescription’s not in the system. What about ‘privacy’ do you not understand? Hmm? How exactly did we hire you?”
She utters a long-suffering sigh. “You there! In the back. Help us out before your friend here loses his job.”
I turn a quarter of the way, showing as little of my face as possible. My heart’s returned to my chest, but it doesn’t do me any good, wheezing about like that. “Yes, Chairwoman?” I ask, my voice faint. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll be happy to get it for you.”
“The amber formula,” she snaps. Each syllable could slice glass. “Row D for Dresden. First rack, first tray. Because it’s me, these syringes are pre-filled. Give me a week’s worth. And if you can’t calculate that in your tiny brain, that’s seven needles.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tucking my head down, I hurry to the proper row. Oh, fike. How did Tanner operate these racks? Holding my breath, I push the number one on the keypad, and the glass door slides open. Thank Fates. I take out the first tray and remove seven pre-filled syringes.
Now what? Do I just hand her the needles? Put them in some kind of container?
Luckily, Tanner is by my side with a glass rack. He arranges the amber-colored syringes inside with a deftness I wouldn’t have been able to improvise, and hands the rack to Dresden. All without her getting a good look at my face.
I retreat to the end of the dispensary, peeking at Dresden out of the corner of my eye.
She places the rack into a solid carrying case, obviously designed for this very purpose. “Listen. You’re new here, both of you, so it’s worth repeating the rules. Nobody knows I was here. Nobody knows what you gave me. One word to anyone, and your careers, your lives are over. Understand?”
“Yes, Chairwoman,” Tanner says.
She shifts her laser-sharp glance to me, and fear climbs up my throat like magma up a volcano. “Yes, Chairwoman.”
“Good.” She spins on her heels and stalks away.
For a moment, we don’t speak, breathing in the chilled air, giving our hearts a chance to settle down.
“What on earth was that about?” I finally ask. “Why all the secrecy? What were those needles?”
Tanner reads the label underneath the tray. “There’s no description here, just a code. If she’s injecting herself daily and renewing her order every week, she’s got to be treating something. Is Dresden sick?”
“I don’t know.” Even as I say the words, I remember how she walked into the transport tube in my bedroom. I thought it was funny at the time, but maybe she wasn’t just being clumsy. Maybe it has to do with this ailment.
Clearly, something’s going on with Dresden. Something that started ten years ago, in this time. What, I have no idea.
Chances are, however, it has nothing to do with our mission.
“We need to go.” I wrap my hand around the syringe in my pocket. “Before we’re too late.”
He nods. Moving quickly, we walk down the hallways, heading toward a room numbered 522, where my younger self and sister are waiting.
50
Déjà vu hits me the moment we turn onto the right corridor, and it’s no gentle stream. It’s an ocean wave crashing into my legs, almost knocking me down.
The same linoleum tile. The same stinging scent of alcohol. Those IV stands jumbled in the corner, that diamond niche cut into the wall. Even the third panel of lights in the ceiling blinks on and off.
Just like I remember. Just like yesterday.
My palms go slick with sweat. My heart beats in my throat like an extra tonsil. Every muscle in my body screams, Run!
This is where my darkest fears formed. Where I relived memories that weren’t mine. Where they shaped me into the person that I am, for better or for worse. Definitely worse.
Helpless. Worthless. Every “-less” that ever existed.
I sway, and Tanner wraps his arm around my waist, holding me up. Our eyes meet, and I don’t have to say a single word. He knows. Perhaps more than anyone else, he knows exactly what I’m feeling right now.
“They tried to…persuade you here?” he asks gently. Ha. That was their word for it. Persuasion. As if calling it by another name could disguise the torture they were actually performing.
“Yes.” The word is faint, so faint that it fades away into the silence, and I can’t be sure if I’ve actually said it.
“They tried to defeat you back then. But you won’t let them win now.”
It’s the exact right thing to say to bring me back to myself. I’m not six years old anymore. They don’t have control over me the way they used to.
“Okay. Let’s do this.” Squaring my shoulders, I push him into a relief room. “Ten years before our present, a few months before this time, the Underground strategically placed spiders all over the building, which gave them secret access through the air vents. That was how Logan broke Callie out of Limbo.”
“And how you broke into my lab.”
Fike. I hoped he wouldn’t remember. “Well, lucky for us, I have the location of every spider memorized. So my vandalism days were good for something.” I crouch by the toilet and try not to touch anything, even though the entire room is sanitized after every use. “See the panel behind the toilet? That’s our access point.”
He sighs. “Why do all my adventures with you involve crawling through sludge?”
“We won’t go near the sludge. I hope. I
’ll go first.” I take a deep breath and crawl straight into a seemingly solid wall, emerging in an air duct on the other side.
I wriggle forward to make room for Tanner, who appears a few seconds later.
“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” Fates, I should’ve asked earlier. They tortured him for six months. Who knows what other phobias those nightmare memories induced?
I sense, rather than see, the shake of his head. The only illumination comes from the light filtering through the air vents. “Nah. They didn’t get a strong enough reaction the first time, so they stopped giving me the memory of being buried alive.”
I grimace. “How efficient of them.”
“You’re telling me.” He taps his wrist com, and a blueprint of the building—identical to the one we’ve been studying—is projected in front of us. “According to this, we go up the ladder, crawl straight for thirty feet and then left for another thirty. Her room should be right below us then.”
I nod. Since he’s in front, he climbs the ladder first and enters the horizontal air shaft. It’s wide enough for both of us, but we crawl single file. For the next few minutes, my only visual is the soles of his hovershoes.
Before the last turn, he pauses. “Remember.” His voice floats back to me. “If we get separated, meet me at the cabin where the time machine is housed. Doesn’t matter how long it takes. I’ll wait for you.”
“Why would we be separated?”
He starts crawling again. “You never know. I just want to be prepared.”
Before I can formulate my next question, he stops at an open air vent and scoots to the side. I crawl up next to him, wedging my shoulders against his, and we both look through the slats into the room below.
A little girl lies in a narrow hospital bed.
Me. Jessa. When I was six years old.