The reporter who asked the question straightens his shoulders. He’s short, with hair that sticks up around his head as if he’s only just gotten out of bed.
“There’s a report that Jason Torino has information about Sikes and he’s willing to talk if he gets immunity.”
Chief clears his throat. “I have no knowledge of the suspect contacting the police.”
“I got this tip from a reliable source,” the reporter says.
Chief’s lips settle into a tight line.
The reporter presses on. “Assuming the rumor is true, can you share the city’s stance on negotiating with terrorists?”
“No comment,” Chief says.
Questions explode from the press gallery. Hands wave, cameras click. Chief leans into the bank of microphones and thanks everyone for coming, promising to let them know as soon as they have more information. His expression holds thunder.
Jack leaves the seat next to mine and asks Aidan to deal him in for a new card game. Calvin starts rambling about some theory involving leaks and hit men. Yuki grabs the remote and switches the TV to a reality makeover show. I sit alone, staring at the flickering screen. For all his efforts to project professional calm, Chief’s surprise at the reporter’s revelation was obvious. Ross, however, looked pleased, even calculating, like a cat trying to figure out which way a cornered mouse might run. Does that mean the rumor is true? My heart does a little flip. If Jason Torino has information, Ross will find a way to get it. Which means that, with Ross’s medical help, I can potentially live long enough to solve this case.
06
BY THE NEXT MORNING, MY EUPHORIA HAS FADED. The 6:30 alarm jolts me awake, and before I even open my eyes yesterday’s grim realities crash over me like a massive sandbag dropped onto my chest. I was sick. Time sick.
“You up?” Shannon asks. My roommate is standing in front of the window twisting her long hair into a tidy braid. She’s already dressed in her mission uniform, though it’s topped with the pink smock she wears when she’s assisting Amy. Under her breath, she’s humming an old pop tune. I can’t remember the title, but I know the chorus includes a line about a girl being amazing the way she is.
I mutter something incoherent without getting out of bed.
“It’s a gorgeous day out there,” she says. “Look at all those people heading out to enjoy it.”
She cranks open our window the three inches the security bars allow. Traffic noises drift up from the street along with the smell of car exhaust.
“It’s Labor Day weekend,” I tell her. “All those happy people are setting off for the accidents KJ will be rewinding this afternoon.”
Shannon shoots me a sharp look. “That’s pretty morbid.”
I shrug. “I just don’t see why you’re so chipper about the weather, it’s not like you’ll get to go outside and enjoy it.”
“Is something bothering you?”
“No.”
The word comes out particularly harshly. Shannon bends to smooth a minute wrinkle from her bedspread, carefully not making eye contact. The weight on my chest shifts uncomfortably. I feel like I just stepped on a kitten.
Shannon vanishes into our miniscule half bath. I turn on my side. Our dorm rooms are compact squares with one window, two beds, and a couple of dressers. Shannon’s side is spotless, mine littered with copies of Ross’s old case files and a criminology textbook I found a while back in the donated book bin. I stare at the wall across from me. The photo of Steve that Shannon used to have pinned over her bed is gone, replaced with a line of drawings from the Youngers. Three of them are bunches of flowers with the words I love you scrawled in sloppy letters.
Julio, one of the night guards, starts the secondary wake-up call, banging his nightstick against each dorm door as he unlocks it. Out in the street, a siren blares past the building, a high-pitched scream of recent disaster. I burrow deeper in my blankets, stopping time with a mental flick before Julio reaches our door. Spinners sometimes freeze time as an instinctual response to nightmares, so staff turn the monitors off at night, not turning them back on until our dorm rooms are unlocked.
Stillness settles around me, slipping through the cracks of my closed lids. I make an effort to relax. Besides high chronotin levels, the only other trigger I know of for an attack is stress. Which is a pretty useless warning since stress is inevitable once the clock starts ticking. I practice steady breathing. I can’t actually fall back to sleep without losing control of the freeze, but maybe a few minutes of peace will settle my nerves.
The heavy mass crushing my chest refuses to be soothed. Tiny things, like the faint bleach smell from my sheets and the headache lurking in the back of my skull, grow larger in the vacuum. I imagine I can feel my chronotin levels rising, the cells duplicating, unchecked by my insufficient dosage of Aclisote.
I have only a few months left to live.
The words clang through my head, knocking away any lingering wisps of sleep. I sit up. The vastness of the unmoving world stretches out endlessly. I am completely alone, and today the thought is chilling rather than freeing. Will death be like this? A solitary soul moving through a world that neither knows nor cares about its existence?
I let time go, shifting instantly back to my earlier prone position. Julio’s stick smacks the door with a sharp crack just as Shannon emerges from the bathroom wiping her face with a towel. I grab my robe and head down the hall to the showers. How much of a risk am I taking by not reporting my illness? I ponder the question, standing under the spray so long the timer clicks the water off before I remember to wash my hair.
A cacophony of clattering spoons and raised voices envelopes me as I make my way down to the basement for breakfast. I scan the cafeteria, stopping when I find KJ. He’s sitting at a table with Calvin, who is talking vehemently about something, his hands pounding the table as he makes his point. KJ nods as if whatever nonsense Calvin is spouting makes perfect sense. When KJ sees me watching them, his mouth lifts in a smile and a tiny bit of the tension wracking my body eases. KJ has forgiven me. The urge to race across the room and pour out my fears is almost unbearable, but I force myself to hold back. KJ’s already got Calvin to worry about. Adding the pain of another sick friend would be cruel.
“There you are, sleepyhead,” Shannon chirps at me from her spot at the meds table set up just inside the door. “Feeling better? I was thinking I’d have to go back up and drag you downstairs.”
For a split second I consider confessing that I’d felt sick yesterday and asking her to run a surreptitious blood test. I squash the impulse. Shannon follows the rules. If the results came back high she’d be sure to report me to Barnard.
Shannon selects a pre-measured dose of Aclisote from the meds basket. I watch her initial the logbook next to my name and try to decide the merits of faking a cold so that I’ll get sent up to the clinic. If I get a high chronotin result from a routine test would they pull me from time work? Or just raise my dosage?
“Here you go,” Shannon says, peeling the plastic seal off the vial with a practiced hand.
“That’s not mine,” I say. “I don’t take that much.”
Shannon checks the label. “Yes, it is.”
I read the tiny writing on the tube she holds out. Alexandra Manning, 5 cc, twice daily. Five cc’s? Yesterday, I’d been taking four and a half. My cheeks warm, relief at getting a higher dosage mingling with guilt, as if somehow Barnard had caught me lying.
“Why did Dr. Barnard change it?” I ask. “He just raised my dose after my blood test two weeks ago.”
“I don’t know,” Shannon says. “But between us two, I bet Amy copied the dosage wrong and no one noticed until now.” She leans over the table and lowers her voice. “She’s totally distracted these days. I think she has a new boyfriend.”
My first smile of the day spreads across my face. This must be why I got sick yesterday. Amy, our cute, scatterbrained nurse, messed up Barnard’s prescription. I toss the medicine down like a cowboy shooting whiskey. The
chemical-sweet flavor tastes reassuringly familiar. I remember the pointed questions Barnard asked me in the lobby yesterday. That must have been why he’d been so curious: he’d noticed the error and been worried about the possible repercussions.
I turn my smile on Shannon, determined to make up for my earlier surliness.
“I’m thinking Amy isn’t the only one who might have a new boyfriend.”
Shannon’s face turns bright pink and she seems suddenly intensely interested in straightening the logbook.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She glances up at me. “Would it bug you?”
I wish people would stop asking me that.
“Of course not,” I lie. If I’m KJ’s friend, it’s my job to do what I can to make him happy. Plus, as Shannon would say, it’s good karma, and I could definitely use some help in the luck department.
I chuck the empty vial into the trash and head over to the breakfast counter. There’s a big pot of oatmeal on the hot pad, and I serve myself a healthy dollop. All that worry, when the only problem was … The oatmeal slops into my bowl. The problem was I’d gotten sick. Whatever the reason, I’d suffered a bout of time sickness. Sure, it was mild, but the first ones usually are. And then first bouts are inevitably followed by second ones, then third. Most people don’t get four.
The oatmeal quivers. I spoon on brown sugar. Ross said if my Aclisote dosage was too high, the new medicine wouldn’t work. Is five cc’s high? How much is someone like Calvin getting?
“You gonna leave any of that for me?”
Jack is standing beside me, pointing at the mound of sugar I’ve heaped into my bowl.
“Sorry.” I put the spoon down. Jack snatches it up and piles twice the amount of sugar I just used onto his own oatmeal.
“Hey, Jack?” I ask. “How much Aclisote do you take?”
“I don’t know.” He adds a generous scoop of raisins. “Six cc’s, I think, why?”
“Just curious.”
I pour a cup of coffee and follow Jack over to the table where KJ and Calvin are sitting. It’s dawning on me how little I know about Aclisote and chronotin, a knowledge gap that suddenly seems glaring. All I really know is that chronotin rises as you age and that high levels are bad. Nothing about exact numbers.
“Yuck,” KJ says, as I set my tray down across from him. “Are you eating that?”
I look down at the mountain of sugar in my bowl, gray oatmeal barely visible along the edges.
“I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” I say.
“I’ll take the extra,” Jack says, scraping off a generous spoonful of sugar and dumping it in his coffee. “The one upside of a short life: there’s absolutely no reason to eat healthy.”
“The Center purposely feeds us low quality food to limit our life spans,” Calvin says. “It saves them money. I should write to the Society for Spinner Rights and ask them to push for a macrobiotic diet.”
“Please don’t,” Jack says, digging into his mound of barely diluted sugar.
Calvin launches into a theory about how the Center profits from buying inferior food—something to do with farm subsidies and using up the nation’s excess corn. I pick up my spoon. If Ross is going to change my meds, he’s going to need to know what my chronotin levels are. Maybe next time I see him we could stop at a drugstore and he could get someone to take a blood sample? I swirl the spoon through the thick oats. No, that’s not going to work. Even if he gets my blood, how would he test it? The only chronotin analyzers are here in the Center.
“Hey, Alex.” KJ nudges my foot under the table. “You still signed up for laundry this afternoon?”
“What?” I blink at him. “I think so, why?”
“Jack and Aidan and I all have the afternoon off, so I reserved the gym. You can join us between loads.”
“OK.” I take a bite of oatmeal. Even with the scoop Jack syphoned off, my breakfast tastes so sweet it hurts my teeth. I put the spoon down.
“Do you think there’s a chart somewhere,” I ask the table at large, “that shows what your Aclisote should be based on your chronotin levels?”
“That’s a random question,” Jack says.
KJ shifts his gaze to something past my shoulder, and his face opens into a smile. “Here’s someone I bet can answer it, though.”
“Answer what?” Shannon sweeps around the table to claim the empty chair beside KJ. He scoots over to make room, and I repeat my question.
Shannon shakes her head. “Not that I’ve ever seen.”
“What’s a normal chronotin reading?” I ask her.
“There isn’t really a normal.” She nibbles on the dry toast she chose for breakfast. “Everyone has their own range.”
“Why are you suddenly so interested in chronotin?” KJ asks.
“Barnard just raised my Aclisote dosage to five cc’s. I was wondering if that related to a specific chronotin reading. I mean, if there were a way to predict when you’re likely to be sick, wouldn’t you want to know?”
“I wouldn’t,” Jack says. “Sounds totally depressing.”
Shannon picks up her tea. “There’s no magic number,” she says. “Dr. Barnard just watches for changes in our levels and adjusts our meds to keep the increases gradual. I don’t think even he knows the trigger for sickness.”
“Well, what’s a high reading?” I push. “Like, what’s Calvin’s?”
“I can’t tell you that.” Shannon wipes her lips with a napkin. “It’s confidential.”
I glance over at Calvin, but he’s focused on his toast, which he is carefully cutting into perfect triangles. I don’t bother asking. Even if he did tell me a number, there’s a very good chance it wouldn’t be accurate.
“I don’t know why you’re all hyped up about your chronotin readings,” Jack says. “We all know who the likely candidates are to get sick next, don’t we?” He raises his coffee cup to toast KJ and Calvin, who, along with Jack himself, are the oldest kids at the Center.
A leaden silence falls over the table. Jack slurps his coffee. KJ stares down at his tray. Shannon reaches over to pat his hand. I stir my oatmeal. All that sugar has turned it a particularly muddy shade of brown.
Shannon checks her watch and gives a little gasp.
“I’ve got to run,” she says, jumping from the table. “My agent is picking me up at eight.”
“Anything fun?” I ask, in an effort to lighten the mood. Shannon rolls her eyes.
“When are missions ever fun? They just mean I’m stuck spending hours with Agent Sourface. She flinches whenever I get near her. You’d think I smell or something.”
The cafeteria is starting to empty out as kids move on to their various assignments. Jack wanders off to snag some toast before the cafeteria closes, leaving KJ, Calvin, and me alone at the table.
“You’re not really worried about getting sick, are you?” KJ asks me. “You’re only sixteen. You should be fine for ages.”
“I know,” I say, too quickly. KJ frowns.
“It’s just …” The oatmeal has now congealed to a point where my spoon stands up all by itself. I push the bowl away. “Getting sick doesn’t seem as far away as it used to, you know? Don’t you think about it sometimes?”
“Of course I do, but it’s not like there’s anything we can do to stop it. When it’s time, it’s time.”
I open my mouth, Ross’s offer perched on my tongue.
“KJ?” Calvin’s voice is tight. “Why did everyone leave? Did something happen?”
KJ turns instantly. “No, buddy. Everything is fine. It’s just that breakfast is over. Come on, I’ll walk you up to the library.” He looks at me. “See you this afternoon?”
“Sure,” I say. The two boys collect their trays and head out of the room. I pick up my coffee. If I want to keep from getting sick again I’ll have to find out my chronotin readings. I wrap my hands around the warm mug, picturing my last test—the narrow exam room, its gleaming surfaces and lingering smell of disinfectant. Amy had been complaini
ng about being hauled in for an extra shift. She’d taken my blood, added something to the sample, and then shooed me out before she put it through the chronotin analyzer. I sip my drink, only realizing after I swallow that I forgot to add milk. I put it down. What I need is to get hold of my medical chart.
Living at the Center doesn’t leave a lot of free time to brood. Spinners not being particularly popular with taxpayers, the Center keeps the cost of running the place low by making the twenty-five kids who live here do most of the work. Just like a real home, Yolly always says. We take turns tidying the common room, helping in the cafeteria, emptying trash, and cleaning bathrooms. Once we’re fully qualified spinners, we get assigned bigger jobs, too, like Shannon working with Amy in the clinic, or KJ’s job as general handyman and computer wiz.
I got assigned to help train the Youngers because I can hold freezes really well. Mostly I help with Class A, the beginners group, all between ages ten and twelve. It’s an OK job, made better by the fact that I love the room itself. Tall windows let in light dappled by the trees outside. The windowpanes are so thick they muffle most of the traffic noise, and the Center is built high enough off the ground that passersby can’t see in. When the trees are in bloom the room reminds me of a giant tree house. This time of year, with the leaves blazing into fall colors, it feels like sitting in a nest surrounded by flames.
The teacher, Julie, taps her watch when I walk in. Class is already in session. Julie is a young woman, with curly brown hair and so many freckles her face appears tan all year long. She always dresses as if she’s about to head out on one of the treks she takes on her days off—jeans, sturdy shoes, and bright bandanas. The kids like her because it’s easy to get her off topic. She’ll give up multiplication tables in a heartbeat if they ask about her latest fishing trip.
Today looks ripe for a distraction. The eight students are spread out across four tables, and all of them are yawning with boredom.
“How many spinners are there in the US?” Julie asks the class.
“Two hundred and eighty,” the kids chorus in a monotone.
Rewind Page 6