by Naomi Hughes
It’s all an ugly, snarled mess in my head, and it makes me want to hurt someone.
“So,” I say to Quint, trudging into the ditch to retrieve the bike, “remember anything yet about your psychopathic former life?” The words are cruel and hard and I hate that they feel wrong even as they leave my mouth. I should want to hurt him. Where’s that awful anger now, when it would actually be justified?
“No,” he says quietly, still looking at the moon.
“How do I know you’re not lying?”
“You don’t.”
“Then what good are you?” I demand, and the words burn like acid. I turn my back and let them eat at both of us as I kneel down and use my sleeve to wipe mud off the seat. The bike looks okay. A few more dents than it had at The Pie Hole, maybe, but from what Kyle said on the phone he’s got bigger problems than bike repairs anyway.
I shove the motorcycle up the side of the ditch with more force than necessary, and it flops to the grass. I pull myself up after it and brush at the mud on my pants before I give up the venture as pointless. I heave the bike upright and take a breath, trying to re-center myself, trying to focus on figuring out our next step.
My. My next step.
“If … if you could remember anything about being him,” I start, trying to keep my voice level, but he cuts me off.
“I’m not him.” There’s acid in his voice now too. He’s turned toward me a little, moonlight glinting off his glasses.
I shove the bike forward. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to the library to read the files we unlocked,” I say, “and I’m also going to look up some information on your evil twin. If there’s anything of interest you can tell me about the two of you first, it might help convince me I can trust you at least a little. Otherwise, I can just go back to completely ignoring you again.”
He stares at me like I’ve punched him. It’s the worst thing I could threaten him with, the only thing he has left—my acknowledgement of his existence. “Now who’s manipulating who?” he says, and I block the surge of shame, because damn it, he’s the bad guy here. I’ve got to find out what was on that tablet and whether it proves Mom’s innocence, have to figure out how to stop Matthew from whatever he might do to hurt me or my family next, and in the meantime Quint is nothing but a liability.
I grit my teeth. “I am stuck in some alternate timeline—”
“According to him.”
“—with no clue how I got here and no clue what my abilities might do next, and he’s the only one who seems to know anything about any of it. And once the agency figures out what happened at The Pie Hole, they’re going to assume I’m in league with a terrorist,” the word leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, “the same way Kyle did. So you can either help me find him and figure all of this out, or we can go back to the way things were between us a few days ago.”
He stops and I do too. He steps in close, leans down. I remember how he looked at the fountain: green eyes like cut glass, and if I met his gaze it would slice me open.
I look away.
He doesn’t. “I know you need to know what happened with your Mom, but do you really think you can trust anything he’d tell you?”
“No.” Some of the venom has leeched out of my voice because I can’t sustain it, not with him looking at me like that. “But I need to know what he knows. What other choice do I have?”
“Run,” he says, without hesitation. “Run, and keep on running, and don’t look back.”
I push the bike forward again and he steps out of the way right before I walk through him. “I’ve done nothing but run lately,” I reply. “Run from my fears, hide from the truth, give up when things go wrong. And you know what? None of it helps. It’s never helped. I’m done running.” My shoulders slump. Mom would say this realization is a breakthrough, but I just feel tired, and afraid, and so, so alone.
Quint keeps pace at my side, lab coat billowing like a storm cloud. “Okay, fine, but you can’t go to him. There’s got to be another option.”
“I already told you the other option. Remember something, and help me.”
His eyes darken. He walks a little faster. “No.”
“That’s it? Just no?”
“I told you I couldn’t remember anything,” he snaps over his shoulder.
“I don’t want you to,” I tell him, because it’s true. I don’t know if people are more than the sum of their memories, but if his come back, it’ll mean he’s that much closer to being Dr. Matthew Lerato and that much further from being the maybe-hallucination I had an our with. “But you could think of something that can help us. You and him were different versions of the same person, right? You have to have some of the same knowledge. So maybe if you really tried, you could at least remember something about alternate timelines and how I could’ve jumped into one.”
“I don’t know anything about that.” His jaw is tight, the words clipped.
“What about—”
He explodes. “I don’t know!” he shouts, whirling on me. “I don’t have his memories, because I’m not him! I’m not, okay? Please, Camryn, please believe me, because if you don’t, I’m not sure I can either.”
We stare at each other for a long moment—then he inhales, spins around, and takes three wide strides before he jerks to a stop like a marionette with its strings caught. He doesn’t move, muscles bunched up like he’s pushing at a wall.
I swallow. “Quint,” I say, but then falter.
He rakes a hand through his hair with a jerky motion and then, after a moment, his shoulders sag. When he turns around, his eyes are bright and shining and I feel like an intruder. He takes a deep breath. “Did you know,” he says with a bitter, painful sort of smile, “that the furthest I can go from you is exactly ten feet and three inches? I’ve tested it a thousand times. I know it by heart. But every once in a while, I try to escape from you again anyway. And I can never get far enough.”
The words drift down, settle to the ground between us. They spread like molasses, slow and heavy, until the silence is too much.
He closes his eyes and bows his head, blowing out a long breath. The crickets chirp all around us and somewhere in the distance an owl hoots, but I stay quiet. I wait for him to say whatever it is that has him so scared, because I’ve done enough running of my own to understand that it’s not only me he’s trying to escape from.
“There’s something there,” he says at last, head still bowed. “In my past. In his past. Every time I looked at him I could feel it. And I think it’s something personal and important and terrible, but I can’t remember it, and I’m starting to think it’s because I don’t want to. Please, Camryn. Please don’t make me remember it.”
He’s asking me to save him. To separate him. To trust him. And that feels like the worst decision I could possibly make … but I think not making it might hurt me as much as him.
My hands curl around the handlebars of my brother’s bike tight enough to make my fingers ache. I take a deep breath—and then let go. The bike sags against a tree as I turn to face Quint. “A few hours ago, there were two versions of you at that train station. One who bombed it and murdered at least three people.”
His shoulders rise and fall with a breath. He stays silent, waiting for my judgment.
“And … another one who was afraid of the dark, and who said he might not like himself if he knew who he was, and who kept me moving until I made it to the surface.”
I make myself look at him, make myself hold his gaze when he lifts his head. It’s not as hard as it was a moment ago. I think now, maybe I might be the one who could slice him open.
I take a step closer. “When we were in that janitor’s closet, you told me you used to hate me because of all the things I had that you didn’t. I told you I believed it was choices that make a person who they are. Not their memories, not their past. And—and I’m not sure if I can still believe that, but I want to. God, Quint, I want to. So … this is me, giving you a chance to convince me I was
right the first time.”
He exhales, closes his eyes, scrubs a hand across his face. “Thank you,” he says roughly. When he opens his eyes, the glint of vulnerability is hidden away again and he gives me his old half-smile. “If you don’t want to wait till tomorrow to check the files, I think there’s a laptop in the saddlebag.”
I freeze. “Seriously?” I hiss, torn between anger that he waited so long to tell me and elation that I can get a head start on finding answers.
He lifts one shoulder. The smile stays, but it doesn’t reach his eyes anymore. “This is me trying to be convincing,” he says simply.
I grab the bike’s handlebars again and hurry toward the barn. When we reach it, I rummage through Kyle’s bags. My heart thumps hard when I come up with a small, heavy duty computer. I log into a guest account and pull up my email. It’s tempting to try and guess my brother’s password to see if there are more agency files on here, but the security features might lock me out and alert his higher-ups if I get it wrong.
Then I pause. I glance over my shoulder; Quint is wandering into the barn, ignoring me, a closed-off expression on his face.
I navigate to a search engine and type in Dr. Matthew Lerato.
The Wi-Fi connects to a local 4G network and after a short wait, an array of news articles fills the screen. “Interview with a Teen Physics Genius.” “Youngest Doctoral Candidate in the State Wins National Prize.” “Prodigy Joins Army’s New Research Branch.”
There’s a picture. Lab coat, green eyes, half smile.
He’s standing next to Dr. Lila. And he’s shaking hands with my mother.
I hit the exit button as fast as my fingers can move and sit there, staring at a blank blue background, unable to breathe. Mom didn’t know. She was welcoming a new recruit. She didn’t know who he was, what he’d do to Kyle, what he’d do to me. This doesn’t mean the two of them were involved in some kind of agency conspiracy together. It doesn’t mean Dr. Lila was right. It doesn’t mean anything.
But they’d worked together. She knew him. How could she have known him?
I close my eyes, but the image is burned into my brain. The details rush at me all at once, an avalanche of the things I’ve tried hardest to forget and remember all at the same time: her long chestnut hair tied in a messy braid and skewered with a chewed-up pencil. A fixed smile on her face because she spent half her life on autopilot while she analyzed research in her head. A Doctor Who T-shirt peeking out from beneath her blue-and-gray jacket because she took every chance she could to rebel against the strict uniform code. And that bracelet. That damn bracelet that she stole, that made me realize I’d never really known her at all.
My eyes burn. I shove the image away and refocus on the other side of the picture—Dr. Lila, smiling at the boy she let me believe didn’t exist.
Matthew worked at the agency base. And Matthew is a bomber.
The equation is ugly, full of spikes and snares and things I don’t want to think about. But I just told Quint I was done running, so I open my eyes, log into my email, and open the secrets they’ve been keeping from me.
I managed to unlock five files. I scroll through them, reading slowly and meticulously, trying to absorb any hint of helpful information. The first document contains one of Dr. Lila’s daily logs from about a week ago, but it’s annotated in some weird shorthand that I can’t make sense of. The next is a departmental memo reminding agents that their confidentiality agreements prohibited them from talking to the press about “the incident,” which is what they call the explosion that killed nearly five thousand people. Then come two requisition orders for “Project Sigma,” listing a bunch of scientific equipment to be delivered to the south end of the base—the explosion’s epicenter.
I grit my teeth. Four files down, and not one of them has told me anything new. With a muttered prayer, I open the last document. It’s an X-ray labeled with my name.
Quint’s leaning against the wall a few feet away now, glancing at the screen over my shoulder. When he spots the X-ray he pushes off and takes a step closer. “Wait,” he says. “I saw that right before you got caught by the janitor. Something’s off about it.”
I peer at the ghostly black-and-white imagery. I know the basics of reading an X-ray, and he’s right. Something’s odd here.
He finds it before I do. “Aren’t you supposed to have surgical implants?”
“Yeah. Steel screws in my leg and shoulder.” The doctors told me they’d been implanted in the days immediately following the accident, when I’d been in a medical coma, but according to this scan they don’t exist.
Quint points at the X-ray date; it’s from last week. “So if it wasn’t the implants that set off the metal detector—and, probably, helped trigger the bomb—what was it?”
I narrow my eyes. I point at the chest, trace my way down the aorta. “Why,” I ask, “are my blood vessels giving off metallic signatures?”
This is part of what the agency has been hiding from me, what they must’ve been covering up when they lied about my implants. The only problem is, I have no idea what it means.
Quint is silent. A frown cuts across his face and he steps away, retreating into the shadows to think or loiter broodingly or whatever it is he does when he’s wearing that faraway glower. I close out the useless files and slam the laptop’s lid shut.
All the answers I manage to find only bring up more questions.
We ditch the bike the next morning. The agency probably knows to look for it by now, and it ran out of fuel a couple miles into town anyway. I wheel it behind a derelict gas station, hide the key atop a tire, and hope Kyle finds it before a thief does.
I think about leaving him a note, but I’m still not sure whose side he’d take if he were forced to choose. Any information I give him could end up helping the agency find me that much quicker.
I clench my hands and stuff them in my pockets. “Do you think he’s real?” I ask Quint before I can stop myself.
He glances up. We’re picking our way through a seedy back alley, sidestepping trash cans and hissing cats while I try to figure out how to locate Matthew’s lair. “I’m not exactly the best judge of who’s real and who’s not,” Quint answers, looking straight ahead.
I keep my eyes on my feet, managing a jerky nod as I step over a moldy takeout container. A man clothed mostly in garbage bags is digging through a dumpster a few yards away and I take a quick right down a different alley so he won’t hear me talking to myself. Not that he’d care, I guess.
Quint peers at me, then hesitates a moment before he takes off his glasses with a sigh. “I can’t say for sure,” he answers, “but based on the similarities to our version of reality, I’d guess this timeline branched off from ours not too long ago. So although this Kyle isn’t your Kyle, he only very recently stopped being your Kyle.” His tone is determined, like he has to force the words out, and he’s scrubbing at his glasses as if his life depends on it.
I feel around the edges of our truce, trying to guess at how much information he can give me without having to remember more than he wants to. “So you think this timeline is close to our timeline.”
He’s walking ahead of me now, back straight, gaze focused on the distance as I follow at his heels. He takes a right turn out of the alley onto a narrow residential street. I duck my head, hoping none of the passing commuters notice my sewer-chic look and decide to call the cops.
“You’ve noticed that a few things are different, but have you thought about how many things are the same?” Quint goes on. “Almost everything. There are a lot of theories about parallel realities, but from what—what he said—” he flounders for a second, but then goes on, his tone still stiff, “about ripple effects, I think this timeline must’ve been artificially created, and I think whatever did it, it happened recently.” His tone goes dark. “Someone’s been screwing with the universe, and it’s not going to end well.”
I stare at his back. So that’s what this is about. He doesn’t feel b
ad for me because of Kyle, and he’s not giving me information out of the goodness of his heart. He’s trying to warn me away from Matthew again. And he’s not wrong; Matthew apparently has the technology to travel between timelines himself, and he also doesn’t seem to have much in the way of ethics, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to think he might’ve been one of the people who helped “screw with the universe” in the first place.
“How can a timeline be artificially created?” I ask flatly.
“The grandfather paradox,” he replies, equally flat.
I stop walking, and after a second he’s forced to as well. “Time travel?” My words echo off the houses that line the street, and I snap my mouth shut when a woman gives me a dirty look from her porch swing—but I’ve watched enough sci-fi to know what he’s talking about. The grandfather paradox is a classic thought experiment that tells the story of a man who goes back in time and winds up accidentally killing his own grandfather, which means the time traveler himself never could’ve been born, which means he couldn’t have gone back in time and killed anyone in the first place. The story is used to illustrate one of the problems that makes time travel pretty much impossible.
“Some theories say that the moment the traveler changes the past by killing his grandfather, an alternate timeline would be created,” Quint says, and we start walking again. He stays ahead of me where I can’t see his expression. “A parallel reality living right next to the original, but with minor variations caused by the changes. Those changes have a ripple effect: maybe the grandfather was supposed to have invented the Internet, but in that version of reality he got killed too soon so it never gets created. Maybe some other invention takes its place instead, and then the present-day world of that timeline ends up looking completely different from ours—all because a hundred years ago, one man died instead of lived.”