Afterimage

by Naomi Hughes

  His eyes turn curious. “But you don’t hate Quint.”

  “He’s not you.”

  “There’s nothing else you can do for him, Camryn.”

  I take a breath. “There’s this,” I say.

  I pull the gun out of my waistband. I aim it at him. I put my finger on the trigger.

  He steps into the threat. The barrel of the gun lifts when it presses against his ribs. He tilts his head to look down at me, and our faces are barely a breath apart. “You’ll shoot me,” he says, and his voice is calm as a glassy sea. “You’ll use up Quint and go back yourself. And then you’ll still be a murderer, but I will be gone, and you’ll remember him. You’ll have everything you want.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. The trigger feels foreign against my finger, too smooth, too easy. “That,” I say, “is not everything I want.”

  “I told you there’s no way out of this that doesn’t end in death.”

  I open my eyes. His expression is oddly gentle. “And you’re okay with it being your own?” I ask.

  One side of his mouth quirks up in a quiet smile. “You can call it justice. I can live with that.”

  “But I can’t,” I tell him, and suddenly the gun feels exactly right in my hands—because he’s wrong. There is another way out of this.

  Leratonium: rushing through my veins. Radiation: still lingering all around the south end of the base. Electricity: neurons in my brain firing, synapses flickering like lightning in the night.

  And a life-or-death situation to trigger my abilities.

  I lift the gun. I turn it around. And I shoot myself in the stomach.

  The pain is fuzzy and slow and red and burning, lava scorching a mountainside. For the second time today blood oozes between my fingers, but it’s not quite as bright this time. Not an arterial bleed; a gut wound. Slower, because I need more time than Kyle had.

  Quint’s energy snakes around me, a waterfall of energy rushing toward the wound. This time I don’t try to push it back. I redirect it instead, only a touch, enough to keep it flowing around the injury instead of healing it. The Leratonium in my veins tingles and rushes, searching for another way to keep me alive. A shift won’t help. Only one thing will now.

  The gun is still in my hand. I toss it overboard. It hits the green water and sinks, leaving the shadow of itself behind in the missing algae.

  Matthew is shouting my name, reaching for me, eyes wide in alarm. I wrap my fingers around his, smearing blood across his knuckles. And then I wrap my other hand around the Leratonium railing and complete the circuit.

  His fingers spasm in mine. His muscles go rigid and his spine arches, his head jerking back. He inhales, a gasping rattle that sounds like a drowning man. Something that feels like the wind is sweeping into my veins, tumbling past the tight currents of Quint’s energy, tugged straight into the Leratonium on the other side like iron filings to a magnet.

  And then it’s gone.

  Quint’s energy noses after it, pulled out of the momentum of its spin by the call of the Leratonium, and I jerk away from the railing before it takes any of him.

  Matthew’s hand is still in mine. It’s loose now, shaking but no longer spasming, and I go down onto my knees to keep ahold of it as he falls. I held his hand the last time he died, too.

  His head cracks against the deck. His eyes are open and locked on mine, green like the storm, green like glass and the sea and betrayal, and I don’t look away.

  I could leave him here. I want to. How long would it take for his body to die, for his consciousness to leave it and follow his energy into the Leratonium? How long did it take the janitor? Fifty seconds, sixty seconds? And then his energy will be used up by the wormhole, and then he’ll sink. Drift. Disappear. The same fate to which he’s condemned millions.

  But I know who I am now. And I’m still angry, so, so angry, but I think that might be okay—because I remember telling Quint it was your choices, not memories or the past or feelings, that determine who a person is.

  Time to make mine.

  I wrap his arm around my shoulder and pull us both to our feet.

  The air above the prow gathers inward, pinching in on itself like wrinkled fabric. The light around it bends and warps. The wormhole. And next to it, exactly ten feet and three inches and an eternity from me: a see-through boy in a lab coat, reappearing from thin air.

  He spots us, a bleeding girl and a dying boy staggering toward a crinkled patch of sky, and he understands. If I can get to the wormhole before Matthew’s consciousness slips away, then I won’t be a murderer. The boy I hate most will go to the past along with me, and he will help me fix everything, and then he will live. And Quint will be left behind. He won’t die, he won’t sink or drift or be forgotten, but he won’t ever have existed either. It’s all I can do for him.

  Five more steps. Three. None. I’m face to face with my ghost.

  Once, we were in a tunnel in the dark with only each other to talk to. Once we walked up a cliff, and I jumped, and he let me. Once we were enemies. And now we’re standing at a wormhole with ten seconds to say goodbye and there’s nothing left to say.

  “I wanted to give you a happy ending,” I manage at last. The pain wraps around the edges of my vision, blanketing the world in a gray haze.

  Quint reaches out. He touches my cheek, smoke on skin. There’s no warmth, no electricity, no vertigo, and now there never will be. Yet another loss to mourn. “You did,” he answers, and then he gives me a grim smile because we both know that it’s a lie and also the truth, and the best either of us can give each other now.

  Five seconds left. I reach up, Matthew’s hand in mine. I touch the wormhole. And the darkness sucks me away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE COOL AIR OF ALMOST-DAWN in my lungs. A horn honking nearby. A massive panic attack raging through me like a hurricane, and a phone clutched tight in my fingers. White letters blink across the screen: call dropped.

  I’m back.

  I jerk my head up. A parking lot gate rises before me, all ninety-degree angles and decorative spikes, and I choke on an inhale. The air I’m breathing is three weeks old. The panic attack burning through me is three weeks old. The base beyond that gate is three weeks old, undamaged, buzzing, unbelievable: half straightforward Army, half elite university, all clean lines and elegant utility. Not radioactive. Not leveled. Not dead.

  Entranced, I take a step forward, but I’m still disoriented from the shift and I lose my balance. I fall. I skin my knee on the asphalt and the wound doesn’t heal, because the blood in my veins is three weeks old too. No spinning energy, no white signatures on an X-ray, no Leratonium.

  No Quint.

  For the first time in weeks, I am alone.

  I bow my head. The grief is slower than I thought it would be, thick like sap, coating the moment and insulating me tight in my own mind.

  “Need you to move along now, Miss Kingfisher,” calls a voice. I flinch—it’s one of the agents, hand on his gun, eyes on the street, concerned look on his face. The experiment. It must be what’s interfering with the cell towers, what’s alarming the guards.

  The experiment has started. I have ten minutes to save the world.

  I drop the phone. I exhale. I ignore the panic that’s burning through my veins and, because I refuse to fail my family one more time and also because accepting my anger has given me more power to accept my fear, I launch myself through the gate and across the parking lot, sprint down a sidewalk, and careen into the base I’ve been terrified of for months.

  I scan the aisles of cars in the parking lot, white noise and panic crowding my thoughts as I search for a lab coat. Matthew is my best bet at stopping the explosion in time. If I can’t find him, if he can’t fix the experiment, if the wormhole spits us out back on that deck with nothing more than a new alternate timeline to show for it—then he’ll be dead, and I’ll be a murderer, and my family will be lost forever.

  I bump into a soldier. I bounce off a car. I scr
amble onto its hood and climb on the roof, cup my hands around my mouth, scream his name.

  People frown. A soldier turns and watches me, a band around her arm labeling her as military police. There’s no sign of Matthew.

  I slide off the car. The first time I met him, he was at the fountain. Maybe he’s waiting there, or maybe he’s already headed to the physics building. Or maybe he didn’t get pulled through the wormhole at all and our mission is already doomed.

  I sprint. I can’t hear my shoes slapping against the pavement. I can’t hear my breaths, though I know they’re coming in loud, frantic gasps. I block everything out except run and eight minutes and faster.

  I race into the courtyard. I skid to a stop at the lip of the fountain. Beyond the veil of spraying water, my memory superimposes an image: a boy sitting on the far edge, knees drawn up and back turned, holding his head.

  I take a shuddering breath. I blink hard. I sidestep, but the vision stays the same.

  It’s not a memory. It’s him. Matthew.

  The fountain is too wide and I don’t have time to run around it. I swing up and over. I splash through the shallow water, duck under the spray, grab Matthew by the collar and shove him to the sidewalk. I climb over after him.

  He stays on the ground, hair falling over his glasses, staring up at me. Other people are staring, too. I grab a fistful of lab coat and yank him to his feet. I give him a shake—losing his energy on the ship must’ve put him into some kind of shock, because he’s just blinking at me, confusion thick in his eyes.

  He looks down at his chest. Then, slowly, he raises his fingers to touch my sleeve. “Camryn?” he says haltingly.

  “Wake up, you bastard,” I hiss. “We have seven minutes to fix your mistake.”

  His head lifts. His eyes change. He turns, and runs.

  The physics building: half a mile across the base with no-nonsense architecture, wide glass doors, and heavy bronze handles. I reach out. I yank.

  Boom. The earthquake rattles the building in its frame. The ground beneath us ripples like a sheet tugged tight, knocking me off balance, and I stagger into Matthew. His arms wrap around my ribcage, catching me. I shove him off, cursing, tears stinging my eyes—because it’s not fair that he’s warm and solid and alive, and the person I want him to be isn’t.

  The ground subsides. Two minutes left.

  We sprint down the hall.

  Two lefts and then a right. A long corridor. Room P-23. Matthew swipes his ID through the lock but it buzzes red. I shove him aside and pound on the door.

  A stodgy man with a lab coat and a self-important expression pokes his head out. “Young lady,” he says, “there is a very important—”

  I punch him in the face.

  He reels backward, holding his nose. Blood gushes out over his hands, and this time I allow myself to feel the regret without being paralyzed by it, because this is too important and too necessary and the damage is minor anyway. He shouts and gurgles, but I push past him, heedless, bowling through the scientists to clear a path for Matthew. He barrels through after me, intent on a row of computers at the front of the room. He tosses aside a chair, puts his hands on a keyboard—and then stops.

  There’s a hand on my shoulder, and someone has a crushing grip on my arm. Someone else is shouting the name Kingfisher, and no one is getting violent yet because they know who my mother is, but I can only hold them back for another second. “Do it!” I shout.

  He hesitates, frozen. Then a revelation washes over his face and he plunges a hand into his pocket. A quicksilver-gray rock falls out with a dull thunk. A piece of paper flutters: the experiment’s corrected settings. He punches in the numbers and then stops again, staring at the screen.

  I shove a middle-aged woman in a lab coat away, but someone is shouting for MPs and bodies are surrounding me, dragging me toward the door, drowning me. People are squeezing past and heading for Matthew.

  He looks up. He meets my eyes. He lifts the paper. It’s a series of seven numbers, the new calibrations for the electrical trigger. “I never wrote down the last digit,” Matthew shouts, desperation tearing at his words.

  Overhead the skylight darkens, throwing rushing shadows across the rows of computers. Birds spiral toward the sun. Our time in the past is almost up.

  The moment quiets. A memory reaches out, tucks itself around me: a boy in an ambulance, trying to remember his name. I think it might have something to do with the number five, he’d said. That was the first thing I thought about when I came to.

  “Five!” I shout, and then someone clamps a hand around my mouth and drags me back toward the door and I can’t see Matthew, I can’t see the computer, all I can see are the swirling birds and the darkened sky and our time ticking to an end.

  I’m a leaf in a current of bodies. The MPs sweep me out of the room, down the corridor. I turn my head: birds darting past the windows, a flurry of feathers and light. Through the MPs I catch a glimpse of lab coat and blond hair. Matthew’s caught in the current too.

  I shut my eyes and take a breath. I feel the countdown in my bones. The earthquake, the birds, the end of the world. Forty seconds left.

  The MPs shove me in a room, not bothering to turn on the lights before they lock the door and head back toward the experiment to check the damage. There’s one window in here, high and tiny and barred, but its screen is open. I scoop up a chair and stand on it and turn my face to the sky. Feathers. Shadows. Chaos.

  A noise at my back. They put someone else in here with me. And I know it’s Matthew Lerato, bomber, blackmailer, murderer, but I can’t help turning around anyway—because if this is the end of my world then I don’t want to be alone, and he has the face of my ghost.

  But he’s not looking at me. He’s sitting with his back to the door, curled around a phone, jabbing at its screen with shaking fingers. He hits one last button and then lays the phone on the ground, splaying a hand atop it. His head is bowed and his hair is over his eyes and I can’t see his face, and I need to see his face.

  “Quint,” I say, which is the wrong name, but I can’t say anything else.

  He looks up. His eyes are bright and haunted and he shakes his head, and suddenly I don’t want to look at him after all. My eyes fall to his phone.

  “I told them,” he says, taking his hand away from it.

  My gaze lifts again. “What? Who?”

  He scrubs a hand through his hair, covers his eyes. “Everyone,” he says, his voice muffled. “I told everyone everything. I just released my entire database of Leratonium research to the public domain. Not the specifics, not the formula, but the results. The experiments. What the agency did. What I did to stop them. What happened, what I’d theorized could happen. Everything.”

  I stare at him. I step down from the chair. My mind tilts slowly, an unbalanced scale.

  Matthew was afraid. Everything he did was to run from that fear, to avoid living with his mistakes. Even at the end, when he wanted me to shoot him—even that was his way of running, his final way of not having to live with what he’s done.

  And now, voluntarily, moments before he might die without anyone ever having to know his wrongs, he’s told the world everything.

  I remember when he saw me at the fountain. The confusion in his eyes, the way it shifted into a sort of wonder when he touched my sleeve. The way he said my name.

  An impossible hope twists deep into me.

  I cross the room. I kneel in front of him. “Quint,” I say again, shaping the word like it’s a breakable thing.

  He looks up at me. “Yes,” he says, but it comes out uncertain. And then, more firmly: “No.”

  The hope curls in on itself. I don’t say anything.

  He swallows once, twice, lining up the words in his head before he says them. “You sent Matthew’s consciousness and your own through the wormhole.”

  I nod. I wait.

  “But your consciousness was tied to Quint’s, so he got sent through too,” he says, and my heart thumps
hard, but he shakes his head. “Two versions of Matthew Lerato got pulled to the past. But there was only one body here for him. We got … mixed back together, into the same person again.” He meets my gaze, raw and miserable. “Camryn, I’m him.”

  And suddenly those green eyes are wrong. That expression is wrong. His words are wrong, they’re horrific and cruel and impossible, because if I let them be true then this is even worse than Quint being gone altogether. Everything I’ve done, the price we both paid, it’s only brought him to the one thing he was trying hardest to escape.

  My breath stalls. My hands drop from his. I stand up and pull away—

  And then stop.

  His phone is still glowing at my feet. The Wi-Fi-based upload indicator is blinking at one-hundred-percent. I bend down, scoop it up, cup it in my hands. I look up at the boy who is both Matthew and Quint and then, slowly, a hypothesis forms. It’s murky and shadowed, but I can see the outline of an answer, and it gleams with something like hope.

  I kneel back down. “What did my father say when you killed him?” I ask softly.

  He covers his face again. “Don’t,” he chokes out.

  Pain spirals tight inside me. I press him anyway, because I have to test my hypothesis. “That’s what he said, or that’s what you’re saying now?”

  He drops his hands, which are still shaking. He looks up at me. “He … was at work. It caught him by surprise. He didn’t have time to say anything.”

  “You have Matthew’s memories.”

  He squeezes his eyes shut and nods.

  I wrap my fingers around the phone. A weight is crushing my chest and there’s a part of me that wants to run from this conversation, but I can’t abandon it now, not until I know. “When we were in the janitor’s closet, me and Quint, you told me you used to hate me. What did you say was the reason?”

  “You had memories and a body and a family, and all I had was you.”

  “And what did I say?”

  He opens his eyes. He doesn’t reply.