Lifespan of Starlight (19 page)

I don’t want to eat anything if I can help it. I’m wondering how to fill my time
without expending too much energy, when
it hits me that I know what I can do instead.
After all, I wouldn’t need food if I wasn’t here.

Numbly, I find my place on the floor. Let myself sink.

I’ll have to stay away longer than one minute if I’m to use this as an escape from
the police, but it’s not as simple as I thought. The longer I stay away, the harder
it is to find my way back. It’s scary here, like swimming away from the certainty
of land as the ocean floor drops away beneath me. The future horizon seems so far
ahead that I’m sure I’ll never reach it.

I pull up to the surface and gasp, my throat choked at the hit of reality. I glance
at the clock and see that I made nearly five minutes. The rush wakes me up; I’m engaged
in a way that I wasn’t before. And I made it further than ever.

How long will I need if I’m to use this as an escape? Ten minutes? Half an hour?
I have to keep practising, make sure.

I only need to prepare for a few minutes before I’m ready again. Once more, I sink.

The improvements have been slow. Even after weeks of practice, I’m barely able to
jump ahead ten minutes at a time. Pushing it further always brings the unease of
being anchorless; swimming into the endless ocean with no certainty I’ll ever return.

I’m able to jump in quicker now, though. A breath, shoulders relax and I’m in. It’s
become my little routine, three steps to oblivion. And I’ve begun dropping away from
different positions, too; on the bed at first and then perched on the edge of a chair.

I’m able to drop into the tunnel from just about anywhere these days, but the returns
are taking practice. Once I lost my balance from sitting on the edge of the bed,
and another time crumpled from the chair, ending up with a lump on my forehead. But
I’m better at it now. As soon as I come back I’m ready to engage with the world,
and can catch myself before I fall.

Lately I’ve begun to return from a skip, take a few breaths and then disappear into
a fresh one. My days have become a wave of in and out, up and down, the calm of the
tunnel and the rush of return. It’s one way to pass the time, only living through
part of it. And there are other benefits, too. I’ve found that I need to eat less.
If I’m here for only half the day, I only need half as much. And besides, the energy
after each return sparks my heart and wakes my mind.

The skipping has messed me around in other ways, though. Usually Mum heads for bed
around nine thirty and I’m still wide awake at one in the morning. So one long night
a couple of weeks back, I gave up on sleep and just skipped ahead through it, bouncing
out and back again through ten-minute chunks of time. By the following night I was
tired enough for bed. Since then I’ve begun to sleep only every second night.

I missed meeting Mum for lunch one day because I didn’t realise it was Friday already.
Another time I picked up a conversation I thought we’d left off earlier that day.
It wasn’t until Mum grimaced, searching back in her memory for the reference, that
I realised the conversation must have happened days before.

Real time, or old time, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t what it used to be.
The more I skip, the less I’m contained by the normal cycles of life. Sunrise, sunset;
day following night. I simply move through it all, skimming the surface like a separate
and perfect drop of oil on an ocean of time.

Maybe it’s because my skips are smoother these days, my chance to escape growing
ever higher, but I’ve begun to feel less afraid too. Each day that passes has become
one more day where Boc hasn’t gone to the police; each hour that I’m free is one
more hour that Mason hasn’t turned me in.

It’s weeks since they worked me out. Maybe they’re going to keep my secret. Maybe,
just maybe, I’m safe. And if that’s the case, then everything’s different. Because
there’s still a chip on the other side of the city, complete with my deets, clocking
up energy rations. A tiny key to the future that I thought I’d lost.

But maybe I can steal it back.

F
IRST STOP IS
the grid. I haven’t checked it for ages – after writing the bot to
keep an eye on Boc and Mason for me, I haven’t needed to. Even after all this time
I shift a little in my chair before going in. Don’t want to be reminded of what it
used to be like, can’t think about the way they must see me now.

Just get the job done, Scout.

I set up the firewall, track across to the school and immediately find Mason. There
he is, right now, sitting in class. Just a simple dot on a screen, but already I’ve
fallen into it, my thoughts travelling back to how it used to be. The way it felt
to be exploring a new kind of reality with him, discovering the truth of time travel
together.

I have to get my head around the way things have changed, but I still don’t know
where I stand. What has he been thinking since I ran that day? How does he feel about
me now?

My eyes close as I lean back and shake the thoughts away. Other questions are more
pressing; some that at least can be answered.

It takes only a few seconds before I shuffle forwards in the chair, regaining focus,
and take control again. I pull the grid back over the past weeks to see a long-term
overview of where he’s been, in case I missed anything that I should know about.
It’s pretty much what you’d expect: school and home, home and school with a restaurant
on the weekends. Still no police visits and the chip is still in his room, same as
it used to be. From what I can tell, it hasn’t moved since I last saw it there.

The security system for his house is set up to trigger if any barriers are broken,
just as you’d expect. But I can’t find any other controllers on the system, so it
must be wired into some sort of onsite com, I guess. I’ll have to get closer in order
to disable it.

Next I pick up Boc’s dot from his house and check him the same way, a long-term overview
of his movements these past weeks. I’m ready for a crazy scribble all over the city,
here and there, meeting friends and heading out of town to go mountain biking, so
I’m not prepared for how neat his worm is. Home, then school, then over to Mason’s
garage. On Saturday afternoons, he heads over to the indoor rock-climbing centre.
That’s it.

Strange. It doesn’t seem like Boc at all. When I zoom out even further to check his
movement over the past six months, my
breathing grows more wary. Because his crazy
scribble all over town continued right up until the evening he found me out.

Ever since then, he’s stopped heading out of the city, stopped most of his climbing
with the Spiderboys. You can clearly see a difference between his movements – his
life – ever since that night. But why?

The unusualness of it makes my throat tighten and I have to walk away from the comscreen.
Think, Scout. Think
. What did I miss?

No idea. Back in I go, checking and double-checking for police contact, double-thinking
what I haven’t thought to check.

I should be glad, I guess, because in some ways he seems less of a loose cannon now.
I bite my lip. He’s more contained, more focused …

I’m zoomed out too far to catch any of the time skips, so I pull out of the grid
and bring up Mason’s garage in real time. It’s easier to follow back from the present
moment, so I start from today and track back to yesterday to find them: two dots,
Mason and Boc, together on Sunday afternoon.

Once I have them in the garage I zoom in closer and track the worms back hour-by-hour,
minute-by-minute.

Immediately, I find a gap in one worm. Boc must have been timing Mason, I guess.

The return time was at 5.14pm. Carefully, I track back the seconds until I’ve reached
a full minute: still no dot to show the moment when Mason dropped off. Backwards
again, five minutes, ten. Half an hour.

My heart pounds at the power of what this means. I’ve never seen Mason time skip
for this long.

Back I go, further still, until I find his worm again. He disappeared at 3.51pm,
which means he stayed away for eighty-three minutes.

Wow. I lean back in the chair, taking it in. Mason was able to skip nearly ten minutes
the last time I saw him; but this is way new territory, well over an hour. I have
to admit, I’m impressed. Maybe a speck jealous.

I should be planning how to get the chip back, but I’m curious. I’m at the moment
on the history grid when he disappeared yesterday so I track backwards from there,
checking to see if he jumped earlier in the day as well.

I’m tracking back minute by minute so that I can pick up the smaller time skips.
At 2.45pm yesterday, I stop.

There’s another gap, except …

My head tilts as I realise. This gap is in the
other
worm. It’s only seven minutes
but still unmistakably a gap.
Boc?

Impressive, if it was one of his first.

Strange that he’s in the exact same spot where Mason used to sit for his time skips.

Now that I think about it, the worm with the long jump was sitting on the couch.
Mason never skipped from there when I was around. I realise that I’m not entirely
certain that the first worm I tracked was actually Mason. I tagged them both when
they first followed me but never added names, so I just assumed that the one jumping
had to be him.

My hands move quickly, tracking back to a time when I can see for sure who is who.
Mason would have been alone in his bedroom on Saturday night, so I tag that dot with
his name.

I return to the dots yesterday afternoon, and my mouth falls open as I gape at the
screen. I was right. Mason wasn’t the one who jumped for so long. It was Boc.

If I can make it into Mason’s house without triggering the alarm, I’ll be able to
get the chip back. I pick a day that Mason stays after school for band practice and
his parents are both at work. Don’t think I’ll need that much time, but I head over
as soon as it’s safe in the morning. In and out, that’s the plan.

Mason’s bedroom is upstairs, so first I check out the fir tree growing outside his
window. It only takes a minute of squinting into the sunlight to decide that the
branches are way too thin to carry me. I’ll definitely have to make my way in at
the ground floor instead.

I find a place in the garden out of sight from the neighbours and start searching
on my compad for the security system. The air is heavy and warm, even though I’m
in the shade; the heat is thick with dust.

Now that I’m within the zone, it’s easy to see what’s going on. It’s just a simple
old electrical circuit set to trigger an alarm if any doors or windows are opened.
I might be able to just cut the power, but there could be a backup battery that catches
me out. Better to play it safe and disable it completely.

It’s slow going, partly because I don’t know what I’m doing and partly because I
don’t want to leave any traces that I’ve been messing around in here. Once I make
it out with the chip I’ll need to return the security system to the way it was. I
work methodically, making sure I have a record of each change I make. Can’t leave
any dumb surprises that give me away.

It’s about an hour before I’m ready to go in. The alarm even gives this little ping
when it disengages, so I know for sure that all is clear.

Instead of working on the front entrance, I head around to the garage. It’s hidden
from the street, but it’s also familiar territory, I guess. This almost used to be
home.

It takes only a second to do a manual override.

I’m pushing the door open when three clear crunches of gravel sound behind me.

A sharp intake of air as I spin around, heart pounding.

It’s Mason, in school uniform and just standing there, casual as anything. As if
we’d organised to meet here in the middle of the day.

He crosses his arms. ‘You took your time.’

I’m so unprepared that I actually let out this weird, awkward laugh. I have a strange
flash of being happy to see him.

Mason doesn’t smile back. ‘I thought you’d come ages ago. You’ve been getting around
stuff by hacking all your life, haven’t you? That’s why you’re so good at it.’

I swallow. It wasn’t a question. All I can do is stare down at the
path between us
as I find my way back to the place we are now. ‘But how? I mean how did –’

‘I set up an alert to tell me if someone was tampering with our security system.
Figured it was only a matter of time.’

Of course. The program I found on the main grid must have been added by Mason.

No idea what to say, where to look. He’s caught me out. I cling desperately to the
knowledge that he could have called the police weeks ago. There must be some reason
why he hasn’t.

‘Come on.’ Not even a sideways glance as he strides past me, pushing the door open
the rest of the way and continuing inside. When he reaches the opposite side of the
room he stops to turn back my way. ‘Seriously?’