Loop (18 page)

“Who are you talking about?”

“That Wyck guy.”

“Wyck?” I snorted. “Why would you think I’d been on a mission with Wyck?”

“Well, you go to Shifter school with him.”

“He’s a transporter.”

“What does that mean?”

“Transporters can’t Shift. That was a nice touch pretending you’d met him before, by the way.”

“But I wasn’t—”

“And for whatever reason, your name doesn’t come up in searches, so I guess we’re safe there.”
Wait.
“Why
are
you here? Did my future self bring back the flexiphone?”

He shook his head.
Dang it.

It wasn’t until that moment I realized Finn still had his hand on my knee. My heart sped back up. He squeezed my leg, and his eyes lit up like green fireflies in July.

He looked all around and lowered his voice an octave: “I think I found something.”

“When you were going through my … stuff?” I hadn’t forgotten his comment earlier about Mom’s accident. I kept the data disk with the news story about it in the back of my underwear drawer.

At least he had the decency to turn a nice remorseful shade of red. “I’m sorry about that. Really, I am. I was searching for a clean pair of socks, and as soon as I realized the stuff in your drawer was your … things, I pulled my hand out, but before I did I brushed against this little button-looking thing and then a newspaper shot out of it. It looked like real paper, but it wasn’t really there. It was like a holograph thingy. Is any of this ringing a bell?”

Still a Nosy McNoserson. But yes. I nodded.

“Right then.” He looked pleased at first, but then the Trig look came back. “Bree, I think our moms are friends with each other.”

chapter 15

“UMM, YEAH.”
I stared at his mouth waiting for something that wasn’t nonsense to emerge, but it didn’t. “I’m going to need you to leave.”

“What? Now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He looked kind of stunned.
Welcome to the club.
“I guess we can talk about it later.”

“No, no. Not my school. I need you to leave my century.”
And my life.

It was like the night a bunch of friends and I watched this movie where every time the main character touched another person they switched brains. In the final showdown, the good guy was fighting a slew of bad guys on the deck of a hovercraft speeding over a lake. No one could keep track of whose brain was whose. The good guy tumbled over the side, but he caught a rope and pulled himself up to barefoot water-ski. That was the point where Wyck laughed so hard he spit popcorn all over the seat in front of him and yelled, “Yeah, right, like
that
could happen!”

The hero had been
switching brains
with people the whole movie, but barefoot waterskiing? That was the part that blew Wyck’s mind. Still, I sort of understood his reaction. That was the moment Wyck’s plausible-o-meter had been pushed over the line.

Finn had snapped the needle off mine.

Our
mothers
were
friends
? There weren’t even words to describe the absurdity of that idea. I should make one up. “Preposterdiculous.” No. No, it didn’t even deserve its own made-up word.

“Yep. You’re going to need to go,” I said.

“Didn’t you hear what I—?”

“Now.”

“Bree, I’m not going anywhere until we have a chance to—owww!”

There’s a teensy nerve right where the neck meets the shoulder that, if squeezed just so, can turn a, say, six-foot man into putty. If you know where it is. (I know where it is.)

Finn wrenched his body around, trying to wriggle out of my grasp. I held on tight and frog-marched him to the place where I should have frog-marched him the moment he showed up at the Institute. Thankfully, there weren’t many people milling around in the halls. The few who were, were busy with good-byes. The hallway to the Launch Room was deserted. As Finn and I approached the door, I pinched extra hard as I bent to brush my hair against the scanner. The door opened. The room was empty.

We slipped in, or perhaps I should say
I
slipped in and dragged the now-writhing Finn along with me. He was going back to his time. And I was going back to pretending that none of this had ever happened.

“What the heck, Bree? I’m trying to tell you something important and you’re—owwww!”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Okay, truthfully, part of me desperately wanted to hear what he had to say, but the panicked, frustrated, exhausted, overwhelmed side of me had my brain in a hammerhold of a nerve pinch. “Finn, I want you to leave.”

“Well, too bad. I’m here to help you.”

“I want you to leave.”

“Bree, you need me.”

“I want you to leave.”

Each time I said it, my words came out more cold, more pointy. From the look on Finn’s face, I could tell they’d finally pierced him. His lips curled in on themselves into a defeated line.

“If that’s what you really want,” he said.

The kicker was that there was this part of me, however small, that wanted—no—needed him to stay. I told that little part to shut up.

“That’s what I really want.”

I centered him on the Shift Pad. He stood there on the circular metal, the fight sucked out of him, all stoic like he was a fricking Spartan headed to war or something. I turned on the controls and looked at him as little as possible. With no Shifter gene and no chip to control it, I had no idea how this would work. But it had brought him here. Surely it would work in reverse.

“Ready?” I asked.

He didn’t say anything.

“Right. I guess this is good-bye then,” I said.

Still didn’t say anything.

The console felt warm to the touch as I slid my index finger down the gauge.
Wow.
There were a lot more buttons and dials and whatnot than I had realized. Still, I’d seen transporters do this more times than I could count. The familiar beeps and bips sounded throughout the room as I powered the Pad up. I couldn’t help but take one long, final look at what was probably the most sincere, albeit incredibly annoying and misguided, guy I’d ever meet. I touched the final launch button.

Nothing happened.

Actually, not true. Finn didn’t move one blessed millimeter or millisecond, but something did happen. As I was poking at the controls trying to figure out why he was still there, the door to the Launch Room slid open. Wyck and Den O’Banion walked in.

Wyck’s face contorted into confusion. As he saw it was only me and Finn, he relaxed a bit.

“Whatcha doing, Bree?” he asked, a tiny edge to his voice that wasn’t there earlier.

“Grand tour,” I said. Because whose cousin doesn’t want to visit a sterile, climate-controlled room full of circuitry and metal? “What are
you
doing here?”

I asked the question simply to change the subject, but the edge was back in his voice when he said, “Grand tour.”

Den fidgeted at Wyck’s side, and I noticed him shift their junk food bag behind his back. They must have been getting ready to sort through it. Did they think I’d narc on them? It was only candy and stuff we couldn’t buy in the school store.

“Wyck, it’s fine. I’m not going to tell anyone.” I pointed to their bag and swished my finger across my lip.

Wyck looked down at the bag, and any strain he was feeling visibly melted away. “You’re a real plinker, Bree. You know that.”

I couldn’t hold off the smile. “Stop it. You’re making me blush.”

I should have taken the opportunity to ask him for his help, to transport Finn then and there, but something held me back. And just as quickly, the moment was gone.

“Heh-hem.” Finn cleared his throat, and as Wyck and Den turned to look at him I silently powered down the console. “How about the rest of that tour, Bree?”

“It’s getting so late,” said Wyck. “Why don’t I walk Finn out for you?”

“No. I’ll show him out.” I didn’t need Finn sharing any more insights from the past.

Finn wrapped his arm around my shoulder as we walked out the door. I didn’t smack his hand until we had made it through the exit, when I let out an audible
phew
.

And I could have sworn I heard one from the Launch Room as well.

*   *   *

After loading Finn into a Publi-pod headed to my house, I trotted straight to bed. As I lay there staring at the ceiling, the weight of what had happened (or, rather, what
hadn’t
happened) in the Launch Room pressed against me. Finn had Shifted here. I should have been able to send him back. Maybe the problem was my lackluster transporting skills. Or maybe it was Finn. I needed to ask Wyck but had no idea how I could explain it without raising his supicions.

A restless, dreamy sleep eventually overtook me. In it, I fought off an army of glowing green cats, all wearing red scrubs and wielding writing pens as tiny swords.

*   *   *

“Shh.”

I woke to Finn’s shadow hovering over me. A warm hand that smelled vaguely of cinnamon covered my mouth, holding any scream in. Not that I was the screaming type. The hand did, however, scare the peewilligers out of me, so I bit it.

“Oww.”

Finn Masterson could swear to protect me all he wanted, but if I died of a coronary it would be all his fault.

“You deserve it,” I hissed. The sheets rustled as I pulled them up to my chin and looked over to Mimi’s bed, but my roommate had put her privacy canopy up. The Metro could barrel through our room and Mimi wouldn’t hear. To be safe, I grabbed the belt around Finn’s waist and pulled him onto the mattress. With the push of a button, my own privacy canopy shimmered down from the ceiling.

Oh my gosh. Future Bree knew about this! That this creeper would sneak into the school somehow, into my
room,
and she still went back in time and asked him to protect her. I mean, me. Us?

I may have just bit Finn’s hand, but I would bite her
head
off if our paths ever crossed. Well, after she gave me Leto’s delivery back.

I grabbed Finn’s shirt and pulled him close. “Why are you here?”

“I told you. Because our mothers—”

“No. Not the preposterdiculous reason you gave me earlier.”

“That’s not a real word.”

“You forced me to make it up! How’d you get back in?”

Finn held up his pinky. My chestnut strands snaked around it, turning it a garish shade of purple.

“What part of ‘go home and wait quietly’ is so difficult for you to comprehend?”

“And what part of ‘our moms used to hang out’ is so uninteresting?”

His words crashed against me. I backed away. There was no rational response. Of course it was interesting. Paralyzingly so. It was also impossible. And I’d had enough impossible to last me the rest of my life. Once I shipped Finn back home, I could pretend he never existed. I could bargain with Leto somehow, maybe agree to do as many deliveries as he wanted free-of-charge once I was de-Anchored. And Bergin and ICE never had to know about any of this. My lips curved in to form the word “out,” but before I could say it Finn had his cinnamon hand back on top of them.

“The Truth lies behind the enigmatic grin,” he whispered.

My heart sped up. I grabbed the corner of my quilt to keep myself from shaking.

“What are you playing at?” That gibberish about the Truth was the last thing my mother had said before she slipped into a coma, when she was found splayed out on the steps in front of the Institute. All the news articles reported what she said with a public plea for anyone who knew what it meant to come forward to help solve the mystery of what had happened to her.

“That saying, about truth,” he said, “does it mean anything to you?”

“I don’t know. My mom believed in seeking wisdom in unexpected places?” That usually shut the reporters up.

“You really think that’s what that means?”

“No. It means … it means my mom was talking nonsense at that point,” I finally said.

As I spoke, I watched Finn’s reaction out of the corner of my vision. I expected the typical fear from a fellow Shifter, or from a nonShifter, the
poor-thing
head tilt. But his neck didn’t bend an inch. If anything, he looked almost excited.

“What if it’s not nonsense?” he said.

“And maybe my mom’s not really in a coma. Maybe she’s just faking it.” I clamped my mouth shut so hard, my teeth sliced into my tongue. I was being horrible. That accusation he’d flung at me after I crashed his Porsche, it was true. I was
worse
than a shrew around him, and I didn’t want to be that person. It wasn’t his fault he’d been dragged into the twenty-third century. Okay, it kind of was. But he’d had decent intentions.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to snap at you. You bring something out in me. It’s the fact that you shouldn’t be here. That you don’t seem to care that you’re here, stuck in the wrong century. That you—”

“—heard that same ‘Truth’ saying more times than I can count growing up from my own mom?”

I scrambled to the edge of the bed where Finn sat. “You
what
?”

“My mom used to say it all the time—to herself, to Dad, to Georgie and me.”

My mom wasn’t crazy. All that rambling, it meant something. Finn didn’t even realize what he had just given me. Hope. If I could prove that she wasn’t exhibiting signs of mental instability when she went into her coma, sending her to Resthaven would no longer be a threat. Other free options would open up for us.

“What does it mean?”

“I think it means our moms must have known each other at some point.”

“No, what does the saying mean?”

“Which part? ‘Truth’ or ‘the enigmatic grin’?”

“Either.”

Finn scooted back against the wall. “No clue.”

“Argh!” I clutched my pillow and flomped it down next to him. “Then why are you even telling me this?”

“Don’t you want to know how they both know that saying?”

“It’s a saying.”

“Is it? I’ve never heard anyone else use it. Ever. Have you?”

“No.” It was like two completely unrelated topics had been smacked together. A stitch in time saves radishes. Curiosity killed the waffles.