Loop (29 page)

“You can do this.”

I had to.

The stairs creaked as I made my way up the first flight. Tufty appeared out of nowhere and gave me the stink eye before running love circles around Finn’s ankles.

“Hey, Tuft,” said Finn, and picked him up. The footsteps above us in the studio stopped.

“Shh. She’ll hear us,” I said.

“Were we trying to sneak up on her?”

“Good point. I guess I’ve gotten used to the secret agent act lately. But I wouldn’t want to give her a heart attack before she slips into a coma.” A sad attempt at humor.

“Bree, you know you can’t tell her—”

“I know. I—”

“What are you doing here?” My mom’s lilting voice rang down from the landing above. There was no accusation or anger in it. Only delight and surprise.

Tears pricked and moistened the corners of my eyes. Mom wiped her paint-splattered hands on an old rag.

“I wasn’t expecting you until dinner. I thought you and Mimi were going shopping today.”

Shopping.
Yes, that’s what I’d been doing before the world imploded. Shopping. So normal. So … nothing.

Mom motioned to Finn. “And you brought a friend.”

“I … I…”
Here we go.

“Hi, I’m Finn.” He jumped up a few steps and gave her a small wave. “And this actually isn’t your Bree.”

Mom looked back and forth between us like she was waiting for the punch line.

“Okay, whose Bree is she?”

“No, what I mean is—”

“What he means is I’m on a Shift from the future.” I licked my lips and waited for her response.

“Oh.” She tossed the rag she was holding onto a laundry basket in the hall and ushered the two of us down the stairs to the living room. “Why didn’t you say so, sweetie? Did you two drop by for a snack?”

“No.” I sank into the sofa, and Finn joined me. My eyes refused to budge from my mom for even a millisecond. I didn’t want to imagine what must happen in the next twelve hours to land my mother babbling and broken on the steps of my school. But the more I knew, the more I could help her.

“Mom, we need to ask you some questions. Just answer honestly even if you have no idea why I’m asking or think I can’t handle it.”

My mother’s demeanor darkened, and she glanced at Finn with a new wariness.

“What’s going on?” She sat down opposite us.

“Nothing. I’m fine, Mom, but I—”

“Who is he?” She pointed to Finn who shrank back.

“Don’t worry about him. He’s a—” I looked at Finn and for the first time realized what I truly thought of him. “He’s a good guy. A really good guy.”

I turned back to my mom and mustered my most reassuring smile.

“I need to know what the saying ‘The Truth lies behind the enigmatic grin’ means.”

Mom bobbed her head a few times as I was speaking, then said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No, you … you have to.”

“I’m sorry, sugar booger. No clue what that means.”

“Okay, let’s try it from another angle,” said Finn. “How do you know my parents, John and Charlotte Masterson?”

“Your parents?” She looked bewildered. “I don’t know any Mastersons.”

“Maybe you knew my mom by her maiden name. Langston.”

“Charlotte Langston? Now that does ring a bell.”

Finn and I both sat up straight. I reached for his hand and squeezed it in excitement. He entwined his fingers with mine, and when I looked down I couldn’t tell which belonged to him and which belonged to me.

Mom snapped her fingers. “No. You know who I’m thinking of? Sharla Lanksbury. You remember her, don’t you, Bree? I worked with her years ago when I first started at the Gallery.”

No, no, no.
I brushed aside my mother’s rambling and tried to bring the conversation back into focus.

“Mom, this is important. I want you to think really hard. You have to have heard that saying before. ‘The Truth lies behind the enigmatic grin.’ Can you think of anything it might be referring to?”

“What is this about?” Mom’s expression turned from confused back to concerned. “Is this for a school assignment?”

“Sort of,” I said at the same time that Finn said, “No.”

I shot him an exasperated look.
Work with me here, Finn.

Mom stood up and moved toward the kitchen. “I think I should give the Institute a call.”

“No!” we both cried in unison, and lunged forward to pull her back to the chair.

“Bree,
what
is going on? You two have exactly”—she looked up at the clock on the wall—“three minutes to explain. Then I’m getting the Institute on the speak-eazy.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath and grabbed my mother’s hand. “Finn is a friend of mine, and we realized a few days ago that you and his mom have both said that thing about Truth and the enigmatic grin. You, umm, you say it in the future, and it stuck out to me. So we need to figure out how you two know each other and what it means.”

“You need to go further back,” said Finn.

I shook my head, but he pointed up at the wall clock that Mom was still checking every few seconds.

“Further back,” I said with a sharp exhale. “All right. I met Finn for the first time on this weird mission a couple weeks ago, only it was a few years ago for him. And I couldn’t find a grave for someone named Muffy van Sloot, so I—”

“Too far,” whispered Finn. “And too confusing.”

“Well, why don’t
you
take a stab at it?”

“Bree Evelyn Bennis, that is no way to talk to a guest.” Mom shot me the
you’d-better-apologize-and-I-mean-it
look.

I muttered, “I’m sorry,” to appease my mom, but Finn wasn’t even listening.

“I was born over two hundred years ago.” He blurted it out, then stared at my mom.

Silence.

Then a sound came out of her mouth that sounded like a cross between a tru-ant and Tufty’s yowl. It took me a moment to realize it was a laugh.

“No, really, what’s going on?” She looked back and forth between the two of us.

I wanted nothing more than to pat my mother’s shoulder and say,
Ha, ha, he’s kidding. Now can you make me an avocado sandwich on rye?

What came out was, “It’s true. I don’t understand it either, but I need your help.”

Mom went back to a moment of silence and then flew off her chair chattering. “So is this all to figure out a way to get him home? Or is the Institute already working on that? What am I saying? Of course they’re working on it. Well, no. What am I saying? This is beyond the Institute. Are you in trouble? Has he been decontaminated? How did he get here in the first place?”

I waved my arms, speechless, to get my mother to stop. But she ranted on and on.

“Mom,” I said when she paused to take a breath, “I don’t have any answers right now. And I don’t have much time. But I am in trouble. You
can’t
tell the Institute I was here. If you want to help, I need you to think really hard about what it could mean, the phrase I told you earlier. ‘The Truth lies behind the enigmatic grin.’ It could be something from when you were a student or from work or—”

“It could have something to do with your microchip,” said Finn.

Oh, blark.
I buried my face in my hands.

Mom’s head snapped up. “
What
did he say? Has anyone tried to tamper with your chip, Bree?”

“Nobody’s tampering with anything, Mom.”

“Because if someone tries to mess with your chip, you could end up—”

“It’s okay.” I was the last person she needed to remind about the dangers of chip tinkering. I reached over and rubbed her arm. “Really. Nothing’s wrong with my chip.”

She sank back into her chair. “You’re
sure
you’ve heard me say this thing about Truth and a grin? I’m racking my brain, but … nothing. Maybe it’s something I pick up in the future.”

What future?
“No, Mom. It has to be something you know about now. It has to be.”

Tufty hopped off Finn’s lap where he’d been lounging and leapt to the mantel. One of Mom’s unfinished paintings was propped on the ledge, just a gray background with a few pale smudges. I had left the canvas there after the accident as a shrine to my mother, a testament to who Poppy Bennis was, to who I dared to hope she might be again. I had never thought much about the ragged, shredded edges until Tufty sank his claws into the frame and began kneading.

“Tufty,” Mom and I scolded at the same time.

A stunned expression took over my mother’s face.

“I think I know what it means.” She clutched the arm of the chair, her nails white with excitement.

“You know what the saying means?”

“Yes. Well, not the whole thing. The enigmatic-grin part. It has to be—” Mom squinched up her nose and started arguing with herself. “No, that doesn’t make sense. If there was something
behind
it, we would have found it ages ago.”

Both Finn and I jumped up.

“Behind what, Mom? Behind what?”

“Behind the—”

But she didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence, not that I would have heard a word she said anyway.

There was no warning, like there had been last time.

No headache, not so much as a twinge.

A bomb simply exploded in my head.

I crumpled to the ground, shrieking and writhing in pain. In some dim corner of my mind, I was aware that Finn and my mother were at my side. I attempted to speak, to listen to what they were saying. Or, rather, screaming. But it was nothing but a muffled garble.

Whoever wanted me back at the Institute wasn’t messing around. And they didn’t seem to care whether they brought me in alive or dead.

chapter 26

ALIVE. BUT BARELY.

A solitary, dim lamp illuminated the small room where I lay heaped in the corner. My head pounded in throbbing pulses. I dragged myself upright and let out a hoarse cough. Blood flecks splattered the lamp in some kind of grotesque Rorschach, and another ribbon of red drizzled to the floor from my nose. I gagged back a rush of vomit. My body couldn’t take another one of these.

I pinched my nostrils to stop the flow and looked around the room. When I recognized where I was, I wondered if arriving dead might have been the preferable option. A heavy weight pressed against my chest, constricting my breath. It took a moment to realize it was Finn still clinging to me, unconscious but breathing. But that wasn’t what scared the blark out of me.

A wall of hodgepodge photographs came into sharp focus as my vision cleared. We had landed in Quigley’s office. I had to get us out of here, but the Institute would be crawling with staff and tru-ants looking for me. Air entered my lungs harder and harder with each breath. And it had nothing to do with the 170 pounds of lean muscle now nuzzling into my camisole.

“Finn?” I poked his shoulder.

“Whah?” He opened his eyes and looked around, then let out a muffled groan. “We’re inside your school, aren’t we?”

“It was a six-month Shift and local. We’re lucky we didn’t end up in the Launch Room.”

Not that Quigley’s office was any better. Probably worse. The sole, minuscule bright spot was that Quigley was currently not in said office. I wriggled out from under Finn and lifted my head to peek out the window into the darkened classroom. A shadow passed by in the hall outside.

“Should we sneak out and try it again?” Finn asked.

I sagged against the wall. Even that small exertion left me gasping for breath through my blood-caked lips. “This place will be on lockdown.”

And when I thought about asking Wyck for more help, I got a blarky feeling in my gut.

“Are you okay?” Finn steadied me and wiped my face clean.

“I will be.” This room was the last place I wanted to be, but I didn’t think my legs would hold me yet.

“Your mom was on to something,” said Finn, again seemingly unfazed by the forced fade. “I could tell.”

My mom. I reached my hand out in front of me. Minutes ago it could have brushed my mother’s cheek. Now Poppy Bennis was back in a hospital bed. I closed my eyes and summoned those last few coherent moments with her.

“Something about the grin,” I said.

“And the ‘behind’ part, too,” said Finn. “She said, ‘If there was something
behind
it, we would have found it by now.’ What did she mean by that? Who’s ‘we’? And behind
what
?”

“She said it out of nowhere. One minute, she had no idea what we were talking about. The next, it was like some light switched on in her brain and she started jabbering to herself about the grin and…” My eyes slid out of focus. Something
had
triggered my mom’s epiphany. “Tufty.”

“Where?” Finn jumped up on his hands and knees. He felt around beneath him and peered under Quigley’s desk. “Did we accidentally bring him back?”

“No, no, no.” I fidgeted and smoothed my hands on the floor in front of me. I had to think. All the pieces were there. I knew it. But the puzzle wasn’t fitting together. “His claws. The canvas. That was when Mom realized what the enigmatic grin is.”

Finn pumped his pointed finger. “You’re right. What was on that painting?”

“Nothing.” Just a plain background. A few splotches.

The office had started to feel claustrophobic. I couldn’t
think
. All Quigley’s photos seemed to be staring straight at us. Or maybe laughing. That one with her and Leonardo da Vinci, especially. I was thankful I’d dropped my QuantCom at the house. It would be harder to track me. But still only a matter of time before they locked my location. Finn and I had to get out of here. I needed to put the “enigmatic grin” out of my mind and concentrate on finding another hiding place for Finn.

Hiding place.

“That’s it!” I squealed, and sat bolt upright like someone had zapped me with a stunner.

Finn tumbled backward and almost brought the lamp in the corner down with him.

“Don’t you see?” Oh, it was perfect. “He was in the Haven. The painting. He must have hidden something on the back of it. A code or a map or something. He’s the key. We have to get back to him. Leonardo’s the key!”

While I was thinking out loud, I had stood up and begun pacing the office.