Split Infinity (10 page)
I don’t sleep much through the night. My dreams are a jumble of searching and hiding, drifting and being chased. It’s as if I’m picking through pieces of a shipwrecked world before returning to the surface for air. Every half an hour or so, I wake and check where I am.
I’m still alive. This is me.
As soon as Mum leaves for work, I send Mason a message.
You okay? Can I come over?
He doesn’t reply, and when I check the grid I find that he’s gone to school. As if everything’s normal.
My hands drop from the keyboard. Until seeing that, I’d hoped that Mason might know what’s going on. We were jabbed with the same needle, after all. But if his timeline was tracking the same path as mine, he would have found a way to contact me by now.
I don’t like the idea, but I have a feeling Mason won’t remember any of it. Whatever happened to me hasn’t happened to him.
It gives me a flash of urgency. I’m the only one who knows about Amon’s accident, and everything it triggers. The wildfire that’s months from sweeping through. Not to mention the fluoro blue drug out there, somewhere, with our names on it.
The mesh across our window from 2089 isn’t there when I check, and there’s clear access down the narrow passage by the side of the house. Good. I set up an alert on my compad that will sound if anyone unusual comes down the front path. Like the Feds, or whoever it was with that glowing blue syringe. Now that I know what might be coming, I’m not leaving anything to chance.
I spend a couple of hours catching up on the news, retracing my steps on the grid over the past weeks even as I spin out at the way everything forwards from here has been swiped clean. It doesn’t take long to catch up. After all, I’ve been here before, done this already. I adjust our standing grocery order so that any food we don’t need is delivered in cans and vac packs that we can save. We’ll be able to dodge the fire, I’ll make sure of that, but half rations are more difficult to avoid.
I get a burst of energy when I realise that Mum’s birthday is in a few weeks. We don’t need to save up credits for a bribe – there’s no way I’m about to have the chip inserted in my wrist to trap me again – so I’ll be able to spend the credits that came with the woman’s chip on Mum. Maybe I really can make this her best birthday ever.
Late in the morning I get busy rewriting the blocking script we’ve been using to mask chips from the grid. It trips me out, rewriting code that’s not meant to exist yet. But it exists in my memory so it doesn’t take long. I’m mostly clear about the additions Mason made. Alistair’s were more complex and I struggle to remember them. But after some false starts I get it working okay. If the police are watching we might need it again. And if not, it might come in handy in other ways.
Maybe I can use it to deal with Boc.
A few minutes after the end of school, Mason replies and we agree to meet at a cafe near his house. He’s standing out the front when I arrive, his hands sunk deep in his pockets and his mouth in a straight line. A strand of hair has fallen over the curve of one cheek and there’s not even the hint of stubble on his jawline. I bite down on my lip, holding back a grin. We’re closer in age again.
Automatically I scan the area for CCTV cameras as I walk up, or anyone in a police uniform. When I’m a few steps from Mason, I grin and my arms lift to pull him into a hug.
You’re here, and you’re safe.
But he turns his head, a wary kind of reluctance about him.
My arms drop and I do this awkward half-step back. Now that I’m seeing him again, it suddenly hits me how much we’ve lost. So much that we’ve been through together has been swiped clean. At least in terms of what Mason knows, it has. The night on the roof; practising snap jumps in the park. Even the moments of panic and sorrow – at least we’d been through them together. There’s a gap in our shared timeline now.
But I also know how that line will end.
Mason’s eyes narrow. ‘You all right?’ There’s concern about him, but awkwardness too.
‘Mh-huh.’ Head nodding fast, eyes blinking even faster. I swallow hard, trying to get a grip. A man in a black jacket strides past and for a moment my brain zaps into plans of escape, but then the man lifts an arm to greet a woman standing by herself and I realise he’s just some guy, not the Feds in their fatigues. Besides, the Feds aren’t after me in this world yet. I keep forgetting that. Too used to running and hiding.
‘Want to …’ Mason hesitates and then gestures inside. ‘Go in?’
He turns to walk inside but I grab his hand and yank. ‘Can we go back to your place instead?’
Mason eyeballs my hand, and I realise how this must look to him: a complete about-face, out of nowhere. From Mason’s point of view I’ve been avoiding him for weeks. Now I’m acting like we’re best friends. Or more.
I loosen my hold and his hand drops. ‘Sorry.’ This is weird. He still thinks I’m the woman who died in the cave, a seasoned time jumper. He doesn’t know I’m illegal.
He doesn’t know me.
A group of people in business suits walk past, laughing at something as Mason steps nearer, closing the distance between us. ‘We can go back to my place if you want. But why now? I mean, you’ve been avoiding me for weeks. What’s changed?’
‘Because I … I need to tell you what’s going on.’ There are so many things I have to say. But not where anyone might be listening. ‘And I can’t do it here.’
Mason’s eyes travel over my face. ‘I knew it,’ he breathes. ‘I knew something was going on … the insertion date on your chip, it doesn’t make sense.’
‘Let me explain?’ I jerk my elbow towards his house, but I can already see it’s worked. His face is so open, so hungry for clues that I grab his hand again and start for the corner leading to his street.
He lets me this time, sneaking glances my way as I keep tugging so hard we break into a jog. It feels urgent. Part of me is still there, haunted by the echoes of that other world. But there’s excitement too, deep down and hidden. We’re both here, safe, together again.
‘Don’t freak out,’ I pant as we reach the corner. ‘It’ll be okay.’
Please. Let this time be okay.
H
ALF AN HOUR
later we’re sitting on Mason’s couch, facing his comscreen. All the fake deets I added to the woman’s chip are on display. The make-up scar has been rubbed off my wrist, my skin an even tan. Before I move on to everything else, I’ve begun with who I am.
After Boc caught me out for being illegal, I always wished that I could wind back time, tell Mason the truth about the chip and make things right. But when the moment came this time, I hesitated. Not because I don’t trust Mason, of course I do. But I also know what will happen if the truth about my identity gets out. To Boc.
My worst nightmare was always getting caught. Now that nightmare has a name.
Mason’s leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees, scrolling through the details of the chip as if he’s finally reading a language that makes sense.
He’s serious, lost in thought, looking anywhere but my way. But he doesn’t seem dark on me the way he was last time. It counts for something, I think, that he didn’t have to hear it from someone else. I’m trusting him with a secret that could send me to jail.
‘So all that stuff about not being able to skip in front of anyone …’ Mason says slowly, still staring at the screen. ‘That was to cover the fact you didn’t know how? I thought it was because you were shy about returning … you know, without any clothes. But all this time you were –’
I shuffle forwards so that I’m on the edge of the couch. ‘Promise not to tell anyone?’
His eyes stay on the screen. ‘I’m not going to turn you in, Scout.’
‘I know, but you can’t tell anyone. Not your folks …’ I breathe in. ‘Not even Boc.’
Mason turns to me as he registers what I just said, a tendon stretched in his neck. ‘Listen, I get it. The whole reason we noticed those gaps on that woman’s history map was because we were checking the grid for illegals. But this is different. I can talk to him –’
‘No! Please, don’t do that. It’s just …’ I’m on the verge of letting it all pour out.
That guy is a double-crossing snake.
But again, I hesitate. I’ve only just told Mason who I really am; but Boc’s been Mason’s best friend for years.
Mason rests his hand on my shoulder and I realise my thoughts must be written all over my face. It’s even worse now that I know how easily everything could unravel again.
‘Hey,’ he says gently. ‘I knew there was something weird about your chip, but I had no real idea what was going on. And you had the guts to tell me anyway. That’s pretty big, Scout, trusting me like that. I’m not going to give you away.’
I almost throw my arms around his neck when he says that.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
But I hold back, sit on my hands. We still have a long way to go.
Mason lets out a sigh, his shoulders sagging slightly as he scrunches his nose at the comscreen. ‘Back to square one, I guess. No way to compare our time in the sinkhole if you don’t know how to skip. Zero chance of synching our returns.’
‘Actually, we’re a long way from square one.’ I try not to bubble too light as I speak, he’s going to love this. ‘If you want to synch a skip, we can do that. And more.’
‘You just came clean about avoiding me because you’re not the woman in the cave. Now you’re saying you know how to synch a skip?’
I tell him everything.
I’ve been speaking for a while when Mason’s eye go wide. ‘You know about my brother?’
‘Yeah, you told me about him.’ My nose scrunches. ‘Or at least, another version of you did. On the roof of this house, actually.’
‘Wow,’ he breathes. ‘I mean … I thought it might be possible, but I never even imagined … I mean, not like …’ He breaks off and grabs my hand. ‘Sorry. Keep going. Tell me absolutely
everything
.’
The warmth of his skin against mine makes me smile. I pick up again where I left off. One step at a time, I talk Mason through it all, describing the domino effect that led to the ten-year jump, and the moment we were both caught in the streets outside Sunshine Hospital.
It’s not easy, living through it all over again: my voice choking as we reach the description of Amon’s body slumped in the trolley. Echo’s sob as she pushed her palms against her eyes. Dust streaked with wet lines on Mason’s face. And then, in 2089, the moment when I heard that Mum had died, and watching Mason slump to the ground after being jabbed with the massive blue glowing syringe.
It’s like being dumped by wave after wave, each pushing me deeper as I struggle for air only to be chased by the next. But beneath each surge lies something deeper: an undercurrent simmering so hot that I end up pacing my way to the middle of the room. I can’t sit still anymore.
When I explain that I escaped arrest by jumping ahead, I skip the part where I worked out that Boc turned me in. That’s the only detail I don’t explain to Mason. Am I saving it to use against Boc when the time is right? Perhaps. But as I talk, pausing here and there to answer Mason’s questions, something in me stills. It’s not quiet. It’s the opposite of peace, it’s simmering anger.
Because I realise that Boc is the cause of the whole mess, the first domino to fall. He’s the reason we were time skipping in front of freight trains, and the one who talked Mason into disabling the safety sensors. It’s Boc’s fault that Mason was tagged for arrest. And if not for Boc turning me in, I would have been here when Mum faced the fire.
I don’t even care that none of that has happened yet. Maybe in this reality, it never will. But even if everything is different from now on, I know now what Boc’s capable of doing.
He still did it, even if he didn’t do it here.
I’m not sure what Mason would say if I told him that his best friend turned me in. Maybe he’d try to explain why Boc would do something like that. Or maybe he’d want to ask Boc about it, and I can’t chance that. I can’t risk Boc having that power over me by letting him hear I stole the chip. Not again. I don’t want an explanation, anyway.
I want payback.