Take Me Tomorrow (19 page)

He was lying. He had to have been. The ocean wasn’t in the Topeka Region.

“I was in Raleigh,” he explained, folding it in half.

“But traveling is—”

“Not illegal,” he
finished, “Just difficult.” He held out the paper to me. “I want you to have it.”

I didn’t move.

He shook it lightly. “Take it,” he coaxed, “Please. Just for now.”

“I—I can’t.”

He reached out with his free hand, grabbed my hand, and pushed the photograph into my grasp. “You can,” he said, stepping away. He leaned against his desk and watched me until I put it in my pocket.

“Don’t lose it,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“Good.” He was smiling, but his smile grew into a large grin when he glanced at his desk. He leapt up. “
No way,” he breathed, picking up an envelope from his desk.

I held my breath
as Noah ripped it open. His eyes skimmed over the material, and his hand dropped to the desk as if he were holding himself help. “I know where she is.”

Before I knew it, I had shot forward and wrapped
my arms around his shoulders. “I told you it was here,” I exclaimed. When he put his arm around me, I ducked away, laughing as I parted from him. His body heat lingered on my torso, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was focused on the words in front of him.

“Finally,” he whispered,
“I can get her out of here.”

I forced a smile,
knowing what it all meant. Noah had come here to get his little sister out. He wouldn’t stay in Topeka forever. I moved away from him. “We should get some sleep,” I noted. “Let’s set the living room up.”

His eyes followed my movements, but his excited expression faltered.
“You’re right,” he agreed, running his hand through his hair. Blond strands stuck up. “Let’s go downstairs.”

A Dim Halo

A siren split the air, and I jumped out of slee
p as if from a nightmare − except this nightmare was my reality. I blinked crazily until my eyes adjusted to the darkness in the living room. As if he had been waiting for trouble, Noah was crouched by the window, peering out of the split blinds. He was perfectly still, his chest barely moving, and his eyes moved from side to side, searching the blackness.

“What was that?” I whispered, pulling the thick comforter up to my neck.

Noah didn’t respond. His gaze focused on the outdoors, distant red and blue lights splattering against the shadowed street. After a moment of silence, he lowered himself to the ground and relaxed. “A cop pulled someone over.” His voice shook as badly as when Phelps had shown up at my father’s house. “But I don’t like how close they are.”

I
buried myself in the blue comforter that had once been on Noah’s childhood bed. He had brought it to the living room earlier, setting up the long couch as a bed for me to sleep on. He had supposedly fallen asleep on the smaller couch, but the sheet he used as a blanket wasn’t wrinkled. Instead of sleeping, he had been keeping guard.

We waited like that for a moment, perfectly still, completely silent. I could hear my heart pounding, my breath quieting. I was tired of running, and my ankle still throbbed. Lyn had diagnosed it as a bad sprain. She had wrapped it, and some of the pain had gone away, but I knew I wouldn’t be fast enough to escape. I also knew Noah wouldn’t leave me behind.

“They’re gone,” Noah noted as the red lights disappeared into the night.

I sighed, and he did, too. He stood up and walked over to the couches to sit down
. He leaned over, elbows on his knees, and rubbed his eyes.

“You okay?” he croaked.

I nodded, but I doubt he could see me. He had just stared directly into the lights. His vision would have to readjust. But I could see him perfectly, including his injured shoulder, and his disheveled appearance made me feel as if the cops were outside, waiting for us.

“You can go back to sleep, Sophie,” N
oah said, staring at the carpet.

“Have you slept yet?”

“Go to sleep, Sophie.”

I grumbled but laid down, my head heavy from exhaustion. The emotional toll was enough to put me to sleep, but my anxiety was enough to keep me awake. “That couch is too small for you to sleep on, isn’t it?” I asked, knowing that the couch was the last reason for him avoiding sleep.

Noah didn’t say anything.

“We can switch couches,” I
suggested.

“I’m not going to sleep
.” He sounded annoyed.

I refused to close my eyes. Without giving him time to q
uestion it, I stood up, wrapped the blanket around my shoulders, and dragged it over to his couch. Plopping down next to him, our hips touched, and he tensed as I turned to him. “I’m not either.”

Noah glared, his eyes ablaze. “You need it.”

“I slept enough.”

Noah hung his head in his hands and threaded
his fingers through his bangs. His watch was still on. “You are one stubborn person.”

“Look
who’s talking,” I quipped.

H
e chuckled beneath his breath as he leaned against my arm. I didn’t move away. I gestured to his wrist instead. “You never take that watch off. None of you do,” I said, cursing myself for not looking at Pierson’s wrists.

“It keeps us connected,” Noah
explained, his lips twisting into a frown. “Why do you always wear that necklace of yours?”

He knew it was my mother’s. He didn’t have to bring it up, but he did. “Can I see it again?” he asked, facing me from only an inch away.

His eyes locked with mine. His vision had adjusted to the dark. He could see me now. “Can I see it?” he repeated.

I pulled it out of my tank top mechanically. He reached up
and cupped the silver heart in his palm. When he ran his thumb over it, the black thread brushed against the nape of my neck. I knew what he saw. The smooth meal only had one slit on the bottom, a thick scrape that indented ‘S’ for my name.

“She has one, too, you know,” he said, dropping it against my sternum. “It has an ‘E’ etched on it.”

“What do you know about her?” I asked, thinking of what Lyn had said.

“
Not a lot,” he stuttered, but his eyes were entranced on the jewelry. Behind his gaze was a memory that I wanted to snatch from him. “You look like her,” he added.

I knew that, but I had
only seen one picture. “Was she okay?”

Noah frowned. “We got along.”

His words didn’t register. “What does that mean?” I asked. I wanted to know what he was thinking. I always did.  But he didn’t say a word. His blank expression remained unreadable, and he refused to look at me. He was lost in his own thoughts, just like he got lost when he took tomo. His silence weighed down on me.

“You were
beautiful that night, Sophie,” he whispered, changing the subject so suddenly that my mind sputtered in disbelief.

“What night?”

“The dance,” he answered, turning back to me. The bags beneath his eyes were darker than I recalled. “You looked beautiful.”

My throat tightened, and I clutched my blanket, remembering the dance, recalling how he had danced with me moments before tossing me into the river. “Why a
re you telling me this now?” My voice strained against my esophagus.

He shrugged,
only to wince from his shoulder wound. “I wanted to tell you then, right in that moment, when we were standing by the river—” I tried to imagine my curling hair matted to my face, my makeup smeared, twigs and mud coating my dress. “But I didn’t,” he added, quickly looking to the floor. “I don’t know why.”

I didn’t speak.

He rubbed his forehead as if to get rid of a migraine. “I hit my head on a rock, right?”

“You did,” I confirmed, wondering how he had forgotten.
“You have the scar to prove that.”

Noah lifted his long fingers to his forehead and
stopped at the slit. “I wasn’t supposed to hit it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were.”

My heart
slammed into my lungs. “What?”

“I always thought the future that tomo showed was fate, that it couldn’t change,” he paused,
“I have lived by that comfort for years, but—”

“But what, Noah?”
I grabbed his arm, refusing to let him ignore me again. I grabbed his chin and forced him to look at me in the eyes. “What happened?”

He squinted, but he didn’t pull his face away
. “When I pushed you in, you were fine in my visions, but it changed when you hit the water,” he explained, his tone wavering. “You hit it. Your head − it smashed into it − and you were unconscious. You drowned.” He stopped to wait for my reaction.

I was numb.

“You died.” His voice shook with anger or desperation or some other emotion that I couldn’t place. “I watched you die.” He grabbed my hand on his chin, and it was only then that I realized I was squeezing him. When he pried my fingers off of his jaw, he laid my hand in his. “And yet, here you are, sitting right next to me.” Because he had hit it instead of me. Lyn was wrong. He had saved my life – right before he almost took it.

He turned my hand over and stared at my small palm as his nails dragged over the lines. In that moment, he was the fort
uneteller in the Albany Region, the one I had met as a child. I could feel her touch through his. When he didn’t speak, I could hear her words, “You’ll be fine, my dear.”

I pulled my hand away before it shook. His neck jerked back like I had slapped him – again.
In a way, I had. I defied the science he lived his life by. His beliefs were proved falsified by my existence.

“I—I don’t know what to say,” I stuttered, closing my palm, unable to look.

“Do you think I do?” Noah’s laugh sounded like a mad man’s chuckle. “I’m not sure what it all means, what any of this means, except that tomo can be resisted, and I have to let my father know.”

My fingers twisted around his fingers, calloused but somehow soft. “Do y
ou think that’s a good idea?”

Noah tilted his face.
“Tomo promised peace after this war,” he recalled the information everyone knew but didn’t talk about. “But if you defied it—”

Peace wasn’t guaranteed.

He didn’t have to say it out loud for me to understand. I grimaced. All of his suffering − everyone’s suffering − would be for nothing. The hope had died in the river I fell into.

“I thought tomo was up to interpretation,” I managed.

“It is,” he agreed, “but I’m pretty good at the interpreting part.”

He was an addict. He had learned through his addiction.

My curiosity consumed me. “How does it work, anyway?”

“Don’t ever take it.” His voice was hard, like he heard what I was thinking.

“I won’t,” I clarified. “I just want to know what we’re fighting for.”

W
e weren’t fighting for the drug, but the drug was the platform we stood upon.

“I only have two
days left,” he said suddenly.

“You have a certain day you have to leave on?” I guessed. When he nodded, I dug my nails into his leg. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Because I didn’t know until—” he sighed. “Gigi told Miles when she saw him. She got the news through Pierson. I don’t know where he got it.”

His words lingered because he wasn’t saying what I wanted him to, “That doesn’t make sense,” I finally argued. “You’re only plan is to get your sister out—”

“Do you know why they killed my mother?”

His question sliced through me.

“She was the only one who had the exact ingredients memorized,” he said. “If we can’t make more, the drug will run out.”

Phelps would win. Like my father said, he could kill all of us, but the war would go on as long as the people had the hope from tomo. Without that hope, they wouldn’t fight. They wouldn’t die for another generation’s freedom.
They would forget about the freedom all together. It would die like a fairytale, a mere fantasy that was told at parties.

“My sister has a photographic memory,” he continued, finally explaining Rinley’s purpose. “If we have any hope, it’s living in her head, and Phelps doesn’t even know it.”

It wasn’t even about her life.

“If she’s alive, we can live,” he finished.

“But I defied it.”

His knees bobbed up and down as if he were running. “I know,” he said, “but my hope isn’t the world’s hope.” He didn’t even care if it were a lie. “You’re also the only person I’ve heard of that happening to.”

“So, what?” I questioned, “I’m special?”

His tense lips spread out. “Of course you are.”

A blush ran over my face, and he stood up, gesturing for me to join him. When I didn’t move, he spoke, “You wanted to know how tomo worked.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to take it.”

His head hung back as he groaned. “I’m not giving you any,” he said, repositioning himself, but his words made it sound like he had some on him. He straightened up. “I’m going to show you.”

In the darkness, his blond hair resembled a dim halo. His outstretched hand was impossible to leave empty. I grabbed his palm, and he pulled me to my feet. I held my breath and stared at the buttons of his shirt. The holes looked like little eyes, peering back at me.

“Ready?” he asked, his voice rushed.

I nodded, but I didn’t look at him until he laid his hands on my fac
e. His palms were cold, but the pads of his thumbs were soft as he moved them over my eyes. When I shut my eyes, he spoke, “Sometimes you see it.” When he let me open my eyes, his lips were against my ear, “Sometimes you listen to it.” His tender voice traveled down my neck, and my nose brushed his shoulder. “Smell comes next.” He smelled clean and crisp, like a spring breeze as it crossed over a lake. I could see the photograph of the ocean from the Raleigh Region he had given me. It was still in my pocket. I imagined that if I knew what an ocean smelled like, it would be him.

“But most of the time—” he paused, and his lips hovered over mine. “you feel it,” he whispered before he kissed me.

He leaned against me or I leaned against him. I wasn’t sure. I could only feel his lips move across mine, light and careful, sweet and sincere. As his hand curled through my hair, my hand tangled into his shirt. His warm chest radiated through my torso, and any breath I had left escaped me. When he pressed his fingers into my lower back, he suddenly pulled away, laying his forehead against mine.

We both gasped, and his chest moved up and down. I stared at my fingers, white from my grip,
and I loosened my hold. He only dropped his hand from my hair once his lips kissed my forehead.

He stepped away, leaving me cold and breathless, but his green eyes bore into me like he was inches away.