Timestorm (3 page)

When it was Courtney’s turn, she laughed and her face flushed. “I can’t tell you mine. It’s going to sound so frivolous after all these horrible stories.”

Mason rolled his eyes. “No it won’t. Just tell us.”

“All right.” Courtney smiled a little, then glanced sideways at me. “I watched my brother fall out of a tree and break his arm when we were six.”

I started laughing, too, realizing that Courtney, at this point in her life, had had it pretty easy. Dad was grinning too and he lifted his hand to indicate his turn. “That was actually mine, too. Same memory.”

Grayson’s eyebrows lifted and I looked at Dad and then back at Grayson, who had probably done this with him already in the four weeks that Dad was stuck here with him before we arrived. I seriously doubted that my broken arm was at the top of Dad’s horrible-events list. His list was probably worse than anyone else’s here. There was Courtney’s death, Eileen’s, probably several close calls with me that I didn’t even know about.

I spoke quickly, interrupting everyone’s train of thought before they had a chance to figure out that Dad was lying. “I saw my dad smoking a cigarette in 1953.”

Everyone laughed and Mason threw a twig in Dad’s direction. “Don’t you know smoking can kill you, Agent Meyer?”

“A slow death spread over the course of fifty years,” Dad said. “Sounds nice, actually.”

“My turn,” Emily said. “My chicken died.”

Courtney squeezed her around the shoulders. “I lost a hamster when I was your age. Dad tried to switch him for another one but I could tell the difference.”

I scratched the back of my head, diverting my eyes from Courtney’s. Dad coughed loudly as if telling me to come clean. “Actually, he didn’t die. Not right away…”

I felt Courtney’s eyes burning a hole in the side of my face. “Jackson!”

“He seemed really unhappy locked up in that cage. I thought he might want to go outside. He was on the balcony, totally fine. I didn’t know he would walk right off the ledge. I think he had brain damage even before he fell. Not the smartest hamster in the litter.”

Mason snorted back a laugh, but Courtney’s glare stayed on me. “I can’t believe you did that!”

“It was an accident,” Dad said, holding back his own laughter, although when we were eight, I had gotten seriously chewed out by Dad for that event.

“Yeah right,” Courtney said, snapping her head in Dad’s direction. “He accidentally opened the cage, removed Jell-O, walked him to the balcony, put him down, then watched him waddle to his death? Explain how that works, Dad?”

“Your hamster’s name was Jell-O?” Mason asked. “Why?”

Grayson clapped his hands together, interrupting the family feud. “Holly, you’re up next.”

Everyone looked at her and her light blue eyes widened as she sat up straighter. The fear only lasted for a split second before her face became totally unreadable. “It’s too hot to sit by this fire any longer.” She brushed off her jeans and then stood up. “And I don’t agree with Blake’s theory. It doesn’t help to talk about it, and my guess is at least half of you are lying, anyway.”

Mason let out a low whistle as Holly took off toward the lake. “
Somebody
is obviously trying to damage our happy circle of feelings.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Lay off her. She’s just freaked out.” I turned to Grayson. “Who’s doing this? Setting off the memory gas and keeping us here?”

Grayson let out a breath, glancing first at Lonnie then Blake and Sasha, getting nods from each of them. “The four of us are a lot like you, Jackson. And I guess like Courtney and Emily, too. Except your existence is a direct result of our existence, and I know that the logic seems mixed up since we’re from…”

“The future?” I prompted. “My future, anyway.”

“That’s right.”

“Time travel was always going to happen,” Lonnie added. “The four of us evolved naturally. In our present times, no one knew who would possess the ability to time-jump.”

“As opposed to the cloned people who were made for it?” Mason asked.

“Exactly,” Grayson said.

“So, like, a whole ton of people can time-travel in the future?” I asked. That seemed like one nasty mess if it was true.

All four of them shook their heads. It was Blake who explained, “We only know of seven true, naturally evolved time jumpers. I was the second to last to be discovered. Sasha wasn’t even born yet, wouldn’t be for a long time.”

“Eyewall headquarters is in this year,” Sasha said. “It’s quite a ways from here. About a two-day walk.”

“But if you guys are from my future,” I asked, “maybe you can tell me what time period Thomas showed me in a time jump?”

I took a minute to explain to them about the perfect future I saw with Thomas. The green landscape everywhere, right in the middle of New York City. The eerie quiet, the perfect temperature, the children with their superhuman powers, climbing and jumping.

All four of the future time travelers were quiet for a while, exchanging weary glances. Grayson took a deep breath before speaking. “You’ve studied history, right? World War II?”

“Yeah,” Courtney, Mason, and I all said together.

“A utopian society that evolves by creating a master race,” Grayson said. “That’s what you saw. Not the aftermath of World War II but of a similar war, a war that caused the destruction here, and in the outcome Thomas showed you, the new Hitler won.”

I knew there was something weird about that place. I didn’t feel the warmth of the world when I was there, nothing good, but it was so hard to judge because it had
looked
amazing. It seemed perfect.

“And they keep us here,” Grayson said. “Because we’re rare and Dr. Ludwig can’t bear the thought of getting rid of us. He doesn’t even want us to suffer too much. That might make it more difficult to use us for whatever experiment he’s working on. Notice we’re given plenty of supplies—food, sources of water, medical equipment.”

“It’s not because they care so much,” Lonnie said, bitterness spilling from each word. She glanced behind her at the bright sun, moving lower in the horizon. “We should get our gear. The sun’s about to set.”

Courtney touched my arm. “It gets really cold at night for some reason. The temperature drops a lot—like going from summer to winter.”

Grayson stood up, prepared to follow Lonnie, but then turned to face me, Dad, Courtney, Mason, and Emily. “I think the best thing you can do right now, all of you, is accept this place as home. Don’t let the negative thoughts creep in and do something stupid. There’s no fight to be won, nothing to make this life seem temporary. Make the choice to accept it and to be happy with what you do have.”

Hadn’t I decided that already? But what about Dad and Courtney …
and Holly
? What did they want?

“Jackson,” Grayson added, “if you have more questions, Blake can tell you his story. He’s seen a bit more of Eyewall than I have.”

Everyone began shuffling around, heading for supplies in different cabins. I moved over and sat beside Blake, who hadn’t made a move to leave. I glanced up at the sky, pink and purple from the setting sun. “So, they’re up there, watching us in this bubble, like gods.”

“They’re not gods,” Blake said firmly. “They’re human. Unfortunately, it seems they’ve forgotten that fact.”

“Right,” I said, not sure exactly what he meant by that.

Blake’s gaze darted around, and then he lowered his voice. “Can I show you something?”

I followed him into the small building and then into a tiny room with several computer screens lining one of the walls. All of the screens were blue and blank. Blake sat on the tile floor and removed an army knife from his pocket. He yanked off his right tennis shoe and his white sock. “I’ve been waiting almost two years to do this.”

And before I could stop him, he sliced a hole in the bottom of his foot.

CHAPTER FOUR

DAY 10. EVENING

Blood oozed from his foot onto the floor. “Dude! What are you doing?”

“Just wait,” he said, leaning forward, pressing his fingers inside the cut. Finally, he held up something silver and bloody between his fingers. “In the year I’m from, we all have memory files. Usually behind the ear.” He tilted his head and I had a good view of the one-centimeter scar behind his ear.

“Here.” I spotted a sink in the corner of the room and ran over to it, grabbing handfuls of paper towels. “Use these. That’s gonna bleed for a while.”

“When everything started going bad,” Blake said, pressing paper towels to his foot with one hand and wiping the floor clean with the other, “Grayson took out my original memory file, put a fake one behind my ear, and then we hid the real one. I needed to remember what happened. To have those thoughts with me at all times just in case. With the others, I’ve told them my story. But I want to show you these instead so that our world and where we came from makes more sense to you.”

“I doubt anything’s going to make much sense to me.”

“Well, it’s possible I have other motivations outside of Grayson’s goals for showing these to you,” Blake said, wiping the tiny metal chip clean. “But we’ll get to that part later.”

He stood up and walked carefully on the ball of his right foot. I waited quietly while he fiddled with a computer and slid the chip into a tiny slot.

“Just so you know, in case you need it for anything, this room is virtually soundproof.” One of the blue screens turned black. “Some of these files I recorded onto the chip myself as a journal entry and some were plucked from various regions of my brain. I couldn’t save everything. I just kept the important ones.”

A robot voice filled the tiny space, “December 8, 2873. Audio recording by host.”

Then Blake’s voice came through, though it sounded a little different, younger maybe. And the words moved across the black screen accompanying the audio.

I never imagined my parents would be so eager to hand over their fifteen-year-old son to the U.S. government. But boy were they ever. It happened on my way to school two days ago. My outer gear is fourth-hand, passed down from my three older brothers, and has lost its wind-resistant ability. The air was bitterly cold, my eyes half-closed, and I could hardly put one foot in front of the other, when suddenly, sunlight hot enough to be July beat down on me. It took me several seconds to realize what had happened. What I’d just done. Unlike my parents, elation wasn’t my first reaction. It was utter panic. I didn’t know how I’d done it and how to get back.

My legs had never moved as fast as they did in that first time jump. I tore my outerwear open as I ran home, bursting through the front door, yelling for them to tell me what day it was. My mother took one look at my clothing and dropped the glass dish she had been holding. My father came running into the kitchen after hearing the glass shatter.

Turns out I had jumped almost exactly three months into the past. I couldn’t even spit out the words to reflect my fear of getting stuck there or just of the unknown because Mom had already picked up her telecom, making the one call every parent dreams of making. And even in my panic, I did feel a small surge of pride as she said the words to the dispatcher on the other line, “My son has just come from the future.” The way she said
my son
meant something entirely different now. Before it just meant one of four nearly identical boys, almost exactly three years spacing each of us apart. Now these words seemed to separate me from the three shadows I had chased my entire life.

My moment of pride only lasted a few minutes, until my father returned with a slightly tanner, sweaty, and confused version of me. This was how they proved it. The only way to know for sure. Not that time travelers are discovered all the time. I’m only the seventh in the history of mankind. No wonder my parents are so proud.

As I stood looking at this barely younger version of myself, I couldn’t grasp much else. The government workers showed up almost instantly. Their navy uniforms crisp and stiff in an inhuman way. They recorded the details I gave them—when did you leave? Approximately what time? What was your location?

Then they gave my family and the other me memory injections so we would spend the next three months knowing nothing of what would happen on December 6, 2873. Once the shock had worn off and reality set in, I knew how to get back.

The cold wind returned, freezing the air into my lungs, but still, as I turned to walk back home, I slowed my pace, knowing they were there. Waiting to take me away. Waiting to make me the envy of every boy and girl in my class. Possibly the envy of everyone in the country. Everyone except the five others like me.

I only had ten minutes to pack my bags and say good-bye before being teleported to an apartment in the nation’s capital, New York City. The apartment is twice the size of my family’s home, and instead of sharing space with five others, I’m only sharing with one. His name is Thomas and he looks about ten years older than me. I only met him briefly this morning. He came in with a navy-suit worker and told me to try not to feel overwhelmed and that we’d talk later. That was hours ago and now I really just want to call home, but I can’t find a telecom anywhere.

I guess receiving this honor, having this rare talent, requires a great deal of patience. A virtue I have yet to acquire.

*   *   *

Blake hit a button on the control panel and the words froze on the screen.

“So Thomas is one of the originals! That explains why he’s able to do the complete jumps so easily. He can go back and forth in the same timeline like regular time travel. Is that the only kind of jump you guys do?” I drilled Blake. “Or can you bounce off World B, too? I know I’m the one who opened that portal, and I also know that cloned time travelers have jumped over there.”

“Until your dad arrived and told us about you, I hadn’t really heard of any other way of time travel besides the complete jump, as you call it. And yes, Thomas is one of the original time travelers and we are the strongest. Last I heard, the clones hadn’t been able to come even close to matching us.”

“Except Emily.”

He nodded solemnly. “She’s a special project. Thomas’s own brainchild.”