Exist Once More Page 11

  The sound of Yumi stirring froze us both and our gazes caught in the mirror. I shoved the toothbrush in my mouth and Sarah grabbed hers, following suit. According to Oz, his father was due for his morning workout any minute—which meant our window for getting the cuff back without him realizing it was gone started now.

  We needed to find Oz, Sarah was right. To make sure he was okay and to return the cuff.

  Yumi stumbled into the bathroom looking confused, shoving her glasses up on her nose. “You two are up early. You coming to run with me again, Kaia?”

  “I think so, yep. And I’m dragging Peyton, too, so we’ll meet you there.” My voice was forced, too cheerful, and Yumi shot me a strange look before heading into the toilet.

  Sarah and I finished brushing and scooted out of the bathroom, hearing the water in the sink turn on a moment later. We didn’t have much time to finish talking.

  “You think you’re fat or something now?”

  “Not really, but it was as good an excuse as any as to why we’re both up early. Now, let’s go.”

  I grabbed the cuff and Sarah took her smallest comp. Once we were in the hallway we both paused, but she was the one who would know where to try.

  “Well?” I prodded. “If Oz couldn’t go back to his room where would he go?”

  She shrugged. “The common room, I’d guess, but if he got caught out there’s a chance his dad took him back to his own room and let him in. Let’s split up.”

  The way she said it, with immense relief, left no secret about her desire to get the heck away from me. Frustration welled in my gut, but at the moment we had bigger problems than our flailing friendship.

  “Fine. Do you want to go to the common room or Oz’s?”

  “I’ll go to his room,” she replied defensively, already moving that direction.

  “If neither of us finds him, I guess we’ll figure it out by breakfast.”

  She gave me a thumbs-up and hurried off, a quickness to her step that suggested no matter how angry she still was with us, she was worried about Oz. No one knew better than me how impossible it was to switch feelings for people off when it became inconvenient.

  I shoved Sarah out of my mind and moved fast, heading for the common room where Oz and I had met last night. The time on my wrist tat made me nervous—if Truman went to the gym at six and showered before breakfast, we were down to about twenty minutes to get in and out of his room.

  I skidded to a stop, my shoulders slumping with relief. The sight of Oz asleep on one of the couches let me breathe for the first time in thirty minutes—since last night, really. I hurried over to him, and that was when the sight of his face bound my chest up tighter than ever.

  A bruise smudged the underside of one eye, and a ring of similar marks marred his bicep where it peered out from under his short-sleeved, black shirt. His too-long, midnight hair flopped over his other eye.

  He stirred, then shot straight to his feet with a wild look on his face, hands in front of him as though to ward off some kind of attack. They dropped to his sides when he realized it was only me in the room, and he blew out a heavy breath. “Kaia. Stars. What time is it?”

  “Time to go,” I informed him, glad that I had the cuff and not Sarah. “Your dad will be back from his workout in, like, fifteen minutes.”

  “Shit,” he cursed, grabbing the cuff from me and heading for the door.

  He said nothing about me following, but after last night there was no way I was leaving him alone. This time I was going to stay in the hall so I could head Truman off myself. Let him try that aggressive shit with me. I’d grown up with a big brother who’d taught me plenty about defending myself.

  In the end, I didn’t need to worry because Oz was in and out of his father’s suite in under a minute and the two of us were sitting in the cafeteria with Sarah when everyone else arrived ten minutes later. Levi did a double-take at Oz’s appearance, but I gave him a quiet thumbs-up that went unnoticed by the rest of the table. He didn’t mention Oz’s bruises and no one else did, either—we’d all been trained.

  Yumi asked what had happened to me this morning. I told her I fell asleep and she dropped it, which meant that all in all, our first mission on the path to put things right at the Academy, and in Genesis, had been a success.

  I cast a glance toward Oz, who winced as he chewed a protein tab, ignoring the tray of hot food in front of him. My lips pulled into a frown. Had his dad gotten a good lick in on his jaw, too?

  He should go to the infirmary, but I knew from past experiences that he wouldn’t.

  Sarah caught me staring, and my frown had nothing on hers. I looked down at my own food, which held little appeal, though I managed to choke down the banana and bowl of cereal, then gave up, tossing the rest into the recycling containers.

  We were due in Reflection with Minnie right after, and I’d started to wonder—and worry—what she might have to say after she saw our different recordings from the camp in England. Or if, like Oz suggested, it was smart to challenge her the way I had her sister.

  I was so lost in my own head that it wasn’t until Peyton reached out from her seat next to me and wrapped her unusually strong hand around my arm that I noticed the members of the Genesis Council striding into the room.

  “Maybe we should just tell them everything,” Levi said, looking tired after only a few days of being involved in the madness surrounding Sarah, Oz, and me. “I mean, they’re here to help, right?”

  We were in the common room, all of our Reflections and other official duties finished for the day. Yumi had been in our room so we’d come here instead, to discuss what the Genesis Council had announced at breakfast this morning—that they would be interviewing everyone at the Academy over the next several days.

  They claimed to have reason to believe that the breaches in the past, the ones the Elders informed us were showing up in the holofiles, had originated from our Academy.

  Which, of course, we already all but knew. We—the big, collective we of the Historian Academy—were in trouble. And that was exactly why doing as Levi suggested didn’t sit well with me.

  “Tell them what, though?” Oz asked before I could open my mouth. “We don’t know anything, not really. We suspect that at least one major event was altered but we don’t know why, and we don’t have any proof. Not even of what Kaia and I saw last semester.”

  “That’s why we would be asking them for help,” Levi argued, frustration oozing from him and nudging the rest of us. “Because they can get things done that we can’t, not while we’re trying to sneak around and not get caught.”

  He shot a pointed look toward Oz’s face, which looked worse than ever after a day’s worth of bruising.

  “He’s got a point,” Sarah admitted. She was staring down at the table comp in front of her, giving the appearance of being busy but really avoiding all of our gazes. “I mean, how much more can we reasonably expect to find out on our own?”

  “I don’t know, but do you really think they’re going to care about what happened to Analeigh, or to Kaia’s parents? The Council will go after the Elders, and they’ll close ranks, and we might never know the truth. Which means we can’t fix it.” Oz sounded tired, too, though I doubted it was for the same reasons as Levi.

  Sarah raised her eyes and leveled her True with a gaze full of contempt. “Nice of you to be so worried about Kaia’s parents.”

  “Oh, knock it off, Sarah.” It was the most direct he’d ever been with her about his feelings over how she’d been treating him, and it took all of us a little by surprise. “What happened to them was partly my fault, and to Analeigh, too. I should have been asking more questions about the little side projects the Elders were sending me on from the beginning but I wasn’t. I should have warned Kaia sooner.”

  I had no idea that he felt partly responsible, though I agreed that he should. I’d made plenty of mistakes last semester, but he’d actually been working with the Elders. Voluntarily.

  Asking quest
ions was the least of what should have happened.

  “We can’t tell them anything yet,” I decided after several moments of silent disagreement on how to handle things. “They’ll do something drastic, like shut down the Academy or restrict time travel altogether.”

  “Maybe that’s what should happen,” Oz mumbled. “Maybe we’re not ready for the technology. We’re certainly acting like it.”

  I knew he was using a collective we, but that only validated my worry that taking away time travel would be the knee-jerk reaction. And even if some or all of the Elders were involved in a harebrained scheme to somehow change events that took place on Earth Before, that didn’t mean that everything we worked for, everything we stood for, was bad.

  We couldn’t forget that. And the Council wouldn’t care.

  “I believe in this place, in the work that we’ve done and what we can continue to do. We can’t let a few bad decisions take that away from future generations,” I pressed. “We have to at least try to figure this out internally. We owe the Originals like my grandfather at least that much.”

  “I agree with Kaia,” Sarah said a minute later, almost killing me from shock. “I’m not saying we don’t involve the Council at some point, but for now, we keep trying to figure out what exactly we’re up against. Once I get the cuff tech figured out and copied, we can go back and see for ourselves.”

  “In the meantime, Levi, you need to keep digging on this Hiroshima bombing thing, okay? See if there’s a holofile of the event somewhere.” I bit my lower lip, wondering what else we could have been doing that we weren’t.

  “What are you and loverboy going to be doing in the meantime?” Levi asked. “Hiding in more closets together?”

  Oz’s entire face went red, answering my unasked question about how Levi was aware of where we’d passed over an hour together last night. My own face heated in response, which probably only gave Levi more reason to suspect something untoward.

  My desire to change the subject grew so strong that I blurted out the one thing I’d been keeping to myself. “I got a weird message from my parents and I’m going to see if I can get a pass out this weekend and go home. I’ll make up some sad story and even let them send a chaperone, if they want.”

  “What message?” Sarah asked, her eyes narrowed.

  In another lifetime, she would have already known. I wondered if that made her sad, too. I shrugged. “It might be nothing. I’ll let you know after I check it out.”

  “And I’m planning to go back through the solo trips they sent me on last semester to see if anything lines up, or follows a pattern,” Oz said quietly, his face retuned to its normal, ruddy shade of tan. “If that’s okay with you.”

  Levi held up his hands in mock-surrender, obviously pleased with himself for getting the reaction he had. None of the rest of us were happy at all, but at least we had some direction. A plan of sorts, and even if we couldn’t see the finish line from where we stood, I had to believe there was one waiting out there somewhere.

  We were close. I could taste it.

  Chapter Eleven

  “I’m sorry, Miss Vespasian.” Elder Midgley looked down at me from the raised platform of his desk. And he didn’t look the slightest bit sorry. “The terms of your staying at the Academy were clear—no passes for the duration of the repeated year. We will re-evaluate before the start of your final one.”

  “I know, I just thought…” I swallowed, not even having to try to conjure tears. “It would have been nice to go home for a night, that’s all.”

  “Yes, well, continue on the straight and narrow path and you’ll be a Historian soon enough, free to come and go as you please. Now, off with you.”

  The dismissal was clear enough and I left his chambers, my hands curled into frustrated, sweaty fists. Soon enough? A year and a half?

  I counted to ten, then told myself his denial wasn’t a surprise. They weren’t going to let me out of their sight, not even for a night. But part of me had hoped that toeing the line all this time would have bought me some amount of good graces.

  Apparently not.

  Seeing his face had given me something, though—a reminder that when Analeigh had told me about Zeke’s paternal founders, she’d said we should take the time to look into all of the Elders’ pasts. We figured now that they were going back to Earth Before to change things, maybe to alter them enough that we could even go back there one day for real, but we still didn’t know why.

  With everything else going on, not to mention the fact that we all figured the files on the Elders were flagged, the whole angle had gotten put on the back back burner. But if Zeke was going to make my life miserable, all of a sudden I felt a lot more motivated to give as good as I got.

  Sarah wasn’t in the room when I returned but Yumi sat in front of one of her comps frowning at what looked like a Reflection file. She’d gone with Peyton and Jessica on a trip to Syria in the mid-twenty-first century, a trip that, from what I knew, couldn’t have been much easier than the one we’d taken the week before to England.

  “Hey,” I said, slinging my bag onto my bed and kicking loose my flats. “How was your trip?”

  “Ugh. Depressing.” She looked up, her expression drawn. “I’m ready for another happy jaunt. I’m sad I’m not scheduled for the Martin Luther King one for another two weeks. You guys seemed to like it.”

  “I did. There’s even something depressing about the positive things, once you put them in the context of nothing ever being good enough to save the planet, though. Don’t you think?”

  She cocked her head to one side. “I do, but I also know that if we think that way—the way you said in Reflection the other day—then our job in Genesis is meaningless. We’re here to make sure we don’t screw it up again.”

  Her words sank in, and they hurt when they landed in my stomach. “If we’re doomed, like every society before us, then what’s the point of all of our documentation? Of our Hope Chest?”

  The Hope Chest was where Reflections went once there was a unanimous decision made that the event they covered qualified as a root cause of our near-extinction.

  I felt in my bones that Yumi was right—that I might have missed Maude’s point, after all, and maybe Booth’s, too. If we accepted that nothing could be done to save us once we—any of us—stepped onto the wrong path, then we might as well have given up.

  We might have talked longer, and it might have felt really good to do it, but right then the little light started blinking on my own desk for the second time in a week.

  Sarah’s was quiet, and so was Yumi’s, and my heart climbed into my throat at the possibility of a second message from my parents. Worry snaked alongside, given that my mother said they’d had to earn the chance to communicate with me and it didn’t seem feasible that they’d get to do it again so soon.

  It was that thought that left me sitting in front of the blinking green light for a good five minutes before summoning the courage to press it.

  What if it was bad news? What if it wasn’t my parents but some Cryon official calling to tell me they’d died? What if something had happened to Jonah?

  You can play what if until you die, Kaia, but the only way to know for sure is to press the stupid button.

  I did just that with one shaking finger, closing my eyes for a brief second before opening them to face the holofile blinking into existence. After that, there was no room for anything but confusion.

  Two people stood there grinning at me. Beaming, really. Two strangers.

  “Kaia! It’s so good to be able to talk to you. We couldn’t believe we ran into your parents on Cryon, of all places, but it sure was nice to see friendly faces. Even in a sticky spot like this, we can talk about how much fun we had while you kids were growing up. We’re just Tom and Judy Wilcox and the Vespasians again for a few minutes every evening before they round everyone up,” the woman, presumably Judy Wilcox, said in a voice that suggested she meant every word.

  “We didn’t have
anyone to send a message to, ourselves.” The man cleared his throat, looking sad for a moment before confusion wrinkled his brow. “And all of these credits keep piling up. When your parents suggested you might like to hear from us we decided to send you a holo right away. We’re proud of you, girl, and your parents are doing just fine.”

  The holo blinked off a few seconds later and I sat back in my chair, dumbfounded by the seemingly nice, innocuous gesture from a couple who, for some reason, found themselves on Cryon along with my parents. Friends of theirs. People who had known me my whole life.

  Except they weren’t, and they hadn’t. Though memories tried to form, they felt like wispy clouds in my mind dissipating before I could grab onto them. The harder I tried, the surer I was that I’d never seen Tom or Judy Wilcox before in my life.

  “Who was that?” Yumi asked, pausing by my desk on her way to the bathroom. The headphones in her ears weren’t glowing, which meant they weren’t on.

  We could use the same brainstem tech that allowed us to speak in each other’s minds to listen to music the same way, but most of us preferred actually listening. It was one of a handful of holdovers from the way things were on Earth Before.

  “Huh?”

  I had no idea how long I’d been sitting there staring, my brain mulling over all of the years I’d spent at home and the subsequent ones I’d visited from the Academy with Jonah, trying to remember if perhaps these two had simply slipped my mind. If maybe their memories and their fondness for me surpassed my own.

  “Who was that?” She nodded toward the holo messenger. “On your message?”

  “Oh, um, friends of my parents. They just wanted to say hi and they’re proud of me.” I shrugged, but my mind raced. The sight of Yumi sparked an idea, one that I knew immediately had to be right.

  They had appeared out of nowhere with memories of me, of my parents, while we were sure we’d never met them—because we hadn’t. My parents must have realized the same thing and wanted to warn me that something was going on in Genesis. Surely they didn’t get news reports, and from what we’d been told, the details of why the Elders called in the Council hadn’t been shared outside the Academy.