Exist Once More Read online

  But my parents were smart, they were resourceful, and they probably didn’t have a whole lot to think about during the long days and nights in exile. So it was possible they had figured it out.

  Or maybe my brother wasn’t the only one who already knew about the Return Project.

  Yumi moved on to the restroom and I took off for the comp lab, figuring it would be better to use those computers than my own. As far as I knew, the Wilcoxes were new to Genesis. There should be no reason for them to be flagged in the systems, so that meant I should be able to search them without worry.

  I almost went back to wait for Sarah, to ask her to switch my wrist tat again so that the comps registered someone else, but then I decided there was no need. They were random people, and I had the excuse of them apparently being family friends if anyone came asking.

  Not to mention that I didn’t think the Elders had a clue who might have appeared across the System because of the changes they’d made—changes they surely believed were small and innocuous, having only specific and planned effects. They couldn’t possibly have flagged people who popped up because they had no way of knowing who they were.

  At least, that was what I was banking on as I dropped my bag and slid onto a stool in the empty lab. Well, almost empty—a boy three years behind me was hunched over a private comp in a reserved carrel. He reminded me of a younger Oz, and I found a smile touching my lips for some absurd reason. Nostalgia for simpler times, perhaps.

  The people in the message, the Wilcoxes, weren’t that hard to find. Their family was small, just the two of them left and one child, a boy who had entered the Science and Technology Academy the same year I’d started here. I had the same vague, wispy memories of him—a name, Trevor, and an image of gangly limbs and light blond hair—but nothing much else.

  I traced their family, using quick finger swipes to scroll through hundreds of years of history. It surprised me how far back their paternal founder was when I found him, a man named Rudolph Wilcox who lived in the part of Russia that would become the Ukraine a hundred years after his death.

  There appeared to be nothing special about him in the file. That fact only made me more suspicious, given what was supposed to be in Yumi’s history that no longer existed—at least her family had been somehow saved from a catastrophic event. That made sense.

  I shut off the comp and sat in the quiet, letting my mind wander, even if its direction scared me.

  Certain events in the past of Earth Before had changed. Big things. And maybe I should have been happy that no one ever dropped an atomic bomb that surely erased hundreds of thousands of people, but I couldn’t be.

  Because what had it cost us in the future?

  Had the Wilcoxes’ paternal founder been meant to perish in some war, or by someone’s hand? I had no idea how I could find out what should have happened, but then I recalled how Levi finally found the information about Yumi’s family—in a paternal founder file.

  All of the original families had separate files on who founded them and why they were chosen to make the trip to Genesis a generation ago. The holofile I’d read was on the current Wilcoxes, not the one who had been approved as a refugee and settler.

  I was almost out of time, but there might be enough to transfer files. I spun fast, pulling up original founder files and going straight to Rudolph Wilcox. The whole thing downloaded to my personal comp within thirty seconds, and without worrying too much about it, I did the same with the Truman family paternal founder.

  There seemed to be about a million excuses I could give for wanting to know more about the Truman line, not the least of which was that it included an American President. The man had been an influential world leader, after all, even if we’d never been to study him directly.

  Had we? I frowned, thinking that if, in another reality, he had dropped that bomb we’d probably been to see it. Reflected on it, even.

  I managed to stop myself from looking for those. If that was an event they’d gone back specifically to change, they’d surely either manually removed Reflections or flagged research paths to get to it. Or both.

  If they questioned me about my storing files on the Trumans, at least I had an excuse. And if they didn’t buy the one about being curious, I could always blame my supposed crush on Oz.

  That, they would certainly buy, especially after his True Companion card and all of the tension between Sarah and me ever since.

  With both files tucked away on my personal comp and only a little while to scoot to lunch on time, I hopped up, grabbed my bag, and slid into the hallway. The boy hadn’t moved. My feet had a little more spring in them now, and some hope that we were on some kind of track blossomed in my chest. Maybe Oz had even managed to find something as he went back through the trips he made last semester, like the one I followed him to in England.

  That one was self-explanatory—he’d changed the mind of a man who had been on the cusp of advancing weaponry by introducing him to a Muslim woman instead of a stringent, Christian wife. The memory tugged my lips down into a frown as I stepped through the doors to the cafeteria—weapons, again. Mass death. It all had to be connected, what they were doing in the past, but how?

  Levi waved me over to a smaller table than we usually chose, but Jessica and Peyton were nowhere to be seen. Yumi wasn’t there, either, which left me thinking the three of them must have met to discuss their recent trip. Wherever they were, this gave the four of us some precious time, mostly alone, to talk.

  The rest of the kids were loud, clearly ready for their hour of free time. They filled the space with chatter and laughter, the sound of trays against tables and chairs over polished floors. The noise did two things: gave us the slightest bit of privacy in a place where no one would think us suspicious for huddling together, and filled me with a sense of poignant loss.

  It wasn’t so long ago that we were the same as these other kids. We’d been carefree and full of excitement over our careers, curiosity over our Observations, nerves over Reflections and pushing each other with healthy competition.

  Now, the weight of several worlds dragged at my limbs. It felt heavy and uncomfortable and, worse than that, impossible to shove away without turning my back on people who needed me. People I loved.

  I hadn’t asked for it. Didn’t want it. Wasn’t sure I was the person to handle it, and the consequences of failing were too much to even consider.

  After Oz and Sarah showed up and I’d grabbed a salad and a banana from the counters, the four of us eyed each other with barely hidden expectation.

  Typically, Levi was the one to break the silence.“Well? Oz? You find anything in your trips?”

  Oz frowned and shook his head. “No. Maybe. There must be a connection, but right now, I can’t see it. I’m thinking the more pieces we find, the easier it will be.”

  “Okay, well, I downloaded the file on Truman and Sarah sent it to your comps.” Levi stuffed a bite of eggplant into his mouth.

  Darn. I should have just waited instead of taking the chance, but it had been too easy to do both. It would still probably be okay. I thought.

  “Read over the historical accounts of what happened—there are a bunch of newspaper articles included, too. That way, when we can…” he glanced around the room and lowered his voice. “When we can find a way to see for ourselves, we’ll have something to compare it to.”

  “I had another message from Cryon,” I piped up after Levi had finished. “It wasn’t from my parents. It was from this couple who said they’d known me my whole life and wanted to say hello. Or, maybe my parents wanted them to say hello.”

  “That’s nice…” Levi ventured.

  Neither Oz nor Sarah said anything. They knew me too well to not realize more was coming.

  “Except I don’t remember them. Not really.” I blew out a deep breath and couldn’t stop myself from checking the room the same way Levi had. If the cameras were on, we were probably giving away our nervousness.

  Then again, with the
Genesis Council in house and all of us on tap to speak with them, maybe being nervous wasn’t such a weird thing.

  “So I went and looked them up, and pulled the file on their paternal founder. I haven’t had time to read it, though.”

  “I guess we’ve all got some reading to do tonight,” Levi groaned. “After we get through another Reflection. At least it’s the last group one.”

  Sarah, Oz and I exchanged glances. We still hadn’t told Levi our suspicions about Yumi but we wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret much longer. Not if we had to explain to him exactly why the Wilcoxes might be important.

  We gathered up the remnants of our lunch and tossed them into the recycling. My feet dragged, but at least Booth would be leading today’s Reflection. It would be a chance to switch up my narrative, to maybe apply the King quote in light of my brief chat with Yumi today. If Booth was on our side, it was time for us to figure out for sure.

  We’d gone through Oz and Sarah’s Reflections, Booth pushing them harder and harder on coming up with something new to add, some different approach than the classes before ours. It was difficult and got more so every year, but they both managed to get grudging grunts of approval from the old man.

  Yumi had just scooted in so he’d given her a break, allowing her to turn in a written Reflection in the morning.

  Which only left me.

  Despite my desire to get his reaction to what Yumi and I saw, nerves tumbled in my stomach. It was dread at having to watch it again, nothing more, though this wasn’t the first time we’d had to watch horror unfold over and over and over again. Some of the Elders claimed you became numb to it the more you watched it—like it became a movie, something unreal you could detach from—but that had never become true for me no matter how many years I’d apprenticed.

  Just last year, I’d wanted to be sick after watching girls burn to death, jump to death, from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Every time, it got worse, not easier.

  Silence permeated the room, at least from the living humans, as the recording from my glasses played. We all watched the kids chatting on the porch. Through the lens of what we knew came later, the conversation that had seemed melancholy turned ominous. Then Yumi and I excused ourselves and wandered back toward the meeting point, only to come across the executions up against the fence.

  Instead of watching that, I studied Booth. His reaction was small, a tiny widening of his eyes and a subsequent extra set of lines around his weathered lips before he set both to right again. The recording ended and he pinned me with his yellowed gaze.

  “Very interesting, Miss Vespasian, but I’m guessing the Gatling sisters already communicated that to you.”

  I nodded. “She said you’d never seen it before. Maude did, that day.”

  “That’s true. But I’m more interested in what you make of it than what happened.” The glint in his eyes made me wonder whether he’d talked to the Gatling sister and knew what I’d told them.

  Whether it made him proud that I was trying to figure out what he’d meant in Alabama.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if no one had ever seen it before because it had never happened before. Another change, another anomaly.

  “I think…I don’t know.” And all of a sudden, I didn’t. What did it all mean, the things we saw? How did they all tie together? Was there really any way to save Genesis from the fate of Earth Before when it was populated by the same, selfish, myopic species?

  Was Yumi right, that we might as well throw in the towel if we believed that?

  “Well, that’s a new one. I doubt it will make it into the Hope Chest, but it’s honest.” Booth’s smooth, honeyed voice was kind, amused even.

  I breathed out a half-laugh, half-sigh, stopping myself from making the comment that it didn’t seem likely that I’d ever get a Reflection into the locked file that was reserved for concrete, agreed-upon philosophies that had the potential to one day save us.

  “I think that maybe there’s no way to stop the cycle of hate and violence. That it’s what people have in their hearts, like it’s part of what makes us up. We can fight it, and we all know there have been some periods of peace that lasted longer than others, but overall? What if the universe isn’t an arc, but a circle?”

  Booth leaned back in his chair, folding his arms over his frail chest and looking older than his seventy-some years. Oz watched me with gray eyes in that careful way of his, like he was trying as hard as he could to keep all of his real thoughts clear of his gaze. Sarah bit down on her lower lip, which had started to tremble, while Levi and Yumi fidgeted in their seats.

  It seemed like forever before our overseer responded. “These are not happy thoughts, Miss Vespasian. Which is not to say that they may not be true. But let me ask you this—if they are true, if there is no way to stop the destruction on the other side of the circle from spinning back around to us…does that mean those of us bright enough to recognize the arc should do nothing to slow it? To fight it? To try to change it?”

  No one moved. I understood what he was saying, I thought—the same thing Yumi had been trying to say earlier today. We’d been taught from a young age that, as chosen Historians, we bore responsibilities. Viewing the past, interpreting the things that happened there, it could be a lot. Too much for some people, but that was the oath we took when we arrived here at ten years old—to be the ones who didn’t look away from the bad things, and who celebrated the good.

  “I guess there have always been people who saw the long arc of justice but chose to believe it would always bend in the right direction eventually.” My own circle metaphor was making my head hurt. If the moral arc of the universe had no end or no beginning—because an arc was simply part of a circle—then it was only a matter of how long until justice came around. Perhaps we’d been on the steady part of the arc and were now bending away.

  Which meant that one day, justice would come back to stay for a while. So, maybe our job was simply to make sure there was still a universe for it to settle into when it did.

  The glint of approval in Booth’s eyes, the small nod as he studied my face, made me think that I’d gotten something right. It suggested I could trust him—that we all could—and the truth of that feeling clicked into place in the back of my mind.

  Trusting Booth was a relief, but the rest?

  It only reinforced the fact that, if we didn’t stop the Elders from going back to change things, the circle would be disrupted. Or even broken.

  If we let that happen, there might not be anyone left to receive the universe’s justice when it bent back our direction.

  Chapter Twelve

  It seemed like forever until we were free of obligations and back in our room. We were all stealing as much time as possible but we’d also agreed that keeping a low profile, looking “normal” if the Elders were watching—and they were—was as important.

  So we all went to dinner. We studied in the lab and in the common rooms, and peeled off to go back to our rooms one at a time. Sarah and Oz went out, since they had passes. Levi had already read the file, so he left the Academy too, for dinner with his parents. I couldn’t wait to stop working on my depressing Reflection on the Muslim prison camp, even though I did think that it was turning out pretty well.

  Back in our room, I whipped out my personal comp and tried to decide which holofile to watch first, the one about Rudolph Wilcox or the files on the Trumans. Yumi was home, too, immersed in her own classwork as her head bobbed to whatever music came through her headphones. She gave me a wave as I settled in, which I returned, and even though it wasn’t the same as having Analeigh there, it wasn’t terrible, either.

  I pulled up what I’d downloaded from the database on Rudolph Wilcox. My heart fluttered as the images flickered to life; not because of anything I’d seen, but because of what I might.

  It began with a simple man on a simple farm, tilling land with nineteenth century equipment. He worked on as the sun glowed on the horizon, nearly set for the day
. Despite what looked like a chill in the air, sweat poured from his tanned brow, wetting his dark hair. His hands shook on the handle of a pitchfork.

  This went on for some time, showing me day after day of similar, backbreaking chores. Rudolph Wilcox had obviously been a dedicated and hard worker. What had he done, then, that led to his family being on the refugee ship to Genesis?

  As if the comp had guessed my thoughts, other scenes began to pepper throughout the ones of him working on his farm. Rudolph taking food to his neighbors, to camps of poor people huddled around train tracks, even though he clearly struggled to make ends meet for himself. Rudolph taking in children while their fathers went to war and their mothers went hungry. He was a good man, clearly. A humanitarian.

  The entire holofile was packed with the same sorts of good deeds over and over. There were so many that they lulled me into a false sense of security, which meant the final scene startled me. Badly.

  I watched as a man arrived at the farm, anger twisting his handsome features into something devilish. I didn’t think that I’d seen him in any of the previous moments but I could have been wrong.

  He walked into the fields where Rudolph was working, a couple of small children pretending to help at his feet. The stranger’s hair was curly and long, pulled back at the nape of his neck, and in his big, gnarled hand he gripped a shining black gun.

  It all happened in the blink of an eye—so fast that I had to stop and replay the incident in slow motion, even if watching it again was the last thing I wanted to do.

  My training kicked in and I stomached it, watching Rudolph’s face this time in an attempt to catch every last nuance.

  He knew the man. I felt sure of that, and also sure that he wasn’t surprised to see him there holding a weapon. A sort of resignation came over him as he straightened up, squared his shoulders, and faced his doom.