Exist Once More Read online

  When I pulled back, part of me was embarrassed. My face must have been a mess and it felt overly hot besides, but there was no judgment on Oz’s face. In fact, the warm expression in his eyes promised that he more than understood—I thought that maybe he felt the same way.

  The other part of me felt strangely relieved to see all of the shit that had been bottled up so tight all over the front of me. At least this way I could pick through the ashes, choose what to keep, and do my best to toss the rest of it away for good.

  Once we got home.

  Oz reached up, tucking strands of hair behind my ear. His hand lingered on my cheek, thumb rubbing away tears as it swept over my cheekbone. A second chill went through me as the expression in his soft eyes changed from understanding to something else.

  Something I couldn’t name. Or didn’t want to.

  I pulled away, clearing my throat and trying to clear the clouds from my head too quickly. “Sorry.”

  “We’re going to figure this out, Kaia. I don’t know what they’re thinking or whether that machine can truly predict enough to make the kinds of changes they want, but we’re not going to let them erase what we have, or put the people we love in jeopardy. Okay?”

  I nodded, needing to believe him more than I actually believed him. Maybe that was all it took to get started, to put one foot in front of the other until I actually did believe.

  “It’s time to go back.”

  I nodded a second time and followed Oz back out into the cold, Chicago afternoon. The sunshine blinded me as we crossed the quad to the private copse of trees that would cover us as we went home.

  As I asked Booth’s cuff to return us to our original destination it dawned on me that there was no real concern in my gut that the Elders would be waiting, or that Booth had turned us in to the Genesis Council. It could have been because he gave us his cuff and would have been in trouble for that himself.

  But I thought it was because, somewhere inside of me, I trusted him.

  And on a day when nothing else had made me feel good, that sort of did.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis - 51 N.E. (New Era)

  Booth proved my gut instinct right. We found him waiting for us outside the pod where we’d left him over an hour ago, a jumpiness about him that looked wrong on his aged frame.

  He’d been in a hurry, mumbling something about being late for a meeting, and had asked only if we’d understood why we were there as he’d slid his cuff back over his bony wrist, and then disappeared with a tight nod as we told him we had.

  We hoped we had, at any rate.

  Booth was definitely helping us, but we didn’t know why. It could have been because he had never been on board with the Return Project, or it could be that he had been and now regretted his involvement now that things had gone south.

  If he was going to help us right this ship amid crashing waves of destruction, maybe that was all that mattered. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.

  “Let’s get cleaned up and then meet in your room before lights out,” Oz suggested.

  I made a face. “We only have thirty minutes and the comp didn’t detect any foreign bodies. Let’s just tell Sarah what we found and then you can go change and shower if you want. We’re not that dirty.”

  He looked slightly shamed by my assessment, a pink tinge around the bruises on his face. I wondered whether he thought my annoyance was due to the fact that he took so much after his father—but the truth was, they weren’t that much alike.

  Oz had always been fussy and quiet, prone to judging other people and preferring to go his own way, but the better I got to know how things were between his dad and him, the more his behavior seemed designed to keep people at a distance for different reasons.

  That maybe Oz had never been aloof. Maybe he’d never wanted to keep himself a step removed from the rest of us but he figured that was easier than explaining the cuts and bruises.

  My heart throbbed with regret as we strode back toward my room in silence, a couple of hallways apart so no one would think we were together.

  The thought that perhaps even Sarah hadn’t wanted to know the whole truth made me feel even worse. We’d all seen bruises on Oz now and then—we’d essentially lived together for almost eight years now—and really, none of us had wanted to dig. To ask. We wrote him off as strange, and obviously clumsy.

  But Sarah was supposed to be his True. The one person ever born who knew Oz best, who loved him without condition. The mere thought of someone hurting Caesarion had torn me apart from the inside. I would have done anything to stop it. If it had been within my power to save his life, if doing so wouldn’t have literally destroyed the world, there would have been nothing that could have stood in my way.

  Why didn’t Sarah feel that way? Why hadn’t she fought harder to get Oz to talk about what was happening, to keep him from confronting his father in situations where they were alone?

  She looked up as I entered the room, and the irritation on her face quickly changed to confusion. My face was probably some arrangement of incredulous anger—I had no idea why it had never occurred to me to wonder about these things before now. Someone should have. Anyone.

  But before last semester, I’d never spent much time thinking about Oz at all, except for wondering how he was going to make Sarah happy for the rest of her life.

  Shame covered me like the itchy, woolen blankets we’d used to pass the time under the stars during an outing to the Civil War in the States, one of the worst and bloodiest we’d observed. And we’d witnessed a lot of wars. I felt like crying all over again, especially remembering how Oz had been there the last time to hold me.

  How he’d been there for me in Egypt, and back at the Academy afterward, standing up for me when he didn’t have to. I still didn’t understand why he’d done that, but right then, I resolved to be better at being his friend.

  “Well?” Sarah asked, bringing me out of my head.

  “One second. Oz is coming.”

  A short, soft knock on the door punctuated my statement and I swung it open, surprised to not only find Oz, but Levi, on the other side.

  “I sent him a comm,” Oz explained as they stepped over the threshold. “Where’s Yumi?”

  “I told her you and I needed a few minutes to talk before bed and would she mind making herself scarce. She didn’t seem bothered by it, but we probably only have another fifteen minutes or so before she comes back.”

  Yumi did seem like a rule follower. Unlike me. It was almost as if the universe had thought we could replace steady, conscientious Analeigh with someone sort of like her and no one would notice.

  Perhaps the only reason it didn’t work was that Analeigh had not disappeared from Genesis, only from the Academy.

  In that moment, fear grabbed my heart. What would happen if one of my friends disappeared? Would we notice? Or would it be like with Yumi only in reverse—nothing would seem off to any of us? They’d just be gone, like they were never here in the first place?

  I was so lost in my terror over the idea that I didn’t hear Oz start relaying what had happened on our trip. He’d gotten halfway through the story and had tossed it to me, his gray eyes raking my face with concern as I came out of the pit of despair in my own head.

  “Kaia. Are you okay?”

  I swallowed a couple of times and nodded, but it was clear that neither action made him feel any better. “I’m fine. What were you saying?”

  “That you were the one in the room so you’d tell them what you saw. Heard. Whatever.” He frowned harder, still watching me with intensity.

  I cleared my throat, then glanced toward Sarah, who gave me an encouraging nod.

  “I think that the Return Project is an attempt to right the wrongs of the Elders’ families on Earth Before—all of the Elders.”

  “What?” Levi looked confused. “How?”

  “You mean like how they’ve changed something in Truman’s past, and the Ga
tlings,” Sarah guessed, as quick as ever. A shine of pride lit Oz’s eyes.

  I nodded. “Yes, and then today we found out that one of the founders of the Manhattan Project, which helped build the atomic bomb President Truman used, was a Bohr.”

  Everyone fell silent. I picked at my cuticles and gave Sarah and Levi a little time to process. No one broke down the way I had in Chicago, but hell. None of them had been through everything I had, either.

  “So we have more pieces,” Levi said, a wrinkle on his forehead. “Which is good, and if we look into the founders of the other Elder families, we can probably get more. But we need to know how exactly they’re changing things in order to repair Earth Before if we’re going to use our own cuffs to go back and stop it. Or fix it.”

  My brain clicked along the train of thought, but Sarah beat me to a response.

  “We still have to figure out how to make a cuff,” she grumbled. “We need someone in Science and Technology to help us, but I have no idea how we’d convince them.”

  Levi snapped his fingers. “Of course! Yumi’s mom works there.”

  “All well and good, but how are we going to convince her to help? Either of them?” I asked. “We can’t involve anyone else.”

  “Why not?” Sarah asked. “We’re in pretty deep the way it is, and we’re all dedicated to seeing it through. Don’t we kind of, you know, have to do what we have to do?”

  Oz shook his head. “I don’t know. I could see asking Yumi for help, but now that the Council is involved and people outside of the Historians are aware of what’s happening—the basics, at least—I don’t think talking to her mother is a good idea.”

  I glanced down at my wrist. We needed to get the guys out of here before Yumi came back and caught us talking about her, which would be any second. Which I was about to say when Sarah piped up again.

  “What if we don’t have to tell them anything? I mean, we’re all semi-close with Yumi—she and Kaia have been chumming around in the gym lately. Kaia, you could talk to her. Tell her how curious I am about tech and how much I would love to see the new stuff. She knows it’s my thing. Then we could ask her to take me with her to visit her mom on our next night out.” She raised an eyebrow at us, looking unsure of herself.

  It had become something of a default expression for her and I hated that.

  “It could work,” I answered, just as the soft beep and click announced Yumi’s return. She stepped through the door as Oz and Levi shot to their feet.

  “I agree,” Oz said, crossing the room to peck Sarah on the temple. My roommate looked as if she wanted to pull away but thought better of it at the last second.

  “Hey, Yumi,” Levi greeted our roommate, looking nervous and thrilled at the same time.

  “Hi,” she said back, her gaze sweeping the room. Probably wondering why we were all here if Sarah had wanted some time alone with her boyfriend.

  “How was your workout?” he asked.

  Her silky, dark bangs were slightly sweaty and stuck to her forehead. I guessed that, combined with her workout gear, didn’t make Levi crazy for assuming she’d snuck in an extra session when Sarah gave her the boot.

  Her cheeks colored. “It was good. But you guys better get going. You’ve only got five minutes and I’d hate for you to miss your next night out.”

  The way she directed the comment toward Levi alone seemed to suggest she expected the two of them to be together again on that night out. Which probably meant she would be less than excited about taking Sarah with her to the Science and Tech Academy.

  We could possibly send Levi instead, but he didn’t have the skills Sarah did. He wouldn’t have a chance in the universe of coming back with a working cuff, or a plan to make one.

  Oz leapt toward the door, dragging Levi with him. “You’re right, Yumi. We should scram and let you girls get to bed.”

  When Sarah went into the bathroom a few minutes later, I could have taken the opportunity to ask Yumi about taking Sarah out. It would be easy to frame, to earn sympathy talking about how bad things had been between her and Oz, things like that.

  But I was tired. I didn’t want to talk to Yumi or anyone else. The only person in the universe—past or present—whose voice I wanted to hear was Caesarion’s.

  And that was impossible.

  I said goodnight to Yumi and laid down, my back to the room and my eyes locked on the wall. All of a sudden, there was nothing I needed more than to take some action. Do something—anything—to keep myself from going mad.

  If I thought I could get away with it, I would steal Truman’s cuff again and go join my brother, and Analeigh. Forget.

  Of course, that wouldn’t stop the appearances. The disappearances.

  And who’s to say I wouldn’t be next?

  A long week passed until the next night the Elders approved passes out of the Academy. At least they were still being offered weekly instead of quarterly, the way they had been during our first several years. Excepting special circumstances, of course.

  Of which I had none, according to the powers that be.

  It would have killed me to wait that long. The week had nearly done me in, and even though I still wasn’t allowed to do jack crap on my own, we had plans. Real plans for real actions that could put us on the path to real answers.

  Yumi had bought my line about Sarah needing a distraction—likely because it wasn’t much of a line, since it was also the truth—and agreed to wait another week for a second date with Levi. My two roommates would spend the evening with Yumi’s mother, and hopefully, Sarah would come home with a way to make us that cuff.

  She was planning to try to slip free at some point, maybe even print a cuff with one of their impressive 3D printers, but we would have to wait and see.

  It would take at least twenty minutes to input the parameters and let the printer do its work. Cuff or not, I wouldn’t be able to relax until she returned, safe and sound.

  The same went for Levi, who agreed to use his pass to go to my house and check out that stupid dog statue. I’d asked him to look under it, too, and around it and to take as many pictures as he could just in case the clue or whatever my parents wanted me to find wasn’t obvious to someone outside the family.

  It was the best I could do, but it wasn’t nearly good enough. Oz had stayed behind tonight, too, since his father hadn’t stopped acting suspicious of him after finding him in his room. We hadn’t really planned to hang out but I was going crazy in the room. Once I got it into my head to research the rest of the Historian Elders I couldn’t get it out.

  And that was how Oz and I ended up in the Reflection lab together.

  It seemed like we were the only people in the entire Academy, though that wasn’t even close to true. Even so, the hallways were silent, the lab was otherwise empty, and even the dining hall played host to only a handful of people.

  We’d discussed re-activating Sarah’s workaround but with so many people gone, we figured it would raise more red flags to use someone’s identity who wasn’t here than to use our own. They would know Sarah helped us with the tech and the last thing we needed was to answer any questions the Elders had about the status of our friendship.

  Not to mention that a few members of the Genesis Council were still in residence. There were more threats lurking than just our Elders.

  “Okay, so who’s left?”

  “Analeigh told me about Zeke’s family, but I haven’t looked him up myself. You know, because…”

  “You figured pulling up the file on our senior-most Elder might set off some alarms. Yeah, I’m guessing that might be the case.” Oz quirked a half-smile my direction. “We’ve also got Darya Gagarin to check out. Maybe we need to trace all of them back to get a look at the bigger picture.”

  There was another Elder, Rachel Turing, but she was descended from the famous Alan—one of the forefathers of the line of thought that created artificial intelligence. Since there was little chance anyone in Genesis would survive were his train of
influence changed in the slightest, I felt safe assuming the Elders wouldn’t mess with it. I guessed Oz did, too, but he was still forgetting someone.

  “And Booth.”

  Oz gave me a strange look. “No, his is easy. His paternal founder is John Wilkes Booth.”

  “The guy who shot Abraham Lincoln?” I asked like a moron who hadn’t spent eight years studying history.

  “The only one I know of,” Oz joked, deciding not to blast me for being an idiot.

  Odd, but I was grateful for the restraint.

  Booth’s history made perfect sense, and was so obvious I kind of couldn’t believe I’d never put two and two together. Of course, until recently, we hadn’t been trying to connect our instructors, the people who had partially raised us, to some of the most horrible and influential events in human history, so maybe I was being too hard on myself.

  “I wonder if they’ve gone back and tried to save him, yet?” I wondered aloud.

  “Not a lot of people would argue that wouldn’t be the right thing to do, in a different context,” Oz mused, sitting down and logging into the table comp next to mine. His bag slumped on the cold floor in between us. “The man’s death was tragic, and I know we’ve discussed how it shaped the United States as a nation, but it wasn’t a mass event. The ripples could have been fairly small.”

  I tugged Jonah’s brown sweater, the softest, fuzziest piece of happiness I owned, tighter around me. Without bodies in the Academy it seemed colder than ever. “True. From what you showed me with the Projector, the trajectory of changing something like that would be easier to trace than stopping that bombing in Hiroshima. I mean…they saved the lives of thousands of people. How could they possibly have guessed what the consequences would be?”

  Oz shook his head, his gaze lingering on my face for a moment before darting away, back to his screens. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I know the Projector was right about things, but there were times when there were also two directions branched off a single event. One was brighter, more sure, but it was almost as if a decision hadn’t yet been made that, however unlikely, could possibly change the outcome.”