Exist Once More Read online

  That sounded right but it wasn’t. Had I told her that?

  I shook my head, wondering if the assignment had been changed and I didn’t remember. “No, Truman’s assassination.”

  Her face screwed up in confusion similar to what I felt. “Oh, right. Too bad Booth isn’t taking you guys back before to get the bigger picture. That would be convenient.”

  I laughed, trying to dispel the unease. “A little too much, I think.”

  We parted ways as I left for class and Sarah settled in at her desk to finish working on her preparations for their trip tomorrow. All the way down the hall and through the Research session on Truman’s killing, that strange feeling of loss that I’d picked up in Hiroshima refused to leave. I wondered if it had anything to do with my moment of dizziness in the shower, whether whatever had been altered had to do with our trip, but with the information I had there was no way to figure out what.

  I went along with it, hoping that my subconscious would pull apart the wrong information and present it to me, the way it had when we’d figured out Yumi didn’t belong. The way my parents had when they’d had their “friends” send me that holo-message.

  We would realize what we forgot. It took patience, that was all.

  In the meantime, maybe there was a way to track down those secret coordinates.

  I was the first one in the comp room, beating even Levi. The space was as chilly as ever but my brother’s sweater cut both the cold and the insistent alarm bells ringing in my head, and the seat under my rear felt anchored and real.

  Everything was fine. We were going to figure this out, all of it. We would change things back to the way they belonged.

  Weird, to be set on figuring out a way to kill the hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima who had received an unscheduled reprieve. It felt wrong even though I knew it was right, and what’s more…I felt as though I’d heard the same words before, but from someone else’s mouth.

  But whose?

  Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America, Earth Before - October 9th, 1945 C.E. (Common Era)

  The group set to observe the assassination of President Harry Truman consisted of Levi, Jessica Beaton, and me. It was a small group but so was our class—the ones behind us at the Academy were much larger. Sarah and Yumi had gone on their assignment already, which meant they were stuck in Reflection today.

  My chest tightened at the knowledge that I was about to spend my morning watching a man die. Maybe even a tough Reflection would have been a better place to be than milling around the front of the White House with a bunch of reporters and onlookers waiting for an update on the status of the war in the South Pacific.

  And for a shot to ring out that would change the world.

  The crowd around us was agitated, their voices spiked with irritation and grief that swirled into a suffocating cloud of anger. The war had gone on longer than they’d expected, with too many lives lost, with more to come during the invasion of Japan.

  Since the news of the existence of both the Manhattan Project and a working, tested atomic bomb had been leaked by an angry—unnamed—member of Truman’s staff after losing the argument against using it, the press had gone wild.

  The speculations over how many American lives Truman’s cowardice—in the opinion of many—would waste unnecessarily splashed across newspapers and flipped off the tongues of many Americans. For those who had family members on their way to fight in Japan, or already entrenched across the Pacific, the news had been a slap in the face.

  It was the reason President Truman was about to be shot during his address.

  I held my breath as his staffers, then the Secret Service, stepped out onto the stage set up out in front of the White House. Microphones sat on the edge of the stage, ready to carry his words to the crowd—words that would one day be read but never uttered. Not all of them.

  The weather was cold, more wintery than the balmy autumn day I’d experienced in Hiroshima just three days ago. We’d all planned for it, donned coats and hats and scarves over our professional attire, but the bitter wind wound its way through every available gap. Nothing could stop the shivers littering my skin.

  We’d borne witness to many deaths over the course of our training. Some were gory and gruesome, others so fast it seemed hard to believe a live person had been there a moment before the dead one, or fathom all of the potential and possibility that had evaporated along with what some people believed to be a soul.

  This one…I didn’t know why it bothered me so much. Truman wasn’t a man who was particularly easy to like, or one who had garnered a lot of sympathy during our preparations. He’d been faced with one of the toughest decisions in history and, until the Elders had messed with it, had made the wrong one. In my opinion.

  Many didn’t share it. Like the people here today. As with every war in human history, people valued the lives of their own people above those on the opposing side. The lives of their soldiers were worth more, even though every one was only following orders.

  It was necessary, I supposed, to believe your cause was the right one.

  But as a third party observer, the only universal truth was that it was always civilians that paid. It was the reason I thought Truman had made a mistake.

  Sure, he had ended the war far sooner than it would have come to a close otherwise, which meant he had saved the lives of innumerable soldiers. But those men had signed up to fight, had put pen to paper knowing what it might cost them.

  The people I watched going about their business in Hiroshima, and their kids and their kids, hadn’t agreed to anything. They were civilians, but Truman traded their lives for his soldiers’ without much consideration.

  At least, he had in the original version of history. Something had changed. Something that led to this moment, and undoubtedly a million other small ones that we might never be able to track down.

  The President of the United States walked out onto the podium. The crowd quieted, though the feeling of a simmering pot about to boil over only intensified. Like a hundred human volcanos just waiting for the right moment to blow their tops.

  My gaze met Levi’s, which was lit with anticipation and the slightest quiver of fear. Jessica avoided meeting my eye, which was pretty normal, since she wasn’t my biggest fan. And vice versa. She was an ice queen anyway; nothing seemed to bother her, not when we were witnesses in the field or watching horrors over and over again while we tore each other’s Reflections apart in class.

  If I had to guess, I figured she was probably on the side of the angry Americans. She was a swift justice kind of girl. Peace no matter the cost. Jessica didn’t acknowledge complications, which made her an interesting Historian. But the Elders seemed to like her. Probably because she agreed with them more often than not.

  Booth watched over all of us with careful eyes. They skimmed Jessica, whose steady gaze was trained on the President as he cleared his throat and began to speak—as we’d been instructed to record the moments leading up to his death as well as the aftermath. They lingered for a moment on Levi, troubled, but he was also following directions. Now.

  When he looked at me I stared back, wishing there were some way to read his mind. Worried that in his dark, yellowed gaze was a reflection of the confusion I felt but also a flicker of recognition. And fear.

  The last poured icy water down the back of my neck. No matter how tight I pulled my coat, or how deep into my pockets I shoved my hands, my body felt frozen deep inside my veins. What was he thinking? Did he feel the wrongness of this moment, too?

  Truman was talking about the decision, about how hard it had been but that he believed in our men in uniform to get the job done, when a trembling, rail-thin woman emerged from the crowd. Her arms were at her sides, her body covered only in a thin flannel shirt and jeans, no coat, while tears streamed down her cheeks. Frizzy hair spilled out of a loose bun wound at the nape of her neck.

  No one paid much attention to her, not at first.

  Not u
ntil she reached into her waistband and pulled out a gun.

  Then, a dozen things happened at once. People screamed. Some of them dove to the ground while others took off running. The Secret Service sprung—some of them off the stage at the woman, others toward the President. The gun went off, sparks popping into the gray morning air. It took a few seconds for the sound to reach me. We were the only ones who weren’t moving, which was maybe the wrong thing to do but there was nowhere to go without losing our line of sight.

  It was over almost before any of it registered. The bullet found its mark, grazing the arm of a Secret Service agent before slamming home in President Truman’s chest. He collapsed. Screaming continued, though most of the reporters had come to their senses and realized they were running away from the biggest news they would ever witness. Cameras flashed. Pens scribbled across notepads.

  We stayed and watched until an ambulance arrived, and then another. Until the police shoved us all backward behind crime scene tape. Like I’d done for the past several months, I did my duty. Kept on task, recorded the assignment. Took note of how fast Truman died—as soon as the bullet hit him, from what I could tell.

  Booth gave a quick jerk of his head then a soft, time to go, which filtered into all of our minds. No one noticed as we backed away from the scene. They were all too intent on the history happening in front of them. They had no way of knowing, of course, that four people from the future were here recording it because what they witnessed is considered one of the more influential events in humanity’s past.

  No way of knowing that it shouldn’t be Truman who was dead, but thousands of Japanese.

  We moved together in silence, toward the alley where we’d landed. It had been empty before, and was now, as people were drawn toward the commotion mere blocks away. Booth wasted no time taking us home. Once we got there, he asked us no questions, which was quite the opposite of his usual modus operandi.

  It made me believe I was right. That he also felt as if we’d witnessed something we shouldn’t have, and like me, spent the time trapped in the airlock silently wrestling with the question of why.

  Chapter Nineteen

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

  We came back to an uproar at the Academy.

  Yumi and Sarah weren’t in our room, and the moment my wrist tat caught up with Sanchi time and place, a comm came through requesting everyone’s presence in the auditorium in…two minutes.

  The abandoned feeling in the rooms and hallways promised everyone else was already at the meeting. I flew through the nervous anticipation in their wake, a stink in the air that tasted anxious and the slightest bit sweaty.

  The cafeteria buzzed with electricity. I slid into the seat next to Sarah, scanning the room—by the looks of the place, I was one of the last people to arrive. It was packed and, for once, too warm.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered to my roommate, eyes on the dais up front.

  “Don’t know yet. Genesis Council found something. Or maybe the Elders did, I don’t know. There was a major panic about thirty minutes ago—I saw Maude Gatling actually running down the hall.” Her tone was incredulous. As if, if she hadn’t seen it with her own two eyes, she would have called herself a liar.

  Stars, I hadn’t seen it and I was having trouble believing it. I didn’t know either Gatling sister was capable of moving at a quicker clip than a shuffle.

  “But no one knows what happened?”

  She shook her head, and we both fell silent as the same Council member who interrogated me the other day stood in front of us. Olivia Price.

  And she looked mad enough to spit space rocks.

  This time, none of our Elders joined her on stage. The people gathered behind her were the same faces from Zeke’s office the other day when I’d gone for my interview—or threat session, as it happened. They were the other members of the Genesis Council, obviously, but I couldn’t remember a single one of their names.

  “Good afternoon,” Elder Price greeted us, each word clipped and hurled our direction. It took all of my self-control not to flinch. “I know this is going to come as a shock to many of you, so I’m just going to come out and say it. One of your Elders has disappeared. From Genesis, not from the Academy.”

  A murmur swept through the room, intensifying at the clarification, which had to be nearly shouted to be heard. The sound of our collective shock grew in both volume and horror as it moved, and hit me like a tidal wave. Sarah’s hand covered mine but neither of us spoke, and the faces of the rest of the kids in my year—in the whole Academy—said it all. We were scared. More than scared. This was the worst thing that could have happened for us, and even though we’d known because of Yumi that things were precarious, this slammed the reality home.

  But who was gone? And if they knew who, how?

  “I’m sure you all have a lot of questions,” Elder Price shouted over us, her face carved out of stone. “I’m going to do my best to answer the ones I can. First of all, we don’t know which of your Elders is missing, only that you’re one short of the required twelve and no one seems to know why, or who it should be. Since they’ve been erased through some glitch—or intentional alteration—to the past, the chances are we may never know their name or remember their face until we run across an unchanged holofile.”

  My heart dropped. Disappeared. One of our own Elders, someone who likely took us on outings, grilled us during Reflections. Raised us. And no one sitting here knew who he or she was. They had been erased by a change to the past. Just like that.

  A change that, with everything Sarah, Levi, and I had learned since last semester, we had to assume one of the other Elders—who were still absent from the room—had made on purpose. Had they known it would cause the disappearance of one of their own? Or had they simply been willing to take the risk?

  None of us could believe they would go about their business totally blind, but since there was no way to guess all of the potential outcomes from a change to the past, how could they have taken such a chance?

  A collective gasp in the room brought me out of my spinning thoughts and dumped me into reality.

  “What did she just say?” I hissed at Sarah, whose eyes were as round as the moons that hung in the sky near Sanchi. “I missed it.”

  The expression on her face said she wasn’t surprised, but she answered me anyway. “They’re closing the time travel portals until they’ve figured out what’s going on, and who’s misusing our privileges.”

  Sweat broke out on my palms. If they did that, we would have no way to try to figure out on our own what had changed President Truman’s mind. “When?”

  “As soon as everyone is back, so definitely by later tonight.”

  “Crap.” I met Levi’s gaze and saw the same panic reflected there. We’d just gotten the cuffs and I’d barely had the chance to even try using mine. “We’ve got to go out. Now.”

  “Tonight? Are you off your nut?” Sarah cut her eyes around the room, clearly expecting Zeke or one of our other stalkers to melt out of the woodwork. “They’re going to be on high alert after this, Kaia.”

  Our own Elders were still nowhere to be seen. In my mind, the Council had them locked up somewhere, but that could be panic talking.

  No one was listening to us as Elder Price continued to give non-answers to the question of how, exactly, the Council was going to find out what had happened and set things right. Which meant we were free to talk. For now.

  “We don’t have a choice,” I whispered back, paranoid even as I dismissed her worries. I tipped my head toward Levi, who nodded. As soon as the meeting broke up, we had to get out of here. “No one will notice. Things are a disaster. We won’t be gone long.”

  “What if they close the portals while we’re out and we can’t get back?” Sarah asked. “They won’t know we’re gone. I made sure the cuffs don’t track to the floor in the Archives.”

  That meant our dots would show us in the Academy, not out. If we were t
rapped in the past longer than twenty-four hours, our tats would self-destruct our brains.

  Would they? If the cuffs didn’t register a trip, would our bio tats still know we weren’t in the right time?

  It was a question for Sarah, but as the meeting wound down and Elder Price trailed off with false promises that no drastic action would be taken with the Historian Academy until they had all of the answers, the room grew too quiet.

  By the time Levi, Sarah and I got back to our room, I thought I might have an idea. Not about how to get back once the portals were closed, but an idea of where we could go to for help, and maybe for answers. Because we obviously needed both.

  Yumi would be back any second; after that crazy crap in the auditorium, I couldn’t imagine anyone not going straight back to whatever space they considered safe. Which for her, might be the gym, but I didn’t think so. She’d been hanging around with us more and more lately, and I’d noticed that we’d barely noticed. She’d become one of us even when we knew she shouldn’t—like it was simply meant to be.

  Which lent credence to the idea that perhaps unexpected changes could alter the future. Change destinies.

  An uncomfortable itch started up under my skin—one that reminded me that something was wrong. Something other than the missing Elder, and Yumi’s appearance, and the portals being closed until further notice. Why couldn’t I pin down where it was coming from?

  “Levi, you’ve got to talk some sense into Kaia,” Sarah snapped once we were alone. “She thinks we need to go see if we can find out who influenced Truman before they close the portals, but that’s crazy. The Council is here. They’re watching. Not to mention we won’t be able to get back once those portals are closed.”

  “Will the self-destruct work?” I asked before Levi could interject his opinion. “I mean, do our bio tats know we’re in the past?”

  Sarah’s forehead wrinkled in thought, the spark in her blue gaze telling me she hadn’t thought about that until now. “I’m not sure. Another reason we should rethink this, right?”