Exist Once More Page 21

  “Please,” our roommate scoffed. “You two, with your heads together…honestly, I’m surprised it took you this long to figure out cuffs of your own.”

  “Things have been pretty intense.” For some reason, the fact that Analeigh and Jonah had worked together—against the wishes of the other pirates—to make sure that we had a place to go if we had nowhere else, made my throat tight and scratchy. “We’re in trouble.”

  “When aren’t you in trouble, little sister?” Jonah barked a laugh, though it didn’t reflect anywhere else on his face.

  “Learned from the best, I suppose.”

  “Touché. Well, how about the four of us go chat in the mess while these jerks finish up. You hungry?” My brother slung an arm over my shoulders, leading the way.

  Even though it was heavy and he still smelled like stinky guy, I didn’t pull away. His touch thwarted the chill deep in my bones, the one I’d begun to suspect had to do with the boy from my dreams, and the unshakable feeling that I needed to fix something.

  We settled around a long, rectangular table in what served as the ship’s kitchen. The table was the biggest thing in the room, dwarfing the tiny cookstove and refrigeration system.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Are you offering something other than protein tabs?”

  “Please, I can cook.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Kaia. I’ve been doing most of the cooking since I’ve been mooching everywhere else.” Analeigh smiled, and it struck me again how relaxed she seemed. How not-anxious to return to her old life. “And because otherwise I would have starved to death.”

  “Your friend is very funny,” Jonah said, his tone dry but his eyes sparkling as he looked toward Analeigh. “Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Honestly? No.” Suspicion rose in my chest as I glanced between the two of them. Something was definitely going on, but I refused to entertain exactly what. Not now, when too much other stuff was going on. “But it seems like more than one thing has changed as far as Analeigh is concerned, so I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  “Tell us what’s been happening at the Academy,” Analeigh replied, her cheeks pink as she changed the subject. “We heard about the Genesis Council mobilizing, that they’ve been on premises for a week, but nothing else.”

  “Our Elders—or at least some of them—figured out from the holofiles that some people had been disappearing throughout the System,” I answered. “And maybe appearing, too. Obviously, their first inclination was that some change had been made in the past that triggered it.”

  “And since we’re the only ones with travel ability, the Council came to us,” Sarah added, her lips taking a break from pressing into a hard line. “It turned out they were right. Kaia and I have a new roommate. We realized at some point that even though we thought we knew her, we couldn’t recall specifics, and sure enough, when we researched her ancestors and paternal founder, they lived through a catastrophic event that should have killed them.”

  Jonah and Analeigh went pale at the same moment, as though on cue.

  “What event?” my brother choked out. “And who changed it? How? Why?”

  Analeigh watched me with bright green eyes, her questions all apparently covered by the ones that had spilled out of Jonah’s mouth in quick succession.

  Sarah and I exchanged a glance, in which her gaze urged me to go ahead.

  I took a deep breath and dove in. “President Harry Truman was supposed to drop the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, to end World War II. He didn’t—at least not in the history you and I recall now, in which an invasion took place and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. And Yumi—our new roommate—appeared in Genesis because of it.”

  “And he was assassinated because of it,” Sarah added.

  Weird, that I’d forgotten that part, and after I’d just been to Washington, DC, to observe the entire thing. I frowned as we waited for Jonah and Analeigh to catch up.

  “But if hundreds of thousands of people died who were supposed to live, and people lived who were supposed to die…” Analeigh trailed off, swallowing hard. “How did they know our whole way of life wouldn’t just disappear?”

  “We don’t know that part,” Sarah answered.

  A long pause permeated the room. I studied the cooking equipment, the nearly empty pantries, the ducts exposed in the low ceilings, and my fingernails. Anything but my friends. It was too hard to see their fear because of the way it fed my own.

  “You haven’t gone to check?”

  I shook my head and tried to re-focus. “I tested the cuffs once, and Booth lent us his before that. Both had to do with the bombs and the Manhattan Project, but we haven’t run into the Elders up to nefarious deeds. Yet.”

  “The plan was to head to Truman’s meetings in the days leading up to the decision to shelve the bombs, but then one of our Elders disappeared, the Council freaked out and is shutting down our travel portals, and then they were looking for Kaia and me. So we came here, instead.”

  “That’s…a lot of information. One of the Elders disappeared?” Jonah scratched his chin, a sure sign that he was deep in thought. “I’m guessing there’s no way to tell who?”

  “No one remembers,” I lamented, my mind again straying to the boy from my dream-not-dream. He was too young to be an Elder, though. He couldn’t have been much, if any, older than me. “We’re just short one.”

  “It’s a good bet that it could have something to do with the Hiroshima thing, since it’s so huge,” Sarah pointed out. Maybe because she wanted to believe that if we could go back and stop them from changing just that one thing everything would go back to normal.

  More silence. This time, Analeigh nudged me under the table. When our eyes met, there was nothing but questions passing between us. I wanted to cry because of how good it felt to have her back in my life.

  “We have to go look. If we’re going to have any kind of shot at stopping the Return Project, we have to catch them in the act and record it, for one,” my brother said, his tone grim.

  “So you do know about the project,” I accused him, the sting of betrayal hot against my cheeks. “How could you not tell me?”

  “You were a kid, Special K. What good would it have done?” His eyes were sad. “I found out the hard way—when they tried to recruit me. After I realized they were living a lie, I knew I had to leave.”

  “You used something to save Rosie first. What?” My curiosity continued to work on overdrive.

  “They have a machine they called a Projector. Supposedly, you could program a person, decision, or event into it and it would spin out all of the possible outcomes so that they could figure out which things could be safely altered and others that never could, not without losing what we’d built here.”

  “The Projector,” I repeated, wondering why that sounded familiar. I’d never heard of it until today. “How is that possible? How does it work?”

  Jonah flinched. “They’ve been working on it for a long time. It was Zeke’s passion, and supposedly it projects all of the potential outcomes from a single event—like, all of the decisions that could be made and how they would have ended up, not only the one that was made.”

  “Zeke Midgley, whose ancestor came as close to single-handedly destroying Earth Before as anyone ever did, thought this was a good idea,” Sarah murmured, her tone incredulous as she gave a matching shake of her head.

  “We know they’ve all got dubious ancestors.” Analeigh sighed, sitting back in her chair and running a hand through her honey curls. “Jonah and the others filled me in on that much, and that’s when I told you what I knew, Kaia. Their families were the reason they developed this whole project to start with—to try to make amends. Apparently, somewhere along the line it became more than that. To actually go back and fix the mistakes with the idea that if Earth Before healed, we would never end up on Genesis to begin with. So maybe it doesn’t matter to them who disappears now, since their goal is to essentially era
se the need for the whole System.”

  The idea was ludicrous to my ears, and the expression on Sarah’s face suggested she thought the same thing, and yet…it sort of made sense? And we’d never lived on Earth Before. I might enjoy my trips, even look forward to them, wish there were more or that the time didn’t pass so quickly, but I didn’t miss it. A person couldn’t miss a place they’d never truly known. Could they?

  What about a person? a voice whispered from the recesses of my mind. Can you miss a person you never knew?

  My thoughts immediately skipped from Caesarion to the boy in my dream. I had felt a connection to him, that was true. As if I…missed his presence. Had he disappeared? If so, why didn’t anyone else act as if they felt the shift, too?

  I pushed the thoughts away for the tenth time since Sarah woke me up against that tree. This conversation was more important. All of our lives were at stake, not only one possibly-disappeared person I may or may not have known in a different thread.

  Because what happened if we disappeared before the Elders fixed Earth Before?

  “If you knew about the Return Project three years ago, why did you run away? Why didn’t you report it then, or try to stop them?”

  Jonah gave me a look that reminded me so much of my mother that I wanted to cry. It meant one thing, and one thing only: he was exasperated with my slowness to fully grasp the situation. “They won’t be stopped, Kaia, not by a conversation or reason. And you know as well as I do that without proof, the Genesis Council isn’t going to listen to a bunch of kids. And even though I knew what they were doing, I was never able to guess where they would be. The changes they were making then were still too small.”

  “Well, now they’re big,” I snapped, feeling resolved. “They screwed up, trying to do too much too soon, and got busted. But they also gave us a chance to catch them. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “How?” Sarah asked, keeping up but looking unsure. “If the portals at the Academy weren’t closed before, they sure are after we disappeared. We’re trapped out here.”

  I turned to look at Analeigh, who grinned. I pointed. “We’re not trapped. The pirates have a cuff—at least one—and Analeigh came to see me without a portal. We just don’t know how.”

  Analeigh and Jonah looked at each other. He gave her a nod that encouraged her to go ahead—maybe it was a secret that she’d been let in on, one for pirates and refugees, and she wasn’t sure whether we were allowed to know. But her checking with him irritated me, anyway.

  “As you know, you only need a portal on one end to travel,” she started.

  “Right,” I said, trying to sound less impatient than I felt. She was reminding me of Levi at the moment, which only served to make me think about the mess we’d left behind. “So? You didn’t use the portals at the Academy when you popped into my room, and I’m assuming there isn’t one on the ship.”

  “Not on the Anne Bonny, no. But it turns out the portals at the Academy aren’t the only ones in the System.” She licked her lips, eyes sparkling. “Not only that, they’re not even the only kind of portals in the System. Your grandfather, Kaia, was a genius.”

  “She keeps saying that like it’s a surprise,” Jonah commented with a smile. “I’ve tried telling her it’s not a secret.”

  “Yes, well, in this case, he had secret portals placed strategically around the System and told virtually no one they existed. Your brother and his big brain figured it out after deciphering some random clues in his journal.”

  “What journal?” I asked, trying hard to keep up. Sarah looked just as lost, but potentially more excited about the revelation of new tech. “I never saw one.”

  “Dad gave them to me a few days before I left the Academy.” The expression on my brother’s face twisted from amusement into pain in the blink of an eye. “I think he suspected…he knew something was wrong but he didn’t know what. He gave them to me hoping they would help me find answers, I think.”

  “I’d love to see them.”

  “Of course,” he said softly. “They’re not mine.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to box up the emotions regarding our busted family so that I could examine them later when there wasn’t so much else at stake. “Okay. So these portals…how do they work?”

  “We’ve only found three, so far. One is at the Academy, hidden underground.” Analeigh paused to sneeze.

  Sarah snapped her fingers, not bothering with a ‘bless you.’ “That’s why the coordinates didn’t make sense. The ones on Wolfram.”

  It did make sense now, at least to me. The confused twist of my brother’s features said he didn’t feel equally enlightened, though, so I took pity on him. “Mom and Dad sent me a holo from Cryon and told me to make sure to take care of Wolfram while they were away. It made no sense, of course, so I figured it was some kind of message. They wouldn’t let me out of the Academy so Levi went and checked. He found the card on the bottom with coordinates at the Academy.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  We fell silent, deep in thought about what to do next. I continued to push aside my worries over what was right, and whether I was being selfish wanting to save Genesis instead of working with the Elders to fix Earth Before.

  Right then, we needed to believe our cause was just, and the fact that my brother and his friends had found portals outside the purview of the Historians would allow us the avenue needed to at least try to bring the endgame of justice a little nearer to our own present.

  Was it possible?

  I wasn’t sure anymore what wasn’t possible. And that was what scared me the most.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  We spent half the night talking, and the rest of it taking a several hours-long trip on the Anne Bonny to the site of one of the other two found portals. It was on Roma, the industrial planet responsible for the majority of the System’s production. A surprise, really, because it’s densely populated and if I was going to hide something like a time travel portal, it didn’t seem like the ideal spot.

  I supposed that my grandfather was a genius, though, and he must have had his reasons. Perhaps this was the first one, and he’d needed help with the building of it and someone here had helped. It could be as simple as that.

  Either way, Jonah and the others thought it would be a good idea for the ship to be nearby when we returned from Earth Before—because the other thing we’d all agreed on was that while the existence of the portal at the Academy meant that Sarah and I could go back, if we wanted, we shouldn’t until we had solid ammunition against the Elders.

  After we’d disappeared in the wake of that request for our detainment, they would only blame all of this on us, otherwise. Nothing would change.

  And so Jonah, Analeigh, and I were standing in the big cargo area of the Anne Bonny with the three illegal cuffs, time and dates set to a week before the bombing of Hiroshima. Or, when they were supposed to be. We had to see for ourselves why he changed his mind, and if it took days before the Elder, or Elders, who were responsible showed up, we would wait.

  We had three cuffs and had decided only three of us would go, just in case there was an emergency. If we got separated, we should all have a way to get home. Sarah wasn’t happy about being left behind, but she had deferred to my brother’s decision like she was already one of his crew.

  One nice thing about the cuffs being used outside of official channels was no self-destruct was coded into them. At least, that was what my brother assured me, and Analeigh backed him up—they’d traveled without worrying about it for months.

  I hated my brother for not telling me about that particular feature before I’d gone to see Caesarion, but maybe that was for the best. Everything happened the way it was supposed to—I still had to believe that.

  “You ready, Special K?” Jonah asked. He raised his eyebrows my direction, shifting closer to Analeigh. “Ana?”

  “I’m ready,” she said with a smile. “It’s been forever since I’ve been to Ea
rth Before. Kind of weird.”

  Analeigh had never loved it there like I had. She had been too focused on doing everything right to enjoy it, and the excitement that had colored her cheeks since we found each other again was a welcome, if odd, sight.

  I gave my brother a tight nod of my own. Nerves tumbled around in my belly, along with that nagging worry that we were forgetting something. Someone. Sarah hadn’t felt the same way when I tried talking to her about it last night, and neither had anyone else. It was as if whatever it was bothered only me, even though everyone agreed it was more than possible that someone else—or a lot of someone elses—had disappeared along with the Historian Elder.

  I had to forget about it. We had no way to remember people that now, we’d never known. Not yet.

  Easier said than done, as the gray eyes of the boy from my dream kept me awake while the others had dozed, but the harder I thought about him the further my memories—if that was even what they were—slipped away.

  “Okay, well, let’s go. Everyone have their supplies?” He checked our arms, all laden with small bags of essentials since we might be staying awhile. “Good.”

  He pressed the last button on his cuff. It felt like it was hard to breathe as the blue light emerged, just as if we were back at home at the Academy, and the three of us set off to change the world back.

  We hoped.

  Potsdam, New York, United States of America, Earth Before - July 3, 1945 C.E. (Common Era)

  Earth Before was much warmer than it would be in a few months, and a few hundred miles south, at the President’s assassination. Midsummer in New York was warm and muggy, it turned out, and we’d all shrugged out of our jackets within a few minutes of arriving.

  This entire outing was going to be problematic. There didn’t seem to be a way to get into the meetings where Truman and his team of advisors actually discussed the pros and cons of dropping the bombs. We didn’t have clearance, and they’d been working together for months—some years.