Exist Once More Read online

  “Let’s wait another hour before we go back,” Sarah said, checking her wrist tat again. “No sense in getting there so long before the ship. It’ll just give them more time to track us.”

  “You won’t get away with this. We’ll just do it over again.” Zeke wobbled slightly in his position on the floor. He was probably too old to be sitting in a cramped position on his rear for that long. Oh, well. “There are a million ways to set Earth Before on a better path, and we’re the only ones who can do it.”

  “You mean with your crappy Projector?” I asked. “The thing doesn’t work. It’s impossible to predict every single offshoot of a decision. You know that.”

  “It works well enough. We were managing to shift our past without any major casualties.”

  For some reason, him calling Oz a minimal casualty made me want to scratch his eyes out. Trying to maintain my decorum, and not wanting to listen to him anymore, I went into the dining room. Sarah was on my heels.

  When I faced her, I saw what else had been changed back—her feelings toward me. It only just occurred to me now that she’d been acting differently.

  No Oz, no anger.

  Her face was white, the apples of her cheeks red, as she watched me. “What did you mean, one of their own was erased?”

  Her question startled me. “Oz was gone. Truman, too. Because they changed history. You don’t remember?”

  She shook her head. “No. Oz was never gone.”

  “Yes, he was. And I tried to remember him but I couldn’t—everyone thought I was being dramatic.” I swallowed, willing my tears to stay in my head where they belonged.

  Sarah was quiet for a long time. We both ignored Zeke as he hollered for us to undo him this instant from the other room. We should probably re-tape his fat mouth before someone in one of the neighboring buildings got suspicious and called the police. But we didn’t.

  “Why did you remember him and I didn’t?” Her question was soft, her own eyes wet. “Why did he show up in your mind, Kaia, and not mine?”

  I swallowed again, but nothing could dislodge the lump in my throat. This moment, and the honesty pouring from one of my closest friends, was enough to force me to look reality straight in the face.

  But it was a lie that came out of my mouth.

  “I don’t know.”

  Her lips curled up in a sad smile. “Yes, you do.”

  “He’s…I don’t know. We’re connected somehow.”

  That was the truth. Something had changed, though I wasn’t sure exactly when or how, or if there was a way to pin those down.

  The bottom line was that I had changed. It was meeting Caesarion. It was finding out that so much of what I’d believed and been taught had been a lie. Losing Analeigh and my parents. Being thrust into a role at the Academy that I wasn’t ready for, didn’t want to take. It could have been any one of those things that altered who I was to such a degree that it allowed room in my heart, in my genetics, for another person.

  Or it could have been everything. All of it.

  “He’s your True, now.”

  “I don’t know, Sarah.” It felt wrong to even think it, after everything Caesarion had made me feel. Everything he’d meant to me, and had forced me to accept about the world. And yet, her words didn’t feel wrong, exactly. “I’m his, I think. That’s why he came to me. That’s why we’re connected.”

  “I don’t know why this is possible. Or how. But I mean…I felt it, too. Even before all of this started I felt him slipping away, but I didn’t want to admit it. Didn’t want to think the machine could be wrong.”

  My heart hurt because she was hurting. Because stretching beyond the confines of what was comfortable and known was painful. Yet I found the capacity there, too. “I don’t think it was wrong. I think…maybe the person we’re perfectly compatible with when we’re seventeen might not be the same person we match up with when we’re thirty, or sixty. I think it depends on how much happens to steer us off the predictable course.”

  “Like you said to the Elders. The Projector can only show so many options. Eventually there are too many branches to know which one will be the one that survives.”

  I nodded, my mind taking over my heart, thank goodness. It was easier to breathe this way. Easier to think. “Yes. And when I pulled that card with Caesarion’s name on it, the factors in my life were different. I didn’t know about the Return Project or the Elders going rogue. I didn’t know Caesarion. I didn’t have to kill him. It changed me.”

  “And something changed Oz. Something that made your edges line up.”

  “Maybe. Honestly, I don’t know what to think yet.”

  Zeke had fallen silent as he strained to hear our hushed conversation. Sarah checked her wrist tat for the hundredth time, then looked up to meet my eyes. In her gaze, I saw that even though everything wasn’t exactly okay between us right then, one day they would be.

  “Time to go,” she said softly. “How do you want to do this? We have to make sure they can get back, just in case they do have a self-destruct built in.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe loosen their bonds just enough to give us a head start?”

  We thought about that for a minute. I wished we would have stumbled on this little issue earlier, when we could have discussed it with the others, but too late now. It was the best idea we had, and we needed to get back to the Anne Bonny on time.

  I wanted to figure out how we were going to fix this—how we were going to convince the Council of everything that had happened before the Elders did exactly what Zeke promised and simply came back to try again.

  The idea of Oz alone at the Academy, of the Council suddenly remembering everything about the two of us, dug discomfort, if not outright fear, under my skin.

  We couldn’t leave him there.

  “Let’s do it,” I told Sarah, trying hard to breathe normally through my growing panic.

  She nodded, though whether she was following my train of thought about Oz was anyone’s guess. We trekked into the parlor, where I stopped so fast that she ran straight into my back, knocking us both off balance.

  The Elders were gone.

  We must have missed one of their cuffs. A hidden spare, an emergency travel plan, I didn’t know. Or maybe there was a way for one of the others to call them back from the portals in the Academy…the ones that were supposed to be closed.

  There was too much we didn’t know about how they operated. How they were working with or around the Genesis Council, whether Jonah and the pirates maybe weren’t the only ones who knew about the secret portal my grandfather had left under the Historians’ refuge on Sanchi.

  “Let’s go,” Sarah urged, like she had at least three times since we’d come into the parlor and found our captives missing. “We need to get back to the Anne Bonny before the Elders raise the alarm. You know they’re going to blame all of this on us.”

  A thought had lodged in my head. It refused to budge, to make room for common sense. To listen to Sarah, who was right that we needed to get out of here, even if our rendezvous with the pirates wasn’t for another hour.

  I’d decided to act before my brain had a chance to say no.

  “We do need to go. You go to the ship.” I paused, spinning the dials on my cuff in the process. Using the coordinates from the card that had been under Wolfram, the ones I’d memorized a week ago when we’d been pulling our hair out over figuring out where they could lead. I pushed the button before I could think twice. Before Sarah could stop me. “I’m going to get Oz.”

  The last thing I saw through the blue haze was her wide eyes, her jaw hanging open, and the promise of a vehement protest on her tongue.

  When I landed at the Historian Academy, it was in a portal I’d never seen. It was underground—no wonder no one had ever found it. Heck, it took me twenty minutes to find the way out, a ladder that led up and into one of the storage rooms that also typically went unused.

  The Academy was quiet, at least for the moment, but the oth
er Elders had returned recently. There was no telling when they would start staking out every entrance to the Academy. Or whether they had already gone after Oz.

  The hallway outside the storage area was empty. If the stunner felt nice and heavy against my waist, it felt downright reassuring in the center of my sweaty palm. My heart twisted with the surety that the Elders were going to try to blame us for the strange happenings in the past, and there was no way they were letting Oz off this time. Not with everything he knew.

  We needed to get out of here—both of us—and fast.

  Sharp, staccato shouts issued from Zeke’s office as I slunk past. There was no way to know what had transpired here since we’d left. The Council could be gone, searching the System for the pirates, Sarah, and me. Or they could still be here, intent on policing time travel and sealing off the past from any further meddling until they figured out how to track us down and fix what had already been changed.

  By the sound of it, at least some of them were here. I recognized Zeke’s heavy, scratchy voice and Truman’s rough, loud one, but more crept into the hall that were unfamiliar. Staying to eavesdrop was tempting, but getting out of here without getting caught seemed better. If they were all in a disagreement about how to handle us, or the Elders, or time travel, I needed to strike while the iron was hot.

  On my way through the maze of cold, white hallways the questions in my mind threatened to overwhelm me. What if Oz was different? What if he remembered being gone? What if he didn’t?

  By the time I knocked on his door my muscles felt like one giant, aching ball. It was impossible to breathe without wheezing. The door cracked, then opened wide, to reveal Levi, not Oz.

  “Kaia,” he gasped, pulling me inside and slamming the door behind me. “What are you doing here?”

  “Coming to get Oz.”

  “Why?” The genuine confusion on Levi’s face answered my question as far as whether or not he remembered Oz had been gone. Definitely not.

  “Long story.” My heart climbed into my throat at the sight of Oz leaning against his desk.

  His gray eyes were on me, filled with an intensity that made me feel hot all over. It was overwhelmingly good to see him standing there in his typical clothes, his hair mussed and glasses slightly askew. Without stopping to think, I took the half a dozen steps across the room and put my hands on his chest just to verify that he was solid. Real.

  Oz’s eyebrows went up with surprise, a soft, gasped intake of air accompanying my touch. Our gazes met and stuck. Unlike Levi, I got the sense that Oz remembered…something. I wasn’t sure what.

  “You’re here,” I said softly. We needed to hurry, but I couldn’t move.

  “I’m here,” he replied. Slowly, a smile spread across his face.

  I grinned back.

  “I don’t know why the two of you are acting so goofy, but I promise you I’ll figure it out,” Levi drawled. “I mean, I know you and Sarah broke up, Oz, but it’s only been a few days.”

  It seemed like a lifetime ago, but I remembered everything that had happened in between. Levi didn’t.

  “We need to get out of here,” I told Oz, ignoring Levi and the urge to ask Oz right then what he remembered and what it was like disappearing.

  “How? The portals are closed.” Oz squinted. I’d missed his nerdy face.

  “And you’re still not allowed out of the Academy, Kaia.”

  That actually made me snort. If only Levi knew. “I have a cuff, and we don’t need a portal. We just need to leave before the Elders come to get…”

  I trailed off as the door to the room burst open, revealing Zeke, Truman, Booth, and Elder Price.

  If looks could kill, I’d have been dead from Zeke’s back in New York, so the one just then seemed like overkill. Booth looked stricken to see me, and Truman looked angry—so, normal. Only Elder Price appeared unruffled, and she was the one who spoke.

  “Miss Vespasian. I must say, I didn’t believe Ezekial when he said I might find you here.” Her gaze traveled over my body.

  I tensed, keeping my hands hidden behind my back, where they’d been since I spun to face them. At my side, Oz reached over to try to tug the stunner from my grasp, but I held on tight. It made me feel better.

  “Levi,” Truman said with a frown. “I hate to think you’re involved in any of this.”

  Luckily, Levi still wore an expression that waffled between amusement and bafflement. “In what, sir?”

  It occurred to me then that he probably was baffled—his involvement in all of this hinged on Truman dropping that bomb.

  “Kaia, if you’d come with us,” Elder Price said, her tone flat. The way they were blocking the door left no doubt in my mind that they weren’t going to let us walk out of here, maybe not ever. The smug expression on Zeke’s face all but confirmed it.

  Oz and I exchanged a glance. It was a split second, but we agreed—we had to fight our way out of here. In my head, he whispered. One.

  I took a deep breath, flicking the safety on the stunner with my thumb.

  Two.

  Levi looked toward me. I shook my head slightly. They didn’t know he was involved. Maybe he wasn’t.

  It was safer this way, and one day perhaps to have a friend inside the Academy would be the best thing that could happen to us.

  I had no idea what would happen after we found our way back to the Anne Bonny, or if we could even make it on time. But I did know that if we stayed here, I would end up on Cryon. Or worse.

  The cold, dead expression on Truman’s face said he had lost all patience with defending his son. Oz wasn’t any safer at the Academy than I was.

  Maybe none of us ever had been.

  Three.

  Levi moved out of the way as Oz and I ran toward the door. I raised the stunner and aimed it at Elder Price, pulling the trigger when it touched her arm without a second’s hesitation. Oz bowled over Zeke, who sprawled out on the floor.

  Truman got his hands on me, blocking me before the stunner touched his skin. He wrenched my arms behind my back with more force than necessary, grinning when the pop in my shoulder made me cry out. The stunner fell to the ground but Oz scooped it up, taking care of the two Council members, one of whom appeared to be trying to run away.

  Then it was Oz, his father, and me. One stunner on our side, but with Truman using me as a shield, there was no way Oz could use it on him. Levi hadn’t moved, and the uncertainty in his gaze said he wasn’t sure how—or if—he wanted to help.

  “Let her go,” Oz growled.

  His father laughed. “Why would I do that? She’s the one the Council is going to punish for making all of these ill-advised trips and changes to the past. We have recordings, even, to prove she was there recently, meddling in the Truman decisions.”

  “Let her go,” Oz repeated. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  The tremor in Oz’s voice went straight to my heart. How many times had his father hurt him, but Oz had never fought back? Never defended himself?

  Now, he was defending me.

  Truman heard the tremble, too, but he heard something else. Something weak, and something that made him feel as if he could safely turn his back on his son. He yanked my arms up as he pulled me down the hall. My knees buckled and my vision went black, stars dancing at the edges until he was really dragging me, my legs scraping the floor as I struggled to stay alert through the pain.

  He didn’t expect the limpness of my body and tripped over me.

  We both tumbled to the ground, his weight slamming me into the cold tile and a groan ripping through my middle. The shock of the stunner went through Truman’s body and into mine. Oz’s face, standing over his father’s body, was pale with regret and fear.

  It was the last thing I saw.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Kaia. Kaia, wake up. I don’t know how to get out of here without you.” Oz’s voice sounded far away. Under water.

  There was an insistent slap on my cheek that stung more with every tou
ch. I tried to jerk away from it but groaned at a fresh shoot of pain up my right arm.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the charge would go through him like that. I’m sorry.” He sounded panicked.

  “Dude, you have to calm down.” Levi’s voice filtered through the mess in my head. “She’s not even awake.”

  “Yes I am,” I mumbled, the words as garbled coming out of my mouth as they sounded in my head. My eyes refused to open on the first several tries, but finally complied. Both Oz and Levi were bending so close I could smell their breath.

  With reality came a deluge of memories: the Council blaming us. Stunning Zeke and Elder Price.

  “We have to get out of here,” I panted, struggling to sit up. “The ship…we’re supposed to meet them in less than ten minutes.”

  The boys helped as I bit down on my lower lip until it bled, barely managing not to scream at the pain in my arm.

  “I think your shoulder is dislocated,” Oz told me, his gray eyes full of worry. “We need to get it fixed.”

  “We need to get out of here,” I repeated, in full on panic now that we wouldn’t make it. “The pirates can help us.”

  “The pirates?” His tone, full of incredulous disdain, almost made me laugh.

  Almost.

  “Yes. How do you think we’ve gotten this far? Or who took care of Analeigh?”

  “Look, you two can have this little lover’s quarrel later,” Levi muttered. “If you know a way out of this Academy, Kaia, you’d better take it. Now.”

  He shot a pointed look toward Elder Price, who was starting to stir. Oz pulled me to my feet by my good arm. They were right—it wasn’t only the rendezvous time that was bearing down on us. We needed to get out of this Academy, and fast.

  “Let’s go. Thanks, Levi.” I gave him a hug, not knowing when we would see him again, and then pulled Oz away from the mess we’d left by the dormitories. I didn’t know where I was going or how far; I only knew that we needed a bit of space so that I could punch in the correct coordinates to get to the portal on Roma.

  We’d only gone a little ways when Oz stopped moving. I whirled around, wondering whether he was regretting throwing his lot in with me. Scared I would see that on his face.