Exist Once More Read online

  “Which means we need a cuff,” I reiterated.

  “That’s the first step,” Oz agreed, flashing me a rare smile. “And we need a way to circumvent the new systems.”

  “Not the first step,” Sarah disagreed, frowning down at her tablet.

  At least she hadn’t been paying attention when Oz smiled at me like he actually wanted to—he hadn’t been that relaxed around her in weeks.

  “I think I could copy the cuff tech, and maybe even program it to mimic an Elder’s specs so that we could all travel using one, but I can’t do it from scratch.” She looked up, still frowning, but this time in thought.

  A knock on the door stopped either Oz or me from responding with the obvious question—how in the System we were going to get our hands on an Elders’ cuff. Our eyes snapped up, first toward the door and then to one another. Our gazes each said we hadn’t invited anyone else or even said anything about being home.

  Sarah stood, crossing to the door and standing on her tiptoes to peer through the peephole.

  “I can hear you breathing,” Levi’s muffled voice rumbled through the door. “And I know you’re not allowed out, Kaia. Open up.”

  I shrugged at Sarah, giving her a nod. If anyone knew for sure I was home it was Levi, and there was no reason to keep him out if he wanted to chat.

  A moment later he crossed the threshold, eyebrows up at the sight of both Sarah and Oz in the room, as well. After we’d run into Truman the other night, the cat was surely now out of the bag regarding our reconciliation. Such as it was.

  “Okay. I only expected to find Kaia, but this is very interesting.”

  “I thought you and Yumi were out together,” I asked, pretty sure she’d told me that.

  Levi avoided my gaze, a slight smile on his lips. “We were. She’ll be here in a minute—she just got a call from her parents on the way in and I wanted to give her some privacy.”

  “What’s very interesting?” Oz butted in, the confrontational tone of his voice slightly out of character.

  It took Levi a moment to follow the question back to its source. Then he shrugged and waved his hand at the three of us. “You guys, together. Does this mean we can stop diffusing anti-anxiety meds around the Academy?”

  “Hilarious,” I informed him, though it was sort of funny. “Did you want something?”

  He paused, seeming to consider whether he wanted to continue, but then a small smile turned up his lips. “I knew the three of you were up to something.”

  “Up to something?” Sarah parroted. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t even have any guesses. I just heard that the three of you were together in the lab but you always act like you hate each other or whatever.” He folded his arms, taking a defiant stance as he towered over the three of us sitting. “If it’s about Analeigh, I want to help.”

  The request…or demand, or whatever it was, took me by surprise.

  Not that he cared about what happened to my best friend. Everyone loved her, and no one had been quite the same since she left. But that even Levi, who always seemed to care little for anything that he couldn’t trade for more information, was willing to put his ass on the line to get her back…it hurt my heart.

  “What do you mean, about Analeigh?” I asked, because we had to be sure. “And who told you we were in the lab together?”

  “Figuring out how to clear her name or whatever. So we can get her back.” He didn’t answer my last question but it had to have been Yumi.

  Even though the entire Academy had been privy to our disciplinary hearing, in which my transgressions of traveling to the past unauthorized and interfering in history were detailed, everyone knew Oz had been with me, but not why.

  Not the real reason, anyway.

  The Elders, for obvious reasons, hadn’t informed the Academy about our stumbling onto the Return Project, which meant that Levi—and the rest of our class—didn’t know the truth about why Analeigh ran.

  Which meant he didn’t know what he was asking, when he talked about clearing her name. Didn’t realize it meant going up against the Elders we had spent a decade deferring to. Believing in.

  And I really wasn’t sure whether we should tell him. Just a few nights ago we’d agreed not to bring anyone else into this mess, but we needed someone else. Someone not under suspicion, and not to mention, already close to Yumi. Levi could be the answer to the question we’d been too afraid to ask.

  “It would help a lot to have someone the Elders aren’t suspicious of helping us,” Sarah echoed my thoughts. She glanced toward Oz, then at me.

  “Yeah, but…” Oz made a face. “Didn’t we also decide we didn’t want to involve anyone else after everything that’s happened?”

  For some reason, both he and Sarah looked toward me. Like I was the one who was supposed to make the call about Levi, about what telling him any more than he knew could mean for his life. Literally.

  If we got caught again—and we probably would—if things went bad with the Elders, we could all end up in exile. Or dead. Our three lives were more than enough to have hanging over my head.

  On the other hand, Levi could be extremely useful if he really wanted in, no looking back. A new ally…the Elders wouldn’t expect that. It could buy us some time, if nothing else.

  Undoubtedly, the right thing to do was to tell Levi there was nothing to know, nothing we could do, and to forget about bringing Analeigh back from space. He wouldn’t buy it, not after our brief exchange, but he couldn’t force it out of us, either.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe Caesarion was right when he said the right thing to do was whatever benefitted our people—and the citizens of Genesis needed us to fight for them whether they knew it yet or not. Maybe my life, or Levi’s or Analeigh’s, didn’t matter as much as bringing the Elders to justice.

  People were disappearing—how long until someone blinked out of existence who had made the sort of discovery or invention that could wipe us all out? Our System was well-conceived and planned out, and we were strong, but we were crashing off course. If we were the ones aware of it, I knew that Caesarion would say it was our job to right the ship.

  The Elders thought they knew what they were doing with that Projector and their stupid meddling, but they didn’t. They couldn’t, or they wouldn’t have made the kind of mistakes that brought Yumi Phan and her family into Genesis. The kind that brought the Council into the loop out of necessity.

  My heart knew the truth the moment Caesarion’s kind, wise eyes floated into my mind. We couldn’t worry about ourselves, at least not as much as we worried about what needed to be done to save the System. That, even more so than getting Analeigh back, had to be the true point of our mission.

  I met Oz’s gaze, wondering what his reaction would be to my reasoning. He hadn’t seemed to care much for Caesarion, though the two of them had never spoken, but I thought they were more alike than either of them would have admitted.

  Determination made Oz’s gray eyes like steel. My heart pounded as I saw in them the promise that he was in, whatever I decided. No matter the plan.

  It warmed my blood and terrified me at the same time, to think that what Caesarion had seen in me all of those months ago—the belief he’d had that I could be the sort of leader he wouldn’t live to become—could have been written in the stars of my life, too.

  I took a deep breath and waited for the confidence to overwhelm the fear. In the end, I had to settle for it coming up even. “Okay. You can help.”

  The room felt as if the space itself had exhaled. Sarah looked pained but didn’t argue. Oz gave me a tight nod, and Levi grinned.

  “Okay. So, tell me. What are you doing to help her?”

  It took the better part of an hour to fill him in on the Projector and what Oz had done and witnessed as far as the Return Project. Levi’s eyes got rounder with each revelation, and he didn’t interrupt once.

  Which, once I was finished, struck me as odd, and I n
arrowed my gaze at him. “What do you know?”

  “Nothing for sure, although what you’re saying makes a lot of sense as far as what they told us in that meeting the other morning. Except it clearly would have been in their better interest to keep it from the Council, so why did they tell?” He frowned, probably working out what the three of us had deduced soon after the announcement—that there had to be some kind of rift among the Elders. “Maybe some of them would be on our side.”

  “But who?” Sarah muttered. “That’s the question.”

  “Maybe Booth,” I blurted. My face felt hot at the memory of what he’d told me on our trip a few days ago, and that I hadn’t relayed it. It had seemed personal at the time, more about my family than anything, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  “Why do you think that?” Oz asked, his voice level and his face free of expression.

  “He said something to me in Alabama the other day. After we listened to Martin Luther King, Jr., give that speech, he told me to remember a certain line, that it applied now, to us, even more than it had to the Americans back then.”

  “What was the line?” Levi was the one who asked, but everyone was waiting to hear.

  “That the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

  “What the heck does that mean?” Levi asked.

  I opened my mouth to say I wasn’t sure, but stopped when my eyes met Oz’s again. There was truth in them, and his understanding somehow filtered to me.

  “It means that justice might seem like it’s a long time coming, but that it will happen if we believe in it.”

  “If we fight for it,” Oz corrected, still looking my direction. “Justice doesn’t just happen. Martin Luther King, Jr., knew that, Kaia, and he fought. People fought for a long time on Earth Before, but justice never came.”

  “It came when we left, and the families who survived promised that things would be different out here,” Sarah said, anger swirling in her icy eyes. She was so mad all the time. “Right?”

  My heart climbed into my throat. “I think Booth is saying it’s still bending. He said I should think about how much longer that arc would seem now, with our understanding of the universe. So that means we’re not there yet.”

  We fell silent for a few moments, letting that sink in. It had seemed, both then and now, that Booth was trying to tell me something, maybe about the Return Project.

  Or maybe he was simply saying that he believed what happened to my parents, or to Analeigh, was unjust but that their time for redemption would come.

  It was hard to say but I’d always liked him, and that made me think he might not be trying to destroy our universe with the rest of them.

  “Maybe there was never justice, only the illusion of it,” Levi murmured, his gaze faraway. “The arc has been growing along with the universe, and keeps growing as it expands.”

  His comment sparked something in the back of my mind. It flickered, then moved before I could grab onto it, but there were too many other things in the way to track it down.

  “I don’t know about Booth, but this doesn’t change anything,” Sarah declared in the quiet. “We need to figure out what’s going on so we can save Analeigh, and maybe the people who have been unfairly erased. So, how can we get our hands on one of the Elder’s cuffs?”

  That question stewed, and I thought about the fact that she didn’t mention appearances. That none of us brought up what we’d learned about Yumi. It was as though we had an unspoken agreement that it wouldn’t go over well, given their closeness, or that Levi might be able to help us if they continued to get closer.

  Or, it could have been that I felt badly, interrupting their budding romance with the news that she was basically a dead girl.

  “My dad,” Oz said quietly after a minute or so. His pained expression said that he might have been working on getting those two words out the entire time. “He takes his cuff off before he showers every night, and he doesn’t put it on again until he’s done showering in the morning.”

  “Dude, your dad showers twice a day?” Levi scrunched up his brow in confusion. “I mean, he’s always seemed pretty regimented but that’s extreme.”

  Oz rolled his eyes. “He works out in the morning.”

  “Oh.” Levi considered that. “It’s still weird. Why does he shower again at night?”

  “Because he’s as regimented as you think and he doesn’t like to get sweat on his sheets,” Oz replied, not rising to the bait. He reached for Sarah’s hand but she shifted away under the pretense of using it to push her hair behind her ear, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. An expression of resignation washed over Oz’s face as he sat back. “How long do you need with the cuff to copy the tech and the Elder specs?”

  “As long as possible, but I think a couple of hours should do if we’re crunched. I can download and copy the files and go through them in detail later.”

  “Okay. I’ll sneak in while he’s in the shower at night, lift it then, and return it while he’s exercising the next morning.”

  “What if he notices it’s missing?” I asked, my stomach in knots over what would happen if we failed at such an early stage. What would happen to Oz if he got caught.

  Oz didn’t seem to have a response for that, and it was several moments before Sarah spoke. “We can’t do it for a few days, because tomorrow we have prep for our next Observation, and then the day after that we’re headed back to Earth Before. With debriefs and Reflections during the days after that, it’s going to be at least a week until things settle down enough for me to have time to crack that tech. So let’s not stress about it now.”

  “Damn,” Levi commented. “I mean, I knew you were good with this stuff, but can you really do all of this? Copy a cuff?”

  Sarah shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  “What can we do in the meantime?” Levi asked. “I mean, a week’s a long time to sit on our hands if the Elders are trying to change the past, isn’t it?”

  I glanced at Oz, who gave me a curt nod before answering our newest cohort. “You could get into the holofiles and check out any previous Observation trips to Hiroshima, Japan, in nineteen forty-five.”

  Levi wrinkled his nose. He’d never been big on schoolwork. “Why?”

  “Just a hunch. Nothing came up in a historical search of the period, but we all have this feeling that it should have. Like something disappeared.” It’s Oz that answered, but it could have come straight out of my own mouth.

  His description was pretty much exactly how I’d been feeling since he mentioned that was where and when Yumi’s paternal founder had been born. Come to think of it, that in itself was strange—most of the families who had been chosen to populate Genesis were much older than that. My own went all the way back to the first century of the Common Era.

  “Isn’t that where Yumi’s family is from?” He glanced at the door, as though thinking that she should have been here by now.

  I had worried about the same thing. It was time to wrap this session up—past time. I didn’t know how Yumi would react to the information we had about her and her family, but I did know that we didn’t have the time or emotional capacity to deal with it then.

  “Yeah.”

  “We could ask her—”

  “No.” The word was harsh on Sarah’s tongue. “We don’t want anyone else involved. This is dangerous.”

  I had a feeling she added the last part as a bit of extra convincing. If Levi cared for her the way we thought, that was the last thing he would want to do.

  “Okay, well, sure.” Levi cleared his throat, looking the slightest bit unsure since he’d burst in demanding truth. “I can share them with you—”

  “No,” Sarah interrupted. “No data sharing. We’ll meet again in a few days and you can tell us what you found then.”

  And that was when Levi’s face went white—when he truly seemed to understand what he’d done throwing his lot in with the three of us—four, if we counted Analeigh.
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  He and Oz got up to leave a few minutes later, all of us deciding we’d get together under the guise of prepping for the next trip in two days so that Levi could fill us in.

  Even though Sarah was watching me like a hawk, and even though I didn’t understand what made me do it, I shot to my feet and flew across the room, slipping into the hallway before Oz had made it around the corner.

  “Oz!” I whispered.

  He froze, then turned. So did Levi, and I hated that I’d made a scene with him watching. We didn’t need any more fake relationship drama, that much was for sure.

  “Yeah?”

  I swallowed, trying to control my expression, which felt more than a little wild at the thoughts banging around in my head. “When you go do…what we discussed? I’m coming with you.”

  “Kaia, you don’t—”

  “You need a lookout and there’s safety in numbers. I’m coming.”

  I could tell that he wanted to say something about what happened the last time the two of us went traipsing around the Academy together late at night. He was probably right, that it would raise a lot of eyebrows and more suspicions if anyone—especially his dad or one of the other Elders—caught us together.

  But even though I knew all of that, it didn’t stop the fear of what his father would do if he caught him alone in there from crushing my chest.

  And in the end, Oz didn’t argue, either.

  Chapter Seven

  We were leaving for our Observation, a quick trip to the English countryside in the year two thousand and twenty-two of the Common Era, in a few hours when the four of us suddenly found ourselves with a few minutes alone. Oz had avoided me completely since our strange agreement in the hallway, only seeing Sarah at their nightly study sessions. Levi had acted weird, too, and the actions of both boys ramped up my nerves dangerously near a breaking point.

  Oz, maybe that wasn’t so strange after everything that had happened. But Levi’s behavior had definitely changed enough that any Elder who cared to could notice. Unable to sleep because of the stress, I’d taken to spending my mornings with Yumi in the gym. Most of the time, Levi joined us, and when he didn’t show up that morning, my roommate acted disappointed.