Exist Once More Read online

  When my wrist comm buzzed ten minutes into our warmup, a message from Sarah asking me to come back to the room to help clean up my mess, I guessed why. Or at least, I guessed that the comm was a cover, in case they were being seen by someone other than the two of us—and that something had happened I needed to know about, asap.

  I faked a cramp and told Yumi I was going to soak in the bath before breakfast and hurried through the halls, sweat sticking my workout clothes to my skin.

  Both Levi and Oz were already in our room, seated on my bed together and wearing twin nervous expressions. Sarah had already activated the noise-cancelation software but they were sitting in silence, waiting for me.

  Like we were programmed, all eyes swiveled to Levi, wondering what he’d found out. It had to be something or we wouldn’t have been there.

  Plus, he looked as if he was about to burst and spray clandestine information all over our room. Which would be hard to explain, and even harder to clean up.

  Levi’s expression, so close to the one he wore when he was dying to share gossip, spiked my blood with annoyance.

  “Well?” Oz snapped, suggesting that he felt a similar way.

  Then again, he’d never been one for gossip, or really even friendships, other than his relationship with Sarah.

  We’d gone from classmates to adversaries to something like allies in the space of a semester, but now I wasn’t sure exactly how to categorize our interactions. I looked around the room, taking a deep breath at the realization of whatever we were or weren’t, we’d found our way to the same side.

  “I found something,” Levi said. “Just today, because all of the files I researched earlier this week kept coming up empty.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean empty?”

  “Literally empty, as if they’d been wiped clean. Poured out. Every time I searched Hiroshima, there was a black hole of dates around when Yumi’s paternal founder was born.” He wrinkled up his forehead, looking as frustrated with his explanation as we were. “Like, there was information about him, and their family, but only scant stuff that led to the grandmother that came here. Almost like an outline.”

  Oz and I exchanged a look, then I shot a similar glance toward Sarah. It might not have made sense to Levi, but for us, it only went further toward proving what we thought about Yumi appearing recently.

  “So, what did you find today, then?” Sarah asked, frowning herself, now.

  “Well, here’s the weird thing. I got frustrated with searching specifics and decided what the heck, might as well go wider. And that’s when I found something.”

  The expression on Oz’s face turned worried, and even though the fact that Levi found something, my own concern twisted in my chest. The more places he poked around, the higher the likelihood it would trip some kind of alarm. But it was done now.

  “And I found it in the permanent files about your family, Oz.”

  The announcement was so Levi—he’d planned out the climax for the maximum impact. And he got it, but not from Oz, who stayed silent. Broody, almost.

  “What? How?” It was Sarah who found her reaction, though I wasn’t far behind.

  “There are separate files on all of the founding families?” I didn’t know why my mind went there first, but it had never crossed my mind before this.

  It would be pretty cool to check out what the holofiles had on my own family.

  Levi nodded. “Yeah, pretty extensive ones, too.”

  “But my family isn’t from Japan,” Oz interjected, his face one giant frown. “They’re from the States.”

  “Right. It’s not about where you’re from, it’s about something you did.” He paused, but seemed to sense that Oz was about to blow his lid if he didn’t get on with it.

  To be fair, he wasn’t hiding it well.

  Also, we were scheduled to be in the travel pods, ready to go, in twenty minutes and none of us were dressed. The clothing for the era wasn’t complicated or troublesome, but at the moment we were all still wearing our black Kevlar, and that would have turned some heads, for sure.

  “Oz, your paternal founder, President Truman, dropped the first nuclear bomb in human history. On Hiroshima, Japan, in nineteen forty-five.”

  It was like the entire room stopped breathing. What Levi said sounded familiar, as though I’d heard it before—learned it before, maybe even discussed it before, which made sense, for sure. Such an important historical event would have been observed not just by me, but by the Historians that had come through the Academy before us.

  So, why couldn’t I remember going to observe it? Reflecting on it? Anything?

  “And the only place you found any mention of the bombing was in the files on the Truman family?” The glisten of sweat on Sarah’s upper lip was a dead giveaway that she was as uneasy and frightened about the loss of a memory as I was.

  “Yeah. But at least we know what we’re missing now, right?”

  An alarm went off on Sarah’s wrist tat, then mine and Oz’s, Levi’s last. We needed to be headed toward the portals.

  More importantly, we needed to act like nothing was wrong and nothing had changed when we met up with the rest of the group for today’s outing to London.

  Which meant we couldn’t show up together.

  I left first, followed by Sarah and Oz together, then Levi went last, even though it wouldn’t be weird for him to show up with any one of us. The only other people going on the Observation with us were Yumi, who generally didn’t ask too many questions, and Maude Gatling, who generally asked too many.

  They were all in the travel pod when I arrived, all of us dressed in a simple getup of blue jeans that were uncomfortably tight and a variety of T-shirts, some plain and others printed. I’d opted for white and pulled my hair back into a ponytail, donning the popular shoe of the day, a black Converse, and leaving my flats in the room. Yumi asked how my cramp was and I felt badly for lying to her.

  Especially now that I knew her family was supposed to have been extinguished in a mass bombing event.

  Maude marked my arrival, then the rest of our group’s, with an assessing glance but no greeting, and an expression of relief crossed Yumi’s face when Levi arrived. She’d probably been worried that she’d be the only one stuck with our uncomfortable trio.

  Or she’d been worried Levi wouldn’t come for other reasons. More personal ones.

  “Very good, you’re all here. And almost on time, well done,” she added dryly, giving Levi a disapproving quirk of the eyebrow. “You’ll recall that we’re traveling into the nearer past on Earth Before, to a concentration camp outside of London, England, that houses citizens of the Muslim faith. There is no specific event that we’re set to record, and I expect you all, at this point in your training, to be capable of observing the camp as a whole and making your own pertinent Reflections at the close of the trip.”

  She didn’t wait for us to respond, but none of us would have, anyway. Instead, she checked us all over, set the dials on her cuff to the correct date, and pressed the button that changed the lights on her wrist from red, to yellow, to green before a blue light surrounded us, and the Academy pod disappeared.

  England, United Kingdom, Earth Before - August 12, 2022 C.E. (Common Era)

  We landed in a remote area of countryside on the outskirts of London, a city that, we’d learned from our research, used to be a metropolitan hodgepodge of cultures and beliefs but in the past decade, had become a segregated nightmare.

  Tensions rose between religious groups, political parties, and every other fault line our current society outlawed when we’d established the colonies in Genesis. It hadn’t taken long at all—less than two decades—for England to fracture under the weight of xenophobia. The entire world followed, everyone retreating to their separate corners, armed to the teeth and holding fast to their beliefs. Compromise became a thing of the past.

  Then, this.

  My heart caught as we approached a towering, electrified barbed wire fence that
reached twenty feet off the ground. A reinforced gate made of wrought iron barred our entrance, but Maude made quick work of it, using a universal device that was developed a decade ago for decoding any lock produced after the electronic era.

  We stepped through, the soles of our shoes kicking up dust. The sun beat down on my shoulders, making me glad of my white shirt even as sweat popped out all over my skin. Given that the environments at home were strictly controlled due to our terraforming, our bodies struggled to acclimate to extremes of either kind. Misery set in fast.

  Or maybe it was the general feeling of gloom attached to the environment on the other side of the gates.

  The buildings were small and identical, manufactured homes that reached as far as the eye could see. Small plots of vegetables were scattered between them, and a couple of longer buildings sat in the foreground—guards’ quarters, I knew. Towers flanked the enclosure, men with large rifles strolling along the turrets waiting for someone to make a wrong move. My heart sped up, hoping that our research and our embedded tech would be good enough to keep it from being one of us.

  I knew it was. The overseers had made this trip dozens of time.

  Without discussing it, we split up into smaller groups. The idea was to blend in, and Yumi stayed close to my side. We weren’t exactly lookalikes, but for the day, our dark hair and dark complexions would let us blend in, and we’d both chosen to wear hijab, as well. The headscarf was illegal in all of the Western world by this time.

  These camps were an exception. Not technically a part of the world surrounding them, and the people inside had no assurances they would ever be released.

  “This place…this is not a good place,” Yumi whispered, her British accent flawless thanks to the filaments woven into her brainstem. It clashed oddly with her Eastern features, but London had been diverse enough that even if she earned a few odd looks, we thought she would be okay.

  Her eyes were wide and moist, the horrible atmosphere of the camp infecting both of us as we made our way toward other people.

  “Nope,” I replied, a sense of déjà vu sweeping over me. In my mind, Yumi and I had had a similar conversation the day we walked through one of Hitler’s camps in the days after the end of the Second World War.

  But she wasn’t really there.

  A shiver zipped down my spine, one that had nothing to do with this awful place.

  Those camps, the ones Adolf Hitler built, had been ended by the action of Oz’s ancestors, according to Levi. An action that had been erased, or at least altered, by whatever the Elders had done in the past weeks.

  We fell silent as we approached a group of teenagers. They lounged in a group on the stoops of two next-door “homes,” listless in the heat. Some of the boys wore long hair hidden by turbans, beards covering their faces, but others were clean-shaven and wearing shorts with their graphic T’s. The girls were the same—some donning traditional garb and others choosing to adopt the modern clothing of the era—and their choices didn’t seem to cause any separation within the larger group.

  They were all brown-skinned, dark eyes bored as they scanned books or the horizon, the sun beating off inky hair. Yumi and I took seats on opposite stoops, no one seeming to notice or care who we were or where we came from. New people were assigned to the camps every day, plus they had no reason to question anything. All of their autonomy, their connection with the outside world, had been stripped away when they walked through those gates.

  “I heard they were going to let us go back to our countries,” one boy said, a tinge of hope flowing beneath his words, cracked like an almost-dry stream in the desert. “As a choice, instead of staying in this shithole.”

  A second boy snorted but didn’t look up from his book, a faded copy of something called The Hunger Games.

  “You think that’s funny?” the first boy challenged, his fingers balled into fists. Anger crackled in the air, ignited in an instant.

  The second boy didn’t respond, though several of the others shifted slightly toward one or the other, as if they anticipated having to either take sides or move out of the way once the inevitable fight broke out.

  My eyes met Yumi’s. In my head, her voice rang loud and clear, echoing my own thoughts. “They’re ready to blow at the slightest thing. Anything. Watch out.”

  I nodded before looking away to let her know I’d heard. I’d sensed it, too—they were on edge. The tiniest slight, real or imagined, would tip them.

  The only thing that kept them balanced was that the second boy didn’t seem inclined to rise to the bait. He closed his book slowly, deliberately, turning down the page to mark his place before making eye contact with his aggressive inmate. “No. But home, Rahim? England is home, for me and for you, and for ninety percent of the people in this god-forsaken place. Not wherever they want to send us and act like it’s some kind of gift.”

  The second boy’s calm demeanor and logical response didn’t have much effect on Rahim’s anger, at least not at first. Then he blew out a breath and uncurled his fingers, leaning back against the concrete step but not relaxing his shoulders, or taking his eyes off his opponent. “How do you know it wouldn’t be better there, Kiaan? Tell us that.”

  “Better where? Afghanistan? Syria? Iran?” The boy, Kiaan, seemed to realize he was still being baited, but maintained his relaxed posture and even tone.

  His knees cradled the book, and as I stared at it, my glasses pulled up a description and other random details—about the author and sales reports, among other things. The story had been successful, a description of a future on Earth gone horribly wrong…which had turned into something too close to reality not long after its publication.

  “Those places are hellholes, my friend. They made sure of that before they ever locked us up in here—why do you think our people have been running like hell since long before we were born?” Frustration bled from Kiaan’s voice, then. Fire sparked in his chocolate eyes, passion ignited by his certainty that he was right—that England was home, for better or for worse.

  “Maybe it’s not like that now that they feel as if the threats have been neutralized within their borders here, and in the United States,” a pretty, plump girl said in a quiet voice. The broken expression on her round face suggested that though she wanted to believe what she’d said, in reality she either didn’t, or couldn’t.

  “Yeah. We’ve been locked up in here for over ten years, Kiaan.” Rahim came to the girl’s defense, or perhaps simply clung to her argument. “We have no idea how it is out there anymore. But doesn’t it have to be better than being locked in here, no education or future, regardless of where we live?”

  “I don’t see how,” the calm boy responded. “Not if those places our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents came from are still torn apart by war, bombs being dropped on innocent people, women being oppressed. At least here, we have each other. We’re safe.”

  “Unless we step out of line,” a second girl muttered, anger tightening her jaw. Rage oozed out of her, bleeding into the air and tugging at my stomach. “They kill us if we give them the slightest reason. Not to mention that the government of this country you seem to think deserves your loyalty, Kiaan…they’re making sure that we can never succeed on the outside. We haven’t been to school. We have no idea how to exist with the advances in technology, or how the political climate has changed. Do you need any more proof that they’re never letting us out of here alive?”

  The rest of the group nodded, their discontent and fear gathering into a cloud set to loose lightning at the slightest provocation.

  Kiaan looked unsure for the first time since he entered the conversation, however unwillingly, a few moments earlier. “So, what do you suggest, Samaira? That we revolt? Or give up?”

  “Either is better than holding out hope,” she shot back, folding her arms. “Reading the stupid books in that ancient library thinking it’s going to save you.”

  The kids fell silent and I caught Yumi’s eye again,
wondering if we should get up and wander around since we only had another twelve minutes before we were to meet the others at one of the abandoned houses toward the rear of the compound. She gave me an eyebrow raise and I nodded, agreeing that it might be best to get at least one more perspective.

  The kids, I thought, had been helpful for understanding the mindset of the Muslims of the time, if only through the frustrated lens of a trapped teenager. The first girl, the one with no name, gave us a timely out when she stood and stretched, walking down the stairs and heading off without an explanation. It gave Yumi and me the excuse to do the same.

  We moved together, my nerves increasing with every step we took deeper into the camp. Or maybe hers were influencing mine, it was hard to say. Either way, by the time we passed another group of people, older ones this time, neither one of us slowed down. They were working in a garden in total silence, sweat pouring off of them and blank, empty stares on their faces that made looking at them physically painful.

  We stepped between two houses, only a few away from our destination, when a soft thud stopped us mid-step. The two of us froze, and my pounding heart climbed into my throat, as we heard the same sound again, then a third and fourth time.

  Our brainstem tats filtered the sound, analyzed it, and popped a message up on our glasses—silenced gunshots. My stomach tried to reject its contents but I hadn’t eaten since last night. Instead of giving in to the desire to turn and run, I crept forward, looking for the source. Yumi stayed close at my side, her breath coming in panicked gasps as we peered around the corner of the second house and glimpsed a line of people against the back fence.

  Her hand snuck into mine and I squeezed tight.

  The people all wore traditional Muslim garb. A litany of facts danced in front of my eyes, obscuring my view. I flicked them all away with a practiced eye movement, forcing myself to breathe as we stared at the events in real time. Three guards—I assumed, based on their black uniforms, armbands, and the guns held steady in their hands—worked their way from one end of the group to the other.