The Fifty-Seven Lives of Alex Wayfare (36 page)

When I reached for the clothes, I made sure not to touch his hands. I didn't care that I'd known him in my past life. I didn't know him now. “Can you turn around?”

“Oh. Of course.”

He went back to the closet, his back to me, and pulled a white T-shirt over his pale torso. I turned away from him and slipped into my clothes as fast as I could. I peered over my shoulder to see if he was peeking, but he wasn't. Not that he probably hadn't already seen what I was covering up.

When I sat on the concrete floor to pull my socks and shoes on, he sat on the edge of the bed in front of me, elbows on his knees. His hands were clasped, his forefingers pressed together, pointing at the floor. We watched each other.

So this guy was my boyfriend in this past life. I guess I could see why I liked him. He was cute, in a boyish, nerdy, emo sort of way. He hadn't stopped frowning since I landed, but it was an appealing frown. The brooding kind you see immortalized as “art” in hipster magazines and photographs. Unlike Ear Nibbler, whose arrogant scowl I wished I could erase from my memory, this boy's frown came straight from a sad and troubled soul.

He kind of reminded me of me.

He leaned back, his palms planted on the mattress behind him. There was an insignia on his T-shirt – a circular red logo bearing the words: AIDA Headquarters, Washington DC. In the center of the circle were three letters.

LVI.

 

CHAPTER 29

 

 

“You're Levi?” I asked, my mouth hanging open.

His lips parted in surprise. He sat up. “You know who I am in the future?”

“I know of you.”

He leaned forward. “Am I still alive?” He held me in an intense gaze, as if the whole world hinged on the answer to that question.

“I... don't know.” I couldn't look at him when I said it.

He let out a breath. His shoulders fell. “Oh. So, we're not…” He glanced at the bed and the rumpled blanket and sheets.

He didn't have to finish his sentence. I knew what he meant. “No. We're not together. We've never met. I've just heard your name.”

His frown deepened, as if that were possible. A thousand unspoken sentences passed between us. Finally he looked over at me, almost reluctantly. “What's your name?” His voice was soft. Restrained.

I lifted my chin. “I can't tell you.” How did I know it wouldn't get back to Gesh?

“Why are you here?”

“I need to talk to Nick.” I shook my head. That wasn't his name in this life. “I mean Tre.”

Levi's eyes narrowed. “Why can't you talk to him in your Base Life?” When I didn't answer, he said, “You aren't partners anymore, are you?”

I didn't want to answer that. I didn't want to tell him anymore than I had to. “I just need to talk to him. Can you tell me where he is?”

“He's still in recovery. He really shouldn't have visitors. Besides, you're not scheduled to be down in the labs today. You have the day off. That's why we…” He glanced at the bed again. The rumpled blankets.

I pushed myself to my feet. “It's really important I speak to him. Just tell me where to find him. I'll go myself.”

“You don't have the proper clearance.”

“I'm a Transcender. Level Five. Doesn't that mean I'm ranked pretty high?”

“Yes,” he said, annoyed. “But that refers to your clearance in Limbo, not the research labs. Descenders aren't allowed in the labs without a supervisor present.”

“Who are the supervisors?”

“Hr Flemming or Hr Gesh.”

He pronounced it “hare,” making me think he was German. I took German my freshman year, and we had to address our teacher, Mr Juniper, as Herr Juniper.

“Are they the only ones with the proper clearance?” I asked.

Thunder rolled outside. Levi sighed through his nose. “No.” He leaned across the bed and grabbed what looked like a key card and a pair of glasses from the window ledge. He gave me an I-hope-I-don't-regret-this look, and said, “Come on.” He swung wide the heavy steel door behind me, and I followed him out into a brightly lit, empty hallway.

That's when I really saw him for the first time, bathed in that bright light.

Dark blond hair. Dark brown eyes. Wire-rimmed glasses.

Levi was the little boy from my memory at AIDA. Not Blue. Levi was the one I remembered so strongly that the mere thought of him brought on the strongest déjà vu. Levi was my ever-present link to Limbo. My key to the past.

Why hadn't Porter mentioned him? He must've meant a great deal to me in this life. More than Blue, which seemed weird. Wasn't Blue supposed to be my soul mate? But maybe Porter had meant “mate” as in friend. That our souls were companions. Maybe he hadn't meant the star-crossed fated lover definition at all.

Levi strode purposefully down the hall to an elevator at the end. I kept pace, staring at him, trying to remember more about him. Anything at all. I didn't like the idea of having lovers in other lifetimes only to forget they existed. It seemed heartless and cruel.

He swiped his card through a card reader on the wall. It beeped and a tiny green light blinked. The elevator doors slid open. We stepped inside and he used his card again to gain access to the lowest level of the building.

The doors closed. We started to descend. It was silent inside, no elevator music, no beeping to signal the passing of floors, only the rumble of the cables lowering us. We stood side-by-side. Levi kept his eyes forward, still frowning. I kept stealing glances at him.

I couldn't remember anything about him, this boy attached to my Polygon stone. We were strangers on an elevator, and I didn't want it to be that way. I didn't want to be the cause of his perpetual frown. Something told me Ivy never made him frown like that.

“Are you a Descender too?” I asked, my voice coming out louder than I anticipated in the small space. “Is that why you have a number for a name like Ivy?”

“No.” His tone was flat. “I'm just a Sub.”

“What's a sub?”

“A Sublunary,” he said, like I was stupid for not knowing. “It means I'm earthbound. Subs are those who can't ascend to Limbo. We're foot soldiers. We do the work here in the present, while the Descenders do the work in the past.”

“Is that why you have security clearance and I don't?”

“Partly. And partly because I'm Hr Flemming's medical apprentice. I help him with his experiments.”

Again with the Hr Flemming thing. “Are you German?”

He wrinkled his nose at me. “Of course not.”

“You sound German.”

“I do not sound German. I sound Danish. And you sound American.” He said American like it was a dirty word.

“Did I not sound American before?”

He returned his attention to the elevator doors ahead of him. “No. Ivy's Danish. Like me.”

Danish. That must be the language I remember he and Gesh speaking in my memories. If I could understand Danish in my memories, did that mean I could speak it too? I relaxed my shoulders, gave in to my host body's instincts, and said, “Denne elevator er sÃ¥ langsom.” This elevator is so slow.

Levi's dark brown eyes snapped to mine. “Don't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Talk like Ivy. You're not Ivy.”

He was angry with me all of a sudden, and I didn't understand why. Was it because I no longer knew him in the future? Was he upset that I'd come to see Blue and not him? “I didn't mean to make you mad.”

“Of course you didn't,” he said with a scowl. “All you meant to do was descend into my girlfriend's body, demand I risk my neck to take you into a high security area–”

“Hey.” I stood up straighter. Taller. “I didn't demand anything from you. If you don't want to come along, just give me your key card. I'll go on my own.”

“Right, and once you've got what you came for, you'll go back to Limbo and leave Ivy to get caught using my credentials. I think not.”

He was so bitter, so mad at me. I could feel it rolling off his skin like heat. But I couldn't blame him. I recognized the look in his eyes. The frustration in his fists. It was the same frustration I felt when I saw Blue in 1961. When he didn't remember me and recoiled from my touch. The moment it dawned on me that the Blue I knew was gone. His body was still there, still standing before me, but a light switch had gone off. I was no longer a part of his life. Snap. Just like that. Everything we shared together meant nothing to him anymore.

I was a stranger to Levi. A stranger standing there in his loved one's body.

“Believe it or not,” I said, “I know how you're feeling right now. I can tell you really loved Ivy, and–”

He shot a glare at me. “No, I love Ivy. Love. Present tense. She's not gone yet.”

“OK. You love Ivy. I get it. But you don't have to be a jerk to me. I'm not staying long. Once I'm gone, everything can go back to the way it was.”

He turned his shoulders to face me, his glare even more piercing. “Nothing can go back to the way it was. Nothing. When you leave, Ivy won't remember your descent, but I will.”

I didn't know what he was getting at. “So?”

“So?” He wiped his mouth with his hand like he was about to lose all patience with me. “How many years did you travel back in time?”

I hesitated. I bit my lip. “Seventeen.” Or was it eighteen? It was confusing because of those nine months Mom was pregnant with me. Did I account for those? I had no idea.

“Seventeen. Do you know what that means?”

I just stared at him. I had no idea.

“For Christ's sake, who's handling your training in your Base Life?” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Here. Let me put it in simple terms you might actually understand.”

I glared at him. My compassion for his situation had one leg out the window, disappearing fast.

“It means that any day now, any week now, Ivy's going to die. Do you understand that? Do you get it? She's going to die to make room for you. So you can be born. Someone who won't remember who I am. I can't unlearn that. I can't just act like everything's fine. And every time I look at her, I'll wonder how much longer I have until she dies and you're reborn.”

It was like a punch in the gut. Like the time Claire kicked me in the stomach on accident when I wouldn't stop tickling her. That churning, sickening feeling that makes you double over. The thought of Ivy dying never crossed my mind. All this time I thought it made things easier if Levi knew who I was. I guess it only made things easier for me. My compassion fell back in through the window with a thud. The window slammed shut.

“But I do remember you,” I said, clambering to fix what I'd broken, to make him feel better. “I remember some things. We played Polygon together. I remember the first time you beat me–”

“Stop.” He cut me off with a raise of his hand. He clenched his jaw, like I was hurting him even more.

I tried harder. I needed to make his hurt go away. “I can make it so you don't remember any of this. I can erase this timeline and make it so I never came here. I just have to do a touchdown–”

“Don't you dare.” He glowered down at me, his eyes almost black behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Don't you dare take my memories away from me. You don't have that right. What makes you think you have that right?”

“Then what do you want me to do? Tell me, and I'll do it.”

The elevator landed softly with a clunk. The doors scraped open. Levi strode out into another long hallway, this one even more brightly lit, looking like a hospital wing. I hurried after him.

“Levi?” I said, catching up.

He wouldn't look at me. “I want you to get what you came for,” he said. “Then I want you to leave and never come back.”

I felt wretched. I couldn't help but wonder if I'd made a horrible mistake by descending. I couldn't even remember why I'd descended in the first place. Why hadn't I just waited and talked to Porter after school? What had been my rush?

In the end it wouldn't matter what Levi said or wanted. I had to erase this timeline whether he liked it or not. I had already made too much of an impact on him. What he knew now would change the course of his life. I hated to do it to him, but I didn't have a choice.

We came to two double doors, which Levi unlocked with his key card. He nudged one of the doors open a crack and peered through. Then he motioned for me to follow him into another bare, sterile hallway. No windows. No other doors. Just white walls and a sloping concrete floor leading down to yet another hallway at the end.

How far had we gone underground?

When we came to the end of that hallway, Levi peered around the corner. I wasn't sure what he was watching out for. If someone came along, it wasn't like there was anywhere for us to hide.

He pulled on my sleeve, letting me know the coast was clear, and we continued around the corner. The hallway opened up into a large open area. Standing before us was a wide, brightly lit room with windows all the way around like the newborn nursery at a hospital. Dad took me to the nursery to look in the windows when Audrey and Claire were born. As we neared it, however, it looked nothing like a nursery inside. It looked far more foreboding than that.

It was a robotics surgical lab. I'd seen one once at the AIDA Institute when Mom brought me in for a tour of her department. A huge, spider-like machine with half a dozen robotic arms stood in the center of the room, arched and poised over an empty surgical table. It looked futuristic, even for my Base Life. There were dozens of monitors and other machines scattered around the room, and wires and hoses snaked across the floor. Large, disc-shaped surgical lights hung from the ceiling. At the back of the room, a man with short, curly, caramel-colored hair, dressed in a white lab coat and black slacks, stood with his back to us. He seemed to be laying out quite the collection of sharp, nasty-looking stainless steel tools on a prep table.