Future Shock (18 page)

21:46

The fire alarm blares, the red lights flashing through the haze of smoke. We enter a large space that looks like a chemistry classroom, with countertops and glass cabinets full of beakers, flasks, and brown bottles with red warning labels. A huge whiteboard on the wall is covered in precisely drawn equations—maybe Future-Adam’s writing? There are no windows, but a hallway leads off to other rooms.

Adam moves to the counters and inspects the equipment there, his face set in something like awe or wonder. He must love all this science stuff.

I scan the room for any sign of evidence, while Chris pops open a panel in the ceiling and helps Zoe out. She coughs from the smoke, but her eyes dance with excitement as she hops to the floor.

I nudge her with my elbow. “See, I knew you could do it.”

She dusts cobwebs off her blue hair and grins. “Piece of cake.”

“So we’re inside. Now what?” Trent asks.

“We need to hurry,” I say, checking my watch. There’s no telling if another guard will show up or if one of the guards will wake early. And we only have a little over two hours left in the future.

Adam puts down the beaker he’s been examining. “It’ll be faster if we split up to search.”

We each pick a room, and I’m hit with a blast of cool air as soon as I enter mine, which has row after row of tall, blinking electronic equipment. Probably not the room we’re looking for, but I spot a desk in the corner and riffle through it, just in case. Finding nothing, I check another room, but it’s just a small kitchen and break room.

Back in the hallway, I study the door at the end that no one picked, with a big orange sign that reads
CAUTION: BIOHAZARD
. I can’t imagine Future-Adam putting the evidence we need in a room like that. I’m not even sure it’s safe for us to go in there without some sort of protective suit.

“Found something,” Trent yells from another room. I rush inside with Chris and Zoe following at my heels. Trent’s standing in the middle of a room full of dusty, old metal filing cabinets. None of them are labeled, but it’s a good bet that Future-Adam stored the information about the old projects here.

“This has to be it,” Chris says.

“What are we looking for?” Zoe asks.

I head for the filing cabinet closest to me and pull open a drawer. “Anything labeled ‘Project Chronos.’”

For a few minutes we search in silence, and the entire time I feel like there’s a ticking clock hanging over us, nudging me to hurry. I quickly skim through the files, my eye catching a Project Lethe and a Project Athena, but I don’t see the one we need.

“Sorry. What’d I miss?” Adam asks as he slips through the doorway. He probably got distracted by more science stuff in another room. This is his lab in the future, so I can’t blame him for being curious about it. It’s another glimpse into his future life. We briefly explain, and he starts searching another filing cabinet.

“Here!” Chris says a minute later. “Project Chronos.”

We crowd around him as he pulls out four thick files and lays them on top of the cabinet. The first one is about the original group of people who went to the future and is dated two years before we signed up. There’s a ton of data about who they were—a mix of scientists and private security—but we flip through to the end, where we find brain scans, medical exams, and a report from Dr. Kapur about the mental state of the patients.

Chris reads a few lines:

Two of the subjects never returned from the future. The three subjects who did return suffered severe memory loss, confusion, and paranoia.

Adam points to something farther down on the page. “It says here the original team was in the future for seventy-two hours, and they thought that might be the cause of their future shock.”

We check the next file and find similar results, although the time in the future was reduced to twenty-four hours to see if that made a difference. Only one person went missing that time, but everyone else returned with the same problems as the first group. For the third group, they kept the length to twenty-four hours but only sent them ten years into the future instead of thirty, in case that was the problem.

I skim over Chris’s shoulder as he reads Dr. Kapur’s report out loud:

Three of the subjects returned with the full effects of future shock and remembered nothing of their time in the future. But two of the subjects returned with lesser memory loss and were able to give us vague information about their experiences. It should be noted that these two subjects were the youngest, at only twenty-two and twenty-three years of age. From the tests we’ve conducted, it appears that the time dilation is too difficult for the adult brain to overcome, even with only a ten-year jump. However, since teenage brains are still developing, they may not have these problems. It is my recommendation that younger subjects be found for the next trial. Ideally below the age of thirteen, though it may be difficult to control subjects of that age or obtain valuable information from them.

“This is it!” Trent says. “We can use this as evidence.”

“Hang on to this.” Chris hands me the report and then opens the last file: our file. And it’s all there—our bios, our medical records, brain scans from before and after, and finally Dr. Kapur’s report from after we returned.

Despite the normal brain scans, all five subjects claim to remember nothing from their time in the future. However, none of them suffer from the confusion and paranoia common in the previous subjects, and they appear to retain their memories from before their visit to the future. This seems to prove the hypothesis that the younger the subject, the fewer effects of future shock they will experience. As such, I recommend conducting the experiment again with younger subjects…

“Normal brain scans,” Trent says. “Maybe we did
lie
about forgetting everything.”

Zoe nods. “Keep going.”

We flip through the report, but there’s nothing about Dr. Kapur or Aether planning to kill us. If they did it, they didn’t leave a record of it behind. I pocket the report anyway.

Chris turns to the last report in the file, written by Lynne about our deaths. I suck in a breath, knowing what’s coming, what the others will learn, but it’s too late to stop them now.

Dr. Kapur theorizes that Elena—possibly due to her eidetic memory—suffered the strongest effects of future shock, yet also remembered brief flashes of her time in the future, resulting in extreme paranoia and confusion. With her history of violent behavior, it seems likely she turned on the other subjects in this confused state and then took her own life once she realized what she had done. We are unsure why the final subject, Adam O’Neill, was unharmed. With this unfortunate turn of events and the loss of the accelerator due to Dr. Walters’s outburst, it is my recommendation that Project Chronos be concluded.

“Elena, what is this?” Zoe asks, her voice high-pitched.

Trent shakes his head. “I don’t understand.
Elena
killed us?”

Chris doesn’t say anything, but his head swivels slowly toward me, and I see murder in his eyes. The files drop back onto the cabinet, and then he lunges for me. I stumble back, my ankle and side screaming, as his hands rush toward me—to hit me or grab me, I don’t know. Adam jumps between us, pushing Chris back, and then everyone starts shouting.

“Stop!” Zoe yells.

Trent holds Chris back by the arm. “Dude, let’s hear what she has to say first!”

“Is. This. True?” Chris gets out between clenched teeth.

I don’t know how to answer. I don’t think it’s true, I don’t want it to be true, but maybe Dr. Kapur is right about future shock and its effect on me. Maybe I will lose my mind when we return and take the others’ lives. And now I understand why I’ll spare Adam’s life. My feelings for him must have stopped me from hurting him, even in my confusion.

“No,” Adam says when I can’t speak. “Aether must be setting her up.”

Chris’s death glare switches to him. “Your knew about this too?” And then back to me. “You both
knew
?”

“I found out at the library,” I say. “But I didn’t think it was true. I don’t have any reason to kill all of you.”

Trent drops Chris’s arm and gapes at me. “You knew about this and you didn’t
tell
us?”

“Because I knew you’d freak out like this!”

“Yeah, no shit!” Chris yells. “All this time,
all this time
, we’ve been trying to find the killer, and all along it was
you
!”

Adam stands in front of me, shielding me with his body. He holds up his hands, looking back and forth between the others. “She’s not the killer, guys. Aether just wants us to think that. We already know we won’t suffer from future shock.”

Chris snorts. “What, you think they planted this report in case we happened to find it in thirty years? No fucking way.”

Trent shakes his head. “We know that Adam doesn’t suffer future shock, but that’s it. Sorry, Elena, but Chris is right. There’s nothing in these files that even hints that Aether is going to kill us.”

Zoe looks unsure, her face turned down to the floor. She sighs. “If this is true, then it’s not your fault, Elena. You can’t do anything about future shock. But…you really should have told us.”

“I know,” I say. “I
know
. I just thought I could fix it or find out more before—”

Our headsets suddenly buzz, and then Lynne’s voice says, “The police are in the lobby. Get out now!”

22:18

We burst out of the lab. Lynne is already in the hallway, waiting. She grabs Adam’s arm. “Did you get it?”

“Yeah, we got it.”

There’s no time to say anything else. We rush down the hall and into the stairwell. My ankle throbs as I limp down the stairs behind the others, and after six flights, my ribs hurt so bad I almost want to lie down and die right there. Chris throws open the door to the parking garage and we dart inside.

“Freeze!” the police yell. “Hands up!”

Two cops stand in front of a police car, their guns pointed at us. No batons this time. Panic spikes in my blood. There’s no way out of this without getting arrested or shot. But with our time in the future running out, we can’t afford to do either.

A lighter flicks, and then Trent lobs one of the smoke bombs at the cops. They duck just long enough for us to start running in different directions as thick, white smoke begins to fill the air. I head toward Future-Adam’s parking spot, while fumbling for the gun in my backpack. I don’t want to use it, but if it’s the only way out of this mess…

Then I hear the unmistakable roar of gunfire and the
plink
of bullets on metal. I drop down, using a car for cover, and my own gun clatters to the ground. Shit, these cops are not messing around.

Lynne crouches next to me, her face pale. I forgot she was still with us. I don’t see any of the others or Future-Adam’s car. I grope around for the gun but can’t find it.

Adam’s voice cries out and my head jerks up. One of the cops twists Adam’s arm back, and when he struggles, the cop bashes him in the face with the butt of his gun. Adam falls, and a guttural scream erupts from my mouth. I grab the edge of the car to haul myself up, but then I hear Lynne yell, “No!”

There’s a loud bang next to me, and everything seems to shift into slow motion. Lynne’s arm jerks back from the recoil of the gun—my gun, now in her hands somehow—at the same time as the cop standing over Adam is knocked back. The cop bounces off the side of a car and then hits the ground with a
thud
. Before I can even process what Lynne has done, another shot fires. She collapses beside me.

For a second I can’t move. She shot him, she killed that cop, and then—oh God, no. I hunch close to the ground, hands trembling as I check her body. Blood gushes out of a hole in her chest and she’s not breathing. She’s already gone. I feel faint. Lynne’s
dead
, and my hands are covered with her blood, and I don’t know where anyone else is or if Adam’s okay, and I have to get out of here,
we
have to get out of here,
right now
.

Zoe appears in the smoke, tears running down her face as she hovers over Lynne’s body. Seeing her clears my head a little. I need to get Adam. We can’t leave without him.

I grab the gun and push myself to my feet, fighting through the pain. Adam’s sprawled on the ground a few feet away, smoke curling around his body. I can’t tell if he’s breathing or not, but he must be alive. He has to be
.

The other cop sees me, but Chris and Trent rush him from behind. They knock off his helmet and force the last chloroform rag over his mouth. While they take him out, I kneel beside Adam. He’s breathing but unconscious, and a long gash on his forehead spurts blood. The other cop lies next to him, but he’s definitely not breathing. A dark pool of blood spreads below his back. I’m paralyzed at the sight, my mind replaying the jerk of Lynne’s arm as she fired the gun. I still can’t believe she did it, that she shot this cop to make sure we could get away, and the price she paid for it.

“Elena, get the car!” Chris yells.

I don’t want to leave Adam, but I don’t know how to help him either. We need to get out of here before more police arrive—they’re probably already in the lobby. I scramble off in the direction of the car, stumbling around on my injured ankle until I find it in the smoke.

I collapse into the car and drive to the others. I’m so exhausted my limbs are shaking, but I find them in the smoke somehow. The boys haul Adam’s body into the backseat, while Zoe slips in beside me. As soon as the doors slam shut, I switch the car to manual and peel out of the garage, tires screeching.

“What about Lynne?” Zoe asks. “We just left her there!”

“She’s dead,” I say. My voice sounds harsh, but I can’t think about her sacrifice without my throat tightening up. We screwed up and she died, but we don’t have time to dwell on that right now. We need to get back to the research facility in the desert before the aperture opens. Once we return to the present, we can fix everything.

I hope.