Loop (6 page)

It was everyone’s first lesson. The Doctrine of Inevitability. Otherwise known as “You can’t change the past.” Not even if someone really wanted to. Not even if someone tried desperately hard. Not even if there was one minuscule moment in the past that sucked my whole future into a swirling black hole. And it didn’t matter how hard I wished and I prayed to go back to that one moment and change it, the black hole was still there sucking me down, down, down.…

Stop. The past cannot be changed.

Neither girl answered my question, but they stopped scuffling when I released their arms.

Future Molly glared at her past self. “If you’d only listen to me—”

“Did
you
listen to you?” I asked, knowing Future Molly must remember this incident.

Future Molly heaved a sigh. “No.”

“Then cut her, er, yourself some slack. Now off to bed, both of you.” I put my hand on Future Molly’s shoulder. “Wait. How did you get here?”

The question perked the girl up. “Private Shift Pad. My grandparents surprised us with one for Christmas. It even has auto-transport.”

Wow.
Molly’s family was loaded.

“Thanks for ruining the surprise.” Present Molly folded her arms across her chest.

“Oh, stop whining; you’ll forget about it in a week,” said Future Molly.

I stepped back between the two girls. “Time to synch, Molly. Careful going back.”

With a nod, the girl opened her QuantCom and faded away. Present Molly looked like a canary-filled cat.

I got in her face: “Listen to her. And study. This is important stuff, you know. People can … can get hurt.”

The grin vanished from Molly’s face like everyone’s did when they remembered my mother—what I represented to all Shifters. Molly scurried backward toward her room. “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll study, Bree. I promise, I will.”

No, you won’t,
I wanted to say. But I knew there was no point.

*   *   *

The overhead lights in the hallways had already dimmed. I ran my hand along the cool, granite wall. The Institute had been the only constant, only solid thing in my life for six months now. There wasn’t a square inch of it I didn’t love. Once upon, this building had housed the U.S. Department of Education. Now it held the Division of Temporal Studies. I passed my corridor and kept walking. Lights in the computer lab were on, and I peeked through the door. Nobody there.

“Log on: Bree Bennis.”

I stood in one of the raised ovals that lined the floor. Virtual envelopes appeared in the air and swirled around until they formed a big, jumbled stack in front of me. My in-box hadn’t been sorted in months, but after flipping through the new messages on top I gave up and shoved them back in a folder. Even though they were only soligraphs—holographs that felt solid to the touch—the folder wouldn’t shut all the way. A warning message popped up midair: “You are close to your storage limit. Please categorize and dispose of nonessential items.”

“Later.” I crammed the folder to the side.

Another warning appeared: “I mean it, Bree. It’s time to clean out your in-box.”
Sassy computers. Meh.

A fresh message popped up in my box. It glowed a deep jade green, and when I opened it I let out an almost audible hiss. It was another brochure from Resthaven, the only free care facility available for my mother. They’d been sending me information since right after Mom’s accident. My mother was going to get better, thank you very much. No one could
prove
she’d gone off the deep end. I tore the pixels into tiny bits before I hit delete.

All right, down to business. I had one shot at this midterm, and Dr. Quigley was a notorious stickler for accurate historical details and descriptions. Her mantra rang in my ears like she was there in the room with me:
I don’t want to hear about our past. I want to hear about
their
present.

I stared at the blank spaces. Even after spending a full evening with Finn’s family, I knew nothing about them. Except their son was a snerkwad.

What had he called me—a lunatic? Oh, yeah,
I’m
the crazy one. I wasn’t the one who had lied to him all these years. If he was going to be mad at anybody, it should be his father. Not that I blamed Shifters in the past for hiding. They were a danger to themselves and others! Hurtling through time and space at random. No, it was better now. The inconvenience of the chip and transporters was such a small price to pay for stability, for safety, for control.

And, of course, for the cure.

Ugh.
Why was I allowing this family a single crevice of my brain? They’d all been dead for over a hundred years.

And I did know one thing about them: No one could ever know they existed.

So what was I supposed to say? After I took a kid hostage, I wandered aimlessly on the beach and caused a family meltdown? Oh, that would be after I recluctantly gave up on my black market delivery. No. I needed general information, stuff that would slip past Quigley in the stack of reports, that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows or questions.

“Search all files: Muffy van Sloot.”
Nothing. Odd.

Chincoteague Island. More than I ever wanted to know about wild ponies, but nothing with a Muffy or van Sloot. I drummed my fingers against my thigh, then said, “Finn Masterson, Virginia,” and the year I’d visited. Maybe the house could be traced back to a van Sloot.

Nada.

Neither his parents nor sister registered either.

After the second Cold War, pockets of off-the-grid communities had popped up in North America and Europe, but that was well after Finn’s teenage years. Besides, I’d never heard of anyone who managed to live undetected and in the lap of luxury at the same time. I’d also never heard of anyone living in such a way without a good reason.

There couldn’t be
no
trace of them.

I almost started to enter the search term “Haven Beacons” but paused.

Wait.
If there really was no trace of them, it could work in my favor. As long as I kept my presentation tomorrow believable and I didn’t raise any alarms, I could make some stuff up and Quigley would never know. I had reached out to close all the search results when I suddenly couldn’t see them anymore. Warm, calloused hands covered my eyes.

“Guess who,” a gravelly voice whispered in my ear.

“Hey, Wyck,” I said as I shuffled the rest of the results away blindly.

His fingers curled away from my face. “How’d you know it was me?”

Umm, because you smell like a wad of yummy wrapped in a layer of delicious?

“Lucky guess.”

“I thought you’d be in bed by now.” He leaned against a stack of stools pushed up against the far wall of the lab. A lock of dusty blond hair fell across his forehead. He swept it back, but it returned to the same spot the moment his hand fell to his side. I looked down and realized I’d brought my own hand up to push it back again. I lowered it before he noticed.

“You’ve been moving nonstop since you left for your midterm,” he said. “How’d it go by the way?”

“Fine,” I said a little too fast. I smirked and added, “No thanks to you.”

“Ahh, now that’s just mean.” Wyck slouched down farther. “Besides, who’s to say I didn’t land you right where I wanted you?”

“Ha! In the middle of a musket battle?”

“A musket battle?” His left eyebrow formed a perfect arch over those ice blue eyes. “In the twentieth century?”

“Twenty-first. And, okay, it may have been a reenactment.” I let out a little laugh. “More like a parade, actually.”

“Oh, no.” He rushed over and grabbed both my hands. “Were there clowns?”

I let out a fake shudder. “They were everywhere. Ye Olde Clowns. I farce you not.”

As I stood there, hanging out with Wyck, the stress from the assignment faded. He was like a Buzztab for my nerves.

“Sorry you were so far off your target,” he said. “I saw the word ‘island’ and the thought of you landing in water…” His shudder was real. “Guess I erred a little too far on the safe side.”

See, that’s what I loved about Wyck O’Banion. Most transporters would have snipped at me for even joking they’d done their job wrong. But not Wyck. There wasn’t a splinter of a chip on his shoulder.

I realized he was still holding my hands and pretended to cough so I could pull them away. “For a minute there, I thought you missed by two hundred years.”

He leaned in close. “I never miss with you.”

His words made me feel warm inside. I’d never felt that way before, at least around Wyck. We were just friends. I covered my cheeks, sure they were burning up.

“There you are!” My roommate, Mimi, marched into the room, hands on her hips. “Charlie said he almost had to trigger a forced fade. Are you okay?”

Wyck snapped his head up. “A forced fade?”

“No!”
No red flags.
I waved the question off and walked toward Mimi. “It was nothing. Log out! ’Night, Wyck.”

I pushed Mimi out the door and down the hall before Wyck had a chance to ask me anything else. Her blond ponytail whacked me in the face as she swung her head around.

“Seriously, are you all right? Do you need any of my meal rations? That was a long mission … how are you on Buzztabs?”

“Bergin took pity and gave me an override,” I said, “and I’m fine on Buzztabs.”
Too fine.

“Well, I’m glad you’re back. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. Pennedy and Teague broke up. Can you believe it?”

When I didn’t chime in with a comment about our friends’ romantic woes, Mimi waved her hand in front of my face. “Are you really okay? You usually put the rest of us to shame on mission times.”

Used to.
I felt a fresh wave of thankfulness that Mimi had known me long enough and was kind enough to not judge me by the last six months.

“I lost track of time,” I said.

I turned away and wrinkled my nose. I’d never lied to Mimi. But something about the … the
weirdness
of it all held my tongue. That and the fact that if one breath of my encounter with a Shifter got out, there would be no chance of another job from Leto. No chance to pay off my mother’s bills. I’d face suspension and be lucky if they stopped there.

When Mimi and I got to our room, I flopped face-first on my bed. The pillow wrapped my head in sateen silence. I tried to lift my arms, but the most I achieved was a thumb twitch.
Ehh, pajamas shmajamas.
Images from the day swirled against my eyelids—green lights and lip gloss tubes and Finn’s sandy sneakers. Thinking about his shoes gave me a sunken feeling in my stomach for some reason, but I pushed it away. And then I felt a gentle tug on my own boots.

I lifted one eye off the pillow to watch as Mimi lined them up perfectly under the funky-painted chair Mom had made for me. It really was a miracle Mimi and I were as close as we were, given our opposite
everything
. Her side of the room was all white and pink and sleek. Mine was … me. Piles of clothes sorted into clean and not-quite-dirty-enough-for-laundry. My pet fish, Fran, who was still alive by some miracle. (Although that miracle probably went by the name of Mimi.) A bunch of movie posters. I even had a real paper one. I’d inherited Mom’s obsession for anything antique, along with the inability to keep it organized.

“Mimi?” I asked. Only my face was still in the pillow, so it came out, “Mrehmreh?”

“Hmmm?” She sat down at the vanity and ran a brush through her honey silk hair.

My own chin-length bob was a windblown mess. I blew a few brown hairs out of my face as I turned to talk to her. I was one of the only girls at the Institute who kept their hair short. Most Shifters wouldn’t take the risk. On a whim the year before, Mimi had cropped her hair into the cutest pixie cut, then had to trigger an emergency fade two days later burning at a stake in Salem. Needless to say, she used a wig while her hair grew out.

“I’m glad you’re my roomie,” I said.

I expected her to respond with a simple,
Me, too,
but instead she tossed her hairbrush on the counter mid-stroke. Before I could say anything else, she bounded across the room and flounced on my bed next to me. She smooshed me up in a lung-crushing hug.

“As you should be.”

We both busted out giggling, and the tension of the day dissipated. Mimi sat up next to me and smoothed my hair down, or at least the worse-offending side.

“Seriously, though,” she said, giving my hand a tiny squeeze, “I’m the lucky one.”

I started to squeeze it back until she added, “Remember that weirdie that Pennedy got stuck with first year? I could’ve ended up with
her
.”

I slapped Mimi’s wrist instead. “So I’m better than … what was her name?”

“Jennily? Jeffiny?”

“Jafney!” we both yelled at the same time.

“Wow, I haven’t thought about her in forever,” I said.

“I doubt anyone has.” Mimi hopped up and moved back to the vanity. “Except maybe the poor transporter who had to do it.”

“Yeah.” It was the only forced fade I’d ever heard of at the Institute. Jafney had left soon after. I wasn’t sure if she’d been kicked out or her family had brought her home. I’d never wondered before what had happened on that girl’s mission to force them to drag her writhing and screaming back to our time.

I wondered now.

Mimi ran her thumb over the neat row of lotions and elixirs lined up on her vanity. A standing open invitation existed for me to use any that I wanted. Unfortunately, every attempt to try them out, when not under her watchful and expert eye, had resulted in me smelling like a rotten petunia or looking like a drowned water rat.

“You sure you’re okay?” she said, all Mother Hennish. “That last-minute fade must be smarting. You need to rest.”

My head
was
throbbing. It was like all the Buzz had built up and hit me when my feet hit the twenty-third century.

“Mimi, have you ever not gotten the Buzz on a mission?”

“You mean like a really light Buzz?” Mimi stared at me in her mirror without turning around.

“No, I mean like none at all.”