Return Once More (13 page)

The questions were so Analeigh. She saw everything, remembered everything, and analyzed it quicker than any other Historian in our class, or any class, for that matter.

“That girl? Her name was Rosie Shapiro. She's Jonah's True.” I paused, running my fingers over the dials on his cuff. “I think he warned her.”

“What?” Analeigh gasped, her mouth falling open.

“I saw it in her eyes. She
knew.
”

My best friend wasted no time grabbing her personal comp and punching up the archived files on the Triangle Fire. The holo-files could only be accessed from the Archives, along with all of the stored reflection, but everything else could be viewed remotely.

“It says here that Rosie Shapiro died in the fire. That she jumped out the window on the eighth floor and was claimed by her family two days later.”

I nod. “I know. I saw it before we left, when I was looking her up.”

Analeigh kept scrolling, her eyebrows drawn into a sharp point across the bridge of her nose. “Wait. Oh my stars, look at this.”

Her face went white as she shoved her comp in my face. I grabbed it, scanning the list containing details on over a hundred dead girls without seeing anything worth freaking out over. “What?”

“There are two records for Rosie Shapiro.” She leaned over and stabbed her finger at the screen, rolling it back up until she found the entry that caught her eye. “There.”

Her breathless wheezing infected my own nerves. I peered at the screen, my heart catching in my chest when I saw what she'd seen a moment ago: another Rosie Shapiro. She had the same date of birth as the one on Jonah's little blue card, but her date of death was different. According to this second archive, Rosie Shapiro had escaped the Triangle factory via the roof and died in Chicago, Illinois at the age of eighty-seven.

“Impossible,” I breathed, unwilling to admit that my brother had changed history even after seeing her leave the building with my own two eyes.

“Well, something happened, because according to our archives, Rosie Shapiro both survived and perished in that fire we saw today.” Analeigh paused. “She survived. Somehow. Even though in those original victim rosters, she definitely didn't.”

“It was Jonah.” My heart settled a little with the admission, making room for the slightest bit of wonder. The tiniest sliver of jealousy that Jonah had been able to save the girl he loved.

At what cost?

Analeigh took the comp back, reading in silence. Her fingers worried at the pieces of lint on her quilt as my mind stumbled through the implications of this entire scenario. The only thing we knew for sure was that Rosie left the Triangle when she wasn't meant to. I felt pretty solid in my assumption that Jonah had warned her at some point during his stint with the Historians, given their connection, but what I couldn't wrap my mind around was how he could have known the resulting ripples wouldn't implode the world as we knew it.

“Does it say any more about her? The Rosie that lived?”

“A little. She married and moved to Chicago in her early twenties. Had six children with her husband—they were married for fifty years before he died. She did an interview once for the paper about surviving the tragedy, and said how every year on March 25th she had a panic attack. That she never locked her doors again, not ever, after that day.” Analeigh pushed her glasses up on her nose, squinting closer at the screen. The gears in her head ground almost audibly as she tried to make sense of this unique and possibly horrifying scenario. “If Jonah really changed this, if he really warned her and she lived when she wasn't supposed to, he could have killed us all, Kaia.”

The Elders taught us that the reason we couldn't interact at all was because no one could predict the spiderweb effect of altering even one insignificant life, one innocuous day. There were simply too many options. Perhaps Rosie Shapiro had been no one of consequence, but what if she'd given birth to a murderer who'd strangled John F. Kennedy before he became president? From there, what if the man elected in his place had started a nuclear war with Cuba?

The entire existence of human history could be altered by slipping a single, tiny block out of place. Saving Rosie Shapiro could have made every single one of us disappear.

As much as I loved my brother, as hard as I wanted to believe in him, my throat burned with shame. Tears filled my eyes and I bit my lip as I nodded, bunching the quilt in my fists. “I know.”

The alarm signaling the end of lunch interrupted us, but neither of us moved. We were due in the next Reflection session in five minutes for a quick debrief on the Triangle Fire so that didn't leave much time for melting down. Along with all of the thoughts about my brother and the rules we'd both broken, I was wondering how Rosie lived with herself all those years. How could she leave all of those girls to die?

The answer to the last question seemed obvious enough—she had to, and Jonah would have known that. If those 146 girls
hadn't
died, women's and workers' rights would have been delayed by years. The leaps the United States made in the early twentieth century in proper working conditions, which propelled the country to a place of prominence in the world, would have been hampered or stalled.

It horrified me that people had to see those burned, broken bodies lying in the street with their own eyes before taking action made sense to them. But they hadn't died for nothing.

“If he saved her, Kaia, when do you think he did it?” Analeigh's voice shook. It brought me back to the present. Genesis. Sanchi.

“I don't know.” I hadn't thought about the logistics. Jonah had disappeared nearly three years ago, the year he'd been certified a full Historian. “Maybe that's what made him leave.”

The Elders could have found out. The lecture Booth had passed along yesterday sprang to mind, along with his mention of my brother and the strange reference to changing the past—it sort of made sense.

He could have been talking about Jonah and Rosie.

“If it's been three years, we should have seen repercussions from the alteration.” Analeigh stood, running her fingers through her long blond waves. Bags drooped under her eyes that hadn't been there before we left this morning.

Fatigue rolled balls of lead through my limbs, too. I wanted to skip the afternoon and hide under the covers. I wanted to forget the looks on those girls' faces as they leaped to their deaths, stop wondering what Jonah had done and whether or not he had broken everything. Most of all, I wanted—
needed
—to forget the whisper in the back of my mind wondering if I could do the same for Caesarion. Save him.

I had to believe my brother wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been sure we'd all be safe. Jonah and I were alike—impulsive but not reckless. Not dumb.

“I guess he got lucky,” I finally replied to Analeigh's question as she reached a hand down to pull me to my feet.

“What are you planning?” Analeigh rummaged in her desk and handed over a protein tab before chewing one herself.

“Nothing. What do you mean?”

“You always answer with a question when you're up to something. You never told me where you snuck off to the other day, and you never, ever talk about Jonah in front of people the way you did at lunch.” She braided her long hair into a single plait that hung over one shoulder, then crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Don't tell me the only reason you're hanging onto that cuff is for sentimentality's sake. You're not that kind of girl. I want to know what's going on with you, Kai. We used to tell each other everything. What happened?”

My heart climbed into my throat. “I don't want you to get in trouble.”

“I don't want
you
to get
in trouble. But I'm your friend, and that's what you do. I don't approve of the unnecessary risk taking, but I won't tattle.” Her huge green eyes were earnest behind her glasses.

The stubborn friendship in them broke down the last of my resolve, no matter how selfish it felt to include her in my subterfuge. Maybe telling her
one
more thing would be okay. “I want to use the cuff to go see Jonah before this morning's heist.”

She surprised me a little by not even flinching. “Why?”

“I want to know why he left.” It wasn't my prepared answer. I had meant to tell her it was to ask about Rosie and how he could be sure the future hadn't been irrevocably damaged. To do our duty as Historians, to ensure the future by protecting the past, but my heart ached to know why he'd abandoned our family. Left me alone.

Her eyes softened, and she turned her palm up, grasping my fingers. “I know you do. But do you really think he's going to tell you? It could be dangerous.”

“Jonah would never hurt me.” Physically.

“I know that. I can't imagine your brother hurting anyone—he always seemed like the nicest guy, to me—but those people he's with now … those pirates.” She wrinkled her nose. “Jonah can't control them. He's
one
of them, and you need to accept that we don't know what he's capable of anymore.”

Jonah had taken on an older brother role with all of my friends, and Analeigh had been especially attached to him. Sometimes it slipped my mind that she'd lost him, too. “I'll be careful. I'll get there ten minutes early and stake it out, then grab him when the fewest people are around.”

“I'm coming with you.”

“No, Analeigh. You have a perfect record. You'll be able to pick your specialty at the end of next year, work in whatever era you want. I can't ask you to jeopardize that because I'm a big fat baby about missing my stupid brother.”

“First, you're not fat, or a baby. Second, for all the things Jonah is, stupid isn't one of them. Third, if he has changed the past, we need to know. We're Historians, Kaia, and I know that means as much to you as it does to me. Our job isn't only to observe and record the past. We have to protect it, to make sure that it all transpires like it's supposed to, so that everyone we love in Genesis is still here at the end of the day. It's our duty. The Elders would understand.”

The determination shining in her gaze surprised me. Analeigh never broke rules. Not ever, not the tiniest one. I could kid myself about there being no precedent for using an illegal cuff to time travel without an overseer, or believe they would somehow praise us for taking our job so seriously instead of reporting the discrepancies regarding Rosie and Jonah, but those were lies. None of our actions would come without a sanction, probably a big one, if they caught us, but the thought of having Analeigh with me choked back my protests. I threw my arms around her neck as Sarah stumbled into the room.

“Whoa, is there something you guys need to tell me?” Sarah asked, staring at us from the doorway. She grinned and it lit up her face. Rooms always brightened when Sarah stepped into them, but now her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were a little glassy.

“Someone just got kissed,” I sang in an obnoxious tone, grinning back.

“What? No, I didn't. We were working out!”

“I'll bet you were,” I teased.

“Is that what it's called now? Working out?” Analeigh gave Sarah a wicked wink. “Maybe that's why I haven't been on a date in a while—I'm behind on the lingo.”

Sarah stripped off her sweaty shirt and tossed it onto Analeigh's head. My best friend shrieked and pawed it away. A nasty, wet sock hit my nose and cut off my snickers. Sarah escaped into the bathroom, still hurling damp clothes at us as she disappeared.

And for a few minutes, I forgot about Caesarion and Rosie and Jonah's potentially putting us all at risk. About how I might do the same.

The whole getting-up-hours-before-breakfast thing wasn't my favorite part of my newfound independence, but it
was
the best time to use Jonah's cuff without getting caught. At night there were alarms set at the Academy's exterior doors, supposedly for our safety but probably more to ensure none of us snuck out for romantic trysts. The Elders took their jobs as teachers and fill-in parents very seriously, though they either pretended ignorance or really didn't realize there were a host of spots inside the Academy used for that purpose.

There were no official rules on procreation or marriage and divorce, but after fifty years of indoctrination, social responsibility governed every decision. It meant that even though we had free access to multiple forms of birth control, and most of us dated and fooled around, we were careful not to waste our future on teenage flings.

Unless you were Sarah and Oz.

Oz was acting like nothing had happened between us in the hall the other day. I did, too, but a cloud of suspicion hung between us that had never existed before, and it surprised me that our friends hadn't noticed. He was lying. I was lying. We both knew it.

I shook away my uneasiness over Oz's recent attitude change, promising myself I would check his bio information again the next time I was in the Archives. Sarah had been a good friend to me for over five years, and True Companion or not, she needed to know what kind of guy she'd drawn in the genetics lottery.

“Okay, so you know how to work that thing?” Analeigh pointed at Jonah's cuff, all lit up with red lights in the quiet, deserted air lock.

I'd insisted on swiping my tat again instead of letting her do it. No one had to know she'd come along. We both shivered in the freezing pod, tugging our cloaks tighter almost in tandem.

“Yes.” I paused, sticking a rubber band between my teeth to buy some time. By the time my hair sat atop my head in a messy bun, a presentable response that had nothing to do with the fact that I'd already used it spilled out. “We've seen the overseers do it hundreds of times.”

Blending in on Roma wouldn't be a concern, so we didn't worry about changing our clothing or appearance. People in all manner of Academy garb, not to mention varying factory uniforms, would be around, so we wouldn't seem out of place. It made sense that the pirates would find enough cover there, as well.