Return Once More (20 page)

I frowned at my hands. Sometimes I wished they had done the nail polish.

The table comp beeped twice and then displayed a short list of possible connections between the three times and places, giving me a simple, glaring answer. All three were instrumental in the development of guns and ammunition.

The Chinese had invented gunpowder, and it had been introduced to the Western world during the Mongolian invasions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1934, John Garand of Canada had developed the first assault rifle. It said nothing about the Puckle gun being invented in 1717 even though it had been in the Archives the other day when I'd followed Oz—it had only displayed for me during the observation.

And now it was gone.

The memory of him shoving that woman right into James Puckle flashed through my mind. My fingers trembled as I pulled up the man's biography with a few punches. Nothing about his inventing a gun. He'd married a woman named Mary and had children, which matched the information the glasses had given me the other day. Then he'd married again, only … I felt sure his second wife's name hadn't been Elira. It had been something English.

A click on the second wife's name brought up nothing but their wedding photo. It was the woman from the street, the one Oz had shoved into Puckle's path.

There was a paragraph on why their union had been recorded—she had been a Muslim from the region that would become Albania, and their union had changed Puckle's rather rigid, vocal outlook on Muslims as mortal enemies of his own beloved Catholic Church.

There had to have been more about Puckle in the Archives previously, about why and how he'd invented that machine gun. Violence and weapons were one of the five major contributors to our evacuation from Earth Before, so anything related to firearm development would have been cataloged.

Oz's actions had apparently wiped it from the record.

Because of his interference, Mr. Puckle had met Elira instead of Nice Catholic Girl, and it had erased the desire to create advanced weaponry from his mind.

Cold fingers made of fear gripped the back of my neck. How many other things had changed because that gun had never been invented? It seemed like it should be a good thing, slowing down the progress of weapons development, except it didn't matter now. That wasn't the reason Historians were allowed access to the past—not to change it or try to repair mistakes. We couldn't fix history. All we could do was make sure fatal errors didn't happen
again
here in Genesis
.

Oz had heard the same lectures as the rest of us all of these years. His father was an Elder, for Pete's sake. What did they know that the rest of us didn't?

I swiped the search results away, pecking with my fingertips through files on the development of weapons, unsure what exactly I was looking for until I found an early reflection by Minnie Gatling. For the first time, I realized she and her sister descended from
the
Gatlings, a family instrumental in the development of guns in America. My instinct insisted that information and Oz's travels might be connected, but my feeble human brain struggled to connect the dots.

Minnie wrote this particular reflection after visiting a shooting in a Colorado movie theater—it was a trip we no longer took as apprentices because the spray of bullets was unpredictable and hard to map. A Historian overseer had been shot during an observation trip about twenty years ago, and though he hadn't died, we now observed either a shooting at a Columbine high school, in an Australian shopping center, or on the Gaza strip for our lesson on weaponry in the hands of civilians.

Young Minnie's reflection made it clear why she'd been chosen to oversee—the writing was concise, the scene laid out with a keen eye—but her reflections came off perfunctory. She wasn't the ideal reflector, being unwilling to delve beneath the surface the way Oz loved to do.

“It is an interesting development that weapons meant for military defense and armed militia have found their way into the hands of private citizens, and in a world that no longer requires one to regularly defend their person, family, or nation. So many wish to blame the machinery itself, which I think is incorrect. My own ancestor was instrumental in the development of the Gatling gun, and some of our contemporaries have hated me on his behalf, but it's not the weapons that pose a threat. It is, and always has been, the nature of humanity that's at fault.”

Hated
her? Hate didn't happen in Genesis. Did it?

I paused and looked over my shoulder, sure one of the Elders would show up any second, ready to hand out a sanction for snooping. No one came, though, and I remembered that I was a Historian, too. Maybe just an apprentice, and maybe off on a tangent that had nothing to do with today's assignment, but our Elders encouraged exploration and knowledge. We could spend as much free time in the Archives as we could stomach. Oz practically lived in here, a fact that would have inspired annoyance a week ago. Now, I was thinking he had reasons for holing up that went beyond taking the nerd recluse lifestyle to the extreme. Feeling more confident, I returned to Minnie's reflection, interested to see where her argument was headed.

“The original settlers of Genesis were right to leave all weapons behind on Earth Before, and to ban their manufacture in the System, with the exception of necessities for defense in the unlikely case of an attack by an unknown foe. Though I believe my ancestor, Richard Gatling, did not create something inherently evil, humanity is constantly challenged to fight the evil inside of us. We cannot trust ourselves or others with machinery that can take a life in a matter of seconds.

“In conclusion, I do not agree with previous reflections that deem the men who created killing machines partially responsible for the collapse of society on Earth Before. As with all of our assignments that revolve around understanding the reason for our exile to Genesis, I believe the nature of humanity responsible for our greatest losses. And as I've stated, I am part of a small contingent of believers that this will happen again, despite the efforts of Zeke and his followers to ensure that it doesn't. We cannot change what we are.”

Zeke and his followers? The Gatlings were Elders, too, and I'd never guessed at a rift between any of them. Perhaps I'd read too much into her words. Plenty of us had differing opinions regarding the fall of Earth Before, the events that led up to it, and even with seemingly insignificant reflections we often disagreed about the potential repercussions or positive benefits.

Other pieces of Minnie's reflection stood out to me as off, too, pricking suspicion. Mostly the words she used, like “exile to Genesis” instead of “relocation to Genesis” or “evacuation to Genesis” as we were taught. Her reflection also seemed to suggest that prior classes of apprentices had a specific assignment to determine what could have been changed on Earth Before to prevent our leaving.

Which was very different from what I'd been taught during my time here—focus on what we could learn, lessons we could apply, that would make Genesis viable
going forward
.

The development of sophisticated weaponry had been determined to be a factor in the collapse of society, and that had to be what drew Oz to those three specific places. But it didn't explain
why
he was so interested, or why he'd pushed Elira into James Puckle and essentially stopped him from creating that gun, or why he was traveling unsupervised in the first place.

Everything I knew about Oz made it hard to believe he'd commit all of those infractions on his own, yet there was no reason to suspect the Elders or anyone else had sent him.

Except Jonah's warning.

Frustration balled a knot under the tat in the back of my neck and I rolled it from side to side, trying to stretch out my thoughts. I was missing something. A connection between Oz and Jonah, the only two people who had the hubris—or the knowledge—to change the past. A link between Oz and the Elders, or Jonah and the Elders—not to mention whatever had caused my brother to run.

I absently tapped on the link under the Gatling gun, reviewing a quick-and-dirty history of the world's first machine gun prototype. It had led to the Maxim machine gun and finally the gangster-favored Tommy gun, which had all culminated in weapons sophisticated enough to take out everyone in this Academy in under two minutes, provided we were all in the same room. Once the guns of the late twenty-fourth century came into play—the models powerful enough to bang through walls made of metal or plaster, or anything really—they could take us all out in under three minutes, even spread out.

If Oz had also made alterations on the Silk Road, or in Canada, how long before changes started showing up in the Archives? Before the descendants of people murdered by guns started reappearing?

*

The morning left a lethargic feeling in my bones akin to the way the actual Triangle Fire had affected me, and my feet dragged down the cold hallway to the mess hall. Oz had returned, and the seven of us sat together, as always. Also as per usual, Jess commanded the conversation.

I blocked her out, but couldn't come up with any answers to the questions somersaulting through my mind. It all eventually came back to the question of
why
Oz—and my brother—had felt confident that the changes they'd made wouldn't rip Genesis from existence
.

I needed to talk to someone, to hear how all of this sounded outside my own head, but I couldn't confide in Analeigh without admitting that I'd used the cuff on my own.

Caesarion's face hovered in my mind, those sharp, thoughtful, midnight-blue eyes trained on my face. He knew my secret now, and I trusted him more than seemed plausible after a day together. I could talk to
him,
if I could get away soon. The sand in Caesarion's hourglass ran faster by the minute, and the memory of the trust in his face when I'd promised to return clung to me like barnacles to the hull of a sea ship. I was determined to see him again—hopefully more than once—before our stolen days together expired.

“What are you wearing to the certification party, Pey?” Jess sipped from her bottle of colorful, enhanced water, peering over the rim with dark, almond eyes.

The parties took place once a year, after certifications were approved and a few months before the next class officially completed their apprenticeship, and they were pretty much a required function. We got out of our standard-issue clothing for the night as well, which girls like Jess loved. Girls like me, who enjoyed wearing different things but had absolutely no fashion sense or period preference, struggled.

Jess had committed to a 1970s vibe, as far as clothing, which she pulled off well. Having visited the time period, I actually thought she looked a lot better than most of the hippie girls bouncing around Berkeley in clouds of pot smoke.

The majority of my plain clothes were hand-me-downs from my mother, which meant cute little mid-twentieth-century dresses. Analeigh was obsessed with early nineteenth-century fashion, and her closet contained a disturbing number of frilly undergarments.

Boys had it easy. Pants and a shirt. Done. Maybe Oz would recycle his dashing 1714 look. Sarah would probably think she'd died and gone to old-fashioned heaven.

“I think I'm going to fool around with an ancient Greek drapey thing,” Pey replied.

“What about you two?” Jess shot a glance in Oz and Sarah's direction. “Doing something stupid and cute, like color-coordinated taffeta and cummerbund?”

“Seriously, Jess, have you
met
Oz? I'll be lucky to get him into a tie and a shirt that doesn't have some kind of food stain on it,” Sarah quipped, choosing to ignore Jess's snotty undertone.

Jess was not-so-subtly jealous of their pairing. Most of us felt the same way, but we tried hard to be happy for the two of them instead of making them feel as though they were some kind of freaks under a microscope.

“Have you got your pirate wench outfit all picked out, Kaia?”

“That joke was funny the first time.” I rolled my eyes at Jess, then slurped a spoonful of soup. “You need some new material.”

“I'm not a writer, I'm a Historian.”

“Good thing,” I spat back.

Tangling with Jess got old fast, especially when there were too many important things vying for my attention. Like when I'd be able to see Caesarion again, or whether Oz or I was going to blow up the future first.

My mind wandered, dismissing the rest of the lunch conversation, until a prickly feeling lifted the hairs on my arms. I looked up to find Oz watching me while Sarah and Pey discussed which branch of the Historians they preferred once we were certified. His gray irises were clear and as enigmatic as ever behind his thick black lenses, though less haughty than normal. I stared back, willing a challenge into my gaze. Oz knew I was up to something, but so was he—and I hadn't altered anything. Not yet.

An answering challenge lit Oz's eyes on fire. He and I were locked in some kind of battle of wills, but I didn't know the rules or the reason for the declaration. A month ago we had been Kaia and Oz, two apprentices a little more than a year away from being certified as full Historians and taking up the mantle of observing, recording, and reflecting. Two people who had known each other since we were kids—not friends, exactly, but not enemies. Now we were both traveling on our own, with our own agendas.

Maybe we both needed to be stopped.

“I mean, of course it would be fun to focus on reflecting, so Oz and I would have the same schedule, but maybe he doesn't want to spend every day in the lab with me.” Sarah nudged Oz's side, turning to smile at him.

The playful grin dropped when he didn't reply to her question, because he was still staring at me with a little too much intensity. My cheeks flushed from the attention, from the guilt and worry. Not because anything about Oz turned me on, but because sometimes it seemed as though those eyes could see right through a person's skin.