Return Once More (33 page)

“Is there another alternative?”

I sat down on the cold floor, drawing my knees up to my chest and wrapping myself into a ball. My mind scrambled, a desperate attempt to find another way, but found nothing. It was impossible to tell how Oz was feeling, except maybe nauseous. Probably at revealing such a big secret to the resident rule breaker.

“Kaia, I can help you get your hands on a sonic waver. It will be quick and painless.”

Oz, as helpful as ever. Like I wanted to think about ways to kill the boy I loved.

As much as I wanted to scream, to kick him and punch him and blame him for putting me through this, it wasn't Oz's fault. It was mine.

I started this, and because of my colossal inability to accept the limitations and realities of my world, I had to finish it, too. People in Genesis couldn't die because of me. If it was only me that would pay the price, I might have been willing to do it, but not my parents. Not Jonah. Not others.

“You're going to have to kill his guards, too. They'll tell people about you. We can't have more instances of strange people in black that appear and melt people's organs.”

“So you know about the
dark ones
?” I paused, waiting for him to decide whether to trust me, or keep lying. “Where did the legends start? Or when?”

Oz paled, busying himself at the pedestal comp until the glowing threads disappeared, making the room feel cavernous. I grabbed his arm and pulled myself up, forcing him to face me. His eyes stayed stubbornly on the floor.

“Oz, why are there new myths in the past about people in black arriving and turning people to liquid, then disappearing into thin air?” My question was careful. My growing anger was not.

“There aren't.” His jaw clenched, and when he finally slid his gray eyes to mine, it was clear he would say nothing more.

Fine. He could believe that because he'd somehow gained access to this room that he had authorization to change whatever he saw fit. I swallowed the urge to spill what I'd read in Minnie's observation. That Analeigh and I thought maybe some of the Elders wanted to find a way to undo the bad decisions that had led to our
exile
from Earth Before.

Oz could pretend all he wanted, but it didn't mean I believed him.

*

As much as I needed to clean up the mess I'd made in Caesarion's world, nothing had changed as far as my having to pick and choose the best time to sneak away. Jonah's chip might ensure no one knew where I had gone, but it didn't stop me from being missed. The Projector, which is what Oz called the machine he'd shown me, said I had a week to make sure Caesarion met his proper fate before things started to change that couldn't be undone.

We had an observation scheduled for today, and there was no way I could skip it. I'd already had to copy Analeigh's research for wardrobe since I'd spent our allotted independent study time running around Egypt, and it was our first observation where the reflection focus was left up to us—there was no assignment. They never told us when we were being tested, but this felt like a way to gauge whether we were ready for more autonomy going into our final year.

Oz was coming today, and so was Levi. Part of me wondered if Oz would show up or if he'd been diverted to another assignment, but he waited calmly in the air lock when Analeigh and I arrived with two minutes to spare.

He and Levi were bare-chested and wearing patterned swim trunks. Booth, our overseer for the day, had similar bottoms but wore a blue T-shirt with the phrase “Surf's Up” scrolled across the front. Analeigh and I both had pretty skimpy bikinis on underneath short dresses that served as cover-ups, and all five of us wore cheap plastic flip-flops.

We were all basically naked, a feeling that left my skin crawling with unease. The wardrobe complemented our destination, though—a beach in the Maldives, off the coast of Sri Lanka, 2001. The boys had chosen this particular observation—Analeigh and I had voted to observe the fate of Anastasia, lost daughter of the last Russian tsar, but we'd been overruled.

Instead we got to watch some famous Californian extreme athlete drown. Lovely.

Extreme sports fascinated Levi in particular, and he planned to work on isolating a common strand of human evolution that had sparked a desire to call dancing with death an entertaining pastime. Jay Moriarty had died one day shy of his twenty-third birthday while free diving—diving deep under water without oxygen tanks, a hobby that did not seem advisable. He had been happily married, according to history and our previous observations, and was described as a gregarious guy who loved life. But apparently not enough to want to continue living it. In truth, I wasn't sure what there was to learn from him or why this even made the list of options for today's trip.

I found the story depressing, but the worst part was how avoidable his untimely death had been.

If these past seven years had taught me one universal truth, it was that the humans who died the youngest, who had been gifted with the least amount of time, managed to do the most with it. They were often remembered, these tragic children, and their legacies lived on in ways that people who had been given entire lifetimes couldn't seem to achieve. The reasons behind that observation would make an amazing reflection topic. Maybe I would explore it one day.

Analeigh and I tossed our Historian uniforms into the drawer next to the boys' and Booth's. Gooseflesh popped out on my arms and I shivered in the freezing cold air lock, crossing my arms over my chest to avoid giving the boys a show.

Booth checked to make sure we were all ready, then set his cuff and gave it an exact location that would be deserted at the time of day we were arriving, which was just after breakfast, when Jay left his friends to go snorkeling.

The lights on the cuff turned to green, and the five of us shimmered inside a blue bubble for a moment until the decontamination chamber disappeared and we stood several yards away from a deserted beach, under the cover of a grove of coconut trees.

*

Maldives
,
Indian Ocean
, Earth Before–June 15, 2001 CE (Common Era)

My skin immediately warmed in the sticky, tropical air. The view from where we stood stunned me: the beaches were pristine and white, the ocean unbelievable cascading shades of blue. It was almost clear, a crystal aquamarine as it washed onto the shore and deepening to turquoise, then cobalt as it spread farther from the shore.

“Whoa.” Analeigh breathed the word next to me, her eyes round as they took in the perfect paradise.

“It looks a lot like Petra, but the water there isn't blue like this. More of a greenish brown. This is better,” Levi observed.

If Petra resembled the Maldives even a little bit, I could see why the property there had to be drawn in a lottery.

Over the next hour, the beach filled with sunbathers and surfers, snorkelers and divers, and Analeigh and I stripped off our cover-ups. We all slathered on sunscreen, an unnecessary little product in our System missing natural sunlight. It smelled wonderful. The sand burned the soles of my bare feet, and the sun baked the skin on my shoulders. Waves washed over my toes as I wiggled them, displacing tiny sand crabs that scurried to find new places to hide.

Booth led us to a more secluded section of shoreline, where boats floated just offshore, their red and white diving flags fluttering in the gentle breeze. The lenses on my glasses indentified Jay Moriarty, a rather handsome guy about the same age as Jonah, with a smile that hit me like a punch in the gut from sixty or seventy yards away.

He faced the water alone, his tanned, toned body obeying his commands to stretch and go through some complicated breathing exercises. A blue mask and snorkel sat on his forehead and he fixed it in place, jumping in the water and kicking lazily back and forth for a while. The expression of contentment on his handsome face felt incongruous, but only because I knew what was about to happen. Still, if I had to die, it would be good to know it would be doing something I loved half as much as this boy loved diving in the ocean.

That was this recording's hidden moment of beauty. Jay's passion.

When Oz's lips brushed my ear, it startled me. I jerked away and shot him a glare, but he moved in closer, using a hand to hold me in place. “Do you know what would have happened had he not died today?”

I kept my eyes, my glasses, trained on Jay. I didn't need any more trouble.

Oz switched to silent speech, apparently realizing an outward conversation would be recorded along with our observations.
“He would have died tomorrow in a boating accident with his wife.”

The whispered words, facts that could only be glimpsed with the help of the strange Projector, sent shivers down my spine. My mind lost complete track of what I was supposed to be recording as Jay grabbed hold of a rope anchored to the sea floor and kicked below the surface for the last time.

“His is the only trajectory I've ever seen that keeps stopping no matter what. If we saved him, it would buy him another twenty-four hours. If we saved him tomorrow, he'd get another week.”
Oz leaned in even closer.
“It almost makes one believe in fate.”

I gave a small shake of my head and elbowed him away from me. I didn't believe in fate. None of us did. The concept was nothing more than the result of choices made by men—by us and the people around us—and, despite the anomaly Jay Moriarty apparently presented, could
always
be altered.

Still, Oz's little Projector lesson turned over and over in my mind, like a pancake flipped and flipped until both sides were burned black. I used the brain stem tattoo to search information on Jay Moriarty, a task that should have been completed before we'd left had I been paying proper attention to my studies the past couple of days. I found more than one reference to the fact that Jay, even as a boy, had felt a strange certainty that he would not live a long life.

Then again, one could argue that if he hadn't been attracted to dangerous sports, this day might have been avoided.

Except according to Oz, Jay's early death was predestined. It made me think of Caesarion and his belief in beings who watched our lives play out, planned from beginning to untimely end. As much as I wanted to believe, as hard as I tried and wished there was a grand design that would bring us together again in another realm, I didn't. Couldn't.

We stood still on the beach, moving every once in a while to shift position or wander toward the water so that no one would take note of the group of five people seemingly riveted to smooth, clear water when Jay's body was later discovered.

A while after he'd kicked to the bottom, two other divers roamed the area. The eyeglasses shared the strangers' eventual eyewitness accounts with me, including the fact that they'd seen Jay on the bottom but had left him there, assuming he was training.

It was sad, and interesting, but I didn't understand why we were here. Aside from Oz's strange and cryptic statement about fate and Levi's obsession with the psychology behind extreme sporting, if Jay Moriarty had never been meant to live, then his death couldn't have any lasting positive or negative impression on humanity.

Could it?

Perhaps
that
was today's lesson. The overseers might have a specific aspect of today in mind, one we should have noticed. I should have been paying more attention. As usual.

We left before Jay's friends sent out the search party that would recover his body. It wouldn't look right for the five of us to be in the same spot, morning to night. People would remember that, once this day became memorable to them, and despite the ancient Egyptian tale about
dark ones
showing up in the pages of history, we'd been trained to take every effort to ensure no Historians accidentally appeared in Earth Before's history books.

Silence accompanied our group on the way back up the beach. We'd witnessed the death of a boy of only twenty-two, and even though it wasn't violent or horrifying like so many of our observations, this unsettled me, too. Perhaps it was the idea that we could be so fully alive and present one moment and gone the next. That the smallest choices could change everything.

A small group of people—two girls, four boys, all young—sat around a crackling fire at the edge of the beach, books embossed with the title
Holy Bible
opened in their laps. They looked as though they might be seminary students of some kind, based on their serious expressions and the fact that they sat on a gorgeous beach to read religious texts instead of enjoying the sun or water. One of the boys read aloud in a pleasing tone that helped ease my mounting tension.

“So, God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'”

He continued, his voice fading as we passed by, making our way back to the secluded coconut trees. The words sounded right, and yet they didn't. My mind played with the verses, trying to figure out why they felt wrong. My brain stem tattoo was no help—every version of the
Bible
it searched came back with the passage read exactly like the boy had intoned it moments ago, yet my memory, which had always been excellent, insisted it was off.

As we gathered together inside the blue bubble, waiting for our return trip, it hit me. The passage had been missing something—the words “be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.”

My mouth went dry and my knees buckled, causing Analeigh to reach out a hand to steady me and Oz to raise a sharp look my direction.

All I could think was that since my brain stem tat hadn't been able to find any texts with the correct wording, they were missing from the historical record.

Which meant someone, sometime, had purposely taken them out.