Split Infinity (26 page)

Maybe I can guess the password.

My heart stills as the account details display on the screen after I type in my first guess:
Agent X
. It’s like a message from when he was still alive. Seeing that name on the screen somehow makes me feel as if he’s here beside me, right now. If he was, he’d say something to make everything okay again, with a lesson between the lines.

The sting of losing him pricks at me again, fresh as ever. It’s my fault he’s not here.

I’m surprised that Alistair’s account balance is less than 5000 credits. Even I have more than that on the woman’s chip; clocking up steadily the whole time I was locked away.

I scroll through the transactions over the last few months, like watching a story backwards in time. Six months ago, Alistair’s balance was way impressive: nearly 200,000 credits. But from the day of my citizen application hearing, large chunks began to disappear. Most of them went to a law firm called
Chen, Chambal and Mubarak
, but in the final two months he started buying top wine and spending crazy amounts at expensive restaurants.

Strange.

It feels wrong to hack into his life like this, especially after all that’s happened, but I can’t stop. Line by line I read through his messages over the last couple of months. In most of them he’s setting up meetings with top-level government officials, or arranging to have expensive bottles of wine sent to them. It doesn’t take long to work out what was going on, but when I realise what he was doing I have to shut down the comscreen, stepping away until I’m leaning back against the wall. I slide down to the floor and rest my forehead on my knees. Anger burns at what they did to us, even as the tears prickle once more.

Alistair spent his life savings trying to get me out of the lab.

Mason comes round a couple of days after I make it home. From the relaxed way he is around Mum I can tell that he was keeping in touch with her, watching out for her when I couldn’t.

Mum heads out for a walk, leaving us to talk.

As soon as the door slips shut, Mason pulls me into a hug. ‘I’m sorry, Scout. I thought you’d be safe.’ His voice reaches me as a muffled echo through his body. ‘We’ve been trying to get you out the whole time.’

But they were playing by the government’s rules. That’s no way to win the game.

‘For what it’s worth, you were right,’ he says, as his tone drops. ‘They didn’t even tell us that jumping was illegal, you know. It’s only thanks to Kessa that we were told. They don’t have proof that any of us can skip, but now that they don’t have you anymore we’ve all been tagged as illegal sympathisers. We think they’re only days away from arresting one of us.’

It’s so familiar. The future isn’t fixed, but some things don’t change.

I pull away. Swallow the dryness. It’s months since I saw Mason and I can see a change about him, but it’s different from the way he’d changed when I saw him in 2089. This time his face seems to have been carved from stone.

We settle on the rug, our backs against the bed, while Mason fills me in on the fight to have me released, a battle that led to them being dropped a ration level. Mason’s dad lost his job, although the official reason was funding cuts. But even so, the skippers kept training in secret, their jumps hidden from the grid with the help of the linking code. He even set up the code to add a link automatically for Mum, and Kessa’s family, in case any of them had learnt to jump.

As Mason finishes, we don’t talk for a while, but soon he turns to me, questions clear in his eyes.
What was it like in there? What did they do to you?

‘There’s this drug,’ I begin. ‘Called Zygoral. It’s meant to block our ability to skip. But this one was green, not blue and … it didn’t do what it did last time.’

His shoulders sink as a sigh escapes. ‘Makes sense. They had years longer to develop the blue one in the other timestream, but no-one to test it on. It would have been a different team, with different technology. So many things have changed.’

‘They were both designed to stop us skipping,’ I add. ‘But something must have been different about the blue one.’ Some extra ingredient, a change in conditions. Whatever it was, we have no way of knowing. Here, it doesn’t exist. My fall into a new reality has been a one-way trip.

‘It’s okay.’ His eyebrows pinch. ‘After this taste of knowing what’s coming … I’m not sure what I want any more.’ He glances at me. ‘We warned the captain of the Metro Fire Brigade, did you know that? Even showed him a skip as proof that he should take us seriously. We kept it hidden from the grid but there didn’t seem much we could lose anymore. You were still locked up. Stopping the fire seemed like the one thing we could fix …’

I try to match the dates in my head, wondering whether the fire captain reported the warning back to government. In order for us to know the firestorm was coming, one of us had to have travelled backwards, which the professor and his team hadn’t been told. Was that the reason Professor W changed his focus when he was studying my brain scans? Was that why they decided to get me out of the lab, rather than just leave me there to burn?

‘On the night of the lightning strikes,’ Mason keeps going, ‘the MFB threw everything they had at stopping the fires, water bombers, fire hovercraft. Every officer they had. And we thought they’d stopped it. Only two grassfires were left and they were so far out of the area you described. I thought we’d done it –’ He shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t until I got your message that I realised …’

I rest a hand on his leg, just above the knee. ‘It’s so not your fault, Mason.’

He doesn’t say anything, just places a hand on top of mine. ‘We’re planning a ten-year skip,’ Mason says. ‘By then, rations should be restored. Maybe a change of government.’

‘Or maybe not.’ I think about the world I saw in 2089. ‘Everything might be even worse by then. They could be even more determined than ever to catch us.’

‘Yeah, we’ve been talking about that.’ There doesn’t seem any question that they’re going to jump. ‘We’ll set up a fake departure point before we block our chips from the grid, the way you already described. So they’ll be watching for our return in a decoy location, and they won’t have any idea when we’re due back. But while we’re gone, we’ve decided to go public. The more people who know how to skip, the harder it will be for them to catch us all, let alone lock us all away. I was tossing up whether to release the deets about how to time skip onto the dark web, but Amon had a better idea.’

Mason grabs his compad, swipes a few times and holds the screen up for me. ‘If citizens can access the dark web, then the government can as well. They’ll work out how to take down anything we add. So we’re putting it up in plain sight instead. No encryption, nothing to hide.’

My eyes track cross the words onto the screen:
It already lies dormant within you; the ability to move within time …

‘It’s a book, started in sparkpad. All of us adding to it. A story, that’s all it looks like, except it just happens to outline the meditation techniques for time skipping, a brief overview of the theory, tips for training your interval timer. The Feds won’t even think to check. At least, that’s the plan.’

‘Clever. But how will anyone work out it’s real?’

‘There’ll be deets in there that are familiar, names of real places. Maybe someone will remember living through the blackout. We only need one or two to start wondering. Maybe they’ll give it a go, just in case …’

‘Can you add info about the linking script?’ I ask. ‘Warn them to hide their gaps from the grid if they do work out how to jump?’

‘Good idea.’

‘So if it works … in ten years, a bunch of time skippers will be waiting, trained and ready?’

‘That’s the plan. If the government won’t share the info, then we will. The more people who know how to jump, the harder it will be to lock us away.’

I’ve changed my mind about how little has changed in the two timestreams. This one
is
different in important ways. We’re thinking ahead, better prepared.

‘You’re coming with us, right?’ He taps something on the screen, then straightens so he can see me properly. ‘And Miya?’

He doesn’t realise that Mum hasn’t learnt to skip. ‘How soon?’ is all I say. There’s still a chance she’ll learn, now that she understands how much is at stake.

‘We’re not sure yet,’ Mason says. ‘Another week? We’re going to jump as a group. There’s less chance that one of us will be lost that way. The adults are all bunny hopping together, and the rest of us will do a full ten-year skip.’

‘Okay,’ I say. Maybe Mason’s folks can help Mum. ‘I’ll talk to her.’

Mum’s still out when Mason leaves so I message Kessa. Her reply comes back in seconds:
Stay there. I’m coming now.

She bursts through as soon as our door slides open, grabbing me in a hug and squeezing so tight that I have to pull back in order to breathe.

‘You’re even skinnier than normal,’ she announces as she pulls back. It comes out joke-like at first, but then her face falls. ‘Scout, I’m so, so,
so sorry
.’

‘It’s not your fault.’ I was ready for this.

‘No, but it was my idea … it was my …’ She lifts one arm as if lost for words and shakes her head.

It was her government. That’s what flashes into my mind, even though that’s not what she was going to say.

‘So they let you down, too,’ I finish for her. ‘Now you understand why I don’t trust them.’

Kessa’s eyes narrow, but she doesn’t take my bait. ‘You have to stop jumping, Scout. It’s outright illegal now. You know that, right?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ I was planning to tell her about the ten-year skip, maybe she’d want to come too, but now I realise I’ll have to be careful. ‘But you can still jump if you want. There are ways …’ I trail off as her eyes go wide.

‘I’m serious, Scout. Now that I’ve had time to think it through, and talk to Mum and Dad … time jumping isn’t as safe as I thought. I mean … when you come back, you have no control over what’s going on. Anything could happen. People could get hurt.’

She’s right. People
have
been hurt. I’ll never forget that. But we’re improving all the time, finding ways to make sure our returns are accurate. The fear of something going wrong isn’t reason to stop; it’s a reason to train harder.

‘So that’s what the government is saying, is it?’ I ask. ‘Stop skipping for your own good. We have to keep citizens safe! Protect them from themselves.’

Kessa’s mouth pushes to one side as she considers me. ‘You find that so hard to believe?’

‘All I’m saying is: don’t wait for them to save you when things go wrong,’ I tell her. ‘You have to be ready to react on your own, to save yourself.’

She nods. ‘I was teaching them how to do it, Malena and my folks. Before the ruling came through.’

‘And?’

‘And they were doing well. Even Dad managed a few seconds. It’s just … now we can’t …’

‘I know. I get it.’ We can already hide any skips by using the linking code on the grid, but Kessa has a future here, she’s safer in the system. I can see why she hasn’t been targeted by the government for being at the hearing. They don’t have to. She’s already doing what they want. And if she gets caught time skipping now she’ll lose access to rations, a place in school. Her future’s along a different path from mine.

‘At least you still have the other chip, right?’ she says. ‘Tell them you missed the start of school because you’ve been sick. You can come back once everything settles down.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

But the chance of going to school doesn’t sparkle for me now the way it once did. I used to believe I had no future without access to rations. But what sort of future is that? I’d be stuck in a system where people on mega rations are the only ones who are free.

I don’t need a school that dictates what I learn, anyway. There are other ways to survive. Better ways to live.

‘You’re going to be okay,’ I tell Kessa, even though there’s

no way I can be sure. But I’ve seen one version of the future waiting for her. ‘Even on half rations you can still finish school and train in emergency obstetrics.’

‘Yeah, well.’ One shoulder goes up. ‘I don’t have any choice. Now that rations have been halved, aiming for high level is my only option.’