Twist (2 page)

“Maybe we're supposed to deliver a message between Haven members,” I said. We turned back down the alley. The Haven Society was a meeting place for free Shifters, past and future. I'd never delivered any messages before, but I knew some of the Resthaven residents had friends in the past.

At the mouth of the alley someone slammed into my shoulder as he passed.

“Excuse me,” I said before looking up to see who had bumped me. Whoever it was wore a suit made of a shiny, silver material. His entire head was covered with a hood and protective mask. Finn and I may have looked a little out of place in our nondescript clothes, but this guy looked like a space alien.

And last I checked, there were no seventeenth-century space aliens.

When the person looked back and saw me, he visibly startled. Then took off in a dead run. It looked like whoever it was had recognized me.

“Come on.” I tugged on Finn's sleeve to follow.

The silver-clad person took off through the serpentine, narrow alley. As he ran, he knocked objects down behind him to block our path. I parted a dingy line of clothes strung between two soot-covered brick walls. The smoke grew thicker, clawing at my eyes and making it hard to see, which didn't make sense as we weren't that close to the initial outbreak of fires.

We reached the end of the alley. It ended in a T shape at the back of another set of buildings. The smoke had grown so profuse, I could taste it down the back of my throat. I squinted in both directions, not sure which way the silver-suited guy had gone. A cat hissed to my right, like he'd just been frightened. I took off that way, Finn close at my heels. It was easier to see this direction anyway. Someone had lit a bunch of lanterns in the street up ahead.

“Wait.” Finn caught me by the shoulder.

“We're going to lose him,” I said, trying to wiggle away from Finn. But then I realized why he had held me back.

Those weren't lanterns.

Something was burning. Something big. I tugged at Finn's hand and raced forward, my other hand clutching my Com, stunner out and ready. Ash fell from the sky like snowflakes. I skidded as we turned a sharp corner into the next street. My boot slammed hard into a puddle, and mud splattered my front up to my chest. I caught myself against a metal grate on the wall. It sliced my arm, and blood oozed out the gash. Dang it. Finn helped me steady myself. Flames licked out and greeted us from the storefront blazing across the street.

“Those poor people,” I said quietly as I wiped mud and who knows what festering germs away from the wound. “Are we supposed to stop the fire?”

“How?” He had a point. It wasn't like they had instantaneous soakswitches from my time or even fire hydrants from Finn's. There was nothing we could do but stand there and watch it burn.

It went hot and fast, which actually appeared to be a good thing. The fire was so intense that it consumed the wood of the storefront before the blaze had the chance to spread too far.

Neighbors and shopkeepers poured out into the street and formed a sad attempt at a bucket brigade. They used hooks to pull down walls to protect bordering buildings. I thought over my Great Fire history and realized their efforts were a moot point. This area would be gone within a few days anyway.

My eyes sifted through the crowd searching for flashes of silver, but I didn't see any. I now recognized the silver suit for what it was—protective fire gear from my time, from the twenty-third century. That thing could easily withstand temperatures upwards of 2,000 degrees. Swarms of rats scurried away from the growing flames. Chaos flared up as quickly as the fire.

“I don't think anyone could survive that,” said Finn.

I gulped. So why were we here?

“Bree.” Finn shook his head slowly from side to side.

“Maybe, umm.…” Ugh. I couldn't think straight. It was so hot. I removed my cap and fanned myself. The breeze didn't cool me off, but it gave me a much-needed waft of oxygen.

“Bree, look.” Gently, Finn turned my face so I was staring directly at what remained of the doorway.

There in a puddle by the already crumbling rafters floated three pools of wax with wicks barely sticking out, each still flickering a faint green.

This was the Haven.

So what had happened to everyone inside?

*   *   *

“Whoever it was, I think he's long faded.” Finn scraped his boot through a pile of still-sparking ash. Only a couple hours had passed, but the street was almost deserted. The few people who hadn't already fled the city were busy grabbing belongings so they could.

“I know.” I'd held out as long as possible, hoping the silver-suited person would return, but was clearly deluding myself.

“Hey, Bree.” Finn stooped to pick up a piece of paper from the cinders. He waved his fingers, and it stuck to them. “It's compufilm.”

“What?” I snatched it away from him. Compufilm was a twenty-third-century invention.

“What does it say?” He peered over my shoulder as I unfolded it.

“To save his, destroy yours,” I read. “And then random letters and numbers and stuff with a bunch of blanks.”

“Huh,” he said. “Wonder what that means. To save his what?”

“Finn.”

“And then who is the ‘he' referring to?”

“Finn.” I held the film for him to examine more closely.

“And destroy what?”

“Finn!”

He finally glanced up. “What?”

“I wrote this. It's in my handwriting.”

He snatched it back. “Was that Future You in the silver suit?”

“Couldn't be. That person towered over me. They were, like, six feet tall.”

“Could that have been me?”

“I doubt it. That was twenty-third-century gear. Besides, I don't think that person was here to fight the fire. I think they started it.”

“Why would they do that?” asked Finn. “This area is going to be destroyed by fire anyway in a matter of days. It all sounds so…”

“Ominous.” Blark. I hated ominous. I started to run my fingers through my hair, but my hand went limp.

Finn stared at me with a look of horror on his face. “Bree, your arm.”

I looked at it and gasped. The arm that I'd cut had suddenly blown up three times its normal size and turned a gruesome orange. I knew these symptoms.

No. It couldn't be.

“Capuchin fever,” I said. “It was eradicated thirty years ago. I mean, thirty years ago in my time.”

“What's capuchin fever?”

“You don't have it back in the twenty-first century.” I tried to wave the question off, but my arm had grown so swollen, it resembled an orange watermelon. “It's a dormant virus, but if exposed to the right germs…”

“Make it stop!” said Finn.

“But I don't know why—” And that's when I felt it.
Whir
. The reverter was going off in my pocket. Son of a germ-infested monkey. Some nonShifter from my time had changed their past. As a result, a long-extinct disease had returned. “Come on.”

Shifting while using the reverter felt different than when I was naturally called to a place. It resembled the sensation of when my chip used to dump me somewhere. Kind of like being shoved rather than pulled.

I held the glowing green device out and wrapped my good arm around Finn before clicking the end of it.

Shifters, chipped or otherwise, normally weren't able to Shift forward into their future. Only backward. I possessed the rare ability to Shift other people, namely Finn, into my own time because I was a chronogenetic mish mash. My father was born at the turn of the twentieth century. My mom gave birth to me at the turn of the twenty-third century. Apparently, that made me the temporal equivalent of double-sided sticky tape.

Finn squeezed me close to his side. He needed to be touching me for my quantum tendrils to latch on to him. As I took one final gaze over the streets of London, I couldn't tell if the dull, red haze in the distance was the sun coming up or another building burning down.

 

chapter 2

“AHH, A SHIFTER.
Welcome to Jamaica, mon.” A Rastafarian tossed a handful of dreads over his shoulder and held out his hand until he saw the state of my arm. “Is that the capuchin?” His tone changed from laid-back and friendly to business-like in an instant. “We need a quarantine procedure over here!”

I ignored the man and peered over his shoulder. We were in a hoverport, somewhere in Jamaica. I didn't bother checking my Com for details. I didn't care what year it was. Clearly it was some point after Shifters had come out in the open, but before the cure to capuchin fever had been discovered. All I cared about was stopping someone from making a blarking stupid decision.

Finn had never been on a reversion mission with me. He stood at my side, biting his nails, staring at my arm. I didn't need a quarantine. I needed to find the idiot who had caused this change.

And there he was.

A man in his mid-twenties fidgeted in the line to board the next hovercraft, destination Atlanta. I'd seen a picture of him before. Somewhere. And suddenly, a lesson from Contemporary Developments in Biology clicked in my head and I knew exactly who I was looking at. It was a young James Canavan, one of the most brilliant minds to ever work for the Centers for Disease Control. Over the last thirty-five years, he had single-handedly created vaccines for more than a dozen infectious diseases. Including capuchin fever.

Canavan stepped out of the line, then back into it. He glanced at his watch, the boarding gate, his watch again. He stepped back out of line. Back in. Back out. Yep. One of the most brilliant minds of modern medicine.

Who apparently had once considered quitting med school to live on a beach in Jamaica.

But it wasn't him that I needed to find. My eyes scanned through the waiting passengers. There. By the windows. The older Dr. Canavan watched his younger self, only prying his eyes away to steal glances at the sapphire blue waves that crashed onto the sand outside. A tear trickled down his cheek, and for a millisecond, I felt sorry for him.

Then my arm started to throb, and that millisecond ended.

I marched toward him just as he parted his way through the waiting passengers toward his younger self.

“Dr. Canavan,” I called. They both looked up, but I ignored the younger one. “You can't do this.”

“Do … what?” The older man looked around nervously. He winced and gripped his neck. Shifting was painful for nonShifters. Probably because they, oh, I don't know, weren't meant to be doing it.

There was a rumble behind me as the Rastafarian who had greeted me pointed two guards in my direction. The capuchin actually worked in my favor. I could tell neither guard wanted to get too close to me. Still, I hurried. The reverter had already started to slow its whirring. If I didn't hurry, Dr. Canavan's change could be permanent.

“You can't stop your past self from boarding that hovercraft.” I pointed at the young Canavan who looked completely perplexed by what was going on around him.

“How did you know—?”

“It doesn't matter.” I lifted up my balloon of an arm. “You can't abandon your work to stay here.”

“Attention”—the reggae song playing over the loudspeakers halted—“the young lady with capuchin fever needs to proceed to medical quarantine immediately.”

The reaction was immediate and explosive. Everyone scattered in a panic with an outcry of “Capuchin! Where is she?”

Crapcakes. A woman jostled into me and then saw my arm and screamed. I flinched and dropped the reverter. Another woman kicked it across the room. Blark!

Finn saw what had happened and joined me to rush after it as it rolled. My arm had gone numb by the time I reached the reverter. If I remembered my capuchin symptoms correctly, I had about three minutes before it rapidly shriveled and fell off. But I doubted I had even that much time before the reverter's window closed. I had to get to the doctor. Finn cleared a path for me.

“You can't do this,” I said when I reached the elder Canavan.

“I'm afraid it might be too late.” He gestured at the public hysteria surrounding us. His touch held genuine compassion as he prodded my arm. “I'm sorry.”

“It's never too late.” This was going to be one of the simpler ones. He wasn't going to fight me or try to stop me like some of them did. I held the reverter against the bare skin on the back of his neck and, without a single word of protest from him, clicked the trigger.

The older Dr. Canavan instantly vanished. My arm was back to normal. The hysterical crowd turned back into patiently waiting passengers, and the younger Dr. Canavan was again standing in line for the hovercraft, acting as if nothing had happened. I watched him until he had boarded, which he did with only a tiny backward glance.

Finn, who was now diligently guarding a patch of thin air, wandered over to me. He wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head.

“That was … amazing,” he said.

“That was an easy one.” I flexed my arm at the elbow, thankful to have an elbow. “And I lied to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told him it was never too late, but that's not true.” I held up the reverter. The green light faded slowly. The whirring noise quieted to a hum. And then the device turned dark and silent. “If I don't stop a change before the reverter switches off, it's permanent.”

“You could have lost your arm.”

“Along with about a million other people.” Not to mention the other hideous diseases Dr. Canavan had helped eradicate over the past few decades.

“What was he thinking?” Finn looked at the departing hovercraft in disgust.

“He wasn't thinking. He was feeling.” I said it like a dirty word.

“The horror,” said Finn, laughing.

I laughed, too, but if there was one thing I'd learned over the last six months, it's that it takes a rare, rare person to willingly sacrifice the things he loves for the greater good. Nine times out of ten in these reversions, I had to wrestle the nonShifters to the ground and jab them against their will in order to fix their changes.