Twist (5 page)

In true Charlotte fashion, Finn's mom squawked for a minute, then tossed three more plates on the table and wrapped bacon around random leftovers from the refrigerator. Somehow, it came out a gourmet feast.

We bobbed our heads as Charlotte led us in grace, and a tenor voice that wasn't Finn's added a final, “Amen.”

“Welcome home, John.” Charlotte tossed Finn's dad a cloth napkin and hopped up to grab him a plate like he hadn't just appeared out of nothingness. Jafney was the only one who startled at his sudden appearance.

Finn bore a strong resemblance to his father, with their square jaws and tall, lean physiques. But as Charlotte shook her fiery auburn hair over her shoulder, there was no doubt that Finn had inherited an equal number of genes from her.

“Back from anywhere interesting?” I asked John.

“Best not to talk shop at the table,” said John, his polite way of letting us know he'd been performing surgeries during a particularly gory battle from history. He adjusted his wire-rim glasses and finally noticed Jafney. “Oh, hello there. I don't think we've been introduced.”

Jafney took that as her cue to begin talking about herself … and … didn't stop the entire dinner.

Turned out, her mother was a sociologist who'd written her dissertation on communal habitation choices, hence the hippy father. Jafney had lived with her grandparents after her mother died when she was five.

“Actually, not my grandparents.” Jafney waved her fork in the air between bites. “My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandniece or something and her husband.”

“Huh?” Georgie was the one who said it even though we were all clearly thinking it.

“Yeah, it's kind of confusing,” said Jafney. “My mom lived on the commune off and on for years, where she met my father. She got pregnant with me and had me here—well, I mean, had me in the twenty-third century. She lied about the identity of my father so they wouldn't disrupt her research. Then she got pregnant again. With my brother. She gave birth on the commune back in the past, but she developed eclampsia during labor and died in childbirth.”

The Mastersons and I all looked at each other, stunned, as Jafney continued.

“They had a hard time locating any suitable guardians in the twenty-third century. My mom was an only child, and her parents died when I was a baby. So once they figured out what had happened, they tracked down my brother's descendants and there you go.”

“I'm so sorry for your loss,” I managed to mumble through my shock.

“Oh, she's not dead,” said Jafney cheerfully. “Not really.”

Uhhhh …

“Don't get me wrong,” Jafney went on. “I miss her. And Dad and my little brother. But once I turn off this chip, I can go back and see them. They're alive. Just not in my time.”

I almost started to argue with her, but then I glanced over at Finn and realized that by my own logic, I was eating dinner with a corpse.

See,
said the voice in my head I'd grown to loathe,
It will never work. It's too convoluted
.

No one at the table had a response, and I was pretty sure I wasn't the only one who was thankful when Charlotte sprang up from her seat and said, “Who wants plum tart?”

As I watched Charlotte bustle into the kitchen, I realized how uncomfortable life could be for her—constantly surrounded by people who had no concept of linear time. She had once told me that she thanked the Good Lord every day she wasn't born a Shifter because what if she floated away with the stove on and burnt the house down?

“But maybe your future self could go back and extinguish it,” I pointed out.

“And maybe I'll let Finn bring that flying-cow poop machine back to the twenty-first century with him sometime.”

And thus ended the deepest temporal theory conversation I ever had with Charlotte.

*   *   *

Jafney's chip reversal went smoothly. It was a simple injection that acted like a vaccine, allowing the brain to fight off the control of the chip. It could leave you weak and with a mean headache for a few hours, but otherwise, pretty non-traumatic. The traumatic part came later. When you realized the world you lived in wasn't the world you thought you lived in.

John sedated Jafney for the procedure. I wasn't sure if it was actually necessary or just to shut her up for more than three minutes.

“She'll be asleep for an hour or so.” John patted her foot.

Finn came up behind me, his Labrador, Slug, trailing behind him, sniffing suspiciously at Finn's fingers. Slug could probably still smell Ed.

“Do we have time to catch that movie?” Finn asked.

“Should we leave?” I pointed at Jafney. I'd feel a little guilty abandoning her there. But she let out a snuffling roar of a snore, and I knew there was no point in staying. Besides, Charlotte wouldn't leave her side.

“If we synch now, we should make the ten o'clock,” I said, looking at my Com. I wrapped my arms around Finn and gave in to the draw back to the twenty-third century.

Then I opened my eyes and saw where we'd landed.

Crapcakes
.

 

chapter 5

“HUH-HO! YOU SNUCK US IN.”
Finn's whisper was practically a shout and earned him a few dirty looks from the moviegoers who streamed into the darkened theater around us.

“No. It was a snafu. There's a difference.”

“You're a little sneak thief.” He started to tickle me, but really, I wanted him to keep his voice down. It was true. I had just ripped off these poor movie theater owners. This was why there were Rules and entire classes on Temporal Ethics.

“I'll pay for the tickets on the way out. Let's just grab our seats before all the good ones are taken,” I said. Several people around us had begun to stare. The last thing I needed was temporal theft on my record. I climbed into one of the sensory chambers and attached the bio-nodes to my scalp. Finn lurrrrrved movies in the twenty-third century. Personally, I found movies back in his day quaint, but yeah. I missed the explosion of all my senses being engaged at the same time.

“You want anything to eat?” said Finn. “Popcorn?”

“That sounds good. I'll get some.” I pulled off the node and hopped out of the chamber as Finn crawled in. When I got out to the lobby, I swiped my hair—my sole form of ID—across a scanner to pay for both our tickets and the snacks.

I joined the line for the popcorn (if one could call it that). Now that I'd had real popcorn—twenty-first-century popcorn with real butter that came from real cows—it was hard to go back to the purple stuff. I was just about to head back into the theater when I paused. Something was off. It felt like I was being watched. That's when I saw him, tucked into a dark corner, like a snake under a stone.

Leto Malone.

I marched over to him.

“What are you doing here?” I never bothered with pleasantries when it came to Leto—an unscrupulous chronosmuggler who had become a nagging yet necessary nuisance in my life. Technically, this was my own fault. I had agreed to work for him last year to pay my mom's hospital bills. I ended up not needing his dirty money, but had in turn recruited him to keep an eye out for Finn. And by “recruit,” I mean bribe. I'd had Finn invest a good chunk of money back in his time, and it was worth a mint and a half by now. I'd then given Leto all but the last digit to access the bank account in which the fortune was held. In exchange, he'd agreed to keep his eyes and ears open for me.

But Leto had strict orders to keep his distance. Especially from Finn, who didn't approve of my association with the chronosmuggler. I'd never even disclosed Finn's full name to Leto.

“Hey, Dollface.” Leto thrust his meaty hand into my popcorn bucket and pulled out a fistful. There went my appetite. He wore his usual tacky suit, and his hair was combed back so thick with grease, it looked like he had a helmet on. He crunched an unpopped kernel. “Heard a rumor you and Pretty Boy were having a little date night and thought it would be a good chance for us to catch up.”

“How did you know I was here?” I asked. I didn't even know I'd be here.

“I pay well for up-to-date information on the whereabouts of my Shifter friends. Especially ones who are sitting on my fortune. Plus you always come to the movies on Saturday nights.”

“It's not your fortune yet, Leto.” I tapped my foot. “What do you want? Because if you came here to bug me for that last digit, it was a waste of your time and mine.”

And Leto had become a master of wasting my time. The moment ICE had announced their new Shifting program a few months ago, he'd been first in line. He discovered the loophole of being able to change his own past almost immediately. Over and over again, I'd had to go back and revert his changes. Most had involved gambling or stealing someone's inventions. You'd think the idiot would learn.

Now here he was. I was starting to rue the day I'd ever dangled that bank account in front of his nose.

“You're not getting that digit, Leto. Finn is the only one who knows it,” I said. Leto knew as well as I did that if he entered a wrong digit in an attempt to access the account, he'd be locked out of it. He wouldn't risk it by trying to guess.

“Well?” I said. But Leto was staring off into space, ignoring me.

“Huh?” He had this dazed look on his face that broadened into a knowing grin. I narrowed my eyes at him when he clicked his tongue and gave me an attagirl eye-squinch. “Sorry, Dollface. Just remembered something I gotta do later.”

“Get out of here, Leto. If I need you, I'll contact you.”

“Get your bloomers out of a bunch,” he said. “Some interesting news came down my pipeline, and I thought you'd like to hear it.”

“You thought wrong.” Probably his newest get-rich-quick scheme. As far as I was concerned, anything that came down that man's pipeline was covered in slime. And I wanted as little to do with it as possible.

“Even if it has to do with a certain Finnigan Jonathan Masterson?”

I whirled around so fast, purple popcorn showered the little kid passing me.

“What did you just say?”

“It has to do with Finn—” But Leto didn't get to finish his sentence as I'd clamped my palm over his greasy lips.

“Where did you hear his last name? How?” I had never used Finn's full name around him. And Quigley had erased every trace of Finn and his family from the public record almost a year ago. I pulled my hand away.

“That's my news. His record's been reinstated. Including where and when he's from.” Leto tsk-tsked. “But that's not the interesting part.”

Leto grabbed one more handful of popcorn and slowly munched it. I whipped my Com out of my pocket and shoved the stunner prod against his neck. Enough games.

“Tell me everything you know.”

“What's it worth to you?”

“You want the last digit?” I asked. “Fine. It's yours.” It didn't do me much good now anyway. I had to get Finn back to his time pronto. And he could never come back.

“Y'know what?” said Leto. “This one's a freebie.”

“You're turning down the last digit?” No blarking way. I didn't believe it. But I also didn't have time to ponder why Leto had had a sudden change of heart.

“I just want to see the look on your face when I deliver the last bit of news,” he said. “That'll be payment enough.”

“There's more?”

“Your friend Finn in there has been classified a chronofugitive.”

“What?”

“Not just any chronofugitive. Level Five.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Finn is going to do some bad, bad things.”

“
Going
to? As in he hasn't done them yet?”

Leto pinched the crease of his nose. “Do you know
nothing
about chronocrime?”

“Apparently not.” And I would have preferred to never have the need to.

“Any crime that someone commits outside his present is considered a chronocrime. So if someone were—hypothetically speaking—to allegedly sell a stolen modern-day medicine to an individual in the past, that would be a Level Two chronocrime. This is all a hypothetical scenario, of course. Of which no one could prove my guilt. And which was done with the most benevolent of intentions. Hypothetically.”

I rolled my eyes.

“But you said Finn's going to be accused of some crime, not that he's already committed it.”

“Yeah. Retroactive reporting only happens at a certain level of offense. No one at the Office of Chronocrime Investigation's gonna bother to do that with a little harmless smuggling. Errr … alleged harmless smuggling.”

“So what? The conviction is inevitable? Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”

“No, they can't legally report back on the trial or the specifics or whatnots. Only the certainty that the crime will be committed and that he'll be accused.”

“Sounds a lot like guilty until proven innocent.”

Leto shrugged. “Obviously, the laws'd be a bit more lenient if I'd written 'em.”

“So … Level Five. What does that mean?”

Finn was the kindest, most loving, least felonious person I knew.

“Means kidnapping, arson, maybe murder.”

“Whah? There's no way he—oh my gosh.” I had to get Finn out of here. I had to get him out of my time.

Leto managed to grab one more bite of popcorn as I turned and raced back into the theater.

“You're welcome,” he called after me.

The chambers had already ascended twenty feet to viewing height as I rushed through the forest of stalk-like bases looking for Finn's and mine. When I reached our chamber, it lowered, and I climbed in next to Finn.

I tugged on his sleeve. “I have to tell you something.”

“Shh. Movie's starting.”