Twist (9 page)

“Our version of the Truth? What do you mean by that?”

Quigley opened her mouth but then hesitated.

“It's like how you got that reverter in the first place…”

“Finn punched Bergin in the nose for it.”

“No. Again. You're thinking linearly. How you
originally
got that reverter. Before it was even a reverter. When it was still an IcePick.”

“Ohhh.” Yeah, that one was a chicken-egg of particularly mind-scrambling proportions. It had actually happened about a week after my chip had been disabled—one of my first Free Shifts back in time. I had succumbed to the pull of the Shift and found myself smack-dab in the middle of Bergin's empty office. After a proper freak-out, I remembered that I was where I was supposed to be. I only needed to figure out why I had been called there.

And as I stood in his office, holding my precious reverter, thinking about the lengths I'd had to go to in order to obtain it and activate it, I realized that Future Me would eventually need to steal an IcePick to create said reverter. Then it occurred to me that maybe I
was
Future Me. Sometimes, the simplest path is the best. I checked Bergin's hidden drawer, and after trying out a few different combinations of his dead wife's name and birthday, it popped open. Yoink. I took his IcePick. Easy peasy.

So technically, I was now the proud owner of two reverters. Or rather, one reverter and one reverter-in-the-making.

Here's the mind-blowing part, though. It was only after I had hidden the IcePick in the Mastersons' safe that it occurred to me that I never should have been able to take it. It shouldn't have existed. ICE had already gone back and changed the past to vote out Bergin from their Advisory Board at that point. The timeline had already changed. But I guess my tendrils wouldn't cling to that false timeline. They'd only cling to the timeline I'd been on. Hence, I'd been able to Shift back and take the IcePick.

“So does that mean if I Shifted back to four months ago,” I said, “I still wouldn't meet up with a Past Bree who was experiencing this timeline? Basically, there's no way for me to find out what she's been up to?”

“There's no way to test that theory,” said Quigley. “The only way to force your tendrils back to a specific time is by activating your microchip. By reinstating your microchip, it would force your tendrils to cling to the current timeline. But it would also mean you would no longer be able to detect any of the changes. At least, like Granderson and me, it would appear that this version of Bree has still been acting in such a way as to live as a Free Shifter.

“There's another theory I've been working on as well.” She brushed her hair against her desk to open a drawer. “But it's a bit complicated.”

“Oh, thank heavens. Because so far this has all been so very simple.”

It was a good thing that Quigley had grown as accustomed to my sarcasm as I had to her abrasiveness. She continued straight on as if I'd said nothing at all.

She pulled out another data disk and tapped it. A timeline, just like the one she used to teach with, erupted out of the button. As she flicked various points on the timeline—
bloop, bloop, bloop
—pictures bloomed out from it. It reminded me of an afternoon a few weeks ago that I'd spent with Georgie, sitting at the end of their dock blowing soap bubbles. I couldn't quite get the hang of it, and my bubbles never seemed to want to fully escape the wand that had created them.

“We're here.” Quigley pointed to today's date on the line.

“Mm hmm.”

“Finn's here.” She pointed back to the early twenty-first century.

“And he'd better stay there.”

Quigley gave a grim nod. She'd pointed out that if a single good thing had come of this change, it was that Finn, now a chronofugitive, was nowhere near the twenty-third century.

“Things have happened between then and now.” She flicked various points and historical facts popped up. Presidents, stock prices, inventions, wars, game shows.

“Whyever did you give up teaching?”

She shot me a scathing look, but then I noticed something odd. None of the dates she had pulled up were within fifty years of our time.

“Ready for a headache?” she asked.

Always.

She tapped a date forty years back, and five bubbles bloomed from the same spot on the line. She tapped a date ten years back, and a dozen bubbles crowded the space above the line. Then she went to a spot near our present. Bubbles erupted from the line like a rolling boil until I lost count.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“Eventualities.”

“What does that mean?”

“Each of these bubbles represents possible outcomes for each date in question. When nonShifters change an incident within their lifetime, it creates an alternate path.”

“You mean an alternate reality?”

“No. Reality is still what is real, what's true. But perception of reality is what's changing.”

“You lost me.”

“Let's try another way of looking at it.” She erased the bubbles, back to the original timeline. This time, when she tapped the date forty years back, a few separate timelines split off from the main one at that point. Ten years back, she touched one of the separate ones and four branched away from it. In the present, the splits resembled the tender, tiny roots of a sapling. But still the main timeline ticked away.

“I think I understand. My body might be here”—I pointed at a spot on one of the branching lines—“but my tendrils are here.” The real timeline. Where Finn should be right now. With me.

“That's … the confusing part.” For the first point in our conversation, Quigley looked uncomfortable. “You didn't turn off your chip on the real timeline.”

She tapped a point six months back, and again multiple timelines shot from the main one.

“Your chip was causing you to cling to one of these other alternate paths when you turned it off. So you're not technically on the true timeline. None of us are.”

“None?” I motioned around us. This house was full to the brim of unchipped Shifters.

“Well, very few. I only know of a handful of Shifters who were never chipped.”

“So all of these people are running around on different timelines?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Then why am I even bothering with this thing?” I held up the reverter. “I'll never be able to get us back to the real Truth. I'm wasting my time.”

“You're not wasting your time,” said Quigley. “You're pruning.”

“Pruning?”

“Imagine each of these branches is an actual branch from a … a grapevine. What happens to a vine if it grows unchecked?”

“It takes over.” Like that kudzu that was stupidly introduced to the southern United States from its native Japan in the late 1800s. It was marketed as a decorative plant to shade porches. It grew so rapidly, though, that it ate up acres of roadside forest and engulfed entire buildings. They had fought it with shears, herbicides, even fire, down to the roots. But if one tiny bit remained, it would just start growing again.

“Blar-r-rk,” I said quietly. “Pruning isn't enough. We have to cut it down to the root somehow. Down to the true timeline.”

“Exactly,” said Quigley. “But all of this was information that you already knew, of course.”

“It was?”

“Or, rather, should have been able to deduce. No. Here's where we slip into theory.” She stretched out her palm expectantly. “May I?”

I realized she wanted the reverter. I handed it over with a cringe, loath to part with it even for a moment. When Quigley brushed it against the base of one of the alternative timelines, though, hope sparked in my chest. The line disappeared, along with all the other alternates branching from it.

The spark extinguished, though.

“That's what I've been doing,” I said. “It's not enough. I can't stop them all.”

It was like being sent off to battle and finding out the only weapon you had was a butter knife.

“I can't keep up with the pruning,” I said.

“Exactly.” She tapped the reverter against the original timeline—the True one—and all the other lines vanished.

“What did you just do?”

“The heart of my theory,” she said. “Point Zero.”

“Huh?”

“There is a moment on the original timeline that if we could figure out a way to revert it, we could stop the Initiative from carrying through with their plans. It would prevent all the other changes.”

“Well…” I took the reverter back and started tapping points along the main line—farther and farther back—until no deviant lines existed. “Here. We just need to somehow get back to this point.”

“No.” She tapped the timeline again, and the tangle reappeared. “You're thinking three-dimensionally. Think
four
-dimensionally. Point Zero could be anywhere on the True timeline. It could be in the future.”

“How?”

“It was a moment, a decision, that
triggered
the first change. Think about what you've just been through. It altered your timeline six months ago, but the change happened today.”

“Then what could have triggered the first change? What happened at Point Zero?”

“No idea.”

I waited for her to elaborate, but I knew she wouldn't. Quigley preferred to deal in fact, not speculation.

“So for now, I should just keep pruning?” I asked.

She nodded. “Whatever you do, don't do anything rash.”

“Me?” I batted doe eyes at her. “When have I ever done anything like that?”

“Perhaps we should aim lower. Don't get
caught
doing anything rash. Which”—she drummed her fingers on her desk—“brings me to Finn. Promise me that if you do meet up with him in the past, you won't bring him back with you. It would be dangerous for Finn and put every member of the Haven at risk.”

“I may be a bit reckless, Quigley. But I'm not an idiot.”

I'd searched the public records on the Pod Ride over to Resthaven. Sure enough, my boyfriend was a certified temporal bad boy. It would have been kind of hot if the crimes that constituted Level Five Fugitive status weren't punishable by life in prison.

“Be careful, Bree,” said Quigley. “You're the only hope for some of these Haven members.

No pressure or anything.

Quigley escorted me out. Resthaven was a refurbished Victorian mansion. It had served as everything from a boutique hotel to a brothel to a genuine sanatorium over the last four hundred years. Most of the newer residents, those whose chips had spontaneously malfunctioned, stuck to the common room. It was well past midnight but not unusual to find the space packed. Free Shifters kept odd hours, always coming and going. With all the changes over the last fifty years, many of them preferred to spend much of their time in the distant past, unsullied by fluctuating history.

Those who had been here the longest kept to themselves. I didn't blame them. Most of them hadn't been chipped in decades, if ever. With the jumbled knot that their timeline had become—being able to detect that something had changed without knowing what, when, who, or why—it was difficult for them to keep up a coherent conversation.

We passed a bedroom with the door ajar. Nurse Granderson was inside, checking on an elderly resident, one of the oldest ones here, if not the oldest. He smoothed out a tuft of her white hair before running a medical scanner down her stick-thin arm. I'd met her once, maybe twice. What was her name? Nava?

I paused and looked at the nameplate on the door.

Nava Schwartz. Yes. She was pretty feisty for being over one hundred years old. In her earlier years, before Shifters had come out of hiding, she'd worked as a cultural anthropologist. She'd gone back to Poland and worked as a postmistress in a small Polish village during World War II, taking samples of DNA from licked stamps, looking the future fallen in the face. One by one. Later, she used the DNA to identify the remains of Holocaust victims in a mass grave near Auschwitz and give them an appropriate burial. Something in her must have snapped, but in a good way.

Quigley had had Nava in to one of her history classes a few years ago to speak about the Holocaust. I remember Nava described the method the Nazis used to identify their victims in concentration camps—crude tattoos on their chests and arms. She said that their skin might have been marked with ink, but she made it her mission to mark their graves with flowers.

When the government offered Nava a microchip to help control her Shifting some fifty years ago, after Shifters went public, she had scoffed in their face. “Blue tattoos all over again.”

Nava was one of the few of my kind who'd chosen to live with foresight and not fear. And what had it earned her? A diagnosis of the Madness and shunning from her fellow Shifters. Not around here, though. At Resthaven, she was something of a hero. Gutsy as all get-out with a wicked sharp sense of humor. Nurse Granderson cared for her as if she were his own mother.

And her body was the one I had seen frozen in ICE's cryounit fifty years ago.

 

chapter 9

“YOU'RE SURE IT
was her?”

We were in Granderson's infirmary rather than Quigley's office now. He hadn't stopped pacing since I'd identified Nava and explained what was going on (or at least the little I understood of it). He took his role in the Haven seriously. He was there to help Shifters no matter where or when they needed him, be it 2:00
A.M.
at Resthaven or 1870's Belgium. One time, I'd found him collapsed on the sofa in the common room. Cassa, another resident, told me not to wake him, that he'd spent the entire day Shifting from beacon house to beacon house throughout the past, treating Shifters for injuries and illness. He was always inoculating himself against some long-extinct disease he'd been exposed to.