Jay stared at his hands, seeming for the first time since he showed up in my dorm room, confused. “We’ll have to take them with us. That’s the only way, isn’t it? They’ll die if we leave them here—even if we leave them with someone—they’ll only have until they’re three.” Jay looked up, his eyes glistening with tears.
“So you do love them—those babies that aren’t yours?”
Jay inhaled sharply. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
“Good.” Tag nodded to the guns in the back. “Take one of those.” Tag got out of the car and looked at me. He opened his mouth, but I stopped him before he could order me to stay.
“Save your breath.” I pulled a gun from the back seat, too.
“Fine. Great, take a weapon. Do you have any idea how to shoot it?”
“No, but neither does Jay, and you gave
him
one.”
Jay shrugged, indicating I was right about his weaponry skills.
Tag tightened his mouth into a thin line and reset each of the guns. “None of them are on tase. We don’t have that kind of time. So don’t pull the trigger unless you plan to down someone forever, got it?”
We nodded and followed him toward the buildings.
I glanced around me. This was one nice neighborhood. “Wow,” I muttered. “They could’ve been rich babies.” Jay glared at me. “What? I’m just saying . . .”
“Summer?” Tag said.
“Yeah.”
“Shut up.”
I did as instructed.
Tag had his gun held ready as he approached the door. He didn’t allow the door to decide if it would glow green or red, he simply shot out the doorknob and kicked the door in.
I hadn’t expected the gun to be so loud and nearly dropped my own gun in surprise at the staccato beat of each bullet flying from the barrel. We stormed the house.
Tag took out the two surprised soldiers. I wondered if he knew the soldiers—if it hurt him to down them. It hurt me to watch. Real people—really gone.
The woman inside of the room the soldiers had been guarding held one of the babies. Her eyes went wide with fear as she glanced down toward the cradle where the other baby was.
I heard a muffled crying, my ears still feeling stuffed from the deafening sound of the gun. The babies were crying. The woman was crying, her sleek red hair sticking to her face as she shook her head.
Jay lowered his gun, unable to hold it steady while she held one of the babies. “I want my children.”
His hard voice left no room for argument. Yet, she stood there clutching the child and shaking her head. “They’re mine! I’m their mother!”
Jay walked right up to her. Tag kept his weapon trained on the woman. I couldn’t, afraid I might accidentally shoot her or the babies. I didn’t think I could do either and live with myself after. The regent’s wife rushed to the cradle, but Jay slid in between her and the cradle obstructing her path. She nearly ran right into him.
“Summer! Get the baby.” Jay directed, not taking his eyes off the woman. She panicked at his words and tried to lunge around him to the cradle. He maneuvered and stayed in front of her. She held the child in her arms so tightly I feared she’d crush it.
I picked up the one in the cradle. The little girl had a green bow in her feather-fine hair. She smelled like fresh flowers as if she’d just come from a bath. She was heavy and much bigger than I’d expected. The babies in the public nursery were always so small that the size of this baby surprised me. She was still crying, likely terrified from the sound of the guns. I backed away behind Tag with her in my arms.
“Give me the other one, and no one else will get hurt.” Jay slung the gun over his shoulder and held out his hands to the woman. She began backing away toward the windows which I realized, after a moment, were doors.
“Jay! The doors!”
He lunged for the woman, catching her up in his arms and pinching at her shoulder. A cry escaped her lips, and she released the baby involuntarily. Jay caught the baby before it could fall too far and pulled away from the woman. Her hands clawed at his face, but he maintained his hold on the infant and fended her off by shoving his shoulder into her chest. He then pulled back, tucked the child into one arm and lifted the gun in his other hand to target on her.
“My babies!” she screamed. “He’s taking my babies!” Someone must have heard the gunfire and seen the damage because outside, sirens blared. The noise startled me. I hadn’t heard sirens except for on the vids and the net and that one time in the dark levels. I’d almost forgotten what they sounded like.
“Soldiers coming.” Tag said. “Time to go.” Tag looked at the woman as if struggling to make a decision. He finally shouldered his weapon, strode to the woman, and grabbed her hand. He jerked the ring from her finger leaving a trickle of blood where he’d scraped across her knuckle. He left her in her room with the empty cradles and kicked the door closed. Tag took my gun from me and pulled one of the Orbitals from his jacket pocket. He strapped it to Jay’s wrist. He indicated Jay should give the baby he had over to me.
The one he held had a yellow bow in its hair. Another girl. I briefly wondered if he’d noticed his twins were both girls, but he didn’t seem to be focusing on that. He focused on the Orbital and the wonder if we’d all get out of this building alive.
Tag readjusted the strap so it didn’t cut off the blood to Jay’s hand. “Right about now, they’re suspecting the New Youths, Jay and Jen Savage, of an insane act of attacking a regent. Soldiers will have already been dispatched to your house.”
Tag started calculating numbers on the Orbital screen. “You’ll never get to her in time. She’ll be implicated and ex-ed before you ever get to LA. So you’re going to have to do this in steps. You have no other choice if you want to have a happy ending. I’ve set this to get you to 1986. You’ll need a babysitter. This is close to your own time which I did on purpose so you wouldn’t stand out, but don’t call a relative, that’s the first place the soldiers will be looking for you. Call a babysitting service, call clergy of some kind. Just make sure it’s someone you don’t know but feel okay leaving the kids with. You won’t want to keep jumping time with the twins in tow, so don’t even look at me like that.”
Jay smoothed out the scowl on his face and listened as Tag explained how to set the date timer and the jump calculations. I listened intently thinking of how nice such information would have been back when I was trying to escape with the Orbital. The babies made listening hard, since they were still crying, but I rocked them back and forth, thinking my arms might fall off from the weight of them. They settled down into whimpers.
Even the regent’s wife pounding on the door didn’t seem to bother them once I rocked them.
Tag stayed focused in spite of all the noise and distraction. “You’ll want to get back to Jen at least three hours ago. From the way the windows look, you’ll be gone before they can get to you. They won’t expect you to plan so well because, frankly, most of the soldiers don’t understand the windows well enough to calculate that many steps ahead. They can’t play chess, either. You want to jump with Jen and the other twins to the exact time you leave 1986. You’ll be kind of stuck at that point. The Orbital isn’t exactly made to hold the figurative weight of that many people. I honestly don’t know that you could take all four babies and the two of you without losing someone. So you’ll be stuck in that time, got it? Don’t contact people you know and love because it will get you caught. Your lives depend on it. The soldiers have Orbitals. Orbitals can find other Orbitals. You’ll want to destroy yours as soon as possible. There’s money in your pocket.” Tag placed a wallet in Jay’s shirt pocket. “Move to a different country with the kids and have a nice life, okay? It was great knowing you for this last hour or so. I hope I don’t see you again.”
Jay didn’t seem to take offense to Tag’s abrupt directions and dismissal, but he looked at me as if realizing he wouldn’t be seeing me again, either. “Thanks, Summer. You saved us, dude. You are the coolest person I know. We won’t forget you. You’re leaving, too, right?”
“Yeah. I’m leaving.”
“Then I won’t worry about you. It’s too bad they did this to us. It’s too bad they didn’t mean it when they said they were making the world better, because they really could’ve, you know? You could’ve saved the future once you graduated biology school and all that.”
I smiled. “Or I could’ve made it worse. Who knows? Anyway . . . take care of your family.”
“Yeah. I’m all over that. Hide yourself somewhere awesome, with a beach and yacht, right?”
“Right.”
He hugged me. Since I was holding two squirming babies, the hug was a bit awkward. Jay took the babies from me, looking relieved to be holding them and seeming like someone practiced in balancing two kids in his arms. He smiled as he tapped the screen. He and the babies faded into the background.
Tag took my hand. “Let’s go.”
“We’ve gotta go see Winter.”
He was shaking his head before I finished the sentence. “No way. Did you not hear what I told your friend?”
“Yes, I heard.” Pounding at the door had finally resulted into splintered wood. The regent’s wife was making an exit. I tried to talk over the noise and the noise of the sirens getting louder. “But Tag, she dies because of an STD. If I warn her, she’ll be careful, she’ll have a full life.”
“And you’ll be changing the future! Isn’t it bad enough we sent six people to the past who don’t belong there? I would have sent them to the future if I thought they’d have a chance of surviving there. Who knows what kind of damage we’ve done. And you want to do more? You can’t save the world! Hasn’t everything you’ve seen over the last day taught you that?”
“I’m not trying to save the world. I’m trying to save one person. Take me to my sister!”
He took a deep breath as though about to yell at me again, but the squeal of brakes outside cut him off. The regent’s wife splintered the door enough I could see her eyes glaring with fury at us. “I’ll have you ex-ed!” she yelled. “We’ll find you wherever you go!”
Tag set the screen and said to the regent’s wife, “I’m sorry.”
The room spun around us until it blurred into obscurity.
The tightening at my chest accompanied the pull at my stomach. I closed my eyes and gripped Tag’s hand. When my chest stopped feeling like someone was trying to squeeze out all my oxygen, I opened my eyes again. The sun was high in the sky, and my feet were planted firmly in sand. Gulls cried out in the air. The regent housing hadn’t been built yet. I smiled at Tag and threw my arms around him. “Are we really in her time? Tell me I’ll really see her.”
“You’ll really see her.” He let me hold him and even seemed to be holding me back.
“I love you, Tag.”
He didn’t tell me not to say those words, but he didn’t say them back to me, either. I shrugged off my disappointment.
“It’s a long way to Washington. We’d better find a place we can rent a car.” He pulled away.
I halted. “You mean steal a car. I don’t have any money.” I almost suggested we try to shift place, but remembered he’d said most people didn’t survive it. What good would coming all this way do us if we killed ourselves upon arrival?
He opened his jacket pocket. “When I took the Orbitals, I took the liberty of financing us as well. We have enough. And I have several driver’s licenses from several different decades just in case.” He tried to move again.
I tugged his hand back. “Can we just sit a minute? We’re safe, and I need a minute. My legs feel like water.”
“Orbitals can track Orbitals. And we’re in the same year you came from. They’ll expect that. We’re not safe.” He brought me in and held me a moment longer. “I know you’re tired. So am I. But we’re not done. You can rest in the car. It’ll be several hours before we get to Washington.” He pulled me along and this time I let him.
We took turns driving and made good time to Washington. It took just over nine hours and the sun had already set on the city of Orting. I was driving, the roads familiar and yet dreamlike at the same time. Was this really my home? Was Winter really here? Had I changed over the last year? Would her face still be my mirror, or would the stress of what I’d seen and been through show in my face?
I shut the car off in front of Aunt Theresa’s house and stared at it for a time before the lack of movement in the car woke Tag up.
He stretched. “We’re here?”
I nodded. “Let’s go.”
We exited the car, Tag a little slow as he tried to wake himself up. It was late and the house was dark with the sleep of its occupants. I put my hand on the door to knock, but Tag seemed to have awoken enough to realize what I’d planned and pulled my hand away. “You’re dead as far as these people know. You’ll give your aunt a heart attack if she sees you.” He tapped on his screen and then wrapped his arms around me. I melted against him, loving the feel of him as things shifted around us. I opened my eyes and found that the world looked gray as it had the day of my accident, gray because we were outside of time as Tag had described it all those months ago. Tag was the only thing that had color. He let me go and went to the hide-a-key inside the little garden gnome by the porch.
“How’d you know that was there?” I asked.
“I was watching, remember?” He used the key and entered the house. He bumped into the entry table and let out a yelp. “That’s the second time that thing’s done that to me.”
“Shh!” I waved my finger in front of my mouth.
“We’re outside of time, Summer. No one can hear us.”
“Oh. Right. I remember that.” I took a moment to breathe the house in, to feel the hominess and rightness of it. Aunt Theresa had pictures of us on her wall and on the mantel over the fireplace. She had the ceramic handprints we’d made in second grade, and carried around with us from home to home until we ended up with her, hanging by the TV. And I knew if I were to look in the kitchen, there would be report cards and more pictures on the fridge. “She really did love us, didn’t she?”
“Your aunt?” Tag looked confused. “Of course she did. Would she have raised you if she didn’t?”
“Right. You’re right.” I smiled and went to the stairs taking them two at a time, hurrying to get to my room, where Winter was sleeping. I opened the door and found myself face to face with Winter’s wide frightened eyes staring at me. Her eyes widened even more upon seeing me—the surprise evident. Her mouth had been gagged. She sat on the bed right next to Professor Raik.