Twist (7 page)

It was too late.

The change was permanent.

“What have you done?” Tears filled my eyes as I spun around to face my future self. I launched at her, a missile of self-loathing. This change had apparently prevented me from going on the midterm when I first met Finn. The whole last six months of my life had been replaced with that of a stranger's. One who was Wyck O'Banion's girlfriend and ate Blinky Beans and … and … “How could you?”

She didn't answer, but instead wrapped her arms around me. At first I thought she was giving me some kind of I'm-sorry hug, but then her hold on me tightened. Tingles crept up my arms and legs.

“Where are you taking me?” I struggled against her, but I realized that she already remembered all this. Fighting was futile. Besides, there was nothing left I could do here. With a sigh, I gave in, and we Shifted away.

*   *   *

As a Shifter, one of the lessons that gets hammered into your skull over and over and over again is “Expect the Unexpected.” Half the teachers at the Institute have a poster of the saying up on their wall (usually with a cutesie picture on it like a baby eating a lemon slice or a pegamoo calf getting sprayed in the face with milk).

But nothing—expected or not—could have prepared me for what awaited us where we landed.

It was a room unlike any I'd ever been in before. The space was a giant dome, maybe fifty feet in diameter. All metal with a slight sheen. My gaze drifted up and across the high, sloped ceiling looking for an escape route. There were two doors, on opposite ends of the room. Neither was marked with signage. Either of them could lead straight to freedom. Or a trap.

Rows and rows of three-foot circular, see-through bubbles lined the edge of the room. One of them was lit with a soft blue light. All the rest were dark. In the exact center of the room was a cylinder, eight feet high and the same width as all the bubbles. It appeared to be full of some kind of clear, jellylike fluid that sloshed sluggishly against the opaque sides of the container. It looked like the dunk tank at the carnival Finn had taken me to in Chincoteague, only taller and sealed at the top.

The whole place seemed to vibrate with pent-up energy. It gave me the sensation of being trapped in a metallic wasp's nest.

The thing that was most striking about the room was how friggin' cold it was. Frigid. My breath detonated in front of my face in icy plumes, and I rubbed my hands together to keep my fingers from stiffening.

“What is this place?” I asked my Future Self.

“The Cryostorage Room at ICE's headquarters.”

It was the first straight answer Future Bree had offered. Unfortunately, it meant nothing to me. Well, other than the fact that we were in the belly of the beast. As I scraped my nail along the one glowing bubble along the edge of the wall, a layer of frost melted in its wake. Ice. How appropriate.

“Don't touch anything,” snapped Bree.

I jerked my hand away from the glass.

“Then tell me what's going on,” I said.

“No time.” And, indeed, she had switched her full attention away from me and onto three interwoven tubes shooting out of the top of the center tank and into a hole in the ceiling above.

“We're time travelers,” I said. “All we have is time.”

She didn't respond, only pursed her lips and lowered her gaze to the tank. She reached out and pressed her palm against it, still not looking at me. I took the chance to really examine her. She looked crapawful, like she hadn't slept or eaten in days. Dark circles clung under her eyes, and her hair was scraggly and unwashed, but the same length and style as mine, so we appeared to still be close in age. Her clothes were stained with … was that blood?

“You sound like Finn,” she finally said.

“Is he okay? When can I get back to see him?”

“You're with Wyck now.”

“I'm not with—”

“Of course you're not.” She snapped around to face me. “But Wyck doesn't realize that. And you won't let him.”

“Do you have any concept what you just cost me back there?” I gestured over my shoulder as if those few precious minutes at the Institute could be reclaimed, as if I could reach out and clasp them. “What you cost us?”

Saying the words, the full weight of her actions settled over me like wet wool. The heaviness of my new—and now permanent—situation sank into my marrow and turned to sludge. I didn't know what I would face as I went home. I didn't know if my tendrils would draw me to Finn in the past like they always had if we didn't share a history. I didn't know if Finn would remember me even if I could.

As my eyes locked with my future self's, I could see that she remembered this moment. Remembered how lost and confused and angry I felt.

“I know none of this makes sense right now,” she said. “And, honestly, it's still really … it's … it's not going to be an easy path, but I need you to trust me.”

Did I have a choice?

I wandered back over to the bubble that was glowing blue and realized it was actually a window. There was a hollowed-out space behind it. And something inside.

“You said this place was ICE's Cryostorage? Storage for what?” I asked. But when I turned back around to look at Bree, she was staring at the tubes again. She'd told me where we were, but I still didn't know when. I checked my QuantCom. We were fifty years in the past.

This was a few years after Shifters came out of hiding. ICE had been around since almost the beginning. As soon as we'd gone public with our ability, it seemed they'd been right there alongside us, “helpful” at every turn. Can't find a job that thoroughly utilizes your Shifting ability? ICE career counselors can help. Can't afford a chip functionality check? Head to your local free ICE clinic. Cost of Buzztabs have you down? There's an ICE benevolence fund for that!

This period of history had been a hotbed of political and social upheaval. NonShifters had been scared of us initially—scared of our ability. It had all been one big scrambled chicken-egg in the beginning. Shifters had agreed to be microchipped because Future Shifters mistakenly claimed that it was the only way to escape a Madness that would develop down the line. The microchips, in turn, led to the Buzz when they kept Shifters from going where their tendrils wanted them to go.

The Madness ended up being nonexistent, or rather, misinterpreted. Technically
I
had the Madness—the ability to detect changes to the timeline. Like I said, one giant temporal omelet. And there was ICE the whole time, hovering over the skillet.

I tapped on the bubble, and soligraphic controls popped up. Even though they were a simulated hologram—nothing but bits and bytes—they felt solid to the touch. A series of words and numbers scrolled across the front. November Bravo Golf 1309874729. I waved my hand in front of the controls, trying to get them to disappear, but instead the bubble opened like a blossom. A long metal shelf began to extend. I turned my attention back to making the controls disappear.

“I said, leave her alone.” Bree stomped over and put her thumb over a red button on the controls.

“Her?” I looked down and that's when I realized what ICE was storing here. Or rather, who. It was a woman, her skin a rippling map of wrinkles framed by snowy hair. She seemed familiar, but it was impossible to place her in such unusual circumstances.

Accident victims were sometimes placed in cryostasis until new organs could be designed and produced for them. But something told me ICE wasn't keeping this woman frozen while they made her a kidney.

Future Me brushed a wisp of the woman's hair back from the age-etched face before pressing the red button, sending the woman back into the confines of the cryostorage unit.

“Who is she?” I asked. “I mean, is she … dead?”

“She's alive.” Bree looked back and forth between the woman and the tank before shaking her head slightly and turning back to me. There was a new expression on her face, like something had clicked. She gave the central tank one last, long look before turning back to face me. “Oh my gosh. I know who … umm, I have to go.”

“What? You mean synch?”

She shook her head and raced off to one of the entrances of the room. The door slid open. As if an afterthought, she turned back around and pointed at a metal screen propped up about ten feet from where I was standing. “You'll hide behind that.”

“Huh?”

But she hadn't stuck around to explain. I didn't have much time to mull it over, though, because the opposite entrance began to unseal. I raced over to the metal screen and slid behind it. She hadn't said I'd get caught here, so that made me feel a smidge better.

Even through the screen, I could tell who one of the people was. Well, not who so much as what. His stiff, red scrub pants swished as he entered the room backward, dragging something heavy behind him. He was one of ICE's workers.

“Couldn't have picked a light one, ehh?” he said to another person following behind him.

I craned my neck as far out as I dared to get a glance at the other person, but the metal screen was grated, and I worried they'd detect the movement.

“I was following very specific orders.” The voice was garbled with a grating rasp to it. I couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman.

I risked a further peek to see why. My hand flew to my mouth before I could stop it. At least I prevented the cry of shock from escaping. It was the person I'd seen earlier. The person at the London Fire, dressed head-to-toe in the same silver protective suit as before. They
did
work for ICE.

“Well?” There was a harsh clip, even through the mask that distorted the voice. I stared at Raspy, willing him or her to pull the hood and mask away so I could get a look at the face, but no such luck.

“Well what?” said the red scrub.

“We had a deal,” said Raspy. “She comes with me.”

“It's gonna take a lot more than one. They got big plans.”

“But we had a—”

“Take it to the higher-ups. Nothing I can do about it.” The red scrub raised the soligraphic controls in front of the central tank. Willowy robotic arms descended from the ceiling and clamped onto the heavy object at his feet. They lifted their load above the tank and dumped the contents in with a
splosh
. The red scrub entered information into the controls, ignoring Raspy, who was pacing behind him.

“Fine,” said Raspy. But his (her?) posture spoke defeat as she (he?… dang, it was really impossible to tell) headed to the far exit.

Blark. The exit that my future self had taken only a few minutes ago. I tried to think of a way to warn her, but then I realized that by virtue of the fact that I knew Raspy was going out there, so did she.

“Fine,” the red scrub jeered at the sealed door. He finished up with whatever information he was entering and turned to leave himself.

As soon as he was gone, I crept out from behind the screen, moving with confidence since Future Bree surely would have warned me if this was folly. I had to know what was in that tank.

The fluid inside had turned a murky blue. The large mass inside floated lifelessly, completely obscured by the combination of thick, frothy, sloshing liquid and the layer of frost on the outside of the tank. A small, soligraphic model floated in the air where the controls had been. At first, it looked like a glowing, baby seahorse, but when I prodded it, I realized what it was. A hippocampus—the part of the human brain that contains the quantum tendrils. The part of the brain that enables Shifters to Shift. There was a number below the hippocampus, ticking up and down every few seconds. .01%.…03%.…04%.…02%

Something twitched in the fluid. I flinched away. Scratch what I had said. I didn't care what was in that tank. I just wanted out of here. This place gave me the willies, and then some.

It was with a rush of relief that I felt my fingers begin to tingle. I was going home. What exactly I would face there, I still wasn't sure. But home.

The room around me began to fade. Right before I took my final breath of chilled air, I looked straight ahead at the tank.

A hand reached out of the darkness and pressed against the inner glass.

 

chapter 8

SQUISH.

My shoe slid into the unused sanislush of the otherwise empty toilet when I landed back in the movie theater in my time. A fitting return to my present situation.

I closed my eyes and could still picture the tank. There was a person in that thing. A person. But I didn't even know where ICE's headquarters were. And besides, that person was there fifty years ago.

I counted to ten, an unsuccessful attempt to slow my shallow breathing. When I opened my eyes, I could still picture that hand.

There was only one reason I could think of why my future self would allow this fake-girlfriend-with-Wyck-charade to go on. Whatever was happening at ICE had to be stopped. And now that Bergin had been cut out of their organization, Wyck was my only connection to them.

The fact that I wasn't really with Wyck provided mild comfort. No, “comfort” was too strong a word. Consolation.

A fresh wave of panic, anger, and sadness sent me reeling when I looked at the door to the bathroom and realized I had to go out there and face Wyck. I had no idea how to act around him. No idea what to say. All the memories I had of the last six months contained Finn. And now I had to somehow convince Wyck that I was his girlfriend. This was why unchipped Shifters had sequestered themselves at Resthaven. The repercussions of this change were staggering.

I was so alone.

No, not alone,
I reminded myself. Finn wasn't here, true. And he could never come here again since he was a chronofugitive. But surely it was only a matter of time before I would Shift to Chincoteague to see him and explain what had happened. Plus, I still had Mom and Quigley and Granderson. They would help me piece together what had happened.