Vortex (39 page)

Sympathy filled her eyes. “I know. Not exactly like you know … but I have a pretty
good idea what it’s like to not be able to let go.”

“Well, I’m glad we at least know not to trust you.”

I jumped backward so fast I nearly tripped. Stewart stood in front of the refrigerator,
arms folded across her chest, glaring at me.

“I better go check on Emily,” Kendrick muttered, leaving us alone.

“Look—” I started to say.

Stewart pressed her hands over her ears the second I looked at her. “Not now, Junior.
You’ve given me way too much shit to deal with already tonight. Let me absorb one
thing before I have to figure out how to keep you from getting yourself killed by
a pint-sized, barely out of high school agent … Can you just do the fingerprint thing
so I can go down and check out the fallout shelter … alone?” She added that last word
firmly, and I knew this was not the time to argue.

After I opened the closet floor for her, I returned to the guest room and sat down
on the small couch next to Kendrick, who was back to scribbling in her notebook, using
a slanted shorthand that was nearly impossible for anyone to read.

“I always assumed that Emily and I would meet when I’m, like, forty or something.
Past August of 2009 when I first met her. I never imagined it’d be
before
that date,” I said, trying to read over Kendrick’s shoulder.

“Do you want to know something really strange?” Kendrick asked, closing her notebook.

I laughed. “You mean something else strange?”

“She has your fingerprints. No two people have the same prints,” she said. “I checked
it, like, twenty times, running it through the computer program. I’ve never heard
of anything like this.”

I stared at Emily, my mouth practically hanging open. “It’s like she doesn’t even
have her own identity.”

“And she’s a girl and doesn’t even look like you … except the eyes.” Kendrick’s gaze
was fixated on the side of my face and she lowered her voice. “What did they do to
make her? I can’t even fathom it and I can understand quite a bit when it comes to
science and technology.”

I watched Emily’s chest move up and down taking tiny little-kid breaths, her lips
moving, forming words without any sound. “It’s not like she’s a robot. A person is
a person, right?”

The question was too ambiguous for Kendrick to answer. I knew that, but I asked anyway.
Finally, she stood up and walked toward the door. “I think we should stay here tonight.
Changing her surroundings might be a little traumatic.”

“Agreed,” I said, tearing my eyes from Emily to glance at Kendrick leaning against
the doorframe. “What about Michael?”

She shook her head and her eyes filled with tears. “I told him … I told him we were
leaving tonight. For France.”

“But—”

“I already said good-bye, Jackson,” she said firmly, pulling herself together. “I
just can’t … He’s everything … everything I lost when my parents and Carson were killed …
and I’m gonna lose him, too, if I’m not careful … It’ll happen, won’t it?”

I remembered how much I appreciated Agent Collins’s honesty when he admitted Holly
was in grave danger, and I knew Kendrick needed the same from me.

“Yes, it’ll happen.”

She sucked in a breath and then nodded slowly. It killed me to watch this happening,
like it had for me. Her heart just shattering into a million pieces, way too many
for anyone to be able to put it back together. She was ruined. Just like me.

My feet moved across the room without any conscious thought and I wrapped my arms
around her. She only stiffened for a second before breaking down and crying into my
shirt.

“I’m not going to come back,” she said. “I can’t go back to him … It’s too risky.”

I squeezed her tighter and said the only words I could offer, “We’ll help … me and
Stewart. We’ll come up with a cover … get his name out of the database and off any
radar. I’ll use time travel if I have to.”

She laughed through her tears and gave me one last squeeze before letting go. “Thank
you.”

“We’re in this together now, right?” I joked. “Now that we’ve broken nearly every
CIA rule.”

She gave me a half smile. “I really need to take a shower. Will you keep an eye on
the little one?”

“No problem.”

I got the sense that even Kendrick wasn’t sure Emily was on our side. And yet, like
me, she had trouble seeing past the child in her. Good or evil, she was still just
a little kid.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

JUNE 21, 2009, 6:05
A.M.

Last night, I fought to stay awake. Around five in the morning, I dozed off for a
little while and woke up to the sound of pages turning frantically. I figured it was
Kendrick writing more notes, but then I saw her stretched out across the end of the
bed, sound asleep. Stewart was sprawled out on the floor, also asleep. Her laptop
rested in front of her, still turned on.

That was when I saw Emily, sitting cross-legged on the bed, eyes zipping over Kendrick’s
notebook pages. I walked slowly toward her and tugged the notebook off her lap. She
jumped and glanced up at me with big eyes, before sliding back until she ran into
the headboard and couldn’t get any farther away.

“It’s okay,” I said, sitting down by Kendrick’s feet. “I’m not gonna hurt you. None
of us will.”

She pointed to the numbers written across the top of the notebook. “Is that right?”

“You mean the year? 2009?” She nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

This seemed to stun her too much for her to look scared again. My eyes traveled to
the needle lying on the bed. The needle connected to the IV that should have been
connected to her hand. She caught me staring at it and picked it up, placing it in
my hand.

“That solution has impurities. I can smell them,” she whispered.

At first I thought that statement was a little weird, but then I thought about it,
like, what would I think if I went back two hundred years and someone handed me a
glass of water? I’d smell impurities. Notice things that people from that year wouldn’t
think twice about.

“Are you hungry? I can make you something to eat,” I said, hoping this would get me
on her good side. I got a tiny little nod. “Great. Let’s go to the kitchen.”

She snatched the notebook out of my hands and climbed off the bed, following close
behind me. Kendrick had dressed her in one of my T-shirts and it hung down to her
knees.

The notebook was clutched to her chest, with a death grip I knew better than to test.
But she let me steer her toward the table and she sat in the chair I pointed to.

She nibbled on more pita bread and Gatorade while I sat across from her. When both
her hands were occupied, I took a chance and stole the notebook back. She dropped
the bread and reached for the spiral end, catching her fingers between the wires.
The look on her face was so desperate, I released the notebook immediately.

“I just … don’t understand,” she said. “I need to read something … data. I like to
read data.”

The way she explained it, you’d think I’d taken her mother away or something. Suddenly,
I had an idea to provide Emily with some concrete evidence. I opened the junk drawer
to the right of the kitchen sink and riffled through it, tossing random items onto
the counter until I found a black ink pad, half dried-up but still usable. I grabbed
a plain white sheet of paper and the ink, setting it down in front of us. Slowly,
I pressed my thumb in the ink and then against the paper, leaving a black fingerprint.
I slid the ink pad toward Emily and she stared at me for a long moment before lifting
her hand. “It won’t hurt you, I promise.”

She nodded and made her own mark next to mine. I watched carefully as she leaned forward,
practically touching her nose to the page. I gave her the small magnifying glass attached
to my pocketknife to help with the examination. “It’s … it’s the same … We’re the
same.”

“Yes.” Another idea came to me, and I ran from the kitchen to retrieve my bag and
lockbox. I showed Emily how it read my fingerprint and then opened, revealing my journal
and Holly’s diary along with some other personal items. She repeated the same move—opening
the top and then closing it again—at least ten times. Then she reached her hands out
to touch my face, almost like Eileen had done that one time. We were nose to nose
for several seconds before she finally whispered, “But you look different?”

“I know … I don’t understand it, either. Actually, we were hoping you might know something.”

She sank back into her chair, looking less afraid, less tentative. “You’re not like
them … They hate that you’re not like them.” She swallowed hard, eyes meeting mine.
“They hate that I might be like you.”

I could only assume she was talking about the EOTs, about me being more emotional,
more human. And someone must have told her, maybe out of anger, that she was acting
like me … the person who shared her fingerprints. Her identity, in a way.

Emily pointed to the notebook again. “Can I read it, please?”

“It doesn’t belong to me, so maybe we should wait until after Lily gets up?”

“She has two names?” Emily asked. “You called her something else last night.”

“Kendrick is her last name.” I paused for a second before asking, “Do you have a last
name?”

“No … only numbers.” She eyed the refrigerator wistfully. “Do you have chickens?”

“Uh … not in there … not live ones, anyway.”

“I had a chicken. He lived with me, but he got sick and died.” She looked down at
her hands and sighed. “He was the last one.”

“The last one?”

“Extinction?” she said, as if talking to someone much younger than herself. “Dead
species?”

“There’s no chickens in the future?” I asked.

Curiosity filled her expression, leaving no room for the fear from earlier. “No …
but won’t everything die out eventually?”

“I don’t know … will it?”

“How old are you? How many names do you have?” she drilled.

“I’m nineteen … years … as in three hundred and sixty-five days times nineteen years.”

She picked up the bread and started eating again, but I didn’t miss the tiny roll
of her eyes. “A year is three hundred sixty-four and one-quarter days. And where I’m
from, time movers record their age in days. Year of birth is nonessential.”

“Nonessential? Do all eight-year-olds say ‘nonessential’ where you’re from?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met any others my age.” She shrugged. “If you have chickens,
then you have eggs?”

“Yeah…”
Why? Do they worship chickens in the future?
“Do you want me to make you some eggs for breakfast? Or are you planning on raising
a chicken farm in this apartment to keep the species from dying out? Is that the mission
that brought you here?” I asked.

Then she did something I hadn’t expected … she laughed. “You can’t raise chickens
in here. Where would I take them for a walk?”

“Central Park?” I suggested before getting up to pull the egg carton out of the fridge.

Emily followed me and examined each egg carefully before letting me crack it into
the bowl. “They look exactly the same … All those years and it won’t change.”

A few minutes later, we both had plates full of scrambled eggs and Emily was practically
inhaling them. I hoped Kendrick would approve of this food choice for her. If not …
well, it was too late now.

“When did you meet me, before? How old was I?” she asked.

“You were eleven the last time I saw you.” I rolled my eyes at the patronizing look
she had just given me. “You do the math and figure out how many days that is.”

“I like math,” she said. “We don’t call it math, but I read about that in history
data.”

“What do you call it?”

“Either logics or number tech … sometimes origins and angles.” Her feet swung back
and forth, not even close to touching the floor. “‘Tech’ is short for ‘technology.’”

“Yeah, I figured that.” I took a deep breath before plunging into the lecture I knew
I needed to give her. “Emily, you’re gonna have to be careful with what you tell us.
It doesn’t mean you can’t answer any questions, but some information can cause more
harm than good. Does that make sense?”

“I understand,” she said, nodding. “I shouldn’t have told you about the chickens,
right?”

“I’m not sure. It doesn’t really bother me, but I’ve seen more than Lily or Jenni …
I’ve time-traveled. So it’s different for me. You can tell me a little more than them,
but not everything, okay?”

“Because we’re the same.” She smiled, looking up at me. “I always wanted to meet you.
Everything I heard was bad, but I just knew you weren’t … You couldn’t be, or they
wouldn’t have used you to make me.”

So she knew how it had happened. She knew more than I did about it. What a weight
for a child to carry. And to be told one thing and decide on her own that she didn’t
agree, at such a young age … that level of freethinking was unbelievable.

I held up my thumb with the ink still on it. “Yes, we’re the same.”

Kendrick came jogging into the kitchen, looking half asleep, half frantic. She stopped
when she saw us and tightened the tie of her bathrobe. “Thank God … I saw the IV line
had been pulled … You’re eating eggs?”

“She asked for them … I wasn’t going to say no. Emily’s got a chicken obsession.”

Emily giggled again and Kendrick looked at both of us and shook her head. “Eggs are
fine. Anything she wants is fine.” She squatted down in front of the little girl,
looking her over carefully. “You look so much better already. You’ve got some color
back and your cheeks aren’t as sunk in.”

It was Stewart’s turn to come stumbling in, sleepy-eyed. “She does look better. Don’t
forget, we have gummy vitamins.”

I gave Stewart a little smile, knowing that was as good as an apology for her outburst
last night. A peace offering. I grabbed a bottle of vitamins and fished around for
two. “Look, I think this one’s supposed to be a chicken.”