Vortex (45 page)

I couldn’t get a clear shot, not with Mason in the way. The man aimed at Courtney,
who instantly disappeared again. I didn’t even have a millisecond to contemplate how
she kept doing that and why I hadn’t thought about jumping, too, because the man was
now about to fire at Emily. I dove forward, grabbing her around the waist and pulling
both of us to the ground. I heard the shot as we fell, then a second one just after.
My eyes barely opened to see Holly shoot the man square in the chest with perfect
aim. I squinted through the black spots of my horrible headache and saw a window of
space between Mason and the remaining man, who looked like he was about to flee.

I shot him right in the back and he fell, mid-run. Holly, Mason, and Courtney all
sank to the now-wet grass, breathing hard, as Emily and I sat up again.

Holly kept staring at the gun in her hand, then back at the man she had shot. I had
a feeling she was thinking the same thing as me … four people … all dead. In a matter
of minutes.

“Hey,” I said, glancing at her, “thanks … it was a great shot and he would have hit
me the second time.”

“Yeah, he would have,” Mason answered.

“Courtney?” I said finally, looking at my sister. “What the hell were you doing? How
did you jump? I couldn’t focus on anything here.”

She shook her head, eyes wide. “You’ll never believe me … Maybe I’m just going crazy.”

“I think we’re all losing our minds. That’s what it feels like, anyway,” Holly said,
squeezing the rain from her ponytail.

“Maybe,” Courtney concluded. “But it was like … I knew what they were gonna do a second
before they did it.”

The pain hit me again and I squeezed my eyes shut, wincing. “Should we go … up the
hill or whatever…?”

“Jackson? Are you okay?” Courtney asked.

“If that’s even the real Jackson,” Mason reminded her as he stood up.

We all managed to stand. As soon as we reached the hilltop, I could see figures way
in the distance, running toward us. Not the faceless men, but people with hair … different-colored
hair. There wasn’t much else I could make out.

“Jackson!” Courtney said, grabbing my arm. “I think it’s Dad!”

All of us took off running and we could see the three people moving closer, shouting
something at us. “What?” I yelled back.

Several small houses rested at the bottom of the hill between a sea of trees that
didn’t fit into the dirty, demolished world we had just run through. I could even
make out a stream or a creek in the distance, behind the houses.

Suddenly the three people stopped running. Just froze right in the grass as we ran
closer. One of them looked young … a guy maybe my age, with dark hair, long and tied
in a ponytail, and a woman with red hair and almost the exact same face as Cassidy …
and Dad … really the real Dad … in a real jump … not a half-jump.

Dad’s eyes locked with mine as we stood in front of them, panting and leaning over.
It was then that I realized how horrified all of them looked. Complete defeat written
on their faces.

“Dad? What is it?” I asked between breaths.

He opened his mouth to speak, and then his eyes drifted to my far right. “Oh, my God …
Jackson, what did you do?” His legs shook and I thought he might fall over, then the
look he gave me, as he tore his eyes from Courtney, was something I’d never forget,
pure gratefulness and grief all at the same time. “Courtney … oh, my God … I can’t …
It’s impossible…”

He hadn’t come here to save her … to reverse anything, because that wasn’t possible.
I knew he wouldn’t have done that. He’d never have let himself get trapped like that.

I stood up straight again, watching Dad stumble over to Courtney, looking her over
and then opening his arms. She fell right into them, hugging him tight around the
waist. “I’m so glad you’re okay, Daddy.”

“Sweetheart … I missed you … so much…” Everyone heard the crack in his voice and saw
the tears streaming down his face. But I don’t think he cared.

Emily was the first to speak and break through the reunion. “I’m sorry for bringing
her … I just … Jackson said he wanted to fix it, and … I’m sorry.”

Emily’s words hung in the air as everyone watched Dad, gripping Courtney like she
was a lifeline. Mason looked like he was fighting his own emotional battle. But a
minute later he snapped into action, the agent coming to life again. “Agent Meyer …
Courtney and I are a little worried about the cloned kid and, well … we think Jackson’s
a clone, too?”

Dad lifted his head immediately and Courtney wiped the tears from his face with her
sleeve. “You think Jackson’s a clone?” Dad asked Courtney specifically.

“Don’t clones look like the person they’re made from?”

“Not exactly … not always,” the redheaded woman spoke up. “Although I do look almost
identical to Experiment 787.”

“Otherwise known as Cassidy,” Dad said, nodding at me and Mason.

The younger guy stepped toward Emily with a tiny flashlight in his hand. “We can settle
this right now.”

Emily backed right into me as if she knew what was coming.

“Don’t touch her,” I warned the guy approaching with his crazy laser-beam thing.

“It’s all right,” Dad said, looking me right in the eyes.

Emily’s entire body stiffened, but she didn’t protest. The beam shone into her eyes
and the guy pulled what looked like a tiny computer from his pocket and read aloud.
“Experiment 1029 … Emily. D.O.B. July fourth, 3192. Death date unknown.”

“Clone,” the woman said. “One of Ludwig’s.”

He turned the laser beam on me and quickly read, eyebrows lifting. “Experiment Axelle,
Product B … Jackson … D.O.B. June twentieth 1990. Death date … unknown.”

“Axelle!” Mason said, his mouth hanging open.

Dad shook his head. “Jackson’s not a clone. Axelle was an experiment with a surrogate
mother—”

“I know what Axelle is,” Mason snapped. “I just thought … well, I didn’t know it was
him … that’s all.”

“I’m only half of it,” I said. “Courtney’s the other half … I guess Product A?”

The young guy with the laser beam headed straight toward Courtney, but Dad stopped
him and pointed at Holly. Holly’s eyes grew large and she began to back away, but
she stopped eventually, letting him flash the thing at her.

The guy shook his head, forehead creasing as he read his computer. “All it says is
she has the DNA of a known Eyewall agent … enrolled in the year 2008.”

Shock filled Dad’s face despite his gift for composed agent faces. Holly was taking
it all in, moving closer to me, looking hard at Dad’s expression.

“Dad, did you know that I did a complete jump? Right before I joined Tempest officially?”

His eyes widened, but it wasn’t total shock. It was as if several pieces had snapped
together. “Wow … the chances were so slight that I never wanted to worry you with
it. Honestly, even Dr. Melvin was scrambling to figure it all out. Especially the
timeline issue.”

“Well, that is a whole different subject,” I said bitterly, then I took a deep breath
before adding, “Dr. Melvin’s dead … and Freeman.”

“And me,” Mason said, raising his hand in the air. “I’m dead, too.”

Dad looked shaken, but I didn’t think he knew what to say. It was Holly who spoke
up next.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” she said, forming some conclusion that she had obviously been
working through her mind in the last several minutes … something she hadn’t let us
in on yet. She grabbed my wrist and turned me around. “You did some voodoo time-traveling
trick. You knew me before. That day I saw you in the bookstore, with Brian … you acted
so weird. I should have known something was up then, but of course I never would have
guessed
this
.”

“Holly?” I said, trying to shake her hand from my arm. She was practically off in
her own world and I understood where the excitement, the energy, came from. This whole
jump-to-the-future thing was major brain overload, and people like us, trained agents,
we lived for answers to the endless questions. I tried to catch her eye, get her to
really look at me. “Hol, listen—”

“God … it’s practically genius, what you can do. Blow your cover with me, and then,
poof! Time-travel back a few hours and erase the screwup. No wonder they freaked out
about you. Collins would have had me move in with you and propose if he could have,
just to get more information. That’s how much you baffled them.”

I rested my hands on her shoulders and shook her a little. “Holly! Look at me.”

She did meet my eyes for a split second, and then her gaze drifted to my wrist. I
felt my body stiffen when I saw what she was staring at. I leaned closer, examining
the blue and black streaks etched across my skin. My heart pounded so loud, I couldn’t
hear if she said anything to me. I glanced over my shoulder and quickly tugged the
sleeve of my sweatshirt over my wrist.

Eileen had said the side effects would be instant. Maybe they were and I’d ignored
them … my head throbbing uncontrollably. But things were happening then, too many
things to pay attention to pain.

“Dad, can we just go home?” Courtney asked, tears trembling in her voice. “I don’t
understand all this experiment stuff, but let’s just go home and then you can tell
me everything.”

Holly was still staring at my wrist, then back at me. I dropped my arms to my sides,
grateful that nobody else had seen the bruises. This wasn’t the time to add more drama.

“Wait … am I going to be dead if we go back?” Mason asked. “I’m working through the
paradox theories and time-travel basics, but it’s not coming out right.”

Dad let go of Courtney and moved closer to the younger guy and the redheaded woman.
They all exchanged a few looks, and then the woman spoke first. “You can’t go back …
We tried to stop you from entering, but it was too late.”

“Entering what?” Mason and I asked at the same time.

“We call it Misfit Island,” the younger guy said. “Like that Christmas movie
The Island of Misfit Toys
 … except we’re misfit time jumpers.” He laughed a nervous laugh, and then turned
it into a cough when he realized no one else had even cracked a smile.

Mason looked up at the sky, which was spinning around in a circle. “What is it? Some
kind of a force field?”

“Yes,” the red-haired woman said.

Her words didn’t even sink in with me. I had always been able to go back home … except
when I was stuck in 2007 … but I was so far beyond that mental block now. There had
to be a way, otherwise why would Healy even send me here to get Dad?

“And an electromagnetic pulse,” Dad said, his eyes filling with worry and sympathy.
“Every day, I hoped you wouldn’t come here and try to find me. I told them there was
no way Jackson would attempt anything that risky after everything he’d been through.”

I was barely listening to Dad. The pain in my head had reached a climactic peak and
I wanted to figure this out before I passed out. “We got here—if we jumped to this
place, then we can leave. Somehow we got through the—”

“Try it,” the woman snapped at me. “Walk toward the bottom of the hill.”

Mason and I were both striding across the grass at the exact same moment. Suddenly
a shock ran though my body, paralyzing every muscle. I knew I was falling, but I had
no control over it. I tried to force myself forward instead of backward. I ended up
flat on my back about twenty feet from the spot that had paralyzed me.

Mason was right next to me, sitting up and looking just as confused as I felt. Neither
of us had felt the force field tossing us backward. We stood up slowly and I stared
at Dad, desperate for him to fix this, to tell me there was another way.

Mason pointed a finger at Emily. “You did this! You tricked us into coming here, didn’t
you?”

Emily burst into tears. “No, no, I didn’t know … I promise.”

I rested a hand on her shoulder, trying to offer comfort. I didn’t know if she had
done this on purpose, but either way, she was just a little kid.

“I’m sorry, Jackson … I messed everything up,” Emily said.

My eyes traveled from Courtney to Mason to Holly, absorbing their shock and mine at
the same time. Trapped.

“You were tricked into coming here,” the redheaded woman said, as if reading my thoughts.
“Just like the rest of us … It’s what they do with time travelers who don’t conform,
don’t offer the agency anything or try to make their alterations. We can guess when
a new one is coming based on the weather, and we try to stop them using any means
possible, but it almost never works.”

The grass and the houses and the stream swirled in front of me. Healy … he tricked
me … used all my weaknesses against me. Dad, Holly, Adam … The tears in Courtney’s
eyes and the ones I knew Holly was fighting to keep hidden hit me right in the gut.

This was my fault. I should have found Stewart, and talked it through. She wouldn’t
have let me screw up like this. The hopelessness swept over me and I closed my eyes,
forcing my mind back to 2009.

Please work … please work
.

The sharpest pain I had ever felt hit me right between the eyes. I fell to my knees,
every muscle in my body shaking violently. My breath came out in loud and effort-filled
gasps.

“Jackson!” Dad said, running over to me. He looked up at the redheaded woman with
panic as he pushed up my sleeves, revealing the bruises.
Just like Cassidy … and the EOT in the basement of the Plaza.

I threw an arm across my ribs, clutching them to relieve the pain. Holly stood next
to me, hands covering her mouth. My eyes locked with hers and there was something
there … something I hadn’t seen from this Holly. Something that stole my breath and
made me forget everything else. Like a magnet, I pulled her closer with my eyes. One
step inside my world … the one that had included me and her.

Just keep looking at me like that and I’ll be okay
. My hand brushed across the side of my face and I was mildly aware of the sticky
substance between my fingers. I waved my hand in front of my face, breaking my eye
contact with Holly and letting the cold draft of reality blow in.