Yesterday (30 page)

“Environmental legislation,” he replies. “We waited too long last time. Global warming has been catastrophic for the entire planet. We have a chance to slow its pace. There are several other units like us in the United States, infiltrating the political system there, poised to make the changes we need that hopefully will have a profound influence on policies worldwide.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“In the United States, ten years. We’ve had a few key people up here in Canada since then too, as support resources, but it wasn’t until the nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India that a select group of very important people in the U.N.A. who were aware of the project began to wonder if life, even in the U.N.A., would soon be doomed. So we began a second phase of the project, settling a limited number of well-connected U.N.A. civilians up here in southern Ontario.” The man strokes his nose and pauses. “With the plague outbreak there were requests for immediate resettlement, including that of you and your mother. I tell you all this so you know that none of this is being done with the intention of hurting you. We just have too much to protect. If this plays out the way we hope, we’ll be changing history. Everyone will be better off. Even you.”

Future me
. The person who’ll be born sixty-two years from now.

“I’d like you to try to understand, Freya. And I’d like it if we could start walking now.”

I cast a look ahead of me. There are still two security types beyond us and two behind.

“You think I should understand?” I say as I take a series of snail-paced steps in the direction the man’s indicating. “You think I should approve of the big picture enough that I won’t blame you for what you’re planning to do to me.”

“I’d like that,” he replies. “I realize it might not be realistic. Especially for someone your age.”

I bristle at the fact that generations before me ruined the planet but that I’m expected to willingly sacrifice myself. “I could’ve already told someone what I know if I’d wanted to. You could let me go. I won’t say anything. I’ll just disappear.”

“That’s not going to happen, Freya, but I’m going to do everything I can to help you, I promise. I need to know anything you can tell me about remembering. It’s important. Not just for you but for anyone else sent back.”

“Anyone else?” I’ve been walking as slowly as humanly possible and now I stop entirely. “You mean they’re still sending people back? The U.N.A. is still out there?”

“Some of it is.”

Some
. “My father?”

The man nods impatiently. “Last I heard, yes. The SecRos have helped slow the spread of Toxo but there’s still no cure. The survivors have been falling back to the north, your father and President Ortega with them.”

So there’s still hope, even for those left behind. My heart leaps at the knowledge that my father’s still alive. “Can we get back again? How did we get here?”

“Keep going, please.” The man cups my elbow and guides me forward. I wrench my arm away from him but continue to walk beside him. “There’s no returning to the future and you wouldn’t want to be there now even if it were possible, believe me. Tell me what you know about remembering and I’ll explain.”

I shoot him a look of angry disbelief.

“I’m not in the habit of lying,” the man says.

“I don’t even know who you are,” I snap.

“My name doesn’t matter but I’m a
director
. There are only a handful of us on either side of the border. I came here today to make sure this was handled properly. You’re important to us. I want you to know that. We want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else. There’s also the matter of your friend Garren. Has he remembered too?”

I shake my head. “He doesn’t know what’s going on. I kept telling him that I felt like I knew him, even before my memories really returned. He thought I was crazy. I haven’t seen him in days. He thinks this is all some diplomatic conspiracy involving the murders of our fathers. You’ve scared him off. He’s gone.”

“We’ll find him too,” the man says.

“But he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t
need
a wipe. You could just let him go. There’s nothing he could tell anyone, even if he wanted to.”

“So you say but you might lie for him,” the man declares.

“I might but I’m not. I don’t have to.” The gap between us and the director’s allies is shrinking. Two of them are standing in front of the Eaton’s department store at the north end of the shopping mall, eyeing us up. I’m running out of time and I stop again. “I’ll tell you why I think the W and C didn’t work—I’m not your average person.”

The director’s so intent on what I’m about to say that he doesn’t berate me for stopping.

“I have a kind of second sight,” I admit. “Since I was very young.”

“That wasn’t in your file,” the director says.

“It wouldn’t be. I hid it from my parents. But it’s the only thing I can think of that would interfere with the wipe and cover. I sensed there was something wrong from the moment I started to physically recover from the journey here. The feeling got stronger when I ran into Garren but I didn’t have a real breakthrough until I went to a hypnotherapist.”

The director squints, unhappiness spreading across his face and creeping into the slope of his shoulders. “Hypnotherapy shouldn’t have had any impact. Your procedure was performed faster than usual because of the Toxo threat but the nanites neutralized the neurons associated with your old memories.” He straightens his spine, twin lines of concentration forming between his eyebrows. “You could be right about the link with your second sight. I don’t understand the nature of the relationship between the two offhand but we’ll investigate that.”

I keep my theory about the role grief played in remembering to myself. “You said you’d tell me how we got back here,” I prompt.

“So I did. We don’t have time to cover the extensive background information now. It will have to suffice for me to say that our presence here is thanks to a discovery we call the Nipigon Chute. In 2044 a U.N.A. archivist uncovered a case study about an American man named Victor Soto in an Australian mental hospital in 1963. The man claimed to have fallen out of a boat on Lake Nipigon in northwestern Ontario in 2041. His doctors performed electric shock therapy until
they considered him cured and he’d come to look upon his experience as a delusion.”

My head’s reeling but I don’t have time for awe. I need to stay focused.

“But he knew too much about the future for it to be a fiction,” the director continues. “And the U.N.A. began researching Lake Nipigon itself. Eventually we learned the exact location of the phenomenon. We’ve still barely scratched the surface in beginning to understand it but we believe the Nipigon phenomenon is as natural as gravity. It’s possible there are more of its kind on the planet—so far undetected—and that others who were intellectually ahead of their time at various points in history may have traveled through similar chutes.

“That’s only theoretical as this point but one thing we do know is that the Nipigon Chute is strictly a one-way journey through time. A jump back seventy-eight years, seven months and eleven days into the past with the physical end point of the journey being a large salt lake in Western Australia, Lake Mackay. Victor Soto was lucky to have arrived in Lake Mackay after heavy rain; otherwise he would’ve suffocated in the salt and none of us would have been aware of the amazing opportunity nature seems to have bestowed on us.”

The director tilts his head, his eyes shining with reverence. “It’s incredible, isn’t it? A second chance for the entire world.”

It is incredible; there’s no denying it. The place and time I’m from desperately needs another chance. No wonder the
director wants to make sure I forget. We thought there were no more real mysteries left on earth, that the only major changes we’d see would be made through our own technologies. I’m speechless.

But if the director thinks this will be enough to make me give in and go with him, he’s wrong. I want my second chance in the here and now, not reserved for some future Freya that may never be born, depending on how history is rewritten. And I want a second chance for Garren too. I want us to stand on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and be free.

“How many of us are back here?” I ask, stalling again.

“I think I’ve satisfied enough of your curiosity,” the director replies. “We have to go, Freya.”

I can’t put him off a second longer. The future’s only steps away and I begin walking, closing the distance between us and the security men. My mind is absolutely clear. No new visions. I can’t wait anymore. I wasn’t a foot nearer than this when I heard the shot in my premonition.

I leap ahead of the director, my weight on my bent left leg to the rear of me. In one fluid action I lift the knee of my right leg and whip out my right foot, kicking into the director’s abdomen with the ball of my Doc Martens boot.

I’ve never done anything like this outside of gushi. I’m stunned that in real life the action works almost as well.

As the power behind my strike propels him backwards into the air, a single gunshot rings out. Then another. Roughly thirty feet ahead of me, both security men buckle.
One of them’s taken a shot to the thigh and the other to the hand. I scan desperately for Garren as I sprint forward and to the right, towards the set of doors that will dump me onto Yonge Street with the pedestrian crowds.

The two security men in my wake have raised their weapons and are running after me. As I begin to turn again I catch sight of Garren behind me. He’s pointing his gun at one of them, yelling at me to
go
.

The security guy nearest me, the one with the hand wound, is reaching for his weapon with his good hand. I careen towards him and launch my right foot solidly at his groin. He crumples to the floor, bullets flying around us. My eyes zoom back to Garren. He’s almost made it.

“
Go!”
he shouts again.

I watch a bullet rip into his sleeve, midway between his elbow and shoulder. His hand flies to the point of entry but he barely slows down. Then he’s with me and we’re tearing out the door and onto the sidewalk, directly into the midst of a group of chanting Hare Krishnas.

Their pace slackens, a vision of halting orange confusion, but the chanting doesn’t stop.

“
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.”

I fight my way through a sea of orange robes, Garren next to me, doing the same. We run south to Queen Street, the sound of the bullets and the Krishna chanting ringing in my ears. I don’t know how close the director’s men are. I
don’t know where we’re going. We just run and run and run, not stopping for traffic lights, not glancing over our shoulders to gauge the position of the men who are chasing us.

“In here,” Garren cries, pointing at the revolving door to Simpson’s department store. The store’s enormous and occupies an entire city block. We race inside and weave through the shoppers, exiting again on Bay Street where my eyes land on a taxi across the street. I wave my hand like someone in danger of drowning as I shout, “Taxi! Taxi!”

The driver pulls over for us and waits. The pedestrian symbols flash a caution sign, telling us we’re about to lose the right of way. Garren and I speed across the walkway. On the other side, with the taxi, I hazard a quick look back across the traffic and see the director and one of his men exiting the department store.

Our eyes lock. The director points at me as I throw myself into the cab, Garren a second behind me.

“Start moving!” Garren shouts.

“Where to?” the driver asks, eyeing us in the rearview mirror.

“South,” Garren says. “We have to
hurry
.”

We’re cruising down Bay Street before the director and his security men have even made it across the street. I lean forward in my seat to study Garren’s right arm where he was hit. He moves his left hand to cover the wound just as I open my mouth to ask how bad it is.

Garren flashes me a warning look, shifting his gaze to the driver.

I understand and stay quiet.

“If we keep going south we’ll end up in the lake,” the driver quips. “You want to give me a more specific destination?”

It’s only then that I notice Garren doesn’t have either of his bags. Mine’s gone too. I don’t know when I dropped it but the important thing now is Nancy’s envelope. As Garren tells the driver that we want to catch up with the commuter GO train somewhere after Exhibition Station I dig into my pocket for it and peek inside at the collection of fifty-dollar bills. By my count there are twenty-two of them.

Eleven hundred dollars
.

I’m not sure if Nancy was telling the truth about not knowing that she was followed today but the money will help. It will take us both all the way to Vancouver and give us something to live on while we look for work. We’re still almost three thousand miles from where we want to be and seventy-eight years away from where we came from but I have the answers I was looking for and the single person in the world who I can trust is sitting next to me, injured but safe.

At this exact moment in 1985 it’s the most I can hope for and I sit back in my seat and exhale for what feels like the first time since leaving Cranbrooke Avenue this morning.

A
fter the taxi driver drops us off at Mimico Station, Garren disappears into the bathroom to examine his arm and I ask about the next commuter train from Toronto. The woman at the ticket counter tells me it’s due in seven minutes and quotes a platform number.

I buy two tickets to Oakville and hover nervously around the men’s room, hoping that our taxi driver doesn’t listen to the news and doesn’t suspect we had anything to do with the Eaton Centre shootings once he does inevitably hear of them. I won’t be happy until we’re moving again, putting miles between us and Toronto.

With two minutes to spare Garren emerges from the bathroom. I tell him that we need to get onto the platform in a hurry and hand him his ticket. “How’s your arm?” I whisper as we veer towards the platform. His right sleeve is torn and wet where he must’ve washed the blood from it.