A Grave Tree (16 page)

Abbey’s brain started to ache with the possibilities. And for once her brainiac mind-feed supplied no useful formulas, theories, or principles.

Caleb held out his hands and waved them through the air, one on top of the other. “It’s like the two time periods are traveling in parallel rivers. My past and present self are learning the new things simultaneously. Every time one river changes course, the other shifts too. What you do and what the past me does in half an hour will change what I remember, and possibly the path of my life. So the me you see here today is probably a different me than you have met previously, and a different me than you will meet if you come back to the future. I have no idea how many times the future has been rewritten. Sylvain used to pull threads all the time, but by letting all those witches out of Nowhere thirty years ago… things have changed. And not for the better.”

“Selena…” Abbey breathed.

Caleb shook his head. “She’s not the only one.”

“Sandy…” Abbey murmured.

A firm rap at the door made Abbey jump. Caleb maneuvered past her, looked out the window in the top of the door, then pulled the door open.

Sarah stood on the stoop, her eyes bloodshot and her face red and tear-stained. “They’ve arrested Simon,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. He didn’t kill Abe. But he was at the office alone at the time of the murder, and he and Abe had a meeting scheduled there, that night. It’s in Simon’s calendar.”

Caleb pulled her inside, and closed the door behind her. “Get the best lawyer you can. I’m sorry, Sarah. I have to get back to my people. I’ve left them for too long. Don’t worry: the charges won’t stick.”

Sarah’s face crumpled. “You don’t know what this city is like, Caleb Sinclair.” She looked at Abbey. “Can’t you find a way to make sure this doesn’t happen?”

Caleb moved abruptly as if to stand in between them and gave Sarah a fierce look. “That’s not how we’re supposed to use the stones. Deliberately pulling threads is dangerous. Abbey could do something that results in Simon getting killed, or worse.”

Sarah turned on him, her eyes fiery. “Can it
get
worse? We live in one of the last outposts of human civilization in a semi-totalitarian oligopoly. We’re not allowed to leave town. It’s not
safe
to leave town. We can’t even walk on the ground. I’m sure we’re being monitored somehow through the sensors in these jumpsuits. We have no idea if the information piped in to us is correct. We have no idea if there are other people out there, beyond the Outlands. And now my husband has been arrested, and you’re not even supposed to be out of bed. Tell me how it can get worse?”

Abbey studied the fuzz of fine red hair on Caleb’s arms. His voice turned grim and raspy. “It can get worse. Don’t involve Abbey,” he said.

Abbey shifted her eyes to Caleb’s face. The scar on his cheek stood out starkly. He was afraid. Since when was her twin afraid? The older Caleb she had met in the forest in his own future just a few months ago had been sad, but he had been a leader, and he had not been afraid.

What had someone done to the futures to make Caleb afraid? A shiver ran down Abbey’s neck.

Caleb gave her a nudge in the direction of the door. “You should go to Abbott’s Apothecary, and then go home. Don’t try to fix the future. There are too many threads. Let us handle it.”

“That’s what all you adults keep saying,” Abbey said. “But you
don’t
seem to be handling it.”

“I know. But it’s too dangerous for you.” Something in the way Caleb said “you” made Abbey’s heart start to patter strangely. Did he mean time travel was dangerous for everyone, or her in particular? “Please, Ab. You better go. As I recall, I’m considering going looking for you.”

Sarah had lowered herself into one of the chairs in the tiny kitchen and held her face in her hands.

Caleb opened the door. “The threads are getting too tangled. Please, if you can find Jake, ask him to come and help me. I need to go back to my people. But just send Jake. Don’t come yourself. Sylvain said he’d bring Jake sometime soon to take me back to my future, but he hasn’t shown up.”

He raised his hands as if to push her out the door, and Abbey obediently stepped out onto the stoop. “Go, now. I would run.” Caleb practically choked on these last few words, and his green eyes gleamed fiercely as he closed the door behind her.

*****

After the booming stopped, and the voices disappeared, Mark sat huddled in a little ball in the room for a long time. Finally, after he had not heard any sounds for at least half an hour, he rose and walked all around the circumference of the pentagram, looking for any traces of Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham. But they were gone.

Trapped
, Mr. Sinclair had written. Mark, by his estimation, was at least thirty years in the future. Had they been trapped for thirty years? A chill unrelated to the dampness of his shoes, socks, and khakis swept up his spine.

He needed to get out of here. What if the pentagram sucked him in, too? He snatched up the cable and the handbag, no longer worrying about it being dirty, and stuffed them in his backpack. (He felt these things were important, somehow, in confirming that Ms. Beckham had been here, that he had not hallucinated her.) Then he fumbled with the wheel on the door, spinning it until the door slid open, and lunged into the small airlock chamber.

He leaned against the outer door, listening. Had his pursuers given up? Or were they waiting outside to collect him, knowing he had no other escape? He cracked open the door and poked his head out. Water rushed in, rewetting his shoes and socks. Twilight had descended, but the river, riverbanks, and top of the dam looked deserted.

Cautiously, he edged out into the river. He and Digby needed to get to Four-Valley Gap and rejoin the others.

He waded to shore as silently as possible in the growing darkness.

A woman emerged from the shadows of the forest, her blond hair glistening in the light of the rising moon.

“Mark,” she called. “I’m so glad I found you. Abbey and Caleb sent me. We’ve been so worried. You can’t go off on your own like that.”

Sandy. His half-sister.

Mark suppressed an urge to turn around and bolt into the trees on the other side of the river.

The streets were filled with the shadows of dusk when Abbey arrived to find Caleb waiting outside Abbott’s Apothecary, just like older Caleb had suggested he would be. He was alone, his freckled face clouded with irritation, Ian nowhere in sight.

Caleb clutched her arm almost painfully. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.”

“Looking for you,” Abbey said. “Where’s Ian?”

Caleb shook his head, an angry jerk. “He hasn’t showed.”

“How did you get away?”

“Anna helped me. She works for Salvador Systems as a geneticist. They scanned us when we went in for treatment. Our genes, I mean, and apparently mine came back as already taken, which would make sense if this has become my future. My genes would be taken by me—an older me. Anyway, it raised a whole bunch of alarm bells. Anna came in, recognized me and smoothed it over, said it was just a glitch in their new scanners. Honestly, I’m not totally sure what happened. It’s creepy that they scanned us though.”

Abbey looked over her shoulder, wondering who was watching them. “A lot of things about this future are creepy,” she said. “I think we should go home. We need to find Mark. I hope he headed back to Sylvain’s cabin.”

Caleb raised his hands in the air in a gesture of uncharacteristic helplessness. “How do we get home without Ian though? We don’t have a key to the tunnels, and I’m not sure if we can get to the swamp over land. Do you think the stones on Coventry Hill are even still there? If Sylvain destroyed them in our present, how could they still have been there when we used them a few months ago, if this is the future? Shouldn’t they have been gone?”

Abbey shook her head. “I think they’re gone now. I think the timelines are entangled, so if something happens in our present to change the future, the future just resets. Everything has changed since the last time we were here.”

The future is not set in stone
, her mother had said to her a few months ago after they first used the stones to rescue the witches from Nowhere. Now that seemed like a colossal mistake. There were too many people pulling too many threads, and it felt like the tapestry was starting to unravel.
The future is crumbling…

“Yeah, Anna doesn’t even own Abbott’s anymore. She works for Sylvain,” Caleb said.

Abbey peered all around them, into the corners and alleyways between buildings. The streets seemed far emptier than the last time she had been here, like a pall had fallen over the entire city, or perhaps the entire future. “Well, where’s Ian? He was supposed to meet us here?”

Caleb drew his shoulders up in a shrug.

Abbey clutched Caleb’s arm. “Are those sirens getting closer?”

Ian burst around the corner, his eyes wide, the lapels of his turquoise and magenta shirt flapping out of his jumpsuit.

“Run!” he called. “To the library! We’ll have to go through the yards and drop down into the tunnel on Fifth Street.”

Abbey and Caleb stared at the small man.

“Now! Get into that alley before they see you!” Ian yelled, snatching Abbey into the small opening between Abbott’s and the domed store next to it. Caleb followed. Flashing blue and red lights appeared on the walls of the buildings in the direction from which Ian came, and a full cavalcade of police cars poured around the corner, their sirens wailing.

In the front car, leaning forward, his fuzzy hair a cloud of white and his silvery-clawed artificial hand resting on the dash, sat Dr. Ford.

*****

Sandy had Mark in some sort of thrall. He felt rooted to the spot while she went on about how worried everyone had been about him and peppered him with questions about where he had been and what he had been doing in the river. Mark grunted responses about looking for contour lines and isogons, while Digby, perched just behind Mark’s head, dug his claws deeper and deeper into his neck.

Sandy seemed disappointed with his answers and looked meaningfully past Mark at the dam.

He examined her face more closely, something he did not like to do, but he felt that in this case an exception was necessary. Her blond hair still formed the same shape that he remembered, but her cheekbones seemed more prominent, and a fine web of lines surrounded her eyes. He would have sworn she was older than when he last saw her, and it occurred to him that this was future Sandy.

“Dams are such fascinating places, aren’t they?” Sandy said. “It would be great if we could explore it together, don’t you think? What did you find in the dam? Can you show me?” she asked with a tinkling voice.

Mark grasped for something, anything, to say. He clutched the straps of his backpack. “I would really like to see the penstock and the generators. That is what I came for. The Granton Dam was constructed in 1965 and at its peak before the expansion had a generating capacity of 140 megawatts. The 2012 expansion added 120 megawatts of capacity, making it the largest dam in the Coventry region. The United States generates forty-nine percent of its power through hydroelectric dams.”

“Mark!” Sandy’s voice cut into his thoughts and his soliloquy (he had been about to start talking about the turbines). “I need you to start being straight with me, because I think you’ve been lying, and it’s not right to lie to family, Mark. To your sister.”

Mark opened his mouth to say something to clarify that she was his half-sister, but she swept on without allowing him to interject.

“I know you’ve done a very bad thing. You’ve gone into a secret room and you could be in a lot of trouble. You saw those men with the guns. If you tell me the truth and show me where you went, I might be able to help you.”

Mark felt his jaw go a little slack as he assessed her words and the prospect of the return of the men with guns. He knew he was not good at nuance, but her statements and behavior all seemed wrong somehow. A wave of stress crept up his neck, and he glanced up at the top of the dam to see if he could see anyone.

She turned her lips into the smile that she usually gave Caleb (which seemed to have the effect of making Caleb very obedient) and patted Mark’s arm, sending Digby burrowing into the backpack. “Just show me, Mark.”

Mark turned as if to wade back into the river, and then all of a sudden his legs were moving as fast as he could move them through the water (which was more strenuous than he thought), heading toward the other bank, away from Sandy.

The men were on him as soon as he exited the water. They threw him roughly to the ground and pressed cold gun barrels into his neck. They wore jumpsuits like the one he had been forced to wear in the future with the maps and the library, except theirs were red. Mark yelped and started to cry. His chest, already hurting from the exertions of the day, heaved in big painful sobs.

“Roll him over,” Sandy ordered.

Mark’s body was dutifully rolled like a log, and he opened his eyes to see Sandy’s face frighteningly close to his own. She still wore the same smile. And if he were to match it up with his little yellow cards with the expressions on them, he would say she was happy. But the smile had a funny stiffness around the edges.

“Mark, I just don’t think you understand. I’m trying to help Peter and Marian. Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham.” (She said this slowly as if Mark might mistake the identity of the people to whom she was referring.) “They need our help. You just need to show me where you went. Mom will be very disappointed with you if you don’t.”

The mention of his mother—the mother that he and Sandy shared—caused a painful twist in Mark’s heart. What had happened to his mother? Was she trapped somewhere too, hoping that Mark would rescue her? Surely she, more than anyone, would know that his challenges would make it difficult for him to rescue anyone. It was clear that Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham did need help, but Sandy was frightening him, and he was not very good at helping people who frightened him. So he closed his eyes and pressed his hands against his ears and started to emit a low continuous scream.