A World Without You (12 page)

I toss my computer
to the foot of my bed and bring up the timestream again. I wish I had my calendar with all my coded markings on it, but it's at the Berk. I don't feel safe picking a day to see her when Sofía would be at the school. Berkshire doesn't feel safe.

Christmas break, then. I was home, and Sofía was with her father in Austin. There will be no chance of a paradox, no chance of me running into my past self. And I'm not going back to warn her or stop her or do anything to change the past. I just want to confirm that my present is real.

My hands tremble as I sort through the timestream. The threads of time weave in and out of each other, each of them flowing back to me. I find the red thread, Sofía's thread. I let my fingers glide over it, relishing in the way it rubs against my skin, reminding myself that this—this is what's real. Time is real. Sofía is real.

I follow the string to Austin and see that there are tangles
and knots in the patterns there, all mixed in with the loose ends of other colored strings. I touch them, twisting the ends with my fingers, and my mind shoots further back in time and bursts with images of other people—an older woman and three younger girls—and I realize that one of the younger girls is Sofía. This was her family before the car accident. I drop the threads as if they were on fire.

It feels wrong, peeking this far into Sofía's past.

Here is something I've learned: You never know all of a person; you only know them in a specific moment of time.

The Sofía I knew was kind and quiet, but she carried her grief around, hidden by a cloak of invisibility. When she told me about her past, it was nothing more than a story to me. I didn't live it with her; I didn't know her during that moment of her life. The Sofía from the past was an entirely different person.

But then I knew Sofía in a way her mother and sisters never did. They never could. They would never know a Sofía without them. Just like I can never know a Sofía with them.

This is the most important thing I learned from being a time traveler. You are not one person. You are a different person in each moment of time. Your name means nothing. Go see a person with the same name in a different time, and it's someone else entirely. I don't know Sofía. I know Sofía-at-Berkshire. Sofía-before-her-family-died is a stranger, someone I'm not sure I should ever meet.

I pull back, carefully arranging the timestream so I touch just the strings from after Sofía came to Berkshire. They feel like guitar strings under my fingers, pressing into my skin and rolling under my fingertips with a twang as I try to find the
correct one, the one of Sofía on Christmas break. When I do touch it, I feel the rightness of it. I wrap my index finger around the thread, crooking my finger and drawing my hand closer to me. Traveling in the timestream is often like this, a give-and-take as I draw the threads closer to me and they pull me further into time. The thread connecting me to Christmas break bites into the skin on my finger, pulling taut and turning the tip purple as my blood flow stops, but I don't let go. I relish the pain. I revel in the thought that it's real.

The thread evaporates, leaving behind the sensation of it having been there, but no visual evidence. I blink in the bright sunlight. It's December, but Austin is warm, far warmer than a Massachusetts winter. The sky is a cloudless blue, almost matching the bright blue paint of the tiny house before me. All the buildings on the street are made of varying shades of beige stucco, but Sofía's house is made of wide, flat wooden panels painted a vivid cobalt, with bright yellow shutters by the window and a blood-red door welcoming me from the front porch.

“My mother liked color,” I remember Sofía telling me. “She said it made her feel alive.” Ironic, I guess, that the colors are all of her that remains.

There's no car in the driveway, but I'm confident that Sofía's in the house. The threads of time led me here. I bound up the steps to Sofía's front door and knock a few times before I notice the doorbell. Still, I'm not prepared when she answers the door.

“Bo?” Sofía asks, looking shocked.

“Hey,” I say. But there's so much more I try to put behind that one word.

“What are you . . . ?” She peers past me, out into the street. “What are you doing here? How did you even get here?”

I cock an eyebrow at her.

“Oh. Yeah.” She sort of half giggles. “Powers.”

“I needed to see you,” I say. “So . . .” I hold my hands out flat. “Here I am.”

Sofía steps inside, motioning for me to follow her. The scent of bleach fills the air. As soon as the front door closes, Sofía grabs me, pulling me closer, and her arms are around me, her fingers weaving through my hair, my name a whispered promise from her lips. She stands up on her tiptoes and kisses me, hesitantly at first, and then deeper, as if she wasn't sure I was real before but now claims me as her own.

When she pulls back, she buries her face in my chest. “I needed you too,” she says in a soft voice.

I tuck her head under my chin, wrapping my arms tightly around her, and we just stand there for several long moments. Sofía's house is bigger than I thought it would be from the outside, but the inside has none of the bright colors. The walls here are all white, and the slick glossiness of the paint makes me think it's fresh. There are hardly any pictures or decorations on the walls, no rugs on the tile floor, very little sign of life at all.

“Come this way,” Sofía says, pulling me deeper into her house. We pass the living room—nothing but a television on a metal stand in front of a nondescript sofa—and the kitchen. There aren't even magnets on the fridge. Nothing decorates the hallway, and every door is firmly shut.

Sofía's bedroom certainly has more personality than the rest of the house, but it still doesn't have as much color as her room at the Berk. The pink here is softer, more childish, not the bright hot pink of her fuzzy lampshades or the neon of her picture frames in her room at school.

On her wooden dresser by the door, Sofía's propped up a Christmas tree made of green construction paper. Once I see that, I realize that the house is missing far more than pictures and color—it's missing Christmas decorations. Sofía used to tell me about the way her mom and sisters would go all out for the holidays, throwing tinsel all over their living room until their carpet looked silver, stringing lights around not just the tree but the curtain rods and picture frames and over the tops of tables. They'd bake cookies and empanadas and fruit tarts and churros until every dish on the big dining room table overflowed with sugary goodness.

And now there's nothing but a green triangular piece of construction paper.

At the bottom of the handmade tree is a card written in Gwen's handwriting and a small box. I gave that to Sofía before we left for the holidays—I was too shy to let her open it in front of me—but I hadn't even bothered to wrap it. I didn't know that the little silver dolphin necklace was the only gift she'd get that year. I should have wrapped it.

“So why are you here?” Sofía asks, closing the door. We're the only ones in the house, but I guess her father could come home at any minute.

“I—I just wanted to see you,” I say.

“You saw me yesterday,” she replies, grinning.

Right. For her, yesterday was the last day of the semester. My dad had picked me up, and the school's van drove Sofía to the airport. That was her yesterday.

“I wanted to see you again. Can you blame me?” I say, and before she can ask any more questions, I lean down and kiss her.

And it is everything I have longed for, and everything that breaks my heart.

When we pull away, she has a love-drunk look in her eyes, and I almost kiss her again. But I'm not sure how long this will last.

“When you see me again after break?” I say. “Don't mention this.”

If Sofía talks about seeing me when we're both back at school, then past-me will know that future-me came back, which didn't happen in
my
past, and . . . time travel is confusing.

“I won't,” she says. “But why did you come back here, then, if we're going to pretend like it didn't happen?”

“Because I need to know it did,” I say before I can stop myself. I feel a lurch in my stomach. Time is warning me. I can't get too close to the truth.

Sofía frames my face with her hands. “What's wrong?”

“I just . . .” I run my fingers through my hair and step back. I can't think when she touches me; I can't think of anything at all but the way she feels.

“Yes?” she asks. She sits down on her bed, bouncing softly, and I'm distracted again.

“This is . . . this is real, isn't it?” I say. I reach her bed in two strides and grab her hand, squeezing it. “This is real.
You
are real. You're really here, and I'm really here. I can travel through time, and you . . .”

Sofía smiles, letting her face disappear. “This is real,” she says while still invisible. Her lips appear in a Cheshire cat grin, and then the rest of her, and she stands up again and kisses me. “And so is this.”

I want to tell her everything.
But “everything” is too close to the truth I can't tell her—that I've left her in the past, that I think Dr. Franklin's given up on helping me save her, that the school is under investigation, and it's all my fault.

Instead, I tell her that I've seen some videos that make it look as if we don't have powers. That the Doctor has said and done things that make me question whether or not he's really our friend.

“The Doctor's good,” Sofía says immediately.

“I used to think so,” I say, my voice trailing off.

She shakes her head. “We can't start doubting everyone. The Doctor's good.”

“But—”

“It sounds as if someone is altering your perception of reality,” Sofía continues. “Someone's making you question what's real and what's not. They're putting false images in your head. If that's the case, the first thing whoever's doing this is going to
want is for people to turn away from the Doctor. Create chaos. Create doubt. Make us question not only reality, but each other.”

I think of the videos I watched. I
know
none of that happened. I nod slowly, agreeing with her. But if the Doctor's not the one altering the videos, then who—

The officials. When they came, everything started falling apart. One of them—Dr. Rivers or Mr. Minh, or maybe both—they can alter the way we see things. The way we think, what we believe.

My mind churns with possibilities. Ryan was right to be suspicious. Dr. Rivers and Mr. Minh are trying to confirm our powers so they can use them. In my glimpses of the future in the timestream, I saw experiments and abuse: Gwen chained to a wall and Harold locked in a cell as men in lab coats tried to take them apart and see how they ticked. In those scenarios, I'd thought that the government officials were merely the spies who informed on us, but if they have powers too, like the ability to alter our perception of reality . . . then it'd be much easier to break down our resolve, to get us to turn on the Doctor and join them, to get us to do things for them.

“But Bo,” Sofía says, her voice small. “That's not the only reason why you're here, is it?”

I look up at her, and all my questions fall away.

There's fear in her eyes. “You've never tried to visit me before, on your own. You could have just called me today, but instead, you're here.”

“I'm here,” I repeat, as much for my sake as hers.

“Is something wrong?”

I
want
to answer her. But I can feel time tugging at my
navel, pulling me back, forcing me into silence. “I'm sorry,” I get out, just before time snaps me back to the present.

I grip the cloth of my duvet cover. She was right there. I can still smell her shampoo.

And now she's gone. Or, rather, I am. I left her in the past, not the other way around.

My phone buzzes, and I flip it over, reading the text message on the screen.

You throw that thing away?
Ryan asks.

I look at my computer. The drive is still sticking out of the port.

Yeah
, I text back.

I wonder how far his powers reach, if he can tell that I'm lying all the way from where he is.

• • •

I ask Dad to take me back to Berkshire early, and he agrees to drive up with me instead of going to church. After our fight yesterday, I think he's glad to get rid of me. Mom doesn't like it, but she doesn't protest that much.

“But Phoebe didn't get a chance to have a family dinner with you this weekend,” she says in a petulant tone. “Let's wait until brunch.”

“I have a lot of work to do,” I say. “And we have next weekend.”

What neither of us says is that Phoebe doesn't really care whether or not she has a meal with me. I mean, she's nice enough for a sister or whatever, but it's not like we're close. We just happen to live together and share the same blood type.

So Dad takes me up past Ipswich and back to school. As soon as the car stops in front of the brick facade of the academy,
I rush past the Doctor, who's waiting to greet me. I hesitate at the door when I notice that the Doc's continued down to the car to talk with Dad, but I don't have time to worry about their conversation.

The first thing I have to do is figure out a way to get rid of the government officials. For good. The problems began with them. At this point, I'm starting to wonder if
they're
the reason I haven't been able to control my powers well enough to save Sofía. I have to get rid of them. And to do that, I'll need help.

I go straight up to the dorm rooms on my unit's level and bang on Ryan's door.

“Told you it'd work,” Ryan says, grinning. He steps back so I can enter his room.

“Yeah,” I lie. The drive's perfectly safe, stuffed between my mattress and box spring back at home. “Listen,” I add, “I watched the first video.”

Ryan's usually good about keeping his cool, but something flashes across his face in the brief instant between when my words fall silent and he first registers their meaning. Something hard and angry. It's quickly replaced with a mask of calm, but he can't control the emotion in his eyes.

“You what?” he asks in a level voice that nevertheless sends chills up my spine. “I told you to get rid of it.”

“It's safe. At my house. Hidden. No one will find it.”

“No one would find it in a landfill near your house either.”

I shrug. “I watched them. Or the first few, anyway. And we have big problems.”

“We wouldn't have any problems if you'd destroyed the damn thing.”

I shake my head. He's not listening. “Those government officials . . . they're powered too.”

Ryan freezes. “What?”

“They have powers too, like we do. Or at least one of them does. I noticed it with Gwen, before. She thinks Sofía is dead. I had thought it was just that she'd lost faith in me, but now . . . And the Doctor's been acting strange. At first I thought he was in on it, but now I think the officials . . . they're altering reality. Or at least our perception of reality. They're making us think we don't have powers. I'm immune because I can just go back in time and see reality before they altered it.”

Ryan narrows his eyes in thought. “And I'm immune because . . .” His voice trails off.

“It must be the nature of your power. Telekinesis and telepathy. You have superior control of your mind, so they can't reach you.”

A grin smears across Ryan's face. “Yeah,” he says, “that must be it.”

“So just . . . be careful, yeah?” I say. “And start thinking of ways we can really get rid of them. Everyone believes they're from the government, and I don't know, maybe they are, but they're dangerous. They're trying to destroy us.”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. “I'm on it. And, dude, next weekend? Destroy that drive.”

“Yeah, okay,” I say, reaching for the door.

“Thanks,” Ryan says. This is the nicest he's ever been to me. The most he's ever paid attention to me, honestly. We're not friends; we barely speak. But he's making such an effort now.

He really wants that drive gone.

Ryan shuts the door behind me after I leave, pushing against it so it clicks firmly closed. There are no locks on our doors—well, there are none that we can control. Dr. Franklin warned us that there are lockdown procedures in case one of the students' powers goes completely haywire, and we're safer locked in our rooms than anywhere else, but the lockdown has never happened while I've been here. Still, I have a feeling that Ryan wishes he could have locked me out as soon as I left. I hesitate, about to knock on his door again and demand some more answers, but I'm not even sure what to ask. There's just something . . . off about Ryan lately. He's not acting like himself.

Maybe the officials are starting to get to him too.

“Bo.” Gwen's voice is quiet, like she doesn't want anyone else to hear, but she strides down the hallway toward me with purpose. “You're back.”

I nod.

“And you're talking to Ryan.”

I shrug. “Yeah?”

Gwen frowns. Before Sofía was gone, they were best friends, always together. I was never close with Ryan, and no one is really friends with Harold, so I sort of drifted around. Being with Sofía put me in Gwen's group, but I don't think she ever really considered me a friend.

“Listen,” Gwen says, lowering her voice and walking with me back toward my room. “Don't put too much trust in Ryan, okay?”

“Why?” I ask. Ryan's not my favorite person in the world, but he's a part of our unit. Unlike the officials.

Gwen glances back at his room. “I don't like him,” she says bluntly. “He's an asshole.”

I snort. “Well, yeah, everyone knows that. But he's
our
asshole.”

Gwen shakes her head. We're at my door now, but neither of us makes a move to leave. “It's not like that. He's not like us. You look at me and him and Harold as part of this unit. This team. But it's not like that, is it?”

“And Sofía too,” I say, searching Gwen's eyes. “She's part of our unit as well.”

“And Sofía too,” Gwen says, her voice cracking over her name. “Before she
died
.” She places gentle emphasis on that last word, clearly worried about my reaction to it. But after we talked in the foyer before the weekend started, I knew there was something wrong with her. And her words now confirm it. Whatever reality the officials are trying to weave around us, she's caught in the web.

“But Bo . . . it's not like that,” Gwen continues. “We're
not
a team. At least Ryan's not. He only ever looks out for himself. He doesn't care about you or me or anyone here at Berkshire. He only cares about himself.”

“You don't understand,” I say. “He's trying to
save
the academy.”

“Save it? From what?”

“The officials and whatever it is they're planning.”

Gwen's frown deepens. “I don't know how to get this through to you,” she says, “other than this: Sofía didn't like Ryan either.”

I shrug. “Well, no one really likes Ryan.”

“No,” Gwen says in a very serious voice. “She
really
didn't like him.”

I narrow my eyes, trying to understand what she's not saying. “Why not?”

“She had her reasons, and I'm not going to betray them even though she's not here now. But she didn't like him. She didn't trust him. And you shouldn't either.”