False Future (12 page)

I
don’t have the option, because Kellogg is stalking toward me from the left. “Time’s up,” he says, grabbing my arm. A fresh lance of pain rolls from my thumb to my shoulder.

“Easy,” I say, shrugging away from him. “I am not your prisoner.”

His little blue beret is askew. He’s within arm’s length. I could grab his Adam’s apple and crush it; I think I’m fast enough for that, even with the wounds and drugs.

But he nods, which is a step in the right direction.

“I have more questions for him,” I say.

“You’ll get to speak later.”

Kellogg pulls me away, and I let him. When I look back a final time, East is staring at the floor again, his lips moving in silence. He was supposed to be able to help us.

“Where are you taking me?” I ask Kellogg.

“You wanted to see your team, right?”

Kellogg takes me into a Hudson News and through the back room (but not before I grab a bottle of Advil off the medicine rack), into the corridors that run behind the stores for garbage disposal. We have to step over full trash bags, which feels like hurdling a car. I know I shouldn’t be up and walking around, but I don’t care. I pop four Advil and dry-swallow them.

We enter a garage filled with overflowing trash bins. The garage doors are shut, and even from this distance I can see the fresh, sloppy welds along the edges. No exit that way. But they’re fooling themselves if they think a couple welds are going to keep True Earth out when they decide to ruin our little party.

Filling the garage are two M1 Abrams tanks, the main tank used by the US military since 1980. I suppose the soldiers won’t really need to open the doors for the tanks to roll out when it comes down to it.

Noble is standing in the middle of the room, between the two tanks, with three soldiers and Peter. Sophia is nowhere to be seen. The soldiers are standing with their rifles held tightly to their chests. They keep a safe distance, which shows how much they trust us at this point.

Peter’s face falls when he sees mine; I must really look damaged. Noble winces. Peter takes a step toward me and then wobbles midstride. Noble has to sling an arm around him to hold him up. Peter grits his teeth.

“I want answers, and I want them quickly,” Kellogg says.

“You can’t destroy the Verge,” Noble says to him.

I wasn’t aware they were planning on attacking it.

“Why not?” Kellogg replies.

“Because there is an entrance to the Black inside it. It’s the only one nearby. If you destroy the Verge, the wreckage will cover it and we’ll never get inside.”

“Then tell me how to beat these people, Mr. Noble,” Kellogg says.

“First, I need to know what East has done with the Key.”

“He says
he
is the Key,” I say.

Noble tilts his head sideways. “I see.”

Peter steps toward me, and I take some of his weight. I can feel his leg trembling with the strain; he shouldn’t be out of bed. If we’re going to keep fighting, that knee has to heal.

I’m eager to tell Noble and Peter what else East told me, but I still don’t trust Kellogg and his men completely.

“Give us some time alone,” I say to Kellogg. “When we figure things out, we’ll let you know.”

Kellogg makes a show of considering it. He doesn’t like it, but what else is he going to do? “Fine, but you don’t have long. These people have some of my men in an internment camp. In the freezing cold. I’m going to get them back.”

I only nod.

“And I’m still waiting for an answer about why you look like the people out there.”

“I understand,” I say. But I have no idea how to really explain that to him.

Kellogg leads us back to the KFC, where I lie down again. He leaves right away, without a word. A nurse rolls Peter’s bed inside for him to lie on, and Noble sits down in one of the booths.

“Where is Sophia?” I say, looking at the faces outside in the open area.

“Getting some rations for us to share,” Noble replies. “She’s remarkably uninjured, save for some crushed cartilage in her ear.”

Peter breathes a heavy sigh of relief. “That’s fantastic. Seriously.”

“Yes, it is,” I say, wondering how she’s doing on the inside. Rhys never got to tell her how he felt…and she never got to hear it. “Are we going to talk about Rhys?”

Noble shakes his head slowly, not looking at anything. I know what Rhys meant to him. In the beginning, Noble raised him as a son.

“I think we should.”

“It’s not going to help us win,” he says, a little harshly.

“You don’t care enough to talk about it? Why are you here, then?” I regret the questions as they come out of my mouth. It’s lashing out for no good reason.

Noble stares me right in the face now. “I am offended by that question.”

“Miranda,” Peter says. “People mourn in different ways.”

And suddenly I’m ashamed.

Noble’s eyes are red, and his lower lip is trembling, or maybe that’s just my monovision. “I am trying to make things right. I am fighting back against what I am. Don’t ever imply I don’t care again, Miranda. I will mourn later, when the rest of my family is safe.”

His words are like a dagger to my heart. I don’t know why I said what I did. Being angry and upset and confused isn’t an excuse.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” I say.

“I understand,” Noble says. Of course he does.

“I’d like to fight back against what I am too,” I say. “The director said I’m her. Or that I will become her in the future.” The words come out in a rush. Now my friends know, and they’ll help me figure it out no matter what.

Peter shakes his head, brow furrowed. “That’s not true. It’s more mind games. You would never be like her.”

“That’s not all,” I say. “Both she
and
Olivia—the
Original
Olivia—say True Earth isn’t really a different universe at all, but just a future of this one.”

Noble has no reaction. None.

“Is that true, Noble?” I press.

Finally he says, “You know, I really can’t say.”

I let my head fall onto the pillow. The throb in my face has changed into the sting of a thousand biting ants. But I get right back up again when I really think about his reaction. “You knew it was a possibility but didn’t tell us? Why?”

He just shakes his head slowly. “Miranda, I did not think it was a possibility. I don’t know much about the Black, or True Earth. Only what Olivia told me. And she didn’t tell me that.”

Time passes and no one says a word. If Rhys were here, maybe he’d say something to fill the silence. A joke that isn’t really a joke. I took him for granted, that’s for sure. I had no idea how much I would miss him. He never talked about it, not ever, but I know what haunted him. Rhys killed his entire team to save them from the creators. And it changed him forever.
But now you’re free.

Olive, Noah, Rhys…all gone. How much longer can we last?

“There is no such thing as destiny, Miranda. You should know that.” Noble’s voice startles me, sets my heart pounding.

“Explain.”

He scratches at his beard. His lower eyelids are red-rimmed and sagging. “Well, True Earth might be one future, but it doesn’t have to be the only future. It is just one possibility. By changing things here, we’re moving down a new course. Theoretically.”

“Right,” Peter says. “If the director says you’re supposed to become her, how can that be true if you don’t want it to be? Just
don’t become her
.”

“I don’t
plan to
,” I say.

Noble raises both hands, palms out. “Stop it. Their future is not relevant. I repeat—
not relevant
. Because what we care about are the people living
right now
, isn’t that so? We’re not going to engineer some event they think needs to happen just to preserve what they know as the future—there are too many variables involved with that anyway. They’ve tinkered with their past and now they’re paying the price.” His eyes flit between us, making sure we’re listening very closely, which we are. He takes a shuddering breath. “But we still have to win. That hasn’t changed. You think Rhys would just surrender?”

“No one is talking about surrender,” I say calmly.

After a moment, he nods, eyes on the floor. Finally he looks at me with semiclear eyes. “Yes, well, you can never be too sure. It doesn’t matter what time lines the other universes belong to, or which ones are linked, or if they’re connected to our world. What matters is
this
world. Let’s keep that in mind going forward. Let’s stay the course. Let’s ignore everything else.” His voice wavers on the last sentence and almost breaks on
else
.

Another length of silence, the weight of which I can feel in my blood. Helplessness is still a specter looming outside our doorway.

“For now, you two need to rest,” Noble says. “You have injuries.”

That’s when Sophia returns with an armload of military MREs—Meals Ready-to-Eat. Not delicious, but nutritious. She doesn’t make eye contact with anyone, just wordlessly hands them out. She also has a few pieces of dried-out pizza, which she holds up in offer.

“Sophia…” I say.

“Don’t,” she says. “I don’t want to hear anything from anyone right now.” Her lower lip quivers. “Not a word.”

I nod. Through a throbbing jaw, I eat some food that tastes like nothing. And I prepare for the moment when I can finally see Olivia’s memories. When I can finally understand who I am.

I
wait until everyone is asleep. It doesn’t take long. I don’t take any pills, so the pain in my nose is enough to keep me awake.

Before I use the memory disk, I stand next to Peter’s bed. He’s sleeping fitfully, his fingers twitching every now and then. He makes a small noise, half of a word—he must be dreaming. It doesn’t seem like a good dream, but I don’t wake him from it. I stare at him in case this is the last time I ever see him. I wish my vision weren’t so blurry. I touch his hair with my finger. But then my fingers are on his neck. His skin is hot from sleep, and I feel the slow and steady beat of his heart under my fingertips. He stirs, and I take my hand away, half-hoping he wakes. He doesn’t, even when I kiss his temple.

I leave the KFC behind on silent feet, then step into a tiny drugstore. All of the pain medication has been stripped from the shelves by now, but I find a bottle of nasal spray. I squirt it up both nostrils until fire crackles through my sinuses and actually brings me to one knee. But it breaks up the blockage in my nose until I can breathe. I spit the stuff that comes out into a paper towel and don’t look at it. Then I slam a Diet Coke for the caffeine. In the very back of the store I find a rack of cheap clothing; I take a black winter hat and the last remaining hooded sweatshirt.

I sit down in the drugstore, behind a rack full of postcards showing various shots of New York.
WISH YOU WERE HERE!
one says, showing the skyline on a pleasant summer day, the sun glowing between the buildings.
JUSTICE FOR ALL
says another, showing the Statue of Liberty. I wish that were true.

I pull the disk out of my pouch and rub my thumb over it. It’s small and black and hard, and feels heavier than it looks.
What are you waiting for?
I ask myself. But I know why I’m waiting. I have no idea what this thing will do to me. I have no idea if I’ll be able to handle what it shows me.

But like so many other times in my life, I don’t really have a choice.

I close my eyes, reach through my hair, and stick the disk onto the base of my skull.

I feel velvety heat, and then a cool liquid sensation spreads throughout my brain. I settle back against the wall. And then I learn the truth.

I don’t spend too long living inside Olivia’s memories. Just enough for me to understand.

Once upon a time, things were very different in True Earth. The Ruling Five could more accurately be called the Ruling Four, because the director reigned supreme. The five of them had rescued the world from the ashes of a nuclear war, but trouble was brewing once again. Olivia was discovering that humanity lived in cycles, and we were steadily marching toward a second apocalypse. For the last century, the director had been concerned with destroying external threats, rather than fixing the rising problems of True Earth itself.

Discovering my world and True Earth are one and the same was a happy accident. Three years ago from my current point in time, Olivia traveled through the Black to what she thought was another world, a world she’d been keeping close tabs on for a long while. It was going to be the next world True Earth conquered, unless she could stop them. Olivia had been fighting back against True Earth’s savagery in secret for years, not daring to fight the director head-on. Olivia knew she would lose and be killed in a permanent way.

Years before, she had arrived to take Noble away, to prepare him for the invasion. At that time she had no idea about the connection between the worlds. She showed Noble the eyeless, the tool True Earth would use to conquer, and asked if he would like to rebel. He said yes.

But on this visit three years ago, as the time for the invasion grew near, she discovered something new. Olivia found the Originals living as teenagers in a small suburb of Cleveland. They were just students, with backpacks, and normal lives, and parents, and after-school activities, and friends. I see images of them throughout their day-to-day lives as Olivia studied them from afar. Olivia was witnessing herself as she was a thousand years ago. It was then she realized that True Earth was planning to invade its own past.

Had Olivia and True Earth never interfered, her own past would have played out just the way she remembered it. The teens would have carried on with their lives, not knowing that ten years later the world would be mostly destroyed by nuclear war, and civilization would break down across the globe. Only China maintained some form of government as clouds of radiation spread throughout the planet. And that only lasted for about a year. Olivia knew all this because she’d lived it.

As survivors, the group of friends traveled to China, where Olivia had family high up in what remained of the government. The years passed, and eventually they, like most of the survivors, began to suffer from the radiation that was present across much of the planet. They underwent treatment. They aged. The government broke down, and soon there was just a barren wasteland with small pockets of survivors.

But science continued. In the ruins of Beijing, a community of 567 people discovered a way to clean the air. They discovered the key to aging. Survivors didn’t just heal, they grew younger. By now the Originals were leaders in the small community, and they brought this technology across the globe over the following decades.

And they began to control it.

When Olivia returned to True Earth, she decided to take action before it was too late. She didn’t want to see the director destroy everything all over again, after humanity had worked so hard to survive over so many eons. She didn’t want the past to repeat itself. And she was sick of standing by while True Earth destroyed any realm it considered a threat to their twisted idea of perfection.

And now she knew she could fix it.

In her effort to make True Earth what it was supposed to be, what it
had
been in the first few hundred years of its existence, Olivia decided to wipe the identities of the director and her friends as teens, including herself, and give them over to the creators with fabricated memories of a past that never happened. These new identities were based on things they’d experienced, but altered in a way to fit with our new reality.

In the future, I am not just the director, but Peter is the Original Peter. Noah is the Original Noah. Olive is the Original Olivia. Rhys is the Original Rhys. Noah and Olive and Rhys are dead right now, but Olivia has their identities stored, ready to bring them back at the right time.

The creators had already been here for decades, thinking they were preparing for just another invasion—even they were ignorant about the truth of our world. They were just following orders, like East said. By the time Olivia first discovered our worlds were linked, the creators had lived out entire lives here, growing into the adults I would later meet.

Three years ago Olivia took us away from our lives, from our parents and friends. Before Olivia, I went to school with the Alpha team. We did normal things. We went to Friday night football games. But all of that was replaced with memories of lessons in combat and warfare, missions and exercises.

Only the last three years of Alpha team is real. We were never raised as children to be weapons. We were just children. But to Olivia, it made more sense to take us away from our original lives and to prepare us for the coming nuclear war instead. The survivors would need us to lead one day, after all.

Olivia went back to True Earth to see if the changes she made transferred into True Earth, and they had. By making the director someone she could control, her team had truly become the Ruling Five, more tightly bound than they had been in centuries. True Earth was a slightly more prosperous place, and the threat of war did not loom quite as large.

Now, when nuclear war eventually did arrive in my time, our team would be ready to take control of a broken earth. We wouldn’t have to wait for the technology or the skills that would come later, like we did the first time. We wouldn’t have to struggle on our way to China, avoiding roving packs of gangs intent on killing/raping/stealing everything in their path. We could take control earlier, in a more efficient way. With our organization and power, we could create the best world possible, one completely free of war and famine and rape and murder. One free of hatred and racism. We could create the truest world of all.

But then the future changed again. Because of me.

Olivia couldn’t tell the others what she was doing. How could she? She was tampering with their lives, and with the future of everyone on the planet. So True Earth still invaded our world with the eyeless, and Olivia could only do her best to help me stop them, to keep things on the right track. Letting the eyeless complete their mission would’ve ensured there wasn’t going to be any kind of future at all.

But when I defeated the eyeless, I changed the future anyway. The world was more unified afterward, and nuclear war never came to pass. The external threat of the eyeless woke everyone up and made them realize they couldn’t afford to fight with one another. But no good thing lasts forever.

The result? As of right now, True Earth is a half-held-together mess of countries. The lack of a nuclear war kept us down the same path we’re on right now, continuing the slow decay of our environment and culture and the depletion of almost every natural resource. The sky is black most of the time, the air unsafe to breathe. All because the Originals never took over following a nuclear war, as they were meant to. The “reset” of our world never happened, and the population continued to grow. After I destroyed the eyeless, the Originals returned to True Earth to find it was not as they had left it.

Olivia, obviously, knew why. She was finally forced to share her secret with the Originals, and the plan to invade New York began. The others haven’t quite forgiven her for her deception, but after a thousand years of companionship, they weren’t able to just kill her, either.

But now the director is willing to risk re-creating the effects of nuclear war in order to get back the world that they knew before, the one they worked so hard to construct. Releasing the Black will do exactly that.

Perhaps the most important thing Olivia’s disk shows me is that the director doesn’t want to stop us; she wants to help me and my team take control, to live the lives we’re supposed to live, to eventually become the Ruling Five ourselves and create the brightest future of all.

The reality of what’s ahead for me and my teammates settles around my neck like a lead chain. But I refuse to let it weigh me down. Because it also shows me something.

There is a future, and it is anything but certain. It is changing all the time.

Olivia leaves me a final memory, one that is more the understanding of an idea than anything else.

The director doesn’t know every move before I make it, because I do have free will. Things are playing out in a way they never have before.

And that means I still have a choice.

I don’t know what side Olivia is on. Maybe part of her doesn’t want to meddle with our world any more than she already has. Maybe she wants to let events happen as they will.

But I know part of her is still loyal to the Ruling Five and to achieving her perfect world. Because the last thing I learn is that she gave me these memories with the director’s consent, as the first step to me and my team becoming who we are meant to become.

And the device feeding memories into my brain right now doubles as a homing beacon, which was activated as soon as I used it.

True Earth knows we’re here. And they’re coming to make sure we do our job.