FutureImperfect (4 page)

“Jeremy?”

Did he want to yell at her? He didn't sound angry.

“I'm…just checking in. You know, wanted to see if you're all right, that sort of thing.”

Wow
—
he's not thinking we're still together, is he? He couldn't possibly be that dense. How many times do you have to hit a guy with a crowbar before he gets the idea?

Filled with anxious energy, she found it easy to say what she assumed had been implied. “Jeremy, I really don't think we should be seeing each other anymore.”

He just laughed. “Yeah. I sort of got that impression when you whacked me upside the head.”

Okay, so that's not it.

“Right. Sorry. So…how's your head?”

“Bruised. No concussion, though.”

“Jeremy, I had to—”

“I know. You had to save Harry Keller. And I had to try to stop you, and if I'd succeeded, he
would
be dead right now, and I'd be wondering if I should've stopped you. So I guess you were right.”

“Wow. Jeremy, that's so…enlightened. You sure your head's okay?”

“Come on, Siara, have I ever been a bad guy to you?”

“No,” she admitted. “Never.”

Even Harry had tried to strangle her once. Of course, he was possessed by a Glitch at the time.

“Glad we got that straight. I just wanted to let you know that there are no hard feelings or anything, and I guess I understand why things didn't work out, even though I don't really.”

“We're just really different, Jeremy.”

“Yeah. That was why I liked you. I thought we had this yin-yang thing going. I always really liked your poem about the clock and that Greek guy, Emphasis.”

“That's Sisyphus, Jeremy, but come on. You're the captain of the football team and the chess team. You've got your pick of any girl in the school. You'll get over me.”

“Sure, but I figure it'll take a week or so.”

Just a week?
Siara thought, but she laughed a little into the phone.

“That's how long I'm grounded, anyway,” Jeremy said with a weird little chuckle. “It's ridiculous. I'm eighteen, I should be able to do whatever I want, but the folks pay the bills on the Humvee, so I'm only supposed to take it to and from school for the next two weeks. You?”

“A month. I'll probably get time off for good behavior after I help out with my mom's demo, but I just wish—”

“What?”

“No. Never mind.”

“Go ahead, tell me.”

“No. It's not fair to you,” Siara said.

“We're way past fair, Siara. At least let's stay honest. Say it.”

“Okay. I really want go see Harry.”

There was a brief silence.

“I should've guessed. So why don't you? That part of the grounding?”

“My dad doesn't think I should go see him, especially not before the demo.”

“He's right,” Jeremy answered flatly

“What? You think Harry's a bad influence, too?”

There was that chuckle again. It sounded strange, almost nerdy, coming from the big jock. “I just think it'd be upsetting. You saw him in the ambulance. He's totally freaked. He'll probably be more stable after he's been on the meds awhile. Isn't that how it works for people like him?”

People like him.

“I know…I just…Jeremy, I know this is crazy, but would you cut school and drive me tomorrow?”

“Uh…no.”

“Why not?”

“Crowbar. Remember?”

That stung, despite how much sense it made.

The silence on the line stretched out, broken up by short bursts of static. Siara was about to apologize one more time and hang up when she heard Jeremy sigh.

“Fine. I'll take you,” Jeremy said.

Her eyes went wide. “Jeremy, thank you so, so much…I don't know how—”

“Oh, wait. I can't. I've got to do something with my parents tomorrow morning. The next day. I'll take you the morning after the demo. It'll give everyone a chance to calm down anyway.”

“But—”

“Come on, Siara, that's the best you're going to get out of me. And no crowbars.”

“Okay. Thanks. Sorry.”

“Yeah. I'll talk to you soon.”

She heard the vague electronic click that told her Jeremy had ended the call. She couldn't believe how pushy she was being.

“Siara?” her mother called from the hallway. “Are you ready? I don't want to be late, honey.”

After the demo. After tomorrow night. Funny how Jeremy echoed her father, as if he'd somehow listened in. She felt a draft against her back, then turned to see her window, still half-open, still waiting. She put her hands back on the white wooden frame, deciding. Her fingers felt cold from the outdoor air. Winter was coming.

She pushed the window shut.

“I'm ready, Mom.”

There had to be
some
way to live in two worlds, at least for a little while.

As if it were a small football, Jeremy Gronson tossed the cell phone toward his bed. It spun on its axis, followed a straight line, hit the thick quilt, and neatly buried itself in the folds.

Touchdown.

It had worked. When he dialed Siara's number on one cell, his second phone also rang. All he had to do was manipulate the life trail of Albert Mendt, a phone repairman working on the line. Jeremy fixed things so that Albert was so busy thinking about having enough money to send his son to college, he “accidentally” crossed a few of the wires he was working on. Then Jeremy had a wrench tumble out of the phone man's pocket, distracting poor Albert yet again, so that he sealed up his work without double-checking it.

Now Jeremy could monitor Siara's calls in case someone unfortunate like Keller tried to get in touch. And of course Jeremy had graciously agreed to take her to Harry
after
the demo. By then, she, her parents, and two thirds of RAW High School would be dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

As if they ever really existed in the first place.

Having carefully delivered the tea to his appropriately thankful parents some time ago, a more cheerful Jeremy padded back down the thick-carpeted stairs onto the kitchen's cold marble floor to retrieve his own. The rainbow cup, made by his mother during her ceramics phase, felt hot in his fingertips as he lifted it from the coriander blue counter.

He thought about how she was like Siara in a way, always doing that strange art stuff, playing with images, as if that would ever get anyone anywhere. Still, the cup was pretty, like Siara's poem about Sisyphus as a clock. And even that, strangely enough, had turned out to be useful.

He brought the cup to his lips. It was quite a special brew. Each cup gave him about a day's worth of effect. As far as the labs he'd hired were able to determine, some ingredients bore a chemical resemblance to Ketamine, but were much weaker, and in combination with other elements. Jeremy once hoped he'd be able to synthesize the herbs, but Nostradamus and the Obscure Masters were too clever for that. He'd been given just enough to accomplish his initiation task.

How many doses were left in the bag? Ten? Should be plenty.

Carried by the steam, a bitter almond smell rose to his nose. Impatient, he took a sip and scalded his tongue. His body shivered, but Jeremy refused to give in to the pain. It was, after all, all about control. Whoever kept it the longest got the most toys.

Cup in hand, he headed back upstairs. Before returning to his own room, he checked in on his parents. They lay in a beautiful king-size Tempur-Pedic bed that conformed to the exact shape of their bodies. They were right next to each other, covered by satin sheets, heads and hair resting on satin pillowcases. Their teacups lay atop a neatly folded
New York Times
on Father's bed table. Jeremy pictured Father placing them there carefully, the way he did everything, arranging things perfectly before taking what he thought would just be a little nap.

The long fingers of Mother's artist's hands were above the sheet, intertwined peacefully above her navel. Father's skin was placid. The worry wrinkles in his face had all but disappeared. They seemed much younger, too, both perfectly peaceful, perfectly perfect.

And dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

As if they had ever existed to begin with.

Jeremy took another sip. A slight dizziness washed his senses, numbing him to the liquid's heat. As he returned to his room, he gulped the rest and placed the empty cup on the chessboard and sat in front of the huge picture window with its grand city view.

When he next inhaled, he also felt himself exhale. And though he worked to slow his breathing, he couldn't be sure if it was the breath he was taking that slowed, the one he'd just taken, or the one he was about to take.

This also was an effect of the tea. A special tea, centuries old.

He didn't think he'd been lucky to find it, only that it was the end of a logical sequence of events, the result of all his hard work, his achievements, his hours of study and exercise.

Of course to the
un
initiated, it all would've looked like an accident, especially the way he opened his locker on the first day of junior year and just found the old library book of prophecies by Nostradamus lying there as if left by a careless student. At the time, even he thought it was an accident. He was going to return it to the school library, try to earn some points with the staff, but something about it intrigued him, and he found himself poring over the age-yellowed pages.

At the time, Jeremy Gronson didn't believe for a second that those silly little poems predicted the future, but his parents had insisted he do an extra-credit assignment for probabilities and statistics class, and the book had given him an idea. Nostradamus was famous, world-famous. If Jeremy could understand how his poems worked, why they appealed to so many people, he figured he could design a computer program to generate equally appealing predictions.

That would net him an A-plus for sure. And just in case his program really did wind up predicting the future, he could use it to invest in the stock market and achieve financial freedom from his parents by the time he graduated.

At the time, he thought that last part was just a fantasy. Nevertheless, he studied the Nostradamus quatrains the way he studied everything else, the way his late tutor, Mr. Chabbers, had made him study: completely, thoroughly, doggedly. He looked not so much at the words, but searched for similarities, patterns, a formula.

Months later, he found one, but not at all the sort he expected. The predictions actually contained a code, based on equidistant letter sequences. If you took all of Nostradamus's quatrains, ordered in the way he had numbered them, and used an algorithm to select particular letters, a new poem appeared, along with some numbers. Roughly translated, it read;

Where time is a snake with no head or tail

There dwell among the beasts of fate

Obscure masters of all God's arts

Who practice the highest truths and by confusion reign

Jeremy was thrilled that he found this amazing dance of math and word. He was even more excited by what the message said. Obscure Masters. The title tickled him, especially the “master” part. “All God's arts” was clearly just a superstitious way of saying
everything
. “The highest truths” sounded coolest of all. It seemed so total, so complete.

But he wasn't finished. Not yet. There were still the numbers to figure out. Most of them gave up their secrets easily enough. They formed a longitude and latitude, a location on the globe, centering on Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, Nostradamus's birthplace. But there were still two numbers left, an eight and a ten. They puzzled Jeremy for months, that eight and that ten, because his was a mind that had been trained, at all costs, not to ever let go.

The more he obsessed, the more he became convinced he was onto something big, something that might even make up for the fact that he still wasn't the greatest chess player in the world, and instead ranked—”only,” as his parents said—sixteenth. He wondered if he'd found a hidden way to the top. A secret, grand success. Book, poem, and numbers burned inside him for months. The school year nearly ended, and he'd never even started his computer program.

Then, by what smaller minds would again see only as some bizarre coincidence, Jeremy heard that his over-reaching French teacher was sponsoring a summer trip to France, and one of the stops was Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. That was all it took to convince him. The coincidence was too glaring. The hand of these Obscure Masters must be behind it. It was then he first suspected they were, in fact, guiding him to them.

He put up with the long wait, with the tour of Paris, with the French girls who he should have been delighted with, until finally they reached Nostradamus's home. When the group came to the exact room the coordinates indicated, he lingered behind until the fat guide, the enthusiastic teacher, and the rest of the students went ahead and left him alone with his dream.

It was only then, in that moment, staring at the cut stones that comprised the walls, that he figured out the final puzzle piece. He counted the stones on the top row from the northeastern corner, eight up, ten to the left.

Giddy as a child on Christmas morning, he tugged at the tenth stone. The oblong stone slipped out easily, as if oiled on all sides. It thudded at his feet and fell prostrate, as if worshipping him. The filthy little bag that had been wedged behind it tumbled into his long-fingered hands as flecks of centuries-old mortar hovered in the air like stars.

He knew then he'd won something better than all the trophies, better than all the girls, better than the rush he got from slamming the pigskin on the grass after making a touchdown and pretending he was hitting Father's or Mother's face with it.

Translating the handwritten note inside the bag alone should have gotten him the A-plus, but he never showed that work to Mrs. Larousa. Instead he followed the directions that told him to keep it a secret and described how to brew the herbs.

Now all that, like the phone repairman's work on Siara's cell,
seemed
an accident. But Jeremy now knew for a fact that the universe was too ordered for that. It had to make sense. It just had to. There were no accidents, just the machinations of Obscure Masters who by confusion reign. And Jeremy, Jeremy was meant to win every game he played, meant to find that small bag, to find the Masters. Meant to triumph.

Anything else would be like a sin.

As his head swam, he saw the sky outside his window darken, lighten, then darken again. Below, the little lives of little people rolled back to insignificant births and ahead to petty deaths. The buildings—the stores, theaters, skyscrapers, the hundred-year-old churches—all rose and fell like ocean waves. Soon all he could distinguish from the blur were the stars in the circling sky as they winked in and out of existence across a billion years, as if they were flecks of mortar floating in the air of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Remembering Siara Warner's fondness for poems, he thought:

I am such stuff as dreams are made on.

With a roar, the world exploded, until everything remained—
the
everything; the endless shifting trails his crushed rival dubbed A-Time, reality raveled into patterns and paths. To the uninitiated, even to Jeremy, it still mostly looked like a big, unruly mess, but the Obscure Masters could see the needles in the haystack, the method in the mess, and they would teach him if he won.

Steadfast, the Initiate strode along the curved surfaces, moving with speed and confidence. In short order he found what he was looking for: Harry Keller's rumbling, bumbling life trail, which vexed him like an unscratchable spider bite.

His nostrils flared as he scanned its surface. Even being near Keller's trail pissed him off. But he had to be sure, so he looked, and looked carefully. Good. There'd been no change. All was as he'd left it after the fire. Keller was hopelessly insane.

He'd come close to getting rid of him before, but now the sedatives and antipsychotics in Keller's bloodstream were preventing him from even entering A-Time, so there was no way for his fate to change again.

Weird how some chemicals could get you there and others keep you out. Weirder still how someone like Keller could get into A-Time without any herbs, but Jeremy needed his tea.

Oh well, the Masters would explain that, too. Jeremy only wished he could have killed Keller. He'd wanted so badly to have Keller die in the fire, but there were too many factors, too many variables. Maybe the fact that Keller was a time walker himself somehow protected him. The closest he could manage was insanity, and for that, Jeremy had had to endure a whack in the skull with a crowbar.

Well, maybe after tomorrow night, he'd try again.

An unexpected rumble caught his attention. Ripples appeared in the trails near Keller's future. They shifted in unison, like choreographed serpents, making room for a new arrival.

This again?

Jeremy grimaced. He was annoyed, but only slightly surprised, to see Siara's trail veering back toward Harry's in the near future.

Tweedledum on her way to save Tweedledee.

It looked like she might try to arrive at Windfree tomorrow afternoon.

Had she found another ride? Was she planning to hitch? This was such a pain in the ass. No matter how many times, no matter how many ways Jeremy tried to separate them, they came together. He'd even dated her himself, just to keep them apart, but they kept growing toward one another, like weeds. It was another puzzle. How could Siara reject him, over and over, against all common sense, for that addled sack of crap? He once thought she'd seemed so smart, but she was obviously a loser, too.

If Keller ever did die, her trail would probably spend the rest of its time circling the point where he died, forever, like the clock in her stupid poem.

But Jeremy had other plans for her, and now he had to seal the deal.

Fighting a feeling of disgust, he drove his strong, long-fingered hands deep into the muck of Harry and felt his way around, turning his head to the side, as if it smelled like a cesspool.

His sense of revulsion was worse than the scalding tea, almost worse than killing his parents. But it was all about control. Concentrating, he shaped this part, pulled at that. He was tickled to think he was getting better at it, or maybe he just wasn't having as much interference. Now that Keller was stuck in linear time, his life was just like anyone else's.

Just like anyone else's.

Hmm. Maybe he
could
kill him.

Soon, the desired changes rattled through Keller's already-dismal future, shortening it considerably. His fingers still in the trail, Jeremy saw Keller's end quite clearly: