Split Infinity (17 page)

Mum’s getting the hang of it too, says that she feels better than she has in weeks. But I still haven’t told her it’s more than a magic trick. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to explain. And I think that moment just arrived.

‘We need to ask Alistair,’ Mum says evenly. The whole time I’ve been talking she’s held a hand pressed over her mouth, but now she lets it drop to her lap. ‘I want to hear what he thinks.’

I showed her two jumps as I explained how it works, selling it as natural and super easy, like an extension of meditation.

Each time I saw the flicker of a frown, I leapt straight to how useful it is. In an earthquake … or a fire … it’s the perfect way to escape. Could maybe save your life.

Could maybe save thousands.

It still scares me, the idea of coming out to apply for citizenship, but I already see this as an ‘in’ to show Mum and Alistair that time skipping is possible. It’s the first step towards teaching them how to do it.

Already Mum’s calling Alistair, asking if he has any time to drop round. If I needed any more evidence that Mum gets what this opportunity could mean, here it is. The whole time Alistair’s been our friend, teaching me how to code and offering advice, we’ve never once said out loud what’s really going on. None of us has come out and said the word: illegal.

Even on a Sunday evening, there’s no guarantee Alistair’s not working. But two minutes later we hear the buzz of an entrance request.

The door slips open but no-one appears for a minute. Welcome to the slow-mo world of a ninety-one-year-old.

He steps in, and lifts an arm as Mum grasps his hand in both of hers. He’s dressed in a pair of dark-grey slacks and a crisp white shirt, same as always.

‘Alistair, thank you for coming,’ she says, guiding him to an armchair. ‘Please, take a seat. Can I offer you some tea?’ A standard welcome.

‘Thank you, no.’ A standard response.

As he makes his way across to the armchair, an image flashes in my mind of him lying in the hospital bed, his eyes rimmed red and crusty with age. It’s hazy now, like a dream, but the feelings are sharp. More than anything I remember the fear of him dying, of never seeing him again.

Mum gets straight to the point, explaining about Christophe Eichmann and asking if Alistair knows anything that might help us. She doesn’t need to explain who would be applying for citizenship status.

‘It’s been done,’ he says, after a long inhale. ‘Twice, that I know of. From what I understand, the application needs to be … exceptional.’

‘I can do exceptional.’ I was leaning against the kitchenette, but I can’t help standing away from the bench. Suddenly, it’s hard to stay still. ‘Remember the stuff I was telling you about Relative Time Theory? I can do it now. For real.’

Alistair’s white eyebrows narrow. ‘You’re saying you can –’

‘Totally. Yep.’ I’ve told him about this already; before I managed my first-ever skip. Not that he believed it was real. ‘I’ll show you.’

‘Wait,’ Mum says and lifts a hand. ‘We’ll get to that in a moment. First I want to ask about the … risks involved. What do you think, Alistair? I’m worried we might be exposed.’

It takes a while for him to pull his gaze away from me. I can tell he’s intrigued. This is the first time he’s considering that the stuff I’ve told him about time travel might actually be true. After all, this time I can prove it by jumping in front of him.

He looks away as he thinks. ‘Well … illegal status in itself isn’t breaking any law.’ He doesn’t need to mention the laws against bribing a GP into faking an abortion certificate. Or stealing a chip from a dead woman’s wrist.

‘You’d have to pretend that you were born to a mother who was also illegal,’ Alistair continues. ‘Hide any connection to this life.’

Mum leans forwards. ‘To me.’

Our eyes meet, both aware of the risks we’ve taken and the price we’d pay if we were ever discovered.

‘I don’t know why we’re even talking about doing this,’ I mutter, and lean back against the bench. ‘I mean, this is just shy of walking in and giving myself away. It’s such a dumb risk.’ ‘Risks can be calculated.’ Alistair shifts stiffly in his chair and rests a hand on his knee. ‘If you really can travel through time … then I think you have a case. A strong one, in fact. I think you should apply.’

‘Really?’ I wasn’t expecting this. Now that I’m hearing Alistair say we should apply, I realise I have to spell it out. ‘Once I admit I’m illegal, I’ll have no rights. What’s stopping them from making up any excuse to chuck me in jail?’ Or worse, developing their drug and testing it on me?

Mum stays quiet, looking at Alistair.

‘Even the government has to stay within the law,’ he says. ‘As long as there’s no way of tracing you to the stolen chip, they’d have no legal right to detain you.’ Alistair shifts in his chair and swaps to rest his other hand on a knee. ‘If we plan this carefully, even if they reject your application, we can make sure you’re protected.’

‘But we can’t be
sure
, I mean –’

‘You’ll be okay. I promise.’

‘But you
can’t
promise that. There’s no way to protect an illegal.’ I make a point not to look over at Mum, sure she’s shooting me a goggle-eyed warning. It’s borderline rude to be arguing like this, but I don’t stop. He’s trying to help, but he hasn’t seen the wall of Feds in black fatigues, their hidden motion-sensors. ‘That’s the whole problem. No-one can –’

‘
I
can.’ Alistair’s voice rises above mine as I break off, pulled up by the force in his tone. He seems almost angry. The muscles in his jaw are clenched and both hands are clasped in fists.

‘I can protect you, Scout,’ he says as his head lowers, ‘because I work in the Department of Illegals.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Y
OU WORK AT
the DOI?’ It’s Mum who breaks the shock in the room, her eyes as wide as mine. ‘All this time?’

Alistair hasn’t moved. ‘We monitor illegals who enter the city, at least those we manage to find. Usually we catch them via the black market. Sometimes fraud. Citizens sometimes give them away, paying illegals credits on the black market, and being found out when the credits are spent in unusual places.’

‘But why didn’t you turn us in?’ Mum and I say in tandem.

Both bushy eyebrows go up as Alistair shakes his head. ‘For six years you were living right under my nose.
Six years
and I never knew. It wasn’t until Scout unlocked your door that day that I realised what was going on. But by then, I suppose … I couldn’t –’

Mum glances my way with a slight head-shake. How close did we come?

Alistair keeps going. ‘Most parents who keep an illegal baby end up buying something that gives them away. Nappies, or a nanny-bot. They’re easy to catch because they can’t help accessing the ration system. But Miya …’ He lets out a snort, more with respect than anything else. ‘My own next-door neighbour and I never knew.’

‘How did you cope without nappies?’ I ask her.

‘Made them from old towels. I had so few credits, I was studying online at the time.’ Mum lets out a light laugh. She almost sounds embarrassed. ‘I used to rinse them at my feet in the shower. I was even too scared to buy proper nappy soak.’

Too smart, more like. For some reason she seems shy to be talking about this, but I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of her than I am now. It’s not just the sacrifice she made to keep me, but the way she kept us both safe all this time …

She’s worked too hard for me to mess it all up. She deserves way more than she has right now. Way more than she got in the firestorm.

‘And Scout.’ Alistair turns to me. ‘Even when you were little, I saw the potential. You had the smarts to survive, although there were times …’ He drifts off.

‘What?’

‘Well, sometimes I had to step in, steer a colleague down a different path by asking for help with other work. The selection committee at Karoly High were monitoring your combehaviour so I created a fake comscreen history …’ He drifts off, thinking. ‘The thing is … I couldn’t turn you in now. Not that I would. But you see, I have a lot to lose as well.’

Alistair keeps his eyes on the rug at his feet, as if he doesn’t want to see the way we’re looking at him. I don’t want think about how close I’ve come to being caught without even knowing it.

How many times did Alistair step in and save us? Save me?

How many illegals has he caught?

For the first time since Kessa told me, I feel a quickening in my chest. A whole pile of ideas tumble on top of each other. It’s beginning to dawn on me that if I show them how to time skip, the government wouldn’t need to lock me away in order to study how it works. I’d already be offering to help.

A low voice comes into my mind, an echo from my last moments in the streets outside Sunshine Hospital:
I can’t help you unless you trust me. You’ll be okay.

Could I work
with
the government scientists? If I agreed to help, would I be safe? I’d be able to explain everything I know about the wildfire. They’d be able to stop it before it gets out of control.

I grab Mum’s shawl from the end of the bed and chuck it at her. ‘Count ten seconds okay? And hold this up for me?’

‘Right. Yes.’ This time she doesn’t try to stop me.

I turn to Alistair. ‘There’s something you need to see.’

Kessa’s about to send me info about the application process when I stop her. Nothing about the application can link to my name, our comscreen, our room. None of this can come anywhere near Mum.

She gets it straight away, popping her eyes. ‘Gosh, sorry. Of course.’ It’s funny though, something about the way she’s biting her lip makes me think she’s enjoying this. Agent X, secret spy. That’s me.

Kessa explains enough for me to find it myself, so I leave the chip at home and head into the state library, wearing a loose coat and a beanie pulled low, hacking into a library terminal with an old compad that I scrounged at the tip. Already I’m playing the role of the person I’ll need to be if this is going to work: an illegal born outside the city limits, with no connection to citizens here. Invisible once more.

‘You’ll have to use a different name for the application,’ Mum says once I come home. A small cloud of steam rises as she pours water into her mug. ‘And I think you should change the way you look. Maybe dye your hair. Thank goodness for the extra credits. We’ll need them to make sure everything’s right.’

‘Dad’s surname … what was that?’ I ask. I’ve been searching and planning a whole heap, but I haven’t begun the application yet. Everything has to be dead-set certain before I do.

‘Karimi.’

‘Okay, I’ll use the name Coutlyn Karimi on the application. Coutlyn’s pretty common these days.’

‘What about Carolyn?’ Mum asks. ‘It’s similar, but you’d have no more ties to this identity. Or the stolen chip.’

There’s a pause as we both consider the way it sounds. Mum’s eyebrows lift.

‘Okay. Carolyn Karimi it is,’ I say. A new name for a new citizen.

I’m just about to switch the comscreen across to TV mode when an alert sounds on my compad. Someone’s coming up the front path.

Mum stops stirring her mug and turns to me, the spoon hovering. An entrance request buzzes as I grab the compad.

Air escapes in a rush. ‘It’s only Mason.’

‘Ah.’ The corner of her mouth lifts, and Mum goes back to stirring.

‘Okay if I go for a walk?’

‘Of course.’