The Eighth Guardian (6 page)

The Civil War ended in 1865, thank you very much, every American history class I’ve ever taken. So we’re somewhere between 1865 and 1899.

Back to the swan boats.
Focus. Focus.
My mom and I haven’t ridden in the boats since I moved away to go to school. The last time we went, I was in the eighth grade. It wasn’t a huge anniversary for the boats, like the hundredth or two hundredth; but the number ended with a zero, so everyone was acting as if it was the biggest deal in the world, which I remember thinking was pretty lame.
What was it?

And then, like magic, the number floats into my head. I can see the sign hanging behind the ticket counter with fireworks and balloons, proclaiming the anniversary.

So subtract that from the year, and I get that the swan boats were started in 1877, which means, Hallelujah, praise Jesus, I am a freaking genius! I am sometime between 1865 and 1876.

Except that now I’m totally stuck.

I drop my head into my hands and rub my eyes. My nose is all sniffly. That always happens when I’m so tired I can barely keep my head up. I can’t process anything. Just as soon as a thought enters my head, it’s out.
Time travel is real. I’m hallucinating. I’m going to wake up from a bad dream in my dorm room at Peel.
The thoughts all swirl together. I need to keep moving. Moving will help me stay focused.

I look both ways to make sure a horse isn’t about to mow me down again and walk into Boston Common. There has to be a trash can around, right? Maybe someone will toss in a newspaper and I’ll find it, like Michael J. Fox did in
Back to the Future
. Mom and I watched that movie a lot. On her good days.

I’m halfway across the Common when it hits me. The smell. I was so worked up before that I didn’t pay attention, but the scent is there, sure as day. It’s a musty, sweet smell blown in on the wind. I’ve lived in New England my entire life, so I know that smell. It’s fall.

One glance up confirms it. It’s dark out, but there’s enough light to notice the yellow and orange leaves looming over me. The dead ones, long tossed from their branches, crunch beneath my feet. So I left during the fall in the present, and now I’m in the fall in the past. Somehow this is comforting.

I stop. I can’t remember what I was doing. I sniffle again. Oh. Right. Trash cans. I blink. Did I really just center a plan around a plot point in an ’80s movie and think that was a good idea? What is wrong with me? I’ve been trained better than this. I
am
better than this.

But still, I glance around to see if I can spot any trash cans, because you never know. I don’t see a single one. I sigh and walk toward the state house. Maybe someone is selling an evening edition of the newspaper?

I have no plan. This is awful. If this was another Testing Day challenge, I’d fail.

I stop in my tracks and gasp. What if this
is
another Testing Day challenge? Oh my God, why didn’t I think of this before? There’s a Testing Day that’s legendary around Peel’s campus. Testing Day: 1995, also known as the Testing Day That Would Not End.

There was the twelve-hour written test, followed by the three challenges, followed by the banquet. But then armed guards wearing all black and night vision goggles cut the electricity, stormed the place, captured all the juniors and seniors, and took them to a remote location off-campus for more testing. One kid died. A junior. There was never an official cause of death, but if there was a box for “Testing Day from Hell” on the coroner’s report, you can bet it would have been checked.

What if this is like 1995 all over again? I’m not done! I haven’t graduated yet. I’m still a student. I have to work my way back to the present, and then Testing Day will finally be over. Holy crap, this could all be a drill!

Suddenly, the idea of a secret government organization that has the ability to time travel doesn’t sound so far-fetched to me. I mean, you would be surprised at all the stuff the government can do, and I only know about a small sliver of it. I can imagine how shocked I’ll be when I get full clearance.

Full clearance. I blow out my breath. Time to get serious. What was the plan? Oh, right, newsboys. That is a
stupid
plan, and not just because there aren’t any newsboys at the state house.

Focus.

There’s a shuffling of footsteps behind me, and I turn just as two men wander up to look at the dome. The guy and the girl who are tailing me are half a block away, and the guy leans in to the girl and whispers something in her ear when he sees me looking at him. For a split second I think about waving, but I’m sure that would violate the no-interaction rule. And I’m not about to blow this now.

So instead I fiddle with my collar and pull out the owl necklace. I press the knob up top by the feather, the way Alpha did, and the lid covering the watch face pops open. The face itself is white, and there are black numbers in a fancy, swirly font I’ve never seen before.
ANNUM
is stamped below the point where the two hands lie on top of each other. The whole face is enclosed in a brass circle, and there are tiny knobs on the right side of the circle. And I mean
tiny
. There’s . . . something inscribed on each of the knobs, but I can’t see what it is. I fiddle with the one on the bottom, but it doesn’t budge. Neither does the one in the middle. But the knob on top moves. I spin it to the right. The minute hand moves, too, and—

Click.

Click.

That doesn’t sound good. No, worse than that. That sounds bad.
Really
bad. As if I’ve just messed with a bunch of wires, and a bomb is about to go off. I turn the knob back two clicks to the left, back to where I started, and hold my breath.

“Already exceeded two thousand dollars?” a voice next to me yells.

I don’t want to be obvious, so I make only a little quarter turn and shift my eyes to the side. It’s the two men who walked up before. They’re still looking at the dome.

I stare back at the watch. I bring it closer to my face and squint, trying to make out the inscriptions on the knobs. They’re letters! The top knob has a
Y
, the middle an
M
, and the bottom a
D
.
YMD
.

“If they exceed the budget any further,” the same man says, “they’d better not levy a single tax to pay for it. At the first sight of a tax collector, I’m grabbing the missus and the boy and heading west. We’ll become border ruffians.”

The other man laughs and claps his friend on the back.

“Bully for you, Morrison!”

Man, people sure talk funny back . . . whenever I am.
YMD
. This seems as if it should be easy, but I’m so tired right now I don’t think I could spell my name correctly on the first try.
YMD
. Yeapons of Mass Destruction?

“Mark my words,” the first man says, “the Centennial will dawn, the dome will be half completed, and the cost to us all will be five thousand dollars.”

The other man laughs again. “The Centennial! Morrison, you’re mad! Simply mad. That’s a year and a half away. The remainder of autumn, perhaps, but it will be gilded by new year.”

The owl necklace slips from my fingers and thumps into my chest. The Centennial is a year and a half away. Even a first grader could tell you the country was founded in 1776, so that means the Centennial is in 1876. Which then means I’m in 1874. It’s fall 1874. I want to leap on both of these men and kiss them, but instead I turn away and start walking back toward the alley.

I’m close. So close. I know the year, and I know the season; but I still need to figure out the month and the day.

I stop in my tracks.

YMD
. Of course!
Year Month Day
.

I’m already turning the knobs on the watch before I’m the whole way back. Today in the present is October 21, and I’m willing to bet anything that today in the past is October 21, too. That’s why the month and day buttons won’t budge. The mission was to get back. And that means only figuring out the year.

I turn the
Y
knob, and the big hand flies around the clock, clucking like a chicken. One whole turn. I bet that’s sixty years. Another turn. And that’s a buck twenty. I slow down and count each tick after that. I can’t screw this up.

And then I remember Alpha’s instruction. Leave from the place you started. That alley? The broom closet? But I’m locked out, and I don’t have—a key!

I shove my hand in the knapsack as I run down Beacon Street. I zip to the right at the first street and find the door. Sure enough, there’s a lock on the outside, and the key slides right in.

“Yes!” I shout to no one. But then there are footsteps. I turn to find the guy and the girl coming toward me. The girl has that look on her face again, like she’s about to pull out a dagger and knife me. What the hell is her problem?

Guess I’ll figure it out later. I open the door, jump into the tiny closet, and snap the lid of the watch face shut. Here goes nothing.

There’s a ride at Six Flags New England. Scream. You’re strapped into your seat at ground level, and then with no warning at all you’re shot straight up, twenty stories in the air at sixty miles an hour.

This is what’s happening to me now. My empty stomach soars and lodges itself into my esophagus, and I don’t have time to scream as my hair is plastered to my face, my arms fly to my sides, and I’m shot up.

                     Up.

          Up.

Up.

How much longer?

And then I stop, midflight. There’s a
ziiiiiiiiip
sound from below, and I crumple to the ground. My elbow slams into a metal grate on the floor, and I groan.

“Welcome back,” a voice says from above. It’s Alpha. He reaches down a hand, then immediately draws it away when I reach for it.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he says. “Which I assure you is a statistical certainty should you try to escape from me again. So tell me, are we past all that?”

I don’t answer the question. Instead I decide to call his bluff. Here. Now.

“I don’t know. Is Testing Day over now?”

Alpha’s honey-brown eyes narrow into a look of pure puzzlement. “Testing Day has been over for hours. You graduated. Did you not believe me?”

I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. His tone is one of finality; his eyes seal my fate. In this instant I know. This is real. And now I’m drowning in an ocean of disappointment, pulled under by a rogue wave of reality. I’m really done at Peel. I can feel it. And that means I’m really done with Abe.

I start to push myself up, but Alpha grabs both of my shoulders and pushes me back to the floor. “Uh-uh. First you have to promise me that you’re past trying to run away.”

I’m Annum Guard now. Annum Guard. An organization I’ve never heard of. I have to come to grips with the fact that time travel might be possible. I think. Ugh, I don’t know what to think. But one thing I do know is that Alpha is stronger than me and clearly has more combat training, so I’d be foolish to try to take him in a fight again.

“We’re past it,” I say.

Alpha’s hand reaches down again, and this time I take it. He pulls me to my feet. “Glad to hear it. Now you need to project again.”

My head snaps back. “I need to . . . what?”

Alpha takes hold of the watch hanging around my neck. “You’re not in the present.”

I blink. “How . . . I don’t . . .”

“When you go back in time, you lose time in the present day. If you go back twenty-five years, two minutes pass in the present for every one minute you’re gone. The further back you go, the more time passes. Ever heard of a Fibonacci sequence? It works like that.”

I try to process what he’s telling me. I don’t even know if I believe him.

“For instance,” Alpha continues, “you go back four hundred years, and every minute you spend there passes nearly two days in the present.”

My mouth drops open. I don’t mean for it to. It’s betraying nearly everything I was taught in Practical Studies about keeping my cool.

Alpha clears his throat and presses on the top knob of the watch. The lid pops open, and Alpha presses the top knob again. The dials fly around the watch six times.

“For future reference,” Alpha says, “whenever you need to get back to the present, just press on the top knob when the lid is open. It will automatically take you to the present. You’re about six hours behind, in case you were wondering.”

“What—”

Before I can finish the thought, Alpha pushes me backward into the black room and shuts the watch face lid. I’m sucked up again, and I choke from the shock. But only a second later I land in a heap on the same metal railing.

Alpha’s hand extends in front of my face. “We still past it?” he asks.

I think I’m going to throw up. The grate below me starts to swirl. “Past it,” I say.

Alpha yanks me up, and I follow him back into the too-bright hallway. He stops outside a door at the other end and enters a code, then turns the handle and cracks open the door an inch. He looks back at me.

“Are you ready to serve your country in a way you never thought possible?”