Twist (36 page)

But how?

“If Bree finds out I did this…” Past Wyck was about to walk off.

I pressed my ear against the metal hinge.

“I told you. Don't worry about that,” said Five-Days-Ago Wyck.

He already knew what I had just figured out. He didn't need to worry about me finding out about this change because I was the one who had instigated it.

Wyck was telling the truth. He was following my orders.

The two of them set off to Quigley's office.

Which meant Past Bree was about to follow them.

I had assumed that Future Bree (i.e., me) knew what she was doing. She'd seemed so confident. I felt anything but as I silently slipped from the locker to stop Past Me from doing what I so desperately still wanted her to do. As my will sagged, a puff of faith in my Future Self lifted it.

I knew where we were headed next. To ICE's headquarters, where I could get a closer look at that equipment. Maybe that was why I had to do all this, to get back to that point fifty years ago and figure out how to get Finn's memories out of those reservoirs before ICE became the mega-organization that it was in my time.

Why I would need to dismantle my life in order to do that, I still wasn't sure, but for now, it was enough to know that I needed to take one step forward, then fifty years back.

Past Bree slipped out of her hiding spot. I pushed her arms to her side and wrapped my hand over her mouth to keep her from yelling. She put up a good fight, but whenever Finn and I sparred, he pointed out my go-to moves and what he always did to defeat them. But it felt like there was something I wasn't remembering …

And then she bit my hand.

“Ow!” I let go of her arm and smacked it. “I forgot I did that.”

She spun around, slack-jawed and silent.

 

chapter 28

“WHAT DO YOU THINK
you're doing?” she said.

“Stopping you from reverting this change.” Please don't ask me why. Because I definitely can't explain it yet.

“Don't you realize what's about to happen?” she asked.

“More than you can comprehend.”

“Well, explain it.” She looked so defeated. “Never mind. There's no time.”

She whirled around to chase after Wyck. Crapcakes. I just barely managed to grab her wrist.

“Have you gone insane?” she said. “He's about to take everything from me.”

Bwaha. I couldn't help but let out a pity-laugh.
Everything
. She had no idea what was coming.

“Don't be angry at him.” I couldn't believe those words were actually coming out of my mouth. But they were true. Wyck was as clueless as I was right now. And there was one thing I knew. “He's just following orders.”

Mine.

She said something in return, but I wasn't even listening. A school buzzer sounded, and students filled the halls. She tried to wriggle out of my grasp as the reverter wound down.

“What have you done?” She spun around. “How could you?”

I didn't supply an answer because none existed, at least none that made sense to me just yet. My tendrils flared.

Puff of faith.

I didn't know the why yet, but I had to trust that my tendrils called me where I was supposed to be. I enveloped her in an embrace.

“Where are you taking me?”

To save Finn.

*   *   *

I was pure focus when we landed.

“What is this place?” Past Me asked.

“The Cryostorage Facility at ICE's headquarters.” I flicked out my QuantCom and double-checked the date even though I knew what it would say. Fifty years back.

Past Me wandered around until she reached Nava's chamber. She scratched a line of frost into it.

“Don't touch anything,” I said.

She shot me a nasty look but obeyed.

“Then tell me what's going on,” she said.

“No time.” I didn't have long before Raspy would show up with that fresh catch. (Sigh. I'd been so sure it was Jafney, but now I was doubting everything.) I had to figure out how this extraction tank worked. The tubes full of blue matter twisted their way up the walls. I knew they ended at the reservoir room. Perhaps disrupting the flow here—no. The other room was older and more hidden. That was the equipment Lafferty was more insistent about protecting. It was the more important of the two.

“We're time travelers,” she said. “All we have is time.”

And yet I was all out.

“You sound like Finn,” I said.

“Is he okay? When can I get back to see him?”

I pictured his lifeless body, lying in the bed at Nurse Granderson's house.

“You're with Wyck now,” I said in a dead voice.

“I'm not with—”

“Of course you're not.” How could she even think that? How could I have ever thought that Finn had abandoned me, even for a single moment? A moment we'd never get back and that he would never remember. I pressed my grief away. “But Wyck doesn't realize that. And you won't let him.”

“Do you have any concept what you just cost me back there?” she asked. “What you cost us?”

Oblivious.

And in that moment, I pitied this girl of the past who had everything to lose. There's a reckless, twisted freedom in having everything to gain.

“I know none of this makes sense right now,” I said. “And, honestly, it's still really … it's…” A hopeless mission. A fool's errand. A desperate last resort. “It's not going to be an easy path, but I need you to trust me.”

I needed to trust myself.

Past Bree turned her attention back to Nava.

“You said this place was ICE's Cryostorage?” she said. “Storage for what?”

Stop. Talking. I needed to concentrate. She tapped on the glass, and I glanced over at her as she waved her hand around the display, trying to get it to go away. Nava's body emerged from the cryounit.

“I said, leave her alone.” I walked over to shut the compartment. I hadn't noticed before that Nava's hippocampal degradation was still 0.00%, so at least it looked like they hadn't put her in that tank yet.

“Her?” Past Me appeared properly horror-struck as it hit her what all these storage units were for. Good thing she didn't know one was reserved for Finn.

I brushed Nava's hair back and touched the red button. At least she wouldn't be in there long.

“Who is she?” Past Me asked. “I mean, is she … dead?”

“She's alive.”

Nava's classification information was still hovering there. November Bravo Golf and then a bunch of numbers. NBG—her initials. No. That wasn't right. Her last name was Schwartz. It should be NBS.

Must have been a mistake.

I started to return my attention to the tubes but swiveled back around slowly.

ICE didn't make mistakes. Not like that.

She was the first one taken. And they had held her captive less than a day. It didn't add up.

I looked back over at the tank. I had an urge to smash it, like I had before. (Or I guess, like I would in the future.) I realized what it reminded me of. Back when I was little, my grandpa used to take me fishing on the Anacostia River. He let me use an autosnag and perm-worms because I got grossed out by touching anything slimy. But he always used a genuine antique reel, and when we trawled out in his skiff, he hooked a trap bucket on the back of the boat to catch minnows for live bait. He'd sift through a bucket of those tiny squiggly fish to find the perfect one. They all looked the same to me, but he swore he could tell the one live bait that was most likely to attract the biggest fish.

I turned back to Nava.

Live bait.

They hadn't kidnapped her for her tendrils. They would have plenty of unknown, untrackable Shifters soon enough for that. But someone had to bring those Shifters here. Raspy. They needed the kidnapper firmly on their hook. And for that, they needed bait.

They needed someone who cared about her.

Someone who would do anything it took to save her.

Even if that meant taking everything away from anyone else who crossed their path.

Nava Schwartz. But NBG.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. I'd been so blind. Nava had practically told me. All that talk about how she'd hoped that cross-temporal relationships wouldn't be taboo by the twenty-third century. And that I shouldn't be ashamed of my parents' love or my sticky tendrils. Nava wasn't really talking about me. She was talking about herself. “I know who…”

Nava had admitted to a cross-temporal love affair. I had assumed that the man was in the past. But what if he was in her future? That would mean Raspy was her … no. This couldn't be happening. I thought over the events of the last few days, and so much plunged into place. Jafney was telling me the truth. She had nothing to do with these kidnappings.

“Umm, I have to go.” I pivoted on my heel and took off toward the exit.

“What? You mean, synch?” Past Me called, but I was barely listening.

They had laid out the tastiest bait possible to recruit Raspy. His mother … Nava B. Granderson.

All this time, I'd thought that Nurse Granderson took such good care of Nava—like she was his own mother—because she had no one else. But that wasn't true. She had him. She had her son. She really was his mother. I needed to look Dev Granderson in the face when I confronted him. (Ahh! Nava had even called him Devvy. She'd said she'd known him his
entire
life. Seriously, I could not have been more blind.) How could he? Not just kidnapping Shifters from the past, but Finn—the son of one of his best friends.

I was halfway out the door before I even remembered that my past self was still in the room.

“You'll hide behind that.” I gestured absentmindedly to the screen where Past Bree would crouch while she puzzled through the overheard conversation.

The lights didn't turn on as I entered the hallway. When I felt along the wall, it was exposed dirt, and I realized that the lights probably hadn't even been installed yet at this point fifty years back. Exposed circuitry and ductwork dangled from the ceiling. A musty, loamy scent permeated the air.

The holes for what would eventually be more transport tubes along the edge of the hall had already been dug out and reinforced. I crawled into one and waited, trying to hold on to the rage I'd felt this whole time toward the kidnapper. But now that I knew it was Granderson and the reason he'd done it—to save his mother—I couldn't muster anything but sadness. So much sadness. He was caught in the same vicious, twisting loop that I was, that Finn was, that we all were.

But that didn't excuse it. I set my Com's stunner high enough to really jolt him without knocking him out. I heard the whish of the Cryostorage door and got ready to pounce. I needn't have bothered, though. He walked straight to the porthole where I was crouched and faced me, his hands at his side, defenseless.

“I'm not going anywhere, but if it will make you feel better to stun me, do it,” he said through the voice-distorting mask.

“Take that thing off,” I said. I needed to see his face to actually believe it was him. And I wanted him to see with his bare eyes one of the lives he was ripping apart.

Granderson pulled the silver headpiece off with a sigh and stroked the hard-worn stubble on his chin. Now that I knew his parentage, I could see the kinship to Nava immediately. The same soft, compassionate eyes with permanent smile crinkles at the corners.

“Why would you do this?” I said.

“They took my mother.”

“They took my mother, too,” I said. “Last year. They put her in a coma.”

“And did you sit idly by and wait for her recovery, Bree? Hmm? Or did you agree to do the dirty work of a known chronosmuggler?”

“You can't compare
this
to my one botched delivery for Leto!”

“I'm not. But she's all that I have. I'm all that she has.”

“That note that they left when they took her from Resthaven. That was for you, wasn't it? That's you right now, isn't it? You're giving them what they want.”

“I have no choice. It's the only way they'll return her unharmed.”

“Does Nava know you're a part of this?”

“No!”

“She wouldn't approve of this,” I said. “I know your mother, and she would never want you to end other people's lives, even to save hers.”

“ICE isn't killing anyone. They're just using them for a while.”

“Is that what you've told yourself as you've fed ICE information on your fellow Shifters?”

“Some of it false,” he pointed out. “I've … I've kept them off your track at times. And I've tried to warn them about the danger of the timeline changes.”

“Which has kept them doing it. You created that chicken-egg. You! I can't believe this.”

“I don't know how to get out.” He clutched his head in his hands.

“Has your father been born yet?” I had no intention of listening to him grovel. We didn't have much time before the red-dressed goon came walking through the door, and I didn't have the luxury of wasting a millisecond of it.

“Yes, but he's younger than me in this time,” said Granderson with a sigh. “Mom's one hundred and seven. Dad's in his early twenties. They met when he was on a Shift back for work when she was twenty-five.”

“When were you born?” I asked.

He gave me the year. It was two years after my own grandpa had been born.

“So there's an eighty-year-old version of you running around somewhere?”

“No,” he said. “Apparently, I die of lung disease a couple decades back.”

“Lung disease?” I scoffed. No one had died of lung disease in forever.

“Effects of smoke inhalation. My theory is I refuse treatment out of guilt for all this.”

I thought about how much my lungs had stung in London and then again at Finn's house. And that was just two fires.