She blinked and peered past me at the few people walking on the sidewalk around us. “We travelled back in time?”
“It was what came to mind when you told me what mom had said. And with that mind smith combing through my brain, I didn’t have time to think through anything more than the first thing that popped in my head.”
She furrowed her brow. “Didn’t you and mom meet in college?” I nodded. “Then what are we doing here, and now?”
“On our first date, I took your mom to see the second Jurassic Park movie.”
“Wow.” She stared at me. “I mean, it’s a decent movie and all, but... really? That sounds like the worst first date idea I’ve ever heard of.”
“What are you talking about? Jeff Goldblum was amazing in that movie. And your mom loved it.”
“Moving on.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “We’re still years before your first date with mom. Why did you bring us here?”
“We figured out after our first date that the two of us had both gone to see the first Jurassic Park movie on the same day four years before, one week after it came out. She even took me to the theater she saw it at during our first trip to LA.”
“Oh.” She smiled. “That’s so nerdy, dad!”
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged and looked past her. “It gave me a time and a place. That’s why we’re here.”
She followed my gaze to the movie theater across the street.
“Wait. So, your plan is to get mom? Why?”
“We have to stop those rogues. And I don’t know if I can do it alone. Especially if we’re going to be doing this under the radar.”
“So... we’re here to get mom to come with us to fight those time-travelling rogues?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds kind of dumb.” I laughed as she grinned at me. “But we have to stop them somehow. There’s no telling what damage they can do to our timeline if we don’t stop them soon.”
“What damage are we going to do by showing up here and revealing ourselves to mom?”
“I think... I think that damage is already done. Jake knew I was going to be travelling through time this morning. He told me when and where to go. I could be wrong, but I think he remembered us showing up here, twenty-four years before. That’s why he sent you and gave you that money.”
“This is making my head hurt.” She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her temple.
“Yeah.” I scrunched up the side of my face. “Time travel doesn’t make any sense.”
Luckily, the theater was in a strip mall with other shops spread around the parking lot. While I waited in the alley, I was able to convince her to go into one of the clothes stores to get me a pair of shoes. Of course, when she came back twenty minutes later, she had more than just a pair of shoes in hand.
“We have to blend in, don’t we?” She shrugged off my accusatory glare and tossed me one of the bags of clothes she had brought back. “Plus, I was able to change out my extra money. Can you believe it used to look like this?”
“Since I grew up with it?” I raised my eyebrows at the uniformly green bills she held in her hand. “Yes, I can. You’re going to be completely blown away by dial-up.”
We took turns behind the dumpster in the alley changing into the clothes she had bought for us, since it wasn’t a bad idea for us to try and blend in as much as possible. Though, as I looked down at the crop-top tee shirt and plaid miniskirt she had gotten for me, along with knee-high black socks, converses, and a denim jacket, I had the strong sense her feel for Nineties fashion had come from watching too many reruns of Saved by the Bell.
After taking a few minutes to duck into one of the stores and use the bathroom to clean off the dried blood on my face and arms, Nicole and I crossed the parking lot to look at the show times of the theater. Although I knew Amber would be there that day, as I glanced up at the list of show times for Jurassic Park, I realized for the first time I had no idea which showing she would have gone to.
“You have any ideas?” Nicole muttered to me, her eyes on the marquee over the theater as well.
“Just one.” I gave an uncertain smile and stepped toward the ticket booth.
“Hello.” The boy in the booth looked up at me, then tilted his head to the side. “Didn’t I see you a few hours ago?”
“Oh.” I glanced at Nicole as she came up next to me. “Yeah, sorry. I had to go give my parents a call.”
“Well, your showing’s almost over.” He glanced back toward the theater. “But the last ten minutes are really worth it.”
“Oh...” I looked between him and Nicole.
“We lost our tickets.” She frowned and pouted out her lower lip.
“Here you go.” He shrugged and handed me two stubs through the glass partition of the booth.
“Thanks!” She scooped the tickets up and put her arm around me to steer me into the theater.
“Okay.” She turned to me as we waited off to the side of the lobby. “What are we going to tell—?”
“We’ll figure that out as we go.” I elbowed her as I spotted a familiar flash of copper in the crowd of people streaming from the nearest auditorium. “But as a general rule, the less we can get away with telling her, the less likely that we’re going to screw up our timeline.”
As nonchalantly as we could, we pushed our way through the crowd until we were walking a few paces behind Amber, who was talking excitedly with a group of friends. As we passed the ticket booth, the boy looked up to see us walk by, and a puzzled look flitted across his face as he noticed Amber as well.
“How are we going to get her apart from her friends?” Nicole whispered in my ear, even as the group of girls fanned out around a convertible.
“You have to distract her.”
“Me?”
“If her friends see me, they’re going to freak,” I growled.
“Excuse me!” She bounded forward while I turned around and strolled over to a newspaper rack. “Sorry, could you help me?”
I heard the girls pause their conversation as they listened to her explain that she needed directions to see the Hollywood sign. Shaking my head, I leaned forward and put a quarter into the rack to pull out a newspaper. I straightened up with the newspaper in front of my face as I leaned against the rack, then peeked over the top of the newspaper to see what was happening.
I saw Amber standing near the back of the group of girls as one of them answered Nicole’s question, though from the way she was looking around the emptying parking lot, I could tell she was bored.
My heart skipped a beat as her eyes swept over me, and I tried to casually prop the newspaper back up over my eyes. Before I could, though, her gaze snapped back to me, and her eyes went wide. Well, at least I had her attention.
“Amber?” I heard one of the girls say. “Where are you going?”
“Oh. I... uh, forgot. I need to get a few things before I can go home. I’ll call my parents and have them come get me. You guys go on.”
“If you’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, thank you guys,” Nicole said lamely.
I heard footsteps approaching before she came and leaned against the newspaper rack next to me. A moment later, I heard the car rev to life. She grabbed a few pages from my newspaper and buried her face behind it, and glancing over at her, I saw her face turning red from embarrassment.
I tracked, through my grav-sense, Amber’s movement as she walked forward onto the sidewalk and paced along the curb to make a wide circle around me. Finally, when she was only a few feet away, she grabbed the newspaper away from me, then gasped.
“Hey Amber.” I winced.
“Wh... who are you?” she stammered and took a step back as I looked back at her. Our age, ironically enough, looked to be exactly the same. We could have passed for identical twins.
“I’m you. Sort of.” I frowned and glanced at Nicole, who had folded her newspaper down and was watching Amber in interest.
“You a repl
icator?” She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Nope. I mess with gravity. Spacetime.” To illustrate my point, I made a pocket of ultra-dense spacetime half-way between the two of us, which snapped away a second later with a loud pop as the air decompressed back to a normal pressure. I was sure my eyes had glowed as well. “Just like you.”
Her eyes went wide again and she backed away. “I have to go.”
“Amber, wait!” I crossed the distance between us in a heartbeat and grabbed her wrist.
“I don’t know what game you’re playing at.” She twisted her hand free as she turned back to me. “But you need to leave me alone.”
“We need your help.” I bit my lower lip, then sighed. “Okay, this is going to sound completely crazy, but it’s true. The two of us?” I gestured behind me to Nicole to make myself clear. “We’re from the future. That’s how I’m you. Kind of. You can bend spacetime. I can too. But I broke spacetime and made a wormhole through time to this moment.”
“If you’re from the future, why do you look like you’re my age?” She raised an eyebrow and squared her hands on her hips.
“It’s... kind of a long story. And, to be honest, I think the less you know about it, the less likely it will be that we screw something up and mess up the future.”
“If you’re me from the future, prove it.”
I nodded. “Sure thing. Your favorite color is purple, and it’s not because you see spacetime in purple. Your first memory was falling off your bike when you were three and breaking your arm. Favorite flavor of ice cream is butter pecan, even though you know it’s an ‘old person flavor’. Have you kissed anyone yet?” I tilted my head to the side. “You’re fifteen, right? So, if you haven’t yet, you’re about to. Your first kiss was, or will be, this summer. Your first crush was Larry Quinn, in the second grade. You thought you were going to marry him, until his family moved to Nebraska when you were in fourth grade. You’ve always wanted a winter wedding, because you love the snow.” My face cracked into a smile. “You kind of lost that love as you grew older. Do you need me to keep going?”
She blinked. “I don’t think a Soviet operative would know all of that. Still...”
“I know you still sleep with the teddy bear that you stole from your older brother, Caleb, when you were two. You call him Theod—”
“Okay!” Her face flashed red, even as Nicole grinned beside me. “I believe you.”
“Good. Because we need your help.”
I wasn’t sure how she would react to my explanation that, in a life-or-death moment, we had decided to travel back in time, and had inadvertently brought six rogues with us that were trying to alter world history. I could see the disbelief and doubt that flashed across her face at each new revelation, but by the end of my explanation, she seemed to accept our story.
“Okay.” She held her hands down, her eyes on the ground. As Nicole and I watched, she paced around on the sidewalk in front of us. “So... there are six rogues?” I nodded. “And we have to stop them, otherwise the changes they make now could spiral out of control in the future?”
“Yeah,” Nicole said. “It’s like The Butterfly Effect.”
“What?” Amber cocked her head to the side.
“You know, that movie with Ashton Kutcher?”
“Who?”
“Nicole.” I scowled. “Number one? That movie won’t be out for another decade. Number two? That actor isn’t an actor yet. She has no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Oh.” She frowned.
“I mean, I sort of get it,” Amber muttered. “The butterfly effect is the idea that really small changes can have really big effects on complex systems. Like that story, The Sound of Thunder?”
I smiled. “That’s actually a much better example. And it has an actual butterfly in it.”
“Wow.” Nicole rolled her eyes, even as Amber blushed. “I forgot how much of a nerd you two are.”
“Well, if you would crack open a book once in a while instead of spending all day staring at your phone—”
“Wait.” Amber looked between the two of us. “You... stare at your phone? Do phones in the future respond to thoughts, or something?”
“Umm...” I blinked, realizing too late my mistake.
“No, they’re more like computers.” Nicole fished her phone out of her pocket and handed it to Amber, who studied it like it was an ancient artifact.
“Nicole.” I glared at her. “We’re trying to not change the future here. Handing her technology from twenty-five years in the future probably isn’t—”
“This is me twenty-five years from now.” Amber’s voice cut through my words, causing me to twist around. She was staring down at the picture on the phone, her eyes drinking in every detail of the faces in front of her.
“Oh, crap.” Nicole darted forward and grabbed her phone back, but the damage had already been done.
“What picture was that?” I asked, my tone dangerously low.
“Er...”
“Nicole?” Amber looked at her as though she were seeing her for the first time. “Are you my daughter?”
I swore.
After getting confirmation from us that Nicole was her daughter, Amber seemed much keener on helping us track down the rogues. However, when she asked how we planned to find them, I realized I had no idea where to even start our search. It was Nicole, of all people, who came up with a plan.
“Jackie?” She used the name we had all decided to call me to distinguish me from Amber. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
Amber watched us curiously as we stepped out of earshot.
“Didn’t...” Nicole shifted uncomfortably on her feet as she met my gaze. “Didn’t your parents die in 1993?”
“They did...” I trailed away, even as my heart started pounding as though it was about to come out of my chest. “They’re going to die on June twenty-first. Three days from now.”
“Weren’t they killed...?”
“In a rogue attack. I don’t remember much.” I rubbed my forehead in thought. “It’s always been really fuzzy in my memory, to be honest. Except...”
“What is it?”
“The mind smith. Amanda. The first time I saw her at your school, I thought I had seen her before, but it didn’t make any sense.”
“You saw her at your house, didn’t you?” She gave me a piercing look. “When your parents died?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.
“Okay.” Nicole sucked in a deep breath as she walked back to Amber. “The rogues are heading to Chicago. And we have to stop them.”
“What?” Amber looked startled. “How do you know?”
“You were able to stop their plans. Or...” Nicole glanced at me and scratched the back of her head. “Someone close to you was able to stop them. They’re going to try and kill that person before you ever get the chance to meet.”
“Who?” Amber furrowed her brows.
“Well...”
I bit my lower lip, then shrugged helplessly. “We really, really can’t say. We’ve already told you enough that we’ve probably changed the timeline irreversibly. I don’t know if we can say any more. You’re just going to have to trust us.”
“Okay.”
“What? That’s all it’ll take?”
“You’re my daughter, right?” Amber looked over at her, then looked at me. “And you’re me?”
“Something like that,” I agreed.
“I trust you. When do we need to leave?”
“As soon as possible.” I glanced over at Nicole, who looked dumbfounded. “You don’t have a license yet, do you?”
“Just a permit. But I do have a car, actually.”
“That’s right.” Nicole smiled. “I forgot Grandpa was loaded.”
“We can drive.” I pointed between Nicole and me for emphasis. “And we have cash for the gas. You think we could borrow your car?”
“Dad’s going to kill me.” Amber winced. “Whatever. I can d
eal with that later. Let’s go.”
“Wait.” Nicole paused as Amber turned around and started walking down the street. “Where are you going?”
“Bus stop’s a block from here.” She called over her shoulder.
“But... we can fly to your house.”
“What?” She turned around to look at her. “You can fly?”
“No. I’m not a prime. But you are. Haven’t you ever flown before?” Nicole asked.
“I mean, I’ve floated around weightless, but I just control gravity. I can’t fly.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You can fly.” I nodded to Amber. “I’m guessing, though, that you haven’t registered yet, have you?”
“No, I have.” She looked like my intimation repulsed her. “I’ve been registered since the age of four. What kind of irresponsible person doesn’t register?”
“Well, that’ll have to do.” I sighed. “If an arbiter gets antsy at seeing us flying, you think I could borrow your papers?”
She nodded. “How do you fly?”
“Like this.”
Amber looked both terrified and exhilarated as I put a field around the three of us that lifted us off the ground and sent us shooting up into the air. Despite the fact Amber had registered her powers, I wasn’t feeling in the mood to test my theory that an arbiter seeing us wouldn’t try to question us, so I made sure we flew straight up for the first few seconds. I levelled off and flew in the direction of Amber’s house only once we were a few thousand feet in the air. Ordinarily, I would have flown faster, but without all of us wearing anything over our faces, it became difficult to breathe through the air at speeds over a hundred miles an hour. We still flew plenty fast—we covered the five miles to Amber’s house within four minutes—but I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that someone looking up would see us and call in arbiters to investigate.
As we flew, though, I stole a few covert glances at Amber, who seemed to be in awe as we fell through the air. She was drawing on her grav-sense to take in every detail of what I was doing. Every time she looked my way I saw her eyes glowing with that familiar shade of purple, and each time I would adjust the field around us to change our trajectory, I saw her trace out the purple lines of the adjusted field around us with her gaze. I could see her taking in every detail—this was something she wanted to remember, and I couldn’t blame her.
Prime Identity Page 30
