Should I sit? She didn’t say to, so I stand awkwardly, trying not to look jumpy.
“You have something for me?” she says.
The transfer drive’s in my sweaty palm. I wipe it on my leg and hand it over.
She looks at me expectantly, but I have no idea what else she wants. Why doesn’t she dismiss me?
“Well?” she prompts, raising her eyebrows. “Tell me what you found.”
“Uh, sure…” I didn’t think I had to memorize it. “Let’s see…I got everything you requested. All the Jenny personnel and bioinformatics records, including files for the one named Max—”
“The governors.”
“Yeah. I got all the info I could find on governors. Assuming you didn’t mean the old state government kind.” I chuckle. She doesn’t.
“Summarize.”
“Uh, there were gobs, some in every quake-time in previous timelines.”
“This timeline.”
That’s easier. “When you discontinued travel, you recalled and recycled all you could, so there aren’t many left.”
“How many are still out there?”
“Three, I think. Listed as DOD—dormant or dead.”
“Which quake-times?”
“I remember two in 1906 and one in 2018.” Easy, because those are Allison’s years. “The one in 2018 has an odd name—you refer to him as ‘Sink.’”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I’m in one of four single beds, the one closest to the door. Sharrow and Daum are both asleep—I can tell by their breathing—and I’m jealous. It’s not that the bed’s not comfy or that I’m not tired. It’s that my stupid brain won’t shut off.
There’s a full-on circus happening in my head. My mom and dad—the young versions—in one ring, surrounded by the crew, all crying out, reaching for me. Another ring has Jake and Bibi herding a bunch of rug-rats in animal costumes. The middle ring is writhing with Nazis. Beck’s at the center cracking a whip, his red eyes leaking blood.
I shiver and roll on my side. I try to imagine I’m back in my bed at Bibi’s, the sounds of baby-mamas walking the halls with fussy rug-rats, the smell of soured formula and full diapers wafting under my door. In real life, that always put me right to sleep simply to escape it. But I’m still wide awake, just sadder.
I hear a soft click at the door. In the dim light, I see Flyx step inside. Our eyes lock. My breath catches.
He crosses to my bed and squats down so we’re face to face. “Hey, you okay?” he whispers.
“Not really.” In more ways than one.
“What’s wrong?”
“Can’t sleep.” I don’t want to go into my whole sad story. Or tell him that being that close to him makes me feel all woogly inside.
“Wanna take a walk?”
“Now?”
“Why not? We’ll have the whole place to ourselves.”
We head away from the cubes and the club. It’s silent, that middle-of-the-night hush when it feels like no one is alive but you.
I like the quiet. I never could find much of it back home. Except in the Main.
We walk side-by-side, settling into a quiet rhythm. I’m glad Flyx doesn’t feel the need to fill the void with chitchat. I don’t like chitchat on a good day.
At the end of a narrow corridor, Flyx banks his personal. I follow him through the door into a BART station, dark, deserted, and cold. I shiver and hug myself against the chill.
“Hang here. I’ll get jackets.” His voice sounds hollow in the void, and it’s creepy, like we’re the only humans left after the apocalypse.
He jogs away and I stare up at the dark ceiling, reminded of all the times I couldn’t take it anymore at a foster home and I’d sneak out to look at the night sky. Somehow, I can forget my problems, at least for a minute, when there’s no ceiling over my head. Plus, stars are pretty.
Flyx returns wearing a black hoodie and carrying a second one. I guess some things never go out of style. It’s heavy, and soft, and I smell dryer sheets as I slip it over my head.
“Where did you go earlier, when you left the cube?” I ask, my curiosity winning over my love of silence.
“Not important.”
“It was important enough you were gone for hours in the middle of the night. What were you doing?” I’m not going to let it go.
He seems to realize this and sighs. “I went to read through the histories again. When you said your crew hadn’t been born yet in 1906, it tickled something in my memory, and I had to tease it out.”
“Tell me.”
“It wasn’t that the crew hadn’t been born yet. In this timeline, they are never born. I’ve been twisted trying to make sense of it—why would dying make them never be born in the first place?”
“Because—” My brain processes what he said. It doesn’t make sense. “Okay…let’s think this through. For me, my parents were killed before I was born—that tracks. I’m assuming it’s the same for Bel, that she hadn’t been conceived yet when our father died. If he’s actually her father.”
“He is.”
“What? How do you know?”
He shrugs, looking sheepish. “I, uh, I checked the DNA records.”
“How? Dietrich said they were in a vault.”
“Yeah, the vault where I work. I rationed you’d want to know for sure.”
“Oh. Thanks.” That was nice of him. Though I don’t remember telling him about it.
“So,” he says, shoving his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. “That explains why you and Bel weren’t born. But not the others.”
“Yeah.” I start walking. I need to think this through, and I can’t do that standing still.
Flyx walks close beside me, not quite touching. It’s a comfort, having him here. And it’s nice he’s letting me think, not pressing me to talk.
After a few minutes, something occurs to me. “You said the whole crew disappeared. Does that mean Kaitlin, too?”
“Affirm.”
“Not died, disappeared?”
“The previous timeline articled her dying in 2018. But this timeline has no record of her existing what-so. She vanished from the histories. She was never born.
This makes zero sense. “What could we have changed in 1906 to make Kaitlin never be born…?”
“I’d guess whatever erased the rest of the crew. For the timing to work, something vanked them all at the same time.”
“But what? They were all born in different times…. How could—” My mom said Maxen wasn’t supposed to be able to have kids, but by some fluke she got pregnant with me. He was different than other Jennys…the only Jenny who could father children. “Oh my God.” The pieces click into place, forming a picture.
“What?”
Could it really be true? “I think…I think maybe…” I swallow. “What if Maxen was everyone’s father—the whole crew.”
It hangs there in the air for a moment.
“If he’s the father of all of us—including Kaitlin,” I continue. “It would make sense that when he died, none of us were born. Unless you have another explanation that works.” I almost want him to, because this makes losing the crew hurt even more.
Flyx cocks his head. “You could be right. It’s the only thing that makes everything fit.”
I nod, my damn eyes filling again. I fist the tears away, doubling my resolve to get the crew back. Then it dawns on me— “Do you think Bel knows?”
“If she does, that’s one way to confirm the theory.”
Bel was adamant that Beck-slash-Maxen was her father and had passed down the ability to time-travel. Maybe that’s because she knew he had fathered children across time, all of whom inherited the ability. “I need to talk to her. Now.”
“You can’t.”
“Try and stop me.” I turn and start back.
“Wait,” Flyx says, catching up with me. “Bel’s in Dietrich’s chambers, in the public sector, past a whole lot of security.”
“But—”
&n
bsp; “How important is it? Can it wait until tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I clench my fists, frustrated, with nowhere for all that energy to go. I glance at the ceiling again, wishing I could see the sky. “How can you stand it? Never seeing the stars.”
“What makes you think I never see the stars?” He raises his eyebrows mischievously.
“Are you serious right now? Because I’m pretty sure I can get through tonight if I could be out under the stars.”
“Okay, but it’s a climb.”
“Bring it on.”
My thighs are burning when we climb out onto a flat roof. There are more stars than I’ve ever seen, and I can smell the ocean.
“This is exactly what I needed.” I feel better than I’ve felt in days. “Can we check out the view of the city?”
“It’s not much to see at night, but sure.” He heads toward the edge of the roof.
I only make it a few steps before I trip and fall hard on my hands and knees.
Flyx rushes back. “You okay?” He reaches for me. “Consent?”
I clasp his right hand with mine. “I consent.” There’s a soft electronic ping from our personals, and he pulls me to my feet.
“You hurt?”
“Just my pride.” I let go of his hand and dust off my knees. My jumper is intact and I don’t seem to be bleeding.
“My fault. I should have guided you. We can’t risk a light. But I know the way.” He extends his hand again.
I slip my hand in his, and my heart gives an involuntary skip. His hand is warm and dry, and I hope mine isn’t clammy. He guides me across the roof to a wall that comes to my chest. Still holding hands, we look out.
“There isn’t a single light,” I say, looking across the tangled black shapes that were once the buildings of my city.
“The Massive destroyed everything. There’s no one down there. No one alive, anyway.”
Seeing this in person punches me in the gut like I’m learning it for the first time. Pier 39, Coit Tower, the Transamerica Pyramid. The Main. Everything I’ve ever known. Ruins.
“Even earthquake-proof buildings went down,” Flyx continues. “Fires burned out of control. Of the million-plus people, only a few thou made it out. That’s one reason the city was declared uninhabitable—all the bodies.”
I heard that on the history video, but couldn’t believe it was true. “They actually left them there…”
“They had to. It was too dangerous to go in and get them. Besides, what would they do with hundreds of thousands of decaying bodies? Can you imagine how much land it would take to bury them? Or how much pollution from cremation?”
I picture streets, stores, office buildings—schools—filled with the dead. I cringe, glad it’s too dark to see anything below. Then I realize—this didn’t just happen. “How long has it been?”
“It was 2119, so…thirty-four years.”
“Shouldn’t the bodies be pretty much decomposed by now? Or picked clean by animals?” I remember the awful video of the birds. “So why hasn’t anyone come back to rebuild?”
“Because we can’t let them—the Resistance. We can’t risk the ASPs finding out about the wormhole. So when they started making noise about coming back to the city, our scientists inflated the test results to show it’s still too toxic.”
“I guess that makes sense.” There’s a sadness, a sickness in my belly as I look out at the wreckage. “How far does it go?”
“The entire peninsula, from the remains of the Golden Gate Bridge all the way down to Palo Alto.”
“The Golden Gate’s gone?”
“All the bridges were destroyed in the quake. No need to rebuild them with the peninsula off limits.”
It’s impossible to imagine San Francisco with no bridges. “What’s the nearest inhabited city?”
“I’ll show you.” He leads me to the opposite side of the roof. Off in the distance, two patches of light glow in the fog. “That’s San Jose to the south, and Oakland to the east. They both suffered damage, but nothing compared to here.”
“What about the new city…New Francisco? Can you see it from here?”
“No, too far inland.”
“What’s it like?”
“No idea. I’ve never been anywhere but here.”
“Really? Don’t you wonder about it?”
“I never thought any more about it than about living on the moon. It’s out of reach, out of the realm of possibility.”
“You don’t get stir crazy?”
“No, not me. Some people do, though. They can leave if they want, but not very many do.”
“You can leave?”
“We’re not prisoners. But it’s not a good life out there. It’s safer here, plus people can be themselves.”
I guess that’s not nothing.
“You ready to go back?” He gives my hand a squeeze and a thrill goes through me.
“Honestly? No. Can we stay a little longer?”
“Sure.” He leads me to a lean-to then lets go of my hand to reach inside. He pulls out a blanket and shakes it into the air, letting it drift down. “Help me spread this out?”
I grab a side and pull it flat, then we crawl to the middle and sit cross-legged.
“I’m guessing you come here a lot,” I say.
“When I need to think.” He repositions himself, lying flat on his back. “View’s better this way.”
I lower myself beside him.
“Wait,” he says. “I’ll make you a pillow.”
I prop myself on my elbow and he slides his arm around me. I settle back with my head cradled in his shoulder. Lying there beside him, I’m aware of his scent, the sound of his breathing, the heat where our sides press together. My whole body is buzzing, like every cell is awake. I like this feeling, but at the same time I know it’s wrong to feel this way about him. I try to focus on the stars while my body wars with itself about whether to press closer or scoot away.
“Allison,” he says, all low and breathy.
I tell myself not to look at him. But I can’t help it. I turn and we’re staring into each other’s eyes.
“I’d like to kiss you,” he whispers.
Quickly, I turn my gaze to the stars. I can’t look at him because I want to kiss him, too. I think of Jake, the only boy I’ve ever kissed. My heart clenches at the memory, and I’m frozen. Caught between missing Jake and wanting to kiss Flyx.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” he says.
“No! I mean, yes.” I turn to him. “I do want to kiss you.”
“Do you consent?” he asks.
This place is so weird! I nod.
He moves closer, so close his breath whispers on my lips. “You have to say it.”
“I consen—”
His lips are on mine, and a bolt of electricity zings through my body. I wrap my arms around him. He pulls me closer, and I kiss him back, hard. My heart is slamming in my chest. I’ve never felt like this before.
After a few minutes, he plants little butterfly kisses across my cheeks, then down my neck. My whole body tingles, and my cheeks sting from where his face scraped against mine. Then he presses against me, his mouth hot against my neck. I’m breathing fast, and so is he, and I know I have to stop this.
“Flyx?”
“Mmmmm, yeah?” His voice is husky, and it makes me want to kiss him more.
“Uh, we should probably go. It’s getting late.” I have no idea what time it is.
He groans. “I hate it, but you’re right.” He plants a quick kiss on my lips, then gets to his feet and extends a hand, pulling me up. “Thanks for coming here with me. Maybe we could do it again sometime?”
I slip my arms around his waist and answer with a kiss.
Chapter Twenty-Six
An alarm blares and I bolt upright, hitting the device on my wrist to stop the sound. I register where I am—the cube—and flop back on the bed. It can’t be morning already.
“Are you always late?” Shar
row asks, coming out of the lav.
I bolt up again. “But—I set my alarm.”
“You’re not late yet. But you’re cutting it close if you want coffee.”
I sling my legs over the side of the bed, still wearing the gray jumper from yesterday. “I always want coffee.”
Sharrow gives me the side eye. “Especially when you’re up really late, huh?”
Guilt floods over me. Does she know I went out with Flyx? She’s smiling, so I’d guess not. Which somehow makes it worse.
What was I thinking, kissing Flyx? I wasn’t thinking. I’m supposed to be Sharrow’s friend. And Jake’s more-than-friend. I can’t let it happen again.
I notice the other beds are empty. “Where are the guys?”
“When I woke up, they were scheming about getting Flyx into Detention to check out the wormhole machine. They should have an opportunity later today, so they went to prep.”
“Cool!” I hop up and head to the lav. “I’ll be ready in a sec.”
Sharrow and I show up at the lavender waiting room with only seconds to spare. Bel got here first again and looks impatient. Today she’s wearing regular clothes. Well, regular-ish. High-water blue plaid pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt that shows her tummy.
“What’s with your clothes?” Sharrow asks.
Bel smirks. “Looks like I graduated.”
“From what?” I ask.
“All this.” Bel gestures to our surroundings. I have no idea what she means. “You should be thrilled, Sparrow.”
“Sharrow,” I say.
“Why should I be thrilled?” Sharrow sounds doubtful.
Bel looks smug. “I convinced Mom I should be the junior diplomat, not you.”
“Really?” I say. Bel’s the least diplomatic person I know.
“How’d you convince her?” Sharrow asks. She seems relieved. Mostly.
“I knew there were records from before the latest history-change,” Bel says. “Mom reviewed them and couldn’t help coming to the conclusion I’d be a perfect diplomat. I’ve only been training for it my whole life.”
“That’s…great.” Sharrow’s smile is strained.
Shake Page 14
