Rift (Rift Walkers #1)

by Elana Johnson

  Like demolish security systems and sneak into hidden rooms, I think.

  Monroe takes a long time to answer the chat, probably because he’s actually asleep. When he does come on, his voice sounds part-mad, part-exhausted. “What?”

  “Thanks,” I say, securing the chatline with a software code, which will block anyone from collecting audio clips or transcripts from the conversation. It alerts all chatters if someone tries to access the line too. Very useful—one of Dad’s inventions I actually appreciate and use.

  “You’re playing a dangerous game,” Monroe warns. “What’s going on?”

  “Did you know there was a time rift at the Bureau?” I wonder if I’m the only one who didn’t know. Maybe my implanted flick into the mandatory messaging system won’t be as powerful as I thought.

  “No.” Monroe exhales. “You think your dad has something to do with that?”

  “I don’t know, but he is the lead developer of technological advancements. Maybe time travel has been moved to the top of his list.”

  “I have no idea what’s at the top of his list,” Monroe says, but it’s clear he’s just trying not to tell me anything.

  “Okay, sure,” I say, my attention drawn to my neighbor’s window. The light just came on, but he doesn’t appear. It’s probably his bathroom or something. I lower my voice anyway. “What’s with that room? What is all that stuff? Why is it hidden behind a carpet of security codes?”

  “One question at a time,” Monroe says. “And I don’t know. I’ve been there before; your dad gives me stuff and tells me where to put it.” He doesn’t sound happy about being Dad’s errand boy. “But I don’t know what he’s using it for, or why he’s keeping it.”

  “There’s paper,” I say. “Why doesn’t he use his cybernetics to snap that information and store it digitally?”

  “Paper burns more easily than an .sps file,” Monroe responds. I hear what he’s not saying: Your dad wants to be able to erase his tracks quickly. I puzzle through what that means.

  “Look, I’m with you on almost everything you’re doing. But I can’t replace your security hub again,” Monroe says. “So either figure out a way to get into the compound without causing a fire, or mind your own business.”

  Monroe’s been a good friend. He does what he needs to do to get paid, but he’s pro-Privatize, just like me. I glance at the door sitting just a few feet to my right. A wind picks up, chilling me and causing goose bumps to erupt along my arms. “Yeah, okay,” I tell Monroe, and he signs off the chat.

  I know I can get into the house using this door.

  Not tonight, I tell myself again. What would I do anyway? Go straight back into that room filled with random clothing, outdated electronic devices, and stacks of paper?

  I jump to my feet. “The notebook,” I whisper. I accidentally took that black notebook from the junk room. I’ll study that, and maybe it’ll give me an idea of what my next step should be.

  With a plan in place, my heart settles back into a normal rhythm. I sit down and lean against the house again. My eyelids feel heavy, and I squint into the brightness of my flatpanel.

  I want nothing more than to go to bed, but I have one more thing to do tonight: Find Cooper.

  I briefly wonder if the Dark Panther will be online and if she’ll help me. But after I login, I discover that the circle under her name is dark.

  Price

  BY THE TIME I WAKE the next morning, I have a dozen chats waiting for me. It is almost noon, to be fair.

  Heath is disappointed I couldn’t find Cooper, but he understands that I couldn’t go into Black Hat mode three times in one day. I’d wanted to, but when I’d seen the Dark Panther was offline, I’d followed Cascade’s lead. No need to get caught for something preventable. With only the clearances of a regular citizen, I couldn’t find Cooper. Even using some of my decoding programs and sneaking into the Enforcement Squad logs. Cooper was arrested by the Hoods, and their records are locked up tight, if they keep them at all.

  Knowing what I do about the Hoods, it wouldn’t surprise me if they weren’t required to maintain a data log on who they question, or who they arrest, or what the outcomes are. They’re almost above the law, which only makes me more determined to stay off their radar. I didn’t tell Heath as much, but the real reason I didn’t use the Black Hat to find Cooper is because I’m scared the Hoods will find me faster.

  Heath says he can jam with me anytime. I send a quick text chat, telling him that we’ll try tonight, if it works out for us to sneak around in the dead of night. I want Cascade to join us, but don’t vocalize it.

  I also have a chat from Newt that says he can “schedule me in” this morning. Since it’s almost noon, I’m sure I missed him. But my status is set to awake now, and if he’s available, he’ll see me.

  My mom likes to make sure my days are filled with “useful things” so I don’t simply link-in all day. As if she has room to speak. No one works as long as she does. I’m sure she spends a ton of time linked-in for personal enjoyment too.

  I also find it ironic that she uses the Circuit to tell me to get off the Circuit. I read her first chat while my stomach growls. “Please try on your new clothes so I know what needs to go back.”

  That’s how my day goes from possibly-spectacular to definitely-sucktacular with a single sentence. At least Dad wasn’t standing over me, fondling contraband technology items and eyeing my gadgetry. I shove my hand under my pillow and feel the notebook there. Last night, I’d taken it from where I’d stashed it in the spare bedroom and kept it close. With Dad gone, I’ll have time today to study it. I wonder when he’ll be home, and what kind of questions he’ll ask. I hope I can come up with plausible answers.

  I hate trying on clothes. Mom makes me do it at least once a month—sometimes more. She has what I’ve heard experts call a shopping addiction. It used to matter, back when we were living off only her income.

  Since Dad invented the Receiver, though, money is not one of our challenges. Mom works hard for her salary too, though. She works as the CFO of Executive Scientific, a major corporation that once funded a lot of Dad’s inventions. They’re also the largest financial backer of the Time Travel Initiative.

  I eye the pile of clothes draped across my desk like they’ve done me a personal wrong. I consider ignoring my mom and simply flinging the designer jeans and name brand collared shirts in my closet, chatting her that everything fits fine, and falling into bed.

  But I don’t. I’ve tried that before, and when I never wore a pair of jeans because they didn’t fit, my mom had a hella flip out. “Do you know how much those jeans cost?” she asked. She couldn’t return them because the refund option had passed. “Two-fifty, Price. Two hundred and fifty dollars!”

  Now I try on all my clothes. Which means I’ll have to try these on too.

  I transfer the pile to my bed, move the notebook to the desk, and cue up my Link station. When I’m halfway through the pile, Newt appears in his holographic glory and scans me from head to toe.

  “Nice jeans,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I reply, buttoning them. “I need another—” I glance at the shorts and polos and jackets and swimming trunks strewn across my bed. “—Thirty minutes to finish. Can you wait?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says.

  “Thanks for the chaser idea,” I say as I pull on a polo.

  “You used one?” He leans forward. “What did it do?”

  “Demolished everything,” I say, smiling at the memory of my dad’s sudden and swift security failure. “Of course, we had to replace the entire security hub, so they’re not perfect.”

  “You mean you can’t use one and be untraceable.”

  “Yeah, that,” I confirm. “And you took my ad-out idea to Privatize.”

  “Did I?” Newt asks, a wry smile on his face. “Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I did watch the very informative and noteworthy Privatize flick on getting your name on the ad-out list. This coul
d be a very good thing for those who dislike the ads.”

  “A very good thing,” I echo. “But it doesn’t prevent the Agency from collecting your data.”

  “We’re years from that,” he says. “Small steps, Ryerson.” He leans forward, a piece of gadgetry in his hand. He sets it on top of the notebook. “I’ve got the wavelength piece. We might be able to talk to your ghost-girl.”

  I glare at him for the blatant topic change, automatically thinking about another girl. One I wish I could have a close encounter with—one where we’re not strapped to zip-lines and wearing gloves and hiding behind alternate identities. “I need a few more minutes.”

  “Take your time.” He scans me from head to toe as I toss another pair of jeans into the keep pile.

  I shove the thought of Cascade to the back of my mind as I continue buttoning, zipping, and adjusting. Newt hovers and rotates, throwing in his opinion on the clothes every now and then. Finally, I’ve sorted them into two piles: Things I like that fit, and things I don’t like or that don’t fit.

  I never tell my mom my categorizing strategy. She thinks everything in the reject pile doesn’t fit. Really, her taste doesn’t always match mine. After I’ve delivered the rejects to her, and thanked her profusely for doing my shopping for me, I change into gym shorts and yesterday’s T-shirt and settle in front of my station. Newt bursts into a grin, a sly look in his eye.

  I attempt to return the gesture, but I didn’t get to sleep until close to dawn, and I’m exhausted. Trying to unravel the secrets of this house kept me awake long after I’d collapsed in bed. Trying to juggle late-night chats and early-morning location missions—while worrying about the Hoods closing in on the Black Hat—is taking its toll. Trying to act like I don’t like Cascade when I do is hard work. I wonder if she’s as tired of the game as I am. I need to ask her out already—and not just to beg for her help on a jam.

  As these thoughts circle my mind, an ad pops into my feed. It’s the time rift flick, and my smile stretches into something genuine. “Fill me in,” I say to Newt.

  “Okay, but I hope you have your boxers on tight.”

  I simply glare at him, sort of embarrassed he knows what kind of underwear I prefer.

  Newt laughs, but its short lived. He sobers and says, “Hear me out, all right?”

  I wait, silent.

  “I’m going to take that as an ‘all right’,” he says. “All right. So I think your house is a rift site.”

  I shake my head. “Not possible. Rifts aren’t stable enough to transmit images. If it’s even a rift.” It can’t be a rift. There isn’t one registered here, and there’s no way this is a rift.

  “I’m sure you’ve seen the flick this morning,” he says, real careful, like he wants to ask me if I’m responsible for that mandatory message.

  “That’s totally different,” I say, leaning away from his holographic image and folding my arms. “That flick shows a rift, sure. But not an image through a rift. Not two things that exist in different folds of time. That’s not possible.”

  “Or simply undocumented.”

  I narrow my eyes at him. “What do you know?”

  I’ve taken advanced technology. I’ve liked putting things together since I was six years old, and I enroll in every mechanical science class the education department offers. I’ve also taken sociology, which outlines the negative effects of time travel on our society. Only scientists interested in the technology of rifts believe they should be used.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I ask when Newt still hasn’t answered.

  He bobs his head, his gray eyes sparking with silver electricity. “Certain rifts are stable enough, and they can transmit images.”

  “Certain rifts?”

  “Older rifts,” he clarifies. “And I believe yours is decades old.”

  “How can you know that?” I ask, trying to remember what I studied, but time travel is one unit in a semester-long class I took over a year ago.

  “My gadgetry is off the books.” Newt swivels, his eyes saying more than his mouth, but I can’t tell what. “Just like this rift. And it is stable enough to transmit images, so it must be old.”

  “There’s been no report of visual transmissions through rifts,” I argue. “We would know.”

  He spins on his chair. “Would you? Just like we all knew about the rift at the Bureau?”

  I can’t answer, so I don’t.

  “People keep a lot of secrets.” Newt gives me a pointed look. “The government keeps a lot of secrets.” He holds up a cube, stretches through the hologram, and sets it on my desk next to his wavelength piece. “This will detect the rift, if there is one.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a device that measures the invisible light spectrum. Rifts are known for their fuchsia afterglows.”

  “Fuchsia afterglows,” I repeat, like I don’t know what the words mean. And in that order, I don’t. I glance around my room, hoping to see the “fuchsia afterglows” without Newt’s device.

  I see nothing but my slate gray walls and unmade bed. “All right,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

  Newt leans back in his chair. “You’ll have to vacate the area.”

  “For how long?”

  “Couple of minutes. It’ll send out the waves, and I’ll record the light spectrum, then we can check it out.”

  I push away from my desk, taking the notebook with me. “See you in a few minutes.”

  I go through the bathroom into the spare bedroom and close both doors, just in case. I sit on the floor with my back against the wall and stroke my fingers over the cover of the notebook.

  It says, “Network Possibilities” in silver marker, and it looks like a girl’s handwriting. I flip open the cover to find page after page covered in equations, arrows, and boxes with a few words printed inside them. The handwriting matches that on the cover. The notes are detailed, and follow an exact pattern. Question, hypothesize, experiment, record findings.

  I’m not an expert—yet—but I recognize the science this notebook is dedicated to: Time and space—and how to move through them.

  The words “rift” and “step through time” are a dead giveaway.

  I wonder why Dad has this old notebook. I wonder what else is still in those boxes, down that hall, or in the basement. I wonder if the thing in my room is really a rift. Holding a notebook dedicated to time travel, which I gathered from a secret room in my house, I decide that it seems likely.

  I flip a few pages and stop at a detailed drawing of a robotic arm shaped like a capital T, with beams of light strobing down the paper from several origination points along the top. “Lasers,” I whisper, trying to figure out what the light is bombarding at the bottom of the page, but there’s nothing drawn.

  I need to find out how rifts are manufactured—something I can find on the Circuit, but have never bothered to learn. The class I took didn’t cover rift invention, only the outlining of the laws dictating travel.

  My brain full, I let the notebook fall open on my lap. It lands on a page near the back of the book, which contains a single line of writing: Should time travel be legal?

  The page is blank. She doesn’t answer herself. Doesn’t hypothesize. Nothing. I turn the page, but it’s equally empty. I flip another page. I want to know what she thinks, how she would answer this question. I’ve asked myself the same thing several times, and I’ve never been able to come up with a conclusive answer.

  I suddenly hear Newt screaming his fool head off. I can’t afford to alert my mom; I don’t want her in my bedroom. I jump up and hurry through the bathroom, waving my arms to get Newt to shut up.

  “Price,” he says, and I know it’s something important when he uses my first name. “Look!” He points to my flatpanel, and I hold my breath as I look.

  The colored print of the wavelengths in my room glow fuchsia.

  Bright fuchsia.

  Twenty minutes later, I haven’t heard a word Newt’s said. I’m raking
my hands through my hair and wondering why nothing like this has happened before.

  “Why now?” I ask. For the tenth time, Newt doesn’t answer. I don’t know what he’s saying. I just know that something has to have changed for this rift to open and close now.

  “That girl,” I breathe. “In her time.” I meet Newt’s eyes through the hologram, and I know we have the same idea.

  “We can’t,” Newt says immediately, but I counter him with, “I want to.”

  “What if you don’t come back?”

  “I will.” I say it with conviction, but I don’t have any idea if it’s true or not. Sure, I’ve taken advanced technology, but the one chapter on time rifts can’t be adequate instruction to know how rifts operate, when I’ll end up, or how to walk through a rift.

  Should time travel be legal? The question runs through my head; I see the words in that girl’s handwriting. Right now, I think so, because I need to find out what’s changed to make this rift randomly transmit images from the past.

  “Price, I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Newt says. “Rifts—they can shut down at any time, for any reason. Could be caused by something on her end, or something on ours—something we don’t know about and can’t do anything about even if we did.”

  I nod. “I know.” Even though I don’t. “But you said this rift was old. That it was stable.”

  “I said I thought it was old,” he argues. “But what if it isn’t? What if it’s losing stability, or seals permanently, or explodes?” The intense fear in his expression makes my chest tight.

  “What if someone needs help?” I ask, seizing onto one of the most common arguments of those in favor of using rifts. “What if they need something?”