Mend (Rift Walkers #2)

by Elana Johnson

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  Price

  I STAND IN MY NEWLY REMODELED bathroom, leaning into my fists as I battle with myself. Cascade hasn’t left me a note. Even if she had, it would’ve been blown up with the rift six months ago.

  Still, I can’t stop myself from checking the cupboard every morning, this silken thread of hope pulling pulling pulling through me with the force of gravity.

  Heath hails me with You comin’ or what?

  I release the breath I’ve been holding and chat him back. Yeah.

  I walk away from the bathroom, the cupboard, the note that isn’t waiting for me. I slip out the window and use the newly built column to slide to the porch. While the house was rebuilt, I’d slept on the couch in our downtown apartment for June, July, and August, with Dad right on top of me, those eyes seeing, appraising, judging everything.

  That same tension settles on my shoulders as I cover the couple of blocks to Heath’s house. The front door stands open, and I climb the steps and enter the living room with heavy footsteps.

  I’m tired though I sleep all night now. I keep up in all my classes, fulfill my civic duties, exceed my outdoor practice time. But organic chemistry and theories of fluids can only excite me so much. I don’t know how people live like this. No jamming. Nothing beyond school, work, swimming?

  As I enter Heath’s kitchen and find him swiping on the screen embedded into his counter, I realize I’m not tired. I’m bored.

  He raises his eyes and waves me over. “Come look at this.” The interest in his voice spikes my adrenaline. Heath’s been speaking in a voice as dull as mine for months—ever since his girlfriend Soda moved to Florida just before school started. With the rift explosion, and given that she and her mom weren’t exactly proper residents in our time, they thought it wise to get as far from Castle Pines as possible.

  Most days, I want to do the same, especially since the explosion prevented me from completing my senior project and I have to finish before I can graduate. But that doesn’t interest me at all either. At this point, I wonder what would interest me.

  “What is it?” I want it to be a message from Cooper, a notorious jam that crippled a city government somewhere, something.

  One final swipe, and Heath steps back so I can crowd the counter.

  Sure enough, it’s a newsfeed about the Black Hat. Cooper’s been selecting jams of bigger and bigger proportions, but he stays hella-careful. This one details the exposure of the Senator who proposed and carried out the auto phase-outs of the twenty-sixties.

  He put a lot of people out of business. Everyone from gasoline companies, oil riggers, car dealerships, and vehicle manufacturers.

  And why? Cooper writes. So he could institute the hydrolifts we all wear today. He made millions while many more lost their livelihood. I ask you: How fair is that?

  And are there people still doing such things? People in our government, our elected officials? Do they have their best interests at heart? Or ours?

  With the recent revelations about the time rifts in Oregon, isn’t it time we know everything?

  I glance up, surprised Cooper mentions the time rifts here in Castle Pines. That rift saved him from a life of imprisonment. Daily beatings from the Hoods. “What’s he playing at?”

  Heath scrolls down. “Keep reading.”

  My mouth feels sticky, coated with a thin film of paste I can’t swallow away. I don’t really want to keep reading, especially when Heath wears his mouth so tight and his eyes so sharp.

  I do anyway.

  My team and I —my mind stalls on the word team. He has a team?— have been monitoring events for the past fifty years. Making lists, charts, comparisons. Most things remain untouched, but there are new inconsistencies happening. People that used to be alive that aren’t. Mysterious accidents. Disappearances.

  These events have started popping up around the globe in the last three months. And we started asking ourselves: Why then? What changed?

  We don’t have the answer. But we think someone out there does. We’d love to hear from you. If you’re the kind of person with access to this knowledge, you’ll know how to contact us.

  The words penetrate my retinas and travel straight to my gut, where they writhe and squirm and cause havoc.

  I know what’s changed in the last three months. I suspect my dad’s been using the newly constructed house to begin his illegal rift walking activities again. I haven’t actually seen anyone at the house—no guards, no congressmen, no one.

  Dad’s the public face of the Time Keeper now, and he vows on the nightly ads that there won’t be any more secrets.

  But there always are. With Dad, there always are.

  I do know how to contact Cooper—or at least get a message to him. My jamming forums haven’t exactly been quiet over the past few months. I just haven’t joined under a new identity. I don’t want to start over with zero posts, no badges, no experience. I haven’t been living that life anyway.

  “Anything to report?” Heath asks, and I startle away from the screen.

  “No.” I meet his eye with a challenge in my voice. “The rift at the house is still damaged. I haven’t seen it in the three months we’ve lived there. It isn’t functional.”

  “Well.” Heath flicks something invisible from his shoulder. “There’s a rift functioning somewhere.”

  “You think…? The Time Bureau?”

  “We know there’s a rift there.”

  “He’d be insane to use it.”

  “Your dad isn’t exactly known for sanity.”

  “He’s not stupid, either.” Something twitches under my skin. Something like the call to jam, to figure out who’s been using what rift, and where, and why.

  I smother it, the same way I’ve been quenching the desire to check for notes that don’t exist more than once a day.

  “Well, something to think about.” Heath heads for the front door, and I follow. “We goin’ to Shep’s today?”

  I sigh, the weariness returning at the normalcy of our tasks. “Yeah, we better.” We’ve been going to Cascade’s grandfather’s house every afternoon. Mostly to make sure he hasn’t died, as Heath likes to joke. I go because he’s my lifeline to Cas. He tells me stories about her, he makes her come alive, he reminds me of who she is and how she’ll keep her promise to come back if she can.

  If she can echoes through my head as we enter the gray November day and move toward her neighborhood. The red door marks her house easily, and I picture her sitting on the front steps, waiting for us to pick her up for social time. I see her stormcloud eyes, her shock of black hair, the f-pats she implanted on her face. I feel the warmth of her hand in mine, taste the weight of her lips, hear the timbre of her voice when she said we could escape into another time together.

  My heart constricts painfully in the box I’ve placed it in. It can’t beat properly behind the bars, but I can’t function if I let it out. So it pulses against the fences I’ve built, pleading for Cas to come back.

  The house smells stale as we enter. Shep snoozes in the armchair in the living room, a tray of mostly untouched food beside him on the table. Heath collects the tray and heads into the kitchen. I detour toward the stairs, which I take two at a time as I head to Cascade’s bedroom.

  I shouldn’t go in there, I know. It’s like reliving a nightmare. A nightmare where I know she likes me, where she kisses me, but I can’t have her.

/>   Frustration flows through me when I cross the threshold of her bedroom. She said she was coming back. She promised. Yet she hasn’t actually looked back once.

  Maybe it’s time I do the same.

  Cascade

  I GLARE AT MY MOTHER LIKE my vision has face-melting abilities. In the future, I probably could’ve coded my cybernetics with an add-on for that.

  “I’m not going to high school,” I ground out between my teeth. I’m too old anyway—Saige is a senior!

  “You never graduated,” Mom says from her position near the garage door. She pats her white lab coat for her car keys.

  “I know more than all those teachers combined,” I say. “I graduated from a school system sixty years in the future.” Technically, my senior project was never completed or approved. Technically, my mother doesn’t know that.

  Technically, my mother doesn’t know a lot of things about me. Besides the Shep of the future, no one does. Price maybe came the closest to unraveling the many layers of the girl I used to be. He’s the only one I wanted to share my life with, spill my secrets to, spend time with.

  He must hate me. Gone for six months without a word.

  Here, everyone calls me Chloe. I hate it. That’s not my name, and not who I am, and I wish they’d all stop looking at me like I’m someone I’m not.

  “I’ll just drive Saige and Shep,” I say, though I don’t actually know how to drive.

  “Nope, I registered you.” Mom indicates a backpack draped over the back of the barstool. “Schedule’s in the front pocket.” She sets her coffee mug on the counter. “I’ll be home at five.”

  Shep and Saige stay at the kitchen table, bent over their maddening bowls of cereal until the sound of Mom’s car fades.

  “I’m not going to school,” I say.

  “Whatever.” Saige gets up and practically slams her bowl in the sink. “What are you going to do all day?”

  Shep, only fifteen, watches me carefully. I haven’t told him I live with him in the future. I told Saige to keep her mouth shut about it too. So far, she has. That’s one thing about Saige—she’s very loyal.

  She’s glaring at me now, though, no sisterly bonds in sight.

  “You sound like Mom,” I say, because I know it’ll annoy her and get her to leave me alone. I don’t want to tell her what my plans are, because she won’t like them. She doesn’t want me to return to the future, and I stopped trying to explain after only a single conversation last week after I woke up and discovered we’d lost six months of our lives trapped in a rift that’s now defunct.

  My comment works, because Saige rips her backpack off the barstool, swipes the car keys from a hook near the garage exit, and storms out.

  “Sorry,” I mumble to Shep as he follows her in a much calmer manner. I can’t tell if he’s glad or mad I’m back. Sometimes I can’t either.

  “I’ll tell her you said that.” He ducks out the door, leaving me to myself. Being alone is what I’ve wanted since the moment I woke up with a bandage on my arm and Saige’s worried eyes six inches from mine.

  But now that I actually am alone, I don’t want to be. I pull out my cell and look up Cedar’s number. He’s five years old than me, so he shouldn’t be in school either. I kept up with him over the years, taking a few minutes every month or so to send him a message or meet up when I was in the right timeline.

  He’s not cut from college cloth and I’m not surprised when he answers on the first ring.

  “Cascade Kaufman.” His voice sounds older, deeper, but with the same teasing quality of the sixteen-year-old I knew before I left for the future.

  A grin springs to my lips. Finally, someone from this past life calling me by the right name.

  “Hey, Cedar. What are you up to?”

  “Oh, you know. Just hangin’ out.”

  I don’t exactly know what that entails for a twenty-three-year-old with more money than gadgets—and that’s saying something. But it means he’s not busy. “Can you come get me? I want—I need…” I trail off, not quite sure how to explain. Usually with Cedar, I don’t have to.

  “Saw some interesting activity on the wavelength meter last week.”

  Relief tugs through my core. Cedar’s been keeping up with our previous activities, even though I’ve been trapped in the rift for six months. “Yeah, I just got back into town. So can you come pick me up?”

  “Be there in five.”

  Seven minutes later, I climb into the cab of Cedar’s huge truck. “When did you get this?”

  “Couple months ago.” He looks at me, his dark eyes seeing things normal people don’t. “You look like hell.”

  I fold my arms to keep my emotions together. It’s harder than I thought it would be. “I was bringing Saige home when the rift exploded. We couldn’t get out.”

  Cedar flips the truck into gear and eases away from the curb. “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You weren’t the only one monitoring that rift, Cas.”

  Of course I wasn’t. Cedar has detailed logs of each instance the rift activates. He has more data than I do. He kept me well-supplied with the details of Guy Ryerson’s illegal rift-walking business, facts I used in the future to stay one step ahead of Price’s father.

  “I’ve got all the data leading up to the explosion, as well as that spike of energy too.” He speaks like we’re planning a picnic at the lake, but I hear the vein of tension just beneath it. Cedar understood why Eliza and her mom had to step through the rift to escape. He understood why I stole my mother’s research and gave it to the futuristic Ryerson’s.

  But he’s never understood why I couldn’t come home.

  I’d explained about my rift-walking contract, my sick brother, my need to find the truth about my dad’s death. But Cedar was smart. He knew there was something else.

  Someone else.

  I press my lips together, wishing Price was as easily explained as rift readings. Wishing Cedar would understand that we can’t be together, even if I loved him like a brother—and maybe more, once.

  A long time ago, once.

  When I was a child, once.

  I pull myself from the past as Cedar pulls into a parking lot. He finds a spot and kills the engine. “Here we are.”

  I peer at the familiar building, then switch my laser gaze to my driver. “I don’t need to see a doctor.”

  “Yes, you do.” He reaches for the door handle, but I punch my fingers on the automatic door lock button. The loud click feels particularly satisfying

  “Cedar, I’m—”

  “If you say fine, I’m going to do the exam myself.” He stares back at me with as much determination and annoyance as I direct at him. Price always did too, that something fierce in both of them that makes the turmoil inside me settle.

  “Cas, you were in a rift when it exploded.” Cedar softens his voice, a tactic he’s used on me many times over the years.

  I look away, unable to deny the unrest swirling beneath my breastbone.

  “Your cells were already degenerating at twice the rate of a normal eighteen-year-old,” he continued, as if I didn’t know, hadn’t been there when his brother had delivered the bad news last winter. “We need to make sure nothing more has been damaged.”

  “I feel fine.” My voice comes out weak, like a drifting dandelion seedling.

  “You could’ve lost a lot more than six months.” Cedar sighs and unlocks the doors. “Please come in and let Trader look at you. He’s as relieved as I am that you’re here.”

  I watch as Cedar—strong, tall, dark-haired Cedar—gets out of the truck. He pauses near the hood and glances at me. With the windshield between us, and that pleading edge in his eye, I see the love he harbors for me. It makes my heart pinch, my mind ache, that I can’t return it.

  But I can let his brother make sure I’m not going to die tomorrow. So I get out of the truck and join him. He drapes a muscled arm around my shoulder and presses a kiss to my temple.

 
“I’m really glad you’re back, Cas.”

  I’m not, but I don’t say it. I have to go back to the future. I have a contract with Guy Ryerson he won’t just ignore. And I’m in love with Price Ryerson, though it would certainly be more convenient not to be. I wonder what he’s doing now, what he thinks of me. I haven’t been able to communicate with him, and the only way he could speak with me would be to go through the rift.

  A rift that may not exist in his time.

  Frustration washes over me, threatening to drown me with its choking hold. I take a deep breath, and another, until I don’t feel like going nuclear. Cedar speaks to the receptionist, and we don’t have time to sit before a nurse calls for us to come on back.

  She puts us in an exam room I know we won’t stay in. Trader doesn’t keep the body scanners in here. He and Cedar have been my confidants about the rift since I knew of its existence, eight years ago. The tech-geek and his medical school brother. They helped me develop ways to collect data, track trends, and it was Trader who insisted I undergo a physical every few months, either here or in the future.

  “Cascade.” Trader enters the exam room and pulls me into a hug. I soften into him, the storm of emotion I’ve been containing threatening to erupt at the fatherly way he holds me. “I’m so glad to see you. We’ve been so worried.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I just got back a few days ago.”

  “Five days,” Cedar corrects. “It took you five days to call me.”

  I step out of Trader’s embrace. “Have you met my mother?”

  Both Trader and Cedar laugh. “Well, let’s see if there’s anything to worry about.” Trader opens the door and checks down the hall before exiting. We move with quick steps toward his office, where he locks the door behind us.

  Through another door off to the left, I enter a sterile room with a capsule-shaped machine standing in the corner.

  “Clothes off. Nothing in the machine, same as always.” Trader pulls a new pair of jeans and a tank top from the top drawer in the cabinet next to the door. “Knock when you’re ready, and we’ll give you thirty seconds to get in the machine. Remember to seal the door.”