Mend (Rift Walkers #2)

by Elana Johnson

I’M READY TO SEE CASCADE WHEN WE ARRIVE in the past, but it takes a few minutes to hyperdrive to her house. Heath scored the boots we needed, and my cheeks feel chapped by the time I climb the roof on my house sixty years in the past.

  At least it hasn’t snowed in Castle Pines yet. When I creep to the window, I nearly fall backward when Cascade’s eyes bore into mine. Then the window opens, and she’s cursing and hauling me and Heath inside.

  Saige wakes, but stays in bed, watching us. I shift closer to Cascade, unable to stop drinking her in. Her hair is lighter, grown out from her black dye job. Her eyes are just as dangerous, just as cutting. She’s wearing no makeup, no jewelry, no facial-patterns.

  My breath hitches as I step into her and gather her into my arms. She softens against me, her arms sliding around me and holding tight.

  “What are you doing here?” Saige asks. Heath crosses the room to her to deliver the message. I can’t stop myself from weaving my hands through Cascade’s hair, holding her away from me just a bit so I can examine her, make sure she’s okay.

  I press my forehead to hers, desperate to kiss her but holding back. “I miss you,” I whisper. “I got your note just a couple of days ago.” I close my eyes so I can take a deep breath of her powdery, floral scent. I never want to forget it, or her. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  She kisses me, and I respond eagerly. With her mouth against mine, an inferno ignites in my bloodstream. She’s mine, and I’m hers, and I don’t want to leave her here. I can’t leave her here.

  She ends the kiss, but nestles into my chest, her ear right over my heartbeat. I clutch her and tell her why we’ve come.

  “It’s not an accident,” I say, “And I just couldn’t let you die when I could warn you.”

  “Thank you.” She clutches the back of my tank top underneath my hoodie like she doesn’t want to let me go either. I kiss her again, tell her again that I miss her.

  “When can you come back?” I ask.

  “I’m figuring out a way.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.” She flashes me a grin just as Heath says, “We gotta go, blood. The rift is set to close in eight minutes.”

  Our absolute cutoff time to leave the house is five minutes. Three to get back, two to arrive at the rift.

  “Go?” Saige says. “You came to tell us we’re going to die, and now you’re just going to leave?” She throws her blanket back and stands up. “No. You can’t go.”

  “You can take precautions now,” Heath says. “We don’t need to stay.”

  “There are people here, waiting to kill us,” she says. “What precautions should we take?”

  “Saige,” Cascade warns.

  “No,” Saige barks back, her eyes set on angry mode. She looks more like Cas’s sister now. “They’re acting like this is nothing. But our mother has a rift framed in her freaking office. And not just any rift.” She throws her arms around like she’s trying to fly. “A rift that crosses timelines and dimensions.”

  I suck in a breath. “What?”

  “That’s right,” Saige yells. “Someone came through it to attend my mom’s fundraiser. Maybe he never left. Maybe there’s someone here from some freaking alternate dimension, trying to kill us. So you’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here until we figure out how to get rid of this thing for good.” She crosses her arms like that’s the final word on the subject. For the first time, I think she might be more determined than Cascade.

  “Here.” Cascade steps out of my arms, and I feel instantly cold. “We put together some information.” She hands me a piece of paper, and it feels really strange in my hands. “We know who the first cross-over is.”

  “Cross-over?” Heath asks.

  “Someone who came from an alternate dimension,” Cas explains. “His name is—”

  “Orville Openshaw,” we say together as I spy the name on the page. My blood feels like it’s draining from my body all at once. “He was my great-grandpa’s college friend,” I say.

  “Price, he is your great-grandpa, just from a different dimension.” Cascade rifles through a drawer. “He became my mother’s chief financier a few days ago, but we’ve never met him.” She glances at Saige, and they’ve got a secret I don’t think they’ll be sharing. “We have it on good authority that he came through the rift solely to become our mom’s sponsor. But then he showed up in the archives yesterday, so we know he’s using the rift for dimension and time travel.”

  I want to crumple the paper in my fist until nothing remains of it. “What do we know about him?”

  “His first appearance was at Stanford,” Saige says. “Where Harlem Ryerson was a student studying the energies needed to create alternate versions of reality.”

  “Those theorems were never proven,” Heath pipes up.

  “No, but we believe that’s where the rift explorations began,” Cascade says. “And a few months later? This Orville guy is deep into the research—in his first semester at Stanford. He later finished his doctorate at Georgetown.” She takes a deep breath and meets my eye with a guilty glint in hers. “My mom discovered the pathway to this alternate dimension the night my dad died. She’s been studying the dimensions—there are four—for the past eight years. She brought Orville here.”

  I turn away from her and face the window. Her mom changed my reality. Bringing Orville here messed everything up. I have no idea how Dad fixed it, but he had to have done something in the future from 2013, from this timeline where Cas and Saige live.

  There’s no way Heath and I are getting back downtown to the rift now. It’s probably closed already. Sure enough, Heath says, “We’re screwed, blood. Might as well stay now.”

  I’m inclined to agree, but I don’t say anything. Cascade snakes her arms around me, pressing her body into my back. “I’m sorry, Price,” she whispers, like there’s any chance I won’t forgive her, that I’ll leave her here. I always knew I wouldn’t. I wonder if Heath knew too, if he prepped his parents for his absence.

  I think of my mom. I didn’t say anything to her. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m a coward. Or maybe because I hoped Cas would come back to the future with me as soon as she saw me.

  “What now?” I ask her in a low voice.

  “I think we need to get this rift out of our lives.” She tugs on my sleeve, silently asking me to turn. I shift in her arms and look into her stormy eyes. She leans in close, closer still. “It’s dangerous to travel through,” she whispers so no one else can hear. “My cells are degenerating, and my bones and muscles are weaker. We have to stop using the rift. Destroy it. Something.”

  Every organ inside my body clenches at her confession about her medical problems. “Side-effects from rift-walking?”

  She nods. “I see a doctor every few months. It’s getting worse. I’m on supplements, but he doesn’t think they’ll do much, and the condition is irreversible.”

  A fist clutches my heart, making it hard to think, hard to breathe. “Okay,” I say. “But we stay together. You and me. We’ll figure things out together.”

  Cascade

  I WISH WITH EVERY DEGENERATING CELL in my body that I could strap on some hyperdrive boots like the ones Price wears and head toward the nearest rift.

  “How’d you get here?” I ask him.

  The corners of his mouth twitch. “Broke into the Time Bureau.”

  I can’t help smiling. “You did not.”

  “We did,” Heath says. “And it was literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “We had to warn Cas.” Price gives Heath one of those looks where they’re having entire conversations without words. I used to be able to do that with Cedar, with my mom.

  Heath sighs and turns away, apparently fascinated by the curtains in my bedroom.

  “And now we need to figure out how to get back,” Price says. “Before my dad shows up.”

  I cock my head as I consider what he’s said. “He knows you went through the rift?”

  “He w
as practically on-site,” Heath growls. “We shouldn’t have come.”

  “We had to warn Cas,” Price barks before he turns to me. “And yes, he knows.”

  I remember how he chased us through the rift last summer. “Why hasn’t he come then?”

  “Well, there’s only one way back this time,” Price says. “Maybe he figures he’ll be waiting when we show up.”

  I nod, but I’m really wondering how much Guy knows about rifts and the medical problems they cause. Has he learned he’s dying faster than he should be? Is that why he won’t step through a rift now, why he hasn’t personally completed any jobs in over two years?

  Something like acid coats the back of my tongue. If he’s known all along about the damaging side-effects of rift-walking, why didn’t he say anything?

  I dismiss the question before my brain can spend too much power on it. Guy Ryerson is driven by one thing: money. He certainly doesn’t care about the health of a bunch of eighteen-year-olds and twenty-somethings who are desperate for cash.

  “Great,” Heath says. “Now we just need to figure out how to get back.” Everyone looks at me, but I’m not exactly sure myself. My first inclination is to hail Cedar, but Price crowds my personal space, the warm smell of his skin infiltrates my nose. I take a deep breath simply because I can.

  “Cas, you are coming back with us, right?”

  I want to hear him say with me.

  A pinch lands sharply on my heart, and I meet his eye. “My dad is trapped in an alternate dimension. As soon as we get that figured out, yes, I’m coming back.”

  A loud clunk draws my attention from the handsome angles of Price’s face. Saige has dropped her phone to the unforgiving hardwood. “You’re leaving again?”

  “Saige.” I step toward her. “I don’t belong in this time. It’s…”

  All wrong, I think.

  “I can’t be happy here,” I finish and slide my fingers through Price’s. He holds on tight, squeezing for a moment before relaxing. Or maybe I can stay, as long as Price does too. But I know what a cruel reality it is to leave behind the technological advancements of the future. I’d be lying if I said they weren’t part of why I want to go back.

  “Shep needs me in the future,” I add as an afterthought, though no one has questioned my motives for returning.

  Saige scoffs, bends to pick up her phone, and storms out of the bedroom.

  “She’s just as fun as ever,” Heath says.

  “Don’t,” I tell him. “She hasn’t had things easy.”

  Heath holds up his hands in surrender and flops into the desk chair, glaring at the normal desktop computer like it’s done him a personal wrong. “So what now, blood?”

  Price’s gaze on the side of my face weighs half a ton. “I need to talk to Cascade. Alone.”

  Alone with Price sounds fantastic, and I follow him out the window, down the rain gutter, and around the house to the backyard. The winter sun is bright, but certainly not warm. I step closer to him to feed off his body heat.

  He slides his hands down my arms as if to prove to himself that I’m real. I lean into him, suddenly desperate to feel his lips against mine. This kiss is wilder, deeper, than the reunion ones we shared in my bedroom.

  I want him to know how much I care about him. How much I want to leave with him right now and never look back. How much I want to show up in his bedroom in the middle of the night and talk about jams, and gadgets, and lots of other things that don’t involve jams and gadgets.

  “Is anyone home?” he asks between kisses.

  “It’s six a.m.” I slide my hands under his hoodie, feel the planes of his abdomen. “Of course people are home.” I go to kiss him again, but he pulls back an inch.

  “Cascade,” he breathes. “I love you.” He touches his lips to mine again gently, and I feel every syllable of his proclamation.

  My skin feels like its letting off steam. “I love you too, Price.”

  He moves his mouth to the tender skin on my neck. “I want you.”

  I grip his shoulders like I’ll fall down without him to hold onto. “I want you too.”

  He lifts his head and I kiss him, kiss him, kiss him.

  “I’ve been going crazy these past several months.” He grips my hips and kneads me closer, if that’s possible.

  “I’m sorry.” My blood burns like lava, and I suddenly wish the house were empty. I lace my fingers through his and lead him toward the garage.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere warmer.” I stride forward a few steps. “Plus, didn’t you say something about talking?”

  “I don’t really want to talk,” he protests. “I liked what we were doing just fine.”

  I sweep him a smile over my shoulder. “You’ll like where we’re going too.”

  He grumbles something I can’t catch as we enter the heated house. I take him through the kitchen, the foyer, and the living room. Around the corner to the game room, where I lock the door behind us, and right down to the basement.

  That door also gets locked, and by the time I face him again, he’s wearing that sly smile I fell in love with in the future.

  “Does this work?” I ask. “There’s bottled water in that mini fridge. And it’s warm. And look.” I flop onto the couch. “There’s seating.”

  He settles next to me, his tall frame bending easily and practically folding around mine. “I still don’t want to talk.”

  I grin at him. “Good, because I don’t want you to talk.” I kiss him, a thrill racing from my feet to my forehead when he slips his hands along my waist, exploring, testing to see how far I’ll let him go.

  Our relationship in 2073 had just begun, but the time apart seems to have stirred my blood. I kiss him until my lips feel swollen, until my insides feel close to boiling. Eventually, I tuck myself into his side and enjoy the rise and fall of his chest, the soft, secure, safe way he holds me.

  “What are we going to do, Cas?”

  “I don’t know.” I maintain my grip on his waist. “Maybe we could try talking to your great-grandpa again. I mean, I just spoke with him a couple of days ago, but that was before this Orville Openshaw guy had used the rift to go back in time. So his timeline is all changed now. Maybe he knows more now than he did two days ago.”

  “You have his number?”

  I think of his bulldog secretary and heaviness settles in my stomach. “No, but I know where his office is.” I glance at Price’s feet. “You’ll need a different pair of boots.”

  Price

  “THEY’RE PRACTICALLY TWINS,” I MUSE, mostly because I’m looking for some acknowledgment and haven’t been able to find it yet. Saige never returned to the bedroom, so Heath, Cas, and I ride a bus downtown. There are cars everywhere, but Cas claimed she doesn’t know how to drive. An adorable blush stained her cheeks when she admitted it, something I’d never seen her do before. Something that makes her human, and real, and desirable.

  I glance up from the mobile device Cas gave me. “Look.” I shove the phone in Heath’s face, and he pulls back with a glare.

  “I saw it, bro. They look like twins.”

  Not the acknowledgement I’m looking for. I study the snap again, my great-grandfather Harlem standing next to his doppelganger, Orville. The VersB snaps of my alter ego I’d seen in the Time Bureau had made my blood run cold.

  But Orville looks…normal. Healthy. Wealthy.

  “You said there are four different verses?” I ask Cas.

  “That’s what my dad said. He said two of them aren’t terrible.” She catches my eye as she speaks, and I read something there that I can’t quite make sense of. “But the Neapolitan Verse is terrible, and there’s one where we live under the rule of communist China.”

  Shards of ice form in my throat when she says Neapolitan. That’s the verse I’ve seen, and I definitely do not want to go there. But Orville doesn’t look any worse for the wear.

  He does look way too old to be in college twenty years ago.


  “Where’s Orville now?” I ask.

  “We haven’t been able to find him,” Cas says. “We think he came here, went to college, got the knowledge and technology he needed, and crossed back over.”

  “He’d still age, though, right?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she says. “The way I did in the future.”

  “So if he came here a couple of days ago as a forty-year-old, but then went back in time twenty years to attend college…” I do the math in my head. He’d have aged eight years while he went to college and earned a doctorate, before he could return to the future and then his own verse. It might’ve even taken him longer to get back to a rift, as they hadn’t been discovered until only five years ago.

  But if he’d planned something with Shawna Phillips…a time to open the rift, a place…anything is possible.

  “So my great-grandpa is still forty, but Orville’s got to be older.”

  “I guess.” Cas squeezes my hand and takes the phone. “What are you getting at?”

  My brain bends with what I’m trying to get at. “I don’t know.”

  “Here’s a question,” Heath says. “If your dad can’t stay in this verse for very long without getting sick, why could Orville come here for years and years?”

  A muscle in Cascade’s jaw jumps. I’ve seen it do that before, when she had answers to my questions but didn’t want to tell me.

  I stare her down, watch as the weight of my gaze settles on her. She shifts her feet, studies the street passing by out the window like it’s a fascinating flick. She says she loves me, she lets me kiss her until I can’t see straight, and she won’t tell me everything?

  “Cascade,” I say real low, almost a growl.

  “I’m ordering the words,” she says. “Give me a minute.”

  “Time’s up,” Heath announces as the bus slows. “This is our stop.” He stands and moves down the aisle. I copy him, but wait for Cas to edge after me, capturing her hand in mine so we don’t get separated.

  “Soda moved to Florida,” I say. “Heath’s been a little unpleasant since.”

  Cascade’s fingernails dig into the back of my hand. “Why’d she move to Florida?”