“No,” Touch said simply. “I didn’t know what I’d find, as far as civilization, until I got here.”
Something inside me stopped cold. In ten thousand years’ time, all traces of the life that currently existed on Planet Earth would be gone. Wiped away. What in the world had happened between my time and his? What had we done, my branch of humanity, to destroy everything we’d spent millennia building, so much that future civilizations wouldn’t even know we’d existed? Leave nothing but your footsteps, Cody’s scout leader used to say, when they headed off into the wilderness with the troop. Somehow I knew in my heart it wasn’t on account of being careful that we’d left nothing behind for Touch’s generation to find.
“So you came here as some sort of anthropologist?”
“You might say that,” Touch said.
“And those people who are chasing you…”
“I told you,” he said. “They want to overthrow Arcadia.”
That didn’t exactly tell me how the two issues were connected. But Touch started walking faster, like what he’d said ended the whole matter. I knew that if I asked any more questions, he’d tell me I was about to make the whole anti-Arcadia army appear right in front of us. Which if you asked me was a little too convenient, so I piped up with something else that was on my mind.
“If that golden ring of yours is one of a kind, how come all your friends can travel through time to find you?”
“They need a target to do it,” Touch said. “A specific DNA configuration. Even with that it’s very complicated.”
“But they’re managing.”
“Apparently.” He sounded very grim.
Never mind how strong I’d become. On my shoulders I felt the whole weight of the world. Plus I felt worried. Worried about our various pursuers, and worried about money and how Touch and I would survive without a way of getting it. I worried about how hungry I felt—we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and the sun had started dipping in the sky. All we had for tomorrow was a package of cookies, some bread, and the peanut butter that Touch wouldn’t eat. We’d filled up water bottles at the visitors center, but that wouldn’t last us more than a day or two. And then what?
Here was the only thing I knew about the future, not Touch’s future, but mine, ours, this civilization where I’d spent my whole life up till now: something would wipe us out, almost all of us, and not only that, every trace of the lives we’d lived. When would it happen? If I didn’t go to the future with Touch, what would I live to see?
Ten thousand years from now the world would be mostly water. It would be very, very hot. And the people left behind—the great-great-great-great- (and on and on) grandchildren of the people here today—would manage, at least eventually, to create a far better world than the one we’d gone and destroyed.
But wouldn’t you know it: the bad ones, the evil ones, still managed to rear their ugly heads. Their ugly and greedy wants, threatening to destroy it all again. Those people living in Arcadia wanted to turn it back into a world ruled by rich people, taking away everything that ought to be shared. Just like our own world, which would destroy itself without leaving anything behind to warn the future.
By the time Touch and I got to Horseshoe Mesa, it was dark. Both of us were too tired to eat. We just rolled out our blankets, pulled on our hats, and fell asleep under the stars—both of us dreaming about time, backward and forward, and on and on, till the first rays of sunlight woke us.
Touch got up first, but he didn’t build a fire like usual. For some reason he seemed energized and twinkly again. “Good morning, Earthling,” he said, when he saw me sitting up on my blanket.
“Good morning yourself,” I said, and then added, “Earthling.”
It almost managed to break me out of my funk, seeing him step so lightly as he knelt and dug through the pack, setting out food and water. My stomach rumbled greedily at the sight of stale bread and peanut butter.
“Did you bring that flashlight?” he asked, digging through the pack.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s in the side pocket.” What I wished I had was a toothbrush. I crawled out from under the blanket and swished some water around in my mouth. Next time we were near a convenience store, I didn’t care if we only had two dollars left, I was going to spend it on toothpaste and a toothbrush.
“What are you thinking?” I said, spreading peanut butter on bread. Touch had found the flashlight and tucked it into the front of his pants.
He gestured toward the ground. “Caves,” he said. “When I came here before, we went diving underneath, through caves. I collected crystals from the ceiling to use in my work. I want to explore a little, see what they look like without the water. And see if the crystals are there, if they have the same properties.”
“Hey,” I said. “You went traveling here, and in the sand dunes. Where all did you live?”
We had left the atlas in the truck, so I took a stick and drew him a map of North America. I didn’t sketch out the countries or the individual states, which wouldn’t mean much to him anyway. It was just the shape of the continent that mattered.
“I think here,” Touch said. He pointed to a spot southeast of us, what would now be the middle of New Mexico. And he pointed out the perimeters, what the continent would come down to. In his world, North America only went so far west as Nevada. The East started somewhere in north Texas. Just one little chunk of land, mostly high ground, left of what had been North America. Touch knelt down and erased what would go missing with his hands. I fought the chills that crawled up my spine, seeing it all wiped away under his palm.
He ate the cookies, and we split up the last two pieces of beef jerky. Then we took careful sips of water—it would be important to conserve—and went off into the caves underneath the mesa, to search for what remained of the future.
I’d never been in a cave before. Touch led the way, holding on to the flashlight with one hand and my hand with the other—both of us with our gloves on. My hands were sweating, and I wanted to take off my jean jacket, but I also wanted to keep getting used to it—the heat, feeling hot, sweating. Because I still wanted to go to Touch’s world, even if it wasn’t a different world after all, but my own world way off in the future.
“It seems like you could fix an awful lot,” I told him, “just by traveling back in time. All you’d have to do is find out where you went wrong—where the world went wrong—in the first place.”
“Ah but that’s where you have to be careful,” he said. He stopped and shone the light up at the ceiling, which was just inches above our heads and lined with glimmering stones, quartz and crystal, just dazzling. “It looks different out of water,” he said. “It’s very beautiful.” And then he said, “Changing history, changing the past, is a tricky business. You never know what else you’ll change inadvertently. For example, if this civilization doesn’t end, ours may never rise.”
“But you went back in time,” I said. “To come here, you went back in time.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said.
“But then you told me you did it again, back in Jackson.”
“Just an hour here and there,” he said. “A few days or a week. And I was very careful not to do anything differently, not to travel back to days that had been personally significant for me. I promised myself that once I’d got the hang of it I’d only go forward in time, and only in an emergency. The only time I made an exception was with you.”
We ducked through an archway—the caves were connected to each other, like rooms, one after another. As Touch talked, we walked deeper into the mesa, holding hands, stalactites dripping over our heads, little bits of moisture dropping down. Remembering our water shortage, I stuck out my tongue to catch the drops.
Touch said, “I knew the time was right to run from Jackson. I’d been there too long, I’d used too many materials. It was only a matter of time before the tracking found me. I knew I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to leave without you. So I went by your apartment, but you were gone
.”
“Gone?”
“Yes. Gone. I managed to get the door open, and there were a few things left behind, but most of it—most of your clothes, and the map you’d had on the wall—was gone. I couldn’t continue on without you. I had to bring you with me. So I broke my own rule.”
“You came back and got me.”
“I turned back time.”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see me without shining the light on my face. It was so dark in the caves—by now we were so deep inside them, not even the barest bit of light could make its way in from the outside. I wondered where I’d gone when he came by my apartment, where I fled to without him to pick me up on the street after what happened with Wendy Lee. Where would I have headed? Where would I be now?
“You turned back time for me,” I said. It would be hard to put into words, how much I wanted to kiss him at that moment.
Touch looked like he felt the very same way. The two of us stood dangerously close. Then he stepped back. He pointed the light toward the ceiling of the cave and all the dense crystals. I watched him reach out to touch them and I did the same, running my hands over their cold, damp bumpiness. But Touch wasn’t just feeling the crystals. He was plucking them, digging his hands deep into the sediment and pulling out chunks of clear, sparkling rock.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you supposed to do that?”
He didn’t answer, and I figured at this point, whether I knew what he was up to or not, I was in this for good. With Touch. So I started collecting crystals, too, scooping them off the ceiling and handing them over. Touch stuffed them into a little pouch.
“That’s probably enough,” he said when it was full. He put the flashlight down by his side. It shone on the dirt floor of the cave, sending up a muted kind of light all around us. I don’t know about my face, but his looked eerie and beautiful and full of emotion, as if emotion were a liquid, like water.
Then all of a sudden, the flashlight flickered. It died a moment, then came back on, then died again. I fumbled in the dark, grabbed it from his hand, and slapped it against my palm. It came on for one second, then it went out. Dead. The two of us were left standing in such complete darkness, not even my cat eyes could see so much as a moving shadow.
Along with the darkness that was total and absolute came silence. Stillness. Me and Touch, standing together in the caves, so deep in there, with walls and ceilings that we couldn’t see close around us. It was the quiet of a mistake of monumental proportions. One of those things they don’t teach you in school: When going deep into a series of caves, make sure you have more than one flashlight. Or an extra set of batteries.
Finally Touch broke the silence. He said, “I don’t understand what happened.”
The mistake hit me full force in that moment. It was all my fault. Touch had no idea about batteries. In his perfect and waste-free society, light devices probably shone on forever. I fumbled through a lame explanation of the short life of batteries, almost glad that I couldn’t see the expression on his face.
“Primitive,” he finally said. That old growl sounded real angry.
The situation was clearly hopeless. We’d already traveled from one cave to another, through archways, not a huge distance but a very winding one. We’d brought ourselves to the center of the mesa, underneath, where not the tiniest bit of light shone through. Black. Too black even for our eyes to adjust, too black even for shadows. We couldn’t see each other’s faces. We couldn’t see the crystals, glimmering all around us, or even the walls that they were embedded in. It was darker than closing your eyes—because even then, you can see colors, light from the other side of your eyelids. I tried to search the store of people I had inside me. Not one of them knew how to navigate out of these caves in the pitch-black, except maybe Tawa. I tried to summon the shreds of sun he’d left inside me, but no luck. The rays wouldn’t translate to the outside world.
“What about the crystals?” I asked. “Can you make something with them?”
“Not without sunlight,” he said.
Sunlight, steps away, or perhaps inside my skin: it might as well have been a million miles. I thought of the ring in the inside pocket of Touch’s coat, and a spike of elation hit me. Surely this was a situation where we needed to grab at our last resort.
“No,” Touch said. “It won’t work. It only travels through time, not space. It would land us right here in the cave, in the dark, in another time.” It amazed me, how calm he sounded.
“But that can’t be,” I said. “You’re from New Mexico. You ended up in Jackson, Mississippi.”
“Before I used the ring for the first time, I took a boat and sailed east.”
“Why?” Inside my head, things had gone very loud. Even if Touch pulled that golden ring out of his inside pocket and used it, we would only land in the darkness of the cave, in another time. Ten thousand years back? Still here, inside these caves. Ten thousand years forward? Still here, inside these caves, only with the added bonus of being underwater.
Touch wasn’t answering my question, and anyway, the most important thing was figuring a way out of this. “What if you brought us back like fifteen minutes, when the flashlight worked?”
In the blackness, I could feel him shake his head, inches away from me. “Doesn’t work that way. Time for the flashlight, for the batteries,” he said that last word in a completely disgusted tone, and I can’t say as I blamed him, “is still moving forward at the same rate. We’d return to fifteen minutes ago with a dead flashlight.”
I stepped in the direction of his scent, his breathing. His arms came around me. For a second I felt myself calm down a little, followed immediately by a new flutter of panic. What if in this darkness, this blackness, his face brushed against mine?
Touch didn’t need light to read my mind. “Shhh,” he whispered, like he could see the panic plain in front of him. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“It sure as hell does matter,” I said. “You think I want to sit here and wait to die alongside a corpse? If this is gonna happen, I at least want some company.” It chilled me to the bone saying that. Of course if he could manage not to touch my face—the only part of me that wasn’t covered by clothing—I would die before him. I was smaller, leaner. Starvation and dehydration would get me first.
“Look,” Touch said. “Let’s not give up hope. There’s always the chance other hikers will come along, exploring the caves.”
I nodded, hoping he could feel and hear the movement of my head, because I couldn’t rightly speak. “Or a forest ranger,” I said. “A ranger could come upon our stuff up on the mesa, and come looking for us.”
“So we’ll wait,” Touch said. “We’ll wait and we’ll listen. We’ll sip water, we’ll eat what food we have left.”
“And if nobody comes along…”
“We’ll die,” he said simply.
We stood quiet a minute, both of us with our deep and sorrowful guilt. As for me, I felt like I’d been so careful not to touch him, to keep him safe, and then I’d managed to kill him in a different way, with a different sort of carelessness.
His arms were still firm around me. I pressed my face into his leather jacket. If I kept it there, pressed into him, it couldn’t hurt him. It felt so hot inside these caves, despite the dampness coming off the walls, and I didn’t dare take off a single layer of clothing. I tried to guess at what it would feel like, if everything I wished came true, and some other spelunker—a smart one, with two flashlights and extra batteries—came along to rescue us. We hadn’t seen a single soul on our way down here, so I wasn’t exactly holding my breath. But if that wish came true, maybe my other wish would, too, and Touch would bring me along home with him, to his time, my own planet. There, ten thousand years from now, I’d always feel this hot, this sweaty, even walking around stark naked. Who would’ve known, all that time wearing leather in the summer, I’d been in training for what would one day be my fondest wish.
Without saying anything, the two of us sank
to the sandy floor. Like I said, your eyes can’t adjust to total blackness—that’s what it was, not just darkness, but blackness—in the sense that you can see anything. But part of me had started getting used to it. Isn’t it amazing what a person can get used to! We managed to kind of scoot back until Touch’s back rested against a cave wall, and I rested against him, keeping my head down low, pressing my face against him, breathing in his familiar smells.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s it like, anyway? Living on a hundred-and-twenty-five-degree planet?”
Touch sighed, and I pressed myself even closer into the movement of his chest. He gave a little shiver, like someone who’d been cold way too long. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “In fact I never really appreciated just how wonderful it was until I realized I could never go back.”
So there in the darkness, not sure whether we would live or die but pretty sure it would be the second, Touch went ahead and told me everything.
The story he told me started a long time from now. Not ten thousand years, but almost. I hardly know whether to tell it in the past tense or the future. But since the past tense is how I heard it from Touch, I guess I’ll stick to that.
Five hundred years before Touch was born, the world was kind of like our world, only maybe even worse. The water had long since washed away most of the earth. There was so little land, which meant very few resources. As you can imagine, once the world was mostly sea, the ocean was the place most of the food came from. People ate fish, and seaweed. Some crops were grown on land, but it was very arid, and rain only came seasonally. Somehow it got worked out that just a few families on each of the continents (there were three, at this point, as far as I could figure: smaller versions of North America, Africa, and Asia) were in control. They lived in giant estates, and all the luxuries to be had belonged to them.
And the rest of the people? They worked for the ruling families, spending most of their lives at sea, on boats and under the hot sun, fishing and cultivating seaweed and diving for shellfish. They only ever returned to land to deliver goods to the ruling families, who pretty much just sat on their butts and waited for the deliveries. The lucky commoners—I guess what you’d call the middle class—lived on land and worked for the ruling class in their houses, waiting on them and such. But most people were out on the ocean, where life was hard and short. Life on land was lazy and luxurious, at least for the people in charge, so it was all super-unfair, and I guess it went on like this for thousands of years.
Rogue Touch Page 17
