by JL Bryan
"I know you do. Whore."
"Just explain it to me! What happened?" Raven said. "I'll help you up, if you promise not to kill me."
"I can't promise that." Kari's flat, cold eyes glared at her without a trace of love or affection. Raven felt her heart breaking. "After you went back in time, the medics at the facility reanimated me. I was only alive from the chest up. The rest of my body was gone. They needed somebody to interrogate, and lucky me....They tortured me for weeks, Raven. The pain was intense, but I didn't break. I protected you, you bitch. Then you betrayed everyone."
"Kari, I think I can change him--"
"Holy shit, really?" Kari shook her head. "The torture went on for weeks. Then, one day, it was over."
"They let you go?"
"No. I woke up in a crappy slum apartment in New Orleans, where I was living with four people I didn't even recognize. My body was intact again, no missing legs, no burns, no torture scars, like it never even happened. History had changed, Raven, and I was the only one who remembered. Everyone thought I was crazy when I started talking. I don't know why my memories didn't change like everyone else--maybe because I was so close to you when you traveled through time. Time-travel radiation, or something like that. Maybe because I died and they brought me back. I don't know why, but I remembered what nobody else did."
"How did history change?" Raven asked, feeling a glimmer of hope.
"Everything got worse. The Carraway regime was still in power, but now they ruled with an iron fist. There was no widespread rebellion, no talk of revolution, just darkness and oppression all over the country. People were too scared to even speak about revolution. To invade the time-travel facility, I had to recruit and train a team myself. We used a series of armed robberies as training runs. They all died, my poor little gang of bandits, but I made it here. I'm going to finish your mission, but I'm going to kill you first."
"Oh, my God," Raven said. "What did I do?" Chunks of the burning floor crumbled away, and she heard screams from the apartment below, inhabited by a pair of sallow graduate students who attended Yale's art school.
"I figured it out eventually," Kari said. "When the Secretary-General's regime first came to power, they immediately captured or killed everyone who would play a critical role in the rebellion--local leaders, our spies and hackers, our sympathetic contacts within the police and military who helped supply our weapons...including my dad. He died even earlier this time. All these people were dead, long before the revolution could really come together. It was as if they knew who their enemies would be, Raven. They knew the future."
"And you think I told him everything?" Raven asked. "I'm the traitor?"
"Why not? You were going to marry him. You decided to make yourself rich and powerful instead of saving everyone. Guess what, though? One day, right in the middle of your happy little marriage engagement, your fancy little private jet crashes into the water. You die before the wedding ever happens." Kari gave her a cold smile as sirens approached in the distance. "You don't get to be queen, Raven, but you do make him a more powerful king."
"A plane crash?" Raven thought of Macey's fate. "In the Caribbean?"
"No, one of the Great Lakes, on your way to Chicago to see your little future dictator. Who cares? The point is: you're dead, bitch."
"The Great Lakes?" Raven felt a sharp headache coming on, either from Kari's new information or from breathing the smoke as her apartment burned down around them. She rubbed her temples, closing her eyes. "And you say it's before we get married? That doesn't make sense. Why would Macey and I both die in plane crashes, but at different places, at different times? I don't understand--"
Something heavy and scorching hot crashed into Raven's skull. She stumbled, disoriented and off balance. Kari sat up, holding the burning timber with which she'd bashed Raven. She'd quietly worked herself free of the roof timbers while distracting Raven with talk of the future.
The world faded in and out while Raven staggered, avoiding a wide hole that opened up in the floor in front of her feet and rained chunks of burning timbers onto a giant clay penis in the art-student apartment below. She was vaguely aware of panicked voices, footsteps on the wooden staircase, screaming sirens closing in on her street.
She found herself swaying dangerously close to the burning remnants of her crawlspace wall, where the broken wooden studs jutted up like sharp, fiery stakes. Kari tackled her and knocked her to the ground, straddling Raven and pinning her with the weight of her armor. Raven couldn't help but think of the two of them play-fighting when they were younger.
Kari clamped her armor-gloved hands around Raven's throat and squeezed. The floor was crumbling beneath them.
"I can't believe I ever loved you," Kari hissed. Her steel-plated fingers tightened, cutting off Raven's air.
Raven's mouth struggled to draw breath. She saw dark spots in front of her eyes. Let her kill me, she thought. Let her kill me and kill Logan, too, if he's not going to change.
At the moment, dying would have been the easy choice, but she couldn't let it happen. Logan's death might change history, but there was no guarantee it would stop the megacorporations from staging a coup when Vasquez, or another President they didn't like, finally gained control of the White House. The mass events of history were too complex to simply rewrite with one bullet, Eliad had told her.
I can stop it, Raven thought. Now that I know, I can stop it. I can save everyone.
Raven forced herself to reach into the fiery ruins of the crawlspace wall, searing her hand. She broke off one of the sharp, burning exposed studs. Fighting against every emotion inside her, she rammed the sharp point through Kari's exposed neck. A gout of warm blood spattered over Raven's hand, sizzling and dripping from the burning wood.
Kari made a gagging sound and toppled over on her side, choking and writhing. Raven was horrified to watch her friend die for a second time. She had to stop herself from screaming.
She found her plasma pistol and aimed it at Kari's head, meaning to end it quickly, but she couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger.
"You're not going to die this way," Raven said. "You're not going to live this way. I'll fix it. I promise, Kari." Through the tears in her eyes, she saw blurry red and blue fire and police lights pulsing between the remaining chunks of her front wall. All the other residents of the house were out on the front lawn, looking up at the burning, collapsed third floor.
She had to escape. Her instincts took over, and she quickly gathered what she needed. She slung her backpack over her shoulders and dashed through the wreckage of Audra's room, where she could jump from Audra's window to the burning second-floor balcony below.
She dropped into the back yard and clambered over a fence into the yard of the house behind hers. She ran across the next street. On the second street away from hers, she pulled the sleeve of her jacket over her hand and punched through the window of a green pick-up truck.
Raven climbed into the driver's seat, stripped open the steering column, and hotwired it. She stomped the accelerator as she drove away, her burning house illuminating the night sky behind her.
For the second time, Kari's dying blood was on her hands. Raven promised herself she would save her friend, somehow. The future wasn't set in stone. She'd lost Audra, too, who had only been nice to her, welcoming Raven into her home, only to be killed because of it.
Raven wanted to cry, but she refused to let herself feel anything. She was a soldier, and she had a mission to complete.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As Raven drove the stolen truck across town toward Yale, she called Logan.
"Having any fun without me?" he answered.
"Logan, I'm coming to get you."
"I'm still stuck in this study group. Let me step out into the hall..."
"This is life or death, Logan," she told him. "People from the future are trying to kill you. And me. We have to get out of town, tonight, right now."
"Are you serious?" His voice dropped to a
whisper over the phone. "Who's trying to kill me?"
"The revolution," she said. "The revolution against you. They're using time travel to assassinate you before you come to power."
"Oh, shit. But we're going to change the future, right? So--"
"Meet me in front of your hall. Bring your car keys."
"What time?"
"Right now. Run outside or you're going to die." Raven swerved up onto the sidewalk in front of Lanman-Wright Hall. Logan emerged a few seconds later, his eyes growing large at the sight of the stolen truck idling at the front door.
"Nice parking job," he said as he climbed into the passenger seat.
"Front-door service," she replied. She stomped the accelerator.
They drove to the parking deck where Logan kept his car and ditched the stolen truck there.
"Where do we go?" Logan asked as he drove his black Infiniti through the parking deck's exit gate.
"The interstate."
"Makes sense. Where are they, these assassins?" He looked at his rearview as though he expected to see people from the future popping up behind them at any moment.
"They could be anywhere in town," Raven said. "I just talked to a friend of mine from the future. We haven't made anything better, Logan. It's gotten worse."
"How could it get worse?"
"You've crushed the revolution. Nothing gets better because of you and me, Logan. You don't change. Even after you met me. Even after I showed you. You still become the thing we're trying to stop."
"That can't happen!" Logan said.
"It's happening. I'm going to die in a plane crash in a few years, just like Macey, and then you'll take whatever you've learned from me and make yourself a more powerful dictator."
"Macey Ingersoll? What does she have to do with--?"
"In the original history, she was your first wife. She died in a plane crash in the Caribbean, three years after you were married. Flying to your family's place on St. Martin. She was pregnant with your first child."
"I married Macey?"
"In the new history, you get engaged to me instead, but I also die...in a private plane crash into the Great Lakes, before we get married. Two completely different plane crashes, Logan. Both times, into water. Both times, your first wife dies and you aren't onboard."
"How could that happen? Fate?" He looked disturbed as he accelerated and merged onto the interstate, heading south toward the Connecticut Turnpike.
"Somebody arranged those crashes, Logan. Somebody wanted your wife to die, and he wanted it to look like an accident. Somebody who wanted to control every part of your life, your career, even who you date, and especially who you marry..."
"Uncle Henry?" Logan asked.
"You said it, not me."
"Why would he want to kill you?"
"That's not a mystery. He already disapproves of me. Poor Riley, no family, no Ivy League education, nothing at all. A wasted opportunity, when you could be marrying more wealth and power." Raven thought it over. "And Macey, with all her relentless idealism, could be a liability to your political career. Your family does some very dirty work, you know. She would be a thorn to the interests who back your father and grandfather. Maybe that's what Henry decides, anyway. He gives Macey a few more years to live than he gives me, though, probably because of her family's wealth and influence."
"Would he really just have people killed like that?" Logan asked. "People that I...people I loved?" He looked away from her quickly. "In these different futures, I mean."
"He has big plans for you, Logan. Bigger than even he knows. When the opportunity comes, you'll seize control of the government. He'll be perched right behind you, still alive and looking like a zombie robot, as your global security adviser--shaping your domestic and foreign policies, the power behind your throne."
"I don't believe it," he said, but his voice was shaky.
"Macey's death--or my death, in the new version of things--was one of the key events that made you into what you will become." Raven shook her head. "No, that's not right. We all lose people we care about. I've lost more people than I could name, seriously. It's your choices, Logan. Your choices create your future."
"How do I stop all of this?"
"You can start by cutting all ties with Henry Sheffield. Kick him out of your life."
"How? I can't make my grandfather fire him."
"Figure it out, Logan. You have to get rid of Henry, and then you have to keep making the right choices."
Logan didn't speak. He seemed to be drowning in troubled thoughts.
"As long as we're on the run, let's pay a visit to Henry," she said. "You can tell him yourself."
"What about those people trying to kill us?"
"If we change the future, the revolutionaries will disappear." As far as Raven knew, no more revolutionaries from the future were actually on their way to kill Logan, but the imaginary threat made it easier for her to control him.
"Henry's in his Virginia house this week. That'll take all night," Logan said.
"We have all night."
"You know, it's weird. He called a few hours ago and said he wanted me to come visit this weekend. He said it was very important, but he wouldn't say what it was."
"He probably wants to make sure you broke up with me," Raven said.
"Maybe. Should we call and tell him we're coming?"
"No!" Raven said, and he raised his eyebrows at her sharp tone. "I mean, no, because those revolutionaries can track your cell phone. And mine. If we call anyone, we'll give away our location."
"Shouldn't we shut our phones down, then?"
"Good idea."
As they drove through the night, Raven tried to make herself relax. Things were going as she intended. So far, Logan seemed determined to avoid the evil path, but apparently that determination would erode and vanish in the years to come.
She tried not to think about the deaths of her friends--they were too recent and too shocking, especially the brutal way she'd taken Kari's life to save her own.
A lost memory pushed its way forward again, the one she'd pushed down when she was in the crawlspace after Audra died. This time, she allowed herself to remember.
* * *
She was nine years old and her name was Rhea. She'd crept down the hall to her father's office that night to spy on her parents after her bedtime. The silent, thick tension between her parents all evening had told her that something unusual was happening.
They lived in a two-story, red brick house in Bellevue, on the Lake Washington waterfront across from Seattle. It had vaulted ceilings and high picture windows that looked out on the water and brought in enormous amounts of light. Her favorite part of the house was the oversized brick fireplace in the living room, flanked by snoozing marble dogs, which kept things cheery and warm through the long, dark winters.
Her father's office was on the second floor, five doors down from Rhea's bedroom. She moved softly on her bare feet through the dim hall, and she peered around the edge of the open office door, her heart thumping.
Her parents were facing away from her, watching a hologram just above her father's desk. Rhea couldn't see it because their bodies blocked her view.
Her mother was very pretty, Rhea thought, with soft golden hair and blue eyes like Rhea's. She was athletic, a dedicated tennis player, and she ran a marathon with Rhea's father every year. She worked as a cardiologist at Harborview Medical Center.
Her father was tall, dark-haired like Rhea, a smiling man in his early forties. He was an executive producer at a national news channel based in Seattle. His office was of minimalist design, including a wafer-thin desk with spindly, threadlike legs. A table with a matching design displayed his collection of vintage matchbox cars.
"If you air this, they'll come after us," her mother was saying.
"If I don't air it, then it will disappear down the memory hole," her father replied. "People risked their lives to collect this footage and bring it to me."
"What go
od will it do? Will it stop anything?"
"We all have to do what we can." He moved aside slightly as he gestured at the hologram, and Rhea saw what they were watching. The holograms were of a long, dim place full of cots and hungry-looking people in orange coveralls. "These people are held prisoner without trial, with no access to an attorney or anyone else. Thousands of people, snatched up and locked away for speaking against the regime."
"And what do you think they'll do to us? What will they do to Rhea?"
"Colin is coming in a few hours to take you and Rhea to a safehouse. There's an underground network that helps people on the run. Tomorrow, I'll set the video to broadcast, then I'll have two hours to get away from the studio before it goes public. I'll meet up with you."
"Maybe we shouldn't. We're giving up our lives. We're putting Rhea in danger."
"She'll never be safe in the world Carraway is creating. We all have to fight back."
"I'm so scared," her mother whispered. Her father held her close.
Rhea slipped back to her own room, feeling frightened and hoping she was just having a bad dream. She didn't understand what was happening, but she knew they were in danger if her mother was scared. Nothing ever scared her mother.
She curled up in her bed, hugged her stuffed cat, Pokeynose--so named for his wiry plastic whiskers--and pulled the blanket over her head.
Later, she heard a rumbling outside, then harsh, shouting male voices. Rhea left her bed and tiptoed down the hall to the landing, which overlooked the foyer on one side and the living room on the other, with views of the front and rear picture windows. A scramble of lights shone through the front windows--headlights, spotlights, pulsing blue lights.
Her father was below her, hurrying down the wide white stairs to the golden hardwood floor of the foyer.
"What's happening, Dad?" Rhea asked. He looked up at her, startled.
"I'm locking the doors. Go find your mother, she's looking for you."
"But what's happening--" she started to ask.
"Go now!" he shouted, and Raven turned and ran down the hall. Her mother was already running toward her from the opposite direction. She snatched Rhea up and carried her back to her room.
