Exist Once More

by Trisha Leigh

  “Sorry, sheesh. I guess breaking up really is hard to do,” Levi joked, the only person in the room who didn’t realize it was far too soon. “There was an index card taped under Wolfram—cool statue, by the way—with a bunch of numbers on it. I think they’re coordinates, and if I’m right, they’re somewhere on Sanchi. I didn’t have time to check it out, though.”

  “Let me see,” I demanded.

  Levi dug through his bag and handed over the index card, plus his tablet. The latter contained pictures of Wolfram, like I’d requested, but it was the index card that grabbed my attention. It was wrinkled, the ink on the sheet smudged.

  The handwriting, though, was unmistakable. It belonged to my grandfather.

  In the end, we decided to take a test trip before using the cuffs to attempt to follow the Elders. Instead of going to Washington, DC, in the days before the bombs should have exploded over Hiroshima, we decided to go to the source—the city itself.

  That way, we could not only confirm that the cuffs worked and we weren’t going to get found out in some way, but we could do the same for the event in question. Make sure we hadn’t gotten it wrong, and that President Truman’s decision had been changed, before we went traipsing after the Elders around the streets of Washington, DC.

  According to the permanent, unchanged holofiles on President Truman, he used the technology developed by the men and women at the Manhattan Project to wipe out Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

  According to the rest of the holofiles at the Academy, President Truman had made the opposite choice, despite the encouragement of his advisors. People in Hiroshima had survived, including Yumi’s parents, which was why she was living on Analeigh’s side of the bedroom.

  My heart lodged in my throat as Oz and I faced each other in the airlock, which had let us bypass the new bioscan requirements. Sarah had assured us of as much, because apparently the new rules didn’t apply to the Elders.

  Good thing we’d gone after Truman’s cuff instead of starting from scratch.

  The ones Sarah had made were secured on our wrists, and Oz had set the time and date on his. We’d discussed where to land based on previous visits to the same time and place. We’d talked about what to expect, and what to be prepared for in case we were wrong.

  Basically, there was no reason to be staring at each other instead of pressing the last button that would change the lights on Sarah’s cuff from red, to yellow, to green.

  Except that I was scared, and maybe he was, too.

  Scared of what we would see, or what we wouldn’t. Of getting caught. Of somehow blowing up the world if we said or did the wrong thing—and maybe the tiniest bit of not being able to get back here if Sarah wasn’t as good as we thought.

  But when our eyes met, his were strong and sure. A new confidence straightened my spine. Whatever happened, Oz would be with me, and despite all of the things that had happened between us, and to us, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that I trusted him.

  “You ready?” he asked softly, not letting go of my gaze.

  I took a deep breath, the scent of the stale, antiseptic airlock mixing with Oz’s aftershave and shampoo. We were both wearing nondescript garb of the time, at least for Americans that might have been in country—Oz wore a military uniform that was quite smart on his solid frame, and I had chosen one belonging to an army nurse. We figured that even if Truman didn’t drop the bomb the war was still happening.

  “Yes. Let’s go.”

  Oz nodded, blew out a breath, and pressed the last button. We had three hours before we had to be in a research session for the next class trip, which should be plenty of time for us to simply confirm which version of the past was the current one. Of course, there had been plenty of times when I thought I had plenty of time with Caesarion, only to watch it slip through my fingers like golden, Egyptian sand.

  The reminder of my True only served to bolster my courage even more. I knew, without a doubt, that he would believe in what we were doing.

  The airlock disappeared. We were on our way, fingers and toes crossed that we’d be able to find our way back.

  Hiroshima, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, Earth Before - August 6th, 1945 C.E. (Common Era)

  Our first mission with our new cuffs started out well, being that we landed where we’d planned, on the outskirts of the city.

  The city that should have been a bombed-out shell, smoke pouring from destroyed buildings and the people who survived unknowingly inhaling contaminants that would affect their children and grandchildren and even further down the line.

  A city that should have been annihilated.

  Instead, we stood staring at a place that looked alive and well. Decidedly unbombed. People went about their business, going to work or dragging children to school, all blissfully unaware of the deadly fate that had swerved so near.

  Oz stepped closer to me, his arm brushing mine as we watched them together. Waited, as if maybe we’d gotten the time wrong and the bomb was coming, any minute now.

  “Weird to be upset that they’re not dead, isn’t it?” he murmured after several minutes.

  I hadn’t thought of it that way until the moment the words came out of his mouth. Nevertheless, he wasn’t wrong. There was horror flitting through me, tumbling into shock at the confirmation that something this big had been altered, and it was, essentially, because thousands of people were alive.

  “I don’t wish they were dead. I just want things to be the way they’re supposed to be. That’s our job, isn’t it? Or what they told us our job would be after finishing our apprenticeship?”

  Booth’s reminder to look as closely at our own actions as those of the farther past rang in the back of my mind and I had to wonder—was I wrong? Were we wrong, to want to change things back? To kill all of these people?

  To erase Yumi?

  My throat burned and my hands curled into fists. I hated that I didn’t know the answer to what was right anymore.

  Oz shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, our job is to observe and to bring the knowledge from this version of us back to the future so that we can all survive this time. That no one needs to be left behind, and that decision never needs to be made. But what if the Elders always had different ideas? What if it’s always been about gathering enough knowledge that they can go back and fix it?”

  He sounded like maybe he had suspected this for a long time, or that the fact that we’d been lied to our entire lives was something we should take in stride, should discuss calmly while we stared at a gorgeous autumn day in a world that was all wrong. It made me want to tear my hair out.

  Or his.

  I took another couple of minutes to breathe. To let the sun kiss my cheeks, and the breeze that smelled only slightly of the coming autumn to wind its way into my blood. Things were good in Genesis, and Sanchi was one of the most comfortable places in the System to live, but most of our trips to Earth Before made me wistful for something I couldn’t even identify.

  Now was no exception. I couldn’t help but wonder, what if they could do it? What if they fixed it so that we all disappeared from Genesis, but as long as the Earth continued on a healed past, we would be born here, in the right time, instead?

  “So you think, what? That they tell us after we’re full Historians? Convince us to help somehow?” I thought about Jonah. It made sense in the context of when he left, and why he’d felt compelled to go so far when he had.

  Because this version of the future didn’t sound so terrible. Really.

  “Not everyone. They probably figure who would be more sympathetic to the cause based on their family history and approach them, and let the rest of us go about the business of gathering information for them.”

  “The rest of us? Because it seems to me that they thought they could recruit you even before graduation, Oz.” My comment might not have been fair, but it was the truth nonetheless. Oz had already been changing things based on the Elders’ instructions when I’d caught him in the act la
st semester.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said quietly, his gray eyes troubled. “We all do what they tell us. Most of us, anyway.”

  The last part was a dig at me, and probably at Jonah, too. At the moment, I wasn’t feeling the slightest bit guilty about my propensity toward rule-breaking. Not if the people making the rules had been holding themselves to different standards the entire time.

  “I know. I’m sorry. The important thing is that you realized what you were doing was wrong.”

  “No, you’re right,” he sighed, looking away from me and toward the horizon. “I should never have gone against our training without a better explanation. Even after they showed me the Projector, I should have insisted they prove it could elicit all possible outcomes. That they tell me why they made it. The truth is that I’m scared of my dad, Kaia, and until you…until recently, I couldn’t find the courage to see anything but that.”

  The confession hung on the breeze. It soured the fresh scent of the afternoon and tugged at my heartstrings, something Oz hadn’t had the power to do before a few months ago. It rocked me, how things had changed. How I had changed, and Oz, and every relationship in our class.

  Our entire world, from the ground up.

  This one, though, the one surrounding Hiroshima, was the same as it was yesterday. It was the one that should have been different. Nothing was right and even though our lives were only supposed to be tangentially connected to the lives of people on Earth Before, it no longer seemed abstract and safe that it was so wrong.

  It seemed intricate, nearly impossible, to pull our lives apart from theirs. Which had always been true, of course, but until people I knew had been affected—until I lived with a girl who wasn’t supposed to be alive—it hadn’t seemed that way.

  “We should go,” I told Oz, backing up a few steps from the edge of the hill overlooking the city, back toward the dense cover of trees.

  “What? But we haven’t…” He trailed off, his thoughts likely catching up with mine.

  “There’s nothing for us to do here. We’ve done what we can—verified that this event was changed. But it happened before today. We’re going to have to go back further if we want to find out how.”

  There were months of meetings leading up to this decision; I had no idea how we were going to figure out when one of the Elders had influenced it in this massive way. Which didn’t change the fact that we needed to try.

  Oz’s expression turned grim as he put his lips to his cuff and asked it to return us to the airlock at the Academy. As the lights changed, and the haze appeared, he reached out for my hand. The connection felt nice. Like we really were in this together.

  He squeezed.

  “We’re going to have to do more than find out how they did it, Kaia. We’re going to have to figure out how to stop them.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  If there was one truly good thing about the morning, it was that Sarah’s tech worked flawlessly—as usual. She may not have been my friend anymore, or Oz’s girlfriend, but she remained the best asset we had on our side and we were lucky to have her.

  Oz and I returned home on schedule, didn’t have to go through a decontamination shower, and left our clothes in the bins to be cleaned and returned to their closets. We were both in a hurry, just to get out of where we weren’t supposed to be and back in the cold hallways within ten minutes.

  “Should we both debrief the others or do you want to just wait until lunch?” I asked Oz, checking my wrist tat. The trip had been short, since there hadn’t been much to explore, and we had over an hour before we were supposed to be in the lab for research.

  Breakfast was over, though, so all of us wouldn’t be together for a few hours.

  Oz checked the time, too, a frown tugging at his mouth. I tried and failed to remember the last time I’d seen him smile. Or really look happy at all. The confession about his father, that he feared him enough to be scared about asking questions—even questions about changing the past—twisted in my stomach. How different his life had been from mine.

  “Let’s talk to them together. I want a shower…” He held up a hand, giving me a look. “I know, I’m ridiculous, but we have time. I’ll come to your room in thirty minutes, and bring Levi. Deal?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t really mind; I hadn’t had time to shower last night either, and could use the time to process what we’d seen. Or what we hadn’t.

  I just hoped Yumi wasn’t in the room. I couldn’t face her.

  Oz and I parted ways with a glance I couldn’t quite interpret, not even in my own head, and I trudged back to the bedroom. It was empty, but that wasn’t terribly weird. Breakfast was over, but both Sarah and Yumi were assigned to a different trip that left tomorrow, and were supposed to be fashioning looks that would fit into Russia during World War II. Shouldn’t take too long; just find the bleakest piece of gray in the wardrobe.

  And a big ol’ coat.

  My mood felt just as gray as I kicked off my flats, then shed my Kevlar leggings and tank top into the dirty clothes. The shower felt marvelous, the hot water nudging loose the knots in my neck and shoulders, and I stood under the spray for longer than usual.

  As I reached out and grabbed a towel, my head went fuzzy. The room spun around a couple of times, too fast, and my fingers clenched around the shower frame to keep me upright.

  As fast as it had come on, the dizzy spell passed, though my brain still felt like it was wrapped in soaked cotton.

  My heart pounded at the memory of the night we believed Yumi had appeared—the same thing had happened, but it hadn’t again since.

  My spine turned to ice. Certainty that something else had changed, that someone had appeared—or disappeared—tickled my mind.

  How would we know who? Could we?

  Dread pooled in my stomach, my movements quick as I stood under the hair dryer and tugged a fresh set of leggings and a clean tank top from my drawer. The door opened a while later and Sarah came in, a huge grin lighting her face when she saw me.

  “Kaia, hey! I was wondering if you’d be back—it took us forever to get approval on our wardrobe choices for some reason. They switched Elders in charge of our outing tomorrow and we had to wait for Rachel to show up. You know how slow she is.” Sarah rolled her eyes and dropped her bag on her bed. “I have to pee, and then you’ll tell me what happened in Hiroshima, right? I’m so relieved the cuff worked.”

  “Like a charm,” I replied, smiling even though in the back of my mind, something felt off. But what? Sarah was normal. I’d been to Hiroshima using the cuff she’d made so we could come and go, figure out what the Elders were up to.

  I shrugged it off, and answered a knock at the door a few seconds later. Levi.

  “Hey, you’re back. Awesome. I’ve got some news about those coordinates,” he said as Sarah came out of the bathroom tugging her hair into a smooth ponytail. “They’re here at the Academy, but not in any place we’ve ever been allowed. Or know about.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, my mind struggling to let go of the odd moment in the shower and delve into the more pressing mystery of the present.

  “That there’s at least one place in the Academy that’s a secret, at least from apprentices.”

  “But my grandfather knew about it?” I asked, trying to make sense of the information.

  “And probably your parents. Maybe your brother, too,” he reasoned.

  “I’m starting to get irritated with my brother for all of the secrets he kept that are turning out to be uber useful.” The lament in my voice made Levi snort.

  “I don’t blame you,” Sarah commiserated, sitting beside me and rubbing the spot between my shoulder blades. “But what about Hiroshima? Was it like we thought?”

  We’d discussed the possibility that perhaps the bomb had simply missed—that the Manhattan Project itself had been tampered with in some way instead of the more popular idea that President Truman had simply decided against the violent course o
f action.

  “There was no bomb. No disturbance at all that I could see. The city was normal, people going about their business. It was a beautiful day.”

  It had been a beautiful day on that hillside all alone. It had also been disturbing, to see such a perfect, healthy example of human existence and yet feel its wrongness at the same time. The whole outing bothered me now, as though I had missed something—or was missing something—important. But I couldn’t figure out what.

  “So we definitely know they changed Truman’s decision, but not when or how,” Levi clarified for everyone.

  I nodded, a twist in my chest at the mention of the long-dead president’s name that I couldn’t place. “Yes. We’re going to have to go back until we figure out when exactly they interfered.”

  Sarah’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “But we know when it changed—the night Yumi appeared, right?”

  “Sure, but that only tells us when Truman changed his mind. When the Elders actually made their move could have been different.” Levi had a point, but not a very good one.

  “We know it had to be before August sixth. It would have been way easier to influence Truman himself as opposed to rigging the bomb, or the Manhattan Project, to fail. So it has to have been when he was meeting with advisors.” I felt sure I was right. At least about that.

  “We just don’t know how they convinced him,” Sarah reasoned.

  After a moment, she nodded her agreement with my thought process, and Levi followed.

  I blew out a relieved breath. “Okay. Maybe we can squeeze it in after our Observations this week.”

  Levi left, mumbling something about telling Yumi they could go for a walk before they had to be in Research.

  Once he was gone, Sarah ran her hands through her short, blond hair and pinned me with a serious gaze. “You’re going to Andrew Jackson’s inauguration tomorrow?”