Lifespan of Starlight

by Kalkipsakis, Thalia

  Her mouth scrunches, sceptical, as if this information tastes strange. It’s hard to swallow.

  Maybe it’s cruel, what I’m about to do, but it’s the only way to prove it to her.

  ‘So, what you’re about to see, it will be hard to take in, okay? But I promise, no matter what happens, I’m fine. I’m coming back. You just have to wait a few seconds. I’ve done this heaps already. It’s perfectly safe.’

  Barely a blink from Mum, as if I’m speaking a different language.

  ‘I’m fine, okay?’ I say it again to make sure that she can hold that truth while I’m gone.

  Mum responds with a circular kind of nod, no idea what I’m saying but willing to go along with it if that helps bring this to an end.

  I take a breath, close my eyes.

  It’s not easy finding the tunnel; something is holding me back. Can’t watch out for Mum while I’m gone.

  My eyes have only been closed for a few seconds when I have to give up. Failed attempt. It’s hard doing this knowing I’m leaving Mum behind.

  ‘Well?’ She lifts one arm, tired and impatient. Don’t you think we’ve been through enough? her expression says.

  I’m tired too, sick of myself perhaps. It’s the relief of nothingness that helps me go back, the promise of the rush. I’ve decided to show her the truth, so I might as well get on with it.

  Mum shuffles forwards in the armchair. One final whisper, ‘Don’t be scared.’

  I let myself sink.

  * * *

  Mum’s behind the armchair when I return, her hands gripping the backrest as if using it to shield her against the unknown.

  ‘I’m okay. See? I’m back.’ I move onto my knees as I speak, enjoying the buzz as I collect my clothes. Only a couple of seconds but it was as good as ever. Man, did I need that.

  ‘What … what was … what did you do?’ Mum’s voice is faint at first, rising with her confusion.

  ‘I know. Amazing, right?’ My eyebrows go up. ‘It’s all about the way time works –’

  But before I can keep going Mum rushes towards me, and pulls me to stand. ‘Let me see you.’

  Her breath is hot in my face, the strength of her fear already stripping the rush away. ‘Mum. I promise, I’m fine. It’s all about the way we exist in time, it’s perfectly –’

  The next thing I know, she’s holding me to her chest, patting up and down my back as if checking I’m whole again. She finishes with a hug, a real one, squeezing so tight. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’

  ‘Mum, I’m okay,’ I say softly. She feels so small, so scared in my arms.

  She was speaking over my shoulder but now she pulls away to focus on me properly. ‘My goodness, Scout …’

  ‘It’s okay, I promise.’ Once she hears about the way it works she won’t be so scared. ‘So everyone thinks that time is steady, right? But it’s not. We’re the ones who control time.’

  ‘Control time?’ Her eyebrows pinch, as her chin pushes forwards in disbelief. ‘Coutlyn, you can’t possibly think … This is … like nothing –’

  ‘But you just saw for yourself. It’s totally safe.’

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘Mum, I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘No.’ It’s just a whisper at first, but then she says it louder: ‘No.

  You can’t know that, Scout. Not for sure. My goodness, what were you thinking? I don’t want you doing that again, okay?’ She peers close, searching my face for agreement. ‘Do you hear me? I want you to promise.’

  ‘I …’ I shake my head. She doesn’t need to be scared. Why can’t she understand that? ‘You could learn how –’

  ‘Coutlyn!’ As if I’m a naughty child.

  ‘Fine! Okay! I promise!’ I spit it out like the sulky child she’s treating me as.

  ‘Where did you learn that?’

  ‘Mason.’ I spin away angrily. I never should have showed her. She doesn’t understand, can’t see what an advantage this could be.

  She’s quiet as I lie on my side of the bed, curl away from her. Alistair would have heard our raised voices. Maybe even the Richardsons.

  I’m not sure what she does next, but I lie here and try to block out her sounds, toying with the idea of skipping again. My heart is so tired. I feel the mattress rock as she slips between the covers on her side. I’m on top, trapping them tight, but I don’t move to make it easier for her. There’s an invisible line stretching between us. I roll the other way.

  She clicks off the lamp, but there’s no way I’m about to sleep. I know she made me promise, but it’s a promise that I won’t be able to keep.

  * * *

  Mum heads out before I’m up the next morning.

  I’m still lying in bed when she comes home a few hours later, saying something about a doctor’s certificate. No reason to move. If the police are coming, it won’t matter if I’m dressed or not.

  She glances at the kitchenette as she comes in, but says nothing about the delivery bag still sitting there. From where I’m lying I can see that she ate nothing for breakfast.

  Of course, I’ll do the same. We both know how this game works. She’s had the same idea once before: that she can cope with almost nothing so that I have enough. My response last time was to match her food intake exactly, so that’s what I’ll do now. If she eats nothing, I’ll do that too.

  Mum sits on the end of the bed. She’s managed to get a doctor’s certificate so she can take three whole days off work. I’m not sure what she had to say to have it approved; you have to be the walking dead to get one of those things. She’s not even expected to work via distance monitor.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asks once she’s finished dodging my questions about how she got the doctor’s certificate.

  ‘Fine.’ Although now I wish I wasn’t lolling round in bed. Maybe she thinks that time skipping is bad for your health.

  Her eyebrows flicker. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’ She glances away and her face tightens.

  ‘I’m okay, Mum.’ My plans to stay angry melt in an instant. I sit up to hug her, my arms trapping her shoulders and my head resting on the back of her neck.

  She squeezes my arms in response and we stay that way for a while. Soon she loosens them slightly. ‘Mason taught you how to do that?’

  I nod with my head against her back. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘And he can do it too?’

  ‘Yep. It’s safe, Mum.’

  She doesn’t say anything, but I feel a shift in weight as she changes her grip on my arms. ‘And you could … do it again?’

  More nodding.

  ‘If the police come?’ She’s thought of it too.

  ‘Think so. I’ll have to practise.’

  Again she says nothing so I’m not sure whether that means she agrees it’s a good idea. I decide not to push it. I’m thinking about asking if she wants to learn to do it herself when she speaks again.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  I pull out from the hug. ‘Not yet.’

  Even though we don’t say it, breakfast becomes a truce of sorts. We still have spare food around, anyway, the legacy of two whole rations. Our issue is how it’s going to be a week from now. The ration points are still saved on the chip, of course. But without the chip to swipe for them, they’re as good as useless.

  After breakfast Mum starts packing in case we have to leave in a hurry: two backpacks holding a weird combination of survival tools and precious mementos.

  Boc and Mason are at school when I check, exactly where they’re meant to be. I should be glad, I guess, but I’m not. Seeing them there, living their lives, gives me a weird mix of anger and envy. I hate the power they have over me now.

  Don’t want to spend my life watching them on the grid
. So I spend the rest of the afternoon writing a bot that will sound an alert if they go anywhere near the police. It can do the watching, so I won’t have to.

  * * *

  On the morning that Mum’s due back at work, I’m sitting up in bed, watching her get ready.

  ‘Just one day, and then the weekend,’ she says as she’s collecting her bag. She comes to sit on the bed. ‘So far, so good, eh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Call me at lunchtime, okay?’ Mum kisses me on the forehead and heads out the door.

  I can tell that she’s glad to be going back. Who wouldn’t be? We’ve spent the last three days waiting, watching, preparing, but we can’t keep living like that forever. Time to get living again.

  As soon as the door engages, I’m hit with the emptiness of this room, the blankness of the future stretching before me.

  Don’t want to think about it. I go back to sleep.

  It’s late morning by the time I realise there’s no chance I’ll sleep any longer.

  I don’t want to eat anything if I can help it. I’m wondering how to fill my time without expending too much energy, when it hits me that I know what I can do instead. After all, I wouldn’t need food if I wasn’t here.

  Numbly, I find my place on the floor. Let myself sink.

  I’ll have to stay away longer than one minute if I’m to use this as an escape from the police, but it’s not as simple as I thought. The longer I stay away, the harder it is to find my way back. It’s scary here, like swimming away from the certainty of land as the ocean floor drops away beneath me. The future horizon seems so far ahead that I’m sure I’ll never reach it.

  I pull up to the surface and gasp, my throat choked at the hit of reality. I glance at the clock and see that I made nearly five minutes. The rush wakes me up; I’m engaged in a way that I wasn’t before. And I made it further than ever.

  How long will I need if I’m to use this as an escape? Ten minutes? Half an hour? I have to keep practising, make sure.

  I only need to prepare for a few minutes before I’m ready again. Once more, I sink.

  * * *

  The improvements have been slow. Even after weeks of practice, I’m barely able to jump ahead ten minutes at a time. Pushing it further always brings the unease of being anchorless; swimming into the endless ocean with no certainty I’ll ever return.

  I’m able to jump in quicker now, though. A breath, shoulders relax and I’m in. It’s become my little routine, three steps to oblivion. And I’ve begun dropping away from different positions, too; on the bed at first and then perched on the edge of a chair.

  I’m able to drop into the tunnel from just about anywhere these days, but the returns are taking practice. Once I lost my balance from sitting on the edge of the bed, and another time crumpled from the chair, ending up with a lump on my forehead. But I’m better at it now. As soon as I come back I’m ready to engage with the world, and can catch myself before I fall.

  Lately I’ve begun to return from a skip, take a few breaths and then disappear into a fresh one. My days have become a wave of in and out, up and down, the calm of the tunnel and the rush of return. It’s one way to pass the time, only living through part of it. And there are other benefits, too. I’ve found that I need to eat less. If I’m here for only half the day, I only need half as much. And besides, the energy after each return sparks my heart and wakes my mind.

  The skipping has messed me around in other ways, though. Usually Mum heads for bed around nine thirty and I’m still wide awake at one in the morning. So one long night a couple of weeks back, I gave up on sleep and just skipped ahead through it, bouncing out and back again through ten-minute chunks of time. By the following night I was tired enough for bed. Since then I’ve begun to sleep only every second night.

  I missed meeting Mum for lunch one day because I didn’t realise it was Friday already. Another time I picked up a conversation I thought we’d left off earlier that day. It wasn’t until Mum grimaced, searching back in her memory for the reference, that I realised the conversation must have happened days before.

  Real time, or old time, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t what it used to be. The more I skip, the less I’m contained by the normal cycles of life. Sunrise, sunset; day following night. I simply move through it all, skimming the surface like a separate and perfect drop of oil on an ocean of time.

  Maybe it’s because my skips are smoother these days, my chance to escape growing ever higher, but I’ve begun to feel less afraid too. Each day that passes has become one more day where Boc hasn’t gone to the police; each hour that I’m free is one more hour that Mason hasn’t turned me in.

  It’s weeks since they worked me out. Maybe they’re going to keep my secret. Maybe, just maybe, I’m safe. And if that’s the case, then everything’s different. Because there’s still a chip on the other side of the city, complete with my deets, clocking up energy rations. A tiny key to the future that I thought I’d lost.

  But maybe I can steal it back.

  FIRST STOP IS the grid. I haven’t checked it for ages – after writing the bot to keep an eye on Boc and Mason for me, I haven’t needed to. Even after all this time I shift a little in my chair before going in. Don’t want to be reminded of what it used to be like, can’t think about the way they must see me now.

  Just get the job done, Scout.

  I set up the firewall, track across to the school and immediately find Mason. There he is, right now, sitting in class. Just a simple dot on a screen, but already I’ve fallen into it, my thoughts travelling back to how it used to be. The way it felt to be exploring a new kind of reality with him, discovering the truth of time travel together.

  I have to get my head around the way things have changed, but I still don’t know where I stand. What has he been thinking since I ran that day? How does he feel about me now?

  My eyes close as I lean back and shake the thoughts away. Other questions are more pressing; some that at least can be answered.

  It takes only a few seconds before I shuffle forwards in the chair, regaining focus, and take control again. I pull the grid back over the past weeks to see a long-term overview of where he’s been, in case I missed anything that I should know about. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: school and home, home and school with a restaurant on the weekends. Still no police visits and the chip is still in his room, same as it used to be. From what I can tell, it hasn’t moved since I last saw it there.

  The security system for his house is set up to trigger if any barriers are broken, just as you’d expect. But I can’t find any other controllers on the system, so it must be wired into some sort of onsite com, I guess. I’ll have to get closer in order to disable it.

  Next I pick up Boc’s dot from his house and check him the same way, a long-term overview of his movements these past weeks. I’m ready for a crazy scribble all over the city, here and there, meeting friends and heading out of town to go mountain biking, so I’m not prepared for how neat his worm is. Home, then school, then over to Mason’s garage. On Saturday afternoons, he heads over to the indoor rock-climbing centre. That’s it.

  Strange. It doesn’t seem like Boc at all. When I zoom out even further to check his movement over the past six months, my breathing grows more wary. Because his crazy scribble all over town continued right up until the evening he found me out.

  Ever since then, he’s stopped heading out of the city, stopped most of his climbing with the Spiderboys. You can clearly see a difference between his movements – his life – ever since that night. But why?

  The unusualness of it makes my throat tighten and I have to walk away from the comscreen.
Think, Scout. Think. What did I miss?

  No idea. Back in I go, checking and double-checking for police contact, double-thinking what I haven’t thought to check.

  I should be glad, I guess, because in some ways he seems less of a loose cannon now. I bite my lip. He’s more contained, more focused …

  I’m zoomed out too far to catch any of the time skips, so I pull out of the grid and bring up Mason’s garage in real time. It’s easier to follow back from the present moment, so I start from today and track back to yesterday to find them: two dots, Mason and Boc, together on Sunday afternoon.

  Once I have them in the garage I zoom in closer and track the worms back hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute.

  Immediately, I find a gap in one worm. Boc must have been timing Mason, I guess.

  The return time was at 5.14pm. Carefully, I track back the seconds until I’ve reached a full minute: still no dot to show the moment when Mason dropped off. Backwards again, five minutes, ten. Half an hour.

  My heart pounds at the power of what this means. I’ve never seen Mason time skip for this long.

  Back I go, further still, until I find his worm again. He disappeared at 3.51pm, which means he stayed away for eighty-three minutes.

  Wow. I lean back in the chair, taking it in. Mason was able to skip nearly ten minutes the last time I saw him; but this is way new territory, well over an hour. I have to admit, I’m impressed. Maybe a speck jealous.

  I should be planning how to get the chip back, but I’m curious. I’m at the moment on the history grid when he disappeared yesterday so I track backwards from there, checking to see if he jumped earlier in the day as well.

  I’m tracking back minute by minute so that I can pick up the smaller time skips. At 2.45pm yesterday, I stop.