by Kailin Gow
Johnny nods. “It needs to, because your memories, your personality, they’re what make you who you are. It does that, and it makes a body for you from your DNA, only when it does that…”
“…it makes you as a baby,” I say. It’s the only explanation that makes sense right then. I guess it says a lot about my life right now that an explanation featuring devices that build people up out of nothing and give them their memories makes sense.
“It’s a flaw in the device,” Johnny says. “I think… I think we didn’t know about it until after we started sending people back, and then once we realized, it was too late.”
It seems strange that something like that could happen. That a device like that might be used again and again without knowing what would happen. Whatever happens in the future, we must have a good reason to send people into the past without testing the device first.
I realize then that I’ve accepted it. I’ve accepted that I’m from the future, and so is Jack. I’ve accepted that I’ve come back through some kind of time machine. That seems like a lot to take in, but some part of me has already recognized it as the truth and gone with it. It’s almost the same as the way I seemed to know who Jack was almost from the moment of meeting him.
“So Jack arrived first, and he’s the oldest,” I say. “What about the rest of us?”
“I don’t know everything,” Johnny says. “There are parts I don’t remember. I know Jack went first. I know you waited for him, Celes, until you knew he’d forgotten the mission. After that…”
“I followed him,” I say, knowing that it’s true even as I say it. “I knew I might not be able to get back, and by then we knew what traveling would mean, but I went anyway. I wanted to find a way to bring him back.”
“Even though no one had done it before,” Johnny adds. He looks from me to Jack. “Then Grayson went after you, not long after you’d gone. I remember trying to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He said that just because he advised you, that didn’t mean he had to listen to advice.”
Jack seemed to be considering all that as much as I was. He looked carefully at Johnny. “Does this mean that you followed later?”
Johnny nodded. “Years later. I don’t remember much about that part, but yes. It’s also why I remember more, I think. My memories are fresher, and when I saw Celes with Grayson yesterday, it reminded me of who I really was. Before that, even I thought I was just a kid who could see visions. But seeing them there like that… I’d recognize them anywhere.”
“And we’ve ended up in the same place,” I say. “It’s kind of a coincidence.”
Jack shakes his head. “Not really. Senator Hammond is interested in the fading machine through Johnny. The same is true of my father and Grayson’s. It’s that need to know what is going on that has brought us here.”
“Maybe,” I say, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more going on than that. “But there has to be a reason why you came back here in the first place, right? So what was it?”
Jack shakes his head. “I don’t know. I get the feeling that there was something, but I don’t know what it was. There’s just… a gap where it should be.”
“That happens to a lot of people,” Johnny says, standing up. Like that, it’s harder to think of him as anything but a little kid, because he barely comes up to my waist. “They come back with the idea of changing the timeline, but the fading machine messes with their brains so much that they don’t remember what they were planning on doing. They get caught up in the lives they have here, and those kind of layer over their memories, so that eventually there isn’t anything left. They’re just people living out their lives.”
I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about that, since nothing is actually happening to those people, but I do feel bad for them. What would it be like to have your identity completely wiped out? It would be like the real you being dead, wouldn’t it? Well, from the sound of it, I guess I’d know.
“But Jack and I didn’t lose those memories completely,” I say.
Johnny shakes his head. “You didn’t, and your powers have started to come out, which means that you might be able to complete the mission you came back for.”
“What mission?” I ask. “And who are you, Johnny? I know you’re just a kid now, but who are you in the future?”
Johnny opens his mouth to answer that, but Jack interrupts by turning to face the door as it starts to slide open. We’ve left it too long. We’re in a room with one way out, and people coming in. We’re trapped.
TWELVE
A couple of men step through the door, dressed in the suits of heat resistant fabric Senator Hammond’s men wear. I start forward, but Jack is already moving, almost faster than I can follow. He traps the hands of the first man to enter the room, slipping an elbow past his guard so that the man only just manages to bear the brunt of the blow on his shoulder. Jack throws a fast series of punches, forcing the other man back as he tries to defend frantically.
I throw myself at the other man. With the heat resistant clothes he’s wearing, I won’t be able to burn him completely unless I manage to grab the exposed skin of his head and neck, but I’m not sure I want to do that anyway. With the bodyguard who knocked me out when I was first here, throwing energy into him hurt and stunned him. That’s all I need here. I need to buy Jack time.
So I push into the second of the men, drawing up as much energy as I can, then putting it out through my hands where they grip his coat. He makes a sound of pain, jerking like I’ve just hit him with a stun gun, trying to throw a feeble punch that I block easily. He obviously isn’t quite as tough as Scott was, because he isn’t able to fight through that pain to hurt me the same way.
Jack is still fighting the other man. For a moment, he seems to falter, moving back under a flurry of punches, elbows and knees. Yet I see that none of them are getting through. He sees each one ahead of time, and reacts so fast that he parries it easily. So the only reason he’s moving back must be…
His opponent doesn’t see the trap until Jack swings to the side, pulling the other man around after him. His foot sweeps out along the floor to send his opponent tumbling from his feet. The guard tries to rise, but Jack brings his fist down sharply on the base of the other man’s skull, and he collapses into unconsciousness.
Then he’s over beside me, helping me with the man I’m using my power to stop. Jack isn’t scared of my power, so he just moves forward and hits the guard I’m holding three times, in a swift flurry of punches that sends him slumping to the floor.
“Come on,” I say, looking at Johnny. “We should get out of here before…”
Jack puts a hand on my shoulder, and I can see he’s still looking at the door. “Put your hands up, Celes,” he whispers.
“What? Why?”
When he does it though, I do it too, and just in time. Half a dozen men come in holding sub-machine guns, spreading out so that they can cover us both easily and standing there with the kind of rock solid steadiness that suggests I really shouldn’t move. Senator Hammond and Grayson’s father, Richard, follow. Richard is dressed the way all the Others do, immaculately in a dark suit. His hair is greying, and he isn’t quite as broad shouldered as his son, but I guess now any resemblance between them is a coincidence. Certainly, they’re nothing alike when it comes to personality.
Senator Hammond looks at us almost sadly. “Jack Simple. I was expecting you to come back with the means to reconstruct the fading machine, not to try to mount some kind of rescue operation.”
“Then you obviously don’t know him very well,” Richard says. He gestures to us to lower our hands. “Celestra. I wish you had the sense to keep out of things.”
Like I believe that he cares what happens to me. Or anyone else for that matter. “I’m not the one who goes after innocent people,” I point out. “I’m not the one who goes around having people killed.” I look around at the men with the guns. “Why? I haven’t done anything.”
“You will though
,” Senator Hammond says. He moves around the room to stand close to his son. Richard follows him. “Right now, Celestra, you might not seem like a threat. You even seem like a perfectly nice young woman.”
“But?” Jack says.
“But if our information is correct,” the senator continues, “then Celestra here is potentially the most dangerous human being on the planet.”
“Assuming that you can still call things like her human,” Richard adds.
Senator Hammond shoots him a sharp look. “Her humanity is not in question. It is the threat she poses that is the problem.”
They’re talking about me like I’m not there. Like I don’t matter. I’ve had enough of that. “What threat?” I demand. “You think I’m so dangerous because I’ve burnt people? Every time, every time, they were trying to hurt me first. It was self-defense.”
“Most of it wouldn’t even have happened if your men hadn’t been trying to stop her because they thought she was so dangerous,” Jack points out. “It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Richard shakes his head. “You think it’s as simple as a young woman who can burn people? If that were it, she would be a minor threat, no more than that. What matters isn’t what she has shown she can do so far. It’s what she is going to do in the future.”
Senator Hammond joins in. “If Johnny is right about it, then who you are, what you do, potentially affects so much. And that’s the part that makes you dangerous.”
“If I’m so dangerous,” I counter, “why not just kill me? You’ve had me here for days. You could have killed me anytime.”
The senator doesn’t look happy about that. “I’m not in the business of killing people.”
“Richard is,” Jack says.
“Well, he isn’t in charge here,” Senator Hammond says.
Grayson’s father’s expression twitches just slightly at that. He obviously doesn’t agree. That, or he doesn’t like being reminded.
“Anyway, it isn’t that simple,” Richard says after a second or two. “The same things that make you so dangerous also make you potentially very valuable.”
“You didn’t seem to think that before,” I say. I note that the men with the guns still haven’t lowered them. I guess that talking won’t make them lose their concentration enough for us to get away, though Jack doesn’t look like he’s about to do anything anyway, so maybe that isn’t his plan. I hope he has a plan.
Richard doesn’t seem bothered by anything I have to say. “Before, I thought that you and those like you were of alien origin. That meant that the danger you represented outweighed the potential benefits. Now that we know where you’re really from though…”
“It changes things, knowing that Celes and I are human?” Jack asks.
“Of course it changes things,” Senator Hammond says. “It means we aren’t fighting off some kind of alien invasion, for one thing.”
“It means that there are things we can learn,” Richard corrects him. “Alien technology or physiology wouldn’t be of that much use to us as a species. You have to understand that technology never exists on its own, it’s part of a wider collection of connections, ways of seeing things.”
“In other words, you wouldn’t be able to understand aliens,” I translate.
“Not enough to get anything useful from studying them,” Richard says. If I’ve made him angry, it doesn’t show. “But you, you aren’t aliens. We know that now. We got signals from you, but that’s just to do with the energy you generate, and that isn’t alien. It’s just advanced.”
Richard actually looks excited about that, like I’m his favorite new toy. “There are people in this world who can already do things with energy. There are people who can light up light bulbs, or channel energy through their bodies without being hurt, or take massive electric shocks. People dismiss them as tricksters or freaks, but they aren’t. They’re the start of an evolutionary path.”
“A path that leads to you,” Senator Hammond says.
I look over at Johnny. All this time he’s been silent, but he won’t even look at me. All signs of those memories that made him seem older are gone, leaving just the sense of a little boy as he sits there in his too large chair, looking at his father.
Whose side is he on? I have the sense that I know him, but I still don’t know from where. In fact, almost everything we know about the future is stuff that he’s told us, backed up with just a few fragments from my dreams. He could be anyone, playing any kind of game, and we’d have no way of knowing until it was too late. Or he could just be a little kid with too many memories floating around in his head, trying to make some kind of sense of them.
“For now,” Senator Hammond says, “let’s get you back to somewhere secure.”
Richard nods in agreement, and some of the men start forward. They’re his men, then, rather than the senator’s. Jack raises his fists, moving in front of me, but that just means that the guns come up again.
“We’d prefer both of you alive,” Richard says, “but if necessary, we will make do with just the girl.”
I put my hand on Jack’s arm. “Don’t, Jack. It won’t help.”
Jack looks at me, nods, and allows the men forward. They bring out handcuffs similar to the ones I’ve already burnt off.
“Those won’t help,” I say. “They didn’t work.”
“They’ll slow you down,” Senator Hammond says, “and having you here will allow us to work on other things. We’ll learn.”
One of the men clips the cuffs onto me, behind my back. Then they lead us out into the corridors, to an elevator rather than the stairwell we used to come up, taking us back down. At that point it hits me that I’ve ruined our escape. If I hadn’t told Jack about Johnny, we could have been out of there and long gone by now. If I hadn’t insisted on going with him, then at least they wouldn’t have captured me.
Yet I can’t imagine ever leaving Jack behind like that. In fact, if what Johnny has said is true, then I’ve crossed time itself so that I don’t have to leave him behind. And we’ve gained something out of it, because we’ve learned more about how we ended up here. We’ve learned things that we might never have learned if we didn’t come back to try to get Johnny out as well.
Yet it has cost us too. The guards lead us back to the apartment space I shared with Grayson, pushing us inside. Hammond is there, his arm around Johnny’s small shoulders.
“You’ll be safe and comfortable here,” the senator says. “So long as you don’t try to escape again, you can even stay together.”
Beside him, I see Johnny’s lips move. The words are easy to make out, because there are only two of them. “I’m sorry.”
I’m not sure what to think. What do those words mean? Do they mean he betrayed us? Or is he just sorry that he wasn’t able to do anything to help us escape? Maybe it’s something else completely. Whatever it is, we won’t find out any time soon, because the door to the apartment slides shut behind us.
THIRTEEN
Almost as soon as the door shuts, Jack turns to me, looking me deep in the eyes.
“Shall we start by getting those cuffs off you?”
“What did you have in mind?” I ask, and I get an answer almost immediately as he kisses me, his mouth moving passionately on mine. “Mmm!” I manage to say before melting into his kiss.
I feel the flash of energy rising up inside me in response to Jack’s kiss, the touch of his hands on my face. It burns up through me, and it takes an effort to send it down through my hands, because right then, all I can think about is Jack. I do it though, and I feel the pressure of the cuffs on my wrists fall away as they melt.
“That’s one way to do it,” I say, when he pulls back.
“One,” Jack agrees, “but I could have done it plenty of other ways. I kissed you because I wanted to, Celes.”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d done it just because it was the best way to generate heat between us.”
Jack smiles. “I think we generated plen
ty of that. I missed you in the time it took to get back and put the mission together. I wanted to show you how much I missed you.” He’s holding my face between his hands, and leans in to kiss me again, so thoroughly my toes curl and I kiss him back with everything I have.
“You weren’t gone that long,” I say pulling back for air.
“Maybe not long enough,” Jack says, looking serious for a moment or two.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe if I’d stayed away longer, I could have planned the rescue in more detail. I was in such a hurry to get you out of here after seeing you and Gray together in that video that I just grabbed the first Faders I could persuade to help and came over. That isn’t how you mount a mission in a fortress like this if you want it to succeed.”
“You got to me,” I point out, but there’s something about the way he said it that’s worrying me. “You do think the others got out okay, don’t you?”
“You mean Grayson?” Jack asks, just a little bit sharply. The trouble is, that’s what I do mean. Grayson went with the other Faders because that was meant to keep him safe. What if it has put him in more danger, though? I know I can’t say that to Jack.
“About the pictures Senator Hammond sent you,” I say instead.
Jack turns away from me, stepping over to the apartment’s small kitchen. “I don’t want you to remind me about that, Celes. If I do, I can’t focus on what has to be done. I know you were with him before you were with me, that you really didn’t break it off with him because of your fading, but it still feels like I was punched in my guts. It still hurts. And the worst part is that I’m still drawn to you regardless of it. I can’t help it, whatever time period we’re in. I can’t help loving you, wanting you.”
“Is that so bad?” I ask, moving closer to him. “Look at me, Jack. Don’t just shut down and walk away. Really look at me.”
