Blackout

by Meredith McCardle

  I smile and let my leg brush against his, then I look down at his hands, at the small metal box he’s tinkering with. That’s Abe. Always tinkering with something. When he was about six, his parents left him with a babysitter, only to come home to find their DVD player in about three hundred pieces on the living room floor. He hasn’t stopped dismantling and re-mantling things ever since. (And I’m pretty sure that babysitter was fired.)

  “I’d ask how you slept, but you look like the Night of the Living Dead,” he says, greeting me with a familiar half-grin.

  Ugh. Abe and his old roommate, Paul, were obsessed with that stupid zombie movie. I can’t tell you how many of our Saturdays went something like, “Hey, want to watch Night of the—” “No.” And then I’d have to listen to Abe and Paul launch into an argument about how that movie started the entire zombie genre and how George Romero is a genius and blah blah blah. There was no reason to point out that the movie really isn’t as scary as they thought.

  I nod at the box he’s holding. “What’s that?”

  Abe looks down for a second. “It’s a feed-through scrambler. I need to tweak the oscillator a little more. The signal isn’t quite right.”

  “I don’t understand a word you just said.”

  He smiles. “I realized I don’t have a good scrambler in my toolbox, and you never know when you’re going to need to jam a signal.”

  Ah, right. Abe’s toolbox. More like junk drawer full of contraptions—anything from small robotic vehicles to cameras hidden in pushpins. Abe really is just a younger version of Ariel, his grandfather and the man who invented the Annum watches.

  I open my mouth to respond, but close it as the door shuts behind us. Abe drops the scrambler into his lap, out of view, as Bonner walks past us to the front of the room. Bonner hands a stack of stapled papers to the front row. Violet and Green each take a packet and hand them back to me. It’s my report, the one I wrote last night. Wait, I mean this morning. I stare at the 2:58 a.m. time stamp, then scan the top page and notice there’s a typo in the first damn paragraph. A bad one. Inwardly I groan as I toss Abe a report and pass the stack to Orange behind me.

  As I do, I catch sight of Red. He’s slouched in a chair at the back of the room with his eyes toward the floor, and I feel for him. That should be Red up there, giving the briefing. Red’s at least ten years older than I am. He was being groomed to take over Annum Guard as its leader, but now he’s been shoved into the position of underling to a mystery woman.

  Red’s had only one job lately, and that’s to keep Bonner informed about our agency. When she first arrived, Red had to give a daylong briefing on how time travel fundamentally works. I rolled my eyes when I got the memo slipped under my door, mandating my presence, because I thought I knew how it all works—a Guardian travels back in time, tweaks the past, and then when she returns, the entire world has shifted up into a parallel present and has no idea about history before the tweak. Only we know.

  I also knew that we travel by wormholes and that the opening is large in the present and gets smaller and smaller the further back you go. That means when you project back, more time passes in the present than it does in the past. If you go back twenty-five years, you lose two hours in the present for every one you spend in the past. A hundred years back, you lose eight hours. Two hundred, you lose about four and half days per hour.

  But turns out there were also a lot of things I didn’t know about time travel. I knew about dual projection—when one Guardian forces another to travel with him to a destination, no matter what date the other’s watch is set to—but I didn’t know you could only dual project into the past, and not use it to return to the present day. It’s because we all travel inside our own wormholes when we dual project. It doesn’t matter how far back you go, or when. You only have catching up to do when you try to return to the present, so you can’t dual project to the present because each Guardian has her own catch-up time to complete.

  And you can’t trick the wormholes. Red looked right at Yellow and me when he said this. You can make a number of jumps, throwing yourself back and forth in time—like Yellow and I did when we were running from Alpha—but you can’t undo all of that like it’s a spiderweb you can bat away with a broom. It’s more like a series of tunnels—hard, steel tunnels. That’s part of the reason Alpha wasn’t able to send a Guardian back to the moment I first ran away, to stop me from going in the first place. I was already inside my wormhole, tunneling my way through time. The only way to catch me was in the past—on my timeline. At the end of the tunnel.

  The wormholes keep us safe while we’re flying through time, but they’re also a prison. There’s no cheating the system.

  Bonner clears her throat, and I swivel around in my chair. She tilts her head back with this stupid, smug grin on her face, like she’s a monarch about to address her subjects. She casts her eyes down and starts reading my report aloud, word for word. I hate when people do that. Everyone in this room can read. Stop wasting our time.

  “ ‘I arrived at McSorley’s at approximately four thirty p.m.’ ”—Bonner frowns and looks at me—“I thought I’d made my position clear on approximate times. Iris, exact times please from this point forward.” She locks her gaze with mine, as if we’re in some kind of staring contest. One I know I’m supposed to lose. It takes every last bit of effort I have to swallow my pride, but I do. I nod. Bonner gives a thin-lipped smile and looks down. “ ‘I located the subject shitting at a table near the bar’ ”—I hold my breath as Bonner’s head whips up and she stares at me again—“I trust that’s supposed to read ‘sitting at a table’?”

  “Clearly,” I mumble.

  “No, clearly you need to exercise more care when drafting official documents.”

  Abe squeezes my leg. It’s a gentle squeeze, one of reassurance and solidarity. But it doesn’t make me feel any better. I zone out as Bonner talks about my dad entering the bar and starting his shady dealings. Living it once was bad enough. Reliving it is just unnecessary. I’ve been struggling for months with the knowledge that my dad was in on Alpha’s scheme.

  I let my thoughts wander to my mom. Maybe this time I can get her to change her mind and stick with a treatment plan. She owes this to me. She promised this to me. I reach under my sleeve and tug at my charm bracelet until it slides down onto my wrist. I finger the one charm on the bracelet my mom gave me—the bird that’s supposed to signify a fresh start for us. I refuse to let that be garbage. My mom will do this.

  I think of the Christmas when I was twelve. My mom wasn’t very religious. Her mother raised her Romanian Orthodox, but it was a pretty half-assed religious education. By the time I came around, we mostly celebrated the Holy Church of Santa Claus at Christmas and the Gospel According to Chocolate Eggs at Easter, and that was it. But the year I was twelve, my mom decided we had to go to church on Christmas. We got all dressed up and walked to the community church down the road. I still remember like it was yesterday how they dimmed the lights and handed out candles. The sound of “Silent Night” being sung by a hundred different voices. The feeling of safety as my mom took my hand in hers, a tear rolling down her cheek as she sang.

  And then I remember the Christmas when I was thirteen. My mom didn’t even get out of bed. There were no presents under our tree, which had turned brown and shed its needles because I didn’t know you had to water it. I knocked on the bedroom door around six that night to tell her I’d heated up a can of soup and to ask if there was anything she needed, and she told me to bring her a razor blade. I pretended not to hear.

  Abe nudges me under the table, and I look up. Bonner is staring at me with raised eyebrows, the universal sign that she’s just asked me a follow-up question about something in my report.

  “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” I ask.

  She pauses a few deliberate seconds. “What else have you been able to ascertain about Iberia Holdings?”

  Oh really? That’s my job now? Because last week I got
reprimanded for trying to look into corporate tax records on my own instead of letting the FBI analysts do their job. Good to know there’s consistency. But also good that I spent about five minutes doing a quick Internet search at two in the morning.

  “Iberia appears to still be in existence. It’s an American company, first registered in Delaware in 1935. It’s filed the required corporate accounting forms with that state every year since. Current registered agent is a woman named Claire Schuller, who also serves as the registered agent for an LLP called Rodkin & Associates, which is a law firm in Waltham, Massachusetts, founded only about ten years ago. I’ll make sure our analysts have all of this information so they can check into any other potential links between Iberia and Rodkin, and learn as much as they can about Schuller.”

  (Spoiler alert: None of this is going to have anything to do with Eagle Industries, the company connected to XP. Nothing Bonner has us doing is remotely related to Eagle Industries.)

  I smile weakly at Bonner, and in return I get a glare. “Yes, that’s what our analysts should be doing at a minimum. You stick with the field work, and I’ll handle the intelligence portion of your job.”

  Abe’s hands ball into fists on the table, and his nostrils flare. So this time it’s my turn to reach under the table and give his leg a reassuring squeeze. Something to let him know that I’m not letting Bonner get under my skin, even though that’s a lie. She’s slimed her way through my pores, through my veins, into my bloodstream.

  Bonner asks, “Does anyone have additional questions for Iris?” The room stays silent, but the tension hangs there like a dense morning fog. “Very well, then. You are dismissed. Iris, a word?”

  She’s got to be kidding. What does she want to do, berate me some more in private after doing it in front of all of my peers? I will not let her get to me, I will not let her get to me. I make that my mantra as I walk to the front of the room, where she’s waiting behind the lectern like a professor.

  “Yes?” I ask.

  “Schedule change for the day,” Bonner tells me. “I had you sitting in with the analysts this morning, but your presence has been requested elsewhere.”

  That’s a relief. Just as I start to wonder who could possibly have requested my presence, a smile creeps across Bonner’s icy pink lips, and I know. Whatever this is, it’s not going to be a relief. Best-case scenario, an annoyance. Worst-case, physically painful.

  “Who am I meeting with?”

  “Whom.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The correct question is ‘With whom am I meeting?’ ”

  Oh my god.

  I don’t take the bait. I just keep looking at her, knowing eventually she’s going to have to tell me.

  Bonner’s eyebrows crease ever so slightly. “The vice president is in town on behalf of Congressman Durrin’s reelection campaign.”

  I clench my fists. Oh no. This is worse than worst-case.

  “The vice president has requested a meeting”—No no no no no—“for this morning. Nine o’clock.” Why, dear god, why? “Secret Service will meet you in the lobby of the Taj and escort you to the vice president’s suite. Do you have any questions?”

  I have plenty. I’ve told the vice president and the investigation committee everything I know about Peel, about former headmaster Vaughn (who’s currently living in a federal detention facility in Maryland and refusing to talk), about Alpha, about my dad, about Eagle Industries. Everything. But they won’t stop. When is enough going to be enough?

  “Nope, I’m all set.” I smile and turn before she has a chance to chide me for saying “nope” instead of “no, ma’am.”

  This is going to be a long day. I grab my coffee and untouched bagel, and I don’t try to cushion the speed of the door slamming on my way out. I gasp as I go flying into Orange. The coffee sloshes in the cup, and I’m seriously glad I opted for a lid today.

  “Hey,” he says, jerking his head back to get the tips of his hair out of his pale-blue eyes. His hair is longer than normal. Usually, he has it buzzed pretty close to his scalp, but today there’s no mistaking its bright orange color. I’ve always thought that Orange got the short end of the code-name stick.

  “Um . . . hi.” This is odd. I literally can count on one hand the number of conversations I’ve had with Orange since I’ve been in Annum Guard. Actually, make that one finger. And even then it was an awkward moment when we both found ourselves on the stairs and neither of us felt like playing that weird game where one person pretends to slow her pace while the other acts like he’s in a rush because we don’t feel like chatting. I think the difference with Orange is that he’s older. He was the first new recruit after Red, and he was here for years and years before the rest of us were added. I’m not sure how old Orange is, but maybe late twenties? He’s friends with Red, not so much with the rest of us. I don’t even see Orange that often anymore, not since he moved out.

  That’s another thing I learned recently. I always thought it was a little odd that everyone lived here—like, don’t we need some work-life separation?—but then Yellow told me that was an Alpha mandate that had been in place for less than a year. It makes sense. Alpha got a little crazy and paranoid toward the end.

  After Alpha died, Orange and Green had moved out by the weekend. Red stayed as a show of solidarity toward the organization. Zeta left for home, but made Yellow and Indigo stay for “safety reasons” that didn’t make any sense then but do now. Violet and I both stayed because we’re in the same boat—nowhere else to go. Abe has plenty of options, but he laughed at me when I suggested he move home.

  “You’re my home,” he’d said, nestling closer to me on my bed.

  “That was total garbage what happened in there,” Orange tells me, snapping me back to the present. His jaw tenses. “I know Alpha had his flaws”—you think?—“but there’s no way he would have let that happen to you. To any of us. Make sure you stand up to her. Don’t get pushed around.”

  I’m not sure what to say. I feel like I’m getting a pep talk from my big brother after a playground bully told me I couldn’t go down the slide.

  “You’re strong, Iris. You’ve certainly proven that. You don’t have to take this.” He pauses, looks at the door to the briefing room, then adds in a much louder voice, “None of us do.”

  And then the door next to the briefing room opens, and Red pokes his head out of Situation Room One. He scowls. “Orange. Discretion.” He jerks his head back into the room.

  Without another word to me, Orange follows Red into the Sit Room.

  “Thanks?” I say as the door closes. I’m not sure if he hears me. I stare at the closed door for several seconds.

  What just happened here?

  But then I brush it off and head for the stairwell. Abe is waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

  “Vice president wants to meet with me,” I say.

  “Again?”

  I shrug and take a bite of the bagel.

  “I set up a meeting with Dr. Netsky at ten thirty. Will you be able to make that?”

  I stop and swallow the bagel. It’s way too big of a bite to manage in one gulp, and it scrapes the inside of my esophagus as it goes down. “Dr. Netsky? Really? How did you manage that?”

  Dr. Netsky is the chief psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, where my mom has been living for the past couple of months. I’ve been trying for weeks to get him to meet with me, ever since my mom started pulling all her old tricks and telling everyone who would listen that she doesn’t really need the treatment she desperately needs. The man is impossible to get on the phone, much less in a face-to-face. Suddenly, this day is looking up.

  Abe flashes me a coy smile but doesn’t say anything.

  I look at the clock hanging in the hall. “Seriously, it’s seven a.m. How did you do this in six hours?”

  Abe shrugs. “Hacked into McLean’s server and found the personal contact info for all staff. I called Netsky at four in the morning and pretended to be from the Ver
mont Department of Children and Families. It’s amazing how fast someone will respond if you call them in the middle of the night about the welfare of a minor.”

  “I’m legally emancipated,” I point out.

  “I didn’t see a need to include that little detail.”

  I shake my head. I can’t believe this. “That was ingenious.”

  “Well, Ingenuity is my middle name.”

  “And all this time, I thought your middle name was David.” I link my arm through Abe’s and lean my head on his shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “You can do ten thirty?”

  “I’ll be there at ten thirty even if I have to break several international laws in the process.”

  “Let’s not go crazy. It would be hard explaining to people that my girlfriend is a UN-sanctioned criminal.” He kisses me on the cheek, then walks toward the library.

  Before the door closes, he winks at me, the same cocky wink he flashes any time he wants me to smile. Because Abe is so not cocky. He tries it on for size every once in a while, but it never fits. His strut is more like a limp, and his pout looks like he’s having an allergic reaction to a bee sting.

  I laugh as Abe shuts the door. Then the smile disappears as I think about what awaits me.

  Okay, it probably won’t take longer than half an hour to get to McLean. As long as Abe and I leave Annum Hall by ten, we’ll be fine. The Taj is a five-minute walk from here. I can’t imagine what the vice president has to talk about that would take more than an hour. There can’t be any questions left that haven’t already been asked. And if push comes to shove, I’m not above being a teensy bit rude and excusing myself.

  You have to come first sometimes, Amanda. That’s one of the things Dr. Becker, a family therapist at McLean, keeps telling me. Over and over, week after week in the sessions I’ve been attending with Mom.

  I’m important, I tell myself. I’m allowed to come first.

  I just hope the vice president agrees.