Remember Yesterday

by Pintip Dunn

  I stare at him. This is not going the way I expected. Not at all. “Did you not see me land the heel-flip trick? That’s the sickest stunt of the day.”

  “Guess I must’ve missed it.” He smirks. Did I think those lips were kissable? More like smackable. Of course he saw me land the trick. He was standing right there.

  Ignoring his hand, I push myself to my feet, even though my elbow stings and my knee burns. What a condescending ass. He’s just trying to get a rise out of me. No wonder everyone says he thinks he’s Fate’s gift to the world. He’s just like every scientist I’ve ever met.

  I glance up the ramp, and Ryder gives me a salute, his shoulders shaking with laughter. He’s watched me fall on my ass dozens of times. Maybe even hundreds. Now that he sees me on my feet, he’s not the slightest bit concerned.

  When I turn back around, however, the smirk has dropped off Tanner’s face. He narrows his eyes, taking in each of my movements, and his hands hover in the air, as if he wants to pick me up and spray my wounds with antiseptic. “Are you okay?” he asks, his voice gentler now. “You had quite a fall there.”

  “I’m fine,” I say brusquely. I twist my arm gingerly to check out the ramp burn. I hiss in a breath as a cool breeze hits the scrape. Ow, it stings. I look like I got tangled up with a vegetable peeler. But I’ve had worse.

  “Oh, good,” I mutter. “It matches the scars on my other arm.”

  “I have them, too.” He pushes up his sleeves to show me the blemishes on his forearm, and his bare skin brushes ever so slightly against mine.

  I go perfectly still. Maybe Tanner’s not so bad after all. Maybe we just got off on the wrong hoverboard…

  “Go sit down,” he orders in a tone that suggests he’s the game master and I’m one of his carved pawns. “Over there on the bleachers, where it’s quieter.”

  My mouth drops open. Maybe not. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

  “I do when you’re acting like an idiot. You had a bad fall. You need to sit down.”

  “You’re the one acting like an idiot. Tell me, does that actually work for you? Bossing people around like you’re a ComA official?”

  He smiles, slow and wolfish. “It’s been working so far.” His tone is so silky it reaches out and caresses me. “Maybe the fall is an excuse. Maybe I just want to spend more time with you.” He looks at me, his gaze long and liquid, and my stomach executes a slow ollie. I will my body to behave. He might be attractive if you were looking at a frozen still of him. But once he opens his mouth, all those good looks slide down the ramp. All the turtle-shell abs in the world can’t make up for his typical scientist arrogance.

  He takes my uninjured elbow, his grip firm and strong, and I let him lead me to one of the long rows of metal bleachers. I’m not stupid. I don’t buy his act for a nanosecond, but this is Plan B. I need to ask him about the mice.

  We sit, and I find my voice. “Why would you want to spend more time with me? We don’t even know each other.”

  He looks out at the hoverpark, at the boarders zipping past, a blur of speed and color. He stares so long I think he might be timing wind sprints, but then he turns to me. For the first time in this conversation, his expression is uncertain. “I know this is going to sound strange. But do you get the feeling we know each other? From before, I mean.”

  “Like from when we were kids?”

  “I was thinking more like a past life.” He leans forward, his tone urgent. “I can’t shake the feeling we’re meant to be in each other’s lives.”

  I burst out laughing, partly because he’s so hokey and partly because I’m relieved. I wasn’t sure what to do with this earnest side of him. “That’s the worst line I’ve ever heard. Maybe someone might’ve fallen for it, back in the pre-Boom era. But these days? You’re better off telling me you saw your future, and I was in it.”

  An expression I can’t read crosses his face. “I’m not hitting on you, Jessa. Trust me, you’d know it if I were.” He leans his elbows against the bleachers. “You’re not exactly my type.”

  “Oh, really?” I bristle. I shouldn’t. This guy means less than nothing to me, and I don’t need anybody to make me feel okay about my looks. Why should I care if he’s not attracted to me? And yet, in some tiny, bruised corner of my mind, I do. Pathetic, but there it is. “Well, that makes two of us, then, because you’re the opposite of my type.”

  “How so?”

  “First of all, you’re a scientist. I don’t date scientists. I don’t even like them.”

  “One of your arbitrary rules?” His tone is mocking.

  I give him a steely look. “More like a life lesson I had to learn the hard way.”

  “I feel sorry for you.” He lifts his hand and grazes his fingers against my cheek. “You have no idea what you’re missing.”

  I slap away his hand and then have to sit on my own so I don’t do something worse. Fates, this guy is something else. His ego is so large I’m surprised the hoverpark’s magnets can hold him up.

  But I have to play nice. I take a deep breath. As much as I can’t stand the guy, he still has information I need. So I push down my irritation and paste a bright smile on my face. “Doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy hearing about your experiments. So tell me, Tanner. What kind of projects are you doing at TechRA?”

  “I’m not.” He tilts his head, as though considering me in a new light. “Three days ago, someone broke into my lab and set my mice free. Would you know anything about that?”

  6

  My heart grows wheels and about rolls out of my chest. Clack-clack-clack. He can’t possibly know it was me. Right?

  “Why would I know anything about that?” I ask faintly.

  He shrugs. “No reason. It feels like a prank, and I thought you might’ve overheard one of our classmates talking, that’s all.”

  I relax. “Oh. I haven’t heard anything.” Which is technically true. “If I do, you’ll be the first to know.” Which is blatantly not true.

  “I also found a mouse’s leg stuck in the cage,” he says. “One of them must’ve severed its leg escaping. Seeing that…it messed me up a little.”

  I blink. Why is he talking about this? Admitting any kind of vulnerability? It doesn’t fit with my image of him. “Why do you care?” I struggle to keep my breathing even. “TechRA will just get you new mice.”

  “That’s not in question. TechRA would do anything for me. I’m their one bright hope for the future. Everyone’s hope for the future, really.” His tone is even, matter-of-fact. No surprise there. But for the first time, I catch a hint of sarcasm in his voice, too.

  “But aside from the fact that I’m not a total monster, I care because even TechRA can’t breed my mice any faster. It’ll take me a year to recreate five generations of mice with the proper genetic enhancement. Which means I won’t be able to go to uni next year. No program in the country would accept me without a completed core thesis these days. Another fallout from a world with no future memory. No one’s willing to take a risk on anything.”

  Wait…what?

  In spite of the late-afternoon sun, in spite of my fingerless gloves, my hands turn ice-bucket cold. I didn’t know. I thought I was freeing the mice. I thought I was getting back at the scientists. I didn’t know I was jeopardizing Tanner’s future.

  What does it matter? a voice inside me grates. He’s one of them. He’s your enemy.

  But it does matter. Tanner might grow up to be the cruelest scientist who ever lived—but right now, he’s just a guy with goals and aspirations. And I’m not in the habit of destroying other people’s dreams.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, even though I know the words are inadequate.

  He shrugs. “Their loss. The world will just have to wait another year to be graced with my brilliance.”

  I take a shaky breath. His arrogance gives me an easy out. No need to feel guilty when he deserves to be cut down a few billion molecules. The world will thank me for it. But there’s something else her
e, too. Something below his breezy words.

  Not your concern, Jessa. Get on with it.

  I clear my throat. “What exactly are you breeding the mice to do?”

  “To run the maze.”

  I wrinkle my forehead. “Haven’t they been running mazes for centuries?”

  He looks at me like I’m a small child inquiring into grown-up matters. “Do you think you’ll be able to understand the explanation?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I say drily. “If you use itty-bitty words no bigger than two syllables, I just might.”

  His lips quirk. “I did give a presentation to a group of five-year-olds the other day.”

  “You’re a big jerk, you know that?”

  “I’ve been called ‘big’ by lots of other girls.” He lowers his voice silkily. “But I don’t think they were talking about my personality.”

  “Um, that’s gross.”

  He shrugs. “It’s the truth.”

  “Truth is relative. You should know. You’re in the business of manipulating other people’s truths.” The words slip out. I don’t know if he knows that a select few scientists used to torture kids by making them live through horrific memories. All I know is that it was a condition of the treaty that I never go public with it.

  He gives me a sharp look. “Do you want to hear the explanation or not?”

  “I’m nearly breathless with anticipation.”

  He shakes his head, but he’s also smiling. Just a little bit. Which—Fates help me—makes me smile.

  “I’ve always been fascinated by animal migration,” he says. “The monarch butterflies, for example, migrate twenty-five hundred miles to the same mountains, year after year, generation after generation. Even though each individual butterfly has never traveled there before. Scientists have offered a bunch of explanations—instincts, the magnetic pull of the Earth, the sun used as a compass. But what if it’s more than that?” He takes a breath, as if gearing up for his next sentences. “What if the butterflies are communicating with each other—across time? What if one generation is able to send a message to the next generation, telling them where to go?”

  The smile falls off my face, skitters down the ramp, and disappears into the hoverpark. Because this research he’s doing? It sounds an awful lot like future memory.

  “I injected my mice with a genetic modification that enhances their natural Sender-Receiver abilities,” he continues. “And then I run them through a maze, which they figure out through trial and error. Pretty soon, they’re memorizing the order of doors by their shapes and colors.”

  Sweat gathers at my hairline. The corridor with the green stripes and purple sofas flashes across my mind. The feeling of running, of being compelled to go down a certain path. Of being born to do it.

  “Green, purple. Purple, green,” I murmur.

  “What was that?” he asks.

  “Nothing.” I lift the damp hair off my neck and twist it into a ponytail. “Please go on.”

  “As I bred the mice, the Sender-Receiver abilities got stronger. Or at least, each generation of mice figured out the maze a little quicker than the one before it.” His words come faster now, as if they’re racing the maze alongside his mice. “Guess how many times it took the fifth-generation mice to figure out the maze?”

  “How many?”

  “One. Each mouse ran the maze correctly on the very first try.”

  I rock back on the bleachers. I was the Sender in my relationship with Callie, but I also have a small amount of Receiver abilities. We all do. When the mouse bit me, could my natural abilities have been enhanced? Could my dream of running down a corridor be some kind of message someone’s trying to send me?

  Despite the sweat, a chill runs up my spine. All of a sudden, I’m sure someone’s trying to communicate with me. Just like the mice.

  But who? And why?

  I can’t dwell on these questions for long, however. Because Tanner isn’t finished. “I have to believe the Sender parent mice are sending messages to their Receiver children. I have to believe this discovery is the first step toward the discovery of future memory.” He looks at me, his eyes bright with knowledge. “Your sister delayed the invention of future memory, Jessa. But she didn’t stop it.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say quickly.

  “Of course I do. Think about it. Future memory hasn’t disappeared from our world altogether, so we know that sometime, at some point, it will be invented once again. Besides, nobody can halt scientific innovation. One way or another, science will find a way. All the scientists in my wing are running similar experiments, with different formulas and different mice. Sooner or later, one of us will discover the link to future memory.” He straightens his spine and looks directly into my eyes. “And I will do everything in my power to make sure that it’s me.”

  7

  The next morning, I’m in the eating area of the Russells’ home, where I eat breakfast every morning. It looks like a baked goods café exploded in here.

  Every available surface is covered with cookies. Chocolate chip, almond lace, pinwheel, peanut butter. Sugar cookies and snickerdoodles, macaroons and pecan cookie balls. Angela pops the next tray into the Meal Assembler as soon as the previous one comes out.

  I snatch up a still-warm cookie and put it into my mouth. The sweet and bitter chocolate tingles my taste buds, and the gooey center explodes over my tongue. Molten magma cookie. Yum.

  This is what I need right now. Something to warm me from the inside out. Something to help me forget that somewhere out there, someone is sending me a message to compel me down a path I’ve never seen, toward a destination I’m not sure I want to find.

  Even now, sweat slicks over my skin, and my legs ache with the need to run. My nerves vibrate, faster and faster with each passing hour, getting more and more antsy, because I’m not moving, not acting, not galloping down a purple and green hallway.

  My body begs me to listen to this compulsion, but I can’t. I don’t even know where this hallway is.

  The Meal Assembler dings. Angela takes out a tray of madeleines and swaps it with a package of coconut snow. Her hair, arranged in a thousand braids, is pulled off her face in a low ponytail, and everything about her is smooth. From her creamy brown skin, to the gentle but capable hands, to the long, stretchy fabric wrapped over her shoulders and midsection, with the tiny face of a six-month-old peeping over the edge.

  “You think Remi’s old enough to eat a cookie?” I pick up a bunny-shaped treat and wave it in front of the baby’s face. “Why’d you make so many, anyway?”

  “It’s called nesting.” Angela looks at the piles of cookies and laughs wetly, like a saturated sponge about to overflow. “Although I suppose I’ve already had the baby.”

  I put down the cookie and whisper a finger over Remi’s face, marveling at the lashes that lay like thistles against her cheek. She turns toward my finger and tries to bite it. “And she’s wonderful.”

  “I know it. I’ve never been so happy in my life.” She bursts into tears.

  I pull my hand from Remi’s face. “Angela, what’s wrong?”

  The air leaves her mouth in quick, breathe-in-a-paper-bag puffs. “What am I doing? I don’t know how to take care of a baby. I have no idea how to keep her safe when she’s learning to crawl.” She presses the plastic wrap from the tray of cookies against her forehead. “I don’t know how to keep her alive.”

  With each word, her body gets a little stiffer. The paralysis spreads a little more. Who can blame her? The fear stems not from normal new-mother anxiety but from her future memory, the one that foretold that her baby girl would crawl off a cliff and fall to her death.

  It’s taken the better part of a decade for Mikey to convince her the memory doesn’t have to come true.

  I wrench her hand from her forehead, plaster wrap and all. “You can change your future. Remember yesterday. If my sister did it, so can you.”

  And so can I. I don’t have to fall in line wi
th whatever future is shown to me. I don’t have to become Dresden’s assistant.

  “Callie’s the only reason this baby exists.” Angela looks down at Remi, beyond smitten. Ready to sacrifice the world for a six-month-old. “Her courage showed me, showed so many of us, that we don’t have to live in constant fear of tomorrow.”

  “You’ll be fine. More than fine. You’re a wonderful mother, Angela. This baby is lucky to be born to you.”

  I should know. For the six years I was on the run with Harmony, she was the only person who tucked me into my pine-needle bed and kissed me good night. Since she and Mikey adopted Ryder, and Ryder and I were inseparable, she was like my mother, too. And now that I’m living in the little cottage behind their home, sometimes I can even pretend she is.

  She ruffles my hair. “I’m the lucky one. You and Ryder came to me fully formed. Six years old, the two of you, with so much goodness shining from your eyes I was slayed. I was fortunate enough to guide you a bit and love you a lot. That’s all.”

  I drop my head, resting it briefly next to Remi’s. She squirms, trying to twist free of the wrap, and holds her arms out to me.

  I grin. Other than Ryder and her parents, the only person Remi will let hold her—the only person Angela will let hold her—is me. It’s like a double seal of approval.

  “Can I play with her?” I ask Angela.

  “Well…” Even now, after I’ve held the baby dozens of times, Angela hesitates. “You have to make sure you don’t put her on the ground. Or let her play with any small trinkets or beads. Or put a blanket too near her mouth. Or jostle her too violently. Or—”

  “I’ve read the baby care manual along with you,” I say gently. “Twice. You know how careful I am with her.”

  She smiles. “Yes. I do know that.”

  She unwraps Remi from the fabric and hands her to me. I hold her straight above me, her dimpled thighs dangling in front of my face. She squeals and coos, clapping her hands as if to say, More! More!