Remember Yesterday

by Pintip Dunn

  “No.” I turn to my sister’s body, wrapping my fingers on the railing. “I’ve only just found her. I’m not going to lose her again. Besides, she looks good to me. Not weak at all.”

  She’s thin, but there’s warmth to her cheeks and a glow to her skin, no doubt due to the sunlamp slung over the monitors. If I didn’t know better, I could believe she was simply asleep.

  Tanner comes up behind me, the quick exhalation of his breath caressing my neck. “You’re right. She looks a lot better than she did yesterday. Maybe it’s due to your physical proximity.”

  I can’t breathe. It’s like the air has turned to lead, and I’m trying to suck it up with a straw. Is Tanner right? Is Callie stronger because I’m here? More importantly, would she be stronger still if we resumed our natural roles and I were to send her a memory?

  There’s only one way to find out. I haven’t exercised this muscle in years, but it’s not something you forget, no matter how hard you try. I should know.

  Hesitantly, I pick up her hand. It’s so narrow, so limp. But warm. Alive. I sift through my memories and choose one from earlier this year, when my mom and I made dinner on the anniversary of Callie’s supposed death. We hand-cooked a meal, even though neither of us has a fraction of her Manual Cooking talent. The eggplant Parmesan was too soggy, the chocolate cake too dense. Still, we lit a flame and remembered Callie until the candle burned down to a stub.

  I send this memory to her now, pouring it into the psychic threads that still connect us. Into the bond that won’t be severed, no matter how much time has passed. Even if I was led to believe that it was merely wishful thinking.

  I pour the memory into my hand connecting hers, my body touching her body, my heart intertwining with her heart.

  Come back to me, Callie. Oh please, come back.

  I hold my breath, waiting and searching for the click. The same click I used to feel years ago, whenever Callie opened a message from me. It’s like the memories I sent hovered in another dimension, waiting to be received. When she got the memory, the communication was complete. The universe clicked into place.

  Come on. Where are you, click? I count down the seconds. One, two…I know it’s here. It’s got to be…seven, eight…any moment now…eleven, twelve…Oh Fates, the click’s not coming. It didn’t work…

  And then I feel it. Click.

  She jerks once, twice. Static erupts from the monitors hooked up to her body. A beeping fills the room.

  My heart stops. It hangs in my chest, suspended, the beats superseded by the beep-beep-beep of the monitor. The noise surrounds me, swelling in my ears, filling the entire cavern of a room. Loud. Insistent. Accusing.

  Oh dear Fates. Did I just kill my sister?

  16

  Tanner pushes past me to the computer terminal. He holds up his hands, and a keyball jumps under his fingers. A few swipes later, and mercifully, the noise—the recriminations—stops. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” I swallow hard. “I sent her a memory. I thought it would strengthen our connection.” Acid climbs in my throat. “Did I…hurt her?”

  His fingers skim over the keyball, and holo-reports appear in the air, one after the other, covered with numbers and notations I don’t understand.

  He sucks in his breath and sweeps his hand in a wide arc, clearing the reports from the air. The documents pop up again, slower this time.

  I step closer to him. “Tanner? What do the reports say?”

  He turns to me, his eyes glazed. “Her vitals have entered the safe zone. Her heart rate, oxygen levels, blood pressure—none of her numbers have been this strong since the first year of her coma.” He puffs out a breath. “You haven’t hurt her, Jessa. Quite the opposite. I think you may have just saved her life.”

  I stare at him, not willing to talk, hardly daring to move, in case the moment falls apart like a dream.

  The security system sounds—short, staccato pings that pierce the air—and a broad figure strides into the room. Down the center column, and then along the final row toward us.

  It’s him. The scientist. The one who watched my chest move but didn’t turn me in. What was his name? Something with a P. Oh, yes. Preston.

  So that’s why he stared at me in the hallway for so long. He must’ve recognized my resemblance to my sister.

  “What’s going on?” He peers at Callie and takes Tanner’s place in front of the terminal. “Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of genius, Callahan? Our hope for the future? I can’t leave you alone for five minutes! What did you do to her?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Tanner says.

  Preston turns slowly, as if just realizing I’m here. “You.” His eyes widen and he takes a step backward, crashing into a machine. “How did you get in here?”

  “I let her in.” Tanner squares his shoulders, and I wait for him to tell this man, who is obviously his boss, that I bribed him, that I threatened him with a stun gun. Anything, really, to show he acted under coercion.

  “It’s not right she doesn’t know,” he continues, and I blink. What is he doing? “This is her sister, her twin. She believed Callie was dead all these years. That’s not okay. Tell Dresden if you want. Take away my lab and experiments. I don’t care. Jessa deserves to know the truth.”

  My heart beats funny, and my face feels hot. He’s taking the fall for me. But why?

  Preston looks from me to Tanner. The air shivers, just like the moment when he saw me breathing in the stretcher. The moment of indecision. Will he report us or let our transgression pass?

  The seconds tick by, and he makes no move to call Dresden. He doesn’t even seem interested in continuing to lecture. Instead, he stares at me as if I’m a creature dredged from a black hole.

  “Are you going to tell Dresden?” Tanner asks hesitantly.

  “I don’t see how it’s any of her business. My experiments, my responsibility.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief, but I can’t relax. Not yet.

  Preston’s eyes are still glued to me. I don’t think he’s even blinked. “How did you find this place? How did you know she was here?”

  There’s no reason to hide the truth. If he’s going to turn me in, he already has ample ammunition. “Callie sent me a vision. A maze that led me to this place.”

  Briefly, I explain how I was infected and developed the same abilities as the lab mice. I tell him how I found Callie and sent her a message, which made the machines start beeping.

  Preston blinks at me for several seconds. And then he lurches to the computer terminal. “This is amazing,” he mutters. “We were so wrong, so completely off base. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

  “See what?” I glance at Tanner. He shrugs, as if to say he doesn’t know, either.

  “Callie has been more or less stable for ten years,” Preston says. “And then last week, her condition worsened. Her vitals flirted at the edge of the red zone, and her brain waves became erratic, irregular. We didn’t know what it meant, but we assumed it couldn’t be anything good.”

  He drums his fingers against his cheek. “Now, it sounds like Callie’s memories have been firing all along, and when you became a Receiver, one of those memories found a home. Her brain started to wake up—that’s what accounts for the irregularity. Her body went haywire because it was searching, searching, searching for a hold, and it couldn’t find one. Here, take a look.”

  He presses some buttons on the keyball. Images of Callie’s brain appear in the air, pictures that must’ve been taken from the sensors on her scalp. Dots of lights in varying colors and brightness pulse in different lobes. He zooms out, and I see a vertical figure standing next to Callie’s horizontal body. Me. A string of light connects us, ropes upon ropes of overlapping braids, twisted together to form our bond.

  My mouth drops. Every doubt I’ve ever had of our psychic link evaporates. There it is, right in front of my eyes. A visual manifestation of our connection.

  “You see what I’m seei
ng?” he asks Tanner.

  Tanner’s breathing is shallow. “We never guessed it could happen this way. We thought the experiment failed.”

  “What experiment?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

  “Before now, Callie’s mind was tied to this time by a mere thread.” Preston wipes away the holograms. “She was connected with the present only because her body was in it. Over the years, as her mind zoomed off to different times, the thread became more and more frail. Then you came here.” His voice is full of awe and something else. Something that sounds very much like fear. “And her mind found something to latch onto.”

  My mouth goes dry. “What do you mean?”

  “You are her connection to this time. She’s twined her consciousness with yours, and the link between the two of you is stronger than the fragile bond she had with her body. By sending her that memory, you woke up her Receiver abilities, powers that have laid dormant inside her for a decade.”

  “I don’t understand.” My mind whirls, trying to piece it all together. “If I could become her link with the present, why didn’t you ask me to send her a memory years ago?”

  “Oh, believe me, we wanted to. But we had received reports, in no uncertain terms, that you had tried and failed.”

  It’s true. I remember sitting on a rock in the woods, feeling as lost as a balloon floating away in the sky. I had tried to send Callie a message, and there was nothing. No click. An emptiness that took my breath away, a blankness that stabbed me right in the chest. Because there was supposed to be something.

  I admitted, then, that Angela was right. The bond I thought I still felt was nothing more than wishful thinking.

  I continued believing that until just now.

  “You held her hand while sending the memory,” Tanner muses. “Maybe it’s the touching that made the difference.”

  “Of course.” Preston nods briskly. “Touching always amplifies the psychic connection between two people.”

  I swallow hard. “So now that Callie and I are reconnected, what’s next?”

  “You’ll send her a memory every day, and we’ll hope. Your bond will get stronger with every memory you send. Maybe someday, the bond will be strong enough that Callie will be able to follow the thread back to the present and wake up.”

  “What are we waiting for?” I blurt. “I’ll just send her a thousand messages right now.”

  “That’s the worst thing you could do,” Preston says. “A new psychic connection is like a newborn baby. It must be nurtured. You have to allow it to grow on its own terms. You can’t make a baby grow any faster by stuffing it with food, and by the same token, you risk endangering the bond by feeding it too much. At the same time, you have to nourish the connection daily.”

  He looks at Callie’s face and then lifts his eyes to mine. “I cannot impress this upon you enough. You are Callie’s only connection to this time. The only thread keeping her mind from flying into oblivion. You must come here every day. You must send her a new memory every day. Otherwise, the connection will wither and fade. And if that breaks, Callie will be gone from us forever.”

  I nod, my heart roaring in my ears. “Anything. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep Callie safe.”

  17

  I run toward the Harmony compound, my feet a blur underneath me. I feel like I’m flying, and I don’t even have my hoverboard. Callie, here and not dead. Vitals in the safe zone. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll wake up and come back to me someday.

  It’s just as likely she won’t.

  My heart contracts so abruptly it hurts. I can’t tell what I’m feeling anymore. Joy or sorrow. Anxiety or anticipation. I’m tiptoeing along the razor’s edge of hope; one wrong step in either direction and I’ll fall on the blade again. Only this time, it will be worse. Losing Callie once sliced my heart into ribbons. If I have to mourn her a second time? The ribbons will be fed through a meat grinder, and I don’t know if I’ll recognize what comes out the other side.

  I take a breath and let it out slowly. Let’s hope I won’t have to try.

  As I approach the compound, I see a lone figure sitting on the ten-foot wall, his long legs dangling against the stucco. The sky has turned purple with the dusk, and a spotlight shines on my best friend’s oversize feet, leaving the rest of him in shadows.

  I smile. Two years ago, Angela ordered the branches of the nearby trees trimmed, but that didn’t stop Ryder and me. Very little does.

  I break into a run, getting in four nice strides before I strike the wall waist-high with my foot and vault myself up. I grab the ledge with both hands, scrabbling my legs beneath me until I get a sneaker on the wall. From there, it’s a simple matter of hauling myself up.

  It took me six months to learn this trick. And I’m still pretty impressed with myself.

  “I think I’m ready to try a twelve-foot wall,” I pant.

  But Ryder doesn’t grin at me, and he doesn’t make fun of my form. I plop onto the wall facing him, my legs hanging on either side.

  “Where have you been?” He swings his leg around so that he’s facing me, too. The moonlight glints off his goggles, but he’s close enough that I can see the worry lines in his forehead.

  “You’ll never believe it,” I burst out. “It wasn’t Olivia sending me that message after all. It was my sister! She’s alive!”

  With run-together words, punctuated by gasps, I tell him the entire story. Ryder’s eyes widen, and he grips the wall as though he might be in danger of sliding off.

  “I remember her,” he says wonderingly. “When I was a kid. She came to Harmony and stayed with us. I didn’t know her well, but I thought she had a pretty smile. I can’t believe she’s still alive.”

  I kick my feet against the wall. “I can’t wait to tell everybody. They’re going to go crazy.”

  “Maybe Mikey will even forget to be mad.”

  My feet stop mid-swing. “Mad? Why is he mad?”

  “I’m sorry, Jessa. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if you were hurt or in danger.” He ducks his head. “I had to tell Mikey everything.”

  Aw, fike. We deliberately disobeyed him. He warned us, and we broke into the lower floors of TechRA anyway. Mikey’s not going to be happy.

  “He’s convinced you’re a bad influence on me,” Ryder says quietly. “I’m grounded from seeing or talking to you for the next month. This is to be our last communication. I’m under strict instructions to bring you to the house as soon as you show up. Your mom’s waiting there with Mikey and Angela.”

  I barely hear his last sentence. Not see or talk to my best friend for a month? I’ve never gone so long without Ryder’s friendship before. What am I going to do?

  All of a sudden, his wrist com flashes white and then red, bright alternating lights that can’t be ignored. I shield my face, while he lifts his wrist to shut down the alarm. “That must be Mikey now.”

  I check my own com unit. I turned it off when I climbed into the stretcher and forgot to switch it back on. The dial spins, counting off the messages with each rotation and emitting the corresponding light. Violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.

  My stomach sinks to my toes. Someone’s left me six messages, each with an escalating level of priority. From violet—“where are you?”—to red—“even if your country is under attack, hear me now.”

  “Which message should we listen to first?” I ask weakly.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Ryder squints at his com. “Same ID code. The security vids outside the compound must’ve gotten a picture of us.”

  He hits play, and Mikey’s voice fills the sky: “I can see you two on the wall. If Jessa isn’t here in the next two minutes, I will personally take apart both your hoverboards and send them on the next trash shipment to space.”

  I wince. “I guess he’s not a fan of our hoverboards?”

  Ryder sighs. He flips on the light on his wrist com and holds it under his chin. “Take a look at this handsome face, Jessa. There’s no t
elling when you’ll see it again.”

  The wave of Mikey’s anger almost knocks me over as soon as I enter the house. I wish Ryder were still with me. We always faced Mikey’s disappointment together, always received our punishments together, from the time we lived in the wilderness. Somehow, scaling fish by the bushel was easier when Ryder was by my side, making fun of my technique or flinging fish guts at me.

  But he’s not here. And he won’t be for the next month.

  “This is not a game.” Mikey slams his foot down as I approach, and a red and yellow splotch appears on the pressure-sensitive floor. Behind him, the tile shows blue and green footprints walking between the couch and the wall screen, where my mom and Angela are standing. “I made it clear you were no longer to snoop around TechRA, and you did what you wanted the first chance you got. I don’t know how else to get through to you.”

  “These agencies are doing things they don’t want the public to know about.” Angela bounces Remi in her arms. “It’s not safe.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing.” Both my mother’s voice and expression are pinched. “You’re going to mess everything up.” Just like always, I could’ve added for her.

  The voices come at me from every direction, the concern and anger and disappointment blending together, and I let their words wash over me. In a moment, everyone’s world will tilt off its axis. All because of a girl who used to be at the center of all our lives. And then wasn’t.

  “I saw Callie,” I blurt out. “She’s not dead like we thought. She’s in a coma—she’s been in a coma these last ten years—and she’s being kept in one of the basement levels of TechRA.”

  It is so quiet you could hear a bot reboot. My mother turns pale, the color of a chicken before it goes into the Meal Assembler. Her hand moves to her throat, kneading and squeezing, as if she can massage out the words that are stuck there.

  My insides twist. “She’s back, Mom. Actually, she never left us. She’s been here all along. She might…come back to us still.”