FutureImperfect

by Stefan Petrucha

  A desparate act

  “Please!” the white-haired cop said. “Don’t do it. The negotiator will be here in just a second and she’ll know just what to say. Just wait a little while…please!”

  Harry looked out at the world, at the tops of the buildings, the little people down below, connected by so many things, disconnected by so few. Subject to disease and war, one hand reaching for the stars, the other slinking back to the darkest cave. And all this time, he’d thought it had somehow all made sense, that he could figure it out.

  But he was wrong.

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” he said to himself. “It doesn’t make any sense. Not one bit.”

  He turned to look at the cop. “I’m really sorry about this,” he said.

  The cop lunged forward to grab him, but Harry smiled, shrugged, and moved his feet over the ledge.

  Briefly, Harry felt weightless, just like he had so many years ago, trapped in his father’s arms at the top of an amusement-park ride. There’d be no parachute this time, though. His stomach lurched. Everything spun. He was expecting to fly, but he wasn’t flying. He was falling.

  It would all be over in seconds.

  The Time Tripper series

  BOOK 1: YESTERMORROW

  BOOK 2: INRAGE

  BOOK 3: BLINDSIGHTED

  BOOK 4: FUTUREIMPERFECT

  TIME TRIPPER

  BOOK FOUR: FUTUREIMPERFECT

  STEFAN PETRUCHA

  Time Tripper 4: FutureImperfect

  RAZORBILL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright 2007 © Stefan Petrucha

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-101-21794-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

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  Is it sublime that each moment of time

  If predestined, makes free will a sham?

  Or is life a feast where all manner of beast

  Can refuse their consent to the plan?

  Though the issue confounds every madman and clown

  I prefer to lose track of the rules.

  For even the Fates throw their thread to the wind

  When they capture the eye of a Fool.

  —SIARA WARNER, 10TH GRADE

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Harry

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  1.

  Hey, Harry, why don’t you kill yourself? Come on, it’ll be fun! Just do it!

  It was the Quirk-shard talking, the one that kept trying to get him to commit suicide. He’d gotten it in A-Time, the timeless state Harry could enter where past, present, and future existed side by side. Animal-like bundles of events, Quirks wandered the terrain trying to happen. While Harry had been fighting one, he’d gotten stuck with a claw. Ever since, it’d been trying to get him to jump off a tall building. Here in linear time, it appeared as that little voice in the back of his head.

  Harry Keller laughed, thinking that, at least here in Windfree Sanitarium, it could scream all it wanted with no results.

  Just the same way Harry screamed. All angst. No payoff.

  “Sorry,” Harry said to the voice. “Door’s bolted. Guard’s outside.”

  Damn, the Quirk-shard said.

  Other thoughts skittered around his head looking for places to hide, like cockroaches in the kitchen when the lights come on.

  Can’t get there from here.

  Hi, Harry, we’re the insides of your eyelids!

  Elijah isn’t real.

  I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding.

  Alligator, alligator, humpback whale.

  Slowly, Harry opened his eyes. They felt dry, painfully dry, like his throat. Thick eye-gunk clung to his lids and eyelashes. It was a side effect of the medication they kept plunging into him every few hours. They just came in, rolled him to the side, and jabbed the needle through a little canvas patch in the straitjacket that flipped open on his arm, like the butt-flap on a toddler’s pajamas.

  His hands were wrapped around his body by the jacket, so he couldn’t lift or clench them. All he could do, really, was sort of swish them up and down at the wrist, in a vague scratching motion. He moved his head. His neck hurt at the base of his skull. Another side effect, or had he just been in the same position for too long?

  What with all the meds they were giving him, being locked up and insane shouldn’t feel so bad. He should be docile. His hallucination and paranoia should be receding. Maybe they were. He wasn’t screaming anymore.

  Why haven’t the meds worked? Why can’t I calm down? Why am I still conscious, if you can call it that?

  Apparently even the expert tweaking of his seratonin and dopamine levels hadn’t extinguished the nagging sensation in the back of his mind that there was something terribly, terribly important he was supposed to be doing.

  Shutting off the lights in the loft? No.

  Finishing some homework? Nope.

  Turning off a burner on the stove? No.

  Saving Siara’s life and stopping the evil plans of her boyfriend, Jeremy Gronson, who was manipulating A-Time to cause death and general mayhem?

  Oh yeah. That was it.

  “Let me out! Let me out! He’ll kill you all!” Harry screeched.

  His throat ached from the effort, but apparently he wasn’t as tired as he thought. He strained, trying to pull himself to a standing position. When he couldn’t, he let himself slump against the wall and huffed a few times as if that might calm him.

  Harry blinked to try to loosen some of the gunk, then looked around—same old, same old: white padded walls, floor and ceiling. Everything looked like the surface of a bare mattress, complete with strange stains. Even the door had padding. It also had that little window toward the top—the one the interns and doctors solemnly peered through now and again to see if he was still alive, or if he’d died or turned into a newt or something.

  If I could just
shrink my body down to the right size, I could slip through that window…, Harry thought. Or better yet, if only I could just make the rest of the world larger…

  At least he was forming sentences. That was an improvement from when his aunt had visited. He remembered hearing her voice, angry in the hall. She kept shouting in that loud actress voice of hers, until finally the door clicked open and the stale air from the hall mixed with the equally stale air in the room.

  She came in, knelt beside him, pushed the hair out of his eyes, and pressed her palm flat against his forehead as if checking for a fever. He remembered how much her hand felt like a mother’s hand, maybe even his own mother’s, though he couldn’t remember her at all.

  Why shouldn’t it? They were sisters. There was something familiar in her face, maybe something he recognized from the photos his father kept in the old apartment. Insanity ran in the family. His aunt was never the most stable person either—but it was okay for an actress to be flighty.

  She’d looked at him, tears in her eyes, and said, “Why don’t you just pretend to be sane? Why not just pretend? It’s all anyone ever does, really. It’s all that sanity is.”

  Easy for her to say, but it was a game Harry had never learned to master.

  He tried to answer, to tell her he’d try, but all he could make was a gurgling sound. He couldn’t even talk, let alone pretend, and he certainly couldn’t explain how deep-down broken he felt. A busted hand you can explain—you can say, See? I can’t move my fingers so I can’t pick up that cup of coffee—and most people understand that.

  But a brain? How do you get that across? Sure, everyone has brain farts, where they forget a word or go off on some weird tangent for a bit, but how do you explain getting stuck on that weird tangent, getting lost and having no idea which way is home? It was like being trapped half asleep, stuck in neutral like it was cement, totally not sure which side had the dreams and which side the world.

  Aunt Shirley’s hand went away and she left. Slowly, the warm spot on his forehead where her palm had touched went cold. Soon it was as though she’d never been there at all. After they gave him his next shots, he was no longer sure if she’d been there at all or if he’d just imagined it.

  Imagined it. Yeah, like the girl he’d fallen so quickly in love with. Elijah, who did not exist, whom he’d kissed, who was just some part of himself. How lame was that?

  Maybe he’d imagined Siara and Jeremy, too—and Todd and the Quirks, the Glitch, the whole ball of wax. Maybe he’d imagined his father, his whole life. Maybe he’d imagined himself. It’d be kind of a relief at this point. But no, that nagging sense of danger wouldn’t let him go. It was worse than the voice of the Quirk-shard.

  I have to get out of here! I have to go save Siara! I have to save the world.

  Even if he could spell it out for his aunt or the doctors, they’d just double his meds

  …throw the door and lock away the key.

  He noticed something lying flat on the floor in the center of the room. It was rectangular, dirty green. He blinked and tried to get it into focus. As he managed to clear the last of the eye-gunk away, he saw what it was.

  A book.

  What the hell?

  There was a book lying on the floor in the center of his padded cell. Hardcover, no less. What would a book be doing there? Could his aunt have left it? No. He certainly didn’t remember her leaving anything, and the doctors had been in here at least once since she’d left. Was there some library here that delivered? Nah. Books couldn’t possibly be allowed in padded cells, could they? TV, maybe, but a book? That’d just be torture for someone in a straitjacket. Not as bad as leaving a backscratcher, but still.

  Harry stared at it. The muscles in his forehead ached as he furrowed his brow. At least it seemed to bring his attention back into the room, away from the beehive buzz in his brain. It was kind of like a toy. Something to play with. He twisted his head sideways trying to make some sense of it.

  Was it real? It looked real.

  Could it be any good? It looked like it might be a good book.

  No, it felt like it might be a good book.

  Can’t judge a book by its cover, or the world by the way you feel.

  Hm. That was almost coherent.

  Curious, but a little afraid, he put his feet out and pulled, so that his butt moved along the bumpy surface. His straitjacket, scraping along the floor, made a loud noise, so he cast a nervous glance at the door’s little window. If the book didn’t belong here and someone saw it, they might try to take it away.

  Slowing, he managed to inch closer more quietly. Soon he saw some letters on the cover, not just printed, but embossed in gold type. They formed just one word. Nothing on the spine, nothing else on the cover, just that one word—but he couldn’t quite make out what it was.

  He shimmied closer. A strange excitement got the better of him and he lost his balance and landed hard on his cheek. The cloth on the floor was like sandpaper, scraping as he rubbed against it.

  Rather than waste time trying to sit up, he gritted his teeth and bent and unbent at the waist, crawling like a human caterpillar. With a sigh of relief, he bumped his forehead against the book’s edge, then used his chin to spin it around.

  The word on the cover was clear now, inches from his eyes. It said:

  HARRY

  Well, that was interesting. Now there were two things in here named Harry, him and the book. He was vaguely aware that his thoughts seemed to calm down a bit as he stared at it, vaguely aware he wasn’t even quite thinking about Jeremy and Siara anymore. Were the drugs finally kicking in, or was it the book?

  Pff. The book. Right. Maybe it was a magic book with three wishes in it. More likely it was a gift from his aunt, a diary he could write down his crazy thoughts in.

  Or maybe not.

  He leaned forward and put his nose under the cover, planning to flip it open and have a look at the first page. As he did, he heard a familiar rattle at the door.

  Someone was coming in.

  Terrified the book would be found, Harry flopped forward, covering it with his chest. As the door opened, he turned his head sideways and saw the black shoes and white pants of one of the interns.

  “Now how’d you get yourself in that screwed-up position?”

  Harry recognized the voice. It was Jesus, one of the nicer interns. He actually used an alcohol swab to clean Harry’s arm before plunging the needle in. He wondered if Jesus sometimes looked in the mirror and said to himself, “What would I do?”

  But the only thing Harry knew about Jesus was that he sometimes got massive headaches and took ibuprofen five capsules at a time.

  “Time to sit up,” Jesus said.

  He started to pull Harry into a seated position.

  No! He’ll see the book, he’ll take it away!

  Harry was lifted like a doll and. The butt-flap on his arm opened. He felt the cool of the alcohol swab, the queasy prick of the needle.

  “There,” Jesus said. “Be easier if you’d take the pills.”

  But I don’t want to!

  It dawned on him he could have said so. The words were right there, on the tip of his tongue.

  Jesus seemed to sense it. He eyed Harry, and said, “Something you want to say?”

  But Harry chose not to answer. He just grunted, but this time it was on purpose. Jesus shrugged and left, sealing the door behind him.

  And he hadn’t taken the book. Hadn’t seemed to notice it. How could he miss it? It was green and square while everything else in the room was white and puffy, like a pillow.

  Was it really there?

  Harry wriggled close to it again and this time managed to flip it open with the tip of his foot.

  The first page was nearly as blank as the cover, but in the center were more words. He flopped down to read them. They said:

  HARRY, COME AND PLAY WITH ME.

  Harry reared. It felt like the book was talking to him, but that was crazy.

  At le
ast I’m dressed for it.

  He felt the drugs swarm in his system, shook his head to try to clear it.

  Why does this feel so familiar?

  Warmth traveled up his arm from the site of the injection. He felt the cacophony in his mind subside, a sensation that should have brought relief, but as he stared at those six black words on the pure white page, his heart beat faster until his chest felt like a balloon pumped too full of air.

  Not just any balloon. A clown balloon.

  That was it. The feeling was the same he had whenever that strange clown balloon appeared.

  He’d thought the image and the feeling were gone forever after he’d seen the clown statue at the amusement park, after he’d remembered it was just a childhood memory, warped and twisted by time.

  He looked around. The clown balloon wasn’t here, but the feeling increased a thousandfold, as if it were trying to break through some invisible wall in Harry’s soul, to take over his whole body, drive him out, make him the hallucination.

  Then again, maybe it was just the drugs kicking in.

  Harry looked back at the page. Full of trepidation, he spoke his first coherent sentence in days.

  “What if I don’t want to come and play with you?” Then, using his chin, he flipped to the next page, which read:

  YOU DON’T HAVE A CHOICE.

  Mystified, terrified, horrified, Harry kicked the book away. His face shook, his body shivered as he tried to get the image of the words out of his head.

  Take it away! Take it away!

  He fell, crawled, moving like a mad insect, trying to put as much distance between himself and the book as possible. He rubbed his face so quickly against the floor, his cheek bled, but he didn’t care. Finally, he managed to get his back against the far wall, then, panting and frightened, proceeded to try to press himself into it.