I stepped inside, avoiding eye contact, and searched the house. Portraits of landscapes covered the walls, and miniature statues decorated the halls. In one corner, a grand piano lingered in dusty silence. A cello leaned against the wall behind it. White carpet spread across the living room floor where two couches, one longer than the other, were put out. A television hung on the far wall, and empty water glasses sat on a coffee table in the middle of the room. Nothing was covered. The windows weren’t boarded up. The floors weren’t falling apart. Next to me, a staircase spiraled upstairs, showing no signs of damage. In fact, the house looked as if it were waiting for the family to return home from dinner.
The front door closed, and a gust of humid air pushed past me. I turned around to face a dazed Noah. He glanced around, seemingly lost in his memories, and his chest fell as he sighed, “Looks the same.”
His hand rose to the nearest light switch, but he didn’t pull it up. His hand dropped, but he didn’t have to explain. The electricity would bring too much attention. His neighbors might not turn him in, but someone driving by might. Noah wasn’t going to risk that.
I opened my mouth to speak, to say anything, but I bit my lip. For a minute, we stood there in silence, mourning something that I recognized as Noah’s reality. His family − his dead mother and brother − his missing sister − his directing father. I couldn’t imagine it, yet I was standing in the remnants of it.
Noah moved into the next room, disappearing around the corner to what I assumed to be a kitchen. I listened to his footsteps echo around the house, and I tried to imagine the living room full of people chatting, laughing, anything. Just alive. But they weren’t. The same people who had drank from the glasses on the table were dead.
“Are you coming or not?” Noah asked as he spun around the corner. He beamed beneath the floppy, white hat on his head.
I giggled, “I’m coming.”
…
Minutes passed like hours, and every room we searched proved to be a like the Traveler’s Bureau − full of paperwork, but nothing linked to Rinley.
The upstairs was as large and clean as the downstairs, and rich colors plastered the walls. Like a museum, paintings of foreign lands hung from golden frames. I wanted to study the hills of green and waves of blue, but I didn’t have the time. We had already been in Noah’s house too long, yet we weren’t done.
Noah tossed papers to the floor of the master bedroom. “It’s going to get dark soon.” He didn’t have to say what we were both thinking. The police could be waiting for nighttime to get us. They didn’t like to do their dirty work in the middle of daylight.
“That’s too much of a risk for Phelps.” I sucked in breath, trying to hide my concern. “We could’ve found the file by now and left.”
“It’s not here,” he said.
“It’s here.” I picked up his scattered papers and placed them on the desk.
Noah stretched to open a corner of the blinds. The purple mist of night melted in. “It’s getting dark,” he whispered, looking back at the room. It would be hard to see without electricity soon. He stood. “I’ll be right back.”
When he left the room, I tried to follow him, but he was too quick. The boy didn’t know the definition of walking. He ran everywhere he went.
I continued without him. I walked down the long hallway and opened the next door, only to linger in the doorway.
The bedroom was painted cobalt blue. School achievements hung on the walls, lined up from oldest to newest, and a twin bed was pushed against a window. Thin marks scaled the windowpane, showing how tall the resident had been while living in the bedroom over the years. One small desk was located at the edge of the bed, and a painting of the ocean was tacked into the wall above it. The sun rose over the waves that crashed into the rocks below, but it wasn’t a professional photograph. It looked like it had been printed at home.
I tiptoed the bedroom and surveyed the framed achievements. I couldn’t breathe. A picture of Noah in a graduation cap hung at the top. Topeka South Middle School explained the occasion, but his face told me his age. His cheeks were softer, and shadows didn’t cling to his eyes. His grin was wider. He had braces.
I walked over, wanting a closer look, but I was halted by another picture on his desk. In a silver frame, a small photo collected dust, but five faces managed to peek out. The woman with thick, black hair stood next to a fair-haired man, and three kids sat in front of them. All of them were smiling. Without hesitating, I picked it up, and the bumpy frame pushed against the palm of my hand.
“That was taken right before—” Noah’s voice faded. He was standing in the room, feet away from me, but I could only look at his siblings. Seeing Liam grinning, alive, was worse than seeing a bullet hole through his chest. It made the bullet real.
My words took over, “You look a lot like your father.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Where did you go?”
His breathing quieted. “I locked us inside with the security system my father set up.”
I looked up. “What?”
“We can get out, but no one can get in without breaking something,” he explained. “The security runs on saved electricity in case the power is cut,” he continued, “No one will know we’re here.” If they didn’t already.
“Oh.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I checked the tunnels,” he said. “They’re all sealed. I don’t know how, but they are.” His trusted neighbors might not have been as trustworthy as he originally thought. Either way, we were stuck, and we didn’t have time to worry about them now.
“So,” I tried to sound casual, “we’re staying here?”
“For the night,” Noah confirmed.
I spun my back to him as I placed his family portrait on his desk. “What’s this?” I asked, reaching out to grab a small trinket that resembled some sort of god, but my nervous hands didn’t hold onto it. It slipped through my grip and crashed to the floor. When it hit the air vent, it cracked in half.
I leapt back, squeaking as my hand shot to my mouth. Before I could move, Noah was across the room and picking up the pieces. His knee was on the ground as he stared at the broken pieces in his hands.
“I—I’m so sorry, Noah,” I managed, fighting back tears.
“It’s fine,” he muttered, pressing the pieces together. The wild-haired man held a sun in his fingers. It looked like the sun imprint on tomo. “It was just an old keepsake.”
His face was unreadable as he placed it on the desk, but he pointed to the picture above his desk. “That’s the only thing that matters to me anyway.”
I stared at the photograph. The edges were curling, but he laid his hand on it as he pulled out the tack. He stared at it before he spoke, “I took this.”
He was lying. He had to have been. The ocean wasn’t in the Topeka Region.
“I was in Raleigh,” he explained, folding it in half.
“But traveling is—”
“Not illegal,” he finished, “Just difficult.” He held out the paper to me. “I want you to have it.”
I didn’t move.
He shook it lightly. “Take it,” he coaxed, “Please. Just for now.”
“I—I can’t.”
He reached out with his free hand, grabbed my hand, and pushed the photograph into my grasp. “You can,” he said, stepping away. He leaned against his desk and watched me until I put it in my pocket.
“Don’t lose it,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“Good.” He was smiling, but his smile grew into a large grin when he glanced at his desk. He leapt up. “No way,” he breathed, picking up an envelope from his desk.
I held my breath as Noah ripped it open. His eyes skimmed over the material, and his hand dropped to the desk as if he were holding himself help. “I know where she is.”
Before I knew it, I had shot forward and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. “I told you it was here,” I exclaimed. When he
put his arm around me, I ducked away, laughing as I parted from him. His body heat lingered on my torso, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was focused on the words in front of him.
“Finally,” he whispered, “I can get her out of here.”
I forced a smile, knowing what it all meant. Noah had come here to get his little sister out. He wouldn’t stay in Topeka forever. I moved away from him. “We should get some sleep,” I noted. “Let’s set the living room up.”
His eyes followed my movements, but his excited expression faltered. “You’re right,” he agreed, running his hand through his hair. Blond strands stuck up. “Let’s go downstairs.”
A Dim Halo
A siren split the air, and I jumped out of sleep as if from a nightmare − except this nightmare was my reality. I blinked crazily until my eyes adjusted to the darkness in the living room. As if he had been waiting for trouble, Noah was crouched by the window, peering out of the split blinds. He was perfectly still, his chest barely moving, and his eyes moved from side to side, searching the blackness.
“What was that?” I whispered, pulling the thick comforter up to my neck.
Noah didn’t respond. His gaze focused on the outdoors, distant red and blue lights splattering against the shadowed street. After a moment of silence, he lowered himself to the ground and relaxed. “A cop pulled someone over.” His voice shook as badly as when Phelps had shown up at my father’s house. “But I don’t like how close they are.”
I buried myself in the blue comforter that had once been on Noah’s childhood bed. He had brought it to the living room earlier, setting up the long couch as a bed for me to sleep on. He had supposedly fallen asleep on the smaller couch, but the sheet he used as a blanket wasn’t wrinkled. Instead of sleeping, he had been keeping guard.
We waited like that for a moment, perfectly still, completely silent. I could hear my heart pounding, my breath quieting. I was tired of running, and my ankle still throbbed. Lyn had diagnosed it as a bad sprain. She had wrapped it, and some of the pain had gone away, but I knew I wouldn’t be fast enough to escape. I also knew Noah wouldn’t leave me behind.
“They’re gone,” Noah noted as the red lights disappeared into the night.
I sighed, and he did, too. He stood up and walked over to the couches to sit down. He leaned over, elbows on his knees, and rubbed his eyes.
“You okay?” he croaked.
I nodded, but I doubt he could see me. He had just stared directly into the lights. His vision would have to readjust. But I could see him perfectly, including his injured shoulder, and his disheveled appearance made me feel as if the cops were outside, waiting for us.
“You can go back to sleep, Sophie,” Noah said, staring at the carpet.
“Have you slept yet?”
“Go to sleep, Sophie.”
I grumbled but laid down, my head heavy from exhaustion. The emotional toll was enough to put me to sleep, but my anxiety was enough to keep me awake. “That couch is too small for you to sleep on, isn’t it?” I asked, knowing that the couch was the last reason for him avoiding sleep.
Noah didn’t say anything.
“We can switch couches,” I suggested.
“I’m not going to sleep.” He sounded annoyed.
I refused to close my eyes. Without giving him time to question it, I stood up, wrapped the blanket around my shoulders, and dragged it over to his couch. Plopping down next to him, our hips touched, and he tensed as I turned to him. “I’m not either.”
Noah glared, his eyes ablaze. “You need it.”
“I slept enough.”
Noah hung his head in his hands and threaded his fingers through his bangs. His watch was still on. “You are one stubborn person.”
“Look who’s talking,” I quipped.
He chuckled beneath his breath as he leaned against my arm. I didn’t move away. I gestured to his wrist instead. “You never take that watch off. None of you do,” I said, cursing myself for not looking at Pierson’s wrists.
“It keeps us connected,” Noah explained, his lips twisting into a frown. “Why do you always wear that necklace of yours?”
He knew it was my mother’s. He didn’t have to bring it up, but he did. “Can I see it again?” he asked, facing me from only an inch away.
His eyes locked with mine. His vision had adjusted to the dark. He could see me now. “Can I see it?” he repeated.
I pulled it out of my tank top mechanically. He reached up and cupped the silver heart in his palm. When he ran his thumb over it, the black thread brushed against the nape of my neck. I knew what he saw. The smooth meal only had one slit on the bottom, a thick scrape that indented ‘S’ for my name.
“She has one, too, you know,” he said, dropping it against my sternum. “It has an ‘E’ etched on it.”
“What do you know about her?” I asked, thinking of what Lyn had said.
“Not a lot,” he stuttered, but his eyes were entranced on the jewelry. Behind his gaze was a memory that I wanted to snatch from him. “You look like her,” he added.
I knew that, but I had only seen one picture. “Was she okay?”
Noah frowned. “We got along.”
His words didn’t register. “What does that mean?” I asked. I wanted to know what he was thinking. I always did. But he didn’t say a word. His blank expression remained unreadable, and he refused to look at me. He was lost in his own thoughts, just like he got lost when he took tomo. His silence weighed down on me.
“You were beautiful that night, Sophie,” he whispered, changing the subject so suddenly that my mind sputtered in disbelief.
“What night?”
“The dance,” he answered, turning back to me. The bags beneath his eyes were darker than I recalled. “You looked beautiful.”
My throat tightened, and I clutched my blanket, remembering the dance, recalling how he had danced with me moments before tossing me into the river. “Why are you telling me this now?” My voice strained against my esophagus.
He shrugged, only to wince from his shoulder wound. “I wanted to tell you then, right in that moment, when we were standing by the river—” I tried to imagine my curling hair matted to my face, my makeup smeared, twigs and mud coating my dress. “But I didn’t,” he added, quickly looking to the floor. “I don’t know why.”
I didn’t speak.
He rubbed his forehead as if to get rid of a migraine. “I hit my head on a rock, right?”
“You did,” I confirmed, wondering how he had forgotten. “You have the scar to prove that.”
Noah lifted his long fingers to his forehead and stopped at the slit. “I wasn’t supposed to hit it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were.”
My heart slammed into my lungs. “What?”
“I always thought the future that tomo showed was fate, that it couldn’t change,” he paused, “I have lived by that comfort for years, but—”
“But what, Noah?” I grabbed his arm, refusing to let him ignore me again. I grabbed his chin and forced him to look at me in the eyes. “What happened?”
He squinted, but he didn’t pull his face away. “When I pushed you in, you were fine in my visions, but it changed when you hit the water,” he explained, his tone wavering. “You hit it. Your head − it smashed into it − and you were unconscious. You drowned.” He stopped to wait for my reaction.
I was numb.
“You died.” His voice shook with anger or desperation or some other emotion that I couldn’t place. “I watched you die.” He grabbed my hand on his chin, and it was only then that I realized I was squeezing him. When he pried my fingers off of his jaw, he laid my hand in his. “And yet, here you are, sitting right next to me.” Because he had hit it instead of me. Lyn was wrong. He had saved my life – right before he almost took it.
He turned my hand over and stared at my small palm as his nails dragged over the lines. In that moment, he was the fortuneteller in the Albany Region, t
he one I had met as a child. I could feel her touch through his. When he didn’t speak, I could hear her words, “You’ll be fine, my dear.”
I pulled my hand away before it shook. His neck jerked back like I had slapped him – again. In a way, I had. I defied the science he lived his life by. His beliefs were proved falsified by my existence.
“I—I don’t know what to say,” I stuttered, closing my palm, unable to look.
“Do you think I do?” Noah’s laugh sounded like a mad man’s chuckle. “I’m not sure what it all means, what any of this means, except that tomo can be resisted, and I have to let my father know.”
My fingers twisted around his fingers, calloused but somehow soft. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
Noah tilted his face. “Tomo promised peace after this war,” he recalled the information everyone knew but didn’t talk about. “But if you defied it—”
Peace wasn’t guaranteed.
He didn’t have to say it out loud for me to understand. I grimaced. All of his suffering − everyone’s suffering − would be for nothing. The hope had died in the river I fell into.
“I thought tomo was up to interpretation,” I managed.
“It is,” he agreed, “but I’m pretty good at the interpreting part.”
He was an addict. He had learned through his addiction.
My curiosity consumed me. “How does it work, anyway?”
“Don’t ever take it.” His voice was hard, like he heard what I was thinking.
“I won’t,” I clarified. “I just want to know what we’re fighting for.”
We weren’t fighting for the drug, but the drug was the platform we stood upon.
“I only have two days left,” he said suddenly.
“You have a certain day you have to leave on?” I guessed. When he nodded, I dug my nails into his leg. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Because I didn’t know until—” he sighed. “Gigi told Miles when she saw him. She got the news through Pierson. I don’t know where he got it.”
Take Me Tomorrow Page 18
