Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

the forbidden fruit

  The cost is always eternity—

  And a very long fall

  Orchard

  October

  This time I materialize in the girl’s bathroom, on my way out of the stall. I nearly collapse on the tile floor before I restore my bearings.

  Judging from my watch, I must have excused myself from world history. (Why does it always have to be Mr. Slattery’s class?) This time I don’t bother to return to his classroom to rip him a new one. I don’t do anything to draw attention to myself. I bottle up my caustic hatred and walk right past his door.

  The entire walk down the deserted hallway, I keep waiting for Wyatt to spring out and ambush me. He never does. Looking for comfort, I run my fingers along the cool brick walls. I realize that this may potentially be the last time I set foot on the Daedalus campus.

  If I fail tonight, these halls could be empty for a lot longer than fourth period.

  Troy’s keys are in the glove compartment and the doors are unlocked, a practice he’ll soon abandon. Just next week, Slade will sneak into the truck and cover the windows with pink tissue paper, then park it in the headmaster’s spot. From then on, Troy will always lock the doors.

  For now, the truck is mine for the taking. I shoot Troy a text saying that it’s an emergency and I need it. A minute later, my phone vibrates as he leaves class. I power it off by the third ring, telling myself it’s just in case Wyatt is tracking my phone, but the truth is it gets harder to walk away from Troy every time.

  I start the engine and zip out of the parking lot because I know that if Troy is calling, he’s already on his way to find me. I’m crunched for time as it is. It’s almost noon now, and Harvestfest begins at sundown.

  That means I have five hours to drive to a college campus and steal some frogs.

  The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, or UMass, is one of the largest universities in New England. It’s where my father taught animal biology.

  Six months after he passed, I’d visited UMass with my biology class for the “Pick Your Poison” exhibit his former department was hosting. If I hadn’t spent the whole field trip depressed, the animals in the cages would have made my skin crawl. Terrariums infested with scorpions and spiders. An aquarium with a blue-ringed octopus that must have died the morning we visited, because no one had fished it out yet.

  Only now, when I drive to campus and enter the veterinary building, the exhibit is gone. It must have been dismantled recently, because the field trip would have only taken place a few weeks prior. I can even see a mildew spot they haven’t repainted where aquarium moisture must have soaked into the wall. I can only hope the specimens were relocated to the labs nearby, and not sent on the road to another university.

  I rub my chin pensively. If I were an exotic deadly frog, where the hell would I be?

  Toward the end of the long foyer, I spy a golden plaque fixed beside a pair of laboratory doors:

  LAKE LABS

  In Memory of Walter Lake

  Beloved Colleague and Ornithologist

  1965 – 2016

  Wherever you are, may you

  soar higher than an Anser Indicus

  There’s an etching of a goose next to the final words. I trace my fingers over the engraving and whisper, “Hope this a sign that I’m on the right track, Dad.”

  I cautiously enter Lake Labs, hoping I’m not barging in during some sort of class dissection. Fortunately, the lab is empty except for the sterile smell of disinfectant and formaldehyde. Toward the rear, I encounter an even more pungent “pet store” odor wafting from under a thick swinging door.

  Inside, I know I must be in the right place. Among the cages lining the walls, I recognize several specimens from the poisonous animal exhibit, including a pair of orange-plumed birds from New Guinea and a venomous jellyfish softly pulsating in its aquarium.

  I hear the door behind me squeak too late, and spin around, expecting to find Wyatt with a gun pointed at my face. But it’s just a young guy with a bleached Mohawk and a white lab coat that has the name Ari stitched into the breast. He stands frozen in the doorway with a clipboard clutched in one hand, and seems as surprised to find me here as I am to see him. At first I’m afraid that maybe he was one of my father’s students, that he somehow recognizes me.

  The door bumps him from behind as it closes, and that brings him back to earth. “What’s the matter,” he asks, “you lose the rest of your campus tour? Or are you a new specimen that escaped from its cage.” He laughs at his own joke.

  No recognition on his part—that’s a relief. I assume my best frantic damsel-in-distress expression. “I was supposed to write a report on the poisonous animal exhibit that was here, but I blew it off and missed my deadline. Now I can’t find my notes, and my teacher’s going to fail me, and …” I cover my face melodramatically and pretend that I’m about to burst into tears. I never was much of an actress, or a liar for that matter, but certain skills come to you only when they’re most needed.

  “Whoa, cleanup on Aisle 5,” Ari says. “No need to have a meltdown. What’s your name?”

  I lower my hands from my face. In my panic, I blurt out the first name that pops into my head. “I’m Marcie Graham.”

  He glances out through the door’s porthole window and taps his pen on the top of the clipboard. “Well, Marcie, I’ll look the other way and not tell my lab supervisor, as long as you promise that you’re not here to kidnap the scorpions.”

  I laugh darkly and hold up three fingers. “Scout’s honor—not the scorpions.”

  I wander over to the corner, where a splash of yellow has caught my eye. It’s a terrarium with a rock and a fake gnarled branch for its inhabitants to climb. My gaze falls on the two frogs inside, with skin the color of lemon rinds.

  “Phyllobates Terribilis,” Ari recites their Latin name, coming up behind me. “The golden dart frog, freshly imported from Colombia. Hard to believe these little bastards are the most poisonous creatures on earth.”

  I kneel down so that I’m eye level with the terrarium. In addition to the vivid yellow of their skin, they have these creepy protruding black eyes. One is climbing up the branch, but the other sits on a rock, staring, watching me. Like he knows what I plan to do. I shudder. “I’d hate to be the one who has to feed them.”

  “I usually just open the top and fling in a handful of crickets.” Ari bends down next to me and taps the glass. “There’s enough poison in their skin to kill a room full of humans. Even brief contact with them can be fatal.”

  Good. I’m counting on it. Because if Osiris and I are both dislodged from the timeline the same way, then his body should remain the same between time jumps like mine.

  That means his wounds will travel with him as well.

  My one-on-one skirmishes with Osiris in both the tree house and the candle factory taught me at least this much: if I try to attack him head-on and kill him by conventional means, he can always retreat back in time before I deliver the killing blow. But the toxins from the dart frog affect the nervous system, so even if he managed to jump back in time, the poison would theoretically travel with him, killing him wherever he goes. The brilliance of my plan, however, lies in how I intend to infect him with the poison without him ever knowing.

  Before I participate in grand theft amphibian, I need something else first. I caress Ari’s elbow. “Frogs and birds are great and all, but tell me, Ari …” I let my eyes flash with mock interest. “Do you ever deal with any larger animals?”

  “Well, we get a lot of hands-on time with horses when we’re studying equine science.” He stops, and I see him boyishly panic when he realizes how lame that sounded. “But,” he continues feverishly, “when the circus came into the Amherst area a few months ago, we got a chance to work on-site with lions, bears, and elephants.”

  “Oh my!” My grip on his arm tightens. “Sounds dangerous.”

  He winks at me. “Dangerous for the lions, maybe.”

  Oh, brother. Now h
e’s creepily flirting with me and he’s not taking the hint. Looks like I’m going to have to grab the lab tech by the horns. “Do they give you anything to protect yourself in case the animals get out of hand? Like a …” He’s still not getting it, so I’ll have to lay all my cards on the table. “Like tranquilizers or something?”

  “Oh hell yeah,” he says. He leads me away from the frog terrarium to a cabinet next to the mice cages. Using a key on the lanyard around his neck, he unlocks the door. Sitting on a shelf near the top, next to a box of darts, is a tranquilizer gun in a leather holster.

  Ari draws the gun and holds it up in his best James Bond pose. “Closest you’ll ever come to being on safari in Western Massachusetts.”

  I snatch it from his hands. “Hey, be careful with that,” he squeaks, reaching for it.

  I take a casual step away and hold it up to the light. I can see the dart already in the chamber, and find the safety on the side. “This is awesome. You ever use one of these?”

  He shuffles nervously. “Not yet. But every once in a while we get a horse in here that’s not too thrilled to be examined. One day that gun might be all that stands between me and a bronco kicking me in the face.”

  “This sedative in the dart,” I say. “It will take down just about any animal?”

  “Yep,” Ari replies. “More than enough etorphine in there to knock even a human out for at least a few hours.”

  “Perfect,” I say.

  Then I shoot him in the arm.

  After the whisper of the gas-propelled dart sticking into Ari’s flesh, there’s an awkward silence where his eyes widen in disbelief and his gaze travels back and forth between the dart in his arm, the gun in my hand, and my face. He staggers forward to make a grab for the gun, but his legs buckle beneath him. I’m grateful that Ari doesn’t have much meat on his body, because it’s easy to catch him as he goes down. Unfortunately, that means the sedative will hit him much harder. “I am so sorry I had to do that,” I apologize as I carefully lay him out on the ground. “I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t an emergency. The good news: as a future vet, it’s your job to count sheep every once in a while.” Before I can even finish the joke, Ari completely loses consciousness. A thin line of drool rolls out of the corner of his mouth.

  I prop up Ari under the mice cages and make sure that he’s breathing okay, then relieve him of his lab coat and slip it on. I drop the tranquilizer gun and its holster into one pocket and then empty the box of spare darts into the other. There are six of them, but for what I need to do tonight, it should only take one.

  Just one.

  I find a white cloth and drape it over the frog terrarium. It’s heavier than I expected. If I drop the glass on my way out, all it will take is a second of contact with the frogs for me to die. And no amount of time-traveling or trips to Patchwork will bring me back.

  Fortunately I reach the truck without incident and without bumping into any of my dad’s old students. The entire time I’m driving, it’s a struggle to keep my eyes on the road in front of me, because they keep flickering between the terrarium, as I pray the frogs don’t somehow pull off a jailbreak, and the rear-view mirror, where I expect to be chased by cops.

  Or Osiris.

  When I reach the bed and breakfast, Mom’s car is gone, which is a relief since it will be hard enough to explain why I’m home again, let alone why I’ve brought home two new exotic pets.

  Down in the basement, on my father’s old workbench, I set up shop. First I empty one of the tranquilizer darts, draining its sedative onto the floor. Then it’s time for the really dangerous part:

  Harvesting the poison.

  Two years ago, when I was still in public school, I had a panic attack in shop class because I had to use a power saw for the first time. The scream of the saw and the awful feeling of release as I fed the piece of wood into the blade rattled me so bad that tears had collected in the bottom of my safety glasses before I was done.

  The fear I feel right now is a thousand times more intense.

  I wrap the lab coat around the bottom part of my face and wear the thickest gloves I can find, hazardous materials ones that go all the way up to my elbows. Then, with a cotton pad on the end of a long wooden dowel, I start to swab poison off the frogs. It’s far from a scientific process. They croak and try to escape, and I know that I’m hurting them. But it’s hard to offer consolation to the frogs that if I survive today, if I go back another month in time, they will be as healthy and poisonous as always. Hell, I might even go back to before they were taken into captivity. Then they can hop free through their rainforest and make a thousand poisonous babies.

  I hold the dart up to the dirty bare light bulb over the lab bench. The metal syringe tip glints at me, and all I can think is:

  This better work.

  When I’m done transferring the poison from the swab to my weapon, I slip the dart carefully into the chamber, then slide the gun back into its holster. One wrong move while I’m out there today, and it could be me dying.

  I have two last preparations that I need to do before I leave the house. First, I grab one of the epinephrine pens that mom keeps in the dining room in case one of her guests has a food allergy. Then I head upstairs to my mother’s bathroom. She stopped dying her hair after Dad died, but she still has an unused bottle inside the mirror cabinet, from back when she rocked a darker shade.

  After the dye and rinse is done, and I’ve taken six inches off, I hardly recognize myself in the mirror.

  Wyatt will be looking for a blonde tonight, not the raven-haired girl staring back at me.

  Somehow, despite all that’s happened, a sardonic smile spreads across my face. Blondes may have more fun …

  … But brunettes can be deadly.

  I park Troy’s truck back at Daedalus, and walk the half a mile to Honey Pot Farms. Such an unassuming name for an apple orchard where things are about to get real ugly.

  The wooden archway with the orchard’s name, complete with the two apple trees to either side, used to seem so inviting when we came here for field trips in middle school. Now the hand-carved letters and the invasion of moss growing up the sides feel like dark omens warding me away.

  I pull the baggy Daedalus hoodie down to make sure it covers the holster slung over my jeans. There’s no turning back now. I take a step inside.

  The Harvestfest is being held out in the center of the orchard, where the land dips into a valley. Freshman year of high school, my public school friends called this place “the Crater.” We would sneak out here on cool fall nights exactly like this one, with whatever contraband we could find—cheap wine that would barely get us buzzed, fireworks, a box of cigars once. It was stupid and childish, but this was our bubble of space. The cover of the apple trees made our antics invisible to the road.

  As I crest the hill, I see that Harvestfest is already underway down in the Crater. Music pulses through the trees from speakers spread around the hillside. Most of the students are clumped around the large boulder in the Crater’s center. Here and there, in the privacy of the trees, I spot a few couples going at it. Not far from them, I see an electric lantern, and attached to it, Mr. Slattery, professional chaperone. The thought of him coming across students having a “good time” makes me sick, but I move on before he spots me.

  As I approach the gathering below, people pay me no heed, because most of them have gone silent and trained their attention on the boulder. The co-chairs of the student government are setting up a large red paper lantern. I remember signing that lantern, too. One of our classmates, Lucia, passed away in a car accident a few weeks earlier. The red lantern has a message written to her from each Daedalus student, wherever she is now.

  As we all watch, the co-chairs light a fire in the base of the lantern, and it takes flight. It ignites a fire in me, too, seeing the letter to the heavens drift upward, carried by the wind toward the sunset. Harvestfest this year was supposed to have a special meaning, celebrating a life cut too short, but
also celebrating the fact that we’re all still here. That we all have so much life left to live.

  Osiris—Wyatt—wants to cut that short.

  I let my rage be my focusing lens. I scan the crowd around me searching for him. After the lantern vanishes over the hilltop, the students gradually begin to speak again as though it were the weight of Lucia’s death being lifted off us all.

  I can’t spot Wyatt anywhere, not that I expected him to be lurking in plain sight. But I can feel him. When I close my eyes for a second, and let the sounds of the Harvestfest wilt away, I feel this electric hum, this magnetism. Maybe it’s just a gut feeling that he’s here. But Osiris and I are the only two beings on earth that can bend time to our will, and in that, I wonder if we’re somehow intertwined. Maybe this strange connection is how Osiris has tracked down the other phoenixes all these centuries.

  Still, there’s nothing refined about this gravitational pull I’m feeling. It’s merely a tingling sensation that he’s nearby, so for now, I have to rely on my eyes, which are so far failing me. In fact, I’m having trouble spotting anyone from my inner circle—Troy, Ivy, Slade …

  I power on my phone for the first time since I borrowed Troy’s truck, and my stomach flips.

  Just the one missed call Troy left as I was powering it down. Nothing else—no voicemails, no text messages. Troy is a worrier. So why did he try my phone only once?

  Through the crowd I finally spot Ivy talking to some guys on the football team who are always hitting on her, fascinated by her alternativeness. I’m happy to see her alive, but it’s safer for both of us if she doesn’t know I’m here. The moment she comes up and talks to me, I’m no longer incognito, and I need to find Wyatt before he finds me.

  Distraction comes in the form of flickering police lights at the top of the hill. Mr. Slattery leads two uniformed officers down into the masses. Everyone falls silent again.

  Then, after scanning the crowd, Mr. Slattery points in my direction. I hold still. No, no, no! I scream silently.