CHAPTER THREE
DAY 10. LATE AFTERNOON
“Doing okay so far?” Courtney asked, holding a hand out as if preparing for me to topple over any second.
“I’m not hooked up to needles and tubes, I can go to the bathroom on my own, I’ve showered, and I’m wearing normal clothes, preparing to see actual daylight for the first time in nearly two weeks.” I smiled at her. “So yeah, I’m doing better than okay.”
Sunlight hit me right between the eyes as we stepped outside. The muggy air hung with dust but I took a deep breath anyway, filling my lungs.
Emily’s face lit up when she saw me and Courtney. She kicked up dirt and grass running over to us. Her cheeks looked rounder and more colorful than they had the night Kendrick and I found her wandering around Central Park, starving and lost. Lily Kendrick. My Tempset partner. I wonder if she’s okay?
Emily was still scrawny as hell but no longer to the point of being sickly.
I took a minute to look around while Emily grasped my hand, tugging it gently toward a fire pit a hundred feet away. A small brick building sat behind the pit and several wooden cabins and tents were scattered around the grassy area. In the distance the grass was much taller, or maybe it was weeds, and there was also a small lake with bluish green water.
That must be the source of the fish they’ve been feeding me for the past four days. Blake—the guy with the ponytail, someone I hadn’t seen since collapsing and nearly dying ten days ago—stood on the far side of the big fire pit, swinging an ax, splitting wood in half.
No wonder they called this place Misfit Island. It was like a weird, forced-camping experience.
Just as I was contemplating walking over to say hi, Blake suddenly dropped his ax and looked up, his face filled with alarm. “Get away from each other!”
Both Courtney and Emily stayed at my side, frozen and confused. Blake ran toward us, grabbing Courtney’s arm and pulling her away.
“What the hell—” I started to say and then I smelled it. The sense of smell is supposed to leave the longest-lasting impressions. And I remembered this. Too well. The metallic scent filled my nostrils and I did exactly what Blake had said. I hauled ass away from Emily and Courtney, and the abrupt movement caused pain to shoot through nearly every inch of my body. I might have been better, but I wasn’t completely healed yet.
Suddenly, Adam Silverman lay at my feet. I stopped, completely frozen. “Adam, what are you doing here?”
His face and leg were covered in blood and he wasn’t moving. His eyes stared up at me, questions … too many questions in them. Questions I couldn’t answer. I dropped to the ground, panic setting in, causing me to lose sight of reality, which wasn’t this at all. I pressed my fingers to his leg, applying pressure to the wound that I’d seen once before. “Adam, you’re okay! There’s a doctor here. It’s okay.”
I shook him hard, trying to get him to wake up. I’ve seen this before … I’ve been here before. What is this?
Memory gas.
I blinked my eyes several times and focused on the object in front of me. It wasn’t Adam. Somewhere in my mind I knew it wasn’t Adam. I pulled my shirt over my nose and held my breath, squeezing my eyes shut.
When I opened them again, a giant log sat in front of me. My hands were scraped and bloody, splinters covering both my palms. My heart began to slow down and I breathed normally, testing the air. The metallic smell was gone. I hadn’t almost murdered someone this time thinking he was Thomas, like I did during training, when Chief Marshall tested the gas out on several of us unsuspecting trainees.
Chief Marshall.
I ground my teeth together at the thought of his shooting Healy and the other version of me. When I had told Dad and Grayson about it in more detail a couple days ago, they both concluded that I had probably done a half-jump, despite the invisible force field over us preventing time travel. Of course, being able to do a half-jump did absolutely no good considering my body was still here and we were no closer to escaping from the year 3200. But the half-jump did provide an important piece of information: Chief Marshall was a bad guy.
Very bad.
A high-pitched scream brought me back to reality. I stood up and saw Courtney covering her face, screaming at the top of her lungs. Dad came barreling out the door of a nearby cabin, racing toward her.
Emily was closest to me, and I reached her before anyone else. She was huddled in the grass, knees pulled to her chest, crying quietly. I picked her up, feeling a pull in my chest where the long scar was still working hard to hold my skin together, and let her bury her face in my shoulder while I carried her toward Courtney.
Dad shook Courtney’s shoulders a little, then tried to pry her hands from her face. “It’s not real, honey. It’s just an illusion. You’re okay.”
Her hands visibly shook but she dropped them to her sides. Her face had gone completely pale. In fact, she looked a little green, like she might spew any minute. She sank to the ground and Dad sat beside her. “Put your head between your knees, it helps.” He looked up at me and Emily. “You okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” I said, glancing around.
Mason pulled himself off the grass, his face colorless.
Emily sniffled a few more times, then lifted her head. “I’m okay.”
I set her down on the ground and counted heads. Blake and Grayson stood near each other, appearing less shaken than the rest of us. I could see Lonnie and Sasha, the dark-skinned girl with the almond-shaped eyes, down by the lake.
“Where’s Holly?” I asked no one in particular.
“I think she was sleeping in one of the cabins,” Courtney said between shaky breaths.
I headed for the closest cabin and had to check three more before spotting blond hair and white tennis shoes huddled in the far corner.
“Holly? You okay?” I walked slowly toward her still figure. Too still. I squatted on the floor beside her and barely rested a hand on her back.
“Don’t touch me!”
Startled, I fell back onto my hands and scurried away, putting a few feet between us. “Holly, it’s okay. It wasn’t real, it’s this stuff—”
“Don’t touch me!” she repeated, shouting into her knees. Then she lifted her head and I was surprised that her cheeks were dry, no sign of tears. Her eyes were hard and cold when they zoomed in on me.
Was she seeing me or an illusion of someone else? And if so, who?
“Okay … I’m not going to touch you.” I moved back a couple more feet and held up my hands. “It’s me … Jackson.”
“I know who you are, a*shole,” she snapped. “I know it’s not real. Just leave me alone. Go help someone who actually needs it.”
Stung by her words, I scrambled to my feet, slightly dizzy from all this movement after ten days of being in bed, and left her alone. When I went outside again, everyone was sitting around the fire pit. Blake tossed some logs into the hole and followed them with a flaming match.
I couldn’t fathom why we needed a fire in this heat and humidity. And it was more than strange to see them gathered together like it was story-and-song time.
Mason caught my eye and gave me a smile that was more like a grimace. “Just like old times, huh, Agent Meyer?”
I let out a breath. “At least this time I only injured my hands and not another person.”
That’s when I remembered Blake, yelling at us to get away from each other. I turned my eyes to him. “Has this happened before? Where’s it coming from?”
“We’re not sure how it’s released into the air.” He laughed darkly. “And yes, it’s happened many times. First time since you guys arrived, though.”
Grayson stood up from his spot next to Blake. “Blake, Lonnie, Sasha, and I have a tradition after each memory-gas episode. We sit out here and tell each other what hallucination manifested from our minds. We’ve done this twelve times, and it seems to reduce the intensity of the next episode.”
“I have a theory,” Blake said. “I think when you talk about the hallucinations out loud, it moves the memory it is based on from the subconscious to a different part of the brain. Somewhere the gas can’t reach.”
A door swung open and Holly emerged from the cabin she’d been holed up in. She breezed past me and took a seat next to Mason. Her face was calm and collected. As if she hadn’t just screamed at me and called me an a*shole.
“I’ll go first,” Sasha said. “On one of my trips to Eyewall headquarters, I got attacked by the faceless men. One of them had a razor blade to my throat, my legs pinned to the ground.”
Courtney pressed her hands over Emily’s ears and I moved closer to the fire, sitting down beside them.
“I didn’t know if they were going to kill me,” Sasha croaked, choking on her words a bit. “Somehow I managed to get away, but it was the closest I’ve been to death.”
Grayson spoke next. “My first delivery in 1985, I hadn’t studied childbirth enough in that year, it was stupid for me to think I could handle it. Probably the biggest regret of my life.” He cleared his throat, regaining composure. “Anyway, the shoulder got caught on the pelvic bone and the cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. I should have caught it earlier. We got her into the OR but the baby had been without oxygen for too long to not suffer a great deal of brain damage.”
Everyone was silent for ten long seconds and then Blake spoke up. “I watched someone kill a good friend’s mother, father, and younger brother. I just watched and I couldn’t stop it.”
Lonnie told a story about her mother dying, and Mason’s memory was of getting caught and interrogated by several Iraqi soldiers when we were doing training in the Middle East. I remembered the area he was talking about, but it must have been a mission with his Tempest specialty group. Something I didn’t have the privilege to know. Dad didn’t look too surprised so I assumed he probably wasn’t hearing about this for the first time.
When it was Courtney’s turn, she laughed and her face flushed. “I can’t tell you mine. It’s going to sound so frivolous after all these horrible stories.”
Mason rolled his eyes. “No it won’t. Just tell us.”
“All right.” Courtney smiled a little, then glanced sideways at me. “I watched my brother fall out of a tree and break his arm when we were six.”
I started laughing, too, realizing that Courtney, at this point in her life, had had it pretty easy. Dad was grinning too and he lifted his hand to indicate his turn. “That was actually mine, too. Same memory.”
Grayson’s eyebrows lifted and I looked at Dad and then back at Grayson, who had probably done this with him already in the four weeks that Dad was stuck here with him before we arrived. I seriously doubted that my broken arm was at the top of Dad’s horrible-events list. His list was probably worse than anyone else’s here. There was Courtney’s death, Eileen’s, probably several close calls with me that I didn’t even know about.
I spoke quickly, interrupting everyone’s train of thought before they had a chance to figure out that Dad was lying. “I saw my dad smoking a cigarette in 1953.”
Everyone laughed and Mason threw a twig in Dad’s direction. “Don’t you know smoking can kill you, Agent Meyer?”
“A slow death spread over the course of fifty years,” Dad said. “Sounds nice, actually.”
“My turn,” Emily said. “My chicken died.”
Courtney squeezed her around the shoulders. “I lost a hamster when I was your age. Dad tried to switch him for another one but I could tell the difference.”
I scratched the back of my head, diverting my eyes from Courtney’s. Dad coughed loudly as if telling me to come clean. “Actually, he didn’t die. Not right away…”
I felt Courtney’s eyes burning a hole in the side of my face. “Jackson!”
“He seemed really unhappy locked up in that cage. I thought he might want to go outside. He was on the balcony, totally fine. I didn’t know he would walk right off the ledge. I think he had brain damage even before he fell. Not the smartest hamster in the litter.”
Mason snorted back a laugh, but Courtney’s glare stayed on me. “I can’t believe you did that!”
“It was an accident,” Dad said, holding back his own laughter, although when we were eight, I had gotten seriously chewed out by Dad for that event.
“Yeah right,” Courtney said, snapping her head in Dad’s direction. “He accidentally opened the cage, removed Jell-O, walked him to the balcony, put him down, then watched him waddle to his death? Explain how that works, Dad?”
“Your hamster’s name was Jell-O?” Mason asked. “Why?”
Grayson clapped his hands together, interrupting the family feud. “Holly, you’re up next.”
Everyone looked at her and her light blue eyes widened as she sat up straighter. The fear only lasted for a split second before her face became totally unreadable. “It’s too hot to sit by this fire any longer.” She brushed off her jeans and then stood up. “And I don’t agree with Blake’s theory. It doesn’t help to talk about it, and my guess is at least half of you are lying, anyway.”
Mason let out a low whistle as Holly took off toward the lake. “Somebody is obviously trying to damage our happy circle of feelings.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Lay off her. She’s just freaked out.” I turned to Grayson. “Who’s doing this? Setting off the memory gas and keeping us here?”
Grayson let out a breath, glancing first at Lonnie then Blake and Sasha, getting nods from each of them. “The four of us are a lot like you, Jackson. And I guess like Courtney and Emily, too. Except your existence is a direct result of our existence, and I know that the logic seems mixed up since we’re from…”
“The future?” I prompted. “My future, anyway.”
“That’s right.”
“Time travel was always going to happen,” Lonnie added. “The four of us evolved naturally. In our present times, no one knew who would possess the ability to time-jump.”
“As opposed to the cloned people who were made for it?” Mason asked.
“Exactly,” Grayson said.
“So, like, a whole ton of people can time-travel in the future?” I asked. That seemed like one nasty mess if it was true.
All four of them shook their heads. It was Blake who explained, “We only know of seven true, naturally evolved time jumpers. I was the second to last to be discovered. Sasha wasn’t even born yet, wouldn’t be for a long time.”
“Eyewall headquarters is in this year,” Sasha said. “It’s quite a ways from here. About a two-day walk.”
“But if you guys are from my future,” I asked, “maybe you can tell me what time period Thomas showed me in a time jump?”
I took a minute to explain to them about the perfect future I saw with Thomas. The green landscape everywhere, right in the middle of New York City. The eerie quiet, the perfect temperature, the children with their superhuman powers, climbing and jumping.
All four of the future time travelers were quiet for a while, exchanging weary glances. Grayson took a deep breath before speaking. “You’ve studied history, right? World War II?”
“Yeah,” Courtney, Mason, and I all said together.
“A utopian society that evolves by creating a master race,” Grayson said. “That’s what you saw. Not the aftermath of World War II but of a similar war, a war that caused the destruction here, and in the outcome Thomas showed you, the new Hitler won.”
I knew there was something weird about that place. I didn’t feel the warmth of the world when I was there, nothing good, but it was so hard to judge because it had looked amazing. It seemed perfect.
“And they keep us here,” Grayson said. “Because we’re rare and Dr. Ludwig can’t bear the thought of getting rid of us. He doesn’t even want us to suffer too much. That might make it more difficult to use us for whatever experiment he’s working on. Notice we’re given plenty of supplies—food, sources of water, medical equipment.”
“It’s not because they care so much,” Lonnie said, bitterness spilling from each word. She glanced behind her at the bright sun, moving lower in the horizon. “We should get our gear. The sun’s about to set.”
Courtney touched my arm. “It gets really cold at night for some reason. The temperature drops a lot—like going from summer to winter.”
Grayson stood up, prepared to follow Lonnie, but then turned to face me, Dad, Courtney, Mason, and Emily. “I think the best thing you can do right now, all of you, is accept this place as home. Don’t let the negative thoughts creep in and do something stupid. There’s no fight to be won, nothing to make this life seem temporary. Make the choice to accept it and to be happy with what you do have.”
Hadn’t I decided that already? But what about Dad and Courtney … and Holly? What did they want?
“Jackson,” Grayson added, “if you have more questions, Blake can tell you his story. He’s seen a bit more of Eyewall than I have.”
Everyone began shuffling around, heading for supplies in different cabins. I moved over and sat beside Blake, who hadn’t made a move to leave. I glanced up at the sky, pink and purple from the setting sun. “So, they’re up there, watching us in this bubble, like gods.”
“They’re not gods,” Blake said firmly. “They’re human. Unfortunately, it seems they’ve forgotten that fact.”
“Right,” I said, not sure exactly what he meant by that.
Blake’s gaze darted around, and then he lowered his voice. “Can I show you something?”
I followed him into the small building and then into a tiny room with several computer screens lining one of the walls. All of the screens were blue and blank. Blake sat on the tile floor and removed an army knife from his pocket. He yanked off his right tennis shoe and his white sock. “I’ve been waiting almost two years to do this.”
And before I could stop him, he sliced a hole in the bottom of his foot.