CHAPTER SIX
DAY 11. LATE MORNING
I found Courtney and Emily in one of the cabins. They both sat on the bottom bunk of one of three sets of bunk beds, sifting through a giant pile of clothes.
“What’s wrong?” Courtney said as soon as she looked up at me.
Twin perception. It got me every time.
“Nothing,” I muttered.
Courtney looked at Emily and shook her head. “Jackson is a big fat liar. And a hamster murderer, too, apparently.”
Emily giggled and tossed items from the top of the pile to the floor by my shoes.
I laughed, too. “Okay, seriously, you need to forgive me for that. We were eight.”
“Fine,” she said. “Help us find pants for Mason. Something close to a thirty-inch waist and thirty-two-inch length.”
My guard flew up instantly as I stared Courtney down. “Let Mason find his own damn pants.”
“That’s nice, Jackson,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “Who do you think dug through an entire supply closet to find jeans in your size?”
“I was incapacitated,” I said. “Last I checked, Mason was in perfect health.”
“Don’t be such a jerk,” Courtney snapped.
I reached into the clothes pile, throwing a few T-shirts to the ground before retrieving some dark blue jeans that looked close to Mason’s size. “There. Happy now?”
She snatched the pants from me. “Thanks.”
Emily and I watched as she stomped out of the cabin, probably to go find Mason. “That’s the second girl I’ve ticked off today.”
Emily sat up straighter, her tiny body barely covering any space on the bed. I took Courtney’s spot on the bottom bunk and leaned against the post and closed my eyes.
“What happened before this?” Emily asked.
“Holly’s a little upset with me.”
“I’m sorry. I know how you feel about her.”
My eyes flew open again, zooming in on this little kid who might be the one person who could ruin my plan with the Holly issue. “You do know how I feel about her, don’t you?”
Emily nodded.
“My journal, right?” That damn journal and damn fingerprint clone. Right after I began Tempest training, Dr. Melvin had given me a lockbox that required my fingerprints for access, and of course Emily being my clone and all meant she was a match. Reading my journal, reading all the things I’d wanted to use time travel to fix, had been the reason we’d ended up here in 3200. She also read a copy of the original 009 Holly’s diary that someone had left in Stewart’s hands before our jump to the future. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read much of it, but I’m sure Emily absorbed every page. And probably in seconds with her brainpower.
My annoyance must have been clearly written on my face because before I could cover it, she was crying and trying to hide the tears from me.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have read it,” Emily said.
My entire gut twisted with guilt. Make that three girls I’d upset in one day. That had to be a personal record for me. I shoved the clothes to the floor and scooted next to Emily, putting an arm around her shoulder. “Hey, it’s not your fault. They would have found a way to trick me. And honestly, everybody I love the most is here and maybe that’s okay.”
She sniffled a bit more, nodding and wiping her nose at the same time. “But Adam … he’s not here. I almost got him, too, I just didn’t have time.”
I wrapped my head around the idea of Adam’s being here, alive. Then I really would be okay. “Emily, do you think … I mean hypothetically … if we ever did get out of here and we could go back to the present, a complete jump back, could we land on a date before Adam died and keep it from happening?”
“You’ve done complete jumps before,” she said, then looked up at me with a sheepish grin. “I read about those in your journal when you saw your two-year-old self and Eileen Covington.”
“Right, yeah, that was a complete jump.”
“Well, did you think about what mark you were going to hit on your way back?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Not really. Just like the half-jumps, I have to go back to home base, back to the exact moment I left.”
“I think you could go somewhere besides home base in a complete jump,” she explained, as if thirty years older than me. “The problem is, you’re going to have to deal with a duplicate version of yourself. It’s not like when you switch timelines from World A to World B. The other Jackson doesn’t vanish.”
“What if someone killed him,” I muttered under my breath, but she heard me.
“I heard Grayson talking about that.” Emily shook her head. “It’s confusing, I know, but everyone would have another version of themselves in 2009 if you go back and it’s not the moment you left. But aligning with the moment you left won’t be difficult. Your body is naturally going to seek out the former home base where there aren’t two Jacksons. Anything other than that would be very difficult.”
Grief swept over me. It was a hopeless situation. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re all stuck here with no prospect of escape anytime soon.” I glanced down at her weary face. “It’s not your fault, Emily. They would have come up with dozens of ways to get us here, or at least me. Imagine how crazy I’d be if I were stuck here alone.”
She nodded and wiped away a few more tears. “You don’t want me to tell anyone about you and Holly, right?”
“I’m not trying to lie to her intentionally, I promise. It’s just … she should have a choice about who she loves. A choice that isn’t influenced by what happened in the past. Or in another timeline. She deserves it. I’ve put her through hell and I won’t do that again.”
“If she asks me anything, I won’t tell her, I swear,” Emily said.
I glanced down at her and smiled. “Are you sure you’re only eight? Maybe clones age slower? You must be at least twenty-seven.”
Emily giggled and jumped off the bed, pulling a pair of red high heels from the clothes pile now on the cabin floor. “You’re right. I’m twenty-seven. That means I can wear these, right?”
“Go for it, kid.” I stood up and watched as she kicked off the little tennis shoes she had on and slid her feet into the pointy red heels. They were the most impractical shoes for Eyewall people to store in a supply closet for the prisoners of Misfit Island. I had to assume that either Sasha or Lonnie showed up here wearing those the day they got trapped.
Emily scooted at a snail’s pace across the slippery, dust-covered floors. “Look! I’m five point three eight centimeters taller!”
“Really? I would have guessed at least five point three nine.”
“Nope.” She laughed again and headed for the cabin door. “I have to show Holly.”
Her hand froze on the door and she turned slowly to face me. “It’s too bad she doesn’t know what you did for her. I think she’s really scared but in a different way than the others. There’s nothing worse than thinking that no one cares about you.”
I walked closer and squatted in front of her. “I care about you, you know that, right? From the first time I met you, I knew we’d need each other someday. I knew you were important to me. And it is possible for good things to come from bad ideas.” Not that Emily herself was a bad idea, but cloning time travelers and forcing children were.
“Do you really believe that?” she asked.
“I do. I really do.”
She gave me a sad smile and then turned to leave again. “I won’t tell her anything, I promise.”
When I went back outside, the first thing I noticed was Courtney standing in front of the cabin next door. Her arm was wrapped around the tall wooden post in front, and Mason stood across from her, a little too close, and leaning closer every second. I stormed up behind him and grabbed the hood of his sweatshirt, tugging it hard and pulling him farther from my sister.
“Excuse us,” I said to Courtney. “Mason and I have some Tempest business to discuss.”
“Okay…?” she said.
I gave Mason a shove in the direction of the lake. “Walk with me.”
“Uh, doesn’t look like I have a choice,” he said, attempting sarcasm, but I could hear the tiniest indication of fear in his voice, which made my blood literally boil.
Guilt. His intentions must not be very innocent.
The lake looked more green than blue now, and I waited until we had nearly reached it before stopping and yanking Mason to a halt by grabbing his hood again.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
He shrugged, looking anywhere but at me. “Nothing.”
I snorted a laugh. “Yeah right. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on in your head. Just put a stop to it now. Whatever you did to send her digging through clothes and memorizing your waist measurements needs to end.”
“I didn’t do anything,” he said, his voice going up an octave. “It’s not my fault we have things in common.”
“Like what? What do you possibly have in common with my sister?”
Mason folded his arms across his chest, staring hard at me.
Oh right, the being-dead thing. I swallowed and took a step back from Mason. “If you touch her, I’ll seriously kick your ass, and if that doesn’t scare you enough, I’m sure Agent Meyer Senior will.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, fine!”
After Mason stomped off, I moved closer to the lake, picked up a few rocks from the grass, and started tossing them in, trying to skip them across the water and blow off steam at the same time. Mason knew what was going to happen to Courtney. He knew everything about my family, so what was he thinking? And he’s seventeen, she’s fourteen. I could see it in his eyes, just then, he liked her. In that way that I remembered all too well from being Mason’s age. It led to kissing and removing bras and—
I shuddered, forcing the mental picture from my brain.
I wasn’t alone for long before I heard Holly’s and Emily’s voices coming from the grass behind me. They were all the way over by the tree stump with the T-shirt still pinned to it and didn’t appear to be coming closer anytime soon. At least I had smoothed things over with Emily. Holly and Courtney still hated me, but one out of three was better than zero out of three.
It had just occurred to me that in my idiotic grief, I had left Holly and Blake alone in the reproduction room. Good thing Blake didn’t have access to wine.
Being jealous of the two of them left me completely demoralized by my moral decision to let Holly choose her own path. What if that path was Blake? What if we were stuck here forever until we got really old and died of natural causes? Did I want to keep this secret from Holly for that long—to never attempt to make her love me again? I didn’t know if it would even be possible, but I did have a record of two out of three with getting the different versions of Holly to do exactly that. This one would be the most difficult, though.
I put a lot more force behind the next rock I threw into the lake as disgust filled me completely. How could I look at being in love that way? Even in my head, using information from 009 Holly and 007 Holly to lure Agent Holly in felt like a total sleazeball thing to do. Plotting to make a move on her, to trick her into loving me—it diminished everything I thought our relationship stood for. It played out in my mind like just another mission. A task full of lies and deception, the polar opposite of true love.
And Holly deserved true love.
It was wrong to avoid her because of our past, and it was wrong to pursue her for that same reason. I needed to start looking at Holly as the girl right behind me, the one I first saw in the NYU bookstore in June of 2009.
“How do you do that?” Emily said. “Show me again!”
From the corner of my eye, Holly came into sight, her blond hair flying around her as she flipped backwards in the grass, landing perfectly on her feet.
I sighed to myself. This no-jealousy thing wouldn’t be easy. Like so many other things in life, it was going to take time. And practice. And unfortunately, a few more screwups, knowing me.
“Like your little computer brain can’t figure this out perfectly.” Holly rubbed the top of Emily’s head. “It’s all about strength-to-weight ratio and physics.”
“And fear,” Emily said. “Or lack of fear, in your case.”
Holly flashed her a wicked smile. “That’s always been my greatest weakness.”
I reached down to pick up more rocks as Holly did a series of three handsprings, landing dangerously close to my feet.
Don’t be angry. Don’t be in love. Don’t be anything. “Staying in shape just in case?”
She shrugged. “Just messing around, I guess. You know, lack of television and Internet.”
“And CIA missions,” I added.
“That, too,” she said. “What else is there to do?”
“Besides listening to Blake’s awkward makeout stories?”
She laughed. “God, that was so freakin’ weird.”
I kicked at a rock with my shoe and kept my eyes on the grass. “So … I was wondering if maybe, since you don’t seem pissed off at me right now, we could start over. Like I’m Jackson and you’re Holly and … and that’s it.”
The amusement dropped from her face. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not? Why is it so important for you to know everything?”
She shook her head and let out a breath. “What else do I have control over now? Nothing. All I have … all we have to hold on to is what we know. I don’t plan on forgetting anything anytime soon.”
So much for new beginnings. I plopped down in the grass next to Emily and she mouthed sorry to me while Holly’s back was turned. I nudged her shoulder with mine and smiled. “Are you gonna do some backflipping too?”
She shook her head fiercely. “No way. I’m not fearless enough.”
“I think you’re pretty fearless, Emily, maybe just a different kind.”
“You, too,” she said.
“We’re finishing our project tomorrow morning,” Holly said, giving me a knowing look.
Hopefully the rest of Blake’s memory files would be more PG and less likely to cause Holly to go off on me again.