Текст книги "Return Once More"
Автор книги: Trisha Leigh
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 19 страниц)
Before my imagination ran wild, my classmate swerved into a young woman who had bent to retrieve a bundle of rosemary she’d dropped into the street.
Her coloring didn’t match the rest of the commoners in town; her skin was shaded an olive color similar to my own, and her long, silky black hair was pinned into a knot at the back of her neck. When Oz banged into her she toppled sideways and right into James Puckle, who caught her in his arms and righted her, concern softening his rigid features. His concern shifted to irritation as his gaze swept the street, probably looking for Oz, before he asked her something in a voice too soft to be overheard. She nodded.
The wisp of Oz’s coattails turned at the end of the street and I hurried after him, turning right to discover an empty, smelly alleyway. He had returned to Sanchi.
The scene I’d witnessed left no doubt in my mind that Oz was up to no good. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an observation. He’d interfered. Pushed that woman so that she and Puckle interacted. Touched the past, as I had done the other day. I knew why I had broken the rules—to meet my True Companion. But Caesarion was personal; I wanted to save him because of my feelings, but it didn’t mean the rules that governed the Historians weren’t smart or in the best interest of humanity as a whole. I would never jeopardize our lives on Genesis or our future.
Nothing I had done so far would change anything significant. What I’d witnessed a moment ago, though … I had a feeling it could. Would.
It left me with the lingering question of whether Oz felt the same way about what we’d been taught at the Academy, or if he had different plans altogether for those of us living in Genesis.
Chapter Fifteen
Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis–50 NE (New Era)
This morning we were working on private reflections, entering our individual conclusions on the Triangle trip, and this afternoon we’d have our last supervised reflection on the event.
Our footsteps and hushed conversations banged off the walls of the empty hallway as my class made our way to private reflection. I’d read old mystery novels where characters overheard conversations through heating ducts or in sewers—the entire Academy felt that way. At least our dormitories, with our blankets and furniture, soaked up some of the noise.
The seven of us found the main Archive room empty, with the exception of a third-year boy whose name escaped me. He scooted past us and out the door without a word. Oz escaped to the private carrel he had on permanent reserve before the rest of us dropped our things. We spread out, two or three to a table, all subdued in the early morning.
It was my first chance to get back to the Archives since following Oz to Norwich, and I wanted to jump right into figuring out what in the System had happened there, but the Triangle reflection came first. There was no way I was ever going back into that memory if it could be helped, and if our deep reflections weren’t approved at our end-of-month review, we had to redo the observation.
The Triangle Fire had been reflected to death—what it meant for women’s rights, workers’ rights, the development of unions, the reinforcement of greedy businessmen by the American court system, the horrible truth that people had to see injustice with their own eyes before it meant anything at all. Those truths had been established long ago and dissertated by Historians before me.
We were expected to bring new observations to the table during deep reflection, and after fifty years, that required focusing on smaller aspects. Which meant, in this instance, my distractions gave me an advantage. Deep reflection was one of the only times my tendency to obsess over the sidelines came into use. While in the past, we were supposed to record what they assigned, but in the Archives any focus was fair game.
The first original reflection I gathered was about the lives of the survivors—how humans had the capability to go on in the face of personal tragedy. There were diary entries in the system from later in Rosie’s second life, along with multiple interviews about the fire, and in every one, her guilt over leaving her friends and coworkers behind oozed from the words. She’d never forgiven herself for surviving, but she hadn’t disgraced her friends’ sacrifice by wasting the years she’d been gifted by my brother. She had fought for workers’ rights, and then women’s rights, and later, civil and gay rights. Rosie Shapiro had spent a lifetime making her good fortune count.
I thought briefly that my reflection might bring too much attention to Rosie, and therefore Jonah, but it seemed unlikely. For one, the only record that she had died was in the original manifest from Earth Before. Any Elder—if they even noticed—would assume the original records had been incorrect and corrected by one of our many trips.
The next two reflection topics were harder, but after three hours I managed to get the table comp to accept as unique contributions the devolving of humanity into a more animalistic state in the face of imminent death and the idea that the majority of the girls chose to have control over how they died.
Everyone else’s eyes were still trained on their comps, fingers nudging observations and typing reflections, with the exception of Oz, who had finished and left an hour ago. He’d probably been sitting alone in his room being boring and ruminating on these reflections since we’d gotten back from New York, wondering if one might be his ticket into the Hope Chest. Aside from his unauthorized trip to England, of course.
I got up and stretched, shaking out the kinks in my legs and neck as I paced the floor, searching for the single red dot roaming outside the Archives, which would have to be Oz’s. The more nonchalant I acted, the more Analeigh’s suspicious gaze burned between my shoulder blades.
When I finally found Oz, he wasn’t in the mess hall or the gardens or the dormitories. His dot disappeared from the travel chamber, then blinked a moment later in Canada, 1934 CE.
What in the System was that boy up to? Whatever it was, he could have used a handy dandy chip like the one Jonah handed me.
My Historian training, coded into my DNA as deeply as my attraction to Caesarion, demanded to know why he’d interfered in England. He changed something. I just didn’t know what. Or why.
If I cross-checked the places he’d gone, maybe a common thread would show up.
A quick press of his dot displayed bio data, and another punch pulled up a two-week history, which I transferred to my locked file before I slid back onto my stool across the table from Analeigh. I ignored her stare and after a moment, she heaved a sigh and returned to her reflection.
Two thousand years ago, someone would have had to flip through volumes upon dusty volumes of actual books to piece together a connection between thirteenth-century Mongolia, eighteenth-century London, and twentieth-century Canada. A thousand years ago, computers could have attempted the search, but the user still had too much influence as far as entering parameters.
I knew he’d gone to see James Puckle, inventor of the Puckle gun, in 1714. That was a start.
I punched in the dates and asked the table comp to find any historical connections, then picked at the chipped polish on my fingernails while it processed. Strange anachronisms, like fingernail polish that didn’t last longer than a few days, filled society in Genesis. Vanity was generally frowned upon, so even though we could time travel, contemporary travel faster than the speed of light, and manufacture vitamin-packed synthetic food, things like the polish, hair dye, and makeup had never been improved. We could probably invent a way to permanently change the color of our nails or hair if the scientists committed a couple of days to the project.
I frowned at my hands. Sometimes I wished they had done the nail polish.
The table comp beeped twice and then displayed a short list of possible connections between the three times and places, giving me a simple, glaring answer. All three were instrumental in the development of guns and ammunition.
The Chinese had invented gunpowder, and it had been introduced to the Western world during the Mongolian invasions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1934, John Garand of Canada had developed the first assault rifle. It said nothing about the Puckle gun being invented in 1717 even though it had been in the Archives the other day when I’d followed Oz—it had only displayed for me during the observation.
And now it was gone.
The memory of him shoving that woman right into James Puckle flashed through my mind. My fingers trembled as I pulled up the man’s biography with a few punches. Nothing about his inventing a gun. He’d married a woman named Mary and had children, which matched the information the glasses had given me the other day. Then he’d married again, only … I felt sure his second wife’s name hadn’t been Elira. It had been something English.
A click on the second wife’s name brought up nothing but their wedding photo. It was the woman from the street, the one Oz had shoved into Puckle’s path.
There was a paragraph on why their union had been recorded—she had been a Muslim from the region that would become Albania, and their union had changed Puckle’s rather rigid, vocal outlook on Muslims as mortal enemies of his own beloved Catholic Church.
There had to have been more about Puckle in the Archives previously, about why and how he’d invented that machine gun. Violence and weapons were one of the five major contributors to our evacuation from Earth Before, so anything related to firearm development would have been cataloged.
Oz’s actions had apparently wiped it from the record.
Because of his interference, Mr. Puckle had met Elira instead of Nice Catholic Girl, and it had erased the desire to create advanced weaponry from his mind.
Cold fingers made of fear gripped the back of my neck. How many other things had changed because that gun had never been invented? It seemed like it should be a good thing, slowing down the progress of weapons development, except it didn’t matter now. That wasn’t the reason Historians were allowed access to the past—not to change it or try to repair mistakes. We couldn’t fix history. All we could do was make sure fatal errors didn’t happen again here in Genesis.
Oz had heard the same lectures as the rest of us all of these years. His father was an Elder, for Pete’s sake. What did they know that the rest of us didn’t?
I swiped the search results away, pecking with my fingertips through files on the development of weapons, unsure what exactly I was looking for until I found an early reflection by Minnie Gatling. For the first time, I realized she and her sister descended from the Gatlings, a family instrumental in the development of guns in America. My instinct insisted that information and Oz’s travels might be connected, but my feeble human brain struggled to connect the dots.
Minnie wrote this particular reflection after visiting a shooting in a Colorado movie theater—it was a trip we no longer took as apprentices because the spray of bullets was unpredictable and hard to map. A Historian overseer had been shot during an observation trip about twenty years ago, and though he hadn’t died, we now observed either a shooting at a Columbine high school, in an Australian shopping center, or on the Gaza strip for our lesson on weaponry in the hands of civilians.
Young Minnie’s reflection made it clear why she’d been chosen to oversee—the writing was concise, the scene laid out with a keen eye—but her reflections came off perfunctory. She wasn’t the ideal reflector, being unwilling to delve beneath the surface the way Oz loved to do.
“It is an interesting development that weapons meant for military defense and armed militia have found their way into the hands of private citizens, and in a world that no longer requires one to regularly defend their person, family, or nation. So many wish to blame the machinery itself, which I think is incorrect. My own ancestor was instrumental in the development of the Gatling gun, and some of our contemporaries have hated me on his behalf, but it’s not the weapons that pose a threat. It is, and always has been, the nature of humanity that’s at fault.”
Hated her? Hate didn’t happen in Genesis. Did it?
I paused and looked over my shoulder, sure one of the Elders would show up any second, ready to hand out a sanction for snooping. No one came, though, and I remembered that I was a Historian, too. Maybe just an apprentice, and maybe off on a tangent that had nothing to do with today’s assignment, but our Elders encouraged exploration and knowledge. We could spend as much free time in the Archives as we could stomach. Oz practically lived in here, a fact that would have inspired annoyance a week ago. Now, I was thinking he had reasons for holing up that went beyond taking the nerd recluse lifestyle to the extreme. Feeling more confident, I returned to Minnie’s reflection, interested to see where her argument was headed.
“The original settlers of Genesis were right to leave all weapons behind on Earth Before, and to ban their manufacture in the System, with the exception of necessities for defense in the unlikely case of an attack by an unknown foe. Though I believe my ancestor, Richard Gatling, did not create something inherently evil, humanity is constantly challenged to fight the evil inside of us. We cannot trust ourselves or others with machinery that can take a life in a matter of seconds.
“In conclusion, I do not agree with previous reflections that deem the men who created killing machines partially responsible for the collapse of society on Earth Before. As with all of our assignments that revolve around understanding the reason for our exile to Genesis, I believe the nature of humanity responsible for our greatest losses. And as I’ve stated, I am part of a small contingent of believers that this will happen again, despite the efforts of Zeke and his followers to ensure that it doesn’t. We cannot change what we are.”
Zeke and his followers? The Gatlings were Elders, too, and I’d never guessed at a rift between any of them. Perhaps I’d read too much into her words. Plenty of us had differing opinions regarding the fall of Earth Before, the events that led up to it, and even with seemingly insignificant reflections we often disagreed about the potential repercussions or positive benefits.
Other pieces of Minnie’s reflection stood out to me as off, too, pricking suspicion. Mostly the words she used, like “exile to Genesis” instead of “relocation to Genesis” or “evacuation to Genesis” as we were taught. Her reflection also seemed to suggest that prior classes of apprentices had a specific assignment to determine what could have been changed on Earth Before to prevent our leaving.
Which was very different from what I’d been taught during my time here—focus on what we could learn, lessons we could apply, that would make Genesis viable going forward.
The development of sophisticated weaponry had been determined to be a factor in the collapse of society, and that had to be what drew Oz to those three specific places. But it didn’t explain why he was so interested, or why he’d pushed Elira into James Puckle and essentially stopped him from creating that gun, or why he was traveling unsupervised in the first place.
Everything I knew about Oz made it hard to believe he’d commit all of those infractions on his own, yet there was no reason to suspect the Elders or anyone else had sent him.
Except Jonah’s warning.
Frustration balled a knot under the tat in the back of my neck and I rolled it from side to side, trying to stretch out my thoughts. I was missing something. A connection between Oz and Jonah, the only two people who had the hubris—or the knowledge—to change the past. A link between Oz and the Elders, or Jonah and the Elders—not to mention whatever had caused my brother to run.
I absently tapped on the link under the Gatling gun, reviewing a quick-and-dirty history of the world’s first machine gun prototype. It had led to the Maxim machine gun and finally the gangster-favored Tommy gun, which had all culminated in weapons sophisticated enough to take out everyone in this Academy in under two minutes, provided we were all in the same room. Once the guns of the late twenty-fourth century came into play—the models powerful enough to bang through walls made of metal or plaster, or anything really—they could take us all out in under three minutes, even spread out.
If Oz had also made alterations on the Silk Road, or in Canada, how long before changes started showing up in the Archives? Before the descendants of people murdered by guns started reappearing?
*
The morning left a lethargic feeling in my bones akin to the way the actual Triangle Fire had affected me, and my feet dragged down the cold hallway to the mess hall. Oz had returned, and the seven of us sat together, as always. Also as per usual, Jess commanded the conversation.
I blocked her out, but couldn’t come up with any answers to the questions somersaulting through my mind. It all eventually came back to the question of why Oz—and my brother—had felt confident that the changes they’d made wouldn’t rip Genesis from existence.
I needed to talk to someone, to hear how all of this sounded outside my own head, but I couldn’t confide in Analeigh without admitting that I’d used the cuff on my own.
Caesarion’s face hovered in my mind, those sharp, thoughtful, midnight-blue eyes trained on my face. He knew my secret now, and I trusted him more than seemed plausible after a day together. I could talk to him, if I could get away soon. The sand in Caesarion’s hourglass ran faster by the minute, and the memory of the trust in his face when I’d promised to return clung to me like barnacles to the hull of a sea ship. I was determined to see him again—hopefully more than once—before our stolen days together expired.
“What are you wearing to the certification party, Pey?” Jess sipped from her bottle of colorful, enhanced water, peering over the rim with dark, almond eyes.
The parties took place once a year, after certifications were approved and a few months before the next class officially completed their apprenticeship, and they were pretty much a required function. We got out of our standard-issue clothing for the night as well, which girls like Jess loved. Girls like me, who enjoyed wearing different things but had absolutely no fashion sense or period preference, struggled.
Jess had committed to a 1970s vibe, as far as clothing, which she pulled off well. Having visited the time period, I actually thought she looked a lot better than most of the hippie girls bouncing around Berkeley in clouds of pot smoke.
The majority of my plain clothes were hand-me-downs from my mother, which meant cute little mid-twentieth-century dresses. Analeigh was obsessed with early nineteenth-century fashion, and her closet contained a disturbing number of frilly undergarments.
Boys had it easy. Pants and a shirt. Done. Maybe Oz would recycle his dashing 1714 look. Sarah would probably think she’d died and gone to old-fashioned heaven.
“I think I’m going to fool around with an ancient Greek drapey thing,” Pey replied.
“What about you two?” Jess shot a glance in Oz and Sarah’s direction. “Doing something stupid and cute, like color-coordinated taffeta and cummerbund?”
“Seriously, Jess, have you met Oz? I’ll be lucky to get him into a tie and a shirt that doesn’t have some kind of food stain on it,” Sarah quipped, choosing to ignore Jess’s snotty undertone.
Jess was not-so-subtly jealous of their pairing. Most of us felt the same way, but we tried hard to be happy for the two of them instead of making them feel as though they were some kind of freaks under a microscope.
“Have you got your pirate wench outfit all picked out, Kaia?”
“That joke was funny the first time.” I rolled my eyes at Jess, then slurped a spoonful of soup. “You need some new material.”
“I’m not a writer, I’m a Historian.”
“Good thing,” I spat back.
Tangling with Jess got old fast, especially when there were too many important things vying for my attention. Like when I’d be able to see Caesarion again, or whether Oz or I was going to blow up the future first.
My mind wandered, dismissing the rest of the lunch conversation, until a prickly feeling lifted the hairs on my arms. I looked up to find Oz watching me while Sarah and Pey discussed which branch of the Historians they preferred once we were certified. His gray irises were clear and as enigmatic as ever behind his thick black lenses, though less haughty than normal. I stared back, willing a challenge into my gaze. Oz knew I was up to something, but so was he—and I hadn’t altered anything. Not yet.
An answering challenge lit Oz’s eyes on fire. He and I were locked in some kind of battle of wills, but I didn’t know the rules or the reason for the declaration. A month ago we had been Kaia and Oz, two apprentices a little more than a year away from being certified as full Historians and taking up the mantle of observing, recording, and reflecting. Two people who had known each other since we were kids—not friends, exactly, but not enemies. Now we were both traveling on our own, with our own agendas.
Maybe we both needed to be stopped.
“I mean, of course it would be fun to focus on reflecting, so Oz and I would have the same schedule, but maybe he doesn’t want to spend every day in the lab with me.” Sarah nudged Oz’s side, turning to smile at him.
The playful grin dropped when he didn’t reply to her question, because he was still staring at me with a little too much intensity. My cheeks flushed from the attention, from the guilt and worry. Not because anything about Oz turned me on, but because sometimes it seemed as though those eyes could see right through a person’s skin.
Could he tell I was nothing more than a girl about to tumble headlong down the wrong path, who couldn’t resist the pull of even a long-dead true love? A girl sitting here judging him instead of herself?
“Oz?” Sarah asked, frowning now. Her blue eyes flicked between us, confused, maybe a little worried.
My roommate’s expression made me look away, and under different circumstances, I might have laughed. Whatever was happening to my relationship with Oz these past couple of weeks, it wasn’t romantic. Simply the dance of two people with secrets they were determined to keep.
He finally realized the entire table was staring at him—at us—and glanced down at his True Companion. “What?”
Oz’s admittedly handsome—if tired—face softened as he registered the worry in Sarah’s expression, and he lifted a hand to brush a piece of short blond hair off her forehead. The tenderness in his touch twisted loose a piece of my heart. I felt the ghost of Caesarion’s lips on mine, a perfect fit I would never know again, and in that moment, realized that I never should have experienced it in the first place.
I never should have met him, because now, nothing in my life could ever live up to the sense of balance and completion offered by his presence.
“Of course I want you to choose reflection, Sarah. I don’t want you off gallivanting at all hours when you could be home with me.” He slid an arm around her waist.
It impressed me that he’d heard her question. While our eyes had been locked, I had barely heard anything over the roar of my own panic, but Oz’s response made me frown. Sarah would hate being relegated to reflection; she loved the observations and recordings. It would be terrible to see her chained to not only surly, superior Oz, but the table comps, too.
The future had always seemed far away, a little murky. For me, it surely held a Chosen Companion, children, and a job at the Academy in some capacity. Now it appeared obscured by the kind of fog that concealed the ground on Angkor. Most people preferred to steer clear of the swampy mist, yet the planet seemed like a dream to me, as though each step meant an adventure—maybe you’d crash into a hole, or maybe the path would lead you into a beautiful re-created bayou filled with cypress trees and Spanish moss.
Sarah glanced between Oz and me one last time, concern tightening her features. But when a loud alert signaled the end of lunch, she shrugged and let it go. Her laid-back demeanor made her one of the easiest girls at the Academy to get along with, but also one of the easiest targets. She was altogether too nice for her own good. Whatever was going on with Oz, and whatever had shifted between him and me, it could hurt her. I needed to make sure that it didn’t.
We all left the mess hall for the Archives, scheduled to spend the afternoon on our final supervised Triangle reflection. Everyone moved slowly after eating, or perhaps because spending the rest of the day watching teenage girls burn to death didn’t appeal to a single one of us.
Oz and Sarah sat next to each other on one side of the largest, square metal table. Analeigh and I took the two seats next to them, across from Jess, Levi, and Peyton. Two Elders stood at either end of the table, and today we were blessed with a double dose of Gatling sisters. Jess and Peyton chattered about something that had happened at Stars last night, but as the clock ticked to the hour we fell silent without having to be asked.
The sisters were both heavyset with unruly, gray old-lady curls, a permanent ruddiness smeared over their cheeks, nose, and chin. Their icy eyes could wrap chills around your spine faster than you could pretend to be paying attention, and standard Historian garb didn’t flatter either one of them, accentuating every pucker, roll, and dimple they’d earned with fifty-plus years of life. Neither of them were mean, but they were strict. They expected our best.
There actually weren’t any Elders that didn’t command our respect, but the Gatlings froze the frame every ten seconds from the beginning to the end of the recorded memory and asked you to analyze the choices you made. It was brutal.
Today, Maude pulled up her own recording of the Triangle Fire on one end of the tabletop screen and Jess’s on the other. Everyone looked as green about the gills at having to relive the situation as I felt.
We watched the recording in ten-second spurts, comparing what Maude recorded to what Jess had seen, and of course my least favorite classmate’s work was nearly perfect. There was a brief mistake, maybe five or ten seconds when she looked away from the girls jumping out the windows. I didn’t blame her.
Analeigh and Oz’s observations were also both hard to fault—Maude had plenty to say about mine, of course, and my distraction by Rosie Shapiro. Levi and Pey both got a lecture on how to make sure the camera cut through smoke so it didn’t obscure anything.
Viewing the fire as it played out seven more times didn’t make it any easier. If anything, it made it worse, but by the end I felt numb toward the entire thing. I watched Rosie go for the last time as we reviewed Minnie’s recording, smiling a little at the thought of the Cubs winning an unscheduled World Series because of my brother. Sports were encouraged in Genesis, on an amateur level, but reflection had determined that a vast separation of wealth had been significantly detrimental to the health of our previous society, so professional athletics had not been reinstated After.
The silence in the room shifted, electrified. Analeigh’s eyes grew big and focused over my shoulder, and when I turned, I found Oz’s father, David Truman, staring at me from the doorway. His eyes, a darker shade than his son’s, flashed with subtle suspicion and rage.
“Kaia, come with me, please.”
My heart thudded, then fell into my butt. I’d been in trouble enough times to recognize the tone of his voice, and at the moment, there were any number of infractions that could have been discovered. I could only hope it wasn’t one that could get me into seriously hot water.
There was nowhere to run in Genesis, or on Earth Before, where the Historians couldn’t find me. So I followed him, trying to prepare myself to face the music.
