A World Without You

  So Dad takes me up past Ipswich and back to school. As soon as the car stops in front of the brick facade of the academy, I rush past the Doctor, who’s waiting to greet me. I hesitate at the door when I notice that the Doc’s continued down to the car to talk with Dad, but I don’t have time to worry about their conversation.

  The first thing I have to do is figure out a way to get rid of the government officials. For good. The problems began with them. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if they’re the reason I haven’t been able to control my powers well enough to save Sofía. I have to get rid of them. And to do that, I’ll need help.

  I go straight up to the dorm rooms on my unit’s level and bang on Ryan’s door.

  “Told you it’d work,” Ryan says, grinning. He steps back so I can enter his room.

  “Yeah,” I lie. The drive’s perfectly safe, stuffed between my mattress and box spring back at home. “Listen,” I add, “I watched the first video.”

  Ryan’s usually good about keeping his cool, but something flashes across his face in the brief instant between when my words fall silent and he first registers their meaning. Something hard and angry. It’s quickly replaced with a mask of calm, but he can’t control the emotion in his eyes.

  “You what?” he asks in a level voice that nevertheless sends chills up my spine. “I told you to get rid of it.”

  “It’s safe. At my house. Hidden. No one will find it.”

  “No one would find it in a landfill near your house either.”

  I shrug. “I watched them. Or the first few, anyway. And we have big problems.”

  “We wouldn’t have any problems if you’d destroyed the damn thing.”

  I shake my head. He’s not listening. “Those government officials . . . they’re powered too.”

  Ryan freezes. “What?”

  “They have powers too, like we do. Or at least one of them does. I noticed it with Gwen, before. She thinks Sofía is dead. I had thought it was just that she’d lost faith in me, but now . . . And the Doctor’s been acting strange. At first I thought he was in on it, but now I think the officials . . . they’re altering reality. Or at least our perception of reality. They’re making us think we don’t have powers. I’m immune because I can just go back in time and see reality before they altered it.”

  Ryan narrows his eyes in thought. “And I’m immune because . . .” His voice trails off.

  “It must be the nature of your power. Telekinesis and telepathy. You have superior control of your mind, so they can’t reach you.”

  A grin smears across Ryan’s face. “Yeah,” he says, “that must be it.”

  “So just . . . be careful, yeah?” I say. “And start thinking of ways we can really get rid of them. Everyone believes they’re from the government, and I don’t know, maybe they are, but they’re dangerous. They’re trying to destroy us.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan says. “I’m on it. And, dude, next weekend? Destroy that drive.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say, reaching for the door.

  “Thanks,” Ryan says. This is the nicest he’s ever been to me. The most he’s ever paid attention to me, honestly. We’re not friends; we barely speak. But he’s making such an effort now.

  He really wants that drive gone.

  Ryan shuts the door behind me after I leave, pushing against it so it clicks firmly closed. There are no locks on our doors—well, there are none that we can control. Dr. Franklin warned us that there are lockdown procedures in case one of the students’ powers goes completely haywire, and we’re safer locked in our rooms than anywhere else, but the lockdown has never happened while I’ve been here. Still, I have a feeling that Ryan wishes he could have locked me out as soon as I left. I hesitate, about to knock on his door again and demand some more answers, but I’m not even sure what to ask. There’s just something . . . off about Ryan lately. He’s not acting like himself.

  Maybe the officials are starting to get to him too.

  “Bo.” Gwen’s voice is quiet, like she doesn’t want anyone else to hear, but she strides down the hallway toward me with purpose. “You’re back.”

  I nod.

  “And you’re talking to Ryan.”

  I shrug. “Yeah?”

  Gwen frowns. Before Sofía was gone, they were best friends, always together. I was never close with Ryan, and no one is really friends with Harold, so I sort of drifted around. Being with Sofía put me in Gwen’s group, but I don’t think she ever really considered me a friend.

  “Listen,” Gwen says, lowering her voice and walking with me back toward my room. “Don’t put too much trust in Ryan, okay?”

  “Why?” I ask. Ryan’s not my favorite person in the world, but he’s a part of our unit. Unlike the officials.

  Gwen glances back at his room. “I don’t like him,” she says bluntly. “He’s an asshole.”

  I snort. “Well, yeah, everyone knows that. But he’s our asshole.”

  Gwen shakes her head. We’re at my door now, but neither of us makes a move to leave. “It’s not like that. He’s not like us. You look at me and him and Harold as part of this unit. This team. But it’s not like that, is it?”

  “And Sofía too,” I say, searching Gwen’s eyes. “She’s part of our unit as well.”

  “And Sofía too,” Gwen says, her voice cracking over her name. “Before she died.” She places gentle emphasis on that last word, clearly worried about my reaction to it. But after we talked in the foyer before the weekend started, I knew there was something wrong with her. And her words now confirm it. Whatever reality the officials are trying to weave around us, she’s caught in the web.

  “But Bo . . . it’s not like that,” Gwen continues. “We’re not a team. At least Ryan’s not. He only ever looks out for himself. He doesn’t care about you or me or anyone here at Berkshire. He only cares about himself.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say. “He’s trying to save the academy.”

  “Save it? From what?”

  “The officials and whatever it is they’re planning.”

  Gwen’s frown deepens. “I don’t know how to get this through to you,” she says, “other than this: Sofía didn’t like Ryan either.”

  I shrug. “Well, no one really likes Ryan.”

  “No,” Gwen says in a very serious voice. “She really didn’t like him.”

  I narrow my eyes, trying to understand what she’s not saying. “Why not?”

  “She had her reasons, and I’m not going to betray them even though she’s not here now. But she didn’t like him. She didn’t trust him. And you shouldn’t either.”

  CHAPTER 25

  I go back to my room and shut the door.

  Can’t trust the Doctor. He’s being manipulated by the government officials.

  Can’t trust my parents. They believe the Doc.

  Can’t trust Ryan. He may want to help me get rid of the officials, but Gwen’s right: He’s helping me because what I want lines up with what he wants. If that ever changes, Ryan wouldn’t hesitate to drop me.

  Can’t trust anyone.

  I call up the timestream, focusing on the swirling black hole where 1692 is. I can’t go there and I can’t pull Sofía out, but I’ll get as close in time as I can, maybe reach Sofía that way.

  I rub the back of my neck. These futile attempts to save my girlfriend are wearing me down, mentally and physically. I’m exhausted. But I can’t give up.

  I reach out, grabbing for the red string swirling into the vortex. It slides through my fingers like water, but I grab some other threads woven into the timestream that lead to a time close to where I left Sofía in the past. I hold on with all my might, gritting my teeth against the pain of their pull, refusing to let go. I steel myself for the fight, holding on to the threads of time with the same desperation as I’d hold on to a rope if I fell off a cliff,
but then I feel it, the familiar tug in my body, the sweet release as time lets me slip through its cracks.

  I am standing in a field.

  No, not a field. There’s grass, but the soil is sandy. I’m definitely still on the island. I whirl around. No academy. No remains of the camp for sick kids.

  The house, however—the one built in Salem—is in front of me. The paint is bright white and new on the wooden siding, and the bricks of the chimney are not yet soot-stained.

  I head toward it. The air is warm and the sun high in the sky, but even so, there’s smoke rising from the chimney. Behind the dark glass windows, the house looks abandoned: no people and few pieces of furniture—a table and two chairs, one of which is knocked over, as if the residents had left quickly. But someone has to be here, or nearby. The fire in the hearth blazes like it was set just moments ago.

  I whisper-shout for Sofía. No reply. Still, she could be close but invisible, hiding. Not from me, but from something or someone else.

  The door to the house is slightly ajar, and I step inside, still calling her name.

  Nothing.

  She has to be here, somewhere. The threads of the timestream brought me to this moment and this time for a reason, and the threads connect me to her.

  I step back out onto the porch. At the Berk, in my time, the boardwalk cuts through the marshy parts of the island, creating a nature preserve for birds and the old dudes who watch them.

  In this time, there’s nothing but dark water and shadows. The perfect place to hide.

  I leave the house, aiming for the swampy wilderness. The island is vast, so I could search all day and not cover it all. Which is weird, since in my time, the island feels tiny. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go, really. But when you add it all up, it is actually large.

  Large enough to hide a girl with powers from the future.

  The ground grows mushy as I approach the swampy water. It isn’t deep—only knee-high in most places, to my waist at worst—but there’s something truly icky about the way the cold, silty water squishes between my toes. No point in shoes here.

  She has to be here.

  Maybe she went to the lighthouse? Was it even built by this point? Or maybe it’s just an empty beach, like the southern part of the island where one day Berkshire will be. Either way, I don’t have many options. I have to pick a direction, so I start heading northeast, toward the lighthouse . . . or where the lighthouse will one day be.

  The silence of the marsh is weird and unsettling. I can see little fish swimming in the water around my legs, darting away as I slosh forward. In my time, the marsh is murky. But here, the water is clearer, the sky is wider. A bluebird cuts through the air, a bright flash of color that reminds me of Sofía’s house.

  I hear people.

  I drop down, squatting behind a clump of reeds, crouching so low that the water’s up to my neck. The people I heard were on horseback, and they stop not too far from me. The horses flick greenhead flies away with their tails and snort so loud that I’m sure the men can’t hear me breathing.

  “Nineteen,” one of them says.

  “For truth?”

  “In Salem.” The first man sounds a little older. “Nineteen.”

  “Madness.”

  I strain to hear more. The men’s voices are loud and deep but heavily accented, their words almost indiscernible.

  “How many in the prisons?” the younger man says.

  My mouth drops open as it finally dawns on me what the first man means. Nineteen. Nineteen witches. Nineteen people. Hanged. Crushed. Dead.

  They move again, heading away from where I’m hiding.

  I stand up. The men could turn around and see me, but I rise anyway. They know what’s going on. They might know if Sofía is among those taken.

  “Fifty or more,” the old man says.

  I start running toward the men, not caring about the noise I’m making.

  “The dark one will be next to hang, surely,” the first man adds.

  “Of the devil, no doubt.”

  I shout for the men to stop, and they do pull their horses up short. Water sprays all around me as I surge forward. But as hard as I’m running—and I’m straining every muscle, my body aching to move forward—I barely shift an inch. The water droplets hang impossibly in the air around me.

  Time snaps me back to Berkshire.

  CHAPTER 26

  Damn it.

  I ended up right back here.

  Not in my nice warm bedroom.

  Nope, in the marsh. Without my shoes.

  At least I’m close to the boardwalk. I pull myself up and begin the soaking wet walk of shame back to Berkshire, praying that no one will see me when I return.

  Nope again.

  Dr. Franklin’s there, waiting for me. He has a flashlight and a radio in his hand, and there are a few other staff members in the main entryway. They were about to go look for me.

  Great.

  “What were you doing?!” Dr. Franklin shouts as the other staff members scurry back to their own units. “Where are your shoes?” His face sort of crumbles as I try to think of an answer. “This is about Sofía, isn’t it?” he asks in a softer tone.

  I nod, hoping that he can understand what I really mean—that this was about saving her. How much of her and the reality of her situation have the officials erased from his mind? How much control of his own memories—of his own reality—has the Doc already lost?

  “Go get changed,” he says, “and meet me back in my office.”

  • • •

  I need a shower, but the Doc didn’t seem in the mood to be kept waiting, so I pull on some dirty clothes and head over to his office. The door is already open. Inside, I can hear low-pitched angry voices.

  First I hear Dr. Rivers, but I can’t make out what she’s saying.

  Then Mr. Minh starts talking. “I must say, we’re very disappointed here, Dr. Franklin. Very disappointed. Your school may be private, but it still must follow Massachusetts law—”

  “We’re not breaking any laws!” the Doctor protests, his voice drowning out Mr. Minh’s. “Sofía’s accident was never supposed to happen, and I’ve been fully cooperative with law enforcement since then!”

  I cringe. So the government officials have the Doctor so turned around that he’s brought in law enforcement?

  “Well, of course something like that isn’t planned,” Mr. Minh’s voice is harsh, cruel. “But regardless, it happened, and we’re trying to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Which, frankly, I’m not sure this school is capable of guaranteeing. I was shocked to see one of your students coming into the school late tonight. How tight of a rein do you have on your students if one can wander off into the marsh at night?”

  Well, crap. I didn’t realize they’d seen me too.

  The Doctor splutters, but Dr. Rivers cuts him off. “It’s just extraordinarily disappointing that not only were the master files of the video observations you compiled destroyed, but the additional files are missing, and there is apparently no way to replace them.”

  “What are you trying so hard to hide, Dr. Franklin?” Mr. Minh shouts. “This level of encumbrance from you makes me question just how much you want to reveal to us at all.”

  “My practices have been transparent from the start!” the Doctor shouts back. “And my students are the most important people to me—not you and your damn paperwork!”

  “That’s what we want to see,” Dr. Rivers says in a clear, high voice, silencing the men’s argument. “We want you to put your students first. But clearly something here at Berkshire Academy is wrong. That boy came back soaking wet and stinking of the marsh. Why was he allowed outside, alone, at this hour? He could have been a danger to himself or others.”

  Is this an allusion to my powers? If so, the Doctor misses it.

  Mr. Minh s
ays something indecipherable in a low voice, but whatever it is, it’s obvious from Dr. Franklin’s flustered tone that he’s offended.

  I push the door open further. The hinges squeak, cutting through the conversation.

  “Bo,” the Doctor says, relieved to see me.

  “You told me to come back for a late-night, uh . . .” I start.

  “Therapy session,” the Doctor supplies. “I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow morning to discuss this situation.”

  Dr. Rivers nods her head, clearly approving of this, but Mr. Minh still scowls. I stare him down as he sidesteps me and they both leave the office.

  “That sounded rough,” I say.

  Dr. Franklin collapses behind his desk, completely ignoring my comment. “I’m concerned that you’re not progressing,” he says bluntly.

  “I—I’m trying, sir,” I say. I stare into his eyes.

  I’m trying to save us all, I want to say.

  Sofía told me to trust the Doctor. I don’t understand why he’s been cooperating with the officials, but . . .

  “You have a Band-Aid,” I say, staring at the Doc’s hand.

  He blinks in surprise, then glances down, staring at the Band-Aid wrapped around his left index finger. “I cut myself when I was changing my razor blade,” he says. “Bo, we need to talk about Sofía, about how you’ve stagnated since her death.”

  That word—death—guts me. First it came from Gwen, and now the Doc’s acting like Sofía is really gone. But his words sound like buzzing in my head, and all my eyes can focus on is that Band-Aid.

  The Doctor can heal. His power is healing. There is nothing in the world that should hurt him enough for him to need a Band-Aid. A razor cut? That should be gone in two seconds. I’ve seen him recover from injuries far more serious than that.

  “Bo?” the Doctor says. “Are you listening?”

  A test. I’ll test him.

  I tell him a joke he told me a month or two ago. He laughs politely, like he’s never heard that joke before in his life.