A World Without You

  I cringe. “They’ll see Gwen summoning fire from the tips of her fingers,” I say weakly. “Harold speaking to the dead. And you. Moving things with your mind.”

  Ryan nods slowly. “And think of the damage they can do with that information. That . . . proof.”

  “But why would the Doctor—?”

  “I don’t know,” Ryan snaps. “But we have to make sure those suits don’t see us using our powers on film, that they don’t know what we can do, what Sofía could do. The fact that there are only two of them here—and that they seem to be rather low-rung—means they probably just have some vague suspicions, if that. If we nip this in the bud now, we can survive this and go back to being anonymous and safe.”

  I lean over the table. “They have the files, though.”

  “Really?” Ryan says, a smug look on his face.

  My eyes widen. “What did you do?”

  Ryan pulls an innocent face. “Maybe the reason I asked to be excused from class was because I saw Dr. Franklin take those two officials out for a tour of the school. Maybe I didn’t come straight here. Maybe I went somewhere else instead.”

  “What did you do?” I ask again.

  Ryan pulls a USB drive out of his pocket. “And I took care of the backup files too. Dr. Franklin needs a password that isn’t just his cat’s name.”

  I look around. There’s a librarian in here—somewhere—but she’s usually just playing solitaire on her computer near the front, only ever actually doing real work when a student calls her over. “You’re going to get in so much trouble!” I say in a low voice.

  My words trigger a complete change in Ryan’s attitude. All playfulness and smugness disappear, replaced by harsh ferocity. “I am not going to get in trouble, because you’re not going to tell one damn person about this, you understand?” He leans over the table, getting in my face. “And if you do, you’ll regret it.”

  Ryan’s never been exactly friendly or easygoing, but I had no idea his demeanor could flip so easily.

  I raise both my hands. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” I say defensively. “But it’s not like they’re going to just be like, ‘Oh well, lost all the files, no big deal.’”

  Ryan leans back, a satisfied grin on his face. “Yeah, we’re going to get searched for sure.” He pulls out a brand new pack of gum, unwraps it, drops the cellophane on the library floor, and selects a piece to start chewing. He doesn’t offer me one.

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  Ryan appraises me. “What are you going to do?”

  I shrug. “I dunno, dude.”

  Ryan rolls his eyes. “Look, even if I smash this thing with a hammer, they’ll find the pieces and know that it was one of us who stole the drive. When they can’t find the drive on us, they’re going to search the trash and everywhere else. It’ll make them even more suspicious if they find it destroyed, and besides, these things are shitastically difficult to break. The trick here is to make them think they just lost it. It was all a bad accident. I didn’t delete the Doctor’s backup files, I just corrupted them. It’ll make it look like he formatted things wrong when he copied them to the drive. All a bad accident, no one to blame. Especially not us.”

  “Why don’t you just alter the files?” I say.

  “I did; I told you I corrupted the Doc’s backup.”

  “No, I mean with . . .” I raise my hands near my head and waggle my fingers. “With your powers. Why not just make it look like we’re normal and not powered?”

  Ryan snaps his gum, thinking. “I tried that,” he says. “But I haven’t really done that sort of thing much. Maybe I messed up. Maybe they’ll break through what I did.”

  “So what are you going to do with the drive?” I ask. “Throw it in the ocean or something?”

  “Nope.” Ryan winds the chewed gum around his finger, then bites it off. “That’s where you come in.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  I stare at him blankly.

  “You and Gwen are the only two people in our unit who go home for the weekends.”

  “So?”

  Ryan stands up, drops the USB drive on the floor, and crushes it with his heel, grinding the black plastic into the hardwood. Then he leans down, pulling out the wad of chewing gum, and sticking all the little pieces to it. “So,” he says, cramming the gum and the broken drive under the table, “when you go home, stop by here first. Grab the drive and put it in your pocket. Throw it away at your house. The evidence will just disappear.”

  Ryan stands up. “Come on,” he says cheerfully. “Time to get back to class.”

  CHAPTER 16

  It took them just a day to notice the drive was missing. Our unit was in the Doc’s office for our morning session when the woman, Dr. Rivers, knocked on the door. She motioned for Dr. Franklin to come over to her, and they stepped into the hallway to talk. I tried to look at Ryan, but he stared straight ahead, a tiny smile on his face. Moments later, Dr. Franklin had another USB plugged into his laptop, and he handed the new files to Dr. Rivers immediately and without question. I could see that Ryan was biting his lip to keep from grinning.

  Before lunchtime, the officials know something is wrong. We’re studying math in Ms. Okafor’s class, just across the hall and two doors down from Dr. Franklin’s office. Dr. Rivers and Mr. Minh storm into the office, shut the door, and soon we hear yelling. I kick Ryan under my desk, but he ignores me, his head bent over his geometry worksheet as if he was focused on it, but he’s already finished all the problems.

  That evening they search our rooms. We’re eating in the common room while it happens, and so none of us realize it until after. They were quiet about it—it’s not like they trashed everything—but it’s clear that our rooms have been searched. Our sheets are untucked, our clothing riffled through, the edges of posters on the walls are lifted up. They even flipped through my calendar, which bothers me more than anything else.

  Ryan comes to my room before lights-out.

  “Told you,” he says, as I refold my clothes the way they’re supposed to be.

  But all I can think about is the haunted look on the Doctor’s face. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s being made to look like an idiot at best and uncooperative at worst, and he’s going to get in trouble. He might even get fired.

  Ryan frowns and steps inside my room fully, shutting the door behind him. “You’re having second thoughts,” he says blankly, but there’s fire behind his eyes.

  I shrug. “I don’t want anything to happen to the Doctor,” I say.

  “That asshole is the one who just turned our data over to the officials.”

  “Maybe he has a plan. Maybe we’re messing it up.”

  Ryan glares at me. I can almost see that genius mind of his churning with ideas, seething with possibilities.

  “You can’t go to the future, can you?” he asks. “That’s what you said originally, on the first day. You said you’re a time traveler, but you can only go to the past.”

  I realize for the first time that, like Ryan, I’ve never really talked all that much about my powers, at least not to the group as a whole. I talked a lot about them to Sofía, in private, and everyone in my unit knows I can go back in time, but I’ve never really discussed details with them. It just . . . never came up.

  “Yeah, no future stuff,” I say. “I can see—well, I call it the timestream. It’s like I’m standing in the middle of a big, flat, uh . . . it’s really thin, barely visible, but it’s like a rubber mat made out of a giant bubble, but with strings linking me to the different times and places. Sorry. I don’t know how to describe what time looks like.”

  “Yeah, that must be hard,” Ryan says flatly.

  “And I can see sort of bright spots, big events. If I concentrate, I can figure out where I want to go, and I pull the string linking me to it, and I’m tra
nsported there.”

  “And it’s all stuff in the past?”

  “I can’t go to the future. And there are limits to what I can see in the past.”

  “Maybe you should try.”

  I laugh. “You don’t think I have? The timestream is like a tapestry; the past is already woven into a picture, but the future is still a tangle of strings.”

  “Huh.” Ryan sits down on the edge of my bed, the mattress creaking under his weight. “It’s really fascinating in a weird way to hear you talk about it all, like it’s real.”

  “It is real.” I stuff the rest of my clothes into my drawer and slam it shut. Ryan always says things like that. Just because something’s not real to him, he doesn’t see the value in it. He’s worse with Harold. He can’t see or hear Harold’s ghosts, so he completely dismisses them, acts like Harold doesn’t have a power at all.

  Ryan’s still staring at me.

  “What do you want?” I ask, because I know he’s not just here to chat.

  “I’m . . .” Ryan fidgets on my bed. “I’m just worried,” he finally says. “About the officials. What they could do. What could happen if you don’t help me get rid of them.”

  I frown. I’m worried about that too, but . . . “I can’t see the future.”

  “Maybe you can,” Ryan says. He holds up his hands when I start to protest. “You can, uh . . . touch points in the past and go there, because they’re fixed. They happened. But since the future hasn’t happened yet, it could go one way or another. So maybe if you look at it that way, instead of looking for one specific thing that definitely will happen, if you look for just, uh . . . possibilities . . . maybe you can see the future that way.”

  All the lights in the academy flicker. Our warning that lights-out is in five minutes. Ryan gets up and turns to go to his own room, then looks back at me. “Look, just try, okay? I know you like Dr. Franklin, but maybe don’t trust him. Not with this.”

  Ryan leaves, closing the door behind him, and I’m alone with my questions and fear. I’m still standing there when, five minutes later, the lights go off entirely.

  • • •

  I sit in the middle of my bed in the dark room, willing my powers to come to me. The timestream rises up, surrounding me, reminding me it’s always there, whether I control it or not. The strings of time flow gently, extending out like a net floating on the surface of the ocean, and I am trapped in the center.

  Before, I’d described the threads as forming a tapestry, but that’s wrong. A tapestry implies organization, a clear picture. There is a pattern—that much I can see—but it’s not discernible at all. There are loose threads and knots and holes, and it should look like a mess, but instead, it looks beautiful.

  I look first, as always, to the red thread swirling over the void of 1692. Sofía’s still there. Still alive. Trapped, but not dead.

  I turn, looking at the frayed, loose strings that float past the woven timestream. And I realize, I can see the future. Or . . . many different futures. I have to sift through the threads, find the ones that pull around behind me, almost out of sight. These threads are finer, like hair or a spider’s web, barely visible. No wonder I’d never really noticed them before. Touching them leads to a sort of empty feeling, and I know instinctively that I won’t be able to travel to any of these futures. Grabbing a string that leads to the past pulls me into history; merely touching it evokes the memory in my mind. But I have to wind the slender filaments of the future around my hand so tightly that I can feel my pulse in my palm in order to see just a brief scene play in my mind, and even that fades like smoke the moment my concentration wavers.

  I carefully pick out the threads involving the Berk and me, right here, right now. It’s like trying to select a single strand of sugar in cotton candy, but eventually I am able to lay out a dozen or so futures floating just above the palm of my hand. They’re all short, slender filaments that I can barely see, but I wrap them around my palm. The further out in time they go, the less clearly I can see, but I at least get an impression of the future, and in every scenario, when I help Ryan, we succeed. When I don’t, the government—or someone else—gets the USB drive and sees the videos of us using our powers.

  The future gets bleaker from there.

  Testing in labs. Being used as research, as a tool, as a weapon. Genetic manipulation. Shock therapy. Psychological exams. Drugs that dull the senses. Drugs that heighten them. Drugs that kill.

  And behind it all, this moment. Here. Now.

  All I have to do is take the drive home with me and throw it away there. No one expects it. And if I do it, then the government officials won’t see our powers. They’ll never know the truth. We’ll all be safe.

  And so will the world. The bleak dystopia in which I’m a weapon or a tool—anything but a human—disappears.

  The choice is simple. I have to help Ryan. I know that for sure now.

  My fingers go slack, and the futures spread out on the surface of the timestream like ripples on water. Because I’ve just realized something else. Not something that I saw in any of the futures, but something I didn’t see in any of them.

  Sofía.

  She’s not in any of my futures. Not a single one.

  CHAPTER 17

  Dr. Franklin and the officials have a long meeting the next day, so our morning session is cancelled. I can only imagine what’s going on in the Doc’s office—he’s probably getting reamed not just for the missing USB drive but also for the corrupt files. As much as I hate the idea of the Doctor getting in trouble for something that Ryan did, I know I have to help. If the Doc could have seen the future, he never would have let the officials come close to the files.

  I’d like to think that, anyway.

  • • •

  When the weekend rolls around, I find myself feeling a little bad for Harold, stuck alone with Ryan in the common room. Gwen and I live close enough to go home on the weekends. Ryan’s parents live in LA; they shipped him out here, and I’ve never seen them before. They pay on holidays for a fancy black car to pick Ryan up and take him to the airport for visits, but that’s it. Harold’s parents live in Brooklyn. He could go home, and on long weekends or breaks he usually does, but I think he feels safer here. He always begs the Doctor to make some excuse to his dads to keep him here at Berkshire instead of anywhere else. I think the little dude would live behind the wallpaper and become a part of the building if he could.

  But I’m betting that’s about to change, and Harold will start heading home on the weekends as well. Ryan’s not the sort of guy you want to hang around with when he’s in a good mood, but the longer the officials are here, the angrier he becomes, and he seems to be focusing a lot of his rage on Harold.

  I texted my mom earlier, asking to stay at the academy for another weekend, but she refused. She’s determined to have “family time,” something she never really cared about before I moved away. I don’t know what she expects from me when I graduate. I mean, I don’t think I’ll go to college, but I also don’t think I’m going to stick around.

  Gwen and I wait together in the foyer for our parents to pick us up.

  “I’m kind of glad to leave this time,” Gwen says, her eyes on the window. There are a few other students from different units milling around, but we’re standing off to the side. Units tend to stick together.

  “Yeah, I get that,” I say. It’s not the same here without Sofía, and if it weren’t for the chance to work on my powers more, I’d rather be home too.

  “It’s been super awkward.”

  I nod.

  “I don’t think I’m coming back next year,” she says.

  I whirl around. “What? Really? Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Just . . . look around.”

  I do. I see Berkshire, far more of a home to me than the house my dad’s going to drive me to. I see Gwen, a member
of my unit, a part of my family. Powers are deeper than blood.

  She shrugs. “This place . . . I really loved it at first. But now . . . I feel watched all the time. I feel like I can’t be myself. And, no offense, but our unit kind of sucks. You’re okay, but Ryan’s a total dick, and Harold’s practically a ghost. What’s the point? The way this school sections us off into these tiny units . . . look at all these other people.”

  She gestures toward the ten or so kids from other units waiting for their own rides.

  “We could be friends with them. Instead, I don’t even know their names,” Gwen says. “I spend all day with you guys and Dr. Franklin, taking the same classes from the same tutors . . . nothing changes. At least with Sofía I had a friend.”

  “She’s coming back,” I say automatically. I’m still not sure how I can save her, but I know I will.

  Gwen narrows her eyes, examining me. “She’s really not,” she says. “You get that, right?”

  “What do you mean?” There’s a roaring in my ears, an ocean rising up in my brain, trying to drown out the doubt on Gwen’s face. She says something else, but I don’t hear her. I hate the way everyone underestimates me. They think that I’m not good enough, not strong enough, not powerful enough to save Sofía. I am. I can. I will.

  “There’s my mom.” Gwen picks up her overnight bag and heads to the door. Before she can leave, though, the Doctor calls her name from the top of the stairs. She pauses, waiting for him to reach the door, and they go out together. Through the window, I see the Doctor bend down, talking to Gwen’s mother with a serious look on his face. Gwen glances back at me, but I can’t read her expression before she throws her bag in the backseat and drives off with her mom.

  The next car to arrive is Dad’s Buick. Dr. Franklin’s already waiting for him, and Dad gets out so they can talk more. Even though I hustle to the car, they finish their conversation before I arrive.

  “How ’bout them Patriots?” Dad asks loudly as I approach, obviously cutting off whatever conversation the Doctor was trying to have with him.