“Are you okay?” I asked, “with the water?”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Subject changer.” I turned to face him. We hadn’t recapped the events of the night before, but I couldn’t stop thinking about his skin, his mouth, his hands.
“I am not. I just wanted to say what was on my mind.” He pulled me down to sit beside him on a bench.
“I hope you’re having the same thought I am,” I said.
“Which is?”
“More.”
He caught the back of my head in his hand and brought me in for a kiss. “Don’t give up yet.”
I nodded, and then a shadow blocked the sun. The afterglow disappeared in a flash.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Hallie.” She looked down her nose at Dune. “Who is this?”
“We’ve never officially met.” He stood to shake her hand, which she did, with disdain. It didn’t faze him. “I’m Dune Ta’ala.”
He put his arm around me when he sat back down, keeping his body forward, as close in front of me as he could be. His eyes had gone from sweet to wary, and the scar through his eyebrow became menacing instead of intriguing.
It was the first time I’d seen him use his physicality to intimidate, like a peacock fluffing up his plumes. It was ridiculously hot, and from the visible tension in my mother’s body, it worked.
“Does your father know about this?” Mother slid her sunglasses off and put them in her purse.
“Yes,” I answered, keeping my eyes on Dune.
“And what does he think about it?”
I shrugged. Let her wonder. If she’d been on the run, it had been somewhere that provided French manicures and root touch-ups. “You look good, but you always do. I see you’ve been shopping for jewelry, too. Why didn’t you call me? We could’ve made a day of it.”
She brushed her fingers just above the long, antique pendant that lay against her turtleneck sweater. “You’re almost eighteen, yet you show no signs of maturity.”
“You’re way past forty. Neither do you.”
“Nothing ever changes.” She sat down on the bench across from ours.
“No, it doesn’t. Probably never will. Why are you here?”
“To help my daughter.”
“Please. There are a million ulterior motives in everything you do.” I rubbed my temples. Oh, how this woman exhausted me.
“I’m here because of who you are.” She paused for effect. “What you are. How you got that way. Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I don’t need you for answers. I don’t need you for anything.” Her expression would have frozen a hot spring solid. In July. After a moment, all the chill melted away, and she smiled.
“Really?”
Cold dread swirled in the pit of my stomach. I knew that smile. She had something on me, something big. She didn’t seem eager to make me work for the information, which meant she could barely contain it.
That was scarier than a hundred rips coming for me at once.
“I’ve been with Chronos for years, ever since my own parents worked for them,” she said. “I’ve seen raw talent that you can’t even fathom.” The smile faded and was replaced by calculation. “I was a scientist before I was a mother, so I had time to think about the kind of child I wanted. One just like me.”
An uneasy fear crept up my spine.
“I wanted to make sure I did everything perfectly,” she said, “so there was research. So much tedious research. I needed to verify the genetic sequence, so I located specimens.”
“Specimens?”
Her smile made a brief reappearance. “Once everything was confirmed and reconfirmed, I began experimenting. Of course, mistakes were made.”
Adrenaline numbed my face and clutched at my vocal cords. She couldn’t mean what I thought she meant.
“No one gets everything right the first time. Experiments can create monsters.”
“What kind of monsters?”
“The versions of you that I didn’t get right the first time.”
My mouth went dry. “You made multiple versions of me. Are they still out there?”
“I don’t allow mistakes.”
I stared at her, hoping for a shred of humanity. Searching for anything that wasn’t cold and self-serving. I didn’t find any of it.
“I count as a success, then?” I asked.
“You’re as close as I could get.”
“Did you ever love me?” I asked. God, it hurt, because I knew the answer. “Or was I just a means to an end?”
“People define love in their own ways,” Mother said. “Some people say love is about duty. Or loyalty. You owe me your very life. The way our relationship has progressed is completely your choice.”
“No, you made all my choices for me.” Either through manipulation or emotional blackmail.
“Have you considered I have motives?”
The pull of the power she had over me was the only thing keeping me in my seat. I decided then and there, no matter how many hours or minutes I had left on earth, that she wasn’t going to dictate one more second.
“Your motives are the least of it. I don’t know one true thing about you, and I don’t want to.”
Dune
“You’re wrong about that,” Teague said to Hallie. “I think there’s plenty you want to know about me. About you.”
Seconds ago, sadness had hung off Hallie’s frame like an empty husk. Now it disappeared and was replaced by determination.
“No, there isn’t.” Hallie squeezed my hand. “I’m done talking. As of right now.”
She leaned back in her seat and imitated zipping her lips and throwing away the key. It was fiendishly immature, and just the right choice to piss Teague off.
Teague stood and turned her back on Hallie.
I had tried to check out emotionally and play the part of the cool observer, but right now I wanted to get ugly. Anger would’ve satisfied me on a primal level, but I chose a more balanced playing field. My weapon would be intelligence rather than emotion. I spoke up. “Tell me your motives.”
When Teague turned around, I realized how much she and her daughter resembled each other. Remarkably so. I knew how beautiful Hallie would be twenty years from now. My job was to figure out how to get her there.
“I don’t think so. You aren’t part of this,” Teague demurred. “I know your weaknesses, Dune. I know you can smell the water from here, and that it calls to you. I even know what it says.”
I felt Hallie tense beside me, but thankfully she was stubborn enough to stay silent. I stood and stepped forward, completely disrespecting Teague’s personal space. “I don’t need a translator. Tell me, Teague, what is your goal? Power? Or is it just the idea of conquering time?”
“I don’t need to share my intentions with you.” Teague looked from me to Hallie. “I’m here to talk to my daughter.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you. I’m the only reason she’s still sitting here, so if there’s something you want her to know, I’m the messenger.”
Teague’s eyes were a deeper hazel, but she and her daughter shared the same slender build and tall frame. Their dark hair shone like silk in the sunlight, and they had perfect bee-stung lips. But where Hallie’s face was still soft, Teague’s was nothing but hard angles. Less in her appearance, more in her countenance. Other than that, they were alike.
Exactly alike.
The truth sneaked in and blindsided me. I took a step back, staring at Teague. “Do you have the transmutation gene?”
Teague offered a bemused smile in response. “You and Hallie haven’t discussed my ability?”
“She told me you’re a human clock. You always know what time it is, down to the second without looking. Half metronome, half party trick.” Hallie had also told me Teague didn’t use it very much. “If you were around someone like that every day, it would get old pretty fast. It might be amusing to a child, but eventually the novelty would wear off. They’d
stop asking for demonstrations. You could stop faking it.”
The deep lines around her mouth told me I was on the right track.
“Instead of digging up specimens with the Infinityglass gene,” I asked, “why didn’t you just use your own?”
“Use my own? That’s a ridiculous assumption.” Teague crossed her arms over her chest. “I—”
“You couldn’t take the chance that having a child naturally would create someone like you. You had to make sure the specific gene was isolated. You needed exact proof.”
She leaned down to pick up her purse. “When my daughter is ready to talk to me, let me know.”
I stepped in front of her. “How long did it take before you considered cloning?”
“Cloning?” Hallie stood, too, giving up her vow of silence.
I got out of the way and let Hallie take over.
“Is he right?”
“Not cloning. You’re genetically engineered.” Teague sounded bored. “It’s not a quick explanation.”
Hallie took a step back. “You’re an Infinityglass, too.”
“I’m not.” Teague tilted her chin defiantly.
“She’s telling the truth,” I confirmed, staring Teague down. “Because she never activated, either because she didn’t want to or she didn’t know how. Or both.”
Hallie’s eyes burned with the truth. “How much of Dad’s ‘protection’ was really you? Did you feed his paranoia to make it easier to keep me under your thumb? How much did he know?”
Teague didn’t answer. She wasn’t even looking at us. She was staring at a rip.
It spread across the park like an extended movie screen, the edges undulating in the breeze.
Except the air around us was still.
It expanded into a rip world bustling with industry. Buildings under construction. Workmen busy at their tasks. Shiny metal signs hung everywhere, displaying the words WORLD COTTON CENTENNIAL, 1884.
“It’s the world’s fair,” Teague murmured.
“It’s a rip world. Your first one?” Hallie asked. Her mom didn’t acknowledge the question. “They get better. See the people in the present disappearing? It’s because the past takes over.”
Teague watched as the rip expanded again, and another building came into view. Electric lights hung everywhere, the name Edison prominent on all the accompanying equipment.
My chest felt like a semi had parked on it. Hallie and I’d talked about the next rip she’d encounter, and what the last one had done to her. What would this one do?
Hallie stood, her back to the rip. “You know how I feel about Jackson Square after what happened. I won’t go there on a good day. There’s no way in hell I’d go past the place where Benny bled to death now.”
Teague’s head jerked up and she focused on Hallie’s face. “Why?”
“The rips come from the past, and they possess me. I troll around in their memories, and they live inside my skin. That’s what being the Infinityglass means. Thank you so very much.”
The rip world grew wider, taking over another section of land. A building made of glass appeared in the distance.
Hallie’s focus shifted to something behind us, her eyes following it in a circle. Horses on a track. “You can blame yourself for this, Mother.”
“I didn’t start it,” Teague said. “Jack Landers is the one who broke the rules.”
“You perpetuated it. You threw in with him,” Hallie argued. “You let him look for the Infinityglass, and the whole time you knew it was me.”
“I kept that information from him,” Teague argued back.
The rip grew wider, going around us instead of flowing over us. I put my hand on the small of Hallie’s back. I needed to get her out.
“I tried to protect you, Hallie.” Teague’s voice trembled.
“Really?” Hallie laughed without mirth. “Don’t pretend like you have feelings for me. You’ve never cared for me the way a mother should care for her own child, because you didn’t give birth to me; you bred me.”
“I created you.”
The smell of manure blended with the sounds of livestock, all of it too close.
“Hal, we’ve gotta go. It’s growing too fast to—”
The rip world moved like lightning, swallowing Hallie, and then Teague.
I did the only thing I could.
I followed.
Chapter 20
Hallie
Suddenly, I was staring up at a bright blue sky rather than the gray one that had been there ten seconds ago.
A crowd of rips gathered, staring at me, just like ones we’d encountered in the alley in the French Quarter.
Two seconds later, my mother appeared.
I took off running, keeping to the Saint Charles side of the park, dodging in and out of crowds. It might be impossible to outrun a rip, but I was sure as hell going to try.
“Hallie, stop!”
I paused to look over my shoulder. My mother. The woman could move in heels, I’d give her that. “Enjoying the early nineteenth century? Because there’s a good chance it’s about to enjoy me.”
I took off again, but I’d chosen the wrong direction. The first rip caught me just outside the international exhibition.
The boy was Chinese. He sat beside a merchant, presumably his father, as they took items out of wooden shipping crates and cataloged them. He’d been crying.
“But I don’t understand why anyone would treat a human this way.”
He spoke a language that wasn’t my own, yet was. I understood it, and the source of the pain in his chest.
“There are slaves in China.” Father speaks with a discordant note, not to admonish me, but to teach me. “The number is small, and the practice is waning, but almost every culture has a race that they treat as half man, half thing.”
“I will never treat a human with anything resembling this contempt.” I make the vow to myself and to my family’s honor.
“I know, son of mine. This is why I brought you here, to America. To see the different ways people live, and so you can choose your own path. Kindness is always the answer. Turn your inner concerns outward, and live for others rather than yourself.”
My father grins and holds up a tiny golden Buddha. “It doesn’t hurt if you sell them a few things along the way.”
When I opened my eyes, I was on the ground, on my back.
My mother had seen the possession, watched it change my body, and she was afraid. “Your face …”
I didn’t have time to enjoy her fear. I was too busy anticipating an onslaught. What I saw when I looked around rocked me to the core.
The rips were watching us. Not me, us. Me and my mother.
Some held back, and others surged forward to stare. Even though they drifted closer to me than her, they still hovered, unable to keep their eyes in one place. Unable to make a decision.
“Do you see that?” I asked her softly. “They can’t decide if they want to pick me or you. You might not be activated, but you’re still an Infinityglass.”
“Maybe. But you’re the powerful one.” She said the words loudly, like she wanted to make sure they could hear. And then she pointed. “She’s the powerful one.”
The rips knew their best option, and now they were advancing. I felt the pull, but it wasn’t as strong as usual. I guessed I had something to thank my mother for after all, even if it was only a momentary distraction.
I moved closer to her. The rips followed me, and once again split their focus between us. My mind scrambled for a way to draw out the confusion as long as I could. Then I caught sight of Dune.
He approached us at a run, grabbing me and pulling me away from Mom and the rips.
“Don’t give in, Hallie.”
He put his body between the rips and me.
It worked.
They were staring only at my mother now, and she gaped at them in horror. They began to circle her, and I held on to Dune instead of being absorbed into the lives of those already dead
.
“Can you get us out?” he asked.
I’d have to make a choice.
I stared at my mother, who even now was trying to wave the rips in my direction.
I took Dune’s hand and closed the rip world.
I left my mother behind.
My hair was still wet from the shower when I climbed into his lap, which was my new favorite place. If we had to be vertical. “She’ll get out. She’s not activated. She doesn’t have enough strength to sustain them.”
He held me close, and his big hand ran slow circles over my back. “Are you okay?”
“At least I know the truth now.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.
I wanted to call my dad, see if he’d known the truth, any part of it. “Not right now. Right now let’s talk about how you got this scar.” I smoothed my finger over his eyebrow.
“I fell off the kitchen counter when I was three.”
“Why were you on the kitchen counter?”
“I was trying to get glue off the top of the fridge so I could attach my Matchbox cars to the coffee table.”
“I bet you were a mess of a toddler.” And got away with everything. No mother would’ve been able to resist those eyes. “Do you have siblings?”
“Three. Two of them own a kick-ass resort on the Kona coast. Obviously, I’ve never been to visit. The other is in med school at USC.”
“You’re the baby?”
“Yep.”
I tickled him, hoping he’d tickle back, because that got his hands near the places I wanted them. When he didn’t, I kissed him and slid my hands up the back of his shirt.
“Hallie. We need to talk about today. I don’t want you to swallow the truth. It’ll burn a hole through you.”
“Why can’t we act like everything is normal?” I removed my hands, put them in my lap. “Just for today?”
“Don’t think I wouldn’t rather be kissing you.” He laid one on me that made my toes curl for posterity. “Because I would. But I’d also like to be kissing you next week and next month and next year. If we can’t figure this out, that won’t—”