I scream and press my palms against my eyes.
“What are you doing in here?” he demands. Scuffling follows, and I hope he’s gluing that towel to his body.
“Sorry, I—”
“Get out! Now!”
Before I can move, his bedroom door swings open. I lower my hands to find Mom standing in the doorway, her normally smooth hair flying in wisps around her face. She’s holding the phone to her ear with a wild look in her dark eyes.
Mom hangs up and stands there, her gaze volleying between me sitting in Shep’s bed and him white-knuckling a towel around his naked body.
Seconds tick by, each one marked by the whitening in my mother’s complexion. “What is going on here?” she finally whispers. It would’ve been better if she’d yelled it. It might’ve been better if she’d never found me, the way she woke up one Sunday morning and never found Chloe.
“Nothing,” I say quickly, leaping from Shep’s bed like it’s suddenly caught fire. I don’t know what else to say. There is no explanation.
I’ve learned not to argue with my mom. Once, I told her I didn’t like the pulp in the orange juice. She lectured me for ten minutes about its health qualities before stomping into her office, shouting “I’ll let you pick the juice from now on!” over her shoulder.
We talk about the weather and my grades and what’s for dinner. Those are the only safe topics, and sometimes they don’t even count. Shep’s learned to grunt and nod instead of actually speaking. Chloe was the only one I could confide in, and since she disappeared, I feel like a stranger in my own family.
Mom’s looking at me with worry pinching her eyes, but there’s something deeper there. Something I don’t like. Something like she’s been expecting me to crack, and now I’ve finally done it by climbing into bed with my younger brother. She squints at Shep, and I see the calculating look she sweeps over him and then me. Does she really think I came in here, and he, and me, and ew.
“I didn’t know she was there,” Shep says, and I get the feeling it’s not the first time he’s defended himself. “Maybe she came in while I was showering or something. She sure as hell wasn’t there when I woke up.”
“Language,” Mom scolds and then she scrutinizes me again. “Well, Saige? Why are you sleeping in your brother’s room?”
There is no freaking way I’m telling her about the breathing. Shep maybe, if he wasn’t fresh from the shower and still clutching a towel around his lower half.
“I wasn’t sleeping in here,” I scoff. “I just needed a thumb drive for school. Shep has trillions of them.” I cast my eyes around the room, hoping a bin of the stupid things will materialize.
“It’s Sunday,” Mom says, and I close my eyes, unable to look at her until I can come up with something else. I can’t tell her I slept in Shep’s room because I saw Chloe sitting in my window seat.
I open my eyes and meet her penetrating gaze. “Yeah, but I’m going to Sarah Jane’s to study today.” The lie hovers in the air between us. She knows a fib when she hears one, and I suck at lying. Chloe took that talent with her.
Mom’s eyes beg me to tell her everything, but at the same time she doesn’t want to know. She can’t hypothesize about my feelings, and that frustrates her.
I push past Shep, leaving my blanket on his bed, hoping Mom won’t notice it. When I arrive in my room via the bathroom, she’s standing in the doorway, blocking my escape into the hall.
“Where’s your blanket?” She glances over my shoulder to the bed.
“Laundry,” I bite out as I move to the window seat, my usual spot for her check-in. “It was too hot last night. You need to turn on the freaking air conditioner already.”
I expect a rebuke for saying freaking, but it doesn’t come. She knows I didn’t sweat through my blankets. She doesn’t vocalize it, but her eyes say everything her mouth can’t. I know she loves me, wants the best for me.
Still. I’m not Chloe, and I’m not going to vanish in the middle of the night. She did things like that, even before she disappeared and never returned. Her bed lay empty most nights, and while I stayed in like a good girl, she snuck out.
After Dad died, Chloe sort of escaped inside herself for a while. She spent more and more time with Mom, and when I asked her where she went at night, she said, “Eliza’s,” or “Cedar’s.”
Her friends—a new group she’d found once she’d entered junior high. A group where I was definitely the tag-along, the one everyone put up with because “she’s Chloe’s little sister.” I reasoned that since she spent so much of her free time at work with Mom, she used her restless nights to hang out with her friends. I didn’t know what they did in the dead of night, and I’d never wanted to know. Until she didn’t come back. Then everyone wanted to know, and I had no answers.
I focus on my reflection in the glass, a clear invitation for Mom to go through her inspection. She’ll leaf through my mostly-finished homework, her lips pursed but not saying anything. She’ll scroll through my text messages, and I can never tell if she’s disappointed I’ve only sent two to Shep, or relieved I’m not messaging boys she doesn’t know. I can still remember Mom shrieking, “Cedar? Who’s Cedar?” after she found Chloe’s phone and the hundreds of texts they’d exchanged.
I hear the scuff as she replaces my phone in my backpack, her footsteps as she moves into the bathroom. She’ll open and close the medicine cabinet before emerging with a scowl of disapproval. I don’t care. I’m not taking the anti-hallucinogens. They make me feel weird, and they don’t stop me from seeing Chloe anyway, so I don’t see the point.
In my reflection I look tired, like I spent most of the night pretending to be asleep.
“Packing again?” she asks.
I turn away from the window and find Mom gesturing toward my computer desk. I hadn’t started packing, but unfamiliar electronics litter my desk. I see a hovering screen, something that looks like an elongated—and much shinier—version of a butter knife, and a paper-thin, nearly transparent tablet.
Mom says something, but I can’t hear her over the sudden intake of my breath. Or the pounding of my heart. Or the scream of jet engines in my ears.
Is this real? Or another hallucination? The visions have never extended to my environment before, but then again, I’d never heard anything either, until last night. The breathing was definitely there, absolutely real.
Something’s changed.
Before I can begin to think of what, a blue bolt of electricity sparks from out of nowhere, and a voice says,“Crap. I’m late for practice.”
“You heard that, right?” I look at Mom, find her staring at the now-perfectly-normal computer desk with disbelief clearly written on her features.
She snaps her gaze from the desk to focus on me, all emotion in her eyes wiped clean. She puts her hand on my shoulder; it feels much too heavy. “Heard what?”
Price
ONLY MINUTES AFTER I’VE FINISHED the flick, an ad comes up in my network, which I set to play on my cybernetic lenses. Legally, I have to watch it—government sponsored ads can’t be deleted unseen. I half listen while stewing over how I can lure the authorities somewhere else.
“Time shouldn’t be messed with,” the ad says, showing a panoramic view of the ocean and a blue whale cresting the waves. “Enjoy the present. Learn from the past.”
Perfect timing. The rift flick will be viral on all the vidlogs by now. As required, I put in sixty seconds on the ad before I delete it. Dad’s going to have to log a ton of in-person hours at the Bureau because of that flick, and I find the thought more comforting than anything else.
I used to be interested in everything Dad did. His inventions, his politics, his job. That was all before I realized that most of what he created made it easier for the government to monitor me, easier for someone at the Advertising Agency to collect data and subscribe specific ads to my personal tastes, and much harder to be myself.
His Receiver made it possible for a person to live within a single
room, never interacting with someone else. Shopping, education, communication can all be done inside your mind—the Receiver connects human brain tissue to the Circuit. Everything can be controlled with a simple thought.
Dad’s politics regarding technology development made everyone stop and stare, analyzing and judging my hair, my jeans, my stature. He pushed technology to the limits, breaking barriers in biological and physical science. He’s invented things that have since been outlawed—like the ability to create an alternate identity online. Someone with no past, no history, no record, no file.
That, of course, didn’t go over well. “We can’t have people committing crimes and then erasing themselves,” Wilder Thomas, the head of the Security department at the Time Bureau, had said. Nearly everyone had agreed with him. Anyone found to have created an alternate identity is immediately taken in for questioning by the Hoods. Wilder’s gone on to become the Time Keeper, and his policies on time travel are well respected. At least until now, I think.
I puzzle through why he thought he needed to hide a rift at the Bureau. Time travel is definitely a controversial subject that’s brought up every election season, along with the education system and federal spending. Too many risks, and too many unknowns, cause general nervousness and unrest among the majority of citizens.
Some—including Dad—say we should use the advanced technology we discover. The Time Travel Initiative allows for testing under extremely controlled measures, but the use of rifts for travel is strictly prohibited.
The same ad declaring that time shouldn’t be messed with pops up in my feed again, and I open it. Ad Agency personnel must be going nuts with damage control. I’ve never received the same ad in the same day before. Even with these attempts to pacify the public, Wilder will have to answer for his unregistered rift at the Bureau—and so will Dad. As the lead developer of technology, he oversees the Bureau security systems. An internal leak about an undisclosed rift will cause him a ton of work and make him hella unhappy.
I almost smile at that thought. Maybe if he’s neck-deep in work, he’ll leave me alone about attending his meetings and joining his tech development team.
As much as I hate how the government uses the technology we have, I admit that I’m linked-in every minute of every hour that I’m awake. I like getting information from my Receiver with only a quick thought. It’s fun to chat with my friends or watch a flick on my cybernetic lenses while I workout.
And I certainly couldn’t have created the Black Hat—or done any of the dozens of jams—without the current legal and illegal technology available. I definitely have a love-hate relationship, with both my dad and technology.
The flick Heath sent bothers me for many reasons, one of which is that I had nothing to do with it. And something more nags at me. A cold prickle skates down my arms as I go into the bathroom and drop a holoswitch into the concealed drawer of the built-in cabinets. I don’t have the proper permission codes to own and use the switch—technology which allows me to see and interact holographically with the person I’m chatting with. I can transfer objects to their environment, and they can show me things from theirs. We’re not physically in the same room, but as close as we can get electronically.
My parents—mostly my dad—monitor where I’m linking into the Circuit, and in what capacity I’m using it. He pulls the log from the Ad Agency, checking which sites I’m looking at, and if I’m really doing my digis for school. If he doesn’t like what he sees, he can put a block on my Circuit sites, only allowing me access to specific, predetermined, and approved information.
Everyone is allowed to be linked-in as much as they want, and I know people who play immersion realms for hours. Dad’s only limited me once, and only after I didn’t turn in my English homework for over a week.
That’s the other thing about holoswitch: I can talk to anyone anywhere without him—or anyone else—knowing. He wouldn’t be able to see the chat or its history, or know who I’ve been talking to. Since I’m underage, I need permission from both a parent and the government to own and use the holoswitch. I don’t have either.
The switch gets lost among the mess of excess computer parts and fiber optic cables in the drawer. As I stare down into the electronics, I commit to myself that I will do a better job of covering my tracks in the future. I’ll stay up late one night, switch over to my Black Hat identity, and play a jam in another state. I can hack into a distant city system and get all the outstanding parking tickets paid, sign the jam with my Black Hat signature, and lure the authorities there. The last thing I need is cops sniffing around Castle Pines. Sure, it’s a big city with a couple dozen sprawling subdivisions, but if they already know I’m here, it won’t take long for them to find the right neighborhood.
I force myself to breathe. “Restart,” I say, and drop static-free rewetting drops over my cybernetics so I can watch the flick again. When the four people exit the building, I suddenly understand the nagging in my mind. I recognize one of the teens. The tallest guy.
“Cooper!” I say, though no one is around to hear. I open my bedroom window and start shimmying down the rain gutter. I could use the stairs, and I have permission to be outside. I just don’t want to tell anyone where I’m going.
“Chat Heath Stonesman,” I instruct my Receiver when I hit the ground. I pinch my thumb and forefinger together to activate the speaker in my ear and it crackles to life with Heath’s voice.
“What’s up, Price?”
“That flick,” I say, knowing I can’t say much over a public line.
“You on your way over?”
“Yeah.”
“Backyard,” he says and the chat beeps, indicating the line has closed. The two blocks to his house feels like two miles.
“Spill,” I say as soon as Heath emerges from the shadows of the massive oak tree in his backyard. He’s taller than me by three inches, and his spiked brown hair adds more height. His eyes look gray in this light, but sometimes they look green and sometimes brown and sometimes blue, depending on what he’s wearing. His hacker identity is “Chameleon” for a reason.
He can run incredibly fast, something that gives him an advantage over me in every hack we do. Luckily, I’m usually behind the screen while Heath is behind the scenes.
Someone built a tree house in the lower branches of the oak, but that’s not where Heath and I go. We stay on the ground and rely on the absorption plugs—another of Dad’s useful inventions—I’ve installed in the bottom of the tree house to suck our words away from anyone who might be listening. Heath has nosy parents and overly concerned neighbors.
“Coop’s been taken in for questioning.” Heath leans against the trunk of the tree and looks at me.
“How long has he been a rift-walker?” The only thing I know about rift-walking is that it’s hella illegal.
Heath sighs and scrubs his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. My parents didn’t know until the Hoods showed up.”
I lean against the tree trunk like I’m not that interested, but I so am. “What were they like? The Hoods?”
“Scary,” Heath says. “They stood like machines, barked orders through those freaky helmets. You can’t see their eyes, their mouths, nothing. They gave us five minutes to locate Cooper, or we’d all be arrested. My mom was pretty freaked out.” Heath checks over his shoulder to make sure his mom isn’t loitering nearby. “She screamed when they shoved Cooper against the wall and cuffed him. She’s been crying for almost two days now.”
“That’s rough,” I say, the guy-talk equivalent of “I’m sorry.” I shove my hands in my pockets. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“They said we couldn’t tell anyone,” Heath says. “Said they’d know if we did. Sorry, bro.”
I wave his apology away. If the Hoods had told me to keep my mouth shut, I’d have done it too.
“Anyway, they said they’d let us know where they’re keeping him. That we might be able to come visit.” Heath kicks at the grass just starting to c
ome back from the long winter.
“But they haven’t told you yet.”
“Mom and Dad speculate every night about where he is, if he’s okay.” Heath meets my eye. “I’d like to know for sure.” He looks away, as if embarrassed. “I’d do it if I could, but they’re watching us, pretty much all the time.” He meets my eye again.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” I say.
“Newt?” he asks, eyebrows raised.
I shrug one shoulder, which really means Definitely Newt. He’s the only one who can get behind walls I can’t.
Heath nods, and we lapse into silence. I’m thinking through when I can stage an identity switch, and where I might look to find Cooper.
“So….” Heath’s toeing the lawn again. “You talk to Cascade yet? The jam is tomorrow, you know.”
“I know,” I say. “And no, I haven’t talked to her yet. I’ve been waiting for the right time.” It’s only sort of a lie. I’ve had plenty of time to talk to her, but I don’t want to waste it on my personal campaign to show the government that they don’t own me.
Heath scoffs. “Listen, bro, with girls, there is no ‘right time.’ Your window is running low. It’s tomorrow night.”
He’s right, and I have no defense. I need to get Cascade on board for the jam we have planned tomorrow night. “Should we postpone?” I don’t look at him as I ask. I don’t really want to cancel, but sometimes fighting the system should be done smarter, not harder.
“Do you think we should postpone?” Heath asks. “You’d know better than me how freaked out the Bureau is.”
I don’t tell Heath that Dad and I don’t talk business as much as we used to. “I can’t believe there’s an unregistered rift at the Bureau. People are gonna go cray-zy.” I’m sort of going crazy. The registered rift sites are in the industrial district so if there’s a problem the loss of human life is low. But with a rift right downtown, in the heart of Castle Pines, where thousands of people work—the public is definitely going to get vocal.