Mend (Rift Walkers #2)

  He must be able to hear the panic pounding through my bloodstream, because he pauses and looks into my eyes. “Put these clothes on after the alarm sounds, and come on out.” He takes a step closer while Cedar drapes a bag over the back of the armchair. I’ll put the clothes I’m wearing in it for testing. “Cascade, it’s going to be okay. At least we’ll know.”

  He exchanges a glance with Cedar, who wears tightness in the corners of his eyes, and they leave me alone to undress.

  Cascade

  BEING INSIDE THE MACHINE REMINDS me of walking through time. It’s colorless, and quiet. So quiet it makes my stomach writhe with snakes. So quiet, I have to listen to my own thoughts. I don’t like where they go.

  So I swallow back the fear of dying before I turn twenty, before I get back to Price, and close my eyes as the lights inside the machine start snapping. Only a few minutes pass before the alarm sounds, but it feels like years. I hate getting my cells analyzed, hate looking into Cedar’s eyes as his brother delivers the findings.

  I pull myself together and get dressed in the clothes I brought last time. I’ll need to replenish the supply since Cedar sprung this visit on me. I look into the mirror above the cabinet and take in my dark eyes, my olive-colored skin. It seems lighter than normal, and a spike of worry stabs through me.

  My hair feels finer, my skin rougher. I blink, and nothing about me seems right. A sob works its way up my throat, but I swallow it back.

  Of course nothing is right. I don’t belong here in 2013. I found my place in the future, a future I want to get back to. A future I’ll do anything to return to.

  My sister’s face drifts through my mind, and I step away from the mirror. I’m not sure I can leave her behind again, but she hasn’t seemed super-keen on leaving this timeline.

  “Cas?” Cedar calls through the closed door, and I step to it and open it.

  “Yeah, sorry.” I move past him, careful not to touch him, and settle in the chair across from Trader’s desk. He doesn’t glance up from the pages his printer spit out.

  Cedar sits next to me, and his gaze is hella-heavy. “Stop staring at me,” I bark.

  “Well, her attitude hasn’t been damaged,” he says with a chuckle.

  I cut him a glare. “I just don’t need—”

  “Cascade, Cedar has a right to be concerned,” Trader interrupts. “These readings aren’t favorable.” He shuffles the papers, making notes on a couple. “Your muscle walls are fifty percent weaker than your last exam, which was only eight months ago.”

  My legs feel weaker already, but he’s not finished.

  “Your bone density is lower than ever. You’re at an increased risk for fractures and breaks, just as someone in their seventies with osteoporosis.”

  “I’ll drink more milk,” I say over a dry throat.

  Cedar sighs, stands, and strides out of the office. Guilt pricks my conscious, but I let him go. Having him worry over me doesn’t help anything.

  “I’m prescribing a calcium supplement, as well as iron.” He scribbles on a notepad. “This is serious, Cascade.”

  “I know that, Trader. I do.”

  He stabs his pen toward the closed door. “Why do you do that, then? He cares about you. We both do.” He rips the scrip from the pad and hands it to me, his dark eyes storming with frustration.

  I slump back into the chair. “I’m not used to people caring about me.”

  Trader stands, his anger a palpable being between us. “Keep telling yourself that lie, Cascade, and eventually, you won’t have anyone here who cares about you.”

  “Trader, there’s someone else. Someone in the future I need to get back to.”

  My confession deflates his fury. He sits next to me, placing one finger under my chin and forcing me to look at him. “Tell him that, then. He won’t move on until he’s sure he can’t have you.”

  I glance toward the door, where I imagine Cedar—my dark, wonderful Cedar—pressing his ear to the wood on the other side. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll tell him.”

  “Before you leave again,” Trader says. “Promise me.” He speaks with the harshness of the arctic wind, so I promise.

  But as I follow him out the door and find Cedar waiting for me in his truck, I don’t know how I can keep all the promises I’ve made. To Shep, the brother I live with in the future. To Price. To Saige. And now to Trader.

  No matter what I do, someone’s going to get hurt.

  “Sorry,” I tell Cedar when I get in the cab. “I have to take supplements.”

  He reaches for my hand and I let him take it. “What next? Meds and rest?”

  “Just meds,” I say, sliding him a look as I extract my fingers from his, slow so he won’t think I don’t want to hold his hand. I don’t need to hurt him more than I already have. “Then I wonder if you’ll help me send a message through the rift.”

  Cedar’s eyebrows lift as he backs out of the parking stall. “Who are we writing to?”

  “The kid who lives in my house in the future. His dad owns the rift—I walk for him. I need to let them know why I haven’t come back, haven’t been in contact. I don’t need them coming here to…retrieve me.”

  “I don’t think they could even if they wanted to,” he says. “Wouldn’t they have already come?”

  “Maybe.” But the thought doesn’t settle me the way it should. If there’s no rift in the future, how will I get back? How can I tell Price I haven’t forgotten about him? These questions plague me while Cedar drops off my prescription and takes me to our favorite diner for a late breakfast.

  By the time we get home, two orange pill bottles in tow, my nerves feel like someone’s attacked them with a weed trimmer.

  Cedar follows me into the game room and down into the secret basement, a space that’s much too tight for the two of us and all the unsaid words between us. I touch my fingertips to my lips to remind myself of the last person who kissed them—Price.

  Not Cedar, though he’s kissed me too. Before Price, before I was sure I wanted to stay in the future, Cedar wanted me to come home.

  I’d been gone for three years, and had just turned sixteen when I’d been commissioned to come back and fix something in the year 2006. It had been freaky to see Cedar as a sixteen-year-old too, but I’d just started rift-walking and my mind hadn’t caught up to the bendiness time can have.

  That was the first time he’d taken me to Trader, on my first contracted rift-walk. I thought for sure Guy would know, that he’d never let me come back to a time period so close to my own again. But if he knew, or suspected, he never said. And I got assigned jobs in all periods of time.

  When it was time for me to return to the future, Cedar stopped me, drew me close, and kissed me. He said he loved me, couldn’t stand the thought of me living in that future with such a dangerous job—and that was before we discovered my degenerative health issues.

  I’d never felt such a strong pull to stay in the past. But I’d just learned about Shep’s medical condition, I’d just signed my contract with Guy, and I couldn’t abandon my responsibilities in the future.

  Cedar had said he understood, but his touch had begged me to stay.

  “We will never be safe,” I’d told him. “Guy Ryerson always finds who he’s looking for.”

  At least that much is still true, and I have to return to the year 2073 to fulfill my contract with him. I wonder if the last six months will go toward the two years I had remaining on my contract when I left in June. Doubtful.

  “Cascade.” Cedar speaks in that same hushed tone, the one he used when he whispered how he really felt about me.

  “Cedar, don’t.” I open both laptops waiting on the counter and turn away from him. I key in the year I want and activate the lasers. A panel on the floor begins to slide back as words crowd my mouth.

  I face him, giving him the respect he deserves. “You’ve helped me so much, and I love you for that. But you’ve got to let me go. Find someone who loves you because you’re wonderful, a
nd kind, and smart, and—”

  “I don’t want someone else.”

  “I’ve already found someone else.”

  Shock tumbles across his face, and he takes a step back like I’ve slapped him. “In the future? What’s his name?”

  I press my lips close, unwilling to tell him I’ve fallen for my evil boss’s son.

  “Is that who we’re sending a note to? Your futuristic boyfriend?”

  “Cedar—”

  He cuts me off with a low laugh. Chills race down my arms with the sound. The vents pumping chilled air into the space don’t help.

  The roar of the rift joins the noise of his laughter. I squeeze my fist around the note I’ve prepared for Price.

  “I want to know his name.” Cedar folds his arms and blocks the way to the rift.

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.” Cedar has never scared me, but now, looking into the depths of his brown eyes, a sliver of fear races through me.

  “My brother and I have taken care of you for years. I’ve given you everything you’ve ever asked for. I understood when you had to go back because of Shep.” He steps closer. Closer still. “You’re my oldest friend. The girl I’ve always wanted.” He reaches me and slips his hands around my waist. I keep my eyes looking at the rift just over his shoulder, though a large part of me wants to sink into his embrace, melt into his warmth. He’s familiar, and safe, and on some level, I do love him.

  He touches his lips to my temple, lower to my cheek. “Cas, please. I just want to know his name.”

  “Price Ryerson,” spills from my mouth before I can contain it.

  Cedar freezes, his body next to mine going rigid. “Don’t you work for a Ryerson?”

  “His father.”

  He releases me and steps back. I miss his touch instantly, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling besides stuff it away.

  “Nothing is ever easy with you, is it?” The anger riding in his words isn’t hard to miss. Neither is the hurt, the agony, displayed in the tautness of his shoulders, the frustration in the flexing of his fingers, and the anguish racing through his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Cedar.” I reach toward him, but he falls back again. He holds my gaze for one, two, three seconds before he spins and flies up the stairs, leaving the way to the rift clear.

  A single tear slides down my face as I step toward the rift and stick my hand through. I drop the note and breathe, breathe again, before extracting my now-empty fist.

  I have no way of knowing if the message will go through. Maybe Cedar is right and the rift isn’t functioning in 2073. Maybe Guy will get the note and never pass my message to Price.

  I turn and face the stairs. Maybe I shouldn’t be pining over a guy I can’t get back to and realize who I have right here.

  Price

  DAD BUILT AN ENTRANCE TO the basement in the exact spot where the old, concealed one used to be. The porch doesn’t wrap quite as far around, and there’s a sidewalk that leads to a set of stairs that go down to where the window well sat.

  I’ve never seen anyone use it—until I stride up the street after Heath and I have taken care of Shep. My feet stumble over themselves as my mind’s busy with the newsfeed Cooper wrote. He was talking to me, but I’m not sure he was asking me for information. More like giving me a warning.

  At least that’s what my gut thinks.

  My suspicions are confirmed when Monroe separates himself from the shadows in the stairwell and gestures me down the new sidewalk.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask when I’m close enough to whisper. We’ve never spoken out in the open, and hardly ever in person.

  “Got assigned to the house this afternoon.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and watches the deserted street.

  “Where have you been?” I ask.

  He cuts me a glance. “Where your father’s been.”

  So the Time Bureau—where another rift exists. Heath was right. Maybe Dad started using that one while he works on repairing the one here at the house. I just can’t believe he’d take such risks, unless they were necessary. So what would make rift walking necessary?

  “Why’d you get assigned here? Why now?”

  “Not my job to ask why.”

  No, that’s my job , I think as I peer into Monroe’s face. I’ve always been able to read more than what he says.

  “Why are you talking to me?”

  “Your dad has a message for you, but he didn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “He could’ve sent it to me. I read all my chats immediately.”

  “Wanted it delivered in person.”

  Annoyance makes me scoff. “So you’re him now?”

  Monroe takes a step forward, and the porch light catches on the grids in his eyes. I look the same direction as him, but see nothing.

  Still, he waits long moments before settling beside me again. “Apparently, a note came through the rift for you.”

  Hope roars from the bottom of my feet to my skull. “ A note?”

  “Came just in time, too.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, Price, that your dad is tired of waiting for his best rift walker to come home. Apparently, he had a rescue mission planned.”

  Ice fills my chest. “I doubt Cascade would consider it a rescue.”

  “You never know,” Monroe says casually, like he’s talking about whether it will rain tomorrow or not.

  “So what did she say?”

  “Said she was working on a way to get home, and she wanted your dad to know she intended to keep her contract.”

  Relief sighs through my tight muscles. Cascade is coming back. “That’s why you’ve been waiting out in the cold? To tell me that?”

  “You didn’t want to know your girlfriend managed to get a note through the rift?” Monroe leans down. “I thought you were smarter than that.”

  I lean against the porch as the strength leaves my legs. “The rift is functional.”

  “You didn’t hear it from me.” Monroe descends a few steps. “Oh, and Price? She has a personal message for you. Your dad wanted to throw that away. Wait. He did throw away that part. Might want to take the trash out tonight.” He disappears down the stairs, leaving me to wonder how many trashcans I’ll need to search before I find the piece of paper with Cascade’s loopy handwriting.

  Six. I finally found a lined piece of white paper in the garbage can in my bathroom, after I’d rummaged through the kitchen trashcan, the downstairs bathroom, the garage barrel, and every other receptacle except the ones in Dad’s wing.

  Monroe must have walked the note upstairs himself. I take a few seconds to print-lock my doors before I open the wadded up paper.

  The rift exploded while we were inside. We returned to Castle Pines just five days ago. Don’t freak out, okay? I’m fine. I just didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten about you, or that I wasn’t coming back.

  Talk soon,

  Cas

  I flop back onto my pillow and press my eyes closed. If I was religious, I’d thank God for getting her out of that rift alive. I’d pray for a solution to the rift damage here at the house so I could step through and see her, talk to her, breathe in the floral scent of her hair.

  I stuff the note under my mattress and cue up the Link. Just because I can, I decide to make a new identity. It’s the middle of the night, and my first thought is to hail Newt—an old habit I haven’t been able to break in the since months since Cascade left.

  See, she was Newt, and she kept me company in the dead of night when neither of us could sleep.

  I sign onto the Link and navigate to the Alternate Identities Personnel Department automatically. I have four registered identities on the books. Four people Dad’s been watching for six months. Four personalities I haven’t used since Cascade left.

  With a simple thought, I navigate to one of the hacker forums I used to haunt. Within seconds I’ve searched for and found the site for unregistered identities. The hardest th
ing to do is choose the name for my new, unregistered identity.

  I go with Owen Kaufman, borrowing Cascade’s last name like we’re related or something.

  Having done something wild and impulsive that buys me a little unmonitored freedom, I switch back to the forum, where I find a new thread about the Black Hat’s newsfeed. I read a few comments before I realize how pointless it is.

  None of those people know anything. The Black Hat hasn’t responded to any of them, and I have a feeling Coop’s waiting for me to post something. It’ll be a slap in the face when Owen Kaufman adds his opinion to the thread.

  I can’t quite decide what to say. I can’t just come out and say my dad’s opened the rift at the Time Bureau—I don’t actually know if that’s true. I can’t say there’s an operational rift at my house—that’s too obvious.

  In the end, I add my thoughts to the thread with a simple, What once was broken may now be fixed.

  Cooper’s smart. He and his team will figure out what that means. I hit submit, making my first post with my new identity, and lean away from my flatpanel. Not four seconds later, I get an alert in my chatline.

  Misuse of identity: Please send vital information to the Personalities Sector within one hour.

  Within ten seconds, Dad’s in my ear too. “In my office, Price. Now.”

  I only think about not going for one heartbeat. Then I trudge down the stairs and around the corner to Dad’s wing. I don’t knock, because a guard opens the door for me, fading into the background the way good help does.

  In the past, he’s made me wait until he was good and ready to talk. This time, he meets me just across the threshold, his expression set on fierce. “What are you doing? Posting on known hacker forums with a newly minted identity?”

  “I—I thought…”

  “Thought I wouldn’t find out.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “I find everything out.”

  “It’s really annoying.” I push past him and move over to the wallscreens. “What are you doing with the rift, Dad?”