Disrupted (19 page)

I flexed my hand, still numb and disconnected, at them. “Now, do as I asked.” My voice cracked, and I had to cough up the lump of weariness before driving my point home. “Make Chris understand. Tell him why he should put himself before us, and you’d better make it good. Because, I can promise you this, you’ve got a damn hard sell.”

“Christian,” called Callum Jade.

Chris broke free from my embrace. “Save you breath. I’m not interested in anything you’ve got to say.”

I turned, to find him looking at Callum Jade. His face was closed, his jaw set. He met my eyes for a short second, then took off for the nearest console. He spread his palm over the transparent tabletop, spurring various applications into individual zoomed windows where he touched. A young male presenter seemed to be broadcasting for a news channel. Another window showed some type of personal planner. Another was a rotating holograph of planet earth wrapped in colour-coded atmospheric layers that projected out of the monitor to hover in mid-air.

The holograph reminded me of Wanda. I turned to Callum Jade. “Can you contact TIC or Wanda?”

“Drustan cut the link shortly after he identified the breach. He disabled my Xylex as well.”

I frowned at him. “Then how—”

“That’s why they captured me,” offered the woman. Her smile was noticeably missing. “They need my Xylex to send Christian back.”

“They haven’t found it,” I recalled.

She grimaced. “I don’t keep it at the institute. Unfortunately it’s only a matter of time before they ransack my apartment.”

I walked up to her, slowly, recalling that photo of the blue-eyes Lily Stanton. “You’re not Doctor Stanton.”

Her brows twitched up.

“You’re not Lily Stanton,” I repeated.

“Lily Stanton was my great aunt,” she said. After a quick glance at Chris, she offered, “I never knew her, but she did some amazing work with Christian. My mother worked closely with Callum. I’m Doctor Roslyn Stanton.” She gave a small shrug. “Genetic biology is something of a family tradition where I come from.”

I looked Chris’s way. He’d frozen, his shoulders stiff. But a moment later he was moving again, his fingers drifting over the consoles, bringing random programs to life as he went.

He was listening. That was the best I could hope for.

I sat myself down in front of Roslyn and Callum Jade and said, “Why is Chris’s life so important? Why do the Razoks want him dead? Drustan refused to tell us.”

“Drustan is over cautious,” said Callum Jade in an argumentative tone.

“With reason,” murmured Roslyn.

“You cannot rewrite history without knowing the future and what needs to be changed.” Callum Jade scowled at me. “A fundamental fact Drustan prefers to ignore.”

I wasn’t the least bit interested in the TIC team’s internal bickering or policies. “Tell me. And speak loud enough for Chris to hear.”

Sudden understanding cleared Callum Jade’s scowl. “I was a young man when the Razoks invaded earth. I’d invented TIC by then, even refined it through a couple of versions...nothing what it is today, you understand, but it navigated the past well enough and I’d managed to keep it secret from the Razoks. Or thought I had.”

He hung his head, lost in the past.

“The Razoks never made it to earth. They were blasted to pieces in space,” I reminded him.

Callum Jade brought his head up. His eyes were brittle stone. “They weren’t blasted anywhere the first time round. Our nutes were less effective than plastic ping pong balls. I leapt back twice, naïve and arrogant enough to believe I could change the future. But I had it all wrong, you see. The universal laws of time and space continuum don’t operate within the linear rule that governs science: for every action there is a reaction.

“I didn’t fail because I was a nineteen year old boy who claimed to be from the future bearing tales of invading aliens. I failed because I was violating the defining law that makes time travel possible. The waves of time are not linear, and it is impossible to control events by any direct action. You have to use the nature of that dimension, simulate the natural order of that environment.”

“Wonderful. Great.”  My brain had fused into its own dimension when he’d started talking waves. “What does this have to do with Chris?”

“To impact the past in any controlled way, I had to drop a managed pebble into a best-guess time coordinate and allow the change to ripple at a natural pace. Chris was that pebble.”

Strobes of coloured light cut the room into linear fragments, distracting him. I glared over my shoulder at Chris, who’d invoked some weird laser show with his fiddling. His back was still resolutely turned on us.

I brought my glare back to Callum Jade. “What did you do?”

“I met Dr. Patricia Stanton, Roslyn’s mother. I was on the run, the Razoks had intercepted the erratic atmospheric disturbances cause by TIC and were after me. The institute had been abandoned, of course, but Patricia and a few others had managed to evade the Razoks and were camping out there. Patricia was a genetic biologist. She went back in time with me, and we stamped Chris with my genetic memory.”

“Chris was stamped?” I gasped. “Not Jack?”

“Jack was my original choice. Patricia and I took positions at the hospital, and started treatments on Mrs. Townsend when she came in for her four month check up. We told her there was a minor complication with the foetus, nothing that a simple series of genetic modifications couldn’t modify. But then...” He let out a heavy sigh. “We’d been there a while, and I’d met Gemma. I was only nineteen, didn’t really understand the consequences or have any definite set of guidelines to work within.”

“What?” I prompted harshly when he lapsed into silence. “What did you do to Jack?”

He frowned at me. Sighed again. “Nothing. Gemma fell pregnant. It was perfect. My biological child wouldn’t just be stamped with my knowledge, he’d bear my true gene. The ability to augment whatever I’d given him, to evolve that knowledge, increased by ten-fold.”

Callum Jade looked over to where Chris stood. I looked as well. We finally had Chris’s undivided attention. His skin had turned a ghostly colour and his eyes appeared to have sunk further into his skull than was physically possible.

If Callum Jade noticed (and how could he not?) he didn’t let it stop him. “You will invent TIC decades before I could, Christian. You will refine and enhance TIC well beyond anything I did or could attempt. You will be in the right place, within the power circles of your time, in a position to command authority. When the Razoks invade, you will retrieve a sample of their technology from the crater that used to be South America and you will leap back and rewrite our planet’s future. I created you, and I cannot regret that. You are all that stands between humanity and the abomination of Razok enslavement.”

“You didn’t create me,” said Chris quietly. “You cannot create life out of nothing. You do not belong in my time, and you can’t add a new soul into the balance of the universe.”

“I’m sorry, Christian. I did not mean for that to happen. We did not understand the governing laws then as we do now.”

Chris took an unsteady step forward. “What are you sorry for? What did you not mean to happen?”

“Callum,” warned Roslyn. “This will destroy him. There is no need for him to know.”

“But there is,” said Chris. He came another step closer.

I pushed to my feet, ready to do something, anything.

Chris gave Callum Jade a dark look. He was no longer pale. He wasn’t trembling. His face was flushed and granite hard. “How did my mother die?”

“You didn’t draw breath when you were born. We kept you alive on machines for six hours, and then your organs started to respond. As you grew stronger, your mother weakened. When you drew your first unaided breath, Gemma breathed her last.”

The universal balance of souls.

“You could have saved her. You chose to trade my soul for hers.”

It wasn’t a question, and Callum Jade didn’t answer.

Roslyn did. “He sat by your side for six hours, Christian. He held your tiny hand for six hours and never let go, not once. He didn’t trade your mother to save the world. No matter what Callum says, he did not kill your mother. In that moment, all he did was save his son.”

I dashed away a tear. There were a dozen more to take its place. I don’t know why I’d risen to my feet. I couldn’t help Chris. I couldn’t even help myself. I let the tears fall as I stumbled to the far side of the room, away from the horror and the terror.

Chapter 21

T
here was a lot more to the story, and we heard most of it over the next few hours in awkward stops and starts.

Callum Jade and Doctor Patricia Stanton had leaped back together that third time. They’d integrated into a small community outside of London, hacked government computers and put themselves onto the staff roll of Biggs Hill’s local hospital. Then they’d waited for a likely candidate, who’d arrived in the form of Mrs. Townsend, and started the process of preparing Jack’s unborn body to accept the genetic stamping. Until Gemma fell pregnant with Callum Jade’s child and Chris became TIC’s new incubator. If that sounds cold and cruel, well, it is.

And maybe everything would have turned out fine. Maybe Chris would never have known any of this. Callum Jade had certainly never told. He’d returned to his time and found his world right way up again and kept his mouth firmly shut.

Everything might have been fine. But for the two Razoks that had captured us now. These same two had followed Callum Jade back in time and arrived almost 12 months after him. From there, the detail got fuzzy. Or rather, too detailed and complex for me.

I understood this much:

They’d arrived shortly after Chris was born and knew that Callum Jade’s child did not belong. That was the first time they tried to kill Chris. And learned their lesson a little too well. They were thrown out of that time. One of the Razoks disappeared before Callum Jade’s eyes in the middle of trying to smother the baby with a pillow. Callum Jade believed he’d succeeded. Believed they’d simply disappeared into the ether, disintegrated or whatever. He couldn’t have guessed that those two Razoks were in fact tossed a hundred odd years into the future, into the very day that Christian Wood died at the age 108.

That is one of the ways in which the universe worked, apparently. How it resolved minor problems like people acting all God-like and playing number games with its souls.

Which brought us back to now, and why there were two Razoks trying to kill Chris (somewhat more subtly and deviously than before), despite Callum Jade past efforts and Chris’s future efforts to ensure no Razok ever set foot on earthly soil.

These Razoks weren’t going to risk losing another century. To them, it had only been a few months in real life living. One minute they were reigning terror over earth and chasing after an errant nineteen year old human, and a few months later they’d lost a century and found their reign had never existed. Terrifying stuff, even if you were a soulless alien monster.

Unfortunately, they were smart monsters. They’d done their homework and found Jack, ripe and ready and pre-treated to be stamped to their will. They already knew it had worked a miracle for Callum Jade, and now they just needed Chris to go back home so Jack could finish off their own little counter miracle.

The good news: Jack’s life and health was not in danger if and when Drustan removed his mother from the hospital. There’d been nothing medically wrong with him to start.

The worst news ever: I think the Razoks might have won.

The price was far too high.

I knew it.

Chris knew it.

I suspected Callum Jade and Doctor Roslyn knew it, and I suspected they didn’t care. Callum Jade had lived through Razok colonization or whatever they were calling it these days. If what I’d been told was true, if only that person who’d leapt back retained dual awareness of what had been and the newly changed future, then Callum Jade was the only one in any position to judge just how high the price was. No one else had lived through alien enslavement or even seen a Razok.

Except future Chris. Before he’d leapt back to save the world.

But for now, there was only thing I could count on. The Razoks had us sussed.

We are what we are.

We are human.

And it’s a little difficult to worry about the survival of future mankind when your emotions are bloodied and leaching out of your gut like raw and exposed intestines. And that was just me. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what Chris was going through, but I knew this wasn’t going to end well.

Eventually, Chris calmed down and stopped his fierce pacing. He came to sit with me in my corner of the room, his face no longer flushed with anger but dark-grey and sunken, as if shadows covered his skull instead of skin. Eventually, his breathing slowed to normal and his fists unclenched. He had his back to the wall, his knees drawn up, his arms hanging at his side, his palms now limp on the floor.

Eventually, my tears stopped rolling.

Eventually, Callum Jade finished telling his story and went on to describe an intolerable world of burnt out shells and charred remains (and that was just the people) that Chris was born to undo.

And still the Razoks didn’t come.

The mist inside my head cleared. The despair running in my veins thinned and relieved some of the heaviness in my bones. Because, you see, us humans are not all doom and wasted emotion. Where there is human (and where there is no Razok), there is hope.

I looked at Chris and opened my mouth to speak. I almost shut it just as quickly, but then I remembered that Jack’s life was not dependant on any genetic engineering and Chris had verbal proof.

“Drustan must have found a way back by now and fixed the past,” I said to Chris. “The Razoks are too late. By the time they make us leap back, everything will be normal again and Jack won’t be programmed to kill you.”

“Maybe.” Chris tilted his head my way and met my eyes. “That would be nice, for Jack.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I also resisted the urge to slap him silly. I know, I know, Chris was dealing with an awful lot of issues right now. But this was huge. This was hope. This meant the end of a horrendous nightmare that didn’t end in sliced vital organs or a severely disabled and/or dead Jack. This wasn’t ‘nice.’

“What exactly is Drustan doing to fix this?” called out Callum Jade. “He’s taken far too long as it is. If the time waves start to overlap, TIC will fade and he won’t be able to go back at all.”

“He’ll still have your version of TIC,” snapped Chris.

“Drustan does not have access to the TIC I invented.”

“He’s doing his best.”

“In other words, he’s being his usual overcautious self.”

“For goodness sake,” muttered Roslyn, “try and remember that’s your—”

She cut off with a worried look at Chris.

“It’s alright,” I said. “We know. Drustan is Chris’s...” But we didn’t know, of course. I shrugged and went with, “Great grandson.”

“Grandson,” said Callum Jade gruffly.

Chris made a funny noise. As I glanced at him, I saw his fist clench again.

“The son of your youngest daughter,” added Callum Jade into the sudden tension.

“Callum, is that wise?” Roslyn asked anxiously.

“He already knows, Roslyn.”

“And now he knows about a daughter too, what next? You don’t agree with Drustan’s view on this matter, but that doesn’t mean you need to go to the other extreme.”

“At least my extremes get things done.” With that, Callum Jade narrowed his eyes on Chris.

“It’s not Drustan’s fault,” said Chris. “There’s something wrong with TIC. Maybe the ripples of change have started affecting the mechanics. TIC won’t let him leap to where he needs to be.”

“And where does he need to be?” said Callum Jade, a frown of concentration across his brow.

“Somewhere between Mrs. Townsend’s admittance to hospital and Jack’s birth.”

“Every leap creates a splash in time that distorts the time coordinates for months either side. The Razoks have just leapt to a few months short of Jack’s birth—”

“Drustan knows that,” said Chris in a manner that was so defensive, you’d never think he was anything other than a staunch Drustan fan. Guess blood really is thicker than the dubious motives and selfish intent Chris had accused him of earlier.

“But Drustan knows nothing of my original leap,” said Callum Jade after a moment of contemplation. “Between the Razoks and me, we’ve thoroughly muddied the times waves. Drustan will have to go back much further.” Another short break with a quick glance at Roslyn, then, “Drustan will figure that out. He’s a smart lad. And of course you must tell him everything I’ve told you, Christian. I should have done it long ago.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Chris. “How can he go back further?”

“To before Jack was conceived, I suppose. That will suit well, considering—”

“And do what?”

I put a tentative hand on Chris’s knee. I would have squeezed, but it was my broken hand that was closest and it was still all numb and not really there.

“The most effective way to manipulate the past is by indirectly nudging circumstance. Drustan cannot kill Jack, but if he nudges events in a direction that might, say, prevent Mrs Townsend from being in the time and place where she might have conceived Jack...”

Callum Jade let that hang. He didn’t need to finish. Everyone in the room understood perfectly.

I braced myself for Chris’s backlash, removed my hand from his knee before he smashed some unwanted feeling back into it. But nothing came. I sneaked a tentative glance his way. Chris was just looking at Callum Jade, as if the man had made some mundane comment about rain on Monday instead of plotting Jack’s un-birth.

Oh, no, this called for something far more drastic and sinister than flushing fury and throwing punches.

Chris pushed away from the wall. He didn’t go far. He kind of rolled one leg over me, so that he was straddling me, sitting on my lap, looking deep into my eyes. He put one hand flat to the wall above my head, his other hand came to my forehead, brushing aside what was left of a monumentally bad hair day. His gaze held mine in a total lockdown, a warm grey of softly melting mercury.

He hadn’t just turned his back on the others, he’d tuned them out of existence.

“Willow, there’s something I want you to know.” He spoke in a husk whisper, words meant for me and me alone. “I’ve always liked you. Since the first day you stood up there in front of the classroom, in that awesome short skirt and defiant stare that was supposed to show you didn’t give a damn.”

“I didn’t give a damn,” I said breathlessly, my throat closing up. What I really wanted to say was, “Chris, no, please don’t do this.”

Chris gave me a slow smile, and my heart seemed to fold in on itself. “You were nibbling your bottom lip so hard, you drew blood.”

I smiled at him as well. A slow, sad smile. “Maybe that was just part of my mean, bad girl routine.”

“That day was torture,” Chris went on. “I wanted to talk to you. Hell, I wanted to ask you out. I was such a mess, I was half way home that afternoon before I remembered I had Math Club after school. I didn’t know what it was, I’d never felt anything like that before. I hadn’t even said a word to you, and I was half in love.”

“Chris...” I hadn’t known. Hadn’t really seen Chris until yesterday. And then I’d been struck by much the same thing.

His fingers brushed down my forehead to my cheek, lightly and caressing. “I didn’t return to school. I spent hours googling sites for cool pick-up lines and stupid things like interpreting body language.”

“Not stupid,” I managed to croak.

“Stupid,” insisted Chris. “And, of course, a complete waste of time. The next time I saw you—”

“I was with Jack.”

“I tried to pretend you weren’t there at all. I thought it didn’t really matter.” His voice held no accusation. “I tried to look straight through, and not see that stubborn thing you do with your chin when you disagree with someone, not see the way your nose twitches when you laugh—”

“My nose doesn’t twitch.”

His fingers trailed down to the corner of my mouth. “Not see the mole—”

“Beauty spot,” I corrected breathlessly as his thumb outlined my lower lip.

He stilled, his thumb resting on my lip, looking so deep into my eyes, he must have seen my heart blush from all the extra blood pumping double-time.

“I just wanted you to know,” Chris said. “I’ve been a total idiot lately, going all Jekyl and Hyde and snapping at you, but that’s not because I don’t like you.”

“And what do you do to the people you don’t like?” I was thrumming under his touch. I’d never flirted in quite this manner before, but then I’d never known a boy quite like Chris before. “Eat them up whole?”

Chris’s smile deepened as he looked into my eyes. “My life has been a mess since Drustan appeared, but that’s nothing compared to chaos of you. I’d pushed you away for so long, and now I had to push you away up close.”

“Did you have to?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. Even though I knew Chris, and how much he took on himself. How much he beat himself up about Jack.

“I did,” he said. “I do.”

So, nothing had changed. I was never going to have Chris. And while I knew ‘never’ probably wasn’t going to be very long at all for one or both of us, my heart had to know for sure. “What about Clarrie?”

“Clarrie.” He tore his eyes from mine to the wall behind, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. “Clarrie is cool. I was surprised when she, you know—but anyway, it was cool. Nice.”