Loop (21 page)

“Do you think she’s put the pieces together yet or not?” asked the first person in a low voice. I could tell it was a man. It sounded like he was facing away, then toward me, then away again. It took me a moment to realize his voice was coming out of a speak-eazy. That voice. It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Shh! Let me check if I’m alone.” The second person’s whisper was barely audible. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. I would guess woman based on the location, but it was pretty clear whoever it was had ducked into the locker room for the sole purpose of getting out of the hall.

“We’re running out of time,” said the man over the speak-eazy.

“No such thing,” said the other person. There was a strange pitch to their voice now, like it was coming from an odd direction, below me, and I realized they must be checking under the shower and bathroom stalls. I pulled my feet up higher.

“But what if she—?” asked the man.

“This isn’t the time to discuss it. But, believe me, she will. Don’t underestimate her. I’ve made that mistake.” Even in hushed tones, the speaker cut the man off with authority. The person moved back toward the door, but before it opened they added, “And we need to be ready when she does. It certainly didn’t take her mom very long to figure things out. The last thing we need right now is to clean up another mess like that. But don’t worry. If it becomes a problem, I’ll take care of her.”

chapter 18

MOM’S CHIP HAD MALFUNCTIONED.
That was all.

An accident.

So why couldn’t I breathe?

The sound of gushing blood roared through my ears with each heartbeat as I felt my way blindly down the hall. I’d say the trip back to my room was a long one, but that would imply I remembered a single step of it. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to wrap the precious, precious hair around my pinky.

I reached my dorm room and leaned my forehead against the wall outside. These walls that had been my only home for the last six months were suddenly caving in. Every night I’d spent crying, praying, screaming—someone had done this to me. To her.

I could take the jabs, the insults and insinuations. But not this. Please not this.

I bent my head toward the scanner but paused. I had no clue how to handle this with Finn. With all that protection talk from my future self, he already acted like I was walking around with one foot in the crematorium. If he knew what I now knew—that someone actually was a threat—I wouldn’t be able to pry him out of this century with a crowbar.

I opened the door slowly in case Mimi had beaten me back and freed Finn from his closet exile already. But Mimi wasn’t there. As I moved toward the closet’s sensor, I heard his voice coming out of it and hesitated, pressing my ear to the door.

“She’ll come around … no, she won’t. Come on, yes, she will. She doesn’t realize yet how she feels about you, but it’s in there. Oh, who are you kidding? You
clung
to her like a spider monkey. I mean, seriously? That was your plan?
Georgie
could have done a better job protecting her.” Finn laughed at his own joke. “Okay, maybe not Georgie. But the monkey might give you a run for your money.”

I jerked away. There was no way I would let Finn know I’d overheard
that
. I backed up to the doorway and coughed.

Finn’s personal pep talk came to a halt.

I counted to three as slowly as I could and walked back to the closet. When it slid open, Finn met me with a smile so forced I wondered if he had sprained his cheek muscles.

“Hey. I didn’t hear you come in.” He pushed himself up from his makeshift bed composed of a pile of clothes and blankets and brushed some nonexistent dust from his hands. He folded that same journal he’d pulled out earlier closed, tucked a pen in the back. “I was writing. Well, doodling. Mom made me start journaling after I found out about Dad. Couldn’t exactly go to a shrink, could I?”

Oh, but he should have. First I caught him babbling to himself. Now he was flat-out lying to save face. Must. Stop. His. Mouth.
I can think of one way to stop it.
My mind drifted back to our kiss the day before.
Get ahold of yourself, brain.

“Have you been out there, uhh, long?” He bent down and massaged his calf.

“No,” I said a tad too quickly, and flashed Finn a reassuring
I-don’t-think-you’re-an-idiot
look. It must have worked, because a relieved smile replaced his overexuberant one. I’d been so caught up in my own fears the last few days, I’d ignored the fact that Finn had his own. He winced as he tried to stretch his leg out. It really was cramped in that closet.

“I got the hair.” It uncoiled from my finger, and I placed it in an empty Buzztab vial on the desk, picked it up, put it back down again. I couldn’t stop replaying what had happened in the locker room in my mind. Over and over. I was feeling claustrophobic again. I needed to go somewhere to think.

Finn’s joints crackled as he stretched his shoulders.

“Hey, would you like to get out of here for a little bit?” I asked.

“Are you serious?” He looked at the door. “Is that smart?”

“Not that way.” I pointed to the abandoned air grate at the top of my closet. “Through there. It’s a vent that leads to the greenhouses. Our Botany teacher’s leading a field trip all day with the younger students, so no one will be in there.”

“I’d like that.”

I shoved the vial containing the hair into my pocket. There was no way I was letting it out of my sight. Finn hoisted me through the grate, then scrambled up behind. The smell of lemongrass and rosebuds enveloped me as we approached the greenhouse opening. I peeked out to make sure it was empty. Finn helped me down before dropping beside me.

“You come here often?”

“Not as often as I’d like. It’s so peaceful. So green.”

“It’s not easy being green,”
said Finn, only in this garbled singsongy voice.

“I … suppose.”

“Really? You know who Ron Weasley is, but you don’t know Kermit.”

“How’d you know that?”

“Oh, please. You have Potterphile written all over you.”

Hmmph.
“
She
told you?”

“Yep.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I could smack her right about now.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I could hold her.” He looked away. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Doesn’t matter. Neither of us gets our wish.” I twisted a waxy hoya leaf between my fingers. “It appears I’m good at starting messes. Not at clearing them up.”

Before he could defend her, I said, “So who’s this Kermit guy?”

“A singing frog puppet.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“Hey. I saw a tiny cow fly by your window this morning. A cow.”

“They’re called pegamoos. It was someone’s pet. They’re notorious little escape artists.”

“I want a pegamoo.”

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“You can’t house-train them.”

“They fly.”

“They bite.”

“They fly.”

“What if I told you they breathed fire?”

“They. Fly. Plus, I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?” I tried to look cross, but really I was curious.

“Your tell.”

“I have a tell?”

“Your right eyelid twitches when you’re lying.”

“It does not!” It twitched.
Dang tell.
“Did I lie to you often?”

“Only once.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. We sat in silence for a minute, until, in a quiet voice, he said, “This is what I miss. Not some dramatic moment that you seem to think defines your future self. I miss the Kermits and the Harry Potters. This is when it’s hard to remember that you’re not you.”

I squeezed his knee. “You’re still not getting a pegamoo.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. Doctrine of Inevitability. People would have noticed a mini flying cow in the twenty-first century.”

“But—”

“No but. Doctrine of Inevitability. You can’t change the past.”

“Can’t or shouldn’t?”

“Can’t.”

“Have Shifters ever tried?”

Have Shifters ever tried?
“Name an atrocity. Any atrocity.”

“The Holocaust.”

“2167. A group of fifteen freedom fighters Shifted back to assassinate Hitler.”

“What happened?”

“You know what happened. They failed. They emergency faded out of a gas chamber in Auschwitz. You can’t change the past. Those Shifters’ tendrils had always taken them to that spot in time. They’d always failed and always faded back.”

“But—”

“You can’t change the past!” My stomach clenched, and my voice broke.

“You’ve thought about it.” Something about Finn’s voice soothed and rankled me at the same time. “With your mother.”

It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway.

I’d swum an ocean of if-onlies for the last six months. But all my if-onlies had floated around one of two things: preventing some sort of accident and talking my mom out of something rash. Never had I imagined staring her attacker in the face.

An attacker who was still after me.

“All right. Let’s do this.” A spark blazed in my voice, a fire that even I didn’t recognize. The sooner we figured out this Truth saying, the sooner I was rid of Finn. Then ICE would pay for Mom’s treatment and I could beg Leto for mercy (which I’d already started in reply to his note).

“Oh-kay.” Finn drummed his fingers against a terra-cotta pot and studied me. “Mind telling me where this enthusiasm came from?”

“You don’t like it?” I asked.

“No, that’s not it. It reminds me of … you.”

Good.
At least I didn’t turn completely helpless. Still, fear soaked the flame that was growing in me. With each passing minute, I drew nearer and nearer to the Future Bree who asked Finn for help. I hadn’t stopped to consider the things that had to happen in the intervening time to prompt me to do that. Bad things. Would it be my mom’s attacker? Or Leto? Or some other threat I hadn’t even considered?

“So when are we going to the Infobank?” Finn hopped up and plucked a pear off a tree.

“Tomorrow.” I traced my initials in the dirt, then, for some ridiculous reason, Finn’s beneath. I wiped it away before he saw. “There’s a student trip to the Pentagon, and we should be able to sneak away for a few hours.”

He gagged on the pear. Mush sprayed across the surrounding flowers. “Excuse me. Did you say ‘Pentagon’?”

“Yeah.”

“As in
the
Pentagon? Across the river, that giant building shaped like a … pentagon?”

“Yes.”

“So they’re going to let us waltz right into
the Pentagon
?”

“Yeah. Well, no.”
What a silly question.
“We’ll have to pay the admission.”

Finn blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“What are
you
talking about?”

We stood there blinking at each other until … “Oh, yeah.” I smacked my forehead. “It used to be a military thing.”

“
The
military thing.” His eyes widened. “Is there world peace now?”

“As a general rule, I don’t like to discuss current events with pastlings.”

“Pastlings?” He swallowed hard and closed his eyes like the word tasted bitter to him. “I saw a flying cow today. Humor me.”

“You have a point.” I curled up and tapped on the end of the vial, trying to figure out what color the strand was. Dirty blond? Light brown? Gray? Hard to tell with one strand. “But sorry to disappoint you. Human beings are still human beings. They built a bigger Defense Building.”

“And I’m sure the other guys built bigger ones, too.”

I shrugged. “Some before us.”

He leaned against the pear tree, his head swaying slowly. “And we’ve got forty-nine states now.”

“Forty-three.”

He held up his hands. “I don’t want to know. I only want to know how we’re going to access your mom’s file.”

“Like I said, tomorrow we’ll go to the Pentagon. You can slip out early from the Institute and take a Publi-pod. Once we’re there, we’ll ditch the group and use this”—I held up the vial—“to access her records. Then, we’ll sneak back in and rejoin the group before the end of the day.”

Easy.

*   *   *

“Watch out for the—”
Eww.
Someone hadn’t cleaned up after their flying cow.

I was sitting on my window ledge, watching Finn as he shimmied down the drainpipe and looked for a Publi-pod on the street below. Finn scraped his shoe along the sidewalk. He looked bizarre standing two feet away from a machine that could clean it.

“Who are you talking to?”

I whirled around from the window. Wyck stood in the doorway, waiting for my answer.
Dang it.
Mimi had left our door open when she ran down to breakfast a few minutes ago.

“No one. Just … people watching. What are you doing here?”

“Came to see if you wanted to split a Pod.”

“Sure!” If I snagged us a double, it would be the perfect time to ask him for his help with Finn. I’d do it now, but anyone could walk by. I was feeling paranoid after the locker room yesterday. Of course, I wasn’t sure if it classified as paranoia when someone was really after you. “I actually have something I wanted to ask you about.”

He stepped into our room and sat on my bed. I plopped down next to him and nudged him on the shoulder.

He nudged back. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, too. I thought maybe sometime we could—”

He was interrupted when Mimi dodged back into the room, snatching something off her vanity. “Forgot my speak-eaz…” Her voice trailed off when she noticed Wyck. She suddenly looked confused, bordering on disturbed.

Crap.
She thought I was “cheating” on Finn.

“Wyck was asking me about splitting a Pod to the Pentagon,” I said.

“Charlie and I will ride with you guys,” she said.

“You don’t have to do that. You’ll want some alone time.”

“I don’t mind at all,” she said, not taking her eyes off of Wyck.

*   *   *

I was a chatterbomb the whole way to the Pentagon, worried Mimi might attempt to steer the conversation to my forbidden true love. But she was unusually quiet. When we reached the Pentagon, Wyck climbed out of the Pod and rushed over to my side to help me out. His hand disappeared before I had a chance to take it, though. Another one, which I recognized as Finn’s, reached inside the Pod. I took it with a sigh and stood up. He must have been waiting here for half an hour. He and Wyck stared each other down with thinly masked sneers on both their faces.