Loop (7 page)

“You have to report it.” She spun around, her eyes agog. “Anything out of the ordinary, you know that. I mean, Bree, what if this could help them figure out what happened with your mom? She mouthed the word “mom” as if the pain of my situation could be lessened by not saying it out loud.

And she was probably right. The Buzz was one of those weird things that Shifters found strangely comforting, like a pregnant woman yacking with morning sickness. Crapawful, yes, but reassuring at the same time. Proof that your microchip was working as it should.

Any other mission, I would have marched straight to Nurse Granderson’s office and blabbed. But not this mission. Mimi meant well, but the thing that would most help my mom was paying her hospital bills. I shuddered at the thought of her ending up in Resthaven because of my failure. I needed things to smooth over, and I needed to get ahold of Leto for another delivery pronto.

“You misunderstood,” I said with the lightest of laughs. “Nothing happened. Y’know what? Forget it. I’m being stupid.”

“You’re probably just tired and forgot how many Buzztabs you took.” But she still looked worried.

“Absolutely. And I have to get up at the keister crack of dawn to finish prep for my Pre-Tri report.”

“Sweet dreams.”

I wish.
I turned over to face the wall. The antique sterling bracelet Mom gave me when I left for the Institute clanked against the bed frame as I did so. I rubbed the heart charm and kissed it as I did every night, the “Bree” engraving almost as worn off as the shallow original etchings on the other side. As the busyness of the day ground to a halt, grief and uncertainty slithered up as usual and squeezed my throat. I pulled the soft, frayed edge of my tatter-loved quilt up to my chin.

Mimi’s shoes squeaked as she tiptoed past my bed to go to the bathroom.

There it was again, that burr in my stomach when I thought about shoes. Why did I—?

I sat up straight with a gasp, heart slamming against my rib cage. My shoes! I’d dumped the sand out of them on Finn’s deck earlier.

Along with Leto’s delivery.

chapter 5

RULE NUMBER TWELVE OF SHIFTING:
Never be late for Quigley’s class. Of course, that rule went for transporters as well. And general passersby.

It was one that I almost broke as I scrambled to my seat in Pre-Tricentennial American History while a disembodied voice overhead warned me of my tardiness.
Shut up, Sassy Computer!
I slid into my desk.

“Ahh, Miss Bennis, thank you for joining us.” The Quig was never in a good mood. At that moment, she looked extrahorked. Her wavy brown hair was pulled back so tight into its usual bun it lifted her prominent cheekbones even higher. Myself, I looked like a Pod wreck. If I fell asleep at all last night, it was a fitful nightmare for half an hour before my alarm went off so I could throw together whatever it was I was going to present in class today.

Every time I’d closed my eyes, all I could see was Leto’s sneering face tattooed on the back of my retina. Instead of counting sheep, I counted the number of times I told myself that he wouldn’t be
that
upset about the lost flexiphone. I’d lost track somewhere around five eighty-six.

I mean, it was an honest mistake. He couldn’t fault me for that.

Five eighty-seven.

“For those of you waiting on anxious bits and bytes for today’s quiz, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you,” said Dr. Quigley. Not surprisingly, Emmaline Walters was the only one who looked the slightest bit put out. “The time has come for you to declare your Intent of Specialization. I have been designated the caring adult to guide you through this process. So make a decision and enter it. There. You’ve been guided.”

Quigley pushed a button on her podium and soligraph forms materialized in front of all our desks, simple check-the-box questionnaires. I picked up my stylus.

“Hey, why do we have to be here?” asked Wyck from the back. He pointed to a few transporters sitting around him.

“Mr. O’Banion, there are thirty-seven areas of Shifter specialization. Pick one.”

“I’m not a—”

“Yes, but the Shifters have to get where they’re going, don’t they? Someone has to do it. So until we finish training the monkeys to do your job…” She waved her arm to mimic checking a box and mouthed the words
pick one.

What a crapwench! Sure, I didn’t blame Shifters for resenting the fact that we needed transporters. But that was uncalled for. I flipped around to look at Wyck, but he didn’t meet my gaze. Every transporter in the room turned crimson. A few of them opened their mouths to say something, but she’d already turned her back on us and begun rearranging notes for the day’s lecture on the wall behind her. A few Shifters in the back of the class leaned over and punched Wyck on the shoulder in a sign of solidarity, but his face had already gone blank, unreadable.

I had known this day was coming, when I had to choose a path, a future. But now that it was here, the words danced around and seemed unfamiliar. The form was straightforward enough, from the most intense, “Chronocrime Investigation,” at the top, to the fluffiest down at the bottom. “Same-day chronocourier.”
Phbbt.

Grandpa used to say all Shifter jobs fell into one of two categories: curiosity or altruism. Or, as he used to phrase it, “the ones who can’t help but know and the ones who can’t help but help.” For the most part, he was right. The majority of Shifters enter academia, studying some form of history, like my mom. And then there were expert witnesses, doggedly taking notes and measurements at the scene of an accident or crime. The rest usually went into public service—do-gooders. Activists who went back and filled out protest crowds or cleaned up the same ecosystems over and over. And medical consultants like Pennedy’s older brother, who prepped the ER staff for incoming trauma patients. But being the smarty-britches I am, I always tried to stump Grandpa with exceptions.

“What about trenders? They don’t do anything useful.” Trenders were personal stylists who went back to the recent past and got paid by rich people to dress them in the next big thing in fashion before it was the next big thing. They held the dubious honor as the only Shifters who were legally allowed to share information from the future. Apparently, rich people have some powerful lawmaker friends.

“Ahh, but isn’t there inherent goodness in beauty?” asked Grandpa.

“Do you
remember
the live-ferret coat fad?” Then I thought of one that was sure to stump him. “How about temporal smugglers?”

“That’s not a calling.” He kissed me on the top of my head. “That’s a crying shame.”

I cringed at the censure of a memory. The form in front of me flashed and brought me back to my task. I’d been thinking about the field of Temporal Ethics, but after yesterday’s mission that probably wasn’t a stellar idea. There was always Quantum Biology. It seemed to be the one class I wasn’t in danger of failing right now. And, of course, anything in the here and now to unravel the mystery of Mom’s accident in the past I wanted to do.

“Done?” Quigley didn’t wait for a response. “Good.”

I managed to mark the Bio box right before the form piffed away.

“Are there any questions?” she asked.

Arms shot up across the room.

“Questions that don’t involve the phrases ‘what should I do’ or ‘rest of my life’?”

Every hand went down.

Except Mimi’s.

“Yes?” said Quigley.

“What would it mean if you didn’t get the Buzz on a mission?” Mimi kept her attention trained forward, but her eyes slid across the aisle in my direction for a fraction of a second.

Panic sprang up in my gut. I hid my mouth with my hand and hissed, “What are you doing?” behind clenched teeth.

Quigley’s lips transformed to a thin, red line. “Mild Buzzes are indicative of nothing.”

“But
no
pain?”

I stared at Mimi, willing her mouth to stop moving. But at the same time, this
was
my one chance to find out.

“Likely the Shifter would have ingested some Buzztabs without remembering,” said Quigley.

“But—”

“Miss Ellison, is there something you need to tell me?”

Mimi shook her head with a casual confidence only she could pull off, and our teacher let it drop.

“Today we’ll cover the Chinchilla Flu Epidemic of— Oh.” The Quig looked down at her screen. “First, Miss Bennis will present her midterm from yesterday.”

I could feel the heat of my classmates’ stares as I made my way to the front of the room. Quigley took a seat off to the side.

“My, umm, my trip—”

“Mission,” interrupted Quigley. “You weren’t on holiday.”

“My mission was to early twenty-first-century Virginia.” I looked up and realized I might as well be talking to air. Mimi and Charlie were the only ones even looking at me. Charlie always sat up front with her rather than in the back with the other transporters. At least my fellow Shifters had their eyes open. Half the transporters were falling asleep. Except Wyck, who was actually taking notes. A first.

“And?” said Quigley.

Wyck looked up from his notes and bobbed his head encouragingly.

“And everything went fine. My launching transporter landed me down a deserted alleyway in Williamsburg. There was a redcoats reenactment going on.”

Quigley raised her eyebrows. I didn’t want to get Wyck in trouble, so I quickly added, “Which was actually a good thing. It kept me on my toes. I had to figure out where I was based on my surroundings because it took a few minutes for my QuantCom to quadrangulate my tendrils and register where I was. I had to use, umm, history skills.”

History skills. This was going great.

“I then took a bus to the location and left the package there. At the location.”

A couple transporters in the third-to-last row, Rab and Paolo, elbowed each other and started whispering.

“The location being?” said Quigley.

“The instructions sent me to a grave for a Muffy van Sloot. It was very … inconspicuous.” So inconspicuous I couldn’t find it. “Sorry. It was a routine mission. I don’t know what else to say. Nothing out of the norm or dangerous. All safety protocol was followed.”

“Sh’right,” coughed Rab.

Quigley must not have heard him, but Wyck sure did. He landed a well-aimed kick to the back of Rab’s chair.

“Umm.” I’d lost my train of thought with the taunt. “As I was saying, nothing of note happened. I observed typical twenty-first-century behavior around me and then Charlie faded me home.”

“Tendril tink,” murmured Paolo under his breath. Several transporters around him grunted.

“You got a problem with Bree?” Charlie leaned back and growled.

“I, uhh…” My throat constricted.

Quigley looked down at my report. “And you rode a school bus to this Chinco”—her tongue stumbled over the name of the town the way mine first had—“uhh, Chincoteague Island. What were the other students like?”

“Very normal.” I could feel a flash of color bloom across my cheeks. Finn and his family were anything but what my teacher would describe as normal. “The kid I sat next to loved movies. And action figures.”

Rab and Paolo were still whispering on the other side of the room.

“And your Buzz level?” asked Quigley as if nothing were going on. In fact, she acted as if she wasn’t interested in my report at all. This just might work.

“Was manageable.” As it was nonexistent. I started to add something else but then paused, struck by something I’d never thought of before. The Buzz is a by-product of the genetic mutation in a Shifter’s hippocampus that causes chronogeological displacement. It’s a payoff. Yes, Shifters can travel through time and space because of a glitch in our brains. But the price is the Buzz. It was only after we came out of hiding that we discovered that, unchecked, the eventual price is much more costly.

My Bio teacher once described the Buzz as like the vibration on a guitar string after you strummed it. Maybe if you had your head shoved up in the guitar. Thankfully, the microchip holds back the Buzz, for the most part. Like pressing your fingers on the strings to control the pitch and tone. The chip doesn’t take it away entirely, but it makes it manageable, almost unnoticeable. It also allows us to choose when and where we go. And then there was the real reason it was invented. (But there were nonShifters in the room, so of course I couldn’t mention
that
.)

After Mom’s accident, when it was discovered her microchip was no longer functional, most people thought she’d succumbed to some overpowering Buzz. But maybe it was the other way around. Her chip could have started overcompensating or something like that. My lack of Buzz might give us a hint of what went wrong on her last mission.

I was so excited by my new theory that I almost didn’t notice it when Rab took out his stylus and acted like he was slicing his skull open and yanking out an imaginary microchip. I bit my cheek to keep from saying something I’d regret. The snerk. It didn’t matter that there was no proof Mom had purposefully tampered with her chip. There would always be those like Rab and Paolo who claimed she did.

While I was zoning, Quigley had pulled up my QuantCom data. Translucent numbers and symbols streamed through the air in front of her. She seemed transfixed by them, but then I realized she was staring straight through them. At me.

“That’s all.” I scurried to my seat.

Quigley didn’t say a word about my midterm. She walked to her podium and launched into the day’s lesson.

When the end-of-class buzzer sounded, Quigley bellowed, “Twenty-kilobyte essay on the Chinchilla Flu Epidemic by Friday,” as she walked into her office at the far end of the classroom and shut the door.

The comments from my departing classmates were to be expected. Suffice it to say, some of the spicier words would have topped Charlotte Masterson’s “sweet Lord Baby Jesus” list.

As I gathered my things, Rab bumped into me and whispered, “Tink.”

Mimi sputtered, “You’re the … the…”

But I knew she wouldn’t actually say the word.

I grabbed her hand and said, “Ignore him.”