Nomad (23 page)

He fired again, and Raven flipped aside. The plasma bolt incinerated the kitchen cabinets and pantry, leaving a roaring wall of flame.

Raven dove into Audra's room, since it was closer and the door was already open. She made it to the bathroom just before a third bolt of plasma struck Audra's bed and rapidly expanded. Fire swept through the girl's room.

Another bolt tore into the bathroom and swelled, scorching every porcelain surface. Raven leaped into her own room and scrambled on hands and knees to her crawlspace, where she pulled herself inside and turned the dial on her safe.

For a moment, she had a horrific flicker of memory, in which she crouched in a little crawlspace similar to this one, alone in the dark, weeping but trying not to make a sound. She was a little girl. Raven shoved the memory away.

Lying flat on her belly in the crawlspace, with her armor-ribbed black jacket pulled over her like a blanket, Raven raised her pistol and took aim as her attacker kicked open her bedroom door.

She fired a blast of blinding-white plasma at the face shield, typically the weakest spot in a suit of armor. It engulfed her attacker's head, distracting him momentarily but doing no real damage. His armor was much tougher than what the bike riders had worn.

Raven knew armor hardened against plasma was also dense, heavy, and slow. If she could knock the security agent off his feet, she might gain a brief advantage while he struggled to stand up again.

She turned her plasma pistol toward the ceiling and released a series of shots, striking the roof of the house with bursting balls of dense, super-hot gas that turned the support structure into ashes.

The roof came down in a heap of burning timbers. The wall dividing her crawlspace from her bedroom ripped open and ignited, flash-frying the air around her until it was searing hot. If she didn't move, she would get trapped in the fire.

Raven crawled out to her roofless, fiery wreck of a bedroom and pulled on her jacket as she jumped to her feet. The heavy old roof timbers had landed on the security agent, pinning him onto his back for the moment. His rifle had been knocked out of his reach. He lay stunned, but began struggling as Raven approached.

"Don't move." Raven aimed her plasma pistol at his faceplate and squatted beside him. She probed her fingers along his neck and found the tiny notch of the helmet control. The armored helmet and faceplate came apart jigsaw-fashion, folding down around the agent's chest and shoulders.

Raven gaped when she saw the freckled face inside. She looked older, her face harder than Raven remembered, her hair shaved to a stubble against her scalp, but Raven recognized her instantly.

"Kari?" Raven asked. "Oh my God, you're alive! Kari!" Raven reached for her with both hands, overwhelmed with happiness. She awkwardly tried to hug the girl while avoiding the smoldering roof beam across her black-armored chest.

"Don't touch me," Kari hissed.

"What?" Raven drew back. "Why are you trying to kill me, Kari?"

"Traitors die. That's the rule." Kari grunted as she struggled to push the roof beam off her chest, and Raven resisted the urge to help her.

"I don't understand, Kari."

"You made your choice. You want to be his queen. You were supposed to kill him, Raven, not fuck him."

"It's not what it looks like. I have a plan."

"I know you do. Whore."

"Just explain it to me! What happened?" Raven said. "I'll help you up, if you promise not to kill me."

"I can't promise that." Kari's flat, cold eyes glared at her without a trace of love or affection. Raven felt her heart breaking. "After you went back in time, the medics at the facility reanimated me. I was only alive from the chest up. The rest of my body was gone. They needed somebody to interrogate, and lucky me....They tortured me for weeks, Raven. The pain was intense, but I didn't break. I protected you, you bitch. Then you betrayed everyone."

"Kari, I think I can change him--"

"Holy shit, really?" Kari shook her head. "The torture went on for
weeks
. Then, one day, it was over."

"They let you go?"

"No. I woke up in a crappy slum apartment in New Orleans, where I was living with four people I didn't even recognize. My body was intact again, no missing legs, no burns, no torture scars, like it never even happened. History had changed, Raven, and I was the only one who remembered. Everyone thought I was crazy when I started talking. I don't know why my memories didn't change like everyone else--maybe because I was so close to you when you traveled through time. Time-travel radiation, or something like that. Maybe because I died and they brought me back. I don't know why, but I remembered what nobody else did."

"How did history change?" Raven asked, feeling a glimmer of hope.

"Everything got worse. The Carraway regime was still in power, but now they ruled with an iron fist. There was no widespread rebellion, no talk of revolution, just darkness and oppression all over the country. People were too scared to even speak about revolution. To invade the time-travel facility, I had to recruit and train a team myself. We used a series of armed robberies as training runs. They all died, my poor little gang of bandits, but I made it here. I'm going to finish your mission, but I'm going to kill you first."

"Oh, my God," Raven said. "What did I do?" Chunks of the burning floor crumbled away, and she heard screams from the apartment below, inhabited by a pair of sallow graduate students who attended Yale's art school.

"I figured it out eventually," Kari said. "When the Secretary-General's regime first came to power, they immediately captured or killed everyone who would play a critical role in the rebellion--local leaders, our spies and hackers, our sympathetic contacts within the police and military who helped supply our weapons...including my dad. He died even earlier this time. All these people were dead, long before the revolution could really come together. It was as if they knew who their enemies would be, Raven. They knew the
future
."

"And you think I told him everything?" Raven asked. "I'm the traitor?"

"Why not? You were going to marry him. You decided to make yourself rich and powerful instead of saving everyone. Guess what, though? One day, right in the middle of your happy little marriage engagement, your fancy little private jet crashes into the water. You die before the wedding ever happens." Kari gave her a cold smile as sirens approached in the distance. "You don't get to be queen, Raven, but you do make him a more powerful king."

"A plane crash?" Raven thought of Macey's fate. "In the Caribbean?"

"No, one of the Great Lakes, on your way to Chicago to see your little future dictator. Who cares? The point is: you're dead, bitch."

"The Great Lakes?" Raven felt a sharp headache coming on, either from Kari's new information or from breathing the smoke as her apartment burned down around them. She rubbed her temples, closing her eyes. "And you say it's before we get married? That doesn't make sense. Why would Macey and I both die in plane crashes, but at different places, at different times? I don't understand--"

Something heavy and scorching hot crashed into Raven's skull. She stumbled, disoriented and off balance. Kari sat up, holding the burning timber with which she'd bashed Raven. She'd quietly worked herself free of the roof timbers while distracting Raven with talk of the future.

The world faded in and out while Raven staggered, avoiding a wide hole that opened up in the floor in front of her feet and rained chunks of burning timbers onto a giant clay penis in the art-student apartment below. She was vaguely aware of panicked voices, footsteps on the wooden staircase, screaming sirens closing in on her street.

She found herself swaying dangerously close to the burning remnants of her crawlspace wall, where the broken wooden studs jutted up like sharp, fiery stakes. Kari tackled her and knocked her to the ground, straddling Raven and pinning her with the weight of her armor. Raven couldn't help but think of the two of them play-fighting when they were younger.

Kari clamped her armor-gloved hands around Raven's throat and squeezed. The floor was crumbling beneath them.

"I can't believe I ever loved you," Kari hissed. Her steel-plated fingers tightened, cutting off Raven's air.

Raven's mouth struggled to draw breath. She saw dark spots in front of her eyes.
Let her kill me
, she thought.
Let her kill me and kill Logan, too, if he's not going to change.

At the moment, dying would have been the easy choice, but she couldn't let it happen. Logan's death might change history, but there was no guarantee it would stop the megacorporations from staging a coup when Vasquez, or another President they didn't like, finally gained control of the White House. The mass events of history were too complex to simply rewrite with one bullet, Eliad had told her.

I can stop it
, Raven thought.
Now that I know, I can stop it. I can save everyone
.

Raven forced herself to reach into the fiery ruins of the crawlspace wall, searing her hand. She broke off one of the sharp, burning exposed studs. Fighting against every emotion inside her, she rammed the sharp point through Kari's exposed neck. A gout of warm blood spattered over Raven's hand, sizzling and dripping from the burning wood.

Kari made a gagging sound and toppled over on her side, choking and writhing. Raven was horrified to watch her friend die for a second time. She had to stop herself from screaming.

She found her plasma pistol and aimed it at Kari's head, meaning to end it quickly, but she couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger.

"You're not going to die this way," Raven said. "You're not going to live this way. I'll fix it. I promise, Kari." Through the tears in her eyes, she saw blurry red and blue fire and police lights pulsing between the remaining chunks of her front wall. All the other residents of the house were out on the front lawn, looking up at the burning, collapsed third floor.

She had to escape. Her instincts took over, and she quickly gathered what she needed. She slung her backpack over her shoulders and dashed through the wreckage of Audra's room, where she could jump from Audra's window to the burning second-floor balcony below.

She dropped into the back yard and clambered over a fence into the yard of the house behind hers. She ran across the next street. On the second street away from hers, she pulled the sleeve of her jacket over her hand and punched through the window of a green pick-up truck.

Raven climbed into the driver's seat, stripped open the steering column, and hotwired it. She stomped the accelerator as she drove away, her burning house illuminating the night sky behind her.

For the second time, Kari's dying blood was on her hands. Raven promised herself she would save her friend, somehow. The future wasn't set in stone. She'd lost Audra, too, who had only been nice to her, welcoming Raven into her home, only to be killed because of it.

Raven wanted to cry, but she refused to let herself feel anything. She was a soldier, and she had a mission to complete.

Chapter Twenty-Six

As Raven drove the stolen truck across town toward Yale, she called Logan.

"Having any fun without me?" he answered.

"Logan, I'm coming to get you."

"I'm still stuck in this study group. Let me step out into the hall..."

"This is life or death, Logan," she told him. "People from the future are trying to kill you. And me. We have to get out of town, tonight, right now."

"Are you serious?" His voice dropped to a whisper over the phone. "Who's trying to kill me?"

"The revolution," she said. "The revolution against you. They're using time travel to assassinate you before you come to power."

"Oh, shit. But we're going to change the future, right? So--"

"Meet me in front of your hall. Bring your car keys."

"What time?"

"Right now. Run outside or you're going to die." Raven swerved up onto the sidewalk in front of Lanman-Wright Hall. Logan emerged a few seconds later, his eyes growing large at the sight of the stolen truck idling at the front door.

"Nice parking job," he said as he climbed into the passenger seat.

"Front-door service," she replied. She stomped the accelerator.

They drove to the parking deck where Logan kept his car and ditched the stolen truck there.

"Where do we go?" Logan asked as he drove his black Infiniti through the parking deck's exit gate.

"The interstate."

"Makes sense. Where are they, these assassins?" He looked at his rearview as though he expected to see people from the future popping up behind them at any moment.

"They could be anywhere in town," Raven said. "I just talked to a friend of mine from the future. We haven't made anything better, Logan. It's gotten worse."

"How could it get worse?"

"You've crushed the revolution. Nothing gets better because of you and me, Logan.
You
don't change. Even after you met me. Even after I showed you. You still become the thing we're trying to stop."

"That can't happen!" Logan said.

"It's happening. I'm going to die in a plane crash in a few years, just like Macey, and then you'll take whatever you've learned from me and make yourself a more powerful dictator."

"Macey Ingersoll? What does she have to do with--?"

"In the original history, she was your first wife. She died in a plane crash in the Caribbean, three years after you were married. Flying to your family's place on St. Martin. She was pregnant with your first child."

"I married Macey?"

"In the new history, you get engaged to me instead, but I also die...in a private plane crash into the Great Lakes,
before
we get married. Two completely different plane crashes, Logan. Both times, into water. Both times, your first wife dies and you aren't onboard."

"How could that happen? Fate?" He looked disturbed as he accelerated and merged onto the interstate, heading south toward the Connecticut Turnpike.