Timestorm (2 page)

Eyewall had her boxed in with no way out and I wasn’t about to do the same thing to her. Not after getting her trapped here. I still couldn’t believe, after all my efforts to keep Holly safe, she’d ended up working for 2009 Eyewall, a division of the CIA that seemed determined to take down my own division, Tempest. And Eyewall hadn’t exactly been a pleasant work environment for Holly. I hated to think about being the reason she was stuck here, but at the same time, I couldn’t forget what had happened when I “held her hostage” before the jump to the future. Her own people, her own division, had been poised to write her off without a second thought.

“I know what you think,” I said to Holly, making a quick decision.

Her eyebrows lifted as if to ask if I also had mind-reading abilities in addition to time-travel powers. “What I think is … that you know me a little better than I know you. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. How would you feel?”

“I don’t know.” I rubbed my face with my hands. “About what I said, Courtney filled me in and honestly, I thought it was her. You have to realize, I hadn’t seen my sister in years, and then she’s here and I’m dying.”

“So you were trying to tell Courtney you loved her before you died?” Holly clarified.

My eyes froze on hers, unwavering as I forced my pupils to stay normal-sized. “Yes.”

“But you did know me, things I don’t have any memory of because of time travel, right?” She looked so focused, so incredibly on-task that it occurred to me for the first time that Holly probably made a fantastic CIA agent. A lot better than I would have if I didn’t have superpowers.

Now for the cover story.

“Adam,” I said, forcing calm. “Adam was my best friend. We were working together on time-travel stuff. He was also your friend, so obviously I knew you then, too.”

“But you didn’t know I was an agent, did you?” she asked, drilling me as if I were a hundred percent healthy and not at all in danger of heart failure or whatever.

“That kinda shocked me,” I admitted, because it lined up perfectly with my cover story. “Which I’m sure you noticed.”

I could tell she was deep in thought, reviewing those memories, but after a few seconds she nodded. “Yeah, I noticed.”

The back of my throat felt like sandpaper and I coughed a few times before asking Holly if there was water or anything to drink. She jumped from her chair and opened a cabinet, pulling out this flat, round water bottle. When she unscrewed the cap, a rubber straw popped out.

“Weird.” I looked it over carefully before taking several big gulps. It hurt like hell, but I was too thirsty to care. “What’s it like out there, anyway?”

Holly took the bottle from my hands and set it on the table before sitting down next to me again. “It’s so odd, seriously. There are a few cabins and some tents, and a building with all this weird-ass technology and supplies. It’s like they want us to stay alive but also not be all that comfortable. Mason thinks they’re watching us constantly. Most of the area isn’t all that futurelike considering the year.”

“If we’re being watched, why don’t they just kill us?” I asked, regretting my choice of words immediately. “Sorry, that wasn’t the positive thinking I had been trying to display.”

Holly laughed. “Believe me, that was the first thought to go through my head. But I think Mason could be right. We’re in some kind of guinea-pig maze. Like a social experiment or something.”

“How many people are here?”

“Mason, Courtney, Emily, your dad, me,” Holly rattled off. “Grayson, Lonnie, Sasha, and Blake.”

“Making friends?”

Holly rolled her eyes. “Yeah, it’s just like summer camp.”

“I’ve met Lonnie and Grayson. I have no idea who Sasha is,” I said. “Blake? Why does that name sound familiar?”

“The guy with the ponytail,” she said, reminding me that I’d already met him. “He’s our age. They’ve been here awhile, you know?”

“How long?”

“Almost two years,” Holly said.

Our eyes met again and we sat in silence, letting the gravity of two years sink in slowly. If there was a way out of here, they would have found it by now.

But did it even really matter to me how long we were stuck here? I had Courtney, Dad, and Holly with me. Three people I loved more than anything else.

Could I secretly be happy in this place?

I had a feeling if I brought this up with anyone else, I’d be in need of more medical attention. Or maybe they’d excuse it and label the behavior as one of the weird things that happens to people after they almost die.

CHAPTER THREE

DAY 10. LATE AFTERNOON

“Doing okay so far?” Courtney asked, holding a hand out as if preparing for me to topple over any second.

“I’m not hooked up to needles and tubes, I can go to the bathroom on my own, I’ve showered, and I’m wearing normal clothes, preparing to see actual daylight for the first time in nearly two weeks.” I smiled at her. “So yeah, I’m doing better than okay.”

Sunlight hit me right between the eyes as we stepped outside. The muggy air hung with dust but I took a deep breath anyway, filling my lungs.

Emily’s face lit up when she saw me and Courtney. She kicked up dirt and grass running over to us. Her cheeks looked rounder and more colorful than they had the night Kendrick and I found her wandering around Central Park, starving and lost.
Lily Kendrick. My Tempset partner. I wonder if she’s okay?

Emily was still scrawny as hell but no longer to the point of being sickly.

I took a minute to look around while Emily grasped my hand, tugging it gently toward a fire pit a hundred feet away. A small brick building sat behind the pit and several wooden cabins and tents were scattered around the grassy area. In the distance the grass was much taller, or maybe it was weeds, and there was also a small lake with bluish green water.

That must be the source of the fish they’ve been feeding me for the past four days. Blake—the guy with the ponytail, someone I hadn’t seen since collapsing and nearly dying ten days ago—stood on the far side of the big fire pit, swinging an ax, splitting wood in half.

No wonder they called this place Misfit Island. It was like a weird, forced-camping experience.

Just as I was contemplating walking over to say hi, Blake suddenly dropped his ax and looked up, his face filled with alarm. “Get away from each other!”

Both Courtney and Emily stayed at my side, frozen and confused. Blake ran toward us, grabbing Courtney’s arm and pulling her away.

“What the hell—” I started to say and then I smelled it. The sense of smell is supposed to leave the longest-lasting impressions. And I remembered this. Too well. The metallic scent filled my nostrils and I did exactly what Blake had said. I hauled ass away from Emily and Courtney, and the abrupt movement caused pain to shoot through nearly every inch of my body. I might have been better, but I wasn’t completely healed yet.

Suddenly, Adam Silverman lay at my feet. I stopped, completely frozen. “Adam, what are you doing here?”

His face and leg were covered in blood and he wasn’t moving. His eyes stared up at me, questions … too many questions in them. Questions I couldn’t answer. I dropped to the ground, panic setting in, causing me to lose sight of reality, which wasn’t
this
at all. I pressed my fingers to his leg, applying pressure to the wound that I’d seen once before. “Adam, you’re okay! There’s a doctor here. It’s okay.”

I shook him hard, trying to get him to wake up.
I’ve seen this before … I’ve been here before. What is this?

Memory gas.

I blinked my eyes several times and focused on the object in front of me. It wasn’t Adam. Somewhere in my mind I knew it wasn’t Adam. I pulled my shirt over my nose and held my breath, squeezing my eyes shut.

When I opened them again, a giant log sat in front of me. My hands were scraped and bloody, splinters covering both my palms. My heart began to slow down and I breathed normally, testing the air. The metallic smell was gone. I hadn’t almost murdered someone this time thinking he was Thomas, like I did during training, when Chief Marshall tested the gas out on several of us unsuspecting trainees.

Chief Marshall.

I ground my teeth together at the thought of his shooting Healy and the other version of me. When I had told Dad and Grayson about it in more detail a couple days ago, they both concluded that I had probably done a half-jump, despite the invisible force field over us preventing time travel. Of course, being able to do a half-jump did absolutely no good considering my body was still here and we were no closer to escaping from the year 3200. But the half-jump did provide an important piece of information: Chief Marshall was a bad guy.

Very bad.

A high-pitched scream brought me back to reality. I stood up and saw Courtney covering her face, screaming at the top of her lungs. Dad came barreling out the door of a nearby cabin, racing toward her.

Emily was closest to me, and I reached her before anyone else. She was huddled in the grass, knees pulled to her chest, crying quietly. I picked her up, feeling a pull in my chest where the long scar was still working hard to hold my skin together, and let her bury her face in my shoulder while I carried her toward Courtney.

Dad shook Courtney’s shoulders a little, then tried to pry her hands from her face. “It’s not real, honey. It’s just an illusion. You’re okay.”

Her hands visibly shook but she dropped them to her sides. Her face had gone completely pale. In fact, she looked a little green, like she might spew any minute. She sank to the ground and Dad sat beside her. “Put your head between your knees, it helps.” He looked up at me and Emily. “You okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” I said, glancing around.

Mason pulled himself off the grass, his face colorless.

Emily sniffled a few more times, then lifted her head. “I’m okay.”

I set her down on the ground and counted heads. Blake and Grayson stood near each other, appearing less shaken than the rest of us. I could see Lonnie and Sasha, the dark-skinned girl with the almond-shaped eyes, down by the lake.

“Where’s Holly?” I asked no one in particular.

“I think she was sleeping in one of the cabins,” Courtney said between shaky breaths.

I headed for the closest cabin and had to check three more before spotting blond hair and white tennis shoes huddled in the far corner.

“Holly? You okay?” I walked slowly toward her still figure. Too still. I squatted on the floor beside her and barely rested a hand on her back.

“Don’t touch me!”

Startled, I fell back onto my hands and scurried away, putting a few feet between us. “Holly, it’s okay. It wasn’t real, it’s this stuff—”

“Don’t touch me!” she repeated, shouting into her knees. Then she lifted her head and I was surprised that her cheeks were dry, no sign of tears. Her eyes were hard and cold when they zoomed in on me.

Was she seeing me or an illusion of someone else? And if so, who?

“Okay … I’m not going to touch you.” I moved back a couple more feet and held up my hands. “It’s me … Jackson.”

“I know who you are, asshole,” she snapped. “I know it’s not real. Just leave me alone. Go help someone who actually needs it.”

Stung by her words, I scrambled to my feet, slightly dizzy from all this movement after ten days of being in bed, and left her alone. When I went outside again, everyone was sitting around the fire pit. Blake tossed some logs into the hole and followed them with a flaming match.

I couldn’t fathom why we needed a fire in this heat and humidity. And it was more than strange to see them gathered together like it was story-and-song time.

Mason caught my eye and gave me a smile that was more like a grimace. “Just like old times, huh, Agent Meyer?”

I let out a breath. “At least this time I only injured my hands and not another person.”

That’s when I remembered Blake, yelling at us to get away from each other. I turned my eyes to him. “Has this happened before? Where’s it coming from?”

“We’re not sure how it’s released into the air.” He laughed darkly. “And yes, it’s happened many times. First time since you guys arrived, though.”

Grayson stood up from his spot next to Blake. “Blake, Lonnie, Sasha, and I have a tradition after each memory-gas episode. We sit out here and tell each other what hallucination manifested from our minds. We’ve done this twelve times, and it seems to reduce the intensity of the next episode.”

“I have a theory,” Blake said. “I think when you talk about the hallucinations out loud, it moves the memory it is based on from the subconscious to a different part of the brain. Somewhere the gas can’t reach.”

A door swung open and Holly emerged from the cabin she’d been holed up in. She breezed past me and took a seat next to Mason. Her face was calm and collected. As if she hadn’t just screamed at me and called me an asshole.

“I’ll go first,” Sasha said. “On one of my trips to Eyewall headquarters, I got attacked by the faceless men. One of them had a razor blade to my throat, my legs pinned to the ground.”

Courtney pressed her hands over Emily’s ears and I moved closer to the fire, sitting down beside them.

“I didn’t know if they were going to kill me,” Sasha croaked, choking on her words a bit. “Somehow I managed to get away, but it was the closest I’ve been to death.”

Grayson spoke next. “My first delivery in 1985, I hadn’t studied childbirth enough in that year, it was stupid for me to think I could handle it. Probably the biggest regret of my life.” He cleared his throat, regaining composure. “Anyway, the shoulder got caught on the pelvic bone and the cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. I should have caught it earlier. We got her into the OR but the baby had been without oxygen for too long to not suffer a great deal of brain damage.”

Everyone was silent for ten long seconds and then Blake spoke up. “I watched someone kill a good friend’s mother, father, and younger brother. I just watched and I couldn’t stop it.”

Lonnie told a story about her mother dying, and Mason’s memory was of getting caught and interrogated by several Iraqi soldiers when we were doing training in the Middle East. I remembered the area he was talking about, but it must have been a mission with his Tempest specialty group. Something I didn’t have the privilege to know. Dad didn’t look too surprised so I assumed he probably wasn’t hearing about this for the first time.