Shift (13 page)

“Your sister is a Shifter too?” asked CP, leaning forward and watching Jake intently now.

“Sure. It runs in families. Wasn’t anyone else in your family a Shifter?”

“My grandma, or so my cousin told me. Only I never met her. But go on.”

“Well, I was supposed to join the act, ‘The Flying Baileys’ they were called. But you saw me on the poles. I get dizzy when I stand on a chair. Anyway, before Mum and Dad could work out what to do with me, ARES came along. Mum and Dad didn’t want me to join. But my sister persuaded them it was the best thing. So she stuck around and they carried on with the rest of the circus. And here I am! Ta da!”

“That sounds cool,” CP said. “I’ve never been to a circus. We went to lots of horse fairs, but they’re probably not the same.”

“Next time my folks are in town I’ll take you. I’ll give you the whole backstage tour!”

“I’d like that,” CP said, beaming now.

I leant back, smiling at my handiwork. Call me Mr Matchmaker.

“What about your family, Scott? Any Shifters?” Jake said.

“Me? Ha, no way. Nope, we’re your regular, boring family. The most exciting thing that happened to me before all of this was when we went on a camping trip to Wales and the caravan got washed away.”

“That happened to one of our caravans,” CP said. “Only it wasn’t washed away, it was blown over in a hurricane.”

She started telling the story of some great storm. Only I wasn’t really listening. I’d just seen someone enter the canteen.

Aubrey was dressed in her sharp, blue military jacket. The orange hoodie she had worn beneath it on Friday night was gone, and instead she was wearing a crisp white shirt and matching blue trousers.

“Sorry, guys. I have to go.” I crawled out from under the table and headed over to her. She was walking head down, as if she didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone, white headphone wires trailing out from her ears. She almost walked into me before she looked up. Her mouth dropped open in shock, and then shut with a loud snap. Her eyes checked the room, as if she was nervous we were being watched. I glanced about. Everyone was tucking into their lunch, busy catching up on the day’s gossip.

I pointed to my ears. Aubrey’s forehead wrinkled in confusion and then she caught on. She pulled the earphones out and I heard the tinny beats of the track still playing.

“Kings of Leon?” I asked, recognising the song.

She nodded. And then got down to business. “You’re here then?”

“Yep, I’m a card-carrying member of the Fresh Meat brigade. Literally!” I pulled out my ID card as proof, although regretted it as soon as she yanked it out of my hand.

“Nice photo,” she said, examining it.

“Yeah, well I don’t photograph well.”

“I don’t know. They’ve caught your stupid grin perfectly.” She handed my card back with a smile. “I honestly thought they’d lock you up.”

“Apparently I’m special,” I said, giving her my stupid grin.

“Special? That’s one word for it.” She raised an arched eyebrow and looked me up and down. “So you’re sure about this, about joining ARES. Because it’s not too late you know. You can always Shift.”

“No. I’m enjoying it. And I know it was hard for you, what with your Mum’s suicide and all.”

Aubrey gasped and she swallowed hard. “Her… how did you know about that?’

“You told me.”

She stepped in close to me and lowered her voice. “Have you been spying on me?”

“No, I swear you told me. When we went back to your flat and you made me coffee and you told me about–”

“I never told anyone about that. Anyone.” She stared up at me, her eyes hopping from one of mine to the other, as if they didn’t match.

I bit my lip and tried to remember. Aubrey was right. She hadn’t told me about her mother’s suicide, only that she’d died. In this reality anyway. But in the other one, before all the mess with my sister and ARES dragging me in, she had. It was another left-over fragment. Another jigsaw piece that belonged to another puzzle.

“Aubrey, I–”

“Goodbye, Scott.” She brushed past me and headed for the counter.

“Hang on,” I said catching up with her. “I’m sorry. I thought… I thought we were friends.” Of course, I’d been hoping for a little bit more than just friends. But it would do as a start.

“Look, you’re Fresh Meat.” She indicated the black T-shirt I’d changed into and then tapped the two golden stripes on her arm. “And I’m an officer. And the two don’t mix. It’s just the way it goes. See you around.”

I watched her walk towards the queue but she must have lost her appetite. She peeled off and headed for the doors, walking so fast her heels clacked on the floor.

“Do you know that girl?” Jake asked as I returned to the table.

“In another life,” I said, watching her leave.

“Do you want a chip?” Jake waved a soggy specimen in my direction.

I shook my head. I wasn’t hungry any more either.

I sat beside Jake and the rest of the kids anyway. Fresh Meat together, after all. They babbled about training and quickly moved on to TV programmes. I only vaguely followed what they were talking about. A bell rang, and everyone started packing up.

“What’s next?” I asked Max who was shoving his last spoonfuls of pudding into his mouth. As he tried to swallow I thought about what essential skills I would need to become an officer. More fighting? Interrogation techniques? Tracking?

“History,” he said, after gulping down the sponge.

“History?”

The classroom was your perfectly normal classroom. Although the chairs were too small for me and the table kept buckarooing every time I tried to move my legs underneath it. I gave up and sat with my knees to the side. The rest of the class dug out notebooks and chatted excitedly. Not something I’d experienced in a classroom before. The only time there had been any excitement in any of my classes was when someone set someone else on fire.

The door opened and a tall black man walked in. All the kids in the class suddenly descended into silence. He turned and nodded at the group. His dark eyes met mine for a fraction of a second and then passed by, clearly finding nothing remarkable about a kid five years too old sitting in his class.

“Afternoon, class.”

“Afternoon, Mr Abbott,” the kids chanted in reply.

I was relieved to see him. Although the memory of our last meeting was starting to fade, I remembered bits of it. Him being kind to me mostly. I was sort of getting used to the mismatched fragments of memories in my head. I knew if I tried too hard to hold on to them, I’d just end up losing a grip on whatever reality I was in now. So I let the thought slide away and focused on what he was saying.

“Once Shifters have come to terms with their powers, one of the first questions that occurs to many of them is ‘Can we change history? Can we stop atrocity x or tragedy y from happening? Why’ – and many of you may have asked yourself this already – ‘if we can change our reality do we allow terrible things to happen?’”

There were a few eager nods in the class. Personally, I hadn’t begun to think of my ability as able to affect anything bigger than my own pathetic life. I’d not stopped in the whirlwind to consider how I could use my ability to Shift to help others beyond saving my sister. I felt a pang of guilt at my selfishness.

“Well, stop worrying about it, because you can’t,” Abbott said. “Because, as you all know, the First Law of Shifting is…?”

“Shifters can only change their own reality,” the class sang. I looked around the room, trying to see if they were all reading this rule off something. But there was nothing on the walls except baffling diagrams and historic timelines. I recognised a picture of Lord Cuthbert Morgan-Fairfax standing next to Queen Victoria.

“Which, of course,” Abbott continued, “means a Shifter can only undo his or her own decisions, and therefore can only affect events within their own lifetime.”

The kids all scribbled in their notepads. I thought I should probably at least look as if I was following what he was saying, and picked up my pen.

“But what about world-changing events that are in your lifetimes, can you affect them?” He looked around the class, hoping for an answer.

“Only if you have made a genuine choice? One that has a direct impact on the event?” Max suggested.

“Ah, the problematic second law of Shifting. ‘Only true choices can be undone.’ Good answer, Max, but no. Not even then.” Abbott turned to face the board and started writing in a blue pen. We waited while the squeaking letters appeared on the white surface. I copied it into my notebook.

Some events cut through all realities.

I looked at the words on the page and back at Abbott. I was starting to wish I was back up on the poles again.

“There are some events that are so tragic, so scarring, that they cut through all realities. They become a fixed, immovable point and all realities bend around them. They are no longer one of many possible realities, such as the minor things we deal with each and every day. They are bigger than any one of us.”

“Like what?” Jake asked.

“Well, for most of you this will be before your time, but the one event that obsessed my generation of Shifters happened on 11th of September, 2001.”

I’d only been four at the time but I’d been told about when the two planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York.

“Is it because of the amount of people who died? Is that what causes the scar?” CP asked.

“Good question,” Abbott said, pointing at her with his pen. “That may be part of it. But there have been other events where more people died and Shifters have been able to alter those. There is a reported case of a leak in a nuclear plant in Russia, where a Shifter of only six years of age was able to save over five thousand lives by calling in a fake fire alarm. But the events we are discussing today, which we call singularities, appear to be moments in time that send shock waves through every culture. When all the eyes of the world observe an event, as it did on 9/11, the collective consciousness of the human race resists the act of a Shift.”

“So there’s no way we can Shift singularities?” CP asked before I had a chance.

“Not once they have become global events, no. But sometimes a Shifter finds themselves in a position to act before an event has time to cross over into a singularity. I take you back to the Russian Shifter and the nuclear plant. He was only able to save those people because he’d been playing around making fake calls all day with his friends. And one of the numbers had been the plant. In the first incidence he decided not to call that number. So it was a simple decision to change. But rarely do we find ourselves gifted with these easy choices.” He looked down at his desk and sighed. I wondered about when he was a Shifter and how many times he’d tried to change an event and failed.

Abbott looked up. The cloud of his memories had passed. “So, can anyone else think of an event that might be considered a singularity?”

Slowly, the class called out names of some of the most horrific events in human history. One by one they filled the white board, from World War I to the tsunami in Japan. I was starting to get really depressed. What was the point in having a cool power if you couldn’t help anyone? Abbott seemed to read my mind.

He slowly capped his pen and put it down. “What I want you all to know now is that this board would have many, many more tragedies on it if it weren’t for people like you. Throughout the ages, children able to Shift have quietly saved thousands if not millions of lives, without it ever leaving so much as a scratch on history. And why? Because the events they changed ceased to exist as soon as they changed them. There have been wars stopped by children changing their mind about begging their parents to stay at home. People saved from earthquakes, because a child decided to speak up when her dog ran away in the night.”

I felt a swell of hope in my chest. “So we can help?”

“Of course you can. But it is why you must be aware of what is happening around you at all times, so you can predict the consequences and act fast. Speed is what makes the difference between a tragic event and a singularity. Those of you who have parents in positions of power, you must watch them and keep them on track.”

The eyes in the room looked to Max. Now that I thought of it, his surname did sound familiar. The name of some politician or other.

“Even those of you who think the adults around you are useless good-for-nothings, they may have a part to play. I know it’s a struggle that you have to keep your powers secret and that as children you don’t get taken as seriously as you deserve. But that is the Shifters’ burden. It is a great shame that the ability to Shift leaves just as we are gaining our voice in society or that the world is not ready to know how important you really are.” He smiled out at the group, a sadness in his eyes. “But don’t let the ignorance of adults stop you. You can make them listen. You can make them change.”

We sat there in silence, taking in what he’d said. When the bell rang a minute later, marking the end of the lesson, no one moved. They were all staring at Abbott just as I was. In awe.

“OK, off you go now. I want an essay on the theory of singularities delivered by next week.”

Slowly, we stood to go. As I reached the doorway, I nodded for Jake to carry on and turned back to Mr Abbott who was tidying up his things.

“Can I help you, Scott?” he said without looking up.

“You mentioned the rules, sir. The Rules of Shifting. It’s just, everyone seems to know them…”

“Weren’t you given our little blue book when you arrived?”

“I haven’t been given anything.”

“Hmm,” Abbott said, straightening up. “All cadets should be issued with a copy. I will have a word with Commandant Morgan. But in the meantime…” He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a small book, bound in blue leather. “You can have mine.”

I took the book and looked down at the cracked leather cover. The Universal Laws of Shifting, by Oswald Price was written in embossed silver paint. It looked really old and really expensive. “I can’t take this, Mr Abbott.”

“Don’t worry. I know the rules by heart. Besides, they no longer apply to me.”