Authors: Julie Cross
Jenni Stewart’s diagrams played in my mind over and over and it was like the rest of me just knew what to do, without even thinking about it.
One of the attackers lunged for Emily, and just as he was about to get his hands around her, I kicked him hard in the stomach, sending him flying backward. The back of his head cracked against the sidewalk. I jabbed the second man, who had approached from my other side, in the face with my elbow. He staggered backward as Emily slid down the wall, like her legs were giving out.
“Can I do it?” I asked her frantically. “Can I jump us both back if we’re in the future?”
Her huge eyes searched mine and she opened her mouth to answer and then let out a scream. “Jackson, look out!”
The third guy had his arms around my neck from behind. I threw his weight over my body and he smashed into the ground. He hollered in agony and I quickly pulled Emily up by her arms and lifted her off the ground. She squeezed me tight and pressed her face into my shirt. She was trying to block everything out. To get us the hell out of here. I had never been more happy to feel the awful sensation of a half-jump as I was right then.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
AUGUST 15, 2009, 3:30
P.M.
The storm had picked up even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Rain whipped me in the face. Emily was still gripping me tight, her face hidden, but I could feel her shaking. I was, too. I attempted to set her down, but she wouldn’t let go of me and her shaking had turned into sobs. I hugged her back, assuming she must be comfortable enough with me in the future, whatever year she came from.
Finally, she released me and took in a deep breath. “I didn’t know it would be … like that.”
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
She nodded and then reached for the pole again, gripping it. “I didn’t exactly aim well … did I?”
“Were you trying to end up on a swim dock in the middle of a giant storm?”
“No, but things change … sometimes it’s hard to get it right.”
The wind picked up and rocked the swim dock. My stomach turned over and I gripped the pole above her hand, trying to focus my eyes on the now distant boat.
“I have to swim back,” I said to Emily, pointing toward the shore.
“Me, too.” She cringed when another roar of thunder cut her off.
“Can’t you just jump? Like, to another day?”
She shook her head, flinging rain everywhere. “No, let them see us swim back and then I’ll jump. You can’t tell anyone about me. About what I can do. I’m just the kid you rescued from the storm, okay?”
That’s why she did a half-jump, so everyone would still see us here, though I doubted the visibility would stretch that far. “What’s going to happen?”
“You have to let me go, no matter what, promise?” Pink and blue lightning brightened her face and I could see she already doubted my ability to take orders from a little girl.
“You took me to the future … does that mean … have you even been born yet?” I asked her.
“I can’t tell you.”
I knelt in front of her and looked her straight in the eyes. “How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Do you know Dr. Melvin?”
She wasn’t floundering in this unannounced staring contest. “I know
of
him.”
“Then he’s not the reason you exist?”
Her defenses crumbled and she took a step back. “We have to go!”
I grabbed her hand. “Not yet.”
“You told me not to answer questions. Not many of them anyway,” she yelled over more thunder.
“That was the other me. He’s, like, really old, right? Nobody listens to him.”
“Oh, really? So you don’t trust your future self, even though he obviously knows more than you?”
I knew she was right. It was irresponsible to force anything out of her. “I’m sorry … It’s just … right now there’s something that might happen and I’ve got to make sure it doesn’t. It’s hard to think about anything else.”
“I know you feel like you have to change everything or fix it, but don’t overthink. Trust yourself to make the right choice. It’s not as hard as it seems.” She pointed to the shore. “We need to go.”
We both jumped in and I helped pull Emily along. Waves came flying over our heads, but finally we reached the shore and walked the rest of the way up the beach. I nodded toward the hotel. “Just run in that direction and I’ll say you found your way in, okay?”
She started to turn and then hesitated for a second. She kept her eyes down but wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed tight. “’Bye, Jackson … good luck.”
I watched her run toward one of the side doors and felt a giant weight pressing on my shoulders. It wasn’t just about saving Holly. There was more to it. Much more. No wonder Dad wanted to keep me away from this.
Too late now.
I turned and jogged toward the harbor. Adam, Holly, and Freeman were already heading in my direction.
“Everything okay with that kid?” Adam asked.
“Yeah, she’s back inside,” I said, waving off any more questions by changing the subject. “Where’s my dad?” I asked Freeman.
“Over by the front doors.”
Holly threw her arms around me and I hugged her quickly, then pointed toward the hotel. “Should we go in?”
Everybody took off running. Dad ushered us inside and the chill of air-conditioning hit us the second we walked into the lobby. We were all dripping wet, shoes squeaking across the marble floor, and yet everyone around us was so calm. It took every ounce of self-control I had to not announce the end of the world to the entire hotel. I couldn’t even tell Tempest what I had seen without telling them about Emily.
Dad nodded toward the hallway on our left and we followed. I sucked in a breath when I saw him draw his gun; Freeman did the same.
“What’s happening?” Holly asked.
“They’re here,” Freeman said.
“What do they want?” Adam asked desperately.
“Jackson,” Dad answered. “At least that’s what Melvin thinks. Possibly to replicate the experiment. We’ve kept them away for a couple months now. I let them get close, against Marshall’s orders, two years ago, so they could see you didn’t have any abilities.”
“Why wouldn’t they just kill me anyway?” I asked.
“They don’t murder needlessly. Only to gain power,” Freeman said, poking his head around the corner before leading us that way.
“Power for what?” Holly asked.
“They believe the world would be a better place if we were all like them,” Dad said. “But Tempest believes time travel by mass population would be utter chaos.”
“Totally,” Adam said.
“Dr. Ludwig’s on their side,” I added. “With all his cloning or whatever.”
“They think Melvin’s creating an army,” Dad said, turning toward me. “Don’t do anything stupid, Jackson. Just try to stay close and keep your distance from them. Freeman and I have done this many times. We can handle it.”
Freeman froze in the middle of the hallway. Then, about twenty rooms down, that blond woman Rena and the man named Raymond appeared out of nowhere.
The man who killed Eileen. I couldn’t imagine what Dad went through having to see him over and over again.
“Damn, that’s freaky,” Holly muttered. “I kinda didn’t believe you about that time-travel thing … Totally believe you now.”
Dad immediately shoved me behind him and I did the same with Holly.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do if they just appear and disappear?” Adam asked, fear gathering in his voice.
“They can’t do it much, trust me,” Dad said.
“Except Thomas,” Freeman muttered.
Thomas
again. His name kept coming up at very important moments.
Holly screamed when Freeman fired at them. They shot back at us and I yanked her farther behind me. If they could pop in and out, she wasn’t going anywhere out of my sight.
Adam yelled this time because another man had appeared right behind us.
The first two EOTs took off running, away from us, and I yanked Holly in front of me as we ran away from the man behind us and toward the two up ahead. Freeman followed them through two doors into a big dining room. The room was filled with people dressed for a wedding. The second we came bursting through the doors with our guns, screams erupted and everyone started running out.
The whole place was full of innocent bystanders. They needed to get out. Quick. I scanned the walls and spotted something to help clear the building.
“Go pull the fire alarm!” I shouted at Holly.
She ran over to the wall behind us and smashed the glass case with her elbow. The alarm sounded and water started spraying down from the sprinklers on the ceiling. More screams. The room emptied in about thirty seconds. Crystal glasses were on every table. A giant grand piano sat in the center of the dance floor. Not exactly a great place for a gunfight.
The shoe-print guy aka Raymond sprang up on top of the piano and aimed his pistol right at Freeman. Holly gasped as we both watched Freeman drop his weapon from ten feet away and raise his hands in the air. The surrender lasted about two seconds before Dad jumped up behind Raymond and kicked him so hard he fell onto the table behind the piano and then slid on his back, sending the plates and silverware soaring in all directions.
The other man suddenly went from thirty feet behind me to right behind me. I moved out of the way and grabbed a chair from one of the tables and threw it in his path. He tumbled over it and sprang back to his feet.
Rena fired at the ceiling and Holly screamed again when the massive crystal chandelier shattered. She dove under a table as pieces of glass flew everywhere. I slid under with her and pulled her next to me. I could feel her heart pounding even harder than mine.
“Stay with me, okay?” I said. “Don’t run off or anything.”
She nodded.
Dad’s feet raced past me and then the woman followed. I aimed my gun at her leg, but it was too close to Dad and I couldn’t risk it. Holly reached out and grabbed Rena’s ankle, causing her to fall right on her face. Adrenaline rushed through me and I rolled out from under the table, stood up, and then stepped right on Rena’s back, pointing my gun at her head.
“No, Jackson! Don’t touch her!” Dad shouted, but I didn’t know why.
The last thing I saw was Dad pulling Adam to the ground as a bullet soared over their heads.
The room dissolved and I had no idea where I was headed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
A full jump. We just did a full jump.
Duh.
That’s why I wasn’t supposed to touch her.
Despite the life-threatening situation and the fact that both me and this blond EOT chick were armed, the first thought to cross my mind as my eyes opened was,
Holly just watched me fucking disappear!
If she didn’t believe that I was a time traveler before, she sure as hell would now. I heard several people gasp and I turned my head to look at a group of teenage girls standing on the sidewalk, dressed in weird argyle skirts and socks up to their knees. Like Jackie Kennedy or something. That’s when I realized what exactly they were looking at. My foot on a woman’s back, pointing a gun at her, and both of us dripping wet. And this day was clear and sunny.
I quickly tucked the gun into my pants and glanced at the street. Old-model Cadillacs were parked all over Fifth Avenue, except they weren’t old. Most of them looked brand-new. Weird-ass hippie buses lined up against the curb and I was half expecting the cast of
Hairspray
to burst into the streets singing “Welcome to the 60’s.”
Rena tossed me off her and I landed on my back and also on one of the prissy girls’ shoes. All five or six of them screamed as loud as possible and I sprang up from the ground, running after the blond woman.
If she jumped, would I be able to get back? And was this the same timeline that we’d left, but in the past? My guess was no, because I knew how hard it was to jump in the same timeline. I could see her head bobbing and I shoved past people to get closer.
My new observational skills never turned off, and as I ran, I took in everything, the hippie guy singing a Bob Dylan song outside a store, the buildings that were missing from the skyline.
Finally, I reached the woman and grabbed the back of her shirt. My arms went around her, squeezing tight. “You had better be able to get us back. Exactly where we left.”
She jabbed me in the stomach with her elbow, but I felt her pulling us back. Or somewhere else. Tagging up in home base didn’t seem necessary in full jumps.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
AUGUST 15, 2009, 4:30
P.M.
My feet slid and I felt myself falling down a slanted surface. Rain. Thunder. Again. My eyes flew open and I nearly shouted after seeing that I was on the roof of the hotel. I sprawled out flat on my stomach and dug my fingers into the shingles. Rena laughed an evil laugh. She had easily wormed herself at least three feet away from me. I wanted to knock her teeth out, and would have if it weren’t for the fact that I was too scared to let go of anything.
“Damn. Off by a few minutes. Maybe they had time to kill your dad by now,” she sneered. “He’s really good at getting in the way.”
Intense fury pulsed through me, giving me the courage to release one hand and reach for my gun. Rena was still trying to get to her feet … she wouldn’t even see it coming. But I couldn’t do it.
Just as my fingers moved from the trigger and reached for a piece of the shingles to grip on to, a loud boom came from below, nearly causing me to tumble to the ground. A bolt of lightning exploded through the sky at the same moment a bullet ripped through her chest.
Whose bullet?
I watched in horror, unable to do anything as the woman fell against the roof, then tumbled down and landed with a smack. I heard shouts from below and sirens going off everywhere. I flipped over so my back was pressed against the roof and attempted to shimmy upward. I pulled the images of the hotel maps up in my mind. There was a roof access door where the roof leveled off above me.
When I reached the top, I started to stand and made the mistake of looking at the ground below. My stomach turned and dizziness swept over me and I was on my back again, panting and trying to force the fear away. I was pretty sure they didn’t let acrophobes join the CIA.