All Our Yesterdays (31 page)

Marina’s nose and ears are red; she’s been crying. Finn’s movements are abrupt and angry as he steps off the sidewalk and flags down a cab. He and Marina climb inside, and off they go.

“Oh God.” I shake Finn’s shoulder. “Wake up! They’ve left him! Please, Finn!”

But I know it won’t do any good. There’s only me now. I fumble for the gun in the glove compartment.

James steps out of the restaurant. His eyes are fixed on the idling car, and he nods at Richter behind the driver’s seat. I have maybe a ten-second window before he gets inside and they drive away.

My fingers are heavy and clumsy as I reach into the glove compartment. I’m not going to make it. I get the gun in my hands and throw open my car door. James has already stepped off the pavement and is making his way to Richter’s passenger’s seat.

I stand up and raise the gun over the roof of the car, aiming it at James, who has a hand on the door handle. He looks up at me. Our eyes meet.

I pull the trigger.

Nothing happens.

James flinches and scrambles into the car.

I look down at the gun. It’s jammed. Stupid semiautomatic piece of crap.

“Damn it!” I slam my fist into the roof as Richter’s car speeds away. I toss the gun onto the floorboard of the car and run down the sidewalk after them. I need to at least see what direction they’re going. I reach the corner and see they’re headed down Fourteenth Street, away from downtown. It’s late afternoon; traffic will be building up soon. It might slow them down enough for me to catch up. Can I get Finn out of the driver’s seat of the car? He’s probably got fifty pounds on me, but if I can push him—

A hand claps over my mouth.

A tight arm around my torso makes it impossible to struggle. For a split second I think Finn’s woken up and this is his perverse idea of a joke. Maybe four years ago it would have been, but not now. Then I recognize the feel of the body against my back, the smell of fabric softener and expensive shampoo in my nose. I begin to writhe and scream against the hand over my mouth.

“Easy, kid,” the doctor says into my ear. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I try to kick, but he’s too tall and strong. He holds me practically off the ground, his arm like a steel band around me, keeping my arms pinned to my sides.

“I could kill you right here,” he says, his voice soft and warm against my chilled skin, “and that wouldn’t stop you, would it? You’ll just keep trying. So what choice do I have but to get rid of
her
?”

Marina. I whimper against his hand.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” His voice is thick. “I would have understood if you’d tried to kill me. I’ve done everything I could to convince you of the good I’m doing, but I know you’re having trouble seeing it. But that boy? Who is such an innocent? How could you, Marina? How could you do that?”

I close my eyes against my burning tears.

“Now you’ll know how it feels.” He releases me, and as I draw breath to scream for help, I feel the sting of a hypodermic needle and the world goes dark.

I wake up on the sidewalk with an ache in my neck and Finn frantic beside me.

“Thank God,” he breathes, pushing the hair out of my face. “What the hell happened?”

For a moment, I can’t speak for the wild, choking sob rising in my throat. “The doctor is back.”

“What?”

“The doctor! He’s gone after Marina and Finn.”

Finn goes gray. “Why them? Why not just kill us?”

“Because he knows we’d only come back and try again,” I say. “If he kills them now, before Cassandra is built—”

“He’ll never have to worry about us,” Finn finishes. He slams his fist into the concrete. “I programmed Cassandra to say we traveled back to the seventh. He shouldn’t have come back until tomorrow.”

I struggle to my feet, and Finn helps me. “He must have come early, thinking he could kill us the moment we reappeared in the warehouse.”

“Then something tipped him off that we’d already come and gone.” Finn’s hand tightens around my elbow. “You don’t think . . .”

“Connor.” How else could he have known we were already here, unless he got the information from our man on the inside? “If he did something to him—”

“He’ll never be there to help us escape again,” Finn says. “This is our last chance.”

“Come on!” I start running for the car, Finn at my heels. I don’t slow down, even though I’m so sore from being knocked out that it feels like I’m breaking apart at every joint. “You have to go after Marina and Finn, keep them safe. Call me the moment you find them. I’ll get James.”

I throw open the driver’s door to the car, but before I can slide in, Finn catches my hand. The look in his eyes stops me cold, but it takes me a moment to realize why.

I’m either going to kill James or the doctor’s going to kill Marina, which means this is it for us.

He kisses me softly on the lips. “I love you.”

I take one last second to memorize his beautiful face. “I love you, too.”

He hands me the keys to the car. “See you on the other side.”

Thirty-One

Marina

In the cab with Finn, I turn on my phone. We’re almost to my house, but my mother could be leaving any moment, if she hasn’t already. I have to get out of this city. Everything else pales next to my need to get as far away from James Shaw as possible right now. I dial Mom’s number without listening to the three voice mails I already have from my parents.

“Marina!” She picks up after the second ring. “Are you okay?”

“I guess,” I say. There are no words for what I really am.

“You’re in big trouble, young lady.”

“I know,” I say, “but I’m on my way home. And I want to go to New York.”

Something in my voice softens her. “It’s going to be good for you, honey. I really believe that.”

It doesn’t matter. At this moment, nothing does. “I’ll see you soon.”

“You okay?” Finn asks softly when I hang up.

I shake my head. The fury that burned inside of me has gone, leaving me cold and empty. It feels like the time I cut my foot on a broken bottle. The ER doc gave me an anesthetic so he could stitch it up, but I
knew
the pain was still there, lurking behind the numbness, waiting for me.

“You did the right thing,” Finn says.

I turn to him. “Did I? I abandoned him when he needed me.”

“Maybe that’s what he really needed. Something to shock him into some sense.”

Or maybe it will make everything worse. Maybe he’ll start acting even more recklessly, and I won’t be there to stop him. “I hate myself.”

“Hey, don’t say that.”

“It’s true.” I cover my face with my hands. I don’t want him to see me cry. “I’ve never been any good for anyone. James is the only person besides Luz who really cares about me, and I left him. I’m mean and selfish and shallow and ugly, and I never do anything right, and—”

“Stop!” Finn pulls my hands away from my face, his fingers firm around my wrists. “M, don’t say that.”

“Nobody loves me, and why should they?” I’m half wild now, the tears thick in my throat. I try to pull my arms out of Finn’s grasp, but he holds tight. “How could they?”

“Marina.” He puts his hands on my face, thumbs brushing the tears from my cheeks, and guides my gaze up to his. “That’s not true.”

For once there isn’t the smallest trace of humor in his ocean-colored eyes.

The cab comes to a sudden, screeching halt in the middle of the street. It pitches me forward, and I slam my head against the back of the driver’s seat. Black dots pepper my vision, and the world swims before me. I’m distantly aware of Finn yelling at the driver, but all I can think of is a song I learned in kindergarten.

Buckle up your safety belt,

Every time you ride.

Don’t forget, not even once,

Safety belts save lives!

My head is throbbing, but it’s such an absurd memory that I laugh. Finn’s hands are on my face again.

“Marina? You okay?”

I touch my forehead, and my fingers come back clean. “Yeah, I think so.”

The driver’s door is open, and he’s standing outside the cab, hollering at something, waving his arms in the air. I crane my neck to see through the windshield. My vision is still dark around the edges, but I can clearly see the black car parked across the middle of the street, blocking the entire road.

Finn is checking me for injuries, so he doesn’t see the door of the black car open or the man who steps out of it. Tall and slim, with neat dark hair and pale skin. I close my eyes and rest my pounding head on my knees.

“Oh God,” I moan. “I think I really
am
hurt.”

Finn puts a hand on my head, stroking my hair, and normally that would be bizarre, but it doesn’t even rank in the strangeness of this moment.

His hand freezes. “What the hell?”

Then there’s a bang, deafeningly loud. I know exactly what it is. I bolt upright and see the cab driver staggering to the ground, and the window beside me splattered with fine red droplets. I try to scream, but the sound lodges painfully in my throat. Through the haze of blood, I see the man I thought was a hallucination walking toward us, gun at his side. I don’t understand how he can be here, how he can have killed a man in cold blood.

Because it’s James.

He’s James, and he’s not James. He’s definitely not the James I ran away from barely twenty minutes ago. My vision tilts and whirls. This person has James’s face, but it’s twisted into an alien expression, the corner of his mouth curling upward as though in distaste and amusement at the same time. His eyes are too sharp, his hair too short, his body too tall and broad.

A shiver goes up my spine. I’m hallucinating, I must be.

I sit frozen in my seat, staring at not-James through the bloody window, but Finn flies into movement. He grabs me around the back of the neck and shoves my head below the window of the cab, covering me with his arm. As we cower there, he kicks open his door and crawls through it, pulling me after him.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he whispers. We crouch on the pavement, keeping the cab between us and the gunman. Finn looks around us for an escape route.

“Did you see him?” I say. “Did you see—?”

Somewhere there’s the squeal of tires and the slam of a car door.

“Marina, run!” a familiar voice cries.

Finn yanks me up by the wrist and sprints for the gap between two houses across the street, dragging me after him. I throw a look over my shoulder, expecting the impact of a bullet at any moment, and what I see stops me dead in my tracks.

The James who isn’t James is running toward us. But before he reaches us, he’s tackled by another man.

By Finn.

The same Finn who’s holding my hand is wrestling not-James to the pavement.

My deadweight jerks Finn back as he tries to run. He turns and freezes at the sight.

The two men in the street continue to fight. The dark-haired man with James’s face is taller and stronger, but the fair man who looks like Finn is quick. He twists the gun out of the dark-haired man’s grip and sends it skittering across the pavement. The dark-haired man hits him across the face with a loosely curled first, the thick
thwack
of it ringing through the quiet street. Then he removes something from his belt, a black rectangle that fits neatly into his hand and shows a tiny glint of metal in the light.

“Marina!” not-Finn cries, his eyes never leaving the weapon.
“Run!”

The dark-haired man jabs what I think is a Taser into the fair man’s side, and he convulses once, his body arcing up off the pavement like a puppet jerked on its strings, before collapsing back to the ground, his eyes closed, mouth agape.

The real Finn comes out of his shock before I do and yanks on my wrist. The two of us run, the slapping of feet like thunder behind us as the dark-haired man comes after us.

“Faster, Marina!” Finn yells.

“I can’t!”

Finn darts into the gap between the houses, pulling me so fast behind him that my feet barely skim the ground and each step jolts the joint of my shoulder. I’m not going to make it. I know I’m not.

“Just go!” I pant.

“No!”

A hand closes around my other arm. I scream.

“Marina!” Finn cries.

The scream dries up on my lips as I look up into the face of the man who caught me. This close, looking into those light brown eyes, there’s no denying it.

“I’m sorry,” James says, and I feel the jab of metal against my stomach before the world upends and goes black.

Thirty-Two

Em

Finn goes to steal a second car so he can catch up with Marina and his younger self, leaving me with the Chevy. It jerks underneath me as I pound the gas and then the brake. James and Richter have an enormous head start on me, and the odds of my finding them are staggeringly slim. My only hope is that they turned onto Fourteenth Street, the major route from downtown to Virginia, because they were headed out of D.C.