A World Without You(17)

It was Phoebe.

She had somehow become a stranger to me. There was a moment there, brief but true, when she had legitimately been a person I did not know or recognize. Somehow while I was retreating to my room and listening to music and taking notes on history, she was spin-spin-spinning away from us all. Somehow in all this time, she had become a different person than the one I had known, a stranger.

Someone I could pass by without recognizing.





CHAPTER 9




I am so sick of memories I don’t really want to have. I don’t want to live in the past. Just give me the future, and Sofía, and a second chance.

I turn away from the ocean and plod back to the academy. Sand sticks to my feet, and I make a halfhearted effort to wipe it off before going inside the mansion. As I head up the stairs, I pass a group of students from another unit. They look a little younger than me, two guys and a girl. I wonder what their powers are. They stick together, moving to the other banister as I climb up the steps. I try to give them a friendly smile, but they hurry away. So. My reputation has preceded me. Maybe it’s a good thing that the units are so self-contained and we don’t interact with other students. Or maybe, if we did, they would know I’m not a monster. That losing Sofía was an accident.

I close my bedroom door and sit in the middle of my room, alone.

I blink, and the timestream stretches out around me, a beautiful mix of opalescent light and strings. It’s a chaotic mess, but it still makes a pattern I think I can almost understand.

There are the knotted places, tangles I cannot penetrate. The knots are places I’ve been to before. I scrutinize them, trying to see the path of my life in the scheme of time and the universe. Here is where I was born, here is where my sister broke her arm, here is where I got an award for history in middle school, here is where I discovered my powers.

And here . . . my fingers run over the knotted mess of where Sofía is trapped in the past. Ever since I lost her, I’ve been trying to find a way to reach her again. And then yesterday, I got there as easy as blinking. At least until I tried to warn her.

Time has a way of keeping itself safe and balanced. Whenever I try to alter something that has to be, whether it’s punching Hitler in the face or changing my own timeline, time has kept me out. It snaps me back. It reminds me that it’s in charge. So . . . maybe the reason I was able to go back to just before the moment Sofía got stuck in the past was because I didn’t really have the intent to try to change anything.

Intent matters with time.

The real importance of this dawns on me slowly, but it’s actually starting to make a lot of sense. When I’ve tried to go back lately, I’ve been focused on saving Sofía. But time doesn’t want me to save her. It’s preventing me from saving her. It knows from the start that’s what I want to do.

Intent matters. If I go to the past not with the intent to change anything, but with the intent of just seeing Sofía . . .

I could.

I could do that.

Holy hell, I could do that.

I reach for my calendar. It’s the kind that has a different page for each day. Sofía used to make fun of me all the time for using a paper calendar rather than my phone, like a normal person, but when you have the ability to slip through time, it’s important to keep track of the days, and paper is more reliable.

I’m meticulous about my calendar; every day I make a special mark on it using a code that I developed. I keep track of whether or not I slipped in time that day, whether it was accidental or on purpose, where I went and when.

Now I flip through the pages, looking at the dates before I left Sofía stuck in the past. I need to find a time when she and I weren’t together so I know there’s no chance I’ll run into my past self. Intent matters. I just want to see her. I just need to find a time where the me from now can go back and see her . . .

I drop the calendar on my bed, focusing on the timestream, blinking as it flows in front of me like a river of threads floating on the surface of a bubble. Strings of time and place radiate around me, blue and gold and gray and brown, each linking me to a different person, a different place, a different time. But the one tying me to Sofía is bright red and easy to find. I follow the red string with my eyes.

My hand shakes as I select the moment. A weekend, when I would be at home and Sofía would be stuck at Berkshire. Sometime after our first date, when everything was still new, but it was also starting to be comfortable. When we’d both sort of accepted the reality of the other.

October 3. A Saturday evening.

I hesitate. I won’t be able to do this often—maybe not ever again. I can lie and say I decided to stay at the Berk rather than go home, and it’ll work once, but there’s no way she’ll believe it a second time.

But I need this now. I focus on that moment in time, the moment where I’ve not been before but where I could be now. I reach out with trembling hands, touching the space in the timestream, wrapping my finger around time itself.

And I’m there.

? ? ?

I’m in my bedroom, the sky just beginning to fade into evening. The plants outside my window are dead or dying rather than how I just left them, starting to show life. I run to my desk and read the date on my calendar.

October 3.

It worked. I’m here. She’s here—somewhere in the academy.