A World Without You(28)

Before lunchtime, the officials know something is wrong. We’re studying math in Ms. Okafor’s class, just across the hall and two doors down from Dr. Franklin’s office. Dr. Rivers and Mr. Minh storm into the office, shut the door, and soon we hear yelling. I kick Ryan under my desk, but he ignores me, his head bent over his geometry worksheet as if he was focused on it, but he’s already finished all the problems.

That evening they search our rooms. We’re eating in the common room while it happens, and so none of us realize it until after. They were quiet about it—it’s not like they trashed everything—but it’s clear that our rooms have been searched. Our sheets are untucked, our clothing riffled through, the edges of posters on the walls are lifted up. They even flipped through my calendar, which bothers me more than anything else.

Ryan comes to my room before lights-out.

“Told you,” he says, as I refold my clothes the way they’re supposed to be.

But all I can think about is the haunted look on the Doctor’s face. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s being made to look like an idiot at best and uncooperative at worst, and he’s going to get in trouble. He might even get fired.

Ryan frowns and steps inside my room fully, shutting the door behind him. “You’re having second thoughts,” he says blankly, but there’s fire behind his eyes.

I shrug. “I don’t want anything to happen to the Doctor,” I say.

“That * is the one who just turned our data over to the officials.”

“Maybe he has a plan. Maybe we’re messing it up.”

Ryan glares at me. I can almost see that genius mind of his churning with ideas, seething with possibilities.

“You can’t go to the future, can you?” he asks. “That’s what you said originally, on the first day. You said you’re a time traveler, but you can only go to the past.”

I realize for the first time that, like Ryan, I’ve never really talked all that much about my powers, at least not to the group as a whole. I talked a lot about them to Sofía, in private, and everyone in my unit knows I can go back in time, but I’ve never really discussed details with them. It just . . . never came up.

“Yeah, no future stuff,” I say. “I can see—well, I call it the timestream. It’s like I’m standing in the middle of a big, flat, uh . . . it’s really thin, barely visible, but it’s like a rubber mat made out of a giant bubble, but with strings linking me to the different times and places. Sorry. I don’t know how to describe what time looks like.”

“Yeah, that must be hard,” Ryan says flatly.

“And I can see sort of bright spots, big events. If I concentrate, I can figure out where I want to go, and I pull the string linking me to it, and I’m transported there.”

“And it’s all stuff in the past?”

“I can’t go to the future. And there are limits to what I can see in the past.”

“Maybe you should try.”

I laugh. “You don’t think I have? The timestream is like a tapestry; the past is already woven into a picture, but the future is still a tangle of strings.”

“Huh.” Ryan sits down on the edge of my bed, the mattress creaking under his weight. “It’s really fascinating in a weird way to hear you talk about it all, like it’s real.”

“It is real.” I stuff the rest of my clothes into my drawer and slam it shut. Ryan always says things like that. Just because something’s not real to him, he doesn’t see the value in it. He’s worse with Harold. He can’t see or hear Harold’s ghosts, so he completely dismisses them, acts like Harold doesn’t have a power at all.

Ryan’s still staring at me.

“What do you want?” I ask, because I know he’s not just here to chat.

“I’m . . .” Ryan fidgets on my bed. “I’m just worried,” he finally says. “About the officials. What they could do. What could happen if you don’t help me get rid of them.”

I frown. I’m worried about that too, but . . . “I can’t see the future.”

“Maybe you can,” Ryan says. He holds up his hands when I start to protest. “You can, uh . . . touch points in the past and go there, because they’re fixed. They happened. But since the future hasn’t happened yet, it could go one way or another. So maybe if you look at it that way, instead of looking for one specific thing that definitely will happen, if you look for just, uh . . . possibilities . . . maybe you can see the future that way.”

All the lights in the academy flicker. Our warning that lights-out is in five minutes. Ryan gets up and turns to go to his own room, then looks back at me. “Look, just try, okay? I know you like Dr. Franklin, but maybe don’t trust him. Not with this.”

Ryan leaves, closing the door behind him, and I’m alone with my questions and fear. I’m still standing there when, five minutes later, the lights go off entirely.

? ? ?

I sit in the middle of my bed in the dark room, willing my powers to come to me. The timestream rises up, surrounding me, reminding me it’s always there, whether I control it or not. The strings of time flow gently, extending out like a net floating on the surface of the ocean, and I am trapped in the center.

Before, I’d described the threads as forming a tapestry, but that’s wrong. A tapestry implies organization, a clear picture. There is a pattern—that much I can see—but it’s not discernible at all. There are loose threads and knots and holes, and it should look like a mess, but instead, it looks beautiful.