The Extinction Trials(44)

She paused and swallowed hard. “And to be honest, as time passes, I feel the memories slipping away even more, like this ship sailing away from the shore. They feel… out of reach, as if I’ll never regain them.”

She picked up the envelope. “In my mind’s eye, I can’t see my mother’s face. Or my sister’s. But I can feel what they meant to me. How I felt about them. That’s something. And there’s a lesson there: we don’t always remember people—or what they do to us—but we remember how they make us feel. We’re emotional beings, and I believe that is how our memories are stored—and often how we form our opinions.”

She reached into the envelope and drew out a small gold pocket watch. “I don’t know what happened to me, but I do know that when I saw—and touched—this pocket watch, it brought back a memory, clear as day.”

She inhaled deeply. “My father gave this to me when I was about Blair’s age. He said that his father gave it to him, and his father gave it to him. That’s been going on in our family for a long time, generations that stretch back to an immigrant in a new land who saved up his money and bought this as an heirloom—as a store of value that could be easily carried and, if needed, cashed in during a time of need.”

She turned the pocket watch over in her hand. “It’s dented and scratched and worn, and I remember his words to me as clear as if he were sitting here with us: ‘The watch isn’t worth much. Not anymore. But what it represents is.’”

Maya set the watch on the table. “He asked me what I thought it represented. My first guess was tradition. Wrong. My second guess was family. Wrong again. When I didn’t wager a third guess, he supplied the answer: a single word—time. The watch stopped working a long time ago, but it kept time for a while. Like we all do. But time marches on, a sea that we swim in for a short while, a force that drowns us all in the end. The central question of our life is this: how will we spend our time? Will we invest it in a better future for those that come after us? What will we pass down—like the pocket watch? A better future? Or a darker one? It seems we’ve woken to the darkest era in human history. What comes next, we decide. And we have one thing at our disposal: time. We say that we spend time for a reason—time is a currency. In the end, it’s the only currency that matters.”

Maya picked up the journal. “Look at how they spent their time. Just like Alister said: trying to survive.”

Alister snorted. “That’s cute. But if you don’t survive, you don’t get any more time to spend. Game over and nothing else matters.”

“On the contrary,” Maya replied. “Sometimes, how you spend your time determines if others survive. What sort of world they inherit. What sort of life we create for the people we care about. That’s what this pocket watch represents to me. Sure, it’s a trinket now, an antique some distant ancestor acquired, but it means more than that to me. It tells a story about my ancestors who tried to create a better life for me. They didn’t spend their time always focused on their own survival. It was about more than that. About future generations.”

She set the watch down. “And I remember one other thing about this watch. My father passed away a short time after giving it to me. I don’t remember the details, only that it was a disease that overtook him quickly. I don’t know if he knew he was sick when he gave me the watch. Looking back, he probably did. His death made the point even more clear to me: time is precious. You never truly know how much you have. How we spend it matters.”

Maya locked eyes with Owen. “That’s why I vote to go to the Escape Hatch location. We may not survive, but we’ve got a better chance at getting answers there—answers that could help those people in Garden Station and the rest of the world. I vote to spend our time trying to help leave this world better than we found it.”





Chapter Thirty-Five





For a while, everyone was quiet. Maya expected Alister to rebuff her with a quip, but even he was silent.

Maya picked up the pocket watch, but just as she was about to put it back in the envelope, she stopped. That was odd. As long as she had owned the antique, it hadn’t worked. The time was stopped. The watch still didn’t work, but the time had changed. Was it a coincidence? Had it simply been knocked around? Or was it a message?

Cara’s voice brought her back to the present. “Was that the only thing in your envelope?”

Maya placed the watch back in the envelope. “No. There was one other item.”

She took out the blank page, slightly larger than her two hands combined.

“I don’t get it,” Owen said.

“I don’t either,” Maya replied. “I looked it over in the station, but there’s no markings.”

“Does a blank page mean anything to you?” Owen asked.

“Not particularly. Not that I can remember. Besides the obvious—a future unwritten, infinite choices, a sort of starting over… like having your memories wiped and beginning your life again.”

Alister let his head fall back theatrically. Maya sensed another tirade coming.

“Listen to us,” the middle-aged man muttered. “We’re reading meaning into these trinkets where there is none! A blank page? What if it’s just that—a blank page? Don’t we know we’re in an experiment here? What if The Extinction Trials is simply like one of those inkblots the psychologists show you? They don’t mean anything. You see what’s inside of you, not what’s there. I bet the proctors are watching us now, sitting back laughing at us chasing our tails. It’s all a big experiment, right? What if the joke’s on us?”