Remember Yesterday

17

I run toward the Harmony compound, my feet a blur underneath me. I feel like I’m flying, and I don’t even have my hoverboard. Callie, here and not dead. Vitals in the safe zone. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll wake up and come back to me someday.

It’s just as likely she won’t.

My heart contracts so abruptly it hurts. I can’t tell what I’m feeling anymore. Joy or sorrow. Anxiety or anticipation. I’m tiptoeing along the razor’s edge of hope; one wrong step in either direction and I’ll fall on the blade again. Only this time, it will be worse. Losing Callie once sliced my heart into ribbons. If I have to mourn her a second time? The ribbons will be fed through a meat grinder, and I don’t know if I’ll recognize what comes out the other side.

I take a breath and let it out slowly. Let’s hope I won’t have to try.

As I approach the compound, I see a lone figure sitting on the ten-foot wall, his long legs dangling against the stucco. The sky has turned purple with the dusk, and a spotlight shines on my best friend’s oversize feet, leaving the rest of him in shadows.

I smile. Two years ago, Angela ordered the branches of the nearby trees trimmed, but that didn’t stop Ryder and me. Very little does.

I break into a run, getting in four nice strides before I strike the wall waist-high with my foot and vault myself up. I grab the ledge with both hands, scrabbling my legs beneath me until I get a sneaker on the wall. From there, it’s a simple matter of hauling myself up.

It took me six months to learn this trick. And I’m still pretty impressed with myself.

“I think I’m ready to try a twelve-foot wall,” I pant.

But Ryder doesn’t grin at me, and he doesn’t make fun of my form. I plop onto the wall facing him, my legs hanging on either side.

“Where have you been?” He swings his leg around so that he’s facing me, too. The moonlight glints off his goggles, but he’s close enough that I can see the worry lines in his forehead.

“You’ll never believe it,” I burst out. “It wasn’t Olivia sending me that message after all. It was my sister! She’s alive!”

With run-together words, punctuated by gasps, I tell him the entire story. Ryder’s eyes widen, and he grips the wall as though he might be in danger of sliding off.

“I remember her,” he says wonderingly. “When I was a kid. She came to Harmony and stayed with us. I didn’t know her well, but I thought she had a pretty smile. I can’t believe she’s still alive.”

I kick my feet against the wall. “I can’t wait to tell everybody. They’re going to go crazy.”

“Maybe Mikey will even forget to be mad.”

My feet stop mid-swing. “Mad? Why is he mad?”

“I’m sorry, Jessa. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if you were hurt or in danger.” He ducks his head. “I had to tell Mikey everything.”

Aw, fike. We deliberately disobeyed him. He warned us, and we broke into the lower floors of TechRA anyway. Mikey’s not going to be happy.

“He’s convinced you’re a bad influence on me,” Ryder says quietly. “I’m grounded from seeing or talking to you for the next month. This is to be our last communication. I’m under strict instructions to bring you to the house as soon as you show up. Your mom’s waiting there with Mikey and Angela.”

I barely hear his last sentence. Not see or talk to my best friend for a month? I’ve never gone so long without Ryder’s friendship before. What am I going to do?

All of a sudden, his wrist com flashes white and then red, bright alternating lights that can’t be ignored. I shield my face, while he lifts his wrist to shut down the alarm. “That must be Mikey now.”

I check my own com unit. I turned it off when I climbed into the stretcher and forgot to switch it back on. The dial spins, counting off the messages with each rotation and emitting the corresponding light. Violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.

My stomach sinks to my toes. Someone’s left me six messages, each with an escalating level of priority. From violet—“where are you?”—to red—“even if your country is under attack, hear me now.”

“Which message should we listen to first?” I ask weakly.

“Doesn’t matter.” Ryder squints at his com. “Same ID code. The security vids outside the compound must’ve gotten a picture of us.”

He hits play, and Mikey’s voice fills the sky: “I can see you two on the wall. If Jessa isn’t here in the next two minutes, I will personally take apart both your hoverboards and send them on the next trash shipment to space.”

I wince. “I guess he’s not a fan of our hoverboards?”

Ryder sighs. He flips on the light on his wrist com and holds it under his chin. “Take a look at this handsome face, Jessa. There’s no telling when you’ll see it again.”

The wave of Mikey’s anger almost knocks me over as soon as I enter the house. I wish Ryder were still with me. We always faced Mikey’s disappointment together, always received our punishments together, from the time we lived in the wilderness. Somehow, scaling fish by the bushel was easier when Ryder was by my side, making fun of my technique or flinging fish guts at me.

But he’s not here. And he won’t be for the next month.

“This is not a game.” Mikey slams his foot down as I approach, and a red and yellow splotch appears on the pressure-sensitive floor. Behind him, the tile shows blue and green footprints walking between the couch and the wall screen, where my mom and Angela are standing. “I made it clear you were no longer to snoop around TechRA, and you did what you wanted the first chance you got. I don’t know how else to get through to you.”

“These agencies are doing things they don’t want the public to know about.” Angela bounces Remi in her arms. “It’s not safe.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Both my mother’s voice and expression are pinched. “You’re going to mess everything up.” Just like always, I could’ve added for her.

The voices come at me from every direction, the concern and anger and disappointment blending together, and I let their words wash over me. In a moment, everyone’s world will tilt off its axis. All because of a girl who used to be at the center of all our lives. And then wasn’t.

“I saw Callie,” I blurt out. “She’s not dead like we thought. She’s in a coma—she’s been in a coma these last ten years—and she’s being kept in one of the basement levels of TechRA.”

It is so quiet you could hear a bot reboot. My mother turns pale, the color of a chicken before it goes into the Meal Assembler. Her hand moves to her throat, kneading and squeezing, as if she can massage out the words that are stuck there.

My insides twist. “She’s back, Mom. Actually, she never left us. She’s been here all along. She might…come back to us still.”

My mother’s eyes well up. “I hoped she was still alive. Something…in the past…made me believe she might be. But as the years passed, and there was no sign of her, I began to lose hope. My little girl…my baby. How is this possible?”

For the second time in half an hour, I repeat the story. You’d think I would get bored of the retelling, but I could talk about this—I could talk about Callie—for the rest of the night. Maybe even the rest of the week.

My mother’s openly crying now, and she moves forward and hugs me, in a way she hasn’t since I came back to civilization. I close my eyes, feeling the warmth of her embrace, the solidity of her arms and chest. This is how it would feel if she loved me. This is how it would be if we were a true family.

“Your true daughter, your firstborn,” I murmur. “The one you actually love.”

I don’t know why I say it. Swear to Fates, it just slips out. I want to snatch the words from the air, stuff them back in.

But it’s too late. She drops her arms and backs away from me. I reach out, but before I can touch her, she cries out and runs from the room. Blood-red footprints decorate the floor in her wake.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. What is wrong with me? This is the closest I’ve felt to my mom in years. Why did I have to ruin the moment with my insecurities?

Angela squeezes my hand. Her eyes are red, and she looks like she’s been crying herself. “She’s emotional, and who can blame her? I can only imagine how I would feel if my daughter were returned to me.” She drops a kiss on Remi’s head. “Don’t you worry. I’ll go talk to her. She may want to be alone now, but in a few minutes, she’ll be glad for the company.”

Shooting me a sympathetic glance, she and Remi leave the room.

And then it’s just Mikey and me.

Except he won’t look at me. His eyes flit from the magnificent mountains on the wall screens to the retractable coffee table to the water-filled massage chair. Anywhere but at me.

He’s not crying, either. In fact, he doesn’t even look surprised.

All of a sudden, I remember him coming to my room, in the early days after we relocated to Eden City.

“Callie’s been gone six years, and you’re still grieving her,” he said. “It might give you closure if you resurrected your bond and sent her some memories.”

“I already tried.” I hugged a pillow to my chest. “Almost every day the first month we escaped, and nearly every week since. It doesn’t work anymore. There’s no click.”

“Try again,” he suggested. “For me. Try it one more time, right now.”

Because I never had a father, because I was barely speaking to my mother, because I loved him as much as I’ve ever loved any parent, I obeyed. Nothing happened.

Looking almost as disappointed as I felt, Mikey left the room, and I pushed the incident out of my mind.

Until now.

Mikey works at TechRA. In fact, he’s one of their head scientists. Is it possible that he’s known this entire time?

“Did you know, Mikey?” I whisper. “Did you know my sister was still alive?”

He finally meets my eyes. And then he nods.

My knees go weak, and the room spins around me. I trusted him. He taught me to hunt, even though I didn’t talk. When we came back to civilization, he let me live with his family in the cottage behind their house, when my mother refused to move to the compound. He was like the father I never had.

“You lied to me,” I say.

“You have to understand,” he pleads. “Every day, I wanted to tell you. I wished every single day that her condition would improve, so that I could come home and tell you the good news. But what good would it have done for me to tell you that Callie was in a coma? It would’ve killed you to see her lying there, day after day, and not be able to do anything to help her.”

“I could’ve sat by her side. Held her hand and sent her my memories.”

“I was trying to protect you.” He walks to the water recliner and flops onto it, covering his eyes with one hand. “Both you and Logan. I had no guarantee she would ever wake up. And I didn’t want the two of you to bury yourselves in that room until you might as well be dead.” He lifts his hand, and it’s like he’s pulled back a curtain. As blank as his eyes were before, they’re full now. Of a long-ago wound that’s never healed. Of a pain so deep it’s carried in his soul. “Turns out, I was right. She took a turn for the worst last week, and even I had to admit that my hope was foolish. It’s only a matter of time before she leaves us once again.”

“No, you’re wrong, Mikey.” I shake my head. “Today, her vitals entered the safe zone after I sent just one memory. All I had to do was touch her for the transmission to work. Preston thinks the only reason her brain was behaving erratically was because it had woken up and couldn’t find a hold. But now that she’s latched onto me, she’s stable. More stable than she’s been since the first year of her coma.”

“Oh, thank the Fates.” He closes his eyes briefly and then opens them. “You can’t tell Logan. You have to promise me that.”

“What? Why not? You just said you were waiting for good news before you told us. This qualifies as good news.”

“Normally, I’d agree with you,” he says quietly. “But when I believed we were going to lose Callie for good, Angela and I redoubled our efforts. We took turns talking to Logan every night; we invited him and Ainsley out to dinner at a Manual Cooking establishment. Angela even let Ainsley play with Remi, so that Logan could see what a good mother she could be. And then, a couple days ago, we finally seemed to get through to him. After all these years, my brother is finally on the verge of moving on. Of being happy.”

“He deserves to know—”

“He deserves to live,” Mikey says, his eyes blazing. “I’m glad Callie’s gotten a new hold on life. I want her to wake up nearly as much as you do. But that may still never happen.”

“Logan has a right to know,” I say fiercely. “A right to live his own life.”

“I can’t let him do that! I can’t lose him, too.”

I stop, not sure I heard him correctly. “What do you mean? Who else have you lost?”

He pushes against the floor with his foot, and the recliner rocks beneath him. For a moment, I don’t think he’s going to answer. And then he sits up and rests his elbows on his knees.

“Most people know I was the first member of Harmony,” he says. “What they don’t know was there wasn’t even a Harmony back then. I was just a sixteen-year-old kid who managed to escape from the TechRA labs. I didn’t go into the woods, but up into the mountains, where a primitive community lived, one that had been together since the pre-Boom era.”

A smile ghosts across his lips. “The mountain people thought I was strange, with my pockets full of gadgets and my talk of psychic powers, but they were kind and they accepted me. There was a woman there. Sierra. Just as I arrived, her little boy, Jonas, was about to step on some sharp rocks, and she swept him up just in time. He laughed, not understanding the danger he was in, and she covered his face with kisses. I fell in love with both of them in an instant. Sierra was the sister I never had, and Jonas was the nephew I never knew I wanted.”

His words are quiet and halting, as though he’s not used to the rhythms of this story. “I’d been there only a couple months when tragedy struck. A snake slithered into their tent and bit Jonas. The poison spread fast. By morning, he was dead.”

I gasp, bringing my hand to my lips. But he continues as though he doesn’t hear.

“We buried him under a mound of loose rocks.” He looks at the wall screen, and I know he’s not seeing the rotating images of the majestic snowcaps. He’s seeing the mountains he knew. The ones where he lived and loved. “Sometimes, I wonder if it would’ve made a difference if I hadn’t piled on so many rocks. Other times, I know this is my Fixed. The event that defines my life so thoroughly it would be the same in every world.”

“What happened?” I whisper.

“An alarm sounded that night. A rockslide was coming, and we had to clear out. There should’ve been plenty of time. But when the supplies were loaded into the wagon, I realized Sierra was missing. I found her at the rocks.” His voice breaks and he drops his face, his shoulders shaking, shaking, shaking.

My mouth falls. Is Mikey…crying? The leader of our community. The man who makes the toughest decisions without flinching. I’ve never seen him teary before, much less sobbing.

I fall to my knees and inch closer to him.

“She was trying to dig Jonas out. Oh Fates, Jessa, she wouldn’t leave him. I pleaded with her, I begged. I even lifted her and tried to drag her away. She fought me like a wild animal, and then she manacled herself to a tree. She said if Jonas couldn’t leave our campsite, then she wouldn’t, either. And then the rumbling started.” He looks up, then, his eyes as dull and black as coals. “Leaving her was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” His voice breaks. “But if I hadn’t, I would’ve been buried there with her and Jonas. My sister. My nephew. They weren’t my first family, nor my last. But not a day goes by when I don’t think of them.”

He stands, scrubbing a hand down his face. Erasing his tears and the moment much like he clears holo-docs from the air—with a single swipe. “If I had to do it again, I would make the same decision, every time. I will always choose life over death. And that’s why you aren’t going to tell Logan about Callie. Because I won’t have him burying himself in the past when he could be living in the present.”

I don’t speak. I can’t. I’m sorry for Mikey’s tragedy, but Logan would want to know. Just like me.

“Would you want him to end up like your mom?” Mikey continues. “Holding onto what could’ve been. Pining for someone who may never come back. She hasn’t been able to let go, and that’s caused her to make decisions that have hurt the people around her. That have hurt you.”

I freeze. My knees become so weak I’m afraid they’re going to spill on the floor. Would I wish my mother’s fate on Logan? Would I wish my fate on Logan’s future children? I imagine a future where Logan is married, where he has kids—but he’s unable to give his family his full heart because he’s hung up on a girl who lies in a coma.

“Give it a few weeks. Your connection with Callie is so new, we don’t know what will become of it.” His gaze pins me against the wall screens, up high on a precipice with no rope and no water. “What do you say, Jessa? If you care about Logan at all, promise you won’t tell him. At least not yet.”

It’s not my place to decide. But Mikey’s right. I can’t bear to think of Logan winding up like my mom. I can’t bear to think of his children winding up like me.

Besides, what can a few weeks hurt? He’s already waited ten years to learn the truth.

“I promise,” I say. And hope to the Fates above that I’ve made the right choice.