Remember Yesterday

37

The first thing I hear when I walk into the hallway is: Beep. Beep. Beep.

My heart stutters, and the smile crumbles from my face. I’ve heard this noise before, just over a week ago. Callie’s vitals have entered the red zone.

Forget not intruding. Without a second thought, I run to the last room down the hall, where Preston and Tanner are working. Where Callie’s body lies.

I throw open the door. “What happened? Is Callie okay?”

Preston stands next to her stretcher, attaching a bag of clear liquid to her IV stand, while Tanner’s fingers fly over the keyball.

“I was afraid of this,” Preston says, his hands trembling on the bag. “I hoped and prayed I was wrong, but I can’t keep pretending anymore. My psychic thread is similar enough to bond with Callie’s, but it’s not a match. I can’t feed her connection the way you could.” His voice becomes more garbled with each word, until it sounds like he has marbles in his mouth. “I can’t keep her alive.”

I grip the railing on the stretcher. “What are you saying?”

Tanner puts down the keyball and swipes a hand across his forehead. “Her heart’s beating too slowly. The meds will speed it up for now. But it can’t last. We need another solution.”

The beep, beep, beep switches off, and my eyes fly to the holo-monitor. Sure enough, the medicine’s done its work. Her heart rate has returned to the normal range.

For now. It can’t last.

“Easy,” I say, my heart pounding fast. “Just transfer her bond back to me.” But even as I say the words, I know it can’t be that simple. Preston and Tanner wouldn’t look so serious otherwise.

My father shakes his head, and my heart sinks.

“I was able to connect with her only after your bond was severed,” he says. “It was touch and go for a few minutes. I thought I’d lost her. Nothing but extreme luck allowed her to reattach to me after she’d been floating untethered in time. She’s so much weaker now that if we tried the same maneuver again…well, I think her death would be all but certain.”

Each sentence pushes down on my shoulders. “We don’t have another solution. That’s been our problem all along.”

Tanner and Preston exchange a look. “That’s not quite true,” my dad says slowly. “Tanner’s had a brainstorm. Something nobody else had considered.”

I want to roll my eyes. Great. Here comes Boy Genius to solve the problem nobody else can. But if he can save my sister, I promise I’ll never be annoyed at him again. No matter how superior he is.

“It should work, in theory.” Tanner pushes the hair off his forehead. “But it’s never been tried. If it fails, the risks are great.”

“The risks are even greater if we don’t try.” I push down the panic that’s climbing my windpipe. The breath rolls across Callie’s body in waves, and her skin is so translucent I can see the veins in her eyelids. “We could lose her.”

“Agreed. Which is why we’re willing to consider the experiment now when we weren’t before.” Preston looks at his assistant. “Do you want to explain?”

Tanner straightens his spine. “Like I told you before, we need to find a way to signal her brain. In our world, we think of time linearly. Yesterday is followed by today is followed by tomorrow. But Callie’s mind zooms around with no idea of past or present or future. We need a glowing beacon she can’t ignore. Something to say, ‘Hey, Callie, over here. This is the present, this is the now.’”

He takes a deep breath. “If Callie can recognize the present, if only for a moment, her mind will have something to latch onto. It will synchronize her with our time, and she’ll wake up again.”

“So how do we signal her?” I ask.

“That’s the problem. She’s been in a coma these past ten years, so by definition, she doesn’t have any memories from this time—at least, that she’s aware of. But then, I got an idea when we were talking about Callie’s ability to modify memories. When we were, um, lying down in the clearing.” His eyes flicker to me for the tiniest moment, and my face burns. When we were wrapped around each other as though we would never let go, he might as well have said. “Callie has no memories of the present. So I thought, why don’t we manufacture one?”

I will not look at him. I will not. “What do you mean?”

“Yeah, I know. It sounds crazy. Hear me out. We time-travel to the past, as close as possible to the moment her mind left synchronous time, when her synapses are firing at lightning speed. We lay a foundation there. We take a childhood memory that’s lived in her mind for so long that it’s turned into fact. A nursery rhyme, maybe, or a jingle her mind will automatically complete. And then we change it, twisting it in such a way that her mind will register that something’s not right.”

He peeks at me, as if to see if I’m still with him. “We come back to the present,” he continues. “We use the modified nursery rhyme, the one we planted in her head, as that glowing beacon. We jolt her mind, like it was jolted only one other time in her life. And then we pray to the Fates that it’s enough to stop her mind from zooming. To make it pause long enough for us to reel her back to the present.” He puffs out a breath of air. “What do you think?”

I look from one scientist to the other. From the boy who could’ve meant something to me to the man who was, once upon a time, everything to my sister. Their expressions are identical. Serious. Hopeful. Waiting.

“There’s one problem,” I say. “We don’t have a time machine.”

“We do, actually,” Preston says. “The same one I used more than two decades ago. The one that’s been boarded up and abandoned. It’s still there, in a cabin in the woods. I’ve been working on it these last few months in preparation for what I thought would be my return. I ran the final test a week ago. It works just as well now as it did twenty-three years ago.”

“Still, it seems complicated,” I say slowly. “Dangerous.”

“Yep.” Tanner nods vigorously.

“Very much so,” Preston agrees.

“Countless things could go wrong when we play with time. Look at Preston. Whoever travels to the past could get stuck there—or worse.”

The scientists nod. “You’re absolutely right,” Tanner says. “The risks are off the charts.”

I take a deep breath. “Okay. When do I leave?”