Remember Yesterday

52

We have less than a minute to act.

“Come on,” I say to Tanner, the sadness gone, the adrenaline kicking in. “We have to hurry.”

Moving quickly, the steps familiar from my multiple lab break-ins, I remove the vent and stow it in the air shaft. Next, I lower myself feet first through the opening, dangle for a moment from the ceiling, and then drop onto the floor.

Unlike the labs, this room isn’t armed with motion sensors. If it were, Callie and Logan would’ve set them off long ago. Tanner drops beside me, and we go to Callie’s body. Without missing a beat, he takes the antidote from his pocket, finds a vein in her wrist, and injects the syringe.

Or, at least, he tries to. Callie jerks at the last second, and the red formula ends up all over the tile, mixing with the antidote she smashed on the floor.

My heart stops. “What happened? How did she move?”

“The formula must still be working through her system,” he says shakily. “It’s a good thing we brought the second needle.”

I shudder. We came so close to leaving behind that second needle. So close to failing our mission. So close to not reviving my sister.

He swallows hard and holds out his hand. “The syringe?”

“Yes, of course.” I fumble in my pocket and give him the needle.

He takes a deep breath. And injects my sister once again.

This time, the syringe goes in. This time, Callie inhales sharply, her entire upper body rising off the ground. Her eyes flutter open halfway. They stare at me, unfocused, and begin to close again.

I slide my arms gently under her torso and pull her onto my lap. “Callie. It’s me, Jessa. I need you to listen to me. I have something very important to say.”

A puff of air escapes her mouth, and her eyes open all the way. “Jessa,” she breathes. “My twin. My half. My soul.”

The tears rise in my throat. I want to sob and rage. I want to shake her, to throttle time. She changed her future, all right, but it shouldn’t have been like this. I should be lying there, not her.

Never her.

I take a shuddering breath and force the emotion back down. There simply isn’t time.

“Listen to me, Callie. Your life depends on it.” I wait, reviewing the nursery rhyme in my head. The one I skipped rope to during the Fitness Core. The one Olivia posed to me before she got on the stealth copter. The one with which my mother primed Callie this morning.

When my sister’s eyes focus on me, I take a deep breath and say:

“How do you kill the beast?

You take away his food, he feeds off the air

You cut off his head

He grows another one with hair.”

And then, I change it. I change it into something that will resonate with her. Something that will make her zooming mind pause. Something that will yank her back to the present.

“How do you stop the chairwoman?” I enunciate each word, making sure she doesn’t miss a syllable. “You become her friend and change the system from within.”

That’s it. Just a few words different from the original, but I hope it’s enough. It has to be enough.

“Remember that, Callie. Oh, please. Remember that.”

She nods. Her hand twitches, as if she would like to bring it to my face, but she is weak, so weak. It’s a miracle—in the form of a red liquid antidote—that she is awake now.

“I would do this again,” she says. Her voice is so soft that I have to read her lips. “In every life and every world, I would choose to save you. Every single time.”

The tears spill from my eyes. There’s no stopping them now. If not through my eyes, the liquid would escape through any available opening—the pores of my skin, my open mouth. Some way, somehow, these tears are finding their way out.

So this is her Fixed. She doesn’t know the terminology, of course, but this is what she means.

“I love you, Jessa. They’ll never be able to take that away from me.”

I grip her hand. “I love you. So much. I’ll never be able to tell you how much.”

Her eyes close, and carefully, I lay her on the floor. They’ll find her soon enough. When my younger self ripped the tubes from my arms, it would’ve set off an alarm. The medical assistants will be here shortly to check on Little Jessa. They’ll find Callie, and they’ll do what needs to be done to keep her alive. My work, here in the past, is done.

I look around the room, searching for Tanner. It’s time for us to go home.

There’s only one problem. He’s not here. Sometime during my last conversation with my sister, he disappeared.