Remember Yesterday

6

My heart grows wheels and about rolls out of my chest. Clack-clack-clack. He can’t possibly know it was me. Right?

“Why would I know anything about that?” I ask faintly.

He shrugs. “No reason. It feels like a prank, and I thought you might’ve overheard one of our classmates talking, that’s all.”

I relax. “Oh. I haven’t heard anything.” Which is technically true. “If I do, you’ll be the first to know.” Which is blatantly not true.

“I also found a mouse’s leg stuck in the cage,” he says. “One of them must’ve severed its leg escaping. Seeing that…it messed me up a little.”

I blink. Why is he talking about this? Admitting any kind of vulnerability? It doesn’t fit with my image of him. “Why do you care?” I struggle to keep my breathing even. “TechRA will just get you new mice.”

“That’s not in question. TechRA would do anything for me. I’m their one bright hope for the future. Everyone’s hope for the future, really.” His tone is even, matter-of-fact. No surprise there. But for the first time, I catch a hint of sarcasm in his voice, too.

“But aside from the fact that I’m not a total monster, I care because even TechRA can’t breed my mice any faster. It’ll take me a year to recreate five generations of mice with the proper genetic enhancement. Which means I won’t be able to go to uni next year. No program in the country would accept me without a completed core thesis these days. Another fallout from a world with no future memory. No one’s willing to take a risk on anything.”

Wait…what?

In spite of the late-afternoon sun, in spite of my fingerless gloves, my hands turn ice-bucket cold. I didn’t know. I thought I was freeing the mice. I thought I was getting back at the scientists. I didn’t know I was jeopardizing Tanner’s future.

What does it matter? a voice inside me grates. He’s one of them. He’s your enemy.

But it does matter. Tanner might grow up to be the cruelest scientist who ever lived—but right now, he’s just a guy with goals and aspirations. And I’m not in the habit of destroying other people’s dreams.

“I’m sorry,” I say, even though I know the words are inadequate.

He shrugs. “Their loss. The world will just have to wait another year to be graced with my brilliance.”

I take a shaky breath. His arrogance gives me an easy out. No need to feel guilty when he deserves to be cut down a few billion molecules. The world will thank me for it. But there’s something else here, too. Something below his breezy words.

Not your concern, Jessa. Get on with it.

I clear my throat. “What exactly are you breeding the mice to do?”

“To run the maze.”

I wrinkle my forehead. “Haven’t they been running mazes for centuries?”

He looks at me like I’m a small child inquiring into grown-up matters. “Do you think you’ll be able to understand the explanation?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say drily. “If you use itty-bitty words no bigger than two syllables, I just might.”

His lips quirk. “I did give a presentation to a group of five-year-olds the other day.”

“You’re a big jerk, you know that?”

“I’ve been called ‘big’ by lots of other girls.” He lowers his voice silkily. “But I don’t think they were talking about my personality.”

“Um, that’s gross.”

He shrugs. “It’s the truth.”

“Truth is relative. You should know. You’re in the business of manipulating other people’s truths.” The words slip out. I don’t know if he knows that a select few scientists used to torture kids by making them live through horrific memories. All I know is that it was a condition of the treaty that I never go public with it.

He gives me a sharp look. “Do you want to hear the explanation or not?”

“I’m nearly breathless with anticipation.”

He shakes his head, but he’s also smiling. Just a little bit. Which—Fates help me—makes me smile.

“I’ve always been fascinated by animal migration,” he says. “The monarch butterflies, for example, migrate twenty-five hundred miles to the same mountains, year after year, generation after generation. Even though each individual butterfly has never traveled there before. Scientists have offered a bunch of explanations—instincts, the magnetic pull of the Earth, the sun used as a compass. But what if it’s more than that?” He takes a breath, as if gearing up for his next sentences. “What if the butterflies are communicating with each other—across time? What if one generation is able to send a message to the next generation, telling them where to go?”

The smile falls off my face, skitters down the ramp, and disappears into the hoverpark. Because this research he’s doing? It sounds an awful lot like future memory.

“I injected my mice with a genetic modification that enhances their natural Sender-Receiver abilities,” he continues. “And then I run them through a maze, which they figure out through trial and error. Pretty soon, they’re memorizing the order of doors by their shapes and colors.”

Sweat gathers at my hairline. The corridor with the green stripes and purple sofas flashes across my mind. The feeling of running, of being compelled to go down a certain path. Of being born to do it.

“Green, purple. Purple, green,” I murmur.

“What was that?” he asks.

“Nothing.” I lift the damp hair off my neck and twist it into a ponytail. “Please go on.”

“As I bred the mice, the Sender-Receiver abilities got stronger. Or at least, each generation of mice figured out the maze a little quicker than the one before it.” His words come faster now, as if they’re racing the maze alongside his mice. “Guess how many times it took the fifth-generation mice to figure out the maze?”

“How many?”

“One. Each mouse ran the maze correctly on the very first try.”

I rock back on the bleachers. I was the Sender in my relationship with Callie, but I also have a small amount of Receiver abilities. We all do. When the mouse bit me, could my natural abilities have been enhanced? Could my dream of running down a corridor be some kind of message someone’s trying to send me?

Despite the sweat, a chill runs up my spine. All of a sudden, I’m sure someone’s trying to communicate with me. Just like the mice.

But who? And why?

I can’t dwell on these questions for long, however. Because Tanner isn’t finished. “I have to believe the Sender parent mice are sending messages to their Receiver children. I have to believe this discovery is the first step toward the discovery of future memory.” He looks at me, his eyes bright with knowledge. “Your sister delayed the invention of future memory, Jessa. But she didn’t stop it.”

“You don’t know that,” I say quickly.

“Of course I do. Think about it. Future memory hasn’t disappeared from our world altogether, so we know that sometime, at some point, it will be invented once again. Besides, nobody can halt scientific innovation. One way or another, science will find a way. All the scientists in my wing are running similar experiments, with different formulas and different mice. Sooner or later, one of us will discover the link to future memory.” He straightens his spine and looks directly into my eyes. “And I will do everything in my power to make sure that it’s me.”