Erasing Time (10 page)

Elise picked up the sack she’d first brought into the room and handed Taylor and Sheridan tooth tablets. They put them in their mouths, and the tablets fizzed their teeth clean. Elise also rubbed tangy-smelling cream onto their hands and arms. “This is sparkle,” she said, wiping the excess across Sheridan’s neck. “It’s cleaning bacteria. Within an hour it will spread across your whole body, eating dead skin, sweat, anything that would make you dirty.”

“You don’t shower?” Sheridan asked. She wasn’t sure she liked the tingling that was crawling up her arms.

“Too much water waste,” Jeth said, “and the bacteria can live up to twenty days per application.”

Hungry bacteria. Great. Sheridan managed a smile even though she wanted to scrape the sparkle off her arms.

Elise reached into the bag and handed out pairs of light-blue pajamas. They looked like leggings and tank tops but felt as soft as whipped cream. “They’re thermal regulated,” she said.

“When you’re finished changing,” Jeth added, “I’ll take your clothes.”

Sheridan held the pajamas against her chest while she looked for a place to change. Finally, her gaze returned to the wordsmiths.

“
Pues?
” Jeth said when neither she nor Taylor moved. “Is something wrong with the pajamas?”

“No, but we need a place to change,” Sheridan said.

The wordsmiths said nothing for several seconds, then Echo held up one hand as though he’d figured it out. “Privacy,” he said. “Men and women didn’t disrobe in front of each other in the early twenty-first century.”

“Of course,” Jeth chimed in. “That was one of their social taboos, wasn’t it?” He looked over at Taylor. “You’ll have to give me a list of those, and tell me what you know about the meaning and origination of each one.”

Taylor nodded weakly at him.

Elise took Sheridan and Taylor to the back room, showed them the bathroom, and explained how to work everything. Then she unrolled a pair of gel beds side by side on the floor. Within a few seconds they grew to normal size, like self-filling air mattresses.

Sheridan changed into her pajamas, feeling a bit awkward that Elise stood there waiting to take her clothes. At least it wasn’t Echo and Jeth.

That was one custom she refused to adopt.

After Elise left, Sheridan took a better look around the room. A desk and computer sat in one corner, but mostly the place looked like an artifact repository. Rows of shelves held vacuum-sealed boxes: a faded Barbie doll, a cracked calculator, a boot, a worn baseball mitt, a water bottle—things she would have thrown into the garbage without a second thought. Now they were museum pieces.

Sheridan lay down on one of the gel beds, and it molded against her body. The cleaning bacteria must have liked the warmth. The tingling grew stronger. “I’m not going to be able to get to sleep,” she said. “I have sparkle crawling down my back.” She twitched and turned over. “Is it going up your nose?”

Taylor had been sitting on her bed, staring at the shelves and thinking. For the first time in hours her face was devoid of a smile. “We have to get out of this city,” she whispered.

Sheridan kept her voice low, in case the wordsmiths were in the other room. “I thought you said we couldn’t go back in time.”

“We can’t,” Taylor said, “but we still have to leave Traventon. Once they implant those tracking crystals in our wrists, they’ll control our entire lives. I’m not letting some power-hungry and morally depraved government tell me what I can learn, say, and do.”

Sheridan propped herself up on an elbow, which immediately sank into the bed. “Where will we go?”

“I don’t know, but Traventon isn’t the only city on earth. Some of them have to be better.”

Sheridan felt the stirrings of hope reviving. Taylor was right. Civilization might be completely different somewhere else. “How can we get out? I thought the government didn’t let people leave.”

“We’ll have to figure out where Traventon is on the map and do some research on the nearby cities. We’ll also need to get supplies and find out if there’s any way to buy, steal, or make bullets. When we leave, that gun is going with us.” Taylor lay down on her side, letting one arm hang off her mattress. “I’m too tired to think about it tonight. I’ll work on it tomorrow.” She yawned, then pushed the button by her bed that controlled the lights.

A shade rolled down the window, the ceiling light flicked off, and the room went completely dark.

“One more thing,” Taylor said. “Try to stick with Echo and keep him away from me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want him to figure out what we’re planning. It will be easier to fool Jeth. He’s not as smart.”

Sheridan turned on her side, settling into the bed. “The wordsmiths might not be around tomorrow. If they find Tyler Sherwood, they’ll be busy with him.”

“I hope not.”

“Why?”

“Because Tyler Sherwood didn’t work on regenerating cells. He worked on ways to take them apart. If they want him here in the future, it’s because they plan on destroying something.”

It took Sheridan a moment to process the statement. “I didn’t know you knew who Tyler Sherwood was.”

But Taylor didn’t answer, and after a few seconds Sheridan heard the deep breaths of sleep coming from her bed.

It was harder for Sheridan to sleep. It was too stressful to think about the present and too painful to think about the past. So she imagined herself riding her horse, Breeze, out underneath the sunshine. After a while, she drifted off to the rhythm of hoofbeats.

W
HEN
S
HERIDAN AWOKE
, the back room was empty and the lights were set on a dim glow. She got up, stretched, and walked into the main room looking for Taylor. The wordsmiths were nowhere around. Taylor sat perched in front of one the computers looking through some sort of data. Sheridan wondered, but only vaguely, how Taylor had managed to log on.

“Good morning,” Sheridan said. As she walked toward the computers, she caught sight of the artifact cabinet. There, hanging in the back like denim flags, were her and Taylor’s jeans. They’d been put in among the relics of the past, already sealed in long, clear, air-vacuumed boxes. A closer look revealed their tops were there too, folded and preserved.

Sheridan stared at them blankly. “Okay, that’s just wrong.”

“I know,” Taylor said. “I’m absolutely not giving them my underwear.”

Sheridan smoothed a mass of tangles from her hair and padded over to see what her sister was doing. The computer showed an aerial map of a domed city.

“According to a trade website,” Taylor said, scrolling toward a river, “the nearest city to Traventon is two hundred ten kilometers—that’s about a hundred and thirty miles—away. If we managed to walk fifteen miles a day, it would still take us almost nine days to get there. I’m looking for roads.”

“Are you going to get in trouble for doing unauthorized research?”

“Maybe.”

On the bottom left side of the monitor, a small box was playing a commercial. It showed a group of women walking past a man. He smiled and spoke to them, but they glanced at his rank badge and turned away, uninterested. A man’s voice said, “Tired of your low rank ruining every darty? Want to see how the glams play? We guarantee a two-digit raise for every ten credits you give Rankraisers. Click us. We have happiness spinning your way.”

The scene disappeared, replaced by a picture of the city landscape. The lilting voice Sheridan had heard in the car yesterday purred out, “A sacrifice for the city is an investment in tomorrow.” Apparently the government had its own commercials. Sheridan wondered if it always used that same caressing voice in its ads. “The city council works on the hard issues, so you can work hard on your rank.”

Well, that seemed like a non sequitur.

A different commercial came on. The screen showed a man relaxing on a balcony with two pink-haired women, one on either side. “El Cielo Estates is now open,” he said, and raised a glass that looked like a test tube. “Homes for those with numbers under a hundred thousand.”

The pink-haired woman on his right turned to the camera with a sultry pout. “Rank has its privileges, and this is one of them.”

“Hmm,” Sheridan said. “Even Elise couldn’t live there.”

Taylor didn’t take her eyes from the map. “The people here are obsessed with their ranks. I swear, it’s all they ever talk about. I wish I had one of Echo’s silencers.”

A news show came on next. People were debating whether family rank numbers should be taken out of the rank algorithm, and were getting quite passionate about the subject. One side said it wasn’t fair to include family rank since a person couldn’t control being related to their family. The other side insisted a family’s position in society had always affected individuals’ ranks.

Yesterday when Sheridan had learned about how things were in Traventon, she’d supposed there was a huge underlying dissatisfaction in the population—a fear of the government, a silent churning desire for change. But this was worse. They didn’t care about rights. They only cared about rank.

Sheridan pulled her gaze away from the screen. “Our time period wasn’t as bad, was it?”

Taylor let out a grunt. “High schools had valedictorians, orchestras had numbered chairs, authors had bestseller lists, athletes had the Olympics, sports teams had play-offs, and fans routinely shouted, ‘We’re number one!’ Our culture even turned
spelling
into a competition. I’m just kicking myself that I didn’t come up with the whole ranking system back in our day. It would have made me rich—which would have given me an awesome rank.”

Sheridan leaned forward to better see the map. “You never used to be so cynical.”

“Yes, I did.” Taylor panned out from the picture so more area was visible. “You call me cynical every time I don’t like a book that you like.”

“That’s because you always criticize happy endings.”

“Exactly my point.”

Sheridan surveyed the map. Traventon looked to be in the Colorado area of the nation. “If we’re only a hundred and thirty miles away from the nearest city, why can’t we hot-wire a car and drive there in a day?”

“The cars only work on the city rails. Besides, the government can track their vehicles and anyone who has a crystal in their wrist. The only advantage we have so far is that they can’t track us.” Taylor rested her chin against the palm of her hand and sighed. “Of course, fifteen miles a day is assuming the Rocky Mountains aren’t blocking our way, and that the weather is good, and that the next city is any better than Traventon.” She scrolled across, looking for domes. “It might actually be worse. According to the information on the computer, every other city on the face of the planet is peopled by bloodthirsty hardened criminals.”

“Lovely,” Sheridan said.

Taylor zoomed in on a spot that turned out to be a lake, not a city. “It’s probably propaganda. The Communist countries used to say the same thing about America during the Cold War.”

“Is there some way to tell which cities are better?”

Taylor shook her head and scrolled toward Kansas. “All I know for sure is that everyone thinks Jackalville is the worst. They’re involved in some sort of brainwashing thing and they want to take over the world.”

“Jackalville isn’t the city that’s a hundred and thirty miles away, is it?”

Taylor magnified a circle of small domed cities with farmland in between them. “No. That’s the odd thing. The computer won’t tell me where Jackalville is.”

The door at the front of the lab slid open. Taylor exited from the map and turned away from the desk as though she’d only been resting on the chair.

Echo strode into the room carrying a bundle of clothing under one arm. He didn’t smile at them as he walked over. He dropped the clothes in front of Sheridan then, without a word of greeting, went to one of the computers. He tapped a few buttons, and voices—Sheridan and Taylor’s voices—filtered out through the speakers.

“Once they implant those tracking crystals in our wrists, they’ll control our entire lives. I’m not letting some power-hungry and morally depraved government tell me what I can learn, say, and do
.
”

“Where will we go?”

“I don’t know.”

Echo tapped another button, and the voices stopped. He turned to them, and when he spoke, his words were clipped, sharp. “In the future, I wouldn’t say anything in this lab that you want to keep secret. And by the way, Jeth isn’t stupid; he just isn’t suspicious.”

Taylor let out a shaky breath. “You recorded us.”

“Of course. We’re studying your language and time period.”

Sheridan swallowed hard. “You should have told us.”

Taylor shut her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “We should have known.”

Echo turned back to the computer, tapping a few of the buttons. His profile was taut, his motions deliberate. “I’ve temporarily turned off the record function and I’m deleting the information from last night and—ah, I see you’ve been on the computer this morning. I’d better hide those searches from the Information Department too.” He spent a few more seconds typing, then straightened. “I heard your conversation only because I had a portable and checked the main computer while I bought clothes for you. The others still don’t know that you think the government is morally depraved and that you’re planning on stealing our gun and fleeing the first chance you get.”