Timestorm (23 page)

“Who is this?” a voice demanded from behind me.

Lonnie stood with Mason’s gun pointed at Adam. I quickly shifted to face her and put myself between them. “It’s okay, we know him. He worked with Holly.”

“Did you know to not enter the force field?” Holly asked him, dropping her arms and stepping back. “Or wait, are you the source Stewart mentioned?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Adam said. “I’ve been undercover, working at Eyewall headquarters for the past six months, getting information by being on the inside. Until they were on to me. I took off before things got scary.” Adam nodded at me. “I had this feeling that it might be you they had trapped here. But I never thought Holly would be here.” He turned to her and stared in disbelief. “How did this happen? Agent Collins and I purposely kept all the info from you so you wouldn’t end up in this time-travel mess, too.”

I couldn’t attempt to wrap my head around how he got here, I was just so elated to see him that I didn’t care. And this time I couldn’t stop myself from grabbing him and giving him a giant hug. “You remember me, right? You’ve had flashbacks of us being friends?”

He seemed startled but didn’t resist. I dropped my arms soon after, moving back a comfortable distance. After having watched him bleed to death, I just couldn’t stop the grin spreading across my face.

Adam was my constant.

“Yeah, I remember,” he said, laughing. “Though I really need to know how you know about that?”

Lonnie kept the gun pointed at Adam and grabbed him by the arm. “Let’s go see what Kevin and Grayson think of your story before we let down our defenses, all right?”

“Yeah sure,” Adam said, then he turned to Holly. “Hey, Hol, grab the little handheld computer from my tent. I think it’ll help prove my case.”

She headed toward the tent we’d seen earlier from a distance, limping noticeably. I followed after her. “Are you okay? You’re limping.”

She waved me off from over her shoulder. “I’m fine. Just twisted my ankle.”

“Well, stop and let me look at it,” I said, but she had already entered the dark blue, rectangular tent. Before I could go in after her, the metallic scent hit my nostrils so fast and so strong there wasn’t time for even one word of warning to escape my lips before the scenery dissolved and I stood facing my sister’s dead body lying in a plush casket.

“No!” I yelled, backing away, but an invisible force held me in place, lifting my eyelids, preventing my eyes from shutting tight as they had done at Courtney’s real funeral.

My stomach churned and my eyes blurred with tears, both from grief and the cold April wind that had been present on the day of her funeral. Her face appeared so discolored, her red hair falling all around her. It was anything but peaceful.

“It’s not real, it’s not real,” I muttered to myself over and over again until the trees formed behind the casket and eventually the casket disappeared altogether. I sank to my knees, clutching my stomach, and literally tried to shake the image from my head. I hadn’t even looked that carefully on the real day of Courtney’s funeral. But somehow that image had stuck itself into my brain and emerged with the help of memory gas.
That’s what they wanted.
To see all of our weaknesses. To know what could be thrown in front of each of us to get us to follow their orders.

I thought my body wouldn’t cooperate enough to stand until I heard Holly’s voice, shouting through the fog of false images. I was on my feet in seconds, ripping open the flap to the tent. The moment I saw her thrashing, fighting some invisible force, when I heard the words she was saying, I knew with complete certainty exactly what was haunting her. Clarity came quickly, along with a rage I’d never experienced before. A desire to murder someone who had already lain dead at my feet. As my hands balled up, my pulse pounded, I imagined killing him a hundred thousand more times and I didn’t care if using time travel to do this would eventually kill me.

But Holly’s voice, the intense fear in it, snapped me back to worrying about her. I lay on the ground beside her and tried to pull her into my arms. She fought hard against me, kicking and throwing her elbows into my face and chest. Just the thought of what she was reliving made me sick to my stomach and broke my heart all over again.

“Holly, it’s okay,” I said, finally pinning her arms down. I wouldn’t let her be alone this time even if she screamed at me to get out and called me an asshole. If she could just talk about it, maybe this wouldn’t keep happening. Maybe she’d move on to a different memory, the way Blake and Grayson had theorized. I pulled her closer, her face pressed against my chest. “I’m not going to hurt you, Hol. You’re okay, I promise.”

I kept whispering the same words into her ear over and over until she eventually stopped fighting me. Then she was crying so hard her entire body shook with sobs. I lay there and held her tight, stroking her hair and rubbing her back. I couldn’t convince myself to be anywhere else despite the turmoil going on around us. Despite Adam’s and everyone else’s presence not too far from us.

“Please don’t tell Adam,” Holly whispered after she had calmed down, though her voice was hoarse and still thick with tears.

“Okay,” I said, not wanting to take any chance of upsetting her more. “Whatever you want.”

She rolled away from me, lifting the bottom of her shirt and wiping her eyes and nose with it. I waited patiently while her gaze stayed focused on the ceiling of the tent. “He’ll blame himself.”

I turned on my side, propping myself up on one elbow so I could see her better. “Why would he—”

“Trust me, he will.”

I couldn’t help myself, I leaned down and kissed her forehead before tucking some loose hair behind her ears. “Hol, we need to talk about what happened with Carter.”

She let out a breath and squeezed her eyes shut for a second before opening them again and looking at me. “I know.”

“We could get hit with the gas again any second. It happened in the woods with my dad, just minutes after you and I were dosed. Maybe if you talk about it, you won’t have to see it anymore…?” I suggested.

Her eyes stayed focused on mine. “I’m sorry I got so pissed at you yesterday. I freaked out because the weird visions started making sense and before, I’d honestly just thought I’d been given memory-modification drugs.”

“That’s what Stewart thought, too,” I said, remembering when she’d first had 007 visions. Her hand lay between us, so I slid my fingers over and covered her hand with mine.

“I don’t remember what happened to me.” Her voice had turned from shaky to steady as if she had fully committed to telling me this story. The real question now was whether or not I could handle hearing it. “I got some sort of vibe after … after it happened. I knew I stayed at his place. I knew there was clothing removed. I remember him kissing me. And then nothing. I think subconsciously I ignored the physical evidence.” She shook her head like she was angry at herself, at her own brain’s ability to deny something like that had happened. “Obviously, there was evidence.”

I tried to draw in a slow, calming breath but all I could do was fight the urge to punch something.

“You heard what he said though, right?”

“You mean before I shot him,” I said through my teeth. “I remember.”

She pulled her hand free and rested it across her stomach. “That was when I knew we’d gone much further than I realized, but it wasn’t until the memory gas hit that first time that I figured out it wasn’t … it wasn’t consensual. He drugged me and I still fought him but he still…” She covered her face with both hands and took a deep breath to regain composure. “So when you had these memories that I didn’t have, in a way it felt the same. I don’t really want them, but part of me needed to push you and see if—”

“Oh, God, Holly. It’s not like that, I swear.” I reached for her hand again, picking it up and squeezing it. “You have no idea how badly I want to kill him all over again.”

Her gaze shifted back to the ceiling, her voice turning almost casual. “So we were together? You and me?”

“Yeah, a couple different versions of you.”

“Did you love me?”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “We loved each other.” Her eyes widened, her head turning to me in surprise. “But listen to me, okay?” She nodded. “What I just saw you relive, I’d do anything to take that away, to make sure you never had to feel like something like that could happen to you against your will, without your being able to choose. I want you to have freedom more than I want you to love me back. Sometimes I forget my goals and I cross the line, look at you the way I used to when we were together. But I do want you to be able to choose, more than anything. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you about us.”

She stared at me for a long moment. “You’re not lying.”

It wasn’t a question. She knew I meant it. Her agent training had provided her with that much at least. “And I feel terrible for messing around with you in the reproduction room—”

“And then again in the hospital room,” she added, giving me a half smile.

“You’re my friend, Holly. Whether you like it or not,” I said. “We’ve been through too much together and I’m talking about
this
version of you. You can stop pretending that you don’t care about me and everyone else in our little commune.”

She laughed a little. “I guess I can live with that.”

My thoughts snapped back to reality. “Shit! We should go help.”

We both jumped to our feet, but before we left the tent, Holly stood on her toes, wrapped her arms around my neck, and gave me a huge hug. I squeezed her so tight, her feet left the ground.

“The computer thing,” she said, remembering the reason she came in here in the first place. I waited while she swiped a tiny black device from the floor. “And just so you know, I didn’t exactly hate making out with you.”

“Really?” I asked, following her back outside.

“Really.”

Both of us were quick to shift gears, scanning the area and counting heads.

“You all right?” Dad asked us when we had reached the group again.

“Yeah, we survived.” I glanced at Adam then back to Dad. “Is everything cool? With Adam?”

Holly handed over the black device Adam had requested from his tent and he hurried over to Dad to explain. “So, I’ve got pretty much every file in the Eyewall system copied here. All the experiment data, all the results, and everything they’ve done to build their utopian world—”

Dad lifted a hand to cut him off. “It’s okay. We’ve actually got most of that already.”

Adam’s jaw dropped open. “How? I went through hell to get this and I was on the inside for six months.”

Dad glanced at Emily, and that was when I remembered her scribbling down data not just from my journals but also from the Eyewall systems. “It’s a long story,” he said with a sigh.

Grayson jogged over to us and proceeded to tape a tiny metal chip to the inside of both our wrists. I recognized the device because it was identical to the memory card Blake had extracted from his foot days ago. From the corner of my eye, I saw Holly wrinkle her nose. I wasn’t too thrilled about attaching something that had been under another person’s skin to my body either but at least we didn’t have to insert it under our skin, just close to a major vein to allow it to register a beating heart.

“You can tape it to your chest if you prefer, just do it quick,” Adam said from Holly’s other side. He lifted his T-shirt to display the tiny metal piece resting over his heart.

The metal poked my wrist and I immediately decided the chest was better.

“Here, let me help,” Holly said, taking the supplies from my hand. “Hold your shirt up.” She gently moved my free hand aside and I lifted my shirt again. She managed to pull the tape off without too much pain. A shiver went up my spine when her fingers pressed against my chest, finding my heartbeat before securing the tape in place. Pink crept up from her neck as her fingers continued to drift over the scar on my chest. “It looks good … I mean, it’s healing really well.”

Holly’s eyes met mine, her face even more flushed than a few seconds ago. She wasn’t Agent Holly right then, she wasn’t looking at me with the same scrutiny and skepticism as her trained-agent persona would. But it wasn’t 007 Holly either.

She was just Holly.

Adam cleared his throat, causing her to withdraw her fingers from my skin and me to drop my shirt back into place. I stepped away from them and walked over to Dad. “What’s the plan?”

“Set up camp over by Adam’s tent,” he said, glancing at Stewart’s sleeping body. “Not much choice with comatose team members. We’ll have to wait until they come to.”

*   *   *

A couple hours later, I sat in a newly set-up tent with Adam, Holly, and Courtney, waiting out the hottest part of the day in the shade.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” Adam said, sifting through a pile of notebook papers Emily had filled up the other day. We’d brought them along at Emily’s insistence. “That kid must really be overloaded. Apparently another version of me wrote notes in Jackson’s journal?” I nodded to confirm this. “And Emily’s copied my handwriting perfectly.”

Holly and I both reached for the page Adam had just discarded beside him. Our fingers brushed and she slid it in my direction and reached for another page. I recognized the journal entry right away. It was mostly my handwriting, but experiment results were written across the bottom in Adam’s writing using his code. I slid beside Adam as I scanned the page.

I laughed. “Oh God, I remember this experiment.”

He leaned in and read over my shoulder. “So what happened? My other self didn’t record any definite results.”

Before I could answer him, Holly jumped to her feet, looking a little spooked or just jumpy for some reason. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I’m gonna get some water.”

Courtney stood up, too, brushing dirt from the back of her jeans. “I’ll go with you.”

I turned my attention back to Adam, who appeared to be eagerly waiting for my answer. “Do you get the whole half-jump concept?”

“Bits of it,” he said. “But not completely.”