talking about me.” The shadow of a smile crosses her face. “But I wasn’t entirely successful. A version of my memory came true a few days ago.”
I’m pretty sure I don’t want to hear this. Whatever her memory is, I’m pretty sure it will devastate me, like all the other bad memories I’ve heard. But ignorance is no longer an option.
“What was it?” I whisper.
“I was standing in the doorway of our house, reaching out my hand, but grasping nothing, screaming at the top of my lungs with no sound coming out. I watched as FuMA came and took my babies away. My twin daughters. Seventeen years old.” She cups my chin, tilting my face from side to side. “Both with this face.”
The chill begins in my stomach and spreads outward to each of my organs. Lungs. Heart. Brain. “I don’t understand.”
“I thought I could circumvent the future,” she says. “They took you away because somebody somewhere received a prophecy that the Key to unlocking future memory lies in a pair of twins.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “So I tried to cheat Fate. I thought if I didn’t have twins, FuMA couldn’t take my babies away.”
I can hardly breathe. “What did you do, Mom?”
“You and Jessa shared the same womb. I had her fertilized embryo removed and stored until I thought it was safe, six years ago. I thought enough time had passed.” Her shoulders move, as helpless as a kite blowing in the wind. “I guess I was wrong.”
38
I limp into Mikey’s old room, where I’ll be sleeping for the night. He’s been gone five years, but a row of medals still hangs on the wall. The air has the strong chemical smell of furniture varnish, and his shelf overflows with old-school textbooks from before the Boom. Textbooks made out of actual paper, rather than the digitized kind.
Logan waits for me on the twin bed.
Twin. As in, two embryos in the same womb. As in, me and Jessa. My mind’s still spinning. No wonder we look so much alike. No wonder we’ve always been so close.
I bite my lip to keep my emotions under control.
“Does my mom know you’re in here?” I ask.
He grins. “She said I could have an hour with you, and then you needed your sleep. She also said I’d better keep my hands to myself, or she’d banish me to another dimension.”
“She could probably do it, too.”
“I know.” He reaches out and touches my plant bracelet, and for a moment, he’s the only thing that matters. His hair has dried, but the little spikes remain. The cozy material of his pajamas invites me to snuggle into his arms and stay forever.
Except I can’t. Tomorrow, I’ll go to FuMA and rescue my sister. We’ll go back to Harmony, and he’ll stay here in civilization, continuing his old life.
The pressure builds behind my eyes. Blinking rapidly, I turn and study the awards decorating the walls. “These are science fair medals,” I say, trying to keep the tremors out of my voice.
“Yeah. Mikey’s always been consumed by the idea of time travel for physical bodies. You know, black holes, Gödel funnels, that kind of thing.”
Just like my father. A wave of sadness hits me. Before it can overwhelm me, I take a textbook off the shelf and page through it. Little strips of paper flutter to the floor, and handwritten notes march across the margins. I read one of the notations and frown. Instead of a student’s elementary thoughts, as I expected, the page contains complicated equations, theorems, and proofs.
“How old was your brother when he was arrested?”
“Same age we are now. Why?”
I hand him the open textbook. “I never learned any of this stuff in school. Did you?”
Logan squints at the equations. “I told you, he was kind of a science geek.”
I pick up another textbook and flip through it. More notes in the same handwriting. More equations I don’t understand. I look through another, and it’s the same. And then another. Soon, the entire shelf of textbooks is scattered around my feet.
He grabs my hands. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
The rough skin of his palms rubs against my knuckles. “Did you ever think that Mikey wasn’t meant to run? Maybe he was supposed to stay in civilization and become a great scientist. Maybe he would’ve gone on to discover the Key, and maybe without him, they’ll never find an answer to future memory.”
“I suppose it’s possible.” He continues to hold my hands.