“So?” He wiped his mouth with his hand like he was about to lose all patience with me. “How many years did you travel back in time?”
I hesitated. I bit my lip. “Seventeen.” Or was it eighteen? It was confusing because of those nine months Mom was pregnant with me. Did I account for those? I had no idea.
“Seventeen. Do you know what that means?”
I just stared at him. I had no idea.
“For Christ’s sake, who’s handling your training in your Base Life?” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Here. Let me put it in simple terms you might actually understand.”
I glared at him. My compassion for his situation had one leg out the window, disappearing fast.
“It means that any day now, any week now, Ivy’s going to die. Do you understand that? Do you get it? She’s going to die to make room for you. So you can be born. Someone who won’t remember who I am. I can’t unlearn that. I can’t just act like everything’s fine. And every time I look at her, I’ll wonder how much longer I have until she dies and you’re reborn.”
It was like a punch in the gut. Like the time Claire kicked me in the stomach on accident when I wouldn’t stop tickling her. That churning, sickening feeling that makes you double over. The thought of Ivy dying never crossed my mind. All this time I thought it made things easier if Levi knew who I was. I guess it only made things easier for me. My compassion fell back in through the window with a thud. The window slammed shut.
“But I do remember you,” I said, clambering to fix what I’d broken, to make him feel better. “I remember some things. We played Polygon together. I remember the first time you beat me–”
“Stop.” He cut me off with a raise of his hand. He clenched his jaw, like I was hurting him even more.
I tried harder. I needed to make his hurt go away. “I can make it so you don’t remember any of this. I can erase this timeline and make it so I never came here. I just have to do a touchdown–”
“Don’t you dare.” He glowered down at me, his eyes almost black behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Don’t you dare take my memories away from me. You don’t have that right. What makes you think you have that right?”
“Then what do you want me to do? Tell me, and I’ll do it.”
The elevator landed softly with a clunk. The doors scraped open. Levi strode out into another long hallway, this one even more brightly lit, looking like a hospital wing. I hurried after him.
“Levi?” I said, catching up.
He wouldn’t look at me. “I want you to get what you came for,” he said. “Then I want you to leave and never come back.”
I felt wretched. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d made a horrible mistake by descending. I couldn’t even remember why I’d descended in the first place. Why hadn’t I just waited and talked to Porter after school? What had been my rush?
In the end it wouldn’t matter what Levi said or wanted. I had to erase this timeline whether he liked it or not. I had already made too much of an impact on him. What he knew now would change the course of his life. I hated to do it to him, but I didn’t have a choice.
We came to two double doors, which Levi unlocked with his key card. He nudged one of the doors open a crack and peered through. Then he motioned for me to follow him into another bare, sterile hallway. No windows. No other doors. Just white walls and a sloping concrete floor leading down to yet another hallway at the end.
How far had we gone underground?
When we came to the end of that hallway, Levi peered around the corner. I wasn’t sure what he was watching out for. If someone came along, it wasn’t like there was anywhere for us to hide.
He pulled on my sleeve, letting me know the coast was clear, and we continued around the corner. The hallway opened up into a large open area. Standing before us was a wide, brightly lit room with windows all the way around like the newborn nursery at a hospital. Dad took me to the nursery to look in the windows when Audrey and Claire were born. As we neared it, however, it looked nothing like a nursery inside. It looked far more foreboding than that.
It was a robotics surgical lab. I’d seen one once at the AIDA Institute when Mom brought me in for a tour of her department. A huge, spider-like machine with half a dozen robotic arms stood in the center of the room, arched and poised over an empty surgical table. It looked futuristic, even for my Base Life. There were dozens of monitors and other machines scattered around the room, and wires and hoses snaked across the floor. Large, disc-shaped surgical lights hung from the ceiling. At the back of the room, a man with short, curly, caramel-colored hair, dressed in a white lab coat and black slacks, stood with his back to us. He seemed to be laying out quite the collection of sharp, nasty-looking stainless steel tools on a prep table.
“Get down,” said Levi. “It’s Hr Flemming.”
Levi grabbed my hand and pulled me to the floor beneath one of the windows. Our backs pressed against the outside wall of the lab. The bright blueish light from the surgical discs spilled out over our heads and onto the floor at our feet.
Flemming was in there. The man who created me. Gave me Newlife. Wove my lives throughout time.
I inched up to peek over the window ledge. I just wanted to see what he looked like – to put a face with Porter’s stories – but Levi gave me a yank and my tailbone smacked down onto the floor.
I ripped my hand from his and mouthed, “Ow.”
He gave me a look that said he’d skin me alive if I tried that again.
I heard the door to the lab open and close, then two male voices around the corner to my left. They spoke to each other in thick Danish. I moved to my hands and knees and crawled toward them. I was only going to peek around the corner, but Levi grabbed me by the hips and pulled me back.
“Are you crazy?” he whispered. “It’s this way.” He jerked his head in the opposite direction to a closed door across the hall. He stood up, bent at the waist, and quietly padded toward it. I followed after him, giving up on seeing what Flemming looked like.
When we reached the door, Levi swiped his key card through a reader on the wall. It beeped. The green light flashed. He eased it open, pulled me through, and shut it behind me, closing us in a small white room with a single hospital bed in the center. Several monitors beeped quietly beside it. A thin, frail body lay on the bed beneath a white blanket, still as a corpse. I moved slowly forward, my body growing more numb with each step.
It was Blue, but I could hardly believe it. He looked like he was hours from death. His skin was so pale I could almost see through it. His muscle mass was completely gone. His head was shaved like mine, and over a dozen wires were stuck to his skull, monitoring his brain functions. Half a dozen more were stuck to his chest and arms. A large white bandage covered the right side of his head, just above his ear.
My hand fluttered to my mouth. Nothing could have prepared me for seeing him like that. So weak and defenseless. It was no wonder Porter said he looked so different at AIDA. I wouldn’t have recognized him in 1927 either.
With my free hand, I entwined my fingers with his, but his touch wasn’t comforting. His skin was cold and clammy, like the formaldehyde frogs we dissected in Biology last year. “What have you done to him?” I whispered.
“He just had surgery,” Levi said, his voice as cold and lifeless as Blue’s skin. He pushed his wire rims up the bridge of his nose.
“What kind of surgery?”
“An experimental procedure on his right temporal lobe. Hr Gesh hopes it will help him retain more of his memory when he descends.”
I slid Blue’s hand from mine and moved to the head of the bed. My stomach lurched. There were pale pink sinuous scars all over his scalp. I lifted a hand to my own head and felt the same scars. The same rivulets of tissue. My fingertips traced over a recent incision, complete with stitches, above my right ear. “I’ve had the same surgeries.”