Shocked, I drop the mouse, and he hobbles away, his three legs scratching against the counter.
I stare at the detached leg. Furless, pink. The size of a matchstick. The skin is loose and bunched, the toes disproportionately long. Nausea roils in my stomach. My mouth dries, and I’m light-headed, but that could be from hanging upside down too long.
“Ten seconds,” Ryder says. “Are you ready?”
I take a shuddering breath. Retreat first. Mourn later. “Yeah. Pull me up.”
I fly through the air as if I’m on a zip line. Ryder grabs me under the arms and hauls me into the air duct, just as the lab door opens and half a dozen guards in navy uniforms spill into the room.
The ceiling panel is still uncovered, but a mechanical “spider” sits at the edge of the hole, projecting a holographic image that makes the surface appear smooth and uninterrupted.
I pull my knees to my chest and will myself not to move. Not to breathe. Not to look at the tiny severed limb stuck in the cage.
Oh Fates, I didn’t mean to hurt him. The last thing I wanted was to rip off his leg. I was only trying to help.
In the dimness of the chute, I meet Ryder’s eyes. His six-three frame is folded like origami, and the smooth darkness of his skin blends into the shadows. I read in his face the same emotion that compresses the walls of my throat. He saw the limb, too.
Below us, a strong voice cuts through the din. Through the holographic screen, Tanner pushes his way through the guards. His tousled black hair falls into his eyes, and he wears his bad-boy-scientist uniform—dark thermal shirt and cargo pants. Clothes just as appropriate for running lab experiments as for racing around on a hoverboard.
Here it comes. Tanner Callahan, boy genius, is about to throw a fit that will blow the spirals off this steel and glass building.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he crouches in front of the cage and studies the leg. And then, with a gentleness even a precog couldn’t have foreseen, he wiggles the limb loose and wraps it in a piece of white gauze.
I gape. He’s not actually…sad…about the amputated leg? He can’t be. They’re not pets to him. The only person—or thing—he cares about is himself.
No. I can’t start imagining things that don’t exist. This is the boy who plays holo-images of himself across the inside of his locker, for Fate’s sake. And if that’s not enough, he’s declared his loyalty to the scientists, who have only one goal. Under the direction of Chairwoman Dresden, their purpose is to discover a way for people to send memories back to their younger selves, so that our society can return to a time with no guesswork and only guarantees. A time when every seventeen-year-old knew exactly what his or her future held.
I wrench my eyes from Tanner and hook my fingers through the harness strapped across my torso. All of a sudden, I can’t wait for the guards to leave so we can crawl through the air ducts back to our secret entrance in Mikey’s office.
Callie died in order to prevent future memory from being invented. She killed herself so the horrendous vision she saw of our world would not come true.
Anyone who seeks to undermine my sister’s sacrifice is automatically my adversary. And I will never, ever forget who my enemy is. No matter how sorry he might feel for a mouse with three legs.
2
“You should’ve seen the leg,” I say to Logan a couple of hours later. I’m back in the Harmony compound I call my home, and we’re balancing a rowboat over our heads as we make our way through the twenty or so individual family houses. “It was so small. It might have even been moving.” My heart thuds behind the black tourmaline pendant hanging around my neck.
He turns, and we lower the boat to the moving sidewalk that weaves through the compound. Even though we aren’t walking, the projected holos, the transport tubes, and the metal gardens continue to zoom by. Logan’s ten years older than me, the age my sister would’ve been if she had lived. In the last decade, his swimmer’s build has gotten even broader, and the lines around his eyes and jaw have hardened.
And yet, he’s still good-looking, still the boy Callie fell in love with as a teenager. Still the friend who whisked me away from FuMA after my sister injected herself. Still the protector who looked out for me all those years the psychics were on the run from the government.
“Why didn’t you use your precognition?” he asks. “You could’ve seen what was about to happen.”
I let go of the boat and grab my necklace. “You know why I couldn’t.”
Callie. It all comes back to Callie. When she stabbed the needle into her chest, she took away more than her life. She also took Logan’s heart—and eventually my desire to use my psychic abilities ever again.
“Besides, I don’t think my precognition is that powerful,” I say. “It’s good for simple physical events just a few minutes in the future—or the will of one or two people. Not so accurate for complex situations with so many independent minds. You need someone with real precognition for that.”
He frowns, as though remembering his last brush with a real precog—and the vision of genocide she showed him and Callie. “You’ve got to stop breaking into labs. First, it was cliff-diving, and then parasailing, and now this. Do you have a death wish, Jessa?”
“No more than you,” I retort. “Look at you, spending all your time in the water. I don’t think you’d ever surface for air if Angela didn’t make you.”
“At least I’m not hell-bent on being a rebel.” The moving sidewalk curves around a corner, and he leans along with it. “You need to put aside this risky behavior. Start focusing on the future. Now, more than ever, employers are returning to the old ways of evaluation, like they used to do before future memory. School is important. Your grades are important. How are you going to get a job if you don’t start applying yourself?”
I don’t lean, just to be contrary, and as a result, I’m almost knocked off balance. “Easy for you to say. You always had your future memory. You always knew you were going to be a gold-star swimmer.”
“We’ve been given a chance for a new start, Jessa,” he says softly. “Don’t mess this up.”
We certainly have been. After Callie’s sacrifice, Logan and I fled civilization to join Harmony, a wilderness community governed by its own laws. We were on the run for six years before the Committee of Agencies, or ComA, realized that without the psychics, their research into future memory came to a standstill. So they offered a deal to the Underground, the covert organization made up of psychics and their families. It wasn’t easy for them to find our leaders. After all, the identities of the Underground members are kept secret for a reason. But a few well-placed whispers got the message to the right people. ComA was desperate, and they were willing to compromise to get back their psychic citizens.
Compromise they did. They granted the people of Harmony amnesty for breaking the law and legislated that we would no longer be coerced into experimental testing. They promised us the luxuries of every normal citizen and even our very own compound. That way, we could continue living as the same tight-knit community we were in the wilderness—just transported to Eden City.
ComA said the compound was a perk, but we all know better. Really, it’s just a way for them to keep an extra-careful eye on us, so that they can quell any rebellious uprisings before they begin. The other members of the Underground were invited to join us, but they would be stupid to do so. ComA can say whatever they want about no longer hunting down the psychics. No one’s about to announce that he or she has special powers.
Still, the treaty was a chance for us to stop running. To live back in civilization once again. So we took the deal, and our leader, Mikey—Logan’s brother and Ryder’s adopted father—oversaw the construction of the compound.