Reluctantly, I pull down my hand. “No. I was frozen to the spot. I probably could’ve moved. I could’ve broken through the resistance of Fate, but I didn’t. It just wasn’t the right moment.”
“When else?” he asks. “It’s not like we have a lot of opportunities left. Olivia shows them the vision. Callie walks down the hallway. She stabs herself.”
My eyes widen. “That’s it. That’s when I’m supposed to say the jingle. After Logan and I jump down the laundry chute. Before the people who inject the antidote arrive. There will be a few precious seconds when she’s drifting in and out of consciousness. I can go to her then.”
“Any idea who injects her? Her file claims she was given the antidote at the two-minute mark. Enough to save her mind but not her body. But it never says who administered the antidote.”
“It’s got to be that guard, William. Right?” I wrinkle my brow. “Or maybe my mom?”
“Negative. Your mom had no idea Callie was even in a coma until a couple of weeks ago, and Mikey and I have quizzed William hard. He insists he had nothing to do with the antidote.”
It hits us both at the same time. I feel like all the oxygen has been sucked out of the air. “Oh Fates, Tanner. What if it’s us? What if we’re the ones who are supposed to give her the antidote?”
He nods rapidly. “It makes sense. That’s the part we never understood. Nobody else even knew they were there. How could they have gotten her the antidote so quickly? It’s got to be us. Especially since we’ve been a part of everything else.”
“But we don’t have an antidote,” I screech, whipping my head wildly around the closet, as though expecting one to materialize. But we’re still in a memory bank full of black data chips. No syringes filled with red liquid anywhere. “We can’t use the one Callie had because she smashed it on the floor. If we attempt to intervene, we’ll change the course of history.”
“I have an idea.” Tanner checks the wrist com my mom lent him. “We have fifteen minutes before Callie walks down that hallway. There’s time, but we have to hurry.”
Abruptly, he turns and walks out of the closet. I scamper after him. “Where are we going?”
“To get the antidote.” He strides down the hall. I take two steps for every one of his. “The system hasn’t changed much in the last decade. If the formulas are still kept in the dispensary, then I know exactly where we can find another antidote.”
We pass the shattered ceramic pot, the trail of soil, the broken plant stalks. My steps falter, and I stop. The mess is still here. Nobody’s cleaned it up. Nobody will until after Callie walks down this corridor again.
Tanner looks over his shoulder. “Coming?”
I nod and hurry after him. And pray to the Fates he knows what he’s doing.
48
Two flights of stairs and three corridors later, we walk into a chilly, oversize refrigerator. The dispensary. Thirty degrees cooler than the rest of the building, housing racks and racks of needles in every color of the rainbow. And many more colors that never existed in nature. Cotton-candy pink and fluorescent yellow and neon green. Everywhere I look, I see needles. The racks extend from floor to ceiling and are stacked ten deep. I feel like I’m in one of Eden City’s virtual theaters, staring into a set of reflecting mirrors that go on forever.
Tanner walks to the computer terminal, scans his fingerprints, and begins tapping on the keyball. “Good thing I’ve studied Callie’s case half my life,” he mutters. “I have her entire file memorized. I know the name of the antidote: Formula X9453. I even know her dosage.”
I wrap my arms around myself. It’s so cold I can see my breath in the air. “Are they going to wonder, a few days from now when they inspect the records, what a six-year-old was doing dispensing this antidote?”
“Yes.” His fingers pause, for an infinitesimal moment, over the keyball. “I turned out okay.”
“Wait a minute.” There’s something in his tone, something both raw and resigned. Something that makes the hair stand up at the back of my neck. “You know what happens. You know what happens to your six-year-old self because of this.”
He curls his hands into fists. “Got it. The formula’s located in row AA, rack 9.14.”
He starts to walk down the dispensary. I grab his shoulder. “Don’t change the subject.” I need to know what happened to him. It may be in the past; there may be nothing I can do to change it. But I need to know. “What did they do to you? As a result of your fingerprints just now.”
He stops moving, but he won’t look at me. “You know what they did, Jessa. The same thing they did to you, except mine lasted longer.”
My heart drops. “This? This is why they tortured you for six months?”
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to. The look in his eyes scares me. If you sliced it up, you would see layer upon complicated layer. Of things too dark and dreary to discuss on a flimsy platform five stories up. To discuss anywhere, really, except right here. Right now.
“How did the torture stop?” I whisper.
“I finally convinced them I had no idea how my fingerprints got logged in the system. Which was true. I really didn’t know, not until this moment.” He shrugs, and even that small movement looks painful. “When they started scraping me off the ground every day, because I was too spent to hold myself up, they concluded I was telling the truth. They came up with a couple scenarios, equally far-fetched. In one, somebody succeeded in impersonating me and breaching the virtually un-breach-able FuMA security system.”
“And the other?”
His lips curve. “A future Tanner travels back in time and breaks into the dispensary. Totally out there, right? Strains the imagination, doesn’t it?”
I try to smile, too, but I can’t. What his six-year-old self is about to endure robs all the smiles—real and fake—out of my heart.
“Tanner, I’m sorry.”
“Let’s not talk about it.” He resumes walking around the room. “Come on. Let’s find the antidote and get out of here.”
He stops at the appropriate row and presses a button to rotate the racks, stopping at the ninth one. He counts down fourteen trays, and there they are: a dozen glass tubes with a red formula swimming in the barrel. The antidote.
He removes one tube and places it into a machine on the far wall. He taps in the proper dosage, and the machine automatically fills a syringe.
I lick my lips. “Is one enough? What if something goes wrong?”
He hesitates. Removes the syringe and checks the safety cap. Puts the needle in his pocket and looks around the room. And still makes no move to prepare a second syringe.
That’s when I get it.
“They punished you more for a second syringe, didn’t they?” I ask. “Of course they did. The more formula that’s missing, the angrier they’re going to be. Forget I said anything. One antidote is sufficient.”
He takes a deep breath. “No, you’re right. We came all this way. We’re not going to mess everything up just so I can have a few less torture sessions. We’ll take two—”
“Tanner. No. We don’t need it. I was just being paranoid.”
“We don’t know what we need. In the past, I was punished for taking two syringes of formula. So we’ll take two now.” He taps the machine, and a second syringe is filled. He holds it out to me. “Here, you’d better keep this, just in case.”
He meets my eyes, and I tumble into their depths. My heart expands until it fills my rib cage, until it presses against my lungs. I can’t breathe for fear that it might pop. I don’t know how I could’ve ever thought he was a jerk. How I could’ve thought him arrogant and selfish—when the opposite is true. Tanner Callahan is the most selfless boy I’ve ever met. I don’t know if he can change the future, but he’s picked up my heart and moved it to a different plane. No matter how this turns out, my life will be changed forever, knowing what he’s done for my sister. Knowing what he’s done for me.