“We can’t change the past.” I grip his shoulders. “You’re the one who keeps reminding me. Remi—”
“Will still be born,” he interrupts. “If you saved Callie, the ripples would extend to everyone close to her, which includes Mikey and Angela. But my ripples will die long before it touches any of you. None of you even know me at this time. We won’t even live in the same city for six more years. Whether or not I’m missing a few fingers won’t affect any of your lives one iota.”
“You don’t know that,” I whisper.
His jaw tightens. “The payoff is too great. I have to risk it.” He gets off the boy and, with renewed energy, hauls him up and once more tries to force his hand to the blade.
My mind spins, working through his logic.
If he’s right, future memory wouldn’t be invented. Callie would still be bonded to me. Dresden would have to find another way.
And Tanner…Tanner would be missing a few fingers. He’ll bear the scars for the rest of his life. Add to this the torture that’s about to come, and it will rock him to his very core. It will change him.
The Tanner Callahan I know—the one I’m beginning to love—might as well be dead.
The blade touches skin, and the little boy’s scream pierces the air.
“No!!!” I throw myself at them with all my strength, knocking them away from the blade.
Tanner hits the ground, and I wrench his younger self from his arms. I pull the little boy, who is full-on hysterical, onto my lap.
“Not like this.” I kiss the boy’s forehead, wetting the too-familiar black hair with my tears. “Callie already injected herself to keep future memory from being discovered. And then you invented it anyway. Don’t you see? No matter what we do, science will find a way. You told me yourself. We can’t stop science any more than we can stop the beast in the nursery rhyme. How many more lives do we have to ruin before we understand that?”
The older Tanner pulls his knees to his chest, his shoulders vibrating violently. “I can’t be responsible for genocide. I can’t be the cause of that and live with myself.”
“No,” I say with all the force in my soul and body. But he’s not listening to me. As lost as he is in his own guilt, he doesn’t hear.
So I turn to the little boy on my lap. “You are not responsible, do you hear me? The only one who can be blamed for Dresden’s actions is Dresden herself. None of this is your fault. Not the world you live in and not your parents’ accident.”
“Do you really think so?” The boy stares at his hand, where blood is blooming from the cut in between his fingers. “If I had listened more, if I had behaved better, maybe the chairwoman wouldn’t have gotten so angry. Maybe she would’ve punished me instead of them.”
I grab a roll of gauze from a nearby table and wrap his finger as best as I can. “There was nothing you could’ve done. You did the best you could, and your parents would’ve been so proud of you. I’m proud of you.” I tie the gauze, hoping it holds long enough until a real medical assistant sees him. “You’re not responsible for the world, Tanner. Just try your best, in everything you do, and I promise you it will be enough. You may feel alone here, so alone. But I promise you that you will be valued. You will be loved.”
He buries his face in my neck. “You’re nice. Are you an angel, just like my mommy?”
I swallow hard. “Something like that.”
“When I grow up, I want to marry you.” The fabric of my shirt muffles his words.
I laugh through the moisture wetting my eyes. “Why don’t we work on being friends first?” I wrap my arms around the little boy, and I glance up to find the older boy watching me. I can’t read the expression on his face, but that’s nothing new. I’ve never been able to tell what Tanner is thinking. But for the first time, I know what’s in my own heart.
So I look straight into his eyes and tell him. “You stay the boy you were meant to be. I wouldn’t change a thing about you. You hear? Not. A. Single. Thing.”
55
Too soon, we have to leave the young Tanner. Everything in me wants to bundle him up and take him back to the future with us, where he won’t have to suffer through six months of torture. Where he won’t grow up alone and unloved. Where he’ll be safe. But I can’t. Time is a loop, but it doesn’t flow in both directions. If I take the six-year-old Tanner to the future with me, I’ll break that loop. The Tanner who is by my side now would disappear.
This is the way his path unfolded, and I have to let time follow its natural course.
We are quiet as we find our way out of the building, sticking to the less trafficked corridors. Once we emerge outside and go into the dense vegetation of the forest, he turns to me, the dappled sunlight decorating his face with shifting shadows.
“I told you once that the only reason I survived the torture was because an angel came into my life,” he says. “She held me in her lap and told me that I was valued. I was loved. That’s the only thing that kept me going when the pain got to be too much. When I would’ve done anything to get it to stop.”
He takes a few quick breaths. “Over the years, her features have blurred. Until I was sure of only one thing: She was beautiful.” He breaks off, dropping his face so I won’t see his eyes. So I won’t see his heart. A full thirty seconds pass as he struggles to compose himself. And then he lifts his head again. “Today, I find out that my angel was you. That’s why I thought I had known you in a past life. That’s why I reacted so strongly at the hoverpark. From the moment I met you, I’ve felt like I was in love with you. The feeling didn’t make any sense to me, so I tried to push it away. But now, I know that nothing makes more sense in the world. It was you, this entire time. It’s always been you.”
He tugs me forward, and I trip over a root. I stumble against his chest and look up into his eyes. He begins to lower his mouth to mine. Our noses bump. His lips graze instead the skin by my ear.
I smile. Our entire relationship, Tanner has been cocky and smooth. Well, he’s awkward now, and I love him all the more for it.
“Let’s try that again,” he whispers, cupping my face with his hands.
This time, our mouths connect solidly. I kiss him like I’ve never kissed anybody before. It’s not just our lips that are touching. Not just our tongues, not just our chests. I feel like our very souls are meeting. And it doesn’t matter if we’re in the present or the past. It makes no difference if we’re in this world or another one.
There’s only one true Jessa and one true Tanner. And we’re here. Together. Now.
He pulls back a fraction of an inch. “I love you, Jessa,” he says against my mouth. “You saved me.”
“I love you.” I weave my fingers together behind his neck. “And you were the one who saved me.”
And he did. I’ve spent my life engaging in stupid pranks that didn’t amount to anything. Trying my hardest to avoid anyone’s political agenda. When my true goal was always in front of me. I just never understood it until he showed me what was important.
Him. Our love. The people in our lives.
We’ve been going about this all wrong. Callie, Mikey, the entire Underground. We thought we could prevent genocide by preventing the invention of future memory. When future memory was never the culprit. It was always Dresden who was to blame. Dresden who is the enemy.
There’s only one way to kill the beast.
He gives me one last kiss and then squints at the sky. The sun is blazing overhead. “I hate to say this, but we need to get going.”