“We need your help,” Adam says, right when I say, “We have some questions.”
“Of course.” Lynne looks back and forth between us. “What can I do to help?”
I look at Adam and he nods, letting me go ahead. I briefly tell her everything we’ve learned about our deaths and about future shock. I leave out any mention of me being the killer and hope she gets the hint not to bring it up.
“Future shock…” She bows her head. “It was horrible, what happened to those other people, but Aether wouldn’t stop the program. From the brief hints we got from the other test subjects, we knew the aperture was working. The accelerator was sending people thirty years in the future and bringing them back. We just needed to find a way to keep them sane. We decreased the time to ten years instead of thirty, but that didn’t remove all of the problems. That’s when Dr. Kapur suggested we use teenagers.”
“So you knew when you recruited us that we might go crazy?” Chris asks, leaning forward, fists clenched like he’s about to jump out of his seat and attack her.
“Dr. Kapur promised us that none of you would suffer from future shock. He showed us studies of teenage brains…” She sighs and stares at her hands folded in her lap. “I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t my call. And we all thought you were going ten years forward, not thirty. I had no idea you went so far ahead until Adam told me many years later.”
“If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you quit?” Chris asks. “Or expose what they were doing?”
She stares into her coffee mug. “You have no idea how hard it is to be a single mom trying to pay the bills. Especially one who desperately needs health insurance for her kid. I couldn’t quit.” She sucks in a long breath. “But after what happened to you, not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d done something to stop it. That’s why I helped Adam bury the project—so Aether could never send people to the future again.”
I like her excuses and apologies about as much as Chris does, judging by the look on his face, but there’s nothing we can do about that now. “We know Adam lied about losing his memories, but what about the rest of us?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. “At the time, we believed you had all suffered from future shock. It’s hard to say if that was true or not, especially since you were all killed only hours later…”
“Is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from future shock?” Chris asks.
“Not that I know of. I’m sorry.”
“There has to be something,” Trent says.
“The only thing would be to stay here in the future, I suppose. Dr. Kapur thought that the act of traveling back to the present was what triggered it, although he couldn’t ever prove it.”
Chris shakes his head. “Staying here is not an option.”
I don’t know. Staying in the future doesn’t sound too bad. I could live out the rest of my life here and never kill the others or myself. Although staying here would mean giving up my dream of going to college, plus there’s that whole problem of having no identity here and the police being after me…I doubt they’d let me off lightly for beating up two cops. No, staying in the future isn’t an option.
“There’s one more thing you need to know,” Lynne says. “A few hours after you got back, I overheard Dr. Kapur arguing with Dr. Walters about sending younger kids to the future. He said something like, ‘It will work if we purge this round of test subjects and erase any evidence they were involved. Then we can start over with a new group.’ A day later, you were all dead.”
“So you think Dr. Kapur had us…purged?” I ask. A tiny spark of hope flickers in my chest at hearing this could all be a cover-up. That would mean I’m not really the killer after all. And now we have a real person at Aether to pinpoint this all on. A person we can focus on stopping.
Lynne nods. “That’s always been my suspicion, but I never found any other proof.”
“Dr. Walters never mentioned any of that,” Zoe says.
“Of course he didn’t,” Trent says. “He was in on it the whole time!”