Lynne beams at us like a proud mother, and my mind flashes back to her body lying on the ground, gushing blood from the hole in her chest. I just watched her die and yet here she is, alive and unaware of her fate in thirty years.
Chris glares at everyone, while Trent and Zoe just look around like they’re lost. Adam takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, standing a little apart from the others. He slips his glasses back on and meets my gaze. He mouths my name, but I look away quickly, his betrayal still as sharp as the pain in my ribs.
Some of the scientists rush forward to take our backpacks. They yank mine off before I can stop them, and only then do I realize I never emptied mine out. There shouldn’t be anything too bad in there, but I hide my hands behind my back and peel off my fake fingerprints. I don’t know if they’d still work now (are they electronic?) but they’d lead to too many questions. I slip them into my pocket, and my fingers brush over paper—the reports we stole from Aether’s headquarters. I dropped Zoe’s sketchbook during the fight over the case, but I still have these.
The case! I glance over, but Adam’s backpack is gone, taken away like the others. Aether has the cure now, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
And that’s when it hits me: I remember everything. I’m not suffering from future shock—which means I’m not the killer and we’re all still in danger. I can’t tell if I’m relieved or even more scared now, knowing it isn’t me. Mostly, I feel like I’m going to throw up.
“You all did such a great job,” Lynne says. “We know you must be tired, but we have to send you to medical quickly to make sure you’re okay, and then we’ll debrief you. We want to know about everything you saw in the future.”
“Please follow me,” Dr. Kapur says, suddenly at my side. He herds me like a sheep into the elevator. The others are split up too, following scientists in different directions. Chris shoots daggers at me with his eyes, but I don’t see Adam anywhere.
In the elevator I lean against the walls, clutching my side and trying to breathe. Time must have finally caught up to me, because I feel like I could sleep for days. Hell, maybe I should after this is all over. Assuming I’m still alive, that is.
A part of me can’t believe I’m in the present again. Everything I experienced in the last twenty-four hours, everything I saw and heard and lived through, hasn’t actually happened yet. And yet it feels just as real as this moment now.
I limp into the medical area and the nurses descend on me, taking my blood pressure, draining my blood, and checking my heartbeat. I barely notice any of it. I rub my eyes, trying to snap out of the daze I’m in, but it’s like I’ve been drugged or something. Is this future shock? I still remember everything, but the world around me is just a little bit fizzy, like I can’t quite grasp on to it. Like my brain is out of sync. But maybe I’m just exhausted.
The nurses cluck at my ankle and aching ribs, taking x-rays of both. There’s nothing broken, so they wrap me in bandages and give me some pain meds. None of them ask me what happened.
When they finish, I’m carted off for an MRI scan so they can study my brain. I understand now why they’re doing all this. They want to see if I’m messed up like the other people who went to the future. But I already know the brain scans will come back normal.
They make me change into a hospital robe for the tests, and I hide the reports from the future and the fake fingerprints in the changing room, stashed between the pages of a magazine. The entire time they run the scans I worry someone will find the evidence. But when I get back, the reports and fingerprints are still hidden there, even though they’ve taken the clothes I wore in the future. I stash the evidence inside my own clothes, which they’ve left for me.
I’m given food and water, then left in a small room and told to wait. It’s like an interrogation room, with a mirror on one wall and a table with two chairs in the middle. I sit in one of those chairs and get that creepy tingling on the back of my neck like I’m being watched. I feel like I should be in an orange prison suit with my hands cuffed to the table.