Meredith McCardle - The Eighth Guardian

I close my eyes and breathe. I imagine my Practical Studies professor’s voice in my head, telling me to slow down and focus and let the answer come to me. But then I hear the clomp-clomp-clomp of another horse and the dress starts itching and I sway to the side as a high-pitched wail brought on by extreme sleep deprivation erupts in my eardrums, and I can’t do it. I can’t focus. I open my eyes.

I hate myself in this moment. I wish I could just whip out my phone, open the browser, and look it up.

Well, why can’t I, exactly? Maybe I’m in some sort of weird universe where I have a network connection.

It sounds weak even as I think it, but still I dig around in the knapsack until I find the back pocket of my pants. My fingers tighten around the phone, and I pull it out, trying to be as inconspicuous as I can. I look down to unlock it and . . . nothing. The screen is dark. I hit the power button, but nothing happens. It’s fried.

There’s laughing again. My head whips up, and the same couple I saw before, standing on the bridge. The guy bites his lip and turns his head when he sees me, but his head bobs as if he’s chuckling. But not the girl. She looks at me with eyes that spit fire before she raises a bony hand and tucks a stray white-blond hair behind her ear.

And then I see it. Because even though that girl is dressed in a long, green-striped gown with a corseted waist and several pickups on the skirt, and even though her hair is half pinned up and tucked underneath a flat hat that matches the dress, that bitch is wearing a sparkly pink plastic running watch.

This couple reports to Alpha, I’m sure of it. They’re Annum Guard, too.

Annum Guard. The words float around in my head. Can it be true? Can there really be a secret government organization that travels back in time? The answer is staring me in the face, screaming at me.

YES.

But how can people time travel? Like, my brain cannot even begin to process this. I need to get back. Back to my time. Then I’ll get some answers.

I turn away from the couple and stare straight at the dome up on the hill. A man and a woman approach me, he in a suit that looks like something from a really pretentious wedding and she in a light-gray pinstriped dress that’s collected about three inches of dust on the hem. I step out of their way. I’m sure I still look pretty ridiculous in a torn dress with a silk tie wrapped around my waist, and let’s not forget about the shoes; but the couple don’t even blink as they saunter past.

I close my eyes and take a breath. I know the swan boat drivers said the boats dated back to eighteen something. Same thing with the gilding of the dome. Think think think think think. I take a breath and close my eyes. Please focus. And then I remember that the tour guide said something about how they wanted to gild it earlier on, but then the Civil War broke out and they had to spend the money on that until the war ended.

The Civil War ended in 1865, thank you very much, every American history class I’ve ever taken. So we’re somewhere between 1865 and 1899.

Back to the swan boats. Focus. Focus. My mom and I haven’t ridden in the boats since I moved away to go to school. The last time we went, I was in the eighth grade. It wasn’t a huge anniversary for the boats, like the hundredth or two hundredth; but the number ended with a zero, so everyone was acting as if it was the biggest deal in the world, which I remember thinking was pretty lame. What was it?

And then, like magic, the number floats into my head. I can see the sign hanging behind the ticket counter with fireworks and balloons, proclaiming the anniversary.

So subtract that from the year, and I get that the swan boats were started in 1877, which means, Hallelujah, praise Jesus, I am a freaking genius! I am sometime between 1865 and 1876.

Except that now I’m totally stuck.

I drop my head into my hands and rub my eyes. My nose is all sniffly. That always happens when I’m so tired I can barely keep my head up. I can’t process anything. Just as soon as a thought enters my head, it’s out. Time travel is real. I’m hallucinating. I’m going to wake up from a bad dream in my dorm room at Peel. The thoughts all swirl together. I need to keep moving. Moving will help me stay focused.

I look both ways to make sure a horse isn’t about to mow me down again and walk into Boston Common. There has to be a trash can around, right? Maybe someone will toss in a newspaper and I’ll find it, like Michael J. Fox did in Back to the Future . Mom and I watched that movie a lot. On her good days.

I’m halfway across the Common when it hits me. The smell. I was so worked up before that I didn’t pay attention, but the scent is there, sure as day. It’s a musty, sweet smell blown in on the wind. I’ve lived in New England my entire life, so I know that smell. It’s fall.

One glance up confirms it. It’s dark out, but there’s enough light to notice the yellow and orange leaves looming over me. The dead ones, long tossed from their branches, crunch beneath my feet. So I left during the fall in the present, and now I’m in the fall in the past. Somehow this is comforting.

I stop. I can’t remember what I was doing. I sniffle again. Oh. Right. Trash cans. I blink. Did I really just center a plan around a plot point in an ’80s movie and think that was a good idea? What is wrong with me? I’ve been trained better than this. I am better than this.

But still, I glance around to see if I can spot any trash cans, because you never know. I don’t see a single one. I sigh and walk toward the state house. Maybe someone is selling an evening edition of the newspaper?

I have no plan. This is awful. If this was another Testing Day challenge, I’d fail.

I stop in my tracks and gasp. What if this is another Testing Day challenge? Oh my God, why didn’t I think of this before? There’s a Testing Day that’s legendary around Peel’s campus. Testing Day: 1995, also known as the Testing Day That Would Not End.

There was the twelve-hour written test, followed by the three challenges, followed by the banquet. But then armed guards wearing all black and night vision goggles cut the electricity, stormed the place, captured all the juniors and seniors, and took them to a remote location off-campus for more testing. One kid died. A junior. There was never an official cause of death, but if there was a box for “Testing Day from Hell” on the coroner’s report, you can bet it would have been checked.

What if this is like 1995 all over again? I’m not done! I haven’t graduated yet. I’m still a student. I have to work my way back to the present, and then Testing Day will finally be over. Holy crap, this could all be a drill!

Suddenly, the idea of a secret government organization that has the ability to time travel doesn’t sound so far-fetched to me. I mean, you would be surprised at all the stuff the government can do, and I only know about a small sliver of it. I can imagine how shocked I’ll be when I get full clearance.

Full clearance. I blow out my breath. Time to get serious. What was the plan? Oh, right, newsboys. That is a stupid plan, and not just because there aren’t any newsboys at the state house.

Focus.

There’s a shuffling of footsteps behind me, and I turn just as two men wander up to look at the dome. The guy and the girl who are tailing me are half a block away, and the guy leans in to the girl and whispers something in her ear when he sees me looking at him. For a split second I think about waving, but I’m sure that would violate the no-interaction rule. And I’m not about to blow this now.

So instead I fiddle with my collar and pull out the owl necklace. I press the knob up top by the feather, the way Alpha did, and the lid covering the watch face pops open. The face itself is white, and there are black numbers in a fancy, swirly font I’ve never seen before. ANNUM is stamped below the point where the two hands lie on top of each other. The whole face is enclosed in a brass circle, and there are tiny knobs on the right side of the circle. And I mean tiny . There’s . . . something inscribed on each of the knobs, but I can’t see what it is. I fiddle with the one on the bottom, but it doesn’t budge. Neither does the one in the middle. But the knob on top moves. I spin it to the right. The minute hand moves, too, and—