Пинтип Данн - Remember Yesterday

“What’s going on?” He peers at Callie and takes Tanner’s place in front of the terminal. “Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of genius, Callahan? Our hope for the future? I can’t leave you alone for five minutes! What did you do to her?”

“ I didn’t do anything,” Tanner says.

Preston turns slowly, as if just realizing I’m here. “You.” His eyes widen and he takes a step backward, crashing into a machine. “How did you get in here?”

“I let her in.” Tanner squares his shoulders, and I wait for him to tell this man, who is obviously his boss, that I bribed him, that I threatened him with a stun gun. Anything, really, to show he acted under coercion.

“It’s not right she doesn’t know,” he continues, and I blink. What is he doing? “This is her sister, her twin. She believed Callie was dead all these years. That’s not okay. Tell Dresden if you want. Take away my lab and experiments. I don’t care. Jessa deserves to know the truth.”

My heart beats funny, and my face feels hot. He’s taking the fall for me. But why?

Preston looks from me to Tanner. The air shivers, just like the moment when he saw me breathing in the stretcher. The moment of indecision. Will he report us or let our transgression pass?

The seconds tick by, and he makes no move to call Dresden. He doesn’t even seem interested in continuing to lecture. Instead, he stares at me as if I’m a creature dredged from a black hole.

“Are you going to tell Dresden?” Tanner asks hesitantly.

“I don’t see how it’s any of her business. My experiments, my responsibility.”

I breathe a sigh of relief, but I can’t relax. Not yet.

Preston’s eyes are still glued to me. I don’t think he’s even blinked. “How did you find this place? How did you know she was here?”

There’s no reason to hide the truth. If he’s going to turn me in, he already has ample ammunition. “Callie sent me a vision. A maze that led me to this place.”

Briefly, I explain how I was infected and developed the same abilities as the lab mice. I tell him how I found Callie and sent her a message, which made the machines start beeping.

Preston blinks at me for several seconds. And then he lurches to the computer terminal. “This is amazing,” he mutters. “We were so wrong, so completely off base. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

“See what?” I glance at Tanner. He shrugs, as if to say he doesn’t know, either.

“Callie has been more or less stable for ten years,” Preston says. “And then last week, her condition worsened. Her vitals flirted at the edge of the red zone, and her brain waves became erratic, irregular. We didn’t know what it meant, but we assumed it couldn’t be anything good.”

He drums his fingers against his cheek. “Now, it sounds like Callie’s memories have been firing all along, and when you became a Receiver, one of those memories found a home. Her brain started to wake up—that’s what accounts for the irregularity. Her body went haywire because it was searching, searching, searching for a hold, and it couldn’t find one. Here, take a look.”

He presses some buttons on the keyball. Images of Callie’s brain appear in the air, pictures that must’ve been taken from the sensors on her scalp. Dots of lights in varying colors and brightness pulse in different lobes. He zooms out, and I see a vertical figure standing next to Callie’s horizontal body. Me. A string of light connects us, ropes upon ropes of overlapping braids, twisted together to form our bond.

My mouth drops. Every doubt I’ve ever had of our psychic link evaporates. There it is, right in front of my eyes. A visual manifestation of our connection.

“You see what I’m seeing?” he asks Tanner.

Tanner’s breathing is shallow. “We never guessed it could happen this way. We thought the experiment failed.”

“What experiment?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

“Before now, Callie’s mind was tied to this time by a mere thread.” Preston wipes away the holograms. “She was connected with the present only because her body was in it. Over the years, as her mind zoomed off to different times, the thread became more and more frail. Then you came here.” His voice is full of awe and something else. Something that sounds very much like fear. “And her mind found something to latch onto.”

My mouth goes dry. “What do you mean?”

“You are her connection to this time. She’s twined her consciousness with yours, and the link between the two of you is stronger than the fragile bond she had with her body. By sending her that memory, you woke up her Receiver abilities, powers that have laid dormant inside her for a decade.”

“I don’t understand.” My mind whirls, trying to piece it all together. “If I could become her link with the present, why didn’t you ask me to send her a memory years ago?”

“Oh, believe me, we wanted to. But we had received reports, in no uncertain terms, that you had tried and failed.”

It’s true. I remember sitting on a rock in the woods, feeling as lost as a balloon floating away in the sky. I had tried to send Callie a message, and there was nothing. No click. An emptiness that took my breath away, a blankness that stabbed me right in the chest. Because there was supposed to be something .

I admitted, then, that Angela was right. The bond I thought I still felt was nothing more than wishful thinking.

I continued believing that until just now.

“You held her hand while sending the memory,” Tanner muses. “Maybe it’s the touching that made the difference.”

“Of course.” Preston nods briskly. “Touching always amplifies the psychic connection between two people.”

I swallow hard. “So now that Callie and I are reconnected, what’s next?”

“You’ll send her a memory every day, and we’ll hope. Your bond will get stronger with every memory you send. Maybe someday, the bond will be strong enough that Callie will be able to follow the thread back to the present and wake up.”

“What are we waiting for?” I blurt. “I’ll just send her a thousand messages right now.”

“That’s the worst thing you could do,” Preston says. “A new psychic connection is like a newborn baby. It must be nurtured. You have to allow it to grow on its own terms. You can’t make a baby grow any faster by stuffing it with food, and by the same token, you risk endangering the bond by feeding it too much. At the same time, you have to nourish the connection daily.”

He looks at Callie’s face and then lifts his eyes to mine. “I cannot impress this upon you enough. You are Callie’s only connection to this time. The only thread keeping her mind from flying into oblivion. You must come here every day. You must send her a new memory every day. Otherwise, the connection will wither and fade. And if that breaks, Callie will be gone from us forever.”

I nod, my heart roaring in my ears. “Anything. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep Callie safe.”

I run toward the Harmony compound, my feet a blur underneath me. I feel like I’m flying, and I don’t even have my hoverboard. Callie, here and not dead. Vitals in the safe zone. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll wake up and come back to me someday.

It’s just as likely she won’t.

My heart contracts so abruptly it hurts. I can’t tell what I’m feeling anymore. Joy or sorrow. Anxiety or anticipation. I’m tiptoeing along the razor’s edge of hope; one wrong step in either direction and I’ll fall on the blade again. Only this time, it will be worse. Losing Callie once sliced my heart into ribbons. If I have to mourn her a second time? The ribbons will be fed through a meat grinder, and I don’t know if I’ll recognize what comes out the other side.