Пинтип Данн - Remember Yesterday

He gives me a sharp look. “Do you want to hear the explanation or not?”

“I’m nearly breathless with anticipation.”

He shakes his head, but he’s also smiling. Just a little bit. Which—Fates help me—makes me smile.

“I’ve always been fascinated by animal migration,” he says. “The monarch butterflies, for example, migrate twenty-five hundred miles to the same mountains, year after year, generation after generation. Even though each individual butterfly has never traveled there before. Scientists have offered a bunch of explanations—instincts, the magnetic pull of the Earth, the sun used as a compass. But what if it’s more than that?” He takes a breath, as if gearing up for his next sentences. “What if the butterflies are communicating with each other—across time? What if one generation is able to send a message to the next generation, telling them where to go?”

The smile falls off my face, skitters down the ramp, and disappears into the hoverpark. Because this research he’s doing? It sounds an awful lot like future memory.

“I injected my mice with a genetic modification that enhances their natural Sender-Receiver abilities,” he continues. “And then I run them through a maze, which they figure out through trial and error. Pretty soon, they’re memorizing the order of doors by their shapes and colors.”

Sweat gathers at my hairline. The corridor with the green stripes and purple sofas flashes across my mind. The feeling of running, of being compelled to go down a certain path. Of being born to do it.

“Green, purple. Purple, green,” I murmur.

“What was that?” he asks.

“Nothing.” I lift the damp hair off my neck and twist it into a ponytail. “Please go on.”

“As I bred the mice, the Sender-Receiver abilities got stronger. Or at least, each generation of mice figured out the maze a little quicker than the one before it.” His words come faster now, as if they’re racing the maze alongside his mice. “Guess how many times it took the fifth-generation mice to figure out the maze?”

“How many?”

“One. Each mouse ran the maze correctly on the very first try.”

I rock back on the bleachers. I was the Sender in my relationship with Callie, but I also have a small amount of Receiver abilities. We all do. When the mouse bit me, could my natural abilities have been enhanced? Could my dream of running down a corridor be some kind of message someone’s trying to send me?

Despite the sweat, a chill runs up my spine. All of a sudden, I’m sure someone’s trying to communicate with me. Just like the mice.

But who? And why?

I can’t dwell on these questions for long, however. Because Tanner isn’t finished. “I have to believe the Sender parent mice are sending messages to their Receiver children. I have to believe this discovery is the first step toward the discovery of future memory.” He looks at me, his eyes bright with knowledge. “Your sister delayed the invention of future memory, Jessa. But she didn’t stop it.”

“You don’t know that,” I say quickly.

“Of course I do. Think about it. Future memory hasn’t disappeared from our world altogether, so we know that sometime, at some point, it will be invented once again. Besides, nobody can halt scientific innovation. One way or another, science will find a way. All the scientists in my wing are running similar experiments, with different formulas and different mice. Sooner or later, one of us will discover the link to future memory.” He straightens his spine and looks directly into my eyes. “And I will do everything in my power to make sure that it’s me.”

The next morning, I’m in the eating area of the Russells’ home, where I eat breakfast every morning. It looks like a baked goods café exploded in here.

Every available surface is covered with cookies. Chocolate chip, almond lace, pinwheel, peanut butter. Sugar cookies and snickerdoodles, macaroons and pecan cookie balls. Angela pops the next tray into the Meal Assembler as soon as the previous one comes out.

I snatch up a still-warm cookie and put it into my mouth. The sweet and bitter chocolate tingles my taste buds, and the gooey center explodes over my tongue. Molten magma cookie. Yum.

This is what I need right now. Something to warm me from the inside out. Something to help me forget that somewhere out there, someone is sending me a message to compel me down a path I’ve never seen, toward a destination I’m not sure I want to find.

Even now, sweat slicks over my skin, and my legs ache with the need to run. My nerves vibrate, faster and faster with each passing hour, getting more and more antsy, because I’m not moving, not acting, not galloping down a purple and green hallway.

My body begs me to listen to this compulsion, but I can’t. I don’t even know where this hallway is.

The Meal Assembler dings. Angela takes out a tray of madeleines and swaps it with a package of coconut snow. Her hair, arranged in a thousand braids, is pulled off her face in a low ponytail, and everything about her is smooth. From her creamy brown skin, to the gentle but capable hands, to the long, stretchy fabric wrapped over her shoulders and midsection, with the tiny face of a six-month-old peeping over the edge.

“You think Remi’s old enough to eat a cookie?” I pick up a bunny-shaped treat and wave it in front of the baby’s face. “Why’d you make so many, anyway?”

“It’s called nesting.” Angela looks at the piles of cookies and laughs wetly, like a saturated sponge about to overflow. “Although I suppose I’ve already had the baby.”

I put down the cookie and whisper a finger over Remi’s face, marveling at the lashes that lay like thistles against her cheek. She turns toward my finger and tries to bite it. “And she’s wonderful.”

“I know it. I’ve never been so happy in my life.” She bursts into tears.

I pull my hand from Remi’s face. “Angela, what’s wrong?”

The air leaves her mouth in quick, breathe-in-a-paper-bag puffs. “What am I doing? I don’t know how to take care of a baby. I have no idea how to keep her safe when she’s learning to crawl.” She presses the plastic wrap from the tray of cookies against her forehead. “I don’t know how to keep her alive.”

With each word, her body gets a little stiffer. The paralysis spreads a little more. Who can blame her? The fear stems not from normal new-mother anxiety but from her future memory, the one that foretold that her baby girl would crawl off a cliff and fall to her death.

It’s taken the better part of a decade for Mikey to convince her the memory doesn’t have to come true.

I wrench her hand from her forehead, plaster wrap and all. “You can change your future. Remember yesterday. If my sister did it, so can you.”

And so can I. I don’t have to fall in line with whatever future is shown to me. I don’t have to become Dresden’s assistant.

“Callie’s the only reason this baby exists.” Angela looks down at Remi, beyond smitten. Ready to sacrifice the world for a six-month-old. “Her courage showed me, showed so many of us, that we don’t have to live in constant fear of tomorrow.”

“You’ll be fine. More than fine. You’re a wonderful mother, Angela. This baby is lucky to be born to you.”

I should know. For the six years I was on the run with Harmony, she was the only person who tucked me into my pine-needle bed and kissed me good night. Since she and Mikey adopted Ryder, and Ryder and I were inseparable, she was like my mother, too. And now that I’m living in the little cottage behind their home, sometimes I can even pretend she is.

She ruffles my hair. “I’m the lucky one. You and Ryder came to me fully formed. Six years old, the two of you, with so much goodness shining from your eyes I was slayed. I was fortunate enough to guide you a bit and love you a lot. That’s all.”