Chapter 1
What if you could see your future? Really smell the smells of it. Really taste and touch and see the richest of its textures. You wouldn’t want it. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to know. All those things you thought you were doing right? All bad gambles. All things you decided with good intentions that later turned to crap. What if you learned to love yourself (which in itself is a freaking chore), only to find the future you is a jerk? The kind people not only hate but are dying to kill? What would you do?
Who would you become today to not be that girl tomorrow?
Ever since I came to Astor Academy, I’ve struggled with who I am. With my body and mind being modified or mutated or whatever, I can’t stop wondering about my purpose here on Earth. Being me, I’m an unwritten book. A language yet to be invented.
Ever since I’ve changed, I’ve worked to integrate my multiple selves with the core me, the original me. Now I know who I am. Well, mostly. With the help of April, I realize I’m just a slab of meat laid out on the hood of a Dodge motherf*cking Challenger. A broken, hated, ruined mess.
Whatever I’ve become, I can’t be this.
I can’t be…her.
Maybe it’s time for me to stop trying to save other people. Maybe it’s time for me to think about saving myself instead.
* * *
Night in the desert is cold and pitch black. Nothing stirs. The landscape just sits there, silent, dark, still, save for the dying down of a rain that barely even came. The accident, however—the rig that plowed over April and overturned in the process—it threw a nightmarish noise into the wet midnight air. Then everything went quiet again, save for me practically hyperventilating.
Gasoline drains from the big rig’s gas tank, creating an oily slick across the blackened highway. I approach the wreck. My world is spinning, everything—all these revelations without much in the way of an explanation—they’re all grinding and thrashing around inside my head. The rain becomes a light mist that becomes nothing. Just wet, chilled air.
God, poor April.
Smeared across the asphalt like greased roadkill is April, a.k.a. Alice. The flattened, chunked, smooshed pieces of her, anyway. With everything I’ve seen lately, blubbering like a wounded child is no longer my first reaction. Alice is dead, yet somehow I’m the one feeling pulverized.
I can hardly breathe.
And my eyes…my eyes won’t stop seeing the carnage! My stomach jolts, wiggles, burns. I look away. Try not to hurl.
Walking around the front of the overturned truck, one headlight is broken, and the other beams weak into the night. There are pieces of bone and hair stuck in the broken front grill. Heat and smoke waft out of the slats. The damp, coppery smell of blood hits me hard. Twenty or twenty-five feet up the highway, in the shine of light, is a heap in the road. It’s a dark shadow in the illuminated light. A lump with spindly, broken legs and what looks like a ripped off arm.
My legs deliver me to the corpse. It’s just lying there, ribs snapped like dry sticks jutting from meat that was once a torso. Blonde hair is matted, dirty, soaked red; half her head is gone. And the face…my God…who she was before, you can’t see it anymore.
It’s not possible.
Unable to look away, my eyes see pulped organs, torn ligaments and skin, clothes mixed with the ground beef look of her. The heat of her body pushes steam into the night.
And an awful, mangled smell.
The shock over everything so violent and profound has the gears of my mind plunking down into a hard first. Yet I find it impossible to cry. To feel bad. To mourn the tragedy of the future me and the loss of April. Alice. Why is that?
Is it because I’ve seen so much death and suffered such catastrophic losses recently? Holy cow, what the hell am I supposed to do now? My body refuses to move. I’m stuck in neutral. Smelling the rain-drenched asphalt. Appraising the mess I’ve made. Barely thinking.
The way I seem to be processing everything so slowly, it’s totally contrary to my mind, which feels like it’s racing in a dozen different directions at once.
Behind me, from the cab of the tipped truck, the driver shoulders the door facing the sky wide open. With the rig turned on its side, the opened door opens slams down hard on the metal side with a loud thwap! Spinning around, suddenly and fiercely traumatized by…God, everything!…my heart is fast becoming a jittery, unstable mass.
Then I see the driver and holy balls! Climbing from the truck is a young girl with blonde hair. A girl? For real? What the balls?
She jumps off the truck, lands gracefully on the asphalt, and says, “Don’t get all emotional, it’s just a body.”
Wait…what?
The girl is about Alice’s age. At least, that’s how she looks in the semi-dark. Or have I lost it? Am I losing it? Am I seeing life from the inside of a fishbowl?
“What…what did you say?” I stammer.
Nothing makes sense. Up is down; right is wrong; black is every freaking shade of white. I’m the flipside of everything normal, the opposite of everything sane.
The girl walks up to me with purpose. Not threatening. More like she knows me.
“It’s me, Raven.”
Alice? I look down at the corpse at my feet, then back up at her. “But you’re…”
“In a new body. It’s cool. You don’t get it.”
“You’re damn right I don’t get it!” I shout, not at all meaning to.
She glances down at the body.
“Eesh, that’s nasty.”
“How is this possible?” my mouth asks. I can’t stop staring at her. If she was the Mother Mary herself, I wouldn’t have been more surprised.
The blonde girl, she says, “The best way for me to explain is this. Where I’m from, bodies are disposable. They’re like outfits you wear. But one mind can’t occupy two bodies, so this body had to die. It was in bad shape after saving the future you anyway. Serious internal bleeding.”
“But how did you get…into that body, being in…April’s body? You got run over by a truck for heaven’s sake!”
“Back home, I made the transfer. Basically I delivered the body to this time, then switched when I pulled out of April, which was right before she was run down. C’mon, we have to go. Seriously. Get future you off the Charger’s hood and into the Audi.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask, dumbstruck.
“Burn the Dodge.”
“You’ll burn the Dodge?”
“Yes, Raven. I’ll burn the Dodge. Jesus, pull yourself together.”
“What about…you? And this truck?”
“You worry too much,” she says, grabbing my hand. “Seriously. We need to go.”
She practically drags me by the hand all the way to the Dodge. I heft my unconscious future self into my arms, then hoist and wrestle her body into the backseat of the Audi. Alice helps, then slides into the passenger seat and buckles up. I start the RS5, pull forward a few feet, then Alice turns and uses her mind to conjure fire.
In my rear-view mirror, the Dodge bursts into flames. I drop my car into Sport Mode, stomp on the gas pedal and launch forward through the darkness just about the time the muscle car explodes. We roar through the big rig’s trail of spilled gasoline and human carnage, then rocket past the truck and the run-down lump of a body.
“Faster,” Alice says.
She turns and seconds later an even brighter glow erupts in my rear view mirror: the truck, pieces of the left-behind body and the Dodge, they’re all burning now.
When we’re far enough up the road, when nearly half an hour has passed, I say, “Will you please explain this to me? Because inside, I’m totally freaking out!”
She turns and faces me. Hers is a gentle look. Fragile. Like how I sometimes see the five year old Alice, yet softer and more lethal. In the eyes of this version of Alice burns an intensity I have yet to see in the five year old version of her. However old she is right now, however crazy she has become, it has run its course on her mind.
To say my Spidey-senses are tingling is a grotesque understatement of the truth.
Alice says, “Bodies in the future are genetically manufactured by major brands, like Bebe, Gucci, Kenneth Cole, Armani. Except none of those brands exist where I’m from.”
“So bodies are like…clothing lines?” I ask.
“Exactly. You pick and choose who you want to look like and be, and for those of us with privilege, there’s always more than enough to wear.”
“I don’t…”
“You don’t understand?”
“Yes. I mean no.”
“How can you? You can’t understand the future anymore than pioneers and early settlers can understand a mobile phone or a jet airplane. You see, in the future, the body is no longer the vessel for the soul. The soul is now a separate coming-and-going-from-the-body type of affair. You don’t need to die to move on. We don’t get old. We’re linked to everything physical through a psychic connection. My soul is still in the future, in what we call ‘The Nest,’ even though I’m using this body as a conduit. My soul isn’t actually in this body as much as it’s back home with me and linked to this body and this time.”
“So I could shoot you in the head and your body would die, but you wouldn’t?”
“Only if I choose to inhabit the body with my soul inside it, then yes, I’ll die. But I won’t really die. My soul will have to wander its way into another body, forfeiting everything I have now, forfeiting the future. It’s basically a crap shoot, a risk I’m not willing to take. That’s why is use the bodies rather than inhabiting them. The Nest is safe. Being inside the body, not so much.”
“So the link between your consciousness and whatever body you’ve chosen, that’s kind of like that movie Avatar?” I ask.
“To some degree. It’s like a video game where I’m in The Nest controlling a body in whatever time I choose. In this case, my soul is back home while this body is here.”
“So the body isn’t real,” I say, poking the shoulder.
“Of course it’s real. My soul just isn’t bound to it like your soul is to yours.”
“So if you die—”
“It’s like I said, I don’t die because my soul is not in the body. I just change bodies, send them back in time, then monitor and inhabit them from the future, out of harm’s way.”
In the back seat, Raven 2.0 is mauled and hacked apart, totally unconscious. There’s no blood though. Whatever did this to her, it was done a long time ago. And thank God, because I really don’t want blood all over my new seats.
“What happened to her?” I ask. “To future me?”
Alice says, “In another time, different to both you and me, she changed the course of history in a gigantic way. Where I got her from, she was in a nearly bottomless pit in the Middle East. That was in the early twenty-fourth century. The you in the back seat, she asked for my help. Even though she and I were in entirely different time periods, she found some way to reach me telepathically. Which seems an impossible feat even now.”
“So she connected with you telepathically…over time?”
“Amazingly enough, yes.”
I shrug my shoulders and say, “I honestly can’t comprehend it.”
After a long time of saying nothing, she looks at me. Then: “You are still the most incredible creature I’ve ever met. You’re an anomaly even now, in my time.”
“If you’re not from…wait, did you say the future me is from the twenty-fourth century?”
“Yes, but no.”
“What do you mean, ‘yes, but no?’”
“That girl in the back seat, she was sent back in time from the twenty-eight hundreds to the late twenty-three hundreds as punishment. As banishment from society, from everything. From the world.”
Jesus, I think. This is way worse than going to the Headmistress’s office, or being confined to detention. Banishment from time, from society, from life…what the hell did I do?
I look over my shoulder, in the back seat at myself. Her body, my body, it’s beaten and abused, like something wretched, something marred by eons of abuse. Damn, I look like an extra in a Mad Max film! The cruelty wrought upon future me’s body…for the love of God, she’s just a girl!
She looks the same age as me. With matching facial features and everything. It hits me then. And gosh damn, this hits me hard.
That’s me.
Through the restlessness and disbelief holding my mind captive comes this realization: this is the last time I switch bodies. As in, I spend hundreds of years looking like Raven de’ Medici. Hundreds of years not changing my face. Not changing my body. Not growing older or dying.
My insides twist and roll at the idea of immortality. My guts seize at the thought of this girl, of me. The implications alone dispel rational thought!
“So you’re here, but this nest place, it’s in another time?”
I already know this. I’ve been listening to her. I just can’t seem to connect the dots, to make it all fit together as perfectly as it does for her.
“Yes.”
“When are you from?”
“Twenty-eight thirty-two is my current year.”
A popping noise in my head, like the sound of my sub-conscious mind turning inside out, puffs out of me. We’re talking untold amounts of disbelief. My mind right now, it’s a four a.m. hooker, as in totally exhausted, as in officially done. Words fail me on every single level.
I can’t even think straight!
This is so much worse than finding out Jake is a traveler. So much worse than knowing he’s old AF and pining after his dead wife. Because I don’t know what to do, I turn on the media player.
Hellyeah’s song “Be Undeniable” plays and it has that sort of angry yet fitting message I’m not sure I should ignore. All I want to do right now is crank it up until the speakers shutter and blow apart.
The music shuts off on its own.
Alice just looked at the radio and it shut off.
“Don’t do that,” I snap, turning it back on with my mind. Not moving a muscle, using just her mind, Alice shuts it off again.
Heat rises into my face and I want to start cursing.
“You can’t win against this version of me,” she explains. “I’m infinitely superior to you in this time.”
“You’re just a little girl in my world,” I retort. Meaning I could end the five year old version of her and she would never exist.
“Is that a threat?” she asks with humor in those usually dark eyes. “Are you actually threatening me?”
We sit in silence for awhile until I can’t take it any longer. “What did she do that she should end up here, looking like that?”
I’m referring to my future self.
“It’s a long story that has something to do with you turning Presidents’ bodies inside out in front of audiences of hundreds of thousands. Think of Jack the Ripper, or Charles Manson, or even someone like Ed Gein, and then multiply that by a thousand and that’s her.”
“Are you effing kidding me?” I gasp, my foot coming off the pedal.
“The way you dispose of the filth of the future, it’s brutal and bloody, and it happens so quickly and so violently people can’t process it. There’s not much violence in the future. Not anymore. That’s your thing, though. Killing people in brutal fashion when brutality is at an all time low.”
My mind is spinning a dizzying web, making my brain feel turned inside out, and the slightest bit delirious. These are merely tricks on my mind. They have to be!
Are you an implanted suggestion? I almost ask the girl beside me. A bad dream? Looking in the rear view mirror at the comatose future me, I actually pinch my own arm and tell myself to wake up.
“You’re awake, Raven. This isn’t a bad dream. This is real.” I reach out and touch Alice’s face. Poke it gently. It reacts. It looks at me and says, “Like I said.”
“So who did this to her?” I ask. “To me? I mean, Jesus Christ, she looks like she has survived something…worse than awful.”
“I’d say she might not survive the trip back home, but it looks like what she’s survived makes her nearly immortal.”
“I can be killed, you know.” And apparently with my hacked off arm and my hacked off leg, I can lose pieces of myself as well. Pieces that won’t grow back.
“I know. So did they. It’s that they didn’t kill you after all this time that makes me think torture was their motive. Never death.”
“That’s unbelievable.”
“After all the things you did, after your holy reign of terror, it’s not really as unbelievable as you might imagine.”
My foot smashes the accelerator again and the speedometer climbs to one hundred ten miles an hour. We’re making good time through the desert. Not that it matters. I know I need to get to Holland, but what can he do? The me in the back seat is not even conscious.
“I have to call Holland,” I say after crossing the state line into California. “He can meet us at the lab.”
“Ah,” she says, “Holland. I can’t say I’ve missed him. It will be interesting, catching up.”
Activating the Audi RS5’s Bluetooth, I say, “Dial number,” then give the car Holland’s number. It rings through.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he answers, his voice rancid with sleep.
“Yeah. Save it,” I say, all business. “You need to meet me at the lab in an hour. I have, well I have a problem.”
“You have a thousand problems,” he grumbles.
“It’s…the future me. She’s hurt. Actually she’s really f*cked up.”
“The future you?” he stammers. All the sudden there’s no sleep in his voice at all.
“Yes,” I say, looking at Alice, who’s looking back at me. “Just trust me, Holland.”
In the phone I hear his cat adamantly meowing for his attention. I swear to Christ, that cat is the only normal part of him.
“Fine,” he says. “I’ll be there.”
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