Future Threat

14

Chris snorts. “What, you couldn’t force it out of them somehow? It would save us a lot of time and effort if we knew where to go.”

She gives him a rueful smile. “I know you think poorly of us, but what would you expect us to do? Torture the other team members? Or you?”

“I wouldn’t put it past Aether…” he mutters.

“We’re a publicly traded international corporation full of the best scientists and brightest minds of this century, not some evil organization bent on world domination. We don’t use torture or threats or assassins in the night. If none of you told us what happened, there wasn’t much we could do to get you to talk.”

Sure, they don’t use torture. They only drug people and force them into time machines. But if our future selves didn’t tell Aether exactly what we did, we must have been confident we could track them down on our own. And we must have had a reason for keeping our actions a secret from Aether.

“But we were successful in bringing them back?” Adam asks.

“You were…for the most part,” Dr. Campbell says. “One of the members of Team Echo—Ken Miyamoto—never made it back. According to your report, he died in this time period and you were unable to save his life.”

“He died?” Shivers creep up my spine. The familiar feeling of dread makes my every limb tense up. “How?”

“We don’t know,” Dr. Campbell says. “None of you knew how he died, or when exactly. We’re hoping it hasn’t happened yet, and that you can prevent his death this time.”

Ken Miyamoto’s file opens in my head, and an image appears of a handsome guy about my age, with short black hair and bright brown eyes. He’s grinning and wearing a green shirt that says, Chemists Have All the Solutions. Something in his expression reminds me of Trent, even though they look nothing alike, and my chest tightens at the memory of Trent’s pale hand rising from the trash. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to block it out, but I can’t.

This guy is going to die, just like Trent. Just like Zoe. And I already know that like before, I won’t be able to stop it.

I jerk to my feet before I know what I’m doing, my body on autopilot, trying to get me as far from here as possible. My knee hits the table, making a loud thunk that gets everyone staring and sends shooting pain up my leg. Ow.

“Elena, are you all right?” Dr. Campbell asks, her forehead creased.

The pain brings me back to reality, and I realize I’m about to dart away like a startled bird. My heart bounces around in my chest so fast I’m surprised it doesn’t jump out and run away on its own. But I’m here, not living in a memory, and I manage to fight back the panic.

“Yeah. Sorry.” I sit back down, and the others look at me like I’ve lost my mind. All except Adam. He reaches under the table and sets his hand on my knee. I place my hand over his and hope he can’t tell that my leg is shaking under the thick fabric of my cargo pants.

I shouldn’t be this upset over some guy I’ve never met, but I can’t escape the memories of the others I failed to save and the feeling that this is all much too familiar. Still, I can’t react like this every time I’m faced with something that reminds me of the past. I need to get it together if I’m going to survive the next few hours.

Adam turns to Dr. Campbell, but his hand is steady on my knee as he speaks, grounding me in reality. “If you knew from your files that Team Echo would go missing and that one of them would die, why not warn them? Or stop them?”

Dr. Campbell’s eyes slide away, in the direction of Dr. Chow and the other people in the room. “We were forbidden from telling them…by Vincent Sharp.”

00:18

The three of us stare at Dr. Campbell for a heartbeat. “Why would he do that?” Chris finally asks.

“Vincent worried that if we told the team what happened to them, we might give them the idea in the first place. Instead, we sent an escort with them to make sure they stayed on track, along with two tails following them. But the team managed to abandon all of them in their first few hours here.”

“How?” I ask.

“We’re not sure exactly. From what we can tell, they led our people on a wild-goose chase around the city while picking up supplies, then managed to drug them and disable the trackers we had placed in their tech, allowing the team to escape without detection. As you’ll see in their files, each one of them has special skills like you do.”

The others go quiet, their eyes distant. Studying the information in their flexis on the other team, probably. My breathing has returned to normal, and my mind is back on the mission, thanks to Adam’s calming touch. I focus on the profiles in my head, skimming each of them.

Ken Miyamoto. Only child, half-Japanese, lives with his parents. A chemistry prodigy who identified a gene that could potentially make crops less prone to damage when he was sixteen. He was arrested at eighteen for selling prescription drugs, but the charges were dropped. According to our team’s mission report, we found Ken dead at Griffith Observatory, but we weren’t sure if he was killed there or if his body was moved, nor did we know how he died.

I open the next files and scan the three profiles, memorizing everything inside:

Zahra Ebabi. A self-taught computer expert who runs a popular feminist video-game blog. Her parents are doctors who emigrated from Iran before she and her older brother were born, and now they all live in Beverly Hills. She was recruited after she was caught hacking into Aether’s files.

Paige Hawkins. Blond, blue-eyed, and part of a wealthy family whose photos scream WASP. A potential Olympic contender in gymnastics until she was asked to leave the team after being arrested for shoplifting. Now she’s a psychology major at USC.

Jeremy Sharp. Son of the CEO of Aether Corporation. Mother died in a car accident when he was thirteen. Graduated high school at fifteen. Graduated from MIT at eighteen with a double-major in physics and chemistry. Worked as Dr. Walters’s assistant for a year. His file is the shortest, and yet he’s the main reason we’re here.