I try to distract myself by reading the file that Grayson has left for me. It’s the latest theory on how the disease began, trying to pin it down more and more precisely. In theory, if we know how it began, then we can stop it. We can do almost anything now, and time… time hasn’t been a problem for a while now. Yet another thing that the former incumbents of my office wouldn’t have believed.
Grayson’s report is straightforward. He knows that I like that, so he keeps his reports that way. He knows so much of what I like by now. With Jack gone, he’s just been there for me. Some days, it’s hard to ignore why he makes that effort. He probably thinks I don’t know that he’s in love with me, but it’s Jack I want right now. Jack I’d give almost anything to see again.
Focus
. I have to focus.
The idea is simple enough. In the early twenty first century, there was a nuclear disaster on a scale people couldn’t have comprehended. People who had only gotten their atomic toys to play with seventy years previously decided to use them, and almost wiped one another out. That’s what the evidence suggests. Simple, provable fact.
The more hypothetical part of the report follows on from that one fact. Millions, even billions of people died in the disaster, yet we know that many were saved. The best and the brightest. Those with the faintest traces of the abilities we would develop in the millennia that followed. With such a concentrated gene pool, those traits just got stronger and stronger. For so long, that has seemed like a good thing, yet now, it seems to have opened us up to the fever. We’ve run into a genetic dead end that threatens to kill us all. Only by stopping the disaster will we be able to go on.
Do I have the right to do that? Do I have the right to change a whole world?
If not me, then who?
“We’re ready, Madame President,” Grayson says, coming into the room. “That is, if you still want to go through with it?”
I nod. “We’ve been through this. I’ve made my decision. Please just help me to do this.”
Grayson nods, leading the way through the White House to the room where he and John have set up the machine. John looks his usual harassed self, a little older than the two of us, flecks of gray starting to show in his hair. He glances up as we arrive.
“Good, you’re here. Grayson, have you explained the process?”
He’s told me the basics several times, but now, he seems determined to go through it again. Maybe he thinks that it will persuade me not to do it.
“You know that the machine doesn’t really move you in time?” he says. “It just disintegrates you, then rebuilds you from scratch in the desired destination.”
“That’s not a problem, Grayson,” I assure him. “Nothing about this is. I’ve handled wars, rebuilding our country, droughts, hurricanes. Next to those, a little jaunt to stop a bunch of primitive humans from blowing themselves up isn’t a big deal.”
“It’s a
very
big deal, Celes,” Grayson insists. “Here, you have knowledge, backup, and technology. There, you won’t have any of those things. You’ll be a baby, completely helpless.”
“You said that I’d have Sara to protect me,” I point out. Sara is one of my bodyguards. She was one of the first to make the journey, and one of the strongest. Almost as strong as me.
“We were able to locate Sara because of the signals her powers give off,” Grayson agrees. “The machine can track them. In theory, even if she doesn’t know exactly who you are, even if she’s confused, she should still feel a connection to you and want to protect you. In theory.”
“Some days, theory is all that we have,” I say. “It’s better than having nothing at all.”
“You won’t have nothing,” Grayson promises. “You’ll have me.”
“No, Grayson. We talked about this. I forbade it.”
Grayson shakes his head. “Once you’re not here, you can’t forbid me anything. I’ll go whether you want me to or not.”
“You won’t remember,” I say, trying to reason with him. “You didn’t score as well as me on the tests.”
“I’ll remember,” Grayson insists. “I promised Jack I’d look after you, remember? It’s been almost four years now, and you know how I feel about you.”
“I know,” I say. If he’s going to admit it, I can. After all, we both know how close we’ve gotten, “and there’s part of me that feels the same way, Grayson, but I have to do this.”
He kisses me, and it’s such a sweet kiss. Such a gentle kiss.
He’s kissed me before, a few times, in the years Jack has been gone, when we’ve both been lonely, or needed it, or just wanted to. With Jack gone so long, expecting to wait would be too much. Yet there’s more to this kiss. This is the kind of kiss that promises forever.
“We might not remember each other at first,” Grayson promises, “but I’ll find you. When I see you, I’ll know.”
“That’s not what the tests say, Grayson.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t care about the tests. I’ll know. I think you will too.”
I don’t point out the obvious, which is that if I’m in the same time as Jack, Grayson isn’t the one my heart will call to, however many intimate moments we’ve stumbled into over the past few years. There is one other point I can make, though.
“Grayson, you really shouldn’t go. You’re needed here to fight the disease.”
“I’m going after you, Celes,” Grayson insists.
I look over at John. “Don’t let him go back, John. He isn’t to follow unless there’s no other way, understood?”
“Celes…” Grayson begins, but I cut him off with a kiss. It might be Jack I’m going after, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love Grayson at least a little by now. I might have tried to ignore it before, tried to pretend that what was between us wasn’t serious, but I guess I can risk it now. After all, I might not be back. So I kiss him. I kiss him in a way that isn’t sweet, or gentle. It’s just passionate. It’s just us.
“I’ll be back, Grayson,” I say. I laugh. “Thanks to time travel, I’ll be back before you even know it.” I take a moment to look at the fading machine. It will, technically, kill me. It will scatter my atoms, saving only a plan from which to recreate me at the other end of the wormhole into the past. It is, when I think about it like that, an insane thing to want to do.
For love though, and for the sake of the world, I’ll do it.
Celes, Jack, and Grayson’s stories continues in
Fever (FADE #4)
Releases
October 2012
From Top Author for Young Adults
Kailin Gow
PULSE
17 year-old Kalina didn’t know her boyfriend was a vampire until the night he died of a freak accident. She didn’t know he came from a long line of vampires until the night she was visited by his half-brothers Jaegar and Stuart Greystone. There were a lot of secrets her boyfriend didn’t tell her. Now she must discover them in order to keep alive. But having two half-brothers vampires around had just gotten interesting…
From Top Author for Young Adults
Kailin Gow
BITTER FROST
All her life, Breena had always dreamed about fairies as though she lived amongst them… beautiful fairies living amongst mortals and living in Feyland. In her dreams, he was always there – the breathtakingly handsome but dangerous Winter Prince, Kian, who is her intended. Then she sees Kian, who seems intent on finding her and carrying her off to Feyland. If she is his intended, why does he seem to hate her and want her dead? And her best friend Logan has suddenly become protective. Things are getting strange…
A Fun Fact about FORGOTTEN
Forgotten and the FADE Series is purely fiction and is an imagined state of the future.
But here is a strong coincidence, unbeknownst to the author at the time of writing how an event in FORGOTTEN coincided with an actual event in reality.
Forgotten was first released on Amazon Kindle on March 8, 2012.
The most powerful solar storm occurred on March 6, 2012, with the prediction that a “glancing blow to our planet's magnetosphere is possible on March 8th or 9th." – Huffington Post
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