Always/Never

Chapter 3 / What Year Is It?

University campuses revolved around time, the factor that ruled every student's life. Dates controlled assignments, schedules, exams. Dates filled the bulletin board in Zen Hall across from reception.

Every day of the week scrawled across the top in poster-board neon. The list showed what clubs met on which days, and told me the events the library was hosting. Monday: Track and field and a new class in biophysics. Tuesday: A seminar on sustainability, which, printed out and pinned down with plastic thumbtacks, almost seemed ironic.

How hard could it be to figure out what year it was?

I spun around, unease distant and unfamiliar within me. The woman at the reception desk looked at me over the screen of her phone. Still rectangular and with OLED displays, so that was something.

"I lost my keys," I said. Reached for her computer through the system. It pushed against me with a force that made me step back. As if I was trying to make my way through a heavy, jelly-like haze, the impulse of the technology in front of me fuzzed at the edges, and grasping only made it fizzle away.

I blinked. Tried again and crashed against the brick wall pressed against my stomach. A firewall? Even that couldn't be so strong. It's resistant to me, like the system sees me as a bug in its code.

"What's your name?" the woman asked.

One more try. I dug my fingernails into the reception desk so hard my heartbeat echoed inside the tendons. Still nothing. That meant there were two options. Either I was so far in the future that computers had evolved to the point that I could no longer access them, or...

"Your name." The woman stared at me.

"Rory."

She typed. A clack against the keyboard. "Devereau or Lennox?"

Or I was so far back in the past that I hadn't gotten my power yet. I scraped a hand through my hair and bonded it there. When I let go, I didn't know what I was going to do. "Never mind. I remember where they might be." I shook my head to prevent her from saying anything further. "It's okay. I'll go find the RA."

I steadied my breathing. That wasn't possible. It couldn't be. If I was in the past, while I was still in university, why was I still me? Why had I gotten out of the machine as Ridge, from the future, and why could Ridge from the future not use her powers? Didn't that defeat the point?

I was still me.

Whatever. This wasn't worth stressing over. The machine malfunctioned. Simple. I stomped across the parking lot, sparse with trucks and older model cars; though, perhaps they were modern by current standards, and through the twisting paths that traced to the garden of residence buildings. The fresh-mowed grass made my nose twitch. Shrubbery guarded every brick building, each taller than the last. It hadn't occurred to me until I reached mine that I didn't know if I remembered what my residence building was called. Rather, it was an autopilot, hard-coded in my DNA, that guided me here.

Block lettering on its side read 'Beaumont.' It certainly looked no different from the buildings encircling it. But somehow the other ones were wrong. I ascended the trio of stairs to the door and scoured in my pockets for my laser.

I hadn't travelled through time with anything other than myself and the system before, so the fact that it had come with me seemed like a good sign. Its power would last a while. Unlike patented inventions, I hadn't bothered with the kill switch, a handler safety that prevented villains from using them. That only works if I care enough.

Especially when I pressed it flat against the electronic lock, testing its strength against the magnet within.

Flicking it on, I held it there. The vibrations coursed through my wrist as it chewed through the wood and hit.