Chapter 10
Kyle
I woke up about six hours ago. The last thing I remember was turning up the electricity lever in the basement, and something went wrong.
When I opened my eyes in the hospital room, a nurse came in almost immediately. "You're awake," she said, getting close to me. "How are you feeling?"
"Lily," I said immediately, feeling my voice too strange. "Is she okay?"
The nurse nodded. "She's still unconscious, but the doctors say she's stable. You both were lucky."
Lucky wasn't the word I would have chosen.
My left wrist was wrapped in a cast, throbbing with a dull ache.
According to the doctor who examined me later, I'll only have to use it for two weeks.
Otherwise, I was remarkably uninjured. But I knew something was wrong, although I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was.
Everything seemed normal. Well, as normal as waking up in a hospital can be.
Until my parents and younger sister came to see me.
Aria looked so small, so fragile, that I almost fainted right there from the shock.
She'd been twenty-two when I last saw her.
Now, she was noticeably younger, maybe eleven or twelve.
Her hair was in pigtails, her face still round with childhood, and none of the adult attitude she'd developed yet was in sight.
My parents were in the same room together, not yelling at each other.
They were even close. Despite seeing my sister incredibly smaller than she should have been, this surprised me even more.
They hadn't even been able to see each other's faces for five years, yet here they were, together, holding hands.
At first, I thought I was hallucinating, a side effect of whatever painkillers they had me on. But then my father squeezed my shoulder, making me realize it was all real.
Real. I didn't even know the correct meaning of that word anymore.
My parents caught me up on what was happening with the excuse that I had a little amnesia after the accident, oblivious to my internal crisis. It was January 6th, 2015, and classes were starting again after the Christmas break. I had decided to volunteer at the hospital for my college resume.
But I never had an accident during that time. This strange situation was new in my life, like an alternate timeline that had diverged from my memories. Something wasn't right, and I didn't know why or how it had happened.
Four hours of checkups later, the doctors officially discharged me, but I told my parents I would stay to see if my friend was okay. I couldn't leave without making sure Lily was alright.
"Don't be too late," my mother said, kissing my forehead. "You have to rest and study for school."
School. I was back in high school. That sounded so impossible, and yet, it felt so real.
My parents gave me my phone and some cash before they left.
As soon as they were gone, I took my time to investigate on the internet, searching for anything about time travel, consciousness displacement, or alternate realities.
I found plenty of science fiction and theoretical physics articles, but nothing that could explain what had happened to us.
Part of me began to think that my entire future life was a dream, and that this was the actual reality. But it didn't make sense. How had I lived such a long life while unconscious? How did I remember so many things in such detail?
Lily could have all my answers.
I believed in the possibility that Lily wouldn't remember anything that had happened in our other life, “our future,” I guess.
That when she woke up, she'd just be eighteen-year-old Lily with no memory of being twenty-eight, no memory of our encounter in the kitchen, no memory of the explosion that somehow sent us back.
I was prepared to face everything alone, like everything from my adult life was just in my head.
But then I saw her outside, wandering the hospital grounds, looking disoriented and serious, and I knew. The way she looked around, the way she moved. This wasn't teenage Lily. This was the woman I'd spent the past week trying to corner at Waldo Security Systems.
I felt selfish, but I was glad I wasn't alone in this madness.
And now here she was, sitting beside me on this bench, punching me in the arm after I'd teased her about our kiss. Some things never changed, even across a decade.
"So we're really here," she said after I confirmed I remembered everything. "Ten years in the past. How is this possible?"
I shook my head. "I have no idea. I've been researching since I woke up, but there's nothing that explains this."
"What do we do now?" she asked with her small teenager's voice.
"I think until we understand why we're in the past, we have to try to live our lives as normally as possible," I said carefully. "Doing everything we remember doing ten years ago."
I've spent the whole morning thinking about the possibilities and repercussions of being in the past on our present, and it was definitely best to find a way to return as quickly as possible without significantly affecting whatever was happening right now.
Lily's eyes widened. "Are you insane? That's the last thing we should do!"
"What do you mean?"
She stood up from the bench energetically. For someone who'd just discovered she'd traveled back in time, she seemed remarkably enthusiastic.
"Don't you see? This is our chance to fix everything! We can change all the mistakes we made, avoid all the terrible things that happened." Her eyes were bright with excitement. "I can warn my mom about her cancer before it's too late. I can take a different college path and avoid—"
"Lily, stop," I interrupted, a chill running down my spine. "You can't just start changing major events. We have no idea what the consequences might be."
"That's exactly what I want, consequences! Different ones than what we got the first time around."
I stood up, too, facing her. "You don't understand. Haven't you ever heard of the butterfly effect? Small changes can have enormous, unpredictable impacts. If you start interfering with the timeline, you could make things worse, not better."
"How could things possibly be worse?" she demanded. "My mother died. The party..." She stopped abruptly, drowning in her thoughts.
The party. Those memories hung between us, impossible to ignore. In our original timeline, someone would be dead in a few weeks.
The tragedy that tore us apart.
"I know," I said quietly. "I know you want to save everyone. So do I. But we have to be careful. We have to think this through. If we change things too drastically, we might not even recognize the future we create."
"Good! I don't want that future. My present, our present," she pointed at us, "sucked because of everything that happened in the past." She took a step closer, her eyes fierce. "Now we have another chance to make things different."
I could see the determination on her face, and I knew I would not be able to change her mind. "What exactly do you want to do, Lily?"
Her answer was immediate and chilling.
"Revenge."