This Is How It Ends (Page 55)

“Crazy shit,” I interrupted, feeling my heart pounding.

“A lot of it, yeah,” Sarah said. “But there’s something there. And my mom—and dad—thought there were ways to tap into it through a sort of hypnosis.”

“The binoculars—her déjà vu glasses—hypnotize you?”

“They put you into a state where you can access things you normally can’t.”

“What kind of things?”

“Memories,” Sarah said. “From the future.”

I stared at her, her tangled hair and torn, dirty face. My mind was spinning through the possibilities and impossibilities of what she was saying. “Sarah—” But I couldn’t finish the thought. I didn’t know where it led.

“Do you remember what Mr. Ruskovich told you?” she asked. “About things traveling the through space-time continuum?”

I nodded. “Matter can’t,” I croaked.

“But energy can,” Sarah finished quietly. “And brain waves create energy.”

She let that hang, and I tried to process it. But my brain felt swollen, pounding against my skull.

“So the things we saw,” I said slowly, “are thoughts and memories we have in the future?” I was trying to find sense in the words as I said them, but mostly it felt like I was just repeating what she’d said.

“Yes,” she said, sounding relieved. “That’s right, Riley. That’s why she called them déjà vu glasses, because that’s what gave her the idea to start with.”

I just stared, and Sarah explained, “My mom thought that feeling of having done something before is so intense because we have the memory of it, the way it feels and looks and smells, it’s all”—Sarah tapped her head—“stored up here.”

It was so impossible, so crazy. There were so many ways I should have been able to shoot holes in this ridiculous story. If only I could think. “Why didn’t you tell us before?” I asked mechanically, not even really aware that the words had come out, until I saw tears pooling in Sarah’s eyes.

“She told me I couldn’t,” Sarah said.

“Who? Your mom?”

Sarah nodded. “She left about a week after the day she explained them to me. I heard her and my dad fighting downstairs. They didn’t throw things or yell, but there was a certain way their voices were.” Tears spilled over, running through the mud on Sarah’s cheeks. “I was on my bed when she came in and sat beside me.

“‘I have to go,’ she told me. ‘I wanted you to come, but . . . well, it’s not that simple.’” Sarah was openly sobbing, her words coming in bursts between broken breaths. “I remember her winking at me,” Sarah said bitterly. “Handing me that case with the binoculars and saying, ‘It’s just as well, sweets. I’ve got a job for you here. An important one.’ Like my life wasn’t falling apart. Like I gave a shit about her stupid glasses.” Sarah spat the words out, swiping at her nose, her cheeks, with the sleeve of her jacket. She was a mess, her eyes wild, and I wondered again about her sanity.

“What was it, Sarah?” I asked gently, thinking maybe if I coaxed out the rest, we could go home. Back to my house or hers. To the hospital or the shrink her dad wanted her to see.

“She wanted me to get them where they needed to be,” Sarah said dully.

“And where was that?”

She didn’t answer, just kept staring at me, tears running down her face, glistening in the sun.

I felt a strange stillness, a dread-filled certainty—like that first night at the cave when I didn’t want to open the box because I almost knew already what was inside and where it might lead—that I shouldn’t ask. But I did.

“What, Sarah?” I demanded, fear making the words harsher than I meant them to be. “Where did they need to be?”

“With you,” she whispered.

CHAPTER 33

HER WORDS WERE PERFECTLY DISTINCT, but incomprehensible. “With me?”

“That’s the thing I remember most about the night she left,” Sarah said. “‘You’ll know, honey.’” Sarah’s voice was higher, mimicking her memory. “‘You’ll look in them, and one day you’ll see the boy I’m talking about. He’s here. And when he looks like he does in these, you’ll know its time. And you’ll know how.’” Sarah closed her eyes, squeezing them tight like she could hold in the tears. I could barely think through the black, ugly buzzing in my head. The boy. Me.

“No,” I heard myself say. “That can’t be. If your mom invented something like that, she’d be famous. She’d have sold it for millions—”

“Sold it to who, Riley?” Sarah asked quietly. “So they could do what?”

She was right. It was the invention of the century, the millennium maybe. But who could you give it to? Who could you trust with something like that?

Certainly not a seventeen-year-old boy you didn’t know.

Except maybe she did know me. In the future.

“Why?” I asked, still trying to pick through the mind-bending possibilities. “Why me?”

“You do something with them,” Sarah said simply. “Something important. That’s all she said. If I got them to you, they’d be safe and she’d come back for me.”

I stared, aghast. “She told you that? If you gave me the binoculars, she’d come back?” It was a ridiculous, awful condition to put on someone, especially your kid.

Sarah’s face crumpled, her voice strangled by sobs. “Yes.”

“And?” I asked roughly. I knew it was mean, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Has she?”

She shook her head, still sobbing. “No.”

I went to her then, put my arms around her and she let me. I didn’t feel like I usually did, close to Sarah. I felt cold. I do something with them. My mind rushed through all the things she’d said. Trying to figure out what, if any of it, could be true. Maybe she felt my hesitation, because she pulled away after a minute.

“Why did you come looking for them?” I asked. “If I’m supposed to have them, why are we here?”

“I never meant it to be like this, Riley,” she said, her eyes desperate again. “All the things that happened . . . I didn’t know—”

The full truth and horror of it hit me then. All the things we’d seen. Sarah had known they’d happen.