Took Me Yesterday (book 2 of The Tomo Trilogy)

Yesterday

In the end, I had to turn the key to open the doors of my freedom. The elevator doors. The ones I stepped out of and Mr. Tomery didn't.

He was dead, and no one had expected that result when I was the one who appeared. Not even me. Not even when Olive found a blanket and wrapped me up in it and whispered lovely things to me. Something about life and living and loving again.

But I couldn't feel a thing. Couldn't see a thing. I couldn't even hear, not beyond the gunshot.

In three days' time, Broden and Miles and Lily came to visit me. We didn't talk much, but we did laugh. At what, I didn't know, but I liked the way Lily's cat rubbed his whiskers on my face and the way Argos let it happen, only replacing the space next to me when no one else was there.

On the fourth day, Olive came in and told me they'd made contact with my family. My dad—along with Lyn and Falo—were safe, somewhere in Albany, and Topeka had closed its borders again. Despite it all, we were free. Raleigh was an independent nation, and Topeka had to acknowledge it after Mr. Tomery's death went public. There'd be fireworks tonight, and she wanted to warn me.

Before the first one went off, I pushed myself out of bed, took a shower, and smoothed down what crazy curls I could without looking in a mirror. Then, I knew I needed to face a mirror again. One that wasn't in an elevator.

I looked at myself, at my tired eyes and pale cheeks, and saw a million versions of me reflected, one after the next. As if I still stood in that elevator. As if Mr. Tomery was still speaking.

"Would you still do it?"

Only now did I realize I'd never answered his question. Only now did I realize he had been trying to tell me something about tomo, how time worked, how everything worked.

"You didn't create a drug to take us back to yesterday."

"I didn't create a poisonous one either."

An eerie buzz simmered in my blood since that day. Hadn't I once told Broden that I wished tomo had gone the other way? A drug that allowed me to go backward instead of forward?

My numbness didn't feel so numb anymore.

I left Sophia standing in the mirror, and then, I went to the open forum. Broden saw me, stood, then sat down again. Miles, with one glance, thought to look away, but Lily rushed over to me and hugged me hard.

"You should go outside," she said, so I did.

There, sitting on the tallest sand hill next to the beach, was a boy. A boy with blond hair, longer than normal, and eyes like rain. Even against the setting sun and the churning ocean and the bustling city, I could see him as clearly as I had seen my own reflection. Broken but alive. Alive and free.

I sucked up a breath and made my way over, his eyes never moving to me, but nevertheless, I felt seen. He continued to stare at the sea when I sat next to him. Beyond the breeze, Rinley and Louise danced down the shoreline like yesterday and the days before it hadn't happened. Their giggles soared over us, and for a moment, Noah smiled.

"Why don't you sit with me?" he asked, patting the space between his legs.

"But—"

He grabbed my arms and dragged me through the sand until my back rested against his heart and his hand rested against mine. "What's this?" he asked, and before I could move, his hand went inside my jacket and landed on the blade I'd kept with me since that day. The knife next to my heart, where Pierson had kept a picture of his wife instead of a blade. Noah stared at the shining silver like he understood it all, and then he tossed it away.

I went to stand, but he held me there, tightening his hug around my torso, his lips on my neck, his breath on my spine. "Sophie, stay."

I stayed and I listened—to the waves crash against the shore, to his whispers on my ears, to the crack of the first firework, an explosion in a now-sunless sky. The first one was blue, like tomo, and the next one after that was pink. I lost the colors after that.

Noah's lips moved across my neck, kissing the words before he said them. "What'd you mean when you said you wished tomo worked the other way?"

Of course he was thinking about the same thing I was.

We always had been on the same wave length, even when we were apart, and no matter how much I wanted to ignore that, there was no denying the truth that now hung in the air.

That moment between Broden and I flickered through my memory, seemingly as far away as the bobbing boats out at sea, black points against an ever-darkening sky. Distant for now. But eventually, they'd come to dock.

"That's what you're worried about?" I asked once I found my voice.

"Please," he said, and I heard his unsaid words. Tell me.

"I thought..." I breathed in the ocean air. "You'd be better off without me. Broden, too." I thought I could go back to yesterday and change it all, just as Mr. Tomery had asked, just as the world had wanted. "I can't help but feel like I screwed everything up by meeting you."

"You just freed Raleigh."

But I hadn't. A dozen of people had. People who'd been striving for it long before I was even born. People who thought nothing of me now. The face of freedom was Tasia, the martyr her twin sister Tamara. I was already forgotten, and it seemed Mr. Tomery was, too.

"Your dad's dead, Noah," I said, regretting the words the moment I said them, but he didn't react. Not how I thought he would. Instead of screaming or shouting or crying or blaming, he held me tighter. He laid his forehead on my shoulder. He moved his fingers across my sternum like my heartbeat had leapt out of my chest and he was trying to push it back in.

"It doesn't feel real," he said after a moment. "None of this feels real."

"None of it ever has," I agreed.

"Nothing but you," he said, and this time, I didn't argue.

He reached up to take my hand. He opened my fingers and kissed my palm. His breath, one last question. "What do we do now?"

"Well," I answered honestly, "your father said Phelps will go after my mother next, so I say we go to Albany."

Noah searched my gaze. "Wherever you go, I'll be there."

"Even if it's to our past?"

He smiled. "I'm already there, aren't I?"

For now, I thought.

"We should go," I said, unable to clarify if I meant to Albany or our past or both. But he knew what I meant. He understood that I wanted it all. 

"After the show," he agreed solemnly. 

And so, we sat there in silence as the fireworks erupted over the ocean, a burst of color against the ever-darkening black. The unknown. Eventually, this would become yesterday, and then months ago, and then years. But somewhere on the plane of time, we would always be sitting here in the sand, hands intwined, legs crisscrossed.

If tomo could take me back in time, I thought, I would be okay if this is where it took me.

I would wake up here, right as we were, and I would visit over and over again. Even if I could change time with tomo, we'd always have this.

We'd always have yesterday.

And now, yesterday was the future. 

Yesterday was endless.