The Eighth Guardian (Annum Guard) Read online

  So instead I fiddle with my collar and pull out the owl necklace. I press the knob up top by the feather, the way Alpha did, and the lid covering the watch face pops open. The face itself is white, and there are black numbers in a fancy, swirly font I’ve never seen before. ANNUM is stamped below the point where the two hands lie on top of each other. The whole face is enclosed in a brass circle, and there are tiny knobs on the right side of the circle. And I mean tiny. There’s . . . something inscribed on each of the knobs, but I can’t see what it is. I fiddle with the one on the bottom, but it doesn’t budge. Neither does the one in the middle. But the knob on top moves. I spin it to the right. The minute hand moves, too, and—

  Click.

  Click.

  That doesn’t sound good. No, worse than that. That sounds bad. Really bad. As if I’ve just messed with a bunch of wires, and a bomb is about to go off. I turn the knob back two clicks to the left, back to where I started, and hold my breath.

  “Already exceeded two thousand dollars?” a voice next to me yells.

  I don’t want to be obvious, so I make only a little quarter turn and shift my eyes to the side. It’s the two men who walked up before. They’re still looking at the dome.

  I stare back at the watch. I bring it closer to my face and squint, trying to make out the inscriptions on the knobs. They’re letters! The top knob has a Y, the middle an M, and the bottom a D. YMD.

  “If they exceed the budget any further,” the same man says, “they’d better not levy a single tax to pay for it. At the first sight of a tax collector, I’m grabbing the missus and the boy and heading west. We’ll become border ruffians.”

  The other man laughs and claps his friend on the back.

  “Bully for you, Morrison!”

  Man, people sure talk funny back . . . whenever I am. YMD. This seems as if it should be easy, but I’m so tired right now I don’t think I could spell my name correctly on the first try. YMD. Yeapons of Mass Destruction?

  “Mark my words,” the first man says, “the Centennial will dawn, the dome will be half completed, and the cost to us all will be five thousand dollars.”

  The other man laughs again. “The Centennial! Morrison, you’re mad! Simply mad. That’s a year and a half away. The remainder of autumn, perhaps, but it will be gilded by new year.”

  The owl necklace slips from my fingers and thumps into my chest. The Centennial is a year and a half away. Even a first grader could tell you the country was founded in 1776, so that means the Centennial is in 1876. Which then means I’m in 1874. It’s fall 1874. I want to leap on both of these men and kiss them, but instead I turn away and start walking back toward the alley.

  I’m close. So close. I know the year, and I know the season; but I still need to figure out the month and the day.

  I stop in my tracks.

  YMD. Of course! Year Month Day.

  I’m already turning the knobs on the watch before I’m the whole way back. Today in the present is October 21, and I’m willing to bet anything that today in the past is October 21, too. That’s why the month and day buttons won’t budge. The mission was to get back. And that means only figuring out the year.

  I turn the Y knob, and the big hand flies around the clock, clucking like a chicken. One whole turn. I bet that’s sixty years. Another turn. And that’s a buck twenty. I slow down and count each tick after that. I can’t screw this up.

  And then I remember Alpha’s instruction. Leave from the place you started. That alley? The broom closet? But I’m locked out, and I don’t have—a key!

  I shove my hand in the knapsack as I run down Beacon Street. I zip to the right at the first street and find the door. Sure enough, there’s a lock on the outside, and the key slides right in.

  “Yes!” I shout to no one. But then there are footsteps. I turn to find the guy and the girl coming toward me. The girl has that look on her face again, like she’s about to pull out a dagger and knife me. What the hell is her problem?

  Guess I’ll figure it out later. I open the door, jump into the tiny closet, and snap the lid of the watch face shut. Here goes nothing.

  There’s a ride at Six Flags New England. Scream. You’re strapped into your seat at ground level, and then with no warning at all you’re shot straight up, twenty stories in the air at sixty miles an hour.

  This is what’s happening to me now. My empty stomach soars and lodges itself into my esophagus, and I don’t have time to scream as my hair is plastered to my face, my arms fly to my sides, and I’m shot up.

  Up.

  Up.

  Up.

  How much longer?

  And then I stop, midflight. There’s a ziiiiiiiiip sound from below, and I crumple to the ground. My elbow slams into a metal grate on the floor, and I groan.

  “Welcome back,” a voice says from above. It’s Alpha. He reaches down a hand, then immediately draws it away when I reach for it.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” he says. “Which I assure you is a statistical certainty should you try to escape from me again. So tell me, are we past all that?”

  I don’t answer the question. Instead I decide to call his bluff. Here. Now.

  “I don’t know. Is Testing Day over now?”

  Alpha’s honey-brown eyes narrow into a look of pure puzzlement. “Testing Day has been over for hours. You graduated. Did you not believe me?”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. His tone is one of finality; his eyes seal my fate. In this instant I know. This is real. And now I’m drowning in an ocean of disappointment, pulled under by a rogue wave of reality. I’m really done at Peel. I can feel it. And that means I’m really done with Abe.

  I start to push myself up, but Alpha grabs both of my shoulders and pushes me back to the floor. “Uh-uh. First you have to promise me that you’re past trying to run away.”

  I’m Annum Guard now. Annum Guard. An organization I’ve never heard of. I have to come to grips with the fact that time travel might be possible. I think. Ugh, I don’t know what to think. But one thing I do know is that Alpha is stronger than me and clearly has more combat training, so I’d be foolish to try to take him in a fight again.

  “We’re past it,” I say.

  Alpha’s hand reaches down again, and this time I take it. He pulls me to my feet. “Glad to hear it. Now you need to project again.”

  My head snaps back. “I need to . . . what?”

  Alpha takes hold of the watch hanging around my neck. “You’re not in the present.”

  I blink. “How . . . I don’t . . .”

  “When you go back in time, you lose time in the present day. If you go back twenty-five years, two minutes pass in the present for every one minute you’re gone. The further back you go, the more time passes. Ever heard of a Fibonacci sequence? It works like that.”

  I try to process what he’s telling me. I don’t even know if I believe him.

  “For instance,” Alpha continues, “you go back four hundred years, and every minute you spend there passes nearly two days in the present.”

  My mouth drops open. I don’t mean for it to. It’s betraying nearly everything I was taught in Practical Studies about keeping my cool.

  Alpha clears his throat and presses on the top knob of the watch. The lid pops open, and Alpha presses the top knob again. The dials fly around the watch six times.

  “For future reference,” Alpha says, “whenever you need to get back to the present, just press on the top knob when the lid is open. It will automatically take you to the present. You’re about six hours behind, in case you were wondering.”

  “What—”

  Before I can finish the thought, Alpha pushes me backward into the black room and shuts the watch face lid. I’m sucked up again, and I choke from the shock. But only a second later I land in a heap on the same metal rail
ing.

  Alpha’s hand extends in front of my face. “We still past it?” he asks.

  I think I’m going to throw up. The grate below me starts to swirl. “Past it,” I say.

  Alpha yanks me up, and I follow him back into the too-bright hallway. He stops outside a door at the other end and enters a code, then turns the handle and cracks open the door an inch. He looks back at me.

  “Are you ready to serve your country in a way you never thought possible?”

  When he says that, the hair on my arms stands on end. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m more exhausted than I have ever been, or that it’s only about sixty degrees in this hallway, or that, maybe deep down, there’s a tiny little part of me hoping Annum Guard is for real. That there’s a secret government organization with the ability to time travel. And that they want me.

  I nod my head.

  Alpha opens the door and gestures me inside. The first thing I notice is the green-striped dress. That bitch who was tailing me is here. She’s taken off the hat and let down her hair. She has pale-blond locks that spiral in curls around her face, and she might actually be pretty if not for the look on her face. It’s the look you might get if someone was holding a bag of dog crap under your nose. I don’t like this chick. I don’t know anything about her, but a girl just has an intuition about these things. She’s not going to like me, and I’m not going to like her. End of story.

  She’s standing off to the side of the room whispering with the guy who was tailing me before. He’s smiling at me, but it doesn’t annoy me like it did back in 1874. The smile is . . . friendly. Relaxed. But still I don’t return it. Not yet.

  There’s a long table at the front of the room with two people seated behind it and an empty seat in the middle. One chair is set front and center before the table, and another row of chairs sits behind it. Seven, I count. Seven chairs. Five of them are occupied by guys and girls who have their backs to me. It’s like everyone is waiting for me.

  Alpha pushes me forward, and I walk past the row of chairs on my way to the seat that I assume is for me. I pass by the girl with the purple hair, but I don’t look down the row. I’m staring straight ahead, at the people sitting behind the table. It’s clear they’re in charge. Alpha takes the empty seat, pulls out the same worn notebook he had on Testing Day, and jots down something. There’s a woman to Alpha’s left, and I know I shouldn’t stare, but I can’t help myself. She’s in a wheelchair, and her arms and legs are bent at unnatural angles and are as thin as twigs. There’s despair on her face, and it makes me think of my mom.

  I look away, to the man on Alpha’s right. He’s in much better condition. Like Alpha, he’s probably around the age my dad would be today. He doesn’t have that tough, gritty look that Alpha does—if I’m being honest, he was probably a bit of a pretty boy when he was younger. He has dark-brown hair flecked with slivers of gray, an angular jaw, and aquamarine eyes staring at me from under eyelashes that most girls would kill for. But still, behind the exterior, there’s something about the way he carries himself that’s really intimidating. That’s one thing he has in common with Alpha. He has to be military or former military, too.

  “Sit,” Alpha commands. I do. “You passed the test. Welcome to Annum Guard. From this moment on, your code name will be Iris. You will go by this name until the day you die. Understand?”

  I don’t move. Don’t blink.

  Alpha stares right at me. “Annum Guard was founded by seven men in 1965,” he says. “These seven men were given the ability of Chronometric Augmentation, to project through time and tweak past events to improve present consequences. They are our founders—our forefathers, if you will. They created the organization and the rules we abide by to this day, including the use of code names. These seven men used numbers as their codes: One through Seven.” Alpha gestures to the people sitting at the table. “My colleagues and I are the second generation of Annum Guard. You already know me. To my left is Epsilon, to my right, Zeta. We are all that remain of the second generation.”

  I rack my brain, trying to remember the Greek alphabet. Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon . . . what?

  “The people seated behind you are third generation. Your generation.” I crane my neck, but I can only see the guy seated all the way on the left. He has dark hair, olive skin, and cheekbones like a movie star’s, and is wearing a white button-down shirt and a pair of navy pants.

  “Red!” Alpha says, and the guy I’m staring at jumps up. “Introduce your team.”

  He nods his head once. “Sir.” I turn all the way around in my seat to look at him. If he was going to give a presentation, you’d think they would have come up with a better seating arrangement beforehand, one that wouldn’t require me to sit backward in a chair.

  “I am Red,” the guy says, even though Alpha made that clear. “The leader of Annum Guard Three. Our code names are colors.

  “This is my team,” he continues, “your team. Orange!” The guy next to him stands up. He does, in fact, have orange hair. That’s unfortunate. “Yellow!” The bitch in the striped dress stands. “Green!” My gazes follows down the line to a short guy with long brown hair. “Blue!” I stare at a tan, blond guy who has his head down, staring at his feet. But at the very last second he looks up and makes eye contact with me. My heart lurches, and I let out a sputtered choke.

  It’s Tyler Fertig.

  I barely hear Red introduce the guy who was tailing me as Indigo and the girl with the purple hair as Violet. Because Tyler Fertig is Annum Guard. Tyler Fertig, superstar of Peel who didn’t get selected to graduate as a junior. Tyler Fertig, who looked angry enough to punch a wall during that graduation. Tyler Fertig. He’s here.

  This does more to solidify Annum Guard in my mind than that little stunt back in Boston. If Tyler Fertig is a member, it has to be legit.

  Tyler and I lock eyes, and I know he recognizes me. He knows who I am. But then he breaks his gaze and sits down with the others.

  Alpha clears his throat, but I hesitate before I turn back around to look at him. I can feel Tyler—Blue—whatever his name is—staring at the back of my head, boring a hole through my skull.

  “And you are Iris,” Alpha says.

  “Which isn’t a color,” I point out.

  “It’s not,” he admits as the man to his right—Zeta, I think?—raises his eyebrows, as if he’s shocked that I just spoke to Alpha that way. “And that’s because you are here on a trial basis.” He clears his throat. “Before we get to that, I think we’d all like to hear a report of how you performed on your first mission. Indigo, we’ll start with you.”

  Indigo makes his way to the front of the room. He’s standing off to the side, in between me and the table.

  He clasps his hands together in front of his body. “Iris did an admirable job. She used powers of deduction to determine the precise year, and she figured out how to use the Annum watch in record time. I think she’ll make a fine addition to Annum Guard.”

  I like Indigo. Not how I like Abe, of course, but I’ll get along with Indigo.

  Behind me, someone clears a throat.

  “Yellow?” It’s the man on the right. “You disagree?”

  I hear her get up behind me. Her dress swishes against the floor as she walks over and stands next to Indigo.

  “I absolutely disagree, sir. Iris committed a number of infractions.” She tosses her head back to get the hair off her shoulder and shoots me a dirty look as she does it. “First, she was seen in civilian clothing by several of the historical subjects. Second”—she pauses, and I’m sure it’s for dramatic effect—“she tried to use a cell phone. In 1874.”

  Behind me, there’s a soft ripple of laughter.

  “I don’t blame her for trying,” Indigo says. “She had no idea where she was, and for all she knew, it might have worked.”

  Yellow holds up a hand to silence him
. “Third, she made vocal contact with an historical subject.” I want to tell her that I’d like to see her not react when someone tries to rob her, but she’s talking so fast I can’t get a word in. “Finally, she nearly blew the mission by walking around in a torn dress with a modern-day school tie wrapped around her waist.”

  I open my mouth to tell her that no one seemed to notice my tie and that I did the best I could with a dress that was clearly too small, but then she’s looking straight at me, one eyebrow raised and a sneer on her face.

  She looks me up and down, her gaze lingering on the torn waistline of the dress, and says, “You’re going to need to lose some weight.”

  “And you’re going to need to kiss my ass.” The words tumble out of my mouth before my brain can process them. Everyone behind me gasps, but I don’t blink. I jump to my feet, and Yellow crouches down like a trained combatant. So she wants to fight? Well, okay then.

  Alpha jumps up and bangs his hand on the table so hard I’m surprised he doesn’t break it. “Everyone, sit down!”

  I don’t take my eyes off Yellow as she slinks away and slides back into her seat between Orange and Green. It’s only then that I turn forward, to Alpha’s angry eyes waiting for me.

  “I told you to sit!” he barks at me, and I do. “Do you not remember me telling you that you were here on a trial basis?”

  “Well, maybe someone should have asked me if I wanted to be here before they plucked me out of school in my junior year, strapped me to a table, implanted a goddamned tracker in my arm, and forced me to join an organization I’ve never heard of.” I’m so angry I don’t care if I’m breaching protocol.

  Alpha leans forward. His eyes are furious, and I expect him to leap across the table and slam me to the ground again. I brace myself. Instead he leans back, grabs a file, flips it open, and starts rifling through a bunch of papers. He pulls one out, walks over to me, and slaps it into my chest. “Remember this?”