Read Online A World Without You by Beth Revis - Free Book Online Page B

eyes.
    My hand shakes as I select the moment. A weekend, when I would be at home and Sofía would be stuck at Berkshire. Sometime after our first date, when everything was still new, but it was also starting to be comfortable. When we’d both sort of accepted the reality of the other.
    October 3. A Saturday evening.
    I hesitate. I won’t be able to do this often—maybe not everagain. I can lie and say I decided to stay at the Berk rather than go home, and it’ll work once, but there’s no way she’ll believe it a second time.
    But I need this now. I focus on that moment in time, the moment where I’ve not been before but where I could be now. I reach out with trembling hands, touching the space in the timestream, wrapping my finger around time itself.
    And I’m there.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    I’m in my bedroom, the sky just beginning to fade into evening. The plants outside my window are dead or dying rather than how I just left them, starting to show life. I run to my desk and read the date on my calendar.
    October 3.
    It worked. I’m here. She’s here—somewhere in the academy.
    I don’t know how this is going to play out. Maybe the moment I see her, I’ll be snapped back into my own time. But if my theory is right, as long as I don’t try to contact her or leave her a message, a warning . . .
    My stomach churns. It feels weird to spy on my girlfriend, weirder still to wish I could warn her away from me.
    I just need one moment
, I think to myself. I just want to see her face. Just once more. It will give me the inspiration I need to figure out how to save her.
    That thought—
save her
—makes reality stutter. I feel it in my navel, a tugging, like the strings of time tightening around my stomach. My breath jerks in my lungs, and my eyes focus like lasers on a single painted concrete block on my wall. I have to shake the thought away. I can’t think about saving Sofía, notwhile I’m here in the past. If time thinks I am going to screw with it, it’ll throw me back to where I’m supposed to be.
    Without her.
    I bite my tongue, tasting blood but focusing on the pain. I try to clear my mind.
Intent matters.
So I won’t intend to do anything other than see her. That’s all. Just one look.
    I sense time easing up on me, the timestream calming and accepting my presence here in the past. I stand up, my legs wobbly, but soon enough I get my bearings.
    A glance at the clock tells me that it’s near dinnertime. Unless we’re having some sort of event, dinners are served in each unit’s common room, and ours is just down the hall from my bedroom.
    I creep down the hallway. I’m not sure what will happen if I’m seen. Just in case, I start thinking of excuses about why I’d be at the academy on a weekend. But I don’t need them—the hallway’s deserted.
    There’s sound and light spilling from the common room. I stand with my back against the wall, listening to the clattering of silverware on plates, the low rumble of voices. A sharp laugh—Ryan’s—pierces the air. I dare to peek around the doors and look inside.
    On weekends, Gwen and I both go home, leaving Harold, Ryan, and Sofía behind. They sit around the main table in the center of the common room now, eating ravioli. The table’s huge even when we’re all there, but it looks like it’s not big enough for the three of them. They’ve spaced themselves out, each taking a different side of the table and sitting as far away from each other as possible.
    The common room is an odd mix of old-school leather and teenaged dishevelment. Big winged chairs litter the edges of the room, interspersed with framed reproductions of famous but somewhat mismatched art—
Starry Night
beside a Renoir next to one of Picasso’s broken women. But there’s also a giant flat-screen connected to the latest