The school in the middle of the great city once called London was a three-story building: one floor for elementary, one floor for middle school, and one floor for high school. It was all concrete and stone, sharp corners and cold floors, thin windows that were never opened and thin doors that were always perfectly oiled. The children all wore the same uniform--the boys had tan pants and red plaid shirts, and the girls had black sweaters and tan skirts and Mary Jane shoes. It was one of the quietest, most placid places you could find.
Autumn hated it.
That day was worse than normal. It was raining, and rain always put her to sleep. When you fell asleep in that school, it never ended well. Especially in math class. Especially when you had bad grades already. Especially when you sat in the front of the room and the teacher was standing right there.
She went to lunch with her head down, a test with a huge red ZERO scrawled across it in her bookbag. Mother would be so disappointed.
Lunch that day was normal, boring old school food. A sandwich and milk and some green beans. Oh, well. She was happy to have any food at all; some people didn't.
Oh, and something new, apparently.
What's this? she thought, peering at the white container.
It had an aluminum foil cover on it, and little pictures of blueberries all over it, but no name or anything. Just blueberries, and the expiration date:
04-24-2058.
Just a few days away from now, Autumn thought.
She put it on her tray cautiously and, when she sat down at the table, saw that everyone had a container with blueberries on it. And they all appeared to be really enjoying it, too.
She peeled back the aluminum foil and made a face.
Are you kidding me? I hate yogurt!
She disinterestedly dropped it back on her tray and ate everything else. No one paid any attention.
It was still raining when she walked home from school. The rain was lovely to see and hear, but it was cold, and never really seemed to end. Autumn missed the sunshine. Plus the rain made her frizzy red hair even frizzier and, somehow, even redder. She couldn't wait to be home, in her warm little brick house with fireplaces ablaze in every room, with her older sister Sammy, who was twelve, and her little brother James, who was four. And Mother. What would she say about that zero in math class?
Stepping down off the sidewalk into the damp empty road, Autumn stumbled over something hidden under a plastic bag. Curious, she turned back and kicked the bag aside.
In the damp road lay a disk of metal. In the middle of the metal circle was a red button. Autumn picked it up, observing it. It was heavier than she expected. It was simple and seamless and had no writing anywhere.
She looked around and, seeing no boys who would make fun of her or some terrorist waiting to see her explode, she pushed the button.
It let out a click, loud in the quiet of the deserted street.
Nothing else happened.
Scoffing, Autumn turned and
she was no longer in the road.
Warmth and dry air surged past her, and gleaming lights illuminated a pale stone ceiling high, high overhead. The linoleum floor shone a glossy color, almost golden, and sweet smells and soft chattering voices came from every direction.
Turning about in amazement, Autumn realized she was somewhere she'd never been before: A shopping mall.
Being a nine-year-old girl, Autumn didn't care how she'd come to suddenly find herself in a mall. She cared that she was there, and it was everything she'd dreamed it would be. It was paradise. There were fancy stone fountains in the middle of the lobbies, huge trees growing right inside, skylights with the sun shining down through them. Autumn bounced about from store to store, knowing she wouldn't buy anything but wanting to see the kinds of things they had anyway.
Spinning away from a store filled with nothing but teddy bears, Autumn slammed right into a lady holding a baby. The baby began to cry, and Autumn, in shame, put her hands over her mouth.
“I'm so sorry, miss! Are you okay?”
The lady sighed. She looked exhausted, with stringy blonde hair and bags under her eyes. Her clothes were old and worn.
“I'm fine. I'm rounding up my kids. Here”—she thrust the now-quiet baby towards Autumn—“hold this one for me, will you?”
Autumn, thoroughly surprised but seeing nothing else to do, put the button in her skirt pocket and followed the lady.
The lady led Autumn through the length of the mall, calling to small children playing in some corner or store across the lobby, and they all came bouncing up to follow her. Strangely, Autumn noticed that they all had a container of the blueberry yogurt, the same kind from school today. Even the baby had a smear of it on her face, which Autumn carefully wiped off.
Eventually the lady had seven kids with her, a swarm of energy and cheerful sound. Autumn, forgotten, followed the lady down an escalator with the baby, three kids behind her, watching them scrape up every last bit of their blueberry yogurt with a ravenous vigor that kind of scared her. What was so good about it? It was just yogurt.
“Why do you guys like that stuff so much?” she asked them, but they barely glanced up.
Stepping off the escalator, Autumn's mouth fell open in total astonishment.
All of the walls in between the stores on this floor were stocked—packed—crammed with blueberry yogurt. It disappeared quickly, slipping into carts and baskets, but someone behind the wall was evidently keeping it stocked, for every time one was taken, a new one slid down the rack, making it impossible to put the yogurt back—not that that was really an issue.
All around her, people were devouring the blueberry yogurt like parched people in the desert who have just found a neverending supply of water. She saw absolutely no one—not a single person—who wasn't eating it, although some less intently than others.
The reality of where she was was starting to settle in, so she ran to catch up with the lady, to return the baby girl so she could press the button and hopefully go home.
The lady now had her own cup of yogurt, produced from a purse somewhere, and looked much more alert. Even her hair looked better, strangely.
“I'm sorry, miss, but I have to go now,” Autumn said rapidly, and held the baby out to the lady. Reluctantly, the lady set her yogurt down and took the baby, settling her in the front seat of a cart Autumn hadn't even seen her pick up. Peering in, Autumn saw various things, mostly school clothes, but, of course, among the things the lady had were containers and containers of blueberry yogurt. She wasn't surprised.
She began to pull the button out of her pocket, but then she looked back at the lady. She was still eating her yogurt, but she was also gazing hungrily at the racks of chicken in one store. Many of the children were looking, too, but they took one look at their mother and turned away, knowing better than to ask.
Autumn felt an understanding stab of compassion. She knew how that felt, that was for sure, although she hadn't felt like that in a few months, now that Mother had her new job and all. She probably had enough money on her to get an extra-large chicken bucket for all of them to share; it surely wasn't too much.
Three minutes later, she came back to where the lady was finishing her yogurt, and, rather awkwardly, set the plastic bucket of chicken down in front of her. Oddly, the chicken had a blue tint to it.
“Here, miss,” she said. “Your little children looked awfully hungry.”
The lady actually dropped her empty yogurt container, she was so dumbfounded.
“Wha...why would...thank you! No one does things like this...”
It was the first time Autumn had seen the woman smile. Her children looked happy, too. Autumn, as she turned to walk away, thought about the woman's comment—no one does things like this. She must be in a very different place, for where she came from, it was common for people to buy others food. Not that she had ever done it before now, but she saw strangers buying each other food all the time, and people had done it for her, too.
She pulled the button from her pocket and, just before she pressed it, she heard a few lines of a song drifting from overhead.
It made her shiver, for she recognized it. That was such an old song! Forty years, at least!

I'm losing my mind, losing my mind, losing control
These fishes in the sea, they're staring at me, whoa-oh
A wet world aches for a beat of a drum...

Her sister listened to that song sometimes. For some reason, when Autumn heard it, her mind immediately flew to the blueberry yogurt.

A dark world aches for a splash of the sun...

Autumn pressed the button.

One more spoon of cough syrup now...
One more spoon of cough syrup now..

Fluorescent lights. Monotonous quiet. Uncomfortable seat. Autumn looked up. She was seated at a metal table, perfectly square, and one person, a man, sat across from her. He looked extraordinarily familiar, somehow. He had red hair and and freckles, like her, but it was the eyes that made her realize who it was. She and her siblings all had different eyes; her little brother had big dark eyes, while she had blue-green, and her older sister Sammy had pale greys, almost silver. They stared at each other for a long minute.                                           “James?” Autumn whispered. “Is that you? What…year is it?” The man blinked.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said back. It was a shock to hear her little brother’s voice so grown and mature. His voice was raspy, his dark eyes deep and fathomless.
“I’ve lost track, really. Twenty…seventy-something.”
James swallowed. “You got the button.”
She looked down at the metal disk, still sitting heavily in her hand. She reached up and set it on the table. “Yeah.”
James rubbed his eyes. “I was hoping you would get it. Now you can do it.”
“Do what?”
“Help us.”
“What’s happened?”
He shook his head.
“It’s weird to see you so little. My big sister. I was so used to you telling me what to do. Not easy being the youngest; you want to make your own decisions, but the minute you get the chance it’s impossible.”
The fact came back to Autumn that the last time she had seen him, that morning before she went to school, she was yelling at him because he’d spilled chocolate milk he wasn’t even supposed to be drinking all over her neat little Mary Jane shoes. They were the only part of her uniform she bothered to take care of. She’d made him cry and hadn’t even felt bad about it. How important are shoes compared to my little brother?
She said nothing.
“To us,” James said, “you vanished that day. No one had any idea where you went. But I invented the button, and I went back myself and put it right where a girl from school said she saw you pick something up. I hoped I was right. And I was. And you’re here. I was hoping to send you home immediately, but then all this happened, and Mother died, and Sammy was shipped off to the camp, and I’m the only one left. And then the button started messing up when I tried to go into the past. I always know where it is and who has it—I have a tracker. So I want you to go set Sammy free, just in case I can’t get you back to the day you left. After that, I’ll try and send you home. If it doesn’t work out…well, I guess you’ll just stay with me here.”
Autumn took a deep breath. Her heart was racing. Help them? Inventor? Mother died? Sammy shipped off to camp? Set her free?
Try to send her home?
“What do I have to do?” she asked shakily.
“You’re going to press the button. You’re going to find yourself at the camp. You’re going to see Sammy, but she won’t be…herself. Don’t be scared of her, okay? Sammy is still herself, somewhere, but you won’t recognize her at first. She might act like she’s going to hurt you, but she won’t. Whatever you do, absolutely do not touch the blueberry yogurt. Okay? Oh, and if a helicopter starts to fly towards you, hide. Try to open the gate or smash the wall or something. Whatever you do, just don’t get caught and don’t eat the yogurt. Any questions?” Autumn’s brain spun in circles. She was beyond confused.
“Wait, why am I setting her free? Can’t I just go home and fix everything?”
“That’s going to be the second thing we do. But the button doesn’t work perfectly—it messed up a little, like I said, which is why you ended up at that shopping mall a few years ahead the first time you pressed it, instead of going straight home. I can set the button to what time and place I want you to go, but sometimes for some stupid reason it just doesn’t work right. See, it’s crazy; you vanished that day because I left the button there, but I put the button there so you wouldn’t vanish. It’s a paradox.” Autumn nodded, beginning to understand.
“So I’ll go into the future first—just like a few hours, right?”
He nodded.
“And that’s like a failsafe for Sammy just in case you can’t get me home.”
“Exactly.”
“All right.” She stood up, grabbing the button.
James stood too. “I would explain everything that’s going on, but I’m sure you want to get this over with, so you’re just going to go and figure it out, okay?”
Autumn nodded, and then, suddenly overcome with emotion, she walked around the table and wrapped her arms around her brother.
Then she turned away, closed her eyes, and pressed the button.
A soft breeze drifted past, pushing her hair back and caressing her face. A warm light soaked her in comfort like a hot bath when one has a fever, and the distant sound of water rolled in her ears. Soft tall grass whispered at her knees, and her Mary Jane shoes sank into soft dirt. She opened her eyes and gasped in delight. She knew this place! This was her grandmother’s home! There was the tiny stone cottage! There were the birch trees! There was the lone mountain in the distance! She whirled around to look at the lake, which had always been her favorite thing here. There it was, pristine and shining as always. Autumn had never seen water so blue and inviting before she saw this place. It was tranquil here, but it was quiet. Too quiet.
Autumn, a bit apprehensive about all James had said, turned again to the cottage. The house was dark and still. Maybe she’d gone too far into the future and no one lived here anymore? She ran to the cottage, up onto the front porch…and hesitated. Where was the front door? And what was that, just inside the doorway? She stepped forward. It took her a minute to make out what the heck was inside the doorway. It was the roof. Wooden beams and chunks of stone filled the doorway completely, blocking it in. There was no way to get inside. Most bewildering of all was the picture someone had tried to spray-paint over all the rubble.
A blueberry. Figures.
Autumn looked down—and jumped back. She let out a small sob. Vomit rose in her throat, but she couldn’t look away.
Sticking out from under the debris was a gnarled old hand, decayed by years but not quite skeletal, and it wore her grandmother’s wedding ring.
She spun around and tore away, sprinting for somewhere else, anywhere else.
“JAMES!” she screamed. “You sent me to the wrong place! I don’t want to be here! Take me to the camp!”
Footsteps from behind startled her, and she jumped, wiping away her tears. Standing before her, staring her down, but not in an aggressive way, was…well, she wasn’t sure. She was a person. But she wasn’t human. She was blue, for one. She walked hunched over like a gorilla, and was butt-naked, and had white hair and pale grey eyes, almost silver. She stared back. How long had that lady-thing been here? She looked past it and was startled again. What the heck? When did that get there? A wall made of thick old logs surrounded the entire clearing, blocking out the lake and most of the birch trees. One wall of her grandmother’s old house was completely crumbled away.
“I went further into the future,” she said to the naked blue gorilla lady, “didn’t I?”
She didn’t expect an answer—the blue lady hadn’t said a word or really moved at all yet—but when she spoke, the blue lady opened her mouth and let out the wildest shriek Autumn had ever heard. In the voice of Gollum from Lord of the Rings, the blue lady screeched,
“HALLUCINATE! NEVER SPEAK BEFORE! LEAVE BE NOW! GONE LONG! NOT YOU! EVIL!”
Autumn, terrified, screamed and ran from the blue lady thing, only to find herself standing in front of five or six more of them. Men and women, all of them naked and blue and screeching. They ran away—well, they bounced away, really. Autumn slowed as they all bounced off, including the lady who’d been screeching at her seconds before. They weren’t angry; they were afraid. She watched for a moment. They all ran and hid behind the ruins of the tiny cottage. The blue lady kept glancing over her shoulder at Autumn and screeching.
In a dreadful instant, Autumn understood. This was the camp. And that blue lady, the one with the pale grey eyes, almost silver…that had to be Sammy. This all happened because of yogurt? Autumn thought, confused. She thought about how they had all been given the blueberry yogurt at lunch. How there was someone behind the shelves at the mall, always keeping them stocked. And it was impossible to put it back when you got it. And there was no label on it.
She looked up at the sky. Yes, there was a helicopter, way up above the camp, just a speck in the clouds, but steadily growing closer. She looked back at the cottage ruins. She walked over, where she could hear the blue peoples’ raspy breathing. Blueberry yogurt containers were all over the ground, some fresh and some moldy. As she stood looking at them, trying to puzzle it all out in her head—were they keeping the infected people for testing, maybe?—the sound of heavy wings beating filled her ears, and something bounced off her head.
She looked down. A blueberry yogurt container. A new one.
She looked up. They were falling down everywhere. The blue people didn’t spare her a glance as they burst out of their hiding places, screeching ecstatically. She looked up further. There was the helicopter, paying no attention to her. The person in the main space had a crate sitting next to him, and he was steadily grabbing armfuls of blueberry yogurt and tossing it all down to the ground, where the blue people were waiting eagerly to rip open the containers and devour it all.
The helicopter lifted, still not seeing Autumn, and moved over the gate, where Autumn could see more yogurt containers falling.
So the people controlling the camps were feeding the yogurt-infected people more yogurt. That didn’t make any sense…unless they wanted them infected.
Unless they were using them for something.
A horror dawned on her, ten times worse than when she had seen her grandmother’s decaying hand earlier. She remembered that blue-ish chicken from the mall earlier.
It wasn’t chicken.
This was a farm.
But why??
She thought about the recent crisis on the news. World hunger had reached its highest point it had ever been in history. It would seem more humane to people if they thought that the things they were eating weren't technically people anymore.
Autumn looked over to the creature that had once been her older sister. She caught a glimpse of gold flashing about her neck, visible as she licked the inside of her empty yogurt container. Her cross necklace. She never took that off, not even when she went swimming in the lake and it got tangled in her hair. She loved God more than anything and everything. Seeing it filled Autumn with a quiet, determined hope. There was still something of her sister left in there. She knew it. Even if Autumn couldn’t get home, she could revive Sammy, get her to someplace safe where she couldn’t get at the yogurt. Would she ever turn normal again? Autumn had no idea.
She cautiously walked up to her sister, trying to be quiet but not trying to sneak up on her. Sammy caught sight of her almost immediately with those silver eyes of hers. There was another little bit of Sammy left.
Sammy threw her yogurt container at Autumn. The useless paper cup bounced pathetically off of her shoulder. Autumn didn’t look away from Sammy’s eyes, trying to get her to see her own. Maybe she would realize that Autumn was real and not just a hallucination. Sammy stared at Autumn, not moving, a low growl stirring deep in her throat. Autumn held her hands out, wordlessly. Sammy looked down at Autumn’s empty reaching hands, seeming uncertain.
Hesitantly she held out her own blue ones, blue as the lake behind the wall, blue as Autumn’s eyes, and laid them in Autumn’s. They were ice-cold.
Sammy jerked back and glared at Autumn.
“Freedom,” Autumn whispered, not wanting to scare her away. Slowly she raised a hand and pointed at the wall in the direction of the lake.
“Out. No..um, no hurt. No pain. No sadness. Free. Can you understand me, Sammy?” Sammy stared, motionless.
“Free,” she whispered. Autumn kept herself from exclaiming. “Yes. Free. Tear down the wall. Help me.” She remembered one of Sammy’s favorite words.
“Revolution.” Sammy blinked.
“Revolution. Revolt. Free.”  She blinked again. “Autumn?” Autumn nodded and, ever so slowly, took a step towards the house. She had spotted an old shovel earlier and suspected that it would slash through the rotting log wall easily. With Sammy following, and not daring to look at the horrendous doorway, Autumn retrieved it. Sammy looked at her curiously.
“Smash,” Autumn said. “Break. Crush. Annihilate. Wall.”
Sammy smiled then, and Autumn’s heart lifted to see her sister’s radiant, charming old smile. Sammy bent down and looked through the rubble until she found a sizable stone, and hefted it easily in her blue arms.
“Ready?” Autumn said. “Run on three. Smash the wall.”
“Revolt,” Sammy said. Autumn nodded.
“Three!” Sammy shouted suddenly. She took off for the wall, screeching even louder than before, impossibly. Autumn could have laughed—it felt like a game, running and screaming with her sister. She held her shovel above her head, sprinting for the old log wall, shrieking like a banshee. The blue people all screamed and ran away.
“FREEDOM!! FREEDOM!” Autumn called. “TEAR DOWN THE WALL!”
Sammy came within inches of the wall and brought her arms down, a huge hole shattering through the weak wood. Autumn followed soon after, hurling her shovel into a spot close to Sammy’s. Sammy was in a frenzy, slamming her stone into the wooden wall over and over with no sign of fatigue. Autumn didn’t have quite her sister’s manic vigor, but she kept up a good pace, aiding Sammy in creating a bigger and bigger hole in the wall. A crash from beside her made her jump. A blue man was nearby with a thick leafless branch from a birch tree, ramming it into the wall. She found his method creative; he had a hold on the branch with his shoulder inside a curvy hollow in the wood. He jumped every time he hit the wall, and always got a running start. Pretty soon, with more and more yogurt-infected blue people running and hitting the wall, it began to collapse. Bit by bit, sections fell, and the blue people abandoned their tools for someone else and made a run for it. Sammy, however, did not.
Sammy stopped for a moment, looked and Autumn, and said a single word. “Others.” Autumn nodded. The gate.
The helicopter had buzzed its casual slow way over to this section of the camp, and she could hear enraged yells coming from the open control pit. She and Sammy, trying to hurry before someone came with reinforcements, aimed for the same spot on the gate and easily blew it open. Of course the blue people in there began to run away, but Sammy and Autumn stood at the gate shouting “FREEDOM! RUN! REVOLUTION!” until they all slowly realized and began to swarm past the infected blue lady and her time-traveling little sister.
Sammy and Autumn saw more helicopters on their way, and Autumn caught Sammy’s arm, pointing.
“No more,” she gasped. “Got to go.” Sammy looked at her, and for one brief, frantic heartbeat, Sammy was just Sammy, weird-looking but herself nonetheless. She held Autumn’s face in her hands, warmer now, and looked at her. Autumn threw her arms around her sister—blue and naked and filthy and all—and Sammy, after a second, broke away gently.
“Others.” She took off running for the next gate.
“No! NO! Sammy, we have to go NOW!” Sammy didn’t look back, but she yelled, “Love you, Autumn!”
And then she was gone in a blinding-bright mist of something grotesque. A flash of gold flew through the air, landing at Autumn’s feet.
Sammy’s cross.
It was covered in blood.
Autumn let out a howl of despair.
What just happened?
They shot her to pieces, that’s what just happened.
Panicking, heartbroken, Autumn looked up at the gunman.
“She was my sister! She was my sister, and you killed her! TWICE!”
She turned away and, before the gunman could move, the button was in Autumn’s hand.

She was still sobbing when the world settled.
“Autumn!” a high-pitched voice cried. It was distant, an echo. “Autumn! What’s the matter?” She looked up, peering through a blur of tears. A little boy stood before her, a little boy of four with curly red hair and big dark eyes.
“Is it your shoes?” He got quiet. “I’m sorry.”
She hugged her little brother.
“Sweetheart, I don’t give a crap about my old shoes. Puke on them if you want. A-And don’t tell Mother I said a bad word.” James gazed at her wonderingly. A figure appeared in the doorway. Autumn looked up. A girl of twelve with straight dark hair and silver eyes. She was peeling the top off a container of blueberry yogurt.
“What’s going on?”
Autumn leaped up and knocked the yogurt from her sister’s hands.
“Hey! What the heck? I was eating that!” Autumn hugged her sister for the second time that day, though thankfully she was clothed this time, and not blue, or crazy. Sammy gave her a bewildered look.
Mother showed up just then, hair disheveled from sleep.
“What on earth is going on here? Someone clean this yogurt up!”
“Wait!” They all turned to Autumn, surprised. She took a deep breath and began to spill the whole story.
Did they believe her? Well, why else would she have a button and a bloody cross necklace?

A strange occurrence happened at the little brick house in the city once called London. A garbage bag full of unopened yogurt containers made its way to the outside trash can. A girl with frizzy red hair and blue-green eyes tipped her head back, thanking God for His blessings. If anyone could be saved, she was glad it at least started with one family.