by Megan Crewe
I’m heading over to check the fire escape when Win’s voice emerges from the air where he was standing before.
“I’m right here.”
The air parts, and the surface of the cloth shimmers back into sight. Only it doesn’t look like a cape now, more like a narrow, archtopped tent, a couple feet taller than Win and maybe four wide. Win’s peering out at me between the flaps of its entrance, his mouth curved into a crooked grin as if daring me to try to explain this away.
I . . . really don’t have any rational way of explaining that. I blink, and the scene before me doesn’t change. If this is crazy, then I’m crazy too.
Win tilts his head. “Are you going to come get your proof or not?”
My heart thuds. I could walk away and never stop wondering. Or I could take a leap. If his “proof” doesn’t hold up, well, I’ll know for sure none of this was true.
I step toward Win. He eases back to make room for me. I hesitate, and then push myself onward. The flap flutters down after I duck inside the sort-of tent, but it doesn’t block the light. The pale outlines of the rooftop outside and the buildings beyond it swim on the inner walls.
Beside me, Win taps the fabric. It hums, and a wavering display lights up, presenting a series of dancing characters.
“So this thing is going to fly us through space and time?” Somehow it sounds even more absurd when I say it out loud.
Win skims through the data with his fingers hovering an inch from the display, his face intent in the reflected glow. “It’s more bouncing,” he says. “That glass ball I said the time field is like? We hit the inner surface and come back down. The field does most of the work.”
With a satisfied sound, he pats the display with his palm. It vanishes.
“This cloth’s an older model,” he says. “The Traveling’s not quite as smooth as—”
The rest of his sentence is cut off by a lurch. The shapes on the walls blur and my stomach jolts into my throat. We’re rushing up and around, spinning and shuddering, as if we’re trapped in some sort of manic elevator. The air shrieks. I close my eyes and clamp my jaw shut to keep from shrieking with it.
There’s a tremor, and then we’re plummeting. My hand gropes out and clutches the first solid thing it finds. My head’s about to pull right off my neck. My lungs are squeezed tight.
We stop with a jerk. The shrieking fades from my ears, leaving only a faint ringing.
It’s Win’s elbow I’m clinging to. I open my eyes, and shut them again, fighting the urge to vomit. Okay. This is definitely not just a tablecloth.
“Sorry,” Win says. “It’s always awful the first time.”
I draw air in and gradually expel it. The various parts of my body settle back into their proper places. I sneak a peek at him.
“It gets better?”
He cracks a smile. “Hard to say. But once you see where you can go, you stop caring.”
Where you can go. I risk a look around. The walls are dark except for a rectangle of yellow light ahead of us. Indistinct figures ripple across it. I don’t know where we are now, but it doesn’t look like the rooftop.
“Ready?” Win asks.
I shouldn’t have agreed to this if I weren’t. “Ready,” I say, without giving myself a chance to rethink it.
He draws open the cloth.
7.
The light hits me first, brilliant sun glancing off sand-strewn ground. The sluggish air wafts over me, tangy with sweat and something putridly metallic. Blood, I realize as my vision adjusts. Dark patches swim into focus just beyond the stone passageway that shelters Win and me. A figure in thin bronze armor dashes past the entrance, spear raised. Farther out across the arena, shapes of animals and men writhe and break apart. Shouts echo against the high walls, which are painted a beige and red that match the gore-splattered sand. Cheers rain down from above. Someone over our shadowy doorway is stomping their feet.
I gulp a breath. Grit prickles against the back of my mouth.
“The Amphitheatrum Flavium,” Win intones beside me. “April 6, 81 AD.”
It’s warm—sweat is trickling down my back under my jacket. I reach past the flap of the cloth to touch the passage wall. The stone is rough under my fingers. Solid. Real.
How can it be real?
Less than thirty feet away, a rhinoceros charges into a cluster of gladiators, tossing one to the side with guts spilling from a gaping belly wound. Win grimaces. A dagger soars from beyond my view and strikes the rhino in the shoulder. A leopard stalks past, shooting a narrow glance into our doorway. I jerk back into the shelter of the cloth. As the leopard pads toward us, a rumbling starts somewhere down the passage behind us. We’re trapped, surrounded by noise and violence and history.
“Take me back,” I hear myself saying raggedly over the thudding of my heart. “I want to go back now.”
The words are hardly out of my mouth when a shower of arrows flits through the air. One impales the leopard’s haunches, another clatters against the stones, and a third is shooting straight toward us. I cringe against the side of the cloth as Win yanks the flaps together. There’s a thunk and a patter as the arrow rebounds off the fabric. Too close. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Take me back!”
We’re already moving. That whirling, jostling feeling sweeps around us again. I press my arms around my head and count the frantic beats of my pulse.
We land with a quiver. The cloth’s flaps part. A dusky light touches my face with a whisper of breeze, and I look up. The roof of the hotel is there to meet me.
I wobble out. The concrete feels firm beneath my feet. The air is cool and moist again.
But I can still see the gutted gladiator falling. Still taste the salty grit on my tongue. Still hear the hiss of the arrow that almost hit us.
I inhale, exhale, trying to flush the smell of pain and death from my lungs.
“We were really there,” I say. “We traveled back in time.”
“Yes,” Win says. “Do you believe me now?”
As he folds up the cloth and slides it into his satchel, I sink onto one of the patio chairs, running my fingers through my sweat-dampened hair. Distantly, I notice I can bend my left arm now, though the elbow joint is still tingly.
I was just in Ancient Rome, 81 AD.
And what about the rest? Win has come from the planet of Kemya? Aliens have been altering Earth’s history for centuries—millennia? They’re looking down at us right now, at my planet in their goldfish bowl?
I died yesterday?
It’s too much: too big, too awful. But I can’t deny what just happened. That part of his story, at least, is real.
“Why are you showing me?” I ask. “Why did you want to talk to me at all?”
Win sits down across from me. “I think you can tell when the past has been shifted,” he says. “The changes made during your lifetime, anyway. The feelings you told me about—some part of your mind is remembering experiencing things differently before the shift.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’ve heard that it’s scientifically possible for shifts to have some effect on Earthlings who are particularly sensitive. It’s unlikely you’re the only one who’s gone through this. But Travelers aren’t supposed to interact with locals unless it’s absolutely necessary. I don’t think anyone before me has ever identified someone like you.”
If he’s right, then every wrong feeling, every panic attack that I convinced myself didn’t mean anything . . . They were actually true. Something really was wrong.
The bench Win sat on, empty the first time I came to the courthouse. Some object once in the corner of the stairwell. The blast. Shifted. My life rewritten.
The whisper of wrong, wrong, wrong starts to echo in my head. Like it did all afternoon and evening yesterday. Telling me I’m not supposed to be here.
I’m supposed to be a vacant burned body lying in a morgue.
No. I look away from Win, across the patio. Seven t
ables. Four chairs around each except for three by that one in the corner. I’m here. I’m real. Yellow lights glinting in two windows of the apartment over the store across the street. A scrawny tabby cat stalking along the border of the neighboring roof.
Here. Real.
Alive.
“You see what this means,” Win’s saying. “If you can track the shifts, you can help us figure out where to go. Jeanant said he’d make little changes, some to distract the Enforcers and some only our group would know were meaningful, to lead us to his weapon. You can help us follow them.”
Right. This isn’t just about jumping through time. Follow a rebel from outer space. Find some alien weapon. Destroy a generator orbiting above my head.
“No,” I say.
“It shouldn’t even be that hard. If you just—”
“No.” I bring my hands to my cheeks, holding the bracelet, feeling the clink of each bead’s rotation against my skin. But my thoughts race on, threading back and forth too fast for me to keep up, and under everything else that little voice is still murmuring, wrong, wrong, wrong.
“You’re not even supposed to be talking to me,” I say.
“I’m not,” he agrees, lowering his voice. “But all the ways we’ve hurt your people—all the ways our interference here has held back our people—it’s because no one was brave enough to challenge our old assumptions. Jeanant wouldn’t have gotten as far as he did if he’d kept toeing the line, and I don’t know if the rest of us will either. Maybe we need you, if we’re going to end this. Helping take down that generator could be the most important thing I do in my whole life. So if I need to break a few rules to make sure we finish this mission, then those rules have to be broken.” The determination in his voice is unmistakable. I have no idea what to believe. I can’t absorb it all. I’m going to crash like a computer running too many operations at once.
“I need to go home,” I say. My throat feels raw. “I’m late. My parents will be worried. I can’t deal with any more right now.”
“If you’d just think about it . . .” Win says.
Like I’ll be able to stop myself. “I need to go home,” I repeat, getting up.
He stands with me, grasping my arm. “Will you at least—If you’re ready to talk more tomorrow, will you meet me here? In the lobby? Before school, or after, whenever—”
“Okay!” I say, just to shut him up. “Okay.”
Disappointment shows clearly on his face, as if he can tell I’m not sure I mean it. But I pull my arm back and walk away.
• • •
I’m halfway home when one awful thought pierces through the haze in my head.
Win’s “Enforcers.” Alien soldiers or not, they did find me at the coffee shop. He never said how. Could they find me again, now?
Whatever Win’s involved in, he admitted he’s broken the rules. How are they going to react if they find out he’s not just told me, but shown me how he travels through time?
My fingers creep to the melted mark on my jacket. My gaze skitters along the darkened street. There’s no sign of anyone following me. But if they’re time travelers too, they’d have cloths like Win’s, right? Which means they could appear out of nowhere, right in front of me, if they wanted.
My legs stall in the middle of the sidewalk. I want to be home so badly my bones ache with it, but maybe home isn’t safe after all.
So where is? Back in the hotel with Win? No. They found me with him before.
I check my watch. Quarter to eight. Normally I’d be back from Ben’s before seven. Mom and Dad will already be starting to fret. What are they going to think if I call them and make some weird excuse not to show up at all?
Picturing their anxious faces strengthens my resolve. I’m already screwed up enough over this—I’m not letting it mess up my parents’ lives too. If that pale woman and her henchman show up at my house, I’ll run to Win then. Not before.
I curl my fingers around my bracelet and walk on, timing the spinning of the beads and the beats of the multiplication tables with my steps.
When I reach my front door, I’ve managed to push back the jumble of Win-aliens-wrong–time machine–wrong-dead-wrong. It’s not gone, but I think I can suppress it enough to act normal.
I catch the rustle of the living room curtain, and can guess that Dad was waiting there, watching for me. So as I open the door I’m already putting on a very honest guilty expression.
Dad’s standing in the hall contemplating today’s mail. He looks up as if he hadn’t known I was outside, and Mom pokes her head around the kitchen doorway.
“Oh good,” she says lightly, but I can see the tension sagging from her shoulders. “I was just about to call Benjamin’s mother to see if she asked you to stay late.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, carefully tucking the melted strip on my sleeve out of sight as I hang up my jacket. “I ran into Bree on the way home, and she was upset about this guy, so we hung out and talked for a bit. I just realized I forgot to call when I got here.”
“It’s all right,” Mom says. “You’re seventeen—we should be glad you’re home for dinner at all.”
“You’re here now,” Dad says with his usual soft smile. “Let’s eat.”
“You didn’t have to wait for me,” I say as I follow him into the dining room.
“It’s just my everything-in-the-fridge stew,” Mom says. “The extra cooking time makes it even better.”
But as we sit down around the table, a ghost sits with us. The memory we’re all thinking about but avoiding mentioning: the night of waiting by windows and increasingly worried phone calls after my brother left with his knapsack and a promise to pick me up a Ring Pop at the convenience store, and never came home. I can see it in the quiver of Mom’s hand as she ladles out the stew, in the way Dad stares at me for a moment as I pick up my spoon, as if he’s not yet convinced I really am here.
So I put on my best carefree voice and tell them about Ms. Cavoy pulling me aside to compliment my physics project, about gluing black silk flowers for Angela’s dance decor, about Bree and I breaking eighteen minutes on our three-mile run for the second time this week. Their daughter is happy, thriving; she isn’t going anywhere. It’s the best way I can make up for freaking them out: reminding them how much they don’t have to worry about me.
The only time my performance falters is when Dad says, “You had that field trip to the courthouse yesterday, didn’t you? You haven’t told us about the cases you saw.”
In an instant, I flash back to the courthouse hall—to the blast of light and the rush of heat. The echo of another past, where the explosion was real and lethal and I wasn’t here right now. The past Win says was the real one, before he changed things.
This scene, the happy family around the table, would never have existed. Mom and Dad would have been grieving my death, the loss of their second child. My hand clenches my spoon.
“Um, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about them,” I say, which is thankfully true, because I barely remember anything from that morning except my panic. My voice cracks. I cover by stuffing a spoonful of stew into my mouth.
When I glance at the window, I half expect an icy stare to meet mine. There’s nothing outside but darkness.
By the time we’re clearing the table, the lingering tension has dissipated. Noam’s ghost no longer seems to hover between us, though he lingers in my head. I load the dishwasher and start it running, and when Mom and Dad have settled on the couch to peruse the evening’s TV offerings, I slip upstairs.
The bedroom between the master at the front of the house and mine at the back now serves as a guest bedroom/workout space. It used to be Noam’s. For years, I could push open this door and see his sketches tacked to the walls, the bright blue Converse sneakers he wore until the soles were falling off in their place of honor by the foot of his bed. Then one day Mom decided the waiting wasn’t doing us any good. I came home from a weekend at my grandparents’ house to find all of Noam’s
stuff packed into cardboard boxes.
She hasn’t thrown any of it out. Most of the boxes are stacked in the attic, and a couple she keeps in what used to be his closet, beside the narrow shelving unit that holds her weights and exercise mat. I suspect she left them there so every now and then she and Dad can do what I’m about to do now.
I check the bedroom window first, confirming no alien gunslingers are lurking outside. Then I go to the closet and ease apart the flaps of the top box. There’s a pile of Noam’s sketchbooks, a box of acrylic paints, a huge Swiss Army knife he said he was going to use on camping trips. My hand is drawn to the worn baseball glove at the back. I pick it up. Sliding my hand inside, breathing the smell of old leather, I travel back through time the only way people are supposed to.
I was four when Noam decided he was going to try out for the baseball team. All his friends were. So they spent hours in the backyard throwing the ball back and forth, practicing pitches, then heading off to the park with the bat after Mom warned them not to break any windows.
One morning I got tired of just watching. Before his friends showed up, I grabbed his glove, marched into his room, and declared that I was going to play too. It seemed only natural to me that my big brother would humor me. He stood a few feet away in the yard and I held out the too-big glove and tried to snatch the ball when he tossed it to me. The first two times, it bounced off the rim and thumped onto the grass. I hated that ball. It wasn’t fair.
Noam crouched down across from me and said, “Hey, third time’s a charm!” And then he flipped the ball to me so gently it fell straight into the waiting glove. I remember laughing, it seemed so miraculous. “See,” he said. “You can do anything.”
Back in the present, I slip off the glove. So many emotions have welled up in my throat that I can’t swallow.
Even after twelve years, it hurts. I don’t know why he left. I can’t imagine what could have been so bad here that he couldn’t stay, that he’d clear out his bank account and take off and never speak to any of us again.
A thought sparks in the back of my head. I’ve wished so often that I could go back and ask him why he did it. If Win’s special cloth could whisk us back two thousand years, twelve should hardly be a problem . . .