by Megan Crewe
He whips back the cloth to reveal a dirt road mottled with hoofprints and wheel ruts. The breeze is cool and damp, with a smell like the park back home just after a rain shower, but muskier. Win heads down the road, folding the cloth as he walks. My boots squelch through patches of gooey mud as I hurry to catch up. Massive ferns line the road around the mossy trunks of the broad-leaved trees, their twisting branches heavy with loops of vine. The buzz of insect life quavers around us. It presses in on me, and for a second I can’t breathe. I curl my fingers into my palm, trying to bring back the feel of the buildings back home, then train my eyes on Win’s satchel, on the rounded edges of the brass buckles, the scuffs on the smooth leather. The suffocating presence of the jungle recedes.
The road veers up a slope scattered with chunks of lichen-splotched rock. We’re just nearing the top when twigs crackle somewhere behind us. I recoil, stepping toward the shelter of the trees. Win turns. No one’s in sight, but a low thudding is carrying toward us. Like many sets of feet treading over the packed earth.
The alarm band around my ankle is still. “It’s not your people,” I say.
“Then that’s most likely more of the army arriving,” Win whispers. “Let’s get out of the way. If they see us, we could shift something.”
I was on board as soon as he said the word army. He squeezes through the heavy underbrush, me behind him, droplets of water dappling my shirt and dress. The jagged fronds scrape against my arms. As I push them away from my face, shivers slide over my fingers. I jerk my hands away.
Win has stopped. He grabs my wrist and tugs me down behind a particularly large fern.
The tramping sound is getting louder. From where we’re crouched, I can make out slivers of the rutted road. There’s no noise other than those footsteps and the insect hum.
Then they sweep into view: a stream of figures marching in rows four across, their plated armor and rounded helmets glinting, swords swaying at their hips. They stride past, perfectly in sync. Despite the muddy road, each soldier’s uniform looks polished and clean.
Well, this appears to be a much more effective revolutionary force than the scattered locals we saw in Paris. Organized, disciplined. In a few minutes, they’ve tramped out of sight over the crest of the hill.
“They’ll be going to join the battle that’ll take place along the river in the next couple days,” Win says quietly. “The Chinese army is coming to meet them, to put down the Vietnamese insurgents. But this time the Vietnamese are going to win their freedom.”
He motions me onward through the jungle. “There might be more coming. We’ll be safer staying off the road.”
We weave between the trees and stumble onto a narrow trail running nearly parallel to the road. I study the back of Win’s head, its slight bobbing in time with his strides, trying to imagine the massive databases he must have had access to on his home planet. Catalogs of thousands of years of history from all across Earth. I’ve never even heard of this battle. He knows so much more about my planet’s history than I do, and I’m the one who lives here.
The one big question that’s been gnawing at me rises up.
“Why did your people start doing this in the first place?” I say. “Studying Earth, experimenting . . . Your science is light-years ahead of ours; you don’t care about art; you have to cross the galaxy just to get here—what did you all expect to learn from a bunch of humans?”
“Ah . . .” Win glances back at me, looking as if he’s swallowed a fly. “That’s pretty complicated.”
“As if everything else you’ve told me wasn’t? Try me.”
There’s silence as we haul ourselves up the steepest part of the hill, gripping the coils of vine and disturbing flowers that expel whiffs of a thick, cloying fragrance into the air. Win’s breath rasps with the effort, so loudly I start to worry the soldiers up ahead will hear it. He wobbles a little, but keeps going as the trail slants downward. Still not answering.
“Win,” I say. “Why can’t you just tell me? It’s not like I’m ever going to give away your ‘secrets’—no one would believe me if I tried.”
“I don’t see why it matters,” he says.
“I want to understand why you did this to us,” I say, and he grimaces.
“It’s not a good story,” he says. “No one really talks about it, except to remind ourselves . . . A long time ago, some of our people made an incredibly huge mistake. A mistake so big it destroyed our world.”
“Just like that?”
He nods. “A new technology was introduced, and implemented widely, without quite as much testing as should have been done, and—Imagine if every nuclear plant on Earth simultaneously melted down and then exploded, multiplied by a hundred. We had just enough warning to evacuate some people to what you’d call a space station that was orbiting the planet before the atmosphere below was completely poisoned.”
“Oh,” I say, a trickle of horror running through me. Every nuclear plant times a hundred.
“We’ve all lived on that space station ever since,” he goes on. “Expanding and improving it as necessary. And supposedly making plans for moving on. When the disaster happened, our scientists had already been scouting out planets to establish a colony on. But then, after the accident, everyone was scared of rushing in too quickly and making another mistake, losing the little we’d managed to hold on to. You have to understand, in the beginning—it was the fate of our entire people at stake. Once we set a course, we were only going to get one chance.”
“Earth was one of those planets?” I venture. “To colonize—”
“Obviously that didn’t happen,” he says quickly. “They wanted to run a few experiments somewhere, to see what sort of challenges we might face, and how the inhabitants might deal with it. Use a time field so we could have them do things over, and check what factors influenced the outcome. They picked Earth. The original idea was that they’d run a relatively brief series of tests and then move in, but after a few years of trials and Traveling, the scientists started noticing discrepancies in the readings. They realized the shifts were degrading the planet.”
Ah. “You didn’t want a planet that was already starting to fall apart,” I say. It was good enough for the Travelers to escape to and play around with, but not good enough to be a home.
There’s no way I want Win’s people moving in with us, but it hurts anyway. The thought that they used us and would keep using us until we’re not fit for anything except being thrown away. How long will it take after we’ve stopped them for the world to recover?
“We should have ended it a long time ago,” Win says. “I know that. Lots of us know. It’s just, the scientists, especially the ones doing the time work, they’re respected, and they like the way things are. And when you’ve been so cautious for so long, it’s hard to even think about doing something risky. No one knows what will be waiting for us on another planet.”
“But you’re all stuck in that space station—you said the people who aren’t Travelers never leave at all.”
“We’ve gotten by for so long that way, no one knows any different. Most people don’t see any need to hurry.” He pauses. “But Jeanant, and Thlo, they suspect the longer we keep delaying, the more likely it is the station’s engines will fail when we finally do leave orbit.”
The breeze licks under my scarf, the cool moisture it carries making the wool cling to my neck. “So they’ll put us through hell, destroy our planet, and maybe even screw up your own people’s chances, just to avoid a little risk.”
“You’d understand better if you grew up there,” Win says. “But I hate it too.”
The trail curves around a spire of craggy rock jutting from the soil, and as we come around it, the trees fall back, giving us a glimpse of the land below: a wide blue river snaking through the jungle, sandy banks shimmering in the sunlight piercing the gathering clouds. The circular walls of a town stand farther to our left, brown roofs rising into sharp peaks.
Win draws in a breath
, gazing at the view. The awe on his face is almost painful to look at. It chokes off my anger. It makes sense now, his comments about the lack of room, about trees and sun. He doesn’t even have an outside where he’s from.
He turns and hurries on. My vision seems to ripple as I follow. The trail narrows, the jungle pressing closer, and then slants more steeply downward.
My feet skid on the slick soil. I grip the branches of a nearby sapling to catch my balance. The feel of the moist bark sends a shudder through my fingers. The trees drown out the view, trunks and vines and leaves twice as big as my head crowding around me. I hold out my hands, snatching at stems, twigs. They seem to slip through my grasp. My skin is too thin.
I shake my head, but the sensation lingers: the world around me expanding and contracting as if I’ve stumbled into a fun-house mirror maze. My legs wobble, and I cling to a fern, feeling as though my hands are about to pass right through it.
It’s not like Paris. Or maybe it is, just . . . more.
A thousand years of shifting, of distortion and degradation, that the atoms making up my body have experienced and this jungle hasn’t.
Ahead of me, Win still stands out against the jungle with his alien presence, but I have to stare to see it. Because it’s not that I’m fading, only that this past world is more solid than the one I was in before.
I fumble in my purse for my bracelet as I scramble on down the trail, trying to count the points on the leaves, the pebbles on the ground. Everything I look at echoes that solid thereness back at me. The jungle sways, or maybe it’s me.
The smooth surface of the beads meets my fingertips as my heel lands on a loose rock. I don’t even have a chance to catch my balance before my feet are shooting out from under me.
16.
I grope for something to steady myself. My free hand finds only air. I hit the ground hip first, a yelp jolting from my throat.
Saplings and shrubs claw at me as I tumble down the hillside. My ankle bangs against a tree trunk and pain stabs up my leg. I roll over, flailing until my fingers catch a loop of vine. My arm wrenches, but I jerk to a stop. I drag in a breath, my heart and head pounding.
“Skylar!” Pebbles skitter as Win scrambles down the trail. He comes to a stop by my left and picks his way over. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” My shoulder throbs as I prop myself up on my hands. My ankle, the one that hit the tree trunk, is radiating a stinging pain. The tongue of my boot is bent to the side, and a wide scrape runs from my anklebone halfway up my calf. Blood’s beading on the raw skin.
I wiggle my foot, and the pain stings only a little deeper. I think I should be able to walk. Just won’t be running any races today.
“It doesn’t look that bad,” Win says hopefully.
Too bad the rest of me still feels like crap. I glance up, and the jungle presses in with a rush of dizziness. I close my eyes. Then I realize what’s really wrong with my ankle.
“The alarm band!” I twist around, searching the damp soil beside me. It must have been scraped off by the impact. I peer through the trees, trying to figure out which one my ankle hit. They blur together.
Win’s gone still. “It came off? But then—Here.” He tosses down a small pad of tan fabric that he’s taken from his satchel. “Put that on the wound. I’ll look for the band.”
He clambers up the slope without waiting to see if I caught the pad, shoving aside stems and fronds to scan the ground. I’d be annoyed if I didn’t want so badly to get up there and help him look. I pick up the square of fabric and set it over the bloodiest part of the scrape. The second I apply pressure, the pad seems to fuse with my leg. The line between its edge and my skin smooths away. I flinch, and then reach to poke at it. I can’t even feel the edge. How am I ever supposed to take it off?
Above me on the slope, Win swears.
“Isn’t it there?” I say.
“It might have . . . disintegrated,” he replies, wrenching aside another sapling. “Traveler tech is programmed to do that in Earth’s atmosphere, in certain conditions, to make sure nothing’s left behind accidentally that the locals could study. Your fall could have set something off.”
My stomach sinks. “So we’ll have no warning if the Enforcers show up.”
He shakes his head.
That . . . isn’t good. My thoughts are still swimming in my head as if it’s full of water. I reach for my purse, panic flashing through me when I see the flap’s open. But both my phone and my bracelet are still tucked inside. I drag the bracelet out and hold it against my palm, sliding my fingers over the beads. Slowly, the weight of history recedes.
“Well, you said it isn’t likely they could be tracing our jumps, right?” I say. “We’ll just need to be even more careful about shifts than we were in Paris.”
“We’ll have to manage,” Win agrees. “Can you stand up?”
I grasp a low branch and haul myself upright. My ankle twinges, but not too badly. Why do I feel so weak? I swallow. My mouth tastes like dust.
The last time I had a drink was a thousand years from now.
“We should have brought canteens,” I say as Win edges back to me, a weak attempt at a joke.
“What?” Win says. “Oh. I do have—Come on, you can drink while we’re walking.”
He reaches into his satchel as we pick our way back to the trail, and hands me a narrow bottle of blue-tinted liquid. By the time I figure out how to open its oddly pointed cap, my hands are shaking. I bring the bottle to my lips. The liquid is cool and faintly sweet. As it slides down my throat, my thoughts sharpen. The residual dizziness fades away.
“Traveling takes a lot out of you,” Win says. “You should probably eat something too. Here.”
He trades me a plastic packet for the bottle. I’m expecting some sort of exotic alien snack, but it’s just standard Earth trail mix: peanuts and almonds and dried fruit. I guess to Win, this is an exotic snack. I pop a few handfuls in my mouth. When I look around, the thereness of the jungle only feels half as imposing.
The ground starts to even out as we shuffle on. The sun glints here and there through the gray haze of the clouds, but the air’s so damp my clothes are chilly against my skin. The hem of my dress snags on thorns and twigs, dirt stains mingling with the ink.
As I stuff the half-finished bag of trail mix into my purse, Win holds out his hand to bring us to a halt. “Pull your scarf up over your face,” he says. “We’re already going to stand out more than I’d like. I think we’ll be safest if we stay out of the locals’ way completely.”
I’m fine with that. I pull the folds of my scarf over my nose, my breath making the air beneath the fabric even more humid.
The trail peters out into the dense vegetation. We creep on to the jungle’s edge.
“Jeanant should have left another hint, like he did with the newspapers in Paris,” Win says. “‘The sign will point at the sky,’ the message said. As soon as you see anything that feels odd . . .”
As if I need a reminder of my function here.
A smattering of trees dots the grassy ground ahead of us, leading to a well-trampled road. On the other side, the grass gives way to alternating stretches of marsh and rocky yellow beach, slanting down toward dark greenish water. The river is so wide it looks more like a lake, though its surface ripples with the current. A wash of misty air drifts off of it.
On a nearby span of beach, several dozen men are gathered, hunched over long poles of bamboo. Conical straw hats shade their faces as they slice at the ends of the poles with carving knives, cutting them into points. They all move with the same sort of steady, efficient rhythm as the soldiers who passed us before, not a word exchanged between them. A heap of already-carved poles lies by the side of the road.
“That’s how they’ll beat the Chinese,” Win murmurs to me eagerly. “They fix those poles in the river, just beneath the surface, and lure the enemy ships onto them. Brilliant strategy. It lets them kill or capture most of their opponents, i
ncluding the prince leading them, while losing few of their own soldiers. I saw satellite footage once, but . . . it’s different being right here.”
The way he’s staring at the workers, talking about them as if this battle is being put on for his entertainment, makes my skin tighten. When he looks at me, raising his eyebrows as if to share the excitement, I have to glance away.
“When’s the Chinese army coming?”
“They arrive tomorrow. These will be the last preparations. And then everyone here will be free to rule themselves for the first time in hundreds of years.”
Despite my discomfort, those words strike a chord in me. If these people can defeat a larger power with good tactics and some well-placed pieces of wood, it’s not so insane to think Win and I—and Jeanant—can beat the Enforcers, is it?
A scraping sound at our right draws my attention. A figure slides into view amid the vegetation: a boy, no more than nine or ten years old I’d guess, scrambling down from a branch he must have been perched on. His straw hat dangles against his back. He peers around him with wide eyes, and his gaze finds me. His mouth drops open.
Win mutters a curse as the kid darts toward the beach. “Let’s get going,” he says. “Before anyone comes investigating.” He pulls me back into the thicker tangle of the jungle. The boy’s chattering voice filters through the trees. We push on as quickly as we can, wading around clumps of fern. I keep glancing back, but no one seems to be following us. That doesn’t mean the boy seeing us didn’t shift something, though.
“With all your special Traveler tech, no one thought of inventing something that’d make the locals see you as someone like them?” I ask.
Win stops, panting. “Someone did, actually,” he says. “There are devices that project over the face . . . but we only managed to get our hands on a few of those. The others have them. I wasn’t supposed to be going anywhere it’d be that hard to blend in.”
I guess in my present day, he could have pretended to be a tourist just about anywhere and no one would have blinked.