Skyline

by Zach Milan

  “Too true,” he replied.

  An obvious lie to match Charlotte’s, but it was true that the Council wanted the Blast stopped. Maybe Monroe wouldn’t need to lift a finger to free Charlotte and Bill. All of them—except Ana—wanted the same thing.

  Yet, if Charlotte and Bill had escaped, they would’ve been home. If the Council worked with them, gave the two of them a way out of this time, then they would’ve sought out Monroe, Felix, and Charlie. At the very least, they would’ve gone after the fifth bomb.

  No, this was a lie. A severe lie that could entrap Bill and Charlotte. Because whatever their future held, Monroe knew it wasn’t home. That was clear. The Council would likely imprison them, exactly as they had Leanor. Torture them, to get a clearer picture of what happened to the Cornerstones? Or maybe they’d just leave them to rot.

  “How?” Charlotte asked. Monroe prayed she didn’t believe this lie. That she and Bill would escape to someplace Monroe could retrieve them. “How would you save our city?”

  “We’d save you from yourselves,” Cora said, leaning her head in.

  “You discovered time travel,” Alek said, spreading his hands. “Well, look around. The sky you see?” The thunder boomed above, precisely on cue. “Time travel caused this.”

  Alek began a tale much different than Ana’s had been. About how every moment is a fragile jewel, perfectly placed. Or like dominoes, lined up to fall. Remove one, and the picture doesn’t quite come together. Remove enough, and the pieces stop falling. Eventually nature took over. An ice age wiped out their race. He said nothing of the EMP Ana had told them the Council had set. Said nothing of his displaced people.

  “This is what Leanor did to our age,” Alek finished. “We would stop your time from suffering the same fate.”

  It sounded reasonable. More convincing, in fact, than the idea that a bunch of out-of-time people somehow took revenge on those who had abandoned them. But Ana had been earnest then. Alek was probably filtering in lies with the truth.

  Monroe arched an eyebrow at Ana, but she simply rolled her eyes. She at least believed Alek was lying. But could she truly know? Hadn’t she been imprisoned until she fled this age?

  Charlotte’s brow was low, a finger at her chin. “But wouldn’t you coming to our time—using time travel to do so—have the same effect?”

  “A single domino,” Alek replied. “A necessary one. Or would you have us die?”

  “We—” Bill began, probably about to say, “We would never.” No matter what he’d seen, he didn’t condemn others to death.

  Then Paris appeared, breathing hard. He explained something in their language, then turned to Bill and Charlotte. “They’re gone,” he said, heaving. “The Cornerstones are gone.”

  Ana had succeeded in trapping their empire, but from here on out, the Council would chase her down. Once they dealt with Bill and Charlotte, of course.

  Alek pressed his ear, said something to Paris, but Cora stepped forward. “Maybe you can help us,” she said, lifting her hand. “We all want the same thing. Help us save your city.”

  “No,” Monroe hissed before he could stop himself. A lucky boom of thunder kept anyone from hearing.

  Charlotte glanced at Bill, who bit his lip. Looked at the sky, the house, then back at the Council. And then he nodded. Charlotte did, too.

  “Come then,” Cora said, her hand still out to them.

  “Er, do you have a car waiting or something?” Bill asked.

  The woman grinned. “Do not presume to know so much.”

  After another shared glance, Charlotte and Bill took Cora’s hand. All five of them vanished.

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Monroe blinked. “Where did they go?” He hadn’t expected the encounter to end so abruptly. He turned on Ana. But no, he was asking the wrong question again. “When did they go?” He pulled Charlotte’s astrolabe from his bag, spinning through time. “Before? Was this the old Council?”

  No, they’d been reacting to the Blast’s effects. They’d sought out the Cornerstones. This was the Council after the Blast, so when would they go? Forward in time didn’t seem too safe, the weather only got crazier as Ana and Monroe had run through the city.

  “Stop.” Ana was by his side, her hand pressed on top of his, freezing it in place.

  “What, you think we should go back farther? To when Charlotte and Bill first came? I could pull them through time first. We could—”

  “Stop.”

  And then Monroe realized where her hand was. Too close to the orb that would free her. He snatched the astrolabe away, scrambling back to the wall. “You stop. What do we do?”

  “We can’t save your friends yet. The Council would only follow. Especially since—you heard them—they believe you’re with me.” She raised a platinum-blond eyebrow.

  Exactly what he’d assumed. “So what then?” He dropped Charlotte’s astrolabe into the bowling-ball bag—where it clunked slightly against Ana’s device. To distract her from the sound, Monroe stepped out into the greenish fog. “Travel forward or wherever the Council went? We could find the exact time, snag ‘em, then we’re done.” He clapped his hands.

  “They aren’t here,” Ana said, following him out. “Not now, not before or after. Not anymore.”

  “Of course they are.” That was how Charlotte’s astrolabe worked. How Ana’s time device worked. It sped through time, but never changed locations. Why would the Council’s be different?

  “No. They aren’t.” Ana said, her eyes rolling. “Haven’t you noticed something strange about my time? About this city? Something missing?”

  Monroe frowned and stepped across the lawn to see what Ana meant. The architecture was odd, indescribable. Roofs and roads were metallic. Some houses seemed wrapped in windows. But that was what was there, not what was missing.

  There were lawns all around the houses. Pools in the back. Streetlights above the skinny streets. All of that seemed normal. As normal as this prehistorical civilization could seem.

  “Cars,” Ana finally spat. “Don’t you see?”

  “Cars?” Monroe asked. There was a street, but it was too thin for anything but bikes. There weren’t garages. No driveways. “But across the bridge the streets were wider, wide enough.”

  “Old streets,” Ana explained. “Made before the Council invented another mode of transportation.”

  The roofs didn’t seem to have any landing pads or storage for a large flying machine. And he hadn’t seen any entrances to a subway on their run down here. Not in the air, not underground. “What other sort?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  The Council hadn’t done anything peculiar. They’d merely grasped Bill and Charlotte’s hands, spun up their devices and vanished. “The orbs. It has to be the orbs.”

  “Obviously.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” He took out the orb he knew would work on this era’s streets. Ana’s. Her eyes grew wide at the sight, but Monroe snorted. “You thought I was magically at the Blast day?” He shook his head. “Tell me how to use it.”

  “Well,” Ana said, leaning in. “First you turn it on.” She made an insignia. She slid closer, her hand under his. “Then you drag a finger across, mimicking the roads we ran down. Then when you release, it’ll take you there. Easy as that.” She left her hand on it, and he didn’t stop her.

  Then Ana yanked her orb away.

  “No!” he said, reaching for her astrolabe. But Ana stepped back, grinning ear to ear. He was too late. “Please, you can’t. I have to find them.”

  “Fair’s fair,” she said. Her orb illuminated at her touch. “You have your sister’s device. I have mine. Aren’t you supposed to be the clever one? Find them yourself.”

  “No,” he whispered. He wasn’t Charlotte, who knew tech instantly. Or Bill, who was good at maneuvering on the fly. Monroe needed time to think—time that the approaching weather wouldn’t allow. “I don’t know anything about this world. I ca
n’t get there. I can’t hide from them. I don’t even know them. You do. I need you.”

  “Nonsense,” Ana said with a wave. But then her face grew serious. “If I helped you, you’d get your friends, sure. But then the three of you would rescue the Council.”

  “Along with thousands of people from New York! We’d keep them from getting trapped in the exact place you want to escape!”

  “Can’t you fucking see?” Ana demanded. She gestured to the air. “Look at the sky! Look at the empty streets. The Council wanted this. They could’ve found a way to stop this. Retrieved our people from time before they hurt our world.” Monroe opened his mouth, and she guffawed. “Time is like dominoes? Please. They did this to our world so that they could stay in control. And if you save them, if you let them? They’ll control your city. Enslave the poor, get the rich on their side, and only ever dole out tech that can be used for their purposes.”

  It didn’t sound so different from some of the people in Monroe’s time. Taking control, only providing tech that could be tracked and traced? But the evidence of the Council’s rule was all around. In the opulent buildings he’d seen today. In the rundown tenements they’d raced past. In the cameras everywhere.

  Worse, they wouldn’t belong. Without being connected to New York—either through blood or through love of its history—what would keep the Council from doing more than they had here? From truly enslaving a race of people they thought inferior?

  It’d happened before. Several times, in Monroe’s era.

  Monroe clenched his jaw. Stared directly into Ana’s eyes as he said, “We won’t let them.”

  She laughed. “You won’t have a choice. So, no, I’m not helping you do a fucking thing.” She spun the lights in her orb.

  “No!” Monroe yelled, and he leaped. Before she vanished, he crashed into Ana, and together they fell to the ground. The astrolabe slid from Ana’s hands, and on its own, the stars still twisting inside, Ana’s time-travel device disappeared through time. She must not have built-in the same failsafe as Charlotte—or her future self—had.

  “You goddamned idiot!” She shoved him off. Then she stood and kicked him in the side. Kicked him again and again and again. He winced, clutching himself, the pain blossoming like a rose of thorns. “You motherfucker! What the fuck is wrong with you!” And still she kicked him. He didn’t get up, didn’t fight her. He curled into a ball, keeping his bowling-ball bag from Ana’s sight. “I was saving them! Saving your precious city! I was protecting them from this. Can’t you see how much better New York is? Can’t you see how, how horrible …” She collapsed beside him, tears falling as the sky opened up with hot rain. “I’ve lost everyone, everything I loved,” she told him in a hoarse whisper. “I just wanted to keep them from our city.”

  Monroe looked up, blood oozing out of his mouth as he showed his teeth in a victorious smile. “Now you have no choice but to help.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THWARTED

  1,803,241 BCE

  Wincing and groaning, Monroe stood and wiped the blood from his lips. He smeared it onto his already ruined embroidered shirt. He pulled Charlotte’s glassy astrolabe from his bag and drew the insignia to turn it on. Hers could work the same as Ana’s; both had been designed by the same person.

  Now, how had Ana said to do it? Drag a finger along the road back. But as they’d run here, he’d been too focused on Charlotte and Bill. What route would take them back to the Council’s spire? “Don’t get too close,” he warned Ana. “Just tell me where to go.” He stood poised with a finger ready.

  She crossed her arms. “You expect your sister’s device to work? Have you forgotten you’re in a different era?”

  “I’m not forgetting anything.” He widened his stance, placed a finger on the orb. “Maybe you’re forgetting who drafted the schematics Charlotte followed? Who perfected this astrolabe?” He gazed directly into Ana’s pale eyes. One day, those eyes would know and respect him. “You.” He drew a line back an inch and appeared a few yards away from Ana.

  The sudden movement made him go cross-eyed. His stomach lurched. Monroe squeezed his eyes shut. Good thing he hadn’t tried to go any farther. But his wooziness proved one thing: he did need Ana.

  She clenched her jaw, glaring at him. “Fine. Like you said, I don’t have a choice.”

  When she took a couple steps closer, he shifted his finger back another inch—his body jolting backward another few yards. This time his stomach lurched violently. He’d better get that under control. “I’m not an idiot, Leanor. You stranded thousands of New Yorkers in this time. Why not three more?”

  She kept glaring. “I promise I’ll be good,” she said, her voice filled with venom.

  Monroe snorted. “Well, if you promise.” But he didn’t have a choice. He jumped beside her. This time, keeping his focus on her eyes and ignoring his surroundings, his stomach only flopped once.

  “I’ll help you,” Ana said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “But not here, not now.”

  “What?” A violent wind blew down the street, tugging at Monroe’s long ponytail. The hot rain was turning cold. The snow would come soon. “We aren’t waiting. I have to save them now.”

  “I thought you were the smart one. Take us to the past. An hour or so.”

  What would being in the past accomplish?

  A sharp flake of snow bit at his cheek, and his fingers started shaking. With a nod, Monroe spun time back with a few fingers. It would at least be a little warmer. And they’d have time to talk. Time to catch the Council unawares.

  The snow and rain faded. The angry clouds greedily took back their moisture. The fog had abated, leaving the air hot and sticky. “If Alek is wrong,” Monroe said, “if time travel doesn’t pull dominoes, then how did this happen? How do a thousand, a million—however many—people out of time ruin an era?”

  “They do,” Ana snapped. “Time’s not a fragile flower, where you pluck enough petals and you’re just left with the stem. It’s, it’s . . .”

  “A mountain?”

  “Yes.” But the fervor faded from her eyes as she searched him. He needed to know the truth. Now. Needed this from her. Because if time was a series of dominoes, then maybe they should keep the Council out. Destroy Charlotte’s astrolabe. “Look, have you seen many time travel movies?”

  “Some.” If Bill were here, he could’ve spun circles around Ana. As it were, Monroe would try his best to keep up. “I’ve seen Back to the Future.”

  “Okay.” Ana’s vision slid through him, then snapped back into focus. “Okay. You know how Marty eventually plays a song from his time in the past? And everyone’s like ‘Oh no, rock and roll!’ Or there was that weird Kid in King Arthur’s Court, with him bringing modern sensibilities to their lives. That’s what happened, but on a grand scale. And imagine that, history rippling forward faster than it should. But not once. Again and again and again, everywhere. With people reshaping history in many different eras. Chiseling away at the mountain to make time what they wanted it to be. And once the Council trapped them all? Well, they couldn’t resist.”

  With enough chisels, an entire mountain could be destroyed. Not because time was fragile, but because of humans. If history had taught Monroe anything, it was that humans tended to fuck things up far more than a natural disaster ever could. “So your history was always in flux.”

  “Exactly. Thanks to the Council’s EMP, we couldn’t fix it either. The age had already been abandoned, and then the clouds came, the earthquakes, the lightning.” Ana’s jaw hardened, and she shook her head. But Monroe had seen her sadness. No wonder she fought so hard to keep New York safe from the Council. She’d already lost not just a family, but an entire people. “Anyway, you seem to be able to use the device. So take us back across the bridge. Down the road, turn right, left, then a long line. Draw it like you would on a map.”

  She had to have some endgame, some way of stealing the astrolabe. But she wasn’t making any sneaky moves, just lightly t
ouching his shoulder. Gripping Charlotte’s astrolabe tightly, Monroe followed her instructions. A straight line, a right, a left, then a long line across the skinny bridge. And then he released.

  Mansions sped past. The road zagged beneath their feet. The bridge appeared and they were across it without moving a muscle. When they stopped, Monroe fell to his knees. Now his stomach came up. His lunch spilled onto a metallic road hundreds of thousands of years before he’d eaten his first meal. “Fuck,” he said, wiping his mouth. Ana still hadn’t made her move. “How do you get used to that?”

  Crazier still was that he’d been right: Leanor had designed the astrolabe to be used this way. Had she known they would visit her ruined age?

  Without replying, Ana placed a hand under Monroe’s elbow. He scrambled away before she could help him up.

  “Okay,” she said, hands held up. “Take your time. Getting back to their spire is simple enough. Once you place a finger, the orb uses your location as the starting point. And, just like with time, any adjustment moves you along. So make a long straight line, then a wide curve.” She gestured with her arm. “This is one of the major thoroughfares, so it’s easier. We’ll get close enough.”

  “And they won’t see us coming,” Monroe said, “because they haven’t even traveled forward and back yet.” Soon the Council’s plan would fail. Their building would leap forward, but Ana’s bombs would send it back. Then, maybe, the Council would see Monroe and Ana running. They’d spot Charlotte and Bill and confront them. Right now, the Council was probably distracted by their upcoming success.

  Monroe leaned his shoulder toward Ana and let her touch it. With a single finger, he followed her instructions, drawing a long line, then a slight gentle curve.

  The city flew by. They passed the obelisk where they’d hidden—would hide—as well as hundreds of other buildings. It was a blur until, just as suddenly, it wasn’t. The Council’s black spire towered above, the tip hidden in the clouds.

  Once again, Monroe stumbled to a knee. He retched, but his lunch was already gone. “Holy shit. That’s, that’s …”