by Lanie Bross
Jasmine hesitated. “I … I’m not sure, actually.”
Ingrid nodded. “You hitching?”
Jasmine assumed she meant hitchhiking. “Kind of.”
“Cool.” Ingrid gave her a faint smile. Even then, the small line between her eyebrows—a worry line—never disappeared. “I always wanted to hitchhike around. Where’d you start out?”
Jasmine turned her face to the window as they wound alongside the bay. “A long, long ways away.”
“Well, Haight-Ashbury’s pretty cool, if you’re looking for a place to crash,” Ingrid said.
Jasmine couldn’t stop herself from grimacing. She knew Haight-Ashbury as a pilgrimage site for old hippies who wore sandals with socks and multicolored fanny packs, or for young, dumb rich kids who wanted to buy pipes and filters from a head shop for their overpriced weed and didn’t know where to look.
“I don’t know,” Jasmine said. “I have to think. I’m a little lost right now.”
The girl half smiled. “Aren’t we all?”
Jasmine glanced at Ingrid. She had on a white embroidered peasant top and a long colorful skirt. It looked like an outfit out of Thrift Town, Jas’s favorite thrift store. It was actually pretty awesome.
They were getting closer to the city and as they passed the Palace of Fine Arts, Jasmine saw workmen all around the area. It looked like they were building the columns that flanked the pathways to the rotunda. Jasmine took a deep breath.
“Look, this is gonna sound weird,” she said, “But … what year is it?”
Ingrid squinted at her. “Are you high or something?”
“What? No. I swear. It’s just …” Jasmine fumbled for an excuse. “It’s hard to explain.…”
“I’m not judging you,” Ingrid said. She laughed hollowly. “My mom would say I don’t get to judge anyone. People in glass houses, right? And God, it’s not like I haven’t tripped before. It’s 1975.”
Two men sat on the corner, shirtless, drumming on bongos, bobbing their heads. Several people stood around them, swaying to a beat Jas couldn’t make out from a distance. One woman had on a maxi dress. The man next to her had on striped bell-bottoms and a dark leather jacket. His hair had to be standing out from his head at least a foot.
Behind them, plastered across the brick building, were dozens of posters.
The War Is Over!
Goose bumps lifted on Jas’s arms. She’d always been fascinated by the 1970s. But it was different to be here, in the middle of it. She didn’t belong here.
“Want to talk about it?” Ingrid asked gently.
Jasmine picked at her jeans, which were fraying at the knee. “I’m … not sure you’d understand,” she said. Her throat was thick. What now, what now? She found herself wishing that time would shift again, and she would be thrown back into her own time, her own familiar streets.
“Try me.” Something in Ingrid’s voice made Jas look up. They were stopped at a light. With one hand, Ingrid smoothed her shirt down over her belly. Jasmine saw her stomach was tight and round. Like an upside-down bowl.
She was pregnant.
“It should be a good thing, right?” Ingrid said. She didn’t wait for Jasmine to respond. “But my parents still don’t know. They’d be so angry. And the father …” Ingrid’s voice broke and her fingers tightened momentarily on the wheel. “The father can’t handle it. Or doesn’t want to. I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” Jasmine said, forgetting, for a moment, about her own problems. Ingrid had to be, what, sixteen? seventeen? And she was all alone. And pregnant. “Isn’t there anyone who could help?”
Ingrid didn’t say anything right away. Then, without warning, she was crying. She pulled the car over and leaned forward, resting her head against the steering wheel. Jasmine didn’t know what to do. She struggled to think of words of comfort but came up empty. Instead, she reached her hand out and very lightly touched Ingrid’s hair.
Ingrid sat up. She pulled up her shirt and used its hem to wipe her eyes. Jasmine could see the high swell of her stomach. Ingrid smiled, even as she hiccupped.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I picked you up because I wanted to help, and now …” She gestured helplessly, sniffling. “I’m just so tired, you know? And so scared.”
Something passed between them, an unspoken understanding. Jasmine had the strangest sensation that she knew Ingrid, had met her somewhere before. But she knew it must be her imagination. “I do know,” Jasmine said.
“He’s not a bad guy,” Ingrid said. She repeated it, as if she wanted to convince herself. “He’s not a bad guy. And I’m sure he loves me. It’s just … have you ever thought about what’s out there? Like beyond what we know?” Her words spilled out over each other. “Would you think I was crazy if I told you that he’s just … different?”
“How do you mean, different?” Jasmine asked carefully. She certainly wasn’t going to accuse anyone else of being crazy. Not after the events of the past few days.
Ingrid had finally calmed down. Now she sat staring out the window, a muscle ticking in her jaw. “He has … a calling. Like a higher law he has to obey.”
“Like a priest or something?” Jasmine asked.
“Kind of.” Ingrid bit her bottom lip. “More like … he has to make sure everything happens the way it should.” Her eyes flicked to Jasmine’s, then quickly flicked away. “Like … fate. Like if fate needed help sometimes … Oh God, this is insane. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.”
Jasmine felt a chill spread through her body. An idea was tickling the edge of her consciousness. She needed to know for sure. Jasmine grabbed Ingrid’s hand and squeezed. “It’s okay. I believe you.”
Ingrid looked up at her. Her eyes got bright. “You do?”
“Absolutely.”
Ingrid took a deep breath. She searched Jasmine’s face, as though looking for signs that Jas was making fun of her. “He told me things, you know,” she said in a rush. “There are roads that connect our world with hundreds of others. Thousands of others. And he’s special in a way that allows him to travel those roads. It sounds impossible, right? Aliens or something, but it’s not like that. That’s why—that’s why he can’t stay here with me.” Ingrid laid her hand on her belly. “With us.”
It felt like all the air had been sucked out of the car. Jas was certain now. The baby’s father was an Executor. Ingrid must have mistaken the look on Jasmine’s face. Her cheeks turned pink and she looked away quickly.
“Anyway, thanks for listening. I—I probably sound like a crazy person to you. I don’t know why I just spilled my guts like that. I guess it felt good to tell someone.” Ingrid started the car engine over and pulled back into the street. They drove in silence for several minutes. Jasmine wanted to ask more questions, but she could tell that Ingrid already regretted saying as much as she had.
While waiting at a light on the corner of Scott and Chestnut, Ingrid coughed and spoke for the first time in ten minutes. She pointed across the street to a huge neon coffee cup. DAPHNE’S DINER blinked in bright pink above it.
“That diner is my favorite place to go and escape for a few hours,” she said, speaking politely now, as if she were a tour guide. “They have amazing milk shakes, and they let me sit for hours with a book and just read when it’s not busy. If the baby is a girl, I’m going to name her Daphne.”
Jasmine suddenly felt as though she were falling. It all made sense: the feeling of familiarity, the blue eyes, even the raven hair. The lemon-yellow Mercury.
“Is your last name Simmons?” Jasmine whispered. The pounding of her heart was so loud, she barely heard Ingrid answer. Ingrid was looking at her almost fearfully now.
“Who are you?” Ingrid said, her eyes narrowing a little. “Do I … do I know you?”
Jasmine closed her eyes. The world turned a somersault. Ingrid was her grandmother.
Which meant her grandfather had been an Executor.
Which meant s
he was an Executor, too. A part of her was, at least.
They sent you to kill one of your own?
Ford’s words came back to her and she felt sick.
“Stop the car,” Jasmine said. This was too much.
Ingrid pulled over to the side of the road and shifted the car into park. “Is everything okay?”
“No, it’s not.” Jasmine fumbled for the door handle and almost fell out of the car in her hurry to exit. She had no idea where she was, but she had to get out, get some air, get away.
Ingrid honked, but Jas ignored her. She couldn’t bear to even look at her grandmother again. She turned and started to run back the way they’d come.
Luc stood on the bank of the river that flowed through Pyralis and looked around.
After pulling the wires apart again, he’d crawled from the tunnels exhausted, his only thoughts of Corinthe. Instead of taking him back to San Francisco, though, the Crossroad had opened here.
Pyralis. He had made it, barely. His fingers smelled like smoke. There were angry blisters on his hands. He was moving automatically, through the pain, no longer caring what happened to the rest of the world—the rest of the worlds.
In the tunnels, he’d moved as though possessed. Hacking with his knife. Tearing at the wires until the tunnels were filled with sparks. Until the tunnels were screaming.
“Bring her back!” he’d shouted in response, as though time would hear, as though it would obey him. “Bring them both back!”
Then: an explosion. He’d felt a great weight hit him, as though a giant fist had punched him out of the tunnels, into the Crossroad. He’d nearly drowned there, suffocated by the swirling winds. But he’d managed to get the archer from around his neck. Corinthe. He focused on the feel of her lips on his. Corinthe.
And now he was here. In Pyralis. At the center of all known worlds.
He was almost afraid at what he would find.
Corinthe had died here.
It was hard to catch his breath, and panic gripped his stomach like an iron fist. Would he have to make a choice again? Now that he knew the cost of picking the Flower of Life, would he be able to let Corinthe do it?
If he didn’t, would Jasmine die?
He staggered away from the river. He didn’t see Jas anywhere, and didn’t know whether that was a good or bad thing. He plunged down a white-pebbled path that wound through lush flowering plants and disappeared into a thick grove of trees.
He heard whispers on the wind. He stopped and turned, wrapping his fingers around his knife. No one.
“Hello?” he called out. Faint whispers again. Or was that the wind? He couldn’t be sure.
He turned around and started forward once more. He hadn’t gone five feet when two girls emerged from the trees. They were maybe nine or ten years old, wearing long white dresses and walking barefoot over the rocks. They were so lost in conversation they didn’t see him until they were close enough to reach out and touch.
The dark-haired girl gasped. A hand flew to cover her mouth and her light-colored eyes went wide. “You can’t be here.” She took a step away from him. “You’re not supposed to be here. No one is supposed to be here.”
The other girl, the one with long blond hair, looked up.
Luc’s breath whooshed from his lungs as he looked into familiar gray eyes.
“Corinthe?” he whispered.
She looked at him without curiosity. “How do you know my name?”
Luc stared. The eyes were the same but there was no feeling in them, no life. Like two of the marbles she told him she used to fetch from the river. Luc suddenly remembered Jasmine at that age—face always smeared with dirt, mouth wide from either laughing or crying, depending on her mood. Corinthe looked like she had never laughed, never cried.
This was Corinthe as a girl then, before she was sent to Humana. Despair opened in his chest. He had gone back. Too far back.
The dark-haired girl grabbed Corinthe’s arm and tugged. “We’re not meant to be curious. Come on.”
Corinthe shrugged the girl’s touch away. “I know, Alessandra. It’s just a question.”
“We’re not meant to ask questions.”
Corinthe frowned in annoyance, and for a second, Luc caught a glimpse of the Corinthe he knew, the Corinthe who would someday be. But then it was gone. Corinthe continued staring at him blankly, as if he were a puzzle she couldn’t quite complete and didn’t have the energy for.
The other girl, Alessandra, looked terrified. She hesitated, looking from Corinthe to Luc and back to Corinthe, as though for guidance. Then she turned and bolted back the way the girls had come.
“Who are you?” Corinthe asked idly, as if she were asking What’s your favorite color? “How did you get here? Only Fates are allowed in Pyralis.”
Luc’s throat was dry. “I’m Luc. I came through the Crossroad. I was … looking for someone.”
At the mention of the Crossroad Corinthe’s eyes changed again, and the wariness was gone. Again Luc saw a spark of the Corinthe he knew. She rose up on her toes and bounced slightly. “You’ve been through the Crossroad? What’s it like? Was it dangerous? Were you scared? I’ve heard that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can get sucked to the very edges of the universe where there’s nothing but dry red desert.”
“You’ve never been through the Crossroad?” Luc asked, though he knew the answer.
Her lips turned down. “We’re not allowed. Our job is to sort the marbles and send them on to the Messengers. The Messengers travel between the worlds, carrying the marbles.” She said it quickly, as if it was a line she had memorized and repeated often.
“To the Executors, right?” Luc prompted.
Corinthe’s frown deepened and she took a step back, watching him carefully. “You know about the Executors, too?” Her gaze flicked toward the trees, and for a second, Luc thought Corinthe would run away.
“I’ve only heard of them,” Luc said, trying to reassure her. His pulse was throbbing in his neck. Corinthe was safe here. Alive. She was home in Pyralis, a place she loved. Should he warn her about what would come? She had once told him that she’d been exiled from Pyralis because she’d been too curious, and lost a fate marble as a result. Should he tell her she must never, ever ask questions?
Then they would never meet. She would never, ever grow up and become Corinthe—wild and free and passionate and good. They would never fall in love.
“Oh. That’s all right, then,” Corinthe said.
Luc took a deep breath. “I’ve heard stories about the Flower of Life, too,” he said carefully. “Have you seen it?”
Her face brightened. “It’s in the Great Gardens. I love the Gardens. We’re only allowed in the outer gardens, though.” Her face darkened momentarily. “The inner garden isn’t allowed. There are lots of things that aren’t allowed.”
“What happens if someone picks the flower?” he asked, though this, too, was a question whose answer he knew.
“Whoever picks the flower dies.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, unemotional.
He was gripped by the irrational urge to make her see how wrong it was, to try to make her see before it was too late. “Doesn’t that seem a little unfair to you?”
“Unfair?” Corinthe tilted her head to the side and looked at him curiously, as if she’d never heard the word before. “It’s perfectly fair. The nectar of the flower gives life. But the blood of the receiver is what makes the flower grow again. That’s what keeps the universe in balance, and balance is a gift from the Unseen Ones. Blood for blood and a life for a life.”
Luc froze. Dread pooled in his stomach. Blood for blood. A life for a life. Corinthe had picked the flower, but she had not used it for herself. She had given the flower’s nectar to Jasmine. Corinthe had died and Jasmine had lived. Would he have to choose between them in order to satisfy the Unseen Ones?
If he saved Corinthe, did that mean the Unseen Ones would keep sending Executors to try to kill Jasmine? Was it some kind o
f sick rebalancing act? Had the Executors been after Jasmine, not him, all along?
He knew immediately that it was true. He felt it. Jasmine would never be safe while Corinthe was alive.
Unless …
Unless he could find a way to go back to the beginning, before everything started, before Jasmine was taken, before Corinthe received her final task.
He felt a swinging sense of nausea. That meant going back to the tunnels.
Impulsively, Luc touched Corinthe’s shoulder. “Whatever you do, don’t stop asking questions.”
Corinthe frowned, then nodded. Her eyes were now the color of a swirling thunderstorm.
He turned and started back toward the river. As he got closer to the end of the path, he could hear the roar of water rushing into the unknown. The sky was the same violet shade as ever; the water reflected thousands and thousands of stars.
Without hesitation, Luc dove into the river and swam toward the line where the stars met the edge of Pyralis. Soon the current grabbed him, propelled him along. He couldn’t stop even if he wanted to. He knew he must be approaching the waterfall that bled out off the edge of Pyralis, and into the Crossroad. The roar of the water was thunderous. The spray got in his mouth and in his eyes. For a second, he was cold with terror and wanted to stop, to get out, to rest. But then the current pushed him over the edge of the waterfall, and he plummeted into the swirling mist below.
This time, when the spikes of pain and light came, driving through Jasmine’s skull, it was almost a relief. She sat down heavily in front of the rotunda and waited. The ground beneath her trembled; she felt like she might get bucked off the surface of the earth. She took deep breaths, recited all the constellations through Dorado.
Finally, her head cleared. The blackness eating the edges of her vision dissipated. The sun was just breaking over the horizon, across the city. The rotunda was changed. Newer. It was the rotunda she recognized. A dozen feet away, a jogger was shouting to her—but she was too focused on his Nike sneakers, on his big digital watch and heart monitor, to make out what he was saying. With a rush of relief, she realized she was back. Or forward. Whatever. She could have cried out with joy.