by Megan Crewe
“I heard a scraping sound,” I say. “When I got to this room, Jeanant was standing here, looking at that wall.” I point. “I think he had blue paint on his hand.”
Win moves onto the spot I indicated on the floor, frowning at the paintings. He crosses his arms in front of him, and I’m struck by the difference between him and the man who was standing there before. Win’s frustration radiates off him, as if my failure has thrown all his plans for a loop, even though a half hour ago he had no idea it was even possible I might talk to Jeanant.
He’s never had a solid plan of his own, has he? He’s been willing to take risks, sure, but it’s all been ‘try this out and see where it takes us.’ The mission itself, the idea of saving Earth, that was Jeanant’s.
Because Jeanant’s the first of his people to step up and actually do something about the time field. And even after he thought the Enforcers had caught up with him, he moved and spoke with such confidence, as if he’d face a whole army if he had to, and maybe come out on top. So much confidence I can still feel it echoing inside me.
We survived the Enforcers back home, the streets of Paris, the museum guard. We’ll get through this too. For once in my life, I am not going to back down and hope I can wait out my problems.
“Do you see anything that looks like a clue?” I ask.
Win shakes his head. He eases closer, studying each of the pieces on the wall. There’s a ship on a stormy sea, a shadowy forest, a woman reclining in the moonlight, a huntsman guiding his horse over a hedge, a family gathered by a flickering hearth, a portrait of a dour young man, and two ravens circling the moors. All of them have bits of blue here and there.
“I don’t suppose any of them were signed by ‘Jean Manthe’?” I say. The corner of Win’s mouth twitches, as if he’s not sure whether to smile or frown.
“Unfortunately not,” he says. “And not by Jeanant or Meeth either . . .”
Meeth. The code name hangs in the air. I look at the images again, and the answer rushes to me. Win glances over, his eyes widening, at the same moment I turn to him.
“Prometheus.”
Bringing fire.
“I should have seen it right away,” Win says a little breathlessly, reaching for the painting of the family by the hearth. “It’s perfect. Only our group knows he went by that name. The Enforcers would never catch it.”
He sets the picture on the floor and squats in front of it, running his fingers along the edge of the gold-trimmed frame. It creaks as he digs his fingers around a corner of the canvas, and I wince.
“You’ll break it!” I say.
“For all we know it was destroyed before Jeanant added that article in the newspaper about protecting the art,” Win says with a shrug. “I’ve got to see—here we go.”
The corner pops out of the frame, and I notice that pressing against the paint has given Win’s fingers the same bluish cast Jeanant’s thumb had. But I can’t help cringing as he yanks the canvas away. This could be a lost masterpiece, just now recovered.
Of course, it’s a human masterpiece. Considering what Win said before about art and wastefulness, I guess even he doesn’t see one Earth painting as much of a loss.
“I’ve got it!” he crows. He tugs something like a thin slab of plastic out from between the canvas and its backing. Embedded in the plastic-like material is a metal rectangle crisscrossed with silvery lines.
“What is it?” I ask. It hardly looks like a weapon capable of blowing up a massive satellite.
“A tech plate,” Win says, grinning. “Either the guidance system or the processor, I’d bet, since those are the parts we’d have the most trouble constructing on our own when we rebuild the weapon. And . . .” He taps the rows of tiny red characters printed along the edge of the slab. They remind me of the ones on the time cloth’s display.
“These must be his directions to the next piece.” His gaze darts over them, his body practically quivering with enthusiasm now. Seeing his face light up, part of me wants to be over there examining it with him. But that isn’t enough to distract me from what he said.
“The next piece? I thought you just needed to find the one thing.”
“Well, we need to find the weapon,” Win says. “But Jeanant didn’t risk putting all his faith in one hiding spot. In his last message to Thlo, he said he’d break up the most essential parts and spread them out between four different places and time periods. So even if the Enforcers stumble on one or two, hopefully we’ll get enough to figure out the rest.”
He says it in the same offhand manner he talked about ruining the painting. As if I should have known this all along. His earlier words come back to me: We’ll have to try again.
He didn’t mean here. He meant some other place, some other time. Another trip in the cloth—and another, and another—to more worlds I was never meant to be a part of. Worlds where nothing will be more wrong than me.
My stomach clenches. “So we’ve barely gotten started,” I say. “You only asked if I’d come to France. You just assumed I’d follow you around wherever else you needed to go?”
“Well, I—” He looks up at me, and his voice falters. “You said you’d help.”
“You made it sound like it was just this one place. Like we’d poke around in Paris a bit and then head home, no big deal.”
His mouth opens. I can actually see him struggling to hold that innocent expression in place. It doesn’t work. His gaze flicks away from me and back. And suddenly I understand.
“You knew I probably wouldn’t come if you told me everything,” I say. I was this shiny new shift-sensing tool he just had to bring with him, so he said what he thought would convince me and left out any other details that might have mattered. Who cares what I want if it gets the mission done?
“I was trying to keep things simple—”
“You decided not to tell me the whole truth.”
And it worked. Here I am. With no way to get home unless he takes me.
My pulse has started thumping. I reach for my bracelet, for the comfort of numbers, but the thought of trying to pull myself together while he’s sitting there watching me like I’m a freak show act just makes me feel more sick. Turning on my heel, I stalk out of the room.
“Skylar!” Win calls after me, but I ignore him. I march back to the wide hall, not stopping until I’ve reached one of the museum’s tall windows.
This one offers a view over the city instead of the inner courtyard. The guns and cannons are momentarily silent, but a couple streams of smoke are still winding up toward the clouds over the carved stone rooftops.
I lean my forehead against the glass, absorbing the scene below as I rotate the beads. I can make out twelve scrawny trees along the side of the boulevard. Bright green foliage drifting in the breeze. Muddled patterns of soot or mud or some other dark liquid smeared across the cobblestones. A body in a red-and-blue uniform sprawled by the corner, unmoving.
What am I doing here?
The answer comes, unbidden, with the memory of the defiance on Jeanant’s face as he spoke back against the Enforcers. I’m not just a passive variable in some alien fishbowl experiment. I’m fixing the world. I’m righting the wrongs.
I just can’t help thinking I’d be doing a much better job of it with Jeanant as my guide.
I hear Win walking up behind me, but I don’t bother to look over. He stops beside the window.
“I’m sorry,” he says stiffly. “Meeting you, it was a chance I’d never have expected to get, a chance to make our mission so much easier. I didn’t want to lose that. But I’ve never done anything like this before—bringing along an Earthling—I was never supposed to. I didn’t know how much I should say.”
“You think it’s been easy for me?” I say. “At least you’ve done some of this before. I did want to help, and I know how important finding this weapon is to you, but it w
asn’t fair to ask me to make that decision without telling me what we were actually getting into.”
“I know. I am sorry. And you know of it now: three more time periods, three more parts of the weapon.” He leans back against the wall. At the edge of my vision, I see his head turn as he surveys the hall. His tone lightens. “It hasn’t been all bad, has it? You did get a trip to Paris out of it. A Paris no one else you know will ever get to see.”
Part of me wants to smack him, but a short laugh lurches out. “I guess so.” I can’t say I wish I hadn’t seen this Paris. That it doesn’t give me a little thrill to think that I might walk into the Louvre someday in my present, and be able to see how it’s changed in the last two centuries.
“Do you want me to take you back?” Win asks.
I look at him then. His jaw is set, his mouth pressed into a flat line, as if he wishes he hadn’t said that. But he did. Even though completing his mission could depend on the fact that I can talk to Jeanant, that I can sense the shifts.
In a way, that means more than anything else he’s said the entire time I’ve known him.
The thought of home sends a wave of longing through me, but I force myself to pause. I parse out my anger, my sense of betrayal, the anxiety underneath. Nothing I’ve been through so far has been outright unbearable. My thumb runs over the bracelet’s beads. I think I can handle more.
I don’t think I can handle going back to living my old life, feeling every little shift and knowing what they mean, knowing Win’s group is still struggling to stop them—struggling more because I gave up and let fear get the better of me. Jeanant’s even more out of place than I am, a galaxy’s length away from home and years apart from any of his own people, and he hasn’t let that stop him.
I drag in a deep breath, trying to ease the jitters that rise up at the thought of leaping even farther into unfamiliar history. Maybe I’m not going to stop, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask for something. “No,” I say. “Not like that. But, before we go wherever and whenever we need to next—I think I’d feel better if you did take me home first, just for a few minutes. So I can . . . catch my breath.” And regain my balance before my world’s thrown out of whack all over again.
“And then you’d come with me?” Win says.
“And then I’d come with you,” I agree. “We’ve still got my planet to save, don’t we?”
He breaks into a smile. “Indeed we do.”
15.
I settle myself in the corner of the window ledge. The hard stone braces me. “Do you know what our next stop will be?” I ask Win.
He holds up the slab of alien plastic. “Not yet,” he says. “It’s like his message to Thlo: kind of a riddle, in case the Enforcers get a hold of it. The first part isn’t too hard. He says to take the number of years for that first message to reach us, and then repeat them two hundred and sixty-eight times since zero. Thlo’s said that the message came exactly three and a half years after he disappeared, so—”
“938,” I say automatically. Win blinks at me. “Numbers are my thing, remember? That’s the year we need to go to? AD, I guess—that’d probably be what the ‘since zero’ means.”
He gives me a slow smile. The smile that makes it hard to remember he’s not a human boy, but an alien. “Definitely,” he agrees. “The rest is more obscure, though. ‘Where the little dragon scares off the big dragon. The sign will point at the sky.’ ”
“Dragons,” I say. “So . . . somewhere in medieval Britain, then? That’d be the right time period.”
“Actually,” Win says with a patronizing air that obliterates any goodwill the smile bought him, “dragons are much more closely linked to many Asian cultures than they are to Europe. That’s more likely what he was referring to.”
I restrain myself from rolling my eyes. “Okay, can you get more specific? Asia’s a big continent.”
“Give me a second. There’s something about that year . . .”
“Do you think it’ll be another revolution?” I ask. “That’s sort of Jeanant’s theme, right? The line about the dragons does sound like some kind of uprising.”
“Of course. That’ll help narrow it down.” He pulls out his time cloth and unfolds it into its laptop-like shape.
“You get Internet access here?” I say skeptically as he sets it on the ledge of the next window over.
“No,” he says. “But there’s plenty of information stored in the cloth itself. It’s tricky to find anything quickly, sifting through all of it, but whatever we need to know, it’s in here somewhere.”
“What about the rest of your group?” I ask. “You have proof that you’re on the right trail now. Shouldn’t you let them know?”
He pauses, the glow of the display casting a greenish tint on his golden-brown skin. Then he shakes his head with a jerk. “No need yet. We’re doing fine on our own. If we can catch up with Jeanant at the next location, we might be able to finish everything right there.”
I don’t see why having some extra help wouldn’t still be a good thing, but right then a cannon booms outside the window, making the wall shudder. Win winces as I leap back. Someone is shooting right at the building.
“I expect this place will hold,” Win remarks, turning back to the screen. Pulse skittering, I edge to my window and peer out, thinking I should suggest he do his information searching at my house.
The shadows across the street from the Louvre are lengthening as the sun sinks below the distant rooftops. I can’t make out anyone moving between them. There’s just a pair of birds circling each other against the sky, where one of the streams of smoke has faded into a wispy thread, and—
There’s a new line of smoke snaking up between the other two, thick and gray. The instant my eyes catch it an uncomfortably familiar tremor of wrong, wrong, wrong pierces my mind. My skin goes clammy.
“Win,” I say. “Win!”
“What?”
For a second, I can only press my finger against the glass as the wrongness chokes me. My other hand fumbles for my bracelet. “There,” I manage. “That smoke. I think something’s shifted.”
Win gazes past me. One of those alien curses falls from his mouth.
“That’s the direction we came from,” I say. “Did we make something—”
“If we were the ones who made it happen, you’d never have seen anything different,” he says. “But maybe we shifted something else. The Enforcers must have picked up our trail somehow.”
The words have only just left his mouth when the band around my ankle starts to shiver. “They’re close!” I say, flinching away from the window.
Win dashes back to the cloth computer. “I’ve almost narrowed it down,” he says. “Just give me a few seconds.”
He flicks through the data on the display. I check both ends of the hall. The band’s only vibrating lightly right now, but that could change at any moment.
“Can’t we get out of here, and then you can finish looking? What if we don’t have a few seconds?”
“If I stop, I’ll have to start all over—there! The Bach Dang River.” He reaches out to me with one hand, the other yanking the time cloth into its tentlike form. “Come on!”
My gaze slips past the window, and catches a movement outside. A pale figure flanked by two darker ones, marching across the boulevard toward our wing of the museum. The instant my eyes snag on them, the pale woman glances up at my window. Her barked command carries through the glass, and Win grasps my arm. I scramble with him beneath the folds of the cloth.
“She’s outside—she saw me,” I babble as the flaps fall shut.
“Well, in a moment we won’t be here,” Win says, swiping at the inner display. “Hold on.”
I barely have time to wonder, Hold on to what? before the cloth jumps, and my stomach heaves with it. I stumble into Win, clapping my hand over my mouth to contain a surge of
nausea. And then it’s over.
Win swears under his breath and pokes at the display again. I stare through the translucent walls, and recognize the same wide hall of the Louvre, the row of busts, the high windows. We haven’t moved more than ten feet.
“What—”
“Let me figure it out!” Win snaps.
The cloth lurches. I manage to keep my balance, but my head is spinning. The blurred outer walls of the museum rise around us. We’ve only Traveled into the courtyard.
An older model, Win said before, when the jumps were rough. Has it died? Win slams his hand against the display, but the cloth doesn’t move at all this time. He leans forward, his head bowed, muttering something under his breath. It sounds almost like he’s praying. I hug myself, braced for the pale woman to burst out of the doorway across from us. Maybe we should get out and run for it.
“You will work,” Win growls at the display, as if he can intimidate the cloth into functioning properly. His fingers flit over the characters. And the world around us finally whisks away.
My eyes squeeze shut. The floor beneath me shudders and the air squeals. This must be what it’s like to be tossed up in the middle of a hurricane. But at least it feels like we’re actually going somewhere this time.
We come to ground with a jolt and a ringing in my ears. Only a dim light penetrates the fabric walls past the buildings looming close on either side, but the rumble of car traffic and the beat of a hip-hop tune filter in with it. Not the Louvre, or Paris, anymore. We’ve left the Enforcers far behind. I let out my breath.
“Third time’s a charm,” I murmur. “Where are we?”
Win consults the display. His stance relaxes. “Back in your city,” he says. “The afternoon we left.”
“Oh,” I say. “I was thinking, like, my house, or . . .”
“I know,” Win says. “But . . . I didn’t expect the Enforcers to catch up with us that quickly.”