by Megan Crewe
He cuts himself off, his head jerking toward the open passage behind me. His hand leaps to a spot on his upper arm, where the outline of a thin band shows faintly through his shirt. “They’re here.”
He scoops up his bag and the glowing square in one smooth movement. As he motions me deeper into the alcove, he dulls the light against his palm. “Stay here while I lead them the other way,” he murmurs. “As soon as they see I’m gone, they’ll follow me.”
No, he can’t go, not yet. “The weapon,” I whisper. “The parts. If you have them, you can give them to me—”
“I’ve already left the second part in the wall,” he says. He presses something small and flat into my hand. “When you hear that the Enforcers are gone, twist the corner of this. It’ll help you find the spot. And after you’ll have to go not far from your region of America, just before blood is spilled where the trees were laid low. That should be all Thlo needs to hear. Be careful.”
I snatch after him as he pushes away from me, but I miss his sleeve by an inch. He rushes toward the passage, little more than a lean silhouette in the dimmed light, and I open my mouth to call his name. Then the clatter of footsteps carries from the distant end of the cave. My voice catches. The Enforcers. A group from his time, it must be, or he’d dox them like he does Win. If I shout, I’ll bring them right to us.
I flatten myself against the wall. Jeanant’s feet thud against the stone as he races away. Someone yells, and the other steps speed up to a run. The dimmed glow of Jeanant’s light fades away completely. A twanging quavers through the air, and I wince.
But they must have missed, or maybe they shot after Jeanant had already whisked away in his time cloth. Through the pitch dark, a few muttered sentences in the alien language drift down the passage: annoyed, not triumphant. Someone sighs. And then there’s no sound at all.
I wait as the silence stretches on, until I can’t stand the blackness any longer. Then I fumble with the token Jeanant placed in my hand. One of the corners bends when I press it. I twist, and light sprays from its surface.
It’s just like the square he was carrying. The alcove feels more eerie now that I’m alone in it. The warmth of Jeanant’s cloak gives me only a small comfort.
I probably should have given it back to him. But there wasn’t time. There wasn’t even time to get all the information from him I think Win wanted. Before blood is spilled where the trees were laid low. I have no idea what that means. Maybe Win will. Jeanant said it would be all we needed. I guess he’ll leave the other two parts there for us, with whatever instructions he didn’t have time to give me now. He might not have had the remaining parts on hand.
There’s still the one he said he left here. I step back, examining the cave wall, then running my fingers over it. Finally, about halfway down, they catch on a crease that wobbles. Digging at it with my nails, I pry a chunk of the rock free.
There. Another slab of that alien plastic, about as long and wide as my forearm, lies in the crevice I’ve opened up. I pull it out. A rectangle of metal much like the first Win found, but twice as large, is embedded inside it amid lines of etched characters. It’s come with another message.
I tuck the slab under my arm as I creep back down the passage. The entrance is a bright speck in the distance. I hurry toward it, wondering where Jeanant is now. If this place with the trees is the answer, if his role in the mission will be finished there, will he be able to go home? I know he hasn’t made it back to Kemya in Win’s present. If he had, he could have told all this to Thlo himself instead of leaving clues.
Seventeen years in the future, Win said. Seventeen years before his group and Jeanant can meet without doxing. Surely the Enforcers will give up their chase before then?
The darkness falls away, the vague shapes of leaves and tree trunks coming into focus beyond the cave entrance. I jog the last short distance, eager to be out in the sun.
The space beneath the tree where Win was going to wait is empty. I swivel, just outside the cave opening. He’s nowhere.
The Enforcers, I tell myself, clamping down on panic. The ones who came from Jeanant’s time. They’d have doxed Win, or he’d have felt them coming and moved out of range. Now that they’re gone, he’ll be making his way back here. I just have to wait.
A crimson bird with absurdly long tail feathers flutters down onto one of the boulders in their jagged row beside me. A branch creaks. And then an out-of-tune twang hums through the air from somewhere to my right.
I flinch around. Someone’s crashing through the brush—there’s a hollered command. I throw myself in the opposite direction, toward the line of boulders. My shoulder jars against one as I scramble behind it, and there’s another shout. Twigs crackle underfoot, far too close. I crouch down, trying to listen over the thundering of my heartbeat. Was I seen?
A brittle voice calls out in words I don’t understand. It’s the pale woman’s voice. I stiffen. I don’t know if she’s trying to talk to me, or her companions. She says something else, but still in the alternately staccato and slurred syllables of their alien language.
The slab Jeanant left weighs heavy in my lap. I can’t let her get this.
I peer around me. There’s a rustle in the bushes a few feet away, near the mouth of the cave. The point of a straw hat and a childish face show through the broad leaves. A pair of frightened eyes stare at me, and then flick back to the area in front of the cave. Where I guess the pale woman is standing.
It’s the boy who followed us before. We didn’t lose him after all. He must have staked out the cave after he saw me go in, determined to get his proof of our treachery. He couldn’t have expected it to turn out like this. And I can tell he doesn’t have any more of an idea how to escape than I do.
Then another voice rings out, from somewhere farther away. “Why don’t you let us leave peacefully? We haven’t done anything wrong.”
It’s Win. I swallow the cry of relief that rises in my throat.
“Stay where you are,” he continues. “I’ll go.”
He’s talking in English. Just to be sure I’ll recognize his voice, or because he wants me to understand what he’s saying? Did he mean that last instruction for me? Stay where I am. He’ll go . . . to me? Considering he’s the one with the time cloth, that sounds like a reasonable plan.
As long as the pale woman doesn’t get to me first. “We will apprehend you,” she says, switching languages automatically at Win’s lead. Her accent is thicker, breaking the words into sharp fragments. “It will be as easy, or difficult, as you decide. I would prefer to bring you both back alive, but we only need one.”
She sounds nearer than before. I adjust my weight over my knees, so I can propel myself forward if I need to run. Glancing over at the boy, I raise a finger to my lips, hoping he’ll understand the gesture. But he isn’t even looking at me. His face is rigid with fear.
“I’d prefer none,” Win retorts. He sounds almost as if he’s above us. I stare in the direction his voice seemed to come from, and glimpse a flicker of golden-brown skin amid the tangle of vine-strung saplings on the ledge over the cave.
“If you truly meant to protect this planet, you would let us remove you,” the woman says, her steps crunching closer. “You are playing with history here as much as anyone else.”
Leaves ripple over the cave entrance. Win’s almost at the edge of the ridge above the boy’s head. But he’s still too far away, and the woman sounds as though she’s just steps from reaching me. I ease forward, readying myself to dash to meet him, and the boy’s gaze darts up.
He must see Win creeping toward him. A yelp bursts from his mouth. He bolts, out of the brush, toward the shelter of the cave. Straight into the pale woman’s line of sight.
My arm flies out, as if there’s any chance of me stopping him. He’s past me, bare feet skittering on the rock-strewn ground. I leap up just as that awful twang splits the
air. A stream of energy slams into the boy’s legs, and he topples onto his hands and knees.
“It’s a local,” a man is saying, on the other side of the clearing. “He saw us.” The pale woman, standing just a few feet from the cave, is already flicking a switch on her weapon.
“I know,” she snaps, and pulls the trigger before my protest reaches my lips.
This shot doesn’t just twang, it shrieks. The blast rams into the boy’s head, sending a shudder through his body as he slumps to the ground. The side of his face is blackened, his left eye nothing more than a cinder, his skin crackled like overheated plastic. He doesn’t so much as twitch again.
I register that in the second it takes the pale woman to whirl toward me. Win leaps from the underbrush at the base of the cliff, racing across the last few feet between us.
“No!” I try to say as he flings the time cloth around us, but my throat is so hoarse I can barely hear myself. Our surroundings spin away in a blur of color and the wailing of the wind.
19.
The cloth lurches around me. The image of the boy’s charred body shudders with it, imprinted on the back of my eyelids. Shudders, then slumps. Shudders, then slumps. Alive, and then, in an instant, completely extinguished.
Burnt to a crisp. Bile rises in my throat. She didn’t even think about it. He was a local. He saw their tech. She killed him.
She wouldn’t have been there at all if it weren’t for Win and me. He was only there because he followed us. Where was he supposed to be, that day, before we came?
“Skylar,” Win is saying. The air outside the cloth has stopped screaming. “Skylar, we’re okay now. We made it.”
“He’s dead,” I say, trembling. “He’s dead because of us.”
“What?” Win says. “The kid? That’s what the Enforcers do. That one woman, Kurra, I’ve heard stories about her. Apparently she has an even more brutal streak than the others.”
You are playing with history here as much as anyone else, she said.
I train my gaze on the blurred landscape beyond the cloth, trying to escape the thoughts rushing through my head. But it’s true. True with a wrongness that peals right through me. He wasn’t just a kid. He was part of history. Not just on that day, but the next—and the next week, and the next year, and on and on.
“One Earthling’s life, it doesn’t mean anything to them,” Win’s saying. “Even one Kemyate life doesn’t matter that much. Which is why we have to—”
“But it’s not just him,” I interrupt. “He wouldn’t have died before, because we wouldn’t have been there for him to follow—he would have grown up and had his own kids and those kids would have had kids and . . . A thousand years. A thousand years of generations and all those people are gone. They’re gone because of us.”
Hundreds of faces, lives, vanished into oblivion with one shriek of Kurra’s blaster. Snuffed out down the long chain of history as easily as hitting a Delete key. I sink down on the floor of the time-cloth tent.
“Skylar, you don’t know that,” Win says, but he sounds less certain now. “He could have died that afternoon, in the battle, or tomorrow, or the day after, some other way. It could be hardly any difference at all.”
“Or maybe it’s a huge difference,” I say. “Maybe—maybe he, or one of his descendants, grew up to be some brilliant leader, or scientist, or—” The possible immensity of it overwhelms me. All it takes is the loss of one person somewhere along one influential family tree, and it’s not just hundreds but billions of lives rewritten. The siren call of wrong, wrong, wrong blares in my ears. I cover my face, but I can’t shut it out. I can’t shut it out because it’s coming from inside me.
“It’s not your fault,” Win says, standing over me. “There wasn’t anything you could do. Kurra killed him, not us. And we have to move, Skylar. If they’re tracing us, we have to get away from this spot before they decode the signal.”
I shake my head and it just spins more. The words keep falling out. “I should have known. I should have noticed he was still following us, made him leave. I should have seen . . .”
Win sucks in a breath with what sounds like a growl. A flick of his hand brings up the glowing data panel.
I stare at my knees, Jeanant’s plastic slab pressed against my abdomen, as the world outside blurs and returns. Blurs and returns. Day, night, buildings, countryside. Each lurch makes my gut clench tighter. It doesn’t matter how many jumps we make, how far we go across space and time. The boy will still be lying there dead in the mouth of a cave near the Bach Dang River, sometime in 938 AD. I don’t know if a single one of the worlds outside looks like the one that was mine. I don’t know if I can ever go back to the exact time and place I called home. It could be completely different now.
The idea crawls under my skin and squeezes around my lungs, and I can’t sit still any longer. Win’s reaching for the display once more as I rock onto my feet.
“Stop,” I say. “That’s enough. Just stop.”
I don’t wait to see if he listens. I shove Jeanant’s slab toward him and stagger between the flaps.
I burst out onto an expanse of rolling hills, knee-deep in grass. The thick blades hiss as I stumble through them. Splotches of clouds dot the sky, one, two, three, four—my heart is pounding so hard my arms are shaking—the line of a wooden fence breaks the sea of grass on the hill beyond this one. Dark evergreen forest sprawling in the distance. An acid burn in the back of my throat. Three red-roofed buildings in a row along the knoll to my left. Five horses grazing in the pasture beside them. One black, two chestnut, two dappled gray. I still can’t breathe.
My bracelet is in my hand. I don’t remember taking it out. I don’t even remember starting the cycle of threes, but my thumb is already on the fourth bead, my lips moving along with the predictable methodical story of the numbers: 3 times 243 is 729. 3 times 729 is 2,187. It’s not enough to quiet the noise in my head. My fingers twist the beads harder. And then there’s a snap, a loosening, and the warm glass slips from my grip.
I snatch at it too late. One of the hemp strings broke. I broke it. I stop and spin around, ready to paw at the grass, and almost bump heads with Win. He’s crouching down amid the blades. I didn’t realize he was behind me.
“Here,” he says, holding up his hand. He’s plucked up the lost bead, white splotched with turquoise. I take it and look at the bracelet. I can’t tie the bead back on, not in any way that’ll hold. It’ll have to wait until I get home and can weave a whole new bracelet. If I ever get home—if that home bears any resemblance to the one I left—
Win straightens up and touches my shoulder. The gentle contact interrupts my thoughts on the verge of their panicked downward spiral.
I told him not to touch me. But he isn’t pushing or tugging or maneuvering me this time. He’s just there, his palm sending a little extra warmth through the fabric of Jeanant’s cloak.
“I think all those jumps one right after another will confuse the signals a bit,” he says. “And I was picking isolated spots so it’s unlikely we’ll shift anything noticeable. But if they’ve found a way to break Isis’s scramble, Kurra and the other Enforcers could still follow us here. We should get out of sight. There was a building that looked empty on the other side of the hill. Can you make it there?”
The killing blast from Kurra’s gun shrieks through my memory again, and my hand clenches around the bracelet. This wide-open landscape is only making me feel more lost. Walls, solid and secure—that sounds good.
“Okay,” I say.
We climb back the way we came. “There,” Win says, pointing, when we’ve reached the crest of the hill. Near the neatly spaced trees of an orchard stands a rough wooden shack, its door hanging loose on its hinges. I nod, and we scramble down toward it.
The shack has clearly been abandoned by whomever it belonged to. Streaks of dirt crust the one small window, and the do
or’s hinges are coated with rust. One corner of the roof has collapsed, giving us a splintery view of the dimming sky outside. But the walls are sturdy enough to hide us from view.
Win sits down on a span of mossy wood that looks like it might once have held a mattress, positioning himself so he can see the hill we arrived on through the murky window. The hill where the Enforcers will arrive if they track us here. I drop onto the floor. The boards are damp and smell like rot, but the discomfort helps hold me in place. In this now. Away from fractured images of death and destroyed ancestries and—
“It isn’t your fault,” Win says, his gaze flicking from me to the window and back again. “I didn’t know that kid was following us either, and I was the one outside the cave. I was the one who startled him and made him run.”
“I saw him hiding there. If I’d said something, gotten him to leave quietly before they noticed him . . .”
“What could you have said? He wouldn’t have understood you!”
He’s right. I know that. But the guilt is clamped tightly around my chest. “I could have found a way. If I’d been paying enough attention, seen everything I needed to—”
“Skylar—”
“You can’t tell me I couldn’t have done anything!” I burst out. “I was there. And I didn’t stop it. Just like—”
A surge of emotion, tangled regret and grief and anger, rushes up inside me. My voice falters. Just like with Noam. That was what I was going to say. But this has nothing to do with Noam.
Except somehow it does. Somehow that much older anguish has swallowed up everything else I was feeling, as if it was the same all along.
“Just like?” Win prompts.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. “It was a totally different situation. I just— My brother, Noam. He ran away when I was five. I was sitting there watching TV and he walked away with his knapsack and all the money he had saved in the bank, and I had no idea he wasn’t just going to the convenience store. It doesn’t matter.”