Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy)

by Megan Crewe

  “We might as well check it out,” I say.

  We start off, picking our way between the narrow tree trunks. Only a few shrubs and patches of grass sprout here and there amid the dead leaves coating the ground. Win wheezes a little after we clamber over a log, but the terrain isn’t too rough. This forest is a lot less dense than the jungle in Vietnam. It reminds me of the state park my parents and I used to visit—the one from the painting Win admired.

  Because, like Jeanant said, this place is pretty close to my part of the country. For all I know, I could run into my own ancestors here—or Bree’s, or Lisa’s . . . or almost any of my classmates’ or neighbors’, really.

  My heart skips a beat. What if we do? What if we do, and we shift something here? What will that do to my present? Angela should be safe—her parents were born in the Philippines—but I don’t know about anyone else. Could I accidentally write someone out of existence? My friends? Noam? Me?

  I yank my thoughts back to the world around me. My fingers itch for the bracelet I no longer have. I curl them into the folds of my skirt.

  Five woodpecker holes dotting the trunk of that maple. Crisscrossing roots forming triangles and pentagons in the dirt.

  I’m here for all those people, the people whose lives are connected to this place. Here to protect them from shifts, not make new ones. I have to focus on that.

  Win slows and points to a stretch of cleared land up ahead. We creep toward the edge of the clearing.

  In the middle of the field stands an earthen rampart, surrounded by a low shadow I realize is a trench. It’s bordered by the pale tips of pointed stakes. The sight of them jerks me back to the workers carving their bamboo poles along the Bach Dang River. I blink, and the heaped blockades of dirt and rock on the Paris streets flash through my mind.

  There are other soldiers standing behind this rampart, along the wooden walls of the fort. The rising sun is glinting off their tall, black helmets and the muzzles of their rifles. The light catches in my eyes, and thousands of years of history collide. Booming cannon fire, the sizzle of Kurra’s blaster, the crackle of a pistol in a marsh.

  Everywhere we go, every when, it’s so much the same.

  I grip the branch next to me, absorbing the dips and ridges and whorls in the bark. We’re almost done. Just a little further, and then I can go back to living in one place, in one time. And I’ll know no one else is wandering around changing our history either.

  “Fort Miamis?” I make myself say.

  Win nods. “Doesn’t look like it’d be easy to get inside, or even to get close. I don’t think Jeanant would pick a place where we’d be so likely to be seen. Do you notice anything about it?”

  I squint at the ditch, at the soldiers patrolling the walls, and shake my head.

  “Well, let’s look a little closer, and then we’ll move on.” He steps forward to skirt a cluster of bushes.

  Apparently the sentries have already spotted us despite our sheltered position. The second Win moves into clearer view, a rifle twitches and a shot thunders across the field. Win throws himself backward, and I leap to help him. The bullet thuds into the trunk of an alder just a few feet away. We scramble deeper into the forest.

  “So friendly,” Win says with a cough.

  “I guess we’d better avoid them completely,” I say. I don’t know why the soldiers would be shooting at us. I guess we must look a little strange in this clothing—or the two of us together, me pale and Win darker—or they might have caught something we said about getting in the fort and taken it as a threat.

  It’s easy to see other people as hardly people at all when you’re watching them from a distance.

  “To the fallen trees, then,” Win says, motioning to our left.

  We head off, the dry leaves crackling under our feet. “We don’t want to rush in there,” Win goes on. “The Native army will be waiting right near the place where the storm hit the trees, expecting the debris to slow the American army down.”

  “And they probably won’t be any more friendly than those soldiers,” I finish for him. I get that Jeanant had a theme he was trying to emphasize, but I can’t help thinking his people, himself, me, this whole mission, would have been safer if he weren’t constantly sending us into battlefields. Maybe the chaos makes it easier to cover up shifts, and offers more action to distract the Enforcers chasing him. Still, we’d be a lot more likely to get through it alive and carry out his plan if he’d decided to hide the weapon parts somewhere and somewhen more peaceful.

  “Do you think . . .” I start, glancing around, and my voice trails off. Something about the trees—the angle of a branch, the flicker of a leaf?—sends a ripple of wrongness through me. My gut knots.

  “What?” Win says.

  “I think something’s been shifted,” I say. “I don’t know what. Over there.”

  I point, the wrongness shivering over my skin. A chill rises through me.

  I have to keep it together without the beads, my usual trick. I close my eyes, picturing Noam sitting down on the couch with five-year-old me at our grandparents’ house instead of heading out the door. Picturing the generator orbiting above us exploding in a burst of flame.

  The feeling recedes.

  Win cocks his head. “Do you think it’s Jeanant or the Enforcers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He starts off in the direction I indicated, and I trail behind him. We’ve only made it a few steps when a figure moves into view between the trees up ahead. No, three figures: three people in brown Traveler clothes that almost blend into the trunks, heading our way. I catch a flicker of ice-pale skin amid the shadows, and bite my tongue.

  Win’s already pulling his satchel open, a curse on his breath. Kurra darts forward, waving her companions along with one hand while raising the slim black shape of her blaster. I scoot close to Win as he tosses the time cloth around us. The Enforcers fade into a haze of motion beyond the tent walls.

  Just as Win brings up the display, a horribly familiar twang reaches my ears. A jolt of light sparks against the tent wall, right in front of me. I yelp, and the cloth heaves. Win swears again as it hits the ground.

  I swivel. We’re still in the forest. All I can see is the wavering forms of trees around us, but twigs are snapping underfoot somewhere nearby. Win smacks the panel, smacks it again, and the cloth doesn’t move another inch.

  “Win?” I say shakily.

  “It’s going to take a few minutes for the circuits to realign,” he says, looking pained. “I’m sorry. It gave us about seventy feet, but we’ll have to—”

  Back where the snapping sounded, a sharp voice rings out, with a word I don’t recognize and yet can clearly understand. It’s a call to action.

  Win grabs my hand. “Run!”

  He drags the cloth down and dashes forward, and my feet follow him automatically. We crash through the underbrush, duck beneath a low-hanging branch, and dodge around a mossy heap of stones. Win’s breath rasps. He’s squeezing his arm against his side, the side where he was bleeding just a few hours ago. It must be hurting him. He keeps running, weaving us back and forth so it’ll be harder for the Enforcers to get a clear shot, but I’m pulling ahead of him.

  I can’t hear our pursuers over the sound of our feet, but I don’t dare look back. My ankle is starting to throb, and it’s taking all my focus to keep my strides steady. The thick air burns my throat. Win trips on a root and I haul him upright. He makes a sound as if he’s trying to speak, but it’s lost in his heaving breaths.

  We swerve past a thicket of saplings. The cloth Win didn’t have time to fold streams over his arm. We can’t stop until we’re sure it’ll work—as soon as we do we’re easy targets again.

  I spot an immense oak ahead of us, wide enough to give us both shelter for a moment to check the cloth. Another twang sings out behind us, followed by the hiss of si
zzling sap. Win jerks me to the right. We leap a shallow creak and veer around a birch. My ankle wobbles under me. I grit my teeth, tugging Win toward the oak. I think a flicker of acknowledgment crosses his face. My hand tightens on his forearm.

  And then I’m holding nothing but air. My fingers spasm, and I stumble. Lurching around, I find myself alone amid the trees.

  No, not alone. In the distance, a hooded figure is charging toward me. Kurra narrows her icy eyes and raises her weapon. I whirl around. Five more feet to the oak. That’s all I need.

  The out-of-tune twang splits the air as I dart away, and my foot kicks out from under me. I throw out my arms to break my fall, tumbling into a patch of weeds at the base of the oak’s trunk. A jolt of pain shoots up my calf from my already sore ankle. And then there’s nothing. No pain. No feeling at all. As if my leg now ends at the knee.

  28.

  I roll onto my back and scuttle away crab-like, dragging my numb foot. It bumps over the uneven ground, sending odd shocks up to my thigh. Kurra stalks toward me through the brush, slower now. She’s lowered her blaster to her side.

  She hit my leg on purpose. Why? She pauses to scan the forest around us, and I remember: she’s aware I’m not alone. She doesn’t know where Win’s gone either. She may even suspect there are others besides Win and me. If she kills me right away, she won’t be able to ask. Somehow I don’t think she plans to make it a polite interview.

  One of the other Enforcers calls out a question from behind her, and she sends him off to survey the area with a flick of her arm. Then she focuses her attention back on me.

  I shove myself backward, groping for anything I can use to shield myself, to try to fend Kurra off. Her blaster jerks up, and she barks a command in the Kemyate language that given her expression probably means, “Stop or I’ll shoot.” My body locks up, my arms quivering.

  I’m a sitting duck. There’s no shelter I can get to, crippled like this, before she could zap me ten more times. But I still have three working limbs. If she gets close enough, I’ll have to try—

  Close enough.

  Kurra stalks through the trees toward me, flicking something out of her sleeve into her free hand, and my mind fixes on that one thought. Win disappeared—Win was doxed. Because someone from another time must be nearby. If that someone is still there, the same thing will happen to Kurra, won’t it? If she comes just a little closer.

  I will myself to hold still and wait, ignoring the cramping of my shoulders. Kurra stops by a birch tree. The birch tree Win and I ran past? She’s almost at the spot.

  But instead of continuing toward me, she stays where she is, about fifteen feet away. Eyeing whatever she pulled from her sleeve, and then me. Her cold gaze penetrates my skin. Her mouth tenses, lines forming like spidery cracks in the marble-pale skin around her lips.

  She says something else, a string of syllables that could be a question. I stare back at her. Her hand drops, revealing the metallic square she’s holding. Its face swims with faint ripples of light. She makes a scoffing sound in her throat, a mix of surprise and horror.

  “Earthling,” she says—not the casual way Jule used the term, but like a slur. That’s when I understand. The thing in her hand, it must be the device she was using to track Win in the office building. Whatever she said a moment ago, it was a test, to confirm what she couldn’t believe her eyes were telling her.

  “The impudence,” she goes on, the staccato rhythm of her accented English fracturing the word. “Your ‘friend,’ whoever he is—when the Council hears—” She shakes her head. Her gun arm steadies.

  Standard protocol, I think, and my lungs clench. But she doesn’t shoot. She must still want to know what I can tell her about Win.

  Which gives me time. I have to make her move closer—and fast, so she doesn’t notice the doxing feeling in time to catch herself. I need something to provoke her.

  My fingers dig into the dirt, grounding me. “That screen of yours is defective, then? Or maybe your eyes are? Since when do Earthlings Travel?”

  She takes one step toward me. “Since our feeble revolutionaries outdid themselves in dishonor, it seems,” she sneers. “You’re not Kemyate. I should have known when I first saw you.”

  “Maybe you’re not as smart as you think,” I snap over the thudding of my heart. “I knew you were a monster the moment I saw you.”

  Another step. Her lips curl in disgust. “Feeble words. Who else is with you?”

  “No one,” I say. Did they see Jule near the safe house?

  “There is someone,” she says, slowly and firmly. “Who is Noam?”

  I freeze, my mouth falling open. How can she— Where did she get his name?

  Kurra smirks at my discomfort. “You were writing a message to him. He—or she—is another one of your ‘friends’? Tell me about him and maybe you will live a little longer.”

  Oh God. The letter I started. It was in my purse—the purse Kurra grabbed. Of course they looked through it.

  “He’s no one,” I say. “He’s nothing to do with this.”

  She shrugs. “You will tell me.”

  I can’t let them go after Noam. After everything that’s already happened to him . . .

  I can’t protect him unless I get out of this.

  My mind trips back to the conversation I overheard between her and Win. Her disgust with Earth. My anger at what her people have done to us. I clutch on to that, feed it into my voice. “Don’t you have better things to do? Or did you screw up on Kemya so badly that they gave you no choice and sent you off to chase shadows?”

  Her face tightens. “You know nothing.”

  “I know this shadow’s outrun you for days,” I shoot back. “You’re obviously not half as good at this ‘job’ as you think you are.”

  “I will not listen—” She tries to interrupt, but I just shout louder.

  “No wonder you got assigned here! The Council must know you’re just as defective as this planet.”

  “Enough!” Kurra snarls, her thumb flicking over a switch on her blaster. She springs forward, and the image of the boy crumpling by the cave flickers behind my eyes. My arms flail back instinctively, my heel jamming into the soil to propel me away, toward the oak, as if that can save me now. My head flinches down, anticipating that awful twang—

  And there’s silence. Not even the sound of her steps.

  I look up. The forest around me is empty. Something like a whimper rushes out of me. It worked. She’s gone.

  The straining muscles in my arms give out. I flop down on my back. Overhead, the leaves stir in the humid air.

  I don’t have time to celebrate. Kurra will be twice as angry now, and she knows where I am. I need to get moving.

  Twisting around, I spot a large stick lying by a bush several feet away. With my lame-crab-walk, I scoot over to it and test it with my hands. Sturdy enough, I think.

  I prop it against the ground as a lever and haul myself upright. My body sways as I pull my half-numb leg under me. It’s still a dead weight, except for a prickling ache that’s creeping up my nerves from my ankle. If it wasn’t fully sprained before, I’m pretty sure it is now.

  How long did it take the numbness to wear off last time? Forty-five minutes? An hour? I don’t have that long. I rotate, scanning the forest. I don’t know where Win was doxed to. But I know we were running in this direction when it happened. Which means if Jeanant’s around, if he’s the one who doxed Win, I should go that way to find him. If I have the rest of the weapon with me when I make it back to Win, we can leave the Enforcers behind forever.

  Using the stick as a cane, I hobble past the oak. It’s impossible for me to walk quietly with my foot dragging, so I concentrate on speed. I need to find Jeanant before he leaves if I’m going to know where he’s hidden the other two weapon parts. And . . . it would be so good to see him one more time, to feel the s
urge of certainty his presence brings.

  The sunlight glints brighter up ahead. After several more lurching steps, I realize the trees are thinning. The distant warble of running water reaches my ears. I push myself toward it, faster, and a figure steps out from behind a nearby tree. A man with coppery skin and long dark hair, a rifle tucked against his arm. I jerk to a halt.

  Of course. Win said the Native American army would be waiting near the river.

  The soldier’s gaze skims over me, holding mine for just a second before darting away. I glance across the landscape behind him, but I can’t see any of his companions. Either they’re well disguised or farther away. Maybe he’s a scout, posted on the fringes of the ambush, ready to give the alarm.

  I hold out my arms, balancing my weight on my good leg, in a gesture I hope conveys I’m unarmed and intend no harm. I’m coming from the direction opposite the American force they’re expecting, and I’m a teenage girl with an obvious injury. Let that buy me a little sympathy.

  The man’s forehead has furrowed. “Where have you come from?” he demands in a low voice, striding toward me. “Where are you going?”

  “I— The fort—” I blurt out. I don’t have the accent, but if he believes I’m with the British, then technically I’m on his side. “I went out yesterday and got lost. I’m trying to find my way back.”

  He looks skeptical. “The fort is there,” he says, gesturing past my arm with his rifle. “Go. It is not good for you to be here.”

  There’s nothing I can do except pretend to follow his directions. “Thank you,” I say, with honest gratitude. I’m glad just not to be shot at.

  He nods sternly, waiting to make sure I leave. I turn and limp off toward the fort, counting each awkward step until I can’t hear the water anymore. When I look around, I can’t see the scout either. I hope I’ve come far enough that he won’t notice me changing course. Turning, I set off parallel to where the river must be.