Passenger

by Alexandra Bracken

  IT WAS THE WARMTH SHE NOTICED FIRST; THE GENTLE PRESSURE of the touch. Her legs and back ached as they came awake, but the pain on the right side of her face was scalding, raw. The air smelled of smoke—fire—but also…Through her lashes, she saw a dark head bent over her, cleaning dirt and blood away from her right hand. Nicholas’s face was drawn, stricken, as he worked, and Etta’s throat tightened as he carefully brought her hand up to his mouth as if to kiss it, his warm breath fanning over her skin. Instead, he shook his head and carefully set her hand down to rest on her stomach. In spite of the pain rattling around inside of her, the lingering pulse of the nearby passage, Etta let herself feel a pang of regret.

  And then she remembered.

  Panicked, Etta tried moving her legs, shifting to get them under her. If he was here, then…she hadn’t gotten away. Ironwood would know she’d tried to slip out of their deal. And her mom…

  He’s going to kill her.

  She shouldn’t have left—she should have been more careful. What was the point of any of this if Cyrus turned around and killed her mom while Etta was centuries and continents away from protecting her?

  I had to take the risk—I had to get ahead of him, to beat his deadline.

  But when she closed her eyes, her mind was already imagining it, already seeing her mother’s lifeless eyes staring back at her.

  This was better. Leaving without his permission had to be safer for her mother than waiting and ultimately running out of time. The air seemed to tick around her, counting down.

  “Miss Spencer?” Nicholas said, his voice loud in her ears. “Can you hear me?”

  Etta forced her eyes open all the way, taking in his face, the remnants of a broken ceiling, and the blue sky beyond. Unsure of what to say, she tried, “Hi?”

  The relief in his face flashed to irritation. “Do you realize you could have been killed—or worse? What the devil were you thinking? Or were you not thinking at all?”

  Irritation burned through Etta. “Mind your own…business.”

  Need to move…need to find it…need to get to Mom…

  But her legs were still not cooperating.

  “I ought to throttle you for this,” he continued. “Is anything hurting other than your cheek and hand? I’ve cleaned your cuts as best I could—”

  She shook her head. Aside from those things, she was fine. Mostly. “Dizzy.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “That is traveler’s sickness. It’ll ease with every passage. For now, I’m afraid you’ll have to bear it.”

  “H-horrible—” Etta tried to get her hands beneath her, to push, so she was at least sitting up. Aside from the anger she felt radiating off him, Nicholas seemed completely unaffected.

  She twisted away from his hands as he reached out to help her, and scooted back through the dust and debris until her back hit a wall. A cool expression slid over his face, and she was suddenly pinned by guilt. If it were possible, Etta felt worse than before.

  “You were attempting to run,” he said, stating the obvious. “Incredibly foolish. Do you honestly believe Ironwood’s reach is limited to the eighteenth century? If nothing else, have a care for your mother! If he sees you crossing him this way, he will kill her.”

  “I left a note with—with Sophia, saying I needed to leave now, because of the deadline.…” Etta shook her head. She’d written it by moonlight, and waited only long enough to be sure the man on guard outside their door was asleep. “I can’t run out of time.” And I don’t necessarily want Ironwood to be able to follow me. “You don’t understand—”

  She’d known it was a risk; that she was maybe naïvely banking on the chance that Ironwood would not punish her mother if she left without his permission in order to, as she’d written in the note, “make your deadline.” Etta had a feeling the old man had ways of tracking her progress across time. She needed a little bit of a head start to find her footing and avoid anyone tailing her to report back on her movements—which passages she’d used. Unfortunately, she hadn’t factored in traveler’s sickness.

  Or Nicholas.

  “Explain it to me!” he said, his voice a harsh, deadly quiet. “Explain to me why you’d risk her life—why you’d risk your life—leaving without any supplies or preparation! I didn’t take you for an idiot!”

  She clenched her jaw, glaring back at him. Her arm was filled with pins and needles as the blood rushed to it, but she lifted it all the same, searching the ground for the bag of things she’d “borrowed” from the trunk in Sophia’s room.

  It looked like they were in some sort of hallway—only, maybe hallway wasn’t the right word. The vaulted stone ceiling was broken up by shattered skylights and long hanging lanterns. There were shops inside here—she saw battered chairs, shoes that had been blown out of storefronts. The second-story windows above each gold-and-black store entrance looked like they had been thrown open all at once.

  “There,” she said, pointing to the leather bag a short distance away. “I didn’t c-come un-unprepared.”

  What had happened here? It looked like a bomb had gone off; everything looked damp, like the people here had only just put out an enormous fire. Where am I? she thought, panic gnawing holes in her core. She heard distant voices, clipped English accents, too faint to decipher.

  Nicholas sorted through the bag. “A pair of sewing scissors, a harmonica engraved with Sophia’s initials, a small mirror, a few pieces of gold, your mother’s letter, a—”

  Etta smirked.

  “—a lady’s support garment, an apple, and a revolver,” he finished, closing the bag again. Sophia hadn’t had a truly modern “support garment,” but the one Etta had found in the trunk was as close to it as she was going to get.

  “What else would I need?” she asked innocently.

  “Water? Maps? A list of known passages? Era-appropriate clothing? Ammunition for said revolver? Do you even know how to use the weapon?”

  Well, he had her there. “If you try to bring me back, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what, Miss Spencer?” Nicholas said, crouching down in front of her. “You’ll glare at me?”

  Etta’s hand closed around a nearby shard of glass, holding it out in front of her. Nicholas’s expression changed; his eyes darkened, drawn first to the makeshift weapon, then to her face. She refused to wilt under the pressure of his gaze, and stared back as defiantly as she could, with one of her cheeks swollen to twice its size.

  He broke first, his face softening. He sat down on a nearby piece of rubble and took out a folded handkerchief. “You’ve cut yourself again, pirate.”

  After a moment, Etta set the piece of glass down and let him hold the warm cloth against her palm, staring at the way his large hand cupped hers. Her chest grew tight as she searched for the right words.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked quietly. “You made me promise not to leave without a word. You couldn’t have done the same for me?”

  “Sorry.” She hadn’t thought of that. The knife of guilt wedged in her stomach was gripped by fear, and given another twist. “I didn’t want to waste another second, not when he could hurt Mom, kill her. I think Ironwood knows better than to hurt her until I come back with the astrolabe. If he did hurt her, then I’d really have nothing to lose, right?”

  Nicholas nodded. “He has other ways of hurting you.”

  “But not motivating me. And—” Etta hesitated, unsure of whether or not to tell him the other motivation that burned inside of her. “I told you about Alice—I need to finish this, get back to her.”

  Nicholas sat back on his heels, glancing up at what they could see of the sky. His usual move, she realized, to try to collect his thoughts. Hide his expression. “Etta, you can’t save her.”

  “Of course I can,” she insisted, but her heart sped up at the expression on his face: the guilt, the sympathy. “I just have to travel back—”

  “And change the past?” he finished. “Alter the timeline?”

  Etta set her
jaw. “I don’t care about that—I don’t! Ironwood has been changing the past for years, and I can’t even save one life?”

  “No, Etta, listen to me,” Nicholas said quickly. “What you’re speaking of isn’t a matter of morality. It’s an impossibility.”

  She pulled back against the wall, away from him, away from his words.

  “Didn’t Sophia tell you this? You can’t cross paths with yourself—you cannot exist twice in the same place, at the same time. Time itself won’t allow it; you’d be bounced back out of the passage before you could move through it,” Nicholas said, keeping his voice low. “That’s why travelers keep journals, to remember the dates and years they’ve already been to.”

  Etta felt like he’d thrown a bucket of ice water over her. Her chest clenched painfully—so she wouldn’t be able to use the passage to get back to that moment before Alice was shot? Never mind that—she wouldn’t even be able to go to any month or year before that and warn her it would happen. All because some past version of herself was already there.

  “Didn’t she explain that the passages connect years, not days?” Nicholas pressed.

  “What do you mean?” Etta whispered.

  His expression softened. “I see. So she didn’t. Even if you could find another traveler to use that passage to save her, you would need to wait a year in order to do so. It’s easiest to think of each year as a tiny stream, all flowing parallel to one another, all moving in one direction, even as we jump between them. We left Manhattan on the twenty-second of September, 1776. We arrived here on the twenty-second of September, whatever year this might be. Do you understand?”

  Etta nodded, unable to speak for several long moments. There has to be another way. It couldn’t end like this. Alice couldn’t die—not for her.

  Mom will know what to do.

  “Blank slate…” she said slowly. “That’s what Ironwood meant when he called me that. It wasn’t because I didn’t know anything, but that I haven’t been anywhere. The chances of me crossing paths with myself are slim. Right?”

  He nodded, touching her elbow. “You do understand, don’t you?”

  She lifted her chin. “I understand there’s always another option, another way, if you look hard enough for it.”

  He let out a faint laugh, closing his eyes. “I thought you might say something like that.”

  “Wait—” Etta said, another thought suddenly occurring to her. “Oh my God—won’t Ironwood be after you for traveling?”

  After what had happened to his half brother, Nicholas had been banned—exiled, he’d said—and she didn’t think this would go unnoticed.

  “My fear for you outweighs my fear of him,” he said simply. “And I told you, didn’t I? If you left, I’d follow you.”

  But should you try to leave on your own, know that I will go to the ends of the earth to bring you back. The words echoed between them, unspoken. A cloud of ash filtered down from above. Without thinking, Etta reached up and brushed the flakes away from his hair. He closed his eyes, bowing his head, leaning into the touch just enough to make her hand tremble.

  “You know what the letter says—the one your mother wrote. And you don’t trust me.…” he began. “You see me as one of them, don’t you?”

  “No!” she said quickly. It was true that he’d agreed to work for Cyrus, to bring her to New York, but he stood apart from them, didn’t he? He’d been badly wronged by them, hadn’t he? She didn’t want to get him tangled any deeper in the family, or give them another reason to make his life miserable.

  “You do,” he said. “After everything I’ve told you?”

  Etta dropped her head back against the wall. He could take her apart with a single look, couldn’t he? But she wanted to tell him this; she wanted him to understand that she wasn’t just being a reckless idiot. She wanted him to be on her side.

  She needed what he knew about the Ironwoods. About traveling. But how mercenary did that make her, to see if he’d come with her—and then leave him to deal with the fallout?

  “Can I trust you?” Etta asked. “Will you trust me?”

  Nicholas gave a curt nod.

  She took a deep breath.

  “I do know how to read the letter,” she admitted. “And I think the old man’s lying, or at least not giving us the full truth.”

  His lips parted, the only slip in his mask. She’d surprised him.

  “What brought you to that conclusion?” Nicholas asked.

  “My mom isn’t a thief,” Etta said. “I don’t care what he says. I think this thing, the astrolabe, it belonged to the Lindens.” Her family—the one that had been whittled down to her and her mother alone. “They, or at least my mom, felt responsible for protecting it.”

  “It might have truly belonged to them,” Nicholas conceded after mulling this over. “My understanding from Julian is that there was an astrolabe for each of the four families—Ironwood, Jacaranda, Linden, and Hemlock—but three were lost, or destroyed outright, a century ago. Ironwood feels that because he is the Grand Master of all of these families, they all belong to him, regardless of the original owner.”

  Etta nodded, wondering what else had been stolen from her family—what heirlooms, secrets, and history had been absorbed into the Ironwood clan. Maybe her mom would be able to tell her.

  Maybe they could reclaim some of that together.

  After you somehow outsmart the old man, save your mom, save Alice, and perform at the debut next month.

  “And this letter—she must have known something was going to happen, otherwise why write it?” Etta said.

  Nicholas braced his arms on his knees. “Well, you can ask her once we have the astrolabe back in Ironwood’s hands and he frees her.”

  Etta blinked. “You want to come with me?”

  She saw a flash of sharp emotion pass quickly over his face, but couldn’t decode it. He glanced away. After a moment, Nicholas scoffed. “As if I’d ever feel comfortable letting you attempt this without any kind of aid—I can see in your face that you’re unhappy, but I trained for years to be able to travel. You’ve only just begun. It’s not weakness to require help, or a protector.”

  “I don’t need a protector,” Etta said. “I need a partner.”

  Nicholas’s gaze had been skimming the destruction around them, over the glimmering wall of air that was the entrance to the passage, but at her words, he met her eyes. His lips parted, as if the idea had startled him. “What are…the terms of this?”

  Didn’t you travel with Julian? she wanted to ask. But…Sophia had called him little more than Julian’s servant, a kind of valet; and, while Etta had initially taken it as the girl being cruel and dismissive, she now had the evidence right in front of her. Her heart cracked and cracked again—at the role they’d thrust him into, at how he’d assumed it would be the same with her.

  “We watch each other’s backs,” she said. “You call me Etta. And we don’t keep secrets.” Except, of course, that she’d never give the astrolabe to Ironwood if she could help it. “And—”

  “We continue our mutual disdain of Ironwood?”

  She grinned, even as doubt began to cloud her thoughts.

  What if returning it is the only way he won’t punish Nicholas for this?

  She couldn’t think about that now. It was a question for when, and if, they actually found the astrolabe. But accepting his help had consequences. He would be risking the old man’s wrath.

  As if he’d leaned over and peered into her thoughts, he said quietly, “It’s my choice. What I do, I decide for myself.”

  “All right.” Whatever invisible string had been tied so tightly around her heart loosened. “Before we find out where we’re going, do you have any idea where we are?”

  He climbed to his knees, giving her a dry look. “I was rather distracted by you lying in a pool of your own blood.”

  “There isn’t a pool,” she protested, rubbing at her swelling cheek. He reached over, as if it were the most natural th
ing in the world, and pulled her hand away to hold.

  “Don’t fuss with it,” he said. He ran a featherlight finger over the scrape. She didn’t breathe until he let his hand fall away.

  “Now you’ve the look of a real pirate,” he told her, with a small, quiet smile. “But I’ll need to purchase clothing and supplies. Will you be all right if I leave you here for a few moments? I won’t be long, I promise.”

  Etta opened the bag she’d hastily packed, and rooted around inside of it until her hands closed on the small velvet sack of gold. She handed it to him. “My mom might not be a thief, but I don’t particularly care if I am.”

  “Seems like just payment,” he agreed, weighing it in his palm, “considering what they’ve done to you.”

  He set off into the wreckage of stone and storefronts around them. Etta watched him turn, and caught his eye as he glanced one last time over his shoulder. She gave him an exasperated wave to move him on, and the laugh that echoed back settled in her like a sip of warm tea.

  She looked around again, struggling up onto her feet. The wall behind was enough of a support to lean against as she stepped through the piles of glass and wet, scorched wood. The signs were in English, and by the smell and scene, she could at least guess that there’d been some kind of fire.

  Etta stepped back to where she’d been before and tucked herself against the wall, out of sight. Every now and then she heard a voice or the soft growl of an engine, and leaned forward to peer down the long hallway at the streets on either side. A bright red bus rolled by, followed by two young women in skirt suits and little hats pinned in place. Etta was painfully aware of her eighteenth-century gown, and the stays squeezing her ribs.

  England, she thought, half-amazed. London, if she had to guess. And the fashion…1950s? Or—

  No.

  She took in the demolished walls, the evidence of fire, the uniformed men passing by the opposite end of the hallway.