Passenger

by Alexandra Bracken

  “That’s beautiful,” she said.

  He turned to her. “Would you like me to go take that violin for you? I’d gladly fight whatever angry mob rises up if it might make you smile.”

  Her heart just about burst at that.

  Be brave. “I would only want to play for you.”

  He turned slowly, as if taking the time to assemble some sort of expression or response. But she didn’t want there to be any mistake, any way for him to dismiss or misunderstand her words. If she was wrong, and he wanted nothing more between them, she would pull back. But now…now she just wanted to be brave. Her hand came to rest on top of his, and despite all of his obvious strength, the shields he threw up to protect the privacy of his mind, she felt his fingers slide through hers.

  The lights flickered again, sending her attention, and her heart, shooting upward. The banging was loud, like hands slamming down directly on top of them. A boy started wailing, and the sound moved like a wave through the other kids. The dancers stopped dancing, but the older gentleman didn’t stop playing until the lights blinked out completely, leaving them in pitch black.

  Etta couldn’t stop shivering. She bit the inside of her mouth and drew blood. The darkness seemed to shudder and rock around them, and whatever terror she’d managed to bottle up broke free.

  I don’t want to die down here.

  I don’t want to disappear.

  I have to get home.

  Mom.

  Mom is going to die, and it’s my fault—

  Hot tears rolled down her cheeks, and she hiccupped as she tried to take in air.

  “Etta,” Nicholas said, close to her ear. He shifted, drawing her closer. She pressed her face against the slope of skin between his neck and shoulder, and felt a hand weave through her hair, pulling it back from where strands were sticking to her wet cheeks.

  “Shhh, Etta, we’re safe,” he said. “The battle’s ours, pirate. They’ll strike their colors, and it will pass.”

  She breathed in the sea salt that always seemed to cling to his skin, no matter how far from the ocean he was. Her mind felt foggy, her face raw, as his hand slipped away from her face and glided down her arm. With an aching tenderness, he laced his fingers through hers and brought them to his other arm, resting upturned in his lap.

  He’d rolled the sleeve up, and she felt a shock of hot skin against her fingertips as he pressed her hand there. “Play me something.”

  “What?” Etta whispered.

  “Something that’ll lift us out of here.”

  His fingers unhooked from hers, following that same path up her arm, and then back down it again. The feeling was so distracting, so good, so sweet against her clammy skin. She didn’t choose a piece from her repertoire; Etta gave herself over to the notes that started streaming through her mind, rising from somewhere deep inside of her.

  The melody of her heart had no name; it was quick, and light. It rolled with the waves, falling as the breath left his chest, rising as he inhaled. It was the rain sliding down the glass; the fog spreading its fingers over the water. The creaking of a ship’s great body. The secrets whispered by the wind, and the unseen life that moved below.

  It was the flame of one last candle.

  Nicholas’s arm was a map of hard muscles and delicate sinews, heartbreakingly perfect. She wondered if he could hear her humming the piece against his skin over the droning roars overhead. Maybe. His free hand skimmed up her skin, leaving a trail of sparks in its wake.

  With the world blacked out around them, she could catalog all of her other senses, capture this moment in the warm darkness forever. He brushed back the loose hair across her forehead, his breath hitching as she turned her face up. Soft lips found her cheek, the corner of her lips, her jaw, and she knew it had to be the same for him, that they’d never been so aware of another person in their entire lives.

  She released his arm, and he drew it up around her, guiding both of them down so they were on their sides, their heads cushioned by the bag, his jacket drawn over them. Etta understood that here, in the darkness, they’d found a place beyond rules; a place that hung somewhere between the past and the future. This was a single moment of possibility.

  The clattering of the attack from above faded as he rested his forehead against hers, his thumb lightly stroking a bruise on her cheek. She traced his face—the straight nose, the high, proud cheekbones, the full curve of his lips. His hand caught her there, taking it in his own; he pressed a hard, almost despairing kiss to it.

  But when she tilted her face up, half-desperate with longing, her blood racing, Nicholas pulled back; and although Etta could feel him beside her, his heart pounding, his ragged breath, it was as if he had disappeared into the thundering dark.

  THE BATTLE EXPLODED AROUND HIM with a ferocity that left him gasping.

  Nicholas had kept an eye on the horizon to the west, where steel clouds had begun to swirl as if God himself was stirring the pot. The skies around him were cast in shades of darkness that left his guts coiled in anticipation. He turned, poised to begin the process of readying the ship to weather the storm, and—

  The crew was gone.

  Every last one of them.

  Chase’s name tore out of his throat as he ran toward the bow of the ship, the sound of his footsteps lost to the shrieking winds. The sails snapped and fluttered above him in warning. A movement caught his eye—there was someone on his ship after all. His back was turned, but there was no mistaking the dark curls rising on each brutal breeze, the steady stance, the hands clasped behind his back.

  “Julian?” he called. But—by God, how was he alive? Had he survived the fall? They needed to get back to port, back to New York—

  The other ship appeared like a ghost, gliding through the misty, shadowed waters around them. He had less than a moment to suck in a shocked breath before she fired a broadside.

  Nicholas felt the ship tear apart beneath him as if it were his own skin, his own bones shattered into a thousand jagged fragments.

  “Julian!” he screamed as the fire and debris exploded around him, trapping him in a blaze of suffocating fire, a swarm of splinters. And all the while, the cannonade never slowed, never stopped. The intensity burned the hair from his face, left him with nothing but scalding white behind his eyelids. He let out a hoarse cry as he was knocked off his feet; the ship dipped sharply to the right, a terrifying slant that could only mean one thing—she was taking on water, and he would drown. Blind, burned, alone.

  And then, the silence.

  It was the suddenness of it that finally woke Nicholas from heavy, dream-laced sleep, dragging him up by the scruff of his neck into awareness. Exhaustion clung to his mind like a barnacle, unable to let logic in. Pure, unyielding panic rushed in like a sweeping wave, forcing him to roll away from the soft warmth he’d been curled around. The white tiles—the hundreds of brown, blue, red, black lumps of blankets around him—people—

  Nicholas sat straight up, pressing his back into the wall behind him. He scrubbed his fists against his eyes, trying to slow the embarrassing way his heart was pounding in his chest.

  You know where you are.

  He did.

  London. Twentieth century. War.

  This was a…transportation tunnel. For a…“train.” The Underground.

  Nicholas blew out a sigh, wiping the crust of sleep from his eyes. The overhead lights flickered like candle flames dancing in the breeze. He cocked his head, listening to the strange sound they produced—somewhere between a hum and a frantic clicking, like the cicadas in the southern colonies.

  Electricity. It had been so long since he’d had the privilege of it, and even when he had, he had never seen the abundance of this era. Julian had been the one to introduce him to it, the one who’d chuckled as Nicholas investigated his first lightbulb. Nicholas had managed to push the memory of his half brother to the very edge of his thoughts for years, where the regret could not infect his hope for the future. But traveling and Julian
were inexorably tied together. Julian was the sole reason he’d gone through the passages at all. At first he’d thought that he was there to ensure that Ironwood’s remaining rivals could not touch him—that he was a protector, a role in which he could take immense pride. In actuality, he’d found himself attending to his brother’s clothing, doing the washing and mending as if he were a valet. He saw to Julian’s mercurial needs and managed his wild, swinging moods. Even as a traveler, he had been a servant. A slave to Ironwood’s will.

  I don’t need a protector, the girl had said. I need a partner.

  The past few hours had proven that she did, in fact, need a protector; but…partner. That was something he had never thought to hope for.

  He spent another moment collecting his nerves before looking back down at the girl sleeping beside him. The air in his lungs and nose was tinged with the smell of roses, as though he’d spent hours with his face buried in her mass of unruly blond hair. Before he could think about why it was unwise, ruminate on what a blackguard he was for taking advantage of the girl in the darkness, he reached over and gently brushed that same hair back from her face.

  In some ways, each time he looked at her, it was as if he was seeing her for the first time on the deck of the Ardent. The symptoms of this sickness were unmistakable: the sharp dive of his heart as it dropped, recovering a moment too late; the tightness in his chest; the way his fingers seemed to curl instinctively, as if wondering how it would feel to weave them in her hair. He knew lust—he’d been consumed by its burn too many times—but Nicholas knew the ways to appease it, how to avoid the tangle of attachment, to leave content and calm and ready to return to the ship.

  As he’d held her last night, he had genuinely believed the result would be the same. Touching her would answer his lingering doubts about whether her skin could possibly be as soft as he imagined. Giving in to the pounding need in his head to comfort her would be acceptable, just this once, when they could not be seen or judged for it.…

  Instead, each second he spent breathing her breath, running his hands along her face, fighting the temptation of her lips…it only fed the burn in his chest. He wanted to believe that he had done it because she’d needed comfort, or at least distraction. He wanted to believe it was because being a stranger to this time had left him feeling unsettled. He wanted to believe that their lives could have ended at any moment, and there had been only this one chance left.

  But the truth was, Nicholas had held her because he wanted to. He hadn’t thought about her reputation, or what anyone else might have cared to think. He’d taken what he wanted, and to hell with everyone else.

  Nicholas felt a rueful smile spread across his face. And a curse be on him for it, because now he knew her. She’d shown him her mind, and she’d opened up her heart, and now he knew the taste of her tears.

  And he was wrecked.

  He clung to his willpower the way a man clings to battered remains of flotsam; it was hard enough to stay afloat, to remind himself of the important facts that remained, when she was so soft and warm and alive in his hands.

  Could he kiss her, knowing that he was on the verge of betraying her and ensuring that the astrolabe got back to Ironwood?

  Could he kiss her, knowing that she must return to her time and he must remain in his? The vilification they would face if she were to come with him back to his time, and they were made to deal with the cruel laws of the colonies…

  Could he kiss her, knowing she might not burn the same way he did?

  From the moment he had been exiled, Nicholas had used the dream of owning a ship as ballast to weather the storm of guilt and anger and devastation. He had learned, again, to swallow the limitations of his era’s society, even if he never fully accepted them. Traveling with her had stirred up thoughts inside of him that he had been so very careful not to touch; it gave him ideas of a dangerous nature. What would life be like, if he did not return to his time? If, rather than return the astrolabe to Ironwood, they spent their lives like pilgrims, moving through lands and centuries until they found one in which they could be safe, one that suited their needs? When two people didn’t belong to the era they were in, did they have to follow anyone’s expectations besides their own?

  Except, of course, she’s desperate to save her mother and go home.

  And he was as desperate to see his own ambitions through. It was nothing more than a thought that had gone rogue, spiraled out of his control. What Nicholas wanted was his ship—multiple ones at that; to live a life without restraints; and to be rid of his family and their scheming forever.

  And surely, Etta would not be safe under any circumstances if he didn’t bring the astrolabe to Ironwood, would she? Not truly. Perhaps one day she might see this, and come to terms with his deception.

  It was all too easy to be carried off by wild, baseless theories. The old man merely wanted to expand his flock. Find more servants. And, while their departure through the passage had been sudden and unexpected, he did not doubt that all would be forgiven—so long as he gave Ironwood what he wanted.

  But there had been a moment, as Alice and Etta had dissected Ironwood’s possible intentions, when the confession had nearly tumbled off his tongue.

  You could keep her. The words slithered through his mind, bringing a host of images with them that filled his heart with a savage kind of joy. When had it become his policy to give up his prizes? When had Nicholas ever given up a treasure that was rightfully won?

  We were made for each other.

  Once the thought was there, it clung to him like a second skin, near impossible to scrub away. Because no, of course they weren’t. They were two ships sailing in opposite directions, having met for a short time in the middle of the voyage, and he could no sooner “keep her” than capture the wind. Nor would he insult her by trying, let alone think it was possible. When the time came, they would continue on as they had before. She would be with her family, safe; he would have his ship, be in full control of his fate, the only thing he’d ever truly wanted for himself.

  This would be a mild disappointment in an otherwise successful life.

  He would not surrender to the disaster of loving her.

  In time, the pain would pass.

  But…he would regret the loss. The simplicity. Neither of them had to work for the other’s regard, nor did they make the other feel as if they had to. It struck him as very peculiar, given his somewhat limited exposure to future centuries, that this girl fit so well beside him; that they understood each other so very well. Life had shown him that there were only two ways he could gain something: through the kindness and pity of others, or by taking it through sheer force of will. Why had this arrived in such a different manner?

  He looked around him again, at the spread of sleeping families, husbands and wives, friends…how uncomplicated they made it seem. The couple that had danced together hours before—how freely they could hold and touch one another, live in a moment they created.

  Enough, he ordered himself. This is a job. She is my companion in it. The stakes were too high for either of them to be distracted by feelings.

  Nicholas searched for the uniformed man he’d seen walking along the edge of the raised platform the night before, and found him asleep on the steps they’d used to come down. Here and there were patches of space scattered among the sleeping Londoners—some must have left at the end of the air raid and gone to whatever was left of their homes.

  He heaved himself up into a crouch, trying to avoid thinking about the city’s destruction. The inhuman sounds of the flying machines and the shelling hadn’t been half as terrible as the thought of what might have happened if they hadn’t run as fast as they did; if the firestorm had been dropped on top of them.

  They needed to leave this era. Quickly. The guardians of this time would be up and searching for them by now.

  He reached over, his finger hesitating a moment before stroking Etta’s cheek to wake her. She shifted, stretching her legs out, and d
rew his jacket over her with a soft sigh. Nicholas put a hand on her shoulder and shook it until her eyes blinked open. She stared, all warm and rumpled by sleep, and his reason for waking her almost flew out of his head.

  “What are you…?” she mumbled.

  He held a finger up to his lips as he stood, sliding the leather bag over his shoulder. Etta took the hand he offered to pull herself up off the ground, swaying. Holding her steady, Nicholas wrapped his jacket over her shoulders. It was only after they started to make their way along the edge of the track, skirting the sleeping Londoners, that he realized he was still holding her hand.

  Nicholas gestured toward the other end of the raised platform, and Etta nodded—he was headed the right way, then. Good. Once he lost sight of the sky, it felt impossible to tell north from south, east from west. He found the experience of being underground about as pleasant as being blown to bits, like the ship in his dream. There was something unnatural about not being able to feel the sunlight on your skin in the morning.

  The platform ended abruptly; he was forced to release Etta’s hand and jump down onto the tracks. His shoes butted up against the raised metal beams running along the ground. Etta sat on the edge of the strange cold, gray, stone ledge and slid down into the dark with him, careful to avoid the clusters of families packed between the tracks. Determination and focus sharpened Etta’s features in the glow of the lights. She turned toward the dark tunnel and led the way.

  The air smelled vaguely of fire; his frown deepened, a new uneasiness stirring in him. He kept close to Etta, forcing her to slow her pace. When he turned, there was a man leaning over the platform, peering down the tunnel. At first, he thought the man had skin darker than his own, but the truth came like a swift blow: the man’s face was stained with soot, but his features were recognizable. He’d shot at them the night before as they’d run toward the station. How the bloody hell had he found them already?

  “One of the Thorns,” he said. “We need to move faster—”