Passenger

by Alexandra Bracken

  He leaned forward, pressing a faint kiss to a bruise on her shin she hadn’t cared to notice until now.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said softly. If she had been paying attention, she would have been able to avoid the snake in the first place. Etta had never doubted that for an instant.

  The reply was whispered against her skin. “I’ll come to see it that way eventually. For now, let me wallow a bit.”

  Etta smiled sweetly, pushing up onto her knees. She crawled the distance between them, listening as his breathing grew more ragged. His gaze focused on her face. His hands curled over the top of his knees, and they were shaking as she put hers over them.

  Picking up his right hand, she pressed a soft kiss to the rough, scarred knuckles, and as he shuddered she felt an answering shiver low in her stomach. She set his hand back down and rested her arms over his hands, trapping them against his knees.

  “You make…” Nicholas trailed off as she leaned forward, brushing a faint kiss across his lips. When he didn’t lean back, when she breathed in his soft exhale, she did it again, applying a little more pressure. She felt him try to tug his hands out from under hers, but she held firm, watching as a look of amazement spread over his face. She worried, just for a moment, that she was trading one obsession for another—trading the high of performing for this strange sense of freedom, for the way a wild, unfamiliar part of herself was opening up around him. He made her feel brave; he let her be who she was unconditionally, without judgment, and because of it, she felt life shifting around her into something that felt much more beautiful and clear.

  He said the words so quietly, she wondered if she’d imagined them. “Then it’s the same for you?”

  She ran her nose down the length of his, and there wasn’t a part of her that wasn’t humming, that wasn’t rejoicing in this tiny, perfect symphony of happiness.

  “Release me,” he said hoarsely. He was strong enough to pull his hands away by force; her thoughts spun in a dizzying dance of want and confusion and desperation. “Etta—”

  He leaned forward and captured her lips, stealing the kiss himself until she had to come up and gasp for breath. Nicholas pulled her back under, and this time she did let go, only to take his beautiful face in her hands, to let his hands tangle in her hair, around her shoulders. If the sky had opened again just then, Etta didn’t think she’d feel the storm at all—not when she was caught so deeply in this. Time was tugging at her back, insistent and demanding, passing faster and faster, but all she wanted was to stay there, to smell the sea on his skin and press her face to that part of his neck where it seemed to fit perfectly, as if it had been made to hold her and her alone. If there was a place to go where time might forget them, she wanted to find it.

  He was breathing hard enough that she felt his heart jumping against her ribs, and she knew hers was doing the same. She turned, running her lips along the curve of his ear, her fingers pressed against the solid muscles of his back.

  “We can’t,” he said into her hair, half-pleading, “we can’t make this so bloody difficult.”

  Too late.

  What was she even doing—torturing herself with what she couldn’t have? She could fight this, whatever force it was that dragged her back to him, that knotted their yearning. Attraction. She would go home and he would go home, and whatever kept pulling them back together would be dissolved by distance and time and death.

  He’s been dead for hundreds of years by the time you’re born.

  They weren’t supposed to have ever met. Maybe that’s why she wanted it so badly—it was impossible, and both of them were too stubborn to let themselves be told what they could and couldn’t have.

  Right now, she didn’t care.

  Right now, he didn’t care.

  Etta wasn’t sure who reached for the other, only that she was kissing him again until her lungs burned and her body ached for him to be closer. Her back collided with the wet stone of the gate, and she imagined she could taste the storm in him, the battering winds of desperation and frustration that met and matched her own, blow for blow.

  His lips softened against hers as his hands slid from the nape of her neck to brace his weight against the wall, trapping her against it. She felt Nicholas give in to the slow exploration of her. The tenderness of his touch made her hands curl in his wet shirt. The world dissolved around her, as if she’d stepped through another passage.

  Passage.

  She pulled him closer, trying to will the world away. Nicholas made a small, hungry noise in his throat.

  Astrolabe.

  Sliding her hands around his waist, her fingers went searching for the warm bare skin beneath his shirt.

  Mom.

  “Etta,” he was murmuring, turning her name into a secret, “Etta…we…the passage…”

  There’s no time.

  “I know,” she managed to say against his lips, “I…”

  Etta didn’t have the strength to push him away, to end it, the way they both knew they had to. Even now, the knowledge only filled her with more desperation, made her unbearably feverish beneath her skin. She gripped him tighter, refusing to let go.

  No time for this.

  This had to stop the same way it had begun. Together. She felt him slow; the lazy, drugging quality of his kisses faded to a ghost of a touch.

  No time for us.

  She let out a shaky breath and turned her face away. Nicholas leaned down and rested his head against one of his hands, trying to catch his breath.

  After a while he said, his voice hollow, “Rather proved my earlier point, didn’t I? We need—we need to go, before Ironwood sends a traveler after us. If he hasn’t already.”

  Etta kept her gaze on the wet stones, the winding rivulets of water slipping between them, and nodded. Why this? The thought seared through her. Why him? Why?

  “Do you know where we’re meant to go?” he asked quietly. He lifted a hand to touch her face but let it fall away, as if thinking better of it.

  “It’s…I think we’re looking for the Elephant Terrace,” she said when she’d found her voice. “That’s what my mom’s painting was of—a view of it from slightly above. I don’t know where it is inside, though.”

  “That’s all right, we have a way of quickly finding it. I imagine we’re close enough for it to catch the resonance.” Nicholas reached into the bag and blew into the harmonica. The call of the passage echoed back twofold, volleying through the empty stones around them. Etta strained her ears, picking through the layers of its call, until she could orient herself in the direction it was coming from. There was something about it, though, a hum she didn’t recognize.

  Her whole body tensed. “Does it sound different to you?”

  “It sounds as atrocious as it always does.” Nicholas shifted the bag back onto his shoulder. “Shall we?”

  She shook off her concern and followed him through the abandoned city. A part of her wondered how long it had taken the jungle to erase most of the evidence of human life—Etta wished she could remember the exact reason why both Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat had been abandoned, but she thought it had something to do with war, and the ever-shifting tide of power that eventually brought down even the greatest of civilizations. Without the resonance the passage had bounced back to them, she wasn’t sure she would have been able to find it at all. While her mom had shown her maps of the city, pointing out where she’d done her dig—if there had even been a dig in her past at all, Etta thought—the pathways were nearly so overgrown, the stone and remnants of wooden structures in such disrepair, she just barely recognized the Bayon when they passed it.

  “That’s the Bayon,” Etta explained, catching Nicholas’s appreciative look at the massive structure. “My mom said that there are over two hundred faces on it, if you look—some people believe many of them are of the king who built the city. Jayavarman the Seventh.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to ensure you’ll be remembered,” he said. “He’s a rather ha
ndsome devil. How do you think I’d look on one of these temples?”

  Etta laughed. “How would I look?”

  “I couldn’t bear the thought of even your face here, left alone, for only the jungle to admire.” He shook his head. “Never. I’d never allow it. The only thing is to hire an artist to turn you into a figurehead for a ship, so some part of you will always be venturing out to sea where you belong.”

  Etta was so stunned by this earnest speech, she lost all capacity for speech herself. He seemed to notice, and ducked his head in scowling embarrassment.

  “All right,” she said. “But only on the condition that you give me some kind of a sword. Maybe even an eye patch? Use your best discretion on what will be more terrifying for your future prey.”

  “Aye,” Nicholas agreed, exaggerating and deepening his accent, “the very sight of you will strike fear in the hearts of all men.”

  She grinned.

  The bas-reliefs along the sides of the temple were darkened by rain and clinging green plants, but Etta could still make out the carved panel of what looked to her like a market—people bartering and selling, with fish swimming above them. They walked quickly past images of warriors marching alongside elephants to war, a scene of an enormous fish swallowing a deer, and what had to be a royal procession, following the barest hint of a footpath through the mud. The rain had washed away any evidence that the monks had ever been there, but Nicholas didn’t relax, didn’t lower his guard, until they spotted the passage’s glimmering wall of light floating above what Etta knew was the Elephant Terrace.

  The same one her mother had painted and hung above the couch in the living room.

  The Elephant Terrace stood a short distance away from the—her mind reached for the name—the Phimeanakas, the city’s first temple. The one that housed a sacred tree buried within it, where her mother had actually done her dig. She eyed the steep stairway that hugged the stacked layers of the temple; the stone seemed almost red compared to the elaborate gray structure that sat on top of it.

  What was her family’s connection to this place?

  She turned back toward the raised platform in front of them, accepting a hand up from Nicholas as he climbed it. The king had used this terrace to survey the march of his victorious army, and carved around it, chipped away from the supports, were elephants. The platform looked as if it was resting upon their backs.

  “Stand on the shoulders of memory,” Nicholas breathed out. The clue made sense to Etta now—elephants were celebrated for their memories—but it didn’t explain the way the passage made the air feel like it was hiccupping. The sound coming off it, its usual bellow of thunder, almost drowned out a second, lower beat. It reminded Etta of the way that you could sometimes feel your pulse in another, unexpected part of your body.

  “Whatever is the matter?” Nicholas asked.

  “Nothing, just…” Etta looked back at the city, slowly turning to take in the sight of the trees that seemed as if they were stepping over the walls, the faces on the Bayon that watched her with tranquil, serene smiles. When in her life would she see this again—see the city at this moment, before humanity came flooding back into it?

  Never.

  This was the danger, the seduction of time travel, she realized—it was the opportunity, the freedom of a thousand possibilities of where to live and how to start over. It was the beauty open to you in your life if you only stopped for a moment to look. Those things drowned out even the most basic dangers of collapsing passages, of being lost, of finding yourself in an unfriendly time.

  “It’s time,” Nicholas said quietly, offering his hand.

  Again, she felt her desire for music swelling in her like an ache. Her fingers pressed against her side, and she imagined how she would try to coax a song of hidden depth, and warm, wild life, from the strings. And when she passed through the damp jungle air into the electric, shivering fingers of the passage, she mourned the fact that she would never see this place again.

  ETTA FOUND HERSELF AWAKE, SPRAWLED out on the grass beneath a generous cover of shade, ears ringing, head throbbing—but awake. And not just awake, but also free of the sickening swoop of dizziness that had come hand in hand with the last passages.

  She sat up, brushing a red leaf out of her hair. The crisp autumn air was practically golden as it came down through the fiery shade of the leaves overhead. When she turned, Etta wasn’t the least bit surprised to see the Luxembourg Garden laid out in front of her, a vision in the warm afternoon light.

  “You were correct.” Nicholas was sitting with his back against the same tree, rubbing his face. “C’est le Jardin du Luxembourg.”

  Etta couldn’t stop her small, ridiculous smile. “Say it again.”

  “Pardon?” he asked.

  Say it again, she thought. His voice did something incredible to the French language. The words moved through her like warm honey.

  “C’est le Jardin du Luxembourg,” he repeated, visibly bewildered.

  “So…what day do you think it is?”

  “The same day as when we woke up in London,” he answered. He knew what she was thinking.

  Etta’s dress had torn in several places at the hem, and had turned from sky blue to a brown usually reserved for muddy rivers. Her boots were crusted with dried dirt and mulch, and she didn’t need to touch her hair to know that it was standing straight up in several places.

  Nicholas took a quick look around—to make sure they weren’t being watched?—and began to smooth her wild waves down, collecting her hair at the nape of her neck. He was careful not to touch her skin as he pulled a ribbon from their bag and used it to tie the mass of it back. Etta was careful not to give in to the urge to lean against his shoulder and wrap her arms around his narrow waist.

  Seven days. Less.

  “Shall we?” she asked.

  “Let’s make a slow and careful approach of this,” he said. “I want to make sure we don’t raise too much alarm.…”

  And she wanted to make sure that it would be safe for him.

  The odd thing was, as they passed through the last of the trees and stood on the edge of the path, Etta couldn’t get a sense of where they were in time. The women’s fashions were somewhere between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—brightly colored, finely tailored jackets with long skirts that were bustled up in the back or decorated with layers of ruffles, exaggerating the natural curves of their bodies. Hair was hidden beneath bonnets and hats, all decorated with flowers and ribbons.

  The men accompanying them, or playing games of cards or chess, wore suits and top hats. Some strolled around a large basin—a central reflecting pool—with canes. Children ran through and around the artists and their easels; women sat beside one another on benches, talking idly. It was not all that different from the Luxembourg Garden of her own time. At the head of the garden, past the large reflecting pool, was the palace itself, as stately as she remembered, standing like a section of Versailles that had broken off and wandered away.

  “We should be all right,” Nicholas said, keeping his voice low. “The trick is not to meet anyone’s eyes—”

  It was like he’d been caught on a hook—one minute he was standing beside her, as tense as any of the marble statues, and the next he was running, off like a shot, jumping over the nearest bed of flowers and ruffling their bright heads. Women shrieked as he passed, men screamed after him—Nicholas didn’t bother with the crowded path around the reflecting pool, but simply cut through the water, splashing through the shallow pool and leaping out on the other side. Two little boys attempted to follow him before being snatched back by their nannies.

  For a moment Etta stood still, her arm still outstretched after him. Something cold was pressed into her palm by a passing, kind-faced old man: a few coins.

  “Wait—no!” she began, trying to give them back. “I’m not—never mind.”

  She pocketed the coins and ran after Nicholas, trying to let the sting of being mistaken for a beggar roll
off her shoulders. First time for everything, and all that.

  It was easy enough to follow his dark shape through the crowds as he ran past the statues of French queens, toward the path that would lead them to the nearest road. Finally he stopped, but his shoulders blocked out what, exactly, he’d been chasing until Etta was standing directly behind him, with the gawkers collecting there.

  It was a woman—older, if the lines on her face were any indication, but elegantly tall. Her dark skin was the shade of deep earth, her hair hidden beneath a plain sort of hat. Compared to the other women around her, she was dressed simply, almost as if the outfit was a uniform.

  An overturned basket had crashed at her feet. Etta moved quickly, trying to gather up the tins that had gone rolling out of it down the path. When she turned, Nicholas’s hand was still on her shoulder as he spoke in gruff French. “Je suis vraiment désolé. Je croyais…ma mère…”

  At that, the look of terror on the older woman’s face disappeared. “De rien.” She smiled at him, patting his hand. “Tu es un cher garçon.”

  Etta righted the basket, passing it back to her wordlessly. Nicholas looked stricken, as if the whole of his chest was caving in.

  “Au revoir,” the woman said, with a small wave.

  “Au—uh, au revoir,” Etta managed, watching her as she hurried away.

  Nicholas stared after her, swaying on his feet. Water dripped off his pants, out of his shoes.

  “It’ll be best if we go unnoticed, huh?” she said.

  Nicholas didn’t reply—he just stood there, rooted in place.

  Better to keep moving than risk being seen by guardians nearby, or by the police. Etta hooked her arm through his and led him off the path, weaving through the trees and picnickers until she found a spot she recognized—the Medici Fountain, and the long pool stretching out in front of it.

  She negotiated his big body onto the nearest bench. “Are you okay?”

  He shook his head, swallowing.

  Etta looked through the bag at his side, digging through it to find some kind of food to give him. Nicholas was in some kind of shock. Turning up nothing, she said, “I’ll be right back.”