Passenger

by Alexandra Bracken

  “It’s charming you think that you could,” Sophia said with a dismissive flick of her hand. One of the Thorns said something in Arabic.

  “It’d be a waste of ammunition,” Sophia said coldly. “Leave them for the desert. And I wouldn’t get near them with a blade. Both are trained too well. The sun will finish them off for you.”

  Etta held her breath, her body straining with pain and alarm, but the men seemed to agree with Sophia’s assessment.

  It was several minutes before the sound of their steps faded completely. Etta breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, to try to keep herself from throwing up. I failed, I failed—Mom, I’m sorry—

  I need to get up—

  “Etta!” Nicholas said. “Etta! Wake up! Etta!”

  She took in a deep breath, still trembling with pain.

  You’re fine, he’s fine, you’re fine, he’s fine.… They could catch up with Sophia and the Thorns, ride hard until they could take the astrolabe back.

  “Henrietta!” he barked. “Miss Spencer! Damn you, if you don’t wake up this instant—”

  She heard the snap of a whip, the grumbling of the camels. Etta didn’t have to look to know that they were leading Daisy away, and whatever Nicholas had ridden in on. They were really stranding them, the bastards.

  “Etta—” It was the desperate, pleading note in his voice that made Etta push herself upright, so suddenly that Nicholas let out a noise of surprise.

  “Are you all right?” she said, her throat aching.

  “I’ll live, but…” he said, looking away. “Damn it all—I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry, we rode as hard as we could—”

  “We?” Etta said, testing the fabric tied around her wrists. The Thorn had managed a knot all right, but he’d been too rushed to make sure it was totally secure. She worked her right hand free, sliding it out of the silk binding with a relieved sigh. “Is Hasan here?”

  “He came with me, but his horse lamed itself and he had to turn back to Kurietain,” Nicholas said. “I’m so bloody sorry. I swear, this isn’t the end. We’ll get back to Damascus—” His words were edged with fire, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “I’ll walk the whole of Nassau if it means finding the passage you came through—”

  “You would do that?” Etta asked.

  He finally looked up. “You cannot fathom the distance I would travel for you.”

  Despite the pain, despite everything, a small smile broke over her face. “With me.”

  “Come here,” he breathed out, eyes reverent. “Come here…come here.…”

  Etta didn’t trust her legs enough to stand quite yet, but she managed to crawl the short distance. A small burst of happiness lit the center of her chest and he tilted his face up, kissing her.

  “Untie me, damn it,” he said. Etta snorted and reached around behind him. He leaned forward as she worked, burying his face in her neck.

  The man had done a better job of binding his hands. The knot swam before her as black began to cloud the edges of her vision. She blinked, leaning back at the feeling of sudden, wet warmth down her front.

  Bright blood had soaked through the front of Nicholas’s shirt. Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears. “You tore…you tore your stitches open…careful.…”

  His eyes widened in alarm, going from her face to her shoulder. She looked down, raising an unsteady hand to the place where she felt a second, white-hot pulse.

  Shot, she thought, dazed. When did that…

  “Etta!”

  There was a spark of electricity at the base of her spine, scorching through her center, ripping her apart. Air cracked and hissed against her skin, and—

  IN THAT FIRST MOMENT AFTER Etta disappeared, dissolving into a million grains of glittering dust, every last trace of blood seemed to leave his body.

  It was impossible to breathe.

  It was impossible to move.

  Perhaps…if he only remained still enough, the moment would…Etta would…

  His skin was still warm from where it had touched hers, even as the blood was cooling on his shirt. He felt the imprint of her lips against his as if they were still there. The rattling heat the air had taken on seemed to shrink the skin around his bones, to snap against his chest—and she—

  She is gone.

  The one clear thought his mind could scrape together from a flood of the senseless.

  She is gone.

  Disappeared so completely, as if she’d been dashed into nothing, as if…

  God, no—God, please, no—

  Nicholas slid along the plaster, unable to keep himself upright when his spine had turned to water. Some part of him was aware of the fact that he was shaking, as his shoulder collided with the stone. He choked on the sand and dirt, the disbelief. And the sound that emerged from that dark, shattered place was a thing of anguish and fury, inhuman.

  Dead. He squeezed his eyes shut, his fingers curled tightly into fists behind him. She’s dead.

  Sophia had taken the astrolabe, and then—

  Etta is dead.

  She was—holy God, it was just as it had been with Julian, from the way the light had broken her apart from the inside out, shattering her, to the thundering, rolling crack of power he felt as the passage in Damascus collapsed from the surge of her loss—

  He howled. He let the fury pour out of him until he, too, was shattered. The sunlight tracked across the floor, marking each passing hour, and he could do nothing but watch it and think of the ends of her hair, matted with blood; the spectral quality of her skin as death had stolen over it.

  When it no longer felt like he was frozen, Nicholas began to work at what was left of the knot around his wrists. The wound in his side pulled, his shoulder ached, and his mind carried him back, unwanted, undeterred, to that moment again. Her forehead had creased, as if she had heard something he had not. And there had been pain—he’d seen it tear across her face, felt it in the way her fingers had suddenly dug into his wrists, as if she could tether herself to him. Her eyes had rolled back, she’d gone utterly limp—

  Had she known?

  Did she know what was happening?

  The silk unraveled under the coaxing of his thumb, slipping against his skin as it fell away. Muscles screamed in protest as he pushed himself up, leaning back against the wall again. He steadfastly avoided looking at the blood that crept across the ancient stone.

  Nicholas watched the sun retreat through the window as it set, hatred hardening his core, until he was finally seized by impulse. He snatched a fragment of plaster up off the ground and drew his arm back to smash it against the stone, beat it into something unrecognizable, when he noticed something a few feet away.

  An earring.

  He scooped it up before the blood could wash over it—clasped it hard enough to feel the shape of the pearl, the prick of the stud, as it dug into his palm—and tried to find her again in himself, to pin down the memory of her face as he’d first seen it on the Ardent.

  All for nothing. All of this, everything, for nothing.

  Why was he so shocked? How had he ever expected life to deliver something he wanted to him, when it had denied him at nearly every turn? And just when he’d finally decided that the risk was worth the reward—when he’d settled on one path over another—Nicholas had been ready to go with her. He would have followed her anywhere.

  And he’d killed her. His shot had missed the guardian—the Thorn—in front of him, and passed through her smaller frame.

  He had let her change his plans; he’d started to rearrange his future, to become open to the possibility of a different kind of freedom. She had taken all of that with her, and he’d been the one to steal her from the world. To silence her talent and charm and unstoppable, fearless heart.

  This. All of this, everything, for this; the cold, unfeeling touch of death and disappointment and grief. Nicholas felt a peculiar sort of envy for his past self, the young man who still existed outside of the barbed knot of time. T
he one who had not yet been crushed into dust.

  He stood, his vision flooding with pops of light and color. His skull felt light enough to float away from his body, to drift off into the night. Was it so wrong to wish it would? If only to escape this…this…

  Nicholas felt his way down the stairs, taking slow, measured steps in the cool darkness, until he reached the lower chamber and stepped outside. As he’d expected, his horse was gone, along with the supply of food and water he’d carried with him.

  Rage once again replaced the numbness, flooding his body with a kind of fury that made him unrecognizable to himself. Sophia hadn’t fired the gun, but she was partially to blame for this. Together, the three of them might have been able to overcome the two Thorns, but she’d turned on him and Etta, just when it had mattered most. He would kill his cousin, woman or not. When the time was right, when he found her, he would call her out, and he would kill her. Even as a sailor, he’d known how to hunt. He would not stop until he found Sophia.

  Nicholas sat at the entrance, leaning his shoulder against the stone, breathing in the night air; it was as dry and harsh as it had been when he and Hasan had camped for a few short hours the night before.

  God. He would need to explain this to Hasan. The other young man would know to come looking for them—for Nicholas—when they didn’t meet on the road.

  He shut his eyes. His cracked lip began to bleed as he drew in another steadying breath.

  There was nothing to do but wait for Hasan, to try to find a way to save the mother, if he could not save the daughter. His helpless anger spread like a blot of fresh ink on paper until it absorbed her mother, too. She should have protected Etta in the first place. If she had, Etta would be playing in her debut; she would be safe, hundreds of years away from the sweltering, wasting reach of this desert.

  The moon was full and bright above him, but he closed his eyes, unwilling to look again. Sleep stole upon him quickly, silently, leaving him confused and disoriented when he woke at the first touch of sunlight.

  And then of course he remembered where he was, and he was hollowed out all over again. He could not move, so he did not try. He could not think, so he did not try. He watched the play of light on the sandy hills, the tombs, and felt as wooden and slow as if he had crawled out of one himself.

  A few hours into the morning, a small family ambled by on camels. Their presence was so sudden, Nicholas was not quite certain they weren’t a mirage until the elder man riding at the front called out to him. Nicholas kept his gaze low, his hands hanging between his knees, and the other man’s foreign words rolled off him. The young son, after a brief consultation with his father, slid down the side of the camel and brought a small offering of dried meat and water.

  Shocked by the small act of kindness, Nicholas managed a brief nod of thanks. The father lifted his hand in acknowledgment, and called the boy back to him.

  Neither hungry nor thirsty, he ate and drank anyway, and was unsurprised to find that it did nothing to fill the emptiness at his core. It occurred to him in the hours that followed that he had misjudged Hall’s behavior after Anne’s death. The endless nights of drinking and joyless merrymaking hadn’t been to dull his senses, or even to numb his pain, but were only fruitless attempts to fill the gnawing nothingness left inside of him, devouring every last feeling.

  His back grew stiff from holding the same position, finally forcing him to stretch to reduce the aching in his joints.

  I will never hear her play, he thought, and pressed a hand against his chest, hard, trying to dislodge whatever it was that was slowly squeezing his heart.

  Or…might he? If he found the astrolabe…The thought made his skin feel as if there were a hive of bees trapped beneath it. Somehow, he could go back—or rather, forward. Could he warn Etta to be wary of Sophia and not enter the passage?

  He’d told her he couldn’t save Alice, but damn if he didn’t understand now why she refused to believe him at first. Etta must truly have wanted to save the woman with her whole heart.

  She would want you to just destroy it.

  Could any of it be done? If he prevented Etta from traveling that first time, then he would never have been in the position to find the astrolabe. Would that undo everything, leave them at the place where they started? Had time already played this story through with them before—an endless, self-fulfilling loop of misery?

  Or would it just make him Cyrus Ironwood?

  How would the old man do it—change the past without preventing Etta from finding the one thing that would have allowed him to pursue that course of action? What was it that he was missing—what piece of this logic?

  He settled down again for the night, wrapping his arms around the stabbing pain in his side. Nicholas needed to think of what he would tell Hasan, how he could ever beg the young man’s forgiveness for failing the Linden family, the timeline, so enormously.

  But night fell over him and the desert again, and still Hasan did not come, and Nicholas was left with nothing but the suspicion that he’d cost the world two lives instead of one.

  THE FIGURE ROSE ON THE HORIZON LIKE THE SUN THE VERY NEXT morning—a distant speck of white that grew larger as it threaded through the hills. For the first time in days, he felt something stir inside of him, rousing the part of him that he had carefully pressed back so as not to suffocate on it. Hasan. Finally.

  Another horse followed the first on a line. His gaze was so fixated on it, it was a considerable amount of time before he squinted, shading his eyes from the haze of the sun, and realized that the rider coming toward him was no man, but a woman.

  A woman with hair like spun gold.

  His heart began to beat wildly in his chest, waging war against disbelief. Etta. It wasn’t a mirage, he could hear the horses breathing, smell the sweat foaming on them, only—

  Closer now, steadily closer; Nicholas saw now that the face was sunburnt, but faintly lined with age, and shadowed with experience. The eyes that moved over him from beneath the scarf were sharp, cut from diamonds rather than the sky. The woman searched the empty spaces around him, glanced up toward the second floor of the tomb, and the realization unspooled in his mind.

  Rose.

  This was Rose—the Rose that Etta had known, the one who had raised her. Somehow, impossibly, she was here; his heart began to rend itself all over again. She’d escaped Ironwood’s men. She’d traveled the desert alone. And now…

  This was the same young woman who had thrown a knife with deadly accuracy in the bazaar—the very same one who had outfoxed the Ironwoods, even with all of their money and resources, for years. He was somehow both impressed and furious with her that she had taken such a risk with her life. She must have ridden through the desert nearly as hard as he had.

  And all for nothing.

  Too late.

  He watched, the earring clasped between his hands, as she made a steady approach. Dressed as a man, her horse unencumbered by anything but the bare necessities, she had the look of a survivor, a fighter, and he respected the hell out of her for it, especially when she slid the pistol out of one of her saddlebags and aimed at him.

  I wish you would.

  He rose slowly, so as not to startle her. Nicholas could not bring himself to speak. The quick glance he’d had of her in the bazaar, even the photograph, hadn’t been nearly enough to truly appreciate her resemblance to her daughter. Hers was a cool, collected beauty, her features sharpened by age. Etta’s appearance struck a person across all the senses at once, like the first blossom of spring. His hand shook, just that small bit, as he raised his hands up and stepped forward.

  Rose’s words sliced through the air. “Don’t come any closer.”

  He stopped where he was, his arms aching with the small effort it took to keep them up. She would need to come to him, approach carefully. He understood the instinct.

  Rose dismounted with practiced ease. When she eyed him, Nicholas suddenly felt as though he needed to fall to his knees and beg f
or her forgiveness.

  “I’m looking for a girl,” she began.

  “Etta.” He scarcely got the name out.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Where is she?”

  He swallowed, trying to clear his ravaged, dry throat. “Gone.”

  It was the first time he had said the word aloud, and it gained permanence; it solidified. He choked on it.

  “She used the astrolabe?” Had Rose’s eyes actually widened, or was it a trick of the light? “She didn’t destroy it?”

  Nicholas shook his head. “It was taken by an Ironwood and two members of the Thorns.”

  Emotions stormed across her face, disbelief whipping into fury and then to despair. Just as quickly, it was all folded away, and her feelings were neatly stowed again behind steely eyes and pursed lips. “Tell me exactly how this happened.”

  He tried to fill in the pieces of the story she wouldn’t know, his throat dry and aching. Rose absorbed his words, soaking them up, until she looked like she might burst.

  “How did you escape?” he asked. “Etta was terrified for your life.”

  “Do you honestly believe I’m not capable of escaping a few Ironwoods?” Rose shook her head. “I fought my way free on the first night, but I couldn’t get here any sooner, not without crossing paths with myself.”

  “She tried to talk to you in the souk,” he said, suddenly furious all over again. “Instead of listening, you attacked her.”

  “That was me twenty years ago. I’d been running from Ironwoods and the Thorns for months. I couldn’t trust anyone,” Rose said, finally lowering her gun. “I made the connection later, once Etta began to grow.”

  What could he say to that?

  “Why did you not tell her the truth from the beginning? About her true family—about what she could do?”

  Her whole countenance tightened, and he wondered if he had trespassed on forbidden ground. But finally she said, “Etta had to be a blank slate for this to work out the way I meant it to.”

  The way I meant it to? he thought, a thrumming awareness tightening across the back of his neck.