“And your…companion?” he supplied carefully, well aware of those feelings regardless.
“Partner,” Etta continued. “And they stole the astrolabe and rode off into the sunset with it. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in another desert and another century. If these men aren’t with you, where are they? And what happened?”
Henry sighed, rising back onto his feet. “I kept your identity and my interest in you secret from the others, and I regret it more than I can say. As for the rest, I realize you’ve been through a trial, but would you consider taking a walk outside with me? It’s far easier to show you.”
WINIFRED—WHO, IT SEEMED, HAD BEEN LISTENING AT THE DOOR—handed her a pair of shoes as soon as Etta emerged from the office. By the time Henry appeared at her side, a light coat over his suit jacket, the woman had faded back down the shadows of the hallway like the ghoul she was.
“No coat?” he asked, eyeing her up and down.
“Darling Winifred didn’t think I needed one, apparently,” she said. One of the guards chuckled into his fist, earning him a swat across the chest from the other.
Henry looked mildly startled. “Your mother called her that as well.”
“My mother met that woman and they both survived it?”
One corner of his mouth twitched, and the parts of her that were still raw, and awkward—and, worse—unsure, eased. “I never said they emerged unscathed.”
“I always wondered how she got the scar on her chin,” Etta said, trying to squeeze the smallest traces of humor from this.
“That was me, I’m afraid,” Henry said. “We were rather ruthless fencing partners when we were much younger. It was another scar in her extensive collection, but, once she returned the favor”—he pointed to the pale, thin mark above his left brow—“the matter was settled.”
Etta tried not to grimace at that. Blood for blood. How very Rose Linden.
The thought was drawn away by Henry placing his overcoat around her shoulders.
“Is that all right?” he asked. “The Octobers here are mild, it likely won’t be too cold—”
It was the anxious look he gave her that made Etta keep the coat around her, clutching it closed between her hands. “Thanks.”
“We’ll be taking a quick walk down the street, Jenkins,” Henry said, turning to the guard who’d laughed. The other man gave a curt nod, and when Etta and Henry started down the hallway, he and the other guard fell into step behind them. Etta turned, confused, only to be drawn back around by the offer of Henry’s arm.
Rather than take the grand stairway down, he led her to a smaller staircase, one so thoroughly plain and serviceable that Etta assumed it was meant for staff. They made their way down two levels, emerging in a large, echoing entryway.
A portrait of a beautiful young woman, as regal as any queen in her velvet gown and diamonds, kept watch over the comings and goings of the foyer, lit by an enormous crystal chandelier that had somehow survived the quake by only molting a few of its feather-shaped ornaments.
Jenkins stood off to the side, next to the massive front door, and was soon joined by two other men, all roughly the same height, all with the same dark hair, some dusted with gray, others not. Etta stopped to examine the portrait for a moment, rubbing her sore shoulder.
“Are you in pain, Miss Hemlock? Would you like something for it?” Jenkins asked.
“Oh—um, no, thank you,” Etta said, letting her hand fall. It did hurt, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be under the influence of any medication—she needed to be as focused as possible. “And it’s actually Spencer, not Hemlock.”
“You’re a Hemlock through and through,” Henry said with a faint chuckle. “Suffering in silence because of indomitable pride. Get her the medicine, Jenkins.”
“That does sound familiar,” Jenkins said with a wink. The friendliness of it, like a shared private joke, startled her all over again.
Henry offered her his arm again, but Etta breezed past him, still preoccupied with those six words. You’re a Hemlock through and through. That would be easy, wouldn’t it? To accept that, to give in to the comfort of fitting into those qualities, to have that place offered to her?
He removed two white tablets from a silver pillbox in his coat pocket.
“Aspirin,” Jenkins reassured her with a small smile.
“I’m all right,” she said, trying to keep the wariness out of her voice. “Really. Thank you.”
Henry looked like he wanted to push the matter, but when he saw her face—which Etta was sure must have looked swollen and red after her crying jag—he decided against it.
“Shall we, gentlemen?”
Standing next to them, the resemblance between Henry and the others was overwhelming, so much so that Etta wondered if they were all related. All Hemlocks.
If they were security, were they also decoys? The thought moved through her mind like a lance. The four men, including Jenkins, stepped into a tight unit around her and Henry, cocooning them on all sides before they even stepped outside. Etta waited for them to step farther away, to break up the human shield as they stepped into the crisp night air, but they never did, even as they began down the steep path. Their movements had the practiced precision of a military maneuver, and she had to wonder what Henry was being shielded from.
But she already knew. Ironwoods. This man, just as much as her mother, was the sworn enemy of Cyrus Ironwood, and had been working to undermine him for decades.
They came to a turn in the road and stopped short. It was only then that Henry gave a small signal with his hands to send the other men back a few feet. They went with reluctant, shuffling feet.
“Now,” he said, turning his attention back to her. “Tell me what you see.”
Etta caught herself looking up at him again, studying the crooked bridge of his nose, the gruesome scar at the base of his left ear where it looked like someone had begun to forcibly cut it off. He’d attempted to tame his hair beneath his hat, but it was already rebelling, curling up to greet the moisture in the air.
She turned back to face the hills and streets that rolled out below her, easing down into the bay. “I see…suffering. Pockets of homes. Twisted buildings.”
But on the whole, the damage—what her history texts had painted in broad, catastrophic strokes—was terrible, but not crushing. Frightening, but not terrifying.
“What you’re seeing is a city which has taken a severe knocking with the quake, but has been spared from fire damage, which is what ultimately caused the bulk of the damage and deaths in the timeline you know,” Henry explained, tucking his hands into his pockets. “But if you had come to this moment in Ironwood’s timeline, there would have been almost nothing to see. That was how devastated it was, by one small change that rippled out to a much larger one.”
This isn’t Ironwood’s timeline. Etta whirled back toward him. “What was it?”
“When Ironwood was pursuing his interests, or rather, the interests of his family’s ancestral territory in the Americas, he altered the outcome of a war. The Russo-Japanese War. Are you familiar with it?”
Etta shook her head. “No—wait, that was before World War One, wasn’t it? Over land disputes?”
“Over rival interests in Manchuria and Korea,” he said. “When it was clear the Russians were beaten and riots at home were breaking out, Ironwood convinced Theodore Roosevelt to mediate the peace talks, rather than let the war proceed a few more months as it had in the original timeline. It cost far more Russian and Japanese lives, but it resulted in sweeping reforms in the former, and spared the lives of millions of Russians in World War One.”
That was…impossible.
Like time travel, she thought grimly. And so was standing there, in an alternate version of the history she had grown up with. A passing breeze kicked a loose strand of Etta’s hair up, forcing her to smooth it back. Instead of smoke and ash, the breeze brought with it the briny scent of the sea, the metallic breath of exhaust, and the
simple stenches of humanity.
“But what does that have to do with an earthquake in San Francisco?” she asked.
Henry turned to face her more fully. “This is what I want you to understand, Etta. I sympathize with you, knowing that your future is no longer what you remember. I know that pain, feeling your life and friends and dreams are gone. All of us have had to come to terms with the fact that our loyalty is to time itself. It’s our inheritance, our nation, our history. But the future you know is filled with strife and war; it is nothing like the world of peace that existed before Cyrus Ironwood decided to remake it.”
Etta recognized that she was as much in mourning over her dreams of being a concert violinist as she was for Alice. She had slowly come around to the idea that there was something more for her in life, and that she could still play without the validation of crowds and success. But the idea of an entirely unfamiliar future would always remain overwhelming.
“Each change we make, big or small, ripples out in ways we cannot always predict, that we can almost never control,” Henry continued. “A war in Russia spreads its vines throughout the years, touching individual lives, nudging them to different locations, shifting their choices, until one man, Dennis T. Sullivan, San Francisco’s fire chief, is in the wrong place when the earthquake strikes, and he dies of his injuries, leaving inexperienced firemen to wield dynamite to create firebreaks. A woman wakes up a few hours earlier than she would have and decides to make breakfast for her family, causing one of the most devastating fires of the entire century.”
“So…we’re in…” Etta began, trying to wrap her mind around the words. “We’re in the original timeline now? The men who took the astrolabe managed to change it back?”
Henry nodded, and, with that, changed her life as she had known it.
“We’ve been identifying potential linchpin moments in history for years—moments and people and decisions that have a huge impact when it comes to these ripples,” he explained. “They tested our theory that the Russo-Japanese War was one, and altered the future from 1905 onward. Ironwood’s focus was on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, thank God, most of his changes prior to then were minor. There wasn’t enough wealth at stake for him to care or make a major play before then.”
“But, unfortunately…?” Etta prompted, detecting the anxiety underscoring his words.
He gave a faint smile. “Unfortunately, we’ve heard reports that he’s already dispatched his men to see about altering events back. If we don’t move quickly, we’ll lose this advantage.”
“Move quickly to destroy the astrolabe, you mean,” Etta clarified.
“My men who took it from you were immediately followed by Ironwood’s men. One of them was, from the note we received, killed. The survivor is in hiding in Russia, still in possession of the astrolabe, waiting for us to rescue him,” he said. “Tonight, I need to inform the others that the only way forward is with its destruction. The complete reversion of the timeline to what was meant to be. We cannot leave the astrolabe in play; if Ironwood ever got his hands on it, he’d open up passages to new years, inflict more crippling changes on humanity. He does not care how many people die, or suffer, so long as he and his line survive. He wants more and more and more, and yet all of these years have proven nothing will ever be enough.”
Until he saved his beloved first wife from death. Until he had everything.
Etta drew his coat around her shoulders more tightly, trapping in the warmth.
Meant to be. He kept using that same phrase. “Do you believe in destiny, then? That something deserves to exist, just because it once was?”
“I believe in humanity, in peace, and the natural order of things,” he said. “I believe that the only way to balance the power of what we can do is with sacrifice. Accepting that we cannot possess the things and people not meant for us, we cannot control every outcome; we cannot cheat death. Otherwise there’s no meaning to any of it.”
“There’s one more thing I don’t really understand,” Etta said. “If my future changed, if my life isn’t what it was, then wouldn’t I have been prevented from going back in the first place? Wouldn’t it have invalidated finding the astrolabe and losing it?”
The information was offered freely, patiently. Etta was so grateful, she almost smiled.
“We live outside time’s natural laws; that’s why you remember your old life, even as it no longer exists. But time has its own sentience in a way, and it despises inconsistencies. To avoid them, it maintains or restores as many of our actions as possible, even in the face of great change. So, in your future, you still travel back from when you did, but perhaps you weren’t performing at a concert; perhaps you were only at the museum visiting.”
And perhaps Alice might still be alive, her mind whispered.
That sweet spark of hope lit her from her scalp to her toes.
The astrolabe had to be destroyed. That was nonnegotiable to her. It was more power than any one person should have, by far, and she could sacrifice her future knowing that at least any future damage could be somewhat contained. But she liked this, what Henry claimed. That they thought not just about themselves, but of how their actions would affect the true victims of Ironwood’s meddling: the regular people who were at the mercy of his whims and wants.
Her time, the future she’d grown up in, had come at the cost of untold lives and damage: not just to the travelers, but to the world. Returning the timeline to its original state spoke to the part of her that had struggled so badly with the notion that travelers could inflict positive change, but chose not to. It could be a return to a moral center, a new beginning to build stronger rules for the travelers to adhere to.
She needed to finish what she’d begun, and soon.
But…Nicholas.
Nicholas, who was waiting for her; who rose in her memory like the lavender sunrise stretched out before them. She let the thought of both wash over her, steady, brightening, beautiful.
I can spare him this. He never should have been involved in this mess to begin with. If she could keep him safely out of it, until the astrolabe was destroyed, maybe then she could begin to make up for the havoc her family had wrought on his life.
“Can I come with you?” she asked. The wind picked up around them, tugging at the coat, her hair, as if trying to move her more firmly onto this path. “To Russia?”
Henry looked as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “You’re sure? If you need a few days more of rest—”
“No, I need to see this for myself,” she said. “Don’t think about leaving me behind for ‘my own good,’ either.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, and it took Etta a moment to process that the unfamiliar tone in his voice was pride. She became just a tiny bit hungry to hear it again. “Let’s go back, shall we?”
The guards formed their protective shell around them again, and they walked in companionable silence back up to the magnificent home that overlooked the city that had been spared by time. Inside, Etta started toward the stairs, but Henry nudged her to the left, into what looked to be a large, formal dining room. Piano music no longer sang out, but there was chatter and the heavy steps of people milling around.
Packing up, as it turned out. Several people attacked the last of the drinks and food left out on the tables. Others swept up any and all messes as men rolled up the sleeping pads and bedding at their feet; even more were laying out the contents of their packs, counting supplies or trading what they had with others.
Although many people were dressed in the severe style of the era, there were equally as many in a rainbow of silk or chiffon ball gowns and stately military uniforms. Women in the corner were helping one another arrange their hair in artful piles, every now and then reaching out to snag the few small children running loops around everyone’s legs. Their laughter struck a chord in her, resonated even in her battered heart.
It was a liminal space, where dawn met night, and the past met the present.
These people had gathered here to conduct their work in hiding, but, more than that, it was a secret, special place that created its own warmth and light, even as the fire was smothered and the candles were doused.
Etta tried to step back, but Henry led her forward. He did not have to say a word for silence to fall like a curtain.
Even the children turned to him, eyes wide, small pearly teeth flashing as they grinned. One held out an open palm, to the obvious, fond embarrassment of his mother. Beside her, Henry dug into his pockets, screwing his face up as if struggling to dig through all of the imaginary things there. A small wrapped piece of candy finally emerged, and the boy snatched it and ran back behind his mother’s skirts with a shriek of giggles.
But not even that could distract the others from their fixation on Etta’s face. The way panic gripped her entire chest made her feel like that little girl performing under the bright stage lights for the first time.
I’m not that girl anymore. Not after everything she’d faced.
“The similarities end with the face and hair,” she managed to say, vaguely gesturing there with her hand.
There was a moment where the expressions of bald hostility turned to confusion. And then the woman, the same mother, began to laugh. The others around her caught the sound, relaxing into their own rueful chuckles. And like the timeline changes Henry had spoken of, the laughter rippled out, until the entire room settled into it.
“We have much to discuss tonight about our path forward,” Henry said, placing a hand on her shoulder, “but would you all allow me the pleasure of introducing my daughter, Etta, to you?”
“Well, hey!” a man shouted from the back, cutting through the quiet din of surprise. “Another Hemlock to add to the ranks—it’s high time for us to finally outnumber you Jacarandas for once! Congrats, old boy! And welcome, doll!”
Henry rolled his eyes but was smiling so hard he was nearly pink with it.
Once their surprise melted away, all that was left were the whistles and shouts that left Etta stunned in turn. The wave of women washed up to her, and warm hands clasped her own, touched her shoulder beneath Henry’s coat, where the bandage was just visible. They were talking over each other, so fast Etta couldn’t keep up with them.