“Why? Do you want to write them thank-you notes?”
“You know what?” Etta gritted her teeth. “Never mind.”
She had more important things to think about: Her mom. The astrolabe. Getting back to Nicholas. Even the debut. That familiar fire lit in her heart when she thought of it now, burning through the dread and apprehension she’d felt about living a life on the run with her mother. She wanted to play—for Alice, yes; so Nicholas could hear her, yes; but even more than that, to take control of her future again, on her own terms.
In Kurietain, men were out talking amongst themselves, smoking water pipes, watching the sunset. They drew a few interested eyes as one of the guardians led them through the maze of sun-bleached streets, heading to what Sophia called a caravanserai, but the others referred to as khan—some sort of lodgings for weary travelers and their beasts.
And water. Clean, cool water. Etta licked her cracked lips. Her goatskin had gone dry an hour before.
“I overheard men talking about hot springs. I can smell the sulfur, can’t you?” Sophia said, taking a deep breath of the evening air.
“Oh,” Etta said sweetly, “I just assumed that was you.”
Sophia’s own smile would have melted the face off a lesser person. “It’s a shame you won’t be able to clean up. It looks like we rode you here.”
Her arms felt like she’d tied hundred-pound weights to each wrist, but Etta did summon the energy to flip off the other girl when she turned back to the road.
The caravanserai was a simple square structure, almost like a fortress. Its exterior was lined with columns and more arches than Etta could count, broken up by a large entryway. Right now, a group of men was walking through it with an unruly herd of camels.
Two young boys were sent out to retrieve the horses and guide them inside, where they were met by a portly, swollen-faced man in fine red robes. He spoke first to the guardians, who must have told him that Sophia was the one with the gold, for the man fumbled for an apology in three separate languages before Sophia deigned to reply in Arabic.
The caravanserai was split between two levels—the upper rooms, where the men slept, and the lower rooms where their camels, horses, and goods were tucked in for the night.
The caravan that had arrived before them had just finished unloading and bedding down its animals. Finished with their sunset prayer, the men began mingling with the other travelers, showing off wares, sharing food.
“In you go,” Sophia said, when they reached their room on the second level. Their escorts moved to the next door down and disappeared inside. She heard the sound of them dropping their bags, and the rustle of fabric as they rolled out their bedding.
Etta stepped into the room to find it was a good ten degrees cooler than outside. At that point, she was so used to the artistry that went into even the simplest of these homes, Etta was surprised to see that the room was as bare as a cave. There wasn’t a door, only a curtain that fell in place after her.
“Right. Here’s a blanket.” Sophia tossed her a rolled bundle of cloth.
Unsurprisingly, after spending the day tied to a horse’s back, it smelled as bad as Etta did.
She spread it out over the floor, trying to psych herself up for the special agony of settling her already-sore body down onto what basically amounted to flat, packed earth.
At least we’re safe for now, she thought, then amended, I think.
“There’s food in that bag,” Sophia said, indicating the cloth sack she’d dumped against the wall on her side of the small space. “I need to see about trading out the horses.”
Her eyes flashed with unspoken warning. Etta merely waved her away.
She waited until the other girl disappeared through the curtain before dragging herself over to the bag. Etta pulled out a handful of figs and tore off a chunk of bread as big as her fist before going back for seconds. Next door, she could hear one of the guardians stand up when Sophia called and, grumbling, make his way down the stairs.
Etta eyed the other bags.
The girl had left all of her supplies there, including but not limited to a small pistol, money, her travel log, a gold pocket watch, and a Swiss Army knife.
The compass she’d seen Sophia use earlier in the day had fallen to the very bottom of the smallest sack. She stared at its face, turning herself around the room until it pointed to true north.
Over the last few hours, Etta had imagined five different variations of the same escape plan. While the others slept, she would creep out, take what few supplies she needed, and ride off ahead of them, beating them to Palmyra and the astrolabe by hours. In every version, Etta was long gone before they ever arrived.
But the longer she stared at the compass, the more those plans seemed to slip through her fingers like dust.
Hasan had warned her and Nicholas that the desert wasn’t a place to travel alone. Even with a compass, she could still find herself off track, lost, dehydrated, or hungry—and she would wander until someone found her or she collapsed. Etta was a true city kid—wilderness survival wasn’t exactly her forte. She needed Sophia and the guardians for their knowledge, and their supplies.
It was getting too close to the thirtieth to waste even a second debating this. All along, she’d been banking on being able to figure out how to use the astrolabe to create a passage back to her own time, to surprise the Ironwoods holding her mother hostage and get her out of there, but now, none of it seemed so simple.
How was she supposed to get to the astrolabe, get it away from Sophia and the guardians before they could take it? And then hide the fact she wasn’t bringing it back to Ironwood long enough to get Rose free from him? Her mind began to dissect the problem, cutting it up into manageable measures, testing the tempo, the flow of beats, until finally she settled on a possibility.
The only way to do this would be to get Sophia on her side. To make her complicit in not only destroying the astrolabe, but lying to Cyrus. Etta could force him to set up a trade—to claim she needed to see her mom before she gave him anything. If her mother knew something was going to happen, would she already have a plan?
Or…Etta was beginning to feel the tremor of certainty in the pit of her stomach that this might only end with the old man’s death. And it might have to be her who dealt the killing blow.
The thought made her sick—her mother might have been ruthless, but Etta wasn’t sure what it would make her into if she did kill him. He was responsible for Alice’s death—the thought should have filled her with the satisfaction of revenge, but…it didn’t.
Besides, what would she do about the other travelers there? The ones that Ironwood would no doubt have guarding Rose?
As she lay in the darkening room, her mind kept circling back to those words, the ones her mom had written at the end of her first letter: An ending must be final.
Final. As in…destroyed? Do what her mother and her great-grandfather couldn’t, and destroy the astrolabe entirely? Now that she had a clearer picture of her mom’s heart, Etta began to wonder if her mother didn’t expect to be saved—if this, like Alice’s last words to her, was meant to comfort her; to direct her; to tell her it was all right.
A flash of bone-deep horror cut through her.
I can’t lose Mom, too. Not now, when she had so many questions about her family. Not ever, when they had so many places to go together. If her mom was gone, too, what reason would Etta even have to try to get back to her New York, to the tattered remains of her old life there?
Destroying the astrolabe would be her last resort, she decided. Some part of her was still hoping she could get through to Sophia, to convince her to come back to Etta’s own time and escape Ironwood once and for all. That way she could use the astrolabe, somehow, to create a passage directly to her time without needing to find the one in the Bahamas that led to the Met.
Etta slid the compass into the folds of her robe, just in case, and stretched out over her blanket. She forced her mind clear of all of th
e competing thoughts that sprang up when she closed her eyes.
It’ll be over soon, she thought. An ending must be final. She rubbed the raw markings around her wrists, and tried very hard not to wish that Nicholas was there. She didn’t need a protector, or a rescuer. But she did need him.
Sophia returned half an hour later by Etta’s guess, still grumbling as she sank down onto her bedding. Next door, the guardians were talking, laughing, and Etta caught a familiar word passing between them, one Hasan had used: ašwaak.
Ašwaak…as in, Thorns?
There was silence between the girls as the last lights from the caravanserai were finally extinguished, dragging them into the darkness of night.
“Does the astrolabe really create passages?” Sophia asked suddenly. “Not read them?”
I’ll give you an answer if you give me one. Etta almost said it, but she thought of Nicholas then, and realized suddenly that she might not need to manipulate Sophia. Not when the truth was on her side.
“Yes. He wants to create a passage back to a point where he can save his first wife without losing his fortune, or his control over the other families,” Etta said. “He’ll destroy our future, I’m almost sure of it, just to rebuild something he thinks is better. You can’t let him have that much power.”
“Oh, I was never going to give it to him,” Sophia said. “Especially not now that I know exactly how powerful it is—thank you for that piece of information, by the way. My God, this is amazing. I won’t just be able to lord it over him—I’ll be able to burn his life down around him.”
“Sophia—” Etta tried to interrupt, but the girl talked over her, almost trembling with her excitement.
“This is the most powerful object in the world; the travelers and guardians won’t just align with me, they’ll kneel. I won’t need to be the heir—I can go back far enough to take him out of the game entirely.”
Etta was so stunned, she almost couldn’t speak. “You’d really kill him?”
“Not before he lived to regret not choosing me,” Sophia said, that false sweetness back in her voice. “I want him to suffer, to see me rise as he falls. So don’t worry, darling. He won’t change the future, because I’ll change it first.”
AFTER NEARLY SEVEN HOURS ON camelback, rocking with the animal’s slow gait, Etta was too focused on controlling her ride to notice when the sparse desert had begun to take on some green again. If she’d thought the first leg of their trip had been barren, this last section felt like they were seeing the dry, crumbling bones of the world. Etta’s eyes never once stopped watering from the sun’s glare cutting through the cloudless blue sky.
But then in the distance, something began to take shape. Not the city itself, but the crumbling fortress on one of the hills that flanked it. What was left after a thousand years of wear and wind looked distinctly Roman, a sea of pillars and columns, hundreds of them that looked like they were holding up the sky.
There was a green oasis nearby, a dense cluster of trees that seemed at odds with the stripped-down land stretching in every direction. But here and there, as they drew their camels into the city, Etta saw evidence of ravines and what looked like small canals.
Now that they were inside the boundaries of the ruins, and Etta had to crane her neck back to look at the carved reliefs on the columns’ heads, it was easy to imagine the magnificent scope of the city in its prime. Hasan had called it one of the most dazzling stops along the ancient trade routes between east and west, a once carefully cultivated jewel that had fallen into neglect, and then devastation, as new civilizations rose up and the roads redrew themselves. There was an amphitheater and a large, towering building that Etta assumed was some kind of temple, but for the most part, they were weaving through the remnants of the buildings’ foundations. Their footprints.
“Well?” Sophia said, turning her camel sharply to cut off the path of Etta’s. Daisy, as she’d started calling the camel, let out a growl and began to dance around impatiently.
“‘Well,’ what?” Etta asked, adjusting her hood. The sun was at its pinnacle, beating down on the top of her head, reminding Etta she needed to keep drinking the water in her rapidly shrinking goatskin.
“What was the clue? Where are we supposed to find it, now that we’re here?”
Lie to her, Etta thought. You’re already here, you don’t need them, and she won’t change her mind. You can go and search by yourself.…Except, of course, that if they got separated, Sophia might be able to find it first, and Etta would be too far away to stop her.
The last resort, then, Etta thought miserably. The stakes were obvious to her now, and it felt like every other minute she’d been biting back tears of bitter frustration. She couldn’t save herself and her future and save her mom. Last night, she’d lain awake for hours trying to imagine the world Cyrus would try to build and control with the astrolabe. Etta had tried to convince herself that Sophia would be the lesser of two evils. But the truth was, Sophia was like a firework with a lit fuse; it would only be a matter of time before her temper or impatience got the best of her, and her plans exploded around her. Then, the astrolabe would almost certainly find its way back to Ironwood.
“I’ll tell you,” Etta said, “but only in exchange for something.”
Sophia’s brows rose at that. “This silly game again, Linden? Really?”
Etta sat up straighter in her saddle, struggling against the rising tears of frustration. I’m sorry, Mom. I just wanted you to be proud of me.… “You could spend weeks, months, maybe even years searching for it here. I’ll help you, but only if you let me create a passage directly back to my time.”
To her surprise, Sophia seemed to be considering this. “You actually know how to use the damn thing?”
Etta seized on the small, hopeful surprise in the other girl’s voice, and lied. “Yes. It was in my mother’s letter. I’ll show you, but only if I have your word you’ll let me create the passage.”
She wouldn’t need more than a second to smash the astrolabe. Etta only needed to find a way to get it into her hands.
“All right,” Sophia said, holding out her hand to shake. Etta took it, meeting the girl’s gaze evenly. “Now tell me what you know.”
“We think the clue refers to a burial place,” Etta said, hoping she wouldn’t live to regret it. “Some kind of a tomb.”
Sophia blew out a hard gust of air from her nostrils. “Can’t you be more specific?”
Etta narrowed her eyes.
The other girl was all impatience and nerves as she moved toward the guardians, consulting with them in rapid Arabic. Sophia had been in a mood from the moment they left the caravanserai that morning; Etta had dismissed it then as the product of too little sleep and too much saddle soreness, but now that she was watching her again, some worry crept in. Frustration might lead her to do something rash.
More than that, thought Etta. She had been watching the guides, her ears tuned in to what few conversations they had, to see if they’d mention the Thorns again. When she’d tried to suggest that they might leave the guardians, or send them back once the city came into view, Sophia had simply snapped her whip and sent her camel into a trot ahead of Etta’s.
Daisy spat, rearing her head back, grumbling something in her own peculiar language. Etta leaned forward and patted her neck. She knew the feeling.
As Hasan had said, there were still people living on the outskirts of the city, most of them in tents and smaller, more temporary structures that looked like they were made mostly of dried mud. They kept to themselves as their party moved down what once must have been a breathtaking colonnade, but Etta felt their eyes tracking her progress.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Fadi claims there is a valley of tombs just beyond the city,” Sophia said stiffly.
“So you do know their names,” Etta muttered, watching the backs of the men’s heads as they rode steadily in front of them, looking a thousand times more at ease on their camels.
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“Of course I do,” Sophia snapped. “I’m not as heartless as everyone would make me out to be. Besides, I had to know their names to find them and to pay them, to keep my little adventure—coming after you—away from Grandfather’s ears.”
“It must have been a real novelty,” Etta began coldly, “to make a decision to do something without him ordering it. To actually pull one over on him. It’s nice to have a little freedom, isn’t it? Think of what you could have had if you’d actually taken my advice and left the family behind.”
Sophia’s expression shadowed, but she didn’t disagree. Etta heard the girl’s hands tightening around the leather reins. They plodded forward through the ruins in a silence as oppressive as the heat.
THE VALLEY OF TOMBS WAS LOCATED PAST WHAT HAD LIKELY BEEN the vibrant, beating heart of Palmyra’s city center, tucked into the city’s shadows. Had they been alone, without the knowledge of the guardians, Etta wasn’t sure she would have ever thought to investigate the buildings. They’d passed right by them on the way in, and she hadn’t given them a second look. They seemed almost like defense posts, or watchtowers.
Despite the grand name, the valley consisted of little more than these towers sticking out of the sand like slightly crooked fingers; some of the tombs weren’t towers at all, but instead carved out of the earthen hills. If there had been other, more elaborate tombs, they were long gone or buried beneath a thousand years of sandstorms.
They dismounted from the camels and left them tied to a nearby crop of pillars that had fallen onto themselves.
“You think it’s safe to go inside?” Etta asked, eyeing the first one. The comparison to fingers hadn’t been a bad one—some of the towers were short, only a story high, and wide, the way you’d expect a thumb to be. Others stretched up several dozen feet higher, casting long shadows onto the loose sand and dirt. One looked as though there might have been a balcony of some kind attached to it. Small slits had been left in their imposing sides, likely to allow air and light inside of them.