It’s Win. I swallow the cry of relief that rises in my throat.
“Stay where you are,” he continues. “I’ll go.”
He’s talking in English. Just to be sure I’ll recognize his voice, or because he wants me to understand what he’s saying? Did he mean that last instruction for me? Stay where I am. He’ll go . . . to me? Considering he’s the one with the time cloth, that sounds like a reasonable plan.
As long as the pale woman doesn’t get to me first. “We will apprehend you,” she says, switching languages automatically at Win’s lead. Her accent is thicker, breaking the words into sharp fragments. “It will be as easy, or difficult, as you decide. I would prefer to bring you both back alive, but we only need one.”
She sounds nearer than before. I adjust my weight over my knees, so I can propel myself forward if I need to run. Glancing over at the boy, I raise a finger to my lips, hoping he’ll understand the gesture. But he isn’t even looking at me. His face is rigid with fear.
“I’d prefer none,” Win retorts. He sounds almost as if he’s above us. I stare in the direction his voice seemed to come from, and glimpse a flicker of golden-brown skin amid the tangle of vinestrung saplings on the ledge over the cave.
“If you truly meant to protect this planet, you would let us remove you,” the woman says, her steps crunching closer. “You are playing with history here as much as anyone else.”
Leaves ripple over the cave entrance. Win’s almost at the edge of the ridge above the boy’s head. But he’s still too far away, and the woman sounds as though she’s just steps from reaching me. I ease forward, readying myself to dash to meet him, and the boy’s gaze darts up.
He must see Win creeping toward him. A yelp bursts from his mouth. He bolts, out of the brush, toward the shelter of the cave. Straight into the pale woman’s line of sight.
My arm flies out, as if there’s any chance of me stopping him. He’s past me, bare feet skittering on the rock-strewn ground. I leap up just as that awful twang splits the air. A stream of energy slams into the boy’s legs, and he topples onto his hands and knees.
“It’s a local,” a man is saying, on the other side of the clearing. “He saw us.” The pale woman, standing just a few feet from the cave, is already flicking a switch on her weapon.
“I know,” she snaps, and pulls the trigger before my protest reaches my lips.
This shot doesn’t just twang, it shrieks. The blast rams into the boy’s head, sending a shudder through his body as he slumps to the ground. The side of his face is blackened, his left eye nothing more than a cinder, his skin crackled like overheated plastic. He doesn’t so much as twitch again.
I register that in the second it takes the pale woman to whirl toward me. Win leaps from the underbrush at the base of the cliff, racing across the last few feet between us.
“No!” I try to say as he flings the time cloth around us, but my throat is so hoarse I can barely hear myself. Our surroundings spin away in a blur of color and the wailing of the wind.
19.
The cloth lurches around me. The image of the boy’s charred body shudders with it, imprinted on the back of my eyelids. Shudders, then slumps. Shudders, then slumps. Alive, and then, in an instant, completely extinguished.
Burnt to a crisp. Bile rises in my throat. She didn’t even think about it. He was a local. He saw their tech. She killed him.
She wouldn’t have been there at all if it weren’t for Win and me. He was only there because he followed us. Where was he supposed to be, that day, before we came?
“Skylar,” Win is saying. The air outside the cloth has stopped screaming. “Skylar, we’re okay now. We made it.”
“He’s dead,” I say, trembling. “He’s dead because of us.” “What?” Win says. “The kid? That’s what the Enforcers do. That one woman, Kurra, I’ve heard stories about her. Apparently she has an even more brutal streak than the others.”
You are playing with history here as much as anyone else, she said.
I train my gaze on the blurred landscape beyond the cloth, trying to escape the thoughts rushing through my head. But it’s true. True with a wrongness that peals right through me. He wasn’t just a kid. He was part of history. Not just on that day, but the next—and the next week, and the next year, and on and on.
“One Earthling’s life, it doesn’t mean anything to them,” Win’s saying. “Even one Kemyate life doesn’t matter that much. Which is why we have to—”
“But it’s not just him,” I interrupt. “He wouldn’t have died before, because we wouldn’t have been there for him to follow—he would have grown up and had his own kids and those kids would have had kids and . . . A thousand years. A thousand years of generations and all those people are gone. They’re gone because of us.”
Hundreds of faces, lives, vanished into oblivion with one shriek of Kurra’s blaster. Snuffed out down the long chain of history as easily as hitting a Delete key. I sink down on the floor of the time-cloth tent.
“Skylar, you don’t know that,” Win says, but he sounds less certain now. “He could have died that afternoon, in the battle, or tomorrow, or the day after, some other way. It could be hardly any difference at all.”
“Or maybe it’s a huge difference,” I say. “Maybe—maybe he, or one of his descendants, grew up to be some brilliant leader, or scientist, or—” The possible immensity of it overwhelms me. All it takes is the loss of one person somewhere along one influential family tree, and it’s not just hundreds but billions of lives rewritten. The siren call of wrong, wrong, wrong blares in my ears. I cover my face, but I can’t shut it out. I can’t shut it out because it’s coming from inside me.
“It’s not your fault,” Win says, standing over me. “There wasn’t anything you could do. Kurra killed him, not us. And we have to move, Skylar. If they’re tracing us, we have to get away from this spot before they decode the signal.”
I shake my head and it just spins more. The words keep falling out. “I should have known. I should have noticed he was still following us, made him leave. I should have seen . . .”
Win sucks in a breath with what sounds like a growl. A flick of his hand brings up the glowing data panel.
I stare at my knees, Jeanant’s plastic slab pressed against my abdomen, as the world outside blurs and returns. Blurs and returns. Day, night, buildings, countryside. Each lurch makes my gut clench tighter. It doesn’t matter how many jumps we make, how far we go across space and time. The boy will still be lying there dead in the mouth of a cave near the Bach Dang River, sometime in 938 AD. I don’t know if a single one of the worlds outside looks like the one that was mine. I don’t know if I can ever go back to the exact time and place I called home. It could be completely different now.
The idea crawls under my skin and squeezes around my lungs, and I can’t sit still any longer. Win’s reaching for the display once more as I rock onto my feet.
“Stop,” I say. “That’s enough. Just stop.”
I don’t wait to see if he listens. I shove Jeanant’s slab toward him and stagger between the flaps.
I burst out onto an expanse of rolling hills, knee-deep in grass. The thick blades hiss as I stumble through them. Splotches of clouds dot the sky, one, two, three, four—my heart is pounding so hard my arms are shaking—the line of a wooden fence breaks the sea of grass on the hill beyond this one. Dark evergreen forest sprawling in the distance. An acid burn in the back of my throat. Three red-roofed buildings in a row along the knoll to my left. Five horses grazing in the pasture beside them. One black, two chestnut, two dappled gray. I still can’t breathe.
My bracelet is in my hand. I don’t remember taking it out. I don’t even remember starting the cycle of threes, but my thumb is already on the fourth bead, my lips moving along with the predictable methodical story of the numbers: 3 times 243 is 729. 3 times 729 is 2,187. It’s not enough to quiet the noise in my head. My fingers twist the beads harder. And then there’s a snap, a loosening, and th
e warm glass slips from my grip.
I snatch at it too late. One of the hemp strings broke. I broke it. I stop and spin around, ready to paw at the grass, and almost bump heads with Win. He’s crouching down amid the blades. I didn’t realize he was behind me.
“Here,” he says, holding up his hand. He’s plucked up the lost bead, white splotched with turquoise. I take it and look at the bracelet. I can’t tie the bead back on, not in any way that’ll hold. It’ll have to wait until I get home and can weave a whole new bracelet. If I ever get home—if that home bears any resemblance to the one I left—
Win straightens up and touches my shoulder. The gentle contact interrupts my thoughts on the verge of their panicked downward spiral.
I told him not to touch me. But he isn’t pushing or tugging or maneuvering me this time. He’s just there, his palm sending a little extra warmth through the fabric of Jeanant’s cloak.
“I think all those jumps one right after another will confuse the signals a bit,” he says. “And I was picking isolated spots so it’s unlikely we’ll shift anything noticeable. But if they’ve found a way to break Isis’s scramble, Kurra and the other Enforcers could still follow us here. We should get out of sight. There was a building that looked empty on the other side of the hill. Can you make it there?”
The killing blast from Kurra’s gun shrieks through my memory again, and my hand clenches around the bracelet. This wide-open landscape is only making me feel more lost. Walls, solid and secure—that sounds good.
“Okay,” I say.
We climb back the way we came. “There,” Win says, pointing, when we’ve reached the crest of the hill. Near the neatly spaced trees of an orchard stands a rough wooden shack, its door hanging loose on its hinges. I nod, and we scramble down toward it.
The shack has clearly been abandoned by whomever it belonged to. Streaks of dirt crust the one small window, and the door’s hinges are coated with rust. One corner of the roof has collapsed, giving us a splintery view of the dimming sky outside. But the walls are sturdy enough to hide us from view.
Win sits down on a span of mossy wood that looks like it might once have held a mattress, positioning himself so he can see the hill we arrived on through the murky window. The hill where the Enforcers will arrive if they track us here. I drop onto the floor. The boards are damp and smell like rot, but the discomfort helps hold me in place. In this now. Away from fractured images of death and destroyed ancestries and—
“It isn’t your fault,” Win says, his gaze flicking from me to the window and back again. “I didn’t know that kid was following us either, and I was the one outside the cave. I was the one who startled him and made him run.”
“I saw him hiding there. If I’d said something, gotten him to leave quietly before they noticed him . . .”
“What could you have said? He wouldn’t have understood you!”
He’s right. I know that. But the guilt is clamped tightly around my chest. “I could have found a way. If I’d been paying enough attention, seen everything I needed to—”
“Skylar—”
“You can’t tell me I couldn’t have done anything!” I burst out. “I was there. And I didn’t stop it. Just like—”
A surge of emotion, tangled regret and grief and anger, rushes up inside me. My voice falters. Just like with Noam. That was what I was going to say. But this has nothing to do with Noam.
Except somehow it does. Somehow that much older anguish has swallowed up everything else I was feeling, as if it was the same all along.
“Just like?” Win prompts.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. “It was a totally different situation. I just—My brother, Noam. He ran away when I was five. I was sitting there watching TV and he walked away with his knapsack and all the money he had saved in the bank, and I had no idea he wasn’t just going to the convenience store. It doesn’t matter.”
Win pauses. His gaze darts to the window and back, reminding me that we’re not really safe here. But he doesn’t move. “Maybe it does,” he says carefully. “If it’s like what happened to that kid, if that’s why you’re so upset, I think it matters.”
“I’m upset because someone died,” I snap before I can catch myself.
“I know,” he says. “But it seems like there’s more than that.”
“I guess.” I rub my forehead. “Do we really have time to get into this?”
“Do you really think you can handle going back out there right now?” Win asks, gesturing toward the doorway.
I look at the slice of pasture beyond the slanted door. A shiver runs through me. There’s so much that could be wrong that I can’t even see yet—
I grip the bracelet. “No,” I manage. “Okay. Noam.” I refocus my thoughts on that time, the afternoon when he ran off, the evening of worry, the growing realization over the next few weeks that he was never coming home. “When he left, I knew I should have noticed that something was wrong. If I had, maybe I could have said something that would have changed his mind. Maybe he thought I didn’t even care that he was leaving.”
“Or maybe it didn’t make a difference,” Win says. “He’d already made up his mind. I think it is like the kid in the cave. There probably wasn’t anything you could have done.”
“I had enough chances to notice,” I say. My throat is raw. I’ve never said this much about Noam to anyone, hardly even let myself think it; but now that I’ve started, it feels like I’ll choke if I don’t get it out. “I talked to him when he was walking me to our grandparents’ house after school, and I saw him answer his phone when I was getting my snack. But when he was heading out, when he told me he’d grab me something at the store and then said good-bye, I didn’t even look at him. All I cared about was a stupid TV show. Three chances, and I didn’t take the last one. I lost it, and he never came back.”
“Third time’s a charm,” Win says.
“What?” I glance up at him.
“You’ve said that before,” he says. “And three—that’s your special number. That’s the one you multiply with, when you’re upset. Right?”
Oh. “I never really thought about that. It was . . . Noam’s the one who always said that. I got it from him.”
I never thought about it because I’d been trying so hard to get past my guilt over Noam, but hearing Win put it together, it’s obvious. Three times. Three chances. A connection I never made, because I wasn’t multiplying back then. Was I even getting the wrong feelings, before Noam left? I frown, reaching back toward my first memory of wrongness. My second day of school in the first grade, less than six months later. Something about a tree in the corner of the playground. I cried through recess and couldn’t tell the teacher why.
Win said I notice the shifts because I’m more sensitive than most people. But I wasn’t always. I started noticing.
A moment flashes back to me: my five-year-old self standing in Noam’s bedroom, hands balled into fists, swearing to myself that I’ll pay more attention from now on, to everything. With the warped childish hope that it would magically compensate for whatever mistake I’d made and bring Noam back. If I could just catch every detail the way I should have that day, from then on, forever and ever . . .
“It all goes back to him,” I say, breathless. “I thought if I just paid more attention to everything around me, I could stop something that awful from happening again. And after that, the feelings started.”
And got worse. Every jab of wrongness made me more desperate to be aware, to see what was wrong, which just made me more sensitive to the shifts. I created my own dysfunction.
“If you think about it, it’s a good thing,” Win points out. “If you didn’t notice the shifts, you wouldn’t have been able to help us.”
“I know,” I say. “But it’s not good in a lot of ways too. A normal person would have been sad about that boy dying, and angry at that woman for killing him, without having a panic attack of guilt over it, right? How much danger did I put us in just
now?”
And it isn’t going to stop. Every time we’ve jumped to a new era, it’s almost overwhelmed me. I lost the alarm band, our protection from the Enforcers, because of it. And after what we just saw, just the thought of Traveling anywhere else gives me a jolt of terror.
“We got out,” Win says. “We’re okay.” He checks the window. “Still okay.”
“What if it happens again?” I say. “You know it was at least partly because of us that boy died. We can’t let anyone else get hurt.”
“We’re doing the best we can,” Win says. “We’re trying to stop something horribly huge. We might not be able to avoid changing a few small things along the way, but we’re changing things for the better too.”
A life that might have led to a vast chain of other lives doesn’t feel so small to me. “We couldn’t go back, make sure he didn’t follow us . . . ?”
“The more we interfere with the locals, the more shifts we’ll end up making,” Win says. “We’d just be increasing the consequences.”
Of course. I had my chance and now it’s gone. Just like with Noam.
At least with the boy, I know exactly what happened, where things went wrong. With Noam, it’s the uncertainty that’s hardest to take. No one thought he was the type to run away. The police never managed to track him down. It was like he vanished into thin air.
My heart stops. Wait. That’s possible, isn’t it? I disappeared into thin air just hours ago, in Win’s time cloth. Why couldn’t Noam have disappeared the exact same way?
It fits so seamlessly I’m struck dumb. Maybe it really is my fault Noam left—maybe I’m the one who took him. I don’t know why I would have, but what other time traveler would think Noam was important enough to steal him away? Maybe it’ll be clear when I get there. But this is the only thing that’s made sense in twelve years of wondering. A perfect circle, beginning with Noam’s disappearance and leading me back to him again as the means of bringing him home.