Earth & Sky

  I suck in a breath, too choked up to speak. It’s all okay. I’m here. I traveled around the world and back and forth through centuries of history, and my life is just where I left it.

  Maybe humans were never supposed to live on this planet. Maybe we all belong back with Win’s people on his cramped space station. But I can’t imagine any place other than this being home. It’s ours now.

  Standing there, the last two days feel like a dream. It hasn’t really been days at all—maybe half an hour since I first vanished from my room upstairs. But it’s been a very long and exhausting dream. The numbness from the Enforcer’s blast to my shoulder has faded, and Win retrieved a bandage from the office that’s wrapped around my ankle, sapping most of the pain away with its cool touch, so all I feel is tired. The longing rises up inside me to wobble to my bedroom, crash onto my bed, and sleep for about a week.

  Win coughs softly where he’s standing just inside the door, which reminds me that I can’t walk away quite yet. I turn to him, and the side of his mouth curls up in a half smile. He’s still so vividly present and real against the muted lines of the hallway. But this world won’t fade anymore, now. Together we’ve made sure the experiments, the shifts and rewrites, will come to an end.

  I want to say something like that, something profound, but what actually comes out of my mouth is, “So, Darwin?”

  A ghost of a blush colors his cheeks. “I didn’t name myself,” he says. “Blame my parents. And I’d really prefer if you stuck with Win.”

  There’s a lot I want to ask about naming your kids after historical figures from a completely different planet, but it’s obviously a sore spot. And I guess it shouldn’t matter to me. Very soon I’m never going to see him again to call him by any name, and he’ll feel like a dream too.

  An ache wells up inside me. I didn’t realize until this moment how hard it was going to be to watch him leave. How do you say good-bye forever to someone who’s been there beside you through the most horrible and amazing things you’ll ever experience; whose life you’ve saved, and who’s saved your life; who’s seen you fall apart and stayed to help you put yourself back together? He’s been my constant companion for the last two days—and eleven centuries. I don’t know if I can call him a friend and yet at the same time friend doesn’t seem to cover half of it.

  “Thank you,” I say. “You kept your promise. Here I am, safely home.”

  “Thanks just as much to you,” he says. “I’ll do everything I can to make sure you stay safe. We’ll be back to take down the time field as soon as we possibly can.”

  “Do you think . . .” I start to ask, and then I remember there’s no way it’ll be that soon. Not this month, not this year. As soon as they possibly can is sometime at least seventeen years from now.

  “In the future, in your present time, it hasn’t gotten that much worse here, has it?” I blurt out instead.

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” he says. “Earth will still be fine. And because of you, there won’t be any more harm done to it.”

  I nod, trying to let his words sooth my nerves. “And then the planet can start to recover.”

  “Recover?” he says.

  “Start . . . binding itself back together again,” I say, motioning vaguely.

  He hesitates. “Oh. Skylar, I didn’t mean to make you think—The damage that’s been done, it isn’t something that can heal.”

  I stare at him. Noticing again the faded quality of the hall behind him, a mark of that damage, sends a chill over my skin. “It isn’t?”

  I should have guessed. A recording of a recording of a recording. You can’t bring back the detail once it’s lost. Maybe I just didn’t want to let myself think it.

  “The planet will still be completely sustainable,” Win says quickly. “And some of the environmental issues, they should settle down in time as everything . . . adjusts. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s not your fault. It’s the opposite of your fault.” I set my hand against the wall. No matter how it looks, it still feels perfectly solid. Perfectly real. “I guess it doesn’t really make a difference anyway. This is normal to us now. What really matters is that we’ll be free, that it won’t get any worse.”

  I repeat the words to myself, willing them to sink in. Earthlings are a resilient bunch—I’ve seen plenty evidence of that. We’ll survive. We always do.

  “I’d say I’ll come see you again, when we make it back, but I don’t think there’s going to be time for side trips,” he says.

  And, seventeen years in the future, in Win’s present, he’ll still be the eighteen or nineteen he looks now and I’ll be . . . thirty-four. The ache in my chest expands. I clamp down on it, my hands balling. I shouldn’t be keeping him, even now. He has to get back—Thlo told him to be quick. But I haven’t said what I need to. I don’t know the words to express it all.

  Forget about words, then.

  I step forward, reaching for him, and he meets me halfway, wrapping his arms around me. My head tips against his shoulder as I hug him. He squeezes me back, one hand brushing over my hair. He smells like the places we’ve been to together: like newspaper ink and green jungle, snowy marsh and summer trees.

  “Skylar,” he says, his voice rough. I ease back. He holds my gaze, his eyes bright in the dim light in the hall, but whatever he was going to say, he can’t seem to find the words either.

  “You stay safe too, okay?” I say.

  His smile returns. “I’ll work on that. And . . . thank you again. For everything. I’m glad I got to know you.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and anything I might have added sticks in the back of my throat.

  That smile is the last thing I see as he pulls the folds of the time cloth around him and wavers out of sight. I stand, watching, until I’m sure he’s no longer there.

  “Good-bye,” I murmur to the empty hall. I didn’t even think to say that.

  I’m back to my life, my real life. A restless urge to make sure everything in the house is as it should be pierces the momentary melancholy. I turn and head down the hall.

  Everything isn’t as it should be—not quite. There’s a framed photograph of a Spanish-looking city in the dining room that sparks a tiny vibration of wrong, and when I blink I see the kitchen cabinets in robin’s egg blue instead of mint green. An afterimage hovers over the soap dish in the upstairs bathroom, of all things, of something . . . rounder? The whisper of wrongness passes as quickly as the image fades.

  I creep into my bedroom last, and rotate on my feet, braced for another twinge. My gaze catches on the photograph from my junior-year camping trip. I move toward the desk, studying it. Me, Lisa, and Evan, with Angela out of sight behind the camera.

  The space around us looks too empty. Is someone missing? But it’s always been the four of us—

  Bree. The name slithers through my head, and my stomach clenches. A grinning face as we jog through the park. Rich laughter as we joke over bowls of tofu curry. Dark ringlets shaking as we safety pin a dress mishap while the thrum of school dance music carries through the restroom door.

  The flashes of memory dart away before I can grasp them, leaving only pale ripples in my mind.

  She’s gone. Something I shifted, or something the Enforcers did, in the chaos we made of Ohio—it took her away. The loss stabs through me, even though I hardly remember who she was.

  She meant something. I liked her. She’s gone.

  I tear my eyes away from the photo, sinking down onto the edge of the bed. What have I done? Maybe it was just a tweak to her life, some minor change that meant she ended up at a different school, or in a whole different city.

  Or maybe I’ve erased her completely.

  What could I have done differently? I don’t know.

  The echoing wrong, wrong, wrong reverberates through me. I drag in a breath, and make myself think of digging up the box by the log, slamming into Kurra, watching Win place every item I helped find into Thlo’s hands. I fou
ght for that girl. I stood up to the people who are truly responsible for every shift, every wrongness. I won.

  Mostly.

  The feeling of loss fades, along with the wisps of memory. Who am I mourning? It seems suddenly distant.

  I tip over, setting my head on the pillow. Exhaustion washes over me again, and this time I don’t fight it. Sleep is one place no wrongness can reach.

  • • •

  For a few minutes, when I wake up in the thin early morning sunlight, it feels like a perfectly normal day. I’ll get up, head to cross-country practice, sit through my classes. Coach will bark at anyone who ran over their previous time, the teachers will review the homework and assign more, the halls will be full of the usual raucous chatter. Beautifully, amazingly normal.

  Then I go downstairs to grab breakfast.

  “Busy day yesterday?” Mom says as I come into the kitchen. She yawns, holding the kettle under the tap.

  I freeze. “What?”

  “Whatever you got up to, you must have really tired yourself out,” she goes on in her usual breezy voice. “I called your name a couple times when dinner was ready and you didn’t even twitch. I thought if you were that far out, you probably needed the sleep.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Yeah.” Dinner. All that jumping—morning to evening to afternoon—I’d lost any sense of schedule.

  But I can’t exactly say that. “I, ah, I guess I didn’t get enough sleep the night before. I stayed up kind of late getting an essay done. And we ran a hard practice yesterday morning.”

  Mom nods as if this all makes perfect sense, which I guess it does. Except it’s not true. These are the first words I’ve spoken to Mom in what feels like days and I’m spouting lies.

  The wonderful sense of normal starts to recede with a knot in my gut.

  My stomach seems completely aware that it missed dinner. It grumbles as soon as I open the bag of bread, with a pang of hunger that shoots right through me. I have to grip the counter for a second, afraid I’m going to puke. Not that there’s anything in there right now to throw up.

  Two days of Traveling, give or take, and all I’ve eaten was a bag of trail mix and a few bites of pecan pie.

  I manage to gather myself before Mom notices, and pop two slices of bread in the toaster. When she ducks out, I make myself two sandwiches as I wait for the toast—one for lunch and one for right after practice. I feel like I could eat five breakfasts, but if I fill up too much before the run, I really will puke.

  I’m gulping down bites of toast slathered in peanut butter when Mom comes back in, holding a spiral-bound book. When she flips it open, I realize it’s one of Noam’s sketchpads. I stop chewing.

  “I started thinking, after we talked the other night,” she says, her eyes on the book. “Maybe we’ve gone too far, boxing all Noam’s things away as if we’re pretending he was never here. It might be nice to have a couple of his pictures framed, put up in the house. What do you think of this one?” She presents a colored pencil drawing of a vine creeping down a latticework fence, one bright red bloom in the midst of the pointed leaves. It’s one of his more polished pieces, only sketchy around the edges, the shades of green bringing out the textures and shadows so the vine seems to emerge from the page.

  I swallow the sticky lump in my mouth. “It’s great,” I say, and it is. But I have to tuck my hands under the table and press my fingernails into my palms to hold back the tears that want to spring into my eyes. Imagine what he could have done, if Darryl hadn’t—If those boys from school hadn’t—

  Mom keeps flipping through the sketchpad, oblivious. And I remember nothing’s changed for her. Noam is still as distant to her, a memory from twelve years ago, as he was to me when we talked on Tuesday.

  She doesn’t know. In her mind, he could still be wandering the world out there, alone, or with new friends . . .

  “Skylar?” Mom says, and I realize she’s looking at me now. “If it bothers you, honey, we don’t have to do it.”

  “No,” I say quickly. “Of course, it’s fine. It’s a good idea.”

  She smiles and wanders back into the hall, maybe trying to decide where to hang the pictures. The rest of my toast catches in my throat going down.

  They need to know. She and Dad—it isn’t right for them to have nothing but that uncertainty—it isn’t right that Noam’s life trailed off without any acknowledgment. It isn’t right that Darryl and the other boys never had to own up to what they did.

  I have to figure out a way for my parents to find out. I mull it over as I clean up my dishes. Noam’s yearbooks are in that box upstairs. I could find Darryl’s full name—and maybe Babyface’s and his tall friend’s too, if their photos look enough like they did in person. That would be a start.

  I think maybe I can work out a plan while I run. The rhythm usually helps me sort out my thoughts. But a half hour later, as I’m pounding along the paths in the park, a different sort of uneasiness drifts over me. There’s a hollowness in the team, in the space around me, even though Marie’s running with me like she often does. A sense of something missing, so hazy it slides away from me whenever I try to latch onto it, only to slink back the moment I let it go.

  Is there a shift, something about the park, about us? I can’t pick out any specific vibe of wrongness. It’s just not exactly right.

  I manage to tune it out during calculus and Spanish. But when I walk into the cafeteria and Angela waves to me from where she’s sitting with Lisa and Evan, it rises over me again. The table is too empty.

  Of course it’s not. I sit down and the four of us fill the space, just like always. Still, the apprehension won’t stop niggling at me. I glance over my shoulder a few times, half expecting to see someone standing there, waiting for us to notice. It’s just the usual cafeteria crowd.

  “So, I think it’s time we start making winter holiday plans,” Lisa declares, and Angela grins.

  “You can never wait long, can you?”

  “Didn’t we—” I start, and hesitate. I was going to say, Didn’t we talk about that yesterday? But we didn’t, did we?

  I try to think back to our conversation in the pie shop, but the memory is slippery. I asked Lisa about the battle, I remember that. And . . . the rest is a haze. I picture the four of us, sitting around the table: Lisa by the window, Evan on one side, and Jasmin, who’s been hanging out with us sometimes since we all had English together last year . . .

  A whisper shivers through me. Wrong. The image blurs. I blink, but I can’t seem to focus on anything in that moment.

  Around me, the conversation has veered off in another direction.

  “You’re all coming to the dance, right?” Angela says.

  “Of course,” I say automatically, and Evan mock grumbles, “I don’t think I was given a choice,” and Angela and I giggle as Lisa punches his shoulder. The whisper slips away, but the vague uneasiness remains.

  “You’ve got to ask someone to dance,” I tell Angela, trying to bury it. “Time for a new crush.”

  Her cheeks flush and her gaze darts toward Teyo, a few tables over . . . with the sophomore girlfriend he hooked up with last month. A chill tickles over my skin.

  “We’ll see,” Angela says, turning back to us.

  “If you don’t pick someone, I’m going to do it for you,” Lisa announces. Angela squeals in protest. And I just breathe.

  Everything’s okay. Win and Thlo and the others are speeding back to Kemya to assemble Jeanant’s weapon, and everything here is perfectly, perfectly fine. Nothing’s felt really wrong, after all. I’m just being paranoid, psyching myself out.

  My pulse keeps thrumming in my head. My fingers itch for my lost bracelet. But it wasn’t helping that much anyway, in the end. I think of bringing the weapon parts to Thlo, a beam exploding the generator over our heads . . .

  Not for seventeen more years.

  I can’t quite shake it off. My nerves are still buzzing when we get up to head to our next classes. “See you,” Angela s
ays, turning down the hall toward her geography room, and the uneasiness bursts into a sudden panic.

  “Ang—” I blurt out.

  She pauses, looking back. “Yeah?” she says. That oh so normal worry line crinkles up in the middle of her forehead. It should bother me that I’m worrying her, but somehow I’m relieved to see it.

  Be careful, I think. Stay safe. Don’t disappear.

  It’s not as though she could help it, though, could she? Who knows what shifts the Kemyate scientists above us will make in the next seventeen years? In the weeks or months or years it takes after that for Win’s group to find the right moment to take down the time field generator? All our lives are going to be rewritten hundreds, maybe thousands more times . . .

  I open my mouth, those fears prickling through me. All I can force out is, “The dance. It’s going to be great.”

  She smiles. “Thanks,” she says.

  I hurry off to physics. A sweat’s broken over my skin. I concentrate on the rows of lockers, the numbers on the doors, my desk there in the middle of the classroom. An aimless drone of apprehension hums in my ears. I grit my teeth as the teacher starts to write on the board, and close my eyes. Three times three is nine. Three times nine is twenty-seven. I picture the numbers in their steady spiral, winding around me like armor.

  No matter what the Travelers and the scientists playing with our planet do, they can’t shift that. They can’t stop three times three from equaling nine—

  Or can they?

  It’s an absurd idea, but the moment my mind’s latched onto it, I can’t shake it. I make myself open my binder and copy Ms. Cavoy’s notes, but it’s still there, in the back of my head.

  I don’t know. I did so much, I fought so hard to protect everyone I care about, and I still don’t know whether a single one of us is really safe.

  I’m never going to know. Seventeen years from now, I can start wondering if it’s happened yet, if the fishbowl around us has been shattered and the watching figures in their satellite have finally gone home, but there’ll be nothing to tell me for sure. I can’t help; I can’t hurry it along; I can’t do anything but wait, like one more clueless goldfish.