Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) (27 page)

When the time cloth lands in the place Win says was arranged for the rebels to meet up—“Isis has it set so only people with the right code can Travel in,” he assures me. “That’ll slow the Enforcers down”—I’m expecting something like the inside of the safe house. Instead, the room is oddly normal looking by Earth standards. It has the feel of a posh modern office space: about the size of the first floor of my house, with a cluster of boxy sofas and armchairs at one end and a long table surrounded by matching ebony chairs at the other. The pale hardwood we step out onto is slick with polish. The only windows are angled skylights built into the high ceiling, casting splotches of sunlight across the floor.

I sink onto the arm of one of the sofas, resting my ankle, as Win folds his cloth. Nervous anticipation tickles under my skin. The numbness has faded enough that I can feel my chest rising and falling again, the tiny hitch in the back of my throat. Even after everything I’ve seen, I don’t feel quite ready for this.

“You’d better leave the Traveler shirt here,” Win says. “Can’t bring any of our tech back with you.”

“How many people will be showing up?” I ask as I pull it off over my T-shirt. I drop it onto the sofa.

“Five,” Win says. “Assuming everyone’s all right. Thlo, Jule, Isis, Pavel, and Mako.”

He edges closer to me at the swish of fabric behind us. As we turn, two figures emerge from a time cloth that’s shimmered into sight in the middle of the room.

One of them is Jule. He glowers at Win for a moment before sprawling across one of the chairs. “Well, this should be interesting. I hope you’ve got a good story worked out,
Dar
win.”

Win’s back has gone rigid, but he ignores the other boy. He tips his head to the curvaceous woman who stepped out beside Jule. “Hey, Ice.”

Her smile cracks a dimple in her dusky cheek as she tugs a bonnet off her crimson-streaked hair, which is coiled into a frizzy bun. Part of blending in, I guess . . . Were they still searching France?

“Win,” she replies, returning his nod. Her hazel eyes flick over me and seem to judge me as no threat. I wonder how much of the story Jule told her.

With a rustle, the flaps of two more time cloths split open nearby, one right after the other. A lanky woman with caramel hair and skin, who looks to be in her late thirties, and a similarly aged, slightly pudgy man with a grim expression emerge from the first. Mako and Pavel, I presume. Because the woman who strides out from the cloth beside them can’t be anyone but Thlo.

Despite her short stature, every part of her, from the briskness of her steps to the firmness of her square jaw, emanates strength. Like all the Kemyates I’ve met, she doesn’t neatly match any Earth ethnicity: at one angle her face looks Chinese, at another South American. Her smooth black hair is slicked away from her face in short waves flecked with gray. Only that and a few fine lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth give away that she’s much older than her companions. Her eyes themselves, a brown so deep they’re almost black, settle on me immediately.

“This is Skylar,” Win says before anyone else can speak. He steps between them and me as he covers a cough. In that moment, under the weight of those five stares, I’m inexpressibly grateful for his attempt at protection. “I don’t know what Jule said, but she—”

“Win,” Thlo interrupts. She doesn’t even look at him; her gaze is still fixed on me. Her tone is so measured in its gentleness it makes me shiver. “She can’t be here. She isn’t part of this conversation. Isis, Pavel.” She adds a command in Kemyate.

The woman Win called “Ice” and the older man move toward me. I draw back against the sofa. Win throws out his arm to block them. “No,” he says. “She deserves to be here. We wouldn’t have any of the weapon if it weren’t for her. We wouldn’t know what Jeanant wanted. She’s
talked
to him.”

Those last four words are the ones that break Thlo’s careful composure. A flicker of surprise darts across her face, and is gone.

Win didn’t mention that part to Jule.

“Wait,” she says, just as calmly as before. Pavel and Isis halt in their tracks.

“It’s true,” I force out before she can change her mind. “I’ve talked to Jeanant. And there was something he wanted me to tell you.” It seems like a cheap way in, but I’m having trouble focusing under Thlo’s gaze, so frankly assessing I want to crawl away inside my skin.

Win has yanked open his satchel. He takes out the smaller tech plate embedded in its rectangle of plastic and offers it to Thlo.

“It was in the Louvre, hidden in a painting, during the July Revolution,” he says.

Thlo studies it, and hands it to Isis. “Guidance system,” Isis reports, her eyes widening as she takes it in.

“What else?” Thlo says.

He hands her the second tech plate, which Isis identifies as a processor. And then the box. Thlo opens it carefully, a few last bits of forest dirt sprinkling on the floor. She draws out a makeshift book of bound pages with a shiny texture, the surface of the ones I can see etched with figures and mechanical diagrams.

“The schematics,” Isis murmurs, her eyebrows lifting even higher. Her hands tremble as she flips through it. She makes a breathless explanation in her own language.

“The fourth—we weren’t able to retrieve,” Win says. “The Enforcers caught Jeanant before he could place it.”

“I saw it,” I put in. “If it helps, to figure out what you’re missing.”

But Thlo seems to have paused over Win’s last sentence. “They— I think you’d better start from the beginning.”

So Win describes how he discovered my abilities—glossing over the way his impatience caught the Enforcers’ notice—and our Travels together, up to our final escape from Kurra. Jule snorts once, at the mention of the trip to the Coliseum, but after that it seems to take all his concentration just to avoid looking impressed. No one else makes a sound.

In the face of their awe, Win’s posture straightens, his voice becoming more and more confident, even though he has to stop a couple of times to sneeze. He leaves spaces for me to fill in the parts of the story only I know, which I do as succinctly as possible. I stumble a little when it comes to the final bit, summarizing my argument with Jeanant. And then his death.

“He didn’t want to take any chance the Enforcers would be able to interrogate him,” I explain haltingly. “Protecting all of you—he told me that was the most important thing. It must have been more important to him than losing that last part.”

“What was it, the one they took?” Isis asks.

“It was a sort of tube, about this big.” I gesture.

Isis glances to Thlo, pointing to something in the book of blueprints. “I bet that was the beam’s fuel. He wouldn’t have needed much, but he was using . . .” She says a word I don’t understand. “It’ll be difficult, but we can probably find a way to get more.”

Thlo nods, still silent. She takes each of the weapon parts again in turn, reading the messages etched on their casings. At the third, her eyes soften.

“ ‘We all started in one place,’ ” she murmurs. “ ‘Some stayed, and some struck out for new ground. Those who follow after always want to take what those before them have built.’ ”

“ ‘Visit the crocodile’s day by the spiderweb’?” Mako reads from beside her, when Thlo halts.

“Algeria, 2157 BC by the Earth calendar,” Thlo elaborates. “It’s the first place we Traveled to as colleagues.”

We all started in one place.
I can hear Jeanant’s voice in the words. He wasn’t just talking about the last location—he was talking about Kemya and Earth.

Thlo sets the box aside. She steps closer to me, taking my chin in her hand. I have to resist the urge to flinch away. For several seconds, she just holds my gaze, as if she can read my intentions there. I can’t help blinking, but I manage not to look away.

“I won’t tell anyone about Kemya, or what you’ve been doing here,” I say when she drops her hand. “I know that would be just as dangerous for me as anyone else. All I care about is knowing the shifts will stop.”

She doesn’t comment on that. The corners of her mouth tighten, and she says, “Jeanant had another message for me?”

There’s something hopeful in the question. Jeanant was her mentor. From the way he talked about her, the messages he wrote, they were close friends too, if not more. And then he disappeared from her life seventeen years ago, without even telling her where he was going. All I have for her is some vague impersonal advice that’s still about his mission. Suddenly I feel twice as awkward.

“Yes,” I say. “He said—he wanted me to tell you—to be careful, when you rebuild the weapon. To make sure you have the right moment before you try to destroy the generator. He thought . . . he moved too quickly, and that was why the Enforcers caught on.”

She seems to be waiting after my voice falters. “I’m sorry,” I add. “That was everything.”

Her face hardens. For a second, I think she’s going to hit me. Then she says, “Ah,” with a soft release of breath, and the moment passes.

“He was the best of us,” she says. “You’re lucky to have met him.” And I can hear it in her voice, as plainly as if she’s said it out loud: she loved him. All at once, I’m ashamed of how scared of her I’ve been.

I knew him for less than an hour, when you add it up. She was with him for years. My regrets are nothing compared to her grief.

“I know,” I say.

She turns her head away as if she’s tired of looking at me.

“Thank you,” she says, “for assisting Win and passing on Jeanant’s last message. We won’t keep you from your life any longer.” Then, to the others: “We should head out before the Enforcers have time to break this code as well. Isis, you’ll contact Britta?”

Isis hurries to a corner of the room, pulling a small device out of her sleeve. Win clears his throat. “If it’s all right, I’d like to be the one who takes Skylar home. I’ll just need to use one of the other cloths.”

“Yes,” Thlo says, all business now. “Of course, but be quick about it.” She catches my eyes once more. “I do mean that thank-you. And we appreciate your discretion.”

She hands him the cloth she was using and swivels to face the others without another word. They gather around her. Then it’s just Win and me again.

32.

T
here’s an instant, as we whirl away from the polished office space, where I squeeze my eyes shut and try to prepare for a present I don’t recognize, that I might not even be a part of. As if I’d notice blinking out of existence if it happened.

I’m still there when we come to earth in a sheltered driveway a couple blocks from my house. I can’t quite feel relieved yet. I keep my eyes on the sidewalk as we hurry down the street in silence, not wanting to see the way things might have changed, how much more
wrong
it might feel than those few twinges the last time I came back.

I remember my parents and Noam, Angela and Lisa, Daniel and Jaeda. My impressions of them all feel normal, right. But would I even know if their roles in my life have been rewritten since before I was born?

The spare house key is in its usual hiding place. I step inside onto the burgundy mat beside the narrow plastic shoe rack. My purple jacket with the melted mark on the sleeve from my first encounter with Kurra hangs where I left it. The savory smell of last night’s stew lingers faintly in the air, mingling with the cedar scent of the hall cabinet. Through the kitchen I can see the amber leaves of the maple in the backyard.

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
wrong
ness 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 fought for that girl. I stood up to the people who are truly responsible for every shift, every
wrong
ness. 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
wrong
ness 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 . . .