Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) (18 page)

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We’re going back. I’m going to save Noam.”

22.

M
y legs wobble, and Win reaches to steady me. I’d pull back, but suddenly I’m not sure I can support my own weight. He keeps his hand on the side of my arm, tentatively.

“Skylar,” he says, his voice as raw as I feel, “I know how much this means to you. But we’ve got the Enforcers just a few steps behind us. No one saw us at the marsh. For them to have found us there, they
have
to have broken Isis’s protections on the cloth’s signal. There’s no doubt they’re tracking us directly. And we’re exhausted, and wet, and cold, so neither of us is going to be thinking clearly right now. The past will still be there in a couple hours. Let’s find somewhere safe—safer—and give ourselves a chance to take all of this in, and then we’ll talk about it. I promise.”

I don’t like it, but he’s making sense. My head feels as wobbly as my legs. I swallow, noticing the ashy dryness of my mouth. “Okay. Okay. Do you have more of that blue water stuff?”

Win’s posture relaxes. “Sure.”

He hands me one of the bottles, and I gulp from it as he skims through the data. “Ah,” he says. “I think this should work. Give us a good head start, anyway.”

We jump once more, landing in an alley across from a long white building with streams of people heading in and out of its doors in the midafternoon sun. “Los Angeles,” Win announces. “Union Station.”

And then a yellow light starts to flash behind the cloth’s display with an electronic ping. Win stiffens.

“What is it?” I ask.

It takes him a few seconds to answer, as if he’s hoping the flashing will stop and he won’t have to say. “That’s the power indicator,” he says, sounding twice as tired as before. “Traveling takes a lot of energy. The cloths can only make so many trips before they need to be recharged.”

My damp clothes suddenly feel colder. “So it’s dying?”

“This is just the early warning. We’ll get at least a few more trips out of it. I’d guess four or five jumps . . . more if most of them are short. We’ll be all right.”

In an ideal situation, we won’t even need that many. One back to save Noam. One to follow the instructions Jeanant gave me and grab the last two parts of the weapon. One to bring them back to Win’s companions. But it doesn’t leave much room for error. Or escape, if Kurra catches up with us.

The drink has cleared my head a little, but it’s still hard to focus. “So what do we do?”

Win drags in a breath. “We keep going,” he says. “And we only jump when we have to. I was already planning on that, since each jump gives the Enforcers another chance to trace us, so I guess it doesn’t change much. Come on.”

We step out. Win leads the way across the street and through the station entrance to the ticket office. I glimpse the date on a computerized screen: it’s the Sunday before I met Win.

Somewhere across the country, there’s another me who hasn’t seen any of this yet. I wince away from the thought.

“We’re taking a train?” I say.

“It’ll let us get some distance quickly,” Win says. “Give us some time to rest and talk while staying on the move. I’ve got enough American cash left to buy a long trip.”

“And they won’t figure out what we did—check the ticket records or something?”

“I’ll buy another ticket, going another direction, first. That’ll be the shift they catch—the first one. Anything after, they won’t know it’s us and not just a ripple.”

I stick close to him, trying not to sway, as he books the fake ticket and then a private sleeper room on the next cross-country train. It’s leaving in just a few minutes. We rush through the crowd to the platform and scramble on board.

Our room’s down a narrow hall toward the back of the train. The bunks haven’t been pulled out yet. I collapse into the long padded seat, Win sinking down across from me. A whistle sounds. The motor hums. With a hitch, the train begins to whir along the track.

I slouch in the seat, gazing out the window but not really registering anything beyond the glass. My head tips forward. And before I notice what’s happening, exhaustion has carried me away.

I wake up with a start at a screech of metal wheels against the tracks. Win’s still sitting next to me, his head tilted against the seat, his eyes closed. Outside the train window, dusk is falling. I’ve been out for hours. How could I have slept, when—

It was already late afternoon when I left with Win from my present time. Between France, Vietnam, and my own past, I’ve been on my feet until what’s the equivalent of well into the next morning. Even if I’d been sitting at home the whole time, I’d have had trouble staying awake.

My stomach growls. I pull the half-full bag of trail mix from my purse and scoop a few handfuls into my mouth. It takes the edge off the pangs.

My mind flickers back to the marshlands. To the scene that played out just a few hours and twelve years ago, before my eyes. My gut clenches. I set aside the rest of the trail mix.

What’s Darryl doing now, in this present? How has he managed to live with himself all this time? And those guys, Babyface and his friend: have they felt even a speck of guilt?

Shapes and colors flash past the window. I see Noam’s pale, determined face, the swing of an arm, the water rippling around a bloodstained jacket. After a few minutes, I pull down the shade, but the beige blankness gives me no comfort. I start picturing that shimmering cone—the carrier, Win called it—appearing beside the train tracks, the Enforcers spilling out. I wouldn’t even know . . .

I push the shade back up. There’s nothing but scattered industrial buildings and stretches of yellowed grass passing by outside. Win said we didn’t have to worry. But my pulse keeps jumping.

Even though nothing feels
wrong
, I dig out my bracelet, careful to avoid unraveling the hemp string further where it snapped. The remaining beads rotate under my fingers, and the threes roll out through my head. The pattern holds me in place, here in the small cabin with the whir of the train’s wheels against the tracks and the plasticky smell of recycled air, but it doesn’t calm me. My nerves are still twitching, my muscles tight.

I can’t do it anymore: just get through it, wait for the worst of the emotions to pass. No matter how many times I turn the beads, no matter how many cycles of three I multiply, Noam will still be dead.

Win said we could talk when we were somewhere safer, when we’d had time to think. I don’t know where we’re going to find a safer spot, and I’ve done enough thinking.

“Win?” I say.

He raises his head. I ready myself. I have to lay it all out as clearly as possible, not giving him any room to argue.

“I know we can’t just take Noam the way I thought,” I say. “But we don’t have to. All we have to do is make some little tweak to stop him from ending up in the marshlands in the first place. I couldn’t seem to talk to him properly about the future, but . . . maybe if I write him a letter without too many details, give it to him when he’s leaving school—I could tell him when Darryl calls him, it’ll be a prank, he should ignore him and just stay at the house. And if he goes anyway, can’t we just, like, grab him for half an hour until the guys have gone off with Darryl and there’s no way for them to take Noam too? We don’t even have to get anyone else involved—the police, my parents—it’d just be Noam’s life we’re changing.”

Win’s mouth twists. “You’re talking about reversing someone’s death. Of course that’s going to impact other people.”

“Well, after,” I say. “But—you reversed the deaths of my whole class the other day, just to distract the Enforcers. Jeanant’s been making all kinds of minor changes to distract them too, right? It’s not like they’re going to know this one is significant. And even if they check it out, we won’t stick around for them to catch us.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Win says. “I meant
you
. If your brother doesn’t disappear, your past will be completely different.”

“What?” I say. “That’s a problem? I’ll get to grow up with the brother I was supposed to have. He’ll get to finish high school and college and meet a girl he wants to marry and do all the other things he should have gotten to do. My parents won’t have to spend all that time wondering what they did to drive him away. I won’t be so torn up with guilt that I . . .”

I falter. I forgot that part of the equation. What made me seek out the answer to Noam’s disappearance to begin with. To know what happened, to know he was okay, so I could get my head on straight.

“If he doesn’t disappear, I won’t get obsessed with paying attention to details,” I say. “I won’t notice the shifts.”

My mind trips backward down the long line of freak-outs and awkward moments and excuses that have been an unshakeable part of my existence until now. What would my life have been like, rewritten without that? What would it be with Noam in it?

Win’s voice brings me back. “If you don’t notice the shifts, I won’t notice you. We’ll never talk.”

Oh. Of course. “I won’t be able to help you follow Jeanant’s messages,” I say. “I wouldn’t even be here right now.” This room, this window, this seat, the rocking of the train’s motion, all erased from my life, even though it feels so real right now. The idea makes me dizzy.

Who will
I
be, without the twelve years of guilt and compulsions?

But trading the certainty of what I have for Noam, for my parents, for a normal life—it’s not even a question.

“So what?” I say. “Maybe you won’t get to run off to Paris and start collecting parts of the weapon, but Thlo and the rest of your group should figure it out eventually, shouldn’t they? You don’t
need
me, I just . . . hurried things along.”

“We don’t know that,” Win says. “If things happened differently, the Enforcers might catch the others, or me, before we make it that far. And even if it would have worked out if I never met you, I
did
, Skylar, and now you and me and Jeanant and the parts he left for us to find, the parts we’ve already collected, they’re all tangled up together. You’ve been interacting with people from all different eras, with Travelers from different presents. If we yank you out of the timeline it might not snap back into place perfectly. Things could just slip out of existence.”

I stare at him. “Is that something that actually happens? Or are you just making that up because you don’t want to do it?”

“It’s happened,” Win says flatly. “Not very often, but—you’ve heard of cases where planes or boats just disappear and are never found? Even people? Sometimes that’s some mistake in our calculations, too many overlapping shifts in the same area at once. No one has any idea how many objects too insignificant to draw notice might have vanished due to some small margin of error. You erase and rewrite parts of the world enough times, and bits and pieces end up getting written out.”

I remember the metaphor he used before: a recording of a recording of a recording. The video getting grainier, the sound more fuzzy, with every copy. Until some details, some words, you can’t make out at all anymore. I pull my legs onto the seat, hugging them through the clammy fabric of my dress.

“You really think the messages, or the parts of the weapon, could just . . . stop existing? Or . . .”

Even people
, he said. Me? Win? Jeanant?

“I don’t know,” Win says. “But what we’ve been doing, it’s so uncontrolled compared to any official shift. And taking you out of it would be just about the biggest shift anyone’s ever made. I have no idea what could happen.”

He looks down at his hands. “I understand why you want to save your brother. I’m sorry. I wish we could, but I can’t agree to do it when it would mean risking
everything
.”

The reason I’m here at all. Jeanant’s plan to destroy the time field generator. Possibly the only chance we have to free Earth from Kemya’s control—the only chance that’s come in thousands of years. I know, I
know
, you can’t remove one figure in an equation without making the whole sequence void.

I won’t care, if I go back and protect Noam and my life is written over. I won’t have any more of a clue than anyone else that the world around me is being shifted and experimented with on a daily basis. I could shrug off Jeanant’s sacrifices and Win’s and the fate of every other person on this planet, so my family and I can live in happy ignorance.

I feel awful just thinking about it. And yet some part of me still finds the possibility appealing.

“It’s not fair,” I say, knowing how childish that sounds. “Why is it so easy to end some kid’s life, but saving someone, we can’t do that?”

“I’m sorry,” Win says again.

I press my face against my knees, squeezing my eyes shut. Fresh tears start to well behind my eyelids. I was right there, I saw Noam, I talked to him. How can helping him be so out of reach?

“There isn’t any way?” I ask without raising my head. “There’s no Traveler loophole you haven’t mentioned?”

I don’t expect him to answer. Win’s silent for what feels like a long time, as the tracks rattle beneath us and the conductor announces the next stop approaching. Then he says, “Maybe there’s something.”

I jerk upright. “What?”

“I don’t know exactly how we would work it,” he says slowly. “But once something is outside the time field, shifts can’t affect it. As soon as we have the parts of the weapon off the planet, back on our ship, it doesn’t matter what happens here on Earth, we’ll still have them. So then, in theory, you could go back and help your brother survive without us losing anything.”

“So we’d just have to get the last two pieces, and then we could do it?”

“I can’t promise you it’ll work,” Win says. “The logistics could be complicated, and . . . Thlo would have to agree. But I’d try.”

Try. That doesn’t feel like quite enough—to keep going, leaving Noam farther and farther behind, without a definite plan to go back for him. I should be overjoyed that there might be a way after all, but the hope that bubbled up inside me starts to deflate. Maybe I’m just too tired for talk of logistics and complications. I rub my eyes.

“I want you to know,” Win says, and pauses. He fixes me with that deep blue gaze, his face so weary I wonder if he slept at all. It occurs to me that no matter what he’s done, no matter how he’s treated me, an awful lot of what we’ve been through has been new and unsettling to him too. That it’s not just me who’s struggling with uncertainty.