Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) (26 page)

A few minutes’ walk later, I glimpse the roof of the fort through the foliage ahead. I pause, thinking of how the British soldiers greeted us last time. Win wouldn’t have gone close enough for them to see him. Where would he wait, if he’s here? If I call out to him, Kurra’s as likely to hear me as he is.

I hobble around the edge of the clearing, taking in every fluttering leaf, every bird’s chirp, as if one of them holds a clue. I’m just following the curve around the north end of the field when a sharp voice cuts through the air.

Kurra. I duck down, swiveling to try to determine which direction it’s coming from. She’s speaking in Kemyate, so low or distant I probably wouldn’t be able to make out most of the words even if I understood the language.

I see one of her companions before I see her: a sturdily built man with tan skin and chestnut hair braided at his neck. I scoot behind the base of a birch’s trunk. He turns away from me, gesturing to someone out of view.

Kurra speaks again. I’m so used to her threats, it’s odd to hear her sound so . . . cajoling. But if her comments are directed at Win, he doesn’t respond.

They seem to be moving away from me. Does that mean Win’s over there too? If Kurra’s tracking him again, I should follow. I creep forward from one tree to the next. Then the man I can see spins on his heel. I duck behind a maple.

Kurra’s voice reaches me again, louder now. Footsteps crackle closer, then stop. I can only pick up a hint of the whispered conversation that follows. They walk on. I think they’re coming toward me now.

I dare to lean an inch past the side of the tree. My pulse stutters. I can see three Enforcers now, Kurra in the middle. They’re coming toward the fort after all.

As I watch, they veer at a slight angle. Slowly but surely, they walk past my hiding spot, leaving me behind.

My gaze drifts up over their heads, and every muscle in my body tenses.

Win’s standing on the wide branch of a chestnut tree, maybe twenty feet away and at least the same distance above us. He’s poised against the trunk, half hidden by the leaves, his brown clothes blending into the bark, the cowl neck pulled up to cover his dark hair. I might not have noticed him at all if not for the oily splotch of the time cloth clutched in his hand.

His head dips, following the movements of the Enforcers below. They’re between us now, heading straight for him. They must be tracking him on that screen.

I ease myself upright and wave my arm, but Win’s focus doesn’t waver from the Enforcers. He doesn’t know I’m here. I can’t get his attention without drawing their attention too.

Why doesn’t he jump away? He’s got the time cloth right there . . .

But how long has he been doing that—jumping from hiding spot to hiding spot with Kurra on his tail? Maybe she shot the cloth again, and it’s malfunctioning. Maybe the power’s nearly drained again. There are all sorts of reasons he could be stuck there. Waiting for me.

Win’s legs quaver. He braces himself, his eyes closing. Fear grips me. He’s sick, he was all but mortally wounded just a few hours ago, and now he must be even more exhausted.

Kurra hesitates, just a few feet from his tree, frowning at her hand.
Go on
, I think at her.
Keep moving.
She turns, studying the ground. At any moment she’s going to look up.

She murmurs something to the Enforcer with the braided hair, and one of Win’s feet slips.

He throws out his hand to a smaller branch nearby, catching his balance, but his shoe rasps against the bark. The branch he’s grabbed creaks. Kurra’s head snaps around, her gun hand flying up to follow her gaze.

No
.

I can’t watch this happen. Not again.

I’m sprinting forward before that thought has even fully formed, my walking stick tossed aside. The pain radiating up my leg brings tears to my eyes, but I don’t care. Win would probably tell me to stay where I am, that it’s too dangerous to interfere, but I don’t care about that either. I am not a shadow; I’m a human being who’s spent the last two days fighting to liberate my planet, and I am not letting it end like this.

The other Enforcers whip around to face me, and Kurra’s attention jerks away from Win. She sidesteps, her blaster swinging down, but I’m already hurtling toward her with all the strength in my body. I crash into her. The twang sings past my ear.

One of the other Enforcers hisses a curse. Kurra rams her elbow into my side, squirming out from under me. I try to dodge her as the third Enforcer aims his weapon. I’m too slow. A streak of light sizzles into my shoulder. I stagger, numbness clawing through my chest.

That’s it,
I think blankly. As I gasp for breath, Kurra snatches my elbow and brings her blaster to my head.

And then she’s stumbling to the side as Win shoves past her with a sweep of his time cloth. I fling myself at him, and he tugs the cloth over me. Kurra gives a cry, her pale eyes wild. She jabs out with her blaster. But this time Win’s already hit the panel.

As the muzzle sparks, her furious face and the rest of the forest whirl away.

31.

T
he world outside the cloth comes into focus and dissolves again as Win raps his fingers against the data panel. The yellow light of the power warning flashes around us. I gulp and sputter. Though my ankle’s on fire, my legs are still holding me up. But a broad swath of flesh, from the base of my chin down across the right side of my torso and along my arm, is numb. It feels as if there’s a gaping hole in the front of my body. A gaping hole where my vital organs should be.

“You can still breathe,” Win shouts over the shrieking of the wind. “Everything inside you is still working, even if you can’t tell. Just try not to think about it.”

Easier said than done. I suck air into the back of my throat, but I can’t feel it moving down to my lungs. Somehow, a moment later, an exhalation rushes out. I close my eyes, trying to let it happen automatically. Listening to my pulse thumping in my ears, a confirmation that my heart’s continued beating.

The shrieking stops and the cloth goes still. “Skylar?” Win rasps. My eyes pop open.

We’ve landed in a dim stairwell. I make myself step out of the cloth after Win. He heads down the stairs and I follow, clutching the railing. We pass three flights and then duck out into a darkened hall. My foot brushes a sheet of plastic crumpled in the corner.

Open doorframes line the hall. Win ducks through one of them, and I limp after. The space on the other side appears to be a vacant condo apartment: bare white walls, marble countertops in the open-concept kitchen, tall steel-edged windows looking out over a concrete balcony that doesn’t yet have a railing.

“They’re just finishing up this place—no one’s moved in yet, and the workers will all have gone home for the day,” Win says, wheezing. He peels down his cowl and rolls it back into his shirt collar, fumbling with it as if he can’t get his hands to work quite right. He coughs a couple of times against his elbow.

“You found Jeanant?” he asks. “Before you found me again?”

I nod, not quite trusting myself to speak.

He shakes his head with a rough laugh. “I can’t believe we pulled that off.”

I guess we did. Not perfectly, not without . . . loss, but our mission’s over.

There’s nothing left to do.

The enormity of it overwhelms me. I hobble forward, toward the late-afternoon sun shining bright in the blue sky beyond the windows. The warmth tingles over every part of me except that numb hollow around my core. When I reach out to touch the glass, the box lodged inside my shirt pokes the still-awake skin over my stomach. One-handed, I tug at the Traveler shirt until I can pull the box out. Bits of the dirt it was buried in cling to my fingers.

Win will bring the parts to Thlo, and hopefully these three will be enough for their group to destroy the time field. We’ll have set everyone’s lives across two planets on a completely different course.

Incredible
.

The word resonates in my head in Jeanant’s voice. The smell of the forest lingers on the box, on my clothes, loamy and damp. Taking me back to Jeanant’s last cry, to his body sprawled in the glade.

“That’s the third part Jeanant left,” I say. My voice is thick, and not just because I can’t feel my vocal cords.

Win takes the box, runs his thumb along the seam, and frowns. “Just the third? But—”

“He didn’t want to change any detail from his original plan,” I say. “He said— He said that if he shifted something by giving us the rest of the weapon all at once, he might throw something off and alter the chain of events. Make it so the Enforcers from his time caught Thlo, or she’d miss his message or . . . I tried to convince him.”

I thought I almost had. But . . . what if he’d been right after all? Did the Enforcers catch up with him finally, force his hand, because of those small moments when his path on Earth was changed: the moments he lingered with me? Maybe in some previous past, when I died in the courthouse, Jeanant dashed away the second after he hid each part, placed his last offering uninterrupted, and lived on at least a little while longer.

Of course, in that other past, maybe Thlo and Win and the others would never have completely deciphered Jeanant’s all too careful clues, never kept ahead of the Enforcers, never have finished his mission. I don’t know. I can’t know. There might not have been any good way for his journey to end.

I fold my working arm across my chest. This is what mattered to Jeanant the most: this moment right now. Getting as many of the parts as he could into our hands. He would rather have died for this than lived without accomplishing it—I know
that
.

Win looks at the object I’ve given him, and then at me. In that instant, he looks so tired, I’m afraid his legs won’t hold.

“We’re not done,” he says.

“We are,” I say, and pause when my voice breaks. “Jeanant’s— The Enforcers from his time, they caught him. He made them kill him so they couldn’t take him for interrogation. He’s dead. They found the last part, the one he was still carrying. We have everything we can get.”

“Oh.
Oh
. You saw— Are you all right?”

The worry in his deep blue eyes isn’t the analytical consideration or anxious impatience I’ve gotten used to, only honest concern. He isn’t freaking out that we lost the last part or demanding to know why I didn’t do better. He just wants to be sure I’m okay. Somehow that makes me
feel
almost okay, for the first time since that argument with Jeanant in the forest.

“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I wish I could have stopped it. I wish we hadn’t lost anything. But . . . it is what it is, right?”

“Yes. It must have been hard, to even get this. I’m sorry I couldn’t have helped more.” He slides the box into his satchel. “There’s a good chance the three will be enough. Thlo and Isis will have a better idea, once they take a look. It’s time we go talk with them. I’m sure Jule has already filled Thlo in on the basics.” He grimaces. “I just wanted to work out what we’re going to say about going back for your brother first. Assuming you still want to.”

Noam. My plan: going back to that day, finding him at school, the note . . .

The note.

Kurra’s voice comes back to me, the intensity in her cold eyes.
Who is Noam?
My fingers clench where the purse used to hang.

“Win,” I say in a rush. “Kurra knew— I’d started writing my note to Noam, when we were in the safe house— It was in my purse— She asked me who he was. What if they’ve already gone back looking for him?”

“Whoa,” Win says. “How much did she know? What did you say in the note?”

“I don’t remember. I’d only just started. The only thing she mentioned was his name.”

“Last name too or just first name? The year?
Your
name?”

I shake my head. “Just ‘Noam
,
’ and I was starting to tell him about Darryl . . .”

“Then he’s fine,” Win says firmly. “How many Noams do you think there must be across the history of this planet? They don’t have anywhere near enough to lead them to him. We didn’t shift anything while we were there, no one even saw us except for him. There’s no way they could determine . . .”

He trails off, and the realization hits me. The way it all connects, like one long line of factors in the cruelest of equations.

“There’s no way, unless I go back,” I say stiffly. “Suddenly a boy who died stays alive. That would have to show up on their monitoring. A boy named Noam.”

Win lowers his eyes. “We could distract from it by making another shift first,” he says. “Try to hide it as a ripple like we did with the train ticket. But . . . they’ll be searching for that name. Investigating any shifts associated with it. Especially in the time periods they’ve traced us to before. It’d be hard for them to miss.”

The acknowledgment seems so final. Almost inevitable. Of course I can change every past there is except the one that matters most.

“What would they do, after they noticed?” I have to ask.

“They’d look into his background, his family, his friends,” Win says. “They’d find records of you.”

“And Kurra would recognize me.”

“Maybe not. If you shifted everything, so you weren’t ever here with me . . . I think it’d depend on whether she was inside or outside the time field when you did it. But she’ll have sent up reports. The Enforcers will still know Noam was significant. And they’ll have a description of the girl I was Traveling with.”

“They’d kill us, wouldn’t they?” I murmur. “They’d kill Noam, to set things back the way they were before, and then they’d kill me, because they wouldn’t know I’m never going to meet you after all. I can save him, and they’ll just murder him all over again.”

A choked laugh jerks out of me. I cover my mouth. It’s like they’ve already killed him. The instant Kurra snapped my purse from my shoulder, she killed any chance I had of saving Noam.

He was already dead. And maybe it was wrong of me to want to make a shift for no one’s benefit but his, mine, and my family’s. Maybe I was selfish not to have cared what other consequences there might be. It doesn’t matter now. This risk is too great, weighing the lives of all the people connected to him who are still alive against a boy who’s been gone for years. There’s no choice here.

I sink down onto the floor, leaning my back against the window. The sun beams over my hair. The skin around the edges of my frozen core is starting to tingle. I stare blankly at the wall. So that’s it. Despite everything I managed to accomplish, I couldn’t save the two people I most wanted to.

“If there was a way . . .” Win says.

“I know,” I say, before he can go on. I honestly believe he’d do whatever he could to help me, if it were possible. “But there isn’t. I guess you might as well take me back to my time.” Back to find out what else might have shifted, after the other history I just meddled with.
I
might not even be there. We might arrive only for me to blink out of reality the second my life aligns with its proper present.

I hug my knees. Well, I’m going to have to find out eventually.

“You could even tell Thlo you realized Jule was right and you shouldn’t have brought me with you, that you took me back before you went for the third part,” I go on when Win doesn’t speak. “Maybe she’ll be less upset then? You can show off how much of their work you managed to do for them, without me there to distract things.”

“You wouldn’t be a distraction,” Win says. “You’re an equal part of this. More than equal. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without you.”

“No one else needs to see it that way.”

“You really think I’d take credit for everything you did?”

I shrug. Why shouldn’t he? Earning his companions’ respect is a lot more important to him than to me.

Win crouches down and rests his hand over mine. Solid and warm, and with a sense of sureness that abruptly reminds me of Jeanant. I look up at him. His face wavers through the tears that have collected in my eyes. But I can still see his expression, so serious it hurts to hold his gaze. He swallows audibly.

“Skylar,” he says, weighting every word with raw sincerity, “the way I treated you, in the beginning— The way I talked to you— What I
did
, without considering how you’d feel— I didn’t have half as much respect for you as I should have. It was wrong of me. I could make a lot of excuses, but that’s not the point. The point is I was stupid, and I’m sorry. So sorry. You’ve been . . . you’ve been spectacular.”

After all this time, I’d stopped hoping for a real apology. I’d assumed we’d put it to rest without that.

Win’s mouth twists, painfully, and I realize I haven’t responded: he thinks it wasn’t enough, that I’m still angry. And any part of me that might have been melts.

“Okay,” I say. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

A little smile creeps across my lips, the best I can manage right now. There are things to smile for, in spite of everything.

Win catches the smile, and returns it, twice as wide. As I hold his deep blue gaze, something in my chest flutters. Something that feels more real than the skipped heartbeats he gave me when we first met, when I wasn’t used to the alien
there
ness of him. When I didn’t really know him.

“I think you should meet them, Thlo and the others,” he says. “They already know you exist. And . . . you were the one who talked to Jeanant. Thlo will probably have questions.”

The flutter fades as my mind trips back to his conversation with Jule about “standard protocol.”

“How angry is she going to be?” I ask.

Win hesitates. “Honestly,” he says, “I’m not completely sure how she would have reacted if she’d found out what was happening in the middle of things. But we’re done now. If I try to hide you away, that’ll make Thlo think there’s something to be suspicious of—and she’ll know your name and what time period I’d have met you in, and Jule would recognize your face. If she wanted to find you, she could. If we just go to her, she’ll see she doesn’t need to worry. That after everything, you can be trusted. And the safest thing for all of us will be for you to go back to your life as if nothing ever changed, so the Enforcers never realize who you were.”

Part of me balks. But what he’s saying makes sense. And Jeanant trusted this woman, believed in her. He wouldn’t have, if she were cruel enough to see eliminating me as a reasonable solution, would he?

“Also,” Win says, a little sheepishly, “there is a practical concern. I’m not completely sure the cloth has enough power left for two more trips.”

What else is new? If I weren’t so shell-shocked, I’d roll my eyes. “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds like a great idea.”

Win laughs and helps me to my feet.