The Forgotten Locket (26 page)

“There are two of Zo,” I pointed out. My hope suddenly reversed to worry. “Can he use his other half to destroy the river?”

Dante frowned. “I doubt that would be his first choice.”

“He’s already tried several things and failed. If he thinks this is his last option . . .”

“The danger is not only to the river,” Dante said. “Seeing our other self is dangerous to us personally. Zo may be many things, but he’s not suicidal. He’ll not risk his own life or sanity if there is any other way. And since he is already wounded, I suspect that his interest in destroying the river has been set aside in favor of his interest in saving himself.”

“What if he sees his other self by accident?”

“I think that would be unlikely. I can feel the other me—the me still in prison—like a constant buzz in the back of my head. He is an echo I can’t ignore. It seems to get louder the closer I get to him.” His smile tightened to steel. “I’m sure Zo is feeling the same thing with his other half. Trust me. Neither one of us will run into our other self by accident—or on purpose.”

I sighed. “I wish I were a Master of Time. Then I could take myself to the dungeon without putting anyone else at risk.” I had said it as a half joke, but then I stopped. My smile turned into a grin. “That’s it! That’s what we should do.” My words tumbled out in a rush. “I’ve been through the door once already. All I’d have to do is go back through and I could be a Master of Time too. And if Valerie and Orlando came with me, then together the four of us could stop Zo and save the river and help you and—” I stopped as Dante touched his finger to my lips, quelling my excitement. “What?” I asked. “It’s a good plan.”

“Becoming a Master of Time might not be that easy.”

“Why not? It was for you.”

“Nothing about the time machine is
easy,
” Dante said, a shadow behind his words. “I could only return through the door a second time because you summoned the other half of the hourglass door on the bank as well as the bridge to get there. Zo, Tony, V, Leo, me—we had all been to the bank countless times and the door had never appeared for any of us. It wasn’t until I took you to the bank—and you brought some of the river with you—that the door appeared.”

My shoulders slumped in defeat. “And you think the same thing will have to happen for me? Someone else will have to come to the bank—someone straight from the river like I did—in order for the other half of my door to appear?”

Dante didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.

“I’m not going to be a Master of Time like you are, am I?” I asked quietly, all my earlier feelings of hope vanishing for good. “I can’t be, because who will come to the bank and open the door for me? Who could I ask to risk their life or their sanity to even try?” My voice sounded impossibly small. “Who is going to save me?”

Dante wrapped his arms around me, holding me close. “I will,” he said. “I will find a way. I promise.”

But as I listened to his heart beating in his chest, I imagined I could hear the soft sound of time sliding away, as swiftly as sand through an hourglass.

• • •

Later that evening, after we had eaten dinner and Alessandro and Caterina had retired for the night, I stood by the window with Dante, watching the moon rise in the sky. The pale light touched the gray-green winter grass, caught in the barren trees that spread their thin branches into the sky, and blanketed the villas scattered across the landscape.

Dante had once told me that what he missed most about his former life had been the quiet. Now I understood what he meant. The silence of the night was warm and comforting, like the silence of a heavy snowfall.

I only wished my thoughts were as silent or as comforting. Dante seemed confident that we would find an answer to the problem of the broken locket, but I wasn’t so sure. No matter how many different ways I looked at it, I couldn’t see a solution. I reminded myself that at least Zo was suffering from the same problem, though the thought was a small comfort.

Dante sighed, and I peeked a glance at him. The moonlight highlighted the angles of his cheekbones, casting shadows beneath his bandaged eyes. He looked worn out. Worn down. I realized it had been a long time since I’d seen him look so tired.

He ran a hand through his hair and slumped against the wall next to the window.

“Are you okay?” I asked, instantly worried that perhaps his eyes were bothering him or, worse, the wound in his heart was deteriorating.

“I’ll be all right,” he said.

“Something on your mind?”

He shook his head. “It’s strange. Being back here. So much has happened since I last stood here in my family’s home—and yet, in some ways, I feel like nothing has really changed. Except me.” He rubbed at his wrists absently as though he could strip away the gold chains.

I took his hand in mine to stop his restless activity. Gratitude flashed in his smile and he pulled me closer, allowing me to lean against his chest.

He sighed, his voice low and weary. “I remember
everything
about this place. This is my home. This is where I was born. I never thought I would
be
here again, experiencing it, feeling it, and there is a part of me that never wants to let it go.” He drew in a deep breath. “I am so grateful for this chance to be here—even for such a short time—but I know I don’t belong here anymore. As much as I want to stay with my family, I know that all this”—he gestured out the window and then at the room around us—“is gone. More than five hundred years gone.” He looked away. “And knowing my family is alive and vibrant—hearing my father’s voice, my mother’s laugh—it almost makes it worse. I feel like I’m trespassing in someone else’s dream.”

“It’s not a dream,” I said. “We’re really here.”

“But for how long? As soon as we leave, the river will wash over this part of the past without even leaving behind a ripple. And everything here—my home, my family, everything—will vanish. Swallowed up as if they had never been.”

I frowned and stepped back. “That’s not true. They
were
here. They existed, and they matter. What we’re doing here—trying to protect the river—is as much to help us and our families as it is to help everyone. Your neighbors, the priests at the cathedral, all those people who don’t even know they are in danger. Yes, the river will wash them away—it will wash all of us away eventually—but until it does, we can’t live our lives obsessing about the past or mourning the future. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to each other to live every moment of our lives the best we can.”

Dante was quiet for a long moment.

I blushed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that.”

“No, I’m glad you did. You’re right. I’ve been so worried about the river, about Zo, about keeping the timeline stable that I’ve forgotten the importance of the here and now.” He brushed my hair behind my ear, his thumb sweeping across my cheek. “And being with you here and now is the best moment I could imagine.”

I turned my face into his touch.

“Except every moment I spend with you is better than the one before it,” he said. He pulled me back into his arms, and I nestled close against his chest, my body fitting perfectly next to his, finally feeling at peace. Feeling like I was home.

Chapter 19

No, I told you, the rook can only move in a straight line—” Dante tried again.

Dante had spent the last hour trying to explain to Valerie how to play chess, but she seemed to be more interested in making up stories about the war between the knights and the pawns or about how the king and queen met than learning the strategy of the game.

“That doesn’t make any sense. Castles can’t move.” Valerie picked up the black rook. “And where is the princess? Usually castles have princesses inside.”

“Abby?” Orlando’s low voice startled me from where I stood by the window.

“Yes?”

“Would you mind taking a walk with me?”

“Now?” I gestured out the window. “It’s a little late.”

A serious expression settled over Orlando’s face. “It will only take a moment.” He pressed his lips together and glanced toward Dante and Valerie. “Please. It’s important I speak to you in private.”

“Of course,” I said slowly, wondering what conversation would be important enough to warrant a midnight walk in the winter wind. But I trusted Orlando, and if he said it was important, I believed him. “Dante?” I called out. “Orlando and I are going out for some fresh air.”

“Bring me back some,” Valerie called back. “Have fun, be safe, don’t take any wooden nickels.”

Dante stood up from the chessboard. “Is everything all right?”

I nodded.

“We’ll be right back,” Orlando said. “I promise.”

He swept his father’s coat around my shoulders and then held the door open for me as we stepped out into the chilly winter night.

The cold hit me like a fist and I exhaled a cloud of steam.

“Are you warm enough?” he asked.

Shivering, I nodded. “I will be. What about you?” Orlando had changed into a clean shirt and dark jacket, but neither one looked particularly warm. “The wind is a bit brisk,” I added.

“It usually is this time of year.” As if to prove his point, a cold breeze swept his words away on a puff of misty air. He gestured for me to follow him along the path toward a manicured garden that spread out behind the house. The moonlight lit the world with a pale glow, as if everything had been coated in ice. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Cold, but beautiful.

“I’m sorry you ended up here during the winter. Spring is much better. All the flowers are in bloom then, and the whole world looks fresh and green.”

“It sounds lovely,” I said, leaning into the wind as we rounded the corner of the garden. A trickle of rocks turned underfoot and I was suddenly glad I had kept my sneakers.

We climbed a small hill. When we reached the top, Orlando stood for a moment, looking out over the small hedge maze that stretched below us; the branches along the path were brown and brittle. The wind rustled through the empty garden, but Orlando seemed immune to the cold.

“You didn’t bring me out here to talk about the weather, did you?”

He shook his head, and his shoulders curved inward. He picked at the hem of his shirt with restless fingers. After a long moment, he asked, “How does my story end?”

“What?”

He turned around, his face bleak. “My story. The story of Orlando. What happens next?”

I bit my lip. “You shouldn’t ask me that.”

“But you know what happens. You’ve lived it.”

Shaking my head, I felt my heart sink. “That’s not how it works. The rules say you shouldn’t know your own future.”

“Why not?”

I knew the answer; Leo had told me the same truth in another time. “Knowing what the future holds for you could influence your decisions and your choices; it could change your life irrevocably.”

“What if I
want
it to change?” he asked quietly.

“You can’t change your past—”

“You are. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To change the past?”

I pressed my lips together and exhaled through my nose in twin plumes of cold air. “That’s not exactly true. What I need to do here isn’t changing the past so much as making sure time stays on the right course. If I fail, then, yes, things will change—but not in a good way.”

“And my future? Can I change that?”

I opened my mouth with an automatic answer, but then paused. If I closed the loop as I was supposed to, then the future would unspool out as it had once before. And that meant Orlando would see more than five hundred years of the world pass by until he would be transformed into Leo and would open a place called the Dungeon where one equally cold January night the band Zero Hour would play a song that would change my life.

I knew that once the loop was closed, what had happened once would happen again—the good
and
the bad—all the way up to the point when I entered the time machine door. But once we returned home and the river was stable and whole, well . . . what happened after that was unknown. That was part of why I had come here: to protect the uncertainty of the future. To keep all our lives full of possibilities.

But Dante had already started to change things by finding his brother, by returning to his parents’ home. Maybe events were already in motion that would result in an unimagined future. Maybe Orlando could be set free from his destiny as Leo.

In my heart, I knew the answer to Orlando’s question, so I gave him the truth he deserved to hear, the truth I chose to believe. “Yes,” I said. “You can always choose to change your future.”

Orlando held my eyes with his for a long time. The wind ruffled his dark hair and bit at his cheeks until they turned red. A mournful howl followed in the wind’s wake; I wondered if a storm was coming.

I pulled Alessandro’s coat tighter around my throat, waiting, but for what, I didn’t know.