Earth & Sky

by Megan Crewe

  The images from the Coliseum fly up—blood, sand, a groan of agony, the hiss of an arrow—and my lungs constrict. I push the glove away. There’s still so much I don’t understand about Win and his story. And what would he want from me in exchange for a favor like that?

  “Sky?”

  Mom’s come in. I close the box and turn around. “I just . . .” I say, but I don’t know how to explain what I’m doing here.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “Accepting Noam’s gone doesn’t mean we can’t remember him.”

  I rub my thumb and finger together, bringing back the feel of worn leather. “He was a good brother,” I said. “While he was here.”

  She smiles. “He was an amazing brother. You know, we don’t mean to overreact when you’re a little late or we’re not sure where you are—”

  “I know, Mom,” I say. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  She puts her arm around me and squeezes my shoulder, and I lean into her. A part of me wishes I could tell her everything, but most of me is glad she hasn’t noticed anything’s wrong. So I can pretend for a little longer that nothing is.

  The doorbell rings, and Mom straightens up, her eyebrows rising. My heartbeat stutters before I remember.

  “That’ll be Angela,” I say. “I forgot to tell you she was coming over—we’ve got an English presentation on Hamlet we have to work on.”

  “As long as she doesn’t stay too late,” Mom says with one last squeeze.

  There’s still a moment as I open the door when I find myself bracing for a pale sneer. My relief when I’m met with Angela’s smiling face must be obvious.

  “What’s up?” she asks as she steps in.

  “Not much,” I say. “Just looking forward to getting this presentation over with.” It’s true enough. Angela’s shy, but she can get into the performance element of it, even when it involves acting out Shakespeare’s archaic vocabulary. I never stop feeling uncomfortable when the whole class is focused on me, every jitter and hesitation magnified.

  “Well, I borrowed costumes I think Mr. Nebb will like from the drama department,” Angela says, heading upstairs with me. “So all we have left to do is figure out what to say about how ‘deep and meaningful’ the scene is afterward. And practice.”

  “I wrote some notes . . .” I paw through the papers on my desk. When I turn around, Angela’s sat down cross-legged by the end of the bed, looking up at the da Vinci print with an appreciative eye.

  And I think: if I’d died in the explosion yesterday, she would have too. She and Daniel and Jaeda and everyone in Ms. Vincent’s class. Wiped away like lines on a chalkboard.

  I’ve been so distracted by the crazy, scary parts of Win’s story that I’ve overlooked that. I haven’t wanted to believe it; I haven’t wanted to face it, but I know what I felt yesterday was something. Something big and awful.

  Quite possibly we’re only alive because of him. There must be a million other things he could have “shifted” to distract the Enforcers, and he chose to save us.

  That could change, couldn’t it? At any moment, without warning. A chill prickles over me. He said there were other Travelers. All it would take is one little tweak from someone else, somewhere out there, to set off a new chain of events in which I no longer exist. Any of us—me, Angela, my parents—could just disappear in the blink of an eye, without anyone knowing the difference.

  “You okay?” Angela asks, and I snap out of it. She’s watching me with that crease on her forehead, and I know it’s for me this time.

  “Yeah,” I say, too quickly. “Here. There’s this whole thing about the significance of the play within the play . . .”

  I sit down next to her, rattling off the points I jotted down, but I’m only half there. The other half is picturing Win in that tacky motel, worrying about his friends, trying to make his own plans. Whoever he is, whatever he’s really doing, he’s the only one I know who has the slightest chance of protecting us. Of stopping these shifts.

  And he thinks I can help him.

  When I walk with Angela to the door an hour later, I only have a vague idea what we’ve decided on. I can’t help glancing up at the sky as she heads down the street—at the few stars bright enough to pierce the city’s glow. And maybe a satellite full of scientists from some distant planet poking at our world like we really are fish in a bowl. My chest clenches.

  I’m scared it might all be true. I’m scared of what’ll happen to us next if it is. Win took a risk on me, he said, because this supposed mission could be the most important thing he does in his whole life. If it’s real, I can’t think of anything more important that could happen in mine.

  I have to go back and talk to him again tomorrow. For the first time ever, I might have the chance to set the wrongness right.

  8.

  I duck out the door at a quarter past seven the next morning. “Have a good run!” Dad calls from the kitchen.

  I do, but not to the park for cross-country practice. I fall into a measured lope halfway down the block, letting the rhythm of my strides untangle my thoughts as I weave through the streets to the Garden Inn.

  In the crisp dawn light, everything looks perfectly ordinary. Dry leaves drift across lawns; cars putter along the roads. I register the details automatically: blue sedan, gold sports car, gray truck with a ridge of rust along the back bumper. A folk tune tinkles from the open door of a cafe; a plane trails exhaust across the sky.

  By the time I make it to the hotel, I half expect to discover it was all a dream. Then the front door opens and Win steps out onto the sidewalk. My gut lurches as the reality of the situation snaps back into place.

  Win’s hair is rumpled and his face looks worn, as if he’s had as much trouble sleeping as I did. I told him I might come sometime today. Was he planning on waiting by the doors the whole time?

  He wasn’t kidding about how important this is to him, that much is obvious.

  He smiles at me, relief shining through the weariness in his eyes, and I’m suddenly struck by how young he appears to be. He can’t be more than a year or two older than I am. I can’t imagine what it’s like being on his side of this equation, stranded in time with vicious teched-up soldiers hunting him down.

  “Thank you for coming,” he says. “I’m sorry I upset you yesterday.”

  “It was a lot to take in,” I say. “I’m still kind of freaked out.”

  “But you’ll help?”

  “I . . .” He doesn’t beat around the bush, does he? “Look, I don’t know how much of this to believe. I just know if people are messing with time, with what’s happened in our lives, I want that to stop.”

  “And we’ll stop it,” Win says. His gaze darts up and down the street. “Do you trust me enough to come in now? We shouldn’t risk anyone overhearing.”

  Right. Because even I’m not supposed to know.

  He could have brought me anywhere, anytime when I stepped into his cloth with him last night. If what he wants from me was something he could take by force, he’s had plenty of opportunities.

  “Okay,” I say, and follow him in.

  As we cross the lobby, I remember stumbling in here yesterday, and the horrible sound of Win’s wheezing. My hand rises to the melted streak on my jacket.

  “Those people who came after us in the coffee shop,” I say. “The Enforcers? Would they be able to figure out you’re staying here? Or where I live, or go to school . . .”

  “They’d have to spot us again,” Win says. “It’s a big city.”

  “But they knew where to look for us yesterday.”

  “Yes.” Win pushes open the door to the hallway of rooms. “I think . . . we must have accidentally shifted something in the timeline around or in the coffee shop, and the scientists picked up on it.” I trace our path to the shop in my memory. “All we did was go in and buy a couple drinks. Would they be accessing the store records?”

  “Unlikely. But there was that one man you talked to, wasn’t there? The one who seemed
angry.”

  “Yeah. He bumped into me and spilled coffee on his shirt.” I hesitate. “And he said something about going in front of an audience. That could have been recorded. You think your scientists would notice something as small as a stain in a TV broadcast?”

  Silly question, I guess, when it comes to people who can jump through two millennia in a matter of seconds. “The computers do most of the work,” Win says. “Pixels to pixels, it’d be easy to catch.”

  “So how careful do I need to be?” I ask. “I mean, all sorts of things would have changed all over the city if a bomb that was supposed to go off didn’t. But they managed to figure out that one little detail was important?”

  Win stops at a doorway at the end of the hall and digs in his pocket for the key. “Ah, that’s my fault,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what happened in the coffee shop would have been a new shift,” he says. “When I stopped the bomber, that started one revised chain of events—one altered set of data. After waiting a few days, I jumped back to yesterday morning to see if the Enforcers had responded and to take another look at you. I didn’t mean to shift anything else—I didn’t know I’d end up talking to you. The accident in the coffee shop would have set off a new series of changes. Unfortunately it led them right to us. The Enforcers must have questioned that guy, found out how he got the stain and what you looked like.” He pushes open the door. “But as long as I don’t make any more shifts here, nothing else you do should stand out. It’ll blend into that same chain. Hopefully I’ll be moving on soon, and it’s me they really want to catch.”

  “What about that jump to Rome yesterday?” I ask.

  “They shouldn’t be able to track the jumps themselves,” he says. “Isis—she’s our main tech person—put a scrambler on our time cloths. It’s supposed to prevent any tracing.”

  “Okay.” One less thing to worry about, I guess.

  I ease into the room. A tidy row of clothes hangs in the closet alcove: a few pairs of jeans and several T-shirts and sweaters in a wide range of hues, from bright red to deep purple. Otherwise, it hardly feels as if anyone is staying here at all. The blue-and-green-striped comforter on the bed is already tightly tucked, the carpeted floor bare. The recycled air carries nothing but a hint of lavender air freshener. From what Win’s said, he’s been moving around so much—from place to place, and time to time—there mustn’t be much point in getting settled.

  Because he’s not just the hipster college guy he looks like. He’s part of the same freaky organization as the scientists we’ve been discussing.

  Win motions me to the small glass-top table at the other end of the room. He grabs his satchel and sits down perpendicular to me, putting out his cloth. “It’s very simple,” he says. “Jeanant, the one who made the weapon and brought it here, he left a message for Thlo, who’s like his second-in-command, that she’d receive if he didn’t make it. To explain his plan, and where he would hide the weapon if we needed to retrieve it. It had to be vague, of course, because the Enforcers could have intercepted it, but she says he alluded to France and times of rebellion.”

  My mind slips back to my world history course a couple years back. “That doesn’t really narrow it down. Just the first French revolution lasted a whole decade.”

  “I know,” Win says. “That’s why we didn’t know exactly where to look. He gave a few other clues, and like I said before, he intended to make little shifts to help us find the right time and place, but he still has to be careful about it. If the Enforcers discover where to look first and find the weapon before us . . .” He makes a gesture, pulling all his fingers into his palm and then flicking them outward like something bursting. “All his work would be lost. But that’s how you can help. You’ve obviously read at least a little about French history before.”

  He lifts the biggest fold of the cloth up as if it’s a laptop. When he squeezes the corners, it stays open like that. He speaks a low command in that unfamiliar language, and the display he used to program our destination yesterday glows on the lower half. He flicks through the data, his fingers manipulating the air above it as if weaving invisible strings, only occasionally touching the fabric. A faded white square comes into focus on the upper half, where the screen would be if it actually were a laptop and not a bunch of folded cloth.

  My jaw’s gone slack. I snap it shut as Win pushes the cloth-turned-computer toward me. The glowing outline of a traditional keyboard has formed on the lower half. The screen shows what looks like a normal browser window.

  “If you could look up the sort of websites you might have visited before, try to remember if any of them gave you that odd feeling—the whole page, or even better, one specific part . . .”

  “Oh,” I say, shaking off my shock. “Um, you remember I told you it’s mostly new things that give me the feelings? You can’t get ‘old’ on the Internet. I’m the weird one in my classes who goes to the library and looks up stuff in books.”

  “All right,” Win says. “Then you could look at the books you read before. That would accomplish the same thing.”

  “Maybe.” The whole point is that I read them because they don’t give me the feelings. But it can’t hurt to try. “And then what happens, if I find something?”

  “You tell me, and it’ll give me a head start on the trail Jeanant left,” Win says. “As soon as we’ve got his weapon, we can leave, finish his mission to destroy the generator, and no one will be able to make any more shifts down here.”

  Looking at his multifunctional piece of cloth, I’m starting to find the idea of scientists from another planet more plausible. And he made his plan sound perfect. That’s what starts the niggling doubt.

  I don’t really know which side he’s on, do I? He sounded determined yesterday, sure, but maybe his mission isn’t quite what he said. Maybe the Enforcers are the ones trying to stop his group from messing with Earth, and the rebels are the ones changing everything. The only shifts he’s mentioned have been ones he or this Jeanant guy made. Who knows what he’s really looking for during the French Revolution?

  “Can you prove it?” I say, thinking back to our conversation last night.

  “What?”

  “Can you prove it?” I repeat. “That if I can point you to some spot in history, whatever you do there is going to help protect Earth? That that’s really why you’re here?”

  Win looks genuinely startled, as if he can’t imagine how anyone could think otherwise, but then, he also looks like a genuine human being while claiming to be an alien. “You still don’t believe me,” he says.

  “I believe that you can travel through time,” I say. “I believe that someone’s playing around with history. Why should I believe that running around in revolutionary France isn’t just more of that?”

  He opens his mouth, and closes it again. Then his face brightens. “I can show you,” he says, grabbing the cloth-computer. “I can show you how much this matters to us—how committed we are to setting Earth free.”

  He tweaks something on the lower half of the computer, and the Internet browser disappears. “Everyone who joins our group watches this recording,” he continues, a note of reverence creeping into his voice. “It’s a—I suppose you could say a mission statement. From a speech Jeanant gave a couple years before he came here to see his plan through.”

  A clear image materializes on the screen. Win swivels it back toward me.

  The recording is zoomed in on a man, catching him from the waist up, in front of a pale marbled background dotted with small indents. The angled edge of a shape I can’t quite place—but somehow looks furniture-ish—bisects the lower right corner of the image. That and the thin, seamless but ripple-textured fabric of the shirt the guy’s wearing give me the prickling sense that this could really be from another world, though the guy looks as human as Win does.

  The guy—Jeanant, this leader Win’s been talking about—appears to be no older than his midtwenties. His curly
black hair drifts over the tops of his ears as he nods, the even light glowing off his bronze skin. But it’s the way he stands that fixes my gaze on him. From the straightening of his shoulders to the tilt of his head, he exudes a firm purposefulness, as if he’s exactly where he needs to be.

  Then he starts to speak, in a low voice that carries through the cloth’s invisible speakers in the choppy yet rolling syllables of what could be an alien language. After a second, a computerized English translation kicks in, its inflectionless tone blending into his voice.

  “It doesn’t matter where they were born, who their ancestors are, what’s written in their genetic code,” Jeanant says. “Every thinking, feeling conscious being deserves our respect. Every one of them deserves the chance to determine the course of his or her own life, without outside manipulation. Because no matter what some of us like to tell ourselves, they have their own minds with their own unique visions of the universe, that are just as valid and meaningful as anyone else’s.”

  He punctuates his point with a sweep of his hands.

  “Look at these people, and remember they could have been our friends,” he says. “They could be our teachers, in a far better way than we use them now. But not until we make things right and release them from what’s all but slavery. And we can. There may not be very many of us, but if we’ve learned anything from all our centuries of study, it’s that a small group can make a difference. Again and again, across innumerable points of data, we’ve seen it happen. Every one of us in this room is valid and deserving too, and, working together, we can become something powerful. If we have the courage to take that chance, to question those who would keep us locked in the same old patterns, we can become something so incredible that we’ll set all our lives on a completely different course—one we can be proud of. Can anyone here think of a better goal than that?”

  His words reverberate through me. No, I think. That’s what I’ve wanted more than anything, for as long as I can remember: to be powerful enough to fix all the inexplicable wrongs around me. To set my life on a new course without them.