by Megan Crewe
He didn’t mean here. He meant some other place, some other time. Another trip in the cloth—and another, and another—to more worlds I was never meant to be a part of. Worlds where nothing will be more wrong than me.
My stomach clenches. “So we’ve barely gotten started,” I say. “You only asked if I’d come to France. You just assumed I’d follow you around wherever else you needed to go?”
“Well, I—” He looks up at me, and his voice falters. “You said you’d help.”
“You made it sound like it was just this one place. Like we’d poke around in Paris a bit and then head home, no big deal.”
His mouth opens. I can actually see him struggling to hold that innocent expression in place. It doesn’t work. His gaze flicks away from me and back. And suddenly I understand.
“You knew I probably wouldn’t come if you told me everything,” I say. I was this shiny new shift-sensing tool he just had to bring with him, so he said what he thought would convince me and left out any other details that might have mattered. Who cares what I want if it gets the mission done?
“I was trying to keep things simple—”
“You decided not to tell me the whole truth.”
And it worked. Here I am. With no way to get home unless he takes me.
My pulse has started thumping. I reach for my bracelet, for the comfort of numbers, but the thought of trying to pull myself together while he’s sitting there watching me like I’m a freak show act just makes me feel more sick. Turning on my heel, I stalk out of the room.
“Skylar!” Win calls after me, but I ignore him. I march back to the wide hall, not stopping until I’ve reached one of the museum’s tall windows.
This one offers a view over the city instead of the inner courtyard. The guns and cannons are momentarily silent, but a couple streams of smoke are still winding up toward the clouds over the carved stone rooftops.
I lean my forehead against the glass, absorbing the scene below as I rotate the beads. I can make out twelve scrawny trees along the side of the boulevard. Bright green foliage drifting in the breeze. Muddled patterns of soot or mud or some other dark liquid smeared across the cobblestones. A body in a red-and-blue uniform sprawled by the corner, unmoving.
What am I doing here?
The answer comes, unbidden, with the memory of the defiance on Jeanant’s face as he spoke back against the Enforcers. I’m not just a passive variable in some alien fishbowl experiment. I’m fixing the world. I’m righting the wrongs.
I just can’t help thinking I’d be doing a much better job of it with Jeanant as my guide.
I hear Win walking up behind me, but I don’t bother to look over. He stops beside the window.
“I’m sorry,” he says stiffly. “Meeting you, it was a chance I’d never have expected to get, a chance to make our mission so much easier. I didn’t want to lose that. But I’ve never done anything like this before—bringing along an Earthling—I was never supposed to. I didn’t know how much I should say.”
“You think it’s been easy for me?” I say. “At least you’ve done some of this before. I did want to help, and I know how important finding this weapon is to you, but it wasn’t fair to ask me to make that decision without telling me what we were actually getting into.”
“I know. I am sorry. And you know of it now: three more time periods, three more parts of the weapon.” He leans back against the wall. At the edge of my vision, I see his head turn as he surveys the hall. His tone lightens. “It hasn’t been all bad, has it? You did get a trip to Paris out of it. A Paris no one else you know will ever get to see.”
Part of me wants to smack him, but a short laugh lurches out. “I guess so.” I can’t say I wish I hadn’t seen this Paris. That it doesn’t give me a little thrill to think that I might walk into the Louvre someday in my present, and be able to see how it’s changed in the last two centuries.
“Do you want me to take you back?” Win asks.
I look at him then. His jaw is set, his mouth pressed into a flat line, as if he wishes he hadn’t said that. But he did. Even though completing his mission could depend on the fact that I can talk to Jeanant, that I can sense the shifts.
In a way, that means more than anything else he’s said the entire time I’ve known him.
The thought of home sends a wave of longing through me, but I force myself to pause. I parse out my anger, my sense of betrayal, the anxiety underneath. Nothing I’ve been through so far has been outright unbearable. My thumb runs over the bracelet’s beads. I think I can handle more.
I don’t think I can handle going back to living my old life, feeling every little shift and knowing what they mean, knowing Win’s group is still struggling to stop them—struggling more because I gave up and let fear get the better of me. Jeanant’s even more out of place than I am, a galaxy’s length away from home and years apart from any of his own people, and he hasn’t let that stop him.
I drag in a deep breath, trying to ease the jitters that rise up at the thought of leaping even farther into unfamiliar history. Maybe I’m not going to stop, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask for something. “No,” I say. “Not like that. But, before we go wherever and whenever we need to next—I think I’d feel better if you did take me home first, just for a few minutes. So I can . . . catch my breath.” And regain my balance before my world’s thrown out of whack all over again.
“And then you’d come with me?” Win says.
“And then I’d come with you,” I agree. “We’ve still got my planet to save, don’t we?”
He breaks into a smile. “Indeed we do.”
15.
I settle myself in the corner of the window ledge. The hard stone braces me. “Do you know what our next stop will be?” I ask Win.
He holds up the slab of alien plastic. “Not yet,” he says. “It’s like his message to Thlo: kind of a riddle, in case the Enforcers get a hold of it. The first part isn’t too hard. He says to take the number of years for that first message to reach us, and then repeat them two hundred and sixty-eight times since zero. Thlo’s said that the message came exactly three and a half years after he disappeared, so—”
“938,” I say automatically. Win blinks at me. “Numbers are my thing, remember? That’s the year we need to go to? AD, I guess—that’d probably be what the ‘since zero’ means.”
He gives me a slow smile. The smile that makes it hard to remember he’s not a human boy, but an alien. “Definitely,” he agrees. “The rest is more obscure, though. ‘Where the little dragon scares off the big dragon. The sign will point at the sky.’”
“Dragons,” I say. “So . . . somewhere in medieval Britain, then? That’d be the right time period.”
“Actually,” Win says with a patronizing air that obliterates any goodwill the smile bought him, “dragons are much more closely linked to many Asian cultures than they are to Europe. That’s more likely what he was referring to.”
I restrain myself from rolling my eyes. “Okay, can you get more specific? Asia’s a big continent.”
“Give me a second. There’s something about that year . . .”
“Do you think it’ll be another revolution?” I ask. “That’s sort of Jeanant’s theme, right? The line about the dragons does sound like some kind of uprising.”
“Of course. That’ll help narrow it down.” He pulls out his time cloth and unfolds it into its laptop-like shape.
“You get Internet access here?” I say skeptically as he sets it on the ledge of the next window over.
“No,” he says. “But there’s plenty of information stored in the cloth itself. It’s tricky to find anything quickly, sifting through all of it, but whatever we need to know, it’s in here somewhere.”
“What about the rest of your group?” I ask. “You have proof that you’re on the right trail now. Shouldn’t you let them know?”
He pauses, the glow of the display casting a greenish tint on his golden-brown skin. Then he shakes his hea
d with a jerk. “No need yet. We’re doing fine on our own. If we can catch up with Jeanant at the next location, we might be able to finish everything right there.”
I don’t see why having some extra help wouldn’t still be a good thing, but right then a cannon booms outside the window, making the wall shudder. Win winces as I leap back. Someone is shooting right at the building.
“I expect this place will hold,” Win remarks, turning back to the screen. Pulse skittering, I edge to my window and peer out, thinking I should suggest he do his information searching at my house.
The shadows across the street from the Louvre are lengthening as the sun sinks below the distant rooftops. I can’t make out anyone moving between them. There’s just a pair of birds circling each other against the sky, where one of the streams of smoke has faded into a wispy thread, and—
There’s a new line of smoke snaking up between the other two, thick and gray. The instant my eyes catch it an uncomfortably familiar tremor of wrong, wrong, wrong pierces my mind. My skin goes clammy.
“Win,” I say. “Win!”
“What?”
For a second, I can only press my finger against the glass as the wrongness chokes me. My other hand fumbles for my bracelet. “There,” I manage. “That smoke. I think something’s shifted.”
Win gazes past me. One of those alien curses falls from his mouth.
“That’s the direction we came from,” I say. “Did we make something—”
“If we were the ones who made it happen, you’d never have seen anything different,” he says. “But maybe we shifted something else. The Enforcers must have picked up our trail somehow.”
The words have only just left his mouth when the band around my ankle starts to shiver. “They’re close!” I say, flinching away from the window.
Win dashes back to the cloth computer. “I’ve almost narrowed it down,” he says. “Just give me a few seconds.”
He flicks through the data on the display. I check both ends of the hall. The band’s only vibrating lightly right now, but that could change at any moment.
“Can’t we get out of here, and then you can finish looking? What if we don’t have a few seconds?”
“If I stop, I’ll have to start all over—there! The Bach Dang River.” He reaches out to me with one hand, the other yanking the time cloth into its tentlike form. “Come on!”
My gaze slips past the window, and catches a movement outside. A pale figure flanked by two darker ones, marching across the boulevard toward our wing of the museum. The instant my eyes snag on them, the pale woman glances up at my window. Her barked command carries through the glass, and Win grasps my arm. I scramble with him beneath the folds of the cloth.
“She’s outside—she saw me,” I babble as the flaps fall shut.
“Well, in a moment we won’t be here,” Win says, swiping at the inner display. “Hold on.”
I barely have time to wonder, Hold on to what? before the cloth jumps, and my stomach heaves with it. I stumble into Win, clapping my hand over my mouth to contain a surge of nausea. And then it’s over.
Win swears under his breath and pokes at the display again. I stare through the translucent walls, and recognize the same wide hall of the Louvre, the row of busts, the high windows. We haven’t moved more than ten feet.
“What—”
“Let me figure it out!” Win snaps.
The cloth lurches. I manage to keep my balance, but my head is spinning. The blurred outer walls of the museum rise around us. We’ve only Traveled into the courtyard.
An older model, Win said before, when the jumps were rough. Has it died? Win slams his hand against the display, but the cloth doesn’t move at all this time. He leans forward, his head bowed, muttering something under his breath. It sounds almost like he’s praying. I hug myself, braced for the pale woman to burst out of the doorway across from us. Maybe we should get out and run for it.
“You will work,” Win growls at the display, as if he can intimidate the cloth into functioning properly. His fingers flit over the characters. And the world around us finally whisks away.
My eyes squeeze shut. The floor beneath me shudders and the air squeals. This must be what it’s like to be tossed up in the middle of a hurricane. But at least it feels like we’re actually going somewhere this time.
We come to ground with a jolt and a ringing in my ears. Only a dim light penetrates the fabric walls past the buildings looming close on either side, but the rumble of car traffic and the beat of a hip-hop tune filter in with it. Not the Louvre, or Paris, anymore. We’ve left the Enforcers far behind. I let out my breath.
“Third time’s a charm,” I murmur. “Where are we?”
Win consults the display. His stance relaxes. “Back in your city,” he says. “The afternoon we left.”
“Oh,” I say. “I was thinking, like, my house, or . . .”
“I know,” Win says. “But . . . I didn’t expect the Enforcers to catch up with us that quickly.”
“We must have made another shift at the museum, right?” I say, but even as the words are coming out, I frown. What shift could we have made that would have entered the Enforcers’ records somehow? The only person we encountered was that guard, who didn’t even see us. And yet the pale woman seemed to know exactly where—and when—to find us. “What else could it be?”
“I don’t know,” Win says, his voice tight. “They shouldn’t be able to unscramble the signal on the cloths after what Isis did. We should be okay. I just thought it was better to take precautions. If they do figure out how to track us, jumping to your house would lead them straight there.”
The thought of the pale woman standing at my front door sends a chill through me. “We can still go there; it’s only a small chance,” Win continues, but I shake my head.
“No.” Seeing my room for a few minutes isn’t worth even a tiny risk. This will have to do.
“Let me know when you’re ready to move on,” Win says. Preferably soon, I can tell he’s thinking. With the idea of the Enforcers following us hanging over me, coming home isn’t quite as comforting as I’d hoped.
“Why don’t we dox the Enforcers, or them us?” I ask as we step out of the cloth into the alley.
“The group looking for me, they’re from the same present I am,” Win says. “Our timelines match up, for the most part. There’s a little wiggle room: if it takes them half an hour to notice a shift we accidentally made, they can’t show up there at the same moment we made the shift, or the half-hour difference in our ‘bubbles’ will push them away. Which is why they didn’t show up the second we walked into the coffee shop the other day. And why we’ll want to avoid staying anyplace for very long.”
Right. I touch the backs of the buildings as we walk toward the street. The bricks and concrete are reassuringly real, but not too real. I peer out onto a shopping strip that’s vaguely familiar. I think it’s near Mom’s gym . . . Ah! When I went in with her for Take Your Children to Work Day a few years back, we ate lunch at that cafe down the street. It had that Black Forest cake she swooned over.
The memory settles me more firmly into place. The people walking by are a blur of jeans and modern jackets, running shoes and stiletto heels, cell phones in hands or at ears. The air I breathe in is laced with exhaust and a salty-greasy smell from the fast food restaurant next to us. The tension in my chest eases slightly.
This is my world. Still here, just like it’ll still be waiting after wherever we go next. I reach into my purse, curling my fingers around my phone. I could call Angela, or Lisa, or Bree—Mom or Dad, even—if I wanted to. But I don’t know what I’d say, or if I might make some inadvertent shift that would definitely bring the Enforcers this way. Still, it’s nice knowing I could.
Win shifts his weight from foot to foot in silent impatience. I only asked for a few minutes here, but now that I’m back, surrounded by the sights and smells and sounds that tell me I belong, the thought of leaving this all behind again is p
ainful.
I could stay here after all. I could just walk away.
And leave Win to face the Enforcers alone. And go back on my word. We’ve still got my planet to save. Who knows if this city will even be here tomorrow if the other Travelers keep making their experimental shifts?
I press my hand against the side of the restaurant, letting the sense of my city wash over me. The sense of the world I’m defending. Then I turn back to Win.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m ready.” And this time I believe it.
We duck back into the shadows, and into the time cloth. As the folds close around me, I remember those first halting jumps when we were trying to leave the Louvre.
“They didn’t do something to damage your cloth, did they?” I say.
“What?”
“The Enforcers. It didn’t really jump the first couple times.”
“Oh,” Win says. “No, it was just being finicky. Like . . . a car stalling. I just had to get it going and then it was fine. We made it here, didn’t we?”
I’d rather we’d made it with a brand-new, top-of-the-line time cloth that didn’t stall. I’d guess that’s what the Enforcers are working with. At least Win doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem that’ll get worse.
He must already have programmed our next destination in, because he only has to tap the panel before we’ve lifted off. I’m almost relieved to feel the shaking, spinning motion that says we’re really Traveling. Bracing myself, I squeeze down my nausea.
It feels like a while before we hit the ground. Trees stand around us, banding the sides of the tent.
“The hills over Vietnam’s Bach Dang River, 938 AD,” Win announces. “On the eve of the great rebellion. The battle takes place on the river, so whatever trail Jeanant’s left us to the next part of the weapon, it’s probably down there.”
“Why didn’t we go straight there?” I ask, and then realize the answer on my own. “Because if the Enforcers trace the jump, that would lead them right to us and Jeanant.”
“They shouldn’t be able to,” Win says, like he did before. “Just a precaution. But we should still get moving.”
