by Megan Crewe
I crouch there, heart thudding. She marches straight in, past me, toward something at the left. A stairwell. Her footsteps clatter up the stairs.
Crap. I stand up, wavering on my feet. She’s figured out Win is here—somehow. Maybe they have better tech than even Win realized. And now she’s between me and him. I dart a look toward the door, but for all I know there are more Enforcers waiting outside.
Win saw me come in. If I head toward him, maybe he can evade Kurra and reach me like he did by the caves.
I creep to the stairwell through a wide room floored with cheap tiles and scattered with the remains of an office area: a few laminate desks and plastic chairs, a tipped-over cubicle divider, a scrawl of crimson spray paint on the wall. Given the broken door, we’re obviously not the first people to have made illicit use of the space. Inching up the stairs, I can’t hear Kurra above me. She must have already gone out onto one of the upper floors.
If I’m lucky, she didn’t know exactly which one Win’s on, and I can sneak right past her to him.
I steal up toward the fifth floor as quickly and quietly as I can manage. I’ve just passed the second-floor landing when a yell carries from above. Another voice responds, too muffled for me to decipher. I push myself onward, breath held. There’s another exchange, and then a sound I’d recognize anywhere. The out-of-tune twang of an Enforcer’s weapon, piercing the air.
I freeze. Another shout reaches me, loud enough that I can make out the words.
“You’re supposed to be protecting Kemya,” Win’s saying. “Why aren’t you there instead of worrying about what happens on Earth?”
His voice is ragged, as if it’s taking all the effort he has in him just to project it. He’s already tired out—from the recent run here, from evading Kurra, and maybe her colleagues too. Why is he talking at all? His voice is going to draw them right to . . .
Oh. It’s for me. To draw me to him. I swallow thickly. He’s putting himself in even more danger so I can find him.
Kurra’s stilted voice yells back. “Why are you worrying about what happens here?” She pauses. “You’re almost surrounded. I can see you—just a little dot on my screen. You may as well give yourself up.”
I edge up the stairs. Her screen—her tracking device. But she still doesn’t know I’m here. She probably doesn’t even suspect the girl she’s seen him with is human. Traveling with me is forbidden, after all. I guess that’s one small advantage.
“You’re giving up your life for people who are just shadows,” Kurra says. “Why do they deserve your loyalty more than Kemya?”
“We’re the ones who made them this way,” Win says. “What we did to them, what we’re still doing—it isn’t right.”
“Most of Kemya would disagree with you,” Kurra retorts. Her voice is coming from somewhere across the fourth floor. She must have caught Win on his way down to meet me.
Neither Win nor she nor any other Enforcer is in sight from the fourth-floor landing. There’s a lot more furniture here than below. A mess of gray desks and dividers blocks off my view of most of the room. Whatever company owned the building must have gone under, and decided it’d cost more to haul out the furniture than leave it. I squeeze between two dividers pushed at awkward angles to each other, straining my ears and my eyes in the dim light.
“They haven’t been here,” Win says, somewhere to my left. “They don’t understand. If they did . . .” His voice quavers, and cuts off. My stomach flips over in the time it takes for him to find it again. “No one back home would want their lives controlled this way.”
I veer toward him, staying crouched and setting my feet carefully amid the bits of glass from a shattered desktop. My ankle, the one I injured in Vietnam, twinges.
Kurra gives a hoarse chuckle. “You don’t think we have our lives controlled, one way or another, on Kemya? Have you made every choice in your life perfectly freely?” Her voice bounces off the walls, the low ceiling, but I think it’s more to my right. Good. I can still hope to get to him first.
“It’s not the same,” Win says.
I skirt a tipped-over desk and step across a scattering of faded printouts in what seems to be the middle of the room. Several of them are stained with splotches of yellow. The scent of old cat urine hangs in the air.
“No,” Kurra agrees. “Because Earth belongs to us. The colonists who volunteered to settle on this insignificant planet knew what that meant. All you’re doing is defiling their sacrifice.”
What? I halt in midstep, catching my balance against the cracked seat of a chair.
“Maybe the original colonists agreed to participate,” Win says. “But their descendants weren’t given a choice. Why should these people keep paying for the decisions their ancestors made hundreds of generations ago?”
The original colonists . . . Hundreds of generations ago . . . He can’t really mean—
I scoot around a table. Footsteps rasp somewhere nearby. Kurra, or one of her companions?
Her reply rings out so clearly she can’t be more than ten feet away. “All of us live with what our ancestors did to Kemya. We keep paying for their mistakes. At least the first Earthlings came by choice and not through a careless accident.”
I don’t want to hear any more of this. I force myself to keep going. I have to find Win. There’s nothing else that matters right now.
Two dividers bent toward each other form a narrow passage. I slip down it. Win’s voice comes from just up ahead. “So we lost one choice, and they only got one.”
“I’m protecting my people; that is all I need to know,” Kurra returns.
I creep forward a few more steps. There’s a rasp of indrawn breath, and Win’s voice wavers out one more time, from what sounds like just the other side of the divider next to me.
“And I’m protecting all our people.”
I don’t let myself think about anything else—about what he’s saying, what she said, what it means. We have to get out of here. My lips part, but in the same moment papers crinkle on the floor behind me. Too close. They’ll hear me.
I reach out and rap my knuckles lightly against the plasticky surface of the divider. One, two, three. If they hear that, hopefully they’ll think it’s Win.
“Skylar?” Win whispers.
Again: one, two, three. I hesitate with my hand against the wall. The person behind me treads closer.
“Stay where you are!” a male voice snaps. The man I saw with Kurra before barges around the table into the makeshift passage. I scramble away with a yelp, eyes fixed on the weapon in his hand. The air blurs between us. Win tosses back the time cloth and whips a metallic marble from his hand.
It explodes in the Enforcer’s face with a shower of sparks. He winces, arms flying up, and the blaster twangs. Its bolt of light crackles against the unlit fluorescent panels in the ceiling, sending a shower of plastic shards down on us. One slices across my forehead.
The man keeps coming. Win lurches into me, spinning us around and pulling the cloth over us. The Enforcer is wiping his eyes, raising his weapon, as the derelict office dims and washes away like paint in the rain.
The cloth whirs and shrieks and deposits us in front of a row of pale houses with red roofs. I catch just a glimpse before we shudder away again amid an increasingly frantic series of pings. Win’s fingers dart over the data panel. He lets go of me to squeeze his other hand against his side. The flickering yellow light turns the dark patch on his shirt a deep orange.
He’s bleeding. Blood down his side, trickling over his hand.
25.
The cloth heaves to the ground, and Win staggers. I catch him as he turns back to the display.
“Win, you have to stop! You’re hurt.”
He’s panting. It wasn’t just fatigue I heard in his voice before, it was pain. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Just a cut. Stupid glass.”
His hand slips, and I see what he means. A thick chunk, its edge glitteringly sharp, is protruding through a tear in his shirt f
rom the flesh just below his ribs. The shot I heard on my way up the stairs, or an earlier one, must have caught one of the glass desks when he was near it. Blood is welling up around the chunk, soaking into the waist of his pants now. Nausea washes over me.
“You’re not fine! We have you to get to a hospital. You need someone to look after that now.”
He’s shaking his head. The idiot. He’d let himself bleed to death in front of me if he could. He almost did, wandering around that office with Kurra following him when he could have jumped away. I push between him and the data panel, digging Jeanant’s cloak from my purse.
“At a hospital . . . records . . . they could track us,” he mumbles as I try to wrap the thin fabric around his abdomen. He looks down at his side. At his bloody fingers. A gasp sputters out of him. “That doesn’t look so great. Okay.”
“I don’t care where we go,” I say. “As long as it’s someplace you can get help.”
He’s still staring at the wound. I nudge his hand away and hold the cloak in place. Blood immediately begins to seep through the fabric, but it’s something.
“She’s going to be mad,” Win says shakily. “Well . . . she was already going to be mad. And the cloth . . .”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. He reaches past me to tap the panel.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Somewhere good,” he says. “Everything’ll be fixed. I promise.”
It’s night where we touch down, on a cobblestone road lined with squat wooden buildings. The windows are dark, but the light of the near-full moon catches on puddles and moist patches on the stones. The smell of rot tinges the air. I grab the time cloth from Win as he tries to stuff it into his satchel one-handed. His other hand is clamped to his side, over the expanding red splotch on the cloak, and I don’t want him moving it.
“Where do we go from here?” I murmur.
Win jerks his head toward the end of the street and starts walking, a hitch in every step. His jaw is clenched. He swerves around the corner at the first cross street and heads down a narrower road. When his knees wobble, I grasp his elbow. His lips twist into a grimace. He keeps going, with my grip steadying him, past a courtyard and around a stable. But his steps are slowing to a hobble.
“Just a little farther,” he rasps. “Couldn’t let the Enforcers trace us too close.”
If I were strong enough, I’d carry him the rest of the way. As it is, I’m scared to get any closer—scared of bumping that slice of glass deeper into his side. My hold on his arm tightens as we scramble over a particularly uneven section of road. He stops, his gaze drifting, and then pushes onward.
“There,” he says.
We edge around the back of a house, and pause at a small wooden door in what appears to be a shed. The knob looks ordinary to me, but Win does something with it, pushes one spot and tugs another, spins it and jiggles it, and somewhere inside a bolt grates open. He shoves the door wide and lurches away from me, down the flight of stone steps on the other side.
“Close it behind you,” he mumbles. I do, bracing myself for the darkness, but the instant the door clicks into the frame, the deadbolt shoots over of its own accord, and a faint streak of artificial light flickers down the slanted ceiling.
Win’s already made it to the bottom of the stairs, where there’s another door almost identical to the one above. Only this one doesn’t even have a knob. He slides his fingernails along an indent in the middle, and flips open a thin flap in the wood to reveal a black metallic square. Clearing his throat, he presses his thumb against the square.
At the short phrase he says in his alien language, the door emits a quiet hum, followed by a sound like a sigh. Then it glides back into the wall. Win staggers on into the room on the other side.
I hurry after him. The door whispers shut behind me, so swiftly I flinch. The second it’s closed, three bright lights blaze on above our heads.
The room is smaller than my bedroom at home, and windowless, with a set of narrow bunks built into one wall, two wide cabinets on the other, and a spindly chair mounted on a large silvery cube at the opposite end from the door. Even though the place feels unlived in, there’s a fresh tang in the air and no hint of dust. Everything—the seamless mattresses on the bunks, the chair, the tiled floor—has the hard sheen of metal in muted shades of gray, peach, and brown. But the surface beneath my feet gives like linoleum, and when I set my hand on the edge of the upper bunk, the frame offers the warmer, slightly gritty texture of plastic, as if it’s some synthesis of steel and polyethylene. Which I guess it could be.
Win motions vaguely around him. “Safe house. Only for total, absolute emergencies. There’s supplies. Take anything you want.” He limps over to the chair and sinks into it with a wince, reaching behind its arm.
There must be a control there I can’t see, because a moment later a shimmering glow flows out of the block at the chair’s base, cocooning him. It seems to condense at the spot above his wound. He peels away the cloak with a shudder and tips his head back, closing his eyes.
Through the ragged gap in Win’s shirt, I can see the rough edges of broken skin, the blood seeping out around the jutting chunk of glass. His body looks so fragile. Fragile, and human. Human skin ripped back from human flesh, human blood coursing from human veins.
Colonists. Ancestors.
The memory of the conversation I overheard weighs on me. But I can’t ask him about it now.
As the glow continues to pool over the wound, the slice of glass starts to crumble and then wisp away, as if the light is somehow consuming it. Win’s blood bubbles up more quickly as the obstruction dissolves. I step toward him, afraid something’s gone wrong, but a second later the bleeding slows. His skin creeps over the exposed flesh. The glow intensifies, so bright it stings my eyes. When I look again, as the light dims, Win’s abdomen is smooth and whole again. Even the blood on his clothes has been whisked away.
Win keeps lying there, completely still and silent except for the stutter of his breath in his chest. The glow wavers and swirls, I suppose healing whatever was injured on the inside. I sit down on the lower bunk, watching. The minutes drag on.
What if he was too hurt for it to completely heal him? My fingers itch, and I reach into my purse for my bracelet, but the slick surface of the beads gives me none of their usual reassurance. To distract myself, I get up and walk over to the cabinets.
The first door opens to reveal six shelves, two stacked with bottles like the ones Win was carrying in his satchel, but tinted green instead of blue, and the others holding boxes stuffed with sandwich-size packets that feel waxy to my touch. Win said I could take anything, but who knows what’s in there?
The bottles seem safer. I pick up one and twist the lid open. The liquid fizzes lightly as I tip the bottle to my lips. I sip tentatively, then take a few deeper gulps, washing the traces of soured pecan pie from my mouth. The liquid has the same sweet taste as the blue stuff, but a prickle of some sort of spice as well—like cinnamon, but not quite.
I lower the bottle, feeling my heartbeat slow, my muscles relaxing. Maybe there’s something in there other than water and flavoring.
My newfound calm doesn’t stop me from jumping at an unexpected rustle. “Hey,” Win says softly, straightening up in the chair. The glow has dissipated. He twists at the torso, and then leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees, his body tilted a little to the left as if his right side is still tender. Then he sneezes, twice.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. His voice is faint, but nowhere near as wretched as when he was bleeding all over himself. “You know, I think somewhere in all this Traveling, I caught a—what do you call it?—a cold.” He sniffs experimentally, and chuckles. “We’re inoculated against everything serious, but even we haven’t come up with a proper vaccine for an ever-mutating virus. The one thing the med seat can’t cure.”
“Not much good then, is it?” I say without thinking, and Win out
right laughs. He pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Well, it fixed everything else.” He tips a little farther, and then pushes himself upright, his eyes suddenly intense. “You talked to your friend? Did she help you figure out Jeanant’s message?”
After what he just went through, he still cares more about the mission than anything else. He’d rather die than fail, I think with a twinge. Even though it’s my planet we’re saving. He’s risked so much more than I have, and I was ready to step away.
“There was a battle,” I say. “Between the American settlers and the Natives, near a British fort, somewhere a bunch of trees had fallen because of a storm. The name probably has something to do with that—with fallen trees.”
“That’s enough,” he says, a smile crossing his face. “And Jeanant said he’d leave the last two parts for us there?”
“He didn’t really have time to go into detail,” I say. “But when I asked him to give me everything we needed, he told me to go there.”
“That must be his plan, then. Hand me the cloth? I should be able to find the exact date easily now.”
I pick up the cloth where I left it in a heap on the bunk. When I turn, Win bends his head to cough, looking so tired despite his relief that I’m afraid he’s going to topple off the chair. So . . . vulnerable.
So human.
I stare at his face. Following the shape of his jaw, the angle of his brow, the curve of his cheeks. I never questioned it, just assumed it was a disguise. But he never looked fake, or felt it, or—in that moment, in the rain—tasted anything but real.
Win glances up at me. His forehead furrows when he catches my stare. Exactly as a human’s would.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I say.
The furrow deepens. “What?”
“I heard your conversation with Kurra,” I say. “Most of it, anyway. About . . . colonists from Kemya coming to Earth?”
“Ah,” he says, and his head droops again. “I forgot you didn’t know.” My fingers tense around the time cloth. “Well, I don’t,” I say. “You didn’t tell me.”
