Earth & Sky

by Megan Crewe

  I touch Win’s back, wanting to express somehow that I’m with him.

  Jule rolls his eyes, but his discomfort shows in the dampening of his voice. “I’m not saying I think that’s a good plan.”

  “And Thlo?” Win says. “What would she think?”

  “I’m pretty sure she’s smart enough to come up with a few alternatives,” Jule replies, but I don’t find his tone completely convincing.

  Apparently Win doesn’t either. “I can make sure of that if we go get the rest of the weapon first. Once we have everything, there’s no mission to jeopardize.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” Jule says. “You expect me to go back to Thlo and tell her I let you run off with some Earthling? Or to lie to her?”

  “It’s for Thlo too,” I say. “The Enforcers—they’ve managed to track our time cloth. If we jump to wherever Thlo and the others are, we’ll be leading the Enforcers straight to them.”

  “Then we’ll go in mine,” Jule says, still addressing Win.

  “It’ll only hold two,” Win says. “We can’t just leave Skylar here.” “It’s as safe a place as any, for her and us. As long as . . . She’s from the twenty-first? You did check what she’s carrying, right?”

  “What?”

  Jule turns to me. “What’s in that purse?”

  I inch back, my hands tightening around it. “Nothing important.”

  “Right.” He steps forward as if to take it, and Win shoves in front of him. Jule raises his arm to elbow Win to the side. Win’s braced himself for a fight, but Jule is bigger, and probably stronger, and Win was half dead a couple hours ago.

  “Stop it!” I say, and thrust my purse toward Jule. He backs off of Win immediately, accepting the purse with surprising grace.

  “Thank you,” he says. Then he fishes inside, pulls out my phone, and tosses it on the floor.

  “Hey!” I cry, but he’s already smashing it under his heel. He gives the screen a few good stomps, until the glass is splintered and the shell cracked, the insides spilling out. Then he scoops it up and shoves the mangled pieces through what looked like a vent low in the wall. There’s an electric sizzle. I guess I’m never seeing that phone again.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Win protests.

  “If you want her to stay alive, you should have,” Jule says, wiping his hands together and handing my purse back to me. “Don’t you know what these twenty-first-century types are like? Calls and texts and photos and video—who knows what she’s already recorded that’d get us in trouble?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me to try, but I realize he’s right. I kept telling Win it didn’t matter what I knew because no one would believe me. But if I had pictures, video footage, hard evidence—that could be another story.

  I glance at the vent, my fingers twitching. But if giving up my phone will convince the rest of Win’s group I’m safe, I can deal.

  “All right,” Jule says. “Let’s go.”

  “We’re not—” Win starts, and the wail of a siren cuts him off.

  I wince as it blares through the room again. The lights overhead flash yellow. Win ducks past me to grab the time cloth, tugging free the thread that was charging it.

  “Not so safe,” he says to Jule. “Skylar told you, they’ve been tracing us.” He hesitates. “We have to go. But we could switch cloths. You could make a few jumps in ours, lead the Enforcers on a chase, while Skylar and I go get the rest of the weapon, and then we can all meet back at the agreed spot.”

  For a second, Jule looks as though he’s considering it. But then that second becomes two, and three, and his face hardens. I can see his answer there. Win touches my arm.

  “Forget it,” he says. He rushes past Jule to the entrance, and I dash after him. Jule spins around, grabbing at Win as the door gasps open. He’s not fast enough. We flee up the steps. Win scrabbles at the outer door and it swings open too. I slam it back in Jule’s face before racing after Win into the street.

  Win lists to one side, and then motions me across a square with a small, silent fountain. We’ve almost reached the shadows of the carriage house on the other side, Jule’s footsteps thundering after us, when Kurra stalks around the side of the building.

  Win skids to a stop, swaying, as her weapon jerks up. He whips out the time cloth. There’s a shout behind us—Jule?—and Kurra’s head twitches to the left, and, without thinking, just reacting on panic, I swing my purse at her gun hand with as much force as I can manage.

  It knocks the blaster off-target. But Kurra’s other hand snatches at the purse strap. She yanks me toward her. Win pulls the cloth around us as I yank back, and the strap snaps.

  “No!” My bracelet—Noam’s beads—

  The purse disappears through the flaps. I almost lunge after it, but Win’s arm is around me, with a rasp in my ear. “Skylar.”

  I catch myself just before I stumble out. The cloth lurches, and the night, the rain-slick cobblestones, Jule, and Kurra all jolt away.

  27.

  Win coughs, loud enough that I can hear him over the shrieking of the air outside. He stumbles when we touch down, catching himself against the wall of the time-cloth tent. The daylight streaking in from outside reveals a feverish flush that’s risen under his skin. He clears his throat.

  The loss of the purse—and my bracelet—is still wrenching through me, but my concern overwhelms it.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. What if the little sleep he got wasn’t enough? What if the confrontation with Jule and that short run were too much for him? He might be bleeding again, inside, and I’d never know.

  Win sniffs, and says, “I’ll be all right. It’s mostly just the cold now. It was fascinating for a moment, but I think I’m ready for it to be over.”

  I have to catch my smile at the flippant irritation in his voice. Okay, so he’s not dying. “Good luck with that,” I say. “It’ll probably be at least a week before it’s gone.” He looks so stricken, I can’t help laughing. So much for scientific curiosity.

  “If Earthlings can survive that long, I suppose I can too,” he says, the corner of his mouth curving up. He leans forward, peering beyond the cloth. We’re on a grassy meadow, glinting modern buildings peeking over the tops of the nearby trees. “I didn’t have time to put much thought into our destination. I suppose we should find that battle before Kurra catches up with us again.”

  “That guy, Jule, do you think he’s going to come after us?”

  “He can’t,” Win says brightly. “He has no idea where we’re going. And no one in our group has tracing tech like the Enforcers do. We won’t see him again unless we want to.”

  I guess there are some benefits to a lack of supplies. Jule doesn’t strike the same terror in me that Kurra does, but he wasn’t exactly pleasant to be around either.

  “Thanks,” I say. “For . . . defending me with him.”

  Win glances at me. “You’re just as much a part of this mission as the rest of us now,” he says. “You deserve to be able to see it through. And . . . I meant what I said to him. No one is going to hurt you, no matter what I have to do.”

  Though his hand quivers where he’s holding it by the data panel, there’s a determined light in his eyes. He’s sick, and he’s obviously still weak, but in that moment I have no doubt he’ll get us through this. An odd warmth spreads through my chest.

  “Thanks,” I say again. It doesn’t seem like enough, but I can’t think of any other words that are right. I touch the back of his shoulder, gently, like I did when he shielded me from Jule. A soft smile touches his lips. He reaches out to rest his hand on my shoulder in return. This time I have no urge to flinch away.

  “All we have to do is pull this last bit off, and you’ll be safe for good,” he says. He turns back to the display. “Americans and Natives, British fort, fallen trees, right?”

  “Yep,” I say. “And somewhere in the northeast.”

  He flicks through the glowing characters. “Ah,” he says after a bit, with a
noise of approval. “There we go. The Battle of Fallen Timbers. Ohio, near Fort Miamis. August 20, 1794 AD.”

  • • •

  When we step out into the Ohio forest, the blanket of humid heat that washes over us is a shock. It fills my lungs and congeals against my skin. Only pale sunlight drifts through the bright green foliage of the trees. As we look around, a sluggish breeze passes over us, not lively enough to cool the sweat already beading on my skin. I long to peel off the Traveler shirt I put on over my own, but I’m sure I’ll look out of place in my T-shirt.

  “The Native soldiers will engage with the Americans in about an hour,” Win says, repeating the information the cloth’s display gave him. “That should give us time to locate the spot Jeanant meant for us to find before ‘blood is spilled where the trees were laid low.’ The fallen trees are over that way”—he waves—“at the edge of a river. And that way”—another wave—“is Fort Miamis. Where the Natives will run when they’re overwhelmed, and be refused shelter.”

  It’s not like the other periods Jeanant picked. In France, in Vietnam, the underdog was going to win, drive back the people trying to oppress them. This battle . . . The Natives are going to be beaten, and beaten again and again all across the country, until they give up their claim to almost all the land they once considered home.

  Maybe Jeanant wanted to remind his followers of that too. That standing up to a greater power isn’t always easy, and you don’t always win.

  The thought casts a gloom over my spirits. I hug myself despite the heat. “Which way do you think we should go?”

  “The message says, ‘Follow the path of anger.’ Sounds like a lot of people around here are going to be angry.” Win frowns. “Maybe the fort? I’d be pretty upset if my allies turned their backs on me.”

  “We might as well check it out,” I say.

  We start off, picking our way between the narrow tree trunks.

  Only a few shrubs and patches of grass sprout here and there amid the dead leaves coating the ground. Win wheezes a little after we clamber over a log, but the terrain isn’t too rough. This forest is a lot less dense than the jungle in Vietnam. It reminds me of the state park my parents and I used to visit—the one from the painting Win admired.

  Because, like Jeanant said, this place is pretty close to my part of the country. For all I know, I could run into my own ancestors here—or Bree’s, or Lisa’s . . . or almost any of my classmates’ or neighbors’, really.

  My heart skips a beat. What if we do? What if we do, and we shift something here? What will that do to my present? Angela should be safe—her parents were born in the Philippines—but I don’t know about anyone else. Could I accidentally write someone out of existence? My friends? Noam? Me?

  I yank my thoughts back to the world around me. My fingers itch for the bracelet I no longer have. I curl them into the folds of my skirt.

  Five woodpecker holes dotting the trunk of that maple. Crisscrossing roots forming triangles and pentagons in the dirt.

  I’m here for all those people, the people whose lives are connected to this place. Here to protect them from shifts, not make new ones. I have to focus on that.

  Win slows and points to a stretch of cleared land up ahead. We creep toward the edge of the clearing.

  In the middle of the field stands an earthen rampart, surrounded by a low shadow I realize is a trench. It’s bordered by the pale tips of pointed stakes. The sight of them jerks me back to the workers carving their bamboo poles along the Bach Dang River. I blink, and the heaped blockades of dirt and rock on the Paris streets flash through my mind.

  There are other soldiers standing behind this rampart, along the wooden walls of the fort. The rising sun is glinting off their tall, black helmets and the muzzles of their rifles. The light catches in my eyes, and thousands of years of history collide. Booming cannon fire, the sizzle of Kurra’s blaster, the crackle of a pistol in a marsh.

  Everywhere we go, every when, it’s so much the same.

  I grip the branch next to me, absorbing the dips and ridges and whorls in the bark. We’re almost done. Just a little further, and then I can go back to living in one place, in one time. And I’ll know no one else is wandering around changing our history either.

  “Fort Miamis?” I make myself say.

  Win nods. “Doesn’t look like it’d be easy to get inside, or even to get close. I don’t think Jeanant would pick a place where we’d be so likely to be seen. Do you notice anything about it?”

  I squint at the ditch, at the soldiers patrolling the walls, and shake my head.

  “Well, let’s look a little closer, and then we’ll move on.” He steps forward to skirt a cluster of bushes.

  Apparently the sentries have already spotted us despite our sheltered position. The second Win moves into clearer view, a rifle twitches and a shot thunders across the field. Win throws himself backward, and I leap to help him. The bullet thuds into the trunk of an alder just a few feet away. We scramble deeper into the forest.

  “So friendly,” Win says with a cough.

  “I guess we’d better avoid them completely,” I say. I don’t know why the soldiers would be shooting at us. I guess we must look a little strange in this clothing—or the two of us together, me pale and Win darker—or they might have caught something we said about getting in the fort and taken it as a threat.

  It’s easy to see other people as hardly people at all when you’re watching them from a distance.

  “To the fallen trees, then,” Win says, motioning to our left.

  We head off, the dry leaves crackling under our feet. “We don’t want to rush in there,” Win goes on. “The Native army will be waiting right near the place where the storm hit the trees, expecting the debris to slow the American army down.”

  “And they probably won’t be any more friendly than those soldiers,” I finish for him. I get that Jeanant had a theme he was trying to emphasize, but I can’t help thinking his people, himself, me, this whole mission, would have been safer if he weren’t constantly sending us into battlefields. Maybe the chaos makes it easier to cover up shifts, and offers more action to distract the Enforcers chasing him. Still, we’d be a lot more likely to get through it alive and carry out his plan if he’d decided to hide the weapon parts somewhere and some-when more peaceful.

  “Do you think . . .” I start, glancing around, and my voice trails off. Something about the trees—the angle of a branch, the flicker of a leaf?—sends a ripple of wrongness through me. My gut knots.

  “What?” Win says.

  “I think something’s been shifted,” I say. “I don’t know what. Over there.”

  I point, the wrongness shivering over my skin. A chill rises through me.

  I have to keep it together without the beads, my usual trick. I close my eyes, picturing Noam sitting down on the couch with five-year-old me at our grandparents’ house instead of heading out the door. Picturing the generator orbiting above us exploding in a burst of flame.

  The feeling recedes.

  Win cocks his head. “Do you think it’s Jeanant or the Enforcers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He starts off in the direction I indicated, and I trail behind him. We’ve only made it a few steps when a figure moves into view between the trees up ahead. No, three figures: three people in brown Traveler clothes that almost blend into the trunks, heading our way. I catch a flicker of ice-pale skin amid the shadows, and bite my tongue.

  Win’s already pulling his satchel open, a curse on his breath. Kurra darts forward, waving her companions along with one hand while raising the slim black shape of her blaster. I scoot close to Win as he tosses the time cloth around us. The Enforcers fade into a haze of motion beyond the tent walls.

  Just as Win brings up the display, a horribly familiar twang reaches my ears. A jolt of light sparks against the tent wall, right in front of me. I yelp, and the cloth heaves. Win swears again as it hits the ground.

  I swivel. We’re
still in the forest. All I can see is the wavering forms of trees around us, but twigs are snapping underfoot somewhere nearby. Win smacks the panel, smacks it again, and the cloth doesn’t move another inch.

  “Win?” I say shakily.

  “It’s going to take a few minutes for the circuits to realign,” he says, looking pained. “I’m sorry. It gave us about seventy feet, but we’ll have to—”

  Back where the snapping sounded, a sharp voice rings out, with a word I don’t recognize and yet can clearly understand. It’s a call to action.

  Win grabs my hand. “Run!”

  He drags the cloth down and dashes forward, and my feet follow him automatically. We crash through the underbrush, duck beneath a low-hanging branch, and dodge around a mossy heap of stones. Win’s breath rasps. He’s squeezing his arm against his side, the side where he was bleeding just a few hours ago. It must be hurting him. He keeps running, weaving us back and forth so it’ll be harder for the Enforcers to get a clear shot, but I’m pulling ahead of him.

  I can’t hear our pursuers over the sound of our feet, but I don’t dare look back. My ankle is starting to throb, and it’s taking all my focus to keep my strides steady. The thick air burns my throat. Win trips on a root and I haul him upright. He makes a sound as if he’s trying to speak, but it’s lost in his heaving breaths.

  We swerve past a thicket of saplings. The cloth Win didn’t have time to fold streams over his arm. We can’t stop until we’re sure it’ll work—as soon as we do we’re easy targets again.

  I spot an immense oak ahead of us, wide enough to give us both shelter for a moment to check the cloth. Another twang sings out behind us, followed by the hiss of sizzling sap. Win jerks me to the right. We leap a shallow creak and veer around a birch. My ankle wobbles under me. I grit my teeth, tugging Win toward the oak. I think a flicker of acknowledgment crosses his face. My hand tightens on his forearm.