Earth & Sky

by Megan Crewe

  He says it so matter-of-factly that a lump fills my throat. “No,” I say. He can’t mean it. Is the future really that inevitable? Or is he sure the same way he’s sure he can’t break from his plan and end his mission now?

  I grasp his hand again, squeezing it tight. Trying to remind him that this moment is just as real as his plan, as the fears in his head.

  “Please,” I say. “Take the chance. Let me have the rest of the weapon, and tell me a place to meet you, in my time. I’ll bring the parts to Thlo, and then I’ll go home, and I’ll come find you. I’ll help you, as much as you need. It can end that way instead.”

  If he says yes, I swear I’ll make it happen.

  For a second, I think he might change his mind. A glimmer lights behind his eyes that could be hope. He opens his mouth, and then jerks his hand away to clap it against the side of his arm. Against the outline of the alarm band he’s still wearing.

  “They’ve caught up with me,” he says.

  Before I can speak, he pushes me toward the shelter of a thicket. “Wait here,” he says urgently. “You’ll find the part, where I intended—over the hill, by the log—it’ll all follow the same plan. I have to, Skylar. For Kemya. For Earth. I’m not going to let you down.”

  But you are, I want to say. You are, right now. But he’s already hustling away.

  As I lean against the brambles, the slow burn of anger swells inside me. He’s so busy trying to be noble and stoic, he can’t see how he’s screwing up his own plan. Leaving the vaguest of messages, so even the woman who knew him best was stumped for weeks. Deciding he’d rather die than take the chance of finishing this now. He says he hates what his people have done to Earth, but he’s acting a lot like the rest of them, isn’t he? Too afraid of making mistakes, of deviating one inch from the available data, even when his stubbornness could mean we’ll never find the rest of the weapon. It’s not just his life on the line, but mine, and Win’s, and Thlo’s, and Jule’s—everyone who’s come here following him. Who believed that stuff he said about working together and setting off on new courses.

  My grip tightens around my makeshift cane. I’m going to make him see . . .

  I straighten up, and grass rustles underfoot somewhere behind me. I flinch back down.

  A moment later, two people move into view, mostly hidden in the depths of the forest. They both have short dark hair, which lets me hope briefly that they might be just more Native American scouts. But they veer closer to me as they stride past, and the sunlight catches off the fabric of their clothes. That plain canvaslike material all the Traveler outfits are made of.

  One of them, a woman, turns her head toward me. I stiffen, but her gaze passes by the thicket without pausing.

  These must be the Enforcers that set off Jeanant’s alarm band—the ones chasing him from his present. They’re heading the same way he went. I suck in a breath, watching as they’re swallowed up by the forest again. He got a good head start. He’s probably already whisked away.

  Taking the last piece of the weapon with him.

  The thought of having to do this—the deciphering of his clues, the fumbling with the locals, the jarring sense of being out of my time—yet again sends a fresh burst of frustration through me. Then I remember the look on his face when I thought he was going to agree to my proposition.

  He doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want it to be this hard. But he honestly doesn’t see any other way. I’m sure, remembering the way he talked in the recording, that he meant everything he said back then. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s the product of an alien culture that’s been content to sit back and wait for thousands of years rather than risk making a new home. That he’s been alone and constantly dogged and hasn’t had anything solid to cling to for days, maybe weeks, except the path he laid out for himself. I’m not sure I’d even still be sane, if it were me.

  It’s amazing he made it this far.

  The Enforcers seem to have moved safely out of hearing. I haul myself to my feet, testing my stunned leg. My knee bends, and a shock of pain sears up it. My toes are tingly, but everything from the ball of my foot to the top of my calf is still numb.

  I hate being this helpless.

  I can make out a short slope scattered with saplings up ahead. That must be the hill Jeanant meant.

  As I turn toward it, the still air breaks with a twang and a crackle. A yell carries from beyond the hill, a brief sentence in that alien language. My heart stops. It’s Jeanant’s voice.

  Before I’ve thought it through, I’m hobbling toward the slope as quickly as my off-kilter legs will take me. Have they hit him, or did he manage to get away? Why was he still here?

  I’ve just hit the base of the slope when a woman’s voice reaches my ears. I halt, worried about the sound of my steps. There’s a thick fir tree ahead, at what appears to be the crest of the hill. I pad up to it, setting my stick and my feet as gently as I can, and crouch down, leaning against its low, needle-heavy branches. The pungent green smell fills my lungs. My breath catches.

  The slope dips down several feet from the base of the fir, into a small glade surrounded by birches and maples. The grass shines in the early sunlight, dappled with delicate purple flowers. It would be a beautiful scene, if Jeanant weren’t sprawled in the middle of it. One of his legs is stretched out in front of him at an awkward angle and his bag—the one that holds his time cloth—lies a few feet beyond the reach of his splayed arm.

  The two Enforcers I saw earlier stand over him, aiming their blasters at him. Jeanant pushes himself a little more upright, and I can tell from the way his leg slides on the ground that he can’t move it. And now they’re speaking to him, first the woman, then the man, in Kemyate, their voices harsh.

  Jeanant gazes back at them. His handsome face looks even more worn than a few minutes ago, but his eyes are defiant, his chin steady, as if he’s the one in control of the situation. I swallow thickly. How can that unshakeable confidence save him now? They’ve got him.

  He says something to them, with an odd twist to his body—turning away from the slope, as if he’s trying to subtly direct their attention elsewhere. My gaze slips away from him to the edge of the glade, just below me. A fallen tree lies on the forest floor there. Its jagged edges are crumbling, the peeling bark splotched with lichen. A bed of dead leaves coats the ground beside it. Except in one spot, near the middle of the trunk, where it looks as if they’ve been swept to the side to clear the soil.

  Because they have been. Understanding hits me with a sickening jolt. By the log. The dirt in that spot looks churned up, as if someone dug into it and then covered the hole. Someone who didn’t have time to smooth the leaves back over that spot to hide it.

  He’s still here because he wasn’t finished. If he hadn’t been so stubborn . . .

  The male Enforcer glances around the clearing. If they start checking the area, it won’t be long before they find the log and that’ll be it. They’ll have the part, and I’ll lose both that one and the one it was meant to lead to. Everything Jeanant’s done, everything Win and I have done, it might be for nothing.

  I’m edging forward before I notice and yank myself back. I can’t barge in there—I’ll just end up shot again, hauled off for questioning. That won’t help Jeanant.

  I have to distract the Enforcers somehow, give him a chance to grab his cloth. Then they’ll follow him, and I can get to the weapon part.

  I paw the ground, my fingers closing around a rock the size of my palm. The woman Enforcer is still talking to Jeanant, her voice rising. Jeanant shakes his head. I grip the rock, wind back my arm, and hurl it.

  It patters into a bush maybe twenty feet away. The Enforcers pause, not taking their eyes off Jeanant. When there’s no further sound, they seem to decide it wasn’t important. The woman snaps out another demand.

  The Native scout. He and the army he’s with, they’re not far behind me. If I could convince them that the Americans are arriving, that they’re here, and
send them charging in . . . It might almost be true. Win said the battle would start in an hour, and that was a while ago. The American force can’t be far off.

  But they weren’t supposed to be met by a charge of Native soldiers right now. If I disrupt the ambush, change the timing of the battle, how will that affect the outcome? Who wins? Who dies? If there’s one young man out there who’s supposed to father a line that stretches all the way to my present—one wrong step and I’m killing all those people, people I know—

  My thoughts scramble and scatter. Wrong. The sweat freezes on my skin.

  It hasn’t happened yet. I haven’t done it, everyone’s still safe. I’m going to keep them that way, like I promised myself I would.

  Before I can come up with an alternate strategy, the woman below makes a comment that sounds decisive. The Enforcers step toward Jeanant, their blasters pointed at his arms.

  To numb them too. So he has no way to struggle, so they can carry him back to Kemya, helpless, for that interrogation he was terrified to face.

  My hand shoots out, as if I can stop them from here. In the same moment, though he’s looking toward the opposite end of the glade, Jeanant calls my name.

  “Skylar!” he yells, so loud it sends a sparrow bursting out of a nearby tree. “Careful!”

  The Enforcers’ gazes twitch away, as if they expect to see the person he’s talking to. And using their momentary distraction, Jeanant lunges.

  He grabs the man by the hand, the hand holding the blaster, reaching for something on the base of the gun. There’s an instant when I see how perfectly it could play out—he’ll swivel the gun, blast the woman, turn it on its owner, and leap away. Yes.

  Except he doesn’t.

  The man jerks back with a shout, but he’s not fast enough. A hollow click echoes through the glade, and Jeanant tugs the man’s hand toward his head. A streak of light burns into my vision, shattering against Jeanant’s temple.

  His body shudders. Then his arms sag back against the grass. His head lolls, revealing a blotch of seared-black skin. His eyes, the eyes that blazed with so much purpose just a few seconds ago, stare blankly at the sky.

  30.

  Jeanant’s voice—my name—is still ringing in my ears. I stare at him, as if he might roll over, snatch up his time cloth, and leap away. But he doesn’t. His body lies there, still and limp, as the Enforcer whose blaster he grabbed kneels down and presses a small device against Jeanant’s neck. The man straightens up, sounding upset as he reports the result to the woman. She snaps something at him, and they bicker back and forth. Over who’s at fault? How they’ll explain this?

  And Jeanant doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t breathe.

  I press my hand to my mouth. My eyes have flooded. He called out to me, and I didn’t—

  He couldn’t have known I was watching, though. His gaze never once stopped on my tree. Careful, he said. He wasn’t crying for help. It was a warning, knowing I was probably close enough to hear. And a distraction, to buy himself a moment to go for the blaster.

  He had the blaster. Why didn’t he try to escape?

  I close my eyes, my mind replaying the scene. His hands on the blaster, while the Enforcer still gripped it. The woman beside him already starting to react.

  It was only a slim chance. For him to have hit the woman well enough to disable her, to have managed to wrestle the blaster completely away from the man and shoot him too, before one of them stopped him . . . Only a slim chance, when it was the only chance he had to prevent himself from being taken for interrogation. I can already imagine him reasoning through his options, just as he tried to reason with me all of ten minutes ago, and deciding the risk of being forced to give up Thlo and the others and ruining everything was greater than the risk of losing just a couple parts of his weapon.

  His words echo back to me. I knew how this was going to end when I left Kemya. He was so sure this was his fate, one way or another. And maybe he hoped if he were dead, the Enforcers would be too focused on that to search the area and find the part by the log.

  If so, he was wrong. As I smear my tears across the sleeve of my borrowed Traveler shirt, the Enforcers stop arguing. The man pats down Jeanant’s clothes while the woman digs through his bag. She pulls out a gray cylinder about the length and width of my forearm with an exclamation. I can tell from the widening of the man’s eyes that it must be the last part of the weapon. Damn it.

  The woman tucks the cylinder into a wide pouch at her hip. Then she starts to circle Jeanant’s body, scanning the ground, the trees. With each rotation, she moves closer to the edge of the glade. Closer to the log and its disturbed patch of earth.

  My body goes rigid. I can’t let them take another part of the weapon. If they get that one too, Jeanant might have given up his life for nothing. I don’t know if the two parts we’ve already collected will be enough.

  A sense of resolve rushes through me. I’m still working with him, even if he only ever saw himself as alone.

  Just a few trees and a couple of bushes dot the slope between me and the log. There isn’t enough cover for me to sneak down there without the Enforcers seeing me. I need them to leave.

  My thoughts dart back to the idea I had a few moments ago, before Jeanant’s shout and the blast. The Native American army. If I send them this way, the Enforcers will have to clear out, at least for long enough that I can dig up whatever Jeanant buried.

  The man steps away from Jeanant’s body, and the woman barks what sounds like an order at him as she continues her ever-widening circuit of the glade. There’s no time to think—I have to do this now.

  My leg aches as I turn around. Grasping my walking stick, I shuffle back down the slope. While I was crouched there, the numbness faded a bit more. With every step, a sharp tingle shoots up from my ankle. But as soon as I think I’m out of hearing, I push myself into a lopsided jog, shoving myself along with the stick, gritting my teeth against the pain. A fresh layer of sweat beads on my skin.

  It wasn’t that far from here that I spoke to the Native scout, was it? I veer toward the river, trying not to wonder how close the American soldiers are now, how big a catastrophe I’ll cause by drawing the Native army out of their ambush. The image of a mass of chaotic figures, slashing and shooting, swims up through my mind.

  Wrong.

  Panic slices through me. I pause, my chest heaving.

  If I screw this up—if someone dies who shouldn’t—if I rewrite the family tree of every person in both armies—

  And if I don’t?

  I wanted to believe I could save everyone. Not let one more person die. But I was as wrong as Jeanant thinking he could bring about some perfect outcome if he just held all the variables perfectly in place. Life doesn’t work that way. After everything I’ve seen in the last couple days, I can say pretty definitively that life is messy, and inexact, and unfair, full of so many variables I could never take half of them into account. It’s terrifying, but thinking otherwise is just deluding yourself.

  If Jeanant had just given me the rest of the weapon when I first met up with him here, he wouldn’t be lying there dead in the glade. I wouldn’t be risking the lives of everyone in my present, or risking my own life if I run into Kurra again. He was so sure his way was the best way, the only way. I think he was wrong about that too.

  There was no careful enough to protect him. And maybe there isn’t a careful enough to protect me, or my family and friends. The shift I make now could wipe me out of existence. I could be killing dozens of people I know. But if I don’t do this, Win’s people could decide to wipe out billions at any moment, as long as the time field is in place. Everything will be wrong until the world itself falls apart, whether I’m around to feel it or not.

  Jeanant’s speech is still true even if he faltered from it. So I will take this chance.

  My pulse evens out as I hurry on. I turn my head, absorbing shape, color, leaves, bark, and there—

  A face. I stop. The scout I saw
before is standing at his post by the same tree. He frowns when our gazes meet. My voice catches.

  What I’m about to do, it’s not just chess pieces moved around on a board. The people in this present matter too. This is a human being whose life I’m planning to alter.

  A human being whose brow is knitting as he jerks his chin toward the forest beyond us.

  “What are you doing here again?” he says roughly. “Go on. This is a dangerous place.”

  “It’s dangerous for you too,” I say, before I realize I’m going to speak. I remember Win’s comments about the battle. About the Native force nearly defeated, turning to their allies, turned away. “There’s so many of them coming—so many of you could be killed.”

  “We know,” he says. “They will kill us either way. Better to die standing up. We will stand here as long as we can. Now go!”

  He steps forward, reaching as if to propel me in the direction of the fort. I wobble backward. And I realize this is his choice too. His choice to be here at all, defending his people.

  From anyone who threatens them.

  “What if I saw some—if I saw Americans, soldiers, heading this way?” I say.

  He grabs my wrist, so tight the bones pinch. “Soldiers? Where?”

  “Over there.” I wave my stick. The image of the armies hurtling together flickers behind my eyes, making my heart thump. I clamp down on my panic.

  Wait. It doesn’t have to be like that. Just because I’m taking this chance doesn’t mean I should throw everything to the wind. The Enforcers are as human as this man and his colleagues. It isn’t going to take a whole army to overwhelm them.

  “There’s just two,” I add quickly. “I think they wanted to . . . to spy on you and report to the others. You just need a few people to scare them off.”

  He hesitates, probably wondering if this is some elaborate trick. The Enforcers could already have found that spot by the log, be digging out that last part of the weapon. If I’m doing this, we have to go. So I blurt out one more thing.