A Sword in Time (Thief in Time Series Book 3)

by Cidney Swanson

  “I don’t pretend to understand what you’re going through,” said Jillian, “but I’m here any time you want to talk.” She hesitated. “In a way, Everett’s been through something similar, and he said talking helped. And there’s Quintus, too, but—you know what? Let’s talk about something else besides bungled time travel.”

  DaVinci grimaced. “That’s me. Bungler of Time.”

  “So,” said Jillian, ignoring the remark, “how are the twins?”

  It was classic Applegate: when someone exhibits distress, pretend you don’t notice and change the subject.

  DaVinci tugged at another errant curl.

  “Are they planning to room together when they go off to college next month?” Jillian asked.

  “Um, I don’t really know,” said DaVinci. “I haven’t been talking to my family much. I’ve been sort of . . . out of it.”

  “Everett still talks about that volleyball championship game you took us to,” said Jillian. “Although I think he liked the uniforms more than the actual sport.” She smiled, shaking her head at some memory.

  DaVinci felt confused. “I took you to a volleyball game? What volleyball game?”

  “Klee and Kahlo’s? The championship?”

  When DaVinci didn’t respond, Jillian’s expression shifted. “The game that landed them the full rides to Santa Clara University?”

  “Klee and Kahlo are going to UCLA.” DaVinci spoke with conviction, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth, her stomach began to knot, as if it was getting to the truth ahead of her brain.

  “No,” said Jillian softly. “Santa Clara University.”

  “Why would they go to Santa Clara?”

  “Um . . . volleyball?”

  “They want to study architecture and urban design,” whispered DaVinci. “Not volleyball.”

  “They’re not ‘studying’ volleyball,” replied Jillian. “They’re majoring in hospitality. You know, like for events or the hotel industry. Volleyball just pays for everything.”

  “I don’t understand,” whispered DaVinci. What she meant was I don’t want to understand. I wish I didn’t understand. I refuse to understand.

  But she did understand.

  She understood, and she wanted to scream, to demand that space–time give it all back.

  Jillian spoke softly. “So this is another . . . change to the time line?”

  “I’ve ruined my sisters’ lives,” whispered DaVinci. How could she have done this? It was one thing to speed up the Yoshida-Ana engagement trajectory. But to take away her sisters’ dreams? How was she going to live with this? Her stomach filled with icy cold.

  Jillian grabbed DaVinci’s hand. “Listen to me. You did not ruin your sisters’ lives. Things may be different than you were expecting, but Klee and Kahlo are . . . well, they’re very excited about Santa Clara.”

  Jillian was saying it as if she needed to convince herself, and that was all DaVinci needed to know the truth. She felt sick to her stomach. “What did I do? How could I?”

  A frown etched creases across Jillian’s face.

  “I’m not going to pretend it hasn’t been hard for them. For your mom and dad, too. But . . . but according to what you told me, this was their . . . their chance to escape. Volleyball gave them that possibility.”

  “To escape? Escape what?”

  “Well, your family’s expectation that they would study art or teach art or make art or somehow devote themselves to art.”

  Now DaVinci frowned. “But that’s what they want. To be architects. I helped them with their portfolios. They were so proud when UCLA accepted them both.”

  Jillian bit her lip. “I can only tell you what I know. I don’t think you helped them with their portfolios. I’m pretty sure of it, actually.”

  “This is like a bad dream, only I don’t get to wake up.”

  “You said . . . you told me they maybe wanted something different. Something that was, how did you put it? Theirs I think you said.”

  “I would never say that,” said DaVinci. Except she must have said it. In the version of history Jillian—this version of Jillian—knew, DaVinci had said that. Slowly, she shook her head.

  “I just can’t imagine a world where Klee and Kahlo would have chosen something over art and architecture. A world where . . . where they didn’t beg me for help with their applications and portfolios. I mean, volleyball? Really? My little sisters?”

  It was like a radio station playing two different tracks at the same time.

  It was like biting into an apple and tasting lemon.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this,” DaVinci said at last.

  As DaVinci watched, Jillian bit her lip. Frowned. The time line might have changed, but her friend’s habits hadn’t changed.

  “You’re biting your lip and frowning,” said DaVinci. “Why?”

  “It’s just . . . you’re saying you don’t know what to do about this. But I don’t know if you should do anything. They’re happy. You know? They say it all the time, how they don’t know what they would have done without volleyball.”

  DaVinci felt her heart crash like a boulder rocketing down Cold Springs Creek in flood. Sure they didn’t know what they would have done without volleyball—after losing the dream that had sustained them for years, her sisters were consoling themselves with volleyball. And it was all her fault, because for some unfathomable reason, she hadn’t been there for them.

  But why?

  Was it because she’d quit making art? Oh no. She turned to Jillian, grief twisting her expression. “I didn’t help them because I threw out my brushes and paint. Is that why?”

  Jillian shrugged uncomfortably. Squeezed her hand. “Honestly? I don’t know.”

  “Halley said I threw out all my art supplies. That I quit making art.”

  “That part is true,” agreed Jillian. “You told us you were done with art.”

  “And if I said I was done, I wouldn’t have helped Klee and Kahlo when they needed it most.” She blinked back the tears burning her eyes. “How am I supposed to live with this?”

  “Oh, DaVinci,” murmured Jillian.

  The two sat in silence for several minutes. The light inside the apartment began to shift, and Jillian rose, crossing to the front window and raising the blinds. “I picked this apartment for the great views of sunsets,” Jillian said softly, returning to the couch.

  Side by side, the two gazed out the front window at an evening sky on fire with flaming vermilions and fierce golds. It was raw and primitive, a cretaceous sky, meant for T. rexes, not humans. DaVinci reached for her cell, and even held it up to capture the vast sky on her screen, but she didn’t press the shutter button.

  “I wish I’d brought my paint box,” she murmured, dropping her phone to her lap.

  Jillian turned to her. “Oh, DaVinci—”

  “Except . . . I threw out my paints.” Tears spilled over her lashes and down her cheeks. “How could I have done that?”

  As soon as the question was out there, she wished she hadn’t asked it. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to hear one more thing about this messed up reality. This world where she would do something as wrong as throwing away her paint box or failing her little sisters.

  Jillian spoke softly. “We never talked about why you did it. You said you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  She hadn’t even tried talking to her friends about this? And they hadn’t . . . insisted? Tried to shake her by the shoulders or read her the riot act or whatever best friends were supposed to do when they saw you going completely off the rails? It was a knife to the gut. All of a sudden, she needed air. She crossed to the door and pulled it open, instantly reeling back from the heat.

  Oh. Wow. “Ugh!”

  She slammed the door shut and swore.

  Jillian’s eyes were anguished.

  Maybe her friends had tried. Who knew what had really happened? Not DaVinci. That much was for sure.

  DaVin
ci closed her eyes tightly. “I just . . . I wanted some fresh air.” She uttered a low, grunting laugh. “Which apparently Florida is sold out of.” Another pause. “I’m sorry.”

  Jillian, who had risen and crossed to DaVinci, wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “I get it.”

  “I don’t. I don’t get any of this,” said DaVinci. “How could I have tossed my art supplies? I don’t know what I said to you before, but I want to talk about this. I need to talk about this.”

  “Okay,” said Jillian. “What do you want to know?”

  “Start from where I said I was done with art. Why did I say that?”

  Jillian’s brows furrowed.

  “Wait. Don’t start there,” said DaVinci. Her friends wouldn’t know why she’d said what she’d said. “How about this: When did I say I was done? What else was happening at the time?”

  “Well, it all started when you didn’t get into the UCSB’s College of Creative Studies. You were really upset about that.”

  “I am upset about that.”

  “Yeah. Well, you attended UCSB for a while, but then you just . . . dropped out midterm.”

  “That’s what Halley told me.”

  “Right,” said Jillian. “After you dropped out, you painted that big angry mural on your house, and then you said you were done with art.”

  DaVinci’s mouth dropped open. “I painted a ‘big angry mural’?”

  Jillian nodded. “Your parents left it there for a few months, but I guess the Van Sants said their kids were having nightmares, so Yoshi repainted the house.”

  “Some . . . big angry mural I supposedly painted is the reason my house is no longer blue?”

  “I’m just repeating what you told me.”

  It was like being stuck in a hailstorm of bizarre where the hailstones kept getting bigger and bigger.

  “I loved our aqua-blue house,” she said, sinking back onto the couch. “We all loved it. I can’t believe I’m the reason my house is the color of a peach margarita.”

  Jillian dug her teeth into her lower lip and then spoke. “I guess you don’t remember suggesting the new color?”

  “Oh my God. That color was my choice?”

  Jillian shrugged but said nothing.

  “I told my parents to paint our house puke pink?” DaVinci’s throat tightened. She swallowed and then croaked out her friend’s name.

  “Jilly . . . I don’t know who I am.”

  It was like being inside a wrong self. How was it possible to be alienated from her own self? And not only from her self, but from everyone she should have known best, who should have known her best. Her sisters. Her best friends. Her family. None of them knew her. None of them recognized who she was. They just kept talking about this stranger—this person she never, ever wanted to know, much less become. She’d never felt so isolated.

  She stared out the window, watching as the sky shifted from ochre to amber to coral, and then finally to a dull pink and a duller gray, a sky grown defeated and tired.

  When she finally spoke again, her voice sounded just as defeated and tired.

  “I don’t understand what hiring a plumber had to do with me not painting.”

  Jillian gave her friend a squeeze around the shoulders. “You could start again.”

  “Start over? Like, do I try to paint everything again from memory? I don’t even know what the last thing I painted was.”

  “The last thing you painted—before the mural, I mean—was the Still Life with X series. And for what it’s worth, Still Life with Lobster is still one of my mom’s favorite paintings.”

  DaVinci looked sadly at her friend. The lobster painting had been pathetic. She was capable of so much more. “It was totally derivative,” was all she said out loud.

  “That was what you said when you didn’t get into the program,” Jillian said softly. “That someone called your pieces derivative. In a bad way.”

  “There is no good way,” replied DaVinci. “Besides, they were derivative. That’s why I didn’t include them in my portfolio.”

  Jillian looked puzzled. “What do you mean you didn’t include them? The Still Life with X series was your portfolio.”

  DaVinci felt as if a giant hand had reached inside and squeezed her lungs.

  “You’re telling me I submitted Still Life as my ‘work in evidence of talent’ for the College of Creative Studies art program?”

  Frowning, Jillian nodded.

  This wasn’t possible. DaVinci felt sick. The room was suddenly 190 degrees. “Can we have some AC in here?”

  Jillian jumped up and crossed to the wall thermostat.

  DaVinci whispered. “Why would I submit my still life series instead of East Mountain 360?”

  Jillian, still tapping the thermostat temperature down, down, down, didn’t respond.

  East Mountain 360 remained, in DaVinci’s opinion, some of her best work. She’d received prestigious awards for her murals since then, but she felt the murals weren’t as interesting or provocative as the pieces in East Mountain 360.

  So why would she have ignored them in favor of the Still Life with X series?

  And then,

  suddenly,

  all the pieces fell into place.

  She understood. She knew where everything had gone off the rails. She knew why she hadn’t been in a position to encourage the twins, to mentor them through their application process. Why they’d left art for volleyball.

  Why she was no longer painting.

  It was because the dry rot in the floor of the downstairs studio never happened, which meant she’d never been forced to find somewhere else to paint. Which meant she hadn’t spent entire months on the flat roof of her house, learning what the mountains looked like in every sort of light, learning how the sea had a personality expressed through color and reflective value. She’d never done any of it because she’d never climbed up to the roof when the indoor studio with its magnificent north-facing wall of windows was declared off-limits, because it had never been declared off-limits. DaVinci had never painted East Mountain 360. Her greatest work ever existed only in her memory.

  29

  • DAVINCI •

  Florida, July

  It was after midnight, Florida time, and DaVinci lay on the sofa bed in Jillian’s apartment thinking about the train wreck that was her life. Thinking about all the things she’d done the past two and a half years and then crashing into the horrifying realization she hadn’t done them.

  She’d never painted the eight large East Mountain 360 canvases, encompassing the wraparound view from her family’s rooftop “studio.” East Mountain 360 had been the project that had turned her from being a dabbler in many forms—textiles, sculpture, serigraphs—into a painter. It had been the project that taught her to see. The project that got her into UCSB’s College of Creative Studies as an art major and into the elite Honors Program, with its included studio space and year-end exhibition. DaVinci had always known how lucky she was to land studio space and a show as a freshman. None of her awards, none of her funding, none of her teaching jobs or commissions would have been possible without that studio space and that year-end exhibition.

  Except—

  She hadn’t won the awards.

  She hadn’t been hired to teach.

  She hadn’t received commissions from wealthy residents of Hope Ranch, or Alameda Padre Serra, or Montecito.

  She’d done none of it.

  She’d traded her painter’s apron for an Enterprise Fish Company apron. She’d quit making art. But the problem was, the DaVinci who’d had years to get used to this reality was not the DaVinci lying on a hide-a-bed in Florida, eyes wide open after midnight.

  She wasn’t even close to sleepy; back home in California, it was only nine o’clock. Her stomach was growling. Complaining. Loudly demanding a snack before bedtime.

  She hadn’t painted the East Mountain canvases.

  The thought seemed to empty her lungs. Three hours had passed since she’d
learned the truth, but it still left her gasping for air. Since that first, awful realization, she’d been trapped, revisiting cause and effect, a contagion sequence where one thing led to another and another and another. “The law of unintended consequences,” Jillian had called it.

  For want of a leak, the floor did not rot.

  For want of a rotten floor, the family did not turn to painting on the rooftop.

  For want of painting on the roof, DaVinci never learned to see.

  For want of artistic sight, DaVinci’s portfolio sucked.

  For want of a nonsucky portfolio, DaVinci didn’t get into UCSB and said, Screw it—

  And all for the want of a leak.

  The bitter circle kept repeating in her head.

  But how was she supposed to break it? Or more importantly, how was she supposed to break it without introducing a whole new set of unintended consequences? What if something even worse than her brother’s early engagement or the twins’ devastating change in college plans were to happen?

  At least no one had died because of the changes she’d introduced. (She had Jillian to thank for that bright bit of encouragement.) Her current life sucked, but everyone she loved was still alive. If she tried to go back in time and chase off the plumber whom she’d hired, what else might change?

  She was exhausted. The backs of her eyes felt gritty from dry airplane air and too much crying. And not enough sleep. She had to get some sleep. Really had to.

  Shifting in bed, she succeeded in tangling her legs in the ankle-length nightie Jillian had loaned her. She should have said no to the stupid nightie. Yes, she’d forgotten to pack one, but she hated long nighties. They made her feel like her legs were in jail. Although, tonight maybe that was just the blankets trapping her. After kicking her legs a few times, she succeeded in freeing them. It wasn’t like she needed a blanket in Florida.

  Sighing, she attempted to settle back into Jillian’s luxurious down pillows. DaVinci wasn’t going to think about her problems anymore tonight. No, sir. No more. She needed to think about something else.

  Something sleepy.

  At least it was quiet.

  Almost quiet.

  If you didn’t count the hum of the refrigerator.