Passenger

by Alexandra Bracken

  “Miss Linden?” Cyrus called, just as her hand gripped the knob. “Know that I have a copy of that letter, should you try to destroy it. Know, too, that it is unwise to test me.”

  “I understand,” said Etta.

  But I’m not afraid of you.

  The noise from the tavern floated up to her on a cloud of tobacco smoke, leather, and wet dog; just before she closed the door, she took one final look at Nicholas’s profile as he stared into the glowing fire, despondent.

  That would have to be enough. As soon as the tavern cleared out and its occupants wound themselves down to sleep, she would follow the lingering rattle of the passage to its entrance, the way she had in the Met. For the first time in days, she felt in control of her life again, not just an unwilling passenger at someone else’s mercy.

  A hand latched onto her arm, wheeling her around. The man posted on guard raised a single black brow as Sophia hauled her the last few steps toward the next door down the hall. Once inside, she shut it gently behind them and went to stand beside the wall separating the bedchamber from the old man’s.

  Cyrus Ironwood had drained what last bit of patience she had, and exhaustion was making her head throb as she surveyed the cramped room. This, again? Maybe this was the old man’s real punishment for what her mom had done: keeping her trapped in confined quarters with a furious Sophia, forced to listen to all of her rantings without strangling her. The frustration that choked her was so real, she felt her hands curl over the back of a frail-looking chair, and seriously considered smashing it against the nearby wall.

  “What are you even doing?” she asked, but Sophia only held up a hand and pressed her ear to the wall.

  “I can’t hear them,” she said quietly. “So, hopefully they won’t hear us.”

  She sat down on the bed in a flounce of skirts, seething. “The nerve of them, making me look like a fool—shutting me out, after I was the one who retrieved you. How dare they keep this from me!”

  “From you?” Etta asked pointedly.

  “Yes, from me,” she said, tearing the pins out of her hair. A trunk had been left in the room, filled to the brim with cloth, glass bottles, and a silver brush. Sophia yanked the latter through her loose hair, tearing at it fiercely.

  The old man was as pleasant as an enraged cat; if Etta had been in Sophia’s shoes, she would have welcomed the opportunity to spend as little time with him as possible. The man had forced Sophia to serve him, had basically barred her from going to any year that might have gifted a woman with a few real rights. Etta had to wonder how much better Sophia’s life might be if she wasn’t under Grandfather Dearest’s unyielding thumb.

  “Why did you even want to be in there?” Etta asked. “If it bothered you that much that he didn’t tell you why he wanted me, couldn’t you have argued to stay?”

  Sophia scoffed. “No one fights with Grandfather. Just ask the other families. They’ll tell you firsthand what you get for ignoring his wishes.”

  Etta considered the situation, moving slowly to sit beside her. The girl was fuming, blowing out one harsh breath after another, and Etta couldn’t tell her anger from her humiliation.

  “Tell me exactly what they said,” Sophia demanded.

  Etta did, mostly. She kept the coded letter from her mother pressed against her gown’s heavy skirts, out of the other girl’s sight.

  “The astrolabe?” Sophia repeated with disbelief. “He’s still looking for it after everything that happened?”

  “Do you know anything else about it?” Etta asked carefully.

  Sophia let out a humorless little laugh. “Of course not. Why would they tell me anything about it? You’ll have to ask your friend, Mr. Carter. He and Julian were sent out to look for it four years ago.”

  The mysterious “Julian” again.

  “Cyrus’s grandson, right?” Etta pressed.

  “He’s…” Sophia began. “He’s dead. He was the heir after his father got himself drowned and his uncle managed to shoot himself in a hunting accident.”

  She ran a hand back through her thick, dark hair, her doll-like face bleak and empty. “He was my intended.”

  Intended. As in…“You were engaged?”

  Despite everything, Etta felt a flush of sympathy. She fumbled for a way to cool her emotions, regain some of the distance she felt toward the other girl.

  “From the time we were children,” Sophia said. “It was a perfect match. Do you know how rare it is for travelers to be able to marry each other? It was only because I was born to a distant cousin. It was my—”

  “Your what?” Etta prompted. The way Sophia said it, barely catching herself, made her wonder if maybe the other girl did want to talk about this—if there was no one else she could discuss it with.

  “My father was no one in this family,” Sophia said, raking a hand through the ends of her hair. “A distant cousin of Grandfather’s who forced himself on some unsuspecting harlot and came back for seconds, only to find the woman dead and me all alone. He drank himself to death a few years later, and only Grandfather was willing to raise me. Said he couldn’t allow a true traveler to slip through the cracks. Most people only have one shadow, but I feel as though I have two. My past trails me every day, every second, and I can’t shake it off. Marrying Julian might have finally stopped the whispers from the other travelers. It might have finally earned me a measure of respect.”

  Marrying up was the only way that any number of women in history had escaped their pasts and whatever stations they’d been born into. They couldn’t work to improve their lives the way men did, and live by their own means. It was grossly unfair to them—and it was especially unfair that Sophia, someone who should have had a future, access to opportunities, was trapped inside of this cage the family had thrown over her.

  Etta finally released her last trace of anger and pressed a hand to her forehead, trying to process this. Sophia pushed herself up onto her feet and began to tug at the strings of her stays and gown.

  After a moment, Etta stood to help her. “If you are related to the old man, and there are so few travelers left, why aren’t you Cyrus’s heir?”

  Sophia rolled her eyes. “Because an infant born a few months ago, who’s so distantly related to Grandfather as to only share a drop of blood—somehow that child is more eligible, simply by virtue of having been born a boy. Little Marcus Ironwood is the heir. For now. I’ll have to wait until he’s old enough for everyone to discern whether he’s a traveler or a guardian. If it’s the latter—well, perhaps Grandfather will be desperate enough to reconsider the rule.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Etta said. The idea of Sophia leading the family and subjecting them to her will was mildly terrifying, but she could hardly be worse than the old man. She was ambitious, and Etta still wasn’t convinced she had been an innocent party to Alice’s death, but Sophia shouldn’t have been denied simply for being a girl. No woman should.

  “That’s—” Sophia cut herself off, surprised. “You agree? It’s simply the way it’s done, and has been done forever, but the older cousins renounced their claim by marrying outside of Grandfather’s wishes. I’m the only one of my generation tied closely enough to his bloodline to have a true claim, and I’m certainly the only traveler left alive who’s been under his direct tutelage.”

  “Maybe it is really time for a change, then,” Etta said. “Can you make your case?”

  “Women are not allowed to attend the family meetings, so how can I? How can I get Grandfather to see what’s been in front of him all along?” Sophia shook her head. “How do you fight against a mountain? How do you move it when you don’t even have a shovel?”

  “Maybe you don’t have to move it,” Etta said, folding the gown over the lid of the trunk. “Maybe you have to climb it.”

  Sophia studied her, her face still flushed from the heat of her words. “I don’t know if there ever will be a better choice than Julian. He was…he was perfect.”

  “No one is perfect. Not
even you.”

  The other girl snorted, climbing into bed and shifting so she faced the far wall—making room for Etta. After a moment’s hesitation, Etta climbed in after her, scooting as far as she could to the edge without falling off. The mattress felt strange, like it’d been stuffed with straw—it smelled that way, too. The frame creaked, but there was another sound beneath it—the ropes supporting the mattress. They scraped against each other, and sounded like the lines had on the ship when the men were adjusting the sails. Her mind shifted back to Nicholas, wondering where he’d sleep.

  Sophia leaned over her, blowing out the candle on the bedside table. The smoke trailed out into the darkness like a silver chain.

  “Was Augustus Nicholas’s father?” Etta whispered into the night.

  “Yes.” The whole bed shifted as Sophia turned over. The silence stretched out for a few beats, punctuated only by her sigh. “I don’t know much about this, truthfully—most of it is gossip. But Augustus was madly, madly in love with Rose. Your mother. Everyone knew it, just like they all knew that he wasn’t the same after she disappeared. He was…troubled.”

  What had the letter said? But I also hope that this helps you put it all to rest, and eases your bedeviled mind.

  “He spent years searching for her, even after Grandfather tried to force him to stop. Eventually he had to do his duty and provide an heir, so he married, and Julian came into the picture. But Augustus was…not pleasant. Never faithful. Never loving. An absolute beast. He took what he wanted from whomever he wanted. Do you understand?”

  Etta understood.

  Nicholas’s mother had been the family’s slave, and Augustus had assaulted her, abused her, and in the end had never freed her. Etta’s fury sprouted a new head, this one with knives for teeth. She thought, just then, that she could tear down the walls of the inn with only her bare hands.

  “Julian wasn’t like that,” Sophia continued softly. “Not at all. He was kind.”

  “Did you love him?” Etta asked. There was a careful reservation in Sophia’s voice when she spoke about him; either the grief was still too new and intense to touch, or there hadn’t been a great, smoldering kind of love between them.

  “I was…content,” Sophia said. “He deserved to live, not the bastard. It’s Nicholas’s fault Julian died, you know, and he readily admits it—like that could somehow absolve him of some of the guilt. They never should have taken that path through the Himalayas, not in the rainy season. He was there to take care of Julian, to see to his needs, keep him from harm; to sacrifice his life, if need be. He should have forced them to turn around and take a different route.”

  Etta turned over to face her, almost too afraid to ask. Nicholas had stopped traveling for a reason. He’d implied he was trapped in this era, and she had a feeling she was on the verge of finding out why. “What happened?”

  “They were going to search the Taktsang Palphug Monastery for something Grandfather wanted—”

  The astrolabe? Etta wondered. Nicholas hadn’t seemed surprised to hear of it.…

  “The monastery is high in the mountains, built into a cliff with sheer walls. If you believe the rat’s story, there was a storm, and Julian slipped and fell. How could they have been standing so close to one another, and Nicholas not have been able to catch him?”

  “Oh my God,” Etta whispered.

  Sophia turned to face the wall, the column of her spine rigid. “One brother lived, one brother died. And if you ask me, he did it on purpose.”

  Etta felt her jaw set as she hugged her arms over her stomach. “Why would he ever do that? Julian was his half brother—and more than that, Nicholas is honorable—”

  “What good is honor when greed eats away at its foundations?” Sophia continued. “You’re right, though; it all comes down to the blood they shared between them. With Julian out of the picture, he had the next best claim. He is in Grandfather’s direct bloodline.”

  “No,” Etta whispered, closing her eyes at the image. Not him. The thought ate away at her picture of him, dissolving it completely. He was her anchor here, the one reliable person who she could count on for the truth, for decency. She couldn’t let Sophia take that away from her, too; not until she’d heard Nicholas’s side of this. “No way.…”

  “And you know what the truly sad thing is, Etta?” Sophia whispered. “If he’d asked, if he’d put his case forward, Grandfather would have considered it. I know he would have. Because being born a bastard in this family is still preferable to being born a girl.”

  “Leave, Sophia,” Etta urged. “Run away if you have to—if there’s really nothing you can do to fix things in this family, get out the way my mom did, and start over!”

  It was a long while before the answer drifted back to her.

  “If I’m not an Ironwood, then I am no one,” Sophia said in a thin voice. “And I have nothing.”

  “That’s not true,” Etta said, shocked by the defeat in the girl’s voice.

  But only the passage answered back, in a rolling murmur, a growling whisper of lies—one that spoke of freedom, of discovery, of reclaiming what was lost, but delivered only a cage of lies and disappointment.

  NICHOLAS CAST HIS GAZE TOWARD the fire, watching the dance of light. He’d felt the weight of Etta’s eyes on him, but had kept still until the door shut behind her, and he heard the wet rattle of Cyrus’s breath as he moved toward the bedside table to light a candle. Nicholas watched the steady movement of his fingers as they ran over the gold frame of a small, oval-shaped portrait he’d seen many times before.

  His first wife, Minerva. Not his second, the sorry shrew of a woman who’d borne him two sons and died in the process of giving him yet another. Not Augustus, nor Virgil, whom he clearly had no desire to honor even in memory—not even Julian, who’d done everything the man had ever asked of him, superbly and without question. A love match by all accounts, and with another traveler.

  For Cyrus, there was only Minerva, with her golden hair, green eyes, and uncommon beauty—a true Helen of Troy. When they’d wed, Cyrus had been at the center of a conspiracy to control the travelers’ fates.

  He had hidden her, but it had not saved her in the end. And when Cyrus’s rival, Roman Jacaranda, murdered the woman, the four families had been flung into all-out war, and the last vestiges of the man’s humanity were torn away. Julian had told him stories of the old man’s vengeful rampage, harrowing tales of how he’d outmaneuvered all of his enemies, until he alone had become the Grand Master, ruling over all of their descendants.

  None of it would bring Minerva back. His rivals had been strategic, choosing a rare year to which no passage led, so that Cyrus could not return to her hiding place and intervene. He could not travel to the years leading up to it to wait out the days, not without crossing paths with himself; nor could he warn anyone, or even himself, in sufficient time without altering his future control of the other families.

  And, Nicholas thought, that was really all one had to know about the man. He wouldn’t shatter the sanctity of his rules, and he would not compromise his position or riches, not even for a woman whose memory continued to haunt him. Cyrus Ironwood’s heart had hardened into flint, capable only of being sparked into fiery anger. It allowed him to scheme without mercy—to steal a young woman from her home, thrust her into a decades-long search that amounted to little more than madness.

  “You cannot be serious with this request,” Nicholas ground out. Fighting the urge to clench his jaw, he added, “She could lose her life. You’re asking her to take a number of enormous risks, with only your word that she’ll be returned to her home.”

  Etta of the twenty-first century. Etta of the distant, unforeseeable future. Etta with the pirate heart. This astrolabe had already cost three lives, and now he was demanding that she sacrifice hers, as well?

  Cyrus eyed him. “Has she proven herself to be spectacularly unsuited to this task? She has the motivation and the means to see this through, and she won’t run the
risk of crossing paths with herself, unlike almost every other traveler. I hardly require more, beyond her discretion about our family, and that is easily maintained by notifying the guardians across time to watch for her appearances, to note her arrivals and departures through the passages.”

  Etta would think she was working independently, none the wiser that the old man was like the mythical Argus, eyes scattered across the whole body of time. Would it be better or worse, he wondered, for Rose to have used other uncharted and unknown passages aside from the one across the road in the Royal Artillery Park? She would be able to travel without the interference of guardians stationed nearby to watch the passages, but if something were to happen—if she were to become hurt, or worse—who could help her?

  “This is a task for your family—”

  “Our family,” Cyrus corrected.

  This was a man who had hit him across the face so many times when he was a child that Nicholas had learned to listen for his voice and avoid his path entirely. Of course, the spineless sop had never raised a hand to Augustus, his monster of a son, even as he terrorized everyone around him with his maliciousness.

  “Julian was all you had in life, and, still, you sent him to his death—”

  Cyrus slammed his fist down on the table, and Nicholas jumped at the bang. “I gave him to you to protect—I live with the consequences of your failure every day.”

  Hardly. Nicholas’s bitterness turned inward, until it frosted his heart. He often dreamt of it: the last look of trust on Julian’s face before the glove slipped off his hand and he fell through the curtain of rain to the rocks below; the bursts of light reflected in the white haze; the cracking boom from the nearby passage, as it absorbed the surge of power that marked the end of a traveler’s life. He dreamt of it in rushes of panic and ice, just as he thought Cyrus must only dream in fire and blood.

  The last time he’d stood before this man, he’d been weak with hunger and exhaustion, burdened by guilt. He’d been made to stand there for hours and report what had happened. Julian’s death collapsed the passage they had taken to Bhutan, forcing Nicholas to use his brother’s rambling travel journal to find another passage in that year to use, and connect to another one, and then another, until he finally found his way back to the year the old man was residing in. It had taken months, and, even if he’d had the strength left in him, Nicholas hadn’t had the heart to stop the words and fists that knocked him around until he was mute and suffocating on his apologies.