Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) (11 page)

14.

W
hy didn’t you explain it to him?” Win demands as we march down the hall to the room where I found Jeanant.

“He didn’t give me the chance!” I say.

“I can’t believe he was here, you talked to him, and we still—” He cuts himself off with a strangled huff.

Neither can I. But it’s not like Win’s in the best position to criticize. “You didn’t exactly do much to prepare me,” I point out. “ ‘Go, hurry, get him talking!’ I
tried
.”

“Well, we’ll have to try again,” Win says, sounding like he’s talking more to himself than to me. “Now that we know it can be done, we just have to find the right moment.”

So I will get another chance. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “You could come with me next time, so he knows I’m with your group, couldn’t you?” I say as I motion him into the string of smaller gallery rooms. “I mean, I know that whole doxing thing happens if you’re from two different times, but you’re not
that
far in his future, are you? A few weeks?” My mind starts spinning, working through this warped physics equation. “You’d just have to find out where he was a few weeks after he first came to Earth, so your . . . bubbles would line up.”

“Ah.” Win clears his throat. “It’s actually years.”

I stop in the doorway and stare at him. “
Years
? But you said you’d only been waiting to hear from the others—I know you said it was a few weeks.”

“And that’s true,” Win says slowly, as if I’m dense not to have figured this out on my own. “Thlo and I and the others, we’ve only been on Earth for about four weeks. But we couldn’t race over here the second Jeanant disappeared. Thlo didn’t even get his message, explaining what he’d done, until a long time after. He knew that as soon as the Enforcers realized he was responsible for the attempted attack, they’d start investigating anyone who’d been associated with him. If Thlo had been caught too, we couldn’t have gotten anything done. So he programmed the message to transmit after there’d been plenty of time for suspicion to die down. And then—it’s not easy to zip across the galaxy from Kemya to here. Especially when you’re doing it without official permission. Putting the plan together, gathering equipment and supplies secretly, arranging a ship—it took a while.”

My mind’s spinning in a totally different way now. “So, wait, how many years are we talking?”

“Almost eleven by our sun,” he says. “Which is something like seventeen for you.”

“Jeanant’s from seventeen years in the past? Then why—”

“No,” Win says. “I told you before, Jeanant’s present, the time when he came down to Earth, is the same as your present time—where I met you.
I
jumped back seventeen Earth years to get there.”

Win is from my future. He could have seen me, seventeen years older?

No. Because I didn’t have a future before Win came. I died in a courthouse bombing.

I press my hand against my forehead, as if that will still my thoughts. None of that matters now. I should focus on what’s in front of me.

Two rows of ivory buttons on the bench’s cushion. Three grooves running down each of the bowed legs. Two paintings on the wall across from me, seven there, where Jeanant was looking. Reds and greens, blues and yellows, in the rich tones of oil paint.

“Can we jump back a little earlier?” I venture when I feel steadier. “I could catch up with Jeanant when he first got to the museum.”

“We’ve been wandering around for a while,” Win says. “I doubt he arrived earlier than us. And two versions of you in the same building at the same time . . . It’s just a bad idea. At least we know what room he picked. Tell me again what happened, what he was doing.”

“I heard a scraping sound,” I say. “When I got to this room, Jeanant was standing here, looking at that wall.” I point. “I think he had blue paint on his hand.”

Win moves onto the spot I indicated on the floor, frowning at the paintings. He crosses his arms in front of him, and I’m struck by the difference between him and the man who was standing there before. Win’s frustration radiates off him, as if my failure has thrown all his plans for a loop, even though a half hour ago he had no idea it was even possible I might talk to Jeanant.

He’s never had a solid plan of his own, has he? He’s been willing to take risks, sure, but it’s all been ‘try this out and see where it takes us.’ The mission itself, the idea of saving Earth, that was Jeanant’s.

Because Jeanant’s the first of his people to step up and actually
do
something about the time field. And even after he thought the Enforcers had caught up with him, he moved and spoke with such confidence, as if he’d face a whole army if he had to, and maybe come out on top. So much confidence I can still feel it echoing inside me.

We survived the Enforcers back home, the streets of Paris, the museum guard. We’ll get through this too. For once in my life, I am not going to back down and hope I can wait out my problems.

“Do you see anything that looks like a clue?” I ask.

Win shakes his head. He eases closer, studying each of the pieces on the wall. There’s a ship on a stormy sea, a shadowy forest, a woman reclining in the moonlight, a huntsman guiding his horse over a hedge, a family gathered by a flickering hearth, a portrait of a dour young man, and two ravens circling the moors. All of them have bits of blue here and there.

“I don’t suppose any of them were signed by ‘Jean Manthe’?” I say. The corner of Win’s mouth twitches, as if he’s not sure whether to smile or frown.

“Unfortunately not,” he says. “And not by Jeanant or Meeth either . . .”

Meeth. The code name hangs in the air. I look at the images again, and the answer rushes to me. Win glances over, his eyes widening, at the same moment I turn to him.

“
Prometheus.
”

Bringing fire.

“I should have seen it right away,” Win says a little breathlessly, reaching for the painting of the family by the hearth. “It’s perfect. Only our group knows he went by that name. The Enforcers would never catch it.”

He sets the picture on the floor and squats in front of it, running his fingers along the edge of the gold-trimmed frame. It creaks as he digs his fingers around a corner of the canvas, and I wince.

“You’ll break it!” I say.

“For all we know it was destroyed before Jeanant added that article in the newspaper about protecting the art,” Win says with a shrug. “I’ve got to see—here we go.”

The corner pops out of the frame, and I notice that pressing against the paint has given Win’s fingers the same bluish cast Jeanant’s thumb had. But I can’t help cringing as he yanks the canvas away. This could be a lost masterpiece, just now recovered.

Of course, it’s a human masterpiece. Considering what Win said before about art and wastefulness, I guess even he doesn’t see one Earth painting as much of a loss.

“I’ve got it!” he crows. He tugs something like a thin slab of plastic out from between the canvas and its backing. Embedded in the plastic-like material is a metal rectangle crisscrossed with silvery lines.

“What is it?” I ask. It hardly looks like a weapon capable of blowing up a massive satellite.

“A tech plate,” Win says, grinning. “Either the guidance system or the processor, I’d bet, since those are the parts we’d have the most trouble constructing on our own when we rebuild the weapon. And . . .” He taps the rows of tiny red characters printed along the edge of the slab. They remind me of the ones on the time cloth’s display.

“These must be his directions to the next piece.” His gaze darts over them, his body practically quivering with enthusiasm now. Seeing his face light up, part of me wants to be over there examining it with him. But that isn’t enough to distract me from what he said.

“The
next
piece? I thought you just needed to find the one thing.”

“Well, we need to find the weapon,” Win says. “But Jeanant didn’t risk putting all his faith in one hiding spot. In his last message to Thlo, he said he’d break up the most essential parts and spread them out between four different places and time periods. So even if the Enforcers stumble on one or two, hopefully we’ll get enough to figure out the rest.”

He says it in the same offhand manner he talked about ruining the painting. As if I should have known this all along. His earlier words come back to me:
We’ll have to try again.

He didn’t mean here. He meant some other place, some other time. Another trip in the cloth—and another, and another—to more worlds I was never meant to be a part of. Worlds where nothing will be more
wrong
than me.

My stomach clenches. “So we’ve barely gotten started,” I say. “You only asked if I’d come to France. You just assumed I’d follow you around wherever else you needed to go?”

“Well, I—” He looks up at me, and his voice falters. “You said you’d help.”

“You made it sound like it was just this one place. Like we’d poke around in Paris a bit and then head home, no big deal.”

His mouth opens. I can actually
see
him struggling to hold that innocent expression in place. It doesn’t work. His gaze flicks away from me and back. And suddenly I understand.

“You knew I probably wouldn’t come if you told me everything,” I say. I was this shiny new shift-sensing tool he just had to bring with him, so he said what he thought would convince me and left out any other details that might have mattered. Who cares what I want if it gets the mission done?

“I was trying to keep things simple—”

“You
decided
not to tell me the whole truth.”

And it worked. Here I am. With no way to get home unless he takes me.

My pulse has started thumping. I reach for my bracelet, for the comfort of numbers, but the thought of trying to pull myself together while he’s sitting there watching me like I’m a freak show act just makes me feel more sick. Turning on my heel, I stalk out of the room.

“Skylar!” Win calls after me, but I ignore him. I march back to the wide hall, not stopping until I’ve reached one of the museum’s tall windows.

This one offers a view over the city instead of the inner courtyard. The guns and cannons are momentarily silent, but a couple streams of smoke are still winding up toward the clouds over the carved stone rooftops.

I lean my forehead against the glass, absorbing the scene below as I rotate the beads. I can make out twelve scrawny trees along the side of the boulevard. Bright green foliage drifting in the breeze. Muddled patterns of soot or mud or some other dark liquid smeared across the cobblestones. A body in a red-and-blue uniform sprawled by the corner, unmoving.

What am I doing here?

The answer comes, unbidden, with the memory of the defiance on Jeanant’s face as he spoke back against the Enforcers. I’m not just a passive variable in some alien fishbowl experiment. I’m fixing the world. I’m righting the
wrongs
.

I just can’t help thinking I’d be doing a much better job of it with Jeanant as my guide.

I hear Win walking up behind me, but I don’t bother to look over. He stops beside the window.

“I’m sorry,” he says stiffly. “Meeting you, it was a chance I’d never have expected to get, a chance to make our mission so much easier. I didn’t want to lose that. But I’ve never done anything like this before—bringing along an Earthling—I was never supposed to. I didn’t know how much I should say.”

“You think it’s been easy for me?” I say. “At least you’ve done
some
of this before. I did want to help, and I know how important finding this weapon is to you, but it wasn’t fair to ask me to make that decision without telling me what we were actually getting into.”

“I know. I
am
sorry. And you know of it now: three more time periods, three more parts of the weapon.” He leans back against the wall. At the edge of my vision, I see his head turn as he surveys the hall. His tone lightens. “It hasn’t been all bad, has it? You did get a trip to Paris out of it. A Paris no one else you know will ever get to see.”

Part of me wants to smack him, but a short laugh lurches out. “I guess so.” I can’t say I wish I hadn’t seen this Paris. That it doesn’t give me a little thrill to think that I might walk into the Louvre someday in my present, and be able to see how it’s changed in the last two centuries.

“Do you want me to take you back?” Win asks.

I look at him then. His jaw is set, his mouth pressed into a flat line, as if he wishes he hadn’t said that. But he did. Even though completing his mission could depend on the fact that I can talk to Jeanant, that I can sense the shifts.

In a way, that means more than anything else he’s said the entire time I’ve known him.

The thought of home sends a wave of longing through me, but I force myself to pause. I parse out my anger, my sense of betrayal, the anxiety underneath. Nothing I’ve been through so far has been outright unbearable. My thumb runs over the bracelet’s beads. I think I can handle more.

I don’t think I can handle going back to living my old life, feeling every little shift and knowing what they mean, knowing Win’s group is still struggling to stop them—struggling more because I gave up and let fear get the better of me. Jeanant’s even more out of place than I am, a galaxy’s length away from home and years apart from any of his own people, and he hasn’t let that stop him.

I drag in a deep breath, trying to ease the jitters that rise up at the thought of leaping even farther into unfamiliar history. Maybe I’m not going to stop, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask for something. “No,” I say. “Not like that. But, before we go wherever and whenever we need to next—I think I’d feel better if you did take me home first, just for a few minutes. So I can . . . catch my breath.” And regain my balance before my world’s thrown out of whack all over again.

“And then you’d come with me?” Win says.

“And then I’d come with you,” I agree. “We’ve still got my planet to save, don’t we?”

He breaks into a smile. “Indeed we do.”

15.

I
settle myself in the corner of the window ledge. The hard stone braces me. “Do you know what our next stop will be?” I ask Win.

He holds up the slab of alien plastic. “Not yet,” he says. “It’s like his message to Thlo: kind of a riddle, in case the Enforcers get a hold of it. The first part isn’t too hard. He says to take the number of years for that first message to reach us, and then repeat them two hundred and sixty-eight times since zero. Thlo’s said that the message came exactly three and a half years after he disappeared, so—”

“938,” I say automatically. Win blinks at me. “Numbers are my thing, remember? That’s the year we need to go to? AD, I guess—that’d probably be what the ‘since zero’ means.”

He gives me a slow smile. The smile that makes it hard to remember he’s not a human boy, but an alien. “Definitely,” he agrees. “The rest is more obscure, though. ‘Where the little dragon scares off the big dragon. The sign will point at the sky.’ ”

“Dragons,” I say. “So . . . somewhere in medieval Britain, then? That’d be the right time period.”

“Actually,” Win says with a patronizing air that obliterates any goodwill the smile bought him, “dragons are much more closely linked to many Asian cultures than they are to Europe. That’s more likely what he was referring to.”

I restrain myself from rolling my eyes. “Okay, can you get more specific? Asia’s a big continent.”

“Give me a second. There’s something about that year . . .”

“Do you think it’ll be another revolution?” I ask. “That’s sort of Jeanant’s theme, right? The line about the dragons does sound like some kind of uprising.”

“Of course. That’ll help narrow it down.” He pulls out his time cloth and unfolds it into its laptop-like shape.

“You get Internet access here?” I say skeptically as he sets it on the ledge of the next window over.

“No,” he says. “But there’s plenty of information stored in the cloth itself. It’s tricky to find anything
quickly
, sifting through all of it, but whatever we need to know, it’s in here somewhere.”

“What about the rest of your group?” I ask. “You have proof that you’re on the right trail now. Shouldn’t you let them know?”

He pauses, the glow of the display casting a greenish tint on his golden-brown skin. Then he shakes his head with a jerk. “No need yet. We’re doing fine on our own. If we can catch up with Jeanant at the next location, we might be able to finish everything right there.”

I don’t see why having some extra help wouldn’t still be a good thing, but right then a cannon booms outside the window, making the wall shudder. Win winces as I leap back. Someone is shooting right at the building.

“I expect this place will hold,” Win remarks, turning back to the screen. Pulse skittering, I edge to my window and peer out, thinking I should suggest he do his information searching at my house.

The shadows across the street from the Louvre are lengthening as the sun sinks below the distant rooftops. I can’t make out anyone moving between them. There’s just a pair of birds circling each other against the sky, where one of the streams of smoke has faded into a wispy thread, and—

There’s a new line of smoke snaking up between the other two, thick and gray. The instant my eyes catch it an uncomfortably familiar tremor of
wrong, wrong, wrong
pierces my mind. My skin goes clammy.

“Win,” I say. “Win!”

“What?”

For a second, I can only press my finger against the glass as the
wrong
ness chokes me. My other hand fumbles for my bracelet. “There,” I manage. “That smoke. I think something’s shifted.”

Win gazes past me. One of those alien curses falls from his mouth.

“That’s the direction we came from,” I say. “Did
we
make something—”

“If we were the ones who made it happen, you’d never have seen anything different,” he says. “But maybe we shifted something else. The Enforcers must have picked up our trail somehow.”

The words have only just left his mouth when the band around my ankle starts to shiver. “They’re close!” I say, flinching away from the window.

Win dashes back to the cloth computer. “I’ve almost narrowed it down,” he says. “Just give me a few seconds.”

He flicks through the data on the display. I check both ends of the hall. The band’s only vibrating lightly right now, but that could change at any moment.

“Can’t we get out of here, and then you can finish looking? What if we don’t
have
a few seconds?”

“If I stop, I’ll have to start all over—there! The Bach Dang River.” He reaches out to me with one hand, the other yanking the time cloth into its tentlike form. “Come on!”

My gaze slips past the window, and catches a movement outside. A pale figure flanked by two darker ones, marching across the boulevard toward our wing of the museum. The instant my eyes snag on them, the pale woman glances up at my window. Her barked command carries through the glass, and Win grasps my arm. I scramble with him beneath the folds of the cloth.

“She’s outside—she saw me,” I babble as the flaps fall shut.

“Well, in a moment we won’t be here,” Win says, swiping at the inner display. “Hold on.”

I barely have time to wonder,
Hold on to what?
before the cloth jumps, and my stomach heaves with it. I stumble into Win, clapping my hand over my mouth to contain a surge of nausea. And then it’s over.

Win swears under his breath and pokes at the display again. I stare through the translucent walls, and recognize the same wide hall of the Louvre, the row of busts, the high windows. We haven’t moved more than ten feet.

“What—”

“Let me figure it out!” Win snaps.

The cloth lurches. I manage to keep my balance, but my head is spinning. The blurred outer walls of the museum rise around us. We’ve only Traveled into the courtyard.

An older model
, Win said before, when the jumps were rough. Has it died? Win slams his hand against the display, but the cloth doesn’t move at all this time. He leans forward, his head bowed, muttering something under his breath. It sounds almost like he’s praying. I hug myself, braced for the pale woman to burst out of the doorway across from us. Maybe we should get out and run for it.

“You will work,” Win growls at the display, as if he can intimidate the cloth into functioning properly. His fingers flit over the characters. And the world around us finally whisks away.

My eyes squeeze shut. The floor beneath me shudders and the air squeals. This must be what it’s like to be tossed up in the middle of a hurricane. But at least it feels like we’re actually going somewhere this time.

We come to ground with a jolt and a ringing in my ears. Only a dim light penetrates the fabric walls past the buildings looming close on either side, but the rumble of car traffic and the beat of a hip-hop tune filter in with it. Not the Louvre, or Paris, anymore. We’ve left the Enforcers far behind. I let out my breath.

“Third time’s a charm,” I murmur. “Where are we?”

Win consults the display. His stance relaxes. “Back in your city,” he says. “The afternoon we left.”

“Oh,” I say. “I was thinking, like, my
house
, or . . .”

“I know,” Win says. “But . . . I didn’t expect the Enforcers to catch up with us that quickly.”

“We must have made another shift at the museum, right?” I say, but even as the words are coming out, I frown. What shift could we have made that would have entered the Enforcers’ records somehow? The only person we encountered was that guard, who didn’t even see us. And yet the pale woman seemed to know exactly where—and when—to find us. “What else could it be?”

“I don’t know,” Win says, his voice tight. “They shouldn’t be able to unscramble the signal on the cloths after what Isis did. We should be okay. I just thought it was better to take precautions. If they do figure out how to track us, jumping to your house would lead them straight there.”

The thought of the pale woman standing at my front door sends a chill through me. “We can still go there; it’s only a small chance,” Win continues, but I shake my head.

“No.” Seeing my room for a few minutes isn’t worth even a tiny risk. This will have to do.

“Let me know when you’re ready to move on,” Win says.
Preferably soon
, I can tell he’s thinking. With the idea of the Enforcers following us hanging over me, coming home isn’t quite as comforting as I’d hoped.

“Why don’t we dox the Enforcers, or them us?” I ask as we step out of the cloth into the alley.

“The group looking for me, they’re from the same present I am,” Win says. “Our timelines match up, for the most part. There’s a little wiggle room: if it takes them half an hour to notice a shift we accidentally made, they can’t show up there at the same moment we made the shift, or the half-hour difference in our ‘bubbles’ will push them away. Which is why they didn’t show up the second we walked into the coffee shop the other day. And why we’ll want to avoid staying anyplace for very long.”

Right. I touch the backs of the buildings as we walk toward the street. The bricks and concrete are reassuringly real, but not
too
real. I peer out onto a shopping strip that’s vaguely familiar. I think it’s near Mom’s gym . . . Ah! When I went in with her for Take Your Children to Work Day a few years back, we ate lunch at that cafe down the street. It had that Black Forest cake she swooned over.

The memory settles me more firmly into place. The people walking by are a blur of jeans and modern jackets, running shoes and stiletto heels, cell phones in hands or at ears. The air I breathe in is laced with exhaust and a salty-greasy smell from the fast food restaurant next to us. The tension in my chest eases slightly.

This is my world. Still here, just like it’ll still be waiting after wherever we go next. I reach into my purse, curling my fingers around my phone. I could call Angela, or Lisa, or Bree—Mom or Dad, even—if I wanted to. But I don’t know what I’d say, or if I might make some inadvertent shift that would definitely bring the Enforcers this way. Still, it’s nice knowing I could.

Win shifts his weight from foot to foot in silent impatience. I only asked for a few minutes here, but now that I’m back, surrounded by the sights and smells and sounds that tell me I belong, the thought of leaving this all behind again is painful.

I could stay here after all. I could just walk away.

And leave Win to face the Enforcers alone. And go back on my word.
We’ve still got my planet to save.
Who knows if this city will even be here tomorrow if the other Travelers keep making their experimental shifts?

I press my hand against the side of the restaurant, letting the sense of my city wash over me. The sense of the world I’m defending. Then I turn back to Win.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m ready.” And this time I believe it.

We duck back into the shadows, and into the time cloth. As the folds close around me, I remember those first halting jumps when we were trying to leave the Louvre.

“They didn’t do something to damage your cloth, did they?” I say.

“What?”

“The Enforcers. It didn’t really jump the first couple times.”

“Oh,” Win says. “No, it was just being finicky. Like . . . a car stalling. I just had to get it going and then it was fine. We made it here, didn’t we?”

I’d rather we’d made it with a brand-new, top-of-the-line time cloth that didn’t stall. I’d guess that’s what the Enforcers are working with. At least Win doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem that’ll get worse.

He must already have programmed our next destination in, because he only has to tap the panel before we’ve lifted off. I’m almost relieved to feel the shaking, spinning motion that says we’re really Traveling. Bracing myself, I squeeze down my nausea.

It feels like a while before we hit the ground. Trees stand around us, banding the sides of the tent.

“The hills over Vietnam’s Bach Dang River, 938 AD,” Win announces. “On the eve of the great rebellion. The battle takes place on the river, so whatever trail Jeanant’s left us to the next part of the weapon, it’s probably down there.”

“Why didn’t we go straight there?” I ask, and then realize the answer on my own. “Because if the Enforcers trace the jump, that would lead them right to us and Jeanant.”

“They shouldn’t be able to,” Win says, like he did before. “Just a precaution. But we should still get moving.”

He whips back the cloth to reveal a dirt road mottled with hoofprints and wheel ruts. The breeze is cool and damp, with a smell like the park back home just after a rain shower, but muskier. Win heads down the road, folding the cloth as he walks. My boots squelch through patches of gooey mud as I hurry to catch up. Massive ferns line the road around the mossy trunks of the broad-leaved trees, their twisting branches heavy with loops of vine. The buzz of insect life quavers around us. It presses in on me, and for a second I can’t breathe. I curl my fingers into my palm, trying to bring back the feel of the buildings back home, then train my eyes on Win’s satchel, on the rounded edges of the brass buckles, the scuffs on the smooth leather. The suffocating presence of the jungle recedes.

The road veers up a slope scattered with chunks of lichen-splotched rock. We’re just nearing the top when twigs crackle somewhere behind us. I recoil, stepping toward the shelter of the trees. Win turns. No one’s in sight, but a low thudding is carrying toward us. Like many sets of feet treading over the packed earth.

The alarm band around my ankle is still. “It’s not your people,” I say.

“Then that’s most likely more of the army arriving,” Win whispers. “Let’s get out of the way. If they see us, we could shift something.”

I was on board as soon as he said the word
army
. He squeezes through the heavy underbrush, me behind him, droplets of water dappling my shirt and dress. The jagged fronds scrape against my arms. As I push them away from my face, shivers slide over my fingers. I jerk my hands away.

Win has stopped. He grabs my wrist and tugs me down behind a particularly large fern.