Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) (20 page)

Greed and inaction . . .
“That sounds like it,” I say, my heart leaping.

“I don’t remember anything about trees being cut down, though,” she says with a shrug.

“It might not have been cut down, I guess. Just that they’d fallen.”

“Oh, that. . . Maybe the name of the battle was something about fallen trees? Because there was a storm that knocked a bunch down where they were fighting or something.”

“You remember where it was?” I ask. “The battle?”

She laughs. “We didn’t talk about it
that
much.”

Bree is still watching me, her eyebrows slightly raised. “You could probably look it up now if you need to know more, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, pulling myself back. That should give us enough detail for Win to find the right battle in his time-cloth computer.

“And now back to more important topics,” Lisa says, leaning toward Evan. “How can we make this beach trip happen?”

As they talk about sun and sand, my mind slips to an imagined battlefield: trees laid low by a storm, Native soldiers fighting Americans, the British watching at a distance . . .

Guns firing. Blood spilling. Bodies crumpling.

If anything, I feel even more detached from the others now. Here I am, hanging out with my friends as if nothing’s wrong in the world—as if Jeanant isn’t racing through the past trying to save our planet, as if some new shift couldn’t rewrite all our lives at any instant. My skin tightens.

“What about you, Skylar?” Bree says, breaking through my thoughts. “What do you think? We’re going to have to work together on this.”

“Yeah,” I manage. “Ah, maybe if we picked a different beach that’s not right by Miami?”

“But still close enough that we could drive over there to party a little,” Bree says, and jabs her finger in the air. “Genius!”

What does Miami matter when the atoms around us are disintegrating? Bree’s comment pulls up an echo of Jeanant’s words from the recording:
Working together . . . we can become something so incredible that we’ll set all our lives on a completely different course.
I was a part of
that
, of fixing myself, fixing this whole world.

But like Win said, I’ve contributed lots already. Why can’t I count that as enough risks taken, and just enjoy the fact that I got home safe?

Lisa lets out a low whistle, looking out the front window. “Whoa. I’ve never seen anyone bleach their hair that light and still make it look natural.”

I follow her gaze, and my back goes rigid. It’s Kurra. With her white-blond hair mostly covered by her hood, stalking down the sidewalk past the pie shop. She probably would have seen me if she’d glanced in the window—I’m only five feet back from the glass. But she’s focused on a metallic square in her slim hand.

“Maybe it is natural,” Evan’s saying. “She could be an albino.”

Kurra glances up briefly, looking down the street, and picks her pace up to a jog. Toward the store where I left Win. In a second, she’s passed out of view.

“Don’t albinos have pink eyes?” Lisa says. “Hers looked gray.”

My lungs constrict. Win has no way of knowing she’s coming for him without his alarm band. And any second one of her colleagues could come by and notice me. Me here with Bree and Lisa and Evan, who are oblivious to the danger—easy collateral damage.

I’ve jeopardized everyone around me, and everything I’ve been trying to help Win accomplish, for a little comfort I couldn’t even enjoy.

“I think that’s mice with the pink eyes,” Bree says, and I push back my chair.

“Sorry, guys,” I say. “I’ve—ah—I just remembered, there was something I promised my mom I’d take care of before she got home—”

They’re staring at me, but that no longer matters. I wave my hand with a tight smile, and rush outside.

24.

I
hesitate when I reach the sidewalk, drawing back toward the shop’s doorway. Kurra’s partway down the next block now, almost at the furniture store where Win said he’d wait. She pauses amid the flow of pedestrians, and then strides on past it. I assumed she was tracking him somehow, but maybe he found a way to throw her off.

Or maybe he’s gone?

My chest clenches tighter. The moment Kurra disappears around the next corner, I sprint down the street. I burst into the furniture shop, breathless. A young couple is meandering amid the coffee tables. Two employees with name tags are murmuring near the counter, the older one scowling as though he’s rebuking the younger. Win’s nowhere to be seen.

Did he leave the second I walked out? Maybe he decided, with my meltdowns and demands, it was more trouble than it was worth to keep me around.

Even as the fear jolts through me, I’m already discounting it. I remember the way he said his promise, the way he held my gaze. Whatever else I might criticize him for, he hasn’t ever gone back on his word.

So where is he?

The older employee saunters away, leaving the younger to do a circuit of the store. I hurry over to him.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Did you see a guy in here, black hair, brown clothes, carrying a—”

The young man’s mouth twists. “Are you with him? When you see him, tell him fire exits are for emergencies only. And he’s lucky that chair he knocked over didn’t break.”

My gaze darts to a small sign at the back of the store, over the outline of a doorway. He ran out the back. Like in the coffee shop the other day. He must have been watching from the front windows, and seen Kurra or one of her colleagues coming.

“Thanks!” I say, and dart out. I circle the block and duck down the alley past the backs of the stores.

Win isn’t there either, but I didn’t expect him to be. He said something, when the Enforcers chased us before, about getting “out of range.” If Kurra’s tracking him, I’d guess her tech works something like the alarm band. It didn’t direct her to me, so it must be picking up his . . . alienness. She probably needs to be close to pick him up. In which case he’d have tried to get some distance.

I edge down the alley toward the back of the furniture store. He wouldn’t have gone anywhere the Enforcers might already know about, like the coffee shop or the hotel. And he wouldn’t have risked leading them back to my house. But I can’t just hang around here hoping he’s able to double back—one of the Enforcers could show up anytime.

A splotch of color catches my eye on the pavement outside the door: a small splatter of blue liquid. A shade of blue I recognize from Win’s drinking bottle. I stop, and test it with the toe of my boot. It streaks at my touch. Fresh.

I hustle farther down the alley. Another tiny splash has hit the edge of the laundromat by the street. He’s left me a trail. So he went to the right, from here.

I poke my head out to check for Enforcers, and then jog down the street. I’m starting to think I made a mistake, that it was a coincidence, when I spot a third speckling of blue on the sidewalk, in a line like he was running to cross the street when he spilled it. On the opposite curb, a little more. I jog on.

Farther down, a streak of blue dapples the front step of a hulking brick building. I take in the boarded lower windows, the battered “For Sale” sign, the empty socket where the doorknob should have been. It looks abandoned. He went in there—to hide? The building is several stories high, so maybe he thought he could get enough distance from the street to avoid the Enforcers’ tracking that way.

Any doubt vanishes when a face appears in a fifth-floor window. Win raises his hand to me with a tense smile, and waves me up. A grin breaks across my face as I nod. He’s fine.

I hurry across the street and nudge open the knobless door. It gives a soft creak, and then there’s a whisper behind me, so faint I might have missed it if I weren’t already on edge. I glance back.

The air is shimmering on the sidewalk just outside the door. I flinch, and scramble behind a dusty reception desk just as Kurra emerges from a time cloth outside.

I crouch there, heart thudding. She marches straight in, past me, toward something at the left. A stairwell. Her footsteps clatter up the stairs.

Crap. I stand up, wavering on my feet. She’s figured out Win is here—somehow. Maybe they have better tech than even Win realized. And now she’s between me and him. I dart a look toward the door, but for all I know there are more Enforcers waiting outside.

Win saw me come in. If I head toward him, maybe he can evade Kurra and reach me like he did by the caves.

I creep to the stairwell through a wide room floored with cheap tiles and scattered with the remains of an office area: a few laminate desks and plastic chairs, a tipped-over cubicle divider, a scrawl of crimson spray paint on the wall. Given the broken door, we’re obviously not the first people to have made illicit use of the space. Inching up the stairs, I can’t hear Kurra above me. She must have already gone out onto one of the upper floors.

If I’m lucky, she didn’t know exactly which one Win’s on, and I can sneak right past her to him.

I steal up toward the fifth floor as quickly and quietly as I can manage. I’ve just passed the second-floor landing when a yell carries from above. Another voice responds, too muffled for me to decipher. I push myself onward, breath held. There’s another exchange, and then a sound I’d recognize anywhere. The out-of-tune twang of an Enforcer’s weapon, piercing the air.

I freeze. Another shout reaches me, loud enough that I can make out the words.

“You’re supposed to be protecting Kemya,” Win’s saying. “Why aren’t you there instead of worrying about what happens on Earth?”

His voice is ragged, as if it’s taking all the effort he has in him just to project it. He’s already tired out—from the recent run here, from evading Kurra, and maybe her colleagues too. Why is he talking at all? His voice is going to draw them right to . . .

Oh. It’s for me. To draw
me
to him. I swallow thickly. He’s putting himself in even more danger so I can find him.

Kurra’s stilted voice yells back. “Why are
you
worrying about what happens here?” She pauses. “You’re almost surrounded. I can see you—just a little dot on my screen. You may as well give yourself up.”

I edge up the stairs. Her screen—her tracking device. But she still doesn’t know I’m here. She probably doesn’t even suspect the girl she’s seen him with is human. Traveling with me is forbidden, after all. I guess that’s one small advantage.

“You’re giving up your life for people who are just shadows,” Kurra says. “Why do they deserve your loyalty more than Kemya?”

“We’re the ones who made them this way,” Win says. “What we did to them, what we’re still doing—it isn’t right.”

“Most of Kemya would disagree with you,” Kurra retorts. Her voice is coming from somewhere across the fourth floor. She must have caught Win on his way down to meet me.

Neither Win nor she nor any other Enforcer is in sight from the fourth-floor landing. There’s a lot more furniture here than below. A mess of gray desks and dividers blocks off my view of most of the room. Whatever company owned the building must have gone under, and decided it’d cost more to haul out the furniture than leave it. I squeeze between two dividers pushed at awkward angles to each other, straining my ears and my eyes in the dim light.

“They haven’t been here,” Win says, somewhere to my left. “They don’t understand. If they did . . .” His voice quavers, and cuts off. My stomach flips over in the time it takes for him to find it again. “No one back home would want their lives controlled this way.”

I veer toward him, staying crouched and setting my feet carefully amid the bits of glass from a shattered desktop. My ankle, the one I injured in Vietnam, twinges.

Kurra gives a hoarse chuckle. “You don’t think we have our lives controlled, one way or another, on Kemya? Have you made every choice in your life perfectly freely?” Her voice bounces off the walls, the low ceiling, but I think it’s more to my right. Good. I can still hope to get to him first.

“It’s not the same,” Win says.

I skirt a tipped-over desk and step across a scattering of faded printouts in what seems to be the middle of the room. Several of them are stained with splotches of yellow. The scent of old cat urine hangs in the air.

“No,” Kurra agrees. “Because Earth
belongs
to us. The colonists who volunteered to settle on this insignificant planet knew what that meant. All you’re doing is defiling their sacrifice.”

What? I halt in midstep, catching my balance against the cracked seat of a chair.

“Maybe the original colonists agreed to participate,” Win says. “But their descendants weren’t given a choice. Why should these people keep paying for the decisions their ancestors made hundreds of generations ago?”

The original colonists . . . Hundreds of generations ago . . .
He can’t really mean—

I scoot around a table. Footsteps rasp somewhere nearby. Kurra, or one of her companions?

Her reply rings out so clearly she can’t be more than ten feet away. “All of us live with what
our
ancestors did to Kemya. We keep paying for their mistakes. At least the first Earthlings came by choice and not through a careless accident.”

I don’t want to hear any more of this. I force myself to keep going. I have to find Win. There’s nothing else that matters right now.

Two dividers bent toward each other form a narrow passage. I slip down it. Win’s voice comes from just up ahead. “So we lost one choice, and they only got one.”

“I’m protecting my people; that is all I need to know,” Kurra returns.

I creep forward a few more steps. There’s a rasp of indrawn breath, and Win’s voice wavers out one more time, from what sounds like just the other side of the divider next to me.

“And I’m protecting
all
our people.”

I don’t let myself think about anything else—about what he’s saying, what she said, what it means. We have to get out of here. My lips part, but in the same moment papers crinkle on the floor behind me. Too close. They’ll hear me.

I reach out and rap my knuckles lightly against the plasticky surface of the divider. One, two, three. If they hear that, hopefully they’ll think it’s Win.

“Skylar?” Win whispers.

Again: one, two, three. I hesitate with my hand against the wall. The person behind me treads closer.

“Stay where you are!” a male voice snaps. The man I saw with Kurra before barges around the table into the makeshift passage. I scramble away with a yelp, eyes fixed on the weapon in his hand. The air blurs between us. Win tosses back the time cloth and whips a metallic marble from his hand.

It explodes in the Enforcer’s face with a shower of sparks. He winces, arms flying up, and the blaster twangs. Its bolt of light crackles against the unlit fluorescent panels in the ceiling, sending a shower of plastic shards down on us. One slices across my forehead.

The man keeps coming. Win lurches into me, spinning us around and pulling the cloth over us. The Enforcer is wiping his eyes, raising his weapon, as the derelict office dims and washes away like paint in the rain.

The cloth whirs and shrieks and deposits us in front of a row of pale houses with red roofs. I catch just a glimpse before we shudder away again amid an increasingly frantic series of pings. Win’s fingers dart over the data panel. He lets go of me to squeeze his other hand against his side. The flickering yellow light turns the dark patch on his shirt a deep orange.

He’s bleeding. Blood down his side, trickling over his hand.