Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) (4 page)

5.

W
in pulls at my arm, his back to the woman. Her gaze is still fixed on me. Her mouth curls into a sneer. She strides forward with predatory speed, and that’s when my body wakes up and decides it’s time to get out of there.

I slide off my chair. Win tugs me through the shop, his hand clamped around my wrist, his jaw tight. He’s so obviously scared, it makes me even more terrified. I’ve never seen that woman before in my life—I’d remember that icy stare. How can she know me?

What does she want with me?

“Hey!” one of the baristas shouts as Win pushes the rear “Staff Only” door open. I glance behind just long enough to see the pale woman loping after us, her hand moving to a thin shape at her hip. My pulse skips and I scramble after Win. We rush through a narrow room packed with shelves of boxes and plastic-wrapped skids to the heavier door at the other end. Win shoves it and gives a huff of relief when it moves.

“Who—” I begin.

“Just come,” he snaps. “Fast!”

The door is squeaking open behind us. I stumble into the alley. Win doesn’t stop for a second. He swivels on his feet and drags me toward the street that’s visible beyond the backs of the neighboring buildings. I keep pace, my wrist aching in his grip. Part of me wants to pull my arm away and part of me is worried he’d break the bones before he let go.

“We should be able to lose them out there,” he says. Then the door we came out thumps again, and he lunges into a run.

I race after him, dodging the garbage spilling from an overflowing trash bin and splashing through a puddle. Footsteps are smacking the pavement behind us. Faster than ours. There’s a twanging sound, like an out-of-tune guitar. Win swears again, yanking me to the side as a sliver of light crackles into the bars of a fire escape, so close the sparks singe my cheek.

My breath stutters, but I don’t have time to wonder what the hell that was. The open space at the end of the alley is just a building-length away. I gulp air and lengthen my strides, my free arm pumping frantically. Win veers left and then right, and my foot skids on a crumpled plastic bag. There’s another twang.

Pain slices up my left elbow, forcing a yelp from my throat. My muscles spasm and my feet tangle under me. Win hauls me upright, out onto the busy sidewalk.

The pain vanishes as we weave through the evening shoppers. For an instant, I’m relieved. Then I realize I can’t feel my arm at all. It’s gone numb from hand to shoulder, so numb I have to look down to make sure it’s still there. When I try to move it, not a single fingertip wiggles. The arm might as well be hollow.

The shock sends a blur of tears into my eyes, but my feet keep running. Win bolts onto the road, and I follow. I don’t know what else to do.

Tires screech. Someone yells at us. My arm bumps limply against my side, like a dead thing. Nausea bubbles up inside me. I swallow it down, training my mind on the simple act of setting my feet flat on the ground, one after the other.

I can’t fall. Whatever might happen if that woman catches up with us has to be even worse than this.

We reach the opposite sidewalk just in time to dash around a bus pulling up at the corner. Win peeks over his shoulder and then turns sharply into a shop doorway beside us. He jerks my wrist, the one I can still feel, so I’ll crouch with him behind the window display. I stare at the glossy objects lining the shelves around us for several seconds before my mind catches up. Shoes. We’re in a shoe store.

“What . . .” I say, but I can’t even figure out what question to ask.

Win holds a finger to my lips. He eases up to peer between the fur-trimmed boots lining the stand by the front window. His chest is heaving, an odd clicking sound coming with each breath. The woman trying on a pair of kitten heels by one of the benches goggles at us. A clerk is marching over.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” she says, “but—”

Win jumps up. “I apologize. We’re leaving.”

We are? I hurry after him as he sprints outside. “Quick,” he says. “They’ll realize we didn’t run that way before very long. We need to get out of range.”

He starts to jog back the way we came. My head jerks around, but there’s no sign of the woman who was chasing us—the woman who
shot
at us. She must have run past the store. I trail after Win across the road, around the corner, and down a different street. My bad arm swings dully by my side.

In a minute, we’ve left most of the traffic behind. My skin prickles. We’re surrounded by houses now. There’s nowhere to hide if she finds us again.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“It’s not far,” Win says. “She won’t know to look for us there.”

I’ll take that for now. We jog down several more blocks and around another corner, until we reach a smaller commercial street and a squat, dun building with a sign declaring it the “Garden Inn.” Win ducks inside and comes to a halt in the lobby. He sags against the wall, his hand pressed against his chest. A grayish cast clouds his skin. He’s not just panting but wheezing now.

We haven’t been running that fast. I’m hardly winded, and he looks reasonably fit.

“Are you going to be okay?” I say. “Do you have an inhaler or something?”

“I’m fine,” he rasps. “Just need . . . a second. It’s . . . the air’s not . . .”

He trails off and doesn’t continue. I stand there as he catches his breath. The balding man at the front desk studiously ignores us in favor of his wall-mounted TV. A tingling is creeping back into the skin around my shoulder and my thumb.

I prod the muscles. I still can’t feel much, but I think the numbness is wearing off. Thank God. But there’s an odd rough patch on the sleeve of my jacket. I look down at the sleeve, and slide it around.

My body stills. Just above my elbow is a mark about a half an inch thick and two inches long. Not a rip or a puncture. It looks as if the synthetic fibers have melted into a lumpy scar where the shot caught me.

What if she’d hit my back? My head?

What
was
that thing she shot me with? I check the skin underneath. It’s smooth and unbroken. How is it possible for the same shot that melted my jacket to have left my skin unharmed, while numbing all my nerves? None of the laws of science I know will let me wrap my head around that.

Win pushes himself upright, looking less like he’s going to die.

“This way,” he says.

He wavers across the lobby to a doorway framed by faux marble. It’s not until I’ve followed him into a hall lined with numbered doors and he pulls out a key that it occurs to me he’s heading to a room here. A room he expects me to go into with him, alone.

I still know nothing about him other than his name, and the fact that he’s associated with some very strange and violent people. He ran away from them, but that doesn’t prove he’s better than they are.

Win makes it a couple of steps farther before he notices I’ve stopped. “It’s just a few more doors down,” he says.

“I’m not going anywhere else until you tell me what’s going on,” I say. My shoulder twitches, a swath of feeling returning with pinpricks of pain.

“We can’t talk about it in the middle of the hall,” he says, managing to sound exasperated despite the continued hitching of his breath.

“Then I’m leaving,” I say. “Maybe I shouldn’t have gone with you in the first place. Why were those people chasing us? What have you gotten me mixed up in?”

“It was you they were looking for,” he points out.

I remember that with perfect clarity: the moment the pale woman’s gaze clashed with mine.
That’s the one
. But I also remember how Win reacted before they’d even stepped in the door.

“You knew they were coming. You knew they were dangerous before they did anything. It’s obviously got something to do with you.”

“I know you’ll be in even more trouble if you go out there and they find you again,” he says.

“Then I’d better go to the cops,” I say. “Maybe they can actually stop those people.” The image of the pale woman flashes through my mind: her athletic speed, the confidence in her stride. I hesitate. “Unless those
were
some kind of cops.”

“You know cops around here who use guns like that?” Win asks, raising an eyebrow as he nods to my arm. The flesh below my shoulder is still completely dead. I try to bend my elbow, and fail.

“I don’t know,” I say. “They could have all sorts of fancy weapons if it was the FBI, or some special army division.”

“They’re not FBI, or army, or anything like that,” Win says. “And there isn’t a police force on Earth that’ll have any idea how to deal with them.”

“And you do?” I say. “All you’ve done so far is ask me weird questions and make up stories about why you care. I’d rather take my chances with the cops.”

His expression flickers. “You don’t understand,” he says.

No, I don’t understand anything about him or what just happened. But I know I don’t trust him, and he’s all but admitted that woman is connected to him somehow. “You’re right,” I say, taking a step back. “But unless you feel like explaining for real . . .”

He looks at me, and then at the floor. Well, there’s my answer. I turn and head back toward the lobby, not totally sure what I’m going to do once I get out there. My stomach’s churning. Can 9-1-1 handle a situation like this?

I guess I’ll have to find out.

I’m almost at the doorway when I hear Win’s voice.

“Wait,” he says. I glance back at him. His jaw is clenched tight and his eyes are bright with something that could be fear or excitement or both.

“I’ll tell you,” he says in a rush. “The real story this time, I promise. If you’ll stay and listen. I
can
protect you from the people who chased us. And . . . I could use your help.”

I pause. I don’t know what the heck he thinks I can do for him, but he sounds like he means it.

He might be right about the cops. At least, if I’m going to them, it’d be better if I have some idea who those people are. Where to find them. What else they’re capable of.

“I’m still not going into some locked room with you,” I say.

Win considers. “I think there’s a patio,” he said, “on the roof. The woman who checked me in said something about breakfast there when the weather’s good. How’s that?”

If I don’t like the look of it, I can always turn around. “Fine,” I say. “Let’s take the stairs.”

I let him go first, so I can keep an eye on him. Pins and needles are jabbing into my wrist and down my upper arm. I can twitch my fingers and my thumb now. Progress.

Win’s panting by the time we’ve climbed up all three flights, but he walks out onto the patio steadily enough. He sits down at one of the grimy plastic tables and motions to the chair across from him.

“You can stay closer to the door,” he says. “And there’s a fire escape over there”—he nods to a spot a few feet from the chair—“if that’s not enough security.”

If I needed to, I could obviously outrun him. I pull the chair out and sit, just out of reach. The autumn evening chill is settling in, damp and clammy. I shrug my jacket closer around me.

“Okay,” I say. “Explain.”

I expect him to launch straight into some elaborate story. Instead, he studies the tabletop with a frown. Then he raises his eyes.

“I wasn’t lying to you because I wanted to,” he says. “We’re not supposed to tell anyone. Ever. That’s the most important rule. But I think what we’re trying to accomplish right now is more important than that rule. I think
you’re
more important.”

I have no idea what to make of that. Win rubs the back of his neck and sighs.

“The reason I was so tired just now,” he says, “it’s not because of a medical condition. It’s because I’m not fully adjusted to the air here, or the gravity. There’s more oxygen, and less pull, on my planet.”

6.

O
n your
planet
?”

This can’t be real. I’m not really hearing this. But I am, and Win’s looking at me with a twist to his lips like he knows how ridiculous it sounds—like he knows but he can’t help it because it’s true. Okay. So he’s insane.

As I come to that conclusion, I’m already getting to my feet.

“No, wait,” he says, lunging forward to grasp at me. When I flinch back, he holds his hand out beseechingly. “Let me tell you the whole thing. I’m not lying—I swear it. I can even prove it to you. Please.”

I stand there, frozen. I don’t want to listen to some long crazy story. But something crazy is going on, isn’t it? Attendants come to drag him back to the psychiatric ward wouldn’t carry strange melty-numbing weapons. And as I stare at him, I’m struck once more by the awful solidness of him: the way, when my attention’s on him, the world around us starts to feel as filmy as tissue paper.

My hand slips into my pocket, thumb sliding over the beads. After a couple of turns, I can breathe again. But I don’t sit back down.

“I’m waiting,” I say.

“My planet,” Win says quickly. “Kemya.” He pronounces the
K
sound with a slight slur in the back of his throat, the part of his accent I couldn’t place, which adds a disturbing edge of authenticity. “You could say we’ve been ‘studying’ Earth. Seeing how the people here deal with problems. Experimenting with possibilities.”

“By stopping courthouses from being bombed and stalking high-school girls?” I say.

“I wasn’t—” He stops, and seems to gather himself. “We have a type of . . . machine, that can create a special field. When we’re inside the field, we can travel between the present and the past. Change events. Observe different outcomes.”

He nods to the darkening sky. “The largest time field generator ever created is up there, hidden from your sensors and telescopes. It’s holding in place a field that surrounds your entire planet. As if it’s encased in a giant glass ball.”

He runs a finger through the grime on the tabletop, drawing one circle that I guess is supposed to be Earth, and a dot that must be this generator thing hovering above it. Then a bigger circle, that stretches from the dot all the way around, engulfing the first circle completely. My chest tightens, as if it’s me he’s confined.

“There’s a team of our scientists and Travelers working on an adjacent satellite up there,” Win says, tapping the generator dot. “They keep the field running and monitor everything down here, and jump in when they have alterations to make that they think will be informative.”

The words are so pat and technical it takes a moment for their full meaning to sink in.

“So you’re telling me that you’re an alien,
and
a time traveler,” I say. “And you and other people from your . . . your planet, you’ve been playing around with things down here, messing with our lives?”

“
I
haven’t,” Win says. “I mean, not very much. I only just finished the training. But there are lots of other Travelers . . . and it’s been going on for thousands of years. I don’t—”

“Thousands of years?” I interrupt. The bottom of my stomach has dropped out. No. I need something—a flick of an eyelid, a tweak of a muscle—to tell me he’s pulling my leg. But his expression is impenetrably serious.

It’s too crazy to be true. There’s no way.

“I don’t like it either,” Win says emphatically. “There’s a group of us—we don’t think it’s right. We want to shut down the time field and stop the experimenting. To leave Earth alone.” He runs his thumb over his drawing, smudging out the second circle, his “glass ball.”

Well, if this weren’t crazy, that’s definitely the side I’d be on.

“That’s why I’m here,” he goes on. “We’re looking for— The leader of our group, he designed a weapon that could destroy the generator, take down all the defenses. There are a lot. But he was almost caught by the Enforcers, our security division, people like the ones who chased us today. So he came down to Earth and hid the weapon from them, where the rest of us could retrieve it later to finish the job.”

I don’t know what to do other than play along. “Okay. And you think he hid it
here
?”

“No,” Win says. “It’s more complicated than that. The rest of the group, they’re looking for Jeanant—our leader—in the past right now. But this is the time when he first came down, so I was assigned to stay here in case there was some sort of sign from when he arrived. I’ve been hopping from country to country, watching for anything unusual. I came to this city because I heard about the courthouse bombing.”

“But it wasn’t bombed,” I say. “Not yet, anyway. You said you . . .”

He said he stopped it.

“I came and I watched, and I could tell pretty quickly the bomb had nothing to do with Jeanant,” Win says. “But I’ve been waiting around for weeks—going through the same week, over and over—and I don’t know what’s happening with the others. We aren’t supposed to be here at all, so our equipment is limited, especially communications. I’ll be called in when they’ve succeeded, but that hasn’t happened yet. I didn’t know whether the Enforcers had caught on. Whether the others might be in danger. Then I saw your class, and . . . It was awful, afterward.” He looks suddenly sick. Visions of ambulances, stretchers, smoke, and burned flesh pass through my head, and my own stomach clenches.

“I knew it would be so simple to go back and save all of you,” he continues. “One little gesture to make up for a tiny bit of the harm the Travelers have done down here. And at the same time I could distract any Enforcers chasing the rest of the group. I didn’t mean to let them get so close.”

The sensation of burning heat and the blast of sound come back to me so vividly I taste ash in my mouth. So if I believe him, the hall really did explode, once. And then Win changed something so it didn’t. And after . . .

After the explosion that didn’t happen, everything felt
wrong
to me. Everywhere I went, everyone I talked to. For hours.

Maybe the problem wasn’t with the entire world. Maybe what was
wrong
was me still being in it.

“When you watched, the first time . . .” I say. “We all died.”

He nods.

The casual acknowledgment chokes me. I drag in the cool air. It’s not true. It’s just a story. How could it be true?

A story to cover
what
? What could possibly be worse than this?

“You came by the school this morning,” I say. “You were still watching us.” I remember the moment he lit up. “You were waiting for Jaeda?”

“Who?”

“Black hair, dark skin, very pretty . . .” I raise my eyebrows.

A flush spreads under his golden-brown skin. “Oh,” he says. “It wasn’t about her. I came back to see if the Enforcers had registered the change, started to investigate. And I’d noticed your reaction, when the explosion was supposed to happen, and thought it might be a good idea to observe you a little. I did notice—Jaeda?—the other day too. She has a . . . distinctive look. It was just good to see she was well.”

Of course. “So I was right in the first place,” I say. “You’re a stalker.”

“It wasn’t like
that
,” he protests. “I’d seen her for all of fifteen minutes. And I had a good reason to want to check on you.”

I fold my arms over my chest, raising my chin. This is ridiculous. Nothing exploded, no one died, I’m fine. “I don’t know why I was considering buying any of this,” I say. “There are about a billion more plausible stories you could have told. Where’s the proof you said you have? Is it just that I felt something weird yesterday?”

“No.” He stands up and sets his satchel on the table. “I’ll show you. You pick the time and place. If you could see anywhere, any time before now . . . where would you go?”

Right. This is a joke. My thoughts slip back to last night’s reading. “Sure,” I say. “Why not? Let’s visit the Roman Coliseum. First century AD. When there are games on. Are you going to pull it out of that bag?”

“You could say that,” he says as he opens the satchel. “We Travel in this.”

He pulls out that bundle of shimmery not-quite fabric that fascinated me earlier and unfurls it. At a press of his fingers, there’s a mechanical click, and a line splits down the middle so he can open it like an immense cape.

“Anywhere, any when,” he says, a reverential tenderness in his tone and his grip on the cloth. “You’re going to have to come inside, of course.”

We’re going to travel through time in a shiny tablecloth? This is the craziest part yet. I shake my head, a laugh sputtering out.

Win squares his shoulders. With a practiced snap of his wrists, he whirls the cloth around him. For an instant I’m watching his form disappear amid the folds of dark fabric.

And then, suddenly, I can’t see him or the cloth at all.

My head whips around. The rooftop is empty except for the vacant tables and me. The wind teases my hair. Streetlights gleam in the distance. Where the hell did he go?

I’m heading over to check the fire escape when Win’s voice emerges from the air where he was standing before.

“I’m right here.”

The air parts, and the surface of the cloth shimmers back into sight. Only it doesn’t look like a cape now, more like a narrow, arch-topped tent, a couple feet taller than Win and maybe four wide. Win’s peering out at me between the flaps of its entrance, his mouth curved into a crooked grin as if daring me to try to explain
this
away.

I . . . really don’t have any rational way of explaining that. I blink, and the scene before me doesn’t change. If this is crazy, then I’m crazy too.

Win tilts his head. “Are you going to come get your proof or not?”

My heart thuds. I could walk away and never stop wondering. Or I could take a leap. If his “proof” doesn’t hold up, well, I’ll know for sure none of this was true.

I step toward Win. He eases back to make room for me. I hesitate, and then push myself onward. The flap flutters down after I duck inside the sort-of tent, but it doesn’t block the light. The pale outlines of the rooftop outside and the buildings beyond it swim on the inner walls.

Beside me, Win taps the fabric. It hums, and a wavering display lights up, presenting a series of dancing characters.

“So this thing is going to fly us through space and time?” Somehow it sounds even more absurd when I say it out loud.

Win skims through the data with his fingers hovering an inch from the display, his face intent in the reflected glow. “It’s more bouncing,” he says. “That glass ball I said the time field is like? We hit the inner surface and come back down. The field does most of the work.”

With a satisfied sound, he pats the display with his palm. It vanishes.

“This cloth’s an older model,” he says. “The Traveling’s not quite as smooth as—”

The rest of his sentence is cut off by a lurch. The shapes on the walls blur and my stomach jolts into my throat. We’re rushing up and around, spinning and shuddering, as if we’re trapped in some sort of manic elevator. The air shrieks. I close my eyes and clamp my jaw shut to keep from shrieking with it.

There’s a tremor, and then we’re plummeting. My hand gropes out and clutches the first solid thing it finds. My head’s about to pull right off my neck. My lungs are squeezed tight.

We stop with a jerk. The shrieking fades from my ears, leaving only a faint ringing.

It’s Win’s elbow I’m clinging to. I open my eyes, and shut them again, fighting the urge to vomit. Okay. This is definitely not just a tablecloth.

“Sorry,” Win says. “It’s always awful the first time.”

I draw air in and gradually expel it. The various parts of my body settle back into their proper places. I sneak a peek at him.

“It gets better?”

He cracks a smile. “Hard to say. But once you see where you can go, you stop caring.”

Where you can go.
I risk a look around. The walls are dark except for a rectangle of yellow light ahead of us. Indistinct figures ripple across it. I don’t know where we are now, but it doesn’t look like the rooftop.

“Ready?” Win asks.

I shouldn’t have agreed to this if I weren’t. “Ready,” I say, without giving myself a chance to rethink it.

He draws open the cloth.