“Here,” he said, motioning her toward a screen. “Change here.”
Etta slipped behind it, watching his silhouette move against the white fabric, pacing. “What happened…?”
She let her dress fall to the ground and tugged on the soft, oversize clothing.
“Nan’s finally at peace,” he told her quietly, coming closer. “I was waiting for it…for the timeline to shift. To be flung out of here. But it never came. And then I tried to remember—I tried to remember if any change had ever been caused by a guardian dying, or if time just sees them the way Grandfather does: disposable.”
“And?”
“And I couldn’t. I couldn’t. It feels like it should have shifted the whole world. A traveler can do one thing outside of his time and the whole of it can shift. I don’t like that—that it makes it seem like she wasn’t important.” He was talking quickly, almost too quickly for Etta’s tired mind to keep up with. “All done?”
Etta stepped out from behind the screen and let him pass her to start changing.
“Julian,” she said gently. “Are you all right? Take a minute if you have to….”
“I don’t think we have a minute, do you?” he said. “There’s an Ironwood message drop in this year just a ways upstate. The Belladonna will have flooded the drops with invitations to the auction, just to get as many bidders as possible. We can start looking there.”
“Who is the Belladonna?” Etta asked.
“She’s a collector and an agent of sale for rare artifacts,” he said, pulling his new shirt over his head. “There’s going to be a buy-in amount in gold we’ll need to provide, but the bidding is done by submitting offers of secrets and favors. We just need to get inside, and then we can do whatever it is you think we’re supposed to be doing.”
“Destroying the astrolabe,” Etta said.
Julian leaned out from behind the screen. “Destroying it—what good is that going to accomplish? Shouldn’t we use it to try to save these people?”
One of the first things she’d learned about life as a traveler was that you couldn’t save the dead, not without consequences. But whatever fate the original timeline had intended for these people, this wasn’t it.
“It’ll reset everything,” she explained. “Bring it back to the original timeline. The one we knew…it’ll be gone.”
Julian turned away from surveying the cots, the weeping men and women by the survivor boards, and glanced back at her over his shoulder. “Then let’s go.”
NICHOLAS FELT HIMSELF NOD.
Nod as if to say, Yes, I expected this. I accept this. Because in truth, some part of him had. This was fate’s delight. To give him what he desired, or what he had not known he desired, only to viciously snatch it back again, just when it seemed as if he might seize it.
“What?” he heard Sophia say. “How?”
“A notice went out to all of the travelers and guardians,” Li Min said, struggling with each word, like her throat threatened to choke on them. She dug into her bag, retrieving a small slip of paper, and passed it to Sophia.
“‘Henry Hemlock demands satisfaction from Cyrus Ironwood for the unspeakably cruel murder of his daughter, Henrietta, who has lately passed into eternity from wounds sustained from an attack by his guardians, while she was already weakened’—oh my God. Date and place of death is listed as October 2, 1905, Texas.”
Something like bile or fire was rising in his throat. He couldn’t speak. Nicholas felt parts of himself begin to close off, as if to deny entry again to that now-familiar pain.
I wasn’t fast enough.
I couldn’t reach you.
I only wanted to save you.
The cathedral of hope in his heart, which he’d carefully crafted each day since he and Etta had been torn apart, burned down to its foundations of desperation and despair.
Oh God. Oh God.
“Carter,” Li Min said. “I think perhaps we should continue through the passage, find a place to sit, and take some water, yes?”
He shook his head, straining to get away from her. He began to stalk down the hall again, reaching for doors, tearing them open. It couldn’t be right. Her earring was here. Hemlock must have been mistaken. He would have felt it, wouldn’t he? He would have felt the world crash down upon itself if she’d passed on. The bell of his spirit would have been silenced. “She’s—”
She had been dead, nearly the whole time he’d been searching for her.
He had been chasing a ghost. A memory. No.
No.
Sophia stood there watching him, letting the death notice slip from her fingers. Li Min finally caught his arm, and this time she didn’t let him shake her off. “I know what it is you think, but consider the possibilities.”
“They said she died in Texas, two days after she disappeared, but then—then, how is her earring here?” he demanded.
Li Min’s response was as infuriatingly calm as always. “Someone might have taken the earring from her, or traded her for it. Or this earring, this version of it, might be from a past time in her mother’s life, before she ever gave them to her daughter. It might have been you, in the future, who returned here.”
Her words dripped through him one by one, poisoning that last small hope moving beneath his skin. He did not know Etta’s father from Adam, but he knew Li Min now. He trusted Li Min.