ONE
TWO FOR THE ROAD
Shelby and Miles were laughing when they stepped out of the Announcer. Its dark tendrils clung to the brim of Miles’s blue Dodgers baseball cap and Shelby’s tangled ponytail as the two of them emerged.
Even though Shelby’s body felt as weary as if she’d done four back-to-back sessions of Vinyasa yoga, at least she and Miles were back on solid—present-tense—ground. Home. Finally.
The air was cold, the sky gray but bright. Miles’s shoulders towered in front of her, shielding her body from the brisk wind that sent ripples across the white T-shirt he’d been wearing since they’d left Luce’s parents’ backyard on Thanksgiving.
Eons ago.
“I’m serious!” Shelby was saying. “Why is it so hard for you to believe that my first priority is lip balm?” She ran a finger across her lip and recoiled exaggeratedly. “They’re like sandpaper!”
“You’re crazy.” Miles snorted, but his eyes followed Shelby’s finger as she gingerly traced her lower lip. “Lip balm is what you missed inside the Announcers?”
“And my podcasts,” Shelby said, crunching over a pile of dead gray leaves. “And my sun salutations on the beach—”
They had been leapfrogging through the Announcers for so long: from the cell in the Bastille where they’d met a wraithlike prisoner who wouldn’t give his name; into and right back out of a bloody Chinese battlefield where they didn’t recognize a soul; and, most recently, from Jerusalem, where they’d found Daniel at last, looking for Luce. Only Daniel wasn’t entirely himself. He was joined—literally—with some ghostly past version of himself. And he hadn’t been able to set himself free.
Shelby couldn’t stop thinking about Miles and Daniel fencing with the starshots, about the way Daniel’s two bodies—past and present—had been wrenched apart after Miles drew the arrow down the angel’s chest.
Creepy things happened inside Announcers; Shelby was glad to be done with them. Now if they could just not get lost in these woods on their way back to their dorm. Shelby looked toward what she hoped was west and started to lead Miles through the dreary unfamiliar section of the forest. “Shoreline should be this way.”
The return home was bittersweet.
She and Miles had entered the Announcer with a mission; they’d jumped through in Luce’s parents’ backyard after Luce herself had disappeared. They’d gone after her to bring her home—as Miles said, Announcers weren’t to be pranced into lightly—but also just to make sure she was all right. Whatever Luce was to the angels and demons fighting over her, Shelby and Miles didn’t care. To them, she was a friend.
But on their hunt, they kept just missing her. It had driven Shelby nuts. They’d gone from one bizarre stop to the next and still had seen no sign of Luce.
She and Miles had bickered several times over which way to go and how to get there—and Shelby hated fighting with Miles. It was like arguing with a puppy. The truth was, neither of them really knew what they were doing.
But in Jerusalem, there had been one good thing: The three of them—Shelby, Miles, and Daniel—had actually, for once, gotten along. Now, with Daniel’s blessing (some might call it a command), Shelby and Miles were finally headed back home. Part of Shelby worried about abandoning Luce, but another part—the part that trusted Daniel—was eager to get back to where she was supposed to be. Her proper era and place.
It felt like they had been traveling for a very long time, but who knew how time worked inside the Announcers? Would they come back and find they’d been gone just seconds, Shelby had wondered, a bit nervously, or would years have passed?
“As soon as we get back to Shoreline,” Miles said, “I’m running straight into a long, hot shower.”
“Yeah, good call.” Shelby grabbed a chunk of her thick blond ponytail and sniffed. “Wash this Announcer funk out of my hair. If that’s even possible.”
“You know what?” Miles leaned in, lowering his voice, even though there was no one else around. Weird that the Announcer had planted them so far off the grounds of the school. “Maybe tonight we should sneak into the mess hall and snag some of those flaky biscuits—”
“The buttery ones? From the tube?” Shelby’s eyes widened. Another genius idea from Miles. The guy was good to have around. “Man, I’ve missed Shoreline. It’s good to be—”
They crossed beyond the line of trees. A meadow opened up before them. And then it hit Shelby: She wasn’t seeing any of the familiar Shoreline buildings, because they weren’t there.
She and Miles were … somewhere else.
She paused and glanced at the hillside surrounding them. Snow sat on the boughs of trees that Shelby suddenly realized were definitely not California redwoods. And the slushy mud road ahead of them was no Pacific Coast Highway. It wound downward over the hillside for several miles toward a stunningly old-looking city protected by a massive black stone wall.
It reminded her of one of those faded old tapestries where unicorns frolicked in front of medieval towns, which some ex-boyfriend of her mom had once dragged her to see at the Getty.
“I thought we were home!” Shelby cried, her voice landing somewhere between a bark and a whine. Where were they?
She stopped just short of the crude road and looked around at the muddy desolation before her. There was no one around. Scary.
“I thought we were, too.” Miles scratched his cap glumly. “I guess we’re not quite back at Shoreline.”
“Not quite? Look at this excuse for a road. Look at that fortress thing down there.” She gasped. “And are those little moving dots knights? Unless we’re in some kind of theme park, we’re stuck in the freaking Middle Ages!” She covered her mouth. “We’d better not get the plague. Whose Announcer did you open up in Jerusalem, anyway?”
“I don’t know, I just—”
“We’re never going to get home!”