IT COULD BE WORSE
New Jersey
Harte came to sprawled on the floor of the moving train car, but the officers were gone. So was Jack.
When he pulled himself up, his head spun so much that he was barely conscious of the soft pile of material he was sitting on or the legs that moved beneath it, but once he was upright, his stomach revolted. Lurching to his feet, he ran toward the door at the back of the train car, barely making it out onto the platform in time to empty his stomach over the railing to the tracks below.
He hung there with his mouth tasting sour, and the warm breeze blew across his clammy skin as the earth sped by beneath him. When the door of the train car slid open behind him not long after, he knew without looking that it was Esta. There was something about the way the air changed whenever she was around him. It had always been like that, but now the voice inside of him whispered yes every time she was close. Soon.
Harte shoved the voice away, and with what strength he had left, he locked it down tight. The effort it took made his head swim again.
“Are you okay?” Esta asked, coming to stand next to him at the railing.
He nodded, still feeling sick and too warm.
Because the weather is too warm.
The sky no longer had the gray heaviness of earlier that morning, and the crisp spring air had been transformed into the balmy heat of a summer’s day. “What just happened?” he asked, closing his eyes against the motion of the train.
“You said to get us out. . . .”
Harte turned to her, comprehension already dawning on him, but before he could say anything, the door behind them opened and a uniformed conductor came out.
The man eyed Harte as he clung to the railing, but otherwise he gave no indication that anything was amiss. “Tickets, please.”
They didn’t have any tickets, but if he could just pull his head together and stay upright long enough to let go of the railing, he could fix this. One touch was all it would take. . . .
But Esta was speaking before he could manage. “I’m so sorry,” she said, pulling a dark wallet from within the traveling cloak she wore. “We were in such a rush, and we didn’t have time to purchase the tickets before we boarded. Can we pay now?”
“Sure, sure,” the man said, pulling out a small booklet and punching two of the tickets with a small silver clamp. “End of the line . . . That’ll be three fifty for each.”
Harte should have been curious about where the stack of money had come from. He should have been interested to watch this new ritual, the purchasing of a ticket—the validation of his freedom. But it was all he could do to keep his stomach from revolting again and his mind from focusing too much on the reality of what Esta had done.
“Is a Pullman car available?” Esta asked the conductor, taking a couple of bills from the wallet and handing them over. Her voice was light and easy, but Harte could hear the edge in it. “My husband isn’t feeling well. I think it might be best if he rested.”
“No Pullman,” the man said, raising a brow in their direction. “This train’s only going as far as Baltimore. You can get a transfer to a Pullman at the next stop, if you’re traveling farther.”
“Of course. How silly of me,” she said with a strained laugh. “Thank you anyway.” She’d made her voice into something breathy and light, but she couldn’t quite manage to keep a tremor of nervousness out of it.
Harte waited until the man had continued on through the next car before he let himself slide to the floor. His head was still spinning as he leaned back against the railing, and the way the train swayed made his already fragile stomach turn over again. He forced all of that aside too and focused on Esta. “The train on platform seven wasn’t going to Baltimore.”
She wasn’t paying attention to him. Instead, she was trying to reach up her sleeve. Her mouth was a flat line of concentration—or was that pain?
“Esta—”
“Hold on,” she said through gritted teeth, and a moment later she pulled the cuff from her arm with a hissing intake of breath. “There . . .” She held it delicately between her fingers, frowning as she examined it.
The cuff itself was a delicate piece of burnished silver, but the metal was less important than what it held—Ishtar’s Key. It was one of the artifacts that gave the Order its power, but this particular stone was special because it allowed Esta to travel through time.
Through time . . .
Harte’s empty stomach felt as though he’d swallowed a hot stone. “What did you do, Esta? This train was supposed to be going to Chicago.”
“You told me to get us out of there, so I did,” she told him, but her attention was on the stone in her hand—not on him.
“But this isn’t the train we were on, is it?” he asked.
“Of course it is.” She finally looked up from her examination of the cuff. “This is the same train—the exact same car. . . .” She hesitated, frowning a little. “It’s just slightly ahead of when we were before.”
“How slightly?” he asked, his stomach churning from the motion of the train and the idea of what she’d just done.
“I don’t know. A day or two, nothing much mo—” But her words fell away as she glanced at the tickets the conductor had handed her.
“What is it?” he asked, swallowing down another round of nausea that had very little to do with the motion of the train.
She cursed as her face all but drained of color.
He had a very bad feeling that he was not going to like the answer to the question he had to ask: “How far ahead are we?”
“I was just trying to get us away from Jack and the police,” she told him, never taking her eyes from the tickets.
“How far, Esta?”
She was practically chewing a hole into her lip. “I was looking for a day or two ahead. I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t—”
“Esta.” He cut her off and took a deep breath—both to calm himself and so he wouldn’t be sick again. It could be worse. They could be in police custody right now. They could be at the mercy of Jack and the Order. “How bad is it?”
Silently, she handed him the tickets.
His eyes were still having trouble focusing from the strangely violent push-pulling sensation he’d experienced just moments before. It had felt like the world was collapsing in on him, twisting him about. It had felt awful—wrong. As he stared at the ticket, that feeling worsened, because there was no mistaking the date printed there.
“Two years?” He was going to be sick again.
Two years ago he was still struggling to climb out of the filth of the Bowery and doing his damnedest to survive. Two years ago he didn’t have money in his pocket or a reputation on the stage. Two years ago he didn’t even have the name he now wore. Two years was practically a lifetime in a world as capricious and dangerous as his, and she’d taken it from him without a second thought.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” she whispered, her expression pained.
“How is that even possible?” he snapped, wincing inwardly at how sharply the words had come out.
But his sharpness was like a flint to a rock, sparking her temper. “Slipping through time isn’t exactly easy, you know,” she said, snatching the tickets back from him. “On a good day, it takes all my concentration to find the right minute to land, and that’s when I’m not in a moving train cornered by the police. You’re welcome, by the way. Seeing as we aren’t currently in jail and all.”
“Two years, Esta.” But then he saw the way her hand holding the tickets was shaking, and his anger receded a little. “I meant for you to”—he waved vaguely—“to slow things down, so we could get off the train and get away.”
“We got away, didn’t we?” She gestured to the obvious absence of Jack.
He took a breath, trying to hold down the bile in his stomach along with his own temper. “You’re right. We were in a tight spot, and you got us out,” he told her, trying to mean it. “It’ll be fine. You can fix this. You can take us back.”
“Harte . . .” Her hesitation made his stomach twist all the more.
“You can take us back,” he repeated.
Esta’s expression was pained. “I have no idea what just happened. I meant to go two days and went two years instead.”
“Because we were on a train—you said so yourself,” he said slowly, trying to keep his composure. “We’ll get off at the next station, and then you can—”
“It wasn’t just the train,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes.
The nausea somehow suddenly didn’t seem so important. “What do you mean?”
“My affinity . . . it doesn’t feel right. Ever since the Brink, it’s felt off. Unstable.”
He frowned at her. He’d known that the Brink had done a number on her, but he hadn’t realized that it had affected her magic. “Why didn’t you tell me? We could have waited another day.”
“We needed to go—we have to get the stones,” she snapped. “We’re running out of time as it is. Soon Logan will be in the city and—” She broke off as though realizing what she was saying. It was already too late. Because of what she’d done, this Logan of hers had already been in the city for two years.
“And nothing. You should have told me,” he said, maybe more forcefully than he’d intended. But his nerves were jangling, and his anger was the only thing that was keeping him from retching over the side of the train again.
“I know,” she said, biting back at him, but then she closed her eyes and took a breath. “I know,” she repeated, her voice softer now. “But everything was happening so fast. We had to find clothes and get out of Brooklyn, and I thought if I could just push through, it would be okay. That I would be okay.”
“But you’re not okay, are you?” he asked, and watched as a series of emotions flashed across her expression—denial, frustration, worry—all mixed together as one.
“You saw what happened at the station. I could barely hold on to time long enough to get us away from Jack,” she told him, still staring out at the passing landscape as though she couldn’t look at him. “You’re right. I never should have tried slipping through time, but we were cornered on a moving train, and I thought, if I could just get us on the next train—if I could just get us to tomorrow—then we would be safe. But once I started to slip through, I couldn’t control it. And then with you—”
“Me?” he interjected. “You’re saying I caused this?”
“Not you,” Esta said as she shook her head. “But whatever it is that’s inside you now. I can feel it when you touch me, and when I’m trying to pull on my affinity, it’s like trying to hold a live wire.”
His stomach turned over again. “You think it’s the Book?” At the very mention of it, the voice began to stir deep within him. On the bridge, he’d told her that the power of the Book was inside of him, but he hadn’t told her everything. Before, he hadn’t been able to find the words to explain what the Book wanted—and especially what it wanted of her. Now, with the questions and the fear that shone in her eyes, he couldn’t make himself say them.
Her hair had come half undone and the dark strands of it were whipping about her face, but her expression was steady now. “I can’t be sure. Maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe something happened to me when we crossed the Brink.”
Maybe he should have consoled her—forgiven her, even. But he was still too upset about the two years of his life that she’d carved away like nothing to give her any reprieve.
Esta sank down next to him, her skirts pooling over his legs. Gently, her hand touched his cheek, turning his head so that he was forced to look at her. “We will fix it,” she told him, her eyes bright with determination. “I will fix this. But I don’t think we should try to go back—not yet,” she finished, before he could argue. “I don’t know why we went so far. I don’t know why I couldn’t control where we landed. Usually I can. But if I try to take us back now and I miss again, we could be stuck. You saw what happened to the bag of stones I tried to bring back on the bridge.”
“They were gone,” he remembered. All that had been left were the charred remains of the settings. The stones themselves had turned to ash.
“I don’t think the stones can exist at the same time with other versions of themselves. If I can’t control my affinity again and we go back too far, Ishtar’s Key will cross paths with itself, and it will be gone. We will be stuck whenever we land, with no way out of the city again and no way to stop Nibsy or the Order.” She licked her lips. “And I don’t know what will happen to me if the stone disappears.”
“To you?” He shook his head, not understanding.
“Or to you. I told you what Nibsy did before we changed things,” she said. “How he sent me forward?”
“When you were a baby . . .”
She nodded. “I think that still needs to happen. If I’m never sent forward, then I can’t come back. If that happens, it means I wouldn’t have been there to help with the heist at Khafre Hall or to save you—any of it. You’ll die. Who knows what that would mean for the Order or Nibsy or magic.” A shadow fell across her expression. “If I’m never sent forward as a baby, I’d grow up like I should have . . . in the past. I’m not sure that this version of me would even exist anymore.”
Panic spiked inside of him. “You can’t just disappear.”
“Why not? The stones did, didn’t they?” she asked, her gaze steady.
He considered that for a moment, a world without Esta. Everything he’d done to try to send her back to her own time had been to save her—from the past, from the power rollicking inside of him. But she’d come back, and in doing so, she’d given him another chance . . . one he didn’t deserve. “Then you’re right. We shouldn’t chance it. We’ll wait.”
“You’d be okay with that?”
“The stones we’re after still exist, don’t they?” he asked. “It’s only been two years. They can’t have gone that far. We’ll find them here . . . now.”
She was still frowning at him. “And then what? We won’t be able to take them back.”
“Because they’ll still exist in 1902,” he realized.
They sat, speechless for a moment, as the click-clacking of the track kept time beneath them.
“It doesn’t matter,” Esta said finally. “We’ll worry about getting the stones back to 1902 when we’re sure we can get back to 1902. First we get the Book’s power under control. We need the stones for that. Maybe once we have them, there will be something in the Book itself to solve the problem. It got us through the Brink, didn’t it? If there’s not, two years isn’t that long.”
Two years is a lifetime. “It’s not a great plan. . . .” Then he realized—the Book.
No.
Harte looked at Esta, unable for a moment to speak. “My coat” was all he could say.
“What about it?”
He saw the moment she understood what he meant, but he said the words anyway, because he had to face them. Because he knew that no amount of silence would make them any less real. “The Book was in the coat. The one I left behind—to get away from Jack.”