Nicholas can’t be helping Ironwood, Etta thought, her hands curling at her side. But then—he had made that agreement with Ironwood behind her back, hadn’t he? Nicholas was supposed to follow her, ensure that she returned with the astrolabe. In exchange, he’d receive Ironwood’s holdings in the eighteenth century.
She straightened. No. He’d turned his back on that. He’d confessed, he’d told her that he loved her. Loved her.
The small, dark wisp of a voice in her mind returned. Infatuation.
“I don’t need to hear another word from you, you bloody selfish coward,” Sophia snapped. “You’ve lost the right to care about me. In fact, why don’t you just walk off that cliff now, finish what you started? At least Grandfather will have a body to bury this time.”
“You don’t mean that,” Julian said, and Etta was almost surprised by how calm he sounded, how he didn’t retreat from any of the ugly looks Sophia sent his way, the hissing words. “Tell me what’s the matter, what’s hurt you so badly. We’ve been friends our whole lives—do you honestly believe I can’t tell when you’re just lashing out?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, finally pulling free of Etta’s arm. Sophia stalked over to pick up the bags she’d dropped. “None of it matters. Jump now, or destroy the astrolabe—your life is over either way. Since you can’t seem to do anything yourselves, allow me to paint the full portrait for you: the Ironwood timeline won’t just disappear. We will all be returned to our own godforsaken times, and the passages will slam closed behind us forever.”
“God,” Etta said, “you’re such a liar.”
Sophia had begun up the path, ignoring how Julian’s hand reached for her. At Etta’s words, she turned. “Am I? I guess you’ll see, won’t you.”
“Wait,” Julian called, following Sophia along the trail. “Soph, please—”
The two of them disappeared around a bend in the rocky path, and took that last small need for control with them. Etta’s breath left her like she’d taken a punch to the lungs, and she brought both fists to her eyes, pressing the freezing skin there to cool the thoughts racing behind them.
Infatuation.
Returned.
Closed.
Forever.
If what Sophia said was true, and Etta had every reason to doubt her, then Henry clearly had never got the full story. He never would have risked separating the Thorn families from one another. God, what if a child was born in a completely different century than his or her parents—what if one of those children running wild in the house in San Francisco found themselves locked inside a violent time, in a place where they had no friends, and couldn’t speak the language, much less ask for help?
Etta remembered what it felt like to have Nicholas’s hands on her face, the way his fingers had run along her skin as if he could paint his feelings onto it. She remembered the way Nicholas had trembled, just that small bit, when she’d lain down beside him in the darkness. The warmth of his lips on her cheeks, her eyelids, every part of her, and how he’d given her his secrets. She remembered the way her fear had broken and dissolved against him, how carefully he had held her together each time she came close to shattering.
How quickly his mind worked, how earnestly his heart believed, how desperately he’d fought for everything in his life, including the belief that they could be together. In her heart, Nicholas was a song in a major key, bold and beautiful.
But Etta remembered, too, the way it had felt when the Thorns had reached for her, embraced her, claimed her with a thousand smiles and questions, trying to defeat the lost time between them. She remembered hearing her father’s music join her own. She remembered her city, how its occupants and streets and trees had been blown into the same shifting, swirling cloud of ash.
She needed to talk to Nicholas; she needed to touch him, and kiss him, and know how he had hurt himself, know how she could help him. But there were a hundred men between them on the beach, and now, even more dauntingly, a hundred questions between them that Etta couldn’t begin to answer.
There’s so much darkness to this story, there are times I feel suffocated by it, Henry had said. How these things came back around. How everything circled back to the astrolabe, again and again and again.
A pattern.
No—Etta shook the thought away as hard and as far as she could.
Julian jogged back to her, running his hands back over his hair, breathing hard. “She wouldn’t listen. There’s something else going on that she’s not telling us, I’m sure of it.”
Etta nodded, keeping her back to the rock as she circled back to watch what was happening on the beach below. She found Nicholas immediately—it would have been impossible to miss him standing beside the old man, a short distance from the cave’s entrance. He stooped slightly, to better hear what Ironwood was saying. Nodding, he stepped forward, cupping his good hand around his mouth to relay the message to the others.
What are you doing? she wondered. What can you possibly be planning?
There had been so many moments on their search together when Etta had felt like she understood his mind better than her own. But for the life of her, she couldn’t understand why he’d taken this role in a game he’d never wanted to play in the first place, unless something had forced his hand.
“What should we do?” Julian said. “If she’s right, then we’ll get the original timeline, but then…that’s the end for us, isn’t it? Without the astrolabe to create the passages again, we’re stuck.”