…you can’t just pluck her off this path, not without consequences.
She’s not ready for this. She doesn’t have the right training, and there’s no guarantee it’ll go the right way for her—!
They hadn’t been talking about the debut.
Confusion preyed on her thoughts, even as guilt locked her in its jaws. She’d said those things to Alice, those horrible things, because she thought her instructor was trying to hold her back.
She was trying to protect me. Her mom had wanted her to travel, to do this—and Alice hadn’t. Was she one of them, too—a traveler? Rose had clearly let her in on their secret, even as she left Etta well out of it. How could they have known all of this, and never once mentioned it? Why would they put her in this position?
…you clearly don’t know Etta if you’re underestimating her like this. She can handle it.
Handle what?
Etta forced her jaw to set, to turn on Sophia with renewed suspicion. If her mother had wanted this to happen, she would have just told her to go with Sophia. The deafening feedback, Alice’s death—none of that would have needed to happen.
It’s her time.
A thought bloomed above the chaos in her mind. Rose and Alice clearly knew she would travel one day, and maybe they had always debated with each other about trying to stop it somehow, to protect her from this. That could be why they hadn’t told her about what she could do—they were arguing about finally cluing her in.
Not soon enough, Etta thought, fighting to keep her breathing even. Not nearly soon enough.
Suddenly, she was terrified for her mom. Because if one of the time travelers—one of the Ironwoods watching them—had killed Alice without any hesitation in order to get to Etta, and Etta specifically, then who was to say they hadn’t done the same to her mother if she, too, had tried to stop them?
Why had they come for her? Why did they want her?
“You are clever enough to figure it out, then,” Sophia said. “The ability is inherited from one or both parents—usually one now, since our numbers have dwindled, and we’ve been forced to marry outside of our kind. There’s a slimmer and slimmer chance of being born with it, but you clearly got it from your mother. Rose Linden.”
Linden. Not Spencer. But why would she take a different last name—had she invented it on a whim, or did it really belong to Etta’s father? How did he fit into this, if at all?
“Rather famous in our circles, I must say. She disappeared one day and caused quite the kerfuffle.”
Sophia seemed to enjoy watching Etta’s world unravel around her. It made Etta’s hackles rise that this girl was lording the information over her, clearly hoping that she would beg for it.
She wouldn’t. “Aren’t you going to ask me another question?”
One corner of Sophia’s mouth tilted up as Etta set her shoulders back.
“Do you know the name Cyrus Ironwood?” Sophia asked finally. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“That was two questions,” Etta pointed out. “And, no to both. How do we travel and how does it work?”
Sophia groaned. “Christ! We spend years learning this—and now I have to give you a summary?”
“Yes,” Etta said firmly.
“It’s…a relationship of sorts, a special one that certain people have had with the timeline for thousands of years. There’s no machine, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s more…natural than that. Grandfather doesn’t like the word, but it’s closer to what you think of as magic. Our ancestors had a unique ability to take advantage of tears in the fabric of time, pass through holes to emerge in a different era.”
What was the most unbelievable part of that explanation? That the timeline could be “torn,” or that she’d used the word magic with a straight face?
“They’re like the natural crevices—fissures—you find around the world. The passages have always existed, and our families have always been able to find and use them. It’s all rather simple, but do try to keep up.” Sophia shifted, trying to get more comfortable. “A passage in medieval Paris could lead to one in, say, Egypt in the time of pharaohs. You step in as you would to any tunnel, passing back and forth between the entrances.”
Etta nodded, trying to rub some feeling back into her freezing limbs, startled from her next question by a rogue thought. Sophia had said our ancestors. At first, Etta had taken it to mean Sophia’s and her grandfather’s, the Ironwoods—but were some of those faceless ancestors hers? The Lindens?
The thought filled the dark, dusty corner of her heart she’d closed off as a kid with a scorching, almost unbearable kind of hope. She’d never let herself want more people than the ones she already had; it felt too ungrateful for the amount of love her mom and Alice brought into her world. But…a family. One with roots, and dozens and dozens of branches by the sound of it—one of which she’d fallen from.
“There’s another gown for you in the trunk in the other cabin,” Sophia said, waving her hand. “God knows if you’ll fit into that any better than what I squeezed you into.”
The insult was shoved aside by the chill of sudden realization.
“Where are my things?” Etta asked. Her clothes—her mom’s earrings—
“I burned your ugly dress when we came through,” Sophia said. “It was ruined, anyway. The earrings you were wearing are in a pouch in there…somewhere.”
The grip of panic eased. “You swear you didn’t throw the earrings away?”
“I was tempted,” Sophia said. “History wouldn’t have missed one ghastly pair of earrings. But—the pearls were real. I thought perhaps you might need them one day. To sell.”
Etta pulled back in surprise. To sell?
“Just go get the damned dress—undergarments, too. You’ll find everything you need wrapped in brown parchment,” Sophia said. “And hurry, will you? I have my next question.”
Etta stood on stiff legs but stopped beside the door, listening. When she was satisfied no one was lingering nearby, she stepped out, ducking into an identical room. There was so little inside it—not even a desk—that she found the wooden trunk immediately and crouched in front of it. The heavy lid groaned as she heaved it up, and a lovely note of lavender rose with it.
There were satchels of it here and there, tucked inside the blanket at the top, even inside the leather shoes she set aside. The brown parcel was tied with rough string, cushioned at the bottom by another layer of blanket. There was little else inside the trunk: a bottle of what smelled like rosewater, a brush, and—she released the breath that was burning her lungs, and picked up the small velvet bag.
The earrings tumbled out onto her palm, and Etta lost it. The sob bubbled up from deep in her chest, ripping out of her so violently that her whole body shook. She pressed her forehead against her fist, felt the prick of the studs dig into her skin.
She shouldn’t have left Sophia’s cabin. She couldn’t keep herself together without the pressure, the need to pretend. She didn’t have to be brave now, or calm. There was nothing to prove.
Alice. Oh my God. Alice. She looked at her hands, as if expecting to see the traces of her instructor’s blood. They’d killed her to get to Etta—why hadn’t she stopped, listened to what Alice had tried to say to her in her mother’s office? Why had Alice tried to stop any of this?