Passenger (Passenger, #1)(66)

“Of course I can,” she insisted, but her heart sped up at the expression on his face: the guilt, the sympathy. “I just have to travel back—”

“And change the past?” he finished. “Alter the timeline?”

Etta set her jaw. “I don’t care about that—I don’t! Ironwood has been changing the past for years, and I can’t even save one life?”

“No, Etta, listen to me,” Nicholas said quickly. “What you’re speaking of isn’t a matter of morality. It’s an impossibility.”

She pulled back against the wall, away from him, away from his words.

“Didn’t Sophia tell you this? You can’t cross paths with yourself—you cannot exist twice in the same place, at the same time. Time itself won’t allow it; you’d be bounced back out of the passage before you could move through it,” Nicholas said, keeping his voice low. “That’s why travelers keep journals, to remember the dates and years they’ve already been to.”

Etta felt like he’d thrown a bucket of ice water over her. Her chest clenched painfully—so she wouldn’t be able to use the passage to get back to that moment before Alice was shot? Never mind that—she wouldn’t even be able to go to any month or year before that and warn her it would happen. All because some past version of herself was already there.

“Didn’t she explain that the passages connect years, not days?” Nicholas pressed.

“What do you mean?” Etta whispered.

His expression softened. “I see. So she didn’t. Even if you could find another traveler to use that passage to save her, you would need to wait a year in order to do so. It’s easiest to think of each year as a tiny stream, all flowing parallel to one another, all moving in one direction, even as we jump between them. We left Manhattan on the twenty-second of September, 1776. We arrived here on the twenty-second of September, whatever year this might be. Do you understand?”

Etta nodded, unable to speak for several long moments. There has to be another way. It couldn’t end like this. Alice couldn’t die—not for her.

Mom will know what to do.

“Blank slate…” she said slowly. “That’s what Ironwood meant when he called me that. It wasn’t because I didn’t know anything, but that I haven’t been anywhere. The chances of me crossing paths with myself are slim. Right?”

He nodded, touching her elbow. “You do understand, don’t you?”

She lifted her chin. “I understand there’s always another option, another way, if you look hard enough for it.”

He let out a faint laugh, closing his eyes. “I thought you might say something like that.”

“Wait—” Etta said, another thought suddenly occurring to her. “Oh my God—won’t Ironwood be after you for traveling?”

After what had happened to his half brother, Nicholas had been banned—exiled, he’d said—and she didn’t think this would go unnoticed.

“My fear for you outweighs my fear of him,” he said simply. “And I told you, didn’t I? If you left, I’d follow you.”

But should you try to leave on your own, know that I will go to the ends of the earth to bring you back. The words echoed between them, unspoken. A cloud of ash filtered down from above. Without thinking, Etta reached up and brushed the flakes away from his hair. He closed his eyes, bowing his head, leaning into the touch just enough to make her hand tremble.

“You know what the letter says—the one your mother wrote. And you don’t trust me.…” he began. “You see me as one of them, don’t you?”

“No!” she said quickly. It was true that he’d agreed to work for Cyrus, to bring her to New York, but he stood apart from them, didn’t he? He’d been badly wronged by them, hadn’t he? She didn’t want to get him tangled any deeper in the family, or give them another reason to make his life miserable.

“You do,” he said. “After everything I’ve told you?”

Etta dropped her head back against the wall. He could take her apart with a single look, couldn’t he? But she wanted to tell him this; she wanted him to understand that she wasn’t just being a reckless idiot. She wanted him to be on her side.

She needed what he knew about the Ironwoods. About traveling. But how mercenary did that make her, to see if he’d come with her—and then leave him to deal with the fallout?

“Can I trust you?” Etta asked. “Will you trust me?”

Nicholas gave a curt nod.

She took a deep breath.

“I do know how to read the letter,” she admitted. “And I think the old man’s lying, or at least not giving us the full truth.”

His lips parted, the only slip in his mask. She’d surprised him.

“What brought you to that conclusion?” Nicholas asked.

“My mom isn’t a thief,” Etta said. “I don’t care what he says. I think this thing, the astrolabe, it belonged to the Lindens.” Her family—the one that had been whittled down to her and her mother alone. “They, or at least my mom, felt responsible for protecting it.”

“It might have truly belonged to them,” Nicholas conceded after mulling this over. “My understanding from Julian is that there was an astrolabe for each of the four families—Ironwood, Jacaranda, Linden, and Hemlock—but three were lost, or destroyed outright, a century ago. Ironwood feels that because he is the Grand Master of all of these families, they all belong to him, regardless of the original owner.”