His breath hitched. “Because I couldn’t let you die. I tried to warn you—”
I jerked away, hard enough that his hands fell from my face. “Warn me?” I said. “You never said a damn thing about this. You never said I’d lose them.”
He looked at his knees. The blood at his wrist had dried, leaving a black rill under the shamrock. “I thought maybe there’d be a way. That we could all make it. But I lied. I always lie to myself and you because the truth is worse.”
I wanted to scream at him, but I was so tired. I let my hands fall to the moss, clutching it like I could dig through to the roots and find my sisters buried under there, waiting. The damp seeped through my skirt, numbing the skin. My toes curled, and I felt the mud ooze under the nails.
Sully reached for my hand, and when I didn’t pull away, he laced our fingers tight. “Before I came back,” he said, “I looked for you. In my world, I mean. I went to the libraries, the graveyards, the churches. I found your name and your sisters’ in the death rolls. I knew what would happen, so I came.”
The words hit different. He’d known.
“You could have told me,” I said, and my voice was ice. “You could have warned me, or lied better, or left me where I belonged.”
He let go, rubbed his palms together, stared at the lines like he could read the future in them. “I wanted you to choose. I thought maybe you’d all come, or maybe you’d want to stay. But there was never enough time. There’s never enough of anything. I didn’t plan it the way it happened, though.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering again, though the wind had dropped. The cold came from the inside now.
“Where are they?” I said, not expecting an answer. “Where do you think they are?”
He hesitated, a twitch in the corner of his jaw. “Alive,” he said, and there was a catch in his voice. “In my world. In the future. Your sisters—they’re together. Maybe they’re scared. But they’re alive, and my friends will take care of them.”
I squeezed the leather ring on my finger. It didn’t feel like enough.
“My parents?” I asked.
He looked away. “They never made it, not in the records I found. I’m sorry. Time couldn’t stop their deaths.”
I wanted to say I hated him. Instead, I pressed my knuckles to my mouth and held the cry there until my teeth ached.
“I’m here,” he said, voice so soft I barely heard it. “If you want to stay. If you want to go, I’ll help. I’ll do whatever you ask.”
For a while I just breathed, trying to find some shape in the world that wasn’t loss. I thought about Maeve, bossing Nora and me, even after she was supposed to be asleep. I thought about how Nora used to sneak out at night, climbing the roof just to sit under the stars. I thought about their faces the last time I saw them—Nora’s eyes huge with fear, Maeve’s hand clamped tight on my arm, the three of us locked together, praying for a miracle.
I looked at Sully, really looked. He was bleeding, his face a ruin, but in his eyes was something I’d never seen before. A kind of shame, but also hope.
“What do we do now?” I said, not expecting an answer.
He smiled, and it was crooked but real. “We live,” he said. “For them, for us. For the baby.”
The word caught me off guard. For a second, I couldn’t breathe.
He put his hand over mine, slow and careful, as if I might shatter. “If you want to leave me, I’ll go. If you want to run, I’ll carry you. Whatever you want.”
I pressed my forehead to his, the pain blurring at the edges. “I want them back,” I said.
He nodded. “So do I.”
We sat there as the sun climbed, the light finding us between the old trees, the moss warm and sweet-smelling under our legs. I let my head fall onto his shoulder, and he held me—not like I was broken, but like I was the only thing left in the world that mattered.
Maybe I was.
Maybe we both were.
Moab
The rift snapped shut with a sound that wasn’t sound, more like a nerve cut or a joint popped out of its socket. For a second, my eyes refused to accept what happened—the blue-white heat burned a negative on my retinas, Toolie’s silhouette and the girl’s haloed in the fire, then gone. Just gone. The morning mist crashed in after it, silent, as if the world wanted to smooth over what we’d done.
I stood frozen in the after-image, boots sunk in the slick grass. The spot where the hole in the world had opened was still shivering—a circle of grass flattened and scorched in a radius that looked too round, too deliberate. My shadow fell into the ring, but there was nothing inside. No trace of Sully. No Catherine. The only thing left was the stink of burnt air, like the time I cut the cord on a live transformer and all the air in the shop turned electric for a week.