Across Eternity Read online

  “Your loyalty is admirable,” she says. “But I’m worried it might get you killed.”

  We hear the echo of a guard’s boots in the hall. “You really think this infirmary plan will work?”

  She squeezes my hand. “I’m not sure, but the fact that you exist, and are my descendant, makes me believe it must.”

  She bolts to her bed, and I lie awake, thinking too many things to possibly hope for sleep. Is what she’s saying possible? Could I be her granddaughter, a product of a first family?

  Or have I given her the kind of false hope that will get us all killed?

  * * *

  I wake just before the guards come in, craving Henri. I roll to my stomach, wishing I could dull the sharpness of missing him. My heart beats faster. I know I only have a moment, but I need this. I need one bright spot before another long day of pretending and worrying begins.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, doing my best to ignore the shrieking of the alarm, and I go to him. It’s early in the morning, those last peaceful days of summer before the harvest began, and the night sky has begun to dull and soften. I press myself to his back, let my hand rest on his broad shoulder.

  I bury my nose in the nape of his neck to smell him, a faint hint of soap from last night’s bath and summer air. I want to weep at the feel of his skin under my hand, at the smell of him. I miss him so much that the ache feels impossible to bear.

  His hand comes up to close over mine. “Did you just smell me?” he asks with a sleepy laugh. I want to weep at the sound of his voice, husky with disuse. I had all of this—his sweetness, his laughter, his warm skin, his smell. I had all of it and I appreciated it, I did, but I never imagined how badly I would miss it. How desperate I’d feel, willing to give up everything just for a single piece of him. Just to carry his voice inside me, the smoothness of him beneath my hands. Just to be able to lean against his chest and tell him what is happening to us and have him direct me, or even just promise things will be okay.

  I wouldn’t demand all of it. Just one of those things would suffice and I can’t have any of them.

  I can’t answer. I press my lips to his neck instead, and he tenses…but it’s a good kind of tension. As if he’s allowing his brain to shut down while his body picks up the slack.

  “Do that again, little thief,” he says. His voice huskier.

  So I do, and then his hand drags mine down, down, to where he is hard and ready. “That’s all it took,” he says, squeezing his palm over mine, against him. And then he rolls toward me. I’ve been so good, lately, only visiting him at night. But, my God, I missed the look I see on his face right now. His eyes taking me in as if he will never want to see anything else as long as he lives.

  “Will it always be like this with us?” he asks, his mouth moving over mine, pressing to my jaw.

  “Like what?” I ask, arching into him.

  “Like nothing but you matters,” he says. “Like I’ll die if I’m not inside you every minute we’re awake.”

  He nudges my thighs apart with a knee and my legs fall open, more than willingly. Yes, I think. I don’t have long but yes. His mouth descends on mine as he starts to push inside me, and then I hear the heavy door scraping the floor as it opens, blinding light in my face as someone flips a switch.

  “Hurry,” I urge Henri, but already the shrieking is making itself known and the sound of shouting is pulling me out of it.

  I stumble to my feet. The women around me are already up and it’s only because someone closer to the door is unresponsive that I didn’t get caught.

  “Fuck!” the guard roars. “We told them there were nineteen left.” He kicks the woman in the bed once and again and then a third time, much harder. My blood begins to heat. That rage in my chest has become as familiar as my own hand.

  “It’s not our fault she’s dead,” replies the other. “They still have plenty to choose from.”

  “Try to tell them that,” the first guard replies. It’s not the first death I’ve witnessed since I arrived, but that’s not the reason I’m unsettled. The guards are often on edge, and very often enjoy their power over us a bit too much, but this is different. They’re scared, and anything that scares them terrifies me.

  We are shuffled past the corpse and on to the cafeteria, where we get our food and sit. Katrin takes the seat next to mine and we exchange a quick, nervous glance as we feign eating. For once the hunger that has gnawed at me every day, eating only the bread, is absent. I don’t think I could eat even if I wanted to. I notice something floating in my gruel. A small white pellet, perhaps what they use to sedate us. When the guards aren’t looking, I fish it out of the bowl and tuck it into my sleeve, though I’ve no idea how it could be useful.

  Marie is louder this morning, more vocal. She’s coming off the drug and she doesn’t want to be. A guard casually hits her in the head with his gun as he passes and tells her to pipe down. And in response to the pain…her hand disappears. Only for a moment. And she moans again.

  Stop, I plead silently. Stop before they hurt you. Before they realize who you are.

  The cafeteria door opens and Gustave, the guard I hate most, bursts in, his mouth set in a grim line. “They’re coming,” he barks. “Be ready.”

  Marie moans again, and my heart begins to slam in my chest. These stupid guards don’t realize she’s waking, but whoever is coming seems to know more about time travel. They might. Her gruel is nearly gone and I can only think of one solution.

  I switch our bowls.

  My stomach lurches with guilt as she digs in, content once more. Guilt and also despair. I’d hoped she was weaning herself from the drug, perhaps getting to the point that she could be reasoned with, that we could discuss escape. And now she is calming, growing docile again. I might have saved her from being raped, but if I’ve just ensured that we’re both stuck here forever—is that an improvement?

  The cafeteria doors open and the guards jump to attention. A young woman enters. There’s a man at her heels, but she’s the one I stare at, because hers is a face I recognize instantly. A face so like my mother’s, few people could tell them apart.

  My aunt is here. And she appears to be…helping them?

  I squeeze my eyes shut, wondering if I’m hallucinating, but when I open them she is still there, talking to the man behind her as they approach. I know she isn’t the mastermind of all of this, because the thing that drew us here occurred long before she was born—but she is not drugged, and she doesn’t look scared, which means she’s not on our side, either. She left Pennsylvania when she was twenty-four, before I was even born. She never returned, which means she doesn’t know I exist. Given how much my mother hated her, this is probably a good thing.

  “Where’s the girl?” she barks at the guard in French. Her accent is terrible, all the vowels flattened. Madame Perot, the old crone I used to read to, would be slapping her hand right now.

  He murmurs something and points at Katrin. The man’s eyes light up and he approaches—and places his hand on my head. “She’s as blonde as you, Iris,” he says to my aunt.

  My heart races so fast it makes me shake.

  “Not her,” says Gustave. “The one beside her.”

  “Pity,” the man replies, but his hand leaves my head and goes to Katrin’s collar. “And there’s no one else? A room full of time travelers and you’ve only captured one from the first family?”

  Gustave begins sputtering. “We wanted to decrease the sedative more but were worried they’d get away,” he says.

  “They can’t get away, you fool,” replies my aunt. “That godforsaken alarm makes it impossible, even for me. I’ll fix this.”

  She walks to the end of the table and throws a woman sitting there to the floor. “Cut out her eyes,” she tells the nearest guard.

  His jaw drops. “Mademoiselle?” he asks. “Her eyes?” He motions to his own, as if perhaps she translated the word wrong.

  “Yes,” she says. “Cut out her eyes, and then her tongue,
and then her ears.”

  The guard swallows and forces himself toward the woman who has begun to sit up. He pulls a knife from a sheath on his belt and grabs her by the hair to hold her steady.

  My breath stops. If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. Words that won’t be spoken for many decades, yet they’re true even now. But if I give myself up to save her, what does that mean for me? And more importantly, what does it mean for Marie? Who will protect her? Who will get her out of here?

  Selfish, I hear my mother saying. Convenient logic once more. But it’s in your blood, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

  The guard pushes the hilt of his knife to her eye socket and a woman near them jumps to her feet.

  “Stop!” she cries in English. A fellow American. “Please stop!” The guards’ heads jerk toward her at once, newly alert. She’s a lovely girl, tan and luminous in a sea of pale, blank faces, and she’s just given herself up.

  My aunt laughs and grabs her by the hair. “I knew that would work. What’s your name?”

  “Luna,” the woman answers, her shoulders sagging. “Luna Reilly.”

  “There, darling,” my aunt purrs, turning to the man holding Katrin by the collar, “now I’ve found you two. Two of four. It’s a start.”

  My mother always hated time travelers, and I finally see why. I’m beginning to hate them now too.

  6

  HENRI

  The house sits empty, waiting for them.

  And I am empty. I press my face to my hands. Come home, Sarah, I plead silently. Come home.

  How could I have let them go? Why didn’t I find a way to stop them? My God. I can’t stand the possibility that it will stay like this forever. That I’ll never learn what happened to them and will go through the rest of my life assuming the worst.

  Father Edouard comes to the house, tugging at his collar and uncertain. His eyes widen at the sight of me—unshaven, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Empty whiskey bottles line the counter, but I let him in anyway, beyond caring.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he says as he steps inside.

  I push a hand through my hair. I haven’t been entirely sober for weeks now. I don’t respect the person I’ve become in Sarah’s absence, but at this point I’m just trying to survive. I have only the barest hope that she or my sister will return, and it’s on behalf of that tiny flicker that I remain here at all, that I bother trying to make it through each day.

  “Can I help you with something?” I ask.

  He pushes his hands into his pockets and stares at the ground, shockingly uncertain for a man who speaks in front of hundreds each weekend. “Marie said she’d be gone two weeks,” he says. “And it’s been six. I was wondering if you’d heard from her?”

  It hits me all over again. Six weeks. Is there any chance at all they’re coming home if they’ve been gone that long? Even if Sarah needed to recover, even if she needed to return to her own time for a while, Marie could easily have been home by now. The journey wouldn’t even be hard on her.

  “I haven’t heard from them,” I reply, the words gritty in my mouth.

  “Surely there’s someone you can call,” he urges.

  I press my fingers to my temples and his gaze flickers to the empty jug on the table. “It was a spur-of-the-moment trip and I have no idea where they went,” I reply.

  “We should call the police, then,” he says, pacing the length of the room. “Border patrol can at least tell us what country they’re in and how long they’ve been there.”

  Police. One way to make a bad situation worse. They will come here, find that Sarah and Marie left without luggage, without travel papers, and then I’ll be tried for murder. Yet nothing could make me sound more guilty right now than arguing against Edouard’s suggestion. “Perhaps,” I reply.

  He stops his pacing and shoves his hands in his pockets. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” he asks. “Amelie?”

  I stare at the table. “She isn’t actually my cousin.” I take a swig off the bottle of whiskey.

  He grabs the bottle and takes a drink himself. “She’s different,” he says, staring at the floor. “And so is your sister.”

  Perhaps he only means their looks, because God knows that’s one thing they can’t disguise. But I get the sense he means more by it. “Yes,” I reply, “they are.”

  “I won’t say anything to the police,” he says. “I have faith they’ll come home.”

  I glance at him, and recognize something of myself in his bleak, desperate face. But his faith that they’ll come home makes no sense. “Why?”

  “Because I’d struggle to believe in a God who’d keep them away forever,” he says quietly. He takes another gulp of whiskey and walks out the door.

  I wish I shared Edouard’s faith, but I do not. That God of his already took my mother. I suppose I lost my faith in His benevolence long ago.

  7

  SARAH

  For a week, I wait for Katrin’s return. A week of listening to the guards laugh and complain while they hit us with the butts of their rifles, trip us, fondle us for their amusement.

  You will die, I find myself thinking. You will die and I’m going to make it slow and painful.

  Katrin returns to our room late at night, lying down in the bed beside mine, which is now free. But she is different, emptier.

  I don’t know what to say to her. I’m sorry. I’m a coward. I should have done something. But it’s not enough. Nothing will ever be enough. “Are you okay?” I finally ask.

  “No,” she says, rolling to face the other way.

  Another week passes before she speaks. I’m just drifting off to sleep when her voice floats into my ear.

  “Luna…” she finally whispers. “She was from Florida. Is that near you? Did you know her?”

  Under other circumstances I’d find the question amusing. Right now, I’m so astonished to hear her voice that I can barely answer. “America is a very large place, and she probably isn’t even from my time,” I reply.

  “She had a little boy,” Katrin says, turning her face to the pillow as her shoulders shake. “He’s only six. He won’t remember her. He won’t ever know how badly she wanted to return to him.”

  “Had?” I ask, my heart thudding in my chest.

  “He climbed on top of her and she just went crazy,” she whispers. “She stabbed him with something she had up her sleeve and he snapped her neck.” Her voice breaks. “Snapped it as if she were a doll.”

  Luna Reilly, the woman far braver and more selfless than I, is dead.

  I couldn’t have saved her. Speaking up wouldn’t have prevented what happened. The guilt, though—it rests on me just the same, so heavy I struggle to get a full breath.

  “He left her corpse beside me the whole time as a warning,” Katrin says quietly. “He says if I’m not pregnant by next month he’ll do the same to me.”

  I watch her thin shoulders shake. I can’t begin to imagine what that week was like for her. Even if we get out of here, an experience like that…it will change her. Scar her. “But I can’t get pregnant here. They hold those women in another room, and they’re monitored, night and day. We have a guard who drinks heavily and sleeps soundly each night, but those women have no chance.”

  “I didn’t realize there were pregnant women here.”

  “I think they were pregnant when they arrived,” she says. “Maybe he thinks one of them carries the hidden child. Maybe he just wants to raise an army of time travelers. I don’t know.”

  This is the past, and I’m sure the women all died—there’s nothing I can do for them anyway—but it’s possible their children survived. “Who would a child become, raised by that man?” I ask.

  She doesn’t reply. We both know the answer.

  “You know, things are supposed to change when the first four families come together at last,” she says. “It’s part of the prophecy. And now there are at least three of the four r
ight here, and things could hardly be worse.”

  “Three?” I ask, my pulse beginning to race. “You mean the pregnant women?”

  She raises a brow. “No, I mean us.”

  “If I’m your descendant, we only count as one family. Luna would have made the second.”

  Her eyes meet mine. “You’re clever, Amelie, but not clever as you think,” she says. “I saw your friend waking up. You gave her your gruel so they wouldn’t catch her.”

  My heart beats faster. It’s occurred to me that Katrin might give them my name, but I didn’t realize she could give them Marie’s as well. “But you didn’t say anything?”

  “No, because then I’d be no better than Iris,” she says. “She’s the woman advising him. I hate him, but I hate her even more—she’s a traitor to her own kind.”

  My gaze flickers away. I haven’t told Katrin that Iris is my aunt, and I’m not sure I should. How could she help but look at me differently if she knew what kind of evil runs in my blood? I even wonder it myself.

  “Why is she helping him?” I ask. “What’s in it for her?”

  “They’re getting married, I think,” she replies.

  “She’s a fool, then,” I say. “He won’t let her live.”

  Her head rises for the first time since we began talking. “Why do you think that?”

  “He can’t let anyone who was here live, but especially a time traveler. Any one of us, including her, could go back and ruin everything he achieves. He won’t risk it.”

  She looks at me, thinking something she does not say. “They’re nearly done with that hole they’re digging. I wonder what it’s for.”