CHAPTER SEVEN
It’s one thing for me to interact with other timelines. It’s quite another for a ghost to appear corporeal before a massive audience.
“I’ll distract them!” Ender screams, his silver-grey body throbbing from the energy expended to appear visible and usher me out into the palace hallway.
Ender wobbles above heads, drawing the attention of every guard, performer, and royal in the room.
One second later, he drifts to the floor and turns invisible.
“Beam!” I whisper-yell.
“I got it,” she cries, rushing to Ender’s side. “Now go!”
This time, I run.
“Jinn!” someone screams behind me before the entire place implodes.
The assassin has long been forgotten in favor of an actual spirit, and I’m miraculously left to sprint down the stone corridors, footsteps muted under the sound of the hullabaloo.
The string around my hand tugs hard, and I nearly trip over the hem of my lehenga.
Beautiful piece of clothing, absolutely horrible for running, but the string guides me back to the room where we entered, and I slam the door shut behind me, heart beating rapidly.
The two people whose clothes we lifted – why did the carousel have to put us in an assassin’s path?
– lie on the ground with sheets from the bed stripped and delicately placed on top of them.
The other end of the string, our path back home, is still anchored to the stone screen wall through which we came.
“We need to go,” Beam says, hurtling through the wall. “Everest has Ender. The crowd is coming. They think it was you, distracting them with a trick of light. Guards are headed down here now.”
My pulse quickens. “But where are Ender and Everest?”
“They were right behind me,” Beam says, frowning. “But Everest said to go without them, he says they can get back without an active timeline.”
“He can?” I ask, and yet another piece of the universe’s order collapses like a faulty foundation. Never abandoning the timeline, keeping in close contact with the string was the first and only rule when I arrived. “How much more hasn’t he told me?”
I know I’m being too loud, but I’ve never been good at controlling my emotions.
They tend to take over when I’m freaking out, and right now, I’m dialed up to my maximum.
Everything has gone wrong and I’ve lost all semblance of who I am in this dimension.
It’s like I’m on my first trip again, scrambling for purchase, rigid at every turn, unsure.
Beam tugs at my arm. “Ryka, please, we need to go.”
“But, Everest,” I say stubbornly. I can’t just leave him behind, despite what he’s told Beam.
I don’t know the logistics of how he’s able to get back, if there’s a cost that he hasn’t shared.
It’s not like he doesn’t have a history of terrible communication to justify my hesitation.
I think of Ender, already thinned from exertion.
My feet stay rooted to the ground despite Beam’s dismay.
Outside, someone barks an order, and that’s not Everest’s voice.
“Split up,” someone growls outside. “She can’t have gotten far. Check every room, every passageway.”
“At least hide!” Beam cries, swooping behind the stone screen as if she’s the one who needs to hide. I dive after her, and the two of us cram together like huddling penguins, so quietly that all you can hear is the light snoring of the priest Everest had swapped places with.
Oh, no.
“I have to switch us back,” I say, crawling out.
Beam swipes at my arm uselessly. “Not now; they’re right outside.”
But their string is so close, an inch away.
I stretch my arm out towards it, preparing to make the change when the door swings open, breaking through the lock.
I freeze, turning to see a Walashahi in pale silken bottoms and a quilted cotton robe under a steel-armored plate.
Hilts of swords stick out from behind him, and he staggers back, taking in first the two unconscious people on the floor, and then me, on my hands and knees, reaching for an invisible weapon.
He opens his mouth to yell when there’s a sickening crack.
A sword hilt slams into the side of the guard’s head.
The door swings shut and the guard falls to the ground, revealing Everest behind him, studying the sword with far too much interest. Ender is wrapped around his arm with a silver thread, so transparent that he’s taken on the very shade of green that carpets the wall behind him. Appropriate.
“I should have known you were still here,” Everest chastises, rushing over to me while Beam takes over the role of supporting a drooping Ender.
I’m pinned in place, but Everest quickly assumes what I was doing and finishes swapping the timelines.
“We have to switch out our clothes as well, hurry up!”
“The g-guard,” I blubber, still staring at the fallen warrior.
Everest tuts. “He’s not dead, but we might be if we don’t get out of here right now.”
“Speak for half of you,” Beam grumbles.
Everest’s already stripped down, tossing the robe on top of the priest before yanking his trousers on. I hurry to follow suit, fairly certain that I put my shirt on inside out, but that’s the least of our concerns.
Beam latches onto the end of the string.
Ender does the same, followed by Everest. He reaches a hand out to me, but I slap it away.
This would be a good time for me to nab the assassin’s hairclip for Quill, but I don’t dare put a toe out of line with Everest watching me and the looming threat of guards breathing down my neck.
I wrap a sweaty hand around the rotten string.
The noise of the chase surges outside, but by the time the door swings open to reveal the three unconscious bodies we’ve left in our wake, we’re long gone.