“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 right 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.