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I KEPT my promise to Mom. I didn’t run.
As Valcas and I approached the door, a beam of light from a tiny camera below the sign stretched out across both of us, starting with our feet. When it reached the tops of our heads, the light flickered off and the camera receded back into the wall underneath the sign. A ringing clang of metal releasing metal stung my eardrums. The bars on the doors sprang open. So did the door.
Valcas turned to me and smiled. “I’ve never seen the door open that freely.”
“Why not?”
“The bars are intended to keep people out. No one at the TSTA cares to see me. You must be in a whole lot of trouble.”
Valcas’ laughter echoed off the walls as he walked ahead of me into the building.
I gritted my teeth and muttered under my breath, “Is this some kind of sick payback for you?”
I followed Valcas through the open doorway. The air inside the building smelled like vinyl and rubber cement. He looked back at me before turning a corner at the end of the hallway, and then looked back again before stepping through another open doorway on the right. The plaque on the wall beside it was also labeled.
“Waiting Room,” I read. I stepped inside, set my backpack on the ground and sat in a chair across from Valcas, shrugging low in my seat. Both of us still wore our dark glasses, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to meet his eyes anyway.
Instead, I busied myself by searching through my glasses, catching glimpses of Valcas’ memory of me as a baby—the way he held me with his hands, the adoration he felt when he called me beautiful, the resolve in his voice when he’d said he was looking for my father. The travel glasses did more than transport me through time and space; they allowed me to search and replay the recordings Valcas and I had burned inside them.
From across the room, Valcas cleared his throat. “We could still be on our honeymoon, you know...”
I lifted my head and looked at him—really looked at him—sitting there in a tan vinyl office chair. Black glasses, black slacks, black leather jacket. Each article of clothing contrasted with the tan chair and plain white walls, the same way his dark hair framed his tan face. He grinned at me, evidently amused by his poor attempt at humor about our feigned engagement; well, the first one anyway. After escaping the bright white light—the Uproar—Valcas had offered me his protection if I agreed to pretend to be his intended bride. That hadn’t worked out so well. I’d stolen his travel glasses and fled back home after he’d locked me in a room for four days. Let’s just say he’d developed a pretty warped sense of protection.
Our second fake engagement was more my fault than his, according to the TSTA. After escaping the palace, I’d searched for and met the elderly inventor of the travel glasses, Edgar Hall, and then traveled into Valcas’ past to find out why he’d searched for me in the first place. What I’d found was a disturbed past version of Valcas—not quite as disturbed as he is now, but an intelligent and lonely teen caught in a made-up world where it was often difficult to figure out what was real and what was not. That version of Valcas had grown fond of me and convinced himself that we were engaged. How that happened still boggles my mind, but I had the evidence of his state of mind with me: a poem about me he’d written on a photograph of us, which I planned to present at the TSTA hearing as part of my defense.
What I hadn’t expected to learn while traveling in Valcas’ past was that his order to protect me had come from my father, whom I’d never met.
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “You knew my father,” I said.
“Plaka was the only true friend I ever had.”
“Tell me about him.”
Valcas shrugged. “I haven’t seen your father in a long time—more than two decades according to Earth years. I wonder if I would recognize him now.”
I felt tears beginning to build, but I blinked them back and tried to sound angry. “That’s not what I meant. What was he like? Where did you meet him?”
“Tell me something, Calla—” Valcas stood up as he spoke. “How comfortable was your life before meeting me? Would you like to return to that? Take some time to think before answering.”
I huffed. “You’re very good at evading my questions.”
“You self-righteously assume that you deserve my answers.” Valcas sneered as he turned to leave the room.
“Wait! I’m sorry—” I clenched my fists. No. “I’m not sorry that I escaped you and took your travel glasses with me. I feared for my life. You locked me in a room for four days. I had no idea that you were supposed to be protecting me.”
Valcas dipped his head and frowned. I felt bad. For the first time since meeting him, he looked like the one who’d been fooled.
“Why are you still protecting me? Is that how you keep him... alive?” I nearly swallowed my last word. I’d assumed that my father had been dead for a long time. I’d accepted that, but there was hope in not knowing for sure. Maybe, I thought, it was Valcas who refused to let go, to believe that his friend was gone forever.
“I’ve protected you only because Plaka asked it of me.” Valcas stepped nearer to me, tight-jawed, looking down at me over crossed arms.
“Oh, so then the story wasn’t true about you needing me to stand in for a bride?” The pitch of my voice rose higher the more I tried to keep it under control. “How do you expect me to believe anything you say?”
“Yes, it was true,” he spat. “It just so happened that the situation also gave me a good reason to keep a closer eye on you.”
“Why not ask my mother how I was doing? You seem to know her pretty well.” I frowned, crossing my arms too. I never asked him to protect me. And, as far as I knew, he wasn’t very good at it.
“I went to prison for you.”
“That sounds like a good place for a kidnapper to me!”
Valcas gritted his teeth but said nothing as he left the room.
I sat in silence, waiting. I felt chilled, betrayed and, now that Valcas was gone, lonely.
I lifted my backpack off the ground and hugged it close to me. It held all that I’d brought with me—a change of clothes, a pair of pajamas sewn by Enta, a couple of travel journals that Edgar had given me, Shirlyn’s diary, the zobascope, my crumpled letter to Edgar and the photograph of me and the past version of Valcas.
I pulled out the photograph and studied it. Valcas smiled at me, the version of him that I’d left back at the White Tower. I exhaled while tracing a finger across his face and his blazing green eyes, wondering how this shadow of someone else’s past could leave such a notable void.
The photograph was half the evidence I’d brought with me to my hearing. The letter to Edgar was the other half. I opened the crumpled ball of paper and smoothed it out. The words written on it were in my own handwriting—words I’d used to trick Edgar into revealing the recipe for his youth elixir, the potion I’d hoped would save his life. It hadn’t worked.
My lips trembled. I missed Edgar too.
As I sat there, with these two written reminders of my interference with Valcas’ and Edgar’s pasts, I wondered what the punishment for their existence would be. Would it hurt as much as losing green-eyed Valcas and Edgar? I wondered. And I waited.
Before long I heard a knock on the doorframe. I hurriedly slipped the photo and letter inside my backpack.
Two people walked into the room, both with familiar faces. The face that did not have a sour look on it belonged to Mom. The sour face belonged to the present version of Valcas, so changed from the photograph of his younger self. I knew that the eyes behind his dark glasses were a holographic ice-gray color, milky and sickly looking. Terrifying. He looked and acted just as youthful, but I knew he was far more jaded. Something in his life had gone terribly wrong.
Valcas waited inside the doorway while Mom advanced toward me.
Mom seemed relieved and genuinely happy to see me, which was odd given how long it had been since she’d last visited me and Uncle Al’s cottage by the lake. I smiled warily, eying the long blond hair she’d plaited in a French braid that trailed down her back. Concern clouded her smooth face and sharp, dark eyes—the same black-brown color that mine used to be.
I sighed. Mom was right. She hadn’t lied to me. She wasn’t a traveler. An unofficial object, such as the travel glasses, had never affected her.
Mom hugged me tightly, thanking Valcas the whole time. “You are a dependable friend. Thank you, Valcas. This means so much to me.”
“You’re welcome, Ms. Winston,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. His voice could have charmed the curl out of my tightly wound mop of dark spiraled hair, but my doubts about him and the sour look on his face were enough to keep it tightly coiled. His allure worked wonders on Mom, though.
“Please—Doreen is fine,” she said.
Valcas had a cheerleader. Great.
“Let’s have a look at you, Calla.”
I tensed as Mom placed her hands on my glasses and removed them from my face.