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THE DAY we reached Chascadia was the day I started to believe in my father’s theories about the TSTA. Maybe I’d believed them earlier, but didn’t want to admit it. Maybe I’d hoped that a time travel agency would bring order to my world of confusion. Maybe not.
My father barely had time to wipe the soil of his homeland from his lips before my watch turned bright red and started beeping.
“I knew it,” he growled, glaring at my wrist.
My hand flew to my wrist. I tapped and swiped furiously at the watch face, trying to silence it or shut it down.
The red light glowed brighter, shooting a beam up into the sky. Its beeping tones stretched out until it screamed like a siren.
“Take it off your wrist, Calla,” bellowed my father. He grabbed my forearm and held it up. “We will bury the vice of surveillance deep in the ground.”
In two swift swipes, my father removed the watch from my wrist. Digging with his hands, he plowed a hole in the ground that was six inches deep. He planted my watch inside the hole and covered it back up, pounding his foot into the ground, while the rest of us stood by, gaping.
I thought it would take the TSTA officers a while to catch up with us—the way they had when Valcas was taken to TSTA Headquarters for his first infraction: world building without a permit. The TSTA hadn’t threatened to come after me at the White Tower either, not unless I would have refused to let Valcas take me there.
I was wrong.
My father’s burial of the watch had deadened its noise. None of its red light poked through the ground. So then, where were the sirens I heard now?
Valcas looked up at the sky, no doubt searching for the loud pulsing noise above and around us. “Plaka,” he said, “did something else happen that you haven’t told us about?”
“No! Although, upon my life I won’t let that demonic agency find me now, not after all my years of solitude.”
“Then what do we do?” I asked, shaking. “Where do we go?”
My father looked at Valcas. His gaze was stern, demanding.
Valcas shook his head. “I’m sorry, Plaka, but Aboreal is out of the question. There are customs, administrative hoops we’d need to jump through in order to be admitted. Not to mention the time limits—”
“Valcas is right,” said Ivory. “We can’t just show up there uninvited. I’d rather the TSTA arrest us than go to an Aborealian prison any day.”
Earlier, Valcas and Ivory had joked about not wanting to overstay our welcome in Aboreal. I’d thought they were bantering about silly customs. I had no idea they were worried about something more dangerous. Visions of Aborealian children wearing black and gold robes flooded my mind. The sweet notes of their singing, their funeral chant, revisited my ears.
My father stood there in stunned silence. His face sagged, defeated.
“What about the White Tower?” I asked.
I felt Valcas’ body go rigid beside me. “I can’t go back there,” he said, his voice tight.
“Why not? You picked me up from the White Tower to take me to TSTA Headquarters for my hearing. You seemed fine then.”
“That was the White Tower from my past,” he said. The pain I’d seen in Valcas’ eyes in the air layer behind the Fire Falls had crawled back in again, searing and terrifying.
“This isn’t about the holobrary and all the time you spent alone as a child, is it?”
He shook his head. “No,” he whispered. His eyes pled with me, begging me not to ask any more questions about it.
My next question caught in my throat, unasked.
My father walked over to us and placed his hands on our shoulders. “You haven’t been to the White Tower ever since?”
“No,” Valcas said.
I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Since what? When?” I asked.
Valcas hung his head. His response was a miserable whisper. “Since my father’s death.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, crushing him in my arms. I blinked back tears. “I had no idea.” Although, I might have—had I taken the time to think about it. Valcas’ father, Jim, was Edgar’s younger brother, but would be nearly as old. Edgar’s daughter, Shirlyn, was barely alive in her early one hundreds. There was no way her uncle Jim was still living.
The difference between my timeline and Valcas’ had worried me before; but now, the full effect of that time gap crushed me. Jim had died according to his own timeline, leaving Sable a widow for however many thousands of years, who knows. If Valcas and I stayed together, if our relationship deepened into something more serious, then I would die long before he did, leaving him alone again.
I blinked back tears. Enta had Edgar’s recipe for his youth elixir. If it became absolutely necessary, I could always travel back in time and get the ingredients from Edgar again, and ask Enta to help me—assuming she wasn’t lost by then. My face crumpled. Everything was so complicated.
Valcas clung to me as I thought through all these things. Later, I hoped to sit with him and have a serious conversation about the timelines and his father’s death.
But right now, I had to rip my thoughts back to the present situation. We needed to escape from the sirens, which no doubt signaled the arrival of TSTA officers.
As if reading my thoughts, a flock of flat silver jets appeared in the sky. The rumble of their engines rivaled the noise of the blaring sirens. Tunneling winds roared around us as the jets drew nearer. I froze, wondering whether the jets planned to land right on top of us.
“We need to decide where to go!” yelled Ivory. “We’re running out of time.”
“There’s not enough time to activate the baglamas,” my father pointed out.
“Then we’ll need to run,” I said. “We have to use the travel glasses.” My heart sank, knowing they would once again affect my eyes. But I had no choice.
I slipped my glasses on my face and reached for the hands of my father and Valcas. Ivory clasped hands with Valcas and Ray. We were joined, my team and I, as well as the object of our completed mission, my father.
“On the count of three,” I yelled. “We run.”
Ivory grinned. “Way to take charge, Transporter.”
“Calla, where are we going?” Valcas asked. He’d also put on his pair of travel glasses. He was not grinning.
“To a place where I stayed a long time without being attacked by the Uproar or bothered by the TSTA—to a Nowhere, to Edgar’s workshop in the woods. It’s abandoned now.”
Valcas squeezed my hand. “Fine. There’s no need or time to explain. We trust you can take us there.”
I focused on Edgar’s workshop in the woods, with its surrounding woods and the still, silver brook. His front garden would be wildly overgrown. Edgar wouldn’t be there to welcome us. But his Nowhere, his un-place, was somewhere we could go, one that I could find with my eyes closed, as long as I was wearing the travel glasses.
“All right, let’s go!” I yelled. “One... Two... Three!”
Hands joined, we broke into a run. Our feet kicked up Chascadian soil. The jets blew the soil back down at us from above. I ignored the rumblings and sirens that pierced my ears and focused on Edgar’s workshop.
The sounds faded as the darkness around us lit up with a bright, warm glow.