to make a key. Tell her I need her to come back with one today, right now.”
Rick ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know, future boy. Can that even work?”
“Why don’t you ask me that question?” came a voice from behind us.
“Luka!”
I almost bowled her over in the eagerness of my embrace. “Whoa, ease up there, tiger,” she said, grabbing my shoulders and holding me at arm’s length. “Hey, you’re not so pasty once you’ve had a bit of summer on you.”
I don’t have the words to properly describe what I was feeling right at that moment. Had her eyes been that bright when I saw them before? I grabbed her and crushed her to me again. “Oh, Christ, I missed you.”
Rick put his long arms around us both. “Amen to that,” he said. “I love a good summer project.”
Luka pulled back again. I think she might have been blinking away a few tears. “Okay, you big crybabies.” She looked right at me. “I got the note. I’m here. It was a close thing, though.”
“Why? The note was in the July box, right? Didn’t you get that a month ago?”
She held up her hand so we could see the string wrapped around it, a small washer tied on either end. “I kept messing up. I was too impatient. The first one I tried, I took it out after a week to see if it would work, but no luck. Then I had to start all over again. The second one I kept in for ten days and still nothing. By that time, I was down to the wire. That was exactly two weeks ago, so I just took it out. Anyway, here I am, just when you said, so what’s the mission, Captain Solo?”
I sniffed and wiped my own eyes. Luka. Luka who I’d been denied all this time. I sniffed again. “Same old mission,” I said. “Rose Hollerith. 1917. You up for it?”
“Try to keep me away,” she said. “So we have to go right now?”
I looked at the warm fire Rick built, buffeted now by a breeze from the lake. How good it would be to just lie down by that fire as John Wald had, rest for a while, and then go home. I shook my head at the thought. “Yeah,” I said. “Right away, before I change my mind.”
“Wait,” said Rick. “How is this working? I haven’t even buried the note yet.”
“Time travel,” we said in unison, then grinned at how quickly we were in synch again.
“So bury it,” I said. “We have to get going.”
“What about him?” said Rick, pointing to the other side of the fire. John Wald was asleep, curled up with his back to the flames.
“That’s John Wald?” said Luka.
“Yeah. We should let him sleep. He’s been through a lot. I think his leg might be broken.” There was something else, too. His solution, his saving of Curtis’s life. I couldn’t see any other way we could have done it. He was right. But I didn’t want those kinds of decisions on this last leg of the journey. I didn’t want anything so harsh. I wanted to follow Wald’s own advice, to float above the stony world.
Rick’s eyes narrowed. “So you just want to go right back into it? Even though—you know—nothing changes? Even though whatever you do, that baby still ends up dead?”
“Not want to,” I said. “I have to. Even if I can’t change a thing. Even if nothing—” I stopped, caught in the half-formed thought. “Even if nothing we do makes a difference, at least we can want to make a difference. That’s what I get now. It matters what you want to do.”
Rick smiled warmly. “You got heart, future boy. I’ll say that for you. You know what you’re making me think about? Last year this English teacher gave us a poem. I don’t remember it much, but it ends up with ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’ I get you, Kenny. It’s like you’re saying if we know the future or whatever, if we know what’s going to happen, we can’t be the masters of our fate.”
I finished for him. “But we can still be the captains of our souls.”
Part Six
One
Crack your head, knock you dead.
1957 coal cellar, empty. 1947 carriage house, empty. 1937 Lilly’s bedroom, empty. 1927 Rose’s bedroom, empty and preserved. 1917 carriage house—screams and cries. That was our one-minute journey fifty years into the past.
The sound of Rose’s wails made their way into the Silverlands, so by the time we stepped out, we had a good idea of what we were going into.
The mirror and its dresser were still downstairs, but close enough that I emerged within Lilly’s field of vision as she stood at Rose’s bedside. She saw me, then Luka, and gave a slight frown. Mrs. Hollerith had her back to me, and I retreated to the couch before she saw me.
“Another breath, dear,” said Lilly. “Just keep it up.”
In whispers, I told Luka everything of the summer. Everything. I confessed to how I hadn’t told Lilly and Peggy of Prince Harming’s accusation, how I had asked my grandmother to send the note warning me of the man in the yellow tie even though I knew by then he didn’t mean me harm.
“You were trying for the best,” said Luka.
“But none of it mattered,” I said. “He said I was going to kill his wife and I did.”
“You didn’t mean to.”
I gave up thinking and talking for a while and just listened to the noises above. About an hour after we got there, Lilly started sounding increasingly worried. I heard the term “breech” again, along with “prolapsed umbilical” and “oxygen starvation.”
There was a brief upset when Mrs. Hollerith found out we were there, but Lilly sent me to fetch clean sheets and Luka to pump water, so she let it go.
After that, it was more of what Lilly called hurry-up-and-hold-your-breath.
I was an anthill of emotions, every feeling inside me running in a different direction. Here was Luka next to me, warm and real and somehow outshining every other thing in the world. And there was Rose upstairs, moaning and crying. And Peggy, bitter, sharp-edged Peggy, who had seemed, in the few moments I had seen her, so tender with Curtis—lost now, forever. Sleep, when it came while I rested on Luka’s shoulder, was the shallow kind, where dreams come as fragmented and rearranged memories. Me pushing Peggy. Her grabbing and taking me along to her watery death. Curtis burning his hands in the fiery mirror, then reaching out to me, touching my face with his charred fingers.
Then I was woken by a scream, one more urgent, more filled with heartbreak than I had ever heard. “Get him out. He can’t be here. He can’t see this. Not like this. Get him out.”
I shot awake to a tiny moment of silence followed by, “Rose? What’s going on? I took care of Mother like Lilly said. She’s been awfully upset. I knew I should stay away—but what’s happening?”
I stood up. Luka was still asleep. I realized with a guilty thrill that we had fallen asleep with our arms around each other.
“Curtis,” came Lilly’s voice, “Rose is ill. I’m helping her. You should just let her be. It’s a trying time for her.”
“Why is there all that blood?” said Curtis. “Where is Mother? Mother now, I mean. I took care of her in my time. But where is she now?”
“She went to the house to get some things, Curtis. Please, dear, give Rose some privacy. Her mother will be back soon, and you’ve done such a good job this year of making sure she didn’t see you.”
I got to the middle of the stairs just in time to see everything dawn on Curtis’s face at once. “She’s not my
