“Abby?” Orlando’s low voice startled me from where I stood by the window.
“Yes?”
“Would you mind taking a walk with me?”
“Now?” I gestured out the window. “It’s a little late.”
A serious expression settled over Orlando’s face. “It will only take a moment.” He pressed his lips together and glanced toward Dante and Valerie. “Please. It’s important I speak to you in private.”
“Of course,” I said slowly, wondering what conversation would be important enough to warrant a midnight walk in the winter wind. But I trusted Orlando, and if he said it was important, I believed him. “Dante?” I called out. “Orlando and I are going out for some fresh air.”
“Bring me back some,” Valerie called back. “Have fun, be safe, don’t take any wooden nickels.”
Dante stood up from the chessboard. “Is everything all right?”
I nodded.
“We’ll be right back,” Orlando said. “I promise.”
He swept his father’s coat around my shoulders and then held the door open for me as we stepped out into the chilly winter night.
The cold hit me like a fist and I exhaled a cloud of steam.
“Are you warm enough?” he asked.
Shivering, I nodded. “I will be. What about you?” Orlando had changed into a clean shirt and dark jacket, but neither one looked particularly warm. “The wind is a bit brisk,” I added.
“It usually is this time of year.” As if to prove his point, a cold breeze swept his words away on a puff of misty air. He gestured for me to follow him along the path toward a manicured garden that spread out behind the house. The moonlight lit the world with a pale glow, as if everything had been coated in ice. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Cold, but beautiful.
“I’m sorry you ended up here during the winter. Spring is much better. All the flowers are in bloom then, and the whole world looks fresh and green.”
“It sounds lovely,” I said, leaning into the wind as we rounded the corner of the garden. A trickle of rocks turned underfoot and I was suddenly glad I had kept my sneakers.
We climbed a small hill. When we reached the top, Orlando stood for a moment, looking out over the small hedge maze that stretched below us; the branches along the path were brown and brittle. The wind rustled through the empty garden, but Orlando seemed immune to the cold.
“You didn’t bring me out here to talk about the weather, did you?”
He shook his head, and his shoulders curved inward. He picked at the hem of his shirt with restless fingers. After a long moment, he asked, “How does my story end?”
“What?”
He turned around, his face bleak. “My story. The story of Orlando. What happens next?”
I bit my lip. “You shouldn’t ask me that.”
“But you know what happens. You’ve lived it.”
Shaking my head, I felt my heart sink. “That’s not how it works. The rules say you shouldn’t know your own future.”
“Why not?”
I knew the answer; Leo had told me the same truth in another time. “Knowing what the future holds for you could influence your decisions and your choices; it could change your life irrevocably.”
“What if I want it to change?” he asked quietly.
“You can’t change your past—”
“You are. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To change the past?”
I pressed my lips together and exhaled through my nose in twin plumes of cold air. “That’s not exactly true. What I need to do here isn’t changing the past so much as making sure time stays on the right course. If I fail, then, yes, things will change—but not in a good way.”
“And my future? Can I change that?”
I opened my mouth with an automatic answer, but then paused. If I closed the loop as I was supposed to, then the future would unspool out as it had once before. And that meant Orlando would see more than five hundred years of the world pass by until he would be transformed into Leo and would open a place called the Dungeon where one equally cold January night the band Zero Hour would play a song that would change my life.
I knew that once the loop was closed, what had happened once would happen again—the good and the bad—all the way up to the point when I entered the time machine door. But once we returned home and the river was stable and whole, well . . . what happened after that was unknown. That was part of why I had come here: to protect the uncertainty of the future. To keep all our lives full of possibilities.
But Dante had already started to change things by finding his brother, by returning to his parents’ home. Maybe events were already in motion that would result in an unimagined future. Maybe Orlando could be set free from his destiny as Leo.
In my heart, I knew the answer to Orlando’s question, so I gave him the truth he deserved to hear, the truth I chose to believe. “Yes,” I said. “You can always choose to change your future.”
Orlando held my eyes with his for a long time. The wind ruffled his dark hair and bit at his cheeks until they turned red. A mournful howl followed in the wind’s wake; I wondered if a storm was coming.
I pulled Alessandro’s coat tighter around my throat, waiting, but for what, I didn’t know.
Orlando remained as still as a statue. “I was positive I was going to die on the bank. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to live if it meant I would have to face such desolation alone. And then I saw you come through the door, and you brought with you so much light and life.” Orlando spoke haltingly, each word limping along after the next. “When I saw you, I thought . . .” He shook his head and looked down. The moonlight turned his blue eyes to gray. “I thought I might have a future after all. I thought I might find some happiness somehow—even after everything that had happened. But then I saw you with him—how you were with him at the shop, in the wagon, here at the house—and that’s not how my story is going to end, is it? It will be you and Dante . . . not you and me.”
Understanding cut through me and left me feeling breathless and bleeding. A memory surfaced: Leo sitting in my living room, explaining to me about the rules that would keep me safe. His voice rang in my mind through the long distance of years: The story for you is more complicated. It begins the same way—young lovers taking a midnight trip to a park—but the ending is very different.
Orlando and I weren’t lovers—at least, not with each other—and the park was a simple, sculpted garden maze, but Leo had told me the truth then, as he always had. This was a complicated story. And the ending to the story of Abby and Orlando would be very different from the ending to the story of Abby and Dante. There was no way around it.
I wondered how I had missed seeing the truth of how Orlando felt. Perhaps I was as blind as Dante was, but in my own way.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling my insides freeze solid until they felt colder than the wind blowing around me. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s just—”
Orlando reached out to touch me, but at the last minute he let his hand drop. “I know. I don’t think you could hurt anyone even if you wanted to. That’s not who you are. I just needed to know the truth.” He looked up at the star-speckled night sky and swallowed. “You love who you love. I understand that. And a powerful love can shape your whole life. What you share with Dante . . . it’s powerful. It’s worth protecting.”
“Orlando—” I started forward, reaching for his elbow, but he pulled away before I could touch him.
“Dante told me about the locket. I don’t pretend to understand everything he said, but I know that if he is going to survive, he needs you. He is my brother, and I love him, so I will do whatever I can to help. Even if it means choosing a different future for myself than I might have wished.”
I couldn’t speak. All my words had vanished into the night.
“I’d rather he didn’t know about . . .” He gestured eloquently from himself to me, somehow managing to encompass the hill, the garden, the entire world arou
nd us. “Please. It would only hurt him.”
Still reeling from his declaration, I tried to process what it all meant and what it might change, if anything. But whatever happened, I knew I would honor Orlando’s wishes; I wouldn’t tell Dante about our conversation. As Leo had once told me, it was not my place to tell another person’s secrets.
“I don’t want you to be hurt either,” I said quietly. “Orlando, you are as much a part of my life as Dante is, but in a different way. And you will always have a place in my heart, I can promise you that.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to know what waited for me in my future,” he said ruefully, “or how my story was going to end.”
I shook my head. “Trust me when I say that your story is a long way from being over.”
A sudden flood of light poured from the house as the door swung open.
“Abby!” Valerie ran toward us, waving her hands in the air. “Abby! Come quick! Something’s happened to Dante!”
Chapter 20
Orlando beat me back to the house, but only by a step. He thundered into the main room and rushed straight to Dante’s side.
Dante had collapsed, sprawled facedown on the floor. In his fist was the crumpled cloth of the bandage.
I grabbed Valerie by the arm. “What happened?”
She covered her mouth with her hands and shook her head.
“Valerie, talk to me. Tell me what happened!”
Orlando rolled Dante onto his back. His face was ashen, covered with the dried poultice his father had applied to his eyes. A dark red streak of blood dripped from Dante’s nose.
“Dante!” he called. “Can you hear me? Wake up.” Orlando listened to his chest, checking for any other wounds before wiping away the blood from his brother’s face.
I let go of Valerie and fell to my knees on the floor next to Orlando. I grabbed Dante’s hand, horrified to feel how limp it was in my own.
My heart pounded in my chest, echoing in my ears, throbbing in my wrists. The edges of my vision turned fuzzy. I sucked down a deep breath, hoping it would help steady me.
“I don’t know what happened,” Valerie said in a rush. “We were talking about how pawns are really queens in disguise, and then he clutched his head like it hurt and then he ripped his bandage away and then he fell to the floor.” She bounced on her toes with restless anxiety.
“Was it Zo?” I asked, pinning her in place with the intensity of my gaze. “Was Zo here?” This reminded me too much of when Zo had broken the locket the first time. I wondered in a rush if Zo had somehow managed to keep part of the locket and had attacked Dante from a distance. I pressed my hand tight to my chest, feeling the weight of the locket against my heart. No, I still had it. It was still safe.
But Dante was in danger.
“No.” Valerie gnawed at her fingernails, her eyes blurry with tears. “There was no one here but us.” She looked at Orlando. “He’s going to be okay, right? He has to be okay. There are too many stories that need him.”
“I don’t know,” Orlando said grimly, meeting my eyes over Dante’s body.
I rubbed my thumb over the back of Dante’s hand. I could feel his heartbeat through his wrist, faint and achingly slow. His breathing was shallow, the air raw and rattling in his throat. Sweat soaked through his clothes. I could see the knots in his muscles as his body tensed and twisted in pain.
“What can we do?” Orlando asked me in a low voice. “Whatever is happening—can we stop it?”
“I don’t know, but we have to try,” I said.
“Tell me what you want me to do.” Orlando squared his shoulders, a soldier ready for battle orders.
But I didn’t know what to say. What would help? What would hurt? Was there even anything I could do that would make a difference?
The wound in Dante’s heart was bleeding out time.
But I knew a way to stop time. At least a small part of it. I had built a shell of time that had trapped Zo and stopped him in his tracks. Maybe I could build a smaller shell that could do the same for Dante by protecting his heart and stopping the unchecked flow of time.
I just hoped it wouldn’t also stop his heart.
A spasm contorted Dante’s body, pulling a guttural groan from his throat.
A hard resolve wrapped itself around my spine. My doubts didn’t matter. The time for hesitation was over; it was time to act. I had to do something, or I knew I would lose Dante forever.
“Stay with him,” I told Orlando, pushing myself to my feet.
“Where are you going?”
“To the bank.”
“Wait—”
But I didn’t.
In an instant the world disappeared around me, and I was standing in a barren wasteland. I caught my breath, feeling the familiar release of pressure in my body that signaled I had transitioned to the bank. My trips had never been that fast before, that automatic.
The bank was untouched: still flat, still empty from horizon to horizon.
But the river was boiling in turmoil.
The unspooling of the river Orlando and I had seen before was even worse. The thin streams of the broken river had grown into thicker branches, snaking out in all directions from the main flow. The once silver-white waves of the river had shadowed to gray, though a few were as sharp and black as shark fins.
I tried to block out the terrible sight and concentrated instead on listening for the music of time that I had heard before when I had summoned the shell of time that had trapped Zo.
There. The chimes were faint, muffled, and on the verge of dissonance, but they were there, and the language that lived in the echoes sounded clearer to me than ever before. If I focused, I could hear the shape of the words as they formed and reformed, flowing in a seamless stream of sound and meaning.
I remembered how Dante said he thought I had been given the gift of languages. I had thought he meant my ability to speak and understand Italian, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe I could also speak the language of the river. Of time itself.
The chimes shivered around me, and I recognized in their melody the unmistakable sound of truth.
I smiled, filled with a renewed confidence and strength. If this was my gift, my power, then I would choose to use it to help those I loved.
I remembered the strange half-word, half-chime sound I had spoken to summon the shell for Zo. I needed something similar for Dante, but I didn’t want something to trap or to hurt, but something to bind up and bandage.
Striving to find that balance of stillness inside of me, I listened to all the variations of the music as it flowed above the churning of the river, picking out exactly the tones I wanted in order to create the word I needed. Protect. Save. Return. Heal.
Exactly. I spoke the chord of meaning and felt a sudden rush of light flood through me. At the same time, a drop of light lifted from the river, hovering like a star above the silver-gray thread of time.
I reached out and touched the edge of the star. The light responded, echoing back to me the music I had used to create it.
I stepped forward into the river and directly back to Dante’s side. The quick trip left me feeling unbalanced, my blood buzzing from the soles of my feet all the way to the top of my head. My ears still rang with the echoes of unspoken time.
But it had worked. I had returned with the drop of light in my hand. I could feel the power of it throbbing like a beating heart.
“It’s beautiful,” Valerie sighed in wonder.
Orlando looked up at me, his mouth opening in amazement. “It’s impossible.”
I knelt by Dante’s side and placed my hand on his forehead. The light flowed from my hand directly into Dante. A glow seemed to flicker beneath his skin, burning with a bright light as it traveled down from his head, spreading across his chest, over his arms, and down his legs.
A ripple of pain shuddered through Dante’s body, turning his muscles rigid. His breath caught, his chest lifting as his back arched off the floor. His face twi
sted, hard lines of pain etching grooves on either side of his mouth.
“What did you do?” Orlando demanded.
“Wait!” I ordered, my eyes still fixed on Dante. “Look.”
The light seemed to burn the brightest across the scar that had blinded Dante. As we watched, the jagged edges of the wound smoothed out. The skin around his eyes faded from an angry blood-red hue to a softer pink. The length of the wound began to shrink, the thinnest ends knitting together tightly.
Within moments, the slash across his eyes had shrunk to half its original size, reduced to a sharp, thin line where it had once been a wide, ragged gash.