Sarah climbs into the bed, and I peer into one of the clay pots on the table. I pick it up, give it a whiff, and gag. It’s awful. It smells like rotting eggs.
“Who are you?” Sarah asks me again.
“I’m a nurse,” I lie as I set down the pot.
“What’s a nurse?” Death is on the tip of her tongue. The back is speckled with tiny white bumps resembling a strawberry.
“I’m here to help,” I repeat, and it’s in that moment that I realize it’s true. I have to help Sarah. This child is dying. But first I have to find Yellow’s necklace.
The necklace isn’t on the bedside table, and the only other piece of furniture is a small, closed armoire. If I had to guess, I’m going to say the doctor stashed it in his own room.
“I’ll be right back,” I whisper to Sarah. “Lie down and be a good girl.”
She has no reason to obey me, but she does. She closes her eyes, and I realize that even holding them open was a chore for her. My heart does a flip. I wonder how long she’s been sick. I wonder how much longer she has. But then I shake my head. Necklace first.
“Ah-ah-aah-aah-AAH!”
I want to clamp my hands over my ears so I don’t have to hear Yellow. But I can’t. I creep back into the hallway and tiptoe to the second room. The door is shut, so I turn the knob slowly and carefully. What if someone else is in the room? What if the doctor has a wife?
When the door is cracked, I peek in. There’s a slightly bigger bed, and it’s made and empty. A small wooden cradle sits beside it. Also empty. I breathe a sigh of relief and swing it open a little wider. A dresser lines the wall with the door, and the necklace sits right there on the corner. I pick it up and slip it into the pocket of my dress. Well, that was easy. Although, really, how hard is it to find something in a sparsely furnished house that’s like five hundred square feet max?
I shut the door to the doctor’s bedroom and tiptoe back to Sarah’s room. She hears me enter and opens her eyes. They’re a mixture of sadness and fear and resignation. Sarah knows she’s dying, and my heart shatters. I need to help her, but I don’t know what I can do here in 1782.
“Am I going to die?” Sarah asks. She coughs, and her entire body shakes.
I don’t say anything.
“My mama died,” she whispers. “And so did Ben. My papa won’t say it, but I think I’m going to die.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m done,” the doctor’s voice says from the floor below.
Oh, not good.
“I’m going to get you medicine,” I whisper to Sarah as I glance into the bowl of herbs next to her bed. “Real medicine. It’s going to make you better.”
I hear the door to the kitchen open downstairs.
“What is this?” the doctor’s voice yells as he spots the broken window. “Sarah!” His feet land on the first step, and I fly out of the room, down the hallway, and into the other stairwell. I thump down the stairs.
“Who’s in here?” The doctor’s voice is now coming from the second floor.
Yellow is still sitting in the same chair, slumped back. Her face is white, and her breath reeks of whiskey. There’s a bucket on the floor that’s half full of vomit. I try not to gag as I pull Yellow’s necklace out of my pocket and spin the year dial two full turns. I toss it to Yellow, and she catches it.
“I set it,” I bark. “Go! Grab the files!”
I’m spinning my own dial as Yellow slips the necklace over her head and tucks the files into her waistband. She tries to stand but staggers backward and falls to the floor.
“The necklace!” the doctor roars from the second floor. “She stole it!”
His footsteps thunder down the stairs. I throw myself over Yellow, grab her pendant, and shut its lid a second before I shut mine.
Yellow and I are ripped through time. I hear Yellow scream. We land, and she stumbles back onto the street. She looks around, and familiarity crosses her face.
“When are we?”
“1894.” I drop my head, grab Yellow’s hand, and pull her into an alley as a policeman rounds the corner, swinging a nightclub.
Yellow looks up at a redbrick building that casts a shadow over us, then leans her back into it and sinks onto the ground. “This is my time.”
“Excuse me?”
“My time,” she says. “My time period. We’re all assigned different eras that we specialize in. I’m the late-nineteenth century. I feel at home here.”
“Except that we’re not staying.” I hold down my hand to help Yellow to her feet, but she doesn’t take it. “Every hour we stay here is like, what?”
“Twelve hours in the present, more or less.”
“So if we stay two hours, we lose an entire day. We can’t do that.”
“Well, I don’t want to project again.” Yellow sighs. “Look at this. Look at what he did to me.” She holds out her arm, and I recoil. Her stitches are crude, thick black strings snaking up half her forearm. “I can’t project again. Physically. I need to recover, at least for a night. I don’t care if I lose a day or a week or even a month. If I project again, I might die.”
I rest my head in my hands. My life is literally racing past me. When I left the present yesterday, it was November. I’m not sure exactly how much time has passed, but it has to be weeks later, maybe even a month or so. And I’ve only passed a few hours.
I could leave Yellow here. I never wanted her tagging along in the first place.
I look down at her, sitting in the street with her legs straight out in front of her. Her patterned tights are ripped, her once crisp dress shirt is ruined, and her skirt is dotted with blood. Because of me. Yellow chose to leave Annum Guard and help me. I can’t abandon her. It would be like leaving an injured man behind on the battlefield. There are some things you just don’t do.
I hold up my index finger. “One night. We’ll develop a game plan and figure out how we’re going to bring down Alpha. So tell me, Miss Nineteenth Century, is there a hotel we could check into or something?”
“The Parker House,” Yellow says. “It’s the best hotel in Boston. I’ve eaten in the restaurant a bunch of times, but I’ve never stayed there. I’ve always wanted to.”
I scrunch my nose. “And how exactly are we going to pay for that?” It dawns on me that when I ran away, I didn’t count on having to pay for things. Ever. I have exactly zero dollars on me. I haven’t eaten in a day. As the thought crosses my mind, I realize that I’m hungry. Starving. And thirsty. It’s as if I was blocking out all the discomfort because I was so high on adrenaline, but now that I can finally breathe, I’ve come crashing back to Earth.
I place my hand on my stomach. “We need to eat. Do you have any money on you?”
She pushes up, pulls a twenty out of her pocket, and looks at it. “This would more than cover a room and dinner, except that we might run into a problem right here.” She holds it in front of my face and taps on the lower-right corner, where the words 2008 SERIES are printed.
I sigh. “So we have no money.”
“And you’re in a muumuu, and I’m in a corduroy miniskirt.”
“You sure you can’t project again?”
“Positive.”
I nod my head. “Okay.” I look down at the charm bracelet dangling from my wrist. My Hanukkah gift from Abe’s family. I hate to part with it, but sometimes you have to make hard choices. “We can sell this.” I shake my wrist.
Yellow shakes her head. “No, you’re not selling that. It was a gift from your boyfriend, right?”
“How did you know that?”