Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) by Megan Crewe Read Free Book Online Page A

here, messing with our lives?”
    “ I haven’t,” Win says. “I mean, not very much. I only just finished the training. But there are lots of other Travelers . . . and it’s been going on for thousands of years. I don’t—”
    “Thousands of years?” I interrupt. The bottom of my stomach has dropped out. No. I need something—a flick of an eyelid, a tweak of a muscle—to tell me he’s pulling my leg. But his expression is impenetrably serious.
    It’s too crazy to be true. There’s no way.
    “I don’t like it either,” Win says emphatically. “There’s a group of us—we don’t think it’s right. We want to shut down the time field and stop the experimenting. To leave Earth alone.” He runs his thumb over his drawing, smudging out the second circle, his “glass ball.”
    Well, if this weren’t crazy, that’s definitely the side I’d be on.
    “That’s why I’m here,” he goes on. “We’re looking for— The leader of our group, he designed a weapon that could destroy the generator, take down all the defenses. There are a lot. But he was almost caught by the Enforcers, our security division, people like the ones who chased us today. So he came down to Earth and hid the weapon from them, where the rest of us could retrieve it later to finish the job.”
    I don’t know what to do other than play along. “Okay. And you think he hid it here ?”
    “No,” Win says. “It’s more complicated than that. The rest of the group, they’re looking for Jeanant—our leader—in the past right now. But this is the time when he first came down, so I was assigned to stay here in case there was some sort of sign from when he arrived. I’ve been hopping from country to country, watching for anything unusual. I came to this city because I heard about the courthouse bombing.”
    “But it wasn’t bombed,” I say. “Not yet, anyway. You said you . . .”
    He said he stopped it.
    “I came and I watched, and I could tell pretty quickly the bomb had nothing to do with Jeanant,” Win says. “But I’ve been waiting around for weeks—going through the same week, over and over—and I don’t know what’s happening with the others. We aren’t supposed to be here at all, so our equipment is limited, especially communications. I’ll be called in when they’ve succeeded, but that hasn’t happened yet. I didn’t know whether the Enforcers had caught on. Whether the others might be in danger. Then I saw your class, and . . . It was awful, afterward.” He looks suddenly sick. Visions of ambulances, stretchers, smoke, and burned flesh pass through my head, and my own stomach clenches.
    “I knew it would be so simple to go back and save all of you,” he continues. “One little gesture to make up for a tiny bit of the harm the Travelers have done down here. And at the same time I could distract any Enforcers chasing the rest of the group. I didn’t mean to let them get so close.”
    The sensation of burning heat and the blast of sound come back to me so vividly I taste ash in my mouth. So if I believe him, the hall really did explode, once. And then Win changed something so it didn’t. And after . . .
    After the explosion that didn’t happen, everything felt wrong to me. Everywhere I went, everyone I talked to. For hours.
    Maybe the problem wasn’t with the entire world. Maybe what was wrong was me still being in it.
    “When you watched, the first time . . .” I say. “We all died.”
    He nods.
    The casual acknowledgment chokes me. I drag in the cool air. It’s not true. It’s just a story. How could it be true?
    A story to cover what ? What could possibly be worse than this?
    “You came by the school this morning,” I say. “You were still watching us.” I remember the moment he lit up. “You were waiting for Jaeda?”
    “Who?”
    “Black hair, dark skin, very pretty . . .” I raise my eyebrows.
    A flush spreads under his golden-brown skin. “Oh,” he says. “It wasn’t about