Our rooms are located at the top of a narrow stairwell, in the alley beside the saloon. We climb the steps to a short landing with four doors, each numbered.
“You’re room one. I’m in three,” Pa says.
I start toward the door, feeling like I’ve wasted a whole day—a worthless postcard in my pocket, and no closer to finding the Architect.
“In the morning,” he says from behind me, “I’ll gather supplies and retrieve the mule—then we’ll leave.”
A stone drops into my stomach.I can’t leave yet. “Where will we go?” I ask cautiously.
Pa’s mustache draws flat, and for a moment he looks away, outat the main street, at the wagons and tents closing up for the night. “I’ve been thinking maybe we could go back to that farmhouse, and the orchard.” His gaze swings back to me. “We could harvest those apples and sell them in the towns. Make a living that way, I suspect.” Pa’s eyes are watering slightly. Maybe it’s the loss of the wagon and Odie and all his tonic. Or maybe it’s the sense of responsibility he feels. With Mom gone, he’s trying to give me a home.A real home. And in truth, the idea of settling in that farmhouse, making one of the bedrooms my own, does stir up a flicker of longing inside me.
But I know I can’t have that life. It won’t last. None of it.
I am the closest to a daughter that Pa’s ever had, and he is the nearest thing to a father, but I can’t go back to that farmhouse. I can’t waste any more time.
I nod at him—as if in agreement—unable to speak the lie to him directly.
I can’t go with him.
I knew it would come to this eventually. He was my way out of the valley, but now, even though my chest aches at the thought of it, a rupturing behind my eyes, I have to go on my own. I can’t go back. Only forward. Time is already moving too quickly. But he won’t understand this, he won’t understand what I must do—he never knew the stories of my ancestors, the women who came before me, the way already marked like starlight on my skin. Mom loved him, but she never trusted anyone to know the whole truth. Even Pa.
I know he will try to stop me—insist that it isn’t safe. He won’t want me to go on my own. It stings behind my eyes, a mouthful of words and fears I can’t say aloud.
I have to leave tonight, or not at all.
I step forward, holding down the bite of tears, not wanting him to see, and I wrap my arms around him—he smells like tobacco and the mule. Like the river in the valley. Like home. He pats his hand gently against my back, not used to affection. “All right, then,” he says, not fully understanding the emotion roaring inside me. “Get some sleep—can’t have you turning me soft where all these townsfolk can see.”
I pull away, wiping at my eyes. This will hurt him, and I hate it. This will break him apart.
But finding the Architect, seeing this through, is more important than the guilt I will carry. The pain that will root between my ribs. And maybe someday I’ll be able to tell him why I left, and what I’ve done. And he will understand. He will see that I had no other choice.
Pa nods finally, swiping at his own eyes, then turns for his door—thinking I’ll be here in the morning, waiting in my room, and together we’ll travel back to the orchard house. As if a simple life in the apple orchard was something we could have. Something I deserved.
He doesn’t know.
In the morning, I’ll be long gone.
A lantern is lit inside my small rented room, casting dreamlike shadows on the wall above the spare bed and the single wooden chair in the corner. There’s no washroom, and it smells like alcohol and smoke from the saloon below.
I wait, wanting to be sure Pa is settled in for the night, beforeI sneak past his door and down to the alley. I bring the quilt to my nose, breathing deeply, hoping to draw up some memory of Mom, of fresh basil and soap—a scent that seemed to live inside her skin. But those scents are all gone. It smells like campfire now, and dirt.
Can I really do this?I think—leave Pa, the last familiar thing, behind.
But I know, there’s no other way.
This is the path that’s already been carved into me—a life predestined by the past, by my ancestors. And I will do what Mom never had a chance to: I will find the man who knows the way to the sea.
I will go on my own.
After a good twenty minutes has passed, when I’m certain Pa will think I’m asleep, I tuck the quilt back under my arm, resolve hardened into my bones, and I pull open the door, slipping out into the dark. But before tiptoeing past Pa’s room, I stop and rest a hand against the thick wood door. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, placing Mom’s quilt on the ground next to the door. It’s too heavy to carry on my own, and I know he will take care of it—the only reminder of Mom. And in the morning, when he finds it, he will know I wasn’t taken, ripped from my room by Theorists or some other shadowed figure—I left on my own. “Goodbye, Pa,” I say softly, biting down the hurt and doubt and pain. A million needles of uncertainty stabbing at my thoughts. But it’s the cold against my neck, the night sky above, that forces me to lower my hand and turn away.
I was never going to be able to stay with him.
It was always moving toward this. And although I can’t see the twin stars through the low layer of clouds, I know they’re up there. Tova and Llitha, spinning wildly in their orbit, closer than they’ve ever been toour atmosphere. And I can feel time tugging at me, pulling against my chest like a silver-spun thread made of the darkness between stars.
I hurry down the wooden stairway, slipping through the dark to the end of the alley, my heart breaking open, eyes wanting to erupt with tears.
But there’s no time for that now.
