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Harte ignored her and concentrated on Sam’s face. If he would only wake up…
Esta tugged at him again. “We have to go,” she said. “That lock will only keep them out for a couple more seconds.”
“I’m not leaving him here,” Harte told her. “I can’t.”
She crouched down and took his hand, but Harte refused to look at her. He couldn’t leave his brother here to be found by their enemies. He wouldn’t. “We’re going to take him.” As long as Harte had ahold of Sam, Esta couldn’t leave him there.
“We can’t,” she told him. Her voice was soft, but the words still felt like a slap. “If Sammie disappears, they’ll know for sure what happened here.”
“I don’t care about that,” Harte told her.
“What happens when we get back to 1920, Harte?” Esta asked. “We can’t stop guns that have already fired. We can’t change what just happened by taking Sammie with us, but if we go now, it doesn’t have to be like this.” Her voice was more urgent now. “We can fix this, Harte, but we have to go. Now. You have to let Sammie go, because if they catch us here, this is how your brother’s life ends. The Brotherhoods aren’t going to let us get away again.”
Harte was still shaking his head. He’d tried to save Sammie once before, and in the end it had come to this. “What if we can’t change anything?” He looked up at her then. “What if we make it all worse?”
“I don’t know,” she told him. “But if we don’t go now, everything ends right here. Including Sammie’s life. Let go of him, Harte. Give me your hand.”
Esta was right. Harte knew she was absolutely right about everything, but it felt impossible to let go of his brother. To leave him like this, alone on the cold floor of a darkened vault.
The turning of the lock on the vault had stopped, and Harte could hear the lever being depressed.
“Harte, please…” Esta’s voice was gentle.
Before the door could open, she grabbed Harte’s shoulder, and the sound drained from the vault as they were caught in the power of her magic. Finally, Harte made himself release his brother and left him there on the floor, outside of Esta’s hold on time. Harte’s legs seemed to move of their own accord, as he forced himself to his feet. Without another word, he took Esta’s hand. She was trembling, he realized, the same as himself. But his legs were strangely solid beneath him.
Harte did not take his eyes from his brother’s face. His body was cold, his brain numb, and every bit of himself felt as distant and dead as the Quellant had made Seshat’s power. On the bloodstained floor of the vault, Sam stared up at them, sightless and silent.
“Let me…” Still holding Esta’s hand, Harte bent down to close his brother’s eyes. “This has to work,” he told her.
Esta’s face was dappled in shadow. “It will,” she told him, her voice as determined as her expression. She wrapped her arms around him, pulling Harte into the warmth of her embrace. The vault was silent, and time seemed to be holding its breath. All at once the world felt like it was contracting around him, ripping itself apart in a great roaring, and then, suddenly, all was quiet again, and Harte found himself spinning through the endless darkness.
No… not endless darkness, and it was only his own head that was spinning. The floor was solid beneath him as Esta let go of his hand and the world righted itself. Nearby he could hear her breathing, soft and steady, as though the world itself hadn’t been turned inside out.
Esta clicked on the flashlight that Sam had given them, and a beam illuminated the vault. Harte didn’t need the light to know that Sammie was no longer there on the floor. He could only hope that Esta was right and that they could change the past so his brother would never be there.
Esta had already launched into action and had located Sammie’s box. A moment later she opened the small metal door.
Harte felt the wash of power before Esta even lifted the golden crown from within Sammie’s box and replaced it with everything they’d stolen from the other security boxes. He wondered how he hadn’t recognized the fake Dragon’s Eye for what it was. Still, standing there with the memory of his brother’s body clear in his mind’s eye, he didn’t feel any relief. How could he, when obtaining the crown meant that he was one step closer to his inevitable end?
LOST
1920—A Train Heading East
Esta didn’t know how she managed to guide Harte out of the bank vault and get him to the station in Oakland without anyone noticing the bloodstains on his clothes or his general state of shock, but she did. She bought two overnight tickets for a train to Chicago that left within the hour and sat silently by his side as they waited for the boarding call. Since the Quellant was still suppressing Seshat’s power, she took the risk of taking his hand in hers, but he didn’t respond. It was clear he was still reeling from the loss of his brother.
Esta thought she might almost understand what loss like that felt like. She’d lost too many people in her life—had herself been the cause of deaths and disappearances. There was the hollow shock of discovering too late that Dolph Saunders had been her true father and the pain of learning that her friend Mari had disappeared, erased from existence because of some change Esta had made in a seemingly unconnected past. Then there was Dakari. Esta still felt a numbing grief when she thought of her friend and mentor, and every time she did, the memory of him being murdered that night in Professor Lachlan’s study rose in her mind.
Even once they were underway, safely ensconced inside the cramped quiet of the train berth, Harte remained distant and far too quiet. They barely talked through dinner, and Esta felt like she was looking at him through the wrong end of a spyglass. Harte was right there, an arm’s length across the narrow table from her, and yet he felt too far away.
Worse, the air between them seemed to be charged with an awkwardness that had never been there before. Esta felt like she was dining with a stranger instead of the one person who had always seemed to see her better than anyone ever had—even when they’d still been enemies. It felt like all of the intimacy they’d shared in the previous weeks, the long days and nights of his recovery—first at the hospital and especially at the hotel in San Francisco—had evaporated into nothing in the presence of his grief.
Or perhaps, the truth of that intimacy had finally come to the surface. Perhaps it had stripped bare each of their vulnerabilities far more than either of them had ever planned, exposing the soft, white underbellies they’d taken such pains to cover and protect for so long.
Still, Esta wanted to say something—anything—that could close the distance between them again. “It wasn’t your fault, Harte,” she whispered, finally breaking a silence that had grown too oppressive for her to bear.
He glanced up at her, his expression so dark that she knew it had been the wrong thing to say. “Sammie’s dead, Esta.”
“But you weren’t the one who killed him.”
