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“There,” she told him. “The white carriage with the gray horse.”
Dakari’s was the second in line. He was younger than Esta had ever known him. He was still tall and broad-shouldered, but he wasn’t much older than a teenager. His deep brown skin wasn’t yet creased in the lines that would come later, and he hadn’t yet filled out. But his expressions were the same as he worked on brushing down the gray mare, his lips moving steadily as though he were speaking to the beast.
“Is he supposed to be here?” Harte wondered. “Or is this something else we’ve changed?”
“He’s supposed to be here,” she told him. But in all of the chaos of the previous days, she’d nearly forgotten that Dakari’s existence was a possibility. “He arrived in the city in the early eighties. But Professor Lachlan didn’t find him right away. He worked here for a few years before the Professor brought him on board.” She wiped the tears from her cheek and choked back a laugh. “He looks so young—he can’t be that much older than we are.”
When she was a child, Dakari had been such an imposing figure, so sure of himself. His steady presence had been so much a part of her childhood, and he’d helped to make her who she was. She’d never imagined him like this, on the cusp of adulthood with his whole future in front of him. But now that she saw him, young and unmarked by Professor Lachlan, her heart ached for the man who died in the library that night. What might he have been if Nibsy hadn’t gotten ahold of him? What else might he have done?
“Do you want to speak to him?” Harte asked.
She shook her head. “I couldn’t.” She felt another tear slide down her cheek, and she dashed it away. “What would I even say? ‘Hi! You don’t know me, but eventually you’ll change my diapers?’?” The thought made her feel ridiculous. “I just… I never thought I’d see him again.”
Harte stilled. “You said that he knew you as a baby?”
She sniffled a little as she nodded. “Well, as a toddler. He was already working with the Professor when I showed up. He was older then. He’d been with Professor Lachlan for a while by then.”
“Esta…” Harte’s voice was barely a whisper when he spoke, as though he were afraid of time or fate or whatever powers existed hearing him. “What if Dakari is the answer?”
Confusion shadowed her expression. “The answer to what? Don’t you remember? It’s my fault that he’s going to die.”
“Is he going to die now?” Harte wondered. “Think about it. We just left Nibsy. He took his own life. How can he kill Dakari?”
Esta frowned. “Maybe he won’t. Or maybe it’s still a possibility. If we go back and set history on the course it should have been, then the Professor who just killed himself would never have happened.”
“I don’t know,” Harte told her, scrubbing his hand through his hair until it stood on end. “How can any of this work? Time doesn’t exactly seem to flow in straight lines.”
“Doesn’t it?” she wondered. “We created the Devil’s Thief, and we saw the effects of that action on history.” But it wasn’t really that simple. If it were, Esta would have already been an impossibility.
“If that’s true, why go back?” Harte asked. “Wouldn’t the past remain unchangeable?”
“Because it’s the only way to make a better future,” she told him, her mind whirring as she considered something new. “I’d always imagined that we’d created a break somehow, that history veered off course. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe time isn’t a line.”
“What is it, if not a line?” Harte asked.
“It’s something more complicated,” she told him. “It’s a tangle. A knot.”
But that didn’t quite fit either, not when she could sift so easily through the layers of minutes to reach a different time.
“Professor Lachlan said that time was more like a book,” she told Harte. “Maybe he was right. Maybe you can change some of the words, but the basic story stays the same. Even if you removed whole pages, the book itself remained. The story is still there.”
“But he believed the ending could be changed, Esta.” Harte was frowning at her. “He wouldn’t have sent you back to find me, to find the Book, if he hadn’t believed that it could change his future in some substantial way.”
“You’re right,” she told him. “He believed it would take something monumental to change time. Something that would be the equivalent of destroying the metaphorical book completely.” She considered the implications of that, the way the Professor’s metaphor aligned with the existence of the Book itself. He never would have destroyed the Book. He wanted its power too badly.
“Maybe we can write over the pages,” she said, still thinking the idea through. “Maybe that’s what we’ve been doing all along. We aren’t erasing anything. Maybe the other versions are still there, waiting, and all the possibilities still remain somehow. At least until something happens to make them impossible.”
“What if Dakari is the answer to rewriting your story?” Harte asked.
She stared at him, not understanding.
“You told me he was a mentor to you,” Harte reminded her. “You told me how he basically raised you. What if he was the one who actually raised you?”
“You mean we could send him to find me?” Esta told him. “Maybe that’s why time hasn’t taken me yet, because someone can still be there.”
Harte nodded. “You need to send the girl forward,” Harte said. “And she needs to be sent back. But why should it matter who raises her?”
Maybe he was onto something. Maybe she was still living and breathing and part of the world because someone was still there to raise her. It could still be Nibsy. When they went back, they might still do something to make it possible for Nibsy to survive. But what if they didn’t? What if it could be someone else who found the girl? Who raised her, and protected her, and sent her back?
