Earth & Sky by Megan Crewe

Author:Megan Crewe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group (Canada)

19.

The cloth lurches around me. The image of the boy’s charred body shudders with it, imprinted on the back of my eyelids. Shudders, then slumps. Shudders, then slumps. Alive, and then, in an instant, completely extinguished.

Burnt to a crisp. Bile rises in my throat. She didn’t even think about it. He was a local. He saw their tech. She killed him.

She wouldn’t have been there at all if it weren’t for Win and me. He was only there because he followed us. Where was he supposed to be, that day, before we came?

“Skylar,” Win is saying. The air outside the cloth has stopped screaming. “Skylar, we’re okay now. We made it.”

“He’s dead,” I say, trembling. “He’s dead because of us.” “What?” Win says. “The kid? That’s what the Enforcers do. That one woman, Kurra, I’ve heard stories about her. Apparently she has an even more brutal streak than the others.”

You are playing with history here as much as anyone else, she said.

I train my gaze on the blurred landscape beyond the cloth, trying to escape the thoughts rushing through my head. But it’s true. True with a wrongness that peals right through me. He wasn’t just a kid. He was part of history. Not just on that day, but the next—and the next week, and the next year, and on and on.

“One Earthling’s life, it doesn’t mean anything to them,” Win’s saying. “Even one Kemyate life doesn’t matter that much. Which is why we have to—”

“But it’s not just him,” I interrupt. “He wouldn’t have died before, because we wouldn’t have been there for him to follow—he would have grown up and had his own kids and those kids would have had kids and . . . A thousand years. A thousand years of generations and all those people are gone. They’re gone because of us.”

Hundreds of faces, lives, vanished into oblivion with one shriek of Kurra’s blaster. Snuffed out down the long chain of history as easily as hitting a Delete key. I sink down on the floor of the time-cloth tent.

“Skylar, you don’t know that,” Win says, but he sounds less certain now. “He could have died that afternoon, in the battle, or tomorrow, or the day after, some other way. It could be hardly any difference at all.”

“Or maybe it’s a huge difference,” I say. “Maybe—maybe he, or one of his descendants, grew up to be some brilliant leader, or scientist, or—” The possible immensity of it overwhelms me. All it takes is the loss of one person somewhere along one influential family tree, and it’s not just hundreds but billions of lives rewritten. The siren call of wrong, wrong, wrong blares in my ears. I cover my face, but I can’t shut it out. I can’t shut it out because it’s coming from inside me.

“It’s not your fault,” Win says, standing over me. “There wasn’t anything you could do. Kurra killed him, not us. And we have to move, Skylar. If they’re tracing us, we have to get away from this spot before they decode the signal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.