“You said to get us out. . . .”
Harte turned to her, comprehension already dawning on him, but before he could say anything, the door behind them opened and a uniformed conductor came out.
The man eyed Harte as he clung to the railing, but otherwise he gave no indication that anything was amiss. “Tickets, please.”
They didn’t have any tickets, but if he could just pull his head together and stay upright long enough to let go of the railing, he could fix this. One touch was all it would take. . . .
But Esta was speaking before he could manage. “I’m so sorry,” she said, pulling a dark wallet from within the traveling cloak she wore. “We were in such a rush, and we didn’t have time to purchase the tickets before we boarded. Can we pay now?”
“Sure, sure,” the man said, pulling out a small booklet and punching two of the tickets with a small silver clamp. “End of the line . . . That’ll be three fifty for each.”
Harte should have been curious about where the stack of money had come from. He should have been interested to watch this new ritual, the purchasing of a ticket—the validation of his freedom. But it was all he could do to keep his stomach from revolting again and his mind from focusing too much on the reality of what Esta had done.
“Is a Pullman car available?” Esta asked the conductor, taking a couple of bills from the wallet and handing them over. Her voice was light and easy, but Harte could hear the edge in it. “My husband isn’t feeling well. I think it might be best if he rested.”
“No Pullman,” the man said, raising a brow in their direction. “This train’s only going as far as Baltimore. You can get a transfer to a Pullman at the next stop, if you’re traveling farther.”
“Of course. How silly of me,” she said with a strained laugh. “Thank you anyway.” She’d made her voice into something breathy and light, but she couldn’t quite manage to keep a tremor of nervousness out of it.
Harte waited until the man had continued on through the next car before he let himself slide to the floor. His head was still spinning as he leaned back against the railing, and the way the train swayed made his already fragile stomach turn over again. He forced all of that aside too and focused on Esta. “The train on platform seven wasn’t going to Baltimore.”
She wasn’t paying attention to him. Instead, she was trying to reach up her sleeve. Her mouth was a flat line of concentration—or was that pain?
“Esta—”
“Hold on,” she said through gritted teeth, and a moment later she pulled the cuff from her arm with a hissing intake of breath. “There . . .” She held it delicately between her fingers, frowning as she examined it.
The cuff itself was a delicate piece of burnished silver, but the metal was less important than what it held—Ishtar’s Key. It was one of the artifacts that gave the Order its power, but this particular stone was special because it allowed Esta to travel through time.
Through time . . .
Harte’s empty stomach felt as though he’d swallowed a hot stone. “What did you do, Esta? This train was supposed to be going to Chicago.”
“You told me to get us out of there, so I did,” she told him, but her attention was on the stone in her hand—not on him.
“But this isn’t the train we were on, is it?” he asked.
“Of course it is.” She finally looked up from her examination of the cuff. “This is the same train—the exact same car. . . .” She hesitated, frowning a little. “It’s just slightly ahead of when we were before.”
“How slightly?” he asked, his stomach churning from the motion of the train and the idea of what she’d just done.
“I don’t know. A day or two, nothing much mo—” But her words fell away as she glanced at the tickets the conductor had handed her.
“What is it?” he asked, swallowing down another round of nausea that had very little to do with the motion of the train.
She cursed as her face all but drained of color.
He had a very bad feeling that he was not going to like the answer to the question he had to ask: “How far ahead are we?”
“I was just trying to get us away from Jack and the police,” she told him, never taking her eyes from the tickets.
“How far, Esta?”
She was practically chewing a hole into her lip. “I was looking for a day or two ahead. I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t—”
“Esta.” He cut her off and took a deep breath—both to calm himself and so he wouldn’t be sick again. It could be worse. They could be in police custody right now. They could be at the mercy of Jack and the Order. “How bad is it?”
Silently, she handed him the tickets.
His eyes were still having trouble focusing from the strangely violent push-pulling sensation he’d experienced just moments before. It had felt like the world was collapsing in on him, twisting him about. It had felt awful—wrong. As he stared at the ticket, that feeling worsened, because there was no mistaking the date printed there.
“Two years?” He was going to be sick again.
Two years ago he was still struggling to climb out of the filth of the Bowery and doing his damnedest to survive. Two years ago he didn’t have money in his pocket or a reputation on the stage. Two years ago he didn’t even have the name he now wore. Two years was practically a lifetime in a world as capricious and dangerous as his, and she’d taken it from him without a second thought.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” she whispered, her expression pained.
“How is that even possible?” he snapped, wincing inwardly at how sharply the words had come out.
But his sharpness was like a flint to a rock, sparking her temper. “Slipping through time isn’t exactly easy, you know,” she said, snatching the tickets back from him. “On a good day, it takes all my concentration to find the right minute to land, and that’s when I’m not in a moving train cornered by the police. You’re welcome, by the way. Seeing as we aren’t currently in jail and all.”
“Two years, Esta.” But then he saw the way her hand holding the tickets was shaking, and his anger receded a little. “I meant for you to”—he waved vaguely—“to slow things down, so we could get off the train and get away.”
“We got away, didn’t we?” She gestured to the obvious absence of Jack.
He took a breath, trying to hold down the bile in his stomach along with his own temper. “You’re right. We were in a tight spot, and you got us out,” he told her, trying to mean it. “It’ll be fine. You can fix this. You can take us back.”
“Harte . . .” Her hesitation made his stomach twist all the more.
“You can take us back,” he repeated.
Esta’s expression was pained. “I have no idea what just happened. I meant to go two days and went two years instead.”
“Because we were on a train—you said so yourself,” he said slowly, trying to keep his composure. “We’ll get off at the next station, and then you can—”
“It wasn’t just the train,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes.
The nausea somehow suddenly didn’t seem so important. “What do you mean?”