Page 7

CHAPTER 7

Einstein’s Idea

One month later

L ike everything I’d ever known, time also seemed to lose all meaning. It was only thanks to the naked priest calendar that I knew we were somewhere in August.

I hadn’t left Naruka.

No, wait, that wasn’t quite true. After James showed me the Gate—a day after? Two?—I’d decided I was definitely going insane. That those mushrooms Willow had given me back in college had finally caught up with me.

I’d gotten all the way to Limerick before I turned the car around. James said I got one look at the city and drove back in horror, but I think that was just some Irish joke.

I didn’t know why exactly I came back. Somewhere along the way, when the rugged heather of County Kerry had given way to the springy grass of Limerick, the fear of just being me again was worse than the fear of being someone else. Or maybe I’d just felt guilty for stealing James’s car—again.

When I drove back, James was waiting for me on Naruka’s steps, a cup of tea in his hand, a romance novel in the other. “How far did ye get?” he’d asked, as if this were all perfectly expected. Instead of insisting I give him the keys, or come inside with him, he’d simply climbed into the passenger seat and said, “Well, I might as well show ye a bit of Kerry.”

We’d driven up, around, and down roads that would struggle to fit two horses, never mind the beat-up old Ford, and James had answered every question I’d thrown at him.

How is it possible to witness the memories here?

There’s a connection between our worlds that goes back centuries, formed intentionally, and souls have been traveling here for years. It’s why our lands share so many things.

I didn’t think we shared gears in the sky, but didn’t mention it.

What happens if someone visits the Gate who isn’t a Ruhaven?

There’s nothing to happen but a little snooze in a meadow if they’re not—and few are, aye, few are.

But that couldn’t be true, because the Gate had allowed me through.

Me. An electrician, a tradeswoman, without even a college degree to my name.

I kept asking questions, and after four hours of hearing the hedges demolish the side of James’s tiny car, we drove back to Naruka.

Tye had tried to talk to me a few times, but I’d pushed him away. Not because I was still upset he’d lied, but because I was embarrassed with myself—in so many ways.

James was still taking care of me: making breakfast, carrying a tray of stew up to my room when the shock of Ruhaven meant I couldn’t get out of bed. Whatever Ruhaven was, whatever the truth of the Gate may be, James believed it. And he treated me so well because he believed I was a part of that world, the history of this place, written in the Ledger .

But I wasn’t.

That shame was enough to keep me up at night as much as the dreams of flying through the gears.

I’d never done anything to deserve this. Never. It wasn’t my birthdate written in the Ledger , not me the book wanted, not Roe from L’Ardoise whose biggest achievement was being a half-decent plumber. I wasn’t a prodigy on the piano, I hadn’t won any awards in high school, I hadn’t graduated college on the dean’s list, I hadn’t graduated college at all.

I hadn’t been there when my sister died. Hadn’t felt it.

So no, it wasn’t me listed on row 1274 of a centuries-old book, my name inked on ancient parchment by Irish monks. Wasn’t me written in precise, golden handwriting, as much as James wanted it to be. As much as he looked at me like I was something special.

All the work he’d gone to, all the hope he’d had, all for a doppelg?nger.

What might have been worse was how much, sometimes, I wouldn’t mind being that lie. Had wanted so badly for it to be me written in the Ledger that I’d stayed weeks after I should have left. Now, there was a ball of pitiable envy and want in my gut that was slowly eating me from the inside, that begged me to reach out and claim this thing that wasn’t even mine.

Because then I would mean something, be someone, and I might eventually believe that who and what I was could matter in the universe, that someone out there was waiting for me. So much that they’d look down and give me this.

But they hadn’t.

I n one of Capolinn’s smoky pubs, Tye’s fist slapped down hard on the table, jittering the empty pint glasses James had left to replenish. “So that’s it, then,” he said as Kazie folded herself onto the stool beside him, ignoring me entirely, as she’d done for weeks. “I spend six months draggin’ your ass to Ireland, to show ya what a lot of others would kill to see, and you’re just leavin’?”

The stare he leveled at me could have peeled layers off an onion. But I couldn’t answer him, not with the truth, not without them knowing they’d confessed all the secrets of Naruka to a fraud. Which was why I had to leave.

I licked my lips, curled my fingers, wishing for that fresh pint that couldn’t come fast enough.

Kazie had wrangled us a snug in the back after a couple men in sweater vests rose to offer us their table, maybe out of manners, or maybe because the girl asking them if they were done with it was wearing a jacket made out of glittery seagull feathers. A veritable Dr. Seuss book hung on the pub’s walls—cracked photos, fishing reels, fiddles, and figs, and the owner’s family tree with every cousin, grandmother, and dog for at least eight generations.

Other people stood or sat on church pews crammed against yellow wallpaper, and the whole space was so narrow, the parish priest would have declared us all standing in sin—if he wasn’t busy ordering a pint at the bar beside James.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated roughly. “Sorry for the time it took to bring me here. Sorry that you had to pretend.”

Tye’s eyes narrowed. “Pretend?”

I shouldn’t have said that, especially not with the note of bitterness Tye had homed in on. “To be someone else,” I amended, “in L’Ardoise.”

He leaned forward on his stool, loose hair coming to rest at his shoulders. I could still feel it sliding between my fingers, his groan humming against my throat.

“Ya listen to me now,” Tye said, voice like gravel. “Things between us may not have been what ya thought, but that don’t mean it was a lie, ya hear? It don’t mean I don’t care for ya, Roe.”

I stared hard at the stained carpet under my feet, memorizing the patterns of the old weave as I struggled to form words that wouldn’t give away how badly I’d wanted to mean more, a lot more. To exist for something more than the empty apartment with my sister’s dreams strung on the walls.

“I wanna know why you’re goin’ back,” he pressed.

That, I couldn’t tell him. “It’s home,” I hedged.

“ Home ,” Tye repeated, nodding slowly as he leaned back again, lifting a smoke to his lips. “Ya know, Roe, I learned a lot about ya when I needed to convince you to come here, so I know what ya were to people in that town you say is home.” He braced an elbow on the table, the light of the candle brushing his flexed jaw. “You know what they called ya?”

“I—”

“ Willow’s sister ,” he finished on a sneer . “And that’s what you wanna go back to? Let me tell ya, Roe, maybe ya should. ’Cause Ruhaven ain’t got time for folks who wanna be nothin’ .”

I dug my fingernails into my thigh.

Willow’s sister. Maybe it was my biggest achievement. And maybe, if he and James had come to L’Ardoise three years earlier, they’d have found the one they wanted.

“Jayzus, that took too long,” James said, unloading the pints between us. “Bloody Colm stopped me at the bar.”

Grateful for the reprieve, I glanced over, following Tye’s gaze to a man with cropped hair, beady eyes, and a stout clenched in his fist. “Who’s he?”

In answer, Kazie lifted her shoulders, letting them dangle by her feather earrings as the fiddles finished their jig, struck up the next.

Tye turned back around, reached for his pint. “Used to date a girl at Naruka, but when we showed her the Gate, she damn up and left like you’re about to, and now he’s got it in his stupid head we did somethin’ to her.” He bared his teeth. “You ain’t datin’ someone in town that’s gonna cause me trouble too, are ya?”

I stared right back. “Worried they’ll whisk me away to the Gate for a kiss, too?”

“Darlin’, if ya think that was a kiss, ya got bigger problems than Ruhaven.”

James thrust my pint between us. “For the love of Mary, me nerves can’t take the two of ya goin’ at it. Now, I know yer of a mind to leave,” he said, straddling a stool, “and maybe that’s me own fault for letting Tye show ye the Gate as he did. Still, as much as most do want to live in Ruhaven, to know who they once were, I know ’tis not for everyone. But in this yer unique, Roe, as I’ve brought ye here for two reasons. I need to tell ye about—”

Tye rose abruptly, sending the stool flying back. “Ya got no business droppin’ this on her when she’s goin’,” he said, grabbing his coat and turning to me. “And as much as I like ya, kid, you don’t got any business with us anymore. With me,” he added.

The words landed hard enough that I was cooling my aching throat with the pint by the time Tye hit the door.

I’d never had any business with them—he was right about that. All his work to get me to move here had been for nothing.

James laid a hand over mine, nearly as comforting as the pint, which only increased my guilt. “He’s wrong, Roe. Whatever ye choose, ye can talk to me, and ye can come back and visit Naruka too, should ye change yer mind.”

I should have blurted out the truth right then, confessed everything, and damn the consequences.

“But I’ve something ye need to know, something ye might not find easy. It’s about Willow.”

My mind stilled, my hand freezing around the glass, so that it hovered in mid-air until cold liquid spilled onto my jeans, jolting me. “I—sorry, I—” He’d found me out already. Why had I thought he wouldn’t check? He and Tye had known enough about me to know where I worked, to convince me to move here. They’d known I had a twin, would’ve checked her birthdate too.

“—that’s why we think yer twin’s death is related to Ruhaven,” James finished over the roar in my ears.

“You know that I—I’m— Wait, what ?” The room yawned open, ripe with cigarette smoke. Had he said her death was—

“Willow died from an aneurysm,” James said calmly, like there wasn’t a ping-pong ball bouncing around my brain. “Like me mother, and others before her, all Ruhavens in the Ledger , who’ve suffered some—some disease, we think, coming from the Gate. I’ve not all the information on it, but I think Willow’s death is related—even if she’s not in the Ledger .”

I swallowed the dregs of my beer; my mouth had gone bone dry.

“You’re the only twins ever in the Ledger ,” Kazie said, and it took me a moment to realize it was her speaking. “Maybe the infection that causes the aneurysms in Ruhavens can jump between you and Willow.”

Willow, dying in the hospital when I hadn’t even known what an aneurysm was. Something I’d worried would prevent her from playing the piano, something I’d help her recover from—together, always.

“An infection?” I said at last, then repeated James’s words. “You have a list?”

“I’ve twenty-seven cases of Ruhavens dead from aneurysms this century,” James repeated softly, “and most were under thirty, like yer sister. ’Tis rare, Roe, ye know yerself. Too rare for so many of us to die from it.”

My ears rang with the deadened mayhem of the bar, the squeaking fiddles a muffled whisper, the whistle an imperceptible whine.

James flattened his palms on the table. “I can’t absolutely swear to ye the disease is behind yer sister’s aneurysm. I’m not the person who’d know.”

“But we have a couple ideas,” Kazie added, my sister and me suddenly interesting to her for the first time. “Tye and I think there’s something that happens in the memories that causes the disease to infect us here. Something we did, right, or someone we spoke to. I dunno why Willow was infected, but I gotta believe it’s because there was that transference.”

“A transference,” I repeated slowly.

She continued, missing the edge in my voice. “Yeah, yeah, I’m always reading about twins and stuff, especially when we found you, and I’m thinking your connection probably transferred. I don’t think you gotta be in the Gate to be infected. James, remember that woman from India?”

“Kazie, I don’t think Roe wants to hear that,” he said, picking up on the chill in the air.

“Well, whatever, anyway. She never went to the Gate, died on recruitment. So maybe that’s what happened to Willow, right, and she, like, picked up something through their twin bond.”

“ Kazie .”

“But the point is,” she steamrolled over James with a finger in the air, “Roe can live the memories, can figure out what might have caused the infection back then. Maybe it’s always in us. But if you went in the Gate, Roe, with your special connection to Willow, you might—”

I shot up from the bench, the pint shaking in my fist. Kazie blinked at me.

She didn’t talk to me for a month and now she wanted to pretend to care about my sister? Only because it could benefit her, could benefit Ruhaven, the only thing anyone at Naruka really cared about. Not me, and not Willow, not who she’d been.

I set the glass down with a crack that sent beer spilling over my fingers. “Willow and I did have a connection, and it had nothing to do with whatever was going on in Naruka. She is—I mean, she was my—”

Fuck .

I swore, looked away, at the dog behind the bar, then at the old woman falling asleep on her accordion.

When I was sure my voice wouldn’t break, I said, “She was the only person who ever knew me. And she didn’t die because of a disease from Ruhaven. She died because her brain exploded when I wasn’t there.”

Face burning, I bent and fumbled for my coat.

Kazie watched me, eyes wide. “Roe, I swear it’s the truth that we’re really dying of this thing. I’m so sorry about Willow, but—”

“No, you’re not, or you wouldn’t bring any of this up. You didn’t see her dead in the hospital, didn’t look at what happened to her brain, and you definitely don’t have any evidence it was from this disease.”

I tried to shove my arm through the suddenly minuscule hole in Willow’s old jean jacket.

“But there are others who’ve died of the infection, who suffered an aneurysm and—”

“Maybe they were just sudden deaths and you’re confused. You said yourself, James, that your mother was older. But my twin’s death isn’t some science experiment for you to pick apart.”

James put a hand on Kazie’s arm, lifting eyes full of sympathy to me. “We didn’t mean to upset ye, Roe.”

Hadn’t they?

“No, you just wanted to make up something to keep me here.”

Hurt clouded James’s eyes. “Ye think I’d lie about me own mother?”

“You? Lie? Yeah, why would I think that?” I spun on my heel, nearly knocking over a table. “I’ll see you at the hotel .”

“But Roe, we do have proof,” Kazie called behind me. “There’s someone who—”

I shoved through the pub, the taps too bright in the dingy dark. Then I was out the door and sucking back night air like a fish thrown overboard.

Lights flared as cars rumbled over the road, the loose cobblestones clacking like thunder. A horse came next, followed by ten men bellowing an off-key Irish tune.

I turned left, stomping through puddles in my search for a cab in the tiny, fifteen-pub town of Capolinn.

“Roe! I’m sorry—wait!”

Ignoring Kazie’s shouts, I hustled toward a taxi driver who’d just switched on his sign. Crimson breaklights shone in zigzag patterns.

I rapped on the cabbie’s window, then coughed when it opened and smoke billowed out.

“Where ye goin’, love?” he asked, a grizzled man of at least fifty years, with rainy blue eyes and a beard gone yellow.

“Naruka,” I was forced to admit. “Just up the road, not ten minutes past—”

“Forty years I’ve lived here. Ye think I don’t know where it is? Bloody Yanks. In ye go, so.”

I stepped to the back, pried open the passenger door—

Kazie slapped it closed.

She kept her hand braced on the door, frizzy hair shining midnight black with the rain. Spots of color stained a face normally a pristine, dusty purple. “So that’s, like, just it?” she panted. “You’re just going to floof off back home? You won’t even look into this?”

I whipped up my hood as the rain thundered down. “ This ?” I repeated. “ This isn’t anything. This is barely even a disease. This is just a convenient way to force me to stay.” To force me to live a life that wasn’t mine, and it was only a matter of time until they found out. Keeping my voice low, I added, “To witness whatever messed-up movie is playing a mile above Naruka.”

I shouldered her aside, wrenching open the door. Kazie threw her weight against it, the crack reverberating through the street. Horns blared.

“ Convenient? ” she seethed. “So you think us being killed by a disease is convenient? I knew people who have died. Ruhavens who’d have given anything to live in that ‘messed-up movie.’ The one you’re throwing away .”

Because it was terrifying how much I wanted to keep it.

I swatted at the finger she drilled into my chest. “Convenient, because I was about to leave when you and James dumped this on me.”

“Because James wanted to help you. Though I don’t know why. You’re selfish, and you don’t deserve Ruhaven.” She paced in a tight circle, pinprick heels clacking off stone and in danger of snagging in the crevices. “I’d give my freaking life to her, to Ruhaven, and you’re actually just going home.”

“Yeah, and when I get there, I’m spending all the money James paid me on a bottle of 1947 scotch and sinking into a stupor so deep and dark that when I wake up, I’ll forget all about this.”

“Love, I’d like nothing more than the same meself!” the cabbie shouted.

In answer, Kazie grabbed my shoulders and slammed me against the cab—hard, despite being a foot shorter. “So that’s all you care about?” she demanded, face a mask of barely contained fury. “Going home? Drinking? Why don’t you think of someone else, Roe? You could save the next person. You might have saved Bryn from the disease.”

“The man James kicked out of Naruka? Where is Bryn, anyway? Here for the ceremony ?” I sneered, and god, I could only be grateful there wasn’t another person here to witness my—

She slapped me. A quick, hard blow that left my cheek stinging from this—this pixie sprout of a girl.

“Bryn survived , you ungrateful cow.” With my collar in her grip, she yanked me down to eye level, wrenching open the cab door. “He was the only one who did, the only one who has answers for you. Think about that .”

I barely avoided whacking my head on the roof before my butt hit the cigarette-burned seat.

“If Bryn suffered an aneurysm, then why’s he still alive?”

She grinned, a blinding row of teeth, not the least bit amused. “What do you care, huh? He’s nobody, just another lunatic who wanted to find you, to show you all this, just so you could skedaddle back to L’Ar-freaking-Doise . And I’m oh-so-sure your sister’s aneurysm was just a coincidence too.” She kicked my knee in, slammed the door. “Bye-bye!” she yelled, then slapped the hood of the car. “Naruka!”

I cranked down the window. “Kazie, wait, I—ah!”

Tires squealed, rolling over the cobblestone roads hard enough to make my brain rattle.