Wayfarer (Passenger 2)

Julian turned on her. “That’s not true! That’s not! You have no idea—”

She wondered if his privilege had made him blind to others’ suffering in his travels, or if maybe it took something of this magnitude to shatter that shield of self-righteousness that being white and male and wealthy had always provided him with. Etta didn’t doubt for a second that, as the heir, he might have been protected from harsher years so as to keep him alive, but she also didn’t doubt that Julian had never been able to see further than a foot in front of him when it came to other people.

Or maybe he’d treated traveling as all of the other Ironwoods seemed to; they disconnected themselves from decency time and time again to play the parts each era demanded of them. They had seen so much, they must have become desensitized to it—the way she could watch a film, see characters suffer, but never fully invest in their lives because of the emotional distance. Because it never truly felt real; not in a visceral way.

This kind of destruction was what traveling did to people—not the travelers themselves, but their victims, the common people who could not feel the sands of history shifting around them before they were smothered.

Julian’s hands were limp at his side, turned slightly toward the room, as if he could weigh the odds of life or death for each person stretched out on a cot. He had closed his eyes; his breathing was shallow, his face screwed up. Powerless.

“Remember this,” she told him. “How you feel right now.”

What it felt like to move through the world without power, at the mercy of things bigger than you. Unable, even if just for an hour, to control one’s life. How Nicholas had felt for years, before he’d taken all of that strength she loved so much about him and pulled himself up, out, back to the sea.

Etta turned her face against the rough fabric of the cot and focused on nothing beyond her own breathing, fighting back the sweep of shame and anger.

I have to finish this. A single man, on Ironwood’s orders, had set this disaster in motion. The blast from the explosion hadn’t just killed the tsar; its effects had rippled out, exactly as Henry had said, cutting through millions upon millions of innocent lives. For the first time in her life, Etta felt lethal.

“We need to leave,” she told Julian. “We have to find your grandfather. He has the astrolabe. We can still fix this.”

Julian shook his head, rubbing his hands over his face. “I can’t go back—I can’t.”

“The survivor rosters have gone up,” she heard a soft voice say. “I’ll take you to them, if you’d like. They only account for this field hospital. We should have others by the evening.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a nurse leading Julian toward the entrance, where a man was hammering up handwritten lists on large sheets of butcher paper. Those who could rise from their cots did so, swarming that small space. The line outside began to push forward as well, surging toward the sheets in a tangle of arms and legs, until everyone was nearly climbing over each other to get a better look.

By the time she saw Julian again, almost twenty minutes later, the same nurse was by his side again, leading him toward an area in the far back of the warehouse that had been sectioned off by sterile white curtains.

Etta pushed herself up and followed, bracing herself for this next hit. Either his old nanny was alive, or he was being drawn back to identify a body. She caught the tail end of the nurse’s instructions as she came up behind Julian.

“…need to wear a mask and try not to touch her—the burns are exceedingly painful.”

“I understand,” Julian said, accepting both gloves and a face mask from the young woman. Her tidy uniform seemed at odds with the barely managed chaos of the place; she cast them both a sympathetic look before falling back.

Etta accepted her own set and pulled them on. She survived. What a small, precious miracle.

“They say she doesn’t have long,” Julian told her, with an odd, forced lightness. Etta knew this feeling, too, of overcompensating to rise above the pain in order to function. “The air way out in Brooklyn was so hot it damaged her lungs.”

Etta put a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I’d like to ask her a few things, if she can answer. But mostly…I think I…”

Julian never finished his thought. He took a deep breath, smoothed his hair back, and stepped through the curtain.

Inside, about a dozen or so beds were arranged in a U shape around a central station, where two nurses were cutting bandages and measuring out medicine. The lights from the lanterns were kept dim, but the shadows didn’t hide the heavily bandaged figures on each of the beds, the blistered patches of exposed, unnaturally gleaming skin.

Julian paced toward the far right end, counting under his breath. Finally, he found the one he was looking for, and Etta saw him straighten to his full height as he moved to the small wooden stool beside the cot. He moved the basin of water onto the floor and reached for the hand of the woman on the bed.

Etta hung back, unsure whether or not she was meant to be listening or watching. The woman seemed less bandaged than the others, but wore a bulky oxygen mask. Her face was as pink as the inside of a seashell, and her eyebrows were entirely gone, as were patches of her gray hair.

With utmost care, Julian stroked the back of her hand, careful to avoid the IV line. Within a moment, the woman turned her head toward him, her eyelids inching open. Etta knew the precise moment she saw him and made the connection, because her free hand floated up to pull down her oxygen mask, and those same blue eyes went wide.