Page 10 of Across Eternity

“No,” she says, rolling to face the other way.

Another week passes before she speaks. I’m just drifting off to sleep when her voice floats into my ear.

“Luna…” she finally whispers. “She was from Florida. Is that near you? Did you know her?”

Under other circumstances I’d find the question amusing. Right now, I’m so astonished to hear her voice that I can barely answer. “America is a very large place, and she probably isn’t even from my time,” I reply.

“She had a little boy,” Katrin says, turning her face to the pillow as her shoulders shake. “He’s only six. He won’t remember her. He won’t ever know how badly she wanted to return to him.”

“Had?” I ask, my heart thudding in my chest.

“He climbed on top of her and she just went crazy,” she whispers. “She stabbed him with something she had up her sleeve and he snapped her neck.” Her voice breaks. “Snapped it as if she were a doll.”

Luna Reilly, the woman far braver and more selfless than I, is dead.

I couldn’t have saved her. Speaking up wouldn’t have prevented what happened. The guilt, though—it rests on me just the same, so heavy I struggle to get a full breath.

“He left her corpse beside me the whole time as a warning,” Katrin says quietly. “He says if I’m not pregnant by next month he’ll do the same to me.”

I watch her thin shoulders shake. I can’t begin to imagine what that week was like for her. Even if we get out of here, an experience like that…it will change her. Scar her. “But I can’t get pregnant here. They hold those women in another room, and they’re monitored, night and day. We have a guard who drinks heavily and sleeps soundly each night, but those women have no chance.”

“I didn’t realize there were pregnant women here.”

“I think they were pregnant when they arrived,” she says. “Maybe he thinks one of them carries the hidden child. Maybe he just wants to raise an army of time travelers. I don’t know.”

This is the past, and I’m sure the women all died—there’s nothing I can do for them anyway—but it’s possible their children survived. “Who would a child become, raised by that man?” I ask.

She doesn’t reply. We both know the answer.

“You know, things are supposed to change when the first four families come together at last,” she says. “It’s part of the prophecy. And now there are at least three of the four right here, and things could hardly be worse.”

“Three?” I ask, my pulse beginning to race. “You mean the pregnant women?”

She raises a brow. “No, I mean us.”

“If I’m your descendant, we only count as one family. Luna would have made the second.”

Her eyes meet mine. “You’re clever, Amelie, but not clever as you think,” she says. “I saw your friend waking up. You gave her your gruel so they wouldn’t catch her.”

My heart beats faster. It’s occurred to me that Katrin might give them my name, but I didn’t realize she could give them Marie’s as well. “But you didn’t say anything?”

“No, because then I’d be no better than Iris,” she says. “She’s the woman advising him. I hate him, but I hate her even more—she’s a traitor to her own kind.”

My gaze flickers away. I haven’t told Katrin that Iris is my aunt, and I’m not sure I should. How could she help but look at me differently if she knew what kind of evil runs in my blood? I even wonder it myself.

“Why is she helping him?” I ask. “What’s in it for her?”

“They’re getting married, I think,” she replies.

“She’s a fool, then,” I say. “He won’t let her live.”

Her head rises for the first time since we began talking. “Why do you think that?”

“He can’t let anyone who was here live, but especially a time traveler. Any one of us, including her, could go back and ruin everything he achieves. He won’t risk it.”

She looks at me, thinking something she does not say. “They’re nearly done with that hole they’re digging. I wonder what it’s for.”

I’ve wondered it too, and the conclusion I keep coming back to is one I haven’t wanted to admit to myself. Now I’m forced to. In Coron’s mind, we are all just things, and most of us are useless things at that, taking up resources. Soon he’ll decide to kill those of us who haven’t woken, so it’s not as if he needs a cellar for food storage, or extra space. There’s only one thing he needs here, now.