Tears blur my vision. I shake my head to clear it, but all I can see is Dad, making my favorite cranberry cider on my birthday. Showing me how to roll the perfect snowball in the backyard. Saying prayers before tucking me in for the night.
And then the memories morph into future moments we’ll never share. Me walking down the staircase in my prom dress while Dad permanently blinds me from the flash of his camera. Dad watching me graduate from high school, and maybe, with us sharing patrol duties, college. Dad walking me down the aisle on my wedding day. Meeting his grandchildren and making them cranberry cider and teaching them how to roll the perfect snowball.
Joe took every last piece of my father away from me.
I think of the meeting Henry and I walked in on the other night. I thought Varo had been alerted to our presence by Stoner Guy, but if it was Joe, if it’s been Joe this whole time, he knew it was me because he heard my message. He sent his followers after us, even though we could have gotten hurt. And yesterday, in the wood—he separated Henry from me. Threatened me.
“Why did you send your followers after me? Were you going to kill me, too?” I ask, even though I remember him saying he wanted us to be taken alive.
He shakes his head as if I’m being ridiculous. “Of course I wasn’t trying to kill you. I was trying to save you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I merely wanted to frighten you so you would stay out of it,” he says. “I tried to save your father, too. I tried to make him see reason. I didn’t want any harm to come to him.”
“Stop lying!”
“I’m not.”
My eyes narrow. “You tried to save him?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me exactly how you tried to save my father. Tell me what you did, what you said, that should have kept him here with me. Because the way I see it, you didn’t try very hard.”
“Please, sit down and I’ll explain everything.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“Very well.” He takes a deep breath. “You know Varo’s story, but you do not know my intentions. You assume the worst of me like your father did, but please, for your own sake as well as mine, try to understand.”
Listening to him is both the last thing I want to do and the only thing I want to do. I want to understand, but nothing he can say will ever make me understand. I want to stand here, unmoving, unchanging, forever. I want to be anywhere but here.
I cross my arms over my chest and nod. I do not sit, and I do not look away from him. I want him to know that at any second I could decide I’ve had enough. That at any second, I could drive my knife through his heart, and although I know it won’t kill him, it’ll feel good to do it all the same.
Joe clears his throat. “I was young when Varo came to power. Impressionable. I agreed with the council’s banishment of him, thought he was crazy for even suggesting we could use the thresholds to change time. But the older I became, the more I realized the power of the wood was being ignored instead of utilized, and I started to wonder if my people—the Old Ones—if we were supposed to use the thresholds of our world to change events in the human world. I started to wonder: What if I could have stopped every single traveler from ever entering our wood, so that our way of life would never be threatened? Or what if I could go back in time and stop the countless wars that have left millions of humans dead from their own destructive tendencies? If I could have brought modern medicine to the plague, or stopped the genocide at the concentration camps—you can’t tell me that’s wrong.”
It’s true. He could have done a lot of good things for the world, but there’s no telling what the ramifications would have been, and as terrible as it sounds, that’s life. We can’t change the past—no one person should have that power. I tell him so, but he laughs.
“You’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid, kid. That’s just an excuse the council came up with to keep the wood a secret. They didn’t want to share it with anyone else. They were the selfish ones, for not seeing the wood as the miracle it was. But Varo saw it. His supporters saw it. They had vision. And when I finally saw it, too, I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibilities. As long as I went back to the exact right moment in history, I could stop every war, every famine, every outbreak of disease. There wouldn’t have to be any suffering in our world or in yours. You can’t tell me that is not a noble cause.”
“What about us?” I ask. “What about the suffering you put my family through when you killed my father?”
“Like I said, he was an unfortunate casualty. I have every intention of bringing him back.”
I freeze. “What did you just say?”
“Once I’ve overthrown the council, I will go back in time and save him, if I can.”
“What do you mean, if you can?”
He shrugs. “Your father did not have to die. If he had just listened to me, if he had just seen reason, he could have joined me. We could have done this together. There’s a chance I can go back and save him without changing the course of my future.”
“That’s not true. You know that’s not true!”
“There is a chance, Winter—”
“Stop it!” I press my palms into my ears. “Stop talking!”
It isn’t true—none of it. He’s psychotic if he thinks he can go back in time and change anything in history without putting his own future in jeopardy. Time isn’t meant to be messed with. Every time he would change something, he’d risk changing his own path. Altering any moment in history, even a tiny, seemingly insignificant one, could then change the lives of the people involved in that moment and the choices they make, which, down the line, could affect Joe in such a way that he never impersonates Varo in the first place. It could maybe even change him so much that he never gets assigned to be the intermediary for my family and he never kills Dad—
And then I get it. It’s tempting, so, so tempting to let Joe do what he wants to do. To take that chance and hope those events in history don’t change my family, that they only change Joe so that he leaves my family alone.
But I know it doesn’t work that way. Time is a domino effect, and just as it would change the lives of every other person who ever lived, it would change mine as well. My father may have never met my mother. I may have never been born. Neither of them may have ever been born. I could disappear and it would be like I never existed at all.
That’s why the council is necessary. That’s why the guardian is so important.
I pull Dad’s Swiss Army knife from my back pocket and flick it open. Sunlight dances across the blade.
“We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” I tell him through clenched teeth.
He sneers. “I am not some traveler you can command back to a threshold.”
I grab hold of my coin, the leather straps taut against my skin. The coin’s symbols glow with white fire. “Want to bet?”
“You don’t want to do this, Winter.”
“The thing is, I really do.”
“You don’t understand. You’re too late. The attack on the council is already under way.”
Henry.
I take a step back. “No.”