Meredith McCardle - The Eighth Guardian

I’m spinning my own dial as Yellow slips the necklace over her head and tucks the files into her waistband. She tries to stand but staggers backward and falls to the floor.

“The necklace!” the doctor roars from the second floor. “She stole it!”

His footsteps thunder down the stairs. I throw myself over Yellow, grab her pendant, and shut its lid a second before I shut mine.

Yellow and I are ripped through time. I hear Yellow scream. We land, and she stumbles back onto the street. She looks around, and familiarity crosses her face.

“When are we?”

“1894.” I drop my head, grab Yellow’s hand, and pull her into an alley as a policeman rounds the corner, swinging a nightclub.

Yellow looks up at a redbrick building that casts a shadow over us, then leans her back into it and sinks onto the ground. “This is my time.”

“Excuse me?”

“My time,” she says. “My time period. We’re all assigned different eras that we specialize in. I’m the late-nineteenth century. I feel at home here.”

“Except that we’re not staying.” I hold down my hand to help Yellow to her feet, but she doesn’t take it. “Every hour we stay here is like, what?”

“Twelve hours in the present, more or less.”

“So if we stay two hours, we lose an entire day. We can’t do that.”

“Well, I don’t want to project again.” Yellow sighs. “Look at this. Look at what he did to me.” She holds out her arm, and I recoil. Her stitches are crude, thick black strings snaking up half her forearm. “I can’t project again. Physically. I need to recover, at least for a night. I don’t care if I lose a day or a week or even a month. If I project again, I might die.”

I rest my head in my hands. My life is literally racing past me. When I left the present yesterday, it was November. I’m not sure exactly how much time has passed, but it has to be weeks later, maybe even a month or so. And I’ve only passed a few hours.

I could leave Yellow here. I never wanted her tagging along in the first place.

I look down at her, sitting in the street with her legs straight out in front of her. Her patterned tights are ripped, her once crisp dress shirt is ruined, and her skirt is dotted with blood. Because of me. Yellow chose to leave Annum Guard and help me . I can’t abandon her. It would be like leaving an injured man behind on the battlefield. There are some things you just don’t do.

I hold up my index finger. “One night. We’ll develop a game plan and figure out how we’re going to bring down Alpha. So tell me, Miss Nineteenth Century, is there a hotel we could check into or something?”

“The Parker House,” Yellow says. “It’s the best hotel in Boston. I’ve eaten in the restaurant a bunch of times, but I’ve never stayed there. I’ve always wanted to.”

I scrunch my nose. “And how exactly are we going to pay for that?” It dawns on me that when I ran away, I didn’t count on having to pay for things. Ever. I have exactly zero dollars on me. I haven’t eaten in a day. As the thought crosses my mind, I realize that I’m hungry. Starving. And thirsty. It’s as if I was blocking out all the discomfort because I was so high on adrenaline, but now that I can finally breathe, I’ve come crashing back to Earth.

I place my hand on my stomach. “We need to eat. Do you have any money on you?”

She pushes up, pulls a twenty out of her pocket, and looks at it. “This would more than cover a room and dinner, except that we might run into a problem right here.” She holds it in front of my face and taps on the lower-right corner, where the words 2008 SERIES are printed.

I sigh. “So we have no money.”

“And you’re in a muumuu, and I’m in a corduroy miniskirt.”

“You sure you can’t project again?”

“Positive.”

I nod my head. “Okay.” I look down at the charm bracelet dangling from my wrist. My Hanukkah gift from Abe’s family. I hate to part with it, but sometimes you have to make hard choices. “We can sell this.” I shake my wrist.

Yellow shakes her head. “No, you’re not selling that. It was a gift from your boyfriend, right?”

“How did you know that?”

“You told me it was a gift when you first started at Annum Guard. I just guessed it was from a boyfriend.”

I can’t believe Yellow remembers something I told her in passing about my bracelet.

“We’ll sell these,” she says. “Or one of them, at least.” She unscrews one of her diamond stud earrings and holds it up, then she drops it into my hand. “You have to do it, though. Those suckers were five thousand dollars apiece, and I think I might pass out when they give me, like, a hundred and fifty for it.”

Yellow leads me down Washington Street and stops in front of a door. SHREVE, CRUMP & LOW is written on a sign out front.

“Tuck your hair up and pretend you’re a man,” Yellow tells me before I go inside. “They’ll give you a better price.”

“I’m in a flowered muumuu. They’re going to think I’m an asylum patient.”

“Oh. True. Well, then, just do your best.”

The man standing inside the jewelry store gives me a very blatant once-over, but all appearances are overlooked when I pull out that diamond stud. He tries to lowball me, but I talk him up to $175. I honestly have no idea if that’s a fair price or if I’m getting ripped off, but, oh well.

Next, Yellow and I duck into a small clothing shop down the street and buy dresses and shoes that are good quality but at least ten years out of fashion. At least that’s what Yellow says. But we can afford them; that’s the important part. Then it’s on to the Parker House.

The lobby of the hotel takes my breath away, even in 1894. Massive Corinthian columns line the room, stretching all the way from the marble floors to the coffered ceilings. Dozens of dome chandeliers dangle above our heads. We go to the desk, money in hand, ready with our cover stories. Yellow and I are the daughters of a foreign dignitary here in town on business. Our father sent us to check into the best hotel in Boston. But the man behind the counter doesn’t even blink. He gives us a metal key to room 303 and that’s that.

Finally. Something is simple for once.

The room is small, with two beds, a dresser, and a night table. Yellow collapses onto one of the beds, but I refuse.

“Uh-uh. Get up. I’m starving, and we have to figure out a plan. We can rest later.”

Yellow grumbles but pushes herself up off the bed. I grab the files and Alpha’s notebook, and we head downstairs into the restaurant, which is already filling up, even though it’s just five o’clock.

When we sit, I glance around, sort of to make sure no one is eavesdropping on us but mostly to see where the damned waiter is with the dinner rolls. I toss Alpha’s notebook onto the table, and Yellow scoops it up at once.

“Is this Alpha’s?” she asks.

“Yeah.” I drum my fingers on the table and look around again. “I took it from his office. I haven’t gotten a chance to look at it yet.” Yellow’s already flipping through it. “There’s so much to process here. What I don’t get is why Alpha wants Ariel Stender dead.”

“Who’s Ariel Stender?” Yellow asks, flipping a page. She doesn’t look up at me.

“He invented these,” I say, fingering the watch hanging from my neck. “I already told you that.”

I look around. Seriously, where the hell is the waiter?

Yellow flips another page. “But who’s Ariel Stender? Was he part of the original Annum Guard?”

“No, he’s still alive in the present. He’s . . . he’s my boyfriend’s grandfather.”

At that Yellow looks up at me over the top of the notebook. Her eyes are wide with surprise.