Free Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) by Megan Crewe

could have brought me anywhere, anytime when I stepped into his cloth with him last night. If what he wants from me was something he could take by force, he’s had plenty of opportunities.
    “Okay,” I say, and follow him in.
    As we cross the lobby, I remember stumbling in here yesterday, and the horrible sound of Win’s wheezing. My hand rises to the melted streak on my jacket.
    “Those people who came after us in the coffee shop,” I say. “The Enforcers? Would they be able to figure out you’re staying here? Or where I live, or go to school . . .”
    “They’d have to spot us again,” Win says. “It’s a big city.”
    “But they knew where to look for us yesterday.”
    “Yes.” Win pushes open the door to the hallway of rooms. “I think . . . we must have accidentally shifted something in the timeline around or in the coffee shop, and the scientists picked up on it.”
    I trace our path to the shop in my memory. “All we did was go in and buy a couple drinks. Would they be accessing the store records?”
    “Unlikely. But there was that one man you talked to, wasn’t there? The one who seemed angry.”
    “Yeah. He bumped into me and spilled coffee on his shirt.” I hesitate. “And he said something about going in front of an audience. That could have been recorded. You think your scientists would notice something as small as a stain in a TV broadcast?”
    Silly question, I guess, when it comes to people who can jump through two millennia in a matter of seconds. “The computers do most of the work,” Win says. “Pixels to pixels, it’d be easy to catch.”
    “So how careful do I need to be?” I ask. “I mean, all sorts of things would have changed all over the city if a bomb that was supposed to go off didn’t. But they managed to figure out that one little detail was important?”
    Win stops at a doorway at the end of the hall and digs in his pocket for the key. “Ah, that’s my fault,” he says.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, what happened in the coffee shop would have been a new shift,” he says. “When I stopped the bomber, that started one revised chain of events—one altered set of data. After waiting a few days, I jumped back to yesterday morning to see if the Enforcers had responded and to take another look at you. I didn’t mean to shift anything else—I didn’t know I’d end up talking to you. The accident in the coffee shop would have set off a new series of changes. Unfortunately it led them right to us. The Enforcers must have questioned that guy, found out how he got the stain and what you looked like.” He pushes open the door. “But as long as I don’t make any more shifts here, nothing else you do should stand out. It’ll blend into that same chain. Hopefully I’ll be moving on soon, and it’s me they really want to catch.”
    “What about that jump to Rome yesterday?” I ask.
    “They shouldn’t be able to track the jumps themselves,” he says. “Isis—she’s our main tech person—put a scrambler on our time cloths. It’s supposed to prevent any tracing.”
    “Okay.” One less thing to worry about, I guess.
    I ease into the room. A tidy row of clothes hangs in the closet alcove: a few pairs of jeans and several T-shirts and sweaters in a wide range of hues, from bright red to deep purple. Otherwise, it hardly feels as if anyone is staying here at all. The blue-and-green-striped comforter on the bed is already tightly tucked, the carpeted floor bare. The recycled air carries nothing but a hint of lavender air freshener. From what Win’s said, he’s been moving around so much—from place to place, and time to time—there mustn’t be much point in getting settled.
    Because he’s not just the hipster college guy he looks like. He’s part of the same freaky organization as the scientists we’ve been discussing.
    Win motions me to the small glass-top table at the other end of the room. He grabs his satchel and sits down perpendicular to me,