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

putting out his cloth. “It’s very simple,” he says. “Jeanant, the one who made the weapon and brought it here, he left a message for Thlo, who’s like his second-in-command, that she’d receive if he didn’t make it. To explain his plan, and where he would hide the weapon if we needed to retrieve it. It had to be vague, of course, because the Enforcers could have intercepted it, but she says he alluded to France and times of rebellion.”
    My mind slips back to my world history course a couple years back. “That doesn’t really narrow it down. Just the first French revolution lasted a whole decade.”
    “I know,” Win says. “That’s why we didn’t know exactly where to look. He gave a few other clues, and like I said before, he intended to make little shifts to help us find the right time and place, but he still has to be careful about it. If the Enforcers discover where to look first and find the weapon before us . . .” He makes a gesture, pulling all his fingers into his palm and then flicking them outward like something bursting. “All his work would be lost. But that’s how you can help. You’ve obviously read at least a little about French history before.”
    He lifts the biggest fold of the cloth up as if it’s a laptop. When he squeezes the corners, it stays open like that. He speaks a low command in that unfamiliar language, and the display he used to program our destination yesterday glows on the lower half. He flicks through the data, his fingers manipulating the air above it as if weaving invisible strings, only occasionally touching the fabric. A faded white square comes into focus on the upper half, where the screen would be if it actually were a laptop and not a bunch of folded cloth.
    My jaw’s gone slack. I snap it shut as Win pushes the cloth-turned-computer toward me. The glowing outline of a traditional keyboard has formed on the lower half. The screen shows what looks like a normal browser window.
    “If you could look up the sort of websites you might have visited before, try to remember if any of them gave you that odd feeling—the whole page, or even better, one specific part . . .”
    “Oh,” I say, shaking off my shock. “Um, you remember I told you it’s mostly new things that give me the feelings? You can’t get ‘old’ on the Internet. I’m the weird one in my classes who goes to the library and looks up stuff in books.”
    “All right,” Win says. “Then you could look at the books you read before. That would accomplish the same thing.”
    “Maybe.” The whole point is that I read them because they don’t give me the feelings. But it can’t hurt to try. “And then what happens, if I find something?”
    “You tell me, and it’ll give me a head start on the trail Jeanant left,” Win says. “As soon as we’ve got his weapon, we can leave, finish his mission to destroy the generator, and no one will be able to make any more shifts down here.”
    Looking at his multifunctional piece of cloth, I’m starting to find the idea of scientists from another planet more plausible. And he made his plan sound perfect. That’s what starts the niggling doubt.
    I don’t really know which side he’s on, do I? He sounded determined yesterday, sure, but maybe his mission isn’t quite what he said. Maybe the Enforcers are the ones trying to stop his group from messing with Earth, and the rebels are the ones changing everything. The only shifts he’s mentioned have been ones he or this Jeanant guy made. Who knows what he’s really looking for during the French Revolution?
    “Can you prove it?” I say, thinking back to our conversation last night.
    “What?”
    “Can you prove it?” I repeat. “That if I can point you to some spot in history, whatever you do there is going to help protect Earth? That that’s really why you’re here?”
    Win looks genuinely startled, as if he can’t imagine how anyone could think otherwise, but then, he also looks like a