Free Ricochet Through Time (Echo Trilogy Book 3) by Lindsey Fairleigh Page A

happened.
    “You will come with me and speak with my father,” the first woman reiterated, then looked at me. “Let us hurry.”
    I nodded. When she released my arm, I followed without hesitation and we made our way back up the beach toward the longhouse.
    “I am called Kikisoblu,” she said.
    “I’m Lex—Alexandra—but then, you already knew that.”
    Kikisoblu let out a dry laugh. “I was told to expect you. I grew up hearing from my father and grandmother about a woman with your name who would come here from another time, seeking sanctuary, but they were just stories. I have seen your likeness drawn on a cave wall, but that was just a picture. I must admit I did not truly believe you were real until this moment.”
    Both her father and grandmother had told her about me—told her to expect me. I felt almost certain that her father had to be Nik, her grandmother Aset. After all, nobody knew what they’d been doing all those years they’d been hiding, let alone why they’d hid. Maybe I was about to find out. Hope fanned to anticipation, to expectation. If Nik was there, in the longhouse, then I would be able to find out what happened in the foyer after I jumped back in time. Re could look into the future At. His soul was special—a ren—and he could see through the instability of the At in my native time; he could view the echo of the moment I’d left. He could tell if Marcus was still alive. If Dom had survived his wounds. If Kat and the others had made it through whatever happened after .
    “Kikisoblu, what’s your father’s name?”
    She looked at me as we neared the narrow doorway at the center of the longhouse’s expansive face, her eyes widened in surprise. “Why, my father is Sealth, of course, for whom the great city of the white men across the sea has been named.”
    My hope deflated. Chief Sealth, namesake of Seattle, had been a central figure at this time, someone kids like me who grew up in Washington State learned about in elementary school alongside George Washington and the like. Cameras, however rudimentary, had existed during this era. I’d glued photographs of Chief Sealth onto a trifold poster board for a middle school project and had memorized and recited his most famous speech. Most of those photos had been of him as an extremely elderly man. Which meant Sealth couldn’t be Nik, let alone Marcus. He couldn’t even be Nejeret, because Nejeret don’t age.
    So how did he know about me ?

8
Bend & Break
     
    Kikisoblu led me into Old Man House—D’Suq’Wub—ahead of Tex and the woman escorting him at spearpoint. The interior of the longhouse was dark and relatively empty, most of the inhabitants utilizing the favorable late summer weather to work outside. This central portion was sectioned off from the rest of the building with wooden walls roughly a dozen yards from the doorway on either side. A sunken rectangular fire pit stretched nearly the length of the room, a single cookfire in the very center of the space providing the only luminescence beyond the late afternoon light leaking in through the doorway and the small opening in the roof over the fire.
    An elderly man sat on a woven mat on the opposite side of the fire pit, a vibrant red blanket draped over his broad shoulders. Two internal totem poles flanked him, one an enormous figure of a man, the other a woman. Both had been carved nude and with serious expressions, seeming to stand guard against the wall behind the old man. Behind Chief Sealth.
    The iconic Squamish chief was such an enormous figure in the history of this area, his ideas, deeds, and words living on long after he was gone, that it seemed incongruous to my mind for him to appear so old, so frail. His heavily lined face and the turned-down corners of his mouth gave him an appearance of absolute solemnity, but the sparkle in his eyes hinted at the kind, wise nature I remembered from my studies.
    As we approached, he held out a hand with huge, gnarled knuckles.