Passenger (Passenger #1) - Alexandra Bracken Page 0,29
Alice tried to stop any of this?
She needed to find a way to keep herself together, otherwise she was never going to get out of there. She was never going to find her way back to her own time.
Breathe, duck. Count it out with me. Three beats in, and three beats out…
Alice’s voice drifted between the fractured pieces of her thoughts. She sucked the damp air deep into her lungs, focused on the way they expanded, and released the air slowly, the way she’d been taught. It had been so long since she’d been in the chokehold of panic and nerves, she’d forgotten how easy it was to slip into their grasp.
Close your eyes.
Listen only to the music.
Listen.
She was listening now, to the sounds of men singing above, to the pulse throbbing fast and untamed in her ears. It was instinct to lift her hands the way she did, to mime the shape of a violin out of nothing but air and play herself back to evenness. She stopped as soon as she knew what she was doing.
Etta breathed out heavily through her nose, rubbing a finger along the bridge.
Mom wanted me to travel. Not like this, she was sure, but one day. She wanted me to know, to understand what I could do. For the first time in her life, Etta realized she had finally stumbled onto her mother’s secret heart—the core of who she was, why she guarded each and every memory of her past. Why she could close herself off so suddenly; why she drifted away into deep thought. In spite of everything else, Etta felt something inside her click into place. The icy knot their relationship had twisted into unraveled inside of her. She felt desperate with the need to find her, to make sure she was safe, to talk to her and really know her for the first time.
But none of that answered the question of why Rose had kept this a secret in the first place. The only travel she did now was between countries, across oceans; Etta felt certain of that. So why had she disappeared, as Sophia had claimed? And how many of her stories were actually true, not invented to lull a restless little girl to sleep?
I need to get back.
She’d woken up on this ship to find that all of her carefully conditioned composure had flown away, and what she’d been left with was raw instinct and will. She’d felt wild and unhinged at the time, but she’d proven to herself, if no one else, that she was willing to fight. Protect herself. Now she needed to use every ounce of her drive to survive at all costs; to channel her unwillingness to crack under pressure, and form a plan to get home.
Home…Her time. New York City.
Etta stuffed her feet into the tight shoes and slipped the earrings back on, pausing only to make sure they were secure. The slight weight of them would be a reminder of home, her mom, Alice, the debut…
Alice. Etta was a time traveler—could she get back to that moment when she’d fought with her mother and Alice? Could she use her ability to go back in time, leave the concert, and take Alice and her mother away with her?
Could she save Alice?
Etta had always known the direction her life was heading; she’d fought to stay on that path each and every time she picked up her violin. Her future was the stage, performances, recordings.…And yet, there had always been a tiny quake in the certainty of that vision. Opening the door even a crack into this was enough of a temptation for her imagination to rip it open and step inside. What would it be like, she wondered, to go wherever, whenever she wanted to?
To stand in the heart of a long-dead empire.
To cross continents and see the wonders of the world before they disappeared.
To sit in the audience in Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater, listening to the debut of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
To beg a lesson from Bach in his years at Leipzig.
To save Alice.
What choice was there, other than to learn as much as she could, so she could get back to that moment in time? She had to put up with Sophia’s smirks; with the sickening thought that she might be staring into the face of her instructor’s murderer, or someone who’d had a direct hand in it.
I can make it, Etta thought, bending to pick up the parcel. I can make it back.