Cascade Read Free Page B

journey.
    “I’ll come with you,” she said. Her tone told me she didn’t quite believe us yet but the only way to resolve it was to show us we were chasing some sort of idiotic fantasy.
    We heard voices outside and began to whisper.
    “I don’t know if you can, Mom,” I said. “It might be just me and Lia that make the leap.”
    “We won’t know if this is all in your heads if we don’t go ahead and attempt it.”
    I swallowed my frustration over her disbelief. “It’s too risky. Last time, I lost hold of Lia, and she arrived days after me. What if you lose hold of us? There’d be no way to get you back—let alone find you.”
    Mom gave me her There’s No Sense Arguing look. “Look, you two aren’t going anywhere if I’m not with you. And if this really is a doorway through time, I want to see it for myself.”
    I don’t know why her words surprised me. Wasn’t it the dream of every historian or archaeologist to go back in time, see another era for themselves?
    Lia was still shaking her head, looking from Mom to me, as if she couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. “Are you insane? Gabs, I almost lost you—twice! Please…let’s stay here. It’s not safe to go back. Think of it as a trip, a wild trip we took once. That’s all.”
    I stared into her eyes, trying to get her to calm down.
    “Lia, I have to go back. Marcello—” My voice broke, and I swallowed, hard. “Please.” She hesitated, and I pressed her again, sensing that her resolve was slipping. “ Please .”
    Mom shifted from one leg to the other. “Evangelia, you two must be sharing some odd delusion. You have to be. But if…if this is true, if you’ve possibly stumbled upon some miraculous gateway, allowing us to go back in time and return—again—it would be one of the top scientific discoveries of all time. How could we not go?”
    “Exactly,” I said, leaping on the convenient excuse. Anything to convince Lia.
    “Just for a little while, then we come back?” she asked tentatively, looking at me.
    “For a little while,” I said.
    “And what if in returning, you go back to being poisoned? Bleeding?”
    “We’ll take the med kit,” Mom said quietly. “There’re shots of morphine and antibiotics in there. A mini-surgical kit. You won’t be alone, Lia. We’ll take care of her together.”
    “You think we’ll be together.”
    Mom stared back at her. “To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to think. But you can’t accomplish what you can’t imagine.” Despite the words that told us she believed a measure of what we were saying, I could still see the trace of skepticism around her eyes. Like a part of her believed she would soon get to the scientific basis of our dreamlike story.
    Lia heaved a sigh and stepped up to the wall. “We have to pull off at the same moment, this time,” she said to me. “Mom, you hold us tight, and whatever happens, don’t let go, all right?”
    “We’re more prepared this round,” I said, trying to ease her fears.
    Outside, the men’s voices came closer. A shout went up.
    They’d discovered our escape.
    “Girls,” Mom said in warning, glancing toward the tomb entrance. “I’m praying you aren’t ill, suffering some sort of mental lapse. Because the last thing I need is Manero to find all three of us in here.”
    “If you think Manero’s bad,” Lia said, “wait till you meet some of the dudes ahead of us.”

 
    CHAPTER 2
     
    My plan worked pretty well. The heat beneath our hands intensified until I could barely stand it; I felt caught, like my skin was becoming fused to the stone of the tomb wall, and feared both options—ripping it away or never being able to do so again. The light became our cue. Above us, the hole again showcased a time-lapse video of trees growing and falling, burning, growing again. Everything was heavy, slow motion and yet scary fast, dreamy, like moving through water with ankle weights. The hole above us disappeared, the grave