Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF

know who he is.
    He accepts my declaration with a slight grimace, which vanishes as soon as the cashier asks for his order. We get our drinks and take a table in the corner, me scooting around back so I have a view across the shop all the way to the door. Win leans over his coffee and inhales the steam. A dreamy expression steals over his face. Then he raises the cup and takes a slow sip.
    “I am never going to get tired of this stuff,” he says. “Amazing what you can get out of a plant.”
    What do I know about this guy? He saves high school classes from bombs, he has the attention span of a guppy, and he moons over lattes.
    “You wanted to talk,” I remind him. “About seeing weird things?” I’d like to get to the finding out whether he actually can help me part of the conversation as quickly as possible. Even without coffee in my system, my body’s humming with a mixture of excitement and anxiety.
    “Yes.” Win blinks out of his coffee reverie. “Sorry. Let me know if this sounds about right.” He taps his finger against the table as if pointing out the elements in a diagram. “Every now and then, you go somewhere, or you see something, and you feel it doesn’t make sense. It should have been different somehow. But there’s no obvious reason why, and no one else seems to notice.”
    “Yeah,” I say, staring at him. The way he explained it—I might not have phrased it quite that way—but that’s exactly how it is. He grins, both with his mouth and those deep blue eyes. It’s hard to stop staring. “How did you know?”
    “I’ve experienced something similar. When did it start? Can you describe how it happens for you?”
    I’ve spent so long keeping this part of myself under wraps that my throat closes up. But he knows—he really knows —without my having said anything. How much else does he know about the wrong ness? About how to make it stop?
    The words spill out, faster than I intended. “I don’t know—the first time I remember it getting bad was when I was around six. All of a sudden, I just feel that something’s wrong . My whole body reacts, like a panic attack . . . Is that what it’s like for you too?”
    “Pretty much,” Win says. “And they just happen whenever?”
    “It seems like it. For a while, when I was little, I thought maybe I had some kind of sixth sense; that it was warning me. But there never is anything wrong. I had to learn how to calm myself down, or else my brain got totally derailed.”
    But if what he says is true—if there was a bomb—maybe the feelings aren’t meaningless after all. Maybe I just didn’t understand. You can’t get much more wrong than being blown up.
    “What calms you down?” Win asks, cocking his head.
    It’s amazing, being able to talk to someone about all this. Someone who gets it, who doesn’t stare at me like I’m crazy. The urge to spill everything is overwhelming. I take a drink from my mug before I continue, to slow myself down. “Focusing on little details around me,” I say. “And numbers. Numbers are good—three, especially. I have this bracelet; I multiply by threes with the beads.”
    “A bracelet.”
    “It’s nothing magical.” I tug it out of my pocket, but my body balks just shy of offering it to him.
    Win eyes it. “It’s too small for your wrist.”
    “When I first started doing the multiplying, I had this one my brother gave me, when I was a lot smaller. The hemp starts to fray after a while, so I’ve been restringing the beads, but it seemed . . . right to keep it the same size.”
    I run my finger over one of the beads. The dapples of blue and purple have been worn down by years of spinning, no longer as glossy as they were on that first bracelet. I remember how gleeful my five-year-old self was, knowing my big brother was making something just for me. Getting to pick out my favorite beads at the store, watching him weave the hemp strings. He never knew how much I was going to need it.
    As with