Twenty-Seven
Idon’t remember the last time I felt this light. Ironic, considering it’s the first time my stomach has felt truly full since I arrived.
“You’re grinning,” he teases, bumping my shoulder with his.
“So are you,” I shoot back. “Funny, since I just corrupted you.”
“Corrupted, am I?” He lifts a brow, biting into his apple with a crisp crack. “Lass, I hate to disappoint you, but this isnae my first crime.”
I slow my pace, turning toward him with exaggerated interest. “Oh? What else have you done?”
Callum chews, considering. Then, solemnly, “Once, as a lad, I nicked a bannock from Campbell’s table.”
“Scandalous,” I whisper.
“Aye,” he agrees gravely. “The guards are still after me.”
I giggle, tilting my face up to the sky. It’s still damp fromthe earlier rain, but the clouds have started to break, revealing star-spattered patches of the night sky. The world feels wide and open, stretching before us in a way that makes me want to keep walking forever.
“This is so nice,” I say after a while.
Callum raises an eyebrow in question.
“Just…walking,” I explain. “I rarely do it at home.”
Callum stops short, looking at me like I’ve just said something inconceivable. “Do you nae?”
“Nope.” I don’t pause, and when he catches up, I say, “I told you, we have cars. I drive pretty much everywhere. People walk in the city, but I live in a more rural area. It’d take me, like, an hour and a half to walk to the market. But in my car, I’m there in ten minutes.”
He takes a moment, marveling at this, then asks, “How did you get from America to Scotland? Are the boats faster, too?”
“I didn’t take a boat.”
I stop, relishing his expression.
“I flew.”
He gapes at me, goggle-eyed. “As a bird flies?”
“No,” I laugh. “In something called an airplane. It’s like a big metal ship that flies really fast through the sky. The whole trip took only about seven hours.”
Callum seems torn between alarmed and incredulous, and I raise my hand like I’m under oath. “I swear it. The bigger planes can carry…I don’t know, maybe a few hundred people?”
“Is it witchcraft?”
“Nope, engineering. The ship has these huge engines, with spinning blades called propellers, and it just”—I gesture with my hand—“takes off into the clouds.”
He makes a littleahhsound. “Does it float uponthem? I’ve often thought clouds might be waves, coasting across the sky.”
“Clouds are just mist. Planes fly through them.”
“The things you know…” He shakes his head, wonder-struck, like I’ve just rewritten the sky.
My glee nosedives.
Callum is so smart, so curious—he’d love the modern world. It’s not fair. I’ll return to modern medicine, clean drinking water, even space travel, while he’ll stay here, where something as simple as a splinter could be deadly.
The thought twists inside me.
