To be fair, it hadn't been Larkin's
plan to ruin the, er, salt monument. Which, by the way, was still a stupid idea. Why anyone would build a monument to salt, she couldn't fathom. But the locals were pretty angry at them, and nothing she said or did would placate them--- and more importantly, nothing Ezzy did would, either. And people
liked Ezzy.
“Yes, well,” Ezzy said,
“you don't plan very well. I'm sorry, Larkin, and I love you, but you should really work on that.” His voice had that slightly frantic note to it that it always had when they were being chased by an angry mob. Larkin flashed him a sheepish smile, then abruptly snagged his arm and dragged him into an alley. She put a hand over his mouth to muffle his exclamation of surprise, watching with bated breath until the crowd had passed by. She didn't let him go until the sound of their footsteps had faded. Esmond leaned against a wall, breathing hard, and mopping at his forehead with the back of one hand.
“That wasn't what I had in mind at all when you said we ought to go see the ocean,” he said. Larkin made a face at him.
“I didn't think it would be so boring. Or that they'd be so salt-obsessed. Or that someone would think it was a good idea to make a salt monument out of actual salt. Does it not rain here? I mean, it would've been destroyed sooner or later, right?” “I don't see a way we're going to get out of this without being branded as vandals. Or worse,” Esmond said, kneading his forehead with his fingers. Personally, Larkin didn't know what was so bad about that. After all, it wasn't as if they had killed anyone. Injured, yes; angered, yes; traumatized permanently,
maybe... But then, Esmond had always been the one who worried about their reputation.
Still, there was no need for such a bleak outlook.
“Don't be like that, Ezzy. You know we can just go back, right?” She patted his shoulder and leaned down so she was face to face with him. He looked at her sidelong, and sighed.
“Yes, but... It always feels so strange. And you know how it muddles my head to keep track of where--- when we are, when we do that.”“Well, it's vandals or going back. You don't want to be a vandal. Besides, this is easy! We'll just skip this town, now that we know there's nothing to see here. It's not like last time, when we executed that guy, and it caused a civil war...” Esmond winced. Okay, it was still too soon to talk about that. She made a mental note of that. At last, however, Esmond straightened, and looked just incrementally less exhausted.
“I guess you have a point,” he said. Larkin grinned at him, and reached out to grab his hand.
Holding her shard aloft for dramatic flair, she said,
“On the count of three--- ready? One... Two... Three!” There was a dizzying lurch, and the world around them melted away into a brown-greyish blur. When it resolved itself back into something recognizable, Larkin and Esmond found themselves walking up a path to a seaside town, five days earlier from where they'd just been.