Divide and Conquer (10 page)

Dak was surprised by how good it felt to be accepted into something so easily. He’d always been more of an outcast at school, made fun of for his habit of spouting random bits of history. That’s one reason he and Sera were such good friends — being outcasts gave them something in common.

He’d have never guessed that he’d ever feel at home with a band of Viking warriors. As they made their way to the ships, gathering dried grasses and sticks, Dak watched his companions. Many of them weren’t much older than Riq, but they had a look in their eyes that said they’d lived very different lives.

For them, there was no such thing as school or hanging out at museums or going to lectures given by world-renowned physicists. But the Vikings’ lives also weren’t only about war, as Dak had once thought. Most of these men were simply looking for a place to settle — land to work and women to marry. But because most of the Viking history was oral rather than written, so much information about them was lost over time. What written details did survive tended to be recorded by those who lost battles against the North Men, which made it easy to see why the portrayals were mostly negative. Sure, some of the Vikings were bloodthirsty, only interested in pillaging and killing, but that wasn’t the majority.

Dak marveled at how he’d almost describe some of these men as friends. Which was why it was that much more difficult to share their food and camp, and yet also try to figure out ways to thwart their efforts at getting into the city.

The longer the Vikings were kept at bay, the better chance the Hystorians had of keeping Siegfried from amassing power, and of fixing the Break. Which meant Dak had to sabotage the very people who’d accepted him as one of their own.

They split into several groups and spread out among the chosen ships to stuff them with the dried debris and prep them to be set on fire. Dak made sure he was assigned to the boat where he’d hidden the SQuare.

His heart pounded hard. What if someone else had found it first? What if it had somehow slipped free and was now on the bottom of the river, broken beyond repair? He climbed aboard and checked the shield he thought he’d hidden it behind.

It wasn’t there.

Had it been moved? Did he just have the wrong spot? As Dak started to search the boat, someone tossed a flaming torch into the aft hull. The fire sparked instantly, eating along the deck and across benches. Overhead the sail roared, its fabric catching quickly.

Dak was running out of time fast. Heat buffeted him and sweat broke out across his forehead and neck. Twice he shied away from the crackle of the hungry fire, but he couldn’t give up on finding the SQuare.

The boat started to make its way down the river away from the group of Vikings and toward the bridge. Dak was stuck on board, still frantically searching behind every shield. There were twenty-five along each side and so far he’d only checked out half of them.

From the shore, men shouted for him to jump, but he couldn’t give up. If the SQuare was destroyed, it wouldn’t matter that Dak survived the fire — they’d never be able to fix the Great Breaks and avoid the Cataclysm.

Wind whipped around him, feeding the flames and sending smoke spiraling into the sky. The flaming ships were drawing dangerously close to the bridge. If the Vikings succeeded in catching the bridge on fire, it would collapse and they’d have free reign up the Seine to the cities and villages beyond.

That bridge wasn’t just protecting Paris, but also the rest of France — and the future of Europe. It was the only thing keeping Siegfried and the rest of the SQ from amassing even more power.

Suddenly, Dak’s priorities were split. He had to find the SQuare, but he also had to make sure the flaming boat didn’t make it to the bridge. Which was more important?

With a sinking stomach, he abandoned the search for the SQuare and pulled out an axe he’d found among the battlefield debris. He began swinging it at a seam between two boards of the hull, trying to make an opening. The wood was thick and solid, and Dak despaired of making any headway, but heat from the fire must have already weakened it because a crack began to form.

Billowing smoke choked the air around him, making his eyes water and lungs burn. The fire burned fiercely, consuming everything as it made its way toward the bow where Dak hacked furiously at the hull.

The wood groaned in protest and then a spurt of water sprayed up through a small hole in the bottom of the boat. It only took three more whacks with the axe for a healthy amount of water to begin filling the boat, slowing its progress toward the bridge.

Dak was almost out of time. The fire had already eaten its way past the mast, destroying more than half of the shields along the way. As fast as possible Dak checked the rest of the ship for the SQuare. Water dragged at his feet, climbing up his calves.

He found the SQuare in the very last place left to be checked. The bag holding it was already drenched, and he pulled the SQuare free and slipped it into the waistband of his pants under his tunic.

With a whoop of success he leapt from the ship, landing knee-deep in the shallows of the river. As he fought his way against the current toward shore he watched as the ship took on more water and began listing to its side before capsizing and sinking just as its bow struck a grouping of rocks used to support the bridge.

The other boats fared no better, crashing against the sunken boat just shy of the bridge. It was a beautiful sight to Dak, and he felt a surge of pride at having accomplished both tasks. He’d rescued the SQuare
and
kept the Vikings from scoring a hit against Paris. All in all, Dak was pretty much a hero as far as he was concerned.

Before he could gloat too much, Dak was forcibly spun around. Gorm, the scarred Viking, grabbed him by the tunic, almost lifting him from the ground. “You think you’re clever, don’t you?” His face was so close that spit flew from his mouth with every word, peppering Dak’s cheeks.

“I . . .” He scrambled for some sort of excuse and came up empty. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The Viking wrenched the axe from Dak’s grip and tossed it into the river. Dak started to protest but thought better of it.

Dak was caught. He struggled to get free of the man’s grasp but it was useless. Without a weapon he had no hope against someone so much stronger and larger.

The Viking grinned in an unpleasant way, the scar across his face causing his features to twist. “I know someone who will be
very
interested in speaking with you.”

I
T STARTED
raining when the sun set, and Sera was drenched. Her teeth chattered as she huddled under the shelter of an old empty barn.

“At least the weather put an end to most of the fighting,” Bill suggested, trying to find something to be cheerful about. Sera only grunted in return. She couldn’t stop thinking of her warm bed in her warm house in a time when such a thing as gas heat existed.

“I’d kill for a hot shower right now,” she grumbled.

“A Jacuzzi would be even better,” Riq agreed.

Bill looked between them, confused. “What’s a shower?”

Sera glanced his way, her arms wrapped tightly around her chest to keep as much warmth pressed to her body as possible. It had hardly occurred to her before meeting the Hystorians that there would be a period in time when something as basic as a shower didn’t exist.

“It’s like a bath, but the hot water falls from a showerhead — from a contraption in the wall or ceiling, like a waterfall,” she explained.

Bill still looked confused. “That sounds like a lot of work for your servants to heat that much water. How many buckets does it take?”

Sera opened her mouth and then closed it, looking to Riq for help.

“The water’s already hot and you don’t need buckets,” Riq said. “Most houses in our time have a heater inside, so there’s always hot water when you turn on the tap.”

“Oh.” It was clear Bill didn’t really follow. But he was trying. “What else is there in the future?”

Sera closed her eyes, not even knowing where to begin. Her world was just so different from Bill’s on every conceivable level. But there was one other thing she wished she had even more than a hot shower: a phone to call Dak on to see if he was okay.

She tried to explain that to Bill. “Well, for one thing we have these things called cell phones. It’s a way for you to talk to someone else who might be far away.”

Bill’s eyes grew wide. “How does that work?”

When she was six, Sera had built her own encrypted smartphone
so that she and Dak could talk whenever they wanted. She started explaining the basics of the advanced mobile-phone system and digitized sampling, but Riq interrupted her.

“Ignore techno-geek over there. Basically everyone has a phone number — a series of numbers — that you plug into a keypad and, ta-da, you’re talking to that person. I’m more of a language guy than a numbers guy, though, and since the numbers have letters associated with them, that’s how I memorize them. My phone number, for example, just happens to spell out the first ten letters of
sesquipedalianist
.” He paused before adding, “It means I like big words.”

Bill’s brow was furrowed and he looked like he was just about to ask a question when Sera bolted to her feet.

“That’s it!” she said excitedly. She pressed her palms against her forehead and groaned. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. For the love of mincemeat! It was so simple!”

Riq and Bill exchanged glances. “Uh, Sera?” Riq asked. “What are you talking about?”

She knelt, using her finger to draw out a series of numbers in the dirt. It didn’t take long for Riq to figure out what she was doing. When she hesitated, trying to remember what came next, he helped to fill in the gaps.

“It’s the series of numbers from the SQuare,” she said. “We thought it was some sort of bifid cipher but we couldn’t figure out what the key was.” She began to draw vertical lines to separate the numbers into pairs.

Below that she sketched the face of a phone keypad, and that’s when Riq groaned, “
Ooh
, I get it now. The first number indicates which number on the keypad and the second is the letter’s position. So since
A
,
B
, and
C
are all on the number two button, twenty-one becomes the letter
A
. How did we miss that before?”

Sera was so elated that she couldn’t help laughing at the look of utter confusion on Bill’s face. “Brint and Mari wanted to ensure that no one from the past could figure out the key to the cipher. What better way to do that than to use a gadget only someone from our time period would know?”

Riq was already matching letters to each pair of numbers so that 32 became
E
and 62 became
N
.

As he worked Bill reached over and ran the knuckles of his hand along the edge of Sera’s jaw. Her breath caught and her cheeks blazed with heat.

“You’d smudged some dirt,” he said softly.

She didn’t know what to say and settled with, “Oh,” which elicited a smile from him. That only made her neck burn hot as well and she wondered if Bill could see how furiously she was blushing in the dim light. She hoped not.

For his part, Riq seemed oblivious, his forehead scrunched up in concentration as he unraveled the message.

All the blood heating Sera’s cheeks drained as the message swirled through her mind. “If that’s true . . .” She couldn’t even finish the statement. She didn’t want to give it voice, as if that could somehow make it real.

Riq didn’t have such hesitation. He looked at her, his own face betraying fear. “Then we’ve definitely made things worse.”

Dak was beginning to realize just how much trouble he’d gotten himself into. His arms were pinned behind him by the scarred Viking named Gorm, who looked a little too pleased to finally have Dak in his clutches.

Even though he had a good idea where he was being taken, his stomach twisted into knots as they approached the large structure dominating the far end of the camp. While most other Vikings slept out in the open or under simple A-frame tents, apparently Siegfried would do with nothing less than a wooden-framed hut.