Now and for Never (6 page)

Silence descended.

Breakfast came and—plates largely untouched, even Milo's—went as the four of them watched the two memory cards like a family of hawks, wondering if one or the other wouldn't just poof out of existence given the proximity of its temporal-loopy doppelgänger.

“Like the torc,” Al said suddenly, turning to blink at Milo over the top of her sunglasses. “In the tomb. Remember the tomb? You said both torcs couldn't exist at the same place at the same time and that's why the cigar box was empty when we opened it and Stu almost shot me again.”

“It was a toy gun,” Clare interjected.

“Yeah …” Al drawled. “Didn't
know
that at the time …”

“Right.” Clare glared at the little black plastic squares. She vividly recalled how they'd walked the spiral path that had magically led them through the walls between worlds and into Boudicca's burial chamber. The exquisite golden neck ring—what the modern world knew as the Great Snettisham Torc—had gleamed in the torchlight where it lay on the cold stone slab, resting on the collarbones of the ancient Iceni queen's skeletal remains. And how the very same torc they'd carried with them into the tomb had vanished.

“How,” Al continued, “can these things exist in the same time and place if they're the same object when Boudicca's torc couldn't? What am I missing here, Milo?”

“She's got a point, smart guy.” Clare gestured at the two red-dotted memory cards. “'Splain.”

“Because,” Milo began, “Boudicca's tomb—the inside of it, at least—had existed in a different time stream—an alternate reality, if you want to think of it that way—right up until the moment Clare went back and changed the way Connal and Comorra's story played out. But I'm guessing these memory cards are part of the
same
time stream. They're the exact same object, existing in the exact same reality, and we're just experiencing them—
it
—at two different points in its own distinct timeline.”

Clare put a hand to her forehead and groaned, expecting to hear her brain go
ka-boom
at any second.

“No. No—this is good!” Milo held up a hand and frowned, logicking his way through the problem. “It means that, whatever we do this time around, we
don't
alter the temporal flow.”

“We don't?” Piper asked hesitantly. “We didn't?”

Al's dark brows were knit in fierce concentration. “He's right. I think. We haven't. At least, not yet.”

Milo shrugged. “It's theoretical,” he said. “It's a working theory.”

“Yeah?” Piper said. “Well, let's hope it works all right!”

Goggles was pretty touchy about alterations in the timeline. Mostly, Clare figured, because her very existence seemed predicated on Stuart Morholt's having ensured that his diary—written from his entrapment in the first century— would one day reach Clare as an heirloom of sorts, passed down through his subsequent generations. Clare preferred to avoid thinking about how he'd seduced a Druid high priestess in order to make that happen.

Shudder,
she thought. And then shuddered.

“Wait!” Al said suddenly. “We're idiots.” She pointed to Milo's messenger bag where it sat on the bench seat beside him. “You have your computer with you, don't you? Does it have a memory card reader?”

“Oh. Uh, yeah. Of course it does …”

He reached for the bag and pulled out the sleek silver machine. Then he flipped open the top and popped the chip into a side slot. The four of them held their collective breath as they waited for the computer to read the files.

“I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier,” Milo murmured, groping blindly for the dregs of his coffee without taking his eyes off the little rainbow-coloured “waiting” wheel rotating in the middle of the screen.

“Think of what?” Clare asked, equally mesmerized by the spinning cursor.

“Sending back a camera. A digital camera …” Milo impatiently scrolled back and forth through the blank thumbnail placeholder icons as the pictures loaded up on the machine. It seemed to be taking a while. “All this time you could have been documenting your shimmer trips. Whoever put that chip in there probably sent back a wealth of information.” His fingers drummed on the laptop casing. “Come on … come on …”

“Yeah, but …” Clare frowned. “How? What about the whole shimmy-shimmer-coco-pop-electro-kablooey? Wouldn't the camera just go
Pfft
?”

It was, she supposed, to Milo's credit that he didn't raise an eyebrow or even ask her what the hell she meant by that.

“I mean,” she continued, “I was always under the rather combustible impression that my time travel perma-fried anything with an electronic pulse.”

Milo nodded slowly, thinking that one through. The magic that created the time rifts that sent Clare bounding between aeons created energy surges (or pulses or whatever) that shorted out (or burned out or pulse-fried or whatever) anything with an active electrical current that Clare happened to be in contact with.

“I dunno, Mi,” Al was saying, forehead creased in logicpuzzle mode. “I mean, sure … Marcus's old Walkman cassette player still worked, but that was only because he'd carried the batteries back in time separately.”

Al's cheeks had flushed to a bright pink beneath the hint of tan she'd acquired on the Glastonbury dig. Clare wondered what it was about the Walkman that was making Al blush.

“No live current,” Piper said, “no surge.”

“I suppose you could take the battery out of a digital camera,” Clare suggested.

“What about the internal battery?” Piper asked.

“Piper's right,” Milo said.

Clare attempted a know-it-all glare at Piper but was pretty sure it came off as half-hearted. Goggles had proven herself too useful and too stalwart to provoke real ire. Piper returned Clare's glare with an unusually mild told-ya face.

“Most cameras have internal rechargeable batteries to keep the time-stamp features and setting preferences operating,” Milo went on. “They're not generally user-replaceable. I mean, I could probably crack open the housing and do it, but—”

“You'd risk messing up its guts,” Al said. “And anyway, if the shimmer wave produces a surge and not a short, you risk frying circuitry with or without a battery anyway.”

“Unless …” Milo reached over and tapped a finger on the camera casing.

Al tilted her head. “Unless what?”

“A Faraday cage.”

Piper blinked in confusion. At least she didn't know everything, Clare thought. She raised a hand as if asking for clarification in science lab. Not that she'd ever done that. “Uh, question for the Tech-Talk Twins?”

“Yes?” Milo said, pointing to Clare. “You there in the front row?”

“What.” Clare paused for effect. “On earth. Is a Faraday cage?”

“Sounds like something you use to photograph sharks in the ocean,” Piper put in.

“Oh, that's encouraging.” Clare glanced sideways at her.

“Different kind of cage,” Milo explained. “In this case, it's as simple as wrapping the camera in foil and carrying it close to your body when you shimmer. If that laptop you fried back at my office was any indication, the EMP—electromagnetic pulse—originates with
you
and flows outward. Electricity naturally wants to travel along the surface of things. A foil package would shield the camera's core from the energy surge.”

“Uh-huh.” Clare nodded.

The computer made a
ping
sound. Milo's lip twitched as he glanced at it.

“So when you go
back
”—he spun the laptop around so that the girls could see the first image that had popped up onto the screen—“you can take whimsical vacation snaps that won't be seen by anyone for almost two thousand years.”

Clare felt as if the Rifleman's patio had suddenly dropped out from under her.

Because there she was on the screen of Milo's computer, standing in bright sunlight against a backdrop of sparkling waves with a red-cliffed island in the distance, holding up a scrap of canvas. Scrawled upon it were black, spindly letters (in Clare's famously crappy handwriting):

HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME TRAVEL …
WISH YOU WERE HERE!

5

T
he blade pressed against Marcus's throat was very cold. And very sharp. He knew that without even opening his eyes, because he could feel the sting of the shallow wound it had already made in his flesh, accompanied with a warm trickle of blood down the side of his neck.

“I thank you for this gift of blood,” a voice, low and husky and female, whispered in his ear as he felt the press of cloth against the cut. “It will be put to good use. I promise you.”

He cracked open his eyes and tried—unsuccessfully—not to flinch. Kneeling over him where he lay on the deck of the ship, still wrapped in his legionnaire's cloak and under an ink-dark sky, was Mallora. High Druidess of Mona, leader of the scathach. Sorceress, warrior, enemy of Rome.

Behind her he could see his fellow legionnaires: pale-faced in the moonlight, bereft of their weapons, and surrounded by a tight circle of fierce, extravagantly well-armed women. These proud soldiers—the ones Suetonius Paulinus had assigned to guard the merchant galley and its cargo of stolen gold—now knelt on the rolling deck of the ship, grim and defeated. The scathach, it seemed, had taken the ship without striking a single blow. Three of the warrior women stood before a pile of spatha and gladii, standard-issue weapons of the legionnaire's fighting kit. The men who'd been under siege by those same
scathach for weeks, who knew what it was to fight against them and lose, had surrendered to a man.

High above Marcus's head, the ship's mast was empty of ravens.

One of the scathach cocked her head and croaked a laugh, her eyes glittering with magic, or madness. Marcus shifted his eyes back to Mallora.

The cloth she held pressed to his neck was the hem of her ragged, feather-embellished cloak. She carefully drew it back, regarded its shiny slick of blood, and nodded in satisfaction.

“You're like the girl,” she said.

“What girl?”

“And you're like him.” She tipped her chin at where Stuart Morholt sat with his back against the side of the ship, knees drawn up tight against his chest.

“I'm nothing like him.”

“He really, really isn't,” Morholt agreed.

Mallora chuckled, a deep, raspy sound. “I mean you're a traveller.”

Marcus understood then that by “girl” she'd meant Clare. Or maybe Allie. One who has travelled through time and space. She held her dagger up in front of her face, a single line of Marcus's blood running in a bright crimson rivulet down the dark-grey surface of the blade. “I can bend to my will the magic that lies dormant in your blood. I will use it to get us where we need to go.”

“And what's wrong with
my
blood?” Morholt asked.

Mallora turned her gaze upon him.

“Er … not that I mind your using his, actually,” Morholt stammered. “Really, I have a low pain threshold and—”

Mallora grinned and put her fingers to his lips, silencing him. “I have everything I need from you, dear mad one.”

She said it with a strange kind of affection, but it was clear that Morholt's time at her side was at an end. She didn't
need him any longer, Marcus thought. She had other priorities now.

“You and the others are free to move about the ship,” she said as she stood. “But please do not attempt to retake it, or your weapons, from my scathach. It would be a mistake. And would serve only to feed the fishes on the way to our destination.”

She turned and disappeared into the striped canvas tent that served as the captain's quarters. Marcus stood and went to the bow—and realized that the ship was moving silently with the current into the Severn Estuary. The shore was only a rugged line in the distance.

When dawn broke, the scathach prodded the galley's terrified sailors to their stations. They raised the sail and headed westward. Across the ocean. On the second day out, Mallora reappeared from the tent. She paced to the point of the ship's bow and lifted her arms to the sky.

And the sky began to swirl.

All around Marcus, the soldiers of Rome began to shout with alarm and terror as a wave of distortion spiralled out before them and swept toward the ship like an onrushing vortex.

A hand of fear gripped his throat.

On the evening of the first day he'd noticed a black speck following in their wake—the second galley that had been moored in the river, no doubt bearing Suetonius Paulinus and the rest of the legionnaires. It had been gaining on them steadily, and he'd dared to hope that help was on its way. Now Marcus feared they'd sail beyond its reach forever.

He climbed on the stern rail for a better view. The mystical wave that had swept his ship had also engulfed the other. Far behind, but caught in the same slipstream of the enchantment. Marcus felt sorry for his fellows. But at least wherever they were headed … they were headed there together. Travelling through time.