The River of No Return (37 page)

Miss Blomgren interrupted Bella. “Are you in love, Julia? It’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it? But also terrible.”

“Apparently she is in love with my brother, Nick,” Bella said. “And she’s just learned that he has a mistress. Some beautiful creature he’s squiring around town and showering with jewels.”

Julia closed her eyes. This was clearly the worst day of her entire life. Perhaps if she just kept her eyes closed, the day would end, and she could begin again.

Cool fingertips touched the back of her hand, and she opened her eyes again. Something like hysteria welled up inside her, and she looked up to meet Miss Blomgren’s eyes.

They were sparkling with sympathy. “Yes,” she said. “I see.” She raised Julia’s hands in her own, smearing them with beet juice, and she kissed Julia soundly on both cheeks. “How delightful. You are perfect for one another.”

“Do you know Nick?” Bella turned to Miss Blomgren. “Why didn’t you say? Oh! You gave him the dog. That’s why Solvig knows you. Of course.”

“My dear, stupid girl.” Miss Blomgren shook her head at Bella, keeping a tight hold on Julia’s hands. “Don’t you realize why your friend is so unhappy? She knew it from the first. I am Nick’s mistress.”

B
ella looked like a rabbit held up by its ears. For her part, Julia was ready to either throw herself into Miss Blomgren’s arms and weep, or plunge out of the house and into the squalid streets of Soho in a righteous fury. But then everything changed.

There was another person in the very midst of them. A thin black man . . . no, a youth, still really a boy . . . with hair that was short and black on the sides but that stood up in a green ridge down the center of his skull. A bright green feather dangled from a hoop that pierced his left ear. He was dressed all in black, like Julia, but there any resemblance between them came to a crashing halt. He wore what looked like tight leggings and a short doublet, except that the leggings clung perfectly to his thin calves and thighs and sparkled with thousands of tiny gold flashes, and the doublet was not a doublet at all, but a thick leather belt wrapped around his hips; it extended neither above his waist nor beyond his upper thigh. His tall boots were laced all the way up with thick golden cords that were then tied in two flourishing bows just under his sparkling knees. He wore a short black leather jacket that seemed to fasten by means of a metal ribbon with serrated edges that ran down the front opening. It was open most of the way down, revealing a leather waistcoat, and beneath that, a shirt of black lace that was somehow wrapped so tightly around that it clung. Julia could see his skin showing through it. Around his neck was a golden chain with what looked like five flat pieces of broken pottery attached. By the time Julia’s eyes found their way back to his face, he was smiling, and one hand was thrust forward. “Sorry to butt in—hello,” he said in friendly tones, but with a very strange accent; it sounded like a Spanish guitar, played flat. He shook Julia’s hand, then Bella’s. “Are you guys new Ofan, or what?”

“For God’s sake!” Miss Blomgren grabbed his arm and dragged him a few steps away, into the brighter light.

Then she froze time.

Julia felt it coming. She locked her knees and forced herself to keep her expression bland and her limbs perfectly still. Thank God they were in a dark kitchen down in a basement. Thank God Miss Blomgren was more concerned with this intruder than with Julia and Bella.

“Peter, what the hell are you doing?” Miss Blomgren grabbed the young man’s shoulders and shook him. “Can’t you tell they’re Naturals? You can’t wear untimely dress outside of the catacombs. Or jump straight to the kitchens. The transporter—use the transporter!”

Peter shrugged Miss Blomgren’s hands away. “Chill out. I have some really exciting news.”

But Miss Blomgren was not to be calmed. “How dare you ask them, to their faces, if they were Ofan? Those poor girls, drowning in this ice-cold era. And I must watch them gasp for breath. While you! With your great gift that lifts you above the dreary flow of time—you flaunt it in front of them? If they were Ofan, Peter, would I have them in here, in the kitchen? No. I would be educating them as I educated you, in the transporter. I would be instructing them in the dangers of being Ofan. In the necessity of being very careful about how and when you reveal yourself.”

Julia curled her toes in her slippers. Miss Blomgren and this young man were Ofans! These were the Russian’s enemy. She willed them not to look her way; she was sure she was trembling.

Peter held up his hands, laughing. “I’m sorry, okay? And I have some news. You may have noticed that my hair is much longer?” He stroked his green ridge.

Miss Blomgren put her hands on her hips. “That’s your news.”

“No. My point is, I’ve been away for three months, not three days.”

“Okay, so? Archana will have your hide either way. You abandoned your post.”

“Archana will forgive me. She always does.” He reached behind his neck and unhooked his chain. “See these?” He laid the necklace with its broken pieces of pottery on the kitchen table, among Alva’s open jars of pickles. “And these.” He fished in his pockets and brought out two wooden sticks, a ragged-looking piece of green paper, and a brightly colored bracelet that looked as if it were woven from embroidery thread. He tossed them on the table beside his necklace. “Voilà!”

Miss Blomgren was unimpressed. “You’ve already filled my office with your detritus of the ages, Peter. I’m in the middle of pickling and I have two Naturals to deal with. This is not the moment.”

“It’s to do with the Talisman.”

Julia stopped breathing, and Miss Blomgren seemed to, as well. She went very still and half raised a hand as if to touch Peter. “That’s nothing to joke about,” she said quietly.

“No, but really. I’ve learned something about it. Something that might help us figure out what it is.”

Pretend, Julia screamed to herself inside her own head. Pretend to be a statue.

“All right then. I’m listening. But tell me quickly, so that I can get rid of these two girls.”

Something in the way Peter turned his face, and in the way he held his hand as he reached to touch the embroidery-thread bracelet, made Julia realize: Peter was a girl. Younger than Julia. Maybe sixteen years old.

The girl named Peter held the bracelet out for Miss Blomgren’s inspection. “Do you recognize this? It’s a friendship bracelet. Piper Connelly gave it to me in, like, seventh grade. Piper had the most friendship bracelets so she had the most power.”

“Like pickled limes,” Miss Blomgren said, holding the colorful thing up and smiling at it.

Peter cocked her head. “No . . . it’s nothing like pickles. God, Alva, you’re obsessed. You know no one is going to actually eat your beets, right? Just like no one eats your green beans or your pickled pumpkin.”

Miss Blomgren pointed at Peter’s nose. “Quickly. What does your friendship bracelet have to do with the Talisman?”

Peter picked up the necklace she had been wearing. “These are like a friendship bracelet,” she said, fingering one of the broken pieces of pottery. “This is a symbolon. It’s half of a clay disc. You break it when you swear friendship to someone. I have five of them. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past three months.”

“You just left in the middle of guard duty to go make some friends and break clay discs with them.”

“Well . . .” Peter kicked a table leg with her boot. “To be honest, it wasn’t my idea. It was Melitta’s. In 1000
B.C
.”

Julia’s ears and eyes felt like they were on stalks, she was straining so hard to see and hear everything. But surely she hadn’t heard correctly; it seemed that Peter had just said she had a friend in 1000
B.C
.

Alva was shocked, too. “You were able to go to 1000
B.C
.? How?”

“I can’t. But that’s just the point: Why can’t we, Alva? I mean, the Pale is in the future, but we all have a sort of a Pale in the past, too. We can’t jump back more than a thousand years, right?”

Julia couldn’t help it. She twitched her head to look more directly at them. She saw that Miss Blomgren was unfazed by the suggestion that it was possible to go back a thousand years into the past.

“I thought we could learn about the Pale if we learn about that other barrier in the past,” Peter was saying when Julia found it possible to comprehend human speech again. “But what I figured out doesn’t have to do with the Pale. It has to do with the Talisman.”

“Yes, so you’ve said.”

“So I’ve been making friends back upriver to see how far back we go. That’s what these symbolon . . . well, it’s what they symbolize. Friendship. They’re from ancient Greece. I’m friends with this guy named Kaveh from the year 28. He can go back to like 1000
B.C
. Back there he’s friends with Melitta, and she sends messages to me through him. She’s the one who came up with the idea of all of us wearing the symbolon. . . .”

“That’s cute,” Miss Blomgren said. “Like pen pals.”

“It’s more than cute. Melitta’s made friends even further upriver, and I have their symbolon, too. I have friends going back to 3000
B.C.
and you act like it’s the Baby-sitters Club.” Peter scowled. “Pen pals. You can be such a jerk, Alva.”

Miss Blomgren leaned into Peter’s face and spoke severely. “I have told you that I want you to make this short.”

“Fine.” Peter started talking very quickly. “Symbolon. It’s one of the ways money developed. You move from these symbols of friendship, where you break these discs in half to show that you are two parts of this emotional whole, to breaking them in half to symbolize debt! Like you owe the person something. You see? Friendship is totally, like, perverted into debt.” Peter was waving her hands now, her words coming out faster and faster. “Feelings and money are totally connected. We use feelings to travel, but we can only travel to places where there’s certain kinds of economies, right? Where there’s colonial conquest and debt and that kind of crap. All those other people living in other kinds of cultures are just hanging out in their time without jumping. Which is so weird! Why is that? I mean, the Guild thrives where there’s money, and the Ofan always exist in the neighborhood of the Guild, like suckerfish on a whale. Why, why, why?”

“War,” Miss Blomgren said. “I’ve explained it to you many times.”

“That’s
your
argument, Alva, and it’s totally right, but there’s more. You’re always like, the river is made out of money and blood. And the Guild is all about how money and war are normal human things and the river is just made out of feelings and we don’t travel to certain kinds of cultures because we simply don’t have the same feelings. Well, I think you’re both right. The river connects different cultures throughout history where feelings have been translated into debt and then into money! Some places in human history haven’t sutured their feelings to money—that’s why we can’t get to them or them to us. Wars of conquest are a big way that that transformation happens because you have to have an economy to feed an army on the march, but even war is a symptom, Alva, not the disease itself!”

Peter paused as if this was a revelation, but Miss Blomgren said nothing—only stared at the girl.

Peter sighed when it was clear that Miss Blomgren was not going to respond, and carried on. “Don’t you see? This means that the Ofan are totally in this with the Guild. There’s no structural reason why we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. We both travel the river for the same reason.” Peter rubbed her hands together, almost as if she were cold. “I know you were all hopped up on the Guild being warmongers who are single-handedly destroying humanity and the Ofan being all rainbows and unicorns and peace symbols. But instead we’re both just totally complicit in this shitty system and there’s nothing we can do about it.” She smiled, her pleasure in her own brilliance shining from her. “Isn’t that awesome?”

After a long silence, Miss Blomgren spoke quietly. “That’s very impressive, actually.”

Peter opened her hands as if she were releasing a bird. “I know! I know, I know!”

Miss Blomgren laughed and held out her arms, and Peter jumped into them and was hugged.

Julia bit her lip, forgetting for a moment that Miss Blomgren was Nick’s lover. What would it feel like to have a mother who loved you? Who hugged you when you were clever?

When Miss Blomgren pulled away from hugging Peter there was a smile in her voice. “You are an amazing creature, my dear. You and your friends down through time. Do they all dress like you?”

Peter bristled. “Of course they don’t dress like me, God, Alva. They’re from different eras. When are you going to get it through your head that I look normal in my own time?”

“You forget that I have been to the 1980s and I know you lie. Plus, I am driven by forces beyond my control to tease you about it. I think it’s because you bring out the auntie in me.”

Peter clearly liked this scolding. “It’s okay.” She scuffed a heel back and forth.

Miss Blomgren stepped away. “Good now, let’s try to figure out a story to tell these two young ladies about you when I start time up again.”

“Wait!” The girl grabbed up the two flat wooden sticks and held them up to show that they were, in fact, one stick that had been snapped down the middle. “Just one more thing. This,” she said, her voice taking on a pedantic edge, “is a tally stick. This one’s from England but they were a really big deal in China, too. You notch it to show how much is owed, then you break it in half, and the borrower keeps one half and the lender keeps the other. It’s just like a symbolon, but it’s never about friendship—it’s all about debt. And guess what? It’s the precursor of paper money.” She grabbed up the slip of green paper and shook it at Alva. “Benjamins! Which in turn symbolize real gold, which is valuable because everyone agrees it is. Or rather, they do until 1971, when they get rid of the gold standard, and the whole thing just becomes fantasy! Get it?”

“No.” Miss Blomgren glanced at Bella and Julia; she was clearly worried about how long she could keep time frozen and continue to concentrate on what Peter was saying. “You’re back in Never Never Land, Peter.”

“But it’s back to emotions,” Peter said. “Don’t you see? Gold had this collectively agreed-upon value, so people with lots of money were like, ‘My paper symbolizes that gold and that symbolic relationship between my paper and that gold makes me feel rich.’ After 1971, when Richard Nixon is like, ‘Let’s just all admit money is a fantasy,’ people had to be like, ‘Dude, I just feel rich because I feel rich!’” Peter’s words tumbled from her mouth. “See? There’s no middleman for them to rest their fantasy on! Nixon was just like, ‘Oh, my God, I can make everybody’s feelings do the work, instead of gold! Everyone will just pretend!’”

Pretend.
That word. Julia was lost in Peter’s story, drowning in it—but she grabbed on to that word.

Miss Blomgren sighed. “This is crazy, Peter. And what in the name of all that’s holy does it have to do—”

“Nineteen seventy-one!” Peter shouted. “It’s after that, Alva! After that it starts getting hard to jump forward! By the twenty-first century it’s actively difficult and from there on out you have to be really talented to get anywhere. But it starts in 1971. That’s when the future starts turning into a big ugly scar!” She stopped talking and stood with her arms crossed, grinning at Alva.