The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (21 page)

24

We’d put some distance between ourselves and the village, though not much, since the marshland curved in the wrong direction and we soon ran out of lake. The woods with their old-growth trees offered some cover and a place for Jacob to dry off. Unless we managed to light a fire, he would have to warm up as best he could. We pulled the kayaks to shore and onto a small beach that lead up to a clearing. The first order of business was the fire.

“Wait,” Nate said to Ron, who had bent to gather firewood. “Let’s check if it’s even worth gathering the wood.” Nate flicked his lighter and this time the flame emerged just fine. “Yay,” I heard Jacob say between chattering teeth as Ron and Nate set about gathering firewood. I surveyed the situation and sent Jacob behind a tree to change into his spare clothes.

Once they had a decent-size stack of wood, Nate tried his lighter again and the dry, brittle branches soon crackled to life. Jacob inched himself as close as he could to the fire without actually setting himself aflame. Nate joined him and took off his boots, placing them next to the fire. Ruth-Ann wrung out Jacob’s wet clothes and set them on a boulder to dry, then turned her attention to warming up water in an aluminum kettle for coffee and oatmeal. Jacob tried to protest that he didn’t drink coffee, but she kindly shushed him. “Now’s the time to start, then. You don’t want to catch a cold. And before anyone tells me that you can’t catch a cold just by
being
cold and wet—I disagree. Your body is more likely to catch something if it’s busy trying to keep itself warm. The last thing we need is anyone getting sick out here.”

There was no arguing with that.

Dr. B was humming as she helped Ruth-Ann ready the
coffee
and oatmeal packets. Time travel was the ultimate dream for harried academics. We had been in the fourteenth century sunset to sunrise, so not even half an hour had passed back in the lab, which meant that she still had plenty of time to prepare next week’s lecture for her undergraduate class,
From Sir Isaac Newton to Caroline Herschel: Anecdotes in the Lives of Famous Scientists
.

Truth be told, if Quinn hadn’t been involved in the present incident, I would have been enjoying my mini-vacation too. I hadn’t taken one in a while. I had been meaning to visit my parents, but something at work always required my attention, not to mention the task of getting Sabina and Abigail settled.

As the fire crackled and the water warmed up, we took turns using impromptu bathroom facilities in the woods. Nate had instructed us to cover up anything we left behind, not only for History’s sake, but to minimize our footprint in the wild, which amounted to the same thing. While the others chatted and went about their chores—Nate was fixing a small puncture on the outside of one of the kayaks with Ron’s help—I sat down next to Dr. B to join her in warming my hands by the fire. She made room for me and said, “She’s my friend, you know. Dagmar. We both jog.”

“I didn’t know you knew her.” I should have realized. A university campus is a small place.

“Chief Kirkland wanted to know whether she had ever talked about the runestone.”

I was glad Nate was pursuing all avenues of investigation, though I couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t mentioned his conversation with Erika. This was officially his investigation, of course, and I was only unofficially involved. He was under no obligation to divulge all particulars of his various avenues of inquiry to me. Still. If Helen had been with us, she probably would have at this point reminded me about jealousy being “the green-eyed monster.”

“So did she?” I asked, repeating Nate’s question back to Erika.

She stirred the fire with a stick. “Dagmar and I did talk about our work, although most of the talking was done by me—she was interested in time travel and what it was like. People usually are, and it’s particularly understandable in her case since she hoped to get on STEWie’s roster. I suggested that she take a workshop or two, which she did. As to her own work, she did say she had her fingers crossed that she’d be offered a junior professorship at St. Sunniva.”

I shook my head. “There’s no funding for it. Her postdoc will expire at the end of the school year.”

A look of been-there passed over the professor’s face. “I have to say—if Quinn did kidnap her and she returns safely with us, I hope the school will feel badly enough about what happened that they’ll find the money to offer her a professorship. Does that make me sound very pragmatic?” She gave a brief, self-conscious laugh. “It’s just that in academia you have to jump at opportunities as they arise.”

I rather figured that was true of all professions, but her career track was more uphill than most.

Erika gave a small shrug. “Like I told Chief Kirkland, Dagmar only mentioned the runestone once, in passing. She said that she felt her peers were too critical of it. According to her, aberrations were to be expected since the runes had been chiseled an ocean away from the ‘standard’ to which they were being compared, probably by a group of men who had varying backgrounds and life experiences.”

I rummaged around in my backpack until I found the map from Dagmar’s proposal, the one I had torn from the section titled
Strategy for Finding Vinland.
“I found this in her office.”

Nate lost his interest in the kayaks and came over to look, Ron on his heels. The older man held a hand out to me. “May I, Julia?”

I handed him the map and he studied it for a moment.

“Ahh, yes,” he said after a moment. “If I was the two of them and I had a…what did you call it?”

“A Slingshot,” Dr. B suggested. “Slingshot 2.0, to be precise.”

“If I had the Slingshot 2.0 at my disposal and wanted to find Vinland, I’d probably do just what she’s proposing. Hide behind a bush at L’Anse aux Meadows and listen to their conversations and follow them when Vinland’s mentioned.”

Ruth-Ann left the kettle to do its thing and came over to join in the discussion. “Are we saying they may not even be coming here?”

“It might depend on who’s in charge,” Nate said. “Quinn or Dr. Holm.”

“Let’s hope we guessed right,” Dr. B said.

I gave myself a mental kick for not mentioning the map before we climbed into STEWie’s basket. “Too bad our STEWie basket didn’t return home without us, like last time. At least then we’d know they were in the vicinity. If they pop up on Runestone Island now, we’ll have no warning.”

“They’ll won’t wait there,” Dr. B said, “for the same reason we left—it’s too exposed. There’s nowhere for them to hide. These lovely woods—” She gestured around us with the small spoon she was using to stir warm water into her oatmeal—“offer plenty of opportunities for concealment.”

They did. I still felt the eyes on us, as I had since we first inflated the kayaks on Runestone Island. I didn’t want to say anything to the others yet; all I had to go on was a feeling.

“I guess your estranged husband is planning to film the
skirmish
with the Psinomani, Julia, or the Black Death flare-up, or whatever it was, for his reality show.” Ruth-Ann tut-tutted as she passed out the small packets of instant coffee for us to stir into our mugs. “It seems disrespectful, to tell you the truth.”

“I imagine it would be toned down and edited for the show.” I said, more in an effort to defend our program than out of any loyalty to Quinn. STEWie researchers had come back with footage of many a disturbing and tragic event from the past. Sometimes, like with the time-traveling camera that had gone out on an ocean buoy to film the sinking of the Titanic (with an automatic timer set to send it back home), the footage was taken from far enough that it didn’t have to be edited for the somewhat inappropriately named
History Alive
exhibition. In other instances, like with video grabbed from Civil War battlefields, the camera had gotten uncomfortably close. Sometimes it seemed to me that history was mostly made of tragic events.

Nate took Dagmar’s map from Ron. “Most people aren’t as squeamish as we think they are. Everyone slows down to look at car accidents. As for Quinn’s reality show, the bloodiest episodes would probably get the highest ratings.”

He was right. No one had complained yet about the gruesomeness of a single one of the
History Alive
exhibits.

“I imagine that the fact that it happened so long ago gives people an excuse not to feel bad about it,” Ruth-Ann said. “After all, there’s nothing we can do, is there?”

Dr. B sighed over her oatmeal. “True. You can’t change History. We know because we tried. At least, Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas tried in the beginning, back when they were still figuring out the rules of time travel…STEWie wasn’t even called that yet. They made an attempt to save the lost Mayan books. It wasn’t long before they realized that the codices could only be rescued for future generations, not past ones—that is to say, they could not save the originals, only scan them before they made it onto the conquistadors’ bonfires.”

The manuscripts she was talking about were displayed in the
History Alive
exhibition on regular paper, not like they would have been made originally, on cloth pounded from tree bark and folded into a book. But we had learned that the Mayans weren’t as obsessed with astronomy as we’d thought—the four codices that had survived into the present before STEWie came along just happened to focus on astronomy.

“Could Mr. Olsen and Dr. Holm be using their Slingshot 2.0 to jump around the continent in their quest to find the Norsemen?” asked Ron over Nate’s shoulder.

Dr. B shook her head over her coffee mug. “I doubt it. That would quickly drain the battery, especially if they go against the arrow of time.”

“Would Dr. Holm know that?” Nate asked.

“It’s Time Travel 101,” Dr. B replied. “I’m pretty sure the principle was covered in the workshops she took. No, they’ll more likely hunker down to conserve their battery power—either in the woods here or, if the map Julia found is any indication, on Newfoundland. If they spot the Norsemen, they’ll most likely follow them on foot.”

“Could they have horses?” I asked. “Quinn and Dr. Holm, I mean. Don’t ask me how or where they might have gotten them.”

“No horses here,” Ron said.

“Are we too far north?”

“No. Ask me more about it later.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It all sounds like a lot more work than Quinn likes to do.”

Nate snorted. “More than going into bankruptcy because of his debts and losing everything?”

“Possibly. You don’t know him like I do.”

Almost like she was trying to change the subject, Ruth-Ann asked to hear some more about ghost zones. “Are they really as dangerous as they sound?”

Dr. Baumgartner chuckled. “When people ask me what I do, I give one of two answers. Both are true, incidentally. Sometimes I just say that I document the lives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists, which always earns me a yawn. Other times, I mention that I also work on compiling a database of ghost zones in those centuries so that we know not to fall into them on future runs, and they perk right up. I wouldn’t worry too much about ghost zones,” she reassured Ruth-Ann and Ron. “There’s a more relevant question. We don’t know much about what happens if there are two teams of time travelers side by side in the same time period who aren’t cooperating with each other. Will we interfere with each other, causing each team to get time-stuck more frequently than usual? Or will History funnel us into the same path?”

“Jacob told us all about ghost zones,” Ruth-Ann said. “He was demonstrating the thin-ice one when he fell out of the kayak and never had the chance to finish the story—Jacob?”

“Has he disappeared again?” I asked. “You’ll find him somewhere with his phone in hand.”

I was right. Jacob wandered over; he had been by himself next to the kayaks. “Sorry, everyone, I was just typing in some thoughts. First impressions of the fourteenth century, that sort of thing.”

“And what are your thoughts so far, young man?” Ruth-Ann asked kindly.

“Only a few, tweet-sized. The awesome night sky. The weirdness of there being no electrical wires in sight. The silence—”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Silence? What about the chirping birds, the buzzing insects, and the hooting owls last night?”

“It’s weird not hearing cars or planes.”

“Give it time,” Nate said. “It takes a few days of being in the wilderness to really tune in into nature. Speaking of which—”

He got to his feet.

Something had moved in the woods across the lake.

We all scrambled to our feet, but it was only a pair of white-tailed deer. The buck and doe stared at us for a long moment, then went on their way through the trees.

It seemed like a signal for us to leave. We finished off the coffee and oatmeal, rinsed the cups where a small stream entered the lake, and doused the fire with water, scattering the ashes around with a stick. We took a last look around to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind and picked up the kayaks to portage them to the north.

It was a no-go, however.

We were time-stuck. Not like on Runestone Island, where Ron had been forbidden from approaching the stone but we had been free to leave.

Completely. On all sides.