Now that they were on the motorway, she had enough data for internet access, and she began to tap at her phone, wishing all the while she had either her computer or tablet with her, because the bigger screen was easier to work with. Chad hadn’t given her time to retrieve them from her car.
Meanwhile, Michael concentrated on his driving. He could have left it to the vehicle itself, but to her complete lack of surprise, he was a control freak and had disengaged the auto-pilot.
A glance at the speedometer told Livia that Michael was going faster than might be considered safe, which was another reason he wasn’t leaving the driving to the vehicle itself. But she still didn’t say anything. She could feel the energy radiating off him. She herself was exhausted, and the warmth of the car threatened to put her to sleep. She fought against it, however, even though the GPS was telling them it was going to take a good forty minutes to get to Llanberis. At the rate Michael was driving, he was going to cut that by a third. She agreed with him that every second counted. As Chad had said, he needed them there five minutes ago.
Michael glanced at her. “Are you getting anything?”
“No.” Livia almost threw down her phone in frustration. “I type my username and password as usual, and there’s enough data here there’s no reason it shouldn’t work. But before it logs me in, the system times out, and I have to start over. It feels like the Balkans all over again.”
“The Balkans?”
Livia glanced at him, and when she didn’t immediately answer, he added, “Is this like a state secret?”
“Not a state secret, merely my failure.”
“Really. You failed at something.”
She gave him a deprecating smile at his deadpan and disbelieving tone. “I failed to see the writing on the wall, maybe. I failed to anticipate my superior’s reaction to mistakes my team made, even if none of those mistakes were mine.” She sighed. Now she’d started, she might as well finish. “I failed to save my team. I was the technology specialist attached to a team based out of Sarajevo, monitoring a resurgence of nationalist activity in the region. The operatives ranged farther afield, of course, and they stumbled upon a Serbian splinter group. Only one got out, severely injured.”
“And this was deemed your fault?”
“I was the last person standing. Who better to have betrayed them?” She looked down at her hands. “At least that was the initial reaction. And initially I hardly cared.”
“You felt like it was your fault, even though it wasn’t. I know the feeling.”
She looked at him with sudden interest. “I suppose you really might. But unlike my operatives, I wasn’t brave. I didn’t stand up for them or myself. I didn’t fight back. Though in the end I was cleared of all misdeeds, I was also demoted. And relegated to the basement of Thames House.”
“Where you met Mark.”
She sighed. “Where I met Mark.”
“Sounds to me like it was meant to be.”
Livia was so surprised she laughed. “I truly had never looked at it that way.” She tipped her head. “You believe in fate?”
Michael laughed himself. “Hard not to believe in something these days, isn’t it?”
She gave a little snort, a bit disgruntled by his deflection.
Michael drove in silence for several minutes, but then he asked, “There’s more, though, isn’t there?”
She didn’t bother to deny it. “I behaved the same way a fortnight ago after Mark and the others disappeared. They were gone, and what was my reaction? I kept my head down. I did what was easy, so I wouldn’t lose my job.” She scoffed. “I hid.”
“You lived to fight another day. There’s no shame in that.” He paused. “And you did stand up in the end, didn’t you? You told your bosses the truth. You drove out to Bangor. You liaised, as they say, with David. If you’d been caught up in the aftermath of Mark’s disappearance, you might have been in a cell instead.”
Livia hadn’t ever thought about it that way, and maybe he wasn’t wrong. Regardless, she hadn’t been hiding these last three days, that’s for sure. Even if she was going to pay a price for that, she found she wasn’t sorry.
“So why MI-5 in the first place?”
Since she was in the passenger seat, Livia could give Michael a long look, but he couldn’t return the favor. He glanced from the road for a second to meet her eyes and then looked away again.
“You mean, What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?”
Michael bit his lip. “Forget I said anything.”
“No, it’s okay. I don’t mind answering. We have a drive ahead of us and nothing else to do. Besides, you’re hardly the first to wonder.”
It didn’t look like she’d made Michael any happier to know he’d asked something dozens of others had thought of before him. Livia gave a light laugh, hoping he would understand she was laughing at herself and the circumstances as much as at him. “I joined Five because I could.”
His eyes narrowed. “You joined MI-5 because it was there? Like a mountain?”
“I have been both over- and under-estimated my whole life. It’s like it says in that song—boys are valued for being strong and smart and girls for being pretty and smart. I was raised to be all three things: smart, pretty, and strong, and I enjoy defying expectations.”
That got him to laugh again. “Aren’t you a rebel!”
Livia grinned. “We are all born with gifts. I can’t help what I look like, but I can help what I do with it. You must have experienced much the same thing.”
Michael shot her a quizzical glance. “In what way?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Because of what you look like.”
“You mean because I have Pakistani ancestry?”
She gaped at him, genuinely surprised, and then said, “No, you plank. Do I really have to spell it out?” She tsked through her teeth. “Because you’re dishy.”
Michael drove in silence for a bit longer than was comfortable, but when he didn’t reply, eventually she had to lean forward to get him to look at her again. “Surely this can’t be news to you?”
But he was embarrassed. She could see.
As it turned out, however, his embarrassment wasn’t because of her opinion. “It ... well ... I don’t know what to say. Amelia implied the same thing to me, and you’re going to laugh, but ...” He shook his head and started over. “A couple of the women in my unit gave me the nickname Dish.
“So there you go.”
He laughed under his breath, but it was mocking rather than humorous. “I thought they called me that because I should be doing the washing up. Washing dishes. Dish.”
His explanation was so unexpected, Livia started laughing herself—and then it was such a release that she couldn’t stop. She leaned her head against the window and held her stomach, laughing hard enough that tears streamed down her cheeks.
Michael kept glancing from the road to her, and finally he put out a hand and touched her arm. “Are you okay?”
She wiped at her eyes and managed to control her laughter. “You can’t be that daft. You’re telling me this whole time you’ve been thinking they were calling you an ethnic slur, and really, they’ve been telling you you’re gorgeous.” She made a pfft sound. “I don’t understand how this is even possible.”
Michael looked flustered, as well he might, and stuttered, “I have an uncle whose English isn’t the best, so he reduces every person, place, or thing to one syllable. He has a restaurant, where I worked, and each of his employees was called by a one syllable name: cook, prep, serve, dish. I was dish.”
“Okay, I get that. Maybe you’re forgiven a little. Did you mention to any of your mates that you had a previous job as a dishwasher?”
“No. I was paid under the table, and I didn’t want to get my uncle in trouble.”
They drove in silence for nearly a full minute while Livia tried to think of how to bridge the gap that had grown between them. She’d created it by laughing, but sh
e couldn’t come up with anything other than a lame, “I’m sorry. I really wasn’t laughing at you.”
“Well, maybe I deserve it,” he said grimly, and then he shrugged and explained further: “I joined the army at eighteen. At the time, I was five foot four with rampant acne. I barely made the height requirement for deployment. I had a sister who was taller than I was. Believe me, I turned no heads. In the first two years of my service, I grew six inches and gained forty pounds. The supply officer couldn’t believe the way he had to keep issuing me new gear.”
“My uncle was like that,” Livia said. “He started university at 5’ 10” and left at 6’ 4”. I just cheat.” Livia stuck out a foot to show off her low-heeled boots.
“I’m not that tall,” he glanced at her. “I have an inch on you, two at most.” Then he looked at her a little more fiercely. “You’re very good, you know.”
“Am I?” she said, a bit absently, still thinking about him as an eighteen-year-old recruit. “How so?”
“Getting me to talk about myself instead of answering my question.”
Livia almost managed to suppress her smile. “It wasn’t intentional. I just would rather talk about you than me.”
There was a pause before Michael prodded, “Well? Why did you join Five?”
“You’re going to laugh.”
“You laughed at me.”
“With you. I laughed with you. Or at worst, in your general direction.” Livia sighed and said in her most academic voice, “The twentieth century was marked by two world wars that tore Europe apart. In the twenty-first century, the greatest threats have moved underground and into cyberspace. I’m good at what I do, and I am happy to do it for Britain.”
Michael laughed.
“Told you you’d laugh.”
“I believe you.” He waggled his head. “I’m hardly one to argue patriotism.”
“Army boy.” Livia nodded. “So why the army?”
“Eh.” When it came to it, Michael was embarrassed to answer too.
She folded her arms across her chest. “I shared.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sharing. To prove myself, probably more than anything. Or because I wanted to be needed.”
“Good reasons.”
“More about me than about anyone else, though.”
“Why’d you become a medic?”
“More independence.” He paused. “And I liked being of service in a way that didn’t involve shooting people.”
She laughed under her breath. Gorgeous and sincere. She didn’t say her thoughts out loud, though, not wanting to embarrass him further. “And now you work for yourself.”
“Sort of.” Michael’s hands flexed around the wheel. “I haven’t had a proper job since I was discharged. Honestly, when you said you were sorry about David leaving, you were right. I was looking forward to protecting him. I liked him. It was a big paycheck doing something that looked pretty damn interesting. For three days, I had something worthwhile to do and to think about and a plan for the future.”
Livia bit her lip. “Here you were starting a job you liked and were looking forward to doing, and I fear I’m at the end of one I’ve started to despise.”
She could feel Michael glancing at her again, but she’d deliberately turned her head to look out the window so she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She hadn’t meant to reveal quite that much. She gave herself a little shake, picked up her phone, and began dialing. “I was the only member of the Security Service at that warehouse tonight, and no others put in an appearance in the hour we were there. I want to know why.”
“I thought that was the deal,” Michael said reasonably. “Your boss was letting you handle it.”
She shot him a withering look, which she hoped he realized wasn’t directed at him so much as at her situation and her employer. “If MI-5 actually were that hands off, it would be the first time.”
“Okay then, maybe your boss is sending a different team to Llanberis from a different location.”
“That I can believe, but then, why has nobody rung me? Why can’t I get into our computer system? I should be on that team.”
Chapter Eleven
3 April 2022
Sophie
As it turned out, it was raining in Avalon too. And dark.
Sophie had fallen to her knees on arrival, which she understood to be pretty typical. It was hard to imagine how a person could travel from one universe to another without falling over. The grass on which she’d fallen was wet, however, and was soaking her skirt and the leggings she wore underneath, but still she bent forward on all fours, breathing hard.
She had decided to fall with Cadell because she couldn’t bear the thought of explaining to Anna how she’d let her son die—and out of a tiny bit of hope it really would work.
It had worked, clearly. Cadell had been right. If they survived this, he would be forever impossible to suppress, though the time traveling had knocked even him for a loop for a minute.
An immediate survey of her surroundings showed grass, broken down stone walls, and a tower at the top of a nearby hill, all of which was dimly visible thanks to distant lights off to their left on the other side of the hill. She stared at the tower, trying to make sense of its form. She didn’t recognize where they were, but hoped it would be a simple matter to determine, once they made it to their feet and out of this rain. They had no identification and no money, apart from what Cadell had thought to stuff into his backpack. As far as she was concerned, they couldn’t find David quickly enough.
Then Cadell sat up from where he’d fallen flat on his back in the grass. “Are we here?”
“It seems so,” Sophie said dryly, finding laughter welling up in her chest. We made it! I’m alive!
More than anything, she was relieved. It felt not entirely unlike the moment her airplane touched down in London after a long holiday. Regardless of what came next, she would be able to speak and be understood, and understand the words of the people speaking back to her. She could have a coffee the way she liked it. And she could see her parents.
She had known, obviously, that she was unhappy in Earth Two, else she wouldn’t have gone to Andre and George about it. But even with the acknowledgment of her desire to leave, it was only now that she’d done so that she could see how the past fortnight had been spent on pins and needles, holding her breath much of the time out of fear and uncertainty at the unknown that faced her. She was overjoyed to be back.
It even seemed to her now that her unhappiness had been necessary because, if she hadn’t been unhappy, if she hadn’t returned to Chester, Cadell would have fallen from Chester’s tower alone.
Cadell brought her back to earth. “It’s raining.”
The boy’s sour tone had Sophie laughing again. She had survived! She’d been tested and found worthy, and now she was home safe again.
She didn’t say any of that to Cadell, who wouldn’t understand, so instead she grinned. “Just a little. It’s more like a heavy mist. That’s familiar, isn’t it?”
Over the years, Sophie had found she did better with bright children when she spoke to them like small adults, with the same tone and word choice, though of course the content of her conversations had to be age-appropriate. She didn’t know what was age-appropriate for a boy who’d just time traveled, but somehow, like always, they would muddle through.
“Are we still in England?” Cadell rose to his feet, his backpack still firmly affixed to his back. They’d been speaking English, with Cadell’s clear American accent echoing around them. Then the boy frowned. “That’s a tower.”
“I don’t know which one.” Sophie pulled her hood over her head to keep out the worst of the rain and then casually adjusted Cadell’s hood as well. Though she’d appeased Cadell by dismissing the rain as insubstantial, in the last few seconds it had begun to fall harder, and the wind was blowing it into her face. “We appear to be in a somewhat remote location.”
Cadell’s eyes were still on the tower, and he started f
orward. Sophie followed, more by feel than because she could see where to put her feet. Then Cadell found a stone stairway mostly covered in grass, and started up the slope. They came through a break in the almost entirely ruined stone wall, to arrive at the base of a great keep.
“Do you recognize it?” Sophie prodded him.
“It’s Dolbadarn.” Cadell’s voice was both stunned and very small. “But it’s ruined.” He spun slowly on his heel. Now that they were at the base of the tower, they could see much more than when they had been down below near the trees.
Immediately to one side of the tower lay a long lake, which was split in half by a road. Farther on, beyond the road, lay a town, which Sophie now knew to be Llanberis, the lights of which brightened the otherwise dark night. That was clearly the direction they needed to go.
The tower, the lake, and the town were set in a narrow valley with mountains on both sides. An industrial complex lay on the other side of the lake at the foot of the mountain, and the security lights from its car park shone brightly, revealing huge slag piles and the workings of a massive mine that stretched hundreds of yards across the face of the mountain. A little bit of Sophie’s joy leaked away at the sight of it, though not enough to undermine her overall sense of well-being.
Cadell, on the other hand, was being uncharacteristically silent, and she put her hand on his shoulder. “We should get moving.”
It was as if he didn’t hear her. “What happened to it? It’s all gone.”
She didn’t know if he meant the castle or the mountain, but he was right on both counts. “It’s been a lot of years between your time and this one.”
“But the mountain ... and my grandfather’s castle ...” he didn’t seem to be able to find the words to express his shock.
Sophie crouched in front of him and put her hands on his hips. While the rain was in her face and the light was minimal, she could see enough of his pinched mouth and furrowed brow to know he was on the verge of tears. To see the ruined castle through the eyes of Cadell was a bit of a revelation for her too. “This is why it was so important for your mom and uncle to come to Earth Two in the first place to save your grandfather’s life. What you see here is disheartening, and I’m sorry it isn’t what you’d hoped, but we need to start walking now.”
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