“I mean … that would be the first-century-Roman thing to say, wouldn’t it?” Allie pressed.
He kept washing his hands silently, his shoulders hunched around his ears.
Okaaay … let’s try a different angle, shall we?
“Um. So. How long have you been in the army?”
He scrubbed even harder at the dirt.
Allie watched as the skin of his knuckles started to turn red. She tried one more time, only this time, she tried it in Latin.
“I said,” she said loudly, “Quamdiu militem eras?”
She was pretty sure her accent sucked big time and her conjugation was a mess, but the attempt had the desired result. And then some. Legionnaire Donatus’s helmeted head snapped around and his eyes blazed with emotion—anger? fear?—as he glared at her.
“Since they found me,” he said in English. “And don’t do that again.”
“What?”
“Speak Latin.”
He threw down the cloth he’d been drying his hands with and stalked back toward her, yanking the tent flap closed on his way.
“What if someone overheard that?” he murmured, gesturing in the direction of the guard, whose shadow Allie could see on the tent wall. “If they know you speak their language, they won’t need me to interpret for them. That centurion could interrogate you himself, and then I wouldn’t be around to make him be nice about it. I don’t think you want that.”
“Oh. Right. No …” Allie swallowed painfully. He was right. She’d been stupid. Which was really, really unlike her. She couldn’t afford to be stupid—it could cost her her life. She felt tears of frustration welling behind her eyes.
Marcus stood staring at her. After a moment, he sighed. “Besides which,” he said in a slightly less berating tone, “your accent is like a cheese grater to the ears. And your conjugation is a mess.”
She glanced up, scowling in indignation, to see him grinning sardonically at her. Allie bit back the sharp retort that was on the tip of her tongue. He was trying to help her get the best out of an impossibly bad situation, it seemed. And he did have a vastly superior accent. Maybe she could learn a thing or two from him. Especially if she could manage to ignore how the sound of his voice made the soles of her feet tingle every time he rolled one of his r’s.
He shrugged and turned away from her. There was a camp desk in the middle of the sparsely appointed tent and Marcus stared down at one of the parchment maps that lay on its surface. He traced the fingers of one hand over the spidery lines.
“To answer your question,” he said in a flat, faraway voice, “I’ve been with the Second Augusta Legion ever since Quintus Phoenius Postumus, the praefect whose tent pole you’re currently shackled to, found me starving to death in the mud below that godforsaken hill out there.”
“Oh. Okay. And … um … how long ago was that?”
“Four years.”
“So you were … what?” Al prodded gently. “Fifteen? Is that right … Mark?”
He turned to her, his eyes haunted by the boy he used to be. And it was, Allie thought, the first time he had truly looked at her.
“That’s your name, right? Mark O’Donnell? Your real name.”
He let his breath out in a shaky sigh. “I’m not imagining you …”
“Uh. No?”
“And I’m not mad, then.” It was almost a question.
“I don’t think so …”
“Which means you’re really from—” He winced suddenly and turned sharply away, his nostrils flaring like those of an animal scenting danger on the wind. He shook his head as if he was having some sort of silent, heated argument with himself. “No,” he murmured. “I can’t believe that after all this time … No. If it’s true, then why wouldn’t someone have come for me before? I don’t even know you. Why didn’t my— No! I know what this is. It’s that damned Druidess. She’s sent you to torment me and I’ll have none of it!”
He turned on the heel of his sandal and stalked out the door.
It was so sudden, so abrupt, that all Allie could do was watch him go. And once he was gone, she sank to the dirt floor of the tent, hugging the pole that kept her captive. She had never in all her life felt so alone.
“Clare …” she murmured. “I’m really ready to come home now …”
But the answer to her plea was silence, broken only by the creaking of her sentry’s leather armour just outside the Roman praefect’s tent.
12
Milo’s face wore an expression that wavered between disbelief, grudging respect, and outright annoyance. “He planned it. The whole thing.”
“Sure.” Piper shrugged. “With the mystical help and half the biology of some whacked-out Druid sorceress ancestor-chick of mine who could see the future.”
Clare was trying not to think about Boudicca’s Druidess sister. That was just too much for her brain at the moment. “You don’t understand,” she said. “It’s Morholt. His schemes don’t work. Ever. For him to even conceive of a plan—”
“I think it was Mallora who did the actual conceiving,” Milo muttered.
“GAH!” Clare covered her ears. “Seriously!”
“Sorry.”
“You really find it that unlikely a scenario?” Piper asked.
Clare turned and blinked at her. “I know you’ve never met the guy, so trust me, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.”
She sighed and shook her head, staring at the little book as Milo carefully turned its pages, his eyes scanning what Morholt had written there. “Yup,” he said. “A Stuart Morholt plan worked. My worldview is seriously compromised.”
“Oh now, mustn’t think like that,” Piper laughed sarcastically. “I mean, it’s only worked up to a point. The book has found its way to you, but it’s not as if you’ve found your way back to Morholt yet, is it? And isn’t that his whole point in sending the book forward in time?”
Clare turned to Milo anxiously. “Does he say how? Are there actually instructions on how to go back without a shimmer trigger? Because I don’t know how the heck Al managed it … and without a trigger, I’m not going anywhere. Does Morholt offer any insights?” She waved at the diary in Milo’s hands.
“Um … not exactly,” Milo said, shaking his head. “He rambles like a madman. I think being stuck back there in the past really did a number on ol’ Stu’s brainpan.”
“I know, right?” Piper nodded. “Like … what the hell does the last page mean?”
Milo flipped to the back of the book and frowned.
“See? That.” Piper gestured to the page, which seemed to consist of nothing more than a few lines of scribbled numbers. “I could never figure that one out myself. Those numbers range from one to twenty-two. But as far as I can see, there’s no pattern. The order and grouping seem totally random.”
Clare leaned over Milo’s shoulder and scanned the first line. Except that to her eyes there was nothing “random” about them at all. And they were written in her distinctly crappy penmanship. The message they conveyed leaped out at Clare, plain as day:
19-8 9-8-5 5-18-11-11 10-14-11-8 1-8-4 20-22-9 7-18-
22-19 5-15-14-6
But her brain swiftly, automatically, shockingly interpreted it:
do not tell milo you can read this
Milo, who was looking at the same message, only without the necessary information to understand it. Milo, who Clare trusted with her life. And maybe even her heart.
Milo …
Why the warning, written in a ridiculous grade-school cipher that only Clare would recognize for what it was? The “code”—and it barely even qualified as that—was something Clare and Al had made up in grade four—or maybe it was five—when using secret codes was both fun and a means of avoiding detention when passing notes in class. It consisted of twenty-two numbers, each one corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, starting in reverse. And just to throw anyone off the trail, Clare and Al had omitted assigning numbers to the letters Q, Z, X, and P. They har
dly ever used those, and if the notes were ever intercepted, anyone who saw that there were only twenty-two repeating numbers probably wouldn’t think to match them alphabetically. And if they tried, the unknown letters the girls had omitted would screw up any attempt at deciphering.
But that had been grade school. The question now was, How on earth had Clare come to write herself a note in Morholt’s ancient diary, and why on earth had she found it necessary to write it in code? Whatever it was, it must have been important. But it would take her a bit of time to decipher it all, and meanwhile she couldn’t let Milo know she could. She also couldn’t risk letting him use his big brain to crack the message. Not until she’d read the whole thing through and figured out why she was warning herself.
“Huh. Random numbers,” she said, reaching over to take the book from Milo, casually ignoring his attempts to keep reading, as if she hadn’t noticed. “Probably just Morholt playing Sudoku to pass the time. Look—there’s even a doodle.” She pointed to an elongated squiggly spiral at the bottom of the page, partially obscured by a smudge of brownish dirt, that vaguely resembled the shape of Glastonbury Tor as seen from above. The doodle was in Clare’s hand, too.
What the hell?
Beside her, Milo was still peering intently at the numbers. Clare could see his brain trying to work out patterns.
“Tell me something …” She nonchalantly closed the pages and turned toward Piper, holding the notebook up between them. “Why did you open the tin?”
“Because I’m the only one who would.” Piper plucked the book delicately from Clare’s fingertips and began to rewrap it in its zipper-cloth and baggie. “You really should be wearing gloves, you know … You want the real reason why this thing has stayed in such marvellous shape? Because for the better part of the last two hundred years it has sat in a dust-free, climate-controlled safe deposit box in a London bank vault. Everyone in my family had heard about it … and no one cared. No one in my family displayed the necessary intellectual curiosity, or the bravery, or even the … the mendacity to open the damned thing. No one except me.”
“Not even your whacko granny?” Clare asked.
“She’s the one I would have thought most likely to, yeah. She actually believed in things like Druid blood curses.” Piper snorted. “She kept newspaper clippings in a scrapbook about the Tutankhamun Curse and the Hope Diamond.”
Clare felt a cold shiver run up her spine. The conversation suddenly resembled one she’d once had with Morholt about the very same subject. Okay, so the coconuts didn’t fall far from the tree. Even after multiple generations.
“She also kept track of Yeti sightings and collected grainy snaps of the Loch Ness monster,” Piper went on, confirming the hypothesis. “Yup. My genetic material was corrupted at the source code. Madman and sorceress. Thanks for making that possible.”
“Don’t mention it.” Clare grinned sourly.
“Right. Nutters, all. But, aside from Gran and me, incurious nutters.” Piper finished packing the book away and waved a hand at the curio shop’s confines. “See … me? I actually believe that the past lives. It lives in the present and it’s our duty to keep it alive for the future. This shop is the very antithesis of a museum. People can walk in here and buy things. Touch things. Take them home and make them a part of their lives. I had to know what was in this.” She held up the tin. “I needed to solve the mystery.”
“What if it had proved to be nothing?”
Piper shrugged. “Then at least I would have known. And I would have sold the thing as a wartime tea tin to some granny to pot a plant in, and made a few quid off it. Also? I’m the last of my line. No siblings, no cousins that I know of. And I’m not precisely the type to settle down and raise a family.”
Clare raised an eyebrow. “Sure. You’re like, what, nineteen? How do you know? Maybe you just haven’t met the right person yet.”
Piper’s eyes flicked over to where Milo stood silently.
“Maybe,” she said. “But maybe not. And I started thinking that, if I didn’t open it, chances are no one in my family ever would. And, insofar as you two are here, I know now that I was meant to open it.”
“What does it say in there about Al?” Clare almost dreaded the answer.
“Well, for starters,” Milo said, “she showed up in a Roman encampment that Morholt was being held prisoner in.” Clare blinked at him in surprise. Among his other talents, apparently Milo was also a speed reader. “Initially, it seems, Morholt assumed that his demands for you to come and rescue him worked. Sort of. I guess he figured you somehow sent Allie in your place.”
“Great,” Clare said. “But here’s the thing—I didn’t have anything to do with sending Al back, did I? And now we know that’s definitely where she went, I still don’t have the foggiest idea how to get her back. Does the book say how we do that? Does it say how I can go back without a shimmer trigger? Does it say anything bloody useful at all?”
Milo hesitated for a moment. He glanced at Piper.
Clare huffed in frustration as the silence stretched out. “Milo?”
“No. I’m sorry, Clare. It doesn’t.”
Piper was staring at Milo, the shadow of a frown on her brow. Clare looked back and forth between the two of them. It felt suddenly as if they were keeping something from her.
“What?” she demanded. “Is it Al? Did something horrible happen to her?” Clare felt rising panic again. She’d never gone back for more than an hour or two at a time. Al had been gone since yesterday. “Is she in trouble? You have to tell me if—”
“She’s fine,” Piper said firmly.
Clare turned to her. “What?”
“Fine,” she repeated, tapping the tin. “So far. On page thirty-four, three days after Morholt first sees her, your friend is still alive and well and—heh—feisty as ever. Apparently she’s a bit of a spitfire, that one.” Piper laughed a little. “Now, if we extrapolate from how Morholt described your travels, the amount of time that passes for Allie there is the same amount of time that would have passed for her here. The passage of time is a personal chronology—it remains consistent to the individual. You can enter the time stream at any point, but it’s like you carry your own stopwatch with you when you do. So. Regardless of how long Morholt’s been stuck back there, when he writes about how long she’s been there, it amounts to the same length of time she would have been here. She hasn’t yet been gone three days. Which means she’s still there, still in good health, and will be for at least another twenty-four hours.”
“Okay,” Milo interjected, “fine. We have a bit of breathing space. And obviously we’re still missing a key piece of the puzzle. I guess we’re just going to have to wait until it reveals itself to us.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Clare said, although she could hardly argue with the logic. “I hate that idea. Wait? Just … wait? I hate waiting.” She wondered how many times Al had cursed her out loud and in colourful language for not getting her the hell back to the future already. As relieved as she was, Clare still felt terrible. Useless.
“Patience,” Piper counselled. “Virtue.”
Clare rolled an eye at her. “Patience. Shove it.”
“Right.” Piper fidgeted for a moment. “You know, maybe this all has something to do with the artifact your pal found. It was a skull, wasn’t it?”
Clare nodded, even though she found the idea unlikely. She’d held the gruesome thing in her bare hands and nary a flicker of a shimmer had she felt. Clare’s triggers had always been manmade. Not, as it were, made of man. But then again, it had been different with Al. The video had clearly shown that. Maybe the bony relic had something to do with Al’s temporal displacement after all.
“Could you bring it here?” Piper pressed. “To the shop?”
Clare looked at Milo. The day before they’d decided that wandering around Glastonbury with a human skull in his knapsack was probably a bad idea, so he’d hidden it in his hotel room for the time being. But Piper had spent
her life surrounded by antiquities, and she’d read the diary back to front. Maybe there was something she could discover that they hadn’t.
Milo must have been thinking the same thing. He shrugged one shoulder and said, “I’m okay with that if you are, Clare—”
Suddenly the clock in the main shop bonged nine, startling the three of them. And only a few seconds later, the front door bell chimed, startling them again.
“Damn,” muttered Piper. “I forgot. The teaspoon ladies.”
Clare and Milo looked at her.
“They’re here every second Wednesday of the month at nine o’clock sharp, all giddy with anticipation, to see if I’ve got any new spoons in. Be right back …” She bustled out to the front of the shop.
Clare glanced at her watch and turned to Milo. “If I’m not at the dig site soon, the supervisors are going to start asking questions. They’re probably already wondering where the hell Al is.”
He nodded. “I’ll walk with you. I’ve got a few things to take care of too, with the virtual-reality dig program.”
When Milo reached out to pick up the book tin, Clare thrust out her hand to stop him. As much as she wanted to take it with them, she didn’t want Milo examining the line of code any more closely than he already had. She couldn’t risk him cracking it.
“Um. Look …” She struggled to find some kind of valid excuse for leaving the thing behind. “I think maybe we should leave the book here for safekeeping. I don’t want to be carting it around in the field. And … I dunno. It’s kind of like a legacy for Goggles. I think we—okay, me—got off on the wrong foot with her. Maybe if we show her we trust her with it … things might go easier.”
Clare held her breath as Milo cast a long look at the battered little box.
“I think you’re right,” he said, smiling as he tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “And I think that’s pretty big of you, all things considered.”
He bent his head and kissed her lightly on the mouth, and Clare felt herself relax a little and breathe a sigh of relief.
Every Never After Page 12