“Au revoir.” And with that, Ian glided away into the night like a cat.
Max turned to them, blinking his eyes like he had been hypnotized. “Are those guys really police officers?”
“They’re a bit unorthodox,” Abbey said, feeling her lips pull into a grim line.
“We better head off,” Caleb said. “See you around, Max.” Caleb turned and started to march back in the direction of the library.
Abbey gave a wave to Max, who still stood in the street with his head tilted to the side, and then turned and followed her brother. Mark would be half-frantic by now, she was sure, and if her parents had already arrived home, they would be worse.
*****
Mark consulted his Garmin Forerunner watch for the fourth time in two minutes. 9:12. He clutched the green file tighter against his chest as the chilly night air crept up under the folds of his shirt. The library had closed twelve minutes ago. He had lingered in the foyer for as long as he could while the other patrons filed out and the librarians started flicking off lights. But finally, when Kasey gave him a bemused look, Mark decided it was time to head outside, where he now stood, the darkened windows of the library behind him. The goats on the rooftop (apparently more nocturnal than he thought) emitted occasional bleats, and he could hear them trodding about in the grass. He hoped none of them got it into their heads to leap off the roof on top of him (but he supposed that whoever ran the library would have had that sort of thing ironed out, as having goats jumping on patrons would likely be frowned upon).
He had been unable to get the photocopy of the library map as he had hoped. Kasey had explained that they had to send large things away for copying, and that it would be ready the next morning and would cost ten GCCs. Mark wasn’t sure what GCCs were, or how he was going to pay for the map out of the shifter account that Kasey had referenced. But Kasey had given Mark his address and indicated that Mark could come by and see Kasey’s map anytime. All of this would require returning to this future as soon as possible.
He checked his watch again. 10:13. Where were Abbey and Caleb? At this point he might even be relieved to see Sylvain (he still considered Sylvain to be a bad man, but he had now been usurped from his position of very badness by the collection of very bad men whom Mark seemed to be encountering on a regular basis now). The prospect of trying to find his way back to the stones via the train was daunting at best. The library staff had vanished into the back of the library after Kasey had locked the doors behind him, reiterating his thanks for the copies of the maps, and the courtyard in front of the building had cleared of patrons almost immediately, the people dispersing down the dim streets with lights winking on and off in their wake.
Mark was just about to turn around and rattle the glass doors behind him in panic when two men emerged from the yard of one of the houses that sat on the edge of the courtyard and made their way down the street that led back to the train station. The two bad men with guns who had been in the library. The angry tones of their voices carried across the courtyard, but they didn’t look back and see Mark, who had tried to wedge himself behind one of the potted junipers that flanked the library doors.
After a few hideous seconds of holding his breath, the men became small black shadows in the distance.
“Hey, Mark.” Abbey’s low voice made him yelp in surprise. Prickles from the juniper scratched his skin as he jumped. “Good job waiting for us. We’re going to head home now.”
7. Universe Jumpers’ Phi
Mark inched out from behind the juniper, his eyes wide and bulgy. Abbey tried to smile reassuringly, but Mark started to shake his head violently and thrust a finger down the street toward the train station.
“What? What’s wrong?” Abbey said.
“The very bad men with guns from… from…”
“From the library? Did they just come through here?” Abbey said. She and Caleb had skittered in silence from where they’d left Max in the street, each of them peering into yards, wondering where the two men had gone, or where they would reappear.
Mark’s left eye twitched a bit and he shook his head again. “No… Yes… No.”
Abbey cocked her head at him. “What do you mean?”
Mark clenched his fists and took a few deep breaths. “It’s hard for me to find my place when I have been interrupted. Yes, they just came through here. Yes, from the library, but also from the bad man’s office with the map.”
“Dr. Ford?”
Mark nodded.
“Figures,” said Caleb.
“We shouldn’t make assumptions,” Abbey said. “Did he seem to be working with the two men, or were they threatening him?”
Mark’s face creased in frustration and he drew his lips into a frown. Abbey resisted the urge to talk, to fill in the blanks as she often tried to do when Mark was silent. Maybe he was thinking.
“There was a woman with them with a red scarf,” he said finally.
“Hmm,” Abbey said. “Was it Sandy?”
Mark shook his head.
“We better go,” Caleb said. “Mom and Dad are going to be freaking, and we don’t know how late that train runs.”
Mark withdrew a piece of paper that showed a map of the train routes and handed it to Caleb, tapping a box in the bottom corner. The train schedule. He must have picked it up at the station.
“Looks like the trains run all night,” Abbey said, looking over Caleb’s shoulder. “Do we want to risk running into those men?”
“I dunno, but I’m thinking better those men than Mom at this point. They don’t know us. They didn’t even look at me in the library. The only person they might recognize is Mark. I can go scout out the station when we get there. The trains go continuously every twenty minutes, so they may have already been on one by now, if they were even going back to the stones.” Caleb went to absently shove the train schedule in his pocket, but Mark gave an agitated wheeze, and Caleb hastily handed it back. Mark carefully flattened it and placed it in the green file folder with his other maps.
“The weird thing is that when we came back from the bubble, a set of stones just appeared outside the lab building. Like there’s more than one set,” Abbey said.
Caleb shrugged. “Maybe. But we have no idea where that set is. We know where the set on the hill is. That’s where we should go.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Sylvain?”
Caleb shook his head. “I’d say he’s on his own. He’s an adult. He’ll find his way back.”
“What did they want from him? I can’t believe you followed them.”
“They just kept demanding some files. But Sylvain claimed he knew nothing about them. They insisted that they knew he had them, and that’s when he started pointing all over the place, talking about the highest point on Circle Plateau, the Stairway Mountains briar patches, and the line of zero declination. I have no idea what he was doing. But it seemed to make them pretty mad.” Caleb started walking in the direction of the train station as he spoke, leaving Abbey and Mark to follow if they wanted to be able to hear him. “If you ask me, he was feeding them a load of crap.”
“We have to go home,” Abbey said over her shoulder to Mark, who looked hesitant to leave the library. Mark pouted slightly but started to trundle after them, checking the contents of the green file folder as he came.
Abbey hastened her pace and caught up to Caleb. “Well, they obviously all think he knows something. Don’t you think it was odd that Simon’s office address was 309 Oltree Road? Is Ian telling us to look there? And Sylvain’s locker in the train station was also locker number 309. And the maps Mark was looking at were in drawer 309. And now we have to factor in zero declination somewhere? It’s too much. I don’t even know where to start.”
Caleb elevated his shoulders. “I dunno. Right now everything seems odd. I have no idea who’s good or bad, or just plain crazy.”
Abbey turned back to see that Mark was now trailing farther behind, the green file f
older open while he studied one of the maps inside.
“Mark, hurry up please,” Abbey called, and then turned back to Caleb.
“I want to look at that list on your phone on the train,” Caleb said.
Abbey searched around in her pockets. “The lesson that Ian gave us—the first one. I left it in my jacket. It’s in the locker. I don’t know the combination.”
Caleb shook his head. “We have to leave it behind.”
“What if there’s something else written on it?”
Caleb flicked his eyes to his phone. “We don’t have time.”
The shops that had been lively an hour or so before were now closed up for the night, and Abbey, Caleb, and Mark arrived at the train station unmolested.
Abbey was about to follow Caleb into the station through the sliding glass doors when Caleb spun and pressed Abbey and Mark into the shadows outside.
“Looks like our friends are here.”
Abbey carefully peered over her shoulder through the glass entryway of the station. Sure enough, the two men, Damian and Nathaniel, were moving through the locker section of the station, trying a key in each of the lockers. Abbey’s heart started to throb. Had they taken Sylvain’s key? Were they going to find her jacket and the lesson from Ian? She tried frantically to remember what else she’d had in her pockets. Sam’s business card, of course, on which he had scrawled his email and Au—the symbol for gold, the most noble of the noble metals. It was an in-joke of course, a reference to The Golden Mean, one of their shared interests.
A train marked “Space Station” cruised into the station. The doors whooshed open and several people disembarked.
It would only be a matter of minutes before it left, leaving them stranded for another twenty minutes with Damian and Nathaniel. Worse, a pair of what appeared to be police officers were now walking down the street, and one of them seemed to be eyeballing Caleb’s orange hoodie.
“Uh-oh,” Caleb said. “That’s my cue. I’m going inside. You report Damian and Nathaniel.”
“Wait, Cale,” Abbey hissed, but Caleb had already gone.
To her surprise, Mark approached the police officers. “We would like to report a potential theft. There are two men in the station out of uniform trying a key in every locker.”
Mark’s almost monotone delivery seemed to work to his advantage. The officers cocked their head at him, appeared to decide he wasn’t worth questioning further, nodded, and went inside. The PA system announced a thirty-second countdown to the Space Station train’s departure.
Abbey and Mark walked as fast as they could across the platform, and she felt the rush of air of the doors closing behind her just as she leapt onto the train.
They fell into seats as the train started to move slowly out of the station and begin its ascent to the causeway. She hoped to God Caleb was on board. After she fastened her seatbelt, Abbey risked turning and looking out the window at the two men who were now talking to the police officers. One of them—a tall, thin-lipped man with dark hair and pale blue eyes—now stared straight at her through the window of the train. She tried to look bland and nondescript. The men had seen Mark before, she realized suddenly. In Dr. Ford’s office. They should have split up and sat in different sections. But Mark’s heavy body pressed into hers as the train rounded a corner and the men flashed out of view, replaced by darkness when the train entered the tunnel that would take it out of the city center.
“’Kay, let me see that list now,” Caleb said from the seat behind her.
Abbey yelped in surprise. Caleb winked. “That’s me. I’m smooth, baby.”
“More like lucky that we decided to wear these ridiculous uniforms,” she replied. She passed him her phone with the list pulled up on the screen. Caleb’s eyes grew alternately round and then squinty as he scanned it.
Mark had reopened the green file folder and withdrawn a pencil from his satchel. He drew something on one of the maps, then thrust it into Abbey’s lap. She stared at it. It was a photocopy of a very old map. The title read “Coventry City,” and based on the street pattern and the size of the city, it must have been from before the previous turn of the century. Vast wide-open spaces that looked like farmland or just undeveloped land covered much of the map—spaces that were now occupied by houses, shopping malls, and schools.
At the very edge of the map, almost off the map, strange lines gave the suggestion of hills and mountains. Abbey tried to orient herself. The Moon River ambled in lazy loops through this old city.
Mark tapped his pencil on the bottom edge of the map, amongst the strange lines, and Abbey noted that he had written the letters “BP” faintly.
BP. Beaver Pond. Was he trying to tell her that this was where the docks were located? That the area he was pointing to was Coventry Hill? Mark tapped the map again, insistently. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Mark. Beaver Pond?”
Mark shook his head impatiently.
“Well, isn’t this cozy?” Dulcet tones punctured Abbey’s thoughts. Mark emitted a yelp and snatched away the map file, closing it as he did. Abbey jerked her head up to see an extremely attractive woman with raven hair and a brilliant red scarf around her neck standing behind Caleb’s seat. She wore shiny black leggings and a tight black denim jacket. Mark had said the woman from Dr. Ford’s office had had a red scarf. She glanced sideways at Mark, but he stared straight ahead, his face rigid with dismay.
The woman slid into the empty seat next to Caleb and offered Abbey and Mark a wide smile. The train began its ascent, and Abbey’s seatbelt locked and held her against her seat. A floral perfume invaded her senses, and she tried not to recoil from the heavy scent.
“You, I know from the night when we came back from Nowhere,” she said, looking at Mark, whose mouth had dropped open. Then she shifted her gaze to Abbey and Caleb. “And you two, unless I’m terribly mistaken, are the children of Peter Sinclair.” She extended a hand with candy-apple red fingernails filed into perfect ovals. “Selena Darby. I’m an old friend of your dad’s.”
Abbey took the hand carefully, expecting to be jolted with electricity or poisoned. The woman’s hand was fine-boned and her grip surprisingly limp.
The woman turned and shook hands with Caleb. Mark closed his arms around the green file folder and pressed his fingertips into his armpits.
“So, just out for a little adventure tonight?” she said.
“You could say that,” Caleb replied.
Selena gave a merry little laugh that seemed overly enthusiastic and intimate for the situation. “I used to just love using the stones when I was a teenager. It seemed like you could do a lot on this side, the future side, with way fewer consequences, as long as you didn’t push it too far. We used to play all sorts of glorious games, like ‘Change the Future’—you know, doing silly things in the present and then coming back through to see if we’d changed anything. We didn’t usually, of course. It takes a lot to change the timeline. But occasionally we were successful.” The woman waved her enameled fingers in an expressive manner as she spoke. “We also played ‘Disrupt the Flow.’ I’m sure your parents have told you all about it. Your dad was the best at Change the Future. Nobody could top his stunts. It was always the most fun when we had an Alty with us. That opened up a whole new range of games.”
“What’s an Alty?” Caleb said.
The skin on the left side of the woman’s mouth twitched faintly. “I’m surprised your dad hasn’t told you. He used to be a great storyteller.” She paused, and there was something in her eyes, some look Abbey didn’t altogether like. “An Alty is someone who can jump between parallel universes. They’re very rare. Even rarer than camels.”
The train slowed as it started to enter the small terminal station just below the causeway. “I see,” Abbey said. “And how many parallel universes are there?”
Another wave of the red-tipped hand. “Oh, nobody knows.” She rose. “This is my stop. Lovely to have met you. Take c
are now.”
“This is everyone’s stop,” Abbey muttered under her breath.
“We’ll say hi to our dad for you,” Caleb called after her.
Her expression seemed pinched for a second when she glanced back over her shoulder, but it was quickly replaced by a beaming smile. “Oh, no need. Your father and I have already had a lovely time catching up.”
Selena exited the train gracefully, and after a second of stunned silence, Abbey, Caleb, and Mark made their way after her. By the time they gathered together on the small terminal platform, the woman was gone, and only the faint scent of lilies lingered in the air.
“That one, we need to watch,” Caleb said.
“You think?” Abbey shot back. She was relieved that Caleb hadn’t been taken in by the woman’s beauty. She wondered if her mother knew about Selena. “Mark, is that her—the woman that was with Damian and Nathaniel in Dr. Ford’s office?”
Mark nodded, and Abbey tried to shake off the twitch of fear that had suddenly skated down her back.
They arrived home two minutes before their parents’ van pulled into the drive. Mark scuttled down to his room, and Abbey, after quickly changing out of the jumpsuit, was overseeing Farley’s rather abundant calls of nature out in the yard. As her parents climbed out of the van, her mother’s face was swollen and red, and Abbey’s father clutched her under the armpit, almost carrying her into the house. Abbey ran after them, the damp grass licking at her ankles.
“How’s Simon?” she called out as they crossed the stoop.
Her father turned, his face weathered and weary. Her mother continued on through the living room to the couch, and sank into its depths, her eyes closed.
“He’s okay, Abs. Nobody’s happy about the situation, of course. But Simon’s handling it okay.”
“How long is he going to be in there?” The cold air washed over her from the open door just behind her. She could hear Farley frolicking about in the juniper that lined their drive. Caleb emerged from the kitchen, clutching a sandwich with one bite taken out of it, his green eyes flicking from one parent to the other.
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