“So you really think you have it?” Asanti said.
“Yes,” Frances said. “I think so.”
“Explain it to me again, please,” Liam said, wiping his mouth. “I’d like to know I didn’t bury my lunch at sea in vain.”
“There was always a part of the manual I was unable to decipher because, out of context, it made little sense to me,” Frances said. “Something about being a spool, rolling up the fabric of time.”
“You’re right,” Liam said. “That’s gibberish.”
“But Izquierdo’s information made me revisit it, and I suddenly understood that what they meant is that the Orb was capable of … rolling up everything around it, somehow, disrupting time.”
“So you’ve figured out how to use the Orb like a time machine?” Liam said.
“Not a time machine,” Frances said. “More like outside time than through it. Or inside. I think.”
“What does that mean?” Grace said.
“The truth?” Frances said. “I don’t know. I only know that whatever it is, it’s what Team Four did. And the Orb can let us do it, too. Which means that maybe we can follow them wherever they went.”
“Inside time,” Sal said. She couldn’t help giving Grace a long look that Grace purposefully didn’t return.
“And we’re coming all the way out here … why, again?” Liam said.
“Well,” Frances said, “because I don’t know quite how wide a net the Orb might cast, or how disruptive it might be.”
The captain let out a short, sharp whistle. He pointed starboard to a long, flat, rocky piece of land that seemed more like an apparition floating on the water than like a genuine island.
“Good thing the Church owns the kind of property that can double as a bomb test site,” Liam said.
“Let’s hope it’s not a bomb,” Menchú said.
“It won’t be,” Frances said.
“What’s the name of this place?” Sal asked.
“Testa Affondata,” Asanti said. “It means ‘sunken head.’”
“Because of the shape?”
“I think so.”
“It does look like that,” Sal said. “Like someone’s head face-down in the water.”
Sal seemed to go somewhere else for a minute mentally. It made Asanti glad that she’d never been a cop, herself.
Testa Affondata was bigger than it seemed from a distance. A skirt of shadows around the edges of the island resolved into small cliffs. A smear of darkness at the waterline turned out to be a beach. Above it, the island was covered in patches of grass with a few shrubs, a stunted tree or two. As they neared the beach they could see the outlines of the foundations where a few small houses used to be, close to the water. On higher ground was the silhouette of the ruins of a larger building.
“What’s the story with this place, again?” Sal said.
“The Church has owned it for centuries,” Asanti said. “At one point there was a monastery here—that’s what the ruins are—and a fishing village.”
“Village?” Sal said. “Looks more like a family lived there, at best.”
“It’s just what the records say. Maybe at the time eight fishermen and a bunch of monks was a village to them.”
“Though not a very self-sustaining one if there were no women,” Sal said.
Asanti laughed.
The captain slowed the boat down, brought it as close to shore as he could, and motioned for Liam to drop the anchor. Then Grace and Liam lowered the green wooden dinghy attached to the side of the boat into the water. Asanti, Sal, Frances, and Menchú got in. Grace followed. Liam lowered the crate holding the Orb down to Grace as if it were made of glass, then got in after it. Frances sat on the crate again, and Grace rowed them to shore. They carried the crate over the sand and set it down on solid ground.
“Is the Orb all right?” Asanti said.
Frances had opened the crate and was moving her hands across the device’s dials and switches.
“It seems fine,” Frances said.
“So what happens now?” Liam said.
It was a rhetorical question, Asanti knew. They’d all agreed they shouldn’t test the Orb in the Archives. They knew that Frances’s discoveries would help them change the way they moved through time—maybe even take them to the somewhen that Team Four seemed to be—but they didn’t know how. Also, it seemed like a good idea not to take the entire Vatican with them.
“We do what we came here to do,” Asanti said anyway. She nodded to Frances.
“Come closer to the Orb,” Frances said. “I don’t know how widespread the effects are going to be, and I want to ensure that it affects us all equally, to the greatest extent possible.”
They gathered closer, shoulder to shoulder.
“So do you … cast a spell?” Sal said.
“No,” Frances said. “It’s all mechanical. Or at least the outside of it is.”
“The magic wands are on the inside,” Liam said.
“Given that I don’t really understand how the Orb works, that’s as good an explanation as any,” Frances said.
“Very reassuring,” Grace said.
Frances crouched over the Orb in the middle of the circle of her colleagues. She looked up at Team Three.
“There is a very small chance that this will kill us all,” Frances said. “Or maybe just some of us. Or just me.”
“Still not reassuring,” Sal said.
“I’m trying to be honest,” Frances said.
“Just do it already,” Menchú said.
“Yes, sir,” Frances said.
She took a deep breath and whispered a few things to herself. They were, Asanti knew, the key words that led her through the rooms of the memory palace she’d constructed for herself to remember the Orb’s instructions. She began moving the dials and switches on the Orb, fast. The Orb hummed to life, delivered a rising moan that fell again. Asanti heard Frances mutter fuck under her breath.
“You have it?” Asanti said.
“Yes,” Frances said, sounding a little irritated. She recited the key words again, moved the dials and switches on the Orb, even faster. The moan rose from the machine once more.
Frances paused for a moment. Turned one more switch. The Orb lit up in a flash. In another flash, the light had expanded beyond the Orb to cover the beach, the entire cove, the rise in the island, past the outlines of the village, the ruins of the monastery. It spread over the entire island.
The sky turned a wan orange, a permanent sunset, or maybe sunrise, though there was no sun. It was the color of tens of thousands of skies, from tens of thousands of days, blurred together, shot through with blasts of pink. The ocean had risen above their heads. The ocean was nowhere to be found, and the sea floor stretched out below them, a sandy plain sprinkled with trees, as though they were up in arid mountains. All these things were true at the same time. Fish swam in the sky below them, alongside giant extinct birds. But they were all moving very slowly. The fish struggled, as if they were trying to swim through honey. The birds’ wings heaved up and down, not fast enough to stay aloft. They should have plummeted to the ground. But there they were. The boat that had brought them floated in space, offshore, underwater, a hundred yards away in the air. The captain wasn’t laughing anymore. He was running like the birds, sluggish and straining, from one side of the boat to the other. He stared at the anchor chain, still hanging off the side, attached to the anchor embedded in the soil. Seaweed had already wrapped around the chain close to the top. Farther down, the branches of a scraggly tree scratched against it. The captain looked up and gave a glacial wave. Asanti could see the panic on his face.
Asanti turned her head, or tried to. She had to put far more effort into it than she would have thought. Her head pivoted, finally, and the village was there. A small cluster of houses with gardens and tiny fences, clotheslines with laundry flapping in the breeze. Someone was burning a small pile of trash farther down on the beach, in the sand. She turned her head back, and
the village was not there. Even the outlines of the foundations were gone. On the top of the hill, she could see the outline of the monastery, its high walls, the tower on its northern end. There was someone manning the windows up there, watching the sea. There was nothing but empty space. On the beach, five-hundred-year-old boats flickered in the waves.
She looked at the rest of the group. Frances was still crouched in the blurry sand next to the Orb. She looked like she hadn’t moved at all. Sal, Menchú, and Liam had taken no more than a step away from the circle they’d formed. Asanti hadn’t realized how animated their faces usually were until she saw them slowed down. Not perfect, like a film; imperfect, unstable, quivering at the edges, like a bad dream. Only Grace seemed to be moving at a normal speed, but her brow was furrowed with exertion, her lips set. She was putting everything she had into it. Here, now, this was what her superhuman speed looked like.
Asanti heard a garbled noise from down the beach and turned her head again. Someone was running toward them, a middle-aged man in homemade clothes. His pants were rolled up to his knees. His legs were wet. Like everything else except Grace, he was moving in slow motion. For a second, he disappeared, then reappeared again a little closer to them. He was terrified. He looked at them and started to shout, but Asanti couldn’t understand what he was saying. He made eye contact with her, and then looked above and beyond her. Asanti followed his gaze.
A long, streaking ribbon of a creature was spiraling down out of the sky. It seemed more like the kind of animal that should be seen under a microscope, its body too long and slender, its enormous wings too narrow, the gnarled teeth jutting from its mouth far too big in proportion to its face. But it was much larger than that. The size of a person, Asanti thought; then saw, as it got closer, that she’d misjudged. It was the size of a car. No. Bigger. Not a lot bigger, but bigger.
It swept down with a sound like a gurgling siren. Asanti wanted to run, but her limbs wouldn’t move fast enough. Grace’s could, though. She stepped between the descending thing and the rest of Team Three and held her ground, the muscles in her legs tight, like a gymnast ready to do a handspring. The open-mouthed thing was close enough for Asanti to see the gelatinous-looking texture of its luminescent skin.
Grace jumped out of its path, reaching down as she rose to grab one fang in each hand. She pulled them apart. The animal let out three short barks, then a howl of pain as Grace, her feet still airborne, kept pulling. Whatever was holding the jaw together gave way, and the creature’s face split open, as though it had been cut in half. Grace pulled some more. Her feet were returning to the ground. She peeled the thing open like a banana, and it slid to the ground, lay there panting for a second, and then deflated.
They heard four more sirens, announcing the arrival of four more of the ribbon-creatures. A deep croak resonated from behind the island’s hill. Whatever that was, Asanti didn’t want to see it. Below her feet, she could see that one of the calling creatures was flying up through the ground she was standing on, as if there were no ground there at all.
How can I even see it? Asanti wondered.
“Turn it off, Frances,” she said. “Turn off the Orb.” It took an agonizingly long time for the words to come out of her mouth. Four more winged ribbons of flesh were curling down from the orange clouds. Over the top of the hill, they saw a tip of horn.
Frances was working the dials as fast as she could, Asanti could tell, but it was like watching an instructional video. “Almost,” she said. Two syllables like pudding. She hit a last button.
The light changed. A blue sky. White clouds. The ruins of the monastery. Only the traces of the fishing village. The boat that had brought Team Three to the island bobbed in the gentle waves.
“That … was not what I was expecting,” Frances said.
“What just happened?” Sal said.
“You said that we’d be going somewhen,” Liam said to Asanti. “That seemed more like anywhen.”
“Or everywhen,” Sal said.
“Help us out here,” Liam said.
“I think you’re getting at it,” Asanti said. “We didn’t so much travel in time as see time collapse around us.”
“The past and future, then?” Menchú said.
“Possibly. We didn’t see any evidence of the future, but maybe that’s because the Church does nothing with this place.”
“But then we were somewhere, too,” Grace said. “And those creatures felt right at home there.”
Menchú nodded. “It was a place in itself. Somehow.”
“Asanti,” Frances said, “do you think Team Four could survive in a place like that?”
She thought about that for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “They would have had to be prepared. It would have been an incredible undertaking. But if they could get there, and been ready to stay—unlike us—then they could have just gone and not come back.”
“And maybe not aged, after that?” Frances said. “You step outside of time, you stop aging, maybe?”
Asanti felt Grace looking at her. “Yes,” she said. “Maybe.”
“Um,” Sal said. She wasn’t quite sure how to phrase her complicated question. “So if we were everywhen—God, I hate talking like this—what do you make of the thing we saw flying up through the ground?”
“You saw that, too?” Asanti said.
Sal nodded. “That wouldn’t be possible if there was always land there, right?”
“I don’t know. I’m still not sure what rules were governing what we just experienced.”
“Asanti,” Sal said, “you’re supposed to be the smart one. Make some assumptions and run with it. Just give us something to hold on to.”
“Fine,” Asanti said. “If those animals fully inhabit the Everywhen—”
“Do we really have to call it that?” Sal said.
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“No.”
“Then it’s the Everywhen for now,” Asanti said. “That we saw what we saw—if we understand the rules correctly—suggests that the land wasn’t there at some point, yes?”
“You mean, before the Earth was created?” Sal said. “We didn’t see anything that suggested we were back that far.”
Asanti frowned. “You have a point.”
Frances looked uneasily around. Asanti could tell she had an idea but didn’t want to say it.
“What?” Asanti said.
“You said it seemed as though time collapsed around us. Maybe that was the part where we saw into the future,” she said.
“In the future, the land disappears?” Asanti said.
Frances shrugged. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”
“How would the land disappear?” Grace said.
Sal thought of the pink flashes in the clouds. The pink sky when she traveled with the Hand back to where he was from.
“Magic?” she said.
“That’s a lot of magic,” Liam said. “A lot.”
Asanti didn’t know what to say to that.
“It’s a very, very good thing we didn’t try this in the middle of Rome,” Menchú said. “We’d have brought a hundred unsuspecting strangers with us.”
“Amen to that,” Liam said.
“So what do we do next?” Grace asked. Asanti could see she was getting impatient.
“Unless anyone has any better ideas,” Asanti said, “given how this test went, I think we should follow our directions to wherever Team Four went in Poland and try it again. Except this time be ready for a fight.”
“And if Team Four isn’t there?”
Asanti shrugged. “We go home and keep looking some other way.”
“Do you have any other ways?” Grace said.
“Not yet.”
They heard a shout from the direction of the water. The captain was screaming and waving his hands. He wanted to get out of there.
“What do we tell him?” Sal said.
“We don’t even know what happened ourselves,” Menchú said. Asanti
detected a weight in his voice.
“Just pay him,” Grace said. “Nobody will believe his story anyway.”
3.
For the next day, all Frances could do was run ideas and theories by Asanti about what they had seen. How far back in time they might have had a chance to witness. How far forward. Whether they actually traveled in time, or time had opened up to them somehow. She’d ended up demonstrating her conception of the experience to Asanti using a slip of paper she cut from a notebook and stapled into a shape like a Möbius strip, only somehow more complicated. Then she stopped herself midway through her explanation, cut the loop into a ribbon again, twisted it another way, and stapled it again.
“We hovered, somehow, within reach of all of it, this … Everywhen, yet somehow not within any of it.” She paused again. “It’s hard to describe.”
“It should be,” Asanti said. “It’s magic.”
Asanti saw a lot of her younger self in Frances. But Frances was turning out to be more adventurous, a little braver than Asanti had been at her age. Maybe even a little reckless, and that had helped her navigate the world in which they found themselves. Asanti wasn’t worried. She liked Frances’s enthusiasm. It was good to be around her, good to see their quest for knowledge through Frances’s eyes. For Asanti, it was a kind of validation she wasn’t used to getting from her colleagues. Not that she needed it. But it was nice to have.
“Asanti? We need to talk.”
It was Menchú, his hands clasped in front of him, like he was about to deliver bad news.
“What do you need?” Asanti asked.
“First,” Menchú said, looking at Frances and then at the other acolytes close at hand, “a little privacy.”
Frances gave Asanti a questioning look and Asanti nodded her assent.
“I’m hungry anyway,” Frances said. “Be back in half an hour.”
“Is that enough time?” Asanti said to Menchú.
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