Once Was a Time

by Leila Sales

  “What is the news?” I asked, as politely as I could, because she was an adult, and she seemed important, and I didn’t want her to tell Daddy that I’d been rude.

  “It’s not appropriate for me to tell you, unfortunately,” she said with an apologetic smile. “Your father is in the car, and he would prefer to tell you himself.”

  Instinctively, I took a step out of my house, closer to the car. I was just in my pajamas, and the night air chilled me.

  Kitty held back. “Who are you, though?” she asked, squinting her eyes. She was not trying as hard as I was to be polite.

  The woman didn’t look offended, though. She reached into her breast pocket and pulled out an identification card that she showed to me and Kitty. It had her photo on it and declared “Royal Department of Nuclear Research” at the top. “I’m with the government,” she explained. “I’ve been working closely with Professor Bromley on his research into time travel portals.”

  I gave Kitty a look to say, See? We can trust her. Dad’s re­search was secret. If this woman knew about it, she was safe.

  “Can it wait until morning?” Kitty asked. She yawned elaborately. “We’re rather tired.”

  “I’m afraid Professor Bromley would like to speak with you now,” the woman said firmly.

  My quick imagination was working at double time now. Was Daddy hurt? Had he heard that Mummy was hurt? Perhaps he had discovered the secret of time travel and needed to share it with me. Perhaps he needed my help.

  I followed the woman through the spitting rain to the car, Kitty close behind me. A sleek black car came into view when we reached the street. The woman opened the door to the backseat, and Kitty and I both peered in. It was so dark that maybe I was missing something, but I couldn’t make out a figure in there. I turned around. “Excuse me,” I said. “Where—”

  At that moment, two men emerged from the shadows. One grabbed me, the other grabbed Kitty. An instant later, he’d thrown a large burlap sack over my head, covering my entire body. After that, I saw nothing.

  I yelled and wriggled and kicked, but a ten-year-old girl is no match for a fully grown man. A strong fully grown man. I kneed him in the stomach as hard as I could, but other than a quiet “Oof,” he didn’t even respond.

  He picked me up and threw me into the car. I scrambled blindly for the door, but a second later, I felt the car accelerate away.

  I’d been kidnapped.

  I screamed as hard and as loud as I could, and I could hear Kitty screaming, too, which gave me comfort: Wherever they were taking me, at least they were taking Kitty, too.

  I tried to shimmy out of the sack, but those men had tied it tightly at the bottom. I stuck my hand down there, hoping to loosen the knot, but all I succeeded in doing was falling out of the seat as the car suddenly turned a corner. I landed in a heap, my head knocking against Kitty’s legs.

  I stayed like that the rest of the drive, my head pressed to Kitty’s shins, trying to convey through layers of skin and hair and burlap, It will be all right. As long as we’re together, it will be all right.

  Kitty started talking at some point. “We’ll pay you,” she offered to whomever might be listening. “Whatever you want, I promise our parents will pay. If you just let us go.” Her voice wavered. “Please.”

  Nobody replied.

  I didn’t know if Kitty was right about her offer. Of course our parents would pay a ransom for us if they could, but I didn’t know whether they could afford whatever these people asked for. Neither of our families were rich. Before the war, my dad was just a normal scientific researcher and physics professor at the university. We lived in a comfortable house, but it was nothing posh.

  And this made me wonder: Why would they take us? There were certainly more profitable children available for kidnapping. I reckoned that Betsy would go for a higher ransom than Kitty and me combined—though whether her parents would want her back was another question entirely.

  The car stopped some time later. Maybe after an hour, maybe longer. I wondered how our captors had gotten enough petrol to drive us so far away when it, like everything else these days, was strictly rationed. If they were really with the government, they could have accessed as much petrol as they needed—but if they were really with the government, then why were they kidnapping us?

  I felt cool air rush in as someone opened the car door, and Kitty and I started screaming again in unison. Just in case anyone might hear us.

  I was picked up again, slung over somebody’s shoulder, and carried indoors somewhere. For a moment I couldn’t hear Kitty anymore, and I panicked, becoming even more frenzied in my wrestling. “Kitty?” I screamed. “Kitty!”

  “I’m here, Lottie!” she shouted back.

  “Don’t leave me!” I screamed. As if Kitty or I had any control over where we were being taken, or whether we would leave each other.

  When the burlap sack was finally taken off, I found myself in a brightly lit, low-ceilinged room, empty except for me, Kitty, the tall woman, and the two burly men who had thrown us into the car. The room had no windows to the outdoors, no furniture, and no decoration. We could have been anywhere: Bristol, Bath, Cardiff, Reading, or a village so small it didn’t even have a name.

  Kitty immediately ran to the room’s one door, but it was steel, and obviously locked—she tugged at the handle, leaning all her weight back, and nothing happened.

  Have you ever had this experience, of being ten years old, and so small, and so powerless, that there’s nothing you can do to help yourself ? It’s pathetic. It’s humiliating. It’s terrifying.

  But I stopped paying attention to the locked door when I noticed what was on the far wall: a big window that showed another room. And on the other side of this window stood my father.

  Chapter 5

  “Daddy!” I screamed, running to the window.

  My dad had always been half-bald, but his remaining hair now looked greasy, his face unshaven. I could see his mouth moving, but through the thick glass, I couldn’t hear a word of it. I beat my fists against the glass. “Daddy! Help me! Dad! Daddy!”

  I saw him start to cry.

  Behind me, the tall woman in the raincoat spoke. “Professor Bromley,” she said. “Good evening. I trust you have been well?”

  I inhaled sharply. Because the woman’s accent was unmistakable.

  She was German.

  How had I not noticed this back at the house? Of course she had been speaking in an English accent there, holding a British government ID card, but how had I not realized that all that was fake? Her German accent was obvious now, immediately frightening, especially to someone like me, who was so worried about the war that she thought every unexpected sound might be a bomber plane, and every foreigner was a German.

  We had been kidnapped by Nazis.

  But why? What would Kitty and I have to offer the enemy? Was this part of a new military technique? Bombing London, torturing spies, and kidnapping primary schoolers?

  Kitty was next to me then, in front of the window. She grabbed my hand and we squeezed, holding on to each other for dear life.

  “I am delighted that your daughters agreed to join us tonight,” the German woman continued, her voice smug.

  I desperately wished that I hadn’t told this woman that Kitty was my sister. I had thought we were so cute. But if I’d just kept quiet, or told the truth, then maybe Kitty wouldn’t be here right now. Maybe she would be getting the Home Guard to rescue us right at this moment. If these Nazis had been looking for Dad’s children for some bizarre reason, that shouldn’t have anything to do with Kitty.

  “I’m not—” she began, but was cut off when one of the big men clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Professor Bromley,” the German woman said, “I’m certain that you recall the terms of our agreement, but allow me to refresh your memory. Option one, you tel
l us now exactly how to create a time travel portal, and you, as well as your daughters, walk out of here free. That will be the end of all of this; you go home to your family.

  “Option two, you continue to keep this secret, and you watch your daughters die. Right now.”

  On cue, the two men pulled handguns out of their waistbands and pointed them at me and Kitty. I gasped, and Kitty began to wail, her voice like an air raid siren in the background.

  The woman pressed a button on the wall and said, “Why don’t you give your answer to all of us, Professor Bromley?”

  “Lottie!” Dad’s voice came through a speaker as I watched his mouth move. “Are you all right, my love? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m scared, Dad. Please help me. Please help.”

  He pressed his hands to the glass. “I’m so sorry this has happened, my darling. I’m—”

  “Professor Bromley!” the woman snapped, her voice so German and so angry. “Will you give us the answer, or will you let your daughters die?”

  “I don’t have the answer yet,” Dad said. “I’ve not worked it out. But please give me more time. I am close. I’m so close to a breakthrough. And then I will give it to you, all of it. Just let us go.”

  The German woman made a harsh sound in the back of her throat. “We have given you time, Professor Bromley. And frankly, we do not believe you. You have been the preeminent researcher on time travel for the past twenty years, and for the past two you have had all the government funding you could want—yet still you have found nothing? It stretches the limits of my imagination.”

  “Sometimes science works like that,” Dad protested. “How long do you think it took humans to work out that the earth was round? How long were mechanics working on automobiles before they finally perfected them?”

  “I don’t care,” the woman said. “I am not in the market for a new automobile. We have been patient, but we are done waiting for you to share your findings on your terms. You will now share them on ours. So, what do you have to say for yourself ?”

  “I have given you all my findings already,” Dad choked out. “I swear it. But if you give me a little more time, perhaps I can—”

  The woman interrupted him. “Our scientists looked through your notes. Just a bunch of unproven hypoth­eses and unsolved equations. Give us your real findings, Professor Bromley.”

  “That’s all there is.” I watched Dad’s lips tremble. “Perhaps . . . perhaps there is no such thing as time travel. Perhaps I’ve not found the answer because it doesn’t exist.”

  I felt Kitty’s hand squeeze mine even tighter, and I knew why. This was the first time we had ever heard my father suggest that time travel might be made-up. Every time Justine or Mum had suggested as much, we had scoffed, because we knew better.

  No time travel? Then what was the point of any of this? If there was no time travel, Dad could have been a simple postmaster, like Kitty’s father, and Mum could still be with us, and there would be milk in the larder, and Kitty and I would be asleep on the living room rug right now instead of trapped in a small room with guns pointed at our heads.

  The German woman’s eyes narrowed. “You mean to tell me that you have devoted your entire career and academic reputation, not to mention thousands of pounds in government resources, to studying something that does not exist?”

  “I don’t know!” Dad cried. “I just don’t know yet. But if you give me a few more months—even weeks—perhaps I could find definitive proof either way. . . .”

  The woman glanced at the men with the guns. They didn’t say anything. They hadn’t spoken once this entire night.

  She turned back to my dad. “Professor Bromley, we do not believe you. We know you have this information, but to protect the interests of your country, you have elected not to share it with us. Very admirable of you, putting your daughters’ lives on the line for Mother England, but very foolish. We will kill them now, and then we will continue to track down and kill every member of your family, every person whom you care about, until you reveal what you know.”

  The room was silent for a moment, except for the sounds of weeping: mine, Kitty’s, and Dad’s.

  If this woman was correct, and Dad really did know the secrets of time travel but was just refusing to reveal them to the Nazis, then he was practically a war hero. He was willing to sacrifice anything it took to protect England, to keep the Nazis from winning. It was so brave, like the stories Kitty and I loved to listen to on the wireless.

  The only problem was that one of the things he was willing to sacrifice was me.

  I respected war heroes. But right now, I didn’t want my father to be a hero. I wanted him to be my dad.

  “Please . . .” Dad whispered.

  And perhaps he said more, but I stopped listening. Because I saw something.

  It was near the right side of the room, about three feet tall and two feet wide. It was flat, almost like a sheet of loose-leaf paper; a patch of air that looked a little bit iridescent, a little bit ripply, like a pool of water with oil spilt in it. Like a small, flat, ruffled curtain made of air.

  In other words, it looked like a time travel portal.

  Or at least, it looked like what I thought a time travel portal looked like. But of course I didn’t know. Did anyone?

  I tried to catch Dad’s eye through the glass and get him to follow my gaze to the portal. But it didn’t work; he was too busy staring at me, like he was trying to commit to memory the daughter he would never see again. And I realized that because the portal was flat, he wouldn’t have been able to see it from his angle, anyway. It was possible that the only one who could see it was me.

  Think, Lottie. Think.

  What did I know about time travel portals?

  “Professor Bromley, we will give you the count of five,” the German woman said. “Then we shoot.”

  The two men cocked their guns.

  “Five.”

  There are time travel portals. They open up at random, and they exist only briefly. But if you step through a portal during the few seconds that it’s open, you will be transported through time and space.

  “Four.”

  Kitty’s fingers interlaced with my own, and her eyes found mine. Was there a way to tell her about the portal without saying anything? I tilted my head toward it and cast my gaze over to it and back again.

  She looked. She didn’t see. Wrong angle, again.

  If you go through one of these portals, you have no idea where you’re going to wind up. Or when you’re going to wind up.

  “Three.”

  I tugged at Kitty, but she stayed stock-still, like an animal caught in a trap. I tried with all my might to beam a thought at her, as if I was sending her another image from a Zener card. Look, Kitty. Look. There’s a portal there, look. Never had I wished for something as hard as I wished in that moment for our telepathy to be real.

  The bigger problem is not that you don’t know where or when in time the portal will take you. The bigger problem is that you would never be able to find your way back home.

  “Two.”

  “I love you,” I whispered to Kitty.

  “I will always love you,” she whispered back.

  If you are ever given the opportunity to go through a portal, you had better be absolutely certain that you can handle never coming back.

  “One.”

  In that moment, I could have tried to pull Kitty with me. It might not have worked, but I could have tried.

  Instead I dropped her hand and ran the few feet between me and the shimmery bit of air. I heard a scream behind me, and the crack of a bullet.

  I jumped.

  A whirling dizziness. A dazzling pain. Then, darkness.

  Chapter 6

  I was vomiting before I even opened my eyes. It hurt worse than anything: worse than the time I got sick
from traveling on the train to London, worse than the time a couple of years ago when I ate undercooked meat and spent the next two days in the lavatory. It felt like my intestines were going to come spewing out of my mouth. Dad hadn’t warned me about this part of time travel.

  Because Dad had never done it. So he hadn’t known.

  When my retching finally slowed down, I inhaled a deep breath. Air. So I wasn’t in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  That was something, at least.

  I opened my eyes. I was lying on grass. It was hot.

  That was as much as I could get right now.

  I reminded myself that I was alive, and that this was a good thing. But it didn’t feel like a good thing right then. It felt overwhelming. I curled my legs in toward my stomach and held on to them as tight as I could. I focused on breathing. Nothing more. Just breathing.

  I lay still for a while as I waited for energy to seep back into my body. I was reminded of Aunt Matilda’s old cat, Spots, who died last year. Spots had had seizures sometimes. They would come out of nowhere, making her thrash and jerk and foam at the mouth. Then she’d lie still. That meant the seizure was over. It would take Spots a long time to regain the ability to stand up and walk around. Aunt Matilda said she was “resolving herself.”

  That’s what I was doing: resolving myself.

  After a long while, I sat up, and immediately I turned to look for Kitty. But of course Kitty wasn’t here. For the first time in my life, Kitty was nowhere to be found.

  I could not think about that yet.

  It was very hot. And sunny. Not a single cloud in the sky. A far cry from the dark night that I had left behind, and the rainy day before that. We almost never got sun like this in Bristol, and when we did everyone would run outside to play, because we didn’t know how long the good weather would last.