Waging War

by April White

  “He’s hurt and can’t walk,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. I looked up and registered the green, spiky hair first, then a face about Arman’s age with intelligent eyes and interesting features. “Jesus, so are you.” His voice was awed as he stared at the blood that had soaked my shirt red.

  “There’s a bomb. Unexploded V-1.” I indicated the ceiling above the last car and Tam’s expression changed immediately.

  “That explains what I’ve Seen. Right, we’re going back up.” He meant the passage and I stared at him in shock.

  “No, we’re getting Connor and getting out.”

  “We won’t make it. The Wolf is hurt, you’re practically dead. We can’t get far enough. The whole tunnel collapses. I’ve Seen it.”

  Just then the Monger shooter dropped down behind me and bolted for the tunnel entrance. Tam spat. “He’ll die. Serves him right.”

  I found I expected Ringo’s voice to come from Tam’s mouth, and it made me trust him. “I’m not healing like I should,” I said wearily.

  “No kidding.” The awe was back in his voice as he surveyed the array of old wounds on my body. He couldn’t see the sword slashes and stab wounds that I knew were under my shirt. “I’ll boost you up and hand the Wolf to you.”

  I looked over to where Connor’s Wolf lay curled around himself, breathing heavily and in obvious pain. His eyes watched me, and I finally nodded.

  Then the room went silent.

  “Twelve seconds,” I whispered.

  Saira – 1944

  The room went silent. For an instant I thought I’d lost my ability to Clock, but then the hum and buzz of the portal began to grow with each turn of my finger, and I realized what the silence meant.

  “Twelve seconds!” I shouted to Ringo and Archer. “The bomb blows in twelve seconds!”

  Ringo understood my words immediately, and he helped Archer to his feet. The whole front of Archer’s white shirt was red with blood. I was terrified for him as he struggled to stand, and I knew he’d been shot multiple times. I just barely resisted the urge to fling myself at him.

  “Ringo, get to Saira! I’ll bring Walters.” I heard Archer’s voice gasp the order. They were only about twenty feet from me, but dragging a wounded Monger could slow Archer down to a dangerous degree. I opened my mouth to protest, but it was pointless. Ringo would do what Archer wanted.

  The buzzing in my head intensified and I could feel the portal open, so I stepped back to avoid being pulled in. Ringo stopped about ten feet away from me and turned back toward Archer, who was bent over George Walters checking for a pulse.

  “Leave him! Let’s go!”

  The silence count had reached five and panic squeezed my throat.

  George suddenly clutched Archer’s shirt with an iron grip, and the flash of gold on his finger was suddenly more than just a ring – it was the Monger ring. Archer tore himself from George’s grasp and rose like a phoenix behind Ringo, his eyes never leaving mine as he mouthed the words, “I love you.”

  Archer – Present Day

  I could see her face clearly in my memory, hear the music in her voice as she promised to love me forever in that walled garden in Oradour-sur-Glane. I could see the love that shone in her eyes, the softness of her hair in the moonlight, and the smile that danced on her lips.

  And I smiled.

  The Wolf lay curled next to me, and my arm draped over him protectively. The young man with green hair crouched opposite, watching us both with concern.

  And then the world outside the passage burned hot and bright.

  And everything went black.

  Saira – 1944

  A blast tore through the station, and fire consumed the air. Heat seared my lungs and concussion filled my head with dull, thudding silence. Ringo hit me so hard we went through the wall - through the spiral portal and between where shock hit me like ice water. I blindly grabbed for a hand that I didn’t feel but knew was there, and then hit the floor with a whump!

  London – 1944

  I lay there, dazed, and then staggered to my feet and stared around me. I’d landed in the bishop’s attic at Guy’s Chapel – the attic I’d brought us to after the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.

  My vision cleared enough to see Ringo on the floor coughing fiercely.

  But no one else.

  “Archer!” I gasped, stumbling forward. “Where’s Archer?”

  Ringo couldn’t speak through his cough, and I gripped his shoulder and shook him hard. “WHERE’S ARCHER?!” I shouted into his face. His eyes cleared just long enough to realize, and then they filled with despair.

  “He pushed me,” Ringo gasped for breath, “into you.”

  I staggered under the weight of the pain his words sent searing through me, and then shoved it off my shoulders, determined to be able to move. “I have to go back,” I choked.

  “You can’t Clock into a bomb site.”

  “I have to! He’s a Vampire. He can survive.”

  Unbelievably, the marker was still clutched in my hand, and I crouched down to draw a spiral around my feet. Ringo tried to crawl to me, but I croaked at him, “No, stay here!”

  The hum began immediately, and I pictured the ghost station clearly in my mind. As I left the attic, the blackness of between consumed me.

  And it didn’t let go.

  I frantically tried to picture a tunnel filled with debris, but the portal didn’t open.

  If it had been an actual door, I would have pounded on it, slammed into it, scratched at the edges until my fingers bled. I kicked out at the blackness, punched the darkness, threw myself against the nothingness where the portal should have been, but there was no door. There was just endless between.

  Noooooo! I shrieked in my mind.

  I couldn’t reach Archer. I couldn’t get back to the place I’d left him.

  The bitter cold and dark of between filled me, became me.

  Between stole the air from my lungs and I felt the blackness curling around my brain as oxygen deprivation became real. I had only a few moments of consciousness left before I was robbed of whatever choice I still had to leave the endlessness that was between time and place.

  I could choose to let go. I didn’t have to face a world where Archer’s light was extinguished, where he would never smile at me, where his arms would never hold me again. I didn’t have to go back to face the aftermath of his death.

  A small spark of will still burned bright in me, and it pushed back against the blackness. I would not choose oblivion, because I would rather feel pain than feel nothing at all. I grabbed onto my choice for life with both hands, and I felt the dim light of the pre-dawn attic draw me like a moth to the weakest of flames. I used the last of my strength to pull myself toward it.

  I didn’t feel the impact of the attic floor when I finally emerged from between. I was alive, but Archer was dead, and the truth of it rode the breath I took and filled my lungs with searing pain. I had no strength left to stand, and I curled into a fetal ball as liquid darkness filled my core and consumed me from inside.

  Strong hands pulled me up, and I was wrapped in arms I couldn’t feel. “It’s gone,” I whispered. “I couldn’t find the door.” I felt hands tighten on my shoulders, and they shook me.

  “Saira,” Ringo said urgently. His tone snapped my eyes to his, and I saw Rachel behind him. “We can run there. Go down through ‘Olborn station. We ‘ave to try.”

  I searched Ringo’s eyes and saw raw pain that mirrored my own. I would try for him, because this was what he could do, but I knew the truth.

  Archer was gone.

  Ringo had avoided speaking to me directly after we’d searched as far into the train tunnel from Holborn station as the rubble would allow. There was no way into the British Museum station from above or below, and even if Archer had survived the blast, it would be months before anyone could dig him free.

  I was strangely reluctant to Clock forward, and I sensed the same hesitation in Ringo. There were too many
unknowns in whatever future lay before us, and we were both shattered by the events of the time we were in. So we gave ourselves a day to build our courage, using Rachel as our excuse for inaction. None of us gave in to sleep though – I think we were afraid we wouldn’t find any reason to wake up again.

  So, instead, the three of us walked. The devastation from the night’s bombing was limited to just a few neighborhoods, even so it was startling to turn a corner to find beleaguered firefighters dousing smoking ruins with water. Inevitably, the residents who had survived the bombs stood on the streets, hollow-eyed with shock as they tried to make sense of the fact that everything they owned was gone.

  The exuberance with which we had run the night before was also gone, and the effort of putting one foot in front of the other took enough concentration to keep my mind blank and empty. Rachel walked between us, and I felt like she was the magnet that held us together.

  We didn’t consciously decide to go to the East End, but our legs seemed to lead us back to the neighborhood where Ringo’s attic flat had been. The commercial building still stood, which, after the devastation of the rest of the city, was strangely ironic, given the average property value of that part of town. Ringo led us through the alley to the back door, which was locked, but in a matter of seconds Ringo had jimmied the door open and we slipped inside.

  Rachel blinked only once – when Ringo opened the closet to reveal the hidden access to the attic – but she followed him without comment up the ladder. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I gasped at the view from the top of the ladder. It was as though Ringo had just stepped out for bread and forgot to come back – for fifty years. Nothing had been disturbed, nothing had been changed. There weren’t even footsteps in the dust until he walked across the floor to open a window. He was as surprised as I was at the fact that his hiding place – his home – had never been discovered.

  Rachel studied Ringo as he moved around this space. “This is yours?”

  “It was,” he said simply.

  She looked at me. “When?”

  Ringo blew the dust off his tea kettle and turned on the gas to light the burner. After a moment of sputtering, it finally caught. “The last time I saw this place was 1889,” he said. He cranked the water tap and waited while the rusty water cleared, then he rinsed the kettle and filled it.

  I pulled the chipped mugs I knew so well out of the cabinet. My favorite had a hand-painted owl on it, and Ringo’s mug was blue. I hesitated before grabbing Archer’s green mug off the shelf, but I added it to the other two on the counter.

  Rachel examined the flat with great attention. She noticed the drape around the bed, the extra bedroll against a wall, and the neat pile of blankets in a corner. She studied the drawings pinned to the walls and the books stacked against them, and when the tea was ready and I’d handed her the owl mug, she finally spoke.

  “Where did she go?”

  I automatically looked at Ringo, but his mouth was a thin line and he cradled his blue mug in his hands in silence.

  When neither of us answered, Rachel continued. “I like her art.”

  “Yeah, she’s good,” I said. I spoke in present tense, which was pretty loaded for a Clocker to do.

  “What is your art?” she asked me.

  “Tagging. Street art,” I clarified. “Why?” I was surprised by the question.

  She shrugged. “Everyone has something. Mine is machines.”

  “Mine too,” Ringo said quietly.

  Rachel seemed surprised. “But I don’t see any here.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know it then. When we—” he swallowed, “when I was here, it was books … and stayin’ alive.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Staying alive is a worthy art.”

  We sipped our tea in silence for a long time. Ringo’s eyes went to Archer’s green mug every time I lifted it to my mouth. He finally spoke directly to me. “I like yer ring.”

  I stared at the gold signet ring on my left hand in surprise. I’d forgotten it was there, and a band of pain wrapped itself around my heart that I could ever forget something as important as being Archer’s wife. I met Ringo’s eyes. “Me too.”

  I finally focused my gaze on Rachel. “What do you want to do?” I asked her.

  “When you go?” She didn’t mince words.

  “You can come with us if you want to, or we can take you back—”

  She interrupted me. “I’m not going back. I already told you.”

  Ringo finally seemed to shake himself awake. “The Allies will win this war. In another year it’ll be over.”

  “Will it be really be over? Will I ever be able to trust my countrymen again? I don’t see the English informing on their Jewish neighbors.”

  “England wasn’t occupied,” I said quietly.

  “Occupation is an excuse to betray your friends? To send your neighbors to camps?” Rachel’s voice was calm, but her hands shook.

  Ringo spoke solemnly, as if it was something he’d thought about for a long time. “Fear is the thing that shows a man who ‘e really is. The ‘ateful ones are pointin’ fingers and layin’ blame because that’s what they think it takes to survive. Those people ‘ave always been there, but fear just shows the rest of us who they are, and because of that, they’ll end up alone. Others, like ye and Bas – ye ‘ide children and ye ‘elp strangers. Ye’ll never be alone because ye will ‘ave the lives of every person ye ‘elped to keep ye warm at night. Ye said there’s an art to survivin’? Well, I say there’s an art to livin’, and ‘ow a person deals with fear can be the difference between survivin’ this life and really livin’ it.”

  Rachel’s gaze hadn’t left Ringo’s as she processed his words. She finally took a sip of her tea and asked him, “What will you do next?”

  “I go where Saira goes,” he said. “There are things she needs to finish, and until they’re done, I’ll be at ‘er back.”

  Rachel nodded, then looked at me. “And you’re going to your own time?”

  “If I can, yes.”

  Her eyes found Ringo’s again. “May I stay here, in this flat?”

  He tilted his head. “What’ll ye do?”

  She exhaled. “I think I’d like to join the temple.” There was a faint smile on her lips. “The one with the chandeliers. I’m very tired of hiding my faith, and I’d like to find a way to help where I can. Then, maybe, when the war is over, I’ll look for my father.”

  Ringo nodded. “Of course ye can stay ‘ere. We’ll ‘elp ye stock up on things before we go.”

  Which we did. Ringo had brought World War II era money with him, and we were able to buy enough food rations from various parts of the city that no one noticed the quantity. We also gave Rachel whatever we had of value from our own bags, which had become extensions of ourselves, much like the clothing we wore. When Ringo gave Rachel his knife, it was like he relinquished a piece of himself to her, and I think she understood how important his gift was.

  I tried to dampen the noise of anguish in my brain with preparation tasks, but it wouldn’t go quiet, and it wouldn’t dull. The edges of it stayed sharp and cut me when I least expected it. Like when I first caught the silent glances that passed between Ringo and Rachel when they thought the other wasn’t looking. The realization that my eyes would never find Archer’s across a room again threatened to choke me. I shoved the pain as far down as I could push it and started to see the small things as an antidote to pain.

  Rachel was clearly aware of him, but Ringo began to notice things about her, too. He was impressed when she rewired a broken lamp and changed a burner on the gas stove. He taught her how to pick locks in case they were changed on the door downstairs, and the two of them worked together to build a cistern for the roof in the event the water was shut off. I didn’t ask him about her, and I doubted he would have known how to answer. Whatever tenuous thing it was between them gave us all a little bit of peace for the briefest of moments, and I loved them both for it.
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  After a day and a night, Rachel was as prepared as we could help her be, and Ringo and I looked at each other with the silent understanding that it was time to go. We had avoided our future long enough – it was time to face the consequences of George Walter’s and Archer’s deaths.

  Rachel knew it too, and her gaze was on Ringo as he checked everything in the flat one last time. “Will you return?” she finally asked him.

  His eyes held hers. “I don’t know.”

  She nodded and looked away, so I pulled her into a hug and whispered into her hair. “If he comes back here, it’ll be to find you. But don’t wait for him. You both have things to do.”

  “I know that,” she whispered back. “He’s rare and special and so are you. I See greatness in you both.”

  I let go of her and shouldered my bag, feeling about as far away from greatness as I’d ever stood. “Take care of yourself, Rachel. Rewrite your story and make sure it’s full of hopes and dreams.”

  She wore a serious expression as she studied me. “Perhaps we’ll be able to get through the wars and move past the deaths when we allow ourselves to dream again.”

  We gave each other the cheek-kisses of goodbye, and I stepped away toward the ladder to give Ringo some privacy. He hugged her, and his hand went to her hair to stroke it. Her eyes were shining as they stepped back, and when they exchanged the cheek-kisses, I thought he might have lingered on the last one. It was an image I tucked into the antidote box, to pull out the next time I felt the sharp edges of pain, and when we left Ringo’s flat, the glimpse of Rachel’s tears got tucked there too.

  Present day

  I Clocked us to my mom’s walled garden at Elian Manor in the late afternoon. The plants were rioting, but that was normal enough that I didn’t give the garden’s condition a second thought. The garden door was locked though, and that did get my attention.