by April White
The dagger sliced across his sleeve and drew blood, and I was instantly assaulted with a sensation of darkness and greed and pain. I shuddered involuntarily and pulled back from Chucky in shock. He lunged at Tom, who smashed out with a fist and caught the kid in the side of the head.
A bigger kid swung his stick and caught Tom in the back with it. Ringo took him out at the knees with his own stick, and Tom kicked him as he went down. He crumpled to a heap next to Chucky.
The two remaining thugs ran away, and suddenly the alley was silent except for our own heavy breathing.
“Merde,” Tom whispered into the dark. He looked at Ringo. “What happened?”
“Let’s get out of ‘ere. I’ll tell ye as we walk,” said Ringo.
Tom reached for Chucky, but I batted his hand away. “You’re bleeding, and that one’s bad,” I said sharply.
Tom held his hand up and looked at the small cuts on his knuckles. “What’s bad?”
“The little Monger kid. Infecting him would be a very dangerous idea.”
Tom’s eyebrows furrowed as he looked first at the kid, and then at me. Ringo had already started back-tracking out of the alley, and I fell into step behind him. Tom hesitated just a moment, then followed us out.
When we were back on the main boulevard, I fell in step with Ringo. “You took us in there on purpose to find a fight.”
Ringo nodded, and I looked at Tom, who had joined us. “Are you back?”
Tom studied us both. “Is that why we were in that alley?” he asked Ringo.
“Sometimes a man just needs to fight,” Ringo said as if that were all the explanation that was needed.
Tom nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah.”
Archer – Present Day
I fought darkness and pain.
Darkness had been the retreat, but now it was a prison that held the pain close. My groan felt like it came from the earth itself until I realized it was the earth that groaned and scraped and moved, even as fire engulfed every nerve ending, every organ, and every inch of skin.
The sound stabbed the darkness and I grabbed onto it, struggling to pull myself up past the pain to the surface of the inky blackness.
“Who’s there?” It was my voice that croaked the barely formed words, but I didn’t recognize any part of the sound as belonging to me. I only knew it was mine from the rough scrape of it in my throat.
A deep, wrenching sound above, a shower of dirt, and then a shaft of light pierced the dark and seared my eyes. I slammed them shut, but the red glow behind my eyelids held all the promise of a sunrise.
The sun. Sunlight dappled the darkness, and it assured agony.
I could feel the light burn my skin with its brightness, and I flinched away from the pain that was sure to make me scream. But the sounds that filled the cavern were of a machine powering down and then the shouts of men, distant and filled with too much hope.
“We’re here!” a voice shouted from the darkness near me. A young man’s voice, full of fear and joy and laughter. “Down here!”
The fire I’d expected was still just heat, and I struggled to roll away from the beams of light before they could damage me further. Pain flared with every pull of muscle, and I groaned anew with the effort.
“You’re awake,” the young man whispered. He had just shouted, and now he whispered as though my consciousness was a secret or a wonder.
“Light,” I croaked, again with the voice that wasn’t my own.
“They’ve dug down through the rubble from the blast. We’re going to be rescued.”
“Burns …” I just managed.
But did it? Did the pain that engulfed me have anything to do with the sun that still shone on my skin?
Cold hands helped push me into the shadows, and I blinked furiously to clear the sun-blindness from my eyes.
Green hair squatted in front of me, and eyes like Ringo’s searched my face. Not Ringo. He was with Saira.
Saira.
“My wife …” I croaked.
“Hang on, let me get you water.” The green hair moved. No, not green hair. Tam. The mixed-blood friend of Ava’s, held captive underground by Seth Walters.
The shouts of men were closer, and the sound of shovels echoed in the small cavern.
“Here,” he squatted in front of me again and held a plastic bottle to my mouth.
Cool water touched my lips and I sipped reflexively. “Not too fast,” Tam said. “You’ve only had whatever I could dribble into you for a couple of days.”
I looked at him in surprise and nearly spat the water I held in my mouth. Water. I was drinking water. I swallowed, and it went down cool and sweet against my parched throat. I gulped another mouthful, then reached a shaky hand for the bottle. Tam let me have it, and I drank another gulp before I finally pulled it away from my mouth.
“Days?” I asked. My voice began to sound as though it actually belonged to me.
Tam nodded. “Between you and the Wolf, I’ve become an expert in hydrating the unconscious.”
The Wolf. Connor lay curled in a ball of fur against the wall that remained shrouded in darkness. Tam’s eyes followed my gaze. “Yeah, he’s still out. The bleeding from the gunshot wound stopped though, and his heartbeat’s pretty strong.”
The shovels above us sent a cascade of dirt raining into the tunnel, and Tam called up. “Hey, watch it!”
“How many of you are down there?” called a man’s voice.
“Two. One’s hurt. And a w—”
I grabbed Tam’s arm and shook my head sharply.
“And a dog.”
“All right. Hold tight. Someone’s coming down.”
Two men, harnessed with ropes, blocked the sunlight as they descended into the tunnel. I whispered quickly to Tam.
“We were exploring the tunnels with our dog when the ceiling caved in.”
Tam nodded silently and I held his gaze. “Am I still bleeding?”
He nodded. “You’ll need stitches.”
I grimaced. “Bob Shaw. St. Brigid’s.” Exhaustion washed over me.
“I’ll do what I can,” Tam whispered. The rescuers had reached the tunnel floor and turned on their torches. I was blinded by the light in my eyes, but the voice of the man holding the torch was unmistakable.
“What a lovely surprise to see you, Devereux,” Seth Walters said, sounding quite pleased with himself. “You’re the injured one, and yet conscious. Isn’t that remarkable? Your blood must be very strong.”
I still couldn’t see anything, and the effort it took to shield my eyes made my arm shake.
“Do it,” Walters growled at the other man. Tam stood and turned to face the men, took one step, and crumpled to the ground. The man behind him held something in his hand, and I struggled to get to my feet.
“This one too.”
“Boss …” he sounded unsure.
“Do it,” Walters spat. “I want them both.”
I kicked out at the other man has he bent over me, and he grunted in surprise and pain. He lunged, and I felt a needle go into my thigh. My last thought as the blackness around the edges of my vision consumed me was about water.
I drank water.
I was awake in the daylight, and had been touched by the sun.
I was alive.
Saira – The Train, 1842
The first train heading south left before dawn, and a well-spent coin had ensured we got our own private sleeper compartment. Tom climbed straight into his bunk before the train had even departed the station, but Ringo and I were hungry and found the dining car nearly empty except for a woman reading a book by the window. We took a table nearby and ordered bread with butter and cheese and a pot of coffee.
Our voices were quiet, though the clack-clack of the rails would have covered them in any case.
“I shouldn’t have taken us to the Hôtel de Sens,” I said.
Ringo shrugged his shoulders. “Where else were ye goin’ to Clock us? And ‘e was fine on the street. It wasn’t un
til I took us into the courtyard that ‘is mind left ‘im.”
I played with the handle on my cup and stared at the steam rising from the liquid. “How many more mistakes am I going to make before I finally screw everything up?”
Ringo leaned back and regarded me. “Ye mean split time? Or are ye thinkin’ of somethin’ bigger?”
I scoffed. “There’s something bigger?”
“Well, the time stream split isn’t the biggest thing out there to someone like Tom. ‘E’s got ‘is own priority.”
“The split affects all of it though,” I whispered fiercely.
He sipped his coffee and looked around the train carriage. “The physical world was the same in the other future, so it didn’t seem like that bomb did more than kill some people.”
I stared at him. “Some people?”
He met my eyes. “Just a question that ye don’t ‘ave to answer out loud, but ye may want to know for yerself. If savin’ Archer wasn’t part of the deal, or if ye couldn’t save ‘im no matter what, would ye still do what ye’re doin’?”
The waiter came to ask if we needed anything else, and I was glad for the interruption. I didn’t want to answer Ringo’s question – I didn’t even want to think about it. Would I care that time had split if I wasn’t trying to get back to Archer?
I let my thoughts wander as my gaze drifted out the window to watch the scenery. My mom was on the other time stream, which was a huge downside. But theoretically, I could Clock back to 1870, sometime before she got pregnant with me, and hang out with both my parents – at least for a little while. Right, I scoffed at myself, because that wouldn’t cause another split.
I tried a couple of different mental variations on the same theme – trying to find a way to be with the people I loved in some time other than the one I couldn’t get back to, but nothing would work for more than a little while.
The direction my thoughts had turned was approximately as comfortable as underwear that didn’t fit, and instead of squirming around in them, I reached into my bag for my book.
The waiter moved away to take a bill to the woman sitting near us, and Ringo finished his coffee in silence.
“Did you ever read Frankenstein?” I asked him. He had bought me the copy of Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, and I’d been waiting for enough uneventful downtime to start it.
“I started it,” he said, “but then I got a little busy.”
I smiled wryly as I flipped open the cover of the slim hardcover volume and turned the page. Yeah, we’d been busy. There was a signature inside, in delicate, precise handwriting – “To Lord Byron from the Author.” I stared at Ringo in shock.
“Where, exactly, did you get this?”
He shrugged. “A bookseller near the tailor. I ‘ave the other two volumes with me when you’re done with the first. It came in a set.”
I showed him the frontispiece of the book. “Did you see this when you bought it?”
Ringo shook his head. “I didn’t open it.” He studied the inscription. “Odd that she didn’t sign ‘er name. They were friends, no?”
I touched the signature with reverence, and was startled by a female voice nearby.
“We brought it to Byron in Venice in 1818. I was so proud to inscribe it to him, even if I couldn’t put my own name to it,” she said in quiet, clipped English. I looked up, startled to find the woman from the nearby table smiling down at us. “The publishers of the first volume suggested that it would hurt sales if it were known to have been written by a woman.”
We both gaped at her, completely at a loss for words.
She laughed lightly at our stunned expressions and extended her hand. “Hello. That’s my book you have there. I’m Mary Shelley.”
“You’re … you’re … wow,” I breathed, finally giving up on finding any word that did justice to what I felt. I’m pretty sure I had the slack-jawed, glassy-eyed stare of a superhero fangirl at a comics convention.
Ringo jumped up immediately and nearly toppled his chair to shake her hand. “Mrs. Shelley,” he said with nearly the same look on his face that I wore.
“Your conversation was the most delightful coincidence, as I had hoped to find a way to introduce myself. Please forgive my intrusion, and more importantly, my presumption,” she said softly.
“There’s nothin’ to forgive, Mrs. Shelley. ‘Tis an honor to make your acquaintance.” Ringo sounded breathless, and Mrs. Shelley seemed amused.
I stood and held out my hand to shake hers. “My name is Saira, and this is my friend Ringo.”
She shook my hand solemnly. “I’m Mary. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Would you …” Ringo hesitated, looking less sure of himself than I’d ever seen him. “Would you care to join us?” He was ratcheting his normal manners up a notch, and it would have made me smile if I wasn’t so awestruck.
She smiled. “Would you mind?” Ringo gave her his seat and pulled another from a nearby table, and Mary looked at the book in my hands wistfully. “May I?” she asked.
I handed it to her and she turned the pages carefully, giving me time to find my voice.
“Lord Byron was with you and your husband when you came up with the story of Frankenstein, wasn’t he?” I ventured.
“I dreamed it, actually. And yes, we were at Byron’s home on Lake Geneva.” Mary returned to the signature page of the book and touched the letters of Byron’s name lightly. She was a slight woman with a narrow face and big, expressive eyes. Her long hair was thick and dark and pulled back into a low, braided bun. Her traveling dress was simple, but made of beautiful, richly dyed burgundy wool. There was something about her that reminded me of one of Tolkien’s elves, only smaller and more approachable. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, but then I did the math and realized she was forty-two.
“It feels like a lifetime ago,” she said softly. She looked up as she closed the book and pushed it back across the table to me. “But I suppose it was. It’s been twenty years since Bysshe died, and then Byron followed him two years later.” Her laughter was as quiet as her words. “If there is an afterlife for men such as those two, I imagine them sitting by a fire, brandies in hand, debating the finer points of poetry, politics, and the pursuit of happiness. The fire would of course burn to embers as neither of them could be bothered to keep it up, while Polidori scribbled their words furiously in a corner of the room lest they notice him and stop their incessant conversing.”
Her eyes seemed to clear from the memory and she gave us an apologetic smile. “I haven’t thought about those nights for a long time.” She held my gaze for a moment, then glanced at my clothes. “I confess, I’ve always wondered how it would feel to wear men’s clothing but was never brave enough to try. How do you find it?”
“More comfortable than dresses, that’s for sure,” I answered, relieved that she didn’t disapprove.
“I presume most people assume you are male because of your height, though I fail to see how they could maintain that opinion once they really look. I saw you walk in and was struck immediately by your carriage.”
“My carriage?” I asked in amazement. I was sitting with Mary Shelley, and she was talking about how I walked?
“The way you hold yourself. You have the confidence of a man and the grace of a woman. It’s quite striking, really.”
Ringo sighed. “It’s a struggle.”
This statement seemed to delight Mary, and she turned to Ringo with an amused smile. “I assume you mean it’s a struggle to be the companion of someone who risks becoming the target of unwanted attention?”
“On a daily basis,” Ringo agreed with a long-suffering tone. I wanted to kick him under the table. This was not what I wanted to be talking about, but she was obviously interested.
“Imagine what it is like when one is a woman,” she said simply.
“I do that too, on a daily basis. And sympathy for it is why I ‘aven’t murdered ‘er ten times over for every time she’s put ‘erself in d
anger.”
“If so, you’re a remarkable young man.” I wasn’t sure Mary believed him, and Ringo’s sense of people was finely-tuned enough that he got that.
Ringo shrugged. “Not remarkable. Women are just not somethin’ I’m afraid of.”
Mary raised an eyebrow in an expression that reminded me forcibly of Archer, and I was hit with a battering ram of missing him. “Please explain,” she said.
Ringo settled back in his chair. “I don’t know when the fear began, or why, though I imagine it ‘ad somethin’ to do with childbirth and general competence, but somewhere along the line, men started fearin’ women.”
I looked for shock on Mary’s face, but only found intense interest. Ringo’s tone was disarmingly casual, and I loved that he spoke with a shrug, like he was just pointing out the obvious.
“It’s the only thing that explains the treatment women get at the ‘ands of men, because it just doesn’t make sense that ‘alf the population of anything is meant to be under the thumb of the other ‘alf.”
“Half the population of anything?” Mary asked.
“There’s no common oppression of females in the animal kingdom,” he said.
“Fascinating.” Mary said, after a pause to consider.
Ringo shrugged. “It just isn’t logical that women are any less ‘uman than men, and since I doubt women decided to take away their own rights, it follows that men did it to clap a firm ‘and on their own fear.”
Mary barely suppressed the grin that threatened, and she turned her gaze to me. “What do you think of your friend’s assessments?”
I was thinking it was a very strange and interesting conversation to be having with the writer of Frankenstein, but I answered her question. “I was raised to believe I am equal to men and wasn’t taught a lot about what women can or cannot do. I pretty much do what I need to do, regardless of whether it’s considered ‘male’ or ‘female’ behavior.”