“Ooh.” Al peered at the charm. “Pretty. And weirdly appropriate.”
“Yeah. And … also also? He kinda told me he, um, loves me.”
Al’s reaction was not what Clare was expecting. Her grey eyes flew wide, her mouth opened in a silent O … and then she burst into tears.
“Gah!” Clare lunged forward to wrap her arms around Al’s heaving shoulders. “Hey! It’s okay! I said it back. I did. I do! I mean, I really actually think I love your stupid genius thickskulled cousin. And I’d never hurt him—I promise! You don’t have to be sad for him. Or me. It’s a good thing, okay? I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to upset you and … uh …” Beneath Clare’s arm, Al’s shoulders had stopped heaving and began to quiver. “Are you … laughing?”
She broke the hug and sat back.
“You are. You’re laughing at me. Because … that wasn’t why you were crying and I’m such an insensitive jerk oh gawd!”
Al shook her head, still laughing a little. “You’re not an insensitive jerk. I am. Here you are telling me that my awesome cousin, who’s been crushing on you since, oh, only for-ev-aar finally goes all ‘True Confessions’ on you—which, by the way, is awesome—and I get an insta-case of green-eyed meanies.”
“You did?” Clare raised an eyebrow.
“Kind of.” Al picked idly at the fraying end of a rope coiled beside her on the deck. “I mean … I just think it’s great. You and Milo. I think it’s the kind of thing I might someday want with … someone.”
“With Marcus.”
“Pff. No …” Al rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I even know the guy. We’re, like, practically strangers. This retrieval mission is just, you know, a moral obligation.”
“Sure.” Clare raised her other eyebrow. “A moral obligation to the guy who thinks you are—and I quote—‘magic.’ And ‘the coolest person he’d ever met.’ Total strangers. Nothing doing there …” Now it was Al’s turn to blush furiously, but Clare the Merciless wasn’t about to let up—not without some kind of a confession. “No sparks, no kissing, no buttockogling … no moonlit whatever-it-was you two were getting up to on top of the Glastonbury Tor that you haven’t even told me about yet because every time the subject comes up your cheeks go nuclear and—”
“Okay, okay!” Al dropped the rope and threw up her hands. “It’s possible that it’s not simply a moral obligation. And … um … it was dancing.”
“Dancing?”
“You know how I never went to any school dances?”
“’Cause they’re lame?”
“Yeah,” Al said with a dreamy sigh. “But slow-dancing under the stars to cheesy eighties romantic pop with a guy with eyes like that … and thews like that …”
“‘Thews’?”
“Yes. Thews. Muscles. And eyes—”
“And dancing.”
“It was decidedly not lame.”
“Dude.”
Clare grinned and threw an arm back around Allie’s shoulders. She hugged her briskly and then stood and stretched, feeling much less woogy than she had earlier. Squinting up at the psychedelic cloud-swirls, she noticed patches of normal blue sky starting to show through and breathed a sigh of relief—they wouldn’t be exiting the temporal tunnel into the teeth of another storm. There was nothing left in her stomach anyway—barfing Tic Tacs would be a new, depraved low and Clare refused to entertain the notion. When a beam of clear yellow sunlight suddenly shone down on her face, she felt a renewed sense of optimism. And when she looked out over the merchant ship’s bow, that sense of optimism expanded like a balloon.
“Y’know,” she said over her shoulder to Al, “whatever happens on this weird strange trip we’re on … I’m glad we’re here. I shouldn’t have tried to convince you otherwise. You never would have done that to me.”
“Sure I would have,” Al said. “In fact I did, remember? I think I objected strenuously and on several occasions to you shimmering back and forth trying to help Connal and Comorra. You did it anyway.”
“Right.” Clare nodded. “But you wouldn’t do that now is my point.”
“Nope.” Al was quiet for a moment and then sighed. “I really hope we find Marcus.”
“We will.”
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
“I am,” Clare said brightly.
“Clare … we’re on a boat.”
“So is he.”
“Not this boat.”
“No …” Clare lifted an arm and pointed in the direction their own ship was hurtling. “That one.”
Clare hadn’t seen Al move so fast in her life. She actually had to reach out and grab her by the shoulders to keep her from hurdling the railing. Like an overexcited bloodhound straining at a leash, Al leaned out over the water. The hunt was almost over. The hunted was in her sights.
“Mark! Marcus!” Al shouted, pointing wildly and jumping up and down. “Clare—look! I can see him!” Then she caught sight of Paulinus, stalking down the length of the ship toward them, the vessel’s captain trotting in his wake. “Hey!” she shouted. “Can’t this bucket go any faster?”
Clare leaned forward and squinted into the distance. No way in the world could Al have made out which teeny silhouette was Soldier Boy’s, but the shadowed shape was definitely a ship. The ship they were chasing. And that wasn’t the only thing remarkable about the view. After the unending stretches of nothing but ocean, there was land. A rugged, ragged coastline loomed to the south, silvery-grey cliffs soaring like castle battlements and topped with the dark green contours of lush, unspoiled forest. The vertex seemed to have drawn them into some kind of gulf or harbour. Or maybe it was an archipelago. But whatever it was, it was land they were leaving behind.
As the line of terra firma dwindled in their wake, Clare caught a glimpse of Paulinus’s face as he gazed at the rich, pristine shoreline, seemingly uninhabited. His expression made her shiver. What she saw there was pure, potent avarice. His was the face of a conqueror. It looked as if he wanted to dash over and plant a standard topped with the eagles of Rome.
Of course, Al probably would have shoved him overboard if he’d tried to change course. Ahead of them, tantalizingly close yet still so far away, the ship Marcus was on kept driving ever westward into open water again. It was smaller and sleeker than their own, and probably swifter, but Paulinus’s captain managed—eventually—to close the distance between the two. In fact, according to the antique watch Clare had borrowed from Piper—a lovely old windup model with a little window at the top of the dial that showed the phases of the moon— it took almost five more hours (and for Al, several bouts of impatient frenzy) before the other vessel slowed almost to a stop. And now it looked as though that vessel, with its cheery yellow-and-blue sail, was charting a course parallel to their own.
As they came closer, Clare and Al could see why. It seemed as though they were approaching their destination.
An island—a familiar-looking island—was just on the edge of the horizon. And it was growing larger by the second. Clare lunged for her bag and dug around in it until she found the Sharpie marker she’d packed. It was invigorating to know they were finally getting somewhere with this shimmer trip. Somewhere they already knew they were supposed to be.
“Al!” she called. “Where’s that Swiss Army knife you brought?”
Al retrieved the knife from her own bag and handed it to Clare, who hacked away at the corner of a folded stack of canvas piled nearby on the deck. She cut a rough square, laid it out flat on the deck, and popped the top off the marker with her teeth.
“Having a wonderful time travel,” she wrote. “Wish you were here.”
Now where in the world, she wondered, is “here”?
12
All right, Clare, Milo thought as he stood at the threshold of a stylish, sparsely appointed condominium unit with a spectacular view of London’s Tower Bridge through the floorto-ceiling windows. Let’s see where in the world you are …
“Milo McAllister, Boy Genius,�
� a thin young man with long hair in a ponytail drawled as he stepped back from the open door to let Milo and Piper into the suite. “Must be one hell of an emergency for you to make a special trip to my humble abode.”
“Humble,” Piper muttered under her breath. “This place probably costs more in a month than I make in a year at the shop …”
“Dan.” Milo shook the hand the hacker held out to him. “Appreciate the help.”
“I’m sure you will.” Dan gestured them toward the main room where virtually every flat surface was covered with computers and/or computer components in various stages of customization.
“First things first,” Milo said as he unslung his bag and pulled out his laptop, setting it down on one of the few unoccupied table spaces. “I’ve got corrupted picture files from a digital camera memory card.”
“First things first,” Dan the techno-wizard corrected him, walking over to the stainless-steel fridge in the open-concept kitchen to get himself a beer. “Can you pay for my services?”
“Don’t I always?”
“Then welcome to Casa Compu-Fix!” Dan grinned, his gaze drifting over to where Piper stood clutching her elbows beside the still-open front door. She looked as if she was trying to decide whether to bolt. “Come in, come in … Can I offer you a beverage?”
Milo stepped in front of Dan and held the memory card out to him.
“None for us, thanks,” he said.
“Right. So. Corrupted files, huh?” Dan plucked the card from his fingers and drifted across the room to sit down in front of a massive wide-screen monitor.
“Yeah,” Milo said over his shoulder. “Look, it’s no huge deal. I just need to recover the images and I don’t have time to get the OS guys to run the fix for me.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.” Dan grinned. “What are they? Dirty pictures?”
Milo raised an eyebrow. “Will it help you to think so?”
“Sure.” His glance slid sideways to where Piper hovered near the kitchen. “I have an active imagination.”
Not active enough, Milo thought. He slapped Dan’s shoulder and gestured for him to get on with it.
Dan nodded at Milo’s computer. “Depending on the level of corruption, it could take a while. Like, I’m talking days, in some cases, but I use a custom program of my own design and, if I may be so humble, it’s never failed to fully recover an image. You’ve got time constraints, so I’ll load the software onto your machine and you can fix the files yourself on the fly. The program will adjust your settings so the machine will keep running the descramble and give you status alerts even if your screen lid is down.”
“You can do that?” Piper asked, skeptical.
“Little lady,” Dan grinned, “if it’s a computer, I can do anything.” He turned back to Milo. “The thing’s a power hog, so just make sure you plug in your machine when you can. Then you can jettison the program after you’re done. No charge.”
“Thanks, Dan,” Milo said, relaxing a little.
“De nada.” Dan shrugged and handed back the memory card. He rifled through a cigar box full of USB drives and, finding the one he wanted, inserted it into the port on Milo’s computer and proceeded to load up the decryption program. When that was done, he popped it out and turned back to Milo. “You said on the phone you had something else you wanted me to look at?”
“Yeah …” Milo emailed Dan one of the uncorrupted pictures from the camera memory—the one with Al’s message to meet them there along with a relative close-up of the island. He cropped Al and the message out of the shot before sending it to Dan. The close-up shot was obviously meant for Milo, with his topographical resources, to identify. In this case, those resources consisted of Dan—who would, for a price, use his tech brilliance for even the most suspect of projects. He’d already been feeding Milo classified information on the terrain around Glastonbury Tor; this current puzzle piece would be just another item added to Milo’s tab.
And it was a puzzle.
“Hey … you, uh, get whatever it was you needed out of that other intel?” Dan asked.
“Yup.” Milo crossed to stand behind Dan’s chair and left it at that.
“Okay then,” Dan said. He didn’t press for details. He probably got that kind of response a lot. “So what have you got for me that you can’t handle all on your lonesome, there, Spock?”
Milo briefed Dan as to what he needed. It was straightforward stuff—use the topographical software and global database at his disposal to match an existing landmark with the one in the picture. Milo probably could have taken care of it by himself, but that would have meant going into the office and maybe getting waylaid by someone at OS wondering why he wasn’t working on all the stuff he was actually getting paid to work on. All he really cared about was finding the island in that picture using the most direct methods. Except it was starting to look like that wasn’t going to be easy.
After the matching program had been running for two hours they still had nothing. Not even close. They’d exhausted potential match targets off the coasts of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and France—one tiny island in the Bay of Biscay almost matched the dimensions except for white sand beaches in place of red cliff faces. Piper sat silently throughout the whole exercise, goggles down over her eyes and attention wholly fixed on the screen. Milo, normally the soul of patience with this kind of work, was getting antsy, which was not a good thing. Tedium came with the territory and you couldn’t let it get to you or you could miss something. And in this case missing something might mean missing the opportunity to help Clare and Allie. But that’s what was making him restless. He fidgeted with the ancient coin he carried in his pocket—the shimmer trigger left behind when Allie and Clare had faded into the past on top of the Tor—and paced back and forth behind Dan’s chair.
Dan, on the other hand, had slipped into a deep computergeek trance and settled into a groove early on, scanning the screen and making adjustments to search parameters as he went. Suddenly …
“There!” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “That’s … no, wait. Never mind. I thought we might have a match but the cliff face is different. Too different.”
“Yeah, well,” Milo murmured, stepping up to peer closely at the screen. “Two thousand years of erosion will do that …”
Dan looked up at him. “’Scuse me?”
Every nerve in Milo’s body suddenly hummed like piano wire. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Can you run a simulation for me on the image I emailed?”
“What kind of simulation?”
“Time and tide. Erosion patterns for that island”—he pointed to the image from the memory card—“working from the assumption that it’s in the same location”—he pointed to the image from the search results—“as that island.”
“But it’s not,” Dan snorted. “It can’t be. Unless they’re the same island existing in two different points in history, that is.”
“Dan … please. Just do it.”
“All right, man.” He shrugged. “But I’m gonna need another beer.”
Wordlessly, Piper got up and went to the fridge.
Dan cracked his knuckles and wiggled his fingers over the keyboard like a concert pianist warming up. “How many years you want me to simulate?”
Milo exchanged a glance with Piper as she put Dan’s beer down beside him.
“Just to make it easy,” Milo shrugged casually, “let’s say … an even two thousand years.”
Dan blinked at Milo.
Milo waved at the screen. “Just … make the magic.”
A tense fifteen minutes later, Dan pushed his chair back from the desk. The beer bottle sat on the table collecting condensation, untouched. “What the hell, man …” His brow darkened with a deep frown and he glared suspiciously at Milo. “Seriously. What the hell is this?”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“It’s a perfect match. Which, as you bloody well know, is impossible. Unless of course someone travell
ed back in time to take this picture …”
“Ha!” Piper suddenly exclaimed, breaking her long silence. “Told you I’m a genius!”
Dan and Milo turned to look at her in confusion.
She clapped her hands together, cocked one hip in a saucy pose, and waved at the screen. “That’s definitely going to get me an A++ in my digital art class then, isn’t it, Milo?”
“Uh—oh! Pff. Yeah.” Milo jumped to agree before Piper started winking conspiratorially. “I guess you … uh … win.”
“Right! I win!” she enthused. “That bet we had for, uh … money!”
“You had me do all this for a freaking art project?” Dan asked flatly.
“And money!” Piper nodded. “Lots of money. It’s a big bet. I have student loans.”
“Yeah, see, I wanted you to go in blind, Dan.” Milo shrugged and pushed his glasses up his nose, striving for nonchalance. “No knowledge of, uh, you know. What you were looking for. It needs to be that convincing for her professors if Piper’s gonna ace the class. So I made a little wager that you’d spot it as a fake right off.”
“An art project.” Dan’s lip was starting to curl upward in the beginnings of an epic sneer.
“Cut me some slack, Dan,” Milo murmured. “She needs top marks on this project to score a huge scholarship. And … you know. She scores …”
The sneer transformed mid lip-lift into a leer. “You score,” Dan murmured back. “Riiiight …”
Milo repressed a shudder at the smarm and grinned wryly. “Something like that.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Dan punched him on the shoulder. “Anything to help a fellow man out with the ladies.”
They looked over at Piper, who’d done a little faked victory dance and was over by the picture window. She glanced back and smiled, looking for all the world as though she hadn’t heard a word of their conversation. But when she swung her pale ponytails coquettishly, Milo thought, Oh. She’s good, and had to restrain himself from winking at her conspiratorially. Instead the two of them embellished their assumed “impatient computer nerds in lust” roles that Dan had so fluidly assigned and waited for him to finish running the last tweaks on the simulation program. Then the three of them sat back and stared in astonishment at the results. With only negligible differences, the two images could have come from the same camera on the same day.
Now and for Never Page 12