Now and for Never

  “Because he’s a legionnaire.”

  Clare nodded. “And that’s not cool. It’s not fair. To either of you.”

  “Not fair how?”

  “Because I keep thinking that, if he was some hot Druid who’d fallen for you and wanted to move to the future, or not even a hot Druid but just some regular Iceni tribesman—”

  “Still hot though, right?”

  “Right.” Clare dismissed any un-hot possibilities with a wave. “And if that was the case, I probably wouldn’t have even argued with you. I’d be all like ‘Awesome! Let’s turn on the Wayback Machine, collect the dude, and then do a musical shopping montage where we hit the High Street and transform Barbarian to Babe, huzzah!’” She did a little jazz-hands cheer and then dropped her arms to her sides, sheepishly shaking her head.

  “But,” Allie continued on Clare’s behalf, “because Marcus is a Roman … sort of …”

  “Even though he’s not,” Clare nodded, “he looks and acts like one, and so my first reaction was still ‘The hell with that guy.’ I realized, well, that that makes me a … something-ist. I’m not quite sure what. But I don’t like it.”

  Allie was touched by Clare’s honesty. And, as always, more than a little amused.

  “You’re not a something-ist,” she assured her. “And I think a musical shopping montage is one of your better ideas. Let’s go see if we can’t convince my cousin, your boyfriend, of that.”

  “Let’s!” Clare linked an arm through Allie’s and improvised ridiculous lyrics based on their adventures to a variety of cheesy musical numbers all the way from the Avalon Mists down the street to the pub.

  MILO WAS SITTING WITH Piper on the Rifleman’s patio when Clare and Al joined him, a steaming pot of coffee at his elbow, already half-empty. His food order, according to Goggles, had been prodigious.

  Al launched directly into a passionate defence of going back and getting her man, Clare wedging in her own affirmations and sound-bite backups.

  “So that’s it. I’m going,” Allie summed up finally. “Come hell or high water.”

  “I’m betting on both!” Clare enthused.

  And then Milo called her a traitor.

  But when Clare began to sputter a protest, he held up a hand. “A traitor in the service of a noble cause. Look, I get it.” He held up his other hand. “And I give up.”

  Clare exchanged a glance with Al. “You do?”

  “Clare,” Milo sighed wearily, “I don’t know if I ever really thought I had a hope—I mean a real, legitimate hope—of convincing you to stick close to the old homestead, temporally speaking.”

  “You didn’t?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s face it. You’re an off-leash beagle.”

  Goggles almost did a spit-take with her coffee.

  “I’m a what?” Clare asked a bit frostily.

  “You had that beagle named Reggie growing up,” Al commented unhelpfully. “Remember? He had that little drooling problem. And separation anxiety—”

  “Yes,” Clare interrupted. “And floppy ears. And I still don’t get the analogy.”

  Milo shook his head and pegged her with a pointed gaze. “Do you know why you almost never see a beagle in an obedience trial?” he asked, lifting his coffee cup to his mouth.

  “Because they’re lousy at taking orders?”

  “Yup.” He took a long swallow of coffee and stared at her over the rim of his cup. “They’re incredibly single-minded. Once they catch a scent of something, it’s almost impossible to call them off. You’re a beagle.”

  Piper snorted and Al nudged her sharply with an elbow. The nudge jostled Piper’s arm, knocking Morholt’s Moleskine journal off the table. It landed on the patio decking and flopped open to the back page. The girl-antiquarian gasped as if she’d just dropped a limited-edition Royal Doulton china figurine and launched out of her seat onto her knees, reached for the journal … and froze.

  “What on earth …?” she murmured.

  “What?” Clare asked.

  Piper held up a silencing hand as she carefully set the diary back on the table. Clare bent her head and looked closely. There was a … thing. A little bit of extra paper—like the corner of a square—was sticking out from the top edge of the seam where the Moleskine’s decorative backing paper was glued to its back cover. It looked as though someone had carefully lifted up the backing with a knife blade and concealed a folded bit of a page torn from somewhere else in the book. Goggles pulled a utility knife out of a pocket of her baggy cargo pants and flipped open a blade. She patiently, meticulously worked loose the carefully creased square of acid-free paper and peeled back the edges.

  Clare watched as Piper’s mouth drifted open, but she couldn’t see what had so astonished her until Piper sat back. There, lying in the middle of the age-creased scrap of page, was a tiny flat square of black plastic.

  “It’s … a memory chip,” Al said in a hushed voice.

  Piper bent over again, peering at it minutely through the lime-green lenses of her steampunk-styled goggles du jour. She held it up between her thumb and forefinger so the others could see.

  “So it is,” she murmured in agreement. “From a digital camera.”

  Clare and Milo exchanged a glance.

  Clare knew that when he’d briefly absconded with Morholt’s little journal he’d doubtless examined the thing thoroughly. That was what Milo did. And there wasn’t much that was beyond his understanding.

  Except maybe this.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “That … that wasn’t there before. I mean, I’m pretty sure I would have noticed it.” He turned to Piper. “Did you know it was there? I mean, you would have noticed it, right?”

  Goggles raised an eyebrow at him. Of course she would have noticed. Over the years it had been in her possession she’d read the diary back to front countless times, memorizing every scratch of ink, every crease and contour. The chip might have been carefully concealed, but surely she would have noticed the slight bulge behind the backing paper …

  Clare leaned across the table and plucked the card from Goggles’s grip. She brought it close to her face, examining it, and when she turned it over she noticed a tiny smear of crimson on the back.

  “Gah!” She dropped the thing on the table.

  It looked like … blood.

  Then Al picked it up. “Huh. Nail polish.”

  Clare grabbed the bit of plastic back from Al’s fingertips. Before they’d even started on the journey to Glastonbury the girls had joked about manicures and how they’d ever manage to keep theirs in decent shape, what with all the digging in trenches. Clare, ever forward thinking, had packed several shades of lacquer. One of them, labelled “Hot Tamale!,” was a favourite summertime shade.

  In fact, she had a bottle of it in her bag.

  The bag hanging off the back of her chair.

  Wordlessly she reached for it, unzipped the main compartment, and pulled out first the little glass bottle and then her digital camera. In all the excitement she’d forgotten she’d packed the thing, and had yet to take a single picture of their Glastonbury sojourn. As Al and Milo and Piper watched, Clare popped open the back of the camera, worked the memory chip free from its slot, and laid it down in the centre of a drink mat. Then she shook the bottle of crimson enamel, cracked it open, and used the brush to paint a tiny dot on the back of the memory card. As she lifted the little brush from the surface, it left a smear along one edge of the dot. Like a comet tail. She blew on the thing to dry it and then put it back down.

  Fingers trembling, Piper laid the other card—the one from the journal—beside it on the table. Its polish mark—like a tiny red dot with a comet tail—was a perfect match.

  Silence descended.

  Breakfast came and—plates largely untouched, even Milo’s—went as the four of them watched the two memory cards like a family of hawks, wondering if one or the other wouldn’t just poof out of existence given the proximity of its temporal-loopy doppelgäng
er.

  “Like the torc,” Al said suddenly, turning to blink at Milo over the top of her sunglasses. “In the tomb. Remember the tomb? You said both torcs couldn’t exist at the same place at the same time and that’s why the cigar box was empty when we opened it and Stu almost shot me again.”

  “It was a toy gun,” Clare interjected.

  “Yeah …” Al drawled. “Didn’t know that at the time …”

  “Right.” Clare glared at the little black plastic squares. She vividly recalled how they’d walked the spiral path that had magically led them through the walls between worlds and into Boudicca’s burial chamber. The exquisite golden neck ring—what the modern world knew as the Great Snettisham Torc—had gleamed in the torchlight where it lay on the cold stone slab, resting on the collarbones of the ancient Iceni queen’s skeletal remains. And how the very same torc they’d carried with them into the tomb had vanished.

  “How,” Al continued, “can these things exist in the same time and place if they’re the same object when Boudicca’s torc couldn’t? What am I missing here, Milo?”

  “She’s got a point, smart guy.” Clare gestured at the two red-dotted memory cards. “’Splain.”

  “Because,” Milo began, “Boudicca’s tomb—the inside of it, at least—had existed in a different time stream—an alternate reality, if you want to think of it that way—right up until the moment Clare went back and changed the way Connal and Comorra’s story played out. But I’m guessing these memory cards are part of the same time stream. They’re the exact same object, existing in the exact same reality, and we’re just experiencing them—it—at two different points in its own distinct timeline.”

  Clare put a hand to her forehead and groaned, expecting to hear her brain go ka-boom at any second.

  “No. No—this is good!” Milo held up a hand and frowned, logicking his way through the problem. “It means that, whatever we do this time around, we don’t alter the temporal flow.”

  “We don’t?” Piper asked hesitantly. “We didn’t?”

  Al’s dark brows were knit in fierce concentration. “He’s right. I think. We haven’t. At least, not yet.”

  Milo shrugged. “It’s theoretical,” he said. “It’s a working theory.”

  “Yeah?” Piper said. “Well, let’s hope it works all right!”

  Goggles was pretty touchy about alterations in the timeline. Mostly, Clare figured, because her very existence seemed predicated on Stuart Morholt’s having ensured that his diary—written from his entrapment in the first century— would one day reach Clare as an heirloom of sorts, passed down through his subsequent generations. Clare preferred to avoid thinking about how he’d seduced a Druid high priestess in order to make that happen.

  Shudder, she thought. And then shuddered.

  “Wait!” Al said suddenly. “We’re idiots.” She pointed to Milo’s messenger bag where it sat on the bench seat beside him. “You have your computer with you, don’t you? Does it have a memory card reader?”

  “Oh. Uh, yeah. Of course it does …”

  He reached for the bag and pulled out the sleek silver machine. Then he flipped open the top and popped the chip into a side slot. The four of them held their collective breath as they waited for the computer to read the files.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier,” Milo murmured, groping blindly for the dregs of his coffee without taking his eyes off the little rainbow-coloured “waiting” wheel rotating in the middle of the screen.

  “Think of what?” Clare asked, equally mesmerized by the spinning cursor.

  “Sending back a camera. A digital camera …” Milo impatiently scrolled back and forth through the blank thumbnail placeholder icons as the pictures loaded up on the machine. It seemed to be taking a while. “All this time you could have been documenting your shimmer trips. Whoever put that chip in there probably sent back a wealth of information.” His fingers drummed on the laptop casing. “Come on … come on …”

  “Yeah, but …” Clare frowned. “How? What about the whole shimmy-shimmer-coco-pop-electro-kablooey? Wouldn’t the camera just go Pfft?”

  It was, she supposed, to Milo’s credit that he didn’t raise an eyebrow or even ask her what the hell she meant by that.

  “I mean,” she continued, “I was always under the rather combustible impression that my time travel perma-fried anything with an electronic pulse.”

  Milo nodded slowly, thinking that one through. The magic that created the time rifts that sent Clare bounding between aeons created energy surges (or pulses or whatever) that shorted out (or burned out or pulse-fried or whatever) anything with an active electrical current that Clare happened to be in contact with.

  “I dunno, Mi,” Al was saying, forehead creased in logicpuzzle mode. “I mean, sure … Marcus’s old Walkman cassette player still worked, but that was only because he’d carried the batteries back in time separately.”

  Al’s cheeks had flushed to a bright pink beneath the hint of tan she’d acquired on the Glastonbury dig. Clare wondered what it was about the Walkman that was making Al blush.

  “No live current,” Piper said, “no surge.”

  “I suppose you could take the battery out of a digital camera,” Clare suggested.

  “What about the internal battery?” Piper asked.

  “Piper’s right,” Milo said.

  Clare attempted a know-it-all glare at Piper but was pretty sure it came off as half-hearted. Goggles had proven herself too useful and too stalwart to provoke real ire. Piper returned Clare’s glare with an unusually mild told-ya face.

  “Most cameras have internal rechargeable batteries to keep the time-stamp features and setting preferences operating,” Milo went on. “They’re not generally user-replaceable. I mean, I could probably crack open the housing and do it, but—”

  “You’d risk messing up its guts,” Al said. “And anyway, if the shimmer wave produces a surge and not a short, you risk frying circuitry with or without a battery anyway.”

  “Unless …” Milo reached over and tapped a finger on the camera casing.

  Al tilted her head. “Unless what?”

  “A Faraday cage.”

  Piper blinked in confusion. At least she didn’t know everything, Clare thought. She raised a hand as if asking for clarification in science lab. Not that she’d ever done that. “Uh, question for the Tech-Talk Twins?”

  “Yes?” Milo said, pointing to Clare. “You there in the front row?”

  “What.” Clare paused for effect. “On earth. Is a Faraday cage?”

  “Sounds like something you use to photograph sharks in the ocean,” Piper put in.

  “Oh, that’s encouraging.” Clare glanced sideways at her.

  “Different kind of cage,” Milo explained. “In this case, it’s as simple as wrapping the camera in foil and carrying it close to your body when you shimmer. If that laptop you fried back at my office was any indication, the EMP—electromagnetic pulse—originates with you and flows outward. Electricity naturally wants to travel along the surface of things. A foil package would shield the camera’s core from the energy surge.”

  “Uh-huh.” Clare nodded.

  The computer made a ping sound. Milo’s lip twitched as he glanced at it.

  “So when you go back”—he spun the laptop around so that the girls could see the first image that had popped up onto the screen—“you can take whimsical vacation snaps that won’t be seen by anyone for almost two thousand years.”

  Clare felt as if the Rifleman’s patio had suddenly dropped out from under her.

  Because there she was on the screen of Milo’s computer, standing in bright sunlight against a backdrop of sparkling waves with a red-cliffed island in the distance, holding up a scrap of canvas. Scrawled upon it were black, spindly letters (in Clare’s famously crappy handwriting):

  HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME TRAVEL …

  WISH YOU WERE HERE!

  5

  The blade pressed against M
arcus’s throat was very cold. And very sharp. He knew that without even opening his eyes, because he could feel the sting of the shallow wound it had already made in his flesh, accompanied with a warm trickle of blood down the side of his neck.

  “I thank you for this gift of blood,” a voice, low and husky and female, whispered in his ear as he felt the press of cloth against the cut. “It will be put to good use. I promise you.”

  He cracked open his eyes and tried—unsuccessfully—not to flinch. Kneeling over him where he lay on the deck of the ship, still wrapped in his legionnaire’s cloak and under an ink-dark sky, was Mallora. High Druidess of Mona, leader of the scathach. Sorceress, warrior, enemy of Rome.

  Behind her he could see his fellow legionnaires: pale-faced in the moonlight, bereft of their weapons, and surrounded by a tight circle of fierce, extravagantly well-armed women. These proud soldiers—the ones Suetonius Paulinus had assigned to guard the merchant galley and its cargo of stolen gold—now knelt on the rolling deck of the ship, grim and defeated. The scathach, it seemed, had taken the ship without striking a single blow. Three of the warrior women stood before a pile of spatha and gladii, standard-issue weapons of the legionnaire’s fighting kit. The men who’d been under siege by those same scathach for weeks, who knew what it was to fight against them and lose, had surrendered to a man.

  High above Marcus’s head, the ship’s mast was empty of ravens.

  One of the scathach cocked her head and croaked a laugh, her eyes glittering with magic, or madness. Marcus shifted his eyes back to Mallora.

  The cloth she held pressed to his neck was the hem of her ragged, feather-embellished cloak. She carefully drew it back, regarded its shiny slick of blood, and nodded in satisfaction.

  “You’re like the girl,” she said.

  “What girl?”

  “And you’re like him.” She tipped her chin at where Stuart Morholt sat with his back against the side of the ship, knees drawn up tight against his chest.

  “I’m nothing like him.”

  “He really, really isn’t,” Morholt agreed.