The Crown of Fire

  The words were strangely familiar. They were what Helmut Bern had told her before he died. “I will come for you.” What Bern meant was anyone’s guess, but here they meant one thing.

  Time travel.

  “Galina came back for Albrecht and Joan,” Becca said. “That’s why she’s here.”

  Wade turned. “Wait . . . what?”

  “Nicolaus drops her in the future,” she whispered. “After her cure, and because she knows where Albrecht’s massive treasures are hidden, she resurrects the Order. She starts laboratories all over the globe, studies time travel, makes experiments, searches—and kills—for the relics of the astrolabe—all for one thing. To come back here and bring Albrecht and Joan to the future.”

  Lily shook her head. “But what would they do in the present?”

  “Just . . . live?” said Becca.

  The air cracked suddenly, the walls shook, and the kids were thrown to the floor.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  “What the—” Darrell said. “What was that?”

  Wade watched the room empty instantly, like the stage at the end of a scene.

  Nicolaus was pulled into the hall by a pair of knights, the infant was bundled and whisked away by the nurse. The artist left with his small wooden panel under his arm. Footsteps retreated and died down the hallway. Only the frail, wheezy breaths of the girl on the bed and the frozen statue of Albrecht remained.

  The air quaked again.

  “What’s going on down there?” Lily said.

  They pushed to the window and looked down. Kronos III, hovering out of time minutes ago, was now a solid object, belching black smoke as it shimmered completely into the courtyard. The moment the spinning air slowed around it, Galina and Ebner jumped from its seats onto the cobblestones.

  “They’ll never fly that back to the present,” Wade said. “They’ll steal the astrolabe!”

  “Not without a fight!” said Darrell. “Come on!”

  They rushed down the stairs in time to see Ebner bolting across the stones to the astrolabe. “I will take the controls, Galina. Find your daughter. Find Albrecht—”

  The troop of knights marching out of the castle surprised him, and he skidded to a stop. Darrell quickly tossed a paving stone at him, catching him in the knees. Ebner crashed to the ground, his gun firing wildly. Without hesitating, Galina bounded past him and the children, and ran up the stairs.

  Lily rushed after Galina. “Oh, no you don’t!”

  Galina knew in her heart the way to her old room.

  She felt every step, every turn in the maze of hallways; she remembered the feel of each stair intimately, as if she’d climbed them just this morning. She flew up to the final landing and down the corridor, pushed open the studded wooden door, and stopped short.

  Oh . . .

  To see Albrecht staring at her younger self—to see herself so near death and know that she now was invisible—stunned her. Without intending it, she found words on her lips, and she uttered the name Albrecht had always called her.

  “I am here, dear Albrecht. Cassiopeia . . . your queen . . . I have returned for you.”

  He didn’t react. Nor did her younger dying self react when she hovered over her bed. Instead the dying girl seemed mesmerized by the in and out of the flickering light seeping in through the shaded window.

  “Albrecht?” she said. But now he was gone, too, vanished from the room. “Albrecht?”

  All at once, the windows shattered stained glass across the bed, and Galina spun and looked out to the courtyard below.

  Kronos was an inferno of flame.

  And Ebner was shrieking, “Galina! Galina! They have destroyed Kronos!”

  Nearly overcome with the stench of burning leather, rubber, and scorching metal, she climbed to the jagged sill, and jumped.

  Seconds after she saw Galina leap from the window, Lily helped Darrell connect the Kronos relics to the astrolabe, while Wade and Becca did their best to neutralize Ebner.

  He wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  Growling like a wild animal—“No! Stop this! No!”—Ebner leaped at Darrell and threw him to the ground. Then he clawed at Becca, tearing what Lily saw was the key chain alarm from Becca’s belt. But she was up again, some kind of pike in her hands, and Darrell joined her, punching Ebner flat in the chest.

  Wade jumped into the pilot’s seat. “Guys—leave him! The hole is closing!”

  They all scrambled in. As Galina tore across the cobblestones, shrieking, Wade threw forward the main lever. The machine shuddered once, and the air went gold, then black around it.

  Wade pushed down on the third lever and the courtyard faded around them, Galina, Ebner, Albrecht, all of them vanishing simultaneously into mist.

  The astrolabe streaked away farther and farther, deeper and deeper into the past, slithering easily through the years and months and weeks. With all twelve relics on board, the flight was as smooth as silk.

  Then it wasn’t.

  Just as they began to slow toward 1514, the golden frame of the machine shook violently, and the whole device spun swiftly toward a giant speeding shard of light.

  “What is that?” Becca yelled.

  “We’re off course!” Darrell shouted. “Wade—do—something!”

  “You could do something!” Wade snapped.

  “Someone do something, I’m still filming!” Lily said.

  With both hands, Becca took hold of the main lever and tugged it back a few inches. The shard of light spun by them, but their machine somersaulted and spun upside down until she moved a series of small levers on the panel. The spinning slowed, then stopped. Time grew heavy. A palace shimmered around them. The sea, blue air, mountains, hills, then thick red columns and paintings of women and griffins and birds.

  They were in the center of the labyrinth.

  In the pit of time.

  On the island of Crete.

  In September 1514.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Crete

  September 22, 1514

  Before dawn

  Wade eased up on the main lever, and the astrolabe’s engines wound down. The terrifying shriek of its exhaust faded to nothing. The thumpety-thumping water pump gave out a wet gasp and died.

  Sparks arced from one relic to the next, then sputtered and ceased. The spinning sheath of air around them vanished like a spray of mist. Everything was quiet. It was dark, some few minutes before the sun peeked over the eastern horizon.

  Wild birds flew and almond-eyed and rose-skinned figures glided across the walls, and the last of the moonlight poured like honey into the center of the labyrinth.

  “It’s impossible,” Becca whispered. “But I think we did it.”

  “We did do it,” Darrell said. “The black streak isn’t burned against the walls, which means the machine hasn’t made its first voyage yet. There’s been no hole in the sky. No nuclear event. We’ve arrived . . . before.”

  Lily let out a long breath. “Okay, guys. I’ve said it before, but it’s finally for real. If we destroy the astrolabe now, we have a big problem. We’ll be as marooned as Galina and Ebner are. You get that, right? You really need to tell me you get that. Tell me!”

  “Except that time is a crazy-nut world,” Darrell said. “There must be a way for it all to work out.” He seemed to want to smirk but couldn’t make his face do it. “I just mean, it has to. It would just be dumb not to.” His voice was weakening. “Nicolaus has to think of something. He’s one of the great world geniuses of all time, right—”

  The sky thundered and crashed. Strange coiling curtains of light crackled suddenly across the brightening air. It was bare moments before the original journey.

  “The northern lights,” said Wade.

  “And here he is,” Becca said. “My gosh . . .”

  Two figures loped across the tilted courtyard stones, their cloaks flying. One was a long-haired boy, the other a bearded man.

  “Hans, the aurora has arrived!” Ni
colaus said. “The hour of the equinox is here. According to Ptolemy, the time is now!”

  “They won’t know us,” said Becca. “Remember, this is before everything. They haven’t gone into the future. Nothing has happened yet.”

  Before they knew it, Nicolaus was there, breathing hard. He saw them inside the machine and in a flash drew his mighty broadsword, Himmelklinge—“Sky Blade.”

  “Who’s there?” he shouted. “Infidels of Albrecht’s Order!”

  “Nicolaus!” Lily blurted out. “Wait. Wait. You don’t know us yet. But do you remember this?”

  Slowly, she held up the gold ring with the seal of Dionysus on it.

  “This ring belonged to your brother, Andreas,” she said. “Of course. You know it does. You gave it to him. And he gave you the Apollo ring you wear.”

  Nicolaus went dead still. “Andreas’s ring . . . but . . . how do you have this? He wears it still.”

  “He . . . ,” Becca started, stopped, started again. “He dies some few years from now. And you give his ring to Hans. Hans, you gave it to us. Many years from now.”

  “Magister, what devilry is this?” said Hans. He was indeed Carlo Nuovenuto, years younger. “Can you children prove what you say?”

  Darrrell unfolded a small parchment and showed them. It was the Frombork Protocol.

  As if the scene was struck with some kind of magic wand, all sound was drained from the air. And movement, too. How long it remained like this no one knew, but finally, Nicolaus took the document from Darrell. He read its date, pored over the wording that would later be his own, then he looked at them with moist eyes.

  “This happened?” Nicolaus asked. “Will happen? These horrors? I wrote these words?”

  “On your deathbed,” Wade said. “A few decades from now.”

  Hans pushed his fingers through his long hair. “I think you have to tell us everything you know,” he said. “From the beginning.”

  What began then was the strange and seemingly incomprehensible story about the threads and foldings and tanglings and spinnings of times past and present and yet to come. It was a tale of ancient Crete, of King Minos and the golden treasure, of earlier selves and later selves and worlds that might be or would be or could never be, and how any of them could change utterly with no more than a breath of air.

  Sharing with him his own diary, Becca told Nicolaus and Hans about the growth of the Guardians, naming friends one by one who the astronomer said were indeed close to him. Then she explained the horrors he would later tell her about in London.

  Lily told the story of Galina—Cassiopeia—and how Albrecht would force him to take a third journey with Galina, virtually all the way to their present, and what she would do when she got there in her attempt to bring her husband and daughter back.

  Wade told about the death of Heinrich Vogel—“my dear uncle Henry”—and how it drew the children and their families’ inevitably into the search for the relics that the vast Guardian network had hidden for centuries.

  “The Frombork Protocol tells what you want us to do, what we have to do,” Darrell said. “Which pretty much proves how we got here and that this has to happen.”

  “It’s so hard to talk to you this way because we figure you know everything,” Becca said. “But this is before you go on your first journey and before you understand what time travel can do. Your friend Michelangelo calls it scientiam temporis. Knowledge of time. Traveling in time changes everything.”

  “Especially things that shouldn’t be changed,” said Wade.

  Copernicus stood away from the astrolabe, his hands quivering as he held the Protocol. “Your story itself has been like traveling in time. And those travels have all come to this place and this time. I have long known that there is a unique wiring sequence necessary to allow the relics to be destroyed.” He paused. “Hans, all our work. And this fantastical machine . . . and yet . . . there seems but one thing to do.”

  Even as the waving, slicing curtains of light shuddered and the hole in the sky quivered above them, Wade, Darrell, Lily, and Becca reluctantly but quickly helped Nicolaus and Hans unbuild the astrolabe before it could take its maiden voyage.

  One by one, the relics were removed. Nicolaus wired them together in an intricate way and laid them on the pit floor like a strange menagerie of jeweled animals, glittering stones, bizarre mechanical devices. Soon, the giant armature of gleaming gold itself was in pieces. Struts, rods, bolts, levers, all the astrolabe’s thousand parts stacked like a funeral pyre in the center of the pit.

  Nicolaus ignited the relics, and the whole mass of the machine burst into hot, white flames, an event only possible when all twelve relics were linked together in that special way. The fire rose, crackling and hissing, smoking and spitting, thirty feet high to the surface and higher.

  Hans set ablaze the scroll and map on which Ptolemy had scrawled the location of the launch site. He tossed it with the rest, where it flamed brightly for a few moments, then blended into the inferno of flames and flying ash.

  As if to seal the event, a sound like a deafening wind descended on the palace ruins. It came like a sudden storm, and the brilliant light cascading from above folded in on itself.

  It seemed to Wade as if years were suddenly flying round them—from that moment right then to the catastrophic future and back again nearly instantaneously.

  To him, it meant one thing.

  The whole fabric of time was folding itself into a smaller and smaller space, an impenetrable sphere like a black hole—if such a thing were possible. As Wade stared into the brightening sky above, the whole five-hundred-year history, from the beginning of the astrolabe’s first journey to the moment when Galina detonated the tanker, was simply taken away.

  It was wiped off the table.

  It had never happened, would never happen.

  In a minute, or half a minute, the roaring air faded. The loops of light lifted away, and nothing happened except that time passed in its normal manner, second after second, minute after minute. A warm wind swept up the shore from the west and into their faces. The sun rose over the eastern sea, and the astrolabe of Copernicus, the Eternity Machine, the great Legacy of the astronomer, was no more than a random scattering of twisted debris in the center of an ancient pit.

  “Whoa . . . ,” Darrell breathed. “Just . . . whoa . . .” Lily stepped next to him.

  The impossibility of it thundered down on Wade at the same time as the reality of it did. To accomplish the Protocol and destroy the astrolabe would negate the future, negate the flood, and all the rest of it. But it would also negate their lives for the last six months.

  “Time is always moving forward,” Nicolaus said. “An event happens, time passes, we move forward. But because of this machine, you were able to come around to this very event a second time. But it can’t be the same event, because now we are here together. Did the first event—without you—still happen? Yes. Did the second event with you still happen? Also yes.”

  “Either way, we just marooned ourselves in the sixteenth century,” said Lily.

  “Ha, no!” said Darrell. “Nicolaus, this is where you tell Lily she’s wrong. It’s okay; I’ve done it before, and she’ll get cranky for a while, but you get through it. So go ahead, Nick. Just tell her she’s so wrong that it’s not even funny, but it actually is funny because she’s so wrong. Tell her that. Start now. Go.” He folded his arms and waited.

  And waited.

  “Lily isn’t wrong,” Hans said, running his fingers through his hair and looking in that moment so like his older self, Carlo, that that wasn’t funny. “I am sorry for you.”

  During all this, Wade couldn’t take his eyes off Becca. Her face had gone pale—not from being sick but from sadness. She was thinking of her parents, of Maggie, of everything that was supposed to be waiting for her and the rest of them when they “got home.”

  But they weren’t going home.

  “We’re really here for . . . ever?” Becca whispered.
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  Wade put his hand on her shoulder. Then, realizing his hand was dumb just sitting up there like a rag, he was about to take it away when she put her hand on his and kept holding it. It was warm.

  “Forever, yes,” Nicolaus said. He looked to the east and the peaceful sea that stretched to the brightening horizon.

  Wade followed his gaze. There were no ripples, no hint at all of the cataclysm he knew would have engulfed the Mediterranean, and would likely have led to the destruction of the entire planet, if the astrolabe had ever taken its first journey.

  Now it wouldn’t. There would be no flood. No Deluge. No End of Days.

  So there was that.

  “On the other hand,” Nicolaus said, “you have just saved your world.”

  EPILOGUE

  Bologna, Italy

  October 3

  Dawn

  At that early hour, the narrow flat Via Ca’ Selvatica was as quiet as a morgue.

  That’s what Sara Kaplan thought when she turned the corner and saw the street for the first time since the Copernicus Legacy had taken over her life.

  No people. No movement. Nothing to suggest that anyone lived there at all.

  She took a few steps—they sounded harsh and loud—then stopped.

  A wall of rough-hewn stone and mottled concrete rambled across the end of the street. There was no opening in it that she could see. The stones were shaded by the buildings to the east, though the sky above was a blue as near white as she had ever seen.

  “Is there a way in?” she asked.

  Roald slipped his phone into his pocket with a breath of frustration and anger. “They found one. But that was before . . .” He stopped moving. “Strange conversation just now with Uncle Henry. He’s fine, of course, but . . . I’m sure he thinks I’m a bit crazy. Maybe, after all, you know . . .”

  Sara realized that Roald hadn’t spoken much for the last few days, and didn’t finish sentences when he did speak. Even in the few years she’d known him, and had been married to him, she had seen him do this, fold down inside himself, trying to work out a problem. Attempting to solve a string of equations so long she couldn’t begin to follow, no matter how much he wanted to share it with her.