The Far Time Incident (36 page)

“Get us out of here, Xavier!” Helen commanded from next to Nate.

“I need a reference point in spacetime or we’re jumping blind—”

“No time,” I said, my mouth dry. I felt Sabina squeeze my hand, hard.

“Now, Xavier!”

“Professor, I know where we are—Alexandria’s harbor—that’s the lighthouse—the Pharos!” Kamal shouted. Celer peered out from between his arms, his body rolled into a protective ball.

“Alexandria, yes, the tsunami triggered by the undersea earthquake near Crete—but the year, Kamal, what
year
is it?”

“Three hundred sixty-five—but I don’t know the day and month.”

“Wait,” I said, “we can’t leave. If it’s Alexandria and the year is 365, we need to check if Hypatia has been born yet. The History of Science building plaque is still missing her birth year—”

“Now, Xavier, the wave—”

We were on a narrow cobblestone street, the night sky a bright, smoky red, the air streaked with gently descending ash and glowing embers, a city ablaze all around us, carts upturned, streams of people heading every which way. My mind immediately went back to Pompeii, but then I caught sight of a cathedral, a large one with a missing spire and restoration work going on. The buildings all around it were burning and the wooden church scaffolding had just caught fire. Crackling orange flames shot up in the air, threatening to leap onto the timber beams of the cathedral roof at any moment.

“Old—St. Paul’s,” Helen coughed out with effort. “The Great Fire of London—1666—we’ve jumped forward more than a thousand years. The church caught fire on the third day of the fire, September fourth—”

Xavier was already entering commands into the Slingshot, shielding it with his body. Nate whacked at the professor’s tunic where an ember had landed—

And then it was all like it had never been. Not if I did time jumps forever would I get used to this, I thought.

And it was cool, blissfully cool, and after almost being burned alive twice, the cold felt so lovely on my face, on my hands, on my
feet, that it took me the better part of a minute to realize that I was standing ankle deep in snow.

We had arrived on train tracks. The snow was still coming down fast, the swirling, large flakes whipped into our faces by ferocious blasts of subzero-windchill air. We only had minutes before severe frostbite attacked our bare limbs and faces. A rotary or wedge plow engine had cleared off the majority of the snow, leaving behind a narrow tunnel—on either side of the tracks, snowbanks rose up to the height of a one-story house. I spun around in panic, certain that a train was about to strike us, but the snow had won: a brief respite in the wind revealed that the train was at a standstill farther down the valley on an offshoot of the main track. The black outline of the locomotive faced us, its smokestack smokeless and silent. The train and its railcars, which were stacked high with logs, had been abandoned until the blizzard passed. All there was around us was woodland and snow.

Sabina, who had certainly never seen that much snow before, covered her face with her hands, as if the cold would go away if she didn’t look at the austere landscape. That we were back in Minnesota seemed likely, but where was the St. Sunniva campus and the safe haven it represented?

Nate bent down and used his fedora to clear off a section of the track, then looked up in the direction of the train. “A white pine logging train,” he hazarded a guess. “Which would mean we’re past 1886 or thereabouts.”

“We seem to be bouncing between continents,” Kamal shouted into the wind, shivering. “An interesting side effect. It would make a good thesis topic. Might suggest it to Jacob when we get back since he’s looking for something to work on. Man, is it cold.”

Through chattering teeth, I said, “My great-grandparents, the Olsens, moved to the state in 1894—wouldn’t it be something if we followed the train tracks to the station and got our bearings and managed to find them—”

“And my grandmother’s family might be nearby, on a Dakota reservation,” Nate said. “But we’re not dressed for the conditions. We could try to make it to the train and seek shelter inside the locomotive, make an attempt to restart the engine.”

“A poor proposition in terms of our survival, I’m afraid.” Snowflakes stuck to Helen’s eyelashes and cheeks, leaving streaks in the ash and grime. Her lips were turning blue.

“The device wasn’t designed for this,” Xavier hastened to defend his invention. “I built it for jumping from a known location, Pompeii, around the Mediterranean for some sightseeing. Simple. This—”

“I am not criticizing your device, Xavier,” Helen explained through chattering teeth. “In fact, I’m rather impressed by it. It will revolutionize time travel.”

Xavier looked like she couldn’t have given him a bigger compliment if she’d tried. He reached for the Slingshot.

And we were at the edge of a lush, green forest, on the shore of a large lake—one of Minnesota’s 11,842, I hoped.

“Oh—looks like we’re still in Minnesota, but it’s summer,” Abigail said, surveying the area around us as we shook the snow off our clothes and bodies. “The trees seem right. And there’s a lake. We must be home.”

“It’s so warm and sunny and bright that I don’t care where we are,” Kamal said. He let Celer down on the ground and blew on his fingers to warm them up.

I willed my limbs to move to get my circulation going. My fingers and toes were so icy they felt like they were on fire. We had jumped to a pleasant summer morning in the woods, one perfect for canoeing or hiking or fishing, if you liked that sort of thing. There were plenty of mosquitoes on the lake. That seemed about right for Minnesota, too.

Sabina had already shaken off the cold and was bending down to pick a wildflower. Even Celer seemed a touch energized. He started sniffing around and gave a short bark at a bird. He trudged after Sabina as she followed a trail of wildflowers deeper into the woods. Seconds later, we heard the girl cry out in surprise. I saw that she was trying to nudge a small, moss-covered stone with her foot. History was blocking her. She reached for a second wildflower instead, a thin-stalked purple iris, and I moved closer to get a look at the mossy rock. My hand wouldn’t even wrap around it. For a moment I thought it was because my fingers were still icy and frozen stiff. Then it hit me. For whatever reason, the stone needed to stay in place. Now that Sabina was no longer in her own time period, she was subject to the constraints of History, just as we were. Celer, too. And that meant that we weren’t home, not yet.

“What is
that
?” the chief asked suddenly, pointing to something above the treetops.

I followed the direction of his arm.

There were
two
suns in the sky.

The normal, yellow one, was already well up above the horizon. Higher still, unbelievably, was a second one—fiery, streaking across the blue sky, such a strange addition to the daytime celestial dome that I could not process what I was seeing. I couldn’t look for long—it was impossible to stare at the fiery object for more than a moment. Whatever it was, it was
nearing
, getting closer by the minute.

“I know what it is,” said Abigail calmly. She spun Sabina around by the shoulders so that the girl wouldn’t hurt her eyes. “We’re not in Minnesota nor are we in our own time period, so we’ll have to jump again. I wish we had more of the Polaroid film,” she added.

“Abigail?” Nate asked.

“We’re in Siberia, in the Tunguska region. An asteroid—or comet—is about to explode above us and emit a shock wave that will level eighty million trees in an area of over two thousand square kilometers. The largest impact in recorded history.” She sneaked a glance up. “I gotta say, to me that looks more like an asteroid than a comet—but it’s hard to say if there’s a tail with all that streaking.”

Calmly I pondered where the moss-covered stone that wanted to stay in place would end up after the catastrophic event was over.

Xavier grabbed the Slingshot off the ground, where he’d dropped it as he stretched his fingers in the warmth of the summer morning, and barked, “Abigail, what date, remind me?”

“June seventeenth, 1908,” she said promptly.

“You’re sure?”

“No, wait, that’s the Julian calendar. Gregorian—June thirtieth. And it’s just after seven in the morning. Good to have previous experience with a subject, right?” she added.

“Previous experience—yes, of course,” I said.

“Julia?” said Helen.

“Maybe she’s becoming delirious,” Abigail whispered loudly, as if I couldn’t hear her. “Her hand looks really bad.”

“I’m not delirious. Ask me later. Let’s get out of here before the sky falls in.”

“Unless we want to stick around to see if any large fragments will hit the ground?” Abigail suggested. “It’s a matter
of some debate, whether the whole thing exploded above and there was just a huge shock wave, or if a piece actually impacted—”

“Julia, are you all right?” I heard someone say as wooziness overtook me and I staggered where I stood, which was in a columned square of some sort, in a pleasant night. Suddenly there were arms supporting me, steadying me as I sat down abruptly. I felt odd, both hot and cold at the same time, and my head swam and swayed. Helen felt my forehead under my hair. “Julia, you’re burning up—”

“He did it,” I said, struggling to break through the fog in my brain. “Dean Sunder did it.”

“Where are we?” asked Abigail. “Back in Pompeii? This looks like the Forum.”

Sabina certainly seemed to think so. She looked around the town square, its columns like blank, branchless trees in the night, with a mixture of relief and apprehension. The Siberian wildflowers fell out of her hands. I heard her inhale deeply, as if confirming that the scent of this place matched
home
. The moonless night didn’t reveal any details beyond the columns, just vague outlines of stone walls and archways. Sabina’s fingers clutched the amulet of Diana over her ash-stained dress, as if the place might disappear if she let go. Celer, by her feet, seemed spooked, like he didn’t like being out at night. He inched as close as he could to Sabina’s leg and started nervously chewing on the wildflowers.

“Did we go backward for some reason, Professor? Back to a pre-eruption Pompeii?” Kamal said slowly. “We do seem to be jumping all over the place.”

“The device is turning out to be far less stable than I anticipated, but we should not have gone backward, no.”

“We haven’t gone backward.” Helen carefully stepped over to examine one of the columns. She touched it gently. “It is the Forum. We’re right by the temple of Jupiter, but the decorations
are faded and mostly gone. There are weeds growing all around. This site has been excavated. We must be back in our own time.”

Xavier heavily sat down on the ground by me, as if a large weight had just fallen off his shoulders. The Callback landed between us with a thump.

“You did it, Professor. You brought us back,” Abigail said. She gave Sabina a hug as Kamal punched the air with a whoop.

I felt the stress leave my body. We had made it—defeated a volcano, a tsunami, a fire, a blizzard, an asteroid hurtling toward Earth…really, History itself. We were home. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could see the outlines of several modern-looking crates stacked by the temple of Jupiter, its columns bare and stunted, its glory long since faded. The marble pavement of the Forum was gone, too, dirt in its place. The equestrian statues that had stood regally in the front of the temple were missing, taken by the volcano or looters, or perhaps safe in some museum. Antibiotics were nearby and so was a good meal, a bath…and an airport. And the first thing I would do when we got back home would be to march, not into Dr. Little’s office, but into Dean Sunder’s, and look him straight in the eye.

Kamal and Abigail were giving each other high-fives and trying to teach Sabina, who looked utterly confused, how to do them. In her halting Latin interspersed with English, Abigail explained to Sabina that we were all voyagers in time and that she was one now, too. A traveler.
Viator
.

Sabina said something back, and Helen translated for me as she lowered herself to the ground by the neighboring column. “Sabina made a vow to Diana asking her to watch over us and keep us safe. Apparently Diana complied.” She added, “It’s too dark to make our way out of the ruins now. We’d be risking broken ankles. Julia, do you think you can wait another hour or two?
It’s almost dawn. The site guides and tourists will start arriving soon.”