Chapter 5 #2
I find myself seeking her counsel on matters beyond engineering.
She listens with a quality of attention I have not encountered before, as if she already knows what I am going to say, and is waiting for me to discover it for myself.
When I asked where she learned engineering, she laughed, and said she’d picked it up along the way.
When I pressed, she said “across the ocean. Across more time than you’d believe. ” I must assume she meant it as a jest.
Abigail set the letter down and picked up the next one. The handwriting had changed again. Calmer. Almost resigned.
I should not be writing these things. And yet I find I must. She showed me the foundation calculations today and suggested an improvement I have been circling around for months without seeing. When I asked how she’d thought of it, she said she’d seen it done before.
The last letter was dated December 1788. The ink was fresh enough that Abigail could see every variation in tone, every slight hesitation. This one had cost him.
I will say only this. Whatever choice is made, I will count myself blessed for the knowing of her. She is the finest mind and the kindest heart I have met in any century.
Any century.
In the margins, Rory had written one more line, almost invisible.
Gods help me, I’m in love with her.
Abigail sat alone with the letters. She read the last one again. The finest mind and the kindest heart I have met in any century. The words reached across the years and tugged at something inside her chest that she didn’t have a name for.
They had been written to her. She could no longer pretend otherwise.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Sam, probably, checking in. She ignored it.
Outside, the sky turned black. Samhain eve settled over Fraserburgh like a held breath.
It happened fast. Faster than any weather system she’d ever seen. One moment the haar was its usual grey, the next, the clouds had thickened into something dark and foreboding. The museum windows rattled. Arthur stuck his head back in.
“That’s odd,” he said. “Forecast was clear through tomorrow.”
“Looks like they got it wrong.” Abigail peered out the window, her shoulders tight.
Lightning split the sky. The thunder was immediate, a crack, not a rumble, sharp and close. The lights flickered and died.
“Power’s out,” Arthur said, which was unnecessary.
Another flash. Abigail looked through the window and saw the lightning strike the Wine Tower, a direct hit, blue-white and violent, the bolt hanging there a heartbeat too long before it released.
The hair on her arms stood straight up. The air tasted like copper and something else.
Something electric. Something green and alive.
She was moving before she’d decided to move, Arthur sputtering behind her to be careful.
Through the archive room, down the corridor, out the back door into the storm.
The wind hit her like a wall. Rain drove horizontal, stinging her face, soaking through her jacket in seconds.
She couldn’t see three feet ahead, and didn’t care.
She ran toward the castle. Toward the Wine Tower.
The path was slick. Her boots skidded on the wet stone.
Once she stumbled and caught herself against the castle wall, cold stone under her palms, and pushed off again without stopping.
The storm was getting worse. She could hear things breaking.
Wood splintering. The scaffolding on the tower swaying in the violence of it.
She reached the seaward side of the Wine Tower. Lightning struck again, not the tower this time, but the ground near her feet, the bolt striking the rocks with a sound like reality breaking apart. The world went white. Her teeth hurt. She could taste metal.
The air around the tower changed. Temperature, density, the very texture of the storm, it all shifted.
The rain stopped falling and hung suspended for an impossible second, each drop lit from within by the lightning that was still branching through the sky.
The stones beneath her feet began to hum, a feeling like the loud bass of rock music filled her body.
Somehow she understood, in that moment, what was happening. The Cailleach had said the storm was the door.
She took a step forward. The hum rose to meet her foot.
And every nerve she had locked up at once.
Don’t.
She stood there. One hand out, one foot committed, the suspended rain hanging in the air around her like a held breath. The instinct wasn’t fear. Fear was loud. This was something quieter, the way a rabbit looks at a wolf.
She could still turn around. The door was open. She hadn’t yet gone through.
Abigail thought of Rory writing any century.
Of her own handwriting on eighteenth-century paper.
Of Sam on a board at Morro Rock, riding every wave like it was the last. Of Elaine Hargreaves and the Bronze Age brooch and every careful path she had ever chosen, watching her career narrow to a dead end.
The ink is drying as we speak.
Abigail stepped forward into the light.
And the light hit back.
It wasn’t falling. Falling had a direction.
This was a force that took her from six sides at once and pulled her through her own skin.
Pressure built in her ears past anything she’d ever felt on a plane, and then her eardrums gave way with two thin, bright pops.
She tasted blood. Her back molar on the left gave a sharp snap, and she felt a shard come loose against her tongue.
Her vision greyed at the edges, went white in the middle, then greyed again.
Something in her right sleeve heated suddenly, the way fabric heats when it’s too close to a stove, and she smelled wool and plastic and a thin chemical burn.
She wasn’t falling. She was being drawn, dragged like thread being pulled through cloth.
The pressure cracked. The pulling let her go. Abigail felt stone under her hands before she felt the air. She was on her side. Wet. Cold. The sound of the sea was very close. Her ears were filled with a high thin whistle she understood distantly was the sound of a ruptured eardrum.
She lay still, didn’t dare open her eyes yet. She took one breath. It hurt. She took another. Then it hurt less.
Her tongue found a new sharp edge where her molar had broken. Her right sleeve was black and curled at the cuff, the outer fabric scorched through, as if something had caught it at the threshold and held on, and she had come through anyway.
The sky above her was clearing. The rain was already thinning to a fine spitting mist. She rolled over slowly, every muscle screaming, and saw the base of the Wine Tower twenty feet above her on the rocks. There was new scaffolding made of timber and rope.
Something moved on the edge of the path.
A man in a dark coat was coming down the rocks toward her with a lantern in his hand and the sort of stride a person uses on a path they have walked at night a thousand times. He hadn’t yet seen her. She had maybe four seconds, so Abigail did the only thing that felt safe.
She closed her eyes and waited for him to find her.