CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Duncan
Duncan stepped through the gate, and the world took him apart.
For one instant, his hand held Ceci’s. Archie’s weight dragged against his other side.
The estate key pressed cold between their joined palms. The red gate blazed around them, iron, paint, wet wood, stone, dawn, and then none of those things held their shape.
The ground vanished.
The air vanished.
His body remained only as points of contact. Ceci’s fingers locked around his. Archie’s sleeve twisted beneath his grip. The key cut into his palm.
Everything else broke open.
He had expected pain. Perhaps he had needed to expect it, because pain could be understood.
Pain had a sequence. A wound. A breath. A hand pressed to the place of damage.
This was stranger. It had no center. The crossing entered every part of him at once and found doors he had never opened.
His mother’s hand at his hair when he was feverish.
Archie at fourteen, laughing too loudly in a school corridor because no one had yet taught him the exact price of being seen. Sabrina in the garden at midnight, shoes in one hand, telling him a truth she trusted him to keep.
Grace as a child in the east corridor, one hand on the banister, looking at the house as if she already understood it would ask too much of her. Ceci in the library, saying she arranged disorder so things could be found.
Then Archie again. Older. Firelit. Mouth open beneath Duncan’s. Breath shaking against him. Years lost between them and, at last, no space left to pretend those years had been empty.
Ceci again. Her hair loose. Her hand reaching for him in the dark. Her voice saying yes with fear and certainty braided so tightly that he had wanted to kneel from the force of it. The crossing gathered all of it.
Then it pulled.
Duncan held on.
He had held men under shellfire. He had held his brother’s hand in fever. He had held Archie back from several disasters and failed to prevent several more. He had held his own grief so long it had become indistinguishable from character.
None of that mattered.
The gate pulled harder.
Archie’s grip slipped.
Duncan felt it happen before he understood it.
No.
The word never reached his mouth. He reached for Archie with both hands and lost Ceci.
Terror split through him.
Then light struck his eyes. He hit the ground on his side, hard enough to drive the breath from his body.
For several seconds, Duncan knew only impact.
Mud beneath his cheek. Wet grass in his mouth.
A roaring sound he could not place. Something sharp in his palm.
The taste of blood, though he could not tell whose.
Then the world returned with terrible precision.
He was outside.
It was raining lightly.
The sky had opened into a gray morning. A dog barked somewhere far off, or perhaps that was memory carrying Ginger across eighty-five years.
Duncan pushed himself up.
The first thing he saw was stone.
Old Hawarden.
The ruins stood around him but changed. The same broken walls rose from the hill, the same old arch, the same sense of a place that had endured insult and weather with equal contempt.
Yet the approach was altered. There was a modern fence where none had been.
A small sign stood near the path, bright with lettering too clean, too uniform.
A metal bin sat beside it. A thin black post held a square device that stared at him with a glass eye.
The gate was closed.
The red gate, the impossible gate, stood shut inside the arch.
No shimmer.
No Voss.
No light.
Only wet wood and iron latch. Duncan stared at it until the roaring came again.
It passed overhead.
He dropped flat, one arm over his head, reaching with the other for the pistol that was no longer in his hand.
The sound grew monstrous, a vast mechanical thunder tearing across the sky.
He looked up just as a silver shape cut through the cloud, smaller with every second, leaving a pale scar behind it.
An aircraft.
No.
Something beyond any aircraft he had known. It moved too fast. Too high. Too certain of its own violence against distance. He forced himself upright, heart striking his ribs like a fist.
“Ceci.”
The name came out raw.
No answer.
“Archie.”
A groan came from behind the low wall. Duncan turned, and his knee slid in mud.
Archie lay half on the path, half in the grass, one arm folded awkwardly beneath him, face turned toward the rain.
His coat was torn at the shoulder. Blood marked his mouth again.
His eyes were closed. Duncan reached him on his hands and knees.
“Archie.”
Archie did not move.
Duncan’s hand went to his throat.
A pulse.
Fast. Present.
Alive.
The relief was so sharp it bordered on pain.
“Archie. Wake up.”
He turned him carefully, mindful of the ribs, though his own hands were shaking badly enough to make care difficult.
Archie’s head lolled against his arm.
“Do not do this.”
Archie’s lashes moved.
Duncan bent closer. “Archie.”
One blue eye opened, unfocused and furious.
“If this is heaven,” Archie rasped, “the landscaping lacks imagination.”
Duncan nearly laughed.
The sound came out wrong. He pressed his forehead to Archie’s temple instead.
Archie breathed against him. “Duncan?”
“Yes.”
“We crossed?”
“I think so.”
“Ceci?”
The question cut through the relief.
Duncan lifted his head.
The ruins blurred for a second, not from the gate, from fear.
“Ceci!”
This time, his voice tore across the wet morning. A sound answered from beyond the arch.
Small. Human. Hurt.
“Here.”
Duncan was moving before the word finished. Archie tried to follow and failed with a curse. Duncan ignored the sound because he had no room in him for two terrors at once.
Ceci lay near the far side of the gate, curled against the base of the stone wall.
One hand clutched the estate key so tightly that rust and mud had stained her palm.
Her coat had twisted beneath her. Her hair had come almost entirely free, dark against the wet grass.
For one awful heartbeat, she did not look like a woman who had crossed time. She looked like a body left by it.
Then she turned her face toward him.
“I’m okay,” she said.
He made a sound he would never willingly describe.
He was on his knees beside her, hands moving over her shoulders, her arms, her face, searching for blood, fracture, proof of damage.
“Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That is not an answer.”
She blinked up at him; rain caught in her lashes. “I landed like absolute garbage.”
His laugh escaped before he could stop it, broken and almost angry.
Then he kissed her.
No grace. No thought. His hand at her cheek, her mouth cold from rain and warm beneath it, alive, alive, alive, alive.
She made a small sound against him and reached for his coat. He drew back only because Archie called from the path.
“I’m delighted everyone is alive, but I have been abandoned with several injuries and a view of something that looks like an iron coffin on wheels.”
Ceci’s eyes widened.
Duncan turned.
Beyond the trees, down the hill where the modern road cut past the grounds, a car moved between hedges, dark and sleek and utterly wrong. Then another followed, its headlights burning white in the morning gloom. Archie stared at them from the path, propped on one elbow. “They are everywhere.”
Ceci sat up too fast and grabbed Duncan’s sleeve when dizziness struck. “Cars.”
“I had gathered they were vehicles,” Archie said. “They move too quietly for anything that fast.”
A laugh burst out of her, then became a sob she tried to swallow. Duncan pulled her against him. For a moment, she let herself fold into his chest. He held her there and looked across her shoulder at the world.
The future had morning in it.
That seemed impossible.
He had expected spectacle, perhaps. Towers of glass. Smoke. Sirens. Some clear proclamation that the world had remade itself. Instead, there was wet grass, distant traffic, a sign with visiting hours, a plastic bottle caught in the hedge, and an aircraft fading behind cloud.
The ordinary persisted.
That frightened him more than grandeur would have done.
Ceci pulled back sharply. “My phone.”
Duncan stared at her. “What?”
“My phone. I had it in my pocket.”
She patted her coat, then her dress, then looked wildly around the grass. Archie, still on the path, pointed weakly toward the arch. “Is that the satanic black rectangle?”
Ceci scrambled toward it.
Duncan rose to help her, but Archie tried to stand again and nearly collapsed. Duncan swore under his breath and went back to him.
“Stop moving.”
“I dislike being left out of discoveries.”
“You dislike everything that does not center you.”
“False. I admire pavements now.”
Duncan hauled him carefully to a sitting position. Archie’s face went colorless.
“Breathe.”
“I am.”
“Deeper.”
“If I breathe deeper, I may become religious.”
Ceci returned with the phone in both hands. The screen was cracked across one corner.
It was still lit.
Her face, already pale, went white in a new way.
“What is it?” Duncan asked. She did not answer at once.
Archie looked up. “Ceci.”
She turned the screen toward them.
The date read:
1 November 2023.
Beneath it, in the upper corner, tiny symbols glowed. A signal. A battery. One percent. Ceci stared at it as if it might vanish under too much attention.
“We’re here,” she whispered.
Archie closed his eyes.
Duncan looked at the numbers. They meant nothing and everything.
2023
The year had no shape in his mind. It was too large, too distant, a cliff with no visible bottom. Yet Ceci’s face made it real. Her century had found her again. Then the phone buzzed in her hand. All three of them flinched.
Ceci looked down.
Her breath caught.
“What?” Archie demanded.
“It’s my calendar.”
Duncan looked at the object with mounting suspicion. “Your calendar speaks?”
“It reminds me.”
“Of what?”