CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Ceci
Gladstone Library (Llyfrgell Gladstone)
Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales
“They’re with me.”
The sentence came out too quickly. Ceci heard it and knew at once she had made a claim larger than the lie required.
The woman at the desk heard it too. Her expression shifted from concern to something more careful, her eyes moving over Duncan’s ruined coat, Archie’s bloodied mouth, the mud on Ceci’s hem, the three of them standing too close together beneath the bright lobby lights.
“With you,” the woman repeated.
“Yes.”
Archie leaned more heavily against Ceci’s side. “Devotedly, I’m afraid.”
The woman blinked at him. Duncan’s hand tightened at Archie’s back. A warning. A support. Both. Ceci summoned every professional, middle-aged, customer-service-adjacent skill she possessed and smiled with the exact amount of embarrassment that made people stop asking the most useful questions.
“There was an accident at the ruins,” she said. “We were doing a photography thing. It was stupid. Very muddy. He slipped against the stone.”
“A photography thing?” the woman asked. Ceci could feel Duncan turn that phrase over and find it lacking.
“Costume research,” Ceci added, which somehow made it worse and better at the same time. “I know how this looks.”
The woman’s eyes said she did not think Ceci knew how this looked at all. Archie lifted one hand weakly. “I object to the implication that I chose this shirt for research purposes.”
“You should sit,” the woman said.
“Yes,” Duncan replied at once.
Archie looked at him. “Et tu, future Duncan?”
Ceci almost laughed.
The woman did not.
“Do you need an ambulance?”
“No,” Ceci said.
“Yes,” Duncan said.
Archie closed his eyes. “A united front. Inspirational.”
Ceci looked at Duncan. “We can’t.”
His eyes met hers.
He understood enough. No identity. No records. No possible explanation for two men who had appeared out of nowhere, dressed like the late 1930s and carrying injuries from a fight with a fascist time traveler at dawn. The woman at the desk looked unconvinced. “He’s bleeding.”
“It’s a reopened cut,” Ceci said. “I can clean it. If he has trouble breathing, if he gets dizzy, if anything worsens, I’ll call emergency services myself.”
“You’re sure?”
No.
No, she was not sure of anything.
The phone in her pocket had one percent battery.
Archie might have a cracked rib. Duncan was staring at the overhead lights as though they were quiet stars arranged by hostile engineers.
Voss had vanished into time or been torn apart by it.
Sabrina and Grace had either watched them disappear fifteen minutes ago or had lived, aged, and died after preserving a house for a future that now stood dripping mud in a lobby.
Ceci was not sure.
She nodded.
“I’m sure enough for the next ten minutes.”
That answer, oddly, seemed to work better than a perfect lie. The woman glanced toward the corridor behind the desk. “I’ll get the first-aid kit.”
“Thank you.”
“And towels.”
“Also, thank you.”
“And you should get him out of public view.”
“Yes.”
That part, at least, was painfully true. Ceci shifted Archie’s weight more securely under her arm. Duncan took more of him without being asked. They made uneven progress across the entrance hall toward the stairs, leaving damp marks behind them on the floor.
Archie looked down. “We are making a trail.”
“Helpful if we get lost,” Ceci said.
Duncan’s gaze moved over the lobby with rigid restraint. “Where are we going?”
“My room.”
Archie’s brows lifted. “Scandal thrives in every century.”
“Medical care first. Scandal later.”
“A cruel but orderly woman.”
The stairs were worse.
Archie tried to hide it. He failed. By the second turn, his breathing had gone shallow and sweat stood at his hairline. Duncan’s face had gone frighteningly blank, which Ceci was learning meant his panic had been forced into formation.
“Stop,” she said.
Archie did not argue.
That scared her.
They paused on the landing beneath a framed print and a discreet sign pointing toward guest rooms. Duncan looked down the corridor, then back at the lobby below.
“This building is too bright,” he said. Ceci followed his gaze. LED lights. Exit signs. A glowing thermostat on the wall. A security camera tucked in the corner, black and watching.
Her stomach dropped.
Camera.
She drew in a careful breath. “Duncan.”
He heard something in her voice and looked at her at once.
“There are cameras.”
His expression sharpened. “Where?”
She nodded toward the corner.
Archie looked up at it. “That little black thing is observing us?”
“Yes.”
“How rude.”
Duncan’s hand moved toward the place where his pistol would have been. Ceci caught his wrist. “Don’t.”
“I was not going to shoot it.”
“You were thinking about it.”
His silence was unhelpful.
“It records images,” she said. “Like moving photographs. Maybe sound too. I don’t know what system they use here.”
Archie stared at the camera with exhausted offense. “The future is appallingly nosy.”
“Yes.”
“Can it see into your room?”
“No.”
“Then lead on, beloved. I suddenly adore privacy.”
Ceci’s heart kicked at the word.
Beloved.
Duncan heard it. His eyes moved to Archie, then to her. Heat rose through the fear, inappropriate and alive. They reached her room slowly. Ceci fumbled the key card from her coat pocket and swiped it once. Red light.
“Damn it.”
Archie breathed through his teeth. “Have we been rejected by the door?”
“It’s a card key.”
“A what?”
“Later.”
She tried again. Green light. The lock clicked. Duncan stared. “That is sorcery.”
“It’s worse. It’s hospitality technology.”
Archie gave a weak laugh and immediately regretted it.
Ceci opened the door.
Her room looked exactly as she had left it.
That was the first cruelty. Her suitcase stood open on the luggage rack.
A sweater hung over the back of the chair.
Her laptop sat on the small desk beside a half-empty bottle of water.
Her book lay face down on the bed, spine cracked at the page she had been reading before she walked up to Old Hawarden and fell through the world.
Nothing had waited dramatically.
No dust. No omen. No sense that months had passed for her while the room kept the shape of one ordinary afternoon. Her life had been paused so neatly it felt insulting.
Archie stared from the doorway.
Duncan did too.
Ceci saw the room through their eyes and felt suddenly embarrassed by every modern object in it.
The wheeled suitcase. The charging cable.
The hairbrush with plastic bristles. The cheap packet of paracetamol on the nightstand.
A sports bra hanging half out of the suitcase like a feral little confession.
Archie leaned close to Duncan. “I have several questions.”
Duncan’s gaze was fixed on the electric kettle. “I have more.”
Ceci pointed at the bed. “Archie. Sit.”
“Yes, madam.”
He sat too fast and went pale. Duncan crossed the room in two strides and caught his shoulder. “Slowly.”
Ceci shut the door behind them and locked it. Then she slid the safety chain into place because apparently the flimsy little chain was now all that stood between them and the institutional consequences of time travel.
Her hands shook.
She turned away before either man could see, then remembered both men saw nearly everything.
Duncan’s voice came softer. “Ceci.”
“I’m fine.”
Archie gave her a look from the bed.
She exhaled. “I am functional.”
“Better,” he said.
The phone in her pocket buzzed once, weakly.
She pulled it out.
One percent.
“Right. Charger.”
She crossed to the desk, plugged it in, and attached the cable. The phone screen lit, went dark, then showed the charging symbol.
A tiny miracle.
Duncan had followed her movement with wary concentration.
“It draws power from the socket?”
“Yes.”
“Into that.”
“Yes.”
Archie looked at the phone. “And then you put it in your pocket?”
“Constantly.”
Duncan stepped back from the outlet.
Ceci pressed her fingers to her mouth to stop a hysterical laugh. A knock sounded at the door.
All three froze.
“Cecily?” the desk woman called. “I have the first-aid kit.”
Ceci gestured sharply to Archie, then Duncan, which meant absolutely nothing except please look less like refugees from the past. Archie sat straighter and looked worse. Duncan moved behind the door, half out of sight. Ceci opened it with the chain still fastened.
The woman stood outside with a red first-aid kit, a stack of towels, and concern that had deepened into suspicion.
“Here,” she said.
“Thank you so much.”
“Should I come in?”
“No,” Ceci said too quickly. “He’s embarrassed.”
From behind her, Archie called, “Mortified.”
The woman’s brows lifted.
Ceci smiled. “See?”
After a pause, the woman passed the supplies through the gap. “I’ll check back in fifteen minutes.”
“Great. Thank you.”
“If he gets worse, we'll call an ambulance.”
“Agreed.”
Ceci closed the door and reset the lock. Then she leaned her forehead against the wood. No one spoke for a second.
Archie said, “I think I performed well.”
“You used the word mortified like a person in a BBC adaptation.”
“I do not know what that is, but I feel accused.”
Duncan took the towels from Ceci before she dropped them. “Come here.”
She turned.
His voice had lowered into command, but his face was all concern.
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Archie is the one bleeding.”
“And you are shaking.”
Ceci looked down.
He was right.
Her hands trembled hard enough that the first-aid kit rattled when she set it on the desk.
Duncan crossed to her, took both her hands, and held them between his.
He did it in the center of a modern room with the lights humming overhead and Archie watching from the bed, and the old steadiness of him, the familiar warmth, passed through the fracture of the morning like a thread pulled tight.
“We are here,” he said.
The words sounded simple.
They were not.
Ceci nodded. Once. Then again.
“You are here,” she whispered.