A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  “Damn,” said Cady. “My phone. I set a timer. I still want us to leave as close to the top of the clock as we can, but without that phone, we're just guessing.”

  “Not so much,” said Smith. “I did check on Wu's pocket watch when we arrived. It put us here at about a quarter past nine in the morning.”

  “That's great,” said Cady, sounding like she did not think so at all, then she caught herself using that less-than-agreeable tone and apologized. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I just really want to do this the right way.”

  “What is the right way?” asked Georgia as they sidestepped one of the blood trails without so much as a grimace.

  “I don't know, that's the problem. I was working this idea that if we controlled the time and spatial coordinates, you know, if we jumped as close to the minute, even the second we arrived, that…”

  “Oh, my!” said Smith.

  They both stopped to look at him, intrigued rather than alarmed.

  “When I was talking to Chumley before we had to fight, he said something about a “golden minute.” Stepping back through the golden minute, or some such. I thought it was just preacher talk, was all. You know how they do love their fancy rhetoricals. But when he was dying, he said it again. I adjudged him delirious then, but now maybe not.”

  “What'd you mean?” Cady asked.

  “He said he was born around these parts,” Smith recalled.

  “That's right,” Georgia confirmed. “In Pompeii. I remember.”

  “What?” said Cady. “Near the volcano?”

  “Yeah. Vesuvius.”

  “Chumley said he was born there and he was supposed to return one day,” Smith continued. “Said something about going back in the golden minute. I didn't pay it much heed, what with him bleeding out and all so …”

  “Omigod! That has to be it,” Cady said, almost squealing. “Don't you see? That has to be it. That's how you can step back. It has to be.”

  She all but jumped out of her own hide she was so excited. Miss Georgia seemed more reserved. Smith could tell from her expression that she had not quite bought this particular bill of goods.

  “What else did he say?” Cady asked. “Can you think of anything, no matter how odd or even innocent?”

  “Weren't like I were taking notes for court,” he frowned.

  “I know, I know, but try to remember as much as you can.”

  He furrowed his brow.

  “Well, he called me an elusive, I recall that. Not just elusive, like hard to find, but an elusive, like it were a proper name.”

  Both girls were fixed in their attendance on him now. The light was fading fast and Smith thought they'd need to find candles, but Cady fetched a small black tube out of her pocket and made a bright light shine from it.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Okay,” Smith said without much confidence. “Let's see. He said he was an apprentice. No surprise there. Said they'd been a-looking for us. Again, no prizes for picking the winner of that one-hoss race.”

  He focused hard on trying to recall every detail of the moments before they'd had at each other with steel.

  “He said this had to stop, we didn't belong here, we couldn't go on. He called Batiatus something odd. An escarpment or something.”

  The girls exchanged a baffled look.

  “Yeah, I couldn't make no head nor tail of that, neither.”

  “Did you say anything to him? Anything he reacted to?” Georgia asked.

  “I told him we didn't have to kill each for the amusement of some slaver. That's when he said Batiatus was an … an escape. Nope, an escapement, that's it. Strange word. It mean anything to y'all?”

  It didn't.

  The shadows of the villa closed in around them as Cady's little hand-held lamp grew brighter in the dusk.

  “He told me I'd given rise to complications, twenty-eight of them, and I must confess I remember that because it seemed so strangely exact.”

  “Twenty-eight?” Cady asked.

  “Yep.”

  She mulled it over.

  “Maybe he's talking about the number of times you jumped, Smith. You've been gone a month or more, right?”

  He nodded in the gloom.

  “Yep.”

  “But some places you stayed more than a single day.”

  “I did, but I did not think to make a note of them. Not until you suggested we do so in London.”

  “What are you thinking, Cady?” Georgia asked.

  “Let's go sit down and talk it through,” she said, leading off and lighting the way. “This way, Smith?”

  “To the end of the hall and then to the right,” he confirmed.

  “When I was in Seattle, your Seattle, Georgia …”

  “And yours.”

  “No, I don't think so. There were historical details that were totally wrong. It wasn't just finding Gracie and Bertie on Jack the Ripper's wiki page. I figure Chumley did that to cover his tracks or something. Or maybe, I dunno, maybe just having two bodies turn up then meant they got pulled into the narrative. It doesn't matter, because there were other details that we couldn't have effected. Like Australia speaking French.”

  “You mean Australie?” Georgia said, as though to correct her.

  “No, I don't,” Cady insisted. “I mean Australia, the once-upon-a-time British penal colony.”

  “No, I'm pretty sure it was a French colony,” said Georgia. “You know, that's why they speak French.”

  “Not where I come from, babe,” Cady replied, and she sounded a little sad, just for a moment. She turned to Smith as they walked on.

  “I think the complications Chumley was talking about were bubble universes which inflated every time you jumped outside of this golden minute. It's just a theory, but I think to move up and down a timeline, you have to leave and enter it precisely. Maybe within one minute of the watch going live again. Any other time you jump, like we have twice now, you create an alternate timeline, a complication on the face of time itself. I think that's why they're chasing us. If they're time keepers, we're fucking everything up for them.”

  They stopped in the dark.

  “Cady,” whispered Georgia. “I've got goosebumps.”

  “Me too,” said Cady.

  Georgia giggled nervously. Then she laughed out loud.

  “I think you might be onto something,” she said.

  Just before she died.

  37

  The thunder was enormous in that confined space, with those hard stone walls and marble floors. The flash and roar so close together and so unexpected that Cady jumped and screamed, not in fear, but surprise. She hadn't noticed a storm brewing up. There'd been no clouds or threat of rain, no distant grumble of thunder and lightning through the dusk.

  There had been none, because there was no storm.

  There was only Batiatus, standing at the end of the corridor, awkwardly waving Smith's handgun at them, screaming curses and invoking his gods and pulling the trigger until the hammer fell on empty chambers.

  And Georgia fell at Cady's feet, her mouth forming an O as she tried to gasp, her chest hitching as she tried to breathe, blood bubbling up out of the bullet wounds there.

  Cady screamed and Smith roared, but she was the closer to Batiatus. She ran at him without understanding what she was doing. She carved and slashed at him with the sword Smith had given her, and he screamed and wailed and fell under the attack.

  She heard someone telling her to stop, someone yelling, “No,” over and over again, but it was some time before she realized that it was her own voice and her throat was raw.

  She was on the floor, in Smith's arms, her head buried in his shoulder, his hands gently patting her on the back as he rocked her like an infant in a crib.

  Cady came back to herself, suddenly dropping back into the world from wherever she had been. She tried to push away from Smith, to get to her friend, to save Georgia. To make everything right again. But the marshal's arms enfolded her like the limb
s of a giant tree which had grown up around her while she was gone. There was no escaping them.

  “She's gone, Cady. She's gone,” he said, almost as though he was crooning a lullaby.

  “Nooooo …” she wailed and tried again to escape him, but there was no strength left in her. No hope. All of that had died with Georgia.

  She couldn't even see her friend.

  They weren't in the hallway where Batiatus had appeared from the shadows like an evil jack-in-the-box. There was no sign of the Roman and none of the young woman he had murdered.

  “Wh … where…” she choked out.

  Smith's voice was low and powerful, but not as steady as she had grown used to.

  “I laid Miss Georgia out on a bed, Cady,” he said, continuing to rock her back and forth. “I tended to her as best I could, but she did not come good. I'm sorry. This is my fault.”

  She pushed him away.

  “No,” she said fiercely. “It's mine. I brought her here. I didn't tell her what I was doing. I just did it because I wanted her with me and I was selfish and I didn't think and I never fucking think of anyone but me and now, and n-n-now …”

  But she could talk no more because she was crying again.

  She cried for hours and at some point, she supposed, she must have fallen asleep.

  She experienced the terrible vertigo of having the whole world go sideways and drop away from you, when you wake up and it takes a second or two for your memory to fire. You could be at home in bed, a few weeks away from being rich and famous and all over BuzzFeed. But you're not. You're lost in some ancient version of hell and your friend is dead because you dragged her there.

  Cady swore and pushed herself up off the bed where Smith had left her. Free falling panic followed when she could not see him.

  “Smith!” she cried out.

  “I'm here,” he replied and appeared at the door. “Sorry. I was just keeping a look out.”

  Silence fell between them.

  “How are you?” Smith eventually asked.

  “How do you think?” Cady mumbled, but she felt even worse for being such a bitch, that she apologized. “Sorry. I'm just … you know.”

  “I do,” he said. “I got this off Batiatus. He was wearing it like jewelry. A pendant or such like.”

  It took her a moment to recognize her iPhone, the one Batiatus had taken. It was wrapped in leather thongs from which crystals or jewels now dangled. They glinted in the morning light. The screen was cracked and it was sticky.

  “I did try to clean it off for you,” said Smith. “But I didn't want to fuss with it overly in case I broke it anymore.”

  Cady's head felt numb but heavy. The world seemed far away, as though she was not part of it. She took the phone without expectation, held down the power button.

  The home screen came to life, which should have been a surprise, even a pleasant one. But she was inured to any sense of pleasure or anticipation, of hope, of anything.

  “Where's Georgia?” she asked.

  “I sat with her, while I kept look out,” Smith said. “She is next door if you would like to visit, perhaps say something for her. I did a few rounds of the rosary on her behalf.”

  Cady didn't understand him at first. She thought he said “rosemary.” But then she realized that Smith had sat up and prayed over her dead friend while she had slept.

  Cady did not respond to his invitation to visit with Georgia.

  To sit with a corpse.

  Nausea rolled through her at the thought and she clamped her jaws together.

  “Did I kill Batiatus?” she asked.

  “Yep,” Smith confirmed. “You did for him, if'n that helps. Never does, in my experience.”

  Smith was right. It did not.

  Cady had trouble with the touch interface. The cracked screen was flaky and unresponsive, but she did eventually bring up the timer she'd set.

  An hour and ten minutes until the watch powered up again.

  She started to cry.

  Smith did not exactly insist that she say her goodbyes to Georgia before they left, but he did not make it easy to leave before she'd done so.

  Cady was freaked beyond imagining by coming upon her friend in state. That's what they said in the olden days, wasn't it? Dead people lay “in state.”

  She'd hoped that maybe Georgia would look like she was sleeping, but death did not spare her with that illusion. Cady took a deep, shuddering breath and, with a trembling hand, pulled back the sheet Smith had draped over her. Her best friend looked dead.

  Some far away part of her understood he must've put the shroud on fresh. It wasn't stained with blood. Cady closed her eyes. The color had drained from Georgia's face and there was a dread sense of weight to her, as though she was so heavy in death she might fall back into the earth.

  “I'm sorry, Georgia,” she whispered, struggling not to cry again. “I'm sorry, and I will make this right. I promise. I don't care how long it takes. I don't care if I have to erase this entire fucking timeline. You are not going to die here. I promise.”

  It sounded mad and empty, all at the same time.

  Her overweening confidence of yesterday, that she'd figured it all out, had deserted her.

  “Best we be going, Miss Cady,” Smith said from the door. “I have directions from Gannicus to the spot where we arrived. I can see some riders moving around on the horizon, too. Don't imagine they're freed men. They'd all be gone by now.”

  “Bye,” she whispered and turned and walked out of the room, weighed down by something vast and invisible.

  Smith wore his gun belt and pistol again and had rigged up a scabbard for the Bowie knife. He offered her a hunk of cheese and some stale bread, but she was not hungry.

  They walked through the baking heat of the morning, the stench of rot and smoke staying with them until they'd left the main campus of the gladiator school well behind.

  “You got bullets?” she asked him, her voice empty of feeling.

  “Yep,” he confirmed.

  That was it for conversation. Smith seemed to understand she wanted to be left alone.

  The road from the estate took them most of the way to the stream, at which point they left the cobblestones and tramped across rolling fields, climbing ever so gently towards a ridge line dotted with olive trees. She assumed they were olive trees anyway. Not that it mattered.

  A rider crested the ridge when they were almost there, but Smith fired one round into the sky, and he galloped away. No more appeared.

  They arrived with a few minutes to spare. Her thoughts were slow and heavy, and she had trouble moving them around.

  “We should, ah …” she started.

  “We should what?” Smith asked when she trailed off.

  “I had an idea. About the special minute.”

  “The golden minute.”

  “Yeah. That one. So we don't miss it.”

  Smith said nothing. He waited for her to go on, and she thought, bizarrely, inappropriately, how unusual that was; for a man to wait for her to speak.

  Be a shame to waste such a rare opportunity.

  If only she could remember what the hell she'd been …

  “Oh, yeah,” she said without animation. “I thought if we held hands and, you know, double-clicked every thirty seconds leading up to the twenty-four-hour mark, we should be right. We'll trigger the jump in the first minute.”

  Smith nodded. He didn't smile, but he did seem pleased.

  “Cady, if that's what you think we should do, then by God, that is what will happen.”

  They stood atop the small hill where they'd arrived. The weather was nearly identical. A scorching day, the sky unmarred with clouds. According to the timer, they had a few minutes to spare, but Cady suggested they start trying as soon as they stood in the spot where both agreed they had appeared.

  They held hands.

  She did not look back.

  On the third attempt, they jumped.

  38

  The
y arrived before themselves. The same spot by the quiet road in the woods outside the city. The same gas station, lit up in the dark, about ten minutes' walk away.

  “You did it,” Smith said. “I think we're back, Cady. Back to Seattle, yours or Georgia's.”

  Cady should have been excited, but she couldn't crawl out from under the suffocating blanket of sadness that had lain over her since Georgia died.

  “Yeah,” she said, and started to walk. She took out her iPhone and thumbed the home button. The screen lit up and the phone searched for a signal.

  No service.

  Both watches were synchronized to the local time zone. 9:47 p.m. by Chumley's watch. It was easier to read to the minute.

  Smith was right. They were back. Maybe.

  She felt her heart beat a little faster at that. Her phone, she remembered, would not be registered with AT&T yet. The SIM was tapping the network, but flaking out because her account didn't exist and would not until tomorrow.

  “Shit,” she muttered, before absently apologizing to Smith for swearing.

  “It's okay,” he said. “Don't matter. Just keep doing whatever you're doing.”

  She put the phone away and resumed the trek towards the gas station.

  Could it be that they had a handle on this now? It did seem they were having an actual Groundhog Day moment this time around. Everything looked the same; the time on the watches, give or take a few minutes; the weather; the familiar skyline on the horizon.

  Cady picked up her pace and crunched along the wet gravel at the side of the road, intent on getting to the Texaco and making the call she dreaded more than anything in the world.

  There was one difference, though. She picked it out of the night sounds, when she heard the voices reach them on the breeze.

  “Hey! Hey you two!”

  “Look,” Smith said, his voice hushed with almost religious awe. “Cady, just stop and look.”

  She turned around.

  There they stood, waving to themselves, calling out. Too far away to be certain in the dark, unless you knew who they were.

  John Titanic Smith and Cady McCall. Newly arrived from London.