Forward and Back We Go

Part One

In the year 2391, nobody watched old movies anymore. Nobody except Milo Fenwick.

He was thirty-four years old, and he restored antique technology for the Archive of the Old World in New Columbus: rotary telephones, film projectors, typewriters, a jukebox once, which had taken him eight glorious months. His hair had gone half white at twenty-five, all down one side, the way his grandfather’s had, so that it stuck up in a wild black-and-white tangle that no comb in the city could tame. His coworkers called him the Badger. He did not mind. He thought badgers were underrated.

And every Friday night for twenty-six years, ever since he was eight years old and had found a battered data disc in his grandfather’s attic, Milo had watched the same film.

Back to the Future.

To everyone else in 2391, it was ancient history. Four hundred years old. A historical curiosity, the way people in the twentieth century had looked at silent films about knights. But to Milo, it was the most wonderful story ever told. Not because of the plot, which he knew by heart, or the music, which he hummed in the shower. It was the idea of it. The dream. That somewhere, somehow, a person could climb into a machine and simply… go. Backward. Forward. Anywhere at all. That time was not a cage, but a road.

He had spent his whole life wishing he could take that road.

Scientists had been trying to build a time machine for three hundred years. They had all failed. The official position of the World Science Council, published in 2340, was that time travel was impossible and that anyone who claimed otherwise should be gently referred to a doctor. Milo had read that report so many times he could recite it.

He dreamed about it anyway. Every night.

On a gray Tuesday morning in late October, Milo woke up at six forty-five, as he always did, made coffee, as he always did, and opened his front door to get the morning air.

And stopped.

There was a car in his driveway.

Not a hover-pod. Not a transit capsule. A car. With wheels. A low, sleek, wedge-shaped silver machine with a long flat hood and doors that lifted straight up toward the sky like the wings of a gull. Its brushed steel body gleamed in the early light. Bundles of coiled wire and brass tubing ran along its back like the ribs of some strange metal creature, and a faint amber glow pulsed from somewhere deep inside it, slow and steady, like a heartbeat.

Milo knew exactly what it was. He would have known it anywhere.

It was a DeLorean. The same kind of car as the one in his favorite film, rebuilt into a time machine.

His coffee mug slipped from his fingers and shattered on the porch steps. He did not notice.

He walked down the driveway very slowly, the way you might walk toward a wild deer, afraid that if you moved too fast it would vanish. He put out one shaking hand and touched the silver hood. It was real. Cold, and solid, and real. The amber light inside it pulsed beneath his palm, warm and alive.

It was not a copy of the movie car. He saw that at once, with the trained eye of a man who had spent his life restoring old machines. It had been built to look like the one in the film, lovingly, almost playfully, the way you might wrap a present in the paper you knew someone would like best. But the machinery underneath was nothing he had ever seen. Brass coils that seemed to hum with no power source. Glass tubes full of slowly drifting golden light. Engineering that did not belong to 2391. Or to any year he knew.

The driver’s door lifted open with a soft hiss at his touch, as if it had been waiting for him.

Milo looked up and down the quiet street. No one. Mrs. Okonkwo’s cat was watching him from her windowsill with mild interest. That was all.

He climbed inside.

The seat was black leather, worn soft. The dashboard was a dazzling tangle of brass dials and glass gauges, some of which he recognized from old cars and many of which he did not. In the center sat a row of three round glass cells, each the size of an egg, each glowing a deep, warm amber. Above them was a panel of polished brass wheels, like the tumblers of a combination lock, with numbers stamped on each one. Month. Day. Year. Hour. Minute.

They were already set.

October 3. 1926. 9:00 PM.

Beneath the panel, in a brass slot, sat a key. Old-fashioned and ornate, like the key to a treasure chest.

On the passenger seat lay a pair of goggles. Heavy brass rims, leather straps, one lens smoked so dark it was nearly black, and the other glowing faintly amber, like the cells on the dashboard. A small brass device was fitted to the side of them, with a tiny light that blinked orange.

And taped to the steering wheel was a note.

It was written on thick cream-colored paper, folded once. When Milo opened it, a scent drifted up from it, faint and sweet and impossibly lovely. Jasmine, and something like rain, and something else underneath that he couldn’t name. The handwriting was elegant and looping, full of curls and flourishes. Frilly. A hand that took its time.

It said:

Milo,

I need your help. Please find me.

That was all. No signature. No name. No explanation.

Milo read it eleven times. Then he held it to his face and breathed in the perfume, and closed his eyes, and something inside his chest turned over in a way it never had before. He did not know who had written it. He had never smelled that perfume in his life.

And yet, somehow, impossibly, it smelled like home.

A sensible man would have called someone. The police. The Science Council. A doctor, as the official report recommended.

Milo Fenwick had been waiting his whole life not to be sensible.

He went back into the house just long enough to grab his heaviest coat, the long layered one with the high collar and the rust-orange scarf and too many straps and buckles, which his sister said made him look like a lost airship captain. He stuffed his pockets with whatever seemed useful: a flashlight, a multi-tool, a packet of crackers, his grandfather’s old pocket watch. He tucked the note into his inside pocket, over his heart.

Then he climbed back into the car, pulled the gull-wing door down, and put on the goggles.

The world changed.

Through the dark lens, his left eye saw the ordinary street, dimmed as if by a storm cloud. But through the amber lens, his right eye saw something else entirely. Faint golden ripples hung in the air around the car, like heat shimmer over a summer road, slowly settling. Threads of light ran from the car’s wheels back along the driveway and simply… stopped, in the middle of the concrete, as if the car had stepped in from nowhere.

The little device on the side of the goggles blinked orange. Milo understood, the way you understand things in dreams, without anyone telling you. The amber lens could see time. The marks it left. The places where someone had torn a hole in it and stepped through.

He took a deep breath. He looked at the three glowing amber cells on the dashboard. He looked at the brass wheels. October 3. 1926. 9:00 PM.

He turned the key.

There was no roar of engines. No crackle of lightning. No mad rush down a road. Instead the whole world went soft at the edges, like a watercolor left out in the rain. The street outside the windshield rippled. The houses folded in on themselves like the pages of a book closing, and then opening again, page after page after page, faster and faster, a blur of light and shadow and color, years flickering past like playing cards being shuffled. Milo gripped the steering wheel and could not breathe and did not want to.

One of the three amber cells on the dashboard flared bright gold. Then dimmed, and went dark.

And the pages stopped turning.

It was raining.

The car sat in a narrow brick alley, slick and black with water, lit by a single flickering electric bulb over a battered steel door. Garbage cans. A stray cat. Somewhere close by, muffled through the walls, Milo could hear music: a trumpet, a piano, a woman’s voice singing low and sweet. The air smelled of rain and coal smoke and gasoline, thick and rich and real in a way the filtered air of 2391 never was.

He pulled the brass key from its slot and tucked it carefully into his coat pocket. Then he pushed open the door and climbed out, and stood in the rain, and laughed out loud.

He had done it. He was here.

The newspaper blowing past his feet in the wet alley said CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE, and the date in the corner said October 3, 1926.

Then he looked down, through the amber lens of the goggles, and stopped laughing.

There were footprints on the wet bricks of the alley.

Not ordinary ones. They glowed. Faint and golden, like his own tracks through the driveway at home, but older, fading, like the last warmth in a fireplace. Small footprints. A woman’s shoes, with a narrow heel. They began in the middle of the alley, exactly where the car now sat, as if she too had stepped out of nowhere. And they led straight to the battered steel door under the flickering bulb.

She had been here. The one who wrote the note. She had stood exactly where he was standing now.

Milo’s heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth.

He knocked on the steel door. A narrow slot slid open, and a pair of suspicious eyes looked out at him, took in his strange coat, his wild black-and-white hair, and the brass goggles pushed up on his forehead.

“Password,” growled a voice.

Milo had no idea what the password was. But he had watched a great many old films. He leaned close to the slot and said, with all the confidence he could muster, “I’m with the band.”

There was a long pause. Then the eyes rolled, and the slot closed, and the door creaked open.

“You’re late,” said the doorman, a huge man with a broken nose. “And you look ridiculous. Get in.”

Inside, it was another world. A long, smoky basement room glowing with amber lamps, packed with people in their finest clothes: men in pinstriped suits and slicked-back hair, women in beaded dresses that shimmered when they moved, feathers in their hair, long strands of pearls. Waiters wove through the crowd with trays of drinks in teacups, to fool any police who might burst in. On a little stage at the far end, under a painted sign that said THE BLUE CANARY, a jazz band was playing, and a woman in a dress of midnight-blue sequins stood at the microphone, singing.

Milo pulled the goggles down over his eyes.

The golden footprints ran straight across the dance floor, weaving between the tables, fainter here, almost gone, as if she had walked this way many times, over many nights. And every single trail led to the same place.

The stage. And the singer in the midnight-blue dress.

The singer was not the woman who wrote the note. Milo knew that the moment he got close. She was tall and dark-eyed, with a voice like warm honey and a beauty mark painted high on one cheek, and she wore no jasmine at all. Her perfume was roses and cigarette smoke.

But when the song ended, and she looked out over the crowd, and her eyes landed on Milo, standing at the edge of the dance floor in his strange coat with his wild black-and-white hair, she went perfectly still.

Then she laughed. Low and disbelieving.

She stepped down off the stage, walked straight through the crowd, took him by the arm, and steered him into a dim corner booth before he could say a single word.

“Well, I’ll be,” she said, looking him up and down. “Half black and half white, like a badger. Funny coat. Big brass spectacles. She said you’d look exactly like that.” She shook her head. “I never really believed her. Name’s Ruby. Ruby Delacroix.”

“Milo,” said Milo. His mouth had gone dry. “Who said? Who are you talking about?”

“Evie.” Ruby’s face softened. “At least, that’s what she told me to call her. Turned up in that alley out back one night last spring, soaking wet, with no money and no coat and the strangest clothes you ever saw. I found her sitting by the garbage cans, crying. Took her in. She stayed with me three months. Washed dishes here at the club.” A faint smile. “Talked about you every single night.”

Milo stared at her. “About me? But I’ve never… I don’t know anyone named Evie. I’ve never met her in my life.”

Ruby gave him a long, strange look.

“She said you’d say that, too,” she said quietly. “She said, ‘He won’t know me yet, Ruby. That’s the hardest part.’”

Something cold and electric ran down Milo’s spine.

“Where is she?” he asked. “Is she still here?”

Ruby shook her head. “Gone. Three weeks ago. She was working on something every night, after we closed, out in Sal’s old garage behind the club. Drawings. Numbers. Talking to herself about cells and coils. Built something big out there, under a canvas tarp, and wouldn’t let a soul see it. Then one night, about a month back, there was a flash like summer lightning out in that garage, and when Sal ran to look, the tarp was lying flat on an empty floor.” She shook her head slowly. “A week later, she was gone too. Left her bed made and a thank-you note on my pillow.” She reached into the beaded purse at her hip and drew out a small envelope of thick cream-colored paper. “And this. For you. She made me swear on my mother I’d keep it safe till you came.”

Milo took the envelope with shaking hands. It smelled of jasmine and rain.

Inside was a single sheet, in that same frilly, looping, unhurried hand.

Milo,

If you’re reading this, I’m sorry. I couldn’t wait here any longer. They were getting too close.

I’ve had to go back further. Follow me if you can. June 2, 1889. 6:00 in the evening.

Don’t trust the man in gray.

All my love, always — E.

And pressed between the folds of the paper was a single small white jasmine flower, dried flat, still faintly sweet.

Milo read the note again. Then again. All my love, always.

“Ruby,” he said slowly, “who is the man in gray?”

The singer’s face changed. For the first time, she looked afraid.

“He came here too,” she said, very low. “Twice. The week before she left. Tall man, long gray coat, gray hat. Asking about a girl who smelled like jasmine. He had glasses like yours, honey. Brass ones. Only both his lenses were black.”She glanced toward the door. “Evie saw him from the kitchen and went white as a sheet. That was the night she started packing.”

Milo was on his feet before she finished.

He thanked her. He kissed her hand, because it seemed like the right thing to do in 1926, and she laughed and told him to get going. And then he was running, through the smoky room, past the dancers and the band and the waiters with their teacups, up the stairs, through the steel door, out into the cold, rainy alley.

The car was still there, gleaming silver under the flickering bulb, with its two remaining amber cells glowing on the dashboard.

But someone was standing beside it.

A tall man, very still in the rain, in a long gray coat and a gray hat with the brim pulled low. He had one gloved hand resting on the silver hood of the car, almost gently, the way you might rest a hand on a sleeping horse. Beneath his palm, for just an instant, Milo thought he saw the amber glow inside the car shiver, like a candle flame in a draft.

He turned his head. Rain dripped from his hat brim. And Milo saw his eyes, or rather, he did not see them, because they were hidden behind a pair of heavy brass goggles, exactly like his own.

Except that both of the lenses were black.

“Hello, Milo,” said the man in gray. His voice was soft and pleasant and terribly calm. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

He smiled. And then he raised his other hand. In it, glinting in the light of the flickering bulb, was an ornate brass key.

Milo’s hand flew to his coat pocket.

It was empty.

~

Part Two

For a long moment, neither of them moved. The rain fell between them. The bulb over the steel door flickered and buzzed.

“How?” Milo managed.

“You bumped into a man at the bottom of the stairs on your way in,” said the man in gray mildly. “He apologized. You didn’t notice his hand.” He turned the brass key over in his gloved fingers, admiring it. “She always did pick the trusting ones.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Sable. Agent Sable, of the Bureau of Temporal Order.” He said it the way a policeman shows a badge. “The year I come from does not matter to you. What matters is that the woman you are chasing is a criminal, Mr. Fenwick. She tore holes in time that should never have been torn. She is dangerous. And this,” he laid his hand on the silver hood again, “is stolen property, built from stolen parts, carrying a stolen power source. I am here to take it back. And to take her back, when I find her.”

Milo thought of the note in his pocket. I need your help. Please find me. He thought of the frilly handwriting, and the jasmine, and all my love, always.

“She doesn’t sound dangerous,” he said.

“They never do.” Sable reached for the handle of the driver’s door and pulled.

Nothing happened.

He pulled again, harder. The gull-wing door stayed shut, as if it had been welded. Sable’s pleasant smile thinned. He laid his palm flat against the silver panel, and the amber light deep inside the car pulsed once, slow and unbothered, and went on pulsing. The door did not budge.

Milo remembered how it had lifted open at his touch, that morning in his driveway. As if it had been waiting for him.

“She keyed it to you,” Sable said softly. It was almost admiration. “Of course she did.” He turned, and his black lenses fixed on Milo. “Very well. Then you will open it for me. And you will drive me to wherever she’s hiding, and this will all be over very quickly and very quietly, and you can go home and forget any of it happened.”

He took a step forward.

And behind Milo, the steel door of the Blue Canary banged open, and a whistle shrieked, and someone inside screamed “RAID!”

Suddenly the alley was full of people. Flappers in beaded dresses, men in pinstripes clutching their hats, waiters, musicians with trumpets under their arms, all pouring out of the door in a panicked, laughing, shrieking flood, running for the street, as police whistles shrilled out front and a paddy wagon’s bell clanged. Milo was shoved sideways against the wall. Someone stepped on his foot. A saxophone hit him in the ear.

And out of the crowd, like a battleship plowing through a harbor full of rowboats, came the huge broken-nosed doorman, with Ruby Delacroix right behind him in her midnight-blue sequins.

“That’s him, Sal!” Ruby shouted, pointing at the man in gray. “That’s the one!”

Big Sal did not ask any questions. He simply lowered his head and went straight through Agent Sable like a freight train through a picket fence. The two of them crashed into the garbage cans in a tremendous clatter. The brass key flew out of Sable’s glove, spun glittering through the rain, and landed with a splash in a puddle three feet from Milo’s shoes.

Milo dove for it.

“Go!” Ruby yelled, already hauling Sal back up by his collar. “Go find her, badger!”

Milo slapped his hand on the car door. It lifted for him at once. He threw himself into the seat, jammed the key into its slot, and looked at the brass wheels. Then he pulled the second note from his pocket, and with trembling fingers, spun the numbers. June. 2. 1889. 6:00 PM.

Through the windshield, he saw Sable rising out of the wreckage of the garbage cans, hat gone, gray coat soaked and filthy, his black lenses turned straight toward the car. He did not look angry. He looked calm. That was worse.

“She isn’t what you think, Milo!” he shouted over the rain.

Milo turned the key.

The alley folded away like a page in a book. The rain, the flickering bulb, the man in gray, all of it went soft and smeared and was gone, and the years spun backward past the windshield in a blur of gold and shadow. The second amber cell flared, and dimmed, and went dark.

One left.

When the world steadied, the car was sitting in the straw of an empty stable, warm and dusty and smelling of horses, with golden evening light slanting through the gaps in the boards. Somewhere outside, very close, a brass band was playing a cheerful march, and an enormous crowd was cheering, and a thousand voices were talking at once in rapid, musical French.

Milo pushed open the stable door and stepped out into Paris.

It was June 2, 1889, and the whole city was having a party.

The great World’s Fair had opened only weeks before, and the streets along the river were packed with people from every corner of the earth: gentlemen in top hats and ladies in bustled dresses and enormous feathered hats, soldiers in red trousers, children with balloons, vendors selling roasted chestnuts and lemonade and little paper flags. And rising over all of it, impossibly tall, brand new, the paint barely dry on its iron lace, was a tower.

Milo knew it, of course. Everyone in 2391 knew it. But in his time, it was a monument, old and beloved and surrounded by gardens. Here, it was a marvel. A shocking, astonishing, brand-new thing that half of Paris loved and half of Paris thought was the ugliest object ever built, and they were all arguing about it at the tops of their voices on every street corner.

He pulled the goggles down over his eyes.

And caught his breath.

The golden footprints were here. But not faded, this time. Not old. They were bright. Warm and glowing and fresh, like footprints in new snow, weaving through the crowds along the river. She had been here today. She had been here within the hour.

He began to run.

The trail led along the river, through the crowds, across the great lawns of the fair, past pavilions from Egypt and Japan and Mexico and a hundred other places, and straight to the foot of the tower. It went up. Milo paid his coins, with money he did not have, a handful of strange 2391 credits that the ticket man squinted at and finally accepted as some kind of foreign curiosity, and climbed. Stairs and stairs and more stairs, around and around, up through the iron lattice, with Paris spreading out beneath him, gold and blue in the evening light.

The footprints ended on the second platform.

She was standing at the railing, with her back to him, looking out at the sunset.

She wore a long dress of pale green, simple and a little worn at the hem, and a small straw hat with a ribbon, and her hair, a soft honey-brown, was pinned up at the back of her neck, with a few curls escaping in the wind. She was not very tall. She held the iron railing with both hands, the way you hold on to something when you are trying very hard not to cry.

And as Milo stopped, breathless, a few feet behind her, the evening wind shifted, and carried to him the faint, sweet scent of jasmine, and rain, and something else underneath that he still could not name.

“Evie?” he said.

She turned around.

She was not the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was something else. She had a round, freckled, open face, and a stubborn chin, and a little crooked scar through one eyebrow, and large gray eyes that were, at that moment, filling up with tears. She looked at him, at his wild black-and-white hair and his ridiculous coat and the brass goggles pushed up on his forehead, and her hand went to her mouth.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, Milo. Look at you. You’re so young.”

And then she crossed the platform in three quick steps and threw her arms around him and held on as if she would never let go.

Milo stood frozen. He did not know this woman. He had never seen her face in his life. And yet his arms came up and went around her on their own, as if they had done it a thousand times, and his chin fit on top of her head exactly, perfectly, as if it had been made to go there. She was shaking. She smelled like jasmine and rain. And something inside him that had been waiting his whole life, without knowing what it was waiting for, went very quiet and very still.

“I’m sorry,” he said into her hair, helplessly. “I’m sorry. I don’t… I don’t know who you are.”

“I know,” said Evie, laughing and crying at the same time. “I know you don’t. Not yet.” She pulled back and looked up at him, and touched his face with one gentle hand, the way you touch something you thought you had lost forever. “But I know you, Milo Fenwick. I know you better than anyone in the whole world.”

They sat on a bench on the second platform of the tower while the sun went down over Paris, and she told him.

Her name was Evangeline Marsh. She had been born in the year 2468. She had worked for the Bureau of Temporal Order, the same as Sable, as one of its engineers, building the machines that let its agents slip in and out of history. And then she had discovered what the Bureau really did with them. How quietly, carefully, it erased people from time: inventors whose ideas were inconvenient, leaders who might change things, ordinary people who simply got in the way. Not killing them. Worse. Making sure they had never been born.

So she had stolen a prototype machine and run.

“I landed in New Columbus,” she said. “In the spring of 2393. The machine was badly damaged. I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have a single coin, and I needed someone who understood old machinery better than anyone alive.” She smiled at him through her tears. “So I walked into the Archive of the Old World, and asked for the best restorer they had. And they sent me to a man with badger hair who was taking apart a jukebox.”

Milo’s throat went tight. Two years from now. In two years, she would walk through the Archive doors.

“You helped me fix it,” Evie went on softly. “It took us months. And somewhere in there…” She looked down at their hands, which had somehow ended up together on the bench between them. “You used to make me watch that ridiculous old film every Friday. You knew all the words. I used to tease you about it. And you said if you ever got the chance to really travel through time, you’d go in a heartbeat. You wouldn’t even stop to pack.”

“I didn’t,” said Milo faintly. “I brought crackers.”

She laughed, a wet, beautiful laugh, and for a moment she looked so happy that Milo forgot how to breathe.

Then her face changed.

“We had two years, Milo. Two whole years. And then Sable found us.” Her voice dropped. “I jumped to lead him away from you. But the jump went wrong, and it smashed my machine’s forward drive. Going back in time is like rolling downhill, you see. Going forward is climbing. My machine could still roll downhill, but it could never climb again, and nothing in 1926 could fix it. So every jump I made after that only took me farther from you. Chicago. Then here.” She swallowed. “I’ve been trapped in the past for almost a year.”

She told him about the car. How she had spent months in an old garage behind Ruby’s club, drawing what power was left in her broken machine, a little at a time, into three new amber cells. How the cells needed a new home that could climb, since the old one never would again, so she had built one from whatever she could find in 1926, and hammered its silver body by hand out of sheet steel. How the old film had given her the idea for its shape, as a gift for him, because she knew he would love it.

“But I couldn’t drive it to you myself,” she said. “The Bureau tracks pilots. Wherever I drive, my trail glows, and Sable follows it. If I’d gone to you, I would have led him straight to your door, and the Bureau erases the people who help us. So I keyed the car to you instead. You would drive. I would only ever ride beside you, and a passenger leaves no trail they can follow.” She looked down at their hands. “I couldn’t send it to you in 2393 or after, either. The Bureau watches every year I ever touched. So I sent it from that garage to the last year before I ever met you, the one place they wouldn’t think to look, and set it to bring you straight back to me in Chicago. I was going to be waiting for you in that alley.” Her eyes filled. “Then Sable walked into the Blue Canary. I had to run that same night, in my old machine, and it only goes one way. So I gave Ruby the note, and rolled downhill to here.” She squeezed his hand. “But I knew you’d come. Even not knowing me. I knew you’d get in.”

“There’s one cell left,” Milo said slowly. “One more jump. Can it carry us both?”

“It can carry us both,” said Evie. “Home.”

They went down the tower together, hand in hand, through the lantern-lit crowds of the fair, laughing like children, and ran all the way to the stable.

The car was waiting for them in the straw, silver in the dusk, with its last amber cell glowing on the dashboard.

And Agent Sable was leaning against it.

His gray coat was still stained from the garbage cans of Chicago. His black lenses caught the lantern light. He did not look surprised to see them. He looked tired.

“Your footprints glow too, Evangeline,” he said quietly. “You walked all over this city in them. And his car leaves a trail a child could follow.” He tapped one finger on the silver hood. “And you should have been more careful with your power cells. I didn’t need to open the door. Bureau gloves carry a resonance pulse. One touch through the hood, there in that alley, and I put a hairline crack in your last one. It won’t survive another jump. It’ll fail halfway, and both of you will come apart somewhere between one year and the next, and there won’t even be enough of you left to bury.”

Milo looked at the dashboard. The last amber cell was flickering. Faintly, unevenly, like a candle in a draft. And there, running across the glass, was a crack as thin as a hair.

“Come with me, Evangeline,” said Sable, “and I’ll take him home safely myself. My word on it. He’ll wake up in his own bed in 2391 and think this was all a dream.” He held out his gloved hand. “Or stay with him, and get in that car, and you both die. Your choice.”

Evie went very white. She looked at Sable. She looked at the cracked cell. And then she looked at Milo, and he saw in her gray eyes exactly what she was going to do. She was going to go with Sable. She was going to trade herself, to save him, the way she had once jumped through time to lead Sable away from him.

She let go of his hand. She took a step toward the man in gray.

Milo grabbed her wrist. Pulled her back. Slapped his palm against the car door, and it swung up for him, and he all but threw her into the passenger seat and dove into the driver’s side after her.

“Milo, no!” she cried. “The cell won’t hold!”

“You said I’d never stop to pack,” said Milo, and turned the key.

Through the windshield he saw Sable lunge for the hood, too late. Then the stable folded away. Paris folded away. The years began to turn, faster and faster, page after golden page, forward this time, flying forward, and Evie’s hand found his in the dark and held on tight.

The last amber cell blazed brighter than it ever had.

Then, with a sound like breaking ice, it cracked in two.

The light went out.

The pages stopped turning.

And the car hung, perfectly silent, in a vast and empty whiteness, with no sky and no ground and no year at all.

Milo stared out at it, his heart hammering, his hand still locked in hers.

“Evie,” he whispered. “Where are we?”

Beside him, very quietly, the woman he had loved for two years and known for two hours answered.

“Between.”

~

Part Three

There was no sound in the Between.

No wind. No hum of an engine. No ticking of the brass dials, which had all stopped dead, their numbers frozen halfway through a turn. Outside the windshield, the whiteness went on forever in every direction, soft and blank and featureless, like the inside of a cloud, or a page that had never been written on.

Milo realized he could not hear his own heartbeat. He put two fingers to his throat. It was there. He could feel it. But the sound of it was gone, as if the Between had simply swallowed it.

“Is this…” He swallowed. “Are we dead?”

“No.” Evie’s voice was steady, but her hand was ice-cold in his. “Not dead. Stopped. When a machine fails in the middle of a jump, it doesn’t land anywhere. It just… stops. Between one second and the next.” She looked out at the endless white. “The Bureau has a name for it. The Margin. They used to tell us stories about agents who got lost here. Some of them are still here, they said. Sitting in their machines. Waiting for a year that never comes.”

Milo looked down at the dashboard. The last amber cell sat in its brass socket, split clean in two along the crack, dark and dead as an empty eggshell. The other two were dark as well. Burned out. Gone.

No power. No year. No way forward. No way back.

He had dreamed of time travel his entire life. He had never once dreamed about this.

“I’m so sorry,” Evie whispered. “I’m so sorry, Milo. I should never have sent for you. I should have let you have your life. Your whole, safe, ordinary life.” Her voice cracked. “I was just so tired of being alone.”

Milo turned in his seat and looked at her. At her round freckled face, pale in the white light. At the little crooked scar through her eyebrow. At the gray eyes, full of tears, that had looked at him on the tower as if he were the most precious thing in the world.

Two hours. He had known her for two hours. It should not have been possible to feel this way about someone in two hours.

But apparently, somewhere up ahead in time, he had already had two years to fall in love with her. Maybe some of it had leaked backward.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Listen to me. I’ve wanted to do this my whole life. Every single Friday night since I was eight years old. And I got to do it. I rode through time. I drank something terrible out of a teacup in a speakeasy. I climbed that tower the year they built it. And I found you.” 

He squeezed her cold hand. “Don’t you dare be sorry. Not for one second of it.”

She stared at him. Then she laughed, a small, broken, astonished laugh, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“That,” she said, “is exactly what you said the first time.”

“The first time?”

“The first time I told you I loved you.” She smiled shakily. “You said, ‘Don’t you dare be sorry.’ Word for word.”

Milo felt his face go hot. He cleared his throat and looked very hard at the dashboard.

“Right,” he said. “Well. In that case, we’d better get out of here, because I’d really like to be around for that.”

And for the first time since the cell had cracked, he started to think.

He was a restorer of old machines. It was the one thing in the world he was truly good at. He had brought back a jukebox that hadn’t played a note in two hundred years. He had rebuilt a pocket radio from parts so corroded they crumbled when he touched them. He had sat for nights on end with broken things, listening to them, until they told him what they needed.

So he listened to this one.

“Tell me how the cells work,” he said. “Not the science. Just what they do.”

Evie blinked, then answered, the way an engineer answers another engineer. “They hold time. Compressed. A tiny, wound-up piece of it. When you turn the key, the cell lets it go, all at once, and it pushes the car through, the way a spring pushes a…”

She stopped. Milo was already digging in his coat pocket.

He pulled out his grandfather’s pocket watch.

It was old, older than him, older than anything he owned. A worn brass case, a cracked glass face, a delicate little winding crown on top. He had restored it himself, when he was fourteen. He had carried it every day since. And he had wound it this morning, in his kitchen, in 2391, out of habit, the way he did every morning, before he ever knew there was a car in his driveway.

He held it up to his ear.

In the silence of the Between, where even his heartbeat made no sound, where every dial and gear in the car had frozen solid, the old pocket watch was ticking.

Faintly. Steadily. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Evie’s mouth fell open.

“It carries its own time,” Milo said, and his voice was shaking. “Doesn’t it? A wound spring. A little piece of a Tuesday morning in 2391, all coiled up inside it. It doesn’t need the world to tell it what time it is. It just keeps going.”

Evie was staring at the watch as if it were a miracle. Perhaps it was.

“It’s not enough,” she whispered. “Milo, it’s not nearly enough. One watch spring. It would barely move us.”

“Then we’ll only need to move a little,” said Milo. “Just enough to find the road.”

He pulled the goggles down over his eyes. And through the amber lens, far away across the endless white, so faint he almost missed it, he saw a thread of light.

It was golden. Thin as a spider’s silk. It ran straight across the white, from somewhere far behind them to somewhere far ahead, and it was glowing, very softly, with the same warm amber light as the footprints in the alley in Chicago.

“Evie,” he breathed. “Look.”

She took the goggles from him and looked. He heard her catch her breath.

“That’s the car’s own track,” she whispered. “When I sent it forward to you. It left a trace through the Margin, the way it left one on your driveway.” She lowered the goggles slowly. “Milo, that thread leads to 2391. To your house. It’s a road home.”

“Then all we need,” said Milo, “is enough push to reach it.”

He went to work.

He pried the brass panel off the dashboard with the multi-tool from his pocket, the one his sister always teased him for carrying everywhere. Behind it was a nest of copper wire and glass tubing and tiny brass gears that would have made any restorer in 2391 weep with joy. He did not let himself stop to admire it. He lifted the cracked cell out of its socket very gently, the two halves cold in his palm. And then he opened the back of his grandfather’s watch, the way he had done a hundred times since he was fourteen, and looked at the little coiled mainspring inside, ticking patiently away in the silence.

“If I do this,” he said, “I’ll ruin the watch. It won’t ever run again.”

Evie put her hand on his arm. “Milo. You don’t have to…”

“My grandfather gave me this,” said Milo. “He’s the one who left that old film in the attic for me to find. He used to say the best thing you can do with time is spend it on someone.” He smiled a little crookedly. “I think he’d like this.”

He fit the open watch into the empty socket where the cell had been. He took a strand of copper from the tangle behind the panel and wound it, carefully, the way you might bind a broken bird’s wing, around the brass case and into the heart of the spring. His hands were perfectly steady. They always were, when he worked. Evie held the flashlight and did not breathe.

Then he put the brass key back in its slot.

“Hold on to me,” he said.

She took his hand.

He turned the key.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, very faintly, from inside the dashboard, there came a sound. Tick. And then another. Tick. And with every tick, the brass dials on the panel trembled, and moved, just slightly, the way a sleeper stirs before waking.

And the car began to move.

Not fast. Not with any roar or rush or folding of pages. It simply drifted, gently, across the endless white, the way a rowboat drifts on a still lake, one tick at a time. Milo held the wheel and steered toward the golden thread. Evie held his other hand. Neither of them spoke.

It took a very long time. Or perhaps no time at all. In the Between, it was impossible to tell.

Once, far off to their left, they passed a shape in the whiteness. A machine, small and dark and strange, like a beetle made of iron, sitting perfectly still. There was a figure inside it in a gray coat, slumped over the controls, as if asleep. Evie looked at it for a long moment, and her face was very sad.

“One of ours,” she said quietly. “A Bureau agent. Lost long ago.” She turned away. “They’ll never find him here. Nobody can find anybody here.”

The watch ticked. The car drifted. The golden thread grew brighter, and closer, and closer still.

And then, with one last small, brave tick, the old watch spring ran down, and was silent.

The car stopped moving.

It was resting, Milo saw, with its front wheels just touching the golden thread.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened at all.

And then the thread caught them, the way a river catches a leaf that has drifted into its current, and the whole world tilted, and the white blew apart like a dandelion in the wind, and they were flying. Forward.

Forward along the golden road, faster and faster, years blurring past the windshield like the pages of a book flung open in a storm, and Evie was laughing, and Milo was laughing, and he could hear his own heart again, pounding, pounding, pounding.

The pages slowed. Settled. Stopped.

And the car was sitting in Milo’s driveway, in New Columbus, in the gray light of a Tuesday morning in late October, 2391.

Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. The street was quiet. Mrs. Okonkwo’s cat was still watching from her windowsill with mild interest. On the porch steps lay the pieces of Milo’s coffee mug, exactly where he had dropped them, and the coffee spilled across the concrete was still steaming.

He had been gone, by the clock on his kitchen wall, a little under four minutes.

For a long time, neither of them moved. They just sat there in the silent car, holding hands, breathing.

Then Evie began to cry. Not sad tears. The other kind. The kind that come all at once, when something heavy you have carried for a very long time is suddenly set down. Milo pulled her across the seat into his arms and held her while she shook, with his chin resting on top of her head, where it fit exactly, as if it had been made to go there.

When she finally sat up and wiped her eyes, he pulled the goggles down over his own, and looked at her through the amber lens.

And caught his breath.

There was nothing. No glow. No faint golden shimmer around her, the way there had been in Paris. He looked down at the driveway where she had stepped out of the car, and there were no glowing footprints. Not a single one.

“Evie,” he said slowly. “Your trace. It’s gone.”

She took the goggles and looked at her own hands through them, turning them over and over in wonder.

“The Margin,” she whispered. “It burned it away. Nobody can find anybody there. Not even the Bureau. And with the cells dead and the road gone behind us, there’s no trail left anywhere. Not mine, not yours, not the car’s.” She lowered the goggles and stared at him, and slowly, her whole face lit up like sunrise. “Milo. They can’t follow me anymore. Sable can’t follow me. No one ever will again.”

She was free.

They went inside. He made coffee in his second-best mug. She sat at his kitchen table in her worn green dress from 1889, and looked around at his small, cluttered house, at the half-restored typewriter on the counter and the old movie posters on the walls and the stack of data discs by the screen, and smiled the way you smile at a place you have not seen in a long, long time.

“You haven’t moved the typewriter,” she said softly. “You never finish it. Not even in 2395.”

Milo set her coffee in front of her and sat down across from her. There was something he had to ask. He had been dreading it since the tower.

“The car could be rebuilt,” he said carefully. “Not quickly. Maybe not for years. But you know how, and I know how to fix things. If we found the right parts, you could go back. Home. To your own time.” He swallowed. “If you wanted to.”

Evie looked at him over her coffee for a long moment. Her gray eyes were very soft.

“Milo,” she said, “I was born in 2468. I grew up in a world where people get erased for being inconvenient. I spent my whole life building machines for people who used them to do terrible things.” She set down her cup and reached across the table for his hand. “And then I fell through time into a city I didn’t know, and walked into a dusty old archive, and found a man with badger hair who took one look at my broken machine and said, ‘Oh, she’s beautiful. Let’s see what we can do.’”

Her fingers tightened around his.

“That’s the only home I’ve ever had,” she said. “I’m not going back. I’m staying. Right here. With you.” A small, wobbly smile. “If you’ll have me. Even though, technically, we only met this morning.”

Milo looked at her across his little kitchen table, in the gray morning light, with her honey-brown curls escaping from their pins and her crooked eyebrow scar and her hand warm in his.

He had dreamed his whole life of traveling through time.

He had never once dreamed of this.

“Don’t you dare be sorry,” he said.

And she laughed, and came around the table, and kissed him.

They were married the following spring, in the reading room of the Archive of the Old World, surrounded by typewriters and telephones and a jukebox that played the whole time. Milo’s sister cried. Mrs. Okonkwo brought her cat. And somewhere in the back row, though no one ever knew it, sat a tall, quiet man in a faded gray coat, with a new pair of ordinary spectacles. Long ago, he had been lost in the Margin, slumped asleep over the controls of a small iron machine. Then one day he had woken to find a golden road running right past his window, and followed it all the way home. He never told anyone how he had found the wedding. He only wanted to see who had left the road behind. He slipped out before the cake.

The car sat under a canvas cover in their garage for the rest of their lives. Every now and then, on rainy Sundays, the two of them would work on it together, Milo with his tools and Evie with her drawings, never in any hurry to finish. Milo kept his grandfather’s silent pocket watch on a shelf above the workbench, where he could see it every day.

And every Friday night, without fail, for the next fifty-three years, they curled up together on the couch in the house in New Columbus and watched the same old film. Evie teased him for knowing all the words. He pretended to be offended. She always fell asleep before the end, with her head on his shoulder, smelling faintly of jasmine and rain.

The something else underneath, the scent he had never been able to name, he finally figured out one quiet evening, many years later, with her asleep against him and the credits rolling on the screen.

It had been home. It had always been home. Evie smelled like home.

Forward and back they had gone, through three centuries and a place with no time at all.

And this, right here, was where they had always been going.

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