John Timson’s face appeared in front of me, above the mirror. Without stopping to think about it, I pushed my hand out of the mirror and punched him in the face.
Then I wondered all over again what Luka would do. I had never seen her shy away from a fight, but I’d never seen her actually beat someone up. She found other ways of doing things. She talked to people. She cajoled. Sometimes she lied.
Maybe there was a way to be like Luka.
I reached for Timson’s shirt. He jerked back, but not fast enough. I grabbed a fistful, and dragged it back into the mirror. It was easy, since in the world of 1957, he was leaning over and gravity was on my side. As I pulled him closer, I pushed my face out.
“Come into the mirror, John Timson,” I said. “Come in and be with us forever. We’ve been waiting for you, John Timson. And we’re hungry.”
Timson cried out, a strangled kind of scream, and pulled away.
From my vantage point in the Silverlands, all I could see were his feet as he jumped the fence. I waited a moment, not wanting to take the chance of Timson or Fenton having a change of heart, then pulled myself out. With the different up-down orientation, I had to put out my two arms, brace myself against the dirt and petunias, and heave with all my might, gritting my teeth against the uptime heat.
Once out, I shook myself off, picked up the mirror, and clambered two fences to Brian’s house.
I checked my watch. The Maxwells would have left for work. I took the mirror down to the coal cellar, and planned for what was next. A quick check uptime told me the 1967 mirror was still submerged.
I steeled myself against the pain that came when you mixed mirror-heat and water, and stuck my hand through to feel around. Sand and mud. I felt a slimy bit of weed and yanked it through, but what good was that? In the last couple of months, I had come up with a hundred schemes for getting back out of that mirror, but none was any good. I could have put a scuba suit on and gone through, but what if John Wald was right, and it wasn’t a breathing thing, just the shock of the water mixing with the mirror-heat?
So there was still no hope of getting through into the future. Not yet.
I had an appointment in the past.
I went back into the coal cellar and left a note for Brian, asking him to leave the mirror and promising I’d be back. Then, making sure I had everything, I held my key and headed into the mirror.
It was the longest, coldest downtime journey I had taken. Out into the carriage house, turn around, hold out the key, and back in. Out into what must have been Lilly’s room in 1937, turn around, hold the key, and back in. Out into the same room in 1927, nobody around in the midmorning, but I could hear sounds from the hallway, so back in again.
Hold on, I said in my head to the baby my father had taken out of the wall, here I come.
I stopped in the Silverlands and watched 1917 before bursting out into it. Just as I had expected from Rose’s diary, the mirror was back in the carriage house where her mother had sent her to live. Half-finished lath on the wall. A neatly made single bed. A pile of books.
A crying girl huddled in a corner.
Time to be like Luka again.
Without another thought, I stepped out of the mirror.
Rose’s head sprang up and her eyes grew round with surprise. “Who on earth are you?” she said as I stepped down off her dresser.
“I’m Kenny Maxwell,” I said, trying to channel my inner Skywalker. “I’m here to rescue you.”
Five
Rescuing, it turns out, is a lot harder than in the movies.
As soon as Rose got over the shock of seeing me, she went right back to sobbing. I had no idea what to do. I stood on the low dresser the mirror was mounted on, and felt like an idiot way out of his league.
“You might as well come in,” she said after a long while in between choked sobs. “What do you mean? I’ve never met you before in my life, Kenny Maxwell.” She pushed herself up, feet braced against the floor, back sliding up the wall, and I saw just how right Luka was about Rose Hollerith’s “condition.”
She had the condition all right. Big. Seeing the direction of my gaze, she sniffed and looked away. “Am I a sideshow attraction, then? No wonder Mother keeps me shut up here. I remember your name now. Past Margaret Garroway and Anthony Currah, am I right? I’ve been making a list of you all. What are you here to rescue me from, Kenny Maxwell?” She looked down at her stomach. “I haven’t exactly been captured by the enemy, have I?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but couldn’t think of anything. She motioned again and I stepped down from the dresser.
“It’s … Prince Harming, I think. There’s … something bad is going to happen. Didn’t anybody tell you? A baby dies.” We were on the second floor of the carriage house, just as I had been in 1947. I looked at the place where one day my father would draw out that tiny blackened parcel. Someone had left it half built in just about the state my dad would leave it half destroyed.
“Oh,” said Rose. “Yes, I’ve heard about that.” She gave me a look that was half pitying, half impossible to interpret. “Lilly told Curtis. Curtis told me.” She touched her stomach and suddenly looked exhausted. She pushed past me to sit on her unmade bed. “But that’s nothing to do with me, Kenny Maxwell from the future. It’s not mine.” She stared at me when she said this. I could see something desperate in her denial, but hard, too, as though she were daring me to disagree.
How do you know? I wanted to ask. But you can’t ask that of a pregnant girl. How do you know your baby will live? All babies have to live, don’t they? But then whose baby was it? When did it come from?
I guess she must have read the question in my face. She shook her head. “You’re just a little bit of a ninny, aren’t you? He can’t die because he’s alive. I’ve known it for months. Don’t you see? I see my son all the time. Every second day, through the mirror.”
“Every—? But that’s Curtis. Your brother.”
She smiled and spat out a bitter laugh. “And isn’t that just like Mother? She knows, you know, but she won’t acknowledge it. In a secret part of her mind, I think she’s planned this all along. Father joined up for service. Two months ago, just as he was starting to fix this place up. He’s German, and it’s never been a bit of a problem to our neighbors until the war began. He finally couldn’t stand it, the looks, the pointed comments, and he went and signed up. Mother didn’t fight him about it, and after that, she’s hardly been out. She has one of the local boys run errands. She’s going to tell them it’s hers. She’s going to tell them all, and my Clive must be dead.”
At that, she collapsed again into tears.
I sat awkwardly beside her on her bed for a moment. “I don’t—I don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t do anything,” she sniffled. “When someone cries and there’s noth—nothing to be done, you just put an arm around their shoulders and shut up.”
So I did that for a while, wondering how long it had been since someone had just sat with her.
How could she be right about Curtis? His age was right. Her diary described him as eight or nine back in January. But if he lived, who died? Who was the baby whose head would be smashed in, and why had Rose written a note asking me to save him?
And who was the Beckett who was chasing me?
Eventually Rose straightened up and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Well, nothing to do but do, as Mother says. Would you like to help, Kenny?”
The tears I had seen when I first came through the mirror were of frustration more than anything else. Rose had finally set to finishing the walls, but it had turned out to be at least a two-person job. She assigned me to holding the thin strips of lath against the wall as she nailed them up, making the very wall I had torn apart half a year before.