People were coming out of the house. Halen pushed up the aircar’s canopy and bounded out. Corva followed, but as she approached her family her footsteps slowed, and then she stopped. Suddenly she burst into tears.
“You’re older!” she exclaimed. A man and a woman rushed over to her, along with a younger man and woman. She let her parents embrace her but pushed away the other two.
“No! It’s terrible, it’s terrible!” With a sob she burst past them and ran into the house.
Toby sat in the aircar, clutching Orpheus and feeling sick. Finally Halen seemed to remember him and called, “Garren! It’s okay, come meet Mom and Dad!”
He didn’t want to get out of the car, but Orpheus squirmed from his grasp and leaped down to the grass, where he proceeded to roll back and forth in delight. Toby put a shaky hand on the canopy bed and climbed out. With slow steps he walked up to Corva’s family. They were debating who should go after Corva.
“—Rescued us from the time lock! He won’t say how he did it, but he agreed to come with us.” Halen was grinning, but his eyes were cold as he looked over at Toby.
His parents weren’t like that, they were practically in tears themselves. Corva’s other brother and sister looked to be about Halen’s age; all seemed older than Corva, but a sinking feeling in Toby’s stomach told him that, no, she must be the eldest.
“I’ll go to her,” said Corva’s sister.
“No,” Toby heard himself say.
Halen’s grin froze. “What?” he said in a slightly strangled tone.
“I’m sorry.” Toby bowed quickly. “I’m Garren Morton. Corva and I are just friends, but, the thing is…”
“What?” Halen said again. His smile was gone.
“It happened to me, too,” Toby blurted. “Having years stolen like … like’s happened to you. I know how she feels. My own brother and sister are … well, they’re a lot older than me now. And my parents are dead. For me, they were alive just a couple of months ago, but it’s been…” Halen’s eyes widened in warning, and Toby shrugged. “An impossibly long time.
“I know you want to run to her,” he said to Corva’s sister. “She looks the same to you, but for her, you’re an entirely new person. It’s going to take her awhile to get over that shock.”
Her father sighed. “It’s what I said would happen. The same thing would have happened to you,” he said to Halen. “You shouldn’t have risked it all like that, son.”
Halen was now the target of their attention. With another quick bow, Toby moved around them and entered the house, where alert bots offered him orange juice and biscuits. He stared at them, sidled past, and called out, “Corva?”
He hesitated but didn’t really feel like he had to tiptoe about; the household bots were there to protect the privacy of the family and would simply bar him from anywhere he shouldn’t go. Or so he supposed, until he saw that half the butlers were sitting silent in dusty corners: broken-down, like so much of the city.
He started up the stairs, and they didn’t stop him.
She was facedown on a bed in one of the bedrooms. This was a girl’s room, its walls tuned to shifting washes of yellow and peach; pictures of family, places and people tumbled and sailed slowly up and back in that dimensionless space. There were wooden boxes under the bed and chests of drawers whose tops overflowed with jewelry and dozens of toys, some of which had broken down and sat forlornly while the rest all crowded at the edge of the surface, watching Corva weep with concern on their tiny faces.
“Evayne’s room looked like this,” said Toby from the doorway. Corva stiffened, then turned her head enough to say, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“She’s my little sister, Corva. At least, she was last time I saw her.”
Corva lay very still for a long time. Then she rolled over and sat up. She wouldn’t meet Toby’s eyes. “I was hoping to totally redo this room before I showed it to any young man. I haven’t lived here in years.”
“You were at school.”
She nodded. “Studying architecture! How to design buildings to last thousands of years. Ruin design, it’s called.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Suddenly, something seemed to occur to her, and now she did send Toby a puzzled look. “What about you? You got lost because you were away from home for some reason. There’re a billion stories about why, but most of them are ridiculous—”
“We had to seal our claim to Sedna by visiting all its moons. One was stupidly far away. Rockette, we called it. I got lost on the way there.”
It was strange. What had been his immediate experience yesterday was something he could talk about as being in the past; it was a story he could tell. He grinned and shrugged. “That’s really all there was to it. I didn’t want to go, but Mom and Dad weren’t home, and Peter and Evayne weren’t old enough.”
Corva frowned, thinking. “That must have been tough on all of you.”
“Toughest on Peter. He hates change, he’s afraid of his own shadow. He cried for days when he found out Mom and Dad were going.”
“What about when you left?”
Toby shrugged. “We had this gameworld we shared, called Consensus. I promised I’d meet him in it every day. He was fine with that.”
Corva gave him a long measured look. “Are you sure about that?”
His heart was suddenly hammering again. He shook himself angrily and scowled at her toys. They backed away, all except for a little warrior with a sword that stood bravely with its thumbnail-size weapon raised.
“We can’t talk about any of this without tripping over it, can we?”
“Tripping over what?” He thought he knew, but he wanted her to say it.
“The change. How we slept, and overnight they got older. And … how it’s all around us all the time. These cliffs of time you could just fall over accidentally at any moment. Lose a day, lose a century … I hate it.”
He was surprised. “You want to leave the lockstep?”
“That would be worse. To be stranded in realtime? Left behind by everybody you ever knew?” She shuddered. “No, it’s just so unfair how a year can be snatched away from you like that. Or … or a whole life.”
He found himself sitting on the bed next to her, and she leaned in to him. As he had so many times with Evayne, he put his arm around her, but this was different and he knew it. Corva buried her face in his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said, voice muffled.
“For what?”
“For using you the way I did. For being mean. I just … didn’t think I could trust you.”
“But you can.”
She was silent. Then she pulled away. “Toby, we have to face them some time. For me, it’s today I guess. For you … do you really know what’ll happen when you do that?”
He clasped his hands and looked down. “No. I guess not.”
“Then don’t make any promises, okay?”
Fair enough, he thought, though her words had hurt him. He stood up briskly. “Come on. They’re waiting for you. I think you need to make the first move.”
“And … how I feel? About seeing them so different?”
He gave a short laugh. “Maybe you should hide that for a day or so. See how it goes.”
Corva stood, too, and blew out a deep breath. Then she smiled. “Nobody else could have said that to me, but maybe you’re right. I’ll pretend for a day and then … see.”
They almost joined hands, but she turned away first, and they went downstairs.