CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

“What the—” Darrell said. “What was that?”

Wade watched the room empty instantly, like the stage at the end of a scene.

Nicolaus was pulled into the hall by a pair of knights, the infant was bundled and whisked away by the nurse. The artist left with his small wooden panel under his arm. Footsteps retreated and died down the hallway. Only the frail, wheezy breaths of the girl on the bed and the frozen statue of Albrecht remained.

The air quaked again.

“What’s going on down there?” Lily said.

They pushed to the window and looked down. Kronos III, hovering out of time minutes ago, was now a solid object, belching black smoke as it shimmered completely into the courtyard. The moment the spinning air slowed around it, Galina and Ebner jumped from its seats onto the cobblestones.

“They’ll never fly that back to the present,” Wade said. “They’ll steal the astrolabe!”

“Not without a fight!” said Darrell. “Come on!”

They rushed down the stairs in time to see Ebner bolting across the stones to the astrolabe. “I will take the controls, Galina. Find your daughter. Find Albrecht—”

The troop of knights marching out of the castle surprised him, and he skidded to a stop. Darrell quickly tossed a paving stone at him, catching him in the knees. Ebner crashed to the ground, his gun firing wildly. Without hesitating, Galina bounded past him and the children, and ran up the stairs.

Lily rushed after Galina. “Oh, no you don’t!”

Galina knew in her heart the way to her old room.

She felt every step, every turn in the maze of hallways; she remembered the feel of each stair intimately, as if she’d climbed them just this morning. She flew up to the final landing and down the corridor, pushed open the studded wooden door, and stopped short.

Oh . . .

To see Albrecht staring at her younger self—to see herself so near death and know that she now was invisible—stunned her. Without intending it, she found words on her lips, and she uttered the name Albrecht had always called her.

“I am here, dear Albrecht. Cassiopeia . . . your queen . . . I have returned for you.”

He didn’t react. Nor did her younger dying self react when she hovered over her bed. Instead the dying girl seemed mesmerized by the in and out of the flickering light seeping in through the shaded window.

“Albrecht?” she said. But now he was gone, too, vanished from the room. “Albrecht?”

All at once, the windows shattered stained glass across the bed, and Galina spun and looked out to the courtyard below.

Kronos was an inferno of flame.

And Ebner was shrieking, “Galina! Galina! They have destroyed Kronos!”

Nearly overcome with the stench of burning leather, rubber, and scorching metal, she climbed to the jagged sill, and jumped.

Seconds after she saw Galina leap from the window, Lily helped Darrell connect the Kronos relics to the astrolabe, while Wade and Becca did their best to neutralize Ebner.

He wouldn’t go down without a fight.

Growling like a wild animal—“No! Stop this! No!”—Ebner leaped at Darrell and threw him to the ground. Then he clawed at Becca, tearing what Lily saw was the key chain alarm from Becca’s belt. But she was up again, some kind of pike in her hands, and Darrell joined her, punching Ebner flat in the chest.

Wade jumped into the pilot’s seat. “Guys—leave him! The hole is closing!”

They all scrambled in. As Galina tore across the cobblestones, shrieking, Wade threw forward the main lever. The machine shuddered once, and the air went gold, then black around it.

Wade pushed down on the third lever and the courtyard faded around them, Galina, Ebner, Albrecht, all of them vanishing simultaneously into mist.

The astrolabe streaked away farther and farther, deeper and deeper into the past, slithering easily through the years and months and weeks. With all twelve relics on board, the flight was as smooth as silk.

Then it wasn’t.

Just as they began to slow toward 1514, the golden frame of the machine shook violently, and the whole device spun swiftly toward a giant speeding shard of light.

“What is that?” Becca yelled.

“We’re off course!” Darrell shouted. “Wade—do—something!”

“You could do something!” Wade snapped.

“Someone do something, I’m still filming!” Lily said.

With both hands, Becca took hold of the main lever and tugged it back a few inches. The shard of light spun by them, but their machine somersaulted and spun upside down until she moved a series of small levers on the panel. The spinning slowed, then stopped. Time grew heavy. A palace shimmered around them. The sea, blue air, mountains, hills, then thick red columns and paintings of women and griffins and birds.

They were in the center of the labyrinth.

In the pit of time.

On the island of Crete.

In September 1514.