Saira – 1889

 

Ringo got older the minute we landed at the London Bridge.

We had arrived the hour before dawn and ran to Ringo’s flat just to test out our injuries. We had decided to give Tom one more day of healing before we Clocked directly into the British Museum station, and he didn’t care where he slept. We’d made a promise to leave Artemisia’s villa, and there was a war on in 1944. In 1889, Ringo could reset to his natural age, and we could stay one more day in a familiar place before we stepped into so much danger and uncertainty.

Ringo and I sat at his table nursing cups of tea. Mary had sent us with enough food to feed five people, so we didn’t need to leave the flat if we didn’t want to, but neither of us really had an appetite. Tom had made a bed for himself on the floor away from the windows, and I watched him idly for a moment while my tea cooled.

“He’s aged too, even though he should look the same as he did before.” I’d been studying the lines in the corners of his eyes. When his eyes were closed, I barely saw the difference, but when they were open, I could see the telltale shadows of too much experience in them.

I shifted my eyes to Ringo’s face. We hadn’t been away a long time, but when the change is sudden, it’s noticeable. More whiskers glinted in the light, his jaw and cheekbones stretched the skin taut, and his hands and forearms looked corded with lean muscle.

“Ye’ve changed,” Ringo said to me. I started at his words, not aware that he’d been studying me too. “Ye’re eyes ‘ave seen more, so they dance less when ye’re restin’. And when ye smile now, it’s deeper, maybe even truer, but it’s not so often, and I miss the ready laughter.” His look was appraising over the rim of his mug. “Ye can run longer now than I’ve ever seen ye go, but ye’re not as reckless with yerself. Ye’ve felt what it is to be ‘urt and it makes ye careful.”

Ringo had never owned a mirror, but he’d found a piece of one when Charlie had lived here with him, and he got up to find it. It had been a long time since I’d studied myself in any mirror – a long time since I’d cared what I looked like beyond my ability to blend into whatever year I found myself.

I studied my face in the shard of mirror. Up close my eyes held less laughter, and my mouth was completely neutral when I wasn’t smiling. My eyebrows were nice though, and I liked my cheekbones – they made interesting hollows and planes in my face. They were balanced by a jaw that let me get away with dressing like a man if a person didn’t notice the long eyelashes. I’d gotten stronger, and lean muscle had settled in, and I knew I would rarely ever fit the world’s idea of feminine beauty. But I could be graceful when I wanted to be, mostly when I was running, and my body was strong enough to do what I asked of it most times.

“Ye’re beautiful,” he said quietly, and I shook my head.

“There’s nothing conventional about my looks.”

Ringo shrugged, “Conventions are more of a guideline than a rule.”

I burst out laughing. “You watched Pirates of the Caribbean?”

He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide a smile. “Connor and I were tryin’ to decide which characters we were more like.”

I laughed. “So, who’s Jack Sparrow?”

He snorted. “Neither of us. We’re both Will Turners, though I wouldn’t mind bein’ a bit more Elizabeth Swann.”

My eyebrows furrowed. “Why?”

“Well, Will is fairly obvious for us – ‘e’s loyal, and brave, and will fight to the death for people ‘e loves. But Elizabeth is a natural leader, and she’s a great battle strategist. She also says exactly what she means, even if it offends someone more powerful. Mostly, though, she inspires people to follow ‘er, like she did all the pirate kings. Connor and I both agree ye’re the most like Elizabeth of all of us, and we’re glad to be yer Wills.”

I shook my head at him but couldn’t hold back the smile. “That might be the nicest compliment you’ve ever given me.”

“Nah, when I said ye could run for longer than ye used to, that was nicer.”

He pulled a small silk bag from his pocket and slid it across the table to me. “‘Ere. I found this for ye in Rome.”

I’d forgotten that Ringo had gone shopping in the city when Artemisia and I were in the Tower of the Winds. I untied the little bag, and a bead strung on a piece of leather fell into my hand. It was Venetian glass of a beautiful amber color swirled through with gold, vaguely eye-shaped, and utterly breathtaking. I looked up at him in wonder. “It’s so beautiful.”

He wouldn’t meet my eyes, but got up to tie the leather around my neck. “It reminded me of yer Cat’s eyes,” he said quietly. The bead nestled in the hollow below my throat, and I touched it reverently.

“Thank you, Ringo.” I turned to hug him, but he dodged my embrace. He went over to the post where I’d carved the crowned heart, touched it lightly, then hauled himself up the climbing rope that dangled from the ceiling. He sat on the cross beam and leaned against the support, didn’t invite me up, and didn’t meet my eyes. I left him to the only solitude a person could get in a single room loft.

I rinsed the mugs and dried them, then re-checked my bag to make sure I had everything I wanted to Clock with. Ringo still hadn’t come down from his perch after I’d done whatever washing I could manage with the limited facilities, so finally I called up.

“I’m going to nap for a while. Shove me over if you want to sleep too.”

“I won’t be doin’ that,” he called down quietly.

“Why not? The bed’s big enough,” I said as I lay down on it. I wasn’t sure what the night in the tunnels would bring, and I felt like rest and food were the only ways I could prepare myself.

He mumbled something that I couldn’t have heard right, because it sounded like he said “no bed’s big enough.” I turned down the noise in my brain so I didn’t wonder about it too long, and I finally drifted to sleep, my hand on the cat’s-eye bead at my throat.

 

Ringo still wasn’t wild about the idea of a spiral in his flat, so the three of us made our way back down to the London Bridge after dark. I wasn’t concerned about getting the exact day and minute right on this Clock, because it was the actions on the platform I needed to hold in my brain.

Tom, Ringo, and I had hashed out the incidents of that night in as much detail as each of us could remember. It was pretty fascinating to dissect the whole thing as if it was a scene in a movie we’d all watched but had interpreted slightly differently.

Tom’s recall of the night had been quite different at first, colored as it was by his anger and the hatred he felt for the whole Walters family. The memories that Ringo and I had were more similar, but there were still differences in what our brains put emphasis on. The thing that was clearest in my mind was landing in the bishop’s attic and realizing that Archer wasn’t behind us. The thing Ringo remembered best was the moment he shoved Tom through the spiral. The thing neither of us could completely recreate was what happened right after that. Both of us had been focused on Tom, so we hadn’t seen how George Walters got the gun from Archer, or how Archer moved right before Walters shot him.

We also had no idea how this was going to work. Based on both Tom’s and my experiences trying to Clock to a place we already were, the theory was that if I directed us to the moment Ringo had tackled Tom and sent him through the spiral, and Tom held that same moment in his mind, he would be spit out, for lack of a more technical term, at the moment he disappeared. The part none of us could guess at was what would happen to me and Ringo.

As I saw it, there were a couple of possibilities. One was that we would hit the platform the moment after we left it. That would be fine if Tom managed to disarm George before he shot the V-1 rocket and armed it to explode. If the bomb went off again just like it had the first time, we’d Clock into an explosion. Which would suck.

Another possibility was that we’d get shot out on the wrong time stream after we left 1944 to go forward. And the third possibility, always a favorite, was that we’d just get lost between times, never to emerge again.

What we mostly realized as we talked through all the possible scenarios was that this job was dangerous for all of us, and in the absence of hazard pay, or fame and fortune and everything that goes with it, we’d have to acknowledge to each other that this sucked, but no matter what happened, we would know what being heroic felt like.

I had already traced three of the five spirals on the bridge support, and both guys had a hand gripped on my belt – one on either side – when I turned quickly and kissed each one on the cheek. “Love you guys.” I really meant it. Even for Tom.

Ringo recovered first. “We’ll get through this,” he said with determination.

“Thank you,” Tom finally said, quietly.

And then we Clocked.