“What are you talking about?” Tess said. “I can’t see my father again. It doesn’t matter what I do.”
Mr. Cleat rubbed his chin, giving her the smug smile of a person who thinks they know best. “The thing about multiple realities, Tess,” he began, “particularly multiple realities between which people have learned how to travel, is that things can get lost. However, they can also be found. Again and again if need be.” He held out his hand, fingers outstretched as though he were holding up an invisible plate. “Imagine each fingertip is a world,” he said. “In each world is a version of you. Of me. Of our good friend Mrs. Pauline Thistleton. And of your father, your mother, everyone you’ve ever known. Theoretically, at least.”
“Theoretically,” Tess said. “You love that word.”
“But isn’t it worth finding out?” Mr. Cleat said, staring at her incredulously. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you, Tess, the most promising scientist of your years I’ve ever met. You don’t even want to think about what I’m saying?”
Tess drilled into Mr. Cleat with her stare. “I had one father,” she said. “And one mother. Other versions of them aren’t them. And other versions of your father aren’t him.”
Mr. Cleat dropped his hand, giving her a cool look. “I think that’s my decision to make,” he told her.
“I am not going to help you,” Tess said, her words slow and deliberate. “I’m not going to help you bring across the worlds things that can drop bombs or cause pain. I will never do that. It doesn’t matter what you offer me, it’s not going to change my mind. So you’d better just give up. You’re wasting your time.”
Mr. Cleat chuckled mirthlessly, shaking his head. “Even if I could help you find your home, Tess? And I don’t mean that silly house by the river. I mean the place you were born.” Mr. Cleat’s icy blue stare was enough to rob Tess of her breath. “Because the world in which you were born, Tess, is the one where all of this began. The world that experienced the Tunguska blast in all its ferocity, where in 1908 a meteorite hit the ground with so much force that it threw up an ash cloud thick enough to block out the sun. All other known worlds, including this one and our war-torn neighbor, suffered but an echo of that cataclysmic event, Tess, but your world is dying, gradually going dark and turning to a lump of blackened stone.” Tess blinked and her mind flashed to the Star-spinner. The tarnished marker, she thought. Is that—is that the key that leads to my home? Mr. Cleat spoke again and it broke her concentration. “If you want to see it before it’s too late, now is the time to act.”
“I don’t need your help to find it,” she retorted.
“You do if I have your device,” Mr. Cleat said, sitting back in his chair. “And your spider. You can hardly go without them, can you?” He pressed his lips into a thin line. “And if you don’t help me tomorrow evening, you’ll never see either of them again.”
A roar was building inside Tess, but she forced it back. “How do you know all this? About me, and my—where I was born?”
Mr. Cleat rubbed a hand through his hair. “You’ve been spoken of since you were an infant, Tess, in the jangling wires and hissing frequencies and tapped-out codes that link the worlds. People have been looking for you in all known realities almost from the moment you were born. You were a legend, some said; a fabrication, said others. Few of us actually believed in the truth of you, a refugee from a dying world, the girl whose father risked all he had to save.” He paused, pursing his lips thoughtfully for a second before continuing. “And of course he ran to save his own hide, too—to keep himself out of the clutches of those who wanted to use the device he’d built for their own ends.”
Tess blinked. “Wait. The device he’d built?”
Mr. Cleat raised his eyebrows. “You mean you hadn’t guessed? I’m surprised. Yes, Tess. Your father was—is—the architect of the Star-spinner. He forged it from materials excavated from the Tunguska blast site on his world and yours, from metals and other things that fell from the stars.” He shrugged. “The exact science is beyond me. All I know is that it works.”
“But it can’t do what you want it to,” Tess said, desperately hoping she was right. “It can’t take your bombers through to a different reality. It just takes me—one person at a time.”
“That’s because you haven’t conducted the correct experiment yet,” Mr. Cleat told her. Then he frowned. “You know, I may have been wrong about you after all. A great scientist needs to be someone with imagination, Tess—a person who sees beyond the obvious to what is possible. A person who asks questions that don’t seem to have answers. You’ve had every chance to do just that and yet you’ve been content to focus on yourself.” His eyes narrowed. “A lot like your father, perhaps.”
“That is not fair,” Tess said, fighting back tears.
“Well, let’s prove me wrong then,” Mr. Cleat said. He sat forward once again. “How about this for a deal? If you don’t do precisely what I require tomorrow evening—and I do mean precisely, because there is a lot at stake—then I’ll be forced to take extraordinary measures. It doesn’t bring me any joy, believe me. But I’ll do what I have to do.”
“Just tell me,” Tess said, through gritted teeth and smeared glasses.
Mr. Cleat stared her down for several long seconds, his eyes sharp as scalpels. Finally he began to speak in a low and deliberate tone. “Tomorrow night I will have at my disposal five bombers. These are flying machines, as I’ve told you before, which have the power to reduce anything on the ground to a smoking crater, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be in their path. Currently their pilots are a bit nonplussed with me as I’ve refused to give them exact coordinates for their mission. I can’t, of course, as they’ll be flying where our coordinates will be meaningless. But I can change my mind and give them coordinates at any time. I can give them the exact location of a lovely old building on the corner of Carlisle Bridge, overlooking the River Plura, right here in our fair city of Hurdleford. Many young ladies live there, I’m told. A rather happy place by all accounts.”
Tess held her breath, trembling as he spoke. With his next words he froze her still. “And it might interest you to know that the lives of every single person in that building depend on your agreeing to help me.” He paused, leaning closer, his eyes sharpening with every word. “You’ve already said I can offer you nothing to change your mind, so the only recourse I have left is to take something away. I’m forced to tell you this, then: if you persist in your stubbornness, you’ll never see your beloved Miss Ackerbee, nor anyone from her blasted Home, ever again.”
“Yes. Yes, I quite understand. But please—won’t you just give me a chance to explain? I have it on good authority that a child is in danger.” Miss Ackerbee paused, listening to the voice on the other end of the phone. “Whose authority? An eyewitness—a child named Millicent, who had been employed in the household.”
Rebecca winced as she watched Miss Ackerbee’s facial expression changing with every word that came down the telephone line.
“A simple charwoman-in-training? I hardly think it’s fair to discount her testimony because of her position!” Miss Ackerbee’s gaze flicked to Rebecca’s face; her fury could burn holes straight through the wall. “She knew the child well and she witnessed the ill-treatment firsthand.”
Please, my dear, Rebecca begged inside her head. Let it go.
Miss Ackerbee’s mouth drew tight against her teeth as she listened. “I simply cannot believe you’re unwilling to take this complaint seriously.” She paused again. “Childish imaginations? Sir, I have worked with children for almost twenty years. I know exactly— Sir? Sir?” Her mouth dropped open as she stared at Rebecca. Slowly she replaced her telephone receiver. “He hung up,” she said.
“I know, love,” Rebecca replied sympathetically. She folded her arms across her middle. “They’re not going to listen to you. The time for asking nicely is over, I think. It’s time to do something instead.”
“But what can we do?” Miss Ackerbee said, taking off her spectacles and pressing her hands against her eyes. “The law can do nothing. The police can do nothing. Nobody will touch a rich, well-connected, apparently law-abiding man, not even when I try to explain that one of my girls…that my girl…” Miss Ackerbee broke down and Rebecca hurried to her. She hugged Miss Ackerbee tightly and Miss Ackerbee clung to her in turn.
“Aurelia,” Rebecca whispered. “She is our girl. Our girl. The only person who loved her more than we do was the man who left her here.” She paused, readying herself for what had to come next. “And we trusted her once—it’s time to trust her again.”
Miss Ackerbee pulled back to look into Rebecca’s face. “What do you mean?” she said, a small hiccupping sob interrupting her words.
“We raised that girl to be clever. We raised her as nobody’s fool. But also she came to us that way. She has formidable courage that belongs to nobody but her, and she chose to face this challenge head-on once already. It’s not the law she needs; it’s us. And her friends.” Rebecca held a hopeful breath. “She doesn’t need a police van to knock on the door and take her away. She needs help to get the answers she went there to find. We owe her that.”
“We owe her safety,” Miss Ackerbee said, her eyes filling with fresh tears. “Her father crossed worlds to leave that child on our doorstep, and this is what becomes of it.”
Rebecca’s eyes shone. “Exactly, Aurelia. Exactly. Imagine how proud of her he’d be.”
Miss Ackerbee gave a tiny tired nod, closing her eyes just as they overflowed. Rebecca watched hopefully as expressions flitted across Miss Ackerbee’s face.
Then Miss Ackerbee cleared her throat and straightened up. She cleaned her face, blew her nose as daintily as possible and reached out to find her spectacles.
She put them on like a queen readying herself for battle.
“What then is our plan?” she asked, and Rebecca smiled.
“For that,” she said, “I think we need to have a word with Wilhelmina.”