Capulin Station, New Mexico
July 17, 59,886 BCE
Nathan held the needle gun in a ginger grip and squinted against the noontime sun.
Charlotte stood in front of him, disgust fouling her features. "Don't be such a snowflake. It won't bite you."
Nathan wasn't worried about the gun hurting him. But the damned thing was as light and flimsy as a child's toy, scarcely hefty enough to give him confidence against the denizens of the Pleistocene. He chewed on his lip and tried to not look across the stream at the carcass of the saber-tooth that had attacked him. He couldn't ignore the stench of rotting meat, though, or the raucous cries of the crows pecking at the animal's exposed innards. "It feels like a toy. You sure it'd be effective against that kind of creature?"
Corbett rolled her eyes, raised her gun, and sent a ruby-colored beam into the cat's haunch. A momentary trail of smoke rose from the flames that erupted wherever the light fell. The birds squalled and flapped away into the brassy noontime sky. "That answer your question? Doofus. Shall we get started?" she asked. From her manner and tone, she could have been asking if he was ready for a game of Canasta or a stroll through a butterfly garden instead of a hike through a pre-historic, predator-filled veldt.
Nathan sucked in a deep breath. "You're sure this is necessary? Why can't we just wait for Claude to come back?"
She narrowed her eyes. "He's not coming back. I told you, the shunt Claude put around this place damps temporal fields for a five hundred meter radius. That's why I had to walk in, and now we've got to walk out."
Nathan fingered the cross dangling about his neck. "Shouldn't you show me how to use this?"
"All you need to know is how to activate it. There's plenty of time for training later."
"At least tell me where we're going."
"I did tell you. You're headed to the Timekeeper Academy."
"Yeah. You just didn't tell where—or when—that is."
"You know what you need to know." She glanced at what looked like an iPad that she clutched in her left fist. "There's nothing bigger than a ferret within a kilometer. It's too hot for the large predators to be out hunting. We should go while it's clear."
Nathan suppressed a desire to scream at her. Above all, he wanted to find out exactly what had happened to Haakon. She'd as good as said they couldn't find his body, except she was being evasive about even simple things. Besides, he had an idea...but first, he needed to learn more about the physics of Timepieces. From what he'd seen and heard so far, he had an inkling of how they might work. He wished he could run some simulations on the supercomputer back in Iowa, but maybe, just maybe, Haakon hadn't actually vanished, at least not in the way Charlotte implied. Maybe this whole Deviation thing was a big mistake. But if she suspected what he was thinking...for now, he needed to focus on the moment. He heaved a calming sigh. "What's that you're carrying? An iPad?"
She turned her head to face him, rolled her eyes, and squeezed her features as if she'd sucked on a lemon. "It's an environmental scanner." A haughty sniff and a curled lip showed her contempt. "iPad indeed. This is serious." She glanced at the screen again. "We should go while it's still clear."
For the first time, he wondered if she were trying to convince herself as well as him. Still, he didn't want to be stranded here, alone. She was his best chance to escape the prison Claude had created for him. "All right. 'Lay on, MacDuff.'"
"Who? Really, this is no time for more of your comic book crap." She squared her shoulders and splashed into the stream.
Nathan traipsed after her, muttering, "'And accursed be she who cries, 'Hold your crap.'"
The prairie grass stood shoulder-high and grew in clumps. The roots turned the dry, packed earth into an obstacle course that grappled with his sneakers. Each step threatened a twisted ankle or a wrenched knee, while the stalks sprouted blades and shoots covered with burrs. Dust and pollen made his breath wheeze and burned his eyes.
Corbett was better dressed than when she'd arrived. She now wore a man's shirt and khaki slacks, with a belt holding the too-large pants to her hips. There hadn't been any sneakers that would fit her feet, though, so she wore sandals. Nathan was sure the veldt must be biting into her exposed flesh.
He swatted at creepy-crawlies that swarmed on his arms and up his legs. De-tasseling an Iowa corn field was bad enough, but nothing like this Pleistocene Hell of bugs, nettles, and fucking sand burrs.
After about fifteen minutes, Corbett led them onto an animal trail trampled through the grass. She paused to consult her not-iPad. "We've got maybe another hundred meters or so to go to be free of the shunt. It would be a good idea to hurry."
She took off at a trot, and Nathan huffed after. "What do you mean, 'a good idea?'"
She just increased her pace and didn't deign to answer. Her breath whistled in her throat, and sweat soaked the armpits of her shirt. Without warning, she halted and used her needle gun to spray a wide arc of light across the prairie grass on her right. The beam vaporized the first fifty meters of prairie grass in its path, leaving smoking cinders behind. Beyond that, flames and smoke billowed in a wave of destruction.
An animal howled, and an enormous creature leapt from the fire and onto the cinders. Nathan jerked at his needle gun and pulled the trigger, but the animal was too fast—the beam trailed behind its charge. A second beam caught the creature between the eyes, and its skull exploded in a burst of brilliant reds, whites, and oranges. Corbett's aim had been better than his.
She muttered, "Dire wolf. Hurry. There's more. They hunt in packs." She snatched at Nathan's wrist and pulled him forward.
The fire she'd started crackled as it spread and sent smoke churning into the hot July air. Each sooty breath seared his throat. She lurched to a stop and stroked the screen on her device. "This is far enough. It's time." She tugged at the medallion hanging about her neck and stepped away from him. "We don't want the fields to commingle."
Nathan nodded and peered at his disk. He punched at the single glowing button with a trembling finger, and at once the temporal field quivered to life about him. Corbett shimmered through the haze, stepping further back, her fingers poised over her own medallion. A snarling mass of muscle and teeth pounced from the grass, from nowhere, and was upon her.
Nathan shrieked, "No!" He fumbled with his needle gun. It tumbled out of his fingers and landed a meter or more away from him. He reached to pick it up, but it was too late. The field had already formed and as suddenly as the wolf-creature had appeared, a bubble of glowing phosphorescence separated him from the Pleistocene. Pinpricks shot through his skin and his insides, but not nearly as intense as the prior times. He must be getting used to this.
The field faded, and a dank room with stone walls took shape around him. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. In front and behind him, the room vanished into blackness. A tunnel. He was in a friggin' tunnel. He turned in a circle to orient himself. Somewhere in the distance, a steady plop of water sent echoes cascading against the walls. He squinted into the blackness. Maybe, just maybe, another light bulb glimmered a couple of hundred yards away.
He shouted, "Hey! Anyone here?" All that returned was his own voice, bouncing off the walls.
If this was the Timekeeper Academy, it wasn't very impressive.
The ground trembled and a dull roar thundered through the corridor. Nathan steadied himself with a palm against the damp wall. The sound rose to a crescendo before it faded to nothingness. That couldn't have been an earthquake. He'd heard that sound before...then he remembered. It had been in a subway in Chicago. When he re-examined the walls and floor, it was clear: he was in an abandoned train tunnel.
Where was Corbett? He was pretty sure she'd activated her Timepiece before the saber-tooth jumped her, so why wasn't she here? "Charlotte? Where are you?" Nothing but echoes answered.
He shivered. Wherever he was, it was cold, and his sweat-soaked clothes now clung to him with a clammy grasp. He set his jaw. He couldn't stay here. He looked left and right, and decided that was a light in the distance on the right. That determined which direction to go.
Within a dozen meters, icy water puddled in the bottom of the tunnel and soaked his sneakers. The illumination from the light bulb behind him faded into the gloom. He let his fingers trail along the rough, slimy walls and forged ahead. After what seemed like an eternity, the glow in front of him grew brighter until at last he stood in another isolated pool of illumination, just like the last.
"Sweet. What do I do now?" His whispers returned to him in a wave of reverberations, bouncing off the walls as if mocking him.
A pure, subsonic tone moaned from nowhere, quickly soaring to a whistle and then wailing into supersonic silence. That was no train. At the same time, a human-sized eggshell of swirling colors coalesced a couple of meters away from him. He jumped back, bumping his head on a low-hanging stone beam.
Inside the bubble of light, an elfin-sized woman took shape. Recognition flitted into Nathan's brain. This had to be a Timekeeper arriving. Whoever it was, she was too short to be Corbett. Maybe she'd know where Charlotte went. Maybe Corbett sent her to rescue him. He pulled himself erect, planted a stern expression on his face, and waited.
The temporal field whisked into a fading whirlpool and vanished. The woman shook herself and tugged at the brown tweed jacket that covered her torso. A matching skirt cloaked her legs to well below her knees. Rigid waves of hair clasped the top of her skull, like a chestnut-colored squid. She caught sight of his examination and stiffened. "Blimey. Who the bloody hell are you?" Her shrill voice wasn't elfin at all, unless elves were also shrews.
"I'm Nathan—" He stopped, remembering how Haakon had reacted to his last name. "Who the fuck are you?" Offense was sometimes the best defense.
"Agatha Magwitch's me name, at least in this era. You're a bloody Yank?" She scanned him from head to toe, her gaze lingering on the medallion that hung about his neck. "You take a wrong turn, mate? You're in 1933 London, not Texas."
"I'm from Iowa, not Texas." What the fuck? Was the Timekeeper Academy in London? Somehow he'd expected it to be in Chicago. Couldn't hurt to ask. "I'm looking for the Academy. Can you direct me?"
"You mean the Royal Academy of the Arts? Why you want that for? And what's a Timekeeper doin' here, talkin' like a bloody Yank?"
"Uh, I meant the Timekeeper Academy. Maybe my Timepiece got set wrong?"
"Well, that'd be quite a mistake, matey, given that the Timekeeper Academy's on Sumatra eighty-some thousand years ago." Agatha's features turned wary, and her hand found its way into the pocket of her jacket. Nathan reflected that the bulge there was just the right size for a needle gun. Too bad his was in the veldt some sixty thousand years away. "Answer me question, and be quick about it. What ya doin' here?"
"Look, I don't know what I'm doing here. There was this Timekeeper, Charlotte Corbett. She's an FBI agent, too. At least, she claimed to be one once. Anyway, she said she was going to take me to the Timekeeper Academy, for training. I don't know how I wound up here."
Her hand came out of her pocket. A chill skittered down Nathan's back. Sure enough, she gripped a needle gun.
"If she be recruitin' a newbie, she'd be right here. Where's she at? You do her in?"
Nathan held up his hands, palms forward. "No. I don't know where she's at. Maybe the wolf or saber-tooth or whatever it was got her before she could activate her Timepiece."
Her eyebrows crawled up her head like a pair of furry caterpillars. "Saber-tooth? Ya bonkers?" Her eyes narrowed. "Or more likely ya ain't what ya claim to be. I heard there was Yanks muckin' around with German ex-pats. Maybe ya be Black Hand?"
Adrenalin pumped through Nathan's chest. From the look on her face, she was ready to kill him now and ask questions later. "I don't know what you're talking about. Really. I'm just a physics student."
"A physics student? And a Yank? That's too much of a coincidence, mate, what with Professors Havisham and Wilson visitin' here. Resident Becquerel'll sweat the truth of ya, he will." She gestured down the tunnel with her weapon. "Go on now. Don't give me no grief, or I'll use this to burn ya in places no man wants burned." Her eyes gleamed in the dim light with a feral glow.
Nathan caught his breath. Now he knew why Corbett had dumped him here. Claude's last name was Becquerel.