SHE WAS IN A chariot pulled by griffins, flying over the streets of Knossos. The goddess came toward her in another chariot, this one drawn by an enormous bee. “Our Lady of Honey,” she said, putting her fist to her forehead. “I thank you for this favor. Please, tell me what I must do for you, how I can fulfill your commands.”
“The grain grows,” the goddess said. “The grain is cut, and dies.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
The goddess’s voice blurred, grew indistinct. Suddenly she heard a loud clanking noise, and she looked down to see her chariot separating from the griffins that pulled it. “No,” she said. “No, wait! Help me—”
She opened her eyes. The room lay in darkness, as black as the hole they had put Gregory in. Something clattered, and she realized the noise she had heard was Franny, trying to make her way through their room.
“Come on,” Franny whispered. “It’s time.”
Ann had gone to bed fully dressed, with her bag next to her. She stood and picked it up, then moved carefully through the bedroom and downstairs to the front door.
She reached out for Franny, making sure she was still there, then felt along the wall of the workshop, trying to avoid Damate’s bed at the center of the room. She had seen a torch by the door, which Damate had put out before going to bed, and when her fingers found the door she backed up, looking for it.
She felt the torch, reached for it—and it fell from the bracket and dropped to the floor. It was only wood, but the noise it made against the stone floor sounded loud in the quiet house. Damate stirred in her sleep, and an instant later one of the children cried out from their bedroom. She and Franny stood silent, waiting for Damate to wake up, to discover them unmoving by the door …
Nothing happened; the child must have gone back to sleep. Ann picked up the torch and they stepped outside, feeling the fresh air in their faces. She closed the door behind them.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Franny asked.
“Yeah,” Ann said. “Just let me get this torch lit first. There’s a shrine around here … There it is.”
They headed toward the fire they saw flickering in the distance. Somewhere far away a dog barked. A ridiculous number of stars shone overhead, more than she had ever thought were in the sky, and a great crescent moon sailed among them.
“After that, though,” Franny said. “Because I want to see Greg.”
“Greg?” Had Franny lost her mind, on top of everything else? “He’s—”
“At the cemetery, I mean. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.”
“We can’t go to the cemetery! Walker’s waiting for us.”
“So what? She didn’t say what time she wanted us to be there, did she? Do you remember how to get to the cemetery?”
She did, but she didn’t know if she should say so. Still, Franny deserved to see the grave—and this might be her last chance.
She lit the torch from the fire in the shrine and looked around. No one else seemed to be outside.
“All right—I think I can find it,” Ann said. “But you have to be quick.”
“Great,” Franny said. “Thanks.”
They walked for a while in silence. Was this Franny’s last chance to say goodbye? Walker seemed to be saying that they had failed, that they would have to leave quickly, before the queen passed sentence on them. And what would happen once they got back to the company? How would that look, to have your first assignment recalled, to have that failure on your record? Well, she had always known it was too good to be true.
Something ran across the path in front of them. It was shaped differently than a dog or cat—a fox? For the first time Ann heard sounds in the night around them, rustling and chittering, loud in the silence. The Kaphtorans called Knossos a city, but it was really much smaller than that, groves and farms close around it.
Beside her Franny wiped her eyes, and Ann realized that she had been crying. You moron, she thought. She knew she had trouble guessing what other people were feeling, but any idiot could have figured out that Franny would be upset.
She should try to comfort her, but how? “I’m sorry about Gregory,” she said finally.
“Thanks. You know, you’re the first person to say anything.”
“Well, nobody knew you were together. And Walker probably read your file, saw you were married.”
“My file, right.” Franny laughed bitterly.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s in those files, do you think? If they can go back in time, how much do they know about us? How much privacy do we have?”
Ann thought of Franny as she was when she’d first met her, a woman who had laughed often and easily. She’d been another of those people who cruised through life, Ann had thought, with nothing to worry about, nothing to hide.
Now she saw how wrong she had been, that they had more in common than she’d thought. “Look,” she said. “I— well, I grew up in foster homes. That’s what they know about me. I think—I think they’re looking for people who aren’t connected to the present, our present. People who might be unhappy there, who would jump at the chance to leave.”
She couldn’t remember the last time she had volunteered anything about her life. Franny stayed silent, though, and Ann cursed herself for opening up, all for nothing.
“My husband used to hit me,” Franny said finally. “He stopped, though. Well, he said he’ll stop. He said that before, though.” Her voice broke, though she was no longer crying.
“So I thought, well, if I got together with Greg, maybe I could leave him,” she went on. “Maybe I could really do it this time. Okay, I knew it wasn’t serious, that it probably wouldn’t come to anything. It was fun to think about, though.” She took a deep breath. “So, anyway. That’s what they know about me. That I’d do anything to get away from my life. Anything they wanted.”
Ann didn’t know what to say. She wanted to ask why Franny had stayed with her husband, but she remembered all the stupid questions people had asked about her life, all the things they didn’t know. She thought that Franny’s story must be like that, something no outsider could understand.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally.
“Yeah,” Franny said. “Well. I’m sorry too. About you, I mean. The foster homes and stuff.”
They had reached the cemetery. “Here we are,” Ann said. “It—who’s that?”
“What?”
“Over there. Someone—it looks like someone’s digging up Gregory’s grave.”
They began to run. The person—a woman—looked up and saw them, but to Ann’s surprise she stayed at the grave and continued digging. There was a light on the ground, a steady yellow like … a flashlight?
“Who are you?” Ann said when they had gotten close enough.
“Meret Haas,” the woman said.
“From the company!” Ann said, feeling relieved. She had forgotten that Transformations had sent other agents to Knossos. “Can you help us? Did you hear what happened with the queen, and the Minos, and—”
“Wait a minute.”
Meret picked up the flashlight and straightened, and Ann saw her clearly for the first time. Her wig had been knocked askew while she was digging, exposing short tight curls, black mixed with gray.
She had a strange expression, an amused half smile, as if she had just told Ann a joke and was waiting for her to laugh. Was she mocking them, did she feel somehow superior to them?
“Why are you digging up Greg’s grave?” Franny asked.
“It’s a long story. Have you ever wondered—well, what do you think about the company?”
“What do you mean?” Ann asked. “I think it’s terrific. I mean, time travel.”
Was it that terrific, though? Weren’t they in a lot of trouble? What would the queen do if she caught them?
“But don’t you wonder what they’re doing?” Meret asked. “What their ultimate goals are?”
“They told us—they’re trying to make things better.”
“That doesn’t explain what they’re doing hern. Things seem pretty good in this tace, pretty stable.”
“Not for the Minos.”
“Not for the Minos, no. And all I know about your assignment is that you’re supposed to contact him somehow. But why does the company want to come in on his side, someone so unhappy with the way things are? The only allies he could get would be from the mainland, Achaeans, warriors, people who worship Zeus, a thunder god. And Kaphtor’s goddesses are peaceful, Potnia, Eileithyia, Kore … They haven’t had a war in hundreds of years.”
Professor Strickland had said the same thing. The Kaphtorans were safe behind miles of ocean; they had no walls around their palaces, no forts at any of the harbors. They had a strong fleet of ships, but their only security on the island was a few guardposts, the ones the Minos wanted them to disrupt.
“But we can’t possibly know everything,” Franny said. “I’m sure there are bigger issues here, more than they’ve told us.”
“We can’t know everything, you’re right,” Meret said. “But I’ve been with the company longer than you have, and I’ve seen some disturbing patterns. In nearly every case I know about the company’s sided with warriors, with patriarchies, with hierarchical societies. Have you ever wondered why matriarchies have pretty much disappeared from the world? People say it’s because they can’t possibly work, but you know that isn’t true—you’ve seen Kaphtor. A peaceful, prosperous, flourishing society that existed for thousands of years.”
“Well, I’m sure they’ll tell us everything when we get back.”
“But that’s strange, too, isn’t it? That they don’t even explain things until afterward?”
“Because we’d act differently if we knew,” Ann said.
“Never mind that,” Franny said. “You never answered my question. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was wondering about Gregory’s death. Why he died so suddenly. As if they wanted to get rid of him.”
Franny looked stricken. “Why would they do that?”
“Because there are other people in the company, lots of us, who are starting to wonder about their policies. About the things they’re changing, and why they’re changing them.”
“Was he—was Greg one of them?” Franny asked.
“I don’t know. We don’t know everyone who thinks this way. It makes it easier if we get caught—we can’t give the others away.”
“You make it sound like it’s some big conspiracy,” Ann said.
“It might be. To be honest, I don’t know how many people there are.”
“I don’t get it,” Ann said. “The company isn’t this evil monolith. They’re trying to save the world, to stop climate change and nuclear war.”
“Look,” Meret said. “Say you had a time machine. Say you started by helping people, preventing a war, like you said. And then, little by little, you saw ways you could help yourself, get some more power and resources for you and your friends. Wouldn’t you do that if you could?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who’s in charge of all of this.”
“Well, that’s the thing. We don’t know. They might be great humanitarians, it’s true. But we’ve been watching them for a while, and we’re starting to wonder.”
“We can’t stay here,” Ann said, suddenly restless. “We have to find Professor Walker, and Franny still wants to say goodbye to Gregory.” She drew Meret away from the grave, far enough so that Franny would have privacy.
“I hope—well, whatever you think, I hope you won’t repeat this to Professor Walker,” Meret said. “Or even tell her I was here.”
“No, of course not,” Ann said.
The words had come automatically, but to herself she thought that she would probably have to report this conversation to Walker. Meret seemed like a wingnut conspiracy theorist, but she might still be able to cause trouble for the company.
“Good. And remember what I told you.” Meret smiled again, with that same look of amusement, almost complicity.
Franny turned away from the grave. “Okay?” Ann asked.
“Yeah.”
They said goodbye to Meret. “Goddess show you your path,” Meret said.
“Well, that was pretentious,” Ann said to Franny as they left the cemetery. “Does she think she’s one of the timebound or something?” She looked back to see Meret bent over the grave, returned to her digging. “So what do you think?”
“About what she said? It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? There’s this conspiracy, only she doesn’t know who’s in it, or how many people it has.”
“Maybe it’s just her.”
Franny laughed. “Still, she’s not the only one wondering about Greg’s death,” she said, looking thoughtful. “He seemed fine to me, completely healthy.”
“But they wouldn’t—they wouldn’t kill him. Not like that. They’d court martial him, or put him in jail or something.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”
“She told me not to tell Walker she was here, but I think I’m going to have to. If she hates the company so much she could do some real damage.”
“It’s weird that she trusted us so much, though. Why would she tell us all of that without making sure of us first?”
“Maybe it’s some kind of test, to see if we’ll report her to the company. And if it is, we’d sure as hell better say something to Walker.”
There was a final reason Ann didn’t believe Meret, but she said nothing to Franny about it, knowing that it wasn’t logical. She had come to love the company, to feel a strong loyalty to it no matter what. How could she not, when it had rescued her from her boring wage-slave existence? And it had shown her marvels here in Knossos, with more marvels to come. She had all of time ahead of her.
They found Walker waiting impatiently at the shrine. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“We saw Meret,” Ann said.
“What? Where?”
“At the cemetery.” She told Walker about their visit to Gregory’s grave, and Meret’s questions about his death.
Walker drew in a breath. “So she’s joined Core!” she said.
“What’s Core?” Ann asked. “Is that the group she was talking about?”
“Lunatics is what they are. They believe in pretty much everything Meret told you, that the company leaders all have secret agendas, that they want to take over the world.”
She seemed sincere, not at all like someone who had just set her a test. Ann continued to press her anyway. “So it’s a real group? How many of them are there?”
“Oh, I don’t know. No more than a dozen, no matter what she said. We try to find them and weed them out of the company, but they’re clever, they keep slipping past us. And they recruit more people all the time.”
“Do they do anything, though, or are they just talk? Could she—”
“Never mind about them,” Walker said impatiently. “I have to tell you what we’re doing next. Remember Yaniel Elias, the agent the company sent to Kaphtor in advance of us? He went to our inn, and the innkeeper told him we’d been arrested. So he asked around and got the names of people who act as jailers, and he found me at the house where I was staying. He told me a disturbing rumor—that the queen’s displeased with some visitors from Egypt, so much so that she wants to, well, he thinks she wants to kill us.”
“Kill us?” Franny said. “So what do we do?”
“Well, as I see it we have two choices. One is that we simply abort, go back to our own tace. But there’s always some blame attached to agents who don’t complete their assignment, even if what happened wasn’t their fault.”
“And the other choice?” Franny asked.
“We could stay hern, hide somewhere, and do what the Minos asked us to do. Drug the lookouts, so his allies can invade.”
“Okay, then,” Ann said. “I’m for staying hern.”
“You misunderstood me,” Walker said. “This isn’t a democracy—I’m the Facilitator, I give the orders. I just wanted to explain my decision, so you won’t have any questions.” She looked meaningfully at Ann, making sure she understood. “And I say we stay hern, carry out our assignment. The company would expect it of us. And it looks bad if your first time out is a failure.”
“So where are we going to hide?” Franny asked. “And how are we going to keep away from the queen’s forces?”
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem. We’ll just find some other inn, and we’ll stay away from the palace.”
“But we’ll have to talk to the Minos again, won’t we?” Ann asked. “Someone has to find out what his plans are, and tell him we’ll do what he wants.”
“That won’t be a problem either,” Walker said.
Really? she thought. She wondered how Walker was going to manage it.
“Looks like the sun’s coming up,” Walker said. “Let’s go find a place to stay.”