THEY SENT HER HOME and gave her another week’s vacation. As soon as she got to her apartment she plugged the thumb drive into her computer.

The data was password-protected, as she had expected. She typed in “Kore” and “Core” and “Hypatia” and “Meret,” but none of them worked. She tried some tricks, everything she could think of, but none of them gave up the contents of the drive. It seemed to be using standard file and encryption systems—her own computer could see that there was data there; it just couldn’t unlock it. At least, she thought, the drive wasn’t using some far-future operating system that she would have to hack at the bit level. She sighed. There were plenty of tools that could do what she needed, but it would take time. She would have to set up a brute force hack, running the most likely combinations of binary data to unlock the encryption. She didn’t like this type of solution—it was inelegant, and would take a long time—but it was the only option she had left.

She bought a textbook about probability and Markov chains, thinking that she could get a head start if the company ever put her to work on the fifth floor. To her surprise the subject fascinated her, and she spent hours working out the problems.

The next day Franny called her, asking if she wanted to get together for lunch. Zach would be coming too, she said.

She didn’t like going out much, and meals, especially, were filled with social landmines, opportunities for people to discover what a misfit she was. But this was Franny and Zach, people she already knew, and who knew her. Anyway, they were misfits too.

She had to take three buses to Franny’s house. It was one suburb over, a town she had never visited, with huge comfortable houses and carefully tended gardens. She headed up the front path and rang the doorbell.

Franny opened the door and led her into an entrance hall with a tiled floor. A room with a pure white carpet lay beyond it. “Could you take off your shoes?” Franny asked.

Take off her shoes? Who did that? Still, Ann did as she was asked. Her socks had holes in them, she saw.

They headed through the living room, the carpet whispering against her feet. They went past a dining room with an enormous table and a chandelier, and then into the kitchen. Zach was already there, sitting in a breakfast nook with a pizza box in front of him.

“Is your husband here?” Ann asked, joining him at the table and taking a slice of pizza.

“No, he’s at work,” Franny said. Before Ann could ask any more questions about him she said, “Zach and I were talking about our next assignment.”

“You got your assignments already?” Ann asked.

“No—we’re just trying to figure out what they might be. Zach wants to go to Rome.”

“Rome?”

“Sure,” Zach said. “What we saw was just a colony. I’d like to see the real thing, the emperors, the center of all that power.”

“It’s too crowded there,” Ann said. “You remember what they told us—they like to go where there aren’t a lot of people. Less of a chance to screw up that way.”

“Yeah, but that’s the challenge. Going to Rome and fooling all of them. Fitting in. I bet I could do it.”

“Anyway, they never ask us for our input, just send us where they need us. You’ll see—you’ll probably end up at the Black Death.”

“Well, there sure weren’t a lot of people there.”

“Fewer all the time,” Ann said.

They laughed. She’d noticed this before, the gallows humor people sometimes displayed about the timebound. It was because they could do nothing to change their lives, she thought, they could only stand by and watch as the people they lived among were overrun by history. As they grew old and died, or were killed.

She didn’t want to think about Hypatia now, though. She looked away from Zach, toward Franny. There was a large bruise, dark purple, on Franny’s upper arm.

Their eyes met, and Franny looked away. That day’s newspaper lay on the table, and Franny reached for it.

“You know that company Rengstorff Media?” she asked. Ann didn’t, but she let the other woman continue. “When we left the CEO was Gayle Shapiro, wasn’t it? But now the paper says that it’s some guy instead, that he’s been there for seven years.”

“Do I look like someone who knows about CEOs?” she asked. “I don’t even know what CEO stands for.”

“I remembered Shapiro because this was the highest a woman had gotten on the Fortune 500,” Franny said. “But now that memory’s getting fainter, and I have this other memory instead. I think this was something we did—some history that we changed. And no one noticed anything, no one except us, because we were in the center of it. The people here remember that this guy was CEO for seven years—and he was, for them. That’s what they lived through.”

“Huh,” Ann said. “But why would the company want to change the CEO of—what is it? A media company?”

“I don’t know. Probably he makes a decision that turns out better for the world.”

“Or for the company.”

“You aren’t still thinking about Core, are you? About that weird woman Meret?”

“No, not really.” But she could not help remembering what Meret had told her, that the company nearly always sided with men.

She needed to change the subject; the last thing she wanted was Franny reporting her to the company. “Hey, you never said where you want to go.”

“I don’t care,” Franny said. “It’s always interesting, no matter where they send us. All I want is someplace not too hot.”

They finished the pizza, and Franny walked them back to the entrance hall. As they stepped outside something whirred at the edge of Ann’s vision, and she turned quickly to look at it. “Hey, a camera!” she said.

“Where?” Franny asked.

“Over there.”

“I don’t see anything. Anyway, why would they send a camera after us?”

Because the company was spying on them, obviously. Franny clearly didn’t want to hear it, though. Even if she had seen the camera she would deny it, would convince herself it hadn’t been there.

She wished she could talk to someone, discuss her doubts, get things straight in her mind. Was the company watching them? Why? Or was Franny right, had she imagined it?

Maybe it was a bee, she thought. Maybe Our Lady of Honey had sent her another message.

WHEN SHE RETURNED TO work she learned that they were going to study the thirteenth century this time. Franny was in her history class, she was pleased to see, and so was Jerry.

“Your next assignment is going to be here, Carcassonne, in the south of France,” Professor Strickland said, indicating a PowerPoint map. “That’s where a new religion started, the Cathars. A heretical religion, one that didn’t believe in following the pope or any feudal lord. So in 1209 Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against them.”

“A crusade?” Franny asked. “I thought the crusaders went to the Middle East.”

“They did, usually. But the church was very intent on stamping out this heresy.”

“Why?” Ann asked. “What did they do?”

“It wasn’t what they did—it was what they believed. They thought there were two gods, an evil god that made this world, an imperfect world full of suffering, and a good, perfect god of love and peace. And since this world was flawed, they didn’t see any reason to follow its god, or any of his authorities. So you can see why the church wanted to get rid of them.”

“We’re not going to be there during the crusade, are we?” Ann asked.

“No, don’t worry. We’ll get you out before then.”

A week into the lessons Ann realized something: she didn’t like this time period as much as the earlier ones they had studied. The Cathars wanted to have little to do with the material world, and some, who called themselves Perfecti, tried to keep themselves as pure as possible. They refrained from sex, they ate only fish and vegetables, they dressed without ornament and owned no property.

The word “cathar,” in fact, meant “pure,” Strickland said. They didn’t call themselves that, though; their name for themselves was “Bonshommes,” which meant “Good Men.”

And that was the problem, Ann thought—there seemed no room for women in that tace. Women had been important in their last two assignments; the Kaphtorans had even worshipped them. Did patriarchal societies grow stronger as the centuries passed, as they tightened their grip on power? Or, as Meret had said, had the company nudged them in that direction?

She said nothing about these thoughts to Professor Strickland, of course. She didn’t want the company to think she wasn’t interested in her next assignment. And really, she didn’t care whern they sent her—it was certain to be fascinating, no matter what tace it was.

In their language class Professor Tran taught them a dialect of French called Languedoc, which had been spoken in the south of France. Most of the troubadours had come from there, Tran said, singers who were attached to the court of some noble, and to help them get a feel for the language she played them videos of local performances.

The songs were about unrequited love, usually the love of the troubadour for a married woman. They felt plaintive, sorrowful, filled with yearning.

There was another reason Tran had played the troubadours’ songs for them, one they learned in Professor Strickland’s next class. “The crusaders are all men, and the people in Carcassonne have known each other all their lives,” she said. “So the only way we can insert you into this tace is by making you troubadours. Fortunately there were women troubadours as well as men, so your appearance won’t seem too odd to them.”

“Troubadours?” Ann said, alarmed, and at the same time Jerry said, “But—”

Strickland held up her hand. “Yes, I know, none of you can sing. But your Facilitator this time is Tarquin Charles, and he can.”

Ann remembered the man called Tarquin from the fifth floor. A computer modeler and a musician, she thought. Pretty talented.

“All you’ll have to do is carry his instruments, and hand them to him when he needs them,” the professor went on. “It shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Roadies,” Jerry said. Ann laughed, but Strickland didn’t seem to know the word.

“You’re going to be from the Rhineland this time,” the professor went on. “That’ll explain your accent, and the fact that you won’t know some of the customs. There were troubadours there too, called minnesingers, and they had the same kinds of songs, the same tradition of courtly love. But according to the background we’ll give you you’ll have traveled all over western Europe, from Germany to Spain—that way you’ll have a diverse repertoire, you’ll be able to come up with whatever your audience wants to hear. Well, Charles will, anyway.”

A few days later they went to the costume room and tried on their clothes. Ann got a long yellow dress with a belt that rested low on her waist, a green kerchief for her head, and high uncomfortable boots. Jerry’s clothes seemed more decorative, more splendid—a tight-fitting coat that reached to his thighs, hose for his legs, and boots that ended in a sharp point. He had told the class that he couldn’t wear contact lenses but the company had given him some new kind of lens so that he didn’t need to wear his glasses. His face looked naked, skinned.

She nearly tripped over the hem of her dress as she came out of the changing room. Good Goddess, how was she supposed to walk in this thing? A woman bustled over with a tape measure. “Some women did wear their dresses this long,” Strickland said, “but since you’re supposed to be traveling it wouldn’t look very believable on you.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ann said.

The days passed quickly, and suddenly it was time to leave. They got their clothes from the costume room and put them on, and Ann noticed with relief that her dress had been shortened and the boots stretched out to fit her. Then they went to the briefing room, where they met someone Strickland introduced as Tarquin Charles.

He wasn’t the man she had seen on the fifth floor after all. He was short, like the rest of the group, and nearly bald. He seemed filled with nervous energy, pacing across the briefing room as Strickland went over their final arrangements.

It was weird that he was called Tarquin, though. Probably the name was in vogue in whatever tace he came from, like all the inexplicable Brittanys and Britneys in her own time.

They went into the launch room and stood together on the platform. People handed up their bags and the musical instruments, and someone began to count down to zero.

THE SHARP PAINFUL LIGHTS diminished, and Ann stood up. She felt sick to her stomach; Da Silva had been right about time sickness getting worse with each insertion.

They had landed at the edge of a forest, a few yards from a dirt path. Charles was bent over next to her, burying the key.

“All right,” he said, standing up and brushing the dirt from his hands. “Let’s go.”

Everyone was standing now. Ann felt relieved to see it; a part of her still expected to find one of them dead. Charles motioned them over to the path and they began to walk.

They had arrived in late May. The sun burned hotly, a brooch of heavy gold in the sky. A warm breeze eddied past, bringing smells of pine and wild strawberries and lavender, and beneath that a sharp barnyard odor of stale food and animal excrement.

As they walked they saw whole families, out working in small orchards and along rows of grape vines. “Wait a minute,” Franny said. “It looks like they’re picking fruit over there. But it’s only May—nothing can possibly be ripe yet.”

“They’re worried about war, about a siege,” Charles said. “They’re taking everything they possibly can and storing it behind the walls. They don’t want to leave anything for the army.”

Now they were passing clusters of stone farmhouses standing back to back. The ground floors seemed to be used as stables or chicken coops, and stone stairs climbed the outside walls to the area where the family lived. Other, smaller buildings lay scattered in the yards, barns, henhouses, dovecotes. And at nearly every house men and women and children were hard at work, harnessing horses, taking down laundry, piling their belongings into carts.

The path joined up with an old Roman road, wider and paved in stone. The road wound back and forth up a hill, until finally they saw the walled city standing in the distance.

“All right,” Jerry said, impressed.

More people crowded the street here, going up to the city. Ann and the others edged around a flock of sheep, dogs nipping at their heels, and then passed the shepherd and his family. A cart drawn by oxen rode past them, stacked high with beds and tables, pots and dishes. Where would they put them all? she wondered, but no doubt the city had made plans for a siege.

Now they could see turrets rising above the walls, capped like mushrooms. A few more turns brought them up to the walls themselves, a patchwork of red brick and large pale stones from the old Roman fortifications.

A line of people had formed in front of the gates. The four of them shuffled forward slowly, finally coming to the gates as the sun began to set.

Two guards stood there. “We’re—” Charles began.

“Troubadours,” one of the guards said, squinting out at them. “I can see that. It isn’t a good time, to be honest.”

“We know the pope’s thinking about a crusade,” Charles said. “We’d like to come in anyway.”

“You won’t have much luck here. I doubt the viscount feels like music.”

“That’s our business, though, isn’t it?”

“All right.” He squinted again. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He stepped aside, and they headed into the city.

“Not much of a reception,” Franny said in English.

“Quiet,” Charles said. “We’ll talk when we get to the inn.”

Charles was right, Ann saw. There were too many people here for them to talk comfortably. They hurried to their inn and went up to their rooms.

Charles shut the door behind him and began to pace. Ann, Franny, and Jerry sat on the beds. “The crusade isn’t for two months yet, right?” Jerry asked.

“Well, but they don’t know that,” Ann said. “For all they know the pope’s army’s coming straight here, instead of Béziers.”

“So what do we do now?” Franny asked. “What’s our assignment?”

“We have to get close to the viscount,” Charles said. “His name is Raimond-Roger Trencavel, and his territories include Béziers and Carcassonne. Ideally, we want him to invite us to a meal, or somewhere else private.”

“But—well, you heard that man,” Ann said. “He probably won’t be interested in music.”

“We’ll just have to be extra charming then, won’t we?” Charles said.

It was growing dark outside; as usual the company had sent them in during the afternoon, to give them time to settle in. “We’ll go out and find dinner, and see Trencavel tomorrow,” Charles said.