Page 5 of Across Time

“What’s the circle of light thing about?”

Marie-Therese’s eyes widen. "Did your mother never tell you the prophecy?”

Henri’s eyes narrow. “Marie, if she doesn’t know, it’s not your place to tell her.”

Marie shrugs. “She’s a time traveler. She’s supposed to know,” she says before returning to me. “The prophecy says that there will be a child born after a great war—it calls her the hidden child—who will produce this circle of light, which is somehow supposed to keep our pasts safe.”

My shoulders sag. I don’t especially believe in prophecies, particularly ones passed down by word of mouth. Honestly, it’s a little shocking that both my aunt and their mother might have believed in it enough to actually go seek it out.

"What's it supposed to keep you safe from?"

Henri frowns. "From you," he says. At my startled look he begrudgingly completes the thought. "Not you, specifically. But from future time travelers. My sister, any children she might have...even those of us who don't have the power, we are all at risk. Any one of you can come from the future and destroy everything, can't you? Even this impromptu visit right now...what if you've changed something? What if the simple act of your arrival has led to some trickle that will become an avalanche?"

I close my eyes and take a small breath. Even in 1938, I can't escape people who think I'm evil. Not that I disagree with them.

Marie-Therese frowns at him. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” she assures me. “My mother believed the circle could keep us from having our futures stripped away.”

I could point out that their futures could be stripped from them anyway. I did a fair amount of research about what’s coming for this part of France when I was preparing to jump to the 1930s. Saint Antoine, given its position between Germany and Paris, will be Nazi-occupied throughout the war, but I hold onto that information for now. I'm not here to change the past any more than is necessary to get back home.

“I don’t really see how I can help you with any of this,” I tell her. “I’m sorry I got your hopes up.”

“Please,” Marie-Therese begs. “If you could get her to tell you her plans, we might still be able to save her.”

Henri's face is drawn and sad in a way that makes him, momentarily, hard to hate. "Marie," he says quietly, "she's not trapped. She's dead, and that's something even you can't fix. No matter what year she went to, she'd have found her way back to us by now if she were alive."

"You don't know that," Marie breathes. She turns to me. "Please consider it. I have to find her.”

I think of the nightmare that led me here. Kit, sitting up in her coffin, her skin a mottled blue and white like a sickly robin’s egg—the way it looked when they pulled her out of the lake.

You have to find them, she told me again and again. For one horrible moment I wonder if it wasn’t Marie I was supposed to save, but her mother and my aunt. I dismiss the thought immediately. Wherever they went, it was obviously very dangerous, and no time traveler alive is more ill-equipped to make that journey than I am. Even Marie shouldn’t attempt it, and I’m not sure I want to help her try.

"I'm sorry," I reply. "My aunt also went missing in Paris, which tells me that what you’re talking about might be a little harder than it sounds. And I'm just doing this one thing for my sister. Once I return to my own time, I’m never jumping again.”

Marie-Therese laughs as if I'm joking, or a child making insane promises I can't keep. "Of course you'll continue to jump. We can't stop ourselves."

Her laughter irritates me, perhaps because my greatest fear is that she’s right. I’ve done nothing but try to stop since I started jumping a decade ago, and yet here I am, time traveling again when it feels like my whole future depends on giving it up.

"I can,” I reply.

Marie-Therese’s hands press to the table. "Your aunt is missing, my mother is missing. How many others must there be? Don't you at least want to see if you can help?"

"I'm mostly interested in not dying," I reply. "Maybe we should all just take their failure as a lesson and stay the hell away from wherever they went.”

Marie-Therese’s shoulders drop. I barely know her and I already hate that I’ve disappointed her. “But your sister said you were supposed to help me.”

My stomach swims uneasily. The nightmares have been unrelenting for weeks and escalated dramatically before I got here. If I don’t provide some kind of help they’ll start back up. I’m sure of it. “Maybe I can help in other ways. I can tell you what's coming."

"We don't want to know what's coming," Henri says firmly.

I’m officially too tired for this. I press my head in my hands, resting my eyes. “Fine, whatever. I’m sorry I’m disappointing you. If you could give me one day here to rest, I’ll be out of your hair."

“You're not going anywhere,” says Henri. “You've identified my sister, a secret we've guarded our entire lives. I can't just let you go back and tell others."

Panic begins to rise in my chest. I think about my arrival, his hand on the hammer of the gun. He was really prepared to shoot me for being here. I wonder if he still might be.

My head swivels, looking for the exits and his eyes follow mine. "There's one exit to this home, and I stand between you and it. Don't even think about trying to get by me."

First he’s demanding I leave, and now he’s basically holding me hostage. One extreme to the next, and both extremes suck. Henri is proving to be far less delightful than those pouty lips of his might lead a female to believe.