One of the young men pacing the perimeter of the clearing raised a hand, twirled it in a warning circle. “One hour to go.”
“Yah.” Brill glanced round again. The forest clearing was peaceful, unoccupied but for Miriam, Brill, and her three young bloods, but she never stopped scanning.
“Are we in any immediate danger?” Miriam asked, shifting her balance on the fallen tree trunk.
“Probably not right now.” Brill paused to continue her inspection. “The Kao’s patrols don’t usually sweep this far northeast. Better not linger, though. We’ll be ready to move in another hour.”
“The Kao?”
“The Favored of Heaven’s border troops. Most of the local tribes give them a wide berth. We should, too.” A warning look in her eyes gave Miriam a cold shiver; if Brill was scared of them, that was enough for her.
“What are you planning on doing once we cross over?”
“We’ve got a hotel suite in San Jose. I plan to get us over there, then make contact with the duke and ask for further instructions. I imagine he’ll want us back on the east coast stat—we’ve got a biz-jet standing by. Otherwise, we’ll do what Security tells us to do. Unless you have other plans?” Brill raised a carefully shaped eyebrow. Even though she’d started the day with a brisk firefight, then a forced crossing into wilderness, she’d taken pains with her makeup.
Miriam shrugged. “I thought I did.” Her hands were restless; trying to keep them still, she thrust them deep in the pockets of her overly heavy coat. “The political situation in New Britain is going to hell in a handbasket. Erasmus was on his way to meet a big wheel in the, uh, resistance.” In point of fact, the biggest wheel in the underground, returning from exile after a generation—to whom he had once been a personal assistant. “It’s too hot for comfort. I was only going along because I couldn’t think of anything else to do; when I fetched up in London all I had was the clothes on my back.”
“Well, at least you got away from the mess at the Summer Palace with your skin intact,” Brill observed. “And thank whatever gods you believe in for that.”
She fell silent for a few minutes. But finally Miriam’s curiosity got the better of her. “I can guess how you tracked me down,” she said. “But what about Huw? And the other two? Who are they? You said something about a job I’d suggested, but I don’t recall . . . and they don’t look like Uncle Angbard’s little helpers to me.”
“They’re not.” Brilliana’s eyes narrowed. “I just called in help and head office sent them along. Hey! Sir Huw? Have you a minute?”
Huw nodded. “Bro, cover for me,” he told the tall, heavily built guy with the semiauto shotgun as he walked towards them. Huw was anything but husky: skinny and intense. “Has something come up?”
“Huw.” Brill smiled, oddly cheerful. “We’ve got a couple of hours to kill. Why don’t you tell her grace what you found?”
Her grace? But I’m not a duchess. Miriam blinked. Suddenly bits of the big picture were falling into place. Heir to the throne. “What you found, where?”
“We’re calling it world four right now, but I think a better name for it would be Transition A–B,” Huw said as he sat down at the far end of the fallen trunk. “It’s where you go if you use the Hidden Family’s knotwork as a focus in your world, uh, the United States.” He grinned, twitchily. “Nobody was able to cross over in New England because, well, it’s probably under an ice sheet—the weather there’s definitely a lot colder than in any of the other time lines we know about.”
Hang on, time lines—Miriam held up a hand. “What were you doing?”
“The duke tasked me with setting up a systematic exploration program,” Huw explained. “So I started by taking the second known knotwork design and seeing where it’d take you if you used it in world two, in the USA, which the Hidden Family had no access to. The initial tests in Massachusetts and New York failed, so I guessed there might be a really large obstacle in the way. There’s some kind of exclusion effect . . . but anyway, we found a new world.”
Miriam narrowly resisted the urge to grab him and start yelling questions. “Go on.”
“World four is cold, as in, about ten degrees celsius below datum for the other worlds we’ve found. That’s ice age cold. We didn’t have time to do much exploring, but what we found—there were people there, once, but we didn’t see any signs of current habitation. High tech, very high tech—perfect dentistry, gantries made out of titanium, and other stuff. We’re still trying to figure out the other stuff, but it’s a whole different ball game. The building we found looked like it had been struck from above by some kind of directed energy weapon—”
“Some kind of—”Miriam stopped. On the opposite side of the clearing, the young blond woman who’d come with Huw was kneeling, her weapon trained on something invisible through the trees.
Brill was already moving. “Get ready to go.”
“But it’s too early,” Miriam started.
“What’s Elena spotted?” Huw rose to his feet. The big guy at the far side of the clearing—the one Huw had called “bro”—was crouching behind the blonde, his shotgun raised: A moment later she turned and scrambled towards them, staying low.
“Riders,” she said quietly, addressing Brill. “At least three, maybe more. They’re trying to stay quiet. Milady, we await your instructions.”
“I think”—Brill’s eyes hardened—“we’d better cross over. Right now. Huw, can you carry her grace?”
“I think so.” Huw knelt down. “Miriam, if you could climb on my shoulders?”
Miriam swallowed. “Is this necessary? It’s too early—”
Brill cut her off. “It is necessary to move as fast as possible, unless you want another shoot-out. I generally try to limit them to no more than one before lunch on any given day. Huw, get her across. We’ll be along momentarily.”
Miriam stood up, wrapped her arms around Huw’s shoulders, and tried to haul her legs up. Huw rose into a half-crouch. She strained to clamp her knees around his waist. “Are you alright?” she asked anxiously.
“Just a second,” he gasped. “Alright. Three. Two.” Something flickered in the palm of his hand, just in the corner of her vision: a fiery knot that tried to turn her eyes and her stomach inside out. “One.”
The world around them flickered and Huw collapsed under her, dry-retching. Miriam fell sideways, landing heavily on one hip.
They were in scrubland, and alone. Someone’s untended back lot, by the look of it: a few stunted trees straggling across a nearby hillside like hairs across a balding man’s pate, a fence meandering drunkenly to one side. A windowless barn that had clearly seen better days slumped nearby.
Miriam rose to her feet and dusted herself off. Her traveling clothes, unremarkable in New Britain, would look distinctly odd to American eyes: a dark woolen coat of unusual cut over the mutant offspring of a shalwar kameez. Along with her temporarily blond, permed hair it was a disguise that had outlived its usefulness. “Where are you parked?” she asked Huw as his retching subsided.
“Front of. Barn.” He staggered to a crouch. “Need. Painkillers. . . .”
Something moved in the corner of her sight. Miriam’s head whipped round as she thrust a hand in her coat pocket, reaching for the small pistol Erasmus had given her before she recognized Elena. A few seconds later Huw’s brother Hulius popped into view, followed almost immediately by Brilliana. “Come on, people!” Brill sounded more annoyed than nauseous. “Cover! Check!”
“Check,” Huw echoed hollowly. “I think we’re still alone.”