“Forget it laddy, I’ve cuffed more prisoners than you’ve had hot dinners. You wouldn’t know what hit you, and I won’t even break sweat.”
Jake felt the damp bricks at his back. He flung a despairing look at Allenby. “You can’t let them take me like this.”
“Nothing I can do about it.”
“I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything. The whole thing. But I won’t talk to them. No one else. Just you.”
The sergeant stopped.
He looked at Allenby. Quietly the inspector said, “You might just be bluffing.”
Jake forced himself to stand up straight. He unrolled his fists and spread his hands wide. “Let me go and you’ll never know. I’ll make a deal. Don’t let them take me, and I’ll spill.”
Allenby’s scrutiny was intense. “If you try . . .”
“I won’t try anything. What can I do?” He stepped forward. “I’m trapped and I know it. I’ll give you the biggest spy network in this country. The whole thing. Names, dates, sabotage plans. On a plate.”
They looked at each other.
Silent, Jake prayed. Surely he couldn’t resist.
Then Allenby shrugged. “All right. This may cost me some groveling. Sergeant, take him to the holding cell. Get this stuff locked up. No one to know about the suitcase but us, understand.”
As he spoke, a distant drone rose up through the walls and roof, a hollow whine that made Jake stare until he realized it was an air-raid siren.
“Oh Gawd. Here the beggars come again,” the sergeant muttered.
“Get him downstairs.” Allenby hurried out.
“No cuffs,” Jake said.
“You think something of yourself, don’t you.” The sergeant sucked his teeth. “I could take you blindfolded.”
Jake was hauled up and shoved out into the dingy corridor, down damp stone steps, down and down past a few guttering lamps. Outside, the sirens stopped abruptly. There was a moment of almost breathless silence. Then, far off, a low pounding.
“Bloody East End copping it again.” The sergeant grabbed him. “Here.” He tugged out a key and unlocked the cell door. “Inside.”
Before Jake knew it, he was through the dark slot and slipping on the wet stone floor, the familiar stink of urine and mold around him.
He dived back to the door, pushed his face against the grilled opening. “What if we get bombed?”
“Pray you don’t, son. After all, they’re your lot.”
The grille was slammed shut.
He turned, and stared into the gloom. At least he was still close to the mirror. He wasn’t on his way to some military prison the other side of England. And he had the bracelet.
Then he saw the other prisoner.
A tramp maybe. A shadowy figure anyway, lying on the bench against the wall, legs stretched out, wrapped in a coat of muddy grays and greens.
Jake slid down and sat on the filthy floor, knees up. He could just sleep now.
Sleep for hours.
But the figure said, “Not even pleased to see me then, Jake.”
He didn’t move for a second. Then he raised his head and stared.
Gideon lounged on the bench, back against the wall. His ivory skin was dark with smeared soot. His long hair tangled in the collar of his pied coat.
Jake was too astonished to move. “Where the hell did you come from? How did you get here?”
“Through the Summerland.” Gideon stretched his legs out. “And believe me, it wasn’t easy.”
“But . . . how did you find me?”
“I searched. There are ways.”
“Searched? It must have taken you . . .”
“No time at all.” Gideon shook his head. His green eyes narrowed in amusement. “You still don’t get it, do you. In Summer’s land there is no time. No time.”
He scrambled up. “Venn sent you? But . . . she . . . Summer . . . my God, what did he have to promise her?”
Gideon looked at the floor. “Summer doesn’t know anything about it. It was Sarah’s idea.”
For the first time in a long time a flicker of hope warmed Jake like a shaft of light. As a bomb fell streets away, shuddering dust down from the ceiling, he grinned.
“So Sarah’s back,” he said.
As if that could make everything all right.
If you can look into the seeds of time . . .
6
Where Janus obtained the mirror is uncertain. It is thought that among his earliest advisers was a man brought in great secrecy from a high security unit in the environs of what had once been Tokyo. ZEUS has no records of this man, and no images. But with him were transported various objects carefully packaged. The guards who accompanied him were never seen again. The consignment appeared on no flight details and was never reported in any customs document.
The package was delivered to London Central.
Immediately after this the tremors and earthquakes began.
Illegal ZEUS transmission; biography of Janus
SARAH WOKE very slowly.
For a long moment she lay curled among the white sheets, trying to hold on to the flavor of her dream, but already it had dissolved to frail, wispy remnants.
Of kneeling here, in this room. In her own time, with the sky raining on her through the charred rafters, and ivy smothering every wall with its glossy leaves. She had been hiding treasures in the small space under the floorboards—a seashell, a doll, a child’s drawing of a red house and a yellow sun crayoned with spikes of light.
She sat up in the bed and gazed around.
In that End Time, over a hundred years from now, the Abbey would be a burned-out ruin, oaks growing through its tiled hall and up the broken staircase. She and her parents had lived—no, would live!—in a small cottage of salvaged stone and charred timbers, built into one of the corners of the cloister.
It was a bitter memory. It hurt her. She swung her feet out of the bedclothes and dangled them over the side. The room was dim; she slipped down and padded to the window, tugging back the heavy velvet curtains, wanting light, and air.
The morning was still.
The storm Summer had created had raged all night. The bright spring was shattered. Bluebells lay broken, new buds and catkins torn down by her spite. The morning was dark with cold rain, the trees gloomy through the drizzle, boughs tossing in the wind. Sarah saw again how the Abbey was a tiny sanctuary in the heart of the deep Wood; how the oaks and beeches rose up on each side, so that only from up here, high in the attic, could you glimpse the hills beyond, and Dartmoor, a gray shadow in the north.
She took down the old red dressing gown Piers had lent her and tugged it around herself. Then she climbed on the window seat and opened the casement. Cold wind gusted in, rippling the curtains with its salt tang of the distant sea.
She allowed herself a wry smile.
She was glad to be back. Because after all, she was a Venn; this was her country.
This was her house.
Under her foot the floorboard creaked. She looked down at it, and another fragment of the dream broke in her memory. Her mother cooking. Her father outside, chopping wood. And then Janus’s voice had come suddenly from the old wind-up radio, breaking the music. He had said “I own the world now. I am the world now” and her mother had turned it off with a shudder, saying “No! Never!” but that hadn’t stopped him; he had crawled and squeezed out of the radio as it had transformed into Wharton’s small red car, and there he had stood in the kitchen, a lank-haired man in blue spectacles, his uniform dark and neat.