The Copernicus Archives #2 (3 page)

M
y vision went black around the edges. My heart pounded as if it would explode. But I held on to myself. I bit my lip, felt my feet on the floor, and focused. I was still afraid to take a step out of the shadows.

“You're Copernicus? You're really him? How can I . . . how . . . ?”

“Let us not waste time on these things, Rebecca Moore.” His voice deepened suddenly. “We have a few moments only. Yes, this is London. Yes, it is November of the year 1517. By some trick—or gift—that I do not understand, travelers such as we can see each other. I am here, but these others cannot see you.”

“So what am I, a ghost?” I said.

He waved that away. “I know, of course, what will
happen to my friend Thomas, though I must not tell him. The horror of knowing and not being able to warn, the horror of knowing it will happen anyway. This is why, you see, we use codes. To hide the truth—not only from the Teutonic Order. But from ourselves.”

The candlelight warmed his face, as the fire in the hearth must have warmed him, though I saw him shiver. I tried to shape my thoughts. I couldn't.

“For Thomas,” he said, “it will happen in eighteen short years.”

“What will happen to him?”

“A rise in fortunes, then a fall. Friendships with King Henry seldom end well. Thomas will be executed on the sixth of July in 1535. Everyone knows this in your time.”

I felt my head emptying out, like water going down a drain. I was faint, ready to fall to the ground, to fall somewhere, but Copernicus rose quickly, took hold of me by my arms, and settled me in a chair. I didn't think it was possible to have form and weight in a dream. Maybe I imagined that, too.

He stood, his forehead deeply furrowed. “Rebecca Moore, I bear much guilt. Perhaps I am guilty even of
this
.” He glanced to the other room. “A time traveler is like a blind man with a torch, setting fire to everything he stumbles into.”

My mouth was as dry as sand. “What do you mean? How can traveling in time do that?” I wished Wade could have heard this, to understand the
time
thing.

“Time travelers are sleepwalkers,” he said. “We trail destruction behind us. Accidental murderers. This is why I took the astrolabe apart. I saw what I had done. What more horrors
could
be done by the Order. Do you see now?”

“I don't see. I don't understand—”

He seemed upset. “Horrible things happen when you travel this way!” He waved his hand up and down to signify—what?—a passage through time? “I didn't know this until my second journey. The holes we created, the holes we left behind. The first journey was joy I'd never known! Rebecca, there was beauty and wonder everywhere, and yes, the blessed power of good!” His eyes sparkled, then faded. “The second time, no. I saw what horrors I had begun.”

I was getting so little of what he told me. “What horrors
you
had begun? But you wouldn't have. You're good. How? And how many journeys did you make?”

“Whenever one travels this way, a hole is created,” he said. “In your time you will know it as a nuclear event.”

It was strange to hear a man in an old house in London in the sixteenth century use the word
nuclear
.

“In this time”—he spread his hands wide—“it is seen as a hole in the sky, a hole as narrow as a dagger's point.” I remembered reading those words in the diary. “Things drift that should not,” he said. “
People
drift, sometimes.”

“But you can do good things because of traveling in time, can't you?” I asked. “Something good must happen. It must.”

He was quiet for the longest time before he said, “She lives.”

“Who?” I said. “Who lives?”

“But because she lives . . . there is
the evil
. You cannot escape that. . . .”

He trailed off.

When I pleaded with him to tell me more, he shook his head sharply. “I should not. I cannot. You must return. Go back. Do not come here again, Rebecca Moore. The evil, the loneliness will break you, do you see?”

“Stop saying that! I don't see! What are you trying to tell me?”

He turned his face to the fire, overcome by something, then said, “To find this relic, remember the words I gave to Meg. Serpens does not lead to it. The words I gave to Thomas's daughter are for you, too.”

“I don't know the code—”

“It has to be in code! To tell you outright would be far more dangerous.”

“Why?” I was getting angry, too. “Why?”

“Because you would stop searching! You cannot stop searching! Look here.” He spun the diary around to the page he had written on while I stood in the shadows. What he had inked were four more words with the odd characters.

“Can't you just tell me what it means?” I pleaded.

“This—
this
—will happen after nightfall tonight.”

“After nightfall tonight?
Whose
night? Yours or mine?”

My brain was fizzling out. Too much information. The horror of knowing, his second journey, the bizarre codes, the sleepwalker.

Then as I stared at the page, trying to etch the symbols into my mind, Nicolaus whispered into my ear, “The . . . Temple . . . of . . . Mithras . . .”

I wanted to ask what he meant, but my words were lost in a mist. Whether he began to fade away from me or I from him, it didn't matter. Without my leaving that close, hot, shivering room, I was dragged away from him, from the old house and the old city, and I couldn't see him anymore.

“W
olff is on the embankment. I see him. Becca, stay here with us.”

The hand was gentle but insistent, tugging me backward. I turned, and there was Wade's face. The Old Barge was gone. Bucklersbury was gone. The ancient curving street was replaced by the throng at the river. Rain sprinkled my face. It was this morning again. Wade and Lily huddled close on either side of me, while Darrell stood in front, as if blocking us from being seen.

“Becca, pay attention!” Lily's voice in my ear.

“What? Sorry.”

“I told you not to say that.”

The half hour, or longer, that I had been back
there
with Helmut Bern and Meg and Thomas and Nicolaus
had gone by in an instant. I was barely a step or two from where I'd been when everything winked out and I saw Helmut Bern crawling on the sand.

“He's moving.” Darrell nodded back over his shoulder.

I saw him then, Markus Wolff. A tall man with a craggy face and close-cropped white hair, walking slowly among those gathered on the far side of the excavation. His black overcoat—the one that had gained him Lily's nickname Leathercoat—glistened in the light rain. Seeing him, remembering how he'd threatened us at gunpoint in San Francisco, shocked me back to the here and now.

As Wolff trained his icy eyes on the workers below and took snapshots with his phone, my time with Nicolaus seemed to snuff out like a candle in the rain.

“He's sending pictures to Galina,” Wade murmured.

“It's strange to see Wolff in the daylight, isn't it?” Lily whispered. “He's so like a vampire, except that vampires are hilarious compared to him.”

My head was splitting. “Just what I was thinking,” I managed to say. The area behind my eyes ached; so did my jaw, as if I'd been clenching my teeth too long. My nose was running, too. When I wiped it, my finger was smeared with blood.

With blood! Like Helmut Bern!
I turned away from
everyone, but that was it. A single drop. I wiped my finger on my jeans.

We started back to Roald and Sara, when all at once the crowd lurched and parted. A long black car, just this side of being a limousine, pushed through the spectators, nudging them away. It stopped.

“BMW,” said Darrell. “And it has no license plates. Julian, no plates.”

A tall man in a dark raincoat with a slouchy rain hat pulled low over his face exited the rear of the car. He stepped to the edge of the embankment.

“Government, maybe,” Julian said. “Or royal family, checking out the barge.”

Wolff turned his gaze from the barge to the hatted man and watched his movements down to the sand as steadily as I followed Wolff's. The work stopped, while the man in the hat spoke to a couple of archaeologists, one of whom was nodding, the other of whom seemed to be almost angry. The man raised his hand, turned away, and answered his phone. He spoke a few words into it. I looked back at Wolff. He was on the phone, too.

“They're talking to each other,” I said. “That man down there is working for the Order.”

“We'll call him Hatman,” Lily said.

Wade ran his hand through his wet hair again. “If he is with the Order, he's high up in the government,
right? Someone who doesn't need license plates.”

While Wolff kept speaking on his phone, Hatman scanned the crowd, moving his gaze nearer and nearer to us.

“Get back—he's looking for us,” said Roald, tugging us into the ranks of the spectators so we couldn't be seen. At the same time, two hefty-size gargoyles emerged from the black BMW. They were dressed in black jeans and jackets. They'd seen us. They entered the crowd and moved toward us.

Sara stood from her wheelchair. “Julian, I think we need our car now. Let's get away from here.”

“I'm calling for it,” said Julian. “I don't know who those men are.”

Several policemen barked at the spectators to move back from the BMW. It reversed slowly, leaving the two gargoyles behind. My head thundered. What was happening? I could faint at any second. My nostril was damp. I sniffed it in.

“We need to vanish.” Roald urged us through the fringes of the crowd and away from the embankment. Sara was back in the chair. Darrell pushed as quickly as he could—“Excuse, please!”—and helped make a path for us.

Julian swiped off his phone. “Our driver can't make it around the crowds. He'll meet us on Upper
Thames Street, straight ahead—”

Everything ached, as if I'd fallen down a long flight of stairs, but I pushed ahead with the others; then I looked up, and saw the street sign.

Allhallows Lane. The path taken by Bern and Copernicus.

I shivered all over, but my face and neck burned. “Uh . . .”

“Come on, Bec,” Lily said, pulling my arm. “Julian knows the best way.”

I stopped. If the twisting old streets were still there, we could avoid the mysterious car with no license plates, maybe put the two thugs off the scent.

“This way,” I said. It was how the girl, Meg, had said it. “This way.”

“Becca, no,” said Wade. “Where do you think you're—”

I pulled away from the others, trotted down some stairs, and turned left off Allhallows, through a tunnel marked with blue lights on the pavement. Parked motorcycles lined the tunnel. Then right, up the hill away from the river. Yes. This was the way.

“Becca, wait,” Roald said from the back. “The wheelchair.”

Sara, too. “Becca, we can't—”

But Julian said, “No. Let me help you down the
stairs. Becca's right. This is better. I'll phone my driver. Everyone follow her.”

Soot-black walls rose up narrowly on either side of me. The street ahead was lined with trucks, blocking other vehicles from entering. It was the same path, the same corner. So I
hadn't
dreamed it. It
had
been real, my climb from the river through the streets after Helmut Bern. After Copernicus.

Suddenly Wade was running with me, past a couple of old cannons—of Cannon Street? Lily was there, too. There might have been a more direct way, but when I saw the old, narrow path of College Street, I entered it. Just like I had five hundred years ago.

Darrell pushed his mother as quickly as he could. The streets were bumpy, barely paved over centuries of cobblestones. “Hold up,” he called.

“No! Follow me!” I passed a church on the right, then rounded another corner up and away from the river. “Just follow me.”

“The men,” Roald said from the back. “The men from the black car . . .”

We forged up College Hill, then down and left onto Walbrook and up into Bucklersbury Passage, where the Old Barge had stood ages ago. The BMW was suddenly roaring up the nearest passable street and skidded across one end of the passage. A motorcycle stopped at
the other end. In its saddle was one of the goons in black jeans. Where had he picked up a bike? In the tunnel with blue lights?

“We need to move faster,” said Darrell. “Mom?”

She got out of the chair with Roald's help. “I'm good. Really. Let's go.”

A second motorcycle joined the first, idling with it. Both engines cut out at the same time. The riders dismounted together.

My legs felt like collapsing. I stumbled. Lily kept up with me. “Becca, really, what's going on with you? You have to tell me. You've never been here before.”

“Not now,” I said. “I just know the way. That's all.”

“Sure. Okay.”

I knew it was wrong to keep this to myself. The loneliness of it
would
break me. Nicolaus knew it. That was the real horror. To be left alone in a cold place without my friends. Only myself. No others. Suddenly I froze. There was a fence surrounding a construction site. A sign pinned up on it read Temple of Mithras.

“The temple!” I said. “He told me about it.”

“The temple?” Julian shot a look at me, then behind us. The two motorcycle men had joined two or three others on foot now. I saw Hatman's hand pointing out the car window.

“Through the fence to the next block,” Julian said.
“Becca's right. Go!”

Wade and Darrell pushed at a hinged door in the fence and urged Lily and me through it, then Roald and Sara. Julian ran in last, still on the phone to his driver, who must be trying desperately to find us.

We wove through cranes and tractors, piles of girders, and shouting construction workers—“Hey, it's not open yet!” “Get out of here!” “Bloody tourists!”—and finally past the red and white foundation stones of an ancient temple nestled serenely among the noise and fenced off within the fenced-off site. We crashed out to the street a block away from the men at the exact moment that Julian's limo raced up the street toward us.

Wade faltered. “Becca, what the—how in the world did you know—”

“I'll tell you!” I said. “I'll tell you everything! Just get in!”

Breathless, we dived into the car, Julian pulling the doors closed behind us. The limo screeched away from the curb, and the moment it did, I did tell them.

Almost everything.