Unwrapped (16 page)

I cleared my throat. “My apologies, Mr. Devitt. I didn’t mean to offend with my immodesty.”

“The only offense, Miss Jenkins, would be if you didn’t do it again.”

Okay, now he was in full-on flirting mode, and heaven help me, I liked it.

Wimple-lady’s increasingly snotty cries brought me back to the present crisis. I turned the transmitter on, entered my passcode on the tiny touchscreen, and made the call.

Nothing happened.

I tried again. Nothing.

I turned it off and turned it back on. Still nothing.

“Why isn’t it working?” Sophie asked.

“No clue.” I gave the transmitter a good, old-fashioned thump on the back. “Dial, dammit.”

“Could it be this time-storm you mentioned?” Henry inquired. “If your friend’s brooch isn’t working properly because of it, could your device also be affected?”

I frowned. “It shouldn’t be. These are literally the toughest things on the market. I could even send a signal from the between-space if I wanted. They are designed to be immune to tachyon interference.”

“Maybe you need a new battery,” Sophie suggested.

“Where’s yours?”

She pulled hers out of a white ankle boot. She turned it on, punched in her code and tried to call, with the same result.

I stared at it for a moment. Transmitters
always
worked. Always. All of our training revolved around this one concrete fact: every emergency, no matter how severe, could be mitigated with the transmitter. No traveler was without help or without a link to their own time. Bureau agents were at the ready, every moment of every day, to materialize and save travelers from whatever horrible situation they’d found themselves in.

Horror stories of the days before transmitters and established travel slipped through my mind. Stories of travelers landing on the
Titanic
as it sank, or in a den of saber-toothed tigers, or in the clutches of some very bloodthirsty Aztec priests.

“They can’t both be malfunctioning,” I said. “It’s got to be the time-storm, but how? Even now, it would barely register on the L’Engle scale.”

“Um,” Sophie said.

“So you opened up a platform and a time-storm came through the breach. But why wouldn’t it dissipate immediately? Regular matter drives tachyons apart, disperses them. It takes an extraordinary amount of energy to pull enough together to travel.”

“Miss Jenkins,” Henry said. He and Sophie were looking behind me.

I looked at them, irritated that they weren’t as preoccupied with this as I was. “And why is it spreading? It’s like it’s feeding. But on what?”

Wimple-lady screamed again. I wheeled around. A pterodactyl—or a pteranodon, I wasn’t a paleontologist—flapped towards us, emitting a shriek as it flew over our heads.
Of course,
I thought.
Of course there is a fucking pterodactyl in the fucking opera house.

Its massive leathery wings sent the chandeliers swinging, shattering a few of the dim electric bulbs as it tried to perch on one.

An idea came to me. I snapped my fingers. “Electricity.”

“No,” Sophie said, “that is a giant reptile bird.”

“I concur,” Henry said.

“No.” I was already moving towards the doors to the auditorium proper. “I meant that I figured it out. It’s the electricity. Tachyons are drawn by power, right? Well, you opened a doorway to the most powerful spot in Westminster, possibly all of London. The storm bled through, drawn by the relative power of the electric Savoy, and now it’s feeding on it, managing to hold itself together with the electricity in the air.”

“So if we cut out the electricity, then we stop the storm?” Henry asked. His crinkled brow begged to be kissed. I tried to let that thought drive away my fears of being fined for even talking to him about this.

“Yes. Find the source of the power, shut it down, and then the Wife of Bath, and Caesar over here can go back home.”

“And the giant reptile bird,” Sophie added.

I reached the doors. “I’m guessing that the generator is nearby—early power plants were usually close to their customers—but if we can maybe sever the lines where they enter the building—”

“Wait,” Henry said as I pulled on the door. “Do you hear that?”

I listened. Loud shouts and bangs and reptilian shrieks carried over the music.

“I think whatever is happening in the lobby has spread into the auditorium.”

Great. A thousand natives impacted by the time-storm. More work for the Bureau, which meant less likelihood of salvaging this for me. I squared my shoulders and opened the doors.

The mist sparkled everywhere, glinting and golden, giving the room a glow not unlike a cheerful summer’s morning. Roman soldiers paced and cursed in Latin, a gilded coach that looked very much like it came from the time of Charles I was high-centered on the railing around the orchestra pit, and several more people from Wimple-lady’s time clung to one another and fretted. Most disturbingly, men and women in tattered clothes wandered dazedly down the aisles, one or two of them snarling, a few murmuring odd things to themselves as they rocked back and forth, all of them bedraggled and alarmingly dirty.

“Did I also mention that the Savoy used to be the site of a mental hospital?” Henry murmured.

Above everything, the ptera-whateverss circled, their wings noisy and rustling, and the bewildered opera singers kept singing, the hesitation and worry evident in their voices.

But most amazingly, the audience seemed not to be frightened at all. In fact, they wore expressions of delight and wonder, clapping and
ooh
ing every time a pteranodon dropped closer or a new person appeared in the room. A flash of light and then a very unhappy Druid stood on the stage. Another flash and someone who was unmistakably a Neanderthal emerged next to a businessman talking on a giant cellphone from the 1980s.

“New plan,” I said. “Sophie, round up my students from Box Four and take them to the nearest platform as soon as possible.”

“Daddy’s company owns a building just a mile away. There’s a platform there.”

Ah, the benefits of going corporate.

“Great. Notify the Bureau as soon as you get there that there’s a time-storm in the Savoy and that the past and the present are bleeding into it. Soon, natives will being bleeding
out
and then it will be really messy.”

“Okay,” she said. She paused. “I am sorry, you know. And thank you for fixing this. You were always good at that.”

I could have pointed out that I didn’t have a choice, that I had to help fix it or I might get sucked into another time without a working transmitter, or that I might get in trouble with the Bureau for not trying to help, but I didn’t. I appreciated her apology. Lord knew they were rare enough.

“Be quick,” I told her. She nodded and dashed over to the private boxes where my students were. I turned to Henry. “Any idea where the electricity might feed into the building?”

“My guess would be behind the stage.”

I started forward, surprised to find that he insisted on taking my arm as we walked down. He navigated us past the lunatics and Vikings, who were making aggressive advances towards the Romans, who had already drawn swords. A young woman ahead of me looked up from an iPad—the kind that was already in a museum in my time. “What on earth…?” But instead of worrying about her temporal form and sudden shift in location and time, she started snapping pictures of the scene.

We pushed past her and mounted the stage where the opera singers had finally stopped singing.

“Is this part of the production?” the female lead asked us.

“Yes, cost a fortune,” Henry said smoothly. “Of course, things are getting a little out of hand…actors, you know.”

She nodded as if she did know, and we walked past the brightly painted scenery and went into the wings. Just then, everything stopped. I don’t mean that everybody got quiet or that everybody got still. Everybody—and everything—stopped. Froze. I looked back at the opera singer, who stood with her eyes unblinking, her skirt caught mid-swish around her legs.

“What is happening now?” Henry asked. I liked that he always sounded politely curious instead of freaked out, which I might have been in his shoes.

“I don’t know. We could be in the eye of the time-storm or the tachyons could be folding in on themselves, consuming time itself as they do so.”

“So how come it isn’t happening to us?”

“I don’t know that either. My guess is that I’ve travelled recently enough to still have some lingering tachyons from my time surrounding me. And you…” I searched his face, his body, wondering. Then I laughed. “I touched you! You have tachyons on you as well.”

“You’d better do it again,” he said. “To be safe.”

“Nice try.” The wings were darker than the rest of the theatre, but I could make my way down a murky stairwell to a small room at the bottom. A few dim bulbs illuminated racks of elaborate costumes and the hulking shadows of unused set pieces. Further down, I could see a velvet chaise lounge and behind it, cables.

“I think I—”

All the lights in the theatre went off.

“That was easier than expected,” Henry remarked.

“I didn’t touch anything.” Warily, I crept forward into the storage room, using the screen of my transmitter for light. “Maybe the storm itself shut off the power.”

Footsteps echoed as Henry went back to the stage. “It’s hard to tell in the dark, but it seems that everybody is still frozen,” he reported. “So what does that mean?”

I sat on the chaise.
I don’t know
, I wanted to say, but I had already said those words so many times tonight. “It means we wait for the Bureau to come and fix everything.”

“Would we be safer if we left the Savoy?” Henry asked. The pale light of the transmitter threw his face into shadow, sharply etching the minute details of his long eyelashes and slightly crooked nose.

“Probably,” I admitted. “But I feel responsible for all this somehow. I need to stay and brief the Bureau when they get here.” I stood. “You should go though. You don’t need to be here.”

“It would not be gentlemanly for me to leave you.”

“Well, you’re not really a gentleman now, are you?”

Even in the dark, I could see his grin.

And then the tachyons reappeared, sparking and glinting, suffusing the small room with a delicate light. Henry waved his hand through the mist, watching the particles sway and move and then join back together. “It’s beautiful,” he said, awe in his voice. “Is this something you always see?”

I shook my head. “Only when I’m traveling. In my time, in the future, we have machines that can draw the tachyons together and send someone through time.”

“Tell me,” he said, coming closer. I could see the shimmering fog reflecting in his eyes.

After we sat back down, I told him. I told him about the discovery of tachyons in 2014 when a particle accelerator malfunctioned—which necessitated explaining particle physics in general—and I told him about the booming time travel industry and how it was constantly at war with the “serious” travelers—people like me at the universities and nonprofit research institutes. I told him about how this was my first field trip and how I pretended to hate Sophie but I didn’t really mind her, and I told him about the future, about the endless advances and technologies that we took for granted, drawing little pictures in the dust on the floor of computers and cars. And finally, I told him about the Bureau. About how they would come and set up waypoints around the entire Savoy and force the building and everyone in it backwards in time one or two hours. About how they would individually shepherd the Vikings and the Druids back home and wrangle the pteranodons back into the prehistoric jungles from whence they came. And about how everybody would find that they had no memory of tonight, and while they would be a little surprised at the lateness of the hour when they emerged from the opera house, they would chalk it up to a fantastic opera.

Henry listened attentively to everything I said, his mouth occasionally quirking up at the corners when I said something that struck him as truly strange. But when I got to the last part, he interrupted me. “Will I also be taken back in time?”

“Yes.”

He touched my face. “So I won’t remember spending the night with you.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I can’t appeal this process somehow?”

His fingers on my cheeks and lips were distracting. “It’s in everybody’s best interest,” I stammered. “Natives shouldn’t have too much knowledge of the future.”

He leaned in closer.

“Like what kind of knowledge?”

“Um, well, like technology and society and…oh…”

He was kissing my face now, his lips trailing across my cheekbones and down to my jawline, where the kisses fluttered and teased and danced until I could barely think straight.

“What about knowledge of women from the future?” he murmured into my ear. “It seems I have so much to learn…”

Now his mouth was on my neck, kissing past my choker and down to my collarbone, little nibbles and licks tracing their way inevitably to my breasts. I ached to be out of my corset.

“Women from the future don’t have very strict morals,” I said a little breathlessly. “And we dress less restrictively…”

“Seems wise,” he said, his fingers behind my back, deftly unlacing my dress and tugging it down.

Maybe this was going too far, even for a twenty-first century girl like me. He wouldn’t remember this after the Bureau got here but I would, and did I really want a fourth trip around the block with someone who wouldn’t even remember it? “Henry…”

He looked at me, eyes devious from behind the sparkling tachyons. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do,” he promised.

I put my hands against his shoulders. “That might work on the girls you know, but not me. Listen, the Bureau could be here any moment, and I don’t really know you that well, and you’re not even going to remember it…”

His hands, stripped of their gloves, slid up my legs, past my stockings. My protests were cut off abruptly as his fingers played with the lace garters holding them up, brushing against the soft skin of my inner thighs.