shrugged. Maybe a little. Enough to want to try again, and actually aim this time. Wisdom, however, prevailed, and she surrendered the gun to the more experienced marksman as they ran.
Nicholas led them across the garden’s green lawn and through the trees, until they were outside of the park and darting across the street. He followed the curve of the road, shouldering through startled onlookers, and ducked into a tight alley. When he crouched down behind some stacked crates, she followed, her chest burning so fiercely she was afraid she’d be sick.
“Bloody hell,” he said again, shaking harder than before as he touched a cut on his shoulder. Had the bullet actually grazed him?
“Who?” she panted, leaning forward, trying to see around the crates.
Nicholas leaned his head back against the dank stone wall behind them. “My father. Augustus Ironwood.”
Etta had suspected—she’d seen those eyes and recognized the look of Cyrus, his nose, his brows, on the younger man. But more than that, she’d seen the flash of anguish cut across his face as he’d called her by her mother’s name.
“Are you all right?” she asked, touching his arm.
“Not the first time that man’s nearly killed me,” he said offhandedly, “but hopefully it will be the last. Christ, I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. Bloody time travel, bloody—”
Oh my God—Etta thought she’d understood this before—that, even after a traveler died, there was still the chance of bumping into them again at some point in history. Each passage was fixed to a specific year and location, but not a date. What were the chances that they’d managed to land on the exact time that a past version of his father had decided to show up?
“The irony of seeing him…” Nicholas shook his head, accepting her touch as she ran the backs of her fingers down his face. He caught them, twining them between his own. His gaze was on the opposite wall, but she saw the emotions storming within him.
Why would her mother hide the astrolabe in a place where the Ironwoods clearly had access to the passage?
Because she hadn’t.
When Etta closed her eyes, thought of the wall of paintings, traced the line of her mother’s stories to the last one she could remember, it brought her here; it was about her being accepted at the Sorbonne for art history. That was the last piece on the wall.
No.
Etta sat up so suddenly that Nicholas turned to her, worry etched on his face. The painting of Luxembourg Garden wasn’t the last one on the wall—or at least her mother had told her she was planning to switch it out, for—for that new painting, the one she had done of the desert in Syria. She had told Etta she was going to replace it. She had woven in that story about the earrings, the market in Damascus, the woman who had sold them to her. And, as Etta was discovering, her mother apparently wasn’t the type to do something for no reason.
Are you listening, Etta?
You won’t forget, will you?
“Remember, the truth is in the telling,” Etta said slowly. In other words, what she told me overrules anything she’s written?
Maybe her mother had moved the painting at some point after writing the clues out—or had it been meant to be a false lead, on the off chance that Ironwood figured out her set of clues, and picked up her trail? In either case, they were in the wrong city, the wrong time.
“We have to go back,” she said. “We missed something. We’re not supposed to be here.”
“But you said…” Nicholas’s brow wrinkled. “Are you certain?”
“Positive,” Etta said. “Can we get back to the passage to Angkor?”
“We can damn well try.”
AS THEY BOTH FEARED, THE AUTHORITIES HAD BEEN CALLED TO Luxembourg Garden after the disturbance, and Etta felt a shiver work through her at the thought of it being written up in the papers—of there being a witness, a record of the event. They’d been so careful until now.…
“I wouldn’t worry,” Nicholas said. “I think…perhaps this was supposed to happen.”
She looked up, startled. They were keeping to the very edge of the garden, weaving in and out of the outer ring of trees. The uniforms of the police blended in with the dark suits of the men giving their statements and accounts, offset by the pops of vivid color that were the women.
“In Virgil’s letter he referenced a sighting by my—that Augustus had, of Rose in Paris. Perhaps this was it?”
Perhaps. But that was