names down so she wouldn’t forget them, and stuck the list in her pocket. With any luck, she’d be able to get others from the shopgirls at lunch, and one of them would ring a bell with Eileen. She and Mike should be here soon. Stepney was less than three-quarters of an hour away, and she doubted if Eileen had much to pack.
But they still weren’t there by eleven, and Polly realized belatedly that she didn’t know Mike’s address or the name of the people Eileen was staying with. And Padgett’s employee records had just been blown to bits. Where are they? she thought. It shouldn’t take four hours to go to Stepney and back.
She watched the clock and the stairways and the lifts, trying not to worry, trying to believe they would walk in any moment, safe and sound, that they were going to find Gerald Phipps, and his drop was going to open and they would go back to Oxford where Mr. Dunworthy would let Eileen go to VE-Day. To believe their retrieval teams were going to walk in any moment and say, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
But as the minutes crept by, and Mike and Eileen still didn’t come, doubts began to drift back in like the fog that first night she’d come through. Even if the measles epidemic had been a divergence point and kept the retrieval team from coming for Eileen till after she’d left for London, Lieutenant Heffernan would have said they’d been there. And if the measles had been a divergence point, why had Eileen been allowed to come through in the first place?
And this was time travel. Polly might have failed to find out where Eileen was from the vicar because she had a train to catch, but the retrieval team wouldn’t have. They had literally all the time in the world.
And if Oxford hadn’t been destroyed, if Colin wasn’t dead, where was he? He had promised to come rescue her if she got in trouble.
“If you can,” Polly murmured. “If you’re not killed.”
The arrow above the lift door stopped at three, and she looked over at the lift, half expecting to see Colin standing there. But it wasn’t him. Or Mike and Eileen. It was Marjorie. “Oh, Polly!” she cried. “Thank goodness! I heard Padgett’s was hit, and I was so afraid… is your cousin all right?”
“Yes,” Polly said, grabbing her arm quickly to support her. She looked even whiter and more ill than yesterday.
“Oh, thank heavens,” Marjorie breathed. “No, I’m all right. It was just that I was afraid… I mean, I sent you there, and if something had happened to you…”
“It didn’t,” Polly assured her. “I’m quite all right, and so is she. You’re the one we’re concerned about,” she said reprovingly. “You can’t keep escaping from hospital and dashing over here. You’re an invalid, remember.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” Marjorie said. “It was only… when I heard people had been killed—”
“Killed?” Polly said, thinking, Thank goodness. I can tell Mike that, and he’ll stop worrying.
“Yes,” Marjorie said. “One of them died on the way to hospital. That’s how I found out about it. I heard the nurses talking. The other four were dead when they found them.”
Way Out
—NOTICE IN LONDON UNDERGROUND STATION
London—17 September 1940
THE SHIMMER BLINDED HIM FOR A MOMENT, AND HE TOOK a stumbling step forward. And nearly killed himself. He was on a narrow spiral staircase, and only a last-moment grab for the iron railing kept him from pitching down it. He cracked his knee hard, barked both shins, and made a clanging, echoing racket in the process.
A brilliant beginning, he thought, nursing his bruised knee and looking at his surroundings. The staircase was in a narrow windowless shaft that extended up—and down—for farther than he could see, and he was apparently the only person in it, or at any rate no one had come to investigate the noise he’d made. And now that its echoes had stopped, he couldn’t hear anything.
Nothing could get through those walls, he thought, looking at the dimly lit stone. If the railing hadn’t been of iron, he’d have thought he was in the tower of a castle. Or the dungeon. In which case he should climb up to get out. But hopefully going either direction would bring him to some clue as to where—and when—this was, and down was easier than up, especially since his knee hurt.
He started down the stairs. Three turns down brought him