rod.”
“I say we dismantle it,” said Riley, raising his hand as though voting in the House of Commons. “Perhaps Garrick will find his hands growing out of his backside if he manages to follow us.”
Chevie was trying to think beyond the time fugue, and Riley’s joking was not helping.
“Stop with the cracks,” she said, giggling. “We should check ourselves to make sure nothing is out of place. Sober thinking now.”
“I am sober. You won’t let me drink, not even beer.”
Chevie stepped from the plate. “We should get out of here. Put some space between us and Garrick. I need to get a gun. Do you know anyone? Gun . . . bang bang?”
“Bang,” said Riley. “Bang bang.”
Chevie pulled Riley from the buried platform and noticed a disk of light hovering in the air, like a spinning silver dollar.
“Silver dollar,” she said conversationally, pointing at the dwindling wormhole.
Riley nodded.
“Men with sacks,” he said, pointing at two men who had entered the basement and were stealing across the mud floor, holding open the mouths of two flour sacks.
Chevie spotted a third man, emerging from a corner, his mouth full of food.
“Not all of them. That one’s got a chicken wing . . . and a blackjack.”
“I claim the chicken wing,” said Riley.
Chevie was still laughing when the sack went over her head.
HALF MOON STREET. SOHO. LONDON. NOW
Garrick tumbled into the pod less than a minute after his quarry disappeared and no more than ten seconds before the entrance to the quantum tunnel disappeared altogether. Just before his dematerialization, the woman, Victoria, had staggered down the stairs and shot him in the good leg with a small-caliber bullet from an almost dainty rifle, and so focused was Garrick on the diminishing wormhole that he forgot to smother his nerve endings. The sudden hammer blow of agony almost rendered him senseless, which would have been a disaster inside the wormhole. A man needed his senses marshaled and ready for duty inside the time tunnel.
The fault is mine, he thought, for allowing that woman to live.
The last sounds he heard from the twenty-first century before he disappeared were the bitter curses of the old woman, damning him to hell for a murdering scoundrel.
Garrick had an inkling that sparing Victoria was not all his own doing. The ghost of that Scot muck-snipe, Felix Sharp, was making a nuisance of itself in Garrick’s own gray matter. The photographs of Sharp’s father lining the wall and the notion of harming Victoria caused a swelling of phantom emotions that had stayed Garrick’s hand twice now.
No more, thought Albert Garrick. I will be a dead man’s cat’s-paw no longer.
Once the orange energy transmogrified his atoms, enveloping him in the sea of quantum foam, Garrick felt a calm descend over him.
I am nothing but soul now. Immortal.
Contentment draped the magician, but then he felt Riley’s fear trail ahead of him, and it snapped Garrick back to himself. He followed it to the mouth of the wormhole, borne easily as a corpse in the Thames. As the end of his journey neared, he gathered his bodily parts, reassembling himself, healing his wounds and expelling wisps of Felix Sharp’s willpower from his thoughts, while retaining his multifarious knowledge. This was a delicate maneuver and Garrick felt that he had not been entirely successful, but certainly he had expunged enough of the Scotsman’s foibles that the notion of putting an end to Agent Chevron Savano did not upset him in the slightest.
Killing that girl will cause me no grief whatsoever, he thought, and with a catastrophic loss of energy his particles coalesced, subliming from gas to solid just as Garrick wished them to, relying on his muscle memory to rejuvenate his body.
My sinews and bones are young, but my mind is full of wisdom.
His powers were not infinite, he knew. There would be no more healings or transformations for Albert Garrick, but he felt young again, with a brain full of twenty-first-century knowledge, which should be more than sufficient to ensure that his life was a long and comfortable one.
Garrick emerged from the wormhole grinning . . .
HALF MOON STREET. LONDON. 1898
. . . to find himself in an empty dungeon. Garrick’s grin shriveled, but his disappointment soon burned off like brandy from a pudding.
I am home.
There was no doubt that he had returned to his own time. Even below street level, as he was, London’s signature blend of smells penetrated the air. The combined excretions of three million souls, and another million beasts