Steel Time

BEFORE-2

Closer than you think, actually. “And you said I’m in Nacostina?”

“Yes.”

Of all the damned luck. Toria slumped in her seat. “And this is an elven artifact?”

Liam’s posture relaxed when speaking about a subject he had obvious passion for, as his hands traced an invisible sphere the size of two of his fists put together. “Well, no. There are no markings on the stone to indicate its origin or provenance. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what it might be capable of, because the risks are so great.”

“Because you said it moves people through time and space.”

“Yes. But we’re going in unnecessary circles.” Liam snagged a pen and pad of paper from his desk. “Do you mind if I ask some questions? I recognize that this is all a shock, but your answers will give me a better idea of how to proceed.”

Toria shifted in her seat.

“You seemed surprised when I said that you were in Nacostina now. Where were you before the incident that brought you here?” He sat poised to record her answer.

Incident was a mild way to put it. “I was in Nacostina.”

“That’s fantastic! So you’re already familiar with the city, to an extent.” He wrote as he spoke. From Toria’s angled perspective, his handwriting was a delightful scrawl.

“I guess you could say that.” She stopped herself from making a quip about being familiar with a pile of rubble.

If all of this was real, and not some elaborate dream or fantasy, Liam couldn’t know about Nacostina’s destruction.

No one could.

The pressure in her chest returned.

Liam jotted down a few more items, then returned his full attention to her. “I don’t recognize your style of dress, but your Loquella is easy enough to understand. Your sword is going to draw some attention, though, because people don’t generally go about armed in this time. Especially human women.”

“In this time. In the future.”

“Yes. In every instance of the stone transporting a person, it has been from the past into the future. The time range is inconsistent though, so I’m a bit relieved that my first instance of this is a person who is not terribly far from the past. My predecessor once had to acclimate a man who traveled almost a thousand years.” Liam twisted his pen in his hand as he spoke.

“How’d that work out for him?” Toria wasn’t sure whether she asked about Liam’s predecessor or the other accidental time traveler.

“It, erm, didn’t.” Liam did a terrible job at hiding a wince. “He had difficulty accepting many social aspects of life and ended up succumbing to influenza the next winter.”

Toria forced down another set of disbelieving manic giggles. A hiccup came out instead. Liam rubbed the back of his neck and busied himself with more notes while she calmed herself.

This was too much. Only one explanation fit. She had tripped on a piece of rubble and landed on her head, knocking herself unconscious. This was all a weird, injury-induced dream. Victory had fetched Kane to help, and all the excess magic was her partner trying to heal her out of it.

Okay. She could play along. “What happens to me now? What do you need to send me home?”

“That’s the bad news, I’m afraid.” Liam paused, clicking the top of his pen a few times before noticing the nervous habit and setting the ballpoint on his notepad. “The trip is not reversible.”

Nothing was irreversible, even elven superiority. “How do you know?”

“There are records, studies into the properties of the stone.” Liam stood and, after dropping his pen and notepad on the desk, rustled through a stuffed filing cabinet. “I should have copies somewhere around here. Ah!” He withdrew a sheaf of papers, flipped through them, and shoved them back in the drawer. “That’s not it. Hmm.”

“It’s fine. You can find them later.” If she let Liam go off-topic, the two of them might never escape this office. Her stomach rumbled. A snack of dried fruit had been hours ago. Or several decades in the future.

Liam resumed his seat across from her. “Again, I haven’t dealt with this before, so I apologize if I come off as frazzled. But let me assure you the museum has a policy in place for these circumstances. We’ll set you up with lodgings and an allowance, along with training and instruction until you adapt here.”

Not much she could argue with there. If this wasn’t some fevered dream, it was nice to know Liam would not toss her out on the street at the close of this conversation. His adamant assertion that she must come from the past because no one had ever come from the future still grated. Her luck to be the anomaly.

Liam had his pen and notepad again. “If I may ask, what year are you from? It can’t be too far in the past. Again, your Loquella is similar to ours, which is convenient, but more detail will allow me to figure out where to start with catching you up.”

“Um.” Toria’s brain stalled. “I’m from Limani.”

Brilliant. Not an answer to his question at all. Now Liam would think her an i***t on top of being an emotional mess. Or worse, her evasiveness would pique his professional curiosity. But no way in hell could she reveal being from the future. Paradox, thy name was Torialanthas.

Liam didn’t press the matter, earning Toria’s undying gratitude. “That’s no issue. In fact, it will solve a lot of problems you might have with other people regarding any unfamiliarity with life here in Nacostina. Unless you wanted to consider returning home?”

“No!” Toria clutched the handkerchief, wringing it between both hands. “I mean, that’d be kind of strange, right? The city, ah, achieved independence a few years ago.”

A safe enough point for her to claim. The Roman Empire had absorbed the last of the Greek city-states in Europa, leaving Limani, their sole colony, to fend for itself across the ocean. In the scramble to achieve self-sufficiency and resist the temptation to merge with the British colonies to the north or Roman to the south, record-keeping had fallen by the wayside. Liam had no way to verify her claim. But between college courses and family stories, she had a decent chance at passing as a refugee from the time period. It even explained the sword.

Speaking of. “You should know something else.” She paused, as if she feared Liam’s reaction. History had not always welcomed magic users, and she had to pretend as if she had no idea how this new world worked. “I’m a mage. Storm powers. Master-level. That’s why I’m so interested in the object that brought me here. Not just idle curiosity.”

Now the swept-hilt rapier at her hip drew Liam’s complete attention. “But why, ah, if I may ask—”

“Family heirloom and awkward power focus.” She drew a few inches of blade and sent a trickle of energy through the sword, which brightened with enough power to register to Liam’s natural elven senses.

A regular mage, even one aligned with rare storm, had no reason to carry a sword, much less know how to wield one. No way could she reveal being half of a magically bonded pair, a connection allowing Toria and Kane to master the martial arts along with the arcane. Every empire in the world documented bonded pairs. Even Limani, teetering on the edge of disaster, would have kept track. Not acknowledging Kane pained her, but he was safe in the future. Or so she hoped.

“Oh! Well, then.” Liam jotted a few more notes Toria couldn’t make out. “Unusual, but not unheard of in this time.”

She still lacked one important piece of information. Might as well rip off the bandage. “So, when have I ended up? How far?”

“Yes, that is a crucial detail, isn’t it?” Liam retrieved a small flip calendar from his desk and presented it to Toria. “Without boring with you the calendar conversions, it’s been approximately a hundred and ten years since Limani became independent. We are now at the start of what promises to be a hot summer.”

Coordinating the British lunar and Roman solar calendars required extensive mental gymnastics at the best of times. She accepted the postcard-sized calendar in silence. The pressure on her chest bore down again, and the world closed in around her. Liam rambled in the background, his words a dim echo, something about acquiring modern clothing and settling her in with a friend. A promise he would personally make sure she became comfortable in this future and adapt well.

With shaking hands, she paged through the months of the calendar to the end of the current year. Liam didn’t have any appointments listed on the page yet, but this calendar highlighted the date of the annual winter renewal festival celebrated throughout most of the known world.

Resolution draped over Toria’s shoulders like a heavy coat as the truth of her situation sank in. If she was in the past, and this wasn’t some sort of ridiculous hallucination, she couldn’t stay in Nacostina.

But she couldn’t go anywhere else either, because the world was about to end.

Liam had yet to say anything about it, but she was aware the Last War had begun a few months ago. Not that anyone called it that yet. Toria touched a date square with one finger. The day when the Qin Empire dropped a hydrogen bomb on the British colonial capital of Nacostina, launching the empires into nuclear war for control of the New Continent.

In just over six months.

Liam’s hand clasped her shoulder, breaking her out of her daze. He stood above her, clutching a sheaf of folders in his other arm. “I said, are you ready to go? I’ll escort you to where you’ll be staying for now, give you a bit of a tour of the city on the way.”

“Yeah, let’s go.” Toria willed away the numbness in her legs as she stood. She left the calendar on Liam’s desk and followed him out of the office.

The past sucked.

After Liam stepped into another office for a moment to contact her new host, he led her out of the museum. She gave him half an ear as he described advancements in technology while she tracked their route out of the museum. She received a primer on electrical power, tried to appear impressed by the electric-powered lighting fixtures in the museum’s hallways and lobby rather than gas or magic—which would have been familiar to “her” time—and bit her tongue before correcting Liam’s elementary description of the internal combustion engine.

Her mind still whirled over Liam’s revelations, and so much physical evidence around her seemed to back them up. Toria made the command decision to go with the flow until things felt steadier. Or at least until her headache passed.

She’d return to investigate the stone herself, regardless of Liam’s assertions that getting home was impossible.

But she didn’t have to fake astonishment when they stepped outside. The park across the street stretched to the left and right as far as the eye could see, and marble buildings glowed in the long afternoon sun. A warm breeze stirred her hair, and she pushed it away from her face while she surveyed the sheer number of town-cars. They rumbled down the wide avenue in front of the museum’s grand staircase, at the top of which Toria and Liam stood between two of the many columns that fronted the building.

Cars, she remembered. The term “town-car” hadn’t become prevalent until language needed a term to differentiate the smaller electrical vehicles from the larger transports, which still ran on rationed diesel. The shiny behemoths here spat noxious fumes. It didn’t appear to bother the pedestrians who strolled the sidewalks.

A handful of passing pedestrians stared back. She knew now the whispers and nudges when she first appeared had to do with her strange outfit. It marked her as different among women who all seemed to wear knee-length skirts and neat blouses. Not to mention her rapier. Going without it in an unfamiliar city where she had no allies didn’t appeal to her, since she’d had the misfortune of being snatched through time without any of her knives.

“This is wild.” Toria settled on those words instead of more colorful language, her original instinct. She’d been raised on arguments that women should have class—her father—and women should say whatever the f**k they wanted—her mother. Time to learn how to be the sort of woman her father might speak to if she ran into him.

Holy s**t. Her dad was alive right now, though bonded to a different vampire. Her mom was alive, too, and her grandfather. Mikelos would be across the ocean in Europa, but running into Victory or Asaron here was a genuine risk.