“Yes, you’re very skilled,” said Oxford, ducking his head so as not to hit it on the lintel as he eased all his arms and legs out of the pantry.
Lovelace leapt neatly from Fenella’s shoulder to Monterey’s. She only drew a little blood, and he managed not to cry out in pain.
“This way!” said Fenella, taking off at a run again. They followed her in a rush, Lovelace clinging to Monterey tightly.
“Did you miss me, dear one?” she asked him.
“Desperately,” he replied, chucking her under the chin. “Where are we heading?”
“Away from the dinosaur,” she informed him.
“Oh, fuck!” he laughed. “Lucky you. I’ve never seen a dinosaur. Were there feathers?”5
“I don’t wish to discuss it.”
“There you are!”
Cressida powered towards them in her outlandish Victorian gown. She did not look particularly savaged-by-velociraptor, though her hair was a tad rumpled. “So,” she said, as if she had not recently summoned a dinosaur to interrupt a dinner party. “912 is out, the way to that aisle is currently occupied. Change of plans. There’s a conjunction in the greenhouse that I’ve always found useful, if a bit of a wild card. Should work out fine.”
“You really think we’re going with you?” Lovelace demanded. “You think we’re going to listen to a word you say?”
Monterey stroked her back. “Darling, you’re trembling. What happened up there?”
“We can’t trust her,” Lovelace hissed.
Cressida looked a little forlorn. “Look, I wasn’t expecting an actual velociraptor, if that’s what you’re freaking out about,” she said. “That’s Event Space for you. The anachronisms are getting out of hand. We have to stop all this before they damage Time herself. I need your help to do it. But first, we have to get out of here.”
“By ‘here’, do you mean the nineteenth century, or Event Space?” Monterey questioned.
“One, then the other,” said Cressida.
Fenella hesitated only a moment. “I’ll come with you, Cress. But you have to tell us the truth. All the truth.”
“I promise, Fen. Soon.” Cressida looked at the others, hope in her eyes. “Oxford?”
Oxford hesitated. To Lovelace’s surprise, he deferred to Monterey. “What do you think?”
Monterey reached up to scritch Lovelace under the chin. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Lovelace, you decide. Do we follow her?”
There was a distant scream above them. It did not sound human.
Lovelace made up her mind. “Let’s get out of 1899. And then we’ll assess whether or not we can trust her.”
“Thanks for that unwavering vote of support,” said Cressida. “To the greenhouse!”
1 Naturally, there were a great many costume changes involved when travelling with Monterey, especially during their Versailles capers, though these were usually at his behest, not weirdly imposed upon them by a captor. Apart from that one time Elizabeth I put him in a neck ruff.
2 Fleur Shropshire wasn’t just famous — she was famous for time travellers. Most Chronos College graduates wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the surprise appearance of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Jones or Sandra Bullock, but if Joan Buckingham or Fleur Shropshire crossed their paths, you can bet they would pay attention. How had the Anachronauts kept this a secret?
3 Thanks to the family connections, Oxford and Monterey had known each other long before Chronos College. Monterey had a clear memory of Oxford as a prissy eight-year-old who used to complain when the other children changed the rules of hide-and-seek halfway through a game. Oxford had a clear memory of Monterey as a bossy kid who liked to dress up in the curtains, while encouraging the other children to change the rules of hide-and-seek halfway through every game.
4 There was a time in Lovelace’s life when she could not see orange-red hues, only the blue-violet and yellow-green spectrums. Whatever technological advancement had given her the ability to travel through time and speak twelve human languages, also brought the orange-red spectrum into her life. Which was at least helpful when explaining to Monterey which silk dressing gown made him look washed out.
5 While Chronos College did not have rules, they still considered the safety of their travellers to be of moderate importance. So far all officially sanctioned time hops had been contained to no earlier than 1000 BCE on the grounds that one should walk before one should run. There was a small group led by Lakshmi Tunbridge who had been patiently putting in requests for dinosaur related hops for years. Somehow, these never quite made it past the scheduling meetings. If Tunbridge had been told that the Anachronauts had access to Cretaceous-era time travel, her personal commitment to rule following might have been severely compromised.
Thirty-One
48 BCE Cleo vs Cressida
In seven years as a tenured professor of Time Mechanics, Boswell had never wanted to kill a human. Maim a little, possibly. Bite and scratch? Constantly.
Right now, facing an imperfect human replica of his lost partner, he felt homicidal.
Ruthven was at least backing away from the blonde in the fake Viking helmet. Sensible move from the lad.
“Professor Boswell,” Ruthven said plaintively. “Are you sure this isn’t the real Cressida? How would they even make a new one? And how do you know?”
“Her smell,” said Boswell. He felt remarkably calm, under the circumstances.
Cressida, still playing along with her ruse, rolled her eyes at him exactly like his Church did, all the time. “Come on, Boz. I’ve been stuck in the wrong time period for seven years. Of course I smell weird. I was in 912 five minutes ago, and you just stepped out of a gross old carpet, no offence, Cleo.”
“Full offence,” said Cleopatra. “That carpet is vintage.”
Boswell blinked slowly. “It’s been seven years for us, Church,” he thrummed in his lowest register of voice, the one that was basically 90% threatening purr, 10% vibrato. “At Chronos College. Are you saying you’ve been here exactly the same amount of time? That’s quite a coincidence.”
“My replacement mentioned how long it had been,” she said immediately. “Remington.”
“Ruthven,” corrected Ruthven, taking another step away from Cressida. “I don’t think I did.”
