Oxford, Ruthven, Fenella, all missing. Boswell and Lovelace too. Nero had been around for a little while after the Rose Garden Incident: shown his face in the canteen, made a few snarky comments in a meeting. Then he, too, had made himself scarce. Tunbridge hadn’t seen him in days.
All time travel was stopped. It had been seven days since the Rose Garden Incident. Melusine from Admin’s tightly plotted travel schedule had been thrown out like the baby with the bathwater.
No hoops active. No one knew why.
Every traveller on staff was curious about what, exactly, had happened. Tunbridge couldn’t tell them. Not that she knew much more than she’d told Melusine and the investigation team.
Classes continued for the students, with various unemployed travellers subbed in for Professor Boswell in his Time Mechanics lectures and seminars. Tunbridge had done one, and found the whole thing excruciating. At least she insisted Ptolemy join her — he entertained the students cheerfully, allowing Tunbridge a whole extra hour in her day to bite her nails, and fret.
In short, everything was terrible and Tunbridge was so stressed her eyeballs were about to pop.
She woke up, in the middle of the night, to find five kilos of Russian Blue sitting on her chest.
“Ptolemy? Ugh, you’re right on my ribs. Claws in.”
“Sorry,” said her cat, practically nose to nose with her. “Are you awake? I can pat your eyelids if that’s helpful.”
“That’s never helpful,” Tunbridge grumbled. “What do you want?”
“We’ve been summoned. Clandestine meeting in the Museum of Lost Things. Aren’t you curious?”
“I’m not awake enough to be curious!”
Ptolemy paused for three seconds. “And now?”
“Yes, all right. Get off and I’ll find some slippers.”
Tunbridge got dressed. Being mysteriously summoned in the middle of the night is the sort of thing that can so easily lead to you having adventures in your pyjamas. Tunbridge read a lot of boarding school novels; she knew what tropes to avoid.
She pulled on a standard jumpsuit and warm boots with a cardigan over the top. She even grabbed her travel satchel, just in case.
“Humans collect so many things,” Ptolemy complained as they made their way across the quad.
“Cats collect things too. They just make humans carry them,” Tunbridge snapped.
The Museum of Lost Things was usually locked at this time of night, though everyone knew that Monterey regularly let himself in at all hours to deposit his latest stolen pen, and/or to host the occasional scavenger hunt.
Today, the door was propped open with a chair.
“We could just go back to bed,” Tunbridge murmured.
“We were invited,” Ptolemy insisted, winding his narrow silvery body around her ankles. “This doesn’t count as rule-breaking.”
“Chronos College has no rules,” Tunbridge sighed. If only she had applied to a university with rules.
“Exactly.”
“Fine.”
The museum was dimly lit. Tunbridge made her way past the displays. Towards the back, she saw lights on in one of the glass-walled Reading Rooms, and a mixed gathering of humans holding large glasses of wine while shouting at each other.
Outside the Reading Room, two people slumped on a bench that didn’t look particularly comfortable. An elegant black cat sat between them, straight-backed.
“Abydos?” said Ptolemy, darting forward. “Are you — what are you doing here?” He sounded both fond and suspicious at the same time.
Abydos. He was famous. One of the first Chronos College travellers who transferred to Aleister College and ran off with the Anachronauts, before Tunbridge even started as a student.
The black cat gave Ptolemy a long-suffering look. “I see you brought a plus-one.”
“You too,” said Ptolemy, a little chilly.
Tunbridge had been trying to work out which of the two humans was Abydos’ equally famous partner Zephyr. Now, she gasped in horror. “Ptolemy. Was I not invited to this meeting? I changed out of my pyjamas.”
Ptolemy gave her an exhausted look. “The exact message was that all cats were to come to the Museum of Lost Things for their own safety. Forgive me for wanting to ensure your safety, also. The Founders are all in there —” he nodded in the direction of the soundproof glass, “— so this is probably the safest place on campus.”
“That’s why our dad told Abydos to bring us along with the cats,” said the taller of the two figures, an androgynous looking human with sleek hair and long eyelashes. “I’m Zephyr,” they added. “This is my brother, Bellerophon Kincaid. He’s a Banksia graduate, but don’t hold that against him. He hardly ever brags about personally saving the honey buzzard from extinction, so I have to do it for him.”
Bellerophon had dark hair, enormous eyes and a weirdly familiar face. He had the kind of muscled shoulders one might expect from a traveller who regularly carried koalas out of the burning bush.
“Have we met?” Tunbridge blurted.
Zephyr raised their eyebrows. “You’re Lakshmi, aren’t you? Our sister Zadie used to talk about you. She was your roommate during the first year of training.”
“No, I…” Tunbridge felt unsteady for a moment. That was true, wasn’t it? It felt true. She knew for a fact she hadn’t had a roommate during training. The other students were so jealous she got a single every year…
And yet, when she thought about her first year as a student, an image of a room with two unmade single beds rose into her mind.
