“I can’t believe he got all three of the Bronte sisters,” she was complaining as Ruthven approached. “That rogue has no sense of honour.”
Boswell nodded in Ruthven’s general direction. “Laddie.”
Ruthven leaned against a case of old sweet wrappers with trivia facts written on them. “You didn’t want to be in the middle of all that?”
Cressida and Boswell snorted in sync.
“I avoid committee meetings at the best of times,” said Boswell.
“Oh, hey,” said Cressida, pulling out a rather battered postcard from the pocket of her stolen jacket. “I should give this back to you, Ruthven. Saved our bacon. Maybe you should frame it.”
Ruthven accepted it back. Whatever messages Cressida had passed to Control while they were in that trial, the postcard was now blank again.
“Thanks,” he said.
Cressida gave him a warm smile. “Could have rescued myself a lot earlier if I’d had an extra one of those. But I hear the old man was in safe hands while I was gone.”
“Oh, really.” Ruthven twitched a smile of his own, looking over at the marmalade tabby. “Have you been saying nice things about me, Professor Boswell?”
Boswell glared at them both, and chose to pretend that cats could not talk.
Cressida and Ruthven, in a moment of complete shared understanding, scratched their cat behind his ears.
Ruthven walked aimlessly around the darkened campus for a while. Then he started panicking about what decisions might be made in that Reading Room. Then he decided that if he really wanted to know what decisions were being made, he should join the meeting.
He didn’t want to be in that meeting. He didn’t want to know any of it. He was feeling tired and fed up and betrayed.
So he went home.
The Media Archives were quiet, calm, and entirely lacking in angry people armed with glasses of red wine.
He was not even surprised to find Oxford there ahead of him, sprawled out on Ruthven’s favourite chair in his tiny office with his long legs up on a crate full of old data discs.
“Thought you were in a meeting,” said Ruthven.
Oxford jumped. The effect was like a startled spider, dangling from a web. He managed to stay in the chair. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Ruthven said automatically. This was awful. He had no idea how to not be friends with Oxford. He’d spent his entire time at Chronos College leaning towards him like a plant thirsting after sunshine.
“I have something to tell you,” said Oxford, already wincing as if he knew his reception would not be warm.
“Really?” Ruthven blurted. “There’s more?”
“Sorry.”
“Is it worse than the last thing you told me?”
“It’s related.”
Ruthven wanted to laugh. He wanted to challenge Oxford to a duel. And also drop a piano on his head.
(He still wanted to kiss him.)
Ruthven spread his hands wide. “Go on, then. Hit me. What secrets do you have left boiling around in that head of yours? What’s the one thing you can say that will make me regret our kiss?”
Oxford took a deep breath. “I know what happened to Aesop. I’ve known for a while.”
Well. Yes. That would do it.
Fifty-One
Meet The Professors
They travelled down to Earth’s surface by flyer. Oxford had a flyer. Apparently, the favourite son of the Founders had been able to head planetside any time he liked.
“I didn’t use it much,” said Oxford apologetically. Everything that came out of his mouth was apologetic. He had ‘forgive me?’ stamped inside his bones, like in a stick of Blackpool rock.
“I didn’t even realise,” Ruthven said softly, his eyes on the blue and green of the sphere beneath them. “I didn’t go home for the holidays. We never had holidays. I remembered that I didn’t have living parents, but I didn’t remember that I had nothing down there to go back to.”
The latest update, by way of Tunbridge, was that Zadie was insisting everyone’s memories be restored. Zadie, now she had her memory back, was making a great many demands. Ruthven was glad to get off campus before words like ‘compulsory’ were thrown around.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what existed in the gaps between his memories of Chronos College. The only thing that tugged on him, the only absence that mattered was Aesop.
According to Oxford, he was now heading towards the answers he needed, with or without the support of the college administration. Ruthven did not care about the rest of it. Let the campuses burn down. Let the time hoops topple. Let the Anachronauts take over, and put David Bowie in charge.
“Thank you for trusting me with this,” said Oxford, as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere.
