The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

lips pressed tightly together. Soon her eyelid began to twitch.

He watched her, finding it increasingly difficult not to smile. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to make you feel desperate to kiss me!” She threw her head back and laughed.

Nick grinned. “Oh, go on, Alice. You run a secret global organization of time travelers. Surely you can get me to kiss you.”

“Well, yes, I probably can.” Alice held out her hand. “My lord, would you be so kind?”

Nick sketched her a bow and lifted her elegant fingers to his lips. He kissed them, just above the big ring with its yellow stone.

“Please,” Arkady said. “Can we talk about the serious thing? The bad feeling, and the way this Mibbs person tried to push Nick through it?”

“Yes, of course.” Alice drew her hand away. “But surely that isn’t the scariest thing about Mibbs. Controlling Nick at Euston Road was far worse. In Guilford Street he was just reaching out for a feeling. Taking another time traveler through time with him. We do that regularly. It’s how you’ll bring Nick back.”

“Yes, yes,” Arkady said. “But Nick shouldn’t have felt what Mibbs was doing. And on top of that, Nick described despair. Despair, Alice. We can travel on every emotion, every thread of feeling—except despair.”

“Why not?” Nick asked. “Unhappiness is pretty powerful.”

“Unhappiness, yes. Unhappiness is powerful and we can travel on it if we must. It is not so nice a trip, perhaps. But despair?” Arkady leveled his eyes at Nick. “Was it unhappiness you felt today? Or was it total? Was it crushing?”

“It was total,” Nick said.

“You see?” Arkady turned to Alice, spreading his hands. “Despair.”

“What’s so impossible about despair?”

“It has to do with how we feel across time, and how feelings stretch across time,” Alice said. “You think you’re the same moment to moment. You’re a guy with kind of a wild life story. But you’re pretty much just a dude. Right?”

“Um, I guess so.” Nick pictured his gravestone, in some bleak, lawn-mowed American expanse: JUST A DUDE.

Alice continued. “But in fact, at every instant you are actually in the process of recalling who you were a second ago and becoming yourself again the next second. In each moment your emotions reinterpret you, invent you anew, move you forward—remember, they are your time machine. Despair is different. The self that has no possibility is in despair. It cannot move. It cannot reinvent itself. It sinks into death.”

“That was death? I might have died?”

“I don’t know. Might you have? Did it feel that way?”

“Yes.”

Arkady and Alice looked at one another, then back at Nick, their faces sober. “Where was this place, this spot on Guilford Street?” Alice asked. “You mentioned it a moment ago. It might be important to what happened.”

“The Foundling Hospital. Now it is a park: Coram’s Fields. But in my old life it was a home for abandoned children. Unmarried women could bring their babies there and leave them.”

Alice stood up. “We must go to Guilford Street right away. I need to feel this place.” She held a hand out to Arkady. “It will be hard for you, my darling. But we must go. It sounds like a scar.”

“A scar?” Nick wondered if he had misheard.

“Yes. Like that dashing one over your eye. Except this is a scar in time. A place where, for a long time, for years on end, many people had the same overpowering emotion. So that the place becomes scarred, or turns in on itself. Do you see? There can be no intervention. No one can enter and no one can leave. It is just . . . a place. Not a place in time. It is a place in despair.”

“And you think that spot on Guilford Street is a scar?”

Alice shrugged. “The gates of the Foundling Hospital, where for years upon years mothers gave over their children, never to see them again? Yes, I should imagine so. Perhaps you felt that despair in that spot on Guilford Street. Or perhaps Mibbs could use that spot to hurt you.”

Nick thought about the feeling he had almost drowned in a few hours ago, and then he remembered the two women who had chosen black balls out of the bag. The way they had turned with their burdens, their eyes staring, terrified, at some future horror. And how the woman who had chosen a white ball had smiled through her tears, and pressed her jet button with such passion into the hand of the man who took her baby. That had been grief, but it had also been a searing kind of hope.

CHAPTER TEN

As the Rolls-Royce (made now, Nick remembered after a moment of confusion, by BMW) pulled out of St. James’s Square and onto Pall Mall, Nick closed the window to shut out the chauffeur. “Before we get back to Guilford Street,” he told Alice and Arkady, “I want the truth. I had no clue what was happening to me today, nor how to defend myself. I want you to tell me the rules of time. Not the rules of the Guild. The rules of time.”

“‘The wreck and not the story of the wreck,’” Alice said dreamily. “‘The thing itself and not the myth.’”

“Tell me, Alice. No more of this Level One security clearance malarkey. You are the Alderwoman of the Guild. You know everything.”

Alice looked around the luxurious interior of the Rolls. “Isn’t it incredible? A little girl, stolen by a slaver . . . and now look at me.” She shook her head. “It never stops being unbelievable, Nick.”

“I do not doubt you.”

She settled down into the leather comforts of her seat. “The Guild is big and terribly, terribly old, but time is bigger and older and very strange. I will tell you what little we understand, but there are things we can’t fathom. And there are people out there, not in the Guild. People who think differently about time. People who are trying to learn to use time to control the world.”

“Ah.” So Leo and Meg had been right. There