“—in life and it affected her. Terrible memory—”
“That’s a lie!” Her lips pushed through the back of his hand, until they protruded out past his knuckles. “Sharp as a tack,” they assured us.
“You are not!”
“Am, too.”
“Then where did we meet?”
She thought about it.
“Under the Forty-fourth Street Bridge,” I said, and they both turned to look at me.
“Oh no. That’s not it,” Daisy said.
“Yes, it is,” Roger said slowly. He frowned. “How did you—”
“You told me,” I said. “Or you will. You didn’t mention the city, but I assume—”
“What do you mean, will?”
“We become friends. In the future. Where I’m from,” I clarified, because he was looking confused. Which was a little odd, considering that he was a time traveler himself, if an illegal one. “Look, I know we got off to a bad start—”
“A bad start? You’re the reason I’m in this mess!”
“The reason you’re in this mess was your decision to try to blow up Parliament and save Guy Fawkes the trouble!”
Before he met my mother, Roger had been part of a guild of time-traveling utopians, trying to improve the world by tinkering with the past. Thankfully—since they screwed up more than they helped—they mostly sucked at it. Time travel, that is, because the spells they used tended to blow people up more frequently than not. But Roger had somehow managed to get back to 1605 anyway, intending to do some meddling for reasons I was still kind of hazy on, maybe because he hadn’t bothered to explain them much.
That was just as well, since when Roger did explain anything, it mostly didn’t make sense.
And, right now, I had bigger problems.
“Agnes caught you and brought you back here—”
“With your help!”
“—and you’ve been rotting in here ever since, and now I’m in the same boat. And I have to get out of here. I need your help.”
“Help yourself,” he said spitefully. “If you got in trouble with that damn Pythia, that’s your problem. Maybe now you know what it feels like!”
“You have to help me!”
“I don’t have to do anything!”
“At least tell me where we are!”
He laughed. “You’re exactly nowhere,” he said, and stepped through the wall.
Chapter Thirty
I followed him, which was easy because I was in spirit form. But he wasn’t. “How did you do that?” I demanded.
“What?”
“That. You just shifted through that wall—”
“I didn’t shift.” It was irritable. “I can’t shift.”
“I saw you!”
“You saw me phase. Some of us have had to learn how to get by without the bright, shiny Pythian power to fall back on—”
“You—what?”
“—which won’t work here anyway, so don’t bother trying.”
He strode off.
I caught up. “Wait a minute!”
“Would you leave me alone?”
“Explain what’s going on, and maybe I will!”
He made a noise, a harrumph of irritation, which made me stare. I’d never heard anyone actually do that before. But then he threw out his hands. “What?”
I honestly didn’t know where to start. “What’s phasing?”
“Going closer to or further away from the real world. The further away you get, the less anything holds you, including wards. You’re just not there as far as they’re concerned.”
“The real world? Then . . . where are we?”
“I already told you.”
“You just said nowhere.”
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t help!”
“It’s not supposed to. This”—he gestured around at the nothingness—“is where they put misbehaving time travelers. It’s nowhere because it’s nowhen. You’re outside time.”
He took off again, and for a second I just stared after him. Then I ran to catch up. “What?”
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his longer-than-strictly-necessary nose. “You know that old story about time travel, the party analogy?”
“The—no, I—”
He sighed again. “Okay. Say you’re invited to a party—”
“What did you mean about outside time?”
“That’s what I’m explaining! You’re invited to a party, all right?”
“Okay.”
“The invitation tells you three things, longitude, latitude, and height, only it puts it more like ‘corner of Eighth and Elm, fifth floor,’ right?”
“Okay.”
“Could you get to that party?”
“I . . . guess so.”
“Really? Then you should have no problem getting out of here. Most people would need a fourth direction. Or to be more precise, a fourth dimension. Most people would need to know when the damn party was!”
He took off again, and I followed, getting pissed now. I grabbed his arm. “That doesn’t tell me anything!”
“On the contrary; it tells you everything. That party only exists as a destination at those coordinates and at that time. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist at all. We don’t live in three dimensions; we live in four, the fourth being time. Only most people never think about it.”
“Okay, fine. But what does that have to do with this place?”
“You asked where we were. I told you nowhere, because we’re not at the party. We can’t be when time doesn’t exist here. That damn Pythia shifted me outside it. No time means no time spells to let me get away from her. And I assume she put you out here for the same reason.” He raised a brow. “You must have really pissed her off.”
He took off again, which I’d pretty much come to expect at this point. And it looked like he was coming to expect things, too, because he stopped before I even managed to grab him again. “What now?”
“If my power won’t work, how do we get back?”
“That way.” He nodded to where Daisy was bouncing along, following an erratically moving sparkle until bip. It was gone. She glowed a little more brightly in her housedress and galoshes for a moment, before turning to grin at us triumphantly. “Got it!”
“Great,” Roger said sourly. “Now go get one with some damn oomph behind it!”
She made a face and flitted off. I just stood there, looking at him. “She’s hunting ghosts because they help you get out of here?”
“It’s more of a hobby,” he said sarcastically. “And they’re not ghosts.”
“Then what are they?”
“What remains of ghosts after they fade. This is the Badlands.”
“The what?”
He looked at me in exasperation. “How do you not know this? You have a ghost.” He looked pointedly at Billy’s necklace, which I guessed he could see because Rosier still had my chameleon. Or because if there was one thing Dad knew, it was ghosts. “Don’t you talk?”
“Not about this!”
“You sure? It’s not exactly . . . but then, I suppose he doesn’t need it, does he?” He picked up the necklace as easily as if it were solid. “That’s what I thought. Talisman, right?”
I just nodded.
“With this he can go, what? Forty, maybe fifty miles away? And still make it back to soak up all the energy it collects for him. And since you’re wearing it, that radius constantly changes, doesn’t it?”