“I really hope you’re Three,” said Josiah. “You’ve chosen me already.”
I haven’t, thought Freddy. She didn’t know what the choice meant yet; there was no way she could have chosen. She wasn’t like Claire. But he didn’t have to know. “Maybe,” she said, doing Mel’s wide-eyed innocent look. She hadn’t noticed Josiah being all that good at figuring out when people were lying.
Claire flapped her hands at them in what may have been disgust, then darted around the two Josiahs and out into the street. The Josiahs shared a superior smile before turning to follow. “It will all seem much less maddening soon,” said M. Lachance. “Say hello to me for me.”
Freddy nodded. She had no idea what was going to happen next. She couldn’t quite understand why she didn’t particularly mind.
11
“That is not the pointy bit of the gun. Point the pointy bit of the gun away from my head,” hissed Josiah, cringing as another volley of bolts arced by overhead.
“The safety’s on,” said Freddy, “and it’s set on low. The worst it can do is knock you out for a few hours.”
“Oh, yes,” said Josiah in his best exasperated tone, “I do so long to be knocked out for a few hours here. Have you been paying attention?”
“Cut the blorkery, you twain,” said Filbert Cardongay, who was a) Three, b) female, and c) not very good at English. No one was in the thirty-second century, though everyone learned it in school. From what Freddy had been able to gather through the weird grammar and the flood of what she thought of as nonsense words, the language had evolved rapidly and strangely after the Second Oil Plummetry, then died out. The dead version schoolchildren were forced to learn was based on English as it had been spoken in England in the twenty-fourth century.
They were in Mexico, currently a colony of New France. No one had explained this. Freddy had long since stopped asking for explanations. Mexico was still called Mexico. The rest of North America was now called Canada. Again, no one had explained this. Freddy hadn’t even considered asking why the language people did generally speak here was a mixture of Greek and Afrikaans.
Freddy and Josiah had been to their future nine times by this point. The furthest they had gone was the ninety-second century, which had been distinctly unpleasant, largely because of the algae. Josiah was always edgy when they ended up in the future. He tended to go on about how the past was more comfortingly boring, but Freddy had gradually gathered the two real reasons the future bothered him: he never knew what was going to happen while they were there, and he hadn’t yet run into himself or Cuerva Lachance in any future time and place. It was worrying him quite a bit, though Freddy was almost certain she knew what was going on.
“It’s your own fault,” she’d told him a month or so ago on her personal timeline and about four thousand years ago on the timeline of the universe. “You’re avoiding yourself. It’s the opposite of what keeps happening in the past. This time, it’s the future you who knows where you’ll be. You have this thing about not wanting to know the future.”
“It would make more sense if it weren’t for Cuerva Lachance and Three,” Josiah had said.
Cuerva Lachance, who didn’t obey rules, hadn’t turned up in the future, either. And though Three always seemed to know who they were and had even been expecting them several times, he or she would never say anything about Josiah’s other self. It all made Josiah uncharacteristically nervous, though maybe it wasn’t that uncharacteristic. Josiah was not the sort of person who dealt well with change. When Freddy pointed out how ironic this was, he could only glower at her.
Filbert pulled a phone the size and shape of a bobby pin out of her hair. “I attempt callen goodbrethren again stat,” she explained. She breathed on the phone, which activated instantly. Freddy, peering through a gap in the barricade, hoped the goodbrethren were planning on responding soon. There were figures advancing through the rubble, flitting in and out of sight amidst the plumes of smoke from the last lightning grenade.
“Pointy end,” said Josiah.
“I know,” said Freddy. “Don’t get your shorbel in a knotten.”
“Oh, please do not start talking like them,” Josiah moaned. “It was bad enough when you picked up Sumerian temple slang.”
Freddy shrugged. “We spent a month and a half in a Sumerian temple. What was I supposed to do, twiddle my thumbs?” She aimed her microgun through the gap and squeezed the trigger. The bolt crackled harmlessly against a fallen pillar.
It was funny how easy it was to get used to never getting used to anything.
The clothes she had started out in were long gone. She had lost even her shoes and her underwear; all she had left from her old life were her keys and her watch. The keys had come in handy several times, especially whenever she had ended up in the Stone Age. Just having something stabby made of metal could be an advantage in certain situations. The watch was useless, practically speaking, but sometimes she thought it was the most necessary thing she owned. She hadn’t adjusted it once. It ran on and on, counting off the moments of her personal timeline, which had nothing to do with actual time. It counted off the days, too. She didn’t look at it all that often, as her stomach tended to flip over when she did. It was knowing it was there that was important.
The day she and Josiah had walked through the back door of the house on Grosvenor Street and into ninth-century Scandinavia, the date on her watch had read “Sept. 27.” Now it read “Feb. 25.”
It was the second time it had shown that date since she had started travelling through time.
*
Sometimes, she hated it. She thought she would die if she couldn’t wake up in her bed and see Mel and Roland and go to school and do all the stupid, pointless things she used to do every day. She even missed the constant anger that had dogged her before. It was entirely gone now, and nothing had really replaced it. She wanted to stand in her living room and smoulder at Roland. She wanted to sit in her kitchen and try to remember when she had last spoken to her mother.