visit.” She gave a little laugh. “That was a real mind bender. In the end, I had to go away again because it was all just too weird.”
Kit gave a passable imitation of an En-Ul grunt of agreement.
“Anyway, it has taught me not to make any assumptions, to keep quiet and observe what’s going on around me and try to blend in so I don’t alarm anyone. I’ve also learned how to calibrate my jumps better. I can leave right now, go back to Prague for a month or two, and then come back here and you won’t have arrived yet.”
“Yeah,” murmured Kit. “But you would know that I was going to arrive eventually, right?”
“Maybe. Sometimes.” She clasped her hands and unclasped them. “I don’t always know what I’m going to remember. You just said I found you in Egypt.”
“Right. You do remember that, don’t you?”
“Kit, I have no memory of that at all. For me-the Mina you are talking to right this moment-it hasn’t happened yet.”
He raised his head, opened his eyes, and stared at her. “Man, that is weird,” he said after a moment. “Mina, you showed up in Egypt just in the nick of time to break Giles and me out of the tomb. You were wearing something like army fatigues, and your hair was tied up in a scarf-it was light blue. You got us out of that terrible crypt where Burleigh had locked us and left us to die. Are you telling me you don’t remember any of that?”
“I have the scarf. But the rest of it?” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Sorry. I don’t have any memory of that.”
“Well, what is the last thing you recall?”
“I remember going to Egypt to meet Thomas Young and to collect you and Giles and the map,” she said slowly. “Then we all went back to Prague and ran into Burleigh. I sent you to the gorge, took Giles home, and came here. That’s all.”
“But before that-you don’t remember coming to Egypt the first time and breaking us out of the tomb?”
“Sorry.”
Kit sat up and put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples with his thumbs. Fearing she had caused an information overload, Mina put a comforting hand on his neck and massaged it gently.
“But it happened,” he said, his voice falling softly.
“Not to me,” she told him. “Not yet.”
Kit nodded, trying to penetrate this new mystery.
“Listen, when we’re together we occupy the same time frame, and the sequence of events is the same for both of us,” Mina suggested. “But when we are separated we go to different times, right? So if we meet up again in a third place, like we are right now, why assume that we’ll meet each other at the exact point where we left off? We might be catching one another before or after some arbitrary point in the sequence of events.” She offered a reassuring pat. “Does that help at all?”
“A little,” Kit allowed. “Maybe.”
The silence stretched between them for long moments that seemed like hours.
“Cosimo said it wasn’t time travel,” observed Kit at last. “He was always at pains to point that out, and I never understood why. He’d say, ‘Remember, Kit-this isn’t time travel.’ I remember thinking: when it so obviously is time travel, why make such a big deal of denying it?” He looked around at Wilhelmina and gave a half smile. “I think I’m finally beginning to understand why.”
“Well, it is time travel, and it isn’t. When we make a leap, we do travel in time, after all. But that isn’t all we do.”
“That’s right. We leave one reality and enter another that is on a different time stream-like stepping from one merry-go-round onto another. Maybe one merry-go-round has not made as many revolutions as the other, but everything else is more or less the same.” He considered this for a moment, then said, “I once asked Cosimo whether it was possible for you to meet yourself in another world. You know? Suppose you popped into London and went to your house, knocked on the door, and-Ta-da! There you are meeting yourself face-to-face. Could that ever happen?”
“What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t know if it could happen, but that it somehow never did,” Kit replied. “It must be that the same person cannot occupy the same reality in two different bodies-something like that.”
“I went back to London and visited the bakery and my flat. I even went around to your place, but you weren’t there. It was strange, but it didn’t occur to me to wonder if I would meet myself there.” She thought a moment. “So if I went to a place where there was another Wilhelmina, I would… what?” She looked at Kit.
“I don’t know. But this idea that once we start jumping around in space and time our lives no longer maintain a linear chronology must be tied up with it somehow.”
“Brother Lazarus is convinced that it all has to do with consciousness,” Mina said. “If that is true, then it might be that you have only one consciousness, and it cannot be in two places at the same time.”
“So you’ve been coming here and consulting with Lazarus a lot?”
“He’s the best,” Mina said. “A trained astronomer with a deep knowledge of cosmology and physics-a huge asset. All that, plus he understands ley travel.”
“I wish I did,” sighed Kit. He regarded Mina thoughtfully for a moment. “I wonder when we’re going to catch up to one another. We have to get synchronised at some point, don’t we?”
“I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.” Her gaze was earnest and sympathetic. “You endured such hardship. I had no idea, or I wouldn’t have sent you there.”
“Really, it’s okay.”
“I looked for you every day-for weeks. Why didn’t you just stay put like I told you?”
“But I did,” Kit insisted. “If I’d waited any longer I would have taken root. I went back every day for as long as I could, but the line never became active again. I waved your little ley lamp around until I was blue in the face, but could never raise a signal.”
“And here was I thinking you’d just got bored and wandered off somewhere.” Mina regarded him with a sympathetic look. “I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I feel responsible.”
“You’re not hearing me, Mina,” he said, force coming once more to his ragged voice. “I count it a privilege to have had the opportunity to spend time with the clan, and to learn what I did. I’d go back there any day.” He smiled knowingly. “Besides, if none of that had happened, I never would have discovered the Spirit Well.”
“If it is the Spirit Well.”
“What else could it be? There is no such thing as coincidence, remember?” He turned his gaze to the blue- misted valley stretching into the distance far below their mountain perch. “I used to think that was just something Sir Henry and Cosimo said-one of their little mottos.”
“And now?”
“Now I know different.” His eyes lost focus, as if gazing through a window into a wider, more intricate landscape beyond. “Everything happens for a reason. You don’t have to convince me. I’m a believer.”
Kit fell silent for a moment, lost in contemplation.
“Tell me again how you found the Spirit Well,” Mina suggested at last.
Kit nodded, considering how best to explain. “I mentioned the Bone House, remember?” he began.
“I remember,” she replied. “But I can’t quite picture what it looks like or exactly what it’s for.”
“Think of an igloo made of the skeletons of prehistoric animals- a huge mound of intertwined bones-and that’ll give you a rough idea. The clansmen carried bones from a kill zone to a clearing in the forest-it’s the dead of winter, right? Then En-Ul-I told you about him, remember? Well, the Bone House was made for him-so that he could go and sleep in it. He called it Dreaming Time-”
“The Dreaming Time,” repeated Wilhelmina softly.
“No,” corrected Kit. “Not the Dreaming Time, just Dreaming Time.”
Mina’s face scrunched up in bewilderment. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not exactly sure. But it seemed that En-Ul went to sleep so that he could dream, and what he dreamed was time.”
“Like looking into the future, something like that?”
“Maybe,” Kit allowed with a shrug. “I got the sense that he somehow entered into the flow of time and was
