her. Is she going to go out with him?”
“Probably not.” I figured that was the answer she was looking for. Going out with people and cheating were things I had no idea about. I was about a million light years away from a girlfriend. Did Luka have a boy up there in the future? She never talked about anyone. She was two years older. I figured that meant she’d never be interested in me.
“Exactly,” said Luka. “No way. So she never goes out with that guy. She goes with Joe instead. But doesn’t that mean she would have told Keisha about Joe, not Chris? And if she told us about Joe and how he was no good, doesn’t that put her back to Chris? The point is, it just didn’t happen. If we try to make something happen when it didn’t happen—it doesn’t happen.”
When I couldn’t wrap my mind around this, Luka insisted on a demonstration. We went back to my place and got out the phonebook. There were four listings for R. Beech, so we called them one by one. The first was a woman, second was an old man. Holding up the phone so we could both hear it, we hit paydirt on the third. “Hello, is this Rick Beech, formerly of Manse Creek?” said Luka in her most formal voice.
He replied immediately, almost before she had finished speaking. “Luka? Is it you? This is the call, isn’t it, the one you told me about?” She tried to say something, but he rushed on. “Look, there isn’t much time and there’s so much I want to tell you. Is Kenny there? Kenny, listen. The baby. It isn’t him. You have to go to 1917. Rose is the key. You already know Wald’s okay, but so is—”
The phone and the lights went dead at the same time.
Seven
The Rules
7. When you go downtime from your own mirror, you can take the kid from the future with you.
A transformer had exploded somewhere in the city, dropping over us a fifteen-mile cloak of darkness beginning at Manse Creek and extending exactly to Wellesley Street, the address at which we had called Rick Beech. Eight car accidents and the transformer explosion itself sent eleven people to the hospital. One died.
“Did we do that?” I asked Luka that night. She had gone off to the carriage house half an hour after the lights went out so as to avoid my parents when they came home. The power outage had dominated both dinnertime conversation and the evening news. By the time I snuck out to the carriage house, I had all the statistics memorized.
“No way,” said Luka. “You can’t change anything. That power-out was going to happen anyway. Look, here’s your pepper spray. You won’t need it, but I’m giving it to you anyway. You flip this and press here.
“So why are we going, then?” I didn’t take the pepper spray or the surveyor’s map.
She read my expression right away. “Look, I don’t know,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking. We have to go back. We have to save someone. Someone wants our help.”
“But you say we can’t change anything. So why are we going?” I didn’t want to be stubborn. The truth was that I was desperate to go. But why?
Luka rolled her eyes. “You’re thinking too much. If we can change things, we caused the power-out and killed people. If we can’t change things, we can’t save anyone, so why bother? Look, Kenny, if you think too much, you never do anything. I can’t get into the mirror to go back without you going first. Are you coming or not?”
It was hard to argue against her. I steeled myself against the cold, grabbed Luka’s hand, and pushed my way in.
Something was different right away. Normally you took a step in that molasses space in between the two sides of the mirror, your eyes shut tight against the heat or cold, and then you were through on the other side. A second step this time, and I wasn’t out.
Luka squeezed my hand. “It’s okay. Stop for a second. Don’t move.”
If I held myself as still as I could, the cold of downtime travel matched with the uptime heat behind me and settled into a kind of buzzing, the kind you get when you lick a nine-volt battery.
“When you get used to it, you can open your eyes,” said Luka.
In front of me was a cloud of floating image-fragments, as though the mirror had been shattered in the act of reflecting a scene and kept holding the same view. An image of the floor of the carriage house floated past me. There was a piece of paper there. A note?
“It’s getting bigger,” said Luka. “The space in between the mirrors. Look behind you, but move really slow so it doesn’t hurt. If you wait long enough, you get used to it.”
Another cloud of images showed the carriage house as we had just left it.
“It makes it safer,” said Luka. “This way you can look and figure out if anyone’s there before you go through. Come on, let’s go.”
As soon as we were through, I shone the flashlight about the carriage house. No trap. No ambush. Just the same silent, junk-filled space, barn-like in the crisp winter air.
I pulled Luka through. “Weird,” she whispered. “I’ve never gone from a place to exactly the same place before. It’s like we haven’t gone through at all.”
“Look at the wall,” I said, and turned my beam on it. The wreckage and gaping holes she had been looking at all day in my time were gone, replaced by a seamless but battered back wall. There was a dead baby inside there.
Remembering the image-fragment I had seen in the mirror, I shone my flashlight at the floor, and there was the note I had seen. Luka and I read it together, though it was addressed to me.
“I guess you’re not coming back. I understand. Bet it all wigged you out pretty bad. I got Jimmy to go back two more times, but it’s getting harder to convince him. Sorry about everything. Rick Beech.”
“This is good,” said Luka, stuffing the note in my backpack. “Come on.”
I hadn’t thought much beyond coming back through the mirror, but Luka clearly had a plan. She took me outside and around to the front of the main house. There were no lights. Some stubborn muddy patches of snow still hung on in the shelter of the house, but there was a spring scent in the air and a wet bounce in the ground.
Luka picked up a pebble and cocked her arm to throw. I caught her hand. “He won’t have the attic,” I said. “Second floor. That one.”
It took three pebbles before Jimmy came to the window. Even in the dark I could tell his eyes were wide with fear. “Come on down,” I said.
“Two against one? No way.”
Luka sighed. “We’re not here to get you. We want to talk. We’ve got a plan.”
Jimmy squinted. “Hey, you’re a girl.”
“I hear that a lot.”
It took some convincing, but he came down. He stayed by his door for a long time, studying us. “So you’re the girl from way in the future?” he said at last to Luka.
“No,” she said. “You’re the boy from way in the past.”
Jimmy frowned and I saw his lips moving as he worked that one out.
“Never mind that,” Luka said. “We’ve got a plan. You say it’s not safe in the carriage house because Pete Masterson and all them go there. There’s a fix for that. You just have to listen.”
As soon as she laid it out, I loved the plan. Jimmy was equal parts terrified and confused. He had trouble getting his mind around the way we knew about people and places from his time. Between the two of us, Luka and I finally managed to convince him to go to the carriage house and help us pry the mirror from its frame with some screwdrivers Luka had brought along. Once it was out, I tested it; my hand still went in, still felt the uptime heat.
“Rick and me—we were just gonna make some money,” Jimmy said as we took the mirror out toward the street. “He said we’d just use it for money.”
“That’s not what Rick said in the future,” I said. “I called him. He knew things about people from way in the
