As soon as she said it, I couldn’t help but steel myself against the buzzing pain and look beyond her. They got dimmer as they stretched away, but there they were, more clouds of images, two at a time, stretching far beyond the limits of vision.
“It is the same in both directions,” said the girl. “Do not ever use them, though. You are blessed only for your own mirror. If you go through another, you may never return. Even a key will not open them.”
“A key?” I said. “The mirrors have keys?”
The girl raised an eyebrow. “How little you know. Are there no elders to teach you of the mirrors?” Before we could answer, she continued. “You do not find it. You make it, and you must have patience, too. Take a—” She stopped and her eyes darted to the image-cloud she had been heading toward. “You must not stay here,” she said. “My uncle is after me. I hid the mirror, but he will find it soon. Have you seen him? A fat man with a scar above his eye?”
“Is he Prince Harming?” I said.
Now her gaze was fixed on her image-fragments, and she talked quickly. “What? No, he is no Prince. No doubt you are talking about some part of your own story. If no one has told you, hear me now. We each have our own stories in the mirrors. My uncle has kidnapped my mother as a child. I must help her before he forces her to take him into the glass.”
“How?” said Luka. “I thought only the kids can go through.”
“Once blessed, always blessed,” said the girl. “But an adult needs a child to open the mirror first.” She hazarded a glance at us. “I wish I could tell you more. Look for an elder, one you can trust. I must go. You, too. Do not let him catch you here.”
With that, she moved uptime in the direction of 1977. The cloud of image-fragments flared for a moment as she went through, then dimmed again so as to be barely visible.
“Come on,” said Luka. “We should go, too. Besides, if you squeeze my hand anymore, my fingers’ll fall off.”
She said she couldn’t stay long, but we ended up talking for another hour in the carriage house, mostly just trading back and forth the new ideas and new words we had just been introduced to. Other mirrors? Keys that you could make? Adults going through?
“This is even better than we thought,” Luka said before she finally went back through the mirror to her own time. “Now everything’s going to happen.”
Part Two
One
And then—nothing happened. Seriously. You have to realize how hard it was to use that mirror for more than your own personal ten-years-to-the past. I sneaked out of the house two or three times a week and went back to see Jimmy and Rick. Luka came sometimes as well. Now and then we saw other kids going through on their own missions, but sound carried strangely in the place between the mirrors, a place Luka started calling the Silverlands, and none of us wanted to leave our own mirrors for fear of getting lost or stumbling through one that wasn’t our own. We were usually confined to a few mangled sentences. What year are you from? What country? Once, far in the distance, I saw a kid being pushed roughly through by a grown woman, but neither turned my way. I kept in mind what the girl in the sari had said. Their stories were not mine.
Our own mirror kids still met as often as we could. Three-way meet-ups were rare, as those required some way to fool parents for a whole day. Melissa made it back to my time in late April, but I didn’t get to her time or backward to Anthony’s. I heard stories, though. In early May, Jimmy went back with Anthony to 1947 and spent a whole day with him and Margaret Garroway. He caught the two of them kissing in a barn where they sheltered from the rain, and Anthony had to admit that, yes, there was something going on. When we asked Jimmy if Margaret knew she was supposed to go missing in a few months, he blushed and said he didn’t know how to talk about “stuff like that.”
About the bigger mysteries—the baby, the disappearances, and the riddle of Prince Harming—we learned nothing. In every decade we could, there seemed to be nothing more than rumors and legends. Jimmy confirmed that the scratched message to Luka on the underside of the dresser drawer existed in his time and ten years before:
Jimmy grew on us. The kid had never met a shadow he wasn’t scared of, but his wide-eyed wonder and open-mouthed gullibility made it fun to tell him all kinds of things, both true and otherwise, that the future would bring. I once had him convinced that Luka was actually a clone, and that the real Lucy Branson controlled this body from the safety of her own time.
In June we finally had a four-way meeting. Melissa lied to her parents about going to a friend’s for a sleepover, then came back to Luka’s time, while Luka, having told the same kind of lie the previous day, waited in mine. Then I went back to 1967 to get Jimmy, and Luka went up to 1987 to pull Melissa through. As long as she didn’t leave the mirror in her own time, Luka could keep it open to 1977. They all slept in the carriage house that night, and I met up with them the next morning, a Sunday for me.
It was my first time meeting Melissa, but still I felt like I had my three best friends with me.
We sat on my sun-warmed driveway and Luka and I did our act of reading out the newest pages of the journal that I had puzzled out, she over-acting as Rose and me as Curtis. Some of the early pages were dull, so I chose something that began on our exact date, sixty years before.
