watching her too closely, she could risk trips well into the past. Sometimes she’d even go further and bring back news, some bad, some good.
Young Curtis remembered nothing of the night he was born. Even his memories of the mirror were muddled. In early October, he made his first friend his own age, a girl from two doors down, and tried to take her into the mirror. When she couldn’t pass in, he grew angry and smashed her head repeatedly into its unbreakable surface. She never recovered completely.
Rose did better than anyone might have expected. By the time Luka actually met her, Curtis was six weeks old and Rose was devoted to him. She never talked of the other baby.
Of the older Curtis who had run out into the night, she could find out nothing, though there were stories of a wild man living in the woods, stealing chickens, sleeping in barns. Even fearless Luka didn’t stray far on the rare nights when she went as far back as 1917.
For almost four months I kept to my parents’ new rules, and I guess it would have stayed that way if it hadn’t been for you and the fact that there’s always one more rule.
Five
Running down the silver street.
My mother had never been crazy about keeping the mirror in the house, but I think she comforted herself with the fact that I was under pretty constant supervision. Grandma moved in with us following the madness of that summer. My dad fixed up the library for her. Between the three adults, I hardly had a moment alone in the house.
So when Mom got an invitation to her office Christmas party on the same weekend Grandma was going to visit a sick friend, she didn’t like it one bit, but somehow my dad convinced her they should go. Two days before Christmas, a week and a half before my year was to end, I found myself alone at night for the first time in months.
I tried to be good. I sat in my room and got an early start on my Christmas vacation homework, willing myself to ignore the time-travel mirror downstairs. A couple of times I thought I might have heard Luka passing through one way or the other, but she had been given a stern lecture by my dad about just exactly how forbidden it was for her to stop over here tonight, and I had heard her make a solemn promise, so I knew there was no chance of company.
After failing for a good half hour to figure out any of my math problems, I gave up and headed downstairs for some cookies and milk. I stayed down in the kitchen to eat, enjoying that room’s better lighting and the comforting sound of the fridge running. When my mother called to check on me, I just about crushed my milk glass in my hand I was so on edge. I assured her that everything was fine. No, Luka hadn’t come through. No, I hadn’t gone near their closet. Yes, I knew the number and would call if there were any problems.
I washed my glass and cleaned up my crumbs. Nothing to do but clump back up the stairs.
I guess that’s when you heard me.
Just as I walked past my parents’ bedroom, I heard a knock and a muffled “Hello?”
I froze. I didn’t know that voice. Another knock. Another “Hello?” but this time a little louder. “Listen, I need some help here. I need the diary. The one with stuff from Curtis and Rose.”
I put my hand on the handle of my parents’ door, then jumped as the guy spoke up again.
“It’s not even me that needs it. It’s Luka. She needs help with Prince Harming.”
That did it. I opened the door and walked to the closet. “Who are you?”
“Oh, man, thank you. Are you Kenny? I’m Connor. From 2017.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Look, can you open the door?”
“It’s locked.”
“I know that, D—Kenny. Luka sent me to get the diary.”
I looked at the closet door. Hinges on the outside. “Give me a few minutes,” I said, and headed down to the basement for a hammer and an awl.
While I took the door off its hinges, I thought I should find out from “Connor from 2017” exactly what was going on and what kind of help Luka needed, but he kept me so busy with questions of his own that I never got to ask mine. How many channels did we have on TV? Had I ever touched a computer? How many phones did we have in the house? Had I ever heard of solar power?
Peevishly, I fired back, “What about you? Do you have a base on the moon?”
“No point. I went uptime with Luka, though, and we saw the Mars landing. That’ll be cool.”
So that was who she had been with. I guessed maybe this was Luka’s new future boy, probably her boyfriend. My feelings of inferiority were even more magnified when I got the closet door off. He was probably two years older than me, about three inches taller, and possessed a frame that was both gangly and muscular. Behind him was the mirror, removed from its dresser again and leaning against my dad’s work uniforms. It was the first time I had seen it in weeks. As wrong as it was, I was itching for the slow molasses of the Silverlands. Uptime heat or downtime cold, it didn’t matter. I wanted to be uncomfortable again.
“Aw, jeez, thanks,” the newcomer said. “I was sweating like a sonofa—” He checked himself, looked sheepish, and continued. “I was sweating bad. Look, I’m sorry about this. Luka told me to leave you out of everything because she didn’t want you getting in trouble. But—” He stopped himself and looked at a large-faced digital wristwatch with four or five buttons around its edge. “Man, she’s been alone out there for more than an hour. Look, will you come back with me?”
“Fine,” I said. “But this better not take long.”
“You should bundle up,” said the new kid. “We’re going outside.”
When I got my strings-and-spoon key out of my coat pocket, Connor gave a low whistle. “Wow. The classic.”
“Pardon?”
“Nah, it’s just—I’ve heard about it, that’s all. That was the first key.”
I shrugged the comment aside. “Let’s get going.”
The cold was as bone-chilling as it ever had been, worse because of how wide the Silverlands had become. When I was going in every day, I had hardly noticed the change, but now it must have been fifteen feet from one mirror to the next. We didn’t see a single person on our journey back.
In 1917, the dresser was back on the second floor of the carriage house. Even in the dark, I noticed the finished wall right away. I guessed Mrs. Hollerith had put that up as quickly as she could.
Enough of our journey had been either painful or necessarily silent that the new kid and I had barely talked. Now I wanted answers. “So where’s Luka?” I said as we stamped our feet and beat our arms for warmth.
Connor turned on a flashlight and aimed it downstairs. “Like I said, we have to go outside. I don’t know how much I should tell you. She’ll be pretty mad that I brought you, especially if she ends up getting shut out of your mirror for the last week of the year. I hate it when she’s mad at me.”
I held up the diary but didn’t give it to him. “You said she’s in trouble. Which way?”
Connor grinned. “The hiding hole.”
He led me out of the carriage house and into the snow-covered winter-bare wood at the back of the property, and on the walk he gave me a scattered account of what had led him to this point. His other adventures in the glass had been all over the place, mostly in the future, but this one had drawn him far into the past. “It started a few years ago, I guess, but I didn’t realize what it all meant until last week. When I was nine years old, Dana took me to a retirement home.”
“Dana?”
He looked at me as though I were slow. “My older sister. I didn’t know why she wanted me to go there at first. All my grandparents still lived in their own houses, but she said it wasn’t them. It was someone way older, my great-grandmother. I hadn’t seen her much at all in my life. She had been in that place since before I was born. At first, she didn’t even seem to remember me, but then when my sister introduced me to her, last name and everything, she grins really wide and asks me how old I’ll be in 2017. I tell her I’ll turn seventeen. Grin gets
