3. Once you’ve gone back, you have to wait until midnight. After that, you can go home again anytime.
Getting downstairs was easy. If I was careful and stuck to the floorboards my dad had fixed, I could blend in with the creaks and pops of the old house settling down for the night.
I surrendered the hat as soon as I got outside and Luka put it on.
It couldn’t have been more than a couple degrees below freezing, and there wasn’t much wind. We stood for a long moment.
“Who are you?” I said, but before she spoke, I added, “Not just your name. What’s going on?” When I asked that, something stiffened in my spine. I was still scared, not of this kid, but of something out there in the night. But that didn’t matter. That was my name on the note I had found. Someone was asking me for help.
She dropped her hands to her sides and looked at me directly. “My name is Luka Branson. I was born October 12, 1970. I live at 428 Larkfield Drive. I’m sixteen years old.”
My heart thudded painfully. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. We’re just starting to figure it out. It goes every ten years. A few days ago I met the girl from 1997, ten years up from my time. She got those rules from you.” I opened my mouth, but she held up her hand. “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”
She grabbed the shoulder of my coat and pulled. I let myself be dragged through the hedge.
“See that?” she said, pointing to the winter-brittle tangle of tall weeds that choked the carriage house’s tiny front yard. “That’s a swimming pool. And right there?” She pointed to the far corner of the hedge. “That’s where Larkfield curves out to Manse Creek Road.”
“There’s no Larkfield going onto Manse Creek,” I said.
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Don’t you get it? Time travel. I’m from 1987.”
I shook my head.
She looked into my eyes. “Come on,” she said. “I really thought you’d know more stuff than this.”
As she dragged me farther from my house, I looked back, worried.
She must have read my mind. “Look, if you got out okay, you’re not going to get caught now. Even if you do, just say you went out for a walk.”
I couldn’t imagine just how badly that would go, but I figured she was right about the first part, so I let her take me down to the creek.
“This used to be a bridge,” she said, pointing to a bend where both banks were about eight feet high. “I mean, it will be. It’s confusing, right? I keep thinking I’m in one of those Mad Max movies, you know? After the world’s been destroyed. I go to these places, and some of the trees look the same. Like that one. Tom Berditti’s dad put a tire swing on it a couple of years ago. But now it’s not there. Yet, I mean.”
She walked me down the creek, pointing to things I couldn’t see, things that wouldn’t be here for years—a whole subdivision, paths to and from the creek, bus stops for routes I had never heard of, and things she called “super mailboxes.”
She was entranced with the world of the past. I was more interested in her.
“How did you get here?” I asked as we walked out onto Lawrence.
“You know that,” she said. “The mirror.”
“But how?”
“That bus stop looks so new! In my time, it’s all beat up. When did they put it in?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. It was here when we moved in. Look, how did you know about the mirror? Does it just take you back? Does it go forward as well? How does this work? I don’t care about this stuff about the neighborhood. I want to go to the mirror.”
She threw up her hands, then tapped her watch. “Fine. I was just killing time anyway. I can’t show you anything until midnight.”
When we got inside the carriage house, there were two minutes to go. Luka took out a flashlight and guided me upstairs through the maze of junk to the low dresser where I found the note. She looked at me and pursed her lips. “Look, I can sit around talking at you all night, or I can show you. What do you want?”
Blood pounded in my ears. “Show me.”
With that she grinned, shone her flashlight at the mirror, and touched it with her other hand. For just a moment, her palm lay on the surface, fingers splayed. “It’s hot,” she said. “You have to be ready. Cold when you go down, hot when you go up.” She beckoned. “Take the flashlight in your other hand. You have to hold my hand all the way through. There’s a space in between going in and coming out. Are you coming?”
“I’ll be able to get back, won’t I?”
She rolled her eyes. “Real adventurer, aren’t you? Yes, you’ll be able to get back. When you’re in the wrong time, you can always go back. After midnight, I mean. I haven’t figured everything out yet, but I know that. Melissa took me through with her last night.”
I knew I had to go through. My name on a list. My name on a note. “How is all this connected?” I said, fixing her with my gaze. “Do you know about the dead baby? The one in the wall? Do you know about Prince Harming?”
She shrugged. “Kind of. There’s some story in the neighborhood about a guy who kills kids or smashes their heads in or something. But that’s all the past. All I can do right now is take you to my time.” She saw that I was about to ask more questions and held up her hand. “Look, I’m from the future, all right? You’re the one from the past. I came back to get answers from you, not sit around explaining things. Are you coming or not?”
I had already made my decision when I left my room. I took the flashlight, grasped her hand, and let myself be dragged along as she stepped up onto the low surface of the dresser and, with some effort, pushed through the mirror. I could see her, like a fun-house effect, going from two girls, to one-and-a-half, to one, to just a double arm, shortening as it pulled me in.
If she hadn’t warned me about the heat, I might have let go. As it was, I flinched. On the skin of my wrist I could feel first the freezing surface of the mirror, then the pore-opening fire of whatever lay beyond. It was like sticking your hand into burning Play-Doh.
Up to my elbow disappeared. The tugging from the other side grew stronger. I felt Luka’s other hand encircle my wrist, and almost stumbled as I got both my feet onto the surface of the dresser and ducked my head.
As my eyes moved toward the mirror, I turned my head and closed them. The cold mirror flattened my ear at first, then my head went through a heat that felt like it would burn my eyebrows off. I had taken a breath and closed my mouth, and now I imagined I was in some kind of burning, molten silver. We moved through that hot blindness for just a step—
Then I was falling—out of the other side of the mirror and into something soft that went “Ow!” and punched me hard in the shoulder.
I opened my eyes to darkness, then brought the flashlight around to Luka’s face.
She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk loud or you’ll wake my mom up. Welcome to 1987.”
Four
The Rules
4. When you go uptime to your home, you can bring the chosen kid from the past with you.
My first impression of the future came from a small room that must have been decorated by someone with a great interest in horses and someone called Bon Jovi. I shone my flashlight beam all around. I guess I had been spoiled by the distant walls of my converted attic, because it seemed claustrophobic.
“This is the future?” I whispered.
“What did you expect, space ships and flying cars? Come here, I’ll show you.” Luka dragged me to the window. “Does that tree look familiar?”
“Kind of.” To me, one tree pretty much looked like the next, but there was something in the way its lowest main branch jutted almost straight out, then changed direction and thrust upward. The street itself was just a quiet suburban subdivision. Did the cars look different? In the dark, I couldn’t tell. Maybe that one’s bumper was a little more rounded, and the same with the roof on that other one two doors down.
