Horace fell to his knees and tossed up his arms in a wordless
This, finally, was Miss Wren. Days ago she’d been nothing more to us than the obscure ymbryne of a little- known loop, but since then she’d achieved mythic stature: she was, as far as we knew, the last free and whole- bodied ymbryne, a living symbol of hope, something we’d all been starving for. And here she was, right in front of us, so human and frail. I recognized her from Addison’s photo, only now there was no trace of black left in her silver hair. Deep-set worry lines stacked her brow and held her mouth in parentheses, and her shoulders were hunched as if she were not merely old, but straining under some monumental burden; the weight of all our desperate hope piling down on her.
The ymbryne pulled back the hood of her cloak and said, “I am very glad to meet you, too, dears, but you must come inside at once; it isn’t safe out here.”
She turned and hobbled away into the passage. We fell into line, waddling behind her through the tunneled ice like a train of ducklings after their mother, feet shuffling and arms held out in awkward balance poses to keep from slipping. Such was the power of an ymbryne over peculiar children: the very presence of one—even one we’d only just met—had an immediate pacifying effect on us.
The floor ramped upward, leading us past silent furnaces bearded with frost, into a large room clogged floor to ceiling and wall to wall with ice except for the tunnel we were in, which had been carved straight through the middle. The ice was thick but clear, and in some places I could see twenty or thirty feet into it with only a slight waver of distortion. The room appeared to be a reception area, with rows of straight-backed chairs facing a massive desk and some filing cabinets, all trapped inside tons of ice. Blue-filtered daylight shone from a row of unreachable windows, beyond which was the street, a smear of indistinct gray.
A hundred hollows could spend a week hacking at that ice and not reach us. If not for the tunnel entrance, this place would make a perfect fortress. Either that or a perfect prison.
On the walls hung dozens of clocks, their stilled hands pointed every which way. (To keep track of the time in different loops, maybe?) Above them, directional signs pointed the way to certain offices:
< UNDERSECRETARY OF TEMPORAL AFFAIRS
< CONSERVATOR OF GRAPHICAL RECORDS
NONSPECIFIC MATTERS OF URGENCY >
DEPT. OF OBFUSCATION AND DEFERMENT >
Through the door to the Temporal Affairs office, I saw a man trapped in the ice. He was frozen in a stooped posture, as if he’d been trying to dislodge his feet as ice overtook the rest of him. He’d been there a long time. I shuddered and looked away.
The tunnel came to an end at a fancy, balustraded staircase that was free of ice but awash in loose papers. A girl stood on one of the lower steps, and she watched our halting, slip-sliding approach without enthusiasm. She had long hair that was parted severely down the middle and fell all the way to her hips, small, round glasses she was constantly adjusting, and thin lips that looked like they’d never once curled into a smile.
