London, in June of 1904, was not like Andrea expected. She had imagined, even having been born only one hundred years prior, a city under a dark cloud of industrial revolution smoke, paired with grimy poverty. But when she arrived in Hyde Park, it was far from her expectations. There was a light mist falling from the grey sky, but it was bright and cheery woods at the heart of the city.
Not much different from my San Francisco on a winter day, Andrea thought, making her way out to the street on the north side of the park. The streets were paved with worn cobblestone and occupied by a few narrow-tired cars moving at heartbreakingly slow speeds. The buildings were big and solidly built, with ornate hand-made decorations. She could not help but to be impressed. The departing professor had been right, this was an exciting time, the beginning of modernity.
Andrea frantically began her search of the city, checking in the types of places she hoped her former teacher would be. Despite the fact that she had a time travel device on a chain around her neck, the flow of time was still moving ahead in the present. Every second she spent searching, despite being in the past, brought her closer to the end of the three days. Time would continue to flow forward in the present and the department of timeline preservation. By her count, she still had over seventy-two hours until the two brothers would be taken out of the prison, but every second could be important.
After two hours of searching, Andrea became accustomed to the curious glances from passersby. She understood it was quite out of the ordinary for Londoners of this age to see a black girl with a funny accent and dress walking about on her own. Soon, she found herself on the east side of the River Thames, walking along the narrow alleys that had bridges connecting the interiors of tall brick buildings. Where would an educated man from the future live in a city of this sort? Almost as if in response to her internal question, her eyes leapt to an oval wooden sign hanging over a doorway.
A Potter's shop!
At first it meant nothing, and then the implications came crashing in.
"I have always looked forward to the day when I could look away from the projections and make tangible clay sculptures with my soft hands."
Professor Osorio had added this unimportant detail the day he had mentioned his pending retirement. Andrea could not think of a better place to ask, as pubs and libraries had turned up nothing. The city was huge, but it was the best idea she had had so far.
Only the light from the windows lit the shop. The ceilings were low and a fine grey power coated the stone floor. By the door, on display, was a bookshelf full of fine clay mugs and bowls, glazed with beautiful earth tones. A man, wearing a stained canvas apron came to the front counter to see what the girl wanted.
"I don't sell my supplies, only the finished product," he told Andrea.
"Is there another shop that would sell to someone, who wanted to throw clay as a hobby?" Andrea asked, trying to pull off a local accent.
"Send you to a competitor? That would hurt me own business!" The potter cried.
"I promise I won't buy a thing!" Andrea said and smiled, trying to charm the man. She tilted her head to the side as she continued with her plea. "I am just looking for a friend who makes his own pottery as a pastime. It's very important that I find him!"
Finally the man yielded and gave up the address of his competitor, who happened to be a ten-minute walk away. There she found success.
"Oh yes. I know Fenton Osorio. He is the Arab looking fellow with the strange name. Comes in once a week to get more clay. Bought a wheel and some basins a pair o' months ago, as well," the friendly shop owner told her. "In fact, he ordered a large bellow and it came in yesterday. You are looking for him, eh?"
"Yes, he was one of my professors at university! I wanted to find him so I could thank him for the position he recommended." Andrea said, offering partial truth.
"Well then, if you deliver this package over to his place, I will give you his address."
Andrea nodded and the man went into the back. He came back with a package wrapped in brown paper and twine. "What did Osorio teach, anyway?"
"Philosophy," Andrea answered. She thanked the man and left the shop.
The address was difficult to find, as the girl from the future was not used to the system of addresses used in early twentieth century London. She walked across the damp town, stopping to ask for directions at a flower stand, finally finding her way to the road named on the parchment. The houses were small and shabby, not the type of domicile that Andrea imagined an important man from the future would reside. She entered the small front courtyard and used the knocker on the door. Waiting for an answer, Andrea's eyes wandered across the brickwork in front of the Professor's home. A wrought iron horse, holding a looped bit in its mouth, adorned the top of the brick fence. He stood alone, looking as if he was missing companions. It seemed to Andrea that he was the last survivor of his kind, the final remnant of past yard decorations.
No one was answering. Andrea wasn't sure how to proceed? She did have a time device. Should she walk right in? Before her mind was made, she decided to walk around the back. The mist had stopped but the walk was still wet. Her shoes clicked with each step as she went down the narrow passage between houses. Unexpectedly, a small horse stable stood to the rear of the house. It had been converted for other uses, now clean and open with no sign of livestock. In the center of the wet wood structure was a brick oven. Shelves lined the walls, holding pieces of pottery in various stages of drying and bisque. Andrea set the package down and brushed her fingers along the top of the oven.
Still warm...
There were basins and buckets full of grey water. In the corner was a chock-topped table with a wire stretched at an angle. Andrea picked up a teacup, displayed next to earlier attempts, and held it by the base. The walls of the cup were thin and Andrea dropped the beautiful cup when Osorio spoke.
"I didn't think they would send you," the older man said. He watched the cup fall from slack fingers, then break on the uneven floor. Fenton Osorio moved nothing but his eyes.
Andrea found herself at a loss for words, unsure of where to begin, as the former Manager looked her up and down.
"You brought that package for me? They let you leave looking like that? No, no. This is wrong," Osorio realized. "How did you get here? What is going on?"
Andrea suddenly felt like she had made a huge mistake in coming. The well-put together professor she remembered had changed in the last two months. Fenton Osorio's balding hair was uncombed and he wore a housecoat under a canvas apron. He smelled of pipe tobacco and gazed at her with an ineffable expression. All that Andrea could do was pull the coin from its hiding place. She dangled it from the chain for him to see.
"Is that..." he asked, his voice fading.
"You were the only person I could come to," Andrea muttered, and then tears fell in rivers down her cheeks. "I brought myself to the present by mistake, but I've made a life there. They found another coin and if I don't do something, in sixty-eight hours, they will start the interrogation and get to the bottom of the stolen coins and I don't know if I'll even exist!"
Osorio swept his eyes around the area as Andrea wept. They were unobserved, which told the old professor a lot. He put his hand on the girl's shoulder and gave her a moment to get control of herself. "Come inside, Ms. Woodbridge. Andrea. We can figure all this out."
Two minutes later, the pair sat in Osorio's study, in high backed chairs. "They recovered a second coin," Andrea told the older man. Osorio made tea as Andrea explained the situation. "And it turns out the boy who had the coin is a brother to the first. The second brother was in shock after his capture, so the Mistress gave us three days off as a reward. She plans on bringing in specialists to use them against each other. They will spill their secrets, I know they will. I just don't know what to do! All I could think to do was come here. Do you know anything about the three stolen coins or the man who stole them? If he could take them and get away with it, there has to be a way for me to
do something, isn't there?"
"You worked as an intern for two months and were let in on all that? The prison? Everything?" Osorio asked.
"I hope that is all. I wanted to work for the Keepers my whole life. Two months in, I've found out about Garlons, prisons, flash cloning, and interrogating young boys! Could it get worse?"
"I does, slightly," Fenton Osorio answered. "Stolen time coins are not the biggest scandal to befall the organization. I have worked through startling discoveries while out on data collection that no one was prepared for. The Garlon were before my time, but they were quite the event in their day. You asked about the thief and what I know?"
"Yes?" Andrea said. She sat forward in her chair, tea growing cold.
"He has been nicknamed the Snow King. Very deep observation into the past suggested he used his stolen coins to commit more robberies in the 20th century. We noticed crimes that were unexplainable cropping up late in this century. These were mostly of Canadian currency, and some art. We speculated that he was from that country, since he valued their money. We suspect other instances of missing valuables in the past were his work as well. But, every time we investigate them, we come up empty handed."
"So there is no explanation for him?" Andrea said. "He is just a man from some place we can't figure out? What did Meyer call them..."
"Transient. An intruder into our timeline from somewhere else. Is that the word you are looking for?" Osorio said. "Oh, yes. That is what I suspect. That is the way he has been classified anyway."
"Is there anyway to use that? Some way to use this factor to our advantage?" Andrea asked.
Fenton Osorio was quiet for a moment, gazing off at his bookshelf. "You worked in timeline preservation for two months. I worked for twenty years. I saw things that made me question my whole existence, but I kept going. I became jaded, working for the Mistress. That woman developed rules and guidelines, brought the University and the Keepers to life from nothing. She was your age when she perfected time travel. I say perfected because we found traces of time travel used before her. It was crude compared to our skills and understanding, but it was time travel nonetheless. I founded my life, my work, and my education on the assumptions of the greater Hopper rules. They are rules for every one but the Keepers, and that was hard to live with. It is why I went into teaching part time. The only way I could live was to have only one foot in the department."
"Why didn't you just transfer to tourism or documentation?" Andrea asked.
"Once you have tasted that drug, of being free from the rules, everything else looses its flavor. What I learned exhausted me, but I could not give it up until I had enough. And so I quit."
"I don't want to be found out as a paradox. I don't want to be a trophy in the prison, the girl who got lost and became a Keeper for two months. I want to keep working in timeline preservation. I also disagree with some of the things that go on, but if I stick around, I may be able to change all that one day. There must be something we can do..."
"You have heard about transients, but have you heard about one of the most famous of all transients? He was called the enigma, because he was so unlike all the others we had ever come across. He kept a very low profile, but repeatedly popped up through history. He was by far, the most stable of all the transients we have dealt with, as well as one of the craftiest. In fact, we transported him through time in exchange for his name soon after we captured the first coin."
"What was his name?" Andrea asked, breathless.
"I believe it was Aros. He traded this information for himself and a companion to be brought here to London, in the year 1900. In previous encounters, we kept our distance, only observing. But this time, our interest was truly peaked. He obtained a curious artifact from a part of town called Seven Dials and went into the park. There, he and his partner disappeared."
"Not time travel, I am assuming," Andrea said.
"That is the case. Our scientists studied the spot they left from. It left enough trace to postulate, that the two left our universe."
"Our universe... They never returned?"
"That is the thing. We set up monitoring devices in the spot, but they never returned there. This man had completely captured me. I have been obsessed with the possibility of other universes. I so badly want to know where he has been and what he has seen. And so that is part of the reason I retired here."
"You hope to see him again?"
Fenton Osorio smiled with a sly grin.
"What do you know?" Andrea said, nearly getting out of her seat. "Have you seen him? Can he help me from being discovered?"
"I think you are right," Osorio said. "If a transient caused this first rift, another could repair it. And while I don't have this Aros to give you as a solution, I have the next best thing."
Andrea sat silent on the edge of her chair, waiting for the professor to speak. The older man took a sip of his tea, drawing out the moment.
"I spotted his companion two days ago."
"This is great! Maybe he can tell me something!"
"He is quite different from when we last observed him. It has been four years for us in the present, but this man left looking thirty, and returned twice that age. I don't know how time passes where he went, but he is much older and seemed to have cooled off. I expected to him to take up his old partners habits of keeping on the move, but he has stayed in town. He was alone and appeared beaten down. I can only guess what has happened to him since they left in 1900."
"Where is he? Take me to him!" Andrea blurted. This time, the excitement was too much to keep her off her feet. "We could see if he knows a way to arrest the flow of time, or something. He will talk to me, I just know it!"
"Girl, you are just stabbing at possibilities. If we want to motivate a transient to do something for us, we have to know just where to push his buttons to make that happen. Sit. We need a plan we can bring to him..."
CHAPTER 26