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The chemical composition is very similar to Earth water,
Nod told her. He and Wynken where still inside her, though all three felt as if they popped in and out using alien Wi-Fi or something.
Does the composition of the water not please you? Does it feel different?

No, it feels fine.
Emily rubbed up the alien shampoo, her sigh cut short by a worrisome thought.
You can’t see me, can you?
Were they girls or guys and even if they leaned girl, she didn’t share her shower with other girls, not since high school gym anyway.

We are not watching. We have no desire to see you shower.

Oh.
Emily wasn’t sure if she should feel insulted or relieved, so she went with relieved. It was also a distraction from feeling uneasy, a little blue, maybe even homesick? Been a strange, fast-forward kind of day. She’d been shocked when the sister—Emily couldn’t bring herself to call her by her name, even inside her own head, it just felt impertinent—told her it had been five hours. Five hours. She’d have gone drama queen about it, asked how it was possible, but this was time travel and stuff, so of course it was possible. They’d ran into the girls in the hall and neither one had recognized her, though Robert’s sister seemed to like the “girls” appellation. If she could like anything. At least her husband,
Helfron Giddioni
—wasn’t that a mouthful of alien name—hadn’t been offended when she said Glarmere was so lame, he’d built a mansion there. He’d just laughed, called it a “masterly description” and kissed her hand.
I had my hand kissed by ET.

I believe you are ET in this place.

Wynken had a point, one she didn’t mind. Kind of cool to be ET. To realize she’d traveled to the past, the future, an alternate reality and a distant galaxy today. She’d outsmarted an automaton, which to be honest wasn’t exactly a badge of honor since he’d been dumb as, well an automaton, and she’d seen her dead uncle explode. She’d faced down the creepy evil overlord and helped foil his evil plan and she’d blown up a gazebo. She’d done way more than six impossible things, things so impossible that part of her still expected to wake up from the dream. Okay, so most of her was glad she hadn’t woke up, if it was a dream, despite the tinge of homesick roiling her tummy. A longing for her museum, maybe her bowling lanes, and even her brother. He might even be worried. Okay, so he was pretty clueless, but it could happen.

She finished rinsing and shut off the water. No fun lingering in alien water when, well, no reason. That’s all. She wrapped the alien towel around her, tucked in the edges. Fit a bit like an Earth towel, thought the texture was a tiny bit different. Guys were such punks. Here she was on an alien planet, using alien stuff and did she love it? No, she didn’t because some guy couldn’t stay committed for five whole hours.

She’d seen the way his sister looked when Robert said she was the one with the museum. Relationships born in the heat of stress couldn’t last. Everyone who’d seen
Speed
knew that.

She rubbed on alien lotion, at least she hoped it was lotion. Couldn’t read the label, but it looked, felt, smelled like lotion, then examined the clothing options someone had left. Lots of military drab with a couple of colorful items. Missed her things. Her poor corset was hammered, her coat shredded. Boots looked okay. She picked out some skivs that looked like they’d fit, pulled on a pair of combat pants. Comfortable, the pockets were a plus, she filled them with her tools, pausing when she found the Emergency Absquatulation Device. Didn’t feel as guilty about grabbing it now. She tucked it in a pocket, then picked out a piece of scarlet from the drab and held it up, studied it. Kind of in the same family as her corset, though didn’t cover as much. She pulled on a tee shirt—because the corset thing was a bit on the scant side—then wriggled the sort of corset over that and trimmed the excess, because she didn’t have her belly button pierced to hide it under olive drab. Air felt a bit cool, so she dug out a combat jacket and shrugged it on, padded to the mirror and ran her fingers into her wet hair, half-heartedly tweaking it, then found her lipstick and traced her mouth with a hint of defiance. Even without a blow dryer, she looked better, though she’d have had to die and turn into a zombie to look worse than she had before the shower. Was that why Robert backed off? Because she had a bad hair/body/everything five hours?

It’s not you, it’s him.

“Oh, you did not go there. That is such a line!” She spun around, but how did you confront something inside your own head? She still tried, though, spinning around again. “If he wants to skin off, he should say it to my face—” Her thoughts froze, words dried up as Nod and Wynken dumped images in her head, images of Robert in some kind of gnarly hospital room, all curled in a sad huddle. His story like a movie played in her head, right up to the day the nanites woke him, took him back from that place. “Where is he?”

Are you still angry?

She boiled out the door, churning with something. “Which way?” She looked right. She looked left. Stopped in shock. Carey, one of the guys from her museum, had one arm braced against the wall, smiled down at— “The comely assistant.” Emily heard the words, said them aloud and inside her head, but didn’t quite believe them.

The comely assistant looked at Emily, her elegant brows arching, well, elegantly. “I beg your pardon.”

Emily walked toward her in a daze. “You’re…you’re the comely assistant.” She swallowed the something clogging her throat. “Olivia Carstairs.”

“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” The words were a bit in the haughty zone.

“This is Emily Babcock, Liv,” Carey said, grinning a bit sheepishly. “She’s the Prof’s—” He stopped, probably couldn’t count the greats.

“I’m his great—I’m his descendent.” So, she had trouble with the greats, too, especially after the bad…five hours. Hard to get her head around that figure when it felt longer. She stared at Olivia, trying to reconcile this woman in modern dress with the pictures from the old newspapers in the museum. She’d asked Robert a question, so technically all the questions bubbling up on her tongue could be asked. The ban was over and she’d wondered for most of her life what had happened to her uncle and Olivia. It was great to know, but it felt…less important until she talked to Robert. The need to see him overrode even this chance to end the family mystery, to finally get the right ending for her book.

“She managed the museum we went to check out,” Carey put in.

“Brae hasn’t had much time to,” she hesitated, “to update me on everything yet.” She flushed, giving Emily a pretty good idea of what they had been doing.

“So you two, you’re like—”

“Snogging, yes.” Olivia smiled up at a slightly abashed Carey. “We hang, which is like stepping out, but with snogging.”

Emily grinned. “We can talk later, when you’ve finished snogging, or get caught up, because no one really finishes snogging, do they?” Carey grinned. “Then I want the full story. This is my family history, you know.”

Carey looked a bit alarmed, but Emily didn’t wait for him to feed her some need-to-know crap. She stalked off in the opposite direction. The list of things Robert needed to explain just got longer.

* * * *

With the endless briefing finally over, Robert, who had meant to find Em, found himself heading for the beach instead. He’d spent a lot of time in this spot, thinking, sorting, analyzing his experiences in this new life, trying to figure out where he fit in—and mostly failing. He’d fit with Em. Being with her, as crazy as it had all been, had felt right, right for the first time since he woke from his break. It felt wrong to not be with her.

It is wrong.

Is she all right?
Delilah had shown her to a room, to a shower—probably shouldn’t contemplate Em in a shower. He needed to think, logically and sensibly—

Seriously? Do you think you can be logical or sensible about Em?

Blynken sounded incredulous and Robert couldn’t blame him, though he felt a need to defend the position.
I love her. I need to do what is right for her, not what I want.

What if they are the same?

How can she know what she wants until she knows the truth, the whole truth about me? I’m freaking thirty-five!

Here is your chance to explain.

He spun around, looking up the slight rise from the beach, the waves swishing at his back. She stood at the top, looking down at him. The wind off the water lifted the edges of her jacket, pushing it back from her body. The camo pants hugged her hips, the strip of bare skin a pale cream between the pants and the scarlet top, worn over more camo. He wondered, a bit vaguely, where she’d found a tee shirt that small, but mostly he just enjoyed the view. The wind tousled her hair, as if it liked it, too, and she’d found her lipstick, too.

Her stance, and the lipstick, reminded him of the first time he’d seen her. His IQ had probably started dropping then, felt a few more points shave off now. Didn’t care that much. Those points hadn’t been nearly as good for him as his five hours with Em. He started toward her. She started down. They met at the base of the rise. A long pause spent staring, him searching for words. Not sure what she used the time for, other than the staring.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you met Olivia.”

He blinked. “Oh. Right.” He tugged at color of his tee shirt. “That is one of the,” he swallowed, “many things I need to explain to you.”

“Okay. Explain.”

Her look was a new one, more serious than any she’d worn through their adventures. Explain. Right. He swallowed again. Didn’t help at all. “I’m not, there are things about me—”

“Are you dumping me?”

She’d gotten the hang of questions pretty fast, too fast. “No.” The word came out as a dry, choke, but at least he didn’t hesitate. “I’m giving you the chance to, er, dump me. To—”

“Run? Save myself?”

He nodded, a pain in his chest no peep could fix.

“No.”

Not even blinking helped this time, not that it had helped that much before. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not going to dump you, run or save myself. If you want me gone, you’ll have to do it yourself.” She crossed her arms and arched her brows, as if to say, what are you going to do now.

“I don’t want you gone, Em, but I’ve—”

“—been in a mental hospital? And now you’re younger than your little sister?”

He nodded again. “How—” He stopped. “They told you.”

She nodded. “Seriously? That’s your problem? How did you fail to notice my totally lame existence in that crazy museum, where, by the way, I would still be if you hadn’t come along. Your nine years in a padded room is less crazy than my twenty-five years as a curator to a museum no one visited until you. Your sister sure thinks so.”

Robert found her hands, gripped them, though he wasn’t sure how he’d done it. “I love your museum.” He tugged her close. “I love you.”

“Excellent. Because I love you, too. Five hours, five days, five years, five decades, five, well, we probably won’t live five hundred years, but if we did, I’d still love you. I’m very loyal, to museums, but especially to people.”

He smoothed the damp strands of her hair back off her face and changed the angle to one more optimal for kissing. “If you are crazy enough to love me, I would be crazy to talk you out of it, Em, and while I might be crazy, I’m not that crazy.”

Emily smiled then, her high beam one, though it seemed more high beam than he recalled. “Is this the part where we start snogging?”

“Snogging? Who—oh right, you met Olivia.” He grinned. “This would be that part, yes, please.” He felt like he should thank her, too, but she didn’t give him time. She arched up on her toes, slid her arms around his neck and tugged him close. It would have been ungentlemanly of him to stop her.

FORTY-SIX

Dinner that night turned out surprisingly jovial. Even General Halliwell seemed almost benign. Still not a bromance, but certainly an easing of the chill, helped by the unexpected arrival of Sara Donovan through the portal. Fyn almost beamed as he bounced their daughter, Miri on his lap. She seemed to think she was solely responsible for Delilah and Hel and no one felt inclined to argue with her.

“I felt a need to come see what you’d done to my city,” Sara said, slanting a look that might be termed provocative at Hel. “Leave a man in charge and of course stuff gets broken.”

“Men aren’t, by nature, very tidy,” Olivia said. She shifted a bit when she once again encountered Em’s fascinated stare.

“Sorry, I know it’s totally rude to stare, but I’ve been wondering what happened to you my whole life. I never ever thought it would be such a cool ending to my book. I mean, I know no one will believe it, because it’s time travel, but for sure there’ll be an app.”

“Not a movie?” Carey asked.

“Movies are so last decade and when we find my machine—”

“Your machine?” Delilah’s brows shot up.

“My uncle, my inheritance. When Robert and I find it—”

Robert made a small movement, one overshadowed by the general’s massive jerk.

“I thought we had concluded that the machine no longer poses a threat?” His irate look almost impaled Delilah.

“Did you tell Olivia—” Robert whispered to Em, under cover of the ruckus.

“—that we exploded my dead uncle? No. I didn’t tell her we found his bones in the desert either. She looks so happy, hated to spoil that.”

“Right. Good.”

“You’re so cute when you do that Brit stuffy thing.”

“I never assume, sir, but since we have cut off the machine’s power supply, it is highly unlikely that it’s still—”

“—bouncing through time?” Em studied Delilah in a very Em-like way. Delilah stood up to it pretty well. For Delilah. “You think its still out there.”

“I think it unlikely, but anything is possible.
If
you find the machine,” Delilah was at her most Brit stuffy, “what would you do with it?”

“Besides the museum? Tour the steampunk cons.” She gave Delilah an admiring look. “You should come. You’d so rock the cons with that sinister vibe.”