Page 17 of Time for You

Slowly, Daphne adjusted to Henry’s constant presence in their lives.

He liked a challenge, and she appreciated that about him.

And even though he was still frequently bewildered by modern life, he had taken to the broader range of food available very quickly.

He loved Thai food, which Daphne had introduced him to on a rainy Thursday afternoon, cackling as he hopped around the kitchen searching for milk to manage the spicy burn.

Once he’d gotten over that first shock, he proclaimed he loved it, and kept looking for new things to taste and cook.

There was a lack of pretention about Henry that she wouldn’t have noticed at first. He was arrogant as all hell—that much hadn’t changed from her first impression—but he embraced new ideas and experiences with a lot more equanimity than she would have ever guessed.

Henry squinted at the recipe he had displayed on Ellie’s tablet. “Keep stirring,” he instructed. “It doesn’t look right to me yet.”

“Yes, chef,” Daphne teased, standing at her station at the stove. The recipe Henry had found was incredibly complex, as it involved making curry from scratch, but their kitchen did smell amazing.

Henry moved next to her and dunked the noodles into the boiling water.

Daphne knocked her shoulder into his, and he grinned to himself, shaking his head.

“I still don’t understand why you think it’s so impossible, given that all the disparate elements of the technology exist,” Henry said, picking up the thread of an old, now-familiar argument.

“Henry, we can’t make dinosaurs.”

“So you say. But you can create human—what did you call them?”

“Embryos.”

“You can create human embryos in a lab. Wouldn’t a reptile be less complex?”

“It’s less that we can’t, and more that we shouldn’t,” Ellie said, emerging from her room.

She’d been sleeping for most of the day, having pulled an overnight shift every night for the past week.

Daphne herself was gearing up for a stretch of those and dreaded it, and not just because of the difficulty of night shifts.

“I still think maybe if they tried with an herbivore—”

“No one has a secret dinosaur island,” Daphne said.

“That you know of,” Henry argued. “And turn the heat off—that looks done.”

Daphne obligingly turned off the heat for the sauce she’d been stirring and turned to face him. “Again, did you bother to finish the book?”

“I did.”

“And you still think we should make a dinosaur island? Maybe we should show you the movies.”

“Movie. The original slaps. The rest are terrible cash grabs,” Ellie said, but Henry didn’t look at her.

He turned away from the noodles to face Daphne. “I simply think it’s not possible for you to know, definitively, if there’s a dinosaur island somewhere or not.”

“Okay, but keeping something like that a secret would be really hard. There’d be all the scientists, and research scientists might be a bunch of dorks, but they’re a chatty bunch of dorks. If one of them knew how to make dinosaurs, you couldn’t keep them from telling someone about it—”

“Um, guys?” Ellie interjected.

“Money can buy silence,” Henry said.

“Not when it comes to something like this. And it’s not just the scientists; there would be like, people who feed the dinosaurs, groundskeepers, janitors—”

“Guys?” Ellie tried again.

Henry’s eyes glimmered with a smile that didn’t reach his lips. “Lots of money can buy a lot of silence,” he insisted.

“Sure, but—”

“What about spy satellites? We have those, you know. Governments would know, and if it was someone from a different country, then there wouldn’t be incentive to keep it quiet.”

“Food’s burning,” Ellie said.

“For someone who doesn’t have a lot of faith in the government, you seem to when it is convenient,” Henry replied, and god, those blue eyes were going to kill her.

Daphne crossed her arms over her chest. “I am just being practical about geopolitics.”

“Guys,” Ellie said loudly.

Reluctantly, Daphne looked away from him. “What?” she said at the same time as Henry.

“Food’s burning,” Ellie said with a jerk of her chin.

Just then, Daphne caught the acrid scent of water burning on a stovetop as the pot Henry was minding bubbled over.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, whipping it off the burner and blowing on the bubbles to calm it down.

“Is it okay?” Daphne asked.

“Looks okay. Maybe a little overdone but nothing catastrophic. Would you want some for dinner, Ellie?” Henry asked. “We made a peanut curry.”

For some reason, Ellie was grinning mischievously. “Sounds delicious.”

“What’s your deal?” Daphne asked, grabbing bowls from the upper cabinet. “Why are you smiling like that?”

But Ellie just kept grinning like the cat that got the canary. “If you don’t know, I’m sure as hell not telling you.”

“I found something while I was reading in Helen’s apartment,” Henry said over breakfast a few days later, between bites of scrambled eggs. “I couldn’t make sense of it, so I brought it here, to see what you think.”

Daphne took the book from him. The Time Veil , it said on the spine, although in some places, the gold was flaking off.

The fabric hardcover was worn in spots, and the paper inside was yellowed and brittle.

The scent of dust and knowledge trickled from the pages as she flipped to the spot he indicated.

Most of Helen’s books were thrillers, but this looked—different. Strange. Otherworldly.

Daphne read the paragraphs three times, turning the words over in her head.

Some liminal spaces are more liminal than others, the veil thinning as the moon reaches the proper position.

In these spaces, as suggested by Hoyme, one might be able to shift between times, as stepping through a waterfall.

Before, the future, behind, the past. The water is the present, shimmering and ephemeral.

These spaces can be found along ley lines, those ancient and hallowed veins of power. With the right moon position on the line and the traveler’s birth, it may be possible to step through the waterfalls of time.

“It sounds like it’s talking about time travel, doesn’t it?” Henry asked. “And look, there’s a map.”

Daphne squinted at the small map showing the western hemisphere, crisscrossed with lines that seemed to coalesce into starbursts in places.

Along some of the lines were small dots, with symbols she vaguely recognized as belonging to various astrology signs.

She could pick out her own, but that was about it.

Next to those signs were circles representing phases of the moon, with an arrow and a set of numbers, ranging from 2 to 498.

Ellie peered over Daphne’s shoulder. “If those are star signs or whatever, and the phase of the moon, maybe this is like, a code? For when those spaces are open?”

“That’s what it looks like, but I don’t know what most of those signs mean,” Daphne said.

Ellie sat down and scrutinized it closely. “I think the map is showing what sign the moon is in and what phase, maybe when the portal opens? These numbers could be spacing, like how far apart it opens. It looks about right, given what I can see here, at least.”

“What else would you need to know?”

“Probably just double-check everything,” Ellie said. “But if I’m reading it right, the little space over Minnesota shows it open when the moon is in Virgo, which would be about when he arrived, and then again ... about a month from now.”

Ellie looked up, an odd expression on her face as she glanced between them. One more month, and then Henry could go back. Daphne swallowed hard, willing herself to be excited—he certainly seemed to be—and then caught his eye. Her heart sank, and she had no idea why.

Or maybe she did, and that was even worse.