The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (23 page)

I suddenly felt a bit woozy and stepped into the water—it was cold but I let myself slip down into it and took a few tentative strokes. I immediately felt better.

“It’s working,” I called out.

“Julia—wait, come back—” I heard Dr. B’s voice.

I made a U-turn in the water. I had forgotten my backpack.

“It’s too dangerous,” Dr. B spit out between shallow breaths. “Don’t you see? What if we all get into the water and swim out and then suddenly we aren’t
allowed
to swim any more?”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t think of that.”

The feeling of something pressing down on my chest was back. Next to me, Jacob was also fighting for breath. Dr. B was on her knees by the computer, as if willing it to work faster.

“Everyone, get into a huddle,” I heard her command. She sounded faint, as if either she or I were disappearing. “Holding hands is best—stand the kayaks on their ends so that they fit into the basket—”

26

“Hey, where are we?” Jacob asked. “This looks completely
different.”

“It shouldn’t be.” Dr. B glanced around wildly. “I sent us just a few minutes ahead. I think—yes, there must have been a minor adjustment by History. The destination we wanted wasn’t available so we arrived as close as History would permit.”

Nate pulled out his compass and map to orient himself. “We were over there…” he said, pointing behind him. “And that’s where we want to go, north.” He pointed ahead.

“STEWie’s basket?” I asked.

Dr. B checked the instrument in her hand. “Still where we left it.”

“Good,” Nate said.

Shivering in my wet clothes, I noticed that Jacob had his cell phone out again.

“Jacob, this is no time to be jotting down thoughts for future blog posts and tweets. We’re finally free to get going. I’m just going to go change behind that tree—” If there was one motif for the week, it was water.

“Wait, Julia. I have an app for binoculars. I thought I saw—yes, look, the place where we were…there are some Indians there now—sorry, Mrs. Tuttle, is it rude to say Indians? I meant the Dakota—the Psinomani.”

“Here.” I took the phone from him, careful not to get it wet, and looked through it. Several Dakota men and boys were passing through from the woods into the more sparsely vegetated prairie to the west. Had we remained at our previous location, they would have run smack into us. I couldn’t help but notice that they were carrying spears. They were blocking our way to STEWie’s basket but luckily the other direction was where we wanted to go, farther north and deeper into the woods.

“Look, we should have anticipated this,” I heard Dr. B explain
as I toweled off and changed into my backup clothing behind the tree. “The best we can expect to do is tiptoe through the woods. If anyone had any visions of mingling with the Dakota or the Norsemen, put them aside immediately. Our clothes are strange. Everything we carry—and the way we carry ourselves—stands out. The very imprints left by the soles of our hiking boots do not belong here. The same will be true for Quinn and Dr. Holm, but at least that works in our favor. They’ll be as limited as we are. If they do come, I expect that we will converge on the same spot sooner or later.”

Ruth-Ann sounded a little disappointed. “I had expected more of a front row seat than one way up in the balcony.”

“Time travel is like that,” Dr. B went on. “First-time STEWie users find that it never lives up to their expectations. It’s always—
smaller
, I guess. They forget that time travelers, like the locals, have only one pair of eyes. They can only see one slice of the battle or take a quick peek into the window of, say, Galileo’s villa. Answering questions is never easy. It takes multiple runs, wise choices, and a lot of luck.”

“And funding,” I called out from behind the tree.

Ruth-Ann and Ron chuckled at that. I had worried that they might slow us down, but they’d struck a good pace, both paddling and when the kayaks needed to be carried.

“What now?” Ruth-Ann asked when I emerged dry, with the small towel wrapped around my hair. At least it had started to warm up as the sun rose higher in the sky.

“We keep heading north,” Nate said. “Into the woods.”

After a bit of experimentation, though, we realized that History didn’t seem to want to let us go deeper into the woods. We were free to head the other way, into the open fields of the prairie with their dry, yellow growth spreading toward the western horizon. Where the Psinomani men were going.

“I guess we have to take a detour,” Nate said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to swing back into the woods sooner rather than later. Do you need any help, Dr. B?”

The professor slung the Slingshot across one shoulder, on top of her backpack. “All ready.”

“Can we stay a bit longer?” Ruth-Ann had been snapping pictures of the Psinomani men as they grew smaller in the distance, hacking at the knee-high grass as they walked.

“We’re not here to sightsee,” Nate said as the rest of us divided up the kayaks and started walking.

“Aren’t you curious about our ancestors, yours and mine?” Ruth-Ann asked, putting the camera away and hurrying to catch up with us.

“I am curious,” he said, turning around. For some reason he was looking at me and not Ruth-Ann, “but now isn’t the time. We have a job to do.”

He picked up his pace as he guided our little group forward.
I hoped he wouldn’t walk smack into one of History’s invisible walls.

Soon it became clear that we were being led on an arc through the gently rolling prairie. “One thing is for sure,” Dr. B commented. “Our path seems to be tied to the coming and goings of the village.”

“Maybe we just need to put some real distance between us and the villagers and that will break this time-stickiness that we’ve been experiencing,” Jacob suggested.

“That could very well be the case,” Dr. B said. “It’s certainly happened often enough on other STEWie runs. You leave the circle of influence of a person or settlement and suddenly it’s like the gates of History have opened and you can go wherever you want.”

I thought it would be wise to eat something to fend of the chill, so when we stopped to allow Ruth-Ann to snap some
photos
—Jacob had spotted a flock of the red-breasted passenger pigeons—I reached for a snack from my backpack.

“If we carried one or two back with us,” Jacob suggested, studying the flock of passenger pigeons gliding gracefully above our heads, with their long tails and broad wings, “they would no longer be extinct.”

Ruth-Ann caught her breath. “Can we?”

Dr. B sighed. “No. It’s a slippery slope. The photos and video will have to do. Maybe some future generation will be wiser than we are and they’ll figure out how to bring all the extinct animals back without destroying the fragile harmony of our modern-day ecosystem, but we’re far from ready.”

Munching on a cookie, I reflected again on how privileged I was to see the Psinomani village, the passenger pigeons, and all the other fourteenth-century surprises that awaited us. And I owed it all to Quinn. Not that I was happy about the situation, but if it hadn’t been for him, I would have been at my desk attending to everyday work matters. I had to admit to myself that I understood his motivations…at least partially. I just wished he had gone about things in a different way.

As we resumed walking, following the pigeons, I reached for another cookie. Nate, who had somewhat impatiently waited for the pigeon photo shoot to end, said from behind me, “You brought cookies, Julia? Haven’t you heard that it’s better to shop on the perimeter of the grocery store than in the middle? You know, where the fresh fruit and fish and milk are.”

Was he teasing me? That was very unlike him. Perhaps the sun was getting to him.

“I could hardly have brought fresh fish and milk with me. Besides, cookies are comfort food in my family. We don’t all have grandmothers who are gourmet cooks, you know.” In my family, pre-sliced white bread and peanut butter and jelly had counted as a treat for dinner. My parents had always been busy with work; chores like grocery shopping and cleaning were done on the weekends, if at all.

“You buy fancier stuff for fundraisers and other school occasions, I’ve noticed,” he said, falling into a stride next to me. “Goat cheese and grapes, bagels and lox, and whatnot.”

“Not to mention champagne. But the school pays for it, you know that. In the grocery store the stuff that’s in the middle of the store is cheaper and requires little actual cooking.”

“You wouldn’t put the cheapest, subpar gasoline into your car, why put subpar food into your body—”

I increased my pace so I could eat my cookies in peace.

“T
hose clouds are starting to concern me,” Ruth-Ann, who was carrying the paddles, said. I had one end of a kayak and Jacob had the other. Nate and Ron were carrying the second kayak, while Dr. B led the group, occasionally signaling us to adjust our route when she felt herself being slowed down by History’s constraints.

I glanced back. “Hmm, I hope it doesn’t rain.” Some grayish clouds, which had been hugging the ground to the east, deep in the prairieland, had started to rise skyward in our direction.

“Nothing our rain jackets can’t handle—” Nate said with a shrug, then stopped. Jacob bumped his end of the kayak into the small of Nate’s back.

“Oops, sorry, Chief Kirkland.”

Nate shaded his eyes with his hand and, with a frown, scanned the horizon.

Ruth-Ann said, “Rain clouds don’t billow up like that. It’s almost like—”

She didn’t finish her thought. In the minute or two we had been standing there, the clouds had broadened and were rising steadily in the previously blue sky. It struck me that they were spreading entirely too fast in the breezeless afternoon and were an odd shade of gray—smoky, charcoal-tinted, ashy.

Nate swore. “Those aren’t rain clouds—it’s smoke from a wildfire.”

As we all stood frozen to the spot, he added, “Though the smoke plumes are so uniform I could almost swear that someone started the fire intentionally…”

Ruth-Ann gasped. “Yes…the villagers might be hunting and want to drive bison or other game into the lake, or are clearing the land to discourage the growth of trees and underbrush so that fresh grass will grow for grazing—”

I wanted to hear more about it, but not at the moment. A pair of white-tailed deer—I couldn’t tell if they were the ones we had seen before—thundered past us and over the rise ahead. There was no mistaking the stench of burned grass and shrubs that followed them.

We had fallen into a ghost zone after all.

“Follow the animals,” Nate commanded. “Run!”

27

Like I said, Nate had experience with wildfires from his years in the Boundary Waters wilderness, by the border with Canada. Wanda the cocker spaniel was a constant reminder of that time, a string tied around his finger that said
Don’t trust too easily again
. Or not. He had probably chosen to keep the dog because he felt sorry for her after her owner went to jail.

Which was completely irrelevant at the moment, except for the experience with wildfires part, which was hugely relevant.

“This is what ghost zones are like, huh?” said Jacob, panting as we hurried along. Under the circumstances, I was glad to see that he seemed calm. It was a sign that he might be successful in leading his own research team a few years down the road. If we made it back.

We crested a rise, which gave an unnerving view of the burning prairie behind us. A jagged line of red-orange gobbled at the prairie grass with an eerie crackling that drifted in and out on the breeze. The nearing edge of the fire had not caught up with us yet, but its heat was creating a wind that drove the smoke and heat in our direction, making it hard to breathe.

We hurried downhill into a bowl-shaped depression. It had to be the only valley in the entire state without a lake. Nate swore again and turned to Dr. B. “Can we use the Slingshot?”

“You mean jump blindly, without running the necessary calculations? Not a good idea. We could end up someplace worse.”

“Worse than this?” Nate jerked his thumb in the direction of the fire.

In the depression, the air was not yet thick with smoke, but it soon would be. I could
taste
the fire, a gritty mouthful of ash and heat that made it hard to speak. I managed to get a few words out anyway. “Xavier had no problem using it to whisk us out of a ghost zone—”

“—and into another. I’m not Xavier Mooney. I won’t just hit a button and send us into the unknown. We could end up in the middle of the ocean, or some place even less survivable, like, I don’t know, outer space or something. I’d rather face a known danger.”

The others reluctantly nodded their agreement.

“Can we outrun the fire?” Ron asked.

“We can’t. It’s too late.” Nate already had a blanket out and was pouring our drinking water on it. Ruth-Ann pulled a blanket out of her own bag and did the same with Ron’s help.

Moving as quickly as we could, we found a rocky spot clear of vegetation and wedged our bodies into it. We covered ourselves with the wet blankets, hauled the kayaks over us, and hoped for the best.