Lockstep

Sixteen

THE LUXURY AIRCAR WAS whisper quiet, and this made it awkwardly obvious that nobody was talking. Outside the tinted windows, the sky suddenly went bloodred, as if to reinforce Toby’s mood.

During all the bowing and speechifying in front of the Keishions’ house, Toby had spotted Halen lurking about on the edge of the delegation. Toby had ignored the bowing multitude and walked up to Corva’s brother.

“You just had to tell them, didn’t you? You just couldn’t wait for me to make up my own mind what to do. You had to force my hand.” Nobody else but the immediate family had known his identity—except for Shylif and Jaysir. Somehow, Toby hadn’t doubted for a second that it was Halen who’d told the government.

He didn’t even try to deny it, simply stepped back and shrugged. “I told them, yes, but they’d promised to leave you alone.”

“This is leaving me alone?” Toby swept an arm to show the massed army and the groveling politicians.

“I know,” said Halen. “But something’s changed.”

Toby glowered out the aircar window now, thinking furiously about what to do. Halen’s betrayal was trivial—and maybe justified—given what he’d told Toby next.

Evayne was on her way to Thisbe. And according to the government telescopes, she was bringing a whole fleet.

“Where are we going?” he demanded of the senior government official who sat opposite him.

“It’s a place called Leaning Pines,” she said brightly. “It’s a resort. It’s the best environment we could find. I hope you like it.”

“Like it? What am I supposed to like about any of this?” He glared at her, then Halen, who sat next to her; then he felt Corva’s hand on his arm.

She leaned in close and whispered, “Can’t you see she’s terrified?”

Toby blinked and suddenly got it: these ministers and representatives, seated chatting but glancing at him every few seconds—they weren’t escorting him as a prisoner, much less a guest. Toby was a McGonigal; they were all his guests, for Thisbe was his world. They were desperate to make a good impression on an absentee landlord unexpectedly making an inspection.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the woman, who smiled uncertainly. Equally uncertain, he stuck out his hand. “I’m Toby.”

Her face held wonder as she let him shake her limp fingers. “Calastrina de Fanto Esperion,” she said. “Appointed proxy of Demographic Twelve of the Great Byte.” The Byte, Toby had learned, was Thisbe’s C-shaped southern continent. That made Esperion the representative of about six hundred million people.

“Appointed proxy?” He’d worn his glasses and could do a search on what she’d just said, but these people knew who he was and would expect his ignorance. “Not elected?”

To his surprise, Esperion blushed. “I’m a proxy, not a representative. I didn’t want the appointment, but it turns out that I vote, mod, and buy exactly like about fifty million other people. I can be relied on to think and vote the way they would if they were in the council. At least until I get jaded or compromised. I’m only here for another year,” she added, as though apologizing.

So this place was based on one of the demarchy models. He probably should have studied local politics earlier, but for a change his mind had been on the bigger picture—the whole history of the locksteps and the place of the McGonigals in them. He looked out the window and sighed, a little ruefully.

They circled a long, sinuous mountain lake. A collection of truly huge tents lay tumbled across one end of it. “The resort,” Corva said, when she saw where he was looking. “They keep it boxed while we winter over and rebuild it every time. The landscape changes too much for a permanent installation.”

“It’s pretty.” The curving sheets of tenting were colored in a whole rainbow of tones.

Corva was very close to him; he could almost feel the heat of her skin on his cheek. “Toby?” she said quietly. “Why did you insist that I come?”

Again he sighed. “Because you’re the only person who knows who I am and isn’t afraid of me. —well, except for Shylif and Jaysir, maybe.”

She laughed and sat back. “And Orpheus.” But she seemed pleased with his explanation.

They landed on a gravel beach next to a cold lake—but a real lake, under a real sky, even if that sky was fluorescent green right now. Toby had brought Orpheus with him, and together they crunched down to the edge of the water, distracted by its reality and beauty. The air was crisp and cold.

“M-Mister McGonigal?”

He turned to find Corva hiding a smile, and past her a half circle of dignitaries were waiting patiently for him to get over the view. Halen was frowning, his arms crossed, but Toby could tell he was excited, too. Well, this was what he’d wanted.

“Okay,” he said, walking back up the beach to stand next to Corva.

“What can I do for you?”

“YES,” HE ADMITTED A few hours later. “I can override every cicada bed on the planet.”

They sat at a huge curving oak table inside a vaulted hall with translucent sides. There was wine and coffee and sweets, and for a very long time now Toby had sat listening to one after another local governmental official give speeches in his honor.

He’d used much of the time to refocus his eyes inside his glasses’ view; he’d been learning how the Thisbe government worked and who these people he was sitting with were. About half the ministers consisted of professional politicians, the rest being made up of randomly chosen citizens like Esperion. To qualify for sortition you had to be a high-ranking player in one of a number of different political or economic games; Esperion must be very good indeed. About half of them were really here—the rest were represented by their avatars. There were political parties, but they were ad hoc and lasted for only one sitting session, which was four years. During that time, the ministers ran sophisticated simulations based on their own or their constituents’ biases and beliefs, and tried to enlist support for initiatives based on the results. Even then, there were no direct votes; the ministers played matching games of the would-fixing-A-improve-B-would-fixing-B-improve-A sort.

All of this was familiar to Toby, because he and Peter had explored these possibilities. The plan was that Sedna would eventually become a full-fledged nation, and Father had emphasized that it would need a well-designed government. This was a major reason their parents had tolerated the many hours Toby and Peter spent in Consensus.

Now, having admitted he could directly control Thisbe’s frequency, Toby tried to gauge the reaction among the politicians. They were all stone-faced or smiling, of course; luckily the political translation layer they’d given him provided a different view through his glasses. Some of the politicos were literally turning green—not with envy but with approval, which subtitles translated in various ways: that fellow over there was happy that Toby was telling the truth, while the woman to the left of him had just had her worst predictions confirmed. Other ministers were yellow, still others crimson, and several had turned black, apparently signifying that they were not psychoculturally capable of actually absorbing the meaning of what he’d just said.

Above them all, the interface was showing a disklike balance-of-power meter, which was currently tilting around like a top. Everything was in play, apparently.

This was all amazing and showed how far government had come since his day. To Toby, though, it just confirmed something that had been obvious since the day he awoke here: the whole Consensus plan had been flawed.

Thisbe could organize its government however it wanted. It didn’t matter, if private individuals like the McGonigals controlled just one critical utility. On Thisbe, they controlled time itself.

“I can change the lockstep frequency,” he continued once the power meter had stabilized a bit. “But I can’t give the power to do that to anyone else. It’s locked to me, somehow.”

They all nodded politely, and orderly waves of change moved through the political model—except that somebody somewhere said sarcastically, “That’s convenient.”

Toby looked for whoever had spoken. Finally, somebody who wasn’t going to be creepily polite! “Probably designed to keep us alive,” he said. “Otherwise, you could torture me into giving you superuser status, then kill me.” Or you could just neuroshackle me. He really hoped they wouldn’t think of that.

“Sound planning.” The speaker was an elderly gentleman with a flat face and high cheekbones, and a dry, sardonic voice. Through the glasses, he appeared amber-colored right now, and his subtitle read LONG SEVILLE, MINISTER OF SECURITY.

“Look, I’d give you all superuser access if I could,” said Toby. “This isn’t where I want to be right now. I just want to get to Destrier and find my mom…”

The entire assembly had turned black and red and green, except for a couple of amber holdouts. One was Long Seville.

Toby appealed to him. “What did I say?”

The old man sighed and sat back, crossing his arms. “You, the Emperor of Time, just announced that you intend to fulfill the ancient prophecy by throwing open the gates of Time itself and awakening the Mother of All. What did you expect to happen?”

“It’s my family,” he said sullenly. “I just want to be reunited with them.”

The old man gestured, and an icon next to his head signaled that he’d turned off his augmented reality implants. Toby frowned, then took off his own glasses. Freed from the intricate political interface, they were now just two people seated at a table. Everybody else was talking, gesturing, looking around inside a shared virtual space. It was as if Toby and this minister were in their own little bubble of reality.

“Not supposed to do this,” Long said, holding up the glasses, “but you’re obviously new to our way of doing things. Listen, kid, most of the room didn’t even hear what you just said, because their translation systems couldn’t figure out a way to have it make sense in their worldview. Thisbe’s a pretty sophisticated world, but everybody here was still raised on the myths and legends about you. For the most part these people don’t believe them, but you just said they were true! What you have to do now is back up and start over, only this time, please try to avoid pushing any religious buttons, would you?”

They put their glasses back on and Toby said, “What I meant was … I don’t want to run the lockstep. Everybody has these ideas about what I’m going to do now that I’m back, but nobody’s thought to consult me about them.”

This got through, largely. Encouraged, he continued, “I know my brother changed your frequency. That was wrong, and I’ll talk to him about it when I see him. I’ll reset it for you.” He turned to smile at Corva, who was watching him stone-faced. “All I ask in return is a little help with…” Was there any way he could say “being reunited with my family” without pressing those “religious buttons”?

“… with settling into my new life.”

They heard that. The interface’s feedback layer flooded him with restatements of his own words: he knew what he’d just said; now the interface was telling him what each minister had heard—what the words he’d said meant to them after being filtered through their stated expectations and hopes, known prejudices and biases, cognitive deficits, and so on. The interface proposed a set of rewordings that it thought would custom-translate his meaning for them, but it was a bewildering jumble that he had no time to review. He signaled yes to it and the rewordings went out.

This politics stuff was harder than it had seemed in Consensus. It still came down to one thing, though. They were haggling.

“Look, I was told Evayne’s on her way here, but then everybody clammed up about it. I need to know. Is she coming? When’s she going to get here? Can I meet with her? Or is that … a bad idea?”

Some of this got through. The political interface swirled through a whole spectrum of colors and the balance of power tipped and swung for a few seconds. Translations and interpretations flew back and forth, and then the whole room stabilized green.

Long Seville nodded and stood up. “Can we get a … yes, thanks,” he added as a set of windows opened in the interface. They were all dark, but if Toby squinted he could make out little points of light in one.

“This,” said Long, “is a telescope view into Sagittarius. Those bright stars there aren’t stars. They’re the engine flares of a whole fleet of ships. They’re aiming for a full stop at Thisbe, and there’s little doubt who’s leading them.”

Toby was unconvinced; he supposed he was giving off subtle body stance and facial cues that would make him look amber right now. “How do you know it’s her?”

“Because we’d been tracking these dots. They were on their way to Wallop, but they changed course right about the time you left.”

“Ah. How many ships?”

“A hundred forty.”

They couldn’t be that big, individually … but still, each one could have the nuclear power to wipe out a few cities.

Toby stared at the display. He, Peter and Evayne had deployed fleets like this in Consensus many times. Of course, that had been a fantasy world of faster-than-light travel. Still, he remembered Evayne’s attitude toward military solutions. She’d never hesitated.

Long was talking, but Toby wasn’t listening anymore. He was remembering how they’d divided empires among them and how passionate Peter had been about the game. It wasn’t a game to him, it was his lifeline, his only route to feeling secure about the world.

Redesign it. Make it perfect. Then make sure it stayed that way.

Evayne had been too young to understand Peter’s passion, but she’d certainly picked up on it. And now? They both ruled a real empire, and they’d been doing it for decades. It wasn’t a game anymore, the stakes were real, and the one person in the world who could destroy everything they had built had just reappeared.

For the first time Toby got it—he understood how Evayne could really be on her way here to kill him. All he had to do was stop imagining the Evayne he’d known, the little girl, and imagine an older woman whose childhood was a blur now and whose reality was rulership.

His mouth dry, he said, “How does this work?”

People had been talking, but his words stopped everyone.

“What does she do when she gets here?”

Long cleared his throat. “We’ll be wintering over. The whole world will be hibernating, at least all the McGonigal beds will be. Normally ships arrive at different times, and they all go dormant until start-of-turn. But in a case like this … you want to be awake first. So they’ll take action as soon as they arrive.”

“What action?”

He looked uncomfortable. “Land in force, wake us up and demand that we turn you over.”

Toby nodded slowly. Advantage went to whoever woke first. “Can you just stay awake until she gets here?”

“We can leave a military force awake, but it’ll cost us. We could also set the force to wake up a month before she arrives. We’ve got a lot of non-McGonigal cicada beds, but not enough yet for a real defense. Either way, it ends in a confrontation, and she can threaten millions of innocent lives. Most of the population will be wintering over, so they’ll be helpless.”

“Not if I wake everybody,” said Toby.

“Exactly.”

“And we know when she’s going to get here?”

“We know the earliest date she can arrive, yes.”

The tables would be turned if all of Thisbe was awake and ready when Evayne arrived. She had to know that, but she was coming anyway, and that made Toby uneasy. Did she really want to kill him? If not, then why bring a whole fleet with her? It made no sense.

He looked around the room, and his gaze fell upon Halen Keishion. Corva’s brother was watching him in return, and he had a smile on his face that could only be described as smug.

There would be no more doubts about who he was if he changed Thisbe’s frequency. Only a McGonigal could do that. There might be rumors and leaks coming from the Thisbe government now, but if he repelled Evayne word would spread instantly through the lockstep. People would wake at the next turn to the news that the Emperor of Time was returned. Sooner or later he would go to Destrier and wake up the Great Mother. And then time—or at least lockstep time—would come to an end.

There was going to be panic and mass hysteria. Millions would flock to Toby’s side, believing that somehow they would be saved by him. Others would side with Peter and Evayne, especially if they abandoned the myth and revealed the truth that Toby was just an ordinary person. There would be chaos and civil war if Thisbe didn’t give Toby to Evayne.

Halen knew this. He’d planned for it.

And he was smiling.

TOBY HAD BEEN BOMBARDED with options, proposals, and facts and details for days now. On the third afternoon, mentally overloaded, he managed to break away from the crush of subdued but frantic officials for a few minutes. He hunkered down on his haunches to toss pebbles into the cold lake.

“How am I supposed to know what to do?” he asked. “There’s just too much to take in.”

“I disagree.” It was Sol, invisible but audible through the earpiece in Toby’s glasses. About halfway through the day of meetings, Toby’d had the brilliant idea of waking his two remaining Consensus characters. Sol and Miranda had been listening in since then, but until this moment they’d been silent.

“What do you mean?” He picked up another smooth pebble and gave it a toss that he hoped would skip it. It sank immediately.

“Before all of this happened, you were following where your own research took you.” Now it was Miranda, speaking in his other ear while Toby groped for another pebble. “You’ve been reviewing the records from the twentier. But they’re not the only source available to you, you know.”

“Huh. I guess.” Summoning the courage to watch the twentier’s records had been exhausting. Because of how difficult those had been, he’d been holding off exploring the other aspect of lockstep life that had made him most uneasy. Obviously, he was out of time with that one.

“Show me Destrier,” he told the glasses.

As always, the amount of information on offer was overwhelming, so Toby had learned to start with kids’ picture books. He found one in the Thisbe Internet and flipped to a page captioned THE GRAND PROCESSIONAL.

In the picture, a sea of pilgrims—he recognized the robes he’d seen at the pilgrimage center on Wallop—were caught midshuffle as they moved down a vast, seemingly endless avenue. The scene was lit by a dozen or so little suns, probably orbital light platforms.

The stones of this grand avenue were worn into smooth grooves by millennia of sliding feet. According to the book, they were replaced every few centuries. The stones of the pyramidal towers that lined the avenue were also replaced on a rotating schedule, such that out here, at least, nothing of the original building material remained. The holy city renewed itself like a living body, shedding cells continuously. —Maybe, but everywhere Toby looked, the surfaces were smoothed and sculpted into natural-looking contours. It was uncanny, as if by wind and rain Nature had sculpted something that looked like a city yet was entirely natural.

The book proudly told how this shuffling procession had been inching forward, reciting one particular chant without pause, for over ten thousand years. Supplicants from all over the galaxy came here; not all were human. They gave up fortunes, families, entire lives to endure decades, even centuries of travel, simply for the chance to put on a coarse robe and parade, just once, down this avenue. Some fainted on the way and others died—just for the opportunity to spend a few precious minutes in the presence of the divine.

The domes of the city looked out on a plain of dazzling white frost dotted with towering spires. It was illegal to walk there, and to the discerning eye that plain should have been far more awe-inspiring than this little road. Those spires had stood, unmoved and unchanging, for eight billion years. Next to that, the centuries of wear and tear visible around the Great Mother’s resting place were nothing. Less than an eyeblink.

Sol and Miranda were reading along with Toby as he flipped through the book. “It says here,” said Sol, “that all of Destrier experienced time within the 360/1 lockstep, except for the domes in these pictures. They’re in realtime.”

“So those people there…” Miranda’s forearm and finger appeared in Toby’s virtual view as she pointed to a bald-headed man in one of the shots. “His family’s been helping pilgrims into their robes for hundreds of generations.”

“Wow,” muttered Sol. “So if we took the whole of written human history up until the day Toby first set foot on Sedna, this city’s records are five times longer.”

“It’s got its own languages, its own cuisine and modes of dress,” said Miranda. “But the only reason the city exists at all is to guide visitors to the place where they can—how does it put it here?—‘glimpse the Great Mother resting forever in her crystal coffin.’”

“Quiet now,” Toby told them.

The only photos of his mother’s resting place were long shots taken from at least a kilometer away. Way over there, the procession entered a ramped slot that led down below the vast oval dome covering Mom’s cicada bed. They would shuffle into a narrow chamber containing a single quartz window, through which the blurry shape of the Great Mother could be seen. From here, the dome appeared more like a rounded hill, though it was scrupulously kept clean of vegetation by the same hereditary keepers who served the pilgrims. The dome hadn’t eroded, really, it had just settled gradually and imperceptibly over the centuries, even while the spires that surrounded it were fervently rebuilt.

The landscape beyond the city might well be impossibly old compared to this place, yet Toby had never in his life seen a place that felt as ancient as this.

And this, of course, was the point. This was the gift that Evayne and Peter had bestowed upon humankind: the gift of permanence.

History roared ahead on the lit worlds. Civilizations rose, but they fell, too, and maintaining one at a starfaring level was very difficult. On the worlds circling the stars of the Local Group, humanity and its various offspring had fallen many times in the past fourteen thousand years. Every time it did, the locksteps had been waiting, ready to pick it up again.

Toby got it now. 360/1 and its siblings were like a seed bank; they were insurance. They lived so slowly and were so dispersed that they were ignored. Yet they were always there, had always been there, and, as long as Evayne and Peter had their say, always would be there.

He took off the glasses, once again finding himself squatting by the cold lake. Reaching to pick up another round stone, he hesitated, unable to complete the gesture without wondering just how old this little rock was. “Shit!”

“I beg your pardon?”

Corva stood next to him, hands on her hips, head cocked quizzically.

“Sorry. I was … thinking.”

“Out here? You’ll catch one of those ancient diseases. Influenza. Or scrapie or something.”

“They don’t work that way.” Then he held out his hand. “Wanna walk with me?”

He saw her nearly glance over her shoulder, then think better. She took his hand and they scrunched through the wet gravel. The pink clouds stuttered and turned gray, and as his eyes adjusted, everything slowly washed into normality. He could be on Earth for all he knew.

“Are you feeling all right?”

He shrugged. “I’m okay. They want me back in ten minutes.”

“But you’ve been negotiating for three days! When is this going to end?”

“Soon,” he said curtly. The government had been making offers, and they’d been running vastly detailed simulations covering all sorts of plans. In some, Evayne somehow got past the orbital defenses and rained down fire from orbit. In those cases, the government admitted it would have to give Toby up without firing a shot in return, in order to save its own people. The simulated Evayne played much like he remembered her doing in Consensus. She rarely chose such a brutally direct option. More often, based on Thisbe’s historical records, she would land and seek to capture her target personally.

Toby was not her first Toby, apparently. There had been many pretenders over the ages, all claiming to be the returned messiah. Some had raised huge armies, but none had been able to crack the biocrypto. They couldn’t prove who they were. None had made it to Destrier, though the more deluded—those who truly believed they were Toby Wyatt McGonigal—swore that if only they were given the chance to lay their palm on the circular lock to the Great Mother’s chamber, they would prove who they really were.

Evayne usually left them to the Guides, but in particularly troublesome cases she would intervene directly. So far the sims showed her behaving exactly as she had in those cases.

Last night, Toby had sat with Corva in front of a fire under the vast peaked roof of the tent house they’d given him. He’d dared to say to her then what he couldn’t say to Halen and the other angry opponents of the McGonigals: “Maybe she doesn’t know it’s really me.”

Corva hadn’t replied. They’d been sitting close together but not touching. They hadn’t kissed since that first time before the last wintering over. He hoped it was because events were just rampaging ahead too fast; there were always people about. They hadn’t had a chance to talk about it and, well, he felt awkward.

Her silence now had seemed like a blow, though. He’d wanted her to agree. He wanted somebody to tell him his sister wasn’t a monster. But it hadn’t happened.

Now, holding her hand on the cold beach, he glanced at Corva and had to smile. Under her black bangs, her face was fierce with concentration. Thinking, always thinking, that was her. She didn’t know the first thing about rendering sympathy, but that didn’t mean she didn’t care how he felt.

Suddenly she looked up. “Where were you, just now?”

“I was visiting Destrier.”

She shuddered and let go of his hand. “That place is creepy. I can’t believe you want to … I mean, I know why, it’s just that…”

“Nobody’s more creeped out than me. But it’s not some weird goddess they’ve got under glass there. It’s my mom.”

“Not just your mom.”

“Just my mom.” When she sent him one of her skeptical looks, he growled. “Corva, she’s slept almost as long as I have. She doesn’t know that Evayne made her into the Great Mother, any more than I knew I was this stupid Emperor of Time! The world’s not going to end when she wakes up. She’s not going to make some mystical pronouncement that will change history. She’s going to…” Ask where her children are.

That, of course, was where Toby got the creeps. It wasn’t those millions of worshipers lapping against the sides of Mother’s stone dome that bothered him. It was the question of what he would have to say when he woke her:

“Why did you abandon Peter and Evayne to wait for me?”

What she’d done was wrong, it was sick. He’d been dead, as far as any of them had known. Why would she entomb herself to wait for a child who would never come home?

Corva sensed his discomfort and shrugged. “I don’t know how you’d even get there,” she said lightly. “Destrier’s better defended than Barsoom. If Evayne and Peter don’t want you there, you’d need an army and a navy as big as the whole lockstep’s just to knock on the front door.”

“Yes, well, talk to your brother about that,” he said. “He’s figured out how to get one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come,” he said, “I’ll show you.” He began walking back up the beach.

“We’ve been running sims for two days now.” He waved to one of the bots that stood near the largest tent complex, and it waved back. “In a situation like this it’s all about who can strike first. Evayne’s hoping to get here while we’re all asleep. If I’m not the real Toby, then she’s certain to be able to, because she’s going to arrive in seven months, realtime. We’ll be wintering over.”

Aircars had been landing all morning in the fields behind the tents. There were crowds of people everywhere, of course; the whole resort was crammed with ministers, analysts, and spin doctors. Corva might not have noticed the new arrivals yet.

“Either way,” he went on, “she has to catch us napping to get the upper hand. The government wants me to wake the whole planet just as she arrives—when she’s committed to landing her people but before she can consolidate her position. Then we’ll ask her to stand down.”

Corva shook her head violently, tossing beads of dew from her black mane. “You know I hate that idea. We should just run. We escaped her at Wallop.”

“Those sims don’t work, Corva. Any ship leaving Thisbe is going to blaze like a star. It’ll be easy to track. —Not that we shouldn’t send out a few decoys anyway. She’ll have to split off a few ships to follow them. But all of them will be caught.”

There was a mumbling murmur coming from up ahead, where the largest of the vaulting tent structures stood. Toby headed in that direction.

He grimaced and ran a hand through his hair. “Anyway, what happens after we’ve had our showdown with Evayne? I’ve promised to restore Thisbe’s frequency, but as soon as I do that, the whole lockstep will know I’m back.”

“No no!” She stepped in front of him, putting a hand on his chest. “All we have to do is say it was Evayne who did it, while she was here! What’s she gonna do, deny it? It’s perfect!”

“And then what? She’ll be watching Thisbe, searching every ship that leaves. Even if we drive her away this time, she’ll just return with a bigger force.”

“Unless we defeat her and then escape.”

“She’ll just keep searching for us, wherever we go.” He gently took her hand and started walking again.

“There’s only one answer to that what-happens-next? question,” he said as he mounted the concrete platform where the edges of the giant tent were fixed. The murmuring was loud now, and Corva heard it. She snatched back her hand and stepped away from Toby, but only now did she see that the two of them weren’t alone anymore: a half circle of men and women stood silently on the path behind them, along with some McGonigal lockstep security bots. Hands clutched under her chin, sneaking looks left and right and behind her, Corva reluctantly followed Toby as he strode toward a sweep of tenting that formed a kind of archway.

“Don’t worry,” said Toby as he stepped into the dim space beyond, “there is another way.”

A spotlight pinioned them there, and within the vast space of the tent, a thousand people gasped and murmured and, just as the government ministers had done in front of Corva’s house, all bent their heads and knelt before the Emperor of Time.

He turned to reassure Corva further, but the look on her face froze him. He would never forget it.

“McGonigal!” Corva threw down the word like a curse.

Then she turned and ran.