Catherine Fisher: The Slanted Worlds

It might teach her how to destroy the mirror.

Too agitated to keep still, she turned and gazed down at the crowded court below. More tourists were queueing for coffee.

And, outside the bookshop, she saw a man. A big, stocky man, his hair neatly combed, his coat an old no-nonsense ex-army parka, his scarf the colors of Compton’s School.

Her eyes widened. “No! It can’t be!”

He was talking to an attendant and she breathed his name in a whisper of dismay.

“George Wharton!”

Jake’s tutor was unmistakable. But what was he doing here?

The attendant nodded, as if in answer to a question, and pointed up at the window. Wharton turned and looked. Before she could move, he saw her.

Their eyes met; a second of startled recognition.

Instantly he was running for the stairs.

Sarah jumped up so quickly the magnifier slid over with a thud. She snatched her bag, grabbed her coat, and raced for the door.

“I’m so sorry! Emergency! Just realized. Have to go!”

“What about the papers!”

“I’ll be back!”

Shrugging into the coat she ran out, turned left in the corridor and then right, found the stairs and raced down them, praying desperately Wharton wasn’t thundering up. She had to get out. H ow on earth had he known where she was?

Since leaving Wintercombe on Christmas night, she had kept herself hidden in London. There was no way they could have found her . . . it must be sheer coincidence . . .

Unless he had been looking for Mortimer Dee’s papers too.

She stopped. Far down the stairwell heavy footsteps were thundering up. She glanced over the rail.

“Sarah!”

He was a flight down. His face was lit with satisfaction. “I knew it was you!”

She turned, hit a door marked Fire Exit and crashed it open, bursting into a huge echoing space packed with people. Colossal Egyptian statues frowned down at her; she ran between gods with crocodile heads and jackal faces into a gallery so jammed with excited and chattering schoolchildren she had to fight her way between their small warm bodies.

She glanced back.

Wharton was at the door. Over the heads of a class in green blazers he yelled, “Wait! Sarah! Wait!”

She twisted away, shoved on, muttering “Sorry . . . Excuse me . . . Sorry . . .” getting caught in photos, bumping into tourists deafened with audio guides.

Plate glass stopped her, a wall of it. She almost slammed against it, spread her hands and saw, beyond it, the mummies.

They lay on their backs in gaudily painted cases, blind eyes staring upward, their shrunken desiccated bodies wrapped in tight bands of ancient linen. For a fatal second she stopped, staring in awe, because these were travelers from a time so distant she had no words for it, fragile journeymen her father would have loved to have seen, treasures that, despite their dreams, had never made it to the world’s end.

Then, over their painted stillness, Wharton faced her.

The crowd hemmed her in; there was nowhere to run.

He yelled something, his breath misted the glass.

Furious, she shook her head. “Leave me alone!”

He found space; he shoved people aside, powering his way around the mummy case toward her. She stepped on someone’s foot, wriggled out, found a wall, a fire alarm. Her hand shot out to the small glass disc.

She hit his fleshy palm instead.

“That would be a really foolish thing to do, Sarah,” he gasped. “And not at all like you.”

She was sweating. Her hair was in her eyes. She felt as if some long wearying effort, some exile had come to an end.

“No,” she said. And then, “You know, George, I’m really tired.”

He could see that. As she sat in the café drinking the tea he had insisted on buying her, he thought she looked thin and worn, her eyes red-rimmed, her blond hair lank. Hungry too, if the way she demolished the egg mayo sandwiches meant anything.

For a while he let her eat. Then he said, “Where have you been living?”

“A hostel.”

“Student?”

“Homeless.”

He stared. “Sarah, why . . .”

She swallowed a mouthful. “I’m stuck here now. In this time. I have to find a way to destroy the mirror, and that’s the last thing Venn wants. How can I go back to Wintercombe . . .”

“He wants you back. He’s been searching for you.”

That was an understatement. As he watched her sip hot tea, Wharton thought of the night, four months ago nearly, when she had slipped, invisible, from the window at Wintercombe Abbey and walked off into the night, leaving behind only her footprints in the snow and those last, astonishing words.

Now he said, “Did you think Venn wouldn’t move heaven and earth to find you? You told him you were . . . would be . . . his granddaughter . Even though his wife is dead and he has no children. You tell him that not only is it possible for him to change the past, but that in your time he’s already done it! And then you disappear!” He shrugged, and sipped his coffee. “Come on, Sarah. Even for a normal man that would be unbearable. For Oberon Venn, it was like the descent into madness.”

She nodded. He realized he didn’t have to tell her that Venn had had his strange servant, Piers, virtually chained to the computer, spending every waking second combing every missing persons database, every police record he could hack into, phoning every hospital for miles around for news of her. She was far too intelligent. Nor could he, Wharton, even begin to express the utter relief he had felt seeing her pale astonished face up at the window. Because there was no way they could let her destroy the mirror.

Not now.

“You have to come back with me,” he said.

She stirred her tea, put the spoon down with a clink, stared at him over it. “No, I don’t. And you can’t make me. Nothing you can say will make me.”

“Sarah . . .”

“I have work to do here! All Venn thinks about is getting Leah back from the dead. I can’t help him with that. That’s his problem. I suppose he’s been working at the mirror . . .”

“Nonstop. And Jake . . .”

“Yes, well, Jake needs to find his father. They both want opposite things to me. Selfish things! I have to destroy the mirror, and that means destroying their hopes. Destroying my own existence. We’re on opposite sides, George . . .”

“There are no sides. We need you.”

“You don’t. Just leave me alone.”

She gathered her coat and stood, but he put one firm hand out across the table and grabbed her wrist in an iron grip.

“Listen to me. Venn is desperate to recover Leah, but he dare not try yet. To be honest, I don’t think he could cope with failure. He needs to be ready. He needs Jake’s father, David. So Jake persuaded him to go after David first. Three weeks ago Jake entered the mirror. It was all planned. Piers was sure it would be safe. I was totally against it, but none of them listen to me, least of all my arrogant little brat of a so-called pupil. He insisted on being sent to the 1960s, because David had been there—remember the photograph? But the mirror, Sarah, it’s so unpredictable. The damn thing seems to work by emotion as much as anything . . .” He shook his head.

Slowly, she sat down again, seeing all at once the sickening worry in his eyes.

“What? What happened?”

“You’ve guessed. He hasn’t come back. He’s lost, just as his father was lost. And the bracelet with him.”

“But . . .”

“It’s worse than that. Venn is desperate. So desperate that he’s going to do the unthinkable. He’s going to ask Summer for help.”