When Tomorrow Went Silent

The first thing they taught us before temporal deployment was never to confuse knowing history with being prepared to live inside it, which was one of those sentences instructors liked to repeat because it sounded profound in a lecture hall with filtered air, clean water, warm lighting and a toilet twenty steps down the corridor, and I had always nodded along politely while privately believing that, unlike half the recruits around me, I actually did understand what I was walking into, because I had spent six years studying fourteenth-century England, three years concentrating almost entirely on the Black Death, and the better part of my adult life examining one particularly strange archaeological site whose existence had become something of an obsession. Alder Wood Manor, or what remained of it by the time we excavated the foundations in 2187, should have been nothing more than another minor rural household swallowed by the mortality of 1349, yet the evidence suggested precisely the opposite, because while neighboring settlements suffered catastrophic losses, the burial ground associated with Alder Wood contained surprisingly few plague victims, its wells and spring channels had been protected in ways almost unheard of for the period, the latrines had been deliberately moved downhill and unusually far from the water supply, several rooms appeared to have been converted into some sort of isolation quarters, and the household records that survived in later copies referred repeatedly to a community composed almost entirely of women. There were stranger details still, including traces of unfamiliar metals, a fragment of synthetic material nobody could explain, and two separate ecclesiastical references to the women beyond Alder Wood , whose household had apparently become wealthy enough to survive well beyond the plague years while remaining sufficiently unusual that local priests, travelers and tax collectors could not agree on who these women actually were, where they had come from, or why so many widows, unmarried women and displaced girls seemed eventually to find their way there. My assignment sounded simple when explained from the safety of the twenty-second century: arrive in early 1349, observe the estate before its transformation, identify whoever created the sanctuary, remain invisible to history, and return seventy-two hours later with enough information to explain what archaeology could not. Instead, on my fourth night in medieval England, I was lying beneath an overturned cart in a muddy roadside ditch while three armed men searched for me on the road above, my left ankle swelling inside a boot I could no longer put weight on, my primary temporal beacon crushed beneath the cart when I had thrown myself out of sight, and the smell of a dead horse drifting through the rain from somewhere farther down the lane. That was when I decided that scholarly detachment had probably reached its practical limit. I pulled the emergency transmitter from beneath my cloak, unfolded the tiny antenna under the shelter of the cart, waited until the green indicator stopped flickering, and whispered, “Field Agent Hart, temporal coordinate thirteen-forty-nine, Yorkshire sector seven, primary extraction beacon destroyed, secondary anchor unstable, plague activity confirmed throughout the operational area,” before swallowing hard and adding the words no field historian wanted preserved permanently in her service record. “SOS. Field agent stranded. Immediate retrieval required.” For several seconds there was nothing but static, rain tapping against wood and the distant murmur of men who were still deciding whether the woman they had seen on the road was worth finding, and then a female voice cut through the interference so clearly that relief almost made me laugh. “Evelyn Hart?” “Yes.” “What happened?” I looked at the broken wheel inches from my face and whispered, “At the moment, I am under a cart.” There was a pause long enough for me to imagine the expression on the other woman's face. “Why are you under a cart?” “Because there are three men looking for me and they have swords.” “Are you armed?” “Yes.” “Then why are you under the cart?” “Because shooting three fourteenth-century men with a twenty-second-century pulse weapon would complicate my observational neutrality.” The woman on the other end exhaled slowly before saying, “My name is Commander Mara Voss, temporal retrieval division, and I am going to tell you something very important, Hart: stay exactly where you are, do not move, do not interfere with anyone else, do not rescue anyone, do not become a healer, saint, witch, noblewoman, prophetess or local legend, and if history gives you an opportunity to remain completely uninteresting for the next twenty-three minutes, take it.” Despite everything, I smiled. “How long did you say?” “Twenty-three minutes.” “There are men thirty feet away.” “Then spend twenty-three minutes being historically insignificant.” Mara arrived twenty-one minutes later without thunder, light or anything remotely cinematic, because temporal insertion was disappointingly subtle when done correctly, and one moment the rain-darkened field beyond the hedgerow was empty while the next a tall woman in a rough brown traveling cloak was crossing it toward me with the calm, purposeful stride of someone who had apparently decided that medieval England was merely another inconvenient worksite. My first thought was that she was taller than I expected. My second was that she looked furious. She waited until the men had moved farther down the road before sliding into the ditch beside me, and after examining my ankle with a compact scanner concealed inside a leather pouch, checking the ruined beacon and watching the secondary anchor flash warnings in a sequence neither of us liked, she sat back on her heels and said, “You broke both of them.” “I broke one of them.” “The secondary is functioning at twelve percent.” “I didn't break that.” “It arrived with ninety-seven.” “Well, medieval England has been very hard on our equipment.” She looked at me for several seconds, and I discovered that sarcasm could apparently be expressed entirely through eye contact. “You're Hart.” “You already knew that.” “I wanted to see whether you would admit it.” I laughed, which turned out to be the first mistake I made with Mara Voss, because the corner of her mouth moved in a way that suggested she was trying not to smile, and once I had seen that softer version of her it became considerably more difficult to be properly intimidated. She packed away the scanner and said, “Sprain, not a fracture, which means you can walk if necessary, and according to the corridor forecast we have an extraction opportunity shortly after dawn, so we remain hidden until then and leave.” “I can't.” Mara stopped moving. “You sent an SOS.” “I know.” “I crossed seven hundred years to answer it.” “I appreciate that.” “That sounds dangerously like the beginning of an argument.” “It probably is.” I pushed myself upright against the cart and explained that Alder Wood already existed, but not as the archaeological site I knew, because the spring remained unprotected, the drainage system had not been built, the isolation rooms showed no sign of having been converted, and whatever event transformed an ordinary minor manor into the impossible sanctuary I had studied for years apparently had not happened yet. Mara listened until I finished, then pulled her hood farther over her head and said, “Interesting.” I felt encouraged until she added, “We are still leaving.” “Mara—” “No.” “You don't even know what I was going to say.” “You were going to ask for more time, and because I am a retrieval officer rather than a historian, I possess the unusual ability to understand that an emergency extraction means extraction.” “I need forty-eight hours.” “You have six.” “One day.” “Six.” “Twelve hours.” “Evelyn.” “Mara.” She leaned closer, rain running from the edge of her hood. “You are standing in the middle of one of the most lethal disease outbreaks in European history with a damaged temporal anchor, an injured ankle and three armed men already curious about you, so whatever mysterious medieval household you intended to study can remain mysterious for another seven centuries.” I smiled at her. She narrowed her eyes. “Welcome to 1349,” I said. The words she muttered in response were not historically appropriate. The extraction window failed before sunrise. I feel compelled to make that clear because Mara accused me of looking pleased when the portable anchor refused to synchronize, and while there may have been a certain academic excitement in discovering that I would have more time, I was not pleased about being stranded in plague-ridden England with deteriorating technology and a woman who already suspected that I regarded catastrophe as an opportunity for additional fieldwork. Temporal operations eventually broke through the interference long enough to tell us that the next stable corridor would not open for at least forty-eight hours, perhaps longer, and after Mara finished demanding explanations from someone who clearly did not have them, she switched off the communicator and stared at me. “Do not smile.” “I am not smiling.” “You are glowing.” “I do not glow.” “You are historically delighted.” “I am concerned.” “You are practically radiant with concern.” We reached Alder Wood shortly after dawn. Calling the place a manor suggested a level of grandeur it no longer possessed, because the owner had died, several servants had already fled, one outbuilding contained a feverish farmhand nobody seemed willing to approach, and the main house smelled of damp stone, smoke, old food, animals, human beings and enough infested bedding to make Mara stop in the doorway and simply say, “No.” “We need shelter.” “We need different shelter.” “This building has thick walls, one main entrance, a spring uphill and defensible ground.” “There is something moving in that mattress.” “There are probably several things moving in that mattress.” She turned slowly toward me. “You studied this century voluntarily?” “For years.” “Why?” That was the morning we dragged every straw mattress we could find into the courtyard and burned them, after which we stripped down to our linen underlayers behind a half-broken wooden screen while inspecting ourselves for bites, and I realized how little historical writing had prepared me for the intimate humiliations of the past, because books describe rulers, armies, harvests, epidemics and trade routes but rarely explain what it feels like to stand half-dressed in a freezing stone room while another woman examines the back of your shoulder for fleas. Mara found several red marks along her waist, stared at them with visible disgust and said, “If I die here, I want the report to make it absolutely clear that it was not during some heroic retrieval attempt, but because an insect found me appetizing.” “You are not going to die from flea bites.” She looked at me. Considering the year, I immediately corrected myself. “That was badly phrased.” “You think?” “Very badly.” She turned enough for me to inspect another mark on her shoulder, then caught me looking and said, “Do not turn this into a research experience.” “I was only checking the bite.” “You looked at my shoulder as though you wanted to footnote it.” That was the first time she laughed. The first woman we saved was named Agnes, although at the time Mara insisted that we had not saved her and had merely made a disastrous temporary decision that would certainly become someone else's problem once extraction resumed. Agnes was twenty-eight, but exhaustion made her look older when we found her beside the road with a bundle of clothing in her lap, dried blood along one temple and nowhere visible to go, and when Mara whispered, “Keep walking,” I might actually have done so if Agnes had not lifted her head and said, “Please,” with such exhausted resignation that the word followed us even after we had taken several more steps. I stopped. Mara did too, although considerably less willingly. “We cannot take everyone we meet,” she said quietly. “I know.” “There will be thousands.” “I know.” “And every intervention changes something.” “I know that too.” Agnes was still watching us. I turned back. Her husband had died three days earlier, she explained, and his brothers had immediately arrived to claim his tools, cottage and livestock, after which one of them struck her when she protested that several items had belonged to her own father, and they had graciously informed her that she could remain in the house if she made herself useful to them. “So you left,” I said. “What else was I to do?” “Where are you going?” She looked along the road and gave the smallest possible shrug. “I had thought perhaps my mother's sister still lived, but I heard yesterday that sickness has reached her village.” Mara exhaled beside me, and by then I had already learned that particular sound meant she knew she was about to lose an argument. “We have shelter,” I said. Mara turned. “We have an infested ruin.” Agnes stared between us. “And work,” I added quickly, because I saw something change in her face at the word. “What work?” “What can you do?” She looked genuinely offended. “Cook, bake, brew, salt meat, smoke meat, keep hens, make butter, mend, spin if I must, keep stores and manage a kitchen if the kitchen be worth managing.” Mara and I looked at one another. Agnes frowned. “Is that not enough?” Mara said, “Agnes, at this moment you may be the most useful person in the household.” Within two days she had proven it. Our emergency ration bars might have contained perfect nutrition, but they tasted like compressed punishment, whereas Agnes knew which nearby farmers still traded, which abandoned gardens could safely be harvested without provoking a property dispute, how to judge whether stored grain had spoiled, how long milk could be kept, what could be salted, what could be smoked and which foods would immediately reveal that Mara and I had no idea how ordinary people actually lived in the century we had supposedly studied. She was less enthusiastic about Mara's obsession with boiling water. One morning Agnes carried a bucket inside, dipped a cup into it and stopped when Mara said, “No.” Agnes looked at the cup. “No?” “Boil it.” “It comes directly from the spring.” “Boil it.” “For drinking?” “Yes.” “It tastes worse after boiling.” “Then drink unpleasant water and remain alive.” Agnes looked at me as though asking whether Mara was always this difficult. I smiled. “She becomes unreasonable whenever someone risks preventable illness.” “I am standing here,” Mara said. “I know.” Agnes stared at both of us for several seconds before the corner of her mouth lifted. Within a week she boiled the drinking water without being asked. Within two weeks she was shouting at Beatrice for forgetting. Beatrice came shortly afterward, only twenty-four and already carrying herself with the exhausted competence of somebody who had spent years cleaning up after wealthier people, because she had worked as a laundress at a religious house several miles away until sickness spread through the community and the surviving women scattered, leaving her with nowhere safe to sleep and no guarantee that any relatives remained alive. Agnes knew her. That was enough. By then the manor had become barely tolerable, because we had removed the worst bedding, scrubbed floors, blocked several rat holes, constructed raised sleeping platforms from salvaged timber and established rules that Mara enforced with the severity of military regulations. Beatrice examined our shared sleeping platform the evening she arrived, glanced at Mara, then at me, and asked, “You sleep together?” Mara nearly dropped the bucket in her hands. I answered before she could. “For warmth.” Beatrice nodded as though the explanation required no further discussion. “It is cold.” “It is.” Mara waited until Beatrice had left the room before saying, “That was convincing.” “It was true.” “Partly.” I looked at her. She looked at me. Neither of us mentioned that we had begun sleeping side by side four nights earlier after a noise outside convinced us that armed men were trying to enter the manor, only for us to discover much later that the terrifying intruder had been a loose shutter in the wind, by which point Mara was already standing near the door with her pulse weapon hidden beneath her cloak while I held a kitchen knife like someone whose academic training had spectacularly failed to include practical combat. We had not slept separately afterward. At first we told ourselves it was security. Then warmth. Then convenience. By the time either of us understood that sleeping beside the other had simply become comforting, neither of us was eager to discuss it. My fever came three weeks later, beginning with nothing more dramatic than a headache, and in another century I would have swallowed a painkiller, increased my fluids and continued working, but in 1349 every ache carried possibilities that could not be dismissed. Mara saw me press my fingers against my temple. “What?” “Nothing.” “You do not touch your forehead like that because nothing is wrong.” “I have a headache.” Her entire expression changed. The portable medical scanner still worked then, although the battery was already declining faster than it should have, and she passed it over me twice before checking the display, then my neck, then beneath my arms with her own hands while I watched a woman who had faced armed men without visible concern become increasingly frightened by numbers glowing on a screen. “Temperature is elevated,” she said. “I noticed.” “Heart rate too.” “I am sitting beside you while you behave as though I am dying, which may have something to do with that.” “Do not joke.” “It might simply be exhaustion.” “It might.” “Or dehydration.” “Yes.” “Or Agnes's cheese.” She looked at me. “I am serious.” “So am I. That cheese could kill a horse.” Despite herself, her mouth moved slightly, but the fear remained. We isolated ourselves in one of the smaller rooms because I insisted on it, and that night Mara sat beside me with a cloth and a basin of boiled water while our two compact respirators lay within reach, one already showing wear around the seal, and I remember looking at her in the candlelight and realizing that she had no intention of leaving. “You should sleep somewhere else,” I told her. “No.” “Mara, if this is plague—” “It probably is not.” “That is not an answer.” “It is the answer you are getting.” “If it is pneumonic, being in this room with me is dangerous even with the respirator.” “I know.” “If it is bubonic and fleas are already involved—” “I know.” “You were sent here to rescue me, not to die beside me.” Her hand stopped over the water basin, and for a moment the only sound was the faint crackle of the fire. “You know what bothers me about historians?” she asked finally. “I'm certain you're about to tell me.” “You spend your entire professional lives explaining why people made choices after everyone involved is safely dead, and I think somewhere along the way you begin believing that every human decision is supposed to be sensible simply because it can later be analyzed.” “This one should be sensible.” “Why?” “Because you could become infected.” “Yes.” “You could die.” “Yes.” “So leave.” She leaned forward, wrung out the cloth and placed it gently against my forehead before looking directly into my eyes. “No.” There was nothing theatrical in the word, no speech, no declaration, just an absolute refusal that unsettled me more deeply than the fever itself, because I suddenly understood that Mara had already decided there were circumstances under which she would rather share my danger than protect herself from it. By morning the fever had fallen. By afternoon I was hungry. By the following evening the scanner suggested that I had most likely suffered from exhaustion, dehydration and something gastrointestinal that Agnes insisted could not possibly have been her cheese. I found Mara sitting outside the room after sunset, her back against the stone wall, looking more tired than I felt. “You stayed,” I said, lowering myself beside her. She did not look up. “Yes.” “You understand that if this had been plague, staying beside me all night would have been one of the least intelligent decisions available to you.” “I understood it perfectly.” “And you stayed anyway.” This time she turned. “Yes.” There was no clever response to that, and for once I did not attempt one, because this woman had crossed seven centuries to retrieve me and then knowingly risked her own life rather than leave me frightened and alone in a plague room, and I found the realization so overwhelming that I simply rested my head against her shoulder. She remained still for a second. Then her head gently rested against mine. By spring there were five of us. Cecily arrived at twenty-six wearing what remained of an expensive blue dress, one sleeve torn, her shoes almost destroyed and enough education to understand immediately that Mara and I were not whatever ordinary travelers we claimed to be, because she was the widow of a minor landholder whose relatives had attempted to solve an inheritance dispute by marrying her to one of her late husband's cousins, and when she refused they locked her inside a room until she reconsidered. She escaped through a window. I liked her almost immediately. Mara took longer. During her second evening she watched Mara repair one of our strange boots and said, “Those were not made by any cobbler I have ever known.” Mara continued working. “You know many cobblers?” “Enough to know that leather does not usually bend like that.” “You are observant.” “My husband used to say it was an unattractive quality in a wife.” Mara glanced up. “And where is your husband?” “Dead.” Mara considered that for a moment before saying, “Perhaps observation was not the real problem.” Cecily laughed hard enough to spill her drink. After that, Mara trusted her slightly more. Isobel came last, thirty-two and already regarded as a healer in two nearby villages because she had learned from her mother and grandmother, which meant she understood herbs, poultices, childbirth, wounds, fever and enough traditional medicine to be simultaneously indispensable and infuriating. She and Mara argued from the first week. When Isobel suggested bleeding a woman whose headache had lasted two days, Mara stared at her and said, “No.” Isobel folded her arms. “Her blood is too hot.” “Her blood is supposed to be warm. She is alive.” “She needs balance.” “She needs water, willow bark and sleep.” “You speak as though God Himself has told you the secrets of the body.” Mara almost replied too quickly, but I coughed loudly from across the room, and she caught herself before saying, “Not God. Experience.” Isobel narrowed her eyes. She knew we were lying. I think she simply decided that the usefulness of our lies outweighed her curiosity. The sanctuary began accidentally and then, without any single moment of decision, became deliberate. The manor's greatest advantage was the spring emerging uphill from the main buildings, because once we protected the source and stopped people from washing, watering animals or dumping refuse near it, the household possessed cleaner water than most properties in the region, and from there Mara and I began applying everything we knew in ways small enough to avoid transforming fourteenth-century England into something unrecognizable. We moved waste downhill and farther from the water. We improved the latrines. We established a separate washing area. We raised stored grain away from rats and damp. We trapped rodents aggressively. We burned badly infested bedding. We isolated newcomers whenever illness was suspected. We insisted on washed hands before preparing food, a rule Agnes initially considered excessive and eventually enforced with more ferocity than either of us. We kept livestock farther from the sleeping quarters. We created separate cloths and bedding for the sick. And during periods when plague reached neighboring villages, we restricted entry so severely that people began whispering that Alder Wood had somehow been spared by divine favor. For a while, modern technology made us seem far more capable than we truly were. The medical scanner helped us identify fever, dehydration and some infections. The respirators protected us when we entered infected houses. Disinfectant concentrate lasted several months. The solar charging fabric kept our smaller devices functioning. The remaining antibiotics saved Beatrice when a cut on her hand became dangerously infected. Then everything began to die. Not dramatically. Slowly. The disinfectant bottle emptied. Replacement filters became precious. One respirator seal split. The scanner battery held less charge each month. The solar fabric tore during a storm and never generated quite enough power afterward. Mara's reconnaissance drone crashed in a distant field when a stabilizer failed, and we spent half a day searching for it before deciding that explaining a small metal object capable of flight to local farmers would probably create more trouble than losing it. Every broken device reduced the distance between us and the century around us. Every exhausted medicine reminded us that knowledge alone did not sterilize wounds, replace antibiotics or guarantee safe childbirth. We learned to make better soap. We learned which local remedies actually did something and which merely possessed impressive reputations. We learned that menstrual hygiene, something neither of us had given serious operational thought before deployment, became a regular household matter involving cloth, privacy, boiling water and constant washing. We learned how quickly wet shoes damaged feet. We learned how dangerous a small cut could become. We learned that medieval people were not stupid, nor universally filthy, nor ignorant of the value of bathing, washing clothes or avoiding spoiled food, but that poverty, overcrowding, fleas, rodents, inadequate drainage, shortages, violence and collapsing social structures could overwhelm even sensible habits very quickly. Above all, we learned that survival was labor. Every day required water, fuel, food, repairs, clothing, cleaning, animals, security and preparation for the possibility that tomorrow would be worse. The men arrived in June. There were seven of them, all armed, and although their leader introduced himself as Sir Roland, Cecily later informed us with considerable contempt that she had never heard of him and doubted he possessed anything more noble than a stolen belt buckle. They came shortly before dusk and stood outside our courtyard examining the stone buildings, stacked firewood, livestock, grain stores and six women with no visible male protector, and I understood his calculation before he spoke. “This holding has no lord.” Mara stepped forward. “It has one now.” His eyes moved over her slowly before he smiled. “That so?” “Yes.” “Which of you?” Without hesitation, she pointed at me. I almost turned around to see whether another woman had appeared behind me. Roland looked at me. “You?” I managed not to show surprise. “Yes.” “Widow?” “No.” “Then who owns you?” It is strange which moments remain sharp after decades, because I remember that question more clearly than I remember the weapon at his belt, the mud beneath his boots or the faces of the men behind him. Who owns you? Cecily moved quietly to my side and said, “No one.” Roland laughed. “That is not how the world works.” Mara's voice became very calm. “It is how this one does.” He took a step toward her, perhaps intending intimidation rather than violence, but when his hand closed around Mara's arm she moved so quickly that I barely understood what happened, twisting his wrist and turning his weight until a man larger than she was dropped to one knee with a cry of pain. One of the others drew his sword. I reached beneath my cloak. Temporal regulations, contamination theory, historical integrity and every lecture I had ever attended screamed at me to stop. The man moved toward Mara. I drew the pulse weapon and fired into the ground. The energy discharge struck wet earth with a violent crack, throwing mud upward and producing a noise so alien to fourteenth-century ears that everyone froze, including our own household. Mara still had Roland's wrist. I lifted the weapon just enough for the men to see it. “This,” I said, trying very hard not to think about how appalling my methodology had become, “is the moment when you decide whether God intends this house to remain under our protection.” No historian should ever say such a thing. It worked magnificently. They left. After we barred the gates, nobody spoke for several seconds until Agnes finally whispered, “What in God's name was that?” I looked at Mara. Mara looked at me. Cecily folded her arms. “I have been waiting months for an explanation.” That night we gave them part of one. We told them we had come from a place unimaginably distant, that the strange tools we possessed could not be replaced and that once they failed there would be no more. We did not tell them the year. We did not tell them about temporal travel. Not yet. Isobel listened with absolute seriousness and finally said, “I knew you were witches.” “We are not witches.” “Then you are something more complicated.” I smiled. “That is closer.” Mara kissed me that night. She later insisted I kissed her first. We disagreed about this for years, and the truth is that neither of us remembered clearly enough to prove anything. She was sitting on the edge of our bed while I cleaned a cut on her forearm where one of Roland's men had driven her against the stone wall, and although the wound itself was shallow, my hands would not stop trembling. “You could have been killed,” I said while tying the bandage. “So could you.” “You put yourself between them and the rest of us.” “You fired a temporal weapon in front of medieval witnesses.” “Seven witnesses.” “That does not improve the situation.” “One of them was looking away.” She laughed softly, then noticed my hands. The laughter disappeared. “Evelyn.” “I am fine.” “No, you're not.” I stared at the bandage rather than at her. “I thought he was going to kill you.” Something changed in her expression. Mara had a remarkable ability to hide emotion when she wanted to, but that night she did not, and when she reached up and touched my cheek with the back of her fingers, I closed my eyes before I could stop myself. “We survived,” she whispered. “For today.” “For today.” When I opened my eyes again, she was close enough that I could feel her breath. “This is probably a terrible idea,” I said. “Yes.” “We live together.” “Yes.” “We may be stranded together for months.” “Yes.” “Temporal service regulations specifically discourage relationships between field personnel during emergency deployments.” “I am familiar with the regulations.” “So this would be professionally irresponsible.” “Extremely.” I do not know which of us moved first. I only remember her mouth against mine, my hand still resting on her bandaged arm, and the sudden overwhelming sense that after months of cold, fear, sickness, death, insects, hunger, arguments and the growing possibility that everything we had once called home might remain beyond our reach, I had finally found one place in the fourteenth century where I felt completely safe. Her arms. The messages from the future began changing not long afterward, although at first we blamed the temporal interference because communications had always been unreliable. Operations usually contacted us every second or third day, sometimes only long enough to exchange status codes, but then five days passed, followed by six, and when the communicator finally activated the voice that answered was unfamiliar. “Voss. Hart. Confirm operational status.” Mara looked at me before replying, “Alive. Extraction requested.” Static swallowed part of the response. “Extraction currently unavailable.” “Reason?” Another burst of interference. “Administrative restructuring.” Mara's expression hardened. “Define that.” No answer came for several seconds, and then another voice broke faintly through the noise beneath the first. “Mara?” She straightened immediately. “Lena?” I recognized the name as Lena Ortiz, one of the temporal control technicians. Her voice sounded frightened. “Listen carefully. Something is happening here. Security personnel entered control this morning, Director Vale has been removed and they're suspending—” Static tore through the transmission. Mara gripped the communicator. “Lena, what is happening?” “—do not attempt autonomous return unless—” The connection vanished. We stared at each other. Two days later another message arrived from a different operator using a security code Mara did not recognize, informing us that all temporal field activity had been suspended pending administrative review. Mara demanded identification. The transmission ended. After that came nothing. One day. Three days. A week. A month. We continued transmitting. Nobody answered. After that came nothing, and although we invented explanations for the silence—equipment failure, political interference, damage to the temporal facility, perhaps even some disaster in our own century—we had no way of knowing which possibility was true, because one day there had been technicians answering our calls, people monitoring our signals and promising that another extraction window would eventually open, and then, without warning or explanation, every voice from the future simply vanished. We transmitted again the following morning, then that evening, then every day for a week, but the communicator returned only static, and as the weeks became months the terrible possibility neither of us wanted to say aloud became increasingly difficult to ignore: perhaps the machinery still existed somewhere seven centuries ahead of us, perhaps the people operating it did not, or perhaps something had happened to our world so completely that there was no longer anyone left who cared that two women had been stranded in 1349. We never learned the answer. From where we stood, the truth was much simpler. The future had stopped speaking. Tomorrow had gone silent. We continued trying for another six months, although Mara held onto hope longer than I did. Every seventh evening she carried the communicator to the hill behind the manor, unfolded the antenna and entered the emergency codes because the slight elevation occasionally improved reception, and after the first month I began going with her, not because I expected an answer but because I could not bear the thought of her sitting alone while listening to nothing. One November evening, with the first snow beginning to gather along the hedges, she switched off the transmitter and remained seated beside it. “How long?” I asked. She knew immediately what I meant. “I don't know.” “How long before we stop pretending this is temporary?” Mara looked toward Alder Wood below us, where warm light glowed behind the shutters and smoke rose from the kitchen chimney while faint voices carried through the cold air. “How long before we admit what?” “That nobody is coming.” Her jaw tightened. I reached for her hand. “This isn't a mission anymore.” She remained quiet for so long that I thought she might argue, but eventually her fingers closed around mine. “No.” “This is our life.” This time she looked at me. “Yes.” That one word changed everything. Until then we had maintained Alder Wood as shelter. Afterward, we began building a home. By the end of the following year, fourteen women lived behind our walls, not because Mara and I went looking for servants or admirers but because women spoke to one another, and once the rumor spread that there was a place beyond Alder Wood where a widow could work without surrendering herself to a man's household, where an unmarried woman could earn food and shelter, where a woman escaping violence might be allowed through the gate instead of handed back to whoever claimed ownership of her, they began arriving. A cook whose employer had died. Two sisters whose village had been nearly emptied by plague. A seamstress who had not been paid in months. A young widow whose husband's relatives wanted her property. A woman who had fled an arranged marriage and reached us barefoot. Nobody stayed without choosing to. Everyone worked. Some received wages. Some received food, clothing and a permanent place in the household. Some later married men outside Alder Wood and left with our blessing. Others never did. Agnes became the unquestioned ruler of the kitchens and stores, while Beatrice managed washing, clothing and linens with an efficiency that eventually required several assistants, Cecily took over accounts and correspondence because her handwriting in the local style was vastly better than mine, and Isobel became our healer despite continuing to argue with Mara about medicine with such enthusiasm that I sometimes suspected both of them enjoyed it. Several of the younger women admired Mara. Two admired her so obviously that even she could not pretend not to notice. One evening I caught Beatrice watching her across supper and leaned closer. “She is staring at you again.” Mara continued eating. “She is looking at the bread.” “The bread is in the opposite direction.” “She appreciates my profile.” I laughed so suddenly I nearly inhaled my drink. Mara smiled into her cup. The realization that changed everything came during our third year. Workers were extending the drainage channel from the washing house, and I was standing beside the trench when I noticed a narrow diagonal crack running through one of the newly placed foundation stones. There was nothing extraordinary about it. Stones crack. Except I knew that crack. I had seen it before. I had enlarged a photograph of it while writing my doctoral thesis. I had stood beside the excavated stone in 2187. My knees weakened. I knelt in the mud and touched the surface. Mara noticed immediately and came toward me. “What happened?” I pointed. She looked at the stone. “It is cracked.” “I know.” “We have others.” “No.” “Evelyn?” My hands were shaking. “I photographed this stone.” She stared at me. “In the excavation.” For several seconds she said nothing. Then she looked toward the drainage channel, the spring house beyond it, the isolation rooms we had converted, the walls we had rebuilt and the courtyard filled with women whose existence should have belonged only to archaeological records. “No.” I laughed, although tears had already begun sliding down my face. “Yes.” “The drainage system.” “We built it.” “The spring protection.” “Us.” “The isolation wing.” “Us.” Her face changed as the final understanding arrived. “The women buried here.” I looked toward our household. “Our women.” Mara sat down in the mud. I sat beside her. Behind us, somebody shouted for another bucket, a chicken escaped through an open gate, Agnes began yelling at whoever had failed to secure it, and somewhere inside the house Beatrice was arguing about linen. For several minutes the two most technologically advanced human beings in fourteenth-century Yorkshire simply stared at a cracked stone. Finally Mara said, “You were sent here to discover who built this place.” “Yes.” “And nobody had built it yet.” “No.” She looked at me. I smiled through my tears. “We did.” We never stopped missing the future entirely, because that would make a better legend than truth. I missed hot water arriving from a pipe. Mara missed coffee with such devotion that Agnes spent nearly a month roasting barley in different ways after Mara attempted to explain the drink, and each failure was presented with increasing confidence until Mara finally drank one cup in silence and declared it “close enough,” which it absolutely was not. I missed antibiotics every time somebody developed an infected wound. I missed dentistry whenever a tooth hurt. I missed sanitary products, refrigeration, recorded music, anesthetic, waterproof fabric and the ability to travel twenty miles without organizing provisions as though crossing a continent. Yet human beings possess an extraordinary talent for allowing the impossible to become ordinary. Years passed. The manor expanded. Our spring house became stone. The drainage channels improved. We planted orchards. We acquired surrounding fields. We built a stronger outer wall. Plague returned in smaller waves, and whenever it did we closed the gates, isolated newcomers, controlled rats and fleas as well as we could, boiled what needed boiling, washed obsessively and hoped that knowledge would be enough. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn't. We lost women. There is no honest version of our story in which we saved everyone, because we did not, and perhaps accepting that was the hardest adjustment of all, since modern knowledge did not make us gods but merely gave us a slightly better chance of surviving in a world where infection, childbirth, injury and bad luck could still kill with terrifying ease. But many survived. Enough that people began talking. Some called us healers. Others called us foreign noblewomen. A few called us witches. One irritated priest referred to us in a letter as “those troublesome women beyond Alder Wood,” which delighted Cecily so thoroughly that she wanted the phrase carved over the gate. Eventually the name became simpler. The Ladies Beyond the Wood. I had read those words centuries before I was born. Now they meant us. Mara and I stopped attempting to define our relationship sometime during our first year together because the effort became ridiculous. Everyone knew. We shared a room. We shared a bed. We made decisions together. We argued over food stores, security, risk, strangers, medical treatment and whether I was still allowed to climb onto roofs after turning forty. Apparently I was not. “I climbed that roof last year,” I reminded her. “You fell off it last year.” “I slipped.” “You landed in the cabbage patch.” “The cabbages survived.” “Agnes said you frightened them.” “I don't believe vegetables experience fear.” “You haven't seen Agnes in that garden.” Twenty years after she came to rescue me, Mara could still make me laugh harder than anyone I had ever known, and twenty years after I first saw her crossing that rain-darkened field toward the cart beneath which I was hiding, I could still look across a crowded room and experience the same small shock of recognition. There you are. The last object from our old world died in my fifty-seventh year. The communicator had not received a signal in decades, but Mara kept it anyway, and once each year on the anniversary of her arrival we climbed the hill behind the manor, unfolded the antenna and switched it on. Nothing ever happened. That year the display did not illuminate. Mara changed the final power cell. Nothing. She pressed the activation switch again. Still nothing. Then, to my surprise, she laughed. Not bitterly. Not sadly. Just laughed. “Well,” she said, “that settles that.” I lowered myself beside her. Below us, the rooftops of Alder Wood caught the evening light, smoke rose from Agnes's kitchen, women crossed the courtyard carrying baskets, somewhere a child laughed and farther away somebody was singing badly enough that Mara winced. “You still think about it?” she asked. “The future?” “Yes.” “Sometimes.” “So do I.” I rested my head against her shoulder. “If a corridor opened right now,” she asked after a while, “would you go back?” I already knew the answer. “Not without you.” Mara smiled. “That wasn't the question.” “Yes,” I said, taking her hand. “It was.” We left the dead communicator on the hill. There was no reason to carry it home. Home was already below us, in Agnes's kitchen, Beatrice's linen rooms, Isobel's endless shelves of jars, Cecily's ledgers, the stone walls built by women who had once arrived with nothing and the clean water running through channels whose ruins would puzzle archaeologists seven centuries later. And beside me was the woman who had crossed time because I sent one frightened message from beneath an overturned cart. When I was young, I believed the purpose of history was to discover what happened, and later I believed it was to understand why, but I know better now, because sometimes history exists for no greater reason than that somebody survives long enough to build it. The future had sent me backward through time to discover the women who created the impossible sanctuary at Alder Wood, and for years I searched for them without understanding that the evidence had been telling me the truth from the beginning. I had never been sent to find her. I had been sent to become her.