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Joan’s chest swooped with fear as she jumped—the fence looked higher from up here. But Nick caught her easily around the waist and set her down.
Joan took a deep breath, trying not to feel the lingering echo of his touch as she looked around. She’d expected to find herself in someone’s back garden, but they’d landed in a dark concrete yard.
‘Back of that little gym,’ Nick breathed, and Joan recognised it then too. Dad worked out here sometimes. The owner’s daughter, Melanie, was in Joan’s English class at school.
The gym’s lights were on. Joan couldn’t see inside—the windows were long rectangles high up near the roof—but she could hear the thunk of weights and rhythmic punches against heavy leather. So strange to think that people were going about their ordinary lives, unaware of the monsters lurking outside.
‘Your apron,’ Nick whispered.
Joan nodded and untied it quickly, slipping the loop over her head. Nick knotted it into a rough ball, and then threw it onto the roof in a basketball toss. It vanished behind an air filtration box. Joan doubted even time travellers would find that. And her green work shirt should be dark enough to be unremarkable—at night at least.
Nick touched her arm before she could start for the road. Light leaked from the gym windows, but not enough to show his expression. ‘Back at the house, you told me that you could explain,’ he murmured. ‘Can you?’
Behind him, the sky had turned the purple of a bruise. Trepidation ran down Joan’s spine. Nick didn’t know it, but she’d been on the run like this before—from him. He had no idea how dangerous he was; how deeply embedded he’d once been in this world. What could Joan risk telling him? What might he figure out himself? The thought of explaining anything to him made her stomach turn.
But … Nick had been caught up in an attack by monsters. They were trying to kill him still. He was back in the monster world, whether Joan liked it or not.
She swallowed hard, and then nodded. ‘As soon as we’re safe, let’s talk.’
six
The gym fronted onto a busy road. There, tucked into the deep shadow of the building, Joan saw the full scope of the search. Cars passed in slow procession. At the roundabout, on the top of the hill, they peeled left and right. Joan imagined checkpoints being set up all over town.
And somewhere, among all this, Aaron was here. A bubble of misery rose in her. She bit the inside of her cheek until it hurt enough to counter it. She really, really couldn’t think about Aaron right now.
Nick moved to jog across the road, and Joan put a hand on his arm. ‘Not here,’ she murmured. She pointed at the camera on the gym’s eave; another clamped to the streetlight across the road. ‘We can’t get caught on camera—they’ll use it to track us down.’ Nick himself had found Joan like that last time.
Nick gave the camera a long look. ‘These people have a lot of resources.’
He had no idea.
Truth was, Joan didn’t understand how she and Nick had escaped at all. They were being pursued by time travellers. Shouldn’t there have been people waiting in that courtyard when they’d jumped? And Joan had worked at the bakery twice a week for months. Couldn’t someone have gone back to a previous Saturday and tried again—or got to her at home or at school?
Or was that not allowed by the timeline? Maybe, having picked one moment to capture her, the attackers could only try again in her personal future. There was so much she still didn’t know about being a monster.
As she thought that, though, she remembered Corvin’s words in the garden. I think the rumours of unusual fluctuations are true.
What did that mean?
Joan bit her lip. She had to focus. They hadn’t actually escaped yet.
Joan’s own neighbourhood had never seemed so alien. The roundabouts usually made traffic flow in regular rhythms; tonight cars stopped and stalled and crawled.
Monsters were everywhere. On the next street, two men materialised, barely ten paces away. Joan grabbed Nick’s arm and dragged him down behind a parked car. She pressed her lips tight, trying to quiet her breaths. Beside her, Nick had a hand on the cold pavement, ready to push himself up and fight. Bare-armed in his T-shirt with muscles coiled, he looked as dangerous as his old self.
Joan strained, listening. After a long moment, Nick lifted a hand and made a walking gesture with two fingers. Walking away, he mouthed. Joan risked peering around the side of the car. The men were at the far end of the street already, oblivious to how close they’d gotten to their prey. As she watched, they turned the corner and vanished from sight.
Nick stood slowly, hands still in fists for the fight that hadn’t happened. With his dark hair and handsome face, he reminded Joan unnervingly of a superhero in ordinary-man disguise. She wondered if he might actually have won that fight. If, untamed, he might have won the fight in the courtyard.
‘They look like they’re in costume for a period drama,’ he murmured.
Joan’s heart had been slowing, but it quickened again at his observation. The men had been in 1920s suits and newsboy caps. Nick had barely been in this world an hour, and he was already figuring out how to spot monsters.
A few streets up, Joan gestured to a cul-de-sac—a few houses and a patch of trees. At first glance, it looked like a dead end, but between the trees there was a dirt path, almost occluded by leaves. A hidden bike track.
Inside, the track was overgrown and disused, tree roots pushing up the ground. An old lamppost drooped, unlit. Joan tried not to think about how the last time she’d been here, Margie and Chris had been with her. Chris had begged for a cycling day, and Margie had fallen almost straightaway, laughing as her bike had crashed, and then finding it even funnier when Joan and Chris had rushed to fuss over her.
Behind them on the street, cars droned, but the track itself was quiet and very still. No crackling radios. No bobbing lights. No voices ahead.
