Page 115 of Never a Hero

Across from them, Ying took his seat. Jamie poured tea, and Ying opened a tin so extravagantly decorated that it could have housed jewels.

‘Opera wafers,’ Ruth said reverently, reaching for a thin finger biscuit.

Ying’s eyes creased into an almost smile. ‘I also miss them in later periods,’ he said. ‘Please.’ He gestured for the rest of them to take a teacup and some biscuits too.

Joan’s stomach growled. When had she last eaten? She wasn’t sure. She took a wafer and bit into it—it was light with a rich chocolate filling. The tea was good too: pale green and delicately floral.

‘So,’ Ying said. He leaned forward in his chair, hands steepled. His clothes seemed slightly anachronistic—closer to the 1910s than 1891. He was in a jacket and waistcoat in midnight blue, charcoal trousers, and a crisp high-buttoned white shirt with no tie. Sitting beside Jamie, Joan could see the resemblance—more in manner than looks. They both had an air of polite formality.

Ying’s gaze stumbled again on Nick. He knew who he was, Joan realised. Who he’d been. Joan put down her cup and felt another wave of déjà vu. In another timeline, in a courtyard much like this, Joan had asked Ying how she could undo Nick’s massacre. Did Ying remember that?

‘So,’ Ying said again. ‘You spoke to Astrid. She told you of the coming calamity.’ He had a beautiful voice—a singer’s voice—and he spoke with careful diction, making every word seem considered.

‘It’s true, then?’ Joan said. Ying’s resonant voice had made it all seem very real suddenly. She sought the others; they’d ended up in pairs. Tom and Jamie to the left of Ying, Ruth and Nick to the right, and Aaron and Joan opposite on the bench.

Ying nodded. ‘Some few among us have the ability to remember previous timelines.’ He met Joan’s eyes; he did remember her. ‘But Astrid has a rarer power than that. She remembers what is still to come. And’—the sad lines of his face deepened—‘she has seen a terrible future.’

The end of everything that matters. He would have stopped it. But you stopped him.

As if he’d heard Joan’s thoughts, Nick set his jaw. His expression was so determined that her heart stuttered.

It’s inevitable now, Astrid had said. But how could that be true? Surely, if Nick could have stopped it last time, there was a way to do it this time. Together.

Joan refocused on Ying. ‘There must be something we can do.’ Ying regarded her without answering, and Joan felt a tug of unease. ‘We know who’s behind it,’ Joan said. ‘Eleanor of the Curia Monstrorum wants to create a world where monsters rule.’

‘A world where monsters rule?’ Ying looked puzzled at that—so puzzled that Joan’s stomach turned over. ‘Astrid’s memories of the future are not so clear as that.’

‘But …’ Joan heard the word trail off. She’d seen the world Eleanor wanted to create. She’d seen the Court livery on a police van. A guard had killed a human in broad daylight. And then Eleanor had confirmed that was what she wanted … ‘What did Astrid see?’

‘Many deaths,’ Ying said simply. ‘The end of this timeline.’

The sun was streaming down, pleasantly warm. Incongruously cheerful. There was something wrong here, Joan thought suddenly—something wrong with her own assumptions. It was a feeling she’d had before, when she’d blundered into Whitehall Palace. But now, like then, she had no idea what was amiss.

‘You wish to stop this,’ Ying said heavily. He leaned over to refill their cups and sighed. ‘It is not possible to succeed.’

Joan’s heart sank. She had hoped that Ying would help them fight Eleanor himself. But his stiff posture reminded her of how Astrid had looked: resigned and matter-of-fact.

‘I don’t believe that,’ Nick said, his dark eyes resolute. ‘We have to try.’ Like Joan, he couldn’t believe that all this was fated. But maybe that was a human trait—to doubt the concept of inevitability—because when Joan glanced at the monsters, she could see that they were all far less sure.

‘You must know something of how this will happen,’ Joan said to Ying. Astrid had never told the Lius that she’d sided with Nick, but it seemed she’d shared her memories of the future with the other heads of her family. And Tom had said that the Lius were the scholars of the timeline. They’d surely figured at least some of it out. ‘You must have some idea.’

‘Of how the timeline will be changed?’ Ying asked. He bowed his head, and Joan had the impression again of sorrow, of resignation. ‘Yes, we have our suspicions.’

Joan sat forward.

‘You understand the theory of change?’ Ying said. ‘That something of significance must be changed if the path of the timeline is to be altered?’

‘Yes,’ Joan said.

‘The timeline resists change,’ Ying said. ‘But the Lius believe that there are certain places where the timeline is weak. We suspect that when a significant event overlaps a weak area of the timeline, change is possible.’

And now Aaron was sitting forward with Joan, a frown on his fine-boned face. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

Joan took in what Ying had said. Had she been at a weak place in the timeline when she’d unmade Nick? She’d taken time from herself to escape from Nick’s prison, but she didn’t know what time period she’d landed in. And Nick had followed her there … Had they ended up in a weak area of the timeline?

‘These are only theories,’ Ying said to Aaron.

‘Then theoretically …’ Nick said intently, ‘do you know where we can find these weak areas of the timeline?’

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