Page 109 of Never a Hero

‘Keep watching,’ Aaron said.

In the canal, the ripples flattened until all signs of the stone were gone.

‘The timeline always returns to its previous state,’ Aaron said. ‘It smooths away our changes.’

‘It’s a law of nature,’ Ruth agreed.

Joan stared down at the near-still water where the stone had been, and a chill seeped into her. No force had stopped her when she’d unmade Nick. She’d thrown a stone, and the ripples had kept rippling without end, in unnatural perpetual motion.

And what happened when you defied nature itself?

Joan saw again the holes in the world, their edges as ragged as torn shrouds, and the black void within them. Pieces of the timeline destroyed in the exact places where she’d used her power … Could that really have been a coincidence?

You should never have been born, Edmund had said to her once, his pale eyes cold. An abomination.

A sound made her jump. On the other side of the river, a man in a flat cap walked by, pushing a wooden wheelbarrow laden with straw. He did a double take as he spotted Joan’s group—they must have seemed a strange crew: two Chinese people, two girls, a giant, a tiny bulldog.

Joan was very aware suddenly of her masquerade dress with its semi-transparent skirt. The gold lion tattoo was still stark on her bare arm. ‘Should we go back inside?’ she murmured to the others. ‘Get some period-appropriate clothes?’ Ruth was still in a catsuit too.

Jamie shrugged, unconcerned. ‘As long as we’re not out on the street, people will mind their own business.’

‘Limehouse is a “den of iniquity” in this period,’ Tom explained, making air quotes. ‘Great thing about that is it’s much less uptight than the posh parts of London.’

Aaron scowled halfheartedly, apparently taking mild insult at posh parts of London.

Joan felt a tingle then at the back of her neck. She lifted her eyes and found with a jolt that Nick’s attention wasn’t on the man across the river—as everyone else’s was. He was looking at Joan. And there were questions all over his face, along with something more dangerous. If it shouldn’t have been possible to change the timeline, then how did you do it? How did you kill me?

I don’t know, Joan wanted to say. She still knew almost nothing about her own power. You don’t even know what you are, Edmund had said to her. You all die without knowing. This time, Joan couldn’t suppress the shiver.

‘Look …’ Jamie ran a hand over his face. ‘The timeline’s resistance aside … We don’t have enough information. All we know is that Eleanor will try to change something significant on the timeline. As I said, it’s likely to be a significant historical event. If we’re going to find her, if we’re going to stop her, we’ll need to know more than that.’

Nick shifted. His eyes were on the canal now, where Aaron had thrown the stone. ‘An event?’ he said, so mildly that Joan almost missed it.

‘What?’ Ruth said to him.

Nick was still looking at the canal. ‘Jamie thinks that Eleanor is targeting a historical event. But what if her target is something else? What if she’s going to try to change a person?’

‘A person?’ Ruth sounded confused. ‘How would changing a person change the timeline?’

Nick didn’t look at Joan, but suddenly her heart was thumping in her chest. She saw again the scene in the library. I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you, she’d said to him. She’d kissed him, and then she’d used her power on him while he’d begged her to stop. Joan had unmade him.

She unravelled the hero’s life, Eleanor had told Nick, and she replaced him with an ordinary boy.

Maybe Nick was remembering the scene too, because raw hurt flickered over his face. Then his walls went up again, and his expression was blank.

‘How would you change a person at all?’ Ruth said.

Joan tensed for Nick to tell Ruth what had happened. A beat went by. Another beat. It took Joan a moment to understand why he was still silent. He’d made her a promise on the boat when she’d told him about her forbidden power. I won’t tell anyone, he’d said. No one will learn about it from me. Even now—even knowing that she’d betrayed him—he wouldn’t tell. It wasn’t in his nature.

Joan swallowed. Ruth didn’t know about Joan’s power at all. And Aaron only knew that it was forbidden. He’d seen something of Eleanor’s show at Holland House, but how much had he understood of it?

Gran had told Joan once: You can trust no one with the knowledge of it.

Gran had been wrong to say that, though. You had to trust people sometimes, and Joan could trust Ruth. She could trust Aaron.

Joan took a deep breath. ‘At Covent Garden,’ she said to Ruth, ‘you asked me how the timeline was changed …’

‘Joan,’ Tom said warningly. He flicked a meaningful glance at Nick.

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