Page 56 of Never a Hero

His equivocation made Joan’s stomach squirm. She was pretty sure that the power was still working on him.

Farther up, Jamie didn’t say anything. He’d argued against it, but Joan had the feeling he was relieved that Nick was leashed.

Jamie led them all up to Victoria Embankment—away from Whitehall. They passed the ancient stone obelisk of Cleopatra’s Needle. Joan had always thought it a strange thing, an object out of its place and time. Covered in worn hieroglyphs, it was one of the few remnants of Heliopolis, a city that hadn’t existed in a thousand years. How had it ended up here, planted beside the Thames?

Across the river, the new pyramid building of this time caught the light. It was vast: a skyscraper with sides that glittered like diamonds. Together, Joan supposed, the pyramid and Needle kind of made sense: a modern building inspired by ancient Egypt standing opposite a real artifact, three and a half thousand years old.

‘I always felt a bit sorry for it,’ Nick said. He’d followed her gaze to the Needle. ‘An orphan, far away from home, its original city destroyed.’

Joan was surprised by how similar her thoughts had been to his. ‘Do you think they saw it coming? The people of Heliopolis? Do you think they ever imagined that, one day, the only remnant of their city would be objects like this?’ She pictured Astrid again, looking out the window as if the world she knew would soon be gone. ‘I don’t think I can imagine it,’ she admitted.

‘We’re going to figure this out,’ Nick said. ‘That’s not going to happen to us.’ He gave her a crooked smile. ‘And if you think about it, Heliopolis isn’t gone. Not for you. Not for anyone who can time travel. Maybe we can visit it when all this is over.’

Joan tried to smile back. When all this is over. What did that even look like? Would Nick ever be able to go home? Would Joan?

They turned from the river toward Covent Garden. The sun lowered as they walked past familiar and unfamiliar shops, toward the market.

‘How did you two meet?’ Ruth asked Joan and Nick curiously. ‘In the attack?’

‘No, the day before,’ Nick said. ‘Joan dropped her phone in the field behind our school, and I found it.’

From up ahead, Jamie met Joan’s eyes.

I didn’t want to meet him again, Joan imagined telling Jamie. That would have been a lie, though. Being near this new Nick was unbearable, but the alternative had hurt even more. ‘Nick’s really popular at school,’ she said to Ruth. ‘We’re in different circles. So, yeah, we only met the other day.’

Nick’s eyes were soft as he looked at Joan, but his gaze was searching too, as if he’d heard something in her voice. ‘I’d seen you around, though,’ he said. ‘I was hoping we’d bump into each other.’

Joan’s heart fluttered out of nowhere, and heat flushed her cheeks. In her peripheral vision, she caught Ruth looking between them assessingly. She was wondering about that hand signal in the boathouse. Joan had indicated that she didn’t fully trust Nick. But Ruth knew Joan better than almost anyone—she had to have seen Joan’s blush too.

‘What about you?’ Nick said. ‘You two are cousins? You and Ruth?’

Joan opened her mouth to tell him, and then realised that she wasn’t sure how she and Ruth were related. To Ruth, she said, ‘Your mum and my mum are cousins, right?’ She knew that Gran wasn’t Ruth’s actual gran. ‘Are we second cousins?’

‘Monsters would just say cousins,’ Ruth said.

Dad’s side of the family was kind of the same. Everyone was a cousin or an aunty or an uncle. ‘Me and Ruth grew up together,’ Joan explained to Nick. ‘I stay with Mum’s side of the family every summer.’

They were in the theatre district now. It must have been just after five o’clock. All around them, office workers walked briskly in the direction of the Tube while tourists milled about, peering at their phones.

‘We usually—’ Joan started to say. Then her voice stopped in her throat. They’d rounded the corner onto Bow Street, and ahead of them, the white columns of the Royal Opera House were tinted gold by the lowering sun. The sight was intensely familiar. This has happened before, she thought. I’ve seen this exact view before.

‘What is it?’ Tom said sharply. ‘Do you see a guard?’

‘No guards.’ She reached for the feeling, but it was already fading. Clouds had drifted over the sun, dulling the portico. ‘I just had the strongest feeling of déjà vu.’

Ruth squinted ahead. ‘Maybe you’re remembering that time Gran took us to the opera.’

‘She did?’

‘You’ve forgotten? That whole big weird show with all the horses?’

‘You’re probably thinking of Pietro il Grande,’ Jamie said absently. ‘Five shows in 1852.’

‘Oh, well, I guess it must have been me and Bertie, then,’ Ruth said. ‘Joan’s never travelled like that.’

Joan let the conversation wash over her as she followed the others up the street. The moment had felt a lot more like a memory than déjà vu. She looked over at the opera house again, picturing the sun’s golden glow on the columns, trying to recapture the exact shade in her mind. The feeling didn’t return, though, and it faded further as Jamie led them down another street and another, past shops with unfamiliar logos and advertisements for a buddy-cop TV show Joan had never heard of.

Jamie stopped, finally, outside a building with scaffolding all over it. It was a single-storey structure, plonked in a street of shops selling pizza and coffee and clothes.

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