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  Mom was still staring at me, at Lia, assessing. “Come on,” she said finally, lifting the back of the tent and bending.

  She was going to sneak out. My mother never sneaked anywhere. She boldly went where she wished.

  I stood up and went to her, looking back to Lia. She hesitated, frowning, and then with an exaggerated roll of her big blue eyes—so like Mom’s—followed us. We ducked under the edge and looked around. We could hear voices on the other side and up the hill by the tombs. Just as it looked like we could make a clean escape, a guy in a Societa Archeologico hat came around the corner.

  Mom froze for a second and then took my arm. “Come on, Gabi,” she said, “we’ll take care of you.”

  The man’s eyes moved to my bloodstained gown, and he hurried over to us. “Ti posso aiutare?” he asked. Can I help?

  “Si, I just need to get her to our car,” Mom responded in Italian.

  Smart of her, I thought. The parking lot would get us halfway to the tomb.

  The man took my arm as if he thought I’d faint at any point, and I accepted his help as if I just might. A couple of other guys were walking up at the far end of the tumuli, but they ignored us. “I can take care of her from here,” Mom said to the man.

  “You’re sure?” He opened the door and settled me onto the seat.

  “Yes.”

  “I can call for an ambulance.”

  “No. It looks worse than it is.”

  Still, he hesitated.

  “Lei ha le sue cose,” I said, turning wise, pained eyes on him, meaning that time of the month, or as they said it here, she has her things. Whatever. We didn’t have time to waste. How long had I been away from Marcello now? A month?

  He frowned and immediately began to back away. The blood’s location made no sense with the explanation, but I knew it’d send him running.

  Mom gave me a little smile and grabbed the medical kit. “In case anybody else starts asking questions,” she said, lifting it in my direction. She tucked it under her arm as the man disappeared back among the three tents—Mom’s white one, flanked by two khaki peaks from the Societa Archeologico team. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Hidden by dense scrub oak, we climbed up the hill. At the clearing, where the twelve tombs rose from the soil in grass-covered domes, we paused and caught our breath, waiting for those two dudes we’d spotted earlier to turn their backs. Any minute now, Manero would go back into the tent and realize we had escaped.

  “Now,” Lia whispered when we all saw them turn the corner of the tomb.

  We hurried over to Tomb Two and scrambled through the narrow igloo-like entrance, Lia and me slower than Mom, since we were in the long gowns. At the end, we stood up, and Mom flicked on the small flashlight she kept in her belt. I pointed to the two handprints.

  “I’ve wondered about those,” Mom said. “So unlike any other fresco motif we’ve ever run across…”

  Lia backed up a couple of steps, as if she didn’t want us cascading back in time by accident.

  “Go on, Mom,” I said. “Pull out a glove and touch the prints. See if they’re warm.” She had a thing about letting the oils of our skin touch ancient frescoes, given that it was her job and all to preserve them.

  Mom frowned, then pulled on a pair of cloth gloves from her belt. After a second’s hesitation, she touched one, and then the other. “No. Nothing. Cold stone. Why did you expect heat?”

  I could tell from her expression that I was losing her. I lifted my hand for a glove. “Let me try.”

  “Gabi,” Lia growled.

  “Calm down. I’m just checking. You know that nothing will happen without you,” I said. “I tried, remember? We both tried.”

  I put on the glove and touched her print first, then mine. Even through the fabric I could tell that hers was cold. Mine was hot. Just like last time.

  “I know it feels like plain old stone to you,” I said to my mother, “but for me and Lia, our prints are hot.” Mom stepped forward and touched it again, then turned and then felt my forehead. I laughed under my breath. “I’m not running a fever, Mom. It’s real.” I put both palms on her face, so she could feel the residual warmth from my right. “Feel that?”

  I knew from her expression that she did. She was beginning to believe. Being there, so close to the portal, made my heart pound. I knew I wanted to go back. But I couldn’t. Not without Lia. And she was nowhere close to jumping back in.

  “What if we don’t pull off the wall in the same time period, Gabi?” she asked, reading my look. “What if we end up in Etruscan times?”

  “That’d be all right by me,” Mom said drily. As an archaeologist specializing in the Etruscan era and populace, she dreamed of seeing everything firsthand.

  I frowned. I hadn’t thought of that. There was no dial, no program, no way to set the year you wanted to hop into. Last time, I’d pulled my hand away when I finally figured out what was happening. I just happened to end up in 1342.

  I looked around the tomb, trying to figure out an answer. “The urn! When it’s broken, we’ll know we’re there.”

  Mom frowned and bent by the remains of the urn, picking up a piece and staring at its edges under the beam of her flashlight. She looked up at me and I bit my lip, but then seized on the situation, as a means to an end. “Look at that, Mom. The shards, the layer of dust atop them, like it’s been there for centuries, right?”

  She nodded slowly. “Grave robbers, most likely.”

  “That would make sense. But I broke it the last time we came through. When I went back to 1342, this place was sealed up tight. There was no hole in the ceiling. It was totally pitch black inside. I couldn’t see where I was going, and knocked it over. Sorry,” I added quickly, with a grimace. After all, I was an archaeologist’s kid, and I’d just admitted to destroying a priceless artifact. I knelt next to her. “But think, Mom. Think hard. When we first got to this site, was the urn broken or whole?”

  She paused for several seconds and blinked rapidly. Two memories clearly collided, as I hoped they might. Conflicting memories. One of the urn, whole. One of it broken. “I…I don’t think it was broken.”

  “But look,” I said, gesturing again to the shards. “That’s like centuries of dust on them, right?” I rose. “Because it happened almost seven hundred years ago. When I was there. Facts, Mom. Facts. They’ll lead you to your theory. Is there anything else in here that is different? Different from any other tomb? Any clue to tell us it’s a doorway to a different time?” I turned and examined the frescoes in the dim light. “Even better would be anything that tells us how we might control what time we’ll land in.”

  Lia stood in my way, arms folded, shaking her head. “There’s no steering wheel for this thing. You remember. We move fast, Gabi. You take a breath after it’s broken and we might be thirty years off. Besides, we’re moving backward. And remember? It’s pitch black in there.”

  She was right. If I waited for the urn, and passed it, I might arrive when Marcello was a baby. That wouldn’t be cool. “The light! That’s how we’ll know. I opened the tomb. At some point, someone rolled that rock back into place. Marcello wouldn’t have done that, not if he thought I was coming back. I just have to wait past that…and, well, I don’t know exactly how I’ll know. But we have to try.”

  “They might have rolled that stone back a hundred years after we left!”

  “We have to try,” I repeated.

  “You’re crazy,” she said, eyebrows lifted.

  “Please, Lia. Just for a while. I have to go. I have to.” I dared to glance at Mom, wondering if she would keep us from the journey.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said. Her tone told me she didn’t quite believe us yet but the only way to resolve it was to show us we were chasing some sort of idiotic fantasy.

  We heard voices outside and began to whisper.

  “I don’t know if you can, Mom,” I said. “It might be just me and Lia that make the leap.”

  “We won’t k
now if this is all in your heads if we don’t go ahead and attempt it.”

  I swallowed my frustration over her disbelief. “It’s too risky. Last time, I lost hold of Lia, and she arrived days after me. What if you lose hold of us? There’d be no way to get you back—let alone find you.”

  Mom gave me her There’s No Sense Arguing look. “Look, you two aren’t going anywhere if I’m not with you. And if this really is a doorway through time, I want to see it for myself.”

  I don’t know why her words surprised me. Wasn’t it the dream of every historian or archaeologist to go back in time, see another era for themselves?

  Lia was still shaking her head, looking from Mom to me, as if she couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. “Are you insane? Gabs, I almost lost you—twice! Please…let’s stay here. It’s not safe to go back. Think of it as a trip, a wild trip we took once. That’s all.”

  I stared into her eyes, trying to get her to calm down.

  “Lia, I have to go back. Marcello—” My voice broke, and I swallowed, hard. “Please.” She hesitated, and I pressed her again, sensing that her resolve was slipping. “Please.”

  Mom shifted from one leg to the other. “Evangelia, you two must be sharing some odd delusion. You have to be. But if…if this is true, if you’ve possibly stumbled upon some miraculous gateway, allowing us to go back in time and return—again—it would be one of the top scientific discoveries of all time. How could we not go?”

  “Exactly,” I said, leaping on the convenient excuse. Anything to convince Lia.

  “Just for a little while, then we come back?” she asked tentatively, looking at me.

  “For a little while,” I said.

  “And what if in returning, you go back to being poisoned? Bleeding?”

  “We’ll take the med kit,” Mom said quietly. “There’re shots of morphine and antibiotics in there. A mini-surgical kit. You won’t be alone, Lia. We’ll take care of her together.”

  “You think we’ll be together.”

  Mom stared back at her. “To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to think. But you can’t accomplish what you can’t imagine.” Despite the words that told us she believed a measure of what we were saying, I could still see the trace of skepticism around her eyes. Like a part of her believed she would soon get to the scientific basis of our dreamlike story.

  Lia heaved a sigh and stepped up to the wall. “We have to pull off at the same moment, this time,” she said to me. “Mom, you hold us tight, and whatever happens, don’t let go, all right?”

  “We’re more prepared this round,” I said, trying to ease her fears.

  Outside, the men’s voices came closer. A shout went up.

  They’d discovered our escape.

  “Girls,” Mom said in warning, glancing toward the tomb entrance. “I’m praying you aren’t ill, suffering some sort of mental lapse. Because the last thing I need is Manero to find all three of us in here.”

  “If you think Manero’s bad,” Lia said, “wait till you meet some of the dudes ahead of us.”

  CHAPTER 2

  My plan worked pretty well. The heat beneath our hands intensified until I could barely stand it; I felt caught, like my skin was becoming fused to the stone of the tomb wall, and feared both options—ripping it away or never being able to do so again. The light became our cue. Above us, the hole again showcased a time-lapse video of trees growing and falling, burning, growing again. Everything was heavy, slow motion and yet scary fast, dreamy, like moving through water with ankle weights. The hole above us disappeared, the grave robbers come and gone in a partial breath, and then the entrance stone was gone, letting light rush in from the side.

  That’s when I saw it.

  A pile of clothes, right in the center.

  A scroll, rolled and tied.

  Marcello.

  I looked into Lia’s eyes and screamed, “Now,” as I pulled my palm from the searing heat. My shout came and went so fast it was impossible for even me to hear, but Lia knew. She’d been watching.

  At that point I couldn’t feel Mom. But when I fell back, on top of her, I laughed in relief. Seconds later, Lia appeared beside us. We lunged to catch her and managed to break her fall, then laughed in relief and hugged one another.

  “That was crazy! I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Mom said, her eyes alight.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. There was something oddly comforting in having Mom with us. Like she could save us from whatever this time had to dish out. I smiled along with her. Lia rose, face glum.

  “Everyone in one piece?” Mom asked, staring at each of us as if she wanted us to count off ten fingers and ten toes.

  “Fine, fine,” I said. I felt my side. Still all healed, as if I’d had the wound ten years rather than just getting it days ago.

  “No ache in your gut?” Lia said. “No poison?”

  I shook my head. “Whatever happens in that time tunnel seems to fix whatever is wrong. I’m good.” I stood up and made my way to the clothing. Marcello had been thoughtful enough to recall my awkward twenty-first-century clothes from the last time I showed up and had figured out a way for me to avoid the embarrassment again. He’d hoped I’d return—the clothes proved it. Not that I really needed proof. I remembered his intense demand, uttered less than an hour ago for me, weeks for him—“Return to me, and you shall find me waiting.”

  I handed Mom a gown. “Trust me, you’ll want to put that on.”

  Lia was fortunately still in hers, and since Marcello’d left two, I could slip on the other and be done with the bloody one. I reached for the note and unrolled the parchment scroll, fighting the urge to run all the way to the castle as I read it.

  Gabriella, welcome. Please, hasten to the castle at once, but be especially cautious of enemies about. They would consider your capture a sure victory. I await you.—Marcello

  “He’s waiting for me,” I said, letting the scroll roll up again. “At least he was.” I looked beside the clothing. My broadsword, with its sheath worn on the back, and a dagger. Beside it, Lia’s bow and arrows. I reached for the sword and wiped a fine layer of dust from the hilt. How long had it been lying here? How long had I been gone, really?

  “These men know you?” Mom said, picking up and studying the finely crafted bow before handing it to Lia.

  “I told you,” Lia said grumpily. “This place is rough. We may very well have to fight for our lives.”

  Mom stared at her for a long moment. Judging from her face, it was all sinking in. “Well, let’s make the most of it, shall we?” Her face was exploding as much with anticipation as wariness. “How do we explain ourselves? Surely you had to concoct some sort of story.”

  I looked at Lia, and we pieced together as much as we could in regard to what we had said. “We’re from Normandy. You are a merchantress but have been missing for a while. That’s our cover story—it’s what brought Lia and me to Toscana, to search for you, where we last heard from you.”

  “I am a merchant? In what goods do I trade?” Mom paused, and her fingers went to her lips. “And tell me, what sort of Italian is this that is coming out of my mouth?”

  “Dante’s own, I think,” I returned, in the same dialect. “It comes with the leap. You’ll find the medieval-speak comes fairly easy too. It’s kind of like watching one of Shakespeare’s plays—you know, at first, you can barely keep up with what they’re saying, and then, boom, you hear it coming out of your own mouth. Oh, and you deal in ancient artifacts,” I said with a grin. “Although they’re fairly superstitious about entering old tombs. You’ll have to be careful on that front.”

  “Yeah, they wouldn’t like it if you started excavating,” Lia said. “Think like a medieval merchant, Mom.”

  Lia picked up her arrows, then moved toward the entrance and crawled out to the edge.

  “All clear?” I asked. Last time, I’d emerged into the center of a battle between the Forellis and Paratores.

  “All clear,” she sa
id over her shoulder. Quickly, I put on my deep green gown, and pulled on the matching slippers. I helped Mom with hers, a blue one probably meant for Lia, and then we moved to join her outside.

  I sucked in my breath. We’d left in the heat of summer. Now a cold wind blew up through the valley, shaking leaves of autumn from the oaks. “Okay, so I missed our exit point by a few months.” Or was my whole time-exchange concept off? Maybe it didn’t matter at all.

  “Let’s hope it’s the same year,” Lia said, sliding her bow over her shoulder.

  My heart paused and then pounded at her words. What if I was off by a year or more? What if Marcello was no longer a guy about my age, but rather a middle-aged man? I shivered.

  That would be…awkward.

  Mom pulled up short as we came around the bend, staring with wide eyes at the Forelli castle ahead of us—and then back behind us, where the Paratore towers just barely peeked over the hilltop.

  “I told you,” I said, looping my arm through hers.

  “I see it,” she said, bringing her hand to her forehead and shading her eyes, still staring at the castles, “but I’m still trying to believe what I’m seeing.”

  I studied them with her, trying to remember that feeling of utter surprise the first time I’d seen both castellos in their original splendor and perfection. But my eyes settled on the flags waving in the brisk fall wind. Both the Paratore and the Forelli castellos were flying the Forelli gold. So they’d managed to hold it, even with the newly drawn border. I wondered if that meant the Sienese forces were constantly under attack. The Fiorentini—the people of Firenze—would not, could not deal with such a shift. No wonder Marcello had left the warning of “enemies about.” We moved down the path and soon crossed the narrow river. Cautiously, we picked our way through the woods, telling Mom all we could from our last visit so she’d be prepared, ready for what was ahead.

  Lia was telling her about Lord Paratore, and her escape, and of Luca and Marcello, when we reached the creek, barely trickling at this point in the season. “This was the border between the properties when we arrived,” I said, balancing on a large rock and hopping to the next. “It changed course at some point, going the opposite way around the hill with the tombs, and suddenly, bam, the Paratores thought they could claim it for Firenze. Of course, they weren’t really thinking the Forellis would fight ’em for it.”