Matt was standing without realizing he’d bolted to his feet. “What?”
“The riddle you were telling on the air, right before the ship was hit.”
He’d never heard that riddle from anyone else. His dad claimed to have made it up. That didn’t mean it wasn’t out there somewhere, but—
“What’s the answer to the riddle?” Lily Baines asked. “You never said, on the transmission. That was when everything started going to hell in a bally basket.”
I am unbreakable. Even when you break me, I remain unbroken. What am I? “Wind,” Matt heard himself say. “Kinda gross, also kinda profound. It’s the kind of riddle sailors like. My dad was navy too.”
Slowly, he sat back down. His ship was going to go down with all hands in the next week. Maybe World War III was about to kick off.
“Holy shit,” said Matt Jackson.
The woman from the past just listened, cool as Devonshire cream, saying nothing.
“OK, Baines,” he heard himself saying, one petty officer to another. “Tonight, eighteen hundred, I start a journey involving three buses, a plane flight, and a helo ride to the fucking North Atlantic where you and I are going to be out of comms reach. So, in the next six hours, how do we head this thing off?”
1943
Withernsea
No,” Lily said forty minutes later, “I cannot fake a series of documents good enough to fool your superiors, and set up another drop with Uncle Andrew. That is beyond my skills.”
“‘Dammit Jim, you’re a Y Station listener, not a forger?’”
“What?”
“Old TV show. Never mind,” Matt muttered on the other end. Lily glared at him, or at least the transmitter. She wanted to ask about these bizarre references he kept making, but there wasn’t time. Five hours and counting . . . she was pacing up and down the room, or at least the few steps and back, which was all the cord would permit. She somehow knew that he was pacing too: she could hear the scrape of shoes, and periodically he stubbed his toes on something and muttered Goddamn tiny Brit furniture. She imagined him as one of those tall, lanky Yanks, towheaded, very white teeth. Pacing, probably rubbing a hand through his hair. She’d only been talking to him for a day, and she had no idea what he looked like, but somehow she’d built up a picture anyway.
“Look, could you go to your commanding officer first thing and convince him I’m real?” she asked instead. “Give him the full story, corroborating details.”
“Uh-huh. So I walk in, ‘Oh, good afternoon, sir, ST1 Jackson here. Just a heads-up, I’ve been talking to a Wren from 1943 on this eighty-year-old wireless she sent me, and she knows for a fact that we’re going to be sunk in a few days. Mind talking to the admiral about turning the battle group around?’ Sorry, Lady Rose, I don’t see that going well.”
“You could take the wireless receiver onto the ship.”
“What if I can’t get you on the freq? We’re talking through a wormhole or some quantum fluctuation or whatever the hell this is; we’re lucky it’s lasted this long.” Lily imagined him looking out the window of his room at the Grand. She wondered what it looked like—how the skyline of her birth city had changed in nearly a century. “How are we doing this?” he asked finally. “Talking across time.”
“Well . . . because of what you said in your transmission, I only knew one exact point of time where you were going to be—on land, anyway. At the Grand, room 202, the ninth of March. So I thought I’d send the wireless and see if it could, I don’t know, create a link.”
“Which was pretty goddamn genius, Lady Rose. If I’d realized I was listening through a wormhole to someone dying three generations in the future, I’d have run around in circles screaming, not put together an eighty-year-old go-package in forty-eight hours flat.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Petty Officer Jackson. You’re pretty cool under fire from everything I heard.” She stopped herself before she could choke up. Even in his last moments, the compartment flooding around him, he’d still been trying to transmit. Throwing out information to help any fellow ships who could hear.
Silence expanded through the airwaves.
“I guess what I mean is, how did you hear me to begin with?” he asked quietly. “How did Lily Baines in her little Y Station in Yorkshire pick up my voice eighty years in the future?”
“I’ve got ears like a bat,” Lily offered.