“You’re coming in amazingly clear. Eighty years away and I can hear every silver spoon and castle turret in your vowels.”
“I didn’t grow up in a castle, thank you.” She sat on the edge of the bed again. She heard a sigh of bedsprings through the transmitter and knew he was sitting on his. “You’re coming in clear too. I’ve practically got ranch dust and mooing cattle coming through the headphones.”
“I’m in York, not Wyoming. Besides, not all American boys grow up on ranches, Lady Rose.”
“Not all English girls grow up in castles, cowboy.”
Another silence.
“Maybe the wormhole or anomaly or whatever came through on my end,” he said. “I’ve heard some chatter about spooky new tech the Russian navy’s supposedly got. Some quantum encabulator thing that can break encryptions on the fly, deny spectrum usage, render most of our security inoperable, who knows.”
“How?”
“How should I know; I’m not there yet in the timeline. I’d tell you to ask me in a few days, but we’ll be out of comms range.”
“Let’s assume that’s it, then.” Lily waved a hand magisterially, even though he couldn’t see it. “Pin it all on the spooky stuff from the Soviets.”
“Russians, actually. Soviets haven’t been around for over thirty years now. And it’s spooky shit, Baines. This is officially a situation where even proper English flowers like you can swear.”
“I have never said that word in my life, and I never will. My nanny tanned my backside for letting slip with bloody awful when I was ten. And are you saying the Soviet Union is gone?”
“Eh, more like they changed the name on the door. And I’m sorry if I shock you. I’m a sailor; we use the word fuck as a comma.”
“Typical Yanks.”
“Hey, your sailors talk like this too, in the twenty-first century.”
“I see the Empire’s standards have slipped shockingly.”
“Yeah, about this Empire business . . .” Lily could hear the smile in his voice, and she returned the smile, flopping on her back across the bed next to the wireless. “You know what,” Matt continued, “never mind. I already let it slip about the USSR dissolving, I can’t risk screwing up the future by telling you too much more.”
“What, the future won’t happen if I know it’s going to?”
“The butterfly effect, Marvel and Loki, and the whole variant-timeline thing. I can see you wrinkling your nose”—Lily was—“but what it comes down to is yeah, we should probably try to avoid timeline paradoxes.”
“Did I set one off by warning you about the Colin Powell attack?”
“I don’t know. But you’ve already done it, so we may as well proceed. Can’t really un-ring that particular bell.”
“If you know my future, I’m tempted to ask you if I live to be an old lady. Or whom I marry.”
A creak of springs on his end. She could tell he’d just lain down, probably pillowing his head on his elbow the way she was. “That’s the kind of thing I probably shouldn’t get into.”
“Can you tell me one thing?” She drew in a breath, and found her voice suddenly clogged with tears. Everything in her locked like a fist, and she had to fight to get the words out, sounding so small and lost, she was ashamed of herself. “Do—do we win?”
A hiss of static, and for a heart-stopping moment she thought she’d lost him. “The war?” he asked, sounding startled. “Your war?”
“Yes, of course my war! The war against Hitler. Who did you think I meant, the Boers? Bloody Napoleon?” She pressed the heel of her hand to her burning eyes. “Just, tell me . . . Do we win?”
“Lily,” he said slowly. He hadn’t said her name before, just Baines or Lady Rose. “Why do you think I’m not talking to you in German right now? Yeah, honey. You win. We all do.”
Oh God, Lily thought, and began to cry. She clapped a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the sounds.
“I’m—look, I’m not going to tell you too much about it, all right? I really, really don’t want to screw up history here. But you win. You do. A lot of it comes down to people like you—listening, decoding, intel. It matters. So, so much more than you think.”
“It does?” She barely managed to keep her words steady over her streaming eyes.
“Yeah.” His voice was like a warm blanket, a hot toddy, an arm around the shoulders. She had a feeling he knew she was crying. “It fucking matters. What I do, our kind, signal technicians—it descends straight from you guys.”