2023
York
Her words fell into Matt’s ears like drops of ice. Dimly he realized he was sitting down on the edge of the bed, rubbing a hand through his hair, listening to a girl in another century tell him how he would die.
“The Colin Powell started taking fire,” she said, her voice tinny. He knew that tone; it was the sound of a navy petty officer brutally flattening all the emotion out of their voice to get a job done. He knew it because he’d done it himself. “You were in the area with some kind of fleet, everyone on high alert because of the Invincible’s disappearance. I didn’t understand it all, what I was hearing, but I heard it all—through you. You were cool as a cucumber, right to the end.”
“Wait, how could you hear me at all?” Matt wasn’t sure why his brain latched on to that detail when he was hearing about his own goddamn death, but it did. “Ship to ship, we would have been talking on encrypted channels. You shouldn’t have been able to listen in.” From 1943 or anywhere else.
“You said you were broadcasting in the clear because the usual channels kept getting bursts of disruption. No one was sure why; it had you all nervous . . .” A pause, and then she burst out, “What were you fighting?”
How do I know that, Lady Rose? Matt thought. According to you, it won’t happen to me for another few days.
“Was it—I can’t believe I’m saying this. Was it vampires? Because you yelled Vampire, vampire inbound—”
Matt squeezed his eyes shut, then open again. His hand was flexing rapidly on his knee, he realized. “It’s—it means missiles inbound. Missiles in the air, gunning for you.” The thing you never, ever wanted to hear. The thing he’d never, ever had cause to say in his entire naval career. He’d never seen combat; radio types didn’t. You sat in little cold rooms with headphones and tracked things, well behind the lines.
“Missiles . . . ,” Lily said from the other end, sounding bemused. Matt found himself giving a brief explanation of what an anti-ship cruise missile was, in terms a forties-era girl would comprehend. She still sounded dubious as she said, “Well—it makes more sense than actual vampires.”
“You thought we were fighting bloodsucking fiends in black capes?” Matt couldn’t help asking with an involuntary laugh.
“I was already listening to a broadcast from the future.” She sounded momentarily waspish. “I was running low on skepticism.”
“Vampires are not real, even in 2023. So far, anyway. Though if you’d put it on my bingo card for 2020, I might have bought it.” JFC, he was not going to try to explain the COVID-19 lockdown to a girl from 1943. She was probably still hearing horror stories about the 1918 pandemic. “Vampires inbound, OK. What happened then?”
“Your ship was hit,” she said simply. “Multiple times. It took forty-two minutes to sink. I heard you till the end. You—you stayed at your post. You couldn’t get out; the explosion had warped the door. Locked you in. You kept transmitting till the end, even as water was flooding the compartment and everyone else was screaming and clawing to get out. You sounded so calm. Right till the last moment—you said that one week ago you were in room 202 of the Grand in York, and you wished you’d known that the same night you’d be hearing about the Invincible. Because you would have stopped worrying about your upcoming PRT, and got the fish and chips at the pub instead of the salad.”
Matt’s entire spine did its best to crawl out of his skin, over his shirt collar, and under the bed.
“Then there was a blare of static, and I thought I heard you scream. But it was cut off. The transmission went dead.”
A ghastly silence stretched, and Matt realized he could imagine her clear as day. This girl whose face he’d found on Google Images, a blurry black-and-white oval over a brass-buttoned uniform. Only she was in living color, with her dark cloud of curls and her crystal-clear Downton Abbey voice, sitting on a bed just the way he was, somewhere in Nineteen Fucking Forty-Three.
“Matt.” Her voice was uneven, rising from its petty officer flatness. “I don’t want you to die like that. Please let me help you. Please believe I am who I say I am.”
He swallowed. “I’m not allowed to believe you, Lady Rose. I know what my protocols would say.”
A long silence, then a crackle of static. For a moment, he thought he’d lost her; then her voice was back. “‘I am unbreakable. Even when you break me, I remain unbroken. What am I?’”