Tristan thought about it.
“Do it again,” he said, and her face immediately relaxed. Relief, he suspected, that he might have actually noticed something, or was at least giving her the opportunity to make him notice.
She tossed the ball again, letting it bounce three times, and froze it.
Then she summoned it back, same as before, and caught it in her hand.
“See something?” she said.
Yes. Not something he could explain, but there was some element out of place. A rapid motion around the ball, barely visible.
“What did you expect me to see?” he asked her.
“Heat,” she said, breath quickening. Clearly she was excited; childishly so. “The thing is,” bubbled from her lips, “according to everything I’ve read, it’s possible time is measurably no different from gravity. Things moving up and down? Gravity. Things moving backward and forward? Force, of course, depending on the dimension—but also, in some respect, time. If the clocks had been stopped, if nothing had changed, there would be no physical evidence that I hadn’t reversed time itself when I reversed the ball’s motion. The only real way you could know that we haven’t traveled in time—aside from trusting your understanding that we haven’t,” she provided as a caveat, gesturing around the room to her experiment, “is that heat was produced by the ball hitting the ground, and heat can’t be lost. Thermal energy bouncing the ball has to go somewhere, so as long as that hasn’t vanished, then we haven’t moved back in time.”
“Okay,” Tristan said slowly, “and?”
“And—”
She stopped.
“And… nothing,” she concluded, deflating a little. “I just thought—” She broke off again, faltering. “Well, if you can see heat, you could also see time, don’t you think?” she said, nudging her fringe aside. “If what you’re seeing is even more specific—electrons or something, or quanta itself—then the next step is to manipulate it. I’ve been thinking about it for ages,” she informed him, again becoming Studious Libby, who temporarily lost her anxious ticks. “With the illusions, with that medeian that I—”
She broke off on the word killed, clearing her throat.
“You told me what you saw,” she clarified, “and I used that information to change my surroundings. So, if you told me what you saw when it came to time—”
“You could use it. Change it.” Tristan chewed the thought for a moment. “Manipulate it?”
“I guess it depends on what you were seeing,” Libby said carefully, “but I think, if I’m right about what you can do, that if you could identify the physical structure of time, then yes. We could maneuver it somehow.” She was breathless with exhilaration; the thrill of a problem nearly solved.
“Though, if you’re busy,” she amended with a floundering blink, “we could always try it another t-”
“Rhodes, shut up,” said Tristan. “Come here.”
She was clearly so pleased that she didn’t bother opposing his tone, instead bounding over to sit beside him. He stopped her and rose to his feet, gesturing her into his chair.
“You sit,” he said. “I’ll stand behind you.”
She slid into his seat and nodded as he concentrated once again.
Whatever this particular magic was, when he focused it hard enough, things became grainy. When he did the equivalent of squinting, it was like the zooming of a microscopic lens. Things were blurrier at the edges, but he could see things, smaller and smaller. Layers upon layers, motion growing more rapid the closer he got.
“When you manipulate gravity,” he said. “What does it feel like?”
Libby closed her eyes, holding out a hand.
With the flat of her palm, she pushed down. The pressure nearly dragged Tristan to his knees.
“Like a wave,” she explained belatedly. “Like things are floating in an invisible current.”
Tristan conjured his understanding of linear time, turning it over in his mind. Where might the misconceptions have been? That it was linear, he supposed. That it moved forward and backward. That it was ordered. That it was irrelevant to concepts like heat.
There it was; when he dismissed his expectations, he found it. It was the only thing moving at an identifiably constant pace, though it varied from different levels throughout the room. Faster higher up, slower lower down. Not the same constancy of the clock on the wall, which was close to the ceiling’s apex, but near Libby, it was regular. As regular as a pulse. He could see it, or feel it—or however he was experiencing it—at what he presumed to be sixty beats per minute right where Libby’s hair brushed the tops of her shoulders, flipping girlishly out. It was getting long; it had grown at least an inch since they’d arrived.