By the second morning after they woke, Jonathan had covered most of the library table.
His drawing from Istanbul lay beneath a sheet of tracing paper. Around it were an atlas, two regional maps and the observatory’s address, copied from Professor Valdés’s fax. A cup of tea occupied the only space he had not yet claimed.
Daniel found him holding the tracing against the window.
“I thought you were writing down what we told you.”
“I was. The woman with the fruit has been particularly unhelpful.”
Daniel smiled and approached the table. Among the maps were several pages describing the city they had visited in their sleep. Jonathan had recorded their accounts separately, then underlined the details on which they agreed.
“You’ve been busy.”
“You were all remarkably specific about a place none of you could locate.”
He lowered the tracing onto a map of South America.
The coastline did not fit exactly. Jonathan had marked several differences in pencil, including a stretch where his copied line bent inland while the modern coast continued almost straight. But the long mountain range ran beside it in a relationship Daniel recognised.
“Chile.”
“I began there because of the fax. I’d like to claim I reached it independently, but I didn’t.”
He adjusted the paper.
“The proportions are awkward. I was copying while the room was changing, and I don’t know how the original was drawn. Enough agrees to keep me interested.”
Daniel bent over the six narrow marks within the enclosure.
“And those?”
“Still troubling me.”
From the hall, Mara called Daniel’s name.
Jonathan glanced towards the door.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Home. Just for the day.”
For the first time, Jonathan put down his pencil.
“Have you told them?”
“Some of it.”
“Which part?”
“That I’m bringing someone.”
Jonathan considered him.
“Probably wise to begin there.”
The gates stood open when they arrived.
Mara looked along the driveway as Daniel turned between the stone pillars. Beyond them, the gravel curved through mature trees before the house came into view: pale stone, tall windows and broad steps rising to the front door. One wing extended towards a walled garden; beyond the other, she could see the roofs of a stable yard.
She turned towards him.
“You said we were going to your parents’ house.”
“We are.”
“You left quite a lot out.”
Daniel glanced at the building.
“I grew up here. I forget.”
His mother opened the door before they reached the steps.
She embraced him, drew back to look at his face, then embraced him again. Mara waited until Daniel turned and introduced her.
His mother’s attention moved between them with an interest neither could mistake.
“Come in. Your father’s waiting.”
The entrance hall rose through two floors, with a wide staircase turning beneath a tall window. Mara noticed fresh flowers on a polished table and an oil painting large enough to occupy most of the wall behind it. Daniel put his coat down without looking, as though the table had been placed there specifically for that purpose.
His mother moved it onto a chair.
Some things, Mara thought, evidently survived any amount of money.
Over lunch, Daniel answered questions about South Africa and allowed Jonathan to bear most of the responsibility for their unusual itinerary. His father asked about the caves. His mother asked whether they had eaten properly.
Mara found that question easier to answer.
Later, when the plates had been cleared, Daniel took her through the garden towards the stables.
“You used to ride?” she asked.
“Most days, when I was younger.”
“And you were going to mention that when?”
“When we reached the horses.”
She nudged his arm.
The stable yard lay beyond an archway, warm with the smell of hay and leather. A groom looked up from a saddle and greeted Daniel with the easy familiarity of someone who remembered him considerably smaller.
Before Daniel could answer his questions, Mara had stopped beside an open stable door.
A chestnut mare watched her over the lower half.
Mara held out her hand. The mare lowered her head, investigated her fingers and breathed softly against her palm.
“She thinks you’ve brought something,” Daniel said.
“I’m beginning to feel I should have.”
He watched her stroke the broad forehead, following the white marking between the mare’s eyes. When she stopped, the horse moved closer.
“Have you ridden?”
“Once. I spent most of it wondering whether the horse knew I was frightened.”
“Probably.”
She looked at him.
“That was comforting.”
“This one’s patient.”
The groom came over, wiping his hands on a cloth.
“She’ll look after you.”
Mara glanced from him to Daniel.
“You’ve both decided already.”
“Only if you want to,” Daniel said.
Her hand remained on the mare’s forehead.
“All right.”
They found her a helmet and adjusted the stirrups while Daniel waited beside her. At first, she held herself so stiffly that he could see the effort in her shoulders. He rode alongside as they left the yard and followed a track between the paddocks, letting her grow accustomed to the mare’s steady walk.
Beyond the fields, the estate opened into parkland. They passed beneath old trees and followed the edge of a meadow, the house appearing occasionally through gaps in the branches.
Once Mara stopped worrying about remaining in the saddle, she began noticing where they were.
“Is all of this yours?”
“My parents’.”
She gave him a look.
He smiled.
“Yes.”
Farther along, her questions changed. She wanted to know how lightly she could hold the reins, whether the mare understood her voice, and where the path beyond the trees led.
“Back towards the house,” Daniel said.
“Is there a longer way?”
“There is.”
“Let’s take that.”
On the return ride, she fell quiet. Daniel looked across and found her smiling, one hand resting briefly against the mare’s neck.
He slowed his horse to remain beside her.
By the time they returned to the house, Mara had mud on her boots and a strand of mane caught on her sleeve.
His mother met them near the garden doors.
“How was your walk?”
“Longer than expected,” Daniel said.
Mara removed the strand from her sleeve.
“Could we come back?”
His mother’s smile deepened.
“Of course.”
At the manor, Lindiwe found Vale in the garden after lunch.
He was sitting on a bench beneath an old tree, watching a gardener work along the far border. She had brought her notebook, but left it closed on her lap when she sat beside him.
For a while, they spoke about the city.
Vale remembered a word she had missed. Lindiwe remembered the way the man had held the metallic bar before the pictures appeared. Neither could account for the people’s complete indifference to their presence.
“I keep thinking I ought to recognise someone,” she said.
“Do you?”
“No. It’s different from the chamber.”
Vale waited while she considered that.
“There, I remembered being someone. In the city, I was only myself.”
“That distinction may matter.”
She turned the notebook in her hands.
“Have you known anyone who could do what Daniel does?”
Vale’s gaze remained on the gardener.
“Yes.”
She waited.
“He was better at it.”
“How much better?”
A small smile appeared.
“He once made a door where I had spent twenty minutes insisting there couldn’t be one.”
“What was on the other side?”
“A kitchen. We were meant to be entering an archive.”
Lindiwe laughed.
“Did you find it?”
“Eventually. Thomas found supper first.”
The name had come easily. What followed it did not.
Vale folded his hands.
“We trained together. Worked together for years.”
“Another Watcher?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him more closely. He spoke of Thomas with a warmth she had seldom heard in his voice, and seemed to notice it himself.
“What was he like?”
“Exasperating.”
“That isn’t much to go on.”
“He would have agreed with you.”
Vale leaned back against the bench.
“He liked people. Even when there was excellent reason not to. He could walk into a room full of men who wanted him gone and come out knowing which of them had a sick mother.”
“And you?”
“I usually knew which one would reach for a weapon.”
“That sounds useful.”
“It was. Thomas sometimes persuaded him not to.”
Across the garden, the gardener straightened and rubbed his back. Vale watched him gather his tools before speaking again.
“He understood his abilities better than Daniel does now. He could hold what he made, change it without losing it. There were things I watched him do that I still couldn’t explain.”
“Could you teach Daniel?”
“Some things.”
“Would Thomas have taught him?”
Vale looked at her then.
“Yes.”
She let the answer settle between them.
“What happened to him?”
The warmth left his face so gradually that she wished she had asked differently.
“We went to a meeting. Leyla was with us.”
Lindiwe remained still.
“It was a trap. Thomas stayed with her.”
“And you?”
“I had someone else to get out.”
He looked down at his hands.
“For a while, I could still hear him.”
The garden seemed suddenly too quiet.
“Could you have gone back?”
“Not without leaving the person I was protecting.”
She could feel how often he had returned to that choice. She kept her amulet beneath her blouse and made no attempt to reach further into him.
“Leyla survived,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Because of Thomas.”
“Yes.”
He drew a slow breath.
“Arthur Hargreaves was his oldest friend. He knew something was happening, but Thomas never told him enough.”
“Daniel’s headmaster?”
Vale nodded.
“To Arthur, he simply disappeared. I never corrected that.”
“Why?”
“I thought silence protected him.”
“And now?”
Vale watched the empty border.
“Now I’m less certain whom it protected.”
Lindiwe opened her notebook, then closed it again. This was not something she wanted to write down in front of him.
“When did he die?”
“Seventeenth of April. Nineteen seventy-six.”
She knew the year Daniel had been born. The rest came when Vale added, quietly, “The date on Daniel’s school record.”
Lindiwe turned towards him.
“His birthday?”
“Yes.”
For a moment, she pictured Vale standing in a school office, looking at a date he had carried for six years.
“You thought Thomas had come back.”
“I didn’t know what to think.”
“And now?”
He took some time to answer.
“Daniel is Daniel.”
She nodded.
But Vale remained looking at the place where the gardener had been, and she stayed beside him until he was ready to speak of something else.
The following morning, Sal came down to breakfast wearing his coat.
Elena had told him they would leave after eating. He had evidently decided to remove one possible cause of delay.
Kane looked up from his coffee.
“Planning to keep that on?”
Sal nodded.
“Even for the eggs?”
The boy looked down at his plate and reluctantly began unfastening it.
They took him into London after breakfast. Gabriel drove, while Lucía sat in front and discussed where they might begin. Once they had parked, the two Watchers allowed the others to move ahead.
Kane noticed Gabriel reflected in a shop window. Elena saw Lucía pause beside a display they had already passed.
“They said they’d give us some room,” she murmured.
“They are.”
“You keep checking.”
“So do you.”
She smiled without looking at him.
Sal wanted to see everything.
At Buckingham Palace, he waited for one of the guards to move and asked Kane how long a man could stand without scratching his nose. Beside the river, he stopped to watch boats until Elena reminded him there were other things they had come to see.
The clock tower held him longest.
He tipped his head back, studying it with such concentration that Kane wondered what he was finding in the stonework. Then Sal asked how they changed the hands when the clock was wrong.
Kane admitted he didn’t know.
“You’re allowed to say that?” Elena asked.
“Occasionally. I try to keep it quiet.”
They found somewhere to eat, and Sal spent several minutes explaining the morning to Lucía when she passed their table. Gabriel remained near the entrance until Kane raised his eyebrows at him.
The man approached.
“You can sit down,” Kane said.
“For a moment.”
Elena moved her bag from the spare chair.
Later, the Watchers fell back again, and the three walked beside the river. Sal held Elena’s hand on one side and Kane’s on the other, using both whenever he wanted to swing his feet clear of the pavement.
After the third attempt, Elena told him to walk properly. Kane helped him once more. She looked across her son’s head.
“You’re encouraging him.”
“I’ve been told I need exercise.”
She shook her head, smiling.
For several steps, none of them spoke. Kane could feel the boy’s small hand settled comfortably in his own. He had spent years knowing exactly where he needed to be next. That afternoon, he found himself content to let Sal choose.
Jonathan’s research reached him in pieces.
A fax supplied the reference for an archaeological survey. Another brought several pages of the article itself. He read those beside the machine before carrying them into the library, where the tea had gone cold again.
By the third afternoon, a courier had delivered a packet from Cambridge.
Professor Valdés had enclosed copies of material already held at the Institute, together with additional information obtained from La Silla. Jonathan laid out descriptions of the surrounding terrain, reproduced survey photographs and a short account of the observatory’s facilities.
A photograph slipped from between two pages.
He picked it up.
A woman stood beside an open dome, one hand holding her hair clear of her face. She was looking towards someone outside the picture, caught in the middle of an expression that might have become either a smile or an argument.
Jonathan turned it over.
Isobel Rojas, La Silla.
He looked at the photograph again before placing it beside her report.
When Mara came into the library, she found him reading the accompanying letter.
“Progress?”
“Yes.”
She glanced at the table.
“Is that Isobel?”
“Apparently.”
Mara picked up the photograph.
“She looks tired.”
“She’s had very little sleep.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
“No. Valdés mentions it.”
Mara returned the photograph to its place. Jonathan moved the archaeological article towards her with rather more purpose than was necessary.
“There are rock engravings around La Silla. A photographic and topographic survey was made in 1990. They left a set of the photographs at the observatory.”
Mara sat down.
“Someone has already looked.”
“At the visible sites. That helps us.”
He showed her the descriptions of the eastern slopes and the ravine below one of the telescopes. Figures and geometric markings had been recorded among scattered rocks. The article associated the occupation with the El Molle complex, while noting that the archaeological sites had not yet been excavated.
By the time the others joined them, he had spread the tracing over the regional map.
“La Silla is here.”
His finger moved from the modern map to the enclosure on his drawing. Six narrow marks lay within it, beside the two small amulet symbols.
“You think that’s the observatory?” Daniel asked.
“The same general area. I can’t put a modern building onto a map whose age we don’t know.”
Kane studied the enclosure.
“What are those six?”
“We thought they might be graves.”
“Did anyone say that?”
Jonathan paused.
“No.”
It was a fair question. He drew a fresh sheet towards him and wrote beneath the copied enclosure:
Six separate features. Purpose unknown.
Mara watched him.
“You’re enjoying having someone check your work.”
“I expect the novelty will pass.”
Daniel looked towards the padded box on a separate desk.
“How old is the history in the article?”
“Thousands of years. Nothing here accounts for what you saw while you were asleep.”
“They needn’t be the same people,” Vale said.
Jonathan nodded.
Daniel remembered the metallic case concealed behind the carving in South Africa. Whoever had placed it there had known enough to protect it, whether or not they understood what it was.
Perhaps the people who had kept the last two had done the same.
“How much ground?” Kane asked.
“Too much for six people to search on foot.”
“Then we need something more precise.”
Lindiwe sat beside the window, her amulet loose between her palms. Its centre and all five smaller stones shone softly with the others gathered around her.
“Perhaps we don’t.”
They turned towards her.
“I didn’t know which hotel room to go to. I didn’t even know what I was looking for.”
Sal looked up from the carpet.
“I knew mine was in this house.”
Daniel remembered Mara on the stairs in Istanbul, drawn towards a case she had never seen.
Vale rested his hand beside the tracing.
“This may bring us close enough.”
Jonathan studied the six marks once more. He had spent three days trying to force them into a position the drawing could not honestly supply. The thought that he might not need to was reassuring, although he would have preferred to discover it before drawing so many lines.
“I’d still like to see those photographs.”
“You will,” Mara said.
They practised that evening in a room overlooking the grounds.
Elena stayed near Sal. Jonathan brought his notebook but placed his chair close to the door.
No one suggested opening the padded box.
They began with the table already in the room. Daniel concentrated on changing its surface, while Mara helped him clear the competing impressions that made the edges slip. Kane noticed the repeated disturbance before Daniel could identify where it began.
“Same corner,” he said. “Every time you look at the window.”
Daniel tried again.
The wood beneath their hands grew smooth and pale.
Lindiwe felt the familiar ease of their connection settle into something they could sustain. Vale asked Daniel to alter one small detail, then another, allowing him time to recognise the moment before he lost it.
After several attempts, Daniel straightened.
“I should be tired.”
Sal looked at him.
“Are you?”
“No.”
The boy smiled and returned his attention to the table.
Elena watched her son, then glanced towards Kane. He remained beside him, close enough to notice if the effort began to cost him anything.
This time, when Daniel let the creation go, the ordinary wood returned without the room collapsing around them.
Jonathan made a note.
“That,” he said, “was considerably better.”
A member of staff appeared at the door carrying a fax.
Jonathan took it and recognised Professor Valdés’s name.
The message was brief. Further observations had reduced some of the uncertainty. They had not reduced the concern.
He read it again before handing it to Vale.
The others watched the change in their faces.
Outside, the last light lay across the lawns. Mara still had mud along the edge of one boot. Sal’s guidebook lay open on a chair, with a postcard tucked between its pages.
Jonathan gathered the research into a folder.
Isobel’s photograph remained beside her report. He placed it carefully inside before closing the cover.
“We should speak to her,” he said.
Daniel looked towards the darkening window.
“Yes.”
This time, no one suggested waiting until morning.