Twice A Hero Part 7

She gave him a whimsical grin. "You said the year is 1884. Well, Mr. Liam Ignatius O'Shea, that wasn't the year I went into that tunnel."

"What?"

"I saida""

He grabbed her shoulders in earnest. "How do you know my middle name?"

"Homer told me. Ia""

"No one knows my middle name."

"I can see why you wouldn't want it spread around."

"Even Perry doesn't know. How do you?"

"Actually, Perry did. Does. And I know because he wasa"isa"mya"" She stopped herself abruptly and rushed on. "Because you're both in the history books."

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, give me strength. Was this fantastic story her attempt to divert his suspicion because she knew he'd unmasked Perry's plot? "History books," he repeated.

"The history books we have in the year I went into that tunnel." The look she gave him then was just a little tempered with reasonable caution, as if she'd finally recognized his mood. "The year nineteen hundred and ninety-seven."

Somehow she had to make him believe. Mac didn't know exactly when the certainty had come over her. If she could make him believe, she'd know it was all true. Which she already did, more or less. The alternative wasn't acceptable. She wasn't a gullible person. She wasn't lost in a dreamworld. She was practical and had faith in what she could see and touch and feel.

As she could see and touch and feel Liam O'Shea. The real, original Liam O'Shea, in all his potent masculine glory.

And he was very much alive.

That was only beginning to sink in. The pile of bones she'd found in the tunnel was gone, because Liam hadn't died. She didn't have to beg his apology for her ancestor's deed, because it hadn't happened yet. If she could only somehow convince him she wasn't losing her mind, all of this would start making sense.

But convincing him wasn't going to be easy. What little she knew of him and her observations in the past hour didn't suggest a proclivity for trust or belief in the impossible. His expression was thunderous, and she was painfully aware of the pressure of his fingers digging into the hollows above her collarbones. He did, in fact, think she was crazy. And who could blame him?

You've gone about this all wrong, Mac. Homer would be ashamed of you. But she hadn't been thinking coherently since she'd come out of the tunnel again. She'd been in some kind of shock. Maybe it was the shock itself that made it soa no, not easy, but possible to accept.

Accept that she'd somehow come back in time.

d.a.m.n, but that sounded very strange. She choked back a laugh. Laughing was not the right approach to take with Mr. O'Shea, who acted as if he'd prefer the company of a poisonous snake to hers.

She cleared her throat. "Uha"I'm sorry, Mr. O'Shea. I haven't been explaining this well. If you could just"a"she wedged her hands upward against his arms, pus.h.i.+nga""just let me goa"

He did, if reluctantly. For a moment she let herself just look at him. Before, when she thought him only a coincidental copy of the man in the photograph, she'd been reluctantly impressed. Nowa"it really was him. The guy whose supposed murder had laid a curse on the Sinclairs, or at least Homer had been convinced of it and sent her down here to find his bones, but she'd found him instead, and now what in the world was she supposed toa Whoa. Slow down. "Let me start over," she said, as much for her own benefit as for his.

He rocked back on his heels. The gunmetal gray of his eyes was as sharp as his machete blade, and just as capable of cutting. His anger was manifest; she sensed that another wrong word could send him over some dangerous edge. He was sarcastic, cynical, impatient, chauvinistic, and just plain annoying, and none of those qualities were conducive to his accepting what she was about to tell him.

Yet she remembered the way she'd felt, lifted up, light as air, in his powerful arms. And how he'd laid her down so gently and fed her water and hovered over her. She'd felt bodiless then, and more than a little unreal.

But this was real. Somehow, incredibly, she of all Sinclairs had been singled out for the most amazing adventure of all. She, unremarkable MacKenzie Rose.

"Listen," she said. "I'll spell it out as cogently as I can, but you're going to have to accept that it's not going to sound rational or reasonable."

His lip curled. "Don't be concerned, Mac. I've become accustomed to your insanity."

She winced. "Okay. I really did come to Tikal as a tourist, with a bunch of other tourists. I wasn't part of a group, though. I was exploring the ruins there when an Indian guide offered to show me something interesting. He cut me a path through the jungle to this place.

"Right after I arrived, my guide disappeared. I decided to explore anyway, and went into the temple, where I found the tunnel. I'd been walking quite a few minutes when I hit the glyph wall, and founda" She caught her breath and slowed down again. She wasn't about to bring up the bones, or all the implications of that discovery. She wasn't ready to deal with it herself.

"I, uh, ran into the wall and started feeling very dizzy, almost sick. I leaned against the wall, anda"" A memory jumped into her minda"of holding her own pendant and Liam's in either hand, pressing her fists against the wall just before it disappeared. The flash of an idea teased her mind and then was gone. "A few seconds later the wall vanished. I was disoriented, and I couldn't find the wall again, so I just started the way I thought was out. And ran into you."

Liam regarded her blankly. "Very interesting, but hardly enlightening."

"Yeah," she said. "But that isn't the punch line. When I went into that tunnel, the date was August 15, 1997. And when I came out, as you told me, it was 1884." She faced him squarely. "In short, I walked through that tunnel and traveled from the future into the past. One hundred and thirteen years. From my timea into yours."

His expression went through a series of transformations that were almost alarming. "Let me get this straight. You claim to have come from the next century?"

"I know it sounds weird." She smiled crookedly and clasped her hands, hoping that she seemed both earnest and sane. "It's hard enough for me to accept. I don't blame you for, um, doubting mea""

"Doubting you?" he said with elaborate sarcasm.

"Not at all. But you do intrigue me. You actually traveleda through time?"

"Yes."

"Fascinating. 1997, you said? I'd be very interested in seeing this distant time of yours." He showed a flash of white teeth. "Now that we've becomea comrades, I'm sure you won't object to taking me with you when you return."

This was just as bad as she'd thought. His deep, rough voice was honeyed with mockery. No time to lose your temper, Maca "But that's the problem," she said. "This all happened by accidenta"that is, I don't know how it happened. I can't reproduce whatever I did toa do it the first time. I can't go back through. It doesn't work. I tried."

He arched a brow. "Then perhaps you can explain to me how this marvelousa pa.s.sage through time functions, and how it came to be here in the middle of the jungle?"

Oh, brother. This was the tricky part. Until now she'd been as sure as any other reasonable person that time travel didn't exist. She was by no means an expert on the theories, though Homer had known some physicists at Berkeley who'd been interested in the subject.

She sifted through memory for examples that would make sense to a man from the 1880s. H.G. Wells's first serialization of The Time Machine wouldn't be published for four more yearsa"from the "now" she was in. But she remembered reading somewhere that the notion of time travel had been popular even before Wells.

"Harper's!" she said triumphantly. "In 1856 they published an article about time travel, about a guy going into the future. I don't remember much about it, buta""

"Is that where you came up with these ideas?"

Mac refused to be baited. "The concept isn't beyond you, I a.s.sume?"

"Miss MacKenzie, you may try my patience, but not my intelligence."

"That's a start." She chewed her lip. "Come to think of it, there are lots of examples from your time and before. Stories about people who went into the future through dreams or suspended animation or even sleeping too long. But that isn't what happened to me. I didn't just stay the same while the world changed. Ia walked into the past."

"Through a Maya temple." Liam stood abruptly. "I'm returning to my camp. It'll be dark soon, and I don't intend to spend the night here. I haven't got time to search for your peoplea"whoever they are. I'll look again in the morning, and then I'm heading for the coast." His mouth twisted as though he'd tasted something along the lines of an underripe lemon. "As for your 'theories'a""

Mac heaved to her feet, swaying at the weakness that clutched at her body. She batted away his offered support. "All right," she snapped. "I get it. No more theories. You want proof." Ignoring her dizziness, she swooped down for her pack and dug for her flashlight, which she'd dumped inside after her fruitless attempt at getting back through the tunnel. She waved the flashlight at him triumphantly. "You wanted to know about this? This is something from the future. No one's going to invent it until the turn of the century. Or batteries this small." She dumped the AA batteries into her palm and tossed one at him. He caught it, glancing from her to the battery.

"Let's see what else I've got in here," she muttered. She rummaged deeper into her pack. Even before the trip she hadn't completely cleaned it out, and it was full of forgotten odds and ends. Travel toothbrush, maybea"and the first-aid kit in its plastic box. That would be good; no one was using plastic this way yet.

She smoothed out a piece of the mosquito netting and began to lay objects out on it. Old Kleenex, a piece of ancient hard candy, an empty can of Dr Pepper, the bottle of muscle relaxant she'd had prescribed when her shoulder was wrenched while moving boxes, a melted lipstick she'd tried once before giving up all notions of using makeup.

Safety pinsa"no, he'd know about those. Two battered ballpoint pens; maybe. Tour book; that would be a good way to prove how different things were in her time from the overgrown Tikal he'd shown her. Map, ditto. Walleta"that would have modern money, and credit cards, and her driver's license with the renewal date printed right on it. Pocket calculatora"pocket calculator! Now that was going to be way beyond his ken. And her watch as well, with its digital face and waterproof plastic wristband. She unbuckled it and laid it on the netting with the rest.

He had already crouched again and was fingering the items with deliberation. Let him look; it might do some good. She started to unzip the pack's smaller pocket when the obvious occurred to her. The backpack itself was made out of nylon, which she was d.a.m.ned sure hadn't been around in 1884. And the zippera ha!

She held the backpack in front of her, running the zipper back and forth until Liam was following her motions with fascination.

"Bet you haven't seen that before," she said. "It's called a zipper, and it's not going to be invented untila"uma"the 1890s. Now do you think I'm so crazy?"

He grabbed the backpack from her hand and worked the zipper himself. Then he set it down and picked up the calculator. Mac obliged him by turning it on, and had the satisfaction of watching him jerk, however slightly, at the appearance of the digital readout.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," he whispered. He punched at the numbers randomly, watching the display.

"It's for calculating," she supplied. "Addition, multiplication, even algebraic equations."

He said nothing, but some of his natural c.o.c.kiness seemed to have deserted him. He put the calculator back and studied the ballpoint pens, packet of Kleenex, and first-aid kit in turn, saving her watch for last. His sunstreaked hair fell into his eyes, and he slapped it away with all the preoccupation of a little boy examining a particularly interesting bug.

"How did you get all this?" he demanded.

"From my time, where these things are common. I'd like to take credit for being the genius responsible for inventing it all, buta"

He was at a loss. She'd never really doubted his intelligence, and she could see it working now as he considered and discarded every easy explanation for objects he had never seen before.

Join the club, my arrogant friend. Now you know how I felt when I realized what had happened. And something tells me you're not the kind of guy who takes well to being at a disadvantage.

"The others with you before," he said. "Did they have these things as well?"

"The other tourists?"

"Challenger, Quartermaina""

Mac had the good grace to wince. "Uma"that was a joke. I did come here alone. When I first met you, I thought you were the crazy one. I didn't realize I'da left my own time."

He only stared at her, bouncing her watch in his hand.

"You still don't believe me, do you?" Mac grabbed the tour book and flipped through the pages until she found a schematic layout of Tikal and its various temples, palaces, plazas, hotels, concessions, and roads. "Take a look at this."

He s.h.i.+fted position to look at the open book, frowning. The legend under the map clearly indicated the name of the place.

"Remember when I said I didn't recognize Tikal?" Mac asked. "This"a"she pointed at one of the hotels near the entrance to the parka""is the hotel I was staying in. And this is what the ruins look like in my time; a lot of it is cleared, restored, and opened for tourists."

He said nothing. Mac opened the book to the first page. She tapped at the copyright date with a blunt fingernail. "See? 1996. Date the book was published."

She couldn't read his face. Beneath the tough, handsome exterior, his emotions were hidden like the proverbial currents under still water. Was he in shock, or simply refusing to acknowledge any of the evidence she was presenting?

"I understand," she said awkwardly, "how difficult this must be for you to accept. I had the same problem. I guess Ia trust myself enough, even ifa""

"Prophesy for me, Miss MacKenzie," he demanded suddenly. "If you're from the future, tell me what will happen."

"Well, Ia I don't know where to start. It's very different from youra"thisa"time. There are s.h.i.+ps that fly in the air, even some that go into s.p.a.ce. We have ways of sending signals through the air just as your telegraphs do code, but without the wirea""

"No," he interrupted. Though he moved no closer, she felt his focused energy like an unantic.i.p.ated touch. His eyes had gone from metallic coldness to silvery heat. "You said I'm in your history books. Tell me of my future."

Chapter Five.

If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak.

a"William Shakespeare OF COURSE, OF course she should have expected this. If he did believe her, it was a natural question. If he didn't, it was a kind of test. And it was the one question she didn't dare answer.

Well, you see, Mr. O'Shea, sometime in the next little while you're going to die and end up a pile of moldering bones in that tunnel over therea She caught her breath. The image was grotesque. He was here, alivea"powerfully alive and compelling as she'd never thought a man could be. The idea that he might, would die, and possibly at the hands of her own ancestora"today, tomorrow, a week from nowa"was incomprehensible. More incomprehensible than her walk into the past.

Unthinkable, impossiblea"and undeniable.

With shock she remembered his reaction to the photograph, his demands about Perry and her knowledge of him.

"Our quarrel was a terrible one," Perry's letter had said. "I left him in the jungle. a" Left him how? Dead? Yet Perry wasn't here, and Liam was still alive.

Oh, boy. What have I wandered into?

Not only what, but why. Why she had come back to this time and place. Why she was here with Liam O'Shea hours or days before he was destined to die.

She had no way of knowing the answers. Not yet. And until she did, she had to buy time.

"Well, oh Prophetess?" Liam prodded.

"I can't tell you your future."

"Why not?"

"Becausea because I can't risk changing the future."

Of course. That was the answer. It wasn't merely an excuse, but the truth. And hard on the heels of that realization came another. She'd been so focused on proving to Liam that she wasn't crazy that she'd totally overlooked the possible consequences of each word out of her mouth and every modern gadget she'd revealed.