“Why not? Isn’t there enough history for you to find your own hunting grounds without taking mine?”
“Because that isn’t the reason I’m following you. At least not anymore.” He paused. He wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t joking. “I think I’m in love with you.”
Her feet kept doing what they were supposed to do. The music kept them moving, which was good because her mind froze. “No,” she murmured.
“Will you give me a chance? A chance to show you?”
It was a trick. A new way to make a fool of her, and it was cruel. But she had never seen him so serious. His brow took on furrows.
She stopped dancing, and he had to stop with her, but he wouldn’t let go. There, stalled in the middle of the ballroom floor, the dance turned to chaos around them.
“No. I can’t love you back, Ned. We’re too much alike.”
For a long moment, a gentle strain of music, he studied her. His expression turned drawn and sad.
“Be careful, Madeline. Watch your back.” He kissed her hand, a gentle press of lips against her curled fingers, then let it go and walked off the dance floor, shouldering around couples as they passed.
He left her alone, lost, in the middle of the floor. She touched her hand where he had kissed it.
“Ned!” she called, the sound barely audible over the orchestra. “Ned!”
He didn’t turn around.
The song ended.
She left the floor, hitched up her skirt and ran everywhere, looking behind every door and every potted fern. But he was gone.
If Ned followed her, it stood to reason others could as well.
Her room had been trashed. The mirror over the vanity was shattered, chairs smashed, a dresser toppled. Powdered cosmetics dusted the wreckage. The wardrobe was thrown open, gowns and fabric torn and strewn like streamers over the furniture.
She didn’t have windows or doors precisely to keep this sort of thing from happening. There was only one way into the room—through a sideways door, and only if one knew just the right way to look through it. So how—
Someone grabbed her in a bear hug. Another figure appeared from behind her and pointed a bizarre vice-grip and hairbrush-looking tool at her in the unmistakable stance of holding a weapon. A third moved into view.
She squirmed in the grasp of the first, but he was at least a foot taller than she and he quickly worked to secure bindings around her arms and hands that left her immobile. All wore black militaristic suits, with goggles and metallic breathing masks hiding their features.
The third spoke, a male voice echoing mechanically through the mask. “Under Temporal Transit Authority Code forty-four A dash nine, I hereby take you into custody and charge you—”
“The what?” Madeline said with a gasp. Her captor wrenched her shoulders back. Any struggle she made now was merely out of principle. “Temporal Transit Authority? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
“You’ve never stepped through to the twenty-second century, then.”
“No.” Traveling to one’s own future was tough—there was no record to study, no way to know what to expect. She’d had enough trouble with her past, she never expected the future to come back to haunt her.
“I hereby take you into custody and charge you with unregulated transportation along the recognized timeline, grand theft along the recognized timeline, historic fraud—”
“You can’t be serious—”
He held up a device, something like an electric razor with a glowing wand at one end and flashing l
ights at the other. He pressed a button and drew a line in the air. The line glowed, hanging in midair. He pressed another button, the line widened into a plane, a doorway through which a dim scene showed: pale tiled walls and steel tables.
He opened a door, he stepped through, and all he needed to do was push a button.
In that stunned moment, the two flunkies picked her up and carried her through.
They entered a hospital room and unloaded her onto a gurney. More figures appeared, doctors hiding behind medical scrubs, cloth masks, and clinical gazes. With practiced ease they strapped her face-down, wrists and legs bound with padded restraints. When she tried to struggle, a half-dozen hands pressed her into the thin mattress. Her ice-blue skirt was hitched up around her knees, wrinkling horribly.