The Denver-bound tourists, headed for some sort of action cowboy shoot down time, cast envious glances at the lucky ones who’d managed to beg, borrow, buy, or steal Ripper Watch tickets. Those were Margo’s new charges, although they didn’t know it yet. The mere tourists heading for London, Margo ignored. Her attention was focused on the three individuals with whom she would be spending the next three solid months, as their time guide.
Dominica Nosette, whose name, face, and body seemed quintessentially French, yet who was as staidly British as kippers and jellied eels, was chattering away with her partner Guy Pendergast. And Shahdi Feroz . . . Margo gulped, just approaching Dr. Feroz where she stood locked in conversation with a Ripper Watch tourist at the next lane over. Dr. Feroz had spent the past four months studying the rise of cults and cult violence in Imperial Rome, through the Porta Romae. At previous training classes like this one, Margo had met all the other team members now in London, before they’d left the station with Malcolm. But none of the others possessed the credentials or the fieldwork record Shahdi Feroz did. Not even the team’s nominal leader, Conroy Melvyn, a seedy-looking Englishman who bore the impressive title of Scotland Yard Chief Inspector.
Looking as Persian as her name and voice sounded, Dr. Feroz awed Margo. Not only was she exotic and beautiful in a way that made Margo feel her own youth and inexperience as keenly as a Minnesota winter wind, Shahdi Feroz was absolutely brilliant. Reading Dr. Feroz’ work, virtually all of it based on first-hand study of down-time populations, reminded Margo of what she’d seen in New York during her agonizing, mercifully short stay there, and of things she’d seen during her few, catastrophic trips through TT-86’s time gates. Not to mention—and she winced from the memory—her own childhood.