And on this side of time, Liam wore one around his neck, while the other…
The other was Peregrine Sinclair’s. In San Francisco. The one Homer would bequeath to her with stories of a curse that must be appeased.
“You know,” she said dazedly. “Who I am. All of it.”
He only gazed at her. “The key must return. The danger is great. You must bring it back, for you and for the people.” Without warning he turned to go.
“Wait! Fernando, I need to know—”
But he had vanished as he seemed so prone to do, leaving her thoughts muddled and her legs weak with shock. She just managed to make them carry her back to her palmetto shelter. She sat down on the ground as the implications raced through her mind.
Fernando had told her that the two halves of the pendant were a key. A key to the temple—to the tunnel that had carried her across time. That she must have both halves, both pendants to make the tunnel work again.
It didn’t matter how he knew how she had come here. She knew he was right. She’d unknowingly held both halves of the key to the wall in the tunnel, and activated whatever mechanism opened the path through time.
Now she had only one pendant—or access to only one. Liam’s, which he wore around his neck. Only half of the key. And that meant…
That meant she was trapped in the past until she found the other one. “You must bring it back, for you and for the people,” Fernando had said. His people? The Maya? And why? Did they understand the full wonder of the miracle inside that temple?
They would, if anyone could. The ancient Maya’d had an obsession with time. They’d calculated back thousands of years before their civilization began, and centuries beyond its death. Who better to build a time machine?
But how did such a machine work, if machine it was? Did it pass through some other dimension between past and future?
And what about the consequences of her traveling through time—of saving Liam’s life? He could marry, have children, impact other lives. Yet surely Liam O’Shea couldn’t be so crucial in the grand scheme of things that his living would alter the course of history.
So maybe… she sat up. Maybe she was making entirely too much out of this. She knew what she had to do. She had to get back to her own time. She had to find the key that would open the time-gate. And that meant…
The palmetto wall sagged as she leaned against it. That meant getting the other pendant, assuming she could beg, borrow, or steal Liam’s. And that meant traveling over a thousand miles away to a certain famous City by the Bay. In the year 1884.
How could she hope to accomplish that? There had to be another way. Maybe one half of the pendant alone would work.
It was worth a try.
One step at a time. The first was getting Liam’s pendant. She’d wondered why he was wearing the symbol of a severed friendship, but now she was grateful. At least she knew where it was. If he hadn’t taken it off when he’d dressed, maybe she could steal it while he was out. If the pills had worked the way they always had with her.
First things first. She’d have to make sure Liam was asleep before searching for the pendant. Another hour should do it. The less she saw of him between now and her next attempt to time-travel, the better.
She climbed awkwardly into the hammock and fell gratefully into an exhausted sleep.
The sun was angled low in the sky when she woke. She rubbed her eyes and rolled out of the hammock, guessing at the time. Blast Liam for stealing her watch.
Then she remembered the antique watch she’d shoved in her pocket following the attack.
It was still working, though it looked as though it had been on at least one hardy trip through the jungle. She’d slept longer than she’d intended, but with luck the pills would have kept Liam under. She tucked the watch back in her pocket and left the champas.