“It’s all right, Miss Talbot,” he said as the van, following that initial thump and bump, rumbled smoothly forward. “You don’t need to brace yourself anymore. It should be easy going from here.”
He proceeded to steer the vehicle out of the parking garage. Because the parking garage was, in fact, still visible all around them, along with all the automagic mobiles in their delineated spots. Only now everything was filmed-over in a hazy pinkishness, dotted with motes of anti-glitter.
Nigel pulled out into traffic. Perfectly still traffic, on a street that was, like the garage, similarly coated in a pinkish aura. He wove in and out among stationary vehicles, the van putt-putting along at no more than 30 miles an hour. But to judge by the rigid-jawed, pale-cheeked expression on Luna’s face, one would think he was driving a wild and reckless grand prix, with her as his prisoner in the passenger seat. She gripped Miss Eugenia’s bouquet with one hand, her other hand braced on the dashboard, knuckles white. She was apparently still praying.
“There’s really no need for alarm, Miss Talbot,” Nigel said. “I am a perfectly capable driver.”
She shot him a withering glare, just on the verge of venomous. “It’s not thedrivingthat concerns me, Mr. Grimm.”
Nigel bristled. “My spellwork is sound,” he said cooly, keeping his eyes on the shimmering road ahead. “You needn’t concern yourself on that score either.”
“If that’s the case, why are you driving along at this creeping pace? You might be mistaken for my Extremely Great Aunt Amelia!”
The bristling intensified. Nigel set his chin, “From everything I’ve heard about your extremely great aunt, that sounds like a compliment.”
“Oh, don’t be so sure about that!”
Luna gasped as Nigel pulled around a lorry, which was frozen in the act of bumping one of its huge wheels on the curb. An oncoming vehicle appeared in the opposite lane, and she braced for impact. But Nigel smoothly continued at the same sedate pace, and the oncoming car never moved an inch. He completed the pass without haste and pulled back into his own lane.
Luna let out a breath. Then she finally pushed back from the dashboard, settled into her seat, and allowed the belt strap to tighten across her breast. “Extremely Great Aunt Amelia,” she said, as though to distract herself from the horrors around her, “drove an ancient old Fordyce Mobile. On the day she and the other aunties came to pick me up from the Greater Snoring station, it took us nearly four hours to drive the five miles back to Tealeaf Cottage.”
“Proving your extremely great aunt exercised caution and consideration for her passengers.”
“No,” Luna growled. “She was just blind as a bat!”
Nigel popped on the blinker before taking a turn, though there was no one else navigating theunspacewith them. “And were you yourself more daring in your motoring ventures along the Crimble Mountain roads?”
She snorted. “I never learned to drive. None of us dared touch Extremely Great Aunt Amelia’s machine. After she passed, weturned it into a planter for tea bushes and stuck to the old horse and cart.”
“Well,” Nigel said, “if we had access to a horse and cart, I would gladly turn over the reins.”
“A horse and cart would get us there faster than this!”
“And why are you so concerned about speed, Miss Talbot?”
“Because youfroze time,Mr. Grimm!” She uttered a little yelp as he drove up onto the sidewalk to navigate around a two-way jam, then yelped again when he came down off the curb back onto the road. “Surely that’s not the sort of thing one ought to maintain for any prolonged period!”
Nigel glanced her way, one eyebrow tilted. “I haven’t frozen anything.”
“You haven’t?”
“Of course not. No one can freeze time. Llewellyn Snickerweft from Oskyae once claimed to have done so, but his methods were debunked by Angus Hexworth in the eighteenth century, and—”
“Then why is everyone frozen? Like that fellow!” Luna pointed out a man walking his dog along the sidewalk. The dog was caught in the act of lifting his leg beside the streetlamp, the emitting stream suspended in midair. “Looks pretty frozen to me!”
“Appearances aren’t everything, Miss Talbot.”
He felt her gaze fix upon him with such lance-like intensity, it might pierce his skull. “Mr. Grimm,” she said in a voice that might have come straight from the icebox, “if you take that condescending tone with me one more time, I’m going tofeed youthese peonies.”
Nigel chuckled. But, upon a second glance at his companion’s steely face and the way she brandished that bouquet, he hastily swallowed back all impulses of mirth and straightened his own features into rather more serious lines. “Time is not frozen,” hesaid and cleared his throat. “It is continuing on at its ordinary pace without interference. We have simply . . . stepped outside of it ourselves.”
“What?”
It wasn’t easy, condensing such a complicated concept into layman’s terms, without the use of certain arcane verbiage and a basic understanding in Dire metaphysics. Nigel took a stab at it, nonetheless. “Picture that our reality is like a crystal ball,” he said, “swathed in bubble wrap and packaged up in a wooden crate.”
Luna blinked. “All right,” she said slowly. “Pictured.”
“We are in, erm, the bubble wrap. And the crystal ball of time-bound reality you see before you, through the pink haze.”
