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She pulled a handkerchief-wrapped object out of her pocket and carefully unwrapped it. It was a beautiful object, a pocket watch, heavy and silver.
“You’ll have to do it, none of us can touch silver.”
Bliss looked at it closely. There were tiny scratches on the side that looked as if someone had tried to pry it open. She recalled Allegra’s hand reaching toward it, and Bliss did the same, pressing a hidden button on the side of the watch. A small round disc appeared in midair. It looked like a spinning globe, with lines moving around it.
“What is that?” Lawson asked.
She shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“I think maybe you need to tell it where you want to go,” Malcolm said helpfully.
“Take us to Rome,” Lawson ordered, and a passage opened before them, shining bright in the darkness.
The light and the passage disappeared, and when Bliss opened her eyes, she saw that she was in a small stone room with bars on the win
dows. “Where are we? A prison?” she asked.
“No…a monastery, I think,” Lawson said, frowning. “But we’re not in the right place or the right time. Look.”
Bliss looked out the window to a grand canal dotted with gondolas and speedboats, people rushing about on the cobblestone streets with umbrellas.
“Where are the monks?” Ahramin asked, taking a seat on a stone step.
“They’re gone, I think only the tourists are left,” Malcolm said, reading a plaque by a velvet stanchion at the end of the room. “It must be Tuesday, when the museums are closed, otherwise we’d be surrounded by them.”
“We’re close,” Bliss said, comforting Lawson. “Venice isn’t too far from Rome.”
“When I make portals…I just imagine a space in my mind.…I thought it would be the same here,” he said, biting his fingernail.
“These portals you create, they must be part of the passages somehow,” Bliss said.
“Maybe, I don’t know. All I know is I can picture myself somewhere else, and then a path appears in front of me. I thought using the chronolog would be that easy.”
Bliss nodded. She had an idea. When the Visitor, Lucifer, had taken over her mind and she’d been able to see his memories, she’d had no control; she couldn’t call up a memory at will. But the images she’d seen of Allegra’s memories felt different, and she wondered if maybe it was possible for her to summon them at will, if she focused hard enough. She’d have to be careful how she explained herself, though; she still wasn’t sure what would happen if Lawson ever discovered her true parentage, and now wasn’t the time to find out. She stared at the chronolog. “I think my mother had one of these once, and sometimes I can access her memories,” she said.
“How?” Lawson asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know, all I know is I can feel her—guiding me—and I think that maybe if I concentrate, I can remember a little more, see how she used it.” She took a seat on the stone step next to Ahramin, who gave her some space. Bliss closed her eyes and focused. Tell me, she thought. Please, if you know anything, please tell me. Show me.
At first all she could see was darkness. But then the darkness blurred, and a light began to shimmer, and she saw Allegra pick up the chronolog again and open it. The disc had stopped spinning and looked more like a regular watch but with three different hands, and the numbers at the edge of the circle were in multiples of thousands, hundreds, and tens. Layered over the whole disc and its hands was a map, and Allegra maneuvered the hands on the chronolog to certain positions.
Bliss opened her eyes. “I think I know how to do this.” She took the chronolog and pressed the button, then waited for the disc to stop spinning. “You see these hands?” She pointed them out. “One set refers to time, measured first in thousands and then hundreds of years, then decades. You have to set it like a clock—see this knob? You wind it so the hands move,” she said, adjusting it. “Now these other hands, with the images of the continents behind them? They represent longitude and latitude. The trick is to line up the time and place you want at the same time, then press another button on the side.”
“So we just have to set it to the right time and coordinates, then press the button and we’re there,” Malcolm said excitedly. “We can do this!”
“Not so fast,” Lawson said. “Anyone know the date? Or the coordinates?”
Malcolm’s face fell.
“We can find those things,” Rafe said. “If this is a monastery, there’s got to be a library here, with a set of encyclopedias.”
“I’ll help,” Bliss said, and followed Rafe down the stairs. They walked around the empty monastery until they reached a room at the end of the hallway that was blocked off from museum tours. “I think this is it,” Rafe said, opening the door marked BIBLIOTHECA.
The room was covered with dust and lined with bookshelves. A little typewriter sat on an antique desk. Rafe whistled, and nodded to a shelf that contained a full set of the Encyclopædia Britannica. What she wouldn’t give for the Internet right now, she thought; they’d have their questions answered in seconds.
“I’ll look up the year, you take the location. Okay?” she asked Rafe.
“Sounds good to me.”
