Second draft: chapter three
Joséphine-Marie Françoise de Blomet, heir to her father’s title, was alone, perched in what seemed to be an endless field of this strange, soft dust. She could see nothing but the gently-rolling layer of lavender dust in every direction, the bizarre view broken occasionally by jagged black rock formations, some of which were taller than her father. The sky was a brilliant shade of orange; the sun was setting directly ahead of her. It seemed small in the sky.
She would never remember how long she sat there, staring at the dust as her fingers sifted absently through it, nor would she ever be able to explain what she had thought in that span of time. It was as though she was waiting. Someone had once said to her that when lost, it is best to remain still rather than risk losing yourself further by wandering off, so she stayed there in the middle of her piled taffeta skirts, knees bent beneath her, one stocking slowly rolling down her calf, whalebone hoops bunched up as high as her ribs. It wasn’t until the stocking’s slow progress stopped at the ankle that she shook herself, feeling the pile of hair atop her head tip drunkenly to one side as the porcelain mask shifted.
So it had happened again. Somnambulism, the doctor had told her parents, getting out of one’s bed and moving about while sleeping. Though when it happened she never seemed to remember actually falling asleep. One moment she would be reading in her father’s library and a passage in the book would remind her of the bust in the drawing room; a moment or two later she would find herself staring at it with no memory of how she had come to be there. Perhaps somnambulism and a sleep disorder, the doctor had suggested, and Sophie had shrugged and let it be.
But never had she regained her senses in a setting quite like this. She had never travelled further than the grounds of the de Blomet estate or her aunt’s country home.
No, it was too ridiculous. Even if she had dropped into a sleep right in the middle of her masked ball, certainly someone between this place-wherever this place was-and Paris would have questioned seeing a girl staggering by in full courtly dress. Surely to have travelled so far while unconscious she would be able to see some evidence of wear in her clothing, but the olive robe was as perfect as it had been at the masked ball.
Yet there was too much detail for this to be a dream, and she had never heard tales of anyone going mad quite like this. The only possibility was that in less than an instant she had moved from her own masked ball to this strange field. But how had she done it?
Or had she done it at all? Sophie pushed herself to her feet, nearly losing her balance as she realised she had lost some feeling in both legs while kneeling in the dust. It wasn’t possible for her to have come so far in so little time, she decided. Someone had brought her here. She must have been unconscious during the journey.
That thought made everything clear at once. She had been kidnapped and was being held here, probably by the convict who had appeared at her masked ball. He would have demanded a ridiculous sum from her father, and of course the baron would have been eager to pay for the safety of his only daughter. Someone would come to collect her soon, to return her to the estate.
The kidnapping of the baron’s daughter would be the most talked-about news in Paris! Even her enemies would certainly be glad to see her safe return. Could an adventure like this even endear her to the count, perhaps?
And what if she acted heroically as well? What if she was able to tell tales of fending off her attackers and protecting herself until her father’s money arrived? Sophie shifted her weight back and forth between her feet until she felt ready to walk. But which way should she go?
She turned, keeping her eyes on the ground in search of tracks. Someone must have left her here. But the lavender dust was undisturbed all around like a blanket of new-fallen snow. Perhaps she had been unconscious long enough for the wind to smooth any other footprints away?
But no, there had been no wind in all the time she had been here. The air was utterly still, oppressive and somehow thinner than she thought it should be. She could hear nothing but her own breathing and the rustle of her skirts.
So where should she go? Sophie squinted up at the distant sun, hoping she could at least determine whether it was rising or setting. A rising sun meant the east, she knew that, and wherever she was the ocean was almost certainly somewhere to the west. Unless she was in the English colonies, though she doubted she could have been kept unconscious for so long. If she could find the Atlantic Ocean, she could eventually find some sort of civilisation and a means to return to Paris. The baron’s daughter, escaping from the clutches of her kidnappers by surviving in the wild! Hadn’t Rousseau written something about man being more perfect in nature than in civilisation? She would return to Paris more knowledgeable than any of them. Marguerite-Anne would be livid.
In her continued search for a sign of the direction her kidnappers might have taken, however, Sophie happened to notice the way her shadow stretched out in front of her, making her skirts look massive and her torso tall and narrow. The effect was unremarkable: what interested her was that the shadow pointed toward the sun which should have been creating it.
She raised an arm and watched the shadow do the same as if to make certain that it was indeed her image. Something behind her was creating a light source strong enough to throw a rather long shadow right into the face of the setting sun. Sophie turned her head, hardly daring to hope that it might be a well-lit building, only to find herself facing the sun and another shadow which pointed the wrong direction.
She turned back. The sun was still behind her along with the incorrect shadow.
She turned again. There it was.
Madness, she thought, and then she said it aloud.
“Madness.”
Her voice was too loud in this windless place.
“I’ve gone mad,” she said quietly. “There are two suns here.”
She could hear the words echo in the silence, her voice reverberating off one of the sleek black rock formations.
“Hello?”
Yes, there was certainly an echo. She called out again to test it.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
The words sounded despairing when they drifted back to her, distorted by the thin air and the silence.
“Hello!” she shouted. “Hello!”
“Sophie!”
That was not her echo.
The strange voice had the effect of a blow to the stomach, sending a slice of terror through her mind and veins like a lightning strike. She whirled around, panic gripping her chest tighter than stays ever could.
Two men were standing behind her as though they had been there all along. The moment she was facing them one flung himself at her neck, wrapping her in an embrace so hearty she thought she heard a piece of whalebone crack. “You made it!” he said triumphantly, his voice too loud in her ear.
For a moment Sophie’s thoughts seemed to stop and she stood in shock; after a moment of standing stiffly in the stranger’s arms she collected herself and pushed her assailant away, nearly knocking him over backwards with the force of her indignation. He staggered a bit and then stared at her with an expression like a puppy kicked away from its master.
To be honest, he didn’t seem terribly threatening, though his clothes were decidedly odd. He was tall and very thin, with messy brown hair, a thin nose that was almost Aquiline, and freckles splattered across his sharp cheekbones. His trousers were made of blue canvas and were long enough to touch the tops of his black canvas shoes, which had a thick-looking white material over the toe. He was wearing a tight grey knit sweater with a collar emerging at the neck that suggested a blouse beneath it, though he had no cravat. And he was still staring at her with a tragic look in his muddy-brown eyes.
His companion stood by silently, watching Sophie and the skinny stranger with unease. He was elegant and pale, with sharp blue eyes, a strong jaw, a delicately pointed chin, a long nose, and straight black hair that hugged his scalp and fell just past his shoulders. His clothes were also eccentric: a ruffled emerald blouse, dark pinstriped trousers, and white boots with a bit of a heel, all partially hidden beneath a long two-tiered cloak. She was almost certain she had seen him before. Perhaps he was one of her father’s friends sent out as part of her search party, though he looked younger than most of those that she had met.
Even if they weren’t friends of her father’s or a search party, neither man conducted himself in quite the manner Sophie would have expected from a kidnapper. With this thought to give her courage, she turned her fiercest glare on the one who had hugged her. “And who are you, exactly?”
The pretty one looked to the thinner one to answer, but he seemed to be concentrating very hard on Sophie’s forehead, his dramatically sad expression fading into one of worry.
The baron’s daughter put a hand over her head and checked for a wound or mark that might have warranted this reaction, but she could feel nothing unusual. Her skin was slightly sticky from the pomade Bruce-Pierre had worked into her hair. “What is it?” She tried to sound indignant, but her voice had a little wobble to it.
“I can’t hear you,” he said softly, his gaze darting back and forth across her face.
“You can’t-?”
The other man spoke up, pulling the skinny stranger back as he took a step forward. His voice was low and gentle. “Sophie?” he said. “Did they call you Sophie?” He was watching her as though she was a startled animal, as though he expected her to flee and vanish at any sudden movement.
“My mother does,” she answered, patience thinning. “You don’t know me at all, and I don’t know you, so let’s stick with formalities, shall we?”
“Formalities.” He repeated the word as though he didn’t understand it.
The skinny one moved to stand just behind him and murmured, “She isn’t there! It’s not- It didn’t work. I can’t hear her.”
“Maybe it’ll come in time,” the pretty one said soothingly. “Didn’t you say it wasn’t like that until you were-”
“Nine. The day we met you.”
Then they both looked up at her, neither saying anything. Sophie felt like one of the animals displayed at the royal menagerie-a dangerous one, judging by their expressions. She clenched her jaw a few times and glowered at them, willing herself to be patient. “Are you here to help me or not?” she demanded. “Did my father send you?”
They exchanged glances. The black-haired one raised his eyebrows at the skinny one, who shook his head, eyes wide.
When neither said anything, Sophie crossed her arms over her stomacher and pursed her lips. If these secretive idiots were her kidnappers, perhaps she had a chance at defeating them in a physical confrontation. Though she wouldn’t report such a detail back to her family once she had been rescued.
The pretty one met her gaze apologetically. “The thing is,” he said, “there’s a lot you have to know. I don’t know if you’ll be able to- I don’t know if it’ll be too much. Can you- would you call yourself open-minded?”
Open-minded? Sophie shrugged. She was certainly not as judgemental as Marguerite-Anne, though she didn’t exactly have Adélaïde’s passion for adventure. “It would depend on whom or what I need to be open-minded about.”
The skinny one had stepped out from behind his companion again, still eying her somewhat warily. He took another step forward, hands raised defensively, and Sophie felt more than ever that they thought her a wild creature that might be startled and turn on them. She considered lurching forward to see if they would be frightened, but instead she stared at the advancing skinny one, the one who had embraced her earlier, as though he were mad. She hadn’t yet ruled that out, after all.
When he was only a few paces away, the freckled stranger stuck out one hand and grinned at her. “Hi!”
Feeling a stronger urge than ever to strike him, Sophie delicately put her fingers against his palm and let him pump her arm up and down in greeting as though he expected her to produce a stream of well water.
“I’m Julian,” he said through that manic grin. He finally released her hand and threw his arm back in his companion’s direction. “That’s Richmond.”
“Joséphine-Marie Françoise de Blomet,” Sophie said warily.
The skinny one’s grin slipped away. “Joséphine?” he repeated. “But I told them to call you Sophie.”
“Julian,” the dark-haired one said, a warning in his voice. He joined them, clasping Sophie’s hand as his own greeting, and glanced reprovingly at his skinny companion. Then he turned back to the baron’s daughter. “Have you ever heard anything about your real parents?” he asked carefully.
She shook her head. “My mother and father said I was a foundling. It’s a bit of a private subject, if you don’t mind.” He still had her hand between his own.
“The thing is,” he continued carefully, “we were the ones who gave you to François when you were a baby.”
Sophie couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s ridiculous!” she said, looking back and forth between the men. “Neither of you could possibly be more an a few years older than I am! Were you in the business of trading infants when you yourselves were toddlers?”
The pretty one smiled and patted her hand. “You have to believe me, okay? This is true. We gave you to François. For you, it was years ago. For us, it was about-” he paused as though making a calculation in his head- “twenty minutes.”
That made less sense than the sister suns. Sophie felt her mouth drift open as she stared at this man, gaze flickering across his graceful features. He looked right back at her, no hint of irony or an oncoming punch line in his eyes, and patted her hand again. “You really believe this,” Sophie mumbled. She couldn’t help but look away from his gentle stare, so she turned to face Julian, the thinner one. “You know my real family?”
Now Julian’s angular face broke into an overwhelming grin, all his concern gone in an instant like closing a book. “Sophie-”
But his companion cut him off. “Joséphine, wasn’t it? You wanted us to call you Joséphine?”
“Well, it’s Joséphine-Marie, actually, but I’m sure Mademoiselle de Blomet isn’t too inconvenient,” Sophie said, giving the thin one a pointed look. He didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s hard for us,” said the pretty one, Richmond. He had finally released her hand at some point, though in all honesty Sophie didn’t mind him clasping it for so long. “We don’t consider you a stranger.”
Sophie felt a smirk tug at the corner of her mouth, but she forced it away. “Because twenty minutes ago I was a baby?” she asked, wincing inwardly at the sarcasm in her voice. These men-secretive and mad though they may be-were her only hope for a way home. It would not do to upset them.
“It’s not…” the pretty one began, but he trailed off, clearly grasping for words. A deep line had appeared between his graceful brows as he concentrated.
The skinny one spoke up, practically radiating enthusiasm. “I can teleport too!”
“Julian!”
“You know,” he said quickly, glancing guiltily at his companion. “You can still do it, right?”
“How else could she have gotten here?”
“I thought maybe- you know Sophie was always trying to bring other people in-”
“What, you thought she figured out how to do it, you never found out, and she somehow knew ahead of time to bring her in right now?”
“I- I hoped-”
“This is Sophie now, okay? We did what we could.”
Both of them looked at her, the thin one chewing his lip. Having given up on understanding their conversation, Sophie tried to read their expressions instead. Had she done something wrong? “I want you to tell me the truth now, please,” she said, proud of her ability to control the frustration that nearly made her voice tremble. “Whatever you think the truth is. I want to hear it. I want to know where I am and I want to know how I got here. Now, I’d thank you if one of you would please stop treating me as though I were a particularly idiotic child and simply explain what has happened!” Perhaps her control was not as good as she had hoped: Sophie’s voice had almost risen to a shout.
She heard her voice echo off of the massive black rocks in the near-silence that followed her outburst. The men were quiet; the one called Julian was glancing back and forth between Sophie and his wary companion as though caught in the middle of an argument. “Sophie-” he began, but the other one, Richmond, cut him off again.
“It’s too much. She won’t be able to hear it all at once. It’d be culture shock or something.”
“You!” snapped the baron’s daughter, pointing at Richmond and using a tone she usually reserved for her mother’s irritating lapdog. “You be quiet. Don’t you say another word to me or to him until he tells me what I need to know. And don’t you dare tell him that I’m too stupid to understand you! I have studied under some of the finest tutors in the city and I daresay I know as much as any common kidnapper! I was dancing with the count only a few moments ago, do you understand me? Today is my saint day and I will not have it ruined by a pair of condescending, poorly-dressed bourgeois criminals!”
Though she regretted her tirade as soon as it was over, Sophie forced herself to follow through and keep her glare steady, focusing on Richmond. He and his companion were quiet for a moment, suitably chagrined, but then their eyes met and the pretty one bit back a smile while his skinny companion burst into a fit of giggles.
“Look at you!” Julian gasped, “You’re already telling me what to do! I can’t take you seriously when you do the angry face, though, I’m sorry!”
“You aren’t stupid, Sophie, of course you aren’t,” Richmond said. He was much calmer than Julian. “I didn’t mean anything like that.”
Sophie looked coldly back and forth between the two men, maintaining her stony expression until they had finished laughing at her. Once they were quiet she crossed her arms over her stomacher and waited, jaw clenched. Julian, the thin one, looked uncomfortable immediately.
“Sorry, Sophe,” he said again. “Joséphine. Whatever.”
“Good,” she said curtly. “Now, were you going to tell me you knew my family? I’d be very interested to know my family name.”
“Family name?” Julian repeated, wrinkling his nose. “We don’t worry about that stuff. I’m Julian, he’s Richmond, you’re Sophie. George is George. Then there’s Mother and Father.”
Sophie raised her eyebrows. “You don’t know your own family name? How can you- how can you exist without a family name? How can you marry or- or gain entrance to the good salons? How do people write you?”
“We aren’t from your time,” Richmond said gently. “You aren’t either. It doesn’t- that doesn’t matter where we’re from.”
“From my time? What does that mean?”
Julian tugged teasingly at Richmond’s cloak and then took a step forward, his expression very serious. “You know the thing you can do? The-you don’t say teleportation, do you? -the travelling thing. How you got here. I can do it too. We both-” he paused for a moment, then put both his hands on her shoulders and grinned at her. “You’re my little sister. Can’t I hug you? Please? I’ve missed you. And even if you changed a lot I still love you, okay? And I’m sorry I’m scaring you but I can’t help it. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay now-right?”
The last question he directed over his shoulder. Richmond had joined them and was pulling Julian away. “We talked about this, Ju,” he mumbled.
Sophie was having difficulty deciding how to respond. It wasn’t easy to understand the thin one; he seemed to say things as he thought of them, leading to a disjointed clutter of sentences and phrases that meant nothing to her. Now he was standing back; Richmond was holding onto his hand in the reassuring way he had been holding Sophie’s earlier.
“Did you say- What did you say?” she asked, though she was quite certain she had not misheard.
“Which part?” Richmond muttered.
“I’d had it all rehearsed in my head,” said Julian apologetically, “but now that she’s here…”
“Yeah.”
Sophie looked closer at the skinny stranger, Julian. Yes, he was tall and a little too thin, just like her; he had the same muddy-brown eyes, the same freckles, and the same nose. His hair was even the same nondescript shade of brown she would see once she washed away all her powder. His chin was sort of small and knobby while hers was pointed, but they both had high foreheads and thin cheeks. Sophie realised she was staring open-mouthed. “You mean to say… you mean to say I have a brother? I’ve always had a brother?”
Julian grinned at her, that hyperactive grin that split his narrow face into an expression of manic glee. She found it difficult not to smile back, but she managed it.
“And he can do it too, Sophie,” said Richmond.
Now the baroness allowed herself to contemplate the other man. He was strikingly good-looking in a very different way from the count. That day at the opera the count had worn his own yellow hair swept into a modest black ribbon; he was a ruddy, masculine sort of handsome that was more popular in farm hands than in famous lovers. Richmond, on the other hand, looked and carried himself like a hero in a romance-the kind of romance the dauphine herself might have been seen reading at Versailles. Sophie found herself thinking that if he only had some sort of title he would have been the most sought-after young man in all of Paris. Suddenly she felt terrible for letting her temper get the best of her. She hoped that he was nothing closer than a cousin.
“Sophie?”
Her attention snapped back to the present. “I’m sorry. You were saying?”
“It’s just that we used to travel around together, all three of us. We did the coolest stuff. We’ve got friends all over the place. That’s how we knew François-well, kind of. Our François. But that’s how we knew he wanted a baby and we knew about Virginie never having any, so we gave you to him.”
“If Sophie had known-”
“Then there’s Berthe in the nineteenth century. She’s French too. You and the French! But anyway, we always waited until it was Christmas and we’d go back and spend it with her. And then we accidentally met-”
“What did you just say?” Sophie interrupted.
Julian’s eyes widened as though he was afraid he had said something wrong. “Uh. Christmas? Berthe?”
“The nineteenth century! What does that mean? What do you mean, the nineteenth century?”
Now Richmond and Julian exchanged glances again: both of them seemed shocked. Julian spoke up again. “You know… the nineteenth century.” When Sophie showed no signed of understanding, he went on. “François is from the eighteenth century, Berthe is from the nineteenth century, Ruth is from the twentieth century-”
“You mean to say,” Sophie began; she spoke slowly as she carefully chose each word. “You’re trying to tell me that you know someone who lives a hundred years from now? And others who live even later than that?”
“Well… yeah. That’s what happens when you…” he squinted at her, studying her blank expression. “You have no idea.”
Richmond stepped forward. “How did you get here, Sophie?” He was speaking in that soothing tone again.
“I don’t know!” she snapped, but then she checked herself with an inhale so deep her stays dug into her ribs before she continued. “I expected you two to tell me that. I was dancing with the count one minute and then suddenly I’m sitting in a pile of dust between two suns. Two suns!” she said again, letting the madness of the idea take hold of her. “I thought perhaps it was the- the somnambulism, that’s what it is-but I can’t imagine I came all the way here without someone first stopping me! How far from the estate am I? Is this even still France?”
Julian slapped a hand against his forehead and let it trail down one side of his face, shaking his head slowly and staring pointedly at his companion. Richmond, meanwhile, was squinting at her in disbelief, his lips parted as though he was concentrating very hard. “Somnambulism,” he repeated softly. “Julian, did you hear that? That’s brilliant. Julian, that’s brilliant!”
“How is that brilliant?”
“Sleepwalking! Ju, they told her she just blacks out and walks places.”
“But that’s stupid.”
“She doesn’t exactly have a watch, does she? How would she know?”
“But no one ever saw her-?”
“Excuse me,” Sophie interrupted, her voice firm.
“Blimey, we did it again,” said Julian. “I’m sorry, Sophe! I’m sorry. I keep forgetting. But if you don’t know, then hey. But you’ve got to believe me, okay?”
“Just keep an open mind,” Richmond added.
“Sophie. Sophe, did you believe me when I said I was your brother? You see me, right? We’ve got some family resemblance going on and stuff, right?”
“I never knew my family, so you might as well be,” she ceded. In truth, the idea of having a brother-even a skinny idiot like this one-was very exciting. His manner of speaking was rather strange, she noticed, as though he had an accent. Some of the things he said reminded her of her old nursemaid.
“Great!” Julian exclaimed. ‘That’s great. Okay, so believe this part too, okay? It sounds weird, but just go with it. I’ll prove it and everything, okay? Just listen.”
Sophie raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to dispense with the theatrics.
“We can teleport. And time-travel.”
The baroness shrugged her shoulders, lips pursed. She did not understand.
“You’re such an idiot,” Richmond told him, his lips twitching up in a little smile.
Now Julian was bouncing up and down on his toes in excitement. “We can… we can travel. We can move through time. We can close our eyes and go anywhere just by trying!”
“I see,” she said flatly. “Well done, then.”
“But that’s how you got here!” he went on eagerly, “to Arquellain 3! It’s not like you hopped on a spaceship and went off for a drive, Sophe! It was the seventeen hundreds when you left!”
“It was 1774, yes,” she said, seizing on the only familiar words she heard, “and you’re trying to say that it isn’t now? That I’ve somehow missed a whole year or something?”
“Not-not exactly. It’s like,” he paused for a moment, his eyes distant and a calmer smile on his lips. When he began speaking again his voice was misty. “Think of any point in time. Any place. If you concentrate on it-”
“Don’t do it now!” Richmond interjected.
Julian continued. “You can sort of reach out, you know, feel it. And when you pull it towards you, you’re there.”
“I can?”
“Well,” said Richmond, “both of you can. I couldn’t. But I’m not like you-not related to you. I’m just Richmond.”
“‘Just Richmond?’” Julian scoffed. “He grew up with us. Since I was nine and you two were eight. Our gardener adopted him. We brought him here all the time. Played tons of hide-and-seek.” He grinned at his friend again as if they shared some sort of joke.
“Sorry,” said the baroness, “one moment. Yes. If you insist you’re my brother, I can accept that. You look a bit like me and I was a foundling. Very well. If you think you can travel to any place in the world just by wishing it, excellent! You’re either mad or a wizard. However, when you start going on about things I’ve done with you as a child-I was raised in Paris. I was taken in by the baron de Blomet and I had an English nursemaid named Eloise. I remember my childhood quite well, and I’m sorry to say it contained no silly older brother in peculiar blue trousers.”
To her surprise, Julian began to laugh again. “I’ve missed you!” he cried out, beaming triumphantly. “You’re brilliant! And you’re right, of course, a hundred percent. But you’re also completely wrong.”
“You’re both mad,” Sophie concluded. “Where am I?”
“Arquellain 3,” the two said in unison. Julian’s face immediately broke into another of his grins; Richmond rolled his blue eyes.
“It was our clubhouse,” Julian continued. “You said that in books all groups of friends have clubhouses, and when we found this planet, abandoned and with a headquarters all ready, you said it could be our clubhouse.”
“Planet?” she repeated. “As in, a star?”
Both were eager to answer this slightly less complex question.
“Oh yes, a planet. A star. Not the earth. Arquellain 3. Welcome!”
“Didn’t you guess when you saw the two suns?”
“They never set. The planet doesn’t spin. You looked it up right away when we first found it. The moment we were back at the manor you took off for the library, remember?”
“She doesn’t, Julian. There’s nothing for her to remember.”
“Um. Right. Sorry.”
“No use apologising. She’s the one who thinks you’re an idiot, not me.”
“Really? You don’t think me an idiot?”
“Oh, come on, Ju, don’t be silly.”
Sophie closed her eyes, covering her face with her hands as she tried to retain everything she had just been told. A star! And an older brother! Hours ago the most interesting part of her life was identifying one masked man in a crowd, but now-! It was as though she had wandered into an outrageous fairy tale. Often when characters encountered something like this they believed they were dreaming, but Sophie had never had a dream so full of detail. She could feel grains of dust between her stockings and her shoes, the thin air burned inside her chest, sweat was gathering along her hairline and her shoulders were beginning to ache. This was really happening. She had no idea what to do.
Sophie cleared her throat. “You’re mad,” she said again, but she did not believe it. The words sounded so small somehow, swallowed in the thin air of this- this star.
Richmond stepped closer to her and offered his arm; she took it mechanically, her skirts brushing against his black cloak. “I like these hoops,” said Richmond. “It’s like you’ve got a defence system set up to keep guys from getting too close.” When he saw Sophie smile he looked back up at Julian. “We could take her to the hotel. Let her sit down and catch her breath.”
“Easy!” Julian nodded. He put out an arm.
“I mean walk,” said Richmond. “Just give her a minute, you know?”
“I guess- but how far is it?”
Richmond pointed with his free arm at something on the horizon. “That looks like the rock shaped like the old guard tower. Isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s the guard tower one.”
“Would you mind a short walk, Sophie?” Richmond asked. “We can answer your questions. If you have any.”
Sophie nodded, focusing on her breathing. “I must get home,” she heard herself say. Her voice sounded faint even to her own ears. “How long have I been gone? How did I get here?” She felt fingers sliding between hers as Julian took her free hand.
“The somnambulism,” said Richmond. They had begun walking. Sophie saw her footprints from earlier in the dust, marking the path she had taken to this spot. The only footprints left by Richmond and Julian were in this little area. It was as though they had been here all along. “If I guessed that you were diagnosed with somnambulism after you suddenly found you had travelled a good distance in no time at all, would I be right?”
“I was in the library,” Sophie mumbled, “and then I was in the garden.”
“She was in the library!” repeated Julian. “Did you hear that? Richmond, she was in the library! I told you it was still her.”
“Quiet, you little nutter.” The words seemed harsh, but Richmond’s tone was indulgent. Sophie noticed that Julian continued to grin as his companion went on. “Why the garden?”
Sophie knew what he meant at once. “There was a poem about a rose. Mother’s rosebush-the one Father gave her when they married… the roses should have been blooming. I was thinking that I wanted to check on it. And then I was looking right at it. The book was still in my hand.”
“It’s the same thing,” said Julian. “That’s how you got here, to Arquellain 3.”
“I don’t- I still don’t understand. You said if I think of something I can just… just go there? That isn’t… I don’t understand.”
Julian squeezed her hand, his grin growing even wider somehow, and then released it; Sophie let her arm fall limply against her skirts and looked up at him. Instead of his hyperactive grin she saw-nothing. There was nothing where he had been standing but a pair of footprints in the dust. Julian had vanished completely.
At the same moment Richmond started and said, “What are you up to?”
“Like that,” said Julian, and then Sophie saw him standing at Richmond’s other side.
“How did you-?”
But then he was back at her right, grabbing for her hand again. He had not walked the distance: one minute he stood by Richmond; a moment later he had vanished and immediately reappeared next to her. “That, Sophie de Blomet,” he said, thin chest thrown out in pride, “is not sleepwalking.”
Chapter Four