The River of No Return

what he had been about to say.
    Alva shook her head. “No, never mind. I do not need you to swear allegiance.” She stood. “Come. Get up. I’d like to try something.”
    Nick got to his feet.
    Alva took his hands.
    “Are we going to jump? This is what Arkady did when—”
    “Don’t worry. You are in the transporter. At the very worst you’ll jump to some Ofan bar brawl in the fifteenth century and they’ll just bring you back to me here. But I think this will work. I’m going to begin to jump with you, but I will let go of you just as we enter the river. When that happens, I want you to think about that acorn. Use it to stay here. To resist the river. I don’t want you to touch it, for this exercise is about your mind, Nick, not about the acorn itself.” She squeezed his fingers. “Are you ready?”
    “No! What are you doing?”
    But she was already doing it. Jumping with Alva was not like jumping with Arkady. With Arkady the feeling had been located in the gut, but with Alva it was in the head. Vertigo . . . he was tumbling, his thoughts were flying away . . . and then Alva let go of his hands and he was lost, tumbling away down a long, dark tunnel. . . .
    The acorn. She had said to think of the acorn . . . don’t reach for it. Do it with your mind. Do it with your mind. He pictured the acorn, its shiny pale brown flanks, its nubbly cap . . . Julia. Julia’s dark eyes. Julia’s soft hand cupping his cheek, her kisses, sweet and urgent . . .
    He opened his eyes. He was in the pub, and he felt strong and alive and firmly planted. Alva was smiling at him. Nothing had changed.
    “There,” she said. “The acorn will keep you here. That’s all you have to do next time.”
    * * *
    “Do you think it is possible to stop the Pale?” Nick was standing behind the bar, washing up their mugs in a bucket of soapy water. Alva sat across from him, eating a packet of lamb-and-mint-flavored crisps she’d pulled out of a drawer. She had described them as “the really evil ones, from the 1980s.”
    “No,” she said. “I don’t think it. I believe it. But belief is more fragile than thought. I believe that the Pale can be turned back. But I might be wrong.”
    “You can’t be wrong,” Nick said, his voice hoarse. “Surely there’s hope.” He set the two mugs upside down on a folded linen towel and planted his hands on the bar, his arms braced.
    “I hope so. But all I base my belief on is human nature.”
    “Then we’re doomed.” Nick plucked a crisp from her packet and popped it in his mouth. “Humans are the scum of the earth.”
    Alva put her head on one side. “Maybe,” she said. “But we exist, and therefore we have to try to do good rather than bad.” She ripped the silvery bag along its seam and opened it out to make eating the crisps easier. “We have talents—ranging from perfect pitch to towering artistic or scientific genius. We usually celebrate these things as gifts from God. So by what right does the Guild say that your ability to manipulate time, which you share with a small fraction of your kind, is too dangerous for you to handle? Surely this talent—this gift—wouldn’t exist if we weren’t supposed to use it.”
    “Maybe it’s a curse. Some people are driven to do unspeakable things and they do them well. We don’t encourage it.”
    Alva rolled her eyes and ate a crisp. “Please. You know that having our talent isn’t the same as being a psychopath. If there is anything that unites the Ofan, that defines us, it is that we want to learn more about our gift. Now that the Pale is coming, we think we might be able to use it to help. But the Guild, with its vaunted tale of protecting the river, is slowly destroying our chance. Going to war against us—for God’s sake, it would be like going to war against the Island of Misfit Toys.”
    Nick laughed. “The Misfit Toys band together and save Christmas.”
    Alva touched her nose with the tip of her finger. “Bingo!”
    “You’re mad.”
    “I’ve already admitted that. But just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me. The Guild’s money and their power—no, let me go even one step further—the very existence of the Guild depends upon war. Because that is their beginning, they cannot imagine a way out of it also being their end. Their omega must follow from their alpha. Trouble is, their finale is everyone else’s, too. They don’t give us a choice. They don’t