The River of No Return

Grandfather was dead and gone. She took a slow, deep breath and exhaled it, her mind and body flooding with sudden understanding.
    “It is me,” she whispered into Eamon’s frozen face. “I am the Talisman.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    S oon Nick could feel it whenever Arkady or Alice stopped time. It became impossible for them to catch him unawares, though they tested him constantly. He could even feel it when he was in another room or far away across the house. At that distance he was not caught up in the aura of their manipulations, but he knew that somewhere close by someone had altered the flow of time. It felt like swimming in a river and sensing a different current a few feet away without actually being in it.
    He described it that way over dinner one night, and Alice lit up.
    “Yes. Remember when I held your hand and said that time is like a river?”
    “You held his hand?” Arkady shot a look at his wife. “When was this?”
    “Oh, shut up,” she said. She leaned over the table and gestured at Nick, a leaf of lettuce speared on her fork. “This River of Time. It seems to flow in one direction, steadily, inexorably. But there are countercurrents and eddies. Ultimately, and in the big picture, it doesn’t matter; the river flows to the sea. Those who know the river, and who use it, know that it moves in complex ways, ways that we can use and even change. Our very bodies swimming in the river alter its flow. But we cannot change it for long, and we cannot change the ultimate truth: The river will run to the sea.”
    “That is a pretty image, Alice,” Nick said. “But what are you trying to tell me?”
    “And what about this hand holding, I want to know,” Arkady muttered.
    Alice rolled her eyes at her husband, then shook her head at Nick. “I tell you,” she said, cocking her head in Arkady’s direction. “He is hardly worth it.”
    Nick leaned back in his chair and twisted his ring on his finger. “Yes, your wife held my hand,” he said to Arkady. “What are you going to do about it?”
    The Russian shrugged. “I kill you.”
    Nick raised his glass in a salute, and Arkady raised his. They drank.
    Alice, meanwhile, was chewing her lettuce with a bored look on her face. She swallowed, dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin, and propped her elbows on the table. “If you two gentlemen are finished with your little male-bonding ritual, I would like to continue my lecture about time and rivers.”
    Arkady grunted and dug into his salad.
    Nick spread his hands. “I’m all ears,” he said.
    “Such handsome ears,” Alice said, cutting a look at her husband over the rim of her glass as she drank.
    Arkady glanced up from his troughing. “Tonight, you pay for that.”
    “Goody. Now be quiet.” Alice turned the full strength of her attention on Nick, her flirting clearly at an end. “Human history is like a river,” she said. “Billions of souls all living and loving and working and fighting and dying down through the ages, pushing history before them in a powerful flow made up of tiny particles. They make their choices, have their passions. Some are brilliant or powerful or rich or simply lucky enough to make a change for good, a little bend in the river, a slight deviation. Or for bad. Perhaps more often for bad. But ultimately, it is the vast power and flow of the river that carries them forward.”
    “I’m following you,” Nick said.
    “Then there is the strange, unexplained fact of us. The Guild. The people who can jump the river’s course. Move backward and forward along it, more like . . .” Alice paused, thinking. “More like a water bug, perhaps, than a drop of water.”
    Arkady snorted. “I am not a bug.”
    “No,” Alice said. “You would say that time is like a harem of beautiful women and you are like a thief who steals in by moonlight. But this is my account, and in my account we are like water bugs. We can skate here and there on the surface of the river, but nothing we do can really change its overall course, its powerful drive toward the sea.”
    “But we all start with a jump,” Nick said. “Right?”
    “Yes. Every single person who can manipulate time begins by first falling out of time. Jumping. We jump and emerge again somewhere further along. Usually it is something drastic that happens to cause the jump. Our lives are at stake. Mostly it’s war. We are fighting, like you were, or we are caught up in war somehow. Less often we are consumed by an