The River of No Return

go. It sounds like a scar.”
    “A scar?” Nick wondered if he had misheard.
    “Yes. Like that dashing one over your eye. Except this is a scar in time. A place where, for a long time, for years on end, many people had the same overpowering emotion. So that the place becomes scarred, or turns in on itself. Do you see? There can be no intervention. No one can enter and no one can leave. It is just . . . a place. Not a place in time. It is a place in despair.”
    “And you think that spot on Guilford Street is a scar?”
    Alice shrugged. “The gates of the Foundling Hospital, where for years upon years mothers gave over their children, never to see them again? Yes, I should imagine so. Perhaps you felt that despair in that spot on Guilford Street. Or perhaps Mibbs could use that spot to hurt you.”
    Nick thought about the feeling he had almost drowned in a few hours ago, and then he remembered the two women who had chosen black balls out of the bag. The way they had turned with their burdens, their eyes staring, terrified, at some future horror. And how the woman who had chosen a white ball had smiled through her tears, and pressed her jet button with such passion into the hand of the man who took her baby. That had been grief, but it had also been a searing kind of hope.

CHAPTER TEN
    A s the Rolls-Royce (made now, Nick remembered after a moment of confusion, by BMW) pulled out of St. James’s Square and onto Pall Mall, Nick closed the window to shut out the chauffeur. “Before we get back to Guilford Street,” he told Alice and Arkady, “I want the truth. I had no clue what was happening to me today, nor how to defend myself. I want you to tell me the rules of time. Not the rules of the Guild. The rules of time.”
    “‘The wreck and not the story of the wreck,’” Alice said dreamily. “‘The thing itself and not the myth.’”
    “Tell me, Alice. No more of this Level One security clearance malarkey. You are the Alderwoman of the Guild. You know everything.”
    Alice looked around the luxurious interior of the Rolls. “Isn’t it incredible? A little girl, stolen by a slaver . . . and now look at me.” She shook her head. “It never stops being unbelievable, Nick.”
    “I do not doubt you.”
    She settled down into the leather comforts of her seat. “The Guild is big and terribly, terribly old, but time is bigger and older and very strange. I will tell you what little we understand, but there are things we can’t fathom. And there are people out there, not in the Guild. People who think differently about time. People who are trying to learn to use time to control the world.”
    “Ah.” So Leo and Meg had been right. There were others.
    “The thing we do know, definitively,” Alice said, “is that the talent always manifests in a jump forward in time.”
    “Why? If we can go back, why do we always go forward first?”
    Arkady turned from staring out of the window. “Because, when you face death, you think: What can I do to save myself? What can I do next ? You are thinking forward, you are hoping—do you understand me? Thinking and hoping forward, into the future. So you pull yourself there.”
    “Okay . . .” Nick frowned. “I guess I understand that. But what about this big secret—that we can all jump back? How does that work?”
    “It is very difficult,” Alice said. “It takes great concentration and training. You must reach back, back into yearnings and memories and feelings of the past. There are some times and places to which we cannot seem to go. We cannot jump in these places we call scars, where the feeling is carved into the very bedrock. We cannot jump to certain kinds of mass events—the destruction of Carthage, for example—events that are so intense, so complete in and of themselves, that they repel the past and the future. And we can’t use despair, which is inert. The feelings we use must reach outward. They must yearn, either forward or back.”
    “But surely everywhere is a scar. Something terrible must have happened in this very spot. Some caveman killed another on . . .” Nick peered out the car window, looking for a street sign. “Right here on Shaftesbury Avenue, twenty thousand years ago.”
    “Yes, certainly. Every inch of the world has been dappled by sadness and happiness. But I’m not talking about individuals and their feelings. Or even individual deaths. Those are drops of water, Nick. Just little drops. We travel on currents,