Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(31)

Aaron was silent for so long that Joan thought he wasn’t going to answer at all.

‘I know,’ he said finally. His expression was closed off. Joan waited for him to elaborate. But instead he started again toward the park.

Joan stared at his back for a long moment before following.

It was a sunnier day than the one they’d left. St James’s Park was a patchwork of picnic blankets and deck chairs, and people eating sandwiches and soft serves.

Conversation blended with kids shrieking and a tinny cricket match streaming from someone’s—Joan blinked. Coming from a silver box the size of a bread bin.

This wasn’t her London, she remembered again.

After that, all she could see were differences. The drape of people’s clothes, the haircuts. Even the air smelled different in this time—like cigarettes and tar. The cars sounded different. When Joan closed her eyes, she could have been in a different city.

And something inside her was drawn to it—just as she’d been drawn to Holland House. She wanted to keep travelling, to see London grow stranger and stranger until there wasn’t even a London here anymore. And then to keep going beyond that. To see the Iron Age, the Bronze Age.

Or to travel forward. To see wonders. Time travel is in your blood, Aaron had said.

‘Hey!’ Aaron’s hand clamped over her arm.

Joan blinked at him, feeling weirdly muzzy. His grip hurt, but in the same distant way that her arm had hurt the time she’d broken it and Dr de Witt had prescribed a wildly strong painkiller that had made her head float.

Aaron’s face was right up close then, eyes wide. ‘Joan?’ His voice sounded far away, as though he were speaking through a long pipe. ‘Hey, stay with me.’

‘Shouldn’t,’ she mumbled. ‘Your family tried to kill me.’

At school, Mr Larch had said that there were once elephants and camels in St James’s Park. And crocodiles. King Charles II had played French croquet here. And before that, it had been a hunting ground. Wild deer and ducks for the king’s table.

‘Joan.’ The suddenness of Aaron’s voice jolted her again. ‘Are you with me? Can you hear anything?’

‘Can hear your stupid voice.’ Her own voice came out weirdly dreamy.

Aaron’s small smile hit her right in the gut. It was unfair for him to be so good-looking, she thought distantly, when he was so disagreeable all the time.

‘Can you feel me touching you?’ he said.

His hand was on her arm. Joan opened her mouth to say that of course she could feel it. But the truth was, she could hardly feel her body at all. And Aaron’s voice was the only thing she could hear clearly. Where a moment ago the park had been full of bird chatter and people talking, now everything seemed muffled. Panic stirred inside her, but even that felt far away and cotton-wooled. ‘What’s happening?’ she mumbled.

‘You’re all right,’ Aaron said. ‘But you need to listen to me very carefully. You have to stay in the moment. This moment. Pick out one detail from the park. What can you hear?’

‘I don’t—’ She tried to pick out a thread from the muffled mess of her senses, but everything wisped away like smoke. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I can hear the wind in the trees,’ Aaron said. And again his voice was the only clear thing. ‘Now you.’

Joan struggled to focus. There was a sound floating above the others. Something high and sweet. She had to struggle even harder to find the word that went with it. ‘Bird,’ she managed. It was like talking underwater. She saw Aaron’s hand tighten, but she still couldn’t feel it.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘What else? I can hear people talking.’

Joan made another exhausting effort. It was like being stuck inside a dream, unable to wake up. ‘Cars.’

‘One more.’

Joan struggled again. ‘Water. Fountain.’

She wasn’t sure how long they stood there together, naming sounds in the park. Aaron’s hand gradually solidified against her skin, temperature coming back first so that she felt the warmth of him before anything else. The conversations around them re-emerged, and then got louder and louder, like someone was turning the volume up. Joan took a breath that tasted like bitter rubber and fuel, and nearly choked on it.

Aaron squeezed her arm, and this time she definitely felt it. ‘There,’ he said. ‘There you are.’

Joan took another choking breath. The fog in her head was clearing. She shook her head, trying to clear it faster. ‘What’s going on?’

‘You nearly died.’

‘What?’

‘You tried to travel without taking time first.’

‘No,’ Joan said, confused. ‘I took time at the Pit. I must have had some leftover.’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Aaron said. ‘Once you jump, it’s gone. You jumped and then you tried to jump again. You didn’t know how to put on the brakes.’

‘No, I just felt . . .’ All Joan had felt was a yearning—a pull in her chest. The same pull she’d felt in the Pit. But if that was how you jumped, how were you supposed to stop yourself from travelling accidentally? How could you stop yourself from feeling a feeling?

‘You should eat something,’ Aaron said. ‘Food from this time will ground you. Until then, you need to focus on the details. Smell, sound, temperature. Stay in the present. Don’t think about anything but now.’