Signal Moon(10)

“What, the future won’t happen if I know it’s going to?”

“The butterfly effect, Marvel and Loki, and the whole variant-timeline thing. I can see you wrinkling your nose”—Lily was—“but what it comes down to is yeah, we should probably try to avoid timeline paradoxes.”

“Did I set one off by warning you about the Colin Powell attack?”

“I don’t know. But you’ve already done it, so we may as well proceed. Can’t really un-ring that particular bell.”

“If you know my future, I’m tempted to ask you if I live to be an old lady. Or whom I marry.”

A creak of springs on his end. She could tell he’d just lain down, probably pillowing his head on his elbow the way she was. “That’s the kind of thing I probably shouldn’t get into.”

“Can you tell me one thing?” She drew in a breath, and found her voice suddenly clogged with tears. Everything in her locked like a fist, and she had to fight to get the words out, sounding so small and lost, she was ashamed of herself. “Do—do we win?”

A hiss of static, and for a heart-stopping moment she thought she’d lost him. “The war?” he asked, sounding startled. “Your war?”

“Yes, of course my war! The war against Hitler. Who did you think I meant, the Boers? Bloody Napoleon?” She pressed the heel of her hand to her burning eyes. “Just, tell me . . . Do we win?”

“Lily,” he said slowly. He hadn’t said her name before, just Baines or Lady Rose. “Why do you think I’m not talking to you in German right now? Yeah, honey. You win. We all do.”

Oh God, Lily thought, and began to cry. She clapped a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the sounds.

“I’m—look, I’m not going to tell you too much about it, all right? I really, really don’t want to screw up history here. But you win. You do. A lot of it comes down to people like you—listening, decoding, intel. It matters. So, so much more than you think.”

“It does?” She barely managed to keep her words steady over her streaming eyes.

“Yeah.” His voice was like a warm blanket, a hot toddy, an arm around the shoulders. She had a feeling he knew she was crying. “It fucking matters. What I do, our kind, signal technicians—it descends straight from you guys.”

“Our kind?” She tried to say it without sharing the classified parts. “The kind with blasted headphones and little cold rooms?”

“Yeah, them. You. Want to know the first thing I did, coming to England? I went to Bletchley Park. Because it’s Mecca to people like us. BP and all the outstations like the one you’re at. The Greatest Generation, all these girls like you sitting in little cold rooms with your headphones on. I saw that display, the Bakelite headphones and wireless receivers and what you managed to do with them, and I felt like I was in goddamn church.”

He shouldn’t have said that, Lily thought. The words Bletchley Park, ultrasecret Station X itself, going out over an open radio channel? But she let it fly into her heart, and felt something ease there. “The Greatest Generation?” she said, wiping her eyes as she steadied her voice. “Is that supposed to be us? My generation?”

“That’s you.” Pause. “Fuck it all, I could really use a drink.”

“Now, now.” Lily sat up. She wanted to ask him so many more questions, and it probably wasn’t a good idea, so she tried for levity instead. “At least be more creative if you’re going to swear. You couldn’t really use a drink; you could really use a chance to get kippered, bottled, sauced, utterly fizzed.”

“I’ll start saying utterly fizzed the day you say the word fuck, Lady Rose.”

“That will never happen, cowboy.”

“I dunno; you said bloody just a moment ago. I’m clutching my pearls, let me tell you.”

Lily wiped her puffy eyes again, hearing the tick of the clock. Time, ticking away, time they didn’t have. “Look, let’s go over the whole transmission again. Everything I heard you say that first night. There has to be something concrete you can take to your commander.”

They were halfway through it again, getting frustrated, when a sharp rapping came on the door. “Baines, open up. Have you got a man in there?”

“Oh crumbs,” Lily whispered. Fist-Face Fiddian, on the warpath. “Matt, fifteen minutes. Next frequency on the list. Over and out.” She cut the connection and frantically raked the headphones off. “Just a tic,” she called through the door.

“Have you got a wireless?” Fiddian’s suspicious voice called back. “Transmitters are strictly forbidden by rule of—”

“Of course I haven’t got a wireless,” Lily called, shoving it into its case. “Don’t be ridic! Just talking to myself.”

“Open this door, Baines.”

Not on your blinking life, Lily thought. They’d take the wireless and transmitter for certain, and she’d probably land in the brig. What was the brig? Did the navy have brigs in Matt’s day? She bundled the case under one arm as Fiddian continued to shout on the other side, hesitated only a moment, then hauled up the sash of the window and looked down. “Couldn’t I have got a ground-floor room?” she muttered, then sighed, dropped the wireless case into the laurel hedge below as gently as possible, and wriggled herself after it. The promenade with its absurd stone turrets was just a quarter mile away, and there was an isolated corner down at the end, right by the water—she could trot there, set up, and be utterly alone in ten minutes. No one would hear the sound of transmission over the whipping ocean breeze.