“There is another here.” Charlie turned back to the screen, analyzing silently. But he must’ve come away empty-handed, because he said nothing else. “But you are the only one I’ve ever encountered who matches these readings.”
Snow hadn’t been here, then. Jo looked to the door, wondering what had happened to the rest of the Society, as though her friends would come walking through behind her.What if, when she’d ended the Society and the Age of Man, they’d. . . Jo couldn’t even bring herself to think it.
“Has anyone else come to you, or shown up in your yard unexpectedly, claiming to know you or recognize you in any way?” Jo attempted.
“No.” Charlie shook his head. “You’re the first to visit me from another dimension. At least that I’ve been made aware of.”
Jo took in a slow breath, forcing herself to remain calm. She tightened her arms around her chest and suppressed a shiver. Just because they hadn’t come to Charlie’s house, or woken here, didn’t mean they were gone. It didn’t mean Pan had the last laugh about Jo destroying the Society.
“I need you to look something up for me.”
“What is it?” Charlie asked, pulling up a browser in the monitors with a thought.
“Me. Josephina Espinosa.”
He gave her a skeptical look but keyed in the query anyway. Nearly a thousand names pulled up across various records. “Care to narrow it down a bit?”
“Search in the LSR. Near El Paso.”
“Where?”
“LSR,” Jo repeated. “The Lone Star Republic.”
Charlie merely stared at her. He squinted his eyes, but not in a way that indicated he was trying to refuse her or be difficult. He was genuinely confused.
“Where’s that?”
Jo opened her mouth and closed it again slowly. Time itself had been changed in a major way. “Pull up a map of the world,” she whispered.
Charlie obliged.
Jo stared at the map that took up an entire screen before her. It looked like the earth she’d known, at a glance. But key differences began to set off alarms in her head—like the fact that Greenland was connected to North America, and South America was not. Or the fact that the Pacific Islands seemed to trail straight down from Japan like perfectly aligned stepping stones, rather than in a sort of arcing scatter.
Or the fact that North America, Greenland, South America, and Japan weren’t even labeled on the map at all.
“This . . . is earth?”
“Yes,” Charlie paused for a moment. “Was it different in your time?”
“Very. Right now, in my time, I’d be in United North America . . . Not the Kingdom of Aristonia.”
“North America?” Charlie repeated, utterly fascinated at the mere words. “What else is different?”
“Just about everything other than the broad strokes of the continents.” Jo leaned away from the monitors, trying to re-file her thoughts.
She was in 2058, but it wasn’t the 2058 of her world. The Society had been broken, by her, and Snow must’ve recreated the world in a new design—one that seemed to deviate greatly from what she’d known.
“Are there gods in this world?” Jo asked, thinking that Snow may have rebuilt the world back to before the Society.
“Not until I met you.” Charlie folded his hands. “At least, none that I know of.”
So it wasn’t the Age of Gods reborn. That left one thing . . .
“Magic. Do you have magic?”
“I do not. But I know many who do.”
“The Age of Magic,” Jo breathed, stepping away to lean against the wall again. It was a reset back to when the Society was formed. But it hadn’t been formed in the Age of Gods—no, Snow had said Pan trapped him while he was weak from rebuilding time into the Age of Magic. It was like Mt. Fuji all over again, but on a much, much larger scale. “He reset everything—reverted, that was the word he used…”
