Because it was a her. I didn't know how I knew that—the painting was crude, the lines simple—but I knew it in my bones the way I knew my own name. Which was absurd. I'd never been here before. I'd never seen these paintings until ten minutes ago. There was no reason for the sudden prickling behind my eyes, no reason for the way my hand drifted up to press against my sternum—not over the bond scar, but lower, deeper, over the place where the borrowed magic sat quiet and heavy in my well.
I shook my head, forcing myself back to the present. The gateway waited, and beyond it, the team and our mission. I thought about Nathan. About Megan. About the life I was leaving behind—empty and numb and barely worth living. I thought about whatever was waiting on the other side and then I stepped through.
The world folded.
That's the only way I can describe it. Not spinning, not falling, not darkness. Just... folding. Like I was a piece of paper, and someone had creased me in half, brought two edges together that weren't meant to meet.
It lasted forever.
It lasted no time at all.
Then I was stumbling forward onto rough stone, and the air was different—colder, damper, smelling of smoke and earth and something wild I didn't have words for.
I was on my hands and knees, breathing hard, my heart pounding, blood rushing in my ears.
"Ellie?" Dev's voice. "You okay?"
I looked up. Darkness. Complete, absolute darkness, except for the thin beams of headtorches cutting through the black like searchlights in fog.
The cave was the same. I could feel that instinctively—the same shape, the same domed ceiling arching overhead, the same rough stone beneath my palms. But everything else was different. The electric lights were gone. The computers, the monitors, the cables snaking across the floor—all gone. The metal stairs, the railings, the reinforced entrance—none of it existed yet. Wouldn't exist for thousands of years.
We were in the same place, but it was a different world.
"I'm fine," I managed, and Dev's hand found my arm, steadying me as I got to my feet. My headtorch swung wildly as I straightened, the beam slashing across the cave floor. I could see Nathan and Megan a few meters ahead, their torches already sweeping the space methodically. Stephen was beside Dev, his breathing audible in the quiet.
"Jesus," Stephen whispered. "It actually worked."
No one answered. We stood there, five people in a pool of weak light, surrounded by twenty-five thousand years of nothing.
The stone circle was still there. I could feel it behind me—the standing stones, ancient and carved, exactly where they'd been in our time. But without the computers and monitors clustered around its base, it looked different. Wilder. The spirals carved into the stone seemed deeper somehow, newer.
"Everyone accounted for?" Nathan's voice echoed in the darkness. Professional. Controlled. As if stepping twenty-five thousand years into the past was just another item on his checklist.
"All here," Stephen said.
“Good, then let’s get back up to the surface. It should be noon here too, we’ll have time to get the lie of the land and set up camp before we lose the light.”
I followed the rest of the team through the cave, to where a faint glow of daylight revealed the entrance we’d come through so far ahead in time. It was only as we started the arduous climb up the narrow tunnel, that I realised that the paintings were missing from the cave. They hadn’t been painted yet. The thought sent a shiver down my spine, and I increased my pace, following closer behind the others until we reached the surface.
CHAPTER 4
ELLIE
Istood at the entrance to the cave, cold stabbing down my throat sharp enough to make me cough.
The hillside fell away in front of me, but instead of farmland, the world had been replaced by the immense steppe; grasslands that stretched endlessly in every direction—frozen grass and wind-carved snow reaching toward the horizon. The emptiness made my chest tighten, not with the familiar ache of the past eighteen months, but with something rawer. More immediate.
There was nowhere to hide out here. Nowhere at all.
No roads. No buildings. No distant hum of anything human. The silence pressed against my ears until I could hear my own heartbeat.
Only the wind moved, combing the frozen grass flat in waves that rippled to the edge of sight.
"Incredible," Nathan breathed somewhere behind me.
The word felt inadequate. Offensive, even. This wasn't incredible—it wasreal. We'd actually done it. Twenty-fivethousand years had just evaporated like morning frost, and I was standing in a world that existed before cities, before agriculture, before my species had figured out how to do anything but survive.
My hands were shaking. Not from cold. I didn't turn around. Didn't want to see whether Nathan was looking at the landscape or at Megan standing beside him, her hand through his arm, as usual. Didn't want this moment contaminated by the sight of them together.
