Between Moments

Lucas can steer now... sort of. After falling through history against his will, he's worked out that the orb in his hand answers to him. The clicks have a rhythm, one he's starting to feel out, but knowing that doesn't mean he can use it yet.

History isn't impressed by the theory. He still lands in the wrong rooms at the wrong moments. From a fleet of treasure ships lit up like a floating city off the East African coast, to a city at the bottom of Africa where a man keeps watching him and saying nothing, to a London night spent very much under the falling kind of sky. The chariots still nearly finish him. The men with weapons still object to his presence. The company is occasionally excellent.

But steering toward one place means leaving another, and Lucas is beginning to notice that the hardest part of the trip was never the danger. It's the people. A grower who treats him like he matters. A woman who looks at him as though he might, this once, actually stay. The longer he spends inside other lives, the clearer it gets: he is always, eventually, already halfway out the door, and he is getting very tired of being the man who leaves.

The fellow in the faded cap is back, and for once he's saying more than he used to. So are others, an elder who has no business knowing what the orb is, a stranger who speaks about it like an old story saved up for exactly this moment. Slowly, unwillingly, Lucas starts to suspect that getting home was never the real test. The orb has been trying to show him something the whole time. He's just been too busy running to look.

Surviving history was one thing. Learning to steer through it is another. Working out where he actually wants to land, that's the part nobody warned him about.

This is for readers who like their time travel funny, their history properly lived-in, and their reluctant heroes armed with nothing more useful than an orange hoodie, a pair of worn trainers, and a steadily improving sense of when to run.

Between Moments is the second book in this series, following Between Things.