Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] Read Online Free

Rotunda. She must be directly below it in that basement they’d discovered. She cast her light around. Other struts jutted at crazy angles out of concrete roots. She ducked under one and around another. It was like a maze, smelling of metal and damp from the lake beyond the Rotunda. She was so absorbed in making her way through the forest of metal girders she was surprised when she emerged into an open space.
    Something gleamed dully in the darkness. She held her little light above her head.
    Her lungs grabbed for air.
    The gears were bronze or brass or something, a thousand of them, big and smaller and really tiny. And they were set with jewels. Some were really, really big jewels. Red and blue and green and . . . and diamonds. They coruscated under her tiny light. The machine must be fourteen, sixteen feet tall. It disappeared in the darkness above her. Stabbing out from the center was the control lever she’d seen in the illustrations, ending in a diamond bigger than her fist.
    Leonardo’s machine was real.
    And she just knew. She
knew
that the Viking-looking guy was really a Viking from long ago and the woman, Lucy, had gone back to get him and changed her life with this machine. You could make these gears and jewels take you through the vortex of time just by thinking about a destination. The book inside her shoulder bag seemed almost jubilant.
    Diana put out a hand to the nearest girder to steady herself and took some deep breaths. Then she examined the machine more carefully. A modern steel box about the size of a lunch box sat at the bottom with several switches and lights on it and a big steel button like the kind you pushed with your palm at traffic lights. That hadn’t been in the illustration. But the instructions on the bookmark mentioned switches. She hauled the book out of her bag and took the slip of paper out, shining her light on the spidery handwriting: “Blue, then the two whites from left to right, twice, and then the red. Push the big button. Then pull the lever down.”
    This was the moment. She could see Arthur and Guinevere. She could see Gawain, the hero who wouldn’t cometo life in her current work in progress. She could be infused with that “one brief shining moment” and come back with a tale to tell. She might be renewed.
    It felt right. Very, frighteningly,
right
.
    Her parents were dead. She had no friends. In the end what did she have to lose? Nothing.
    She knelt beside the metal lunch box with the lights and switches. Her hand had stopped shaking. She flipped the blue switch and a blue light came on.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
She flipped the switches in sequence and palmed the round metal button. The machine stood silent.
    Wait . . . was that a hum from the lunch box? The hum accelerated rapidly. It screamed up the scale until it disappeared. She scrambled over to stand in front of the three-foot brass rod topped by the diamond.
    “Okay,” she muttered. “This is it.” She grabbed the diamond and pulled. It moved about a foot. Nothing happened. She put her weight into it. It slowly descended. The big gear in roughly the center of the machine began to turn slowly. Smaller wheels spun into action. The machine came alive. The diamond vibrated under her hands. Power hung in the air like a coiled spring waiting to be released. The tension grew almost unbearable in her chest. Whirring gears assaulted her eardrums.
    Don’t faint. Don’t faint. Think of the time you want to go to.
Suddenly the myriad jewels seemed to light from within, sending colored beams careening around the ceiling. The machine leaped into brilliant focus.
Okay. Okay.
She tried to calm herself.
Camelot. Back to the time when everything was possible.
    The machine slowed until all was still, as though even time had stopped. Disappointment drenched her. How stupid had she been to believe this was all true?
    A scream of power tore through the room. She couldn’t breathe. The gears all spun into action almost