Ripping Time

More sirens hooted insanely overhead, a shrieking rhythm that drove Skeeter's pulse rate into the stratosphere and left his head aching. But the pain in his head was nothing to the agony in his heart. Wally let him pass the security cordon around the riot zone, then he fought his way clear of the riot's fringe, searching frantically for a flash of white Ephesian gown, the familiar gloss of her dark hair. But he couldn't find her, not even a trace. Skeeter bit his lip, shaking and sick. He had allowed the unthinkable to happen. Someone wanted Ianira Cassondra dead. And whoever that someone was, they had snatched her right out of his grasp, in the middle of a riot. If they killed Ianira...

They wouldn't get out of Shangri-La Station alive.

No one attacked the family of a Yakka Mongol and lived to boast of it.

Skeeter Jackson, adopted by the Khan of all the Yakka Mongols, a displaced up-time kid who had been declared their living bogda, spirit of the upper air in human form, the child named honorary uncle to an infant who one day would terrorize the world as Genghis Khan, had just declared blood feud.

Margo Smith glanced at her wristwatch for the tenth time in three minutes, fizzing like a can of soda shaken violently and popped open. Less than seven hours! Just seven more hours and she would step through the Brita

But she'd learned her lessons—dozens of them, in fact—and after months of the hardest work she'd ever tackled, her gruelling efforts had finally paid off. Her grandfather was letting her go back down time again. And not through just any old gate, either. The Brita

One she dreaded.

The elite crowd gathered in the time terminal's weapons range talked nonstop in a fashion unique to an assemblage of late-arriving wealthy tourists, world-class scholars, and self-important reporters—each hotly defending his or her own pet theories as to "whodu

The Denver-bound tourists, headed for some sort of action cowboy shoot down time, cast envious glances at the lucky ones who'd managed to beg, borrow, buy, or steal Ripper Watch tickets. Those were Margo's new charges, although they didn't know it yet. The mere tourists heading for London, Margo ignored. Her attention was focused on the three individuals with whom she would be spending the next three solid months, as their time guide.

Dominica Nosette, whose name, face, and body seemed quintessentially French, yet who was as staidly British as kippers and jellied eels, was chattering away with her partner Guy Pendergast. And Shahdi Feroz... Margo gulped, just approaching Dr. Feroz where she stood locked in conversation with a Ripper Watch tourist at the next lane over. Dr. Feroz had spent the past four months studying the rise of cults and cult violence in Imperial Rome, through the Porta Romae. At previous training classes like this one, Margo had met all the other team members now in London, before they'd left the station with Malcolm. But none of the others possessed the credentials or the fieldwork record Shahdi Feroz did. Not even the team's nominal leader, Conroy Melvyn, a seedy-looking Englishman who bore the impressive title of Scotland Yard Chief Inspector.

Looking as Persian as her name and voice sounded, Dr. Feroz awed Margo. Not only was she exotic and beautiful in a way that made Margo feel her own youth and inexperience as keenly as a Mi

Margo's lack of education—a high-school GED and one semester of college which Kit had arranged for up time, augmented with months of intensive study on the station—caused her to stammer like a stupid schoolgirl with stagefright. "Dr. Feroz. Your, uh, safety goggles and muffs, earmuffs, I mean, for your ears, to protect them..." Oh, for God's sake, stop shaking, Margo!

"Thank you, my dear." The inflection of dismissal in her voice reduced Margo to the status of red-faced child. She fled back down the line of shooting benches, toward A

"So, are you all set for London?"

"Oh, boy, am I just! I've been packed for two whole days! I still can't believe Kit managed to swing it with Bax to let me go!" She had no idea what it had taken to convince Granville Baxter, CEO of Time Tours, Inc. on station, to give Margo that gate pass. And not just a one-cycle pass, either, but a gate pass that would let her stay the entire three months of East End Ripper murders.

A

Margo flushed. "I know." She glanced at the journalists, at the woman whose scholarly work was breaking new ground in the understanding of the criminal mind in historical cultures. "I know I haven't really got enough experience to guide the Ripper Watch Team through the East End. Not yet, even though I've been to the East End once." That trip, and her own greenhorn mistakes, she preferred not to remember too closely. "But I'll get the experience, A

A

Margo gri

A

"Right!"

Margo needed to prove to A

Her smile, which had been known to cause cardiac arrest, was one of the few weapons currently available in her self-defense arsenal, so she dredged up a heart-stopping one and got to work. "Hi! Is everybody ready to get in some weapons practice?"

Heads swivelled and Margo was the abrupt focus of multiple, astonished stares.