Ianira stirred against the pillow. Dark lashes fluttered. Jenna discovered she was clenching her hands around her new costume's trousers belt. The leather felt slippery under the sweat. She realized with a sinking sensation in her gut that it was one thing to carry the prophetess on earth unconscious through the station's basement. It was quite another to gaze eye-to-eye with the embodiment of all that Jenna had come to believe about life and how it ought to be lived. Then Ianira's eyelids fluttered open and Ianira, Cassondra of Ephesus, lay gazing up at her. For a breathless moment, no intelligence flickered in those dark eyes. Then an indrawn breath and a lightning flicker of terror lashed at Jenna. Ianira flinched back, as though Jenna had struck her. Marcus, who knew Ianira better than anyone, surely, pressed the tips of his fingers across her lips.

"Hush, beloved. We are in danger. Cry out and you warn them."

Ianira's gaze ripped away from Jenna's, met her husband's. "Marcus..." It was the sound of a drowning soul clinging to a storm-battered, rocky shore. His arms went around her. The former Roman slave lifted her trembling figure, held her close. Jenna had to turn aside. The sight of such intimacy tore through her, a bitter reminder of the emptiness of her own life before Carl, an emptiness which had brought her, shaking and sick in her heart, into the Temple in the first place. The Temple, where she'd found real friendship for the first time in her life, friendship and Carl... The loss tore through her, still too new and raw to endure. Across the hotel room, Marcus was speaking, voice low, the words in some language other than English or the Latin he'd used earlier. Greek, probably, since Ianira had come to the station from Athens.

Someone touched Jenna's arm. She glanced up and found Noah watching her. "Yeah?" she asked, voice roughened, uncertain.

"She's asked for you."

Jenna's pulse banged unpleasantly in the back of her throat as she crouched down at the edge of the hotel bed. Ianira's dark, unearthly gaze shook her so deeply she couldn't even dredge up a greeting. When the prophetess lifted a hand, Jenna very nearly flinched back. Then Ianira touched Jenna's brow, slowly. "Why do you Seek," she murmured, "when you already know the answers in your heart?"

The room closed in around Jenna, dizzy and strange, as though voices whispered to her from out of a shimmering haze, voices whose whispered words she could not quite hear. From the depths of the blackness which filled her mind, a blackness which had swallowed nearly all of her childhood—which was far better forgotten than relived in aching emptiness again and again—a single image blazed in Jenna's mind. A woman's smiling face... arms held out to her... closing around her with a sense of safety and shelter she had not felt since her mother's death, so many years ago, now, it was blurred in her memory. What this sudden memory meant, Jenna wasn't sure, but it left her gasping and sick on her knees, so violently shaken she couldn't even wipe her burning eyes.

Someone crouched beside her, braced Jenna all along one side, wiped her face with a warm, damp cloth. When the stinging, salty blindness had passed, she found Noah gazing worriedly at her. "You okay, kid?"

"Yeah." The fact that it was true shocked her. She was okay. Then it hit her why: she wasn't quite alone any longer. She knew almost nothing about Noah Armstrong, not even the most basic thing one person can know about another—their gender—but she wasn't alone, facing this nightmare. Noah might not be going with her when Jenna stepped through the Britannia Gate a couple of hours from now, but Noah cared. Somehow, it was enough. She managed to meet the enigmatic detective's eyes. "Thanks."

"Sure." Noah gave her a hand up, steadied her.

Jenna turned slowly to face the woman whose presence, whose touch and single question had triggered... whatever it had been. "Did—" Jenna had to clear her throat roughly. "Did Marcus tell you what's happened?"

She studied Jenna gravely. "He has told me all that he knows."

Jenna drew breath, trying to find the words to make sense of this. "My father..." She stopped, started again, coming at this mess from a different direction, trying to find the words to explain to a woman who had never seen the up-time world and would never be permitted to visit it. "You see, lots of people don't like the Temples. The Lady of Heaven Temples. They've got different reasons, but the prejudice is growing. Some people think Templars are immoral. Dangerous to society. Perverting children, that kind of garbage.

"There's this one group, though... down-timers, mostly, coming up-time from the remains of TT-66. They formed a cult to destroy us. The Ansar Majlis hate us, say it's blasphemous to worship a goddess. Rather than their idea of a god." It came out bitter, shaky. The expression in Ianira's eyes left Jenna gulping, terrified to her bones. She got the rest out in a rush, trying to hold onto her nerve. "As long as the Ansar Majlis were kept bottled up in the Middle East, where they started coming through the down-time gates, they were pretty much harmless. But a lot of people would like to see the Temples destroyed, or at least hurt badly enough they're not a political threat, anymore. Some of the lunatics who live up time have been helping that murdering pack of terrorists..."

"Your father," she said quietly. "He is among them."

Jenna didn't have to answer; Ianira knew. Jenna bit one lip, ashamed of the blood in her own veins and furious that she couldn't do anything besides smash Ianira's world to pieces. "He gave the orders, yes. To a death squad. They murdered my mother's sister. And my... my best friend from college..." Jenna's voice went ragged.

Ianira reached across, touched Jenna's hand. "They have taken him from you," she whispered, the sympathy in her voice almost too much to bear, "but you have his final gift to you. Surely this must bring some consolation, some hope for the future?"

Jenna blinked, almost too afraid of this woman to meet those dark, too-wise eyes. "What... what do you mean?"

Ianira brushed fingergips across Jenna's abdomen, across the queasiness which had plagued her for nearly a full week, now. "You carry his child," Ianira said softly.

When the room greyed out and Jenna clutched at the edge of the bed in stupid shock, the prophetess spoke again, very gently. "Didn't you know?"

Someone had Jenna by the shoulders, kept her her from falling straight to the floor. Dear God... it's not fear sickness, it's morning sickness... and I am late, oh, God, I'm going to Victorian London with Daddy's killers trying to find me and I'm carrying Carl's baby... . How long would they have to hide in London? Weeks? Months? Years? I can't go disguised as a man, if I'm pregnant! But she had no real choice and she knew it. Her father's hired killers would be searching for a frightened girl in the company of a detective, not a lone young man travelling with several large steamer trunks. When she looked up, she found Ianira's dark gaze fastened on her and, more surprisingly, Noah Armstrong's grey-eyed gaze, filled with worry and compassion.

"You're... sure... ?" Jenna choked out.

Ianira brushed hair back from Jenna's brow. "I am not infallible, child. But about this, yes, I am certain."

Jenna wanted to break down and cry, wanted to curl up someplace and hide for the next several decades, wanted to be held and rocked and reassured that everything would be all right. But she couldn't. She met Ianira's gaze again. "They'll kill us all, if they can." She wrapped protective arms around her middle, around the miracle of Carl's baby, growing somewhere inside her. A fierce determination to protect that tiny life kindled deep within. "I'd be in a morgue someplace, already, undergoing an autopsy, if Noah hadn't dragged me out of that trap where Aunt Cassie died. I'm not going to let them win. Not if I have to spend the next forty years on the run, until we can find a way to stop them."