9. The Watch.

"I suppose you're out in our corner of the world to search for this." The old man's voice was rough and powerfully quiet. He narrowed his eyes, Ava knew, to check her reaction, and she kept her expression stern despite the desire to leap forward and snatch the trinket away from these strangers. 

She'd expected it to be old, rusted, dusty, stuck on some long-lost hour. What lay before her, however, was ticking steadily, polished, and gleaming her own reflection back at her from its golden curved edge. 

Her grandfather's pocket watch. 

Or at least, that's clearly what this old man wanted Ava to think. She glanced at him suspiciously. She'd never actually seen the original watch, but there was one way to know if this was it.

The man flipped the watch over, as if reading her thoughts. There it was--the inscription that marked this treasure as her family's: ἐξαγοραζόμενοι τὸν καιρόν.

Redeem the Time.

8. The House That Abe Built.

She stopped dead in her tracks. "What's wrong?" Abe asked as he turned back towards her. They were both a little out of breath from their tramp.

She tried to make her voice sound casual as she made her reply. "This is your house?" The cozy bungalow looked strikingly familiar to her. She knew she'd seen it before. But that couldn't be possible--she'd never been to the English countryside in all her life before this. And yet even the crossed slats on the dark wood siding stared back at her just as she expected, a taunting sort of déjà vu.

Abe, too, stared back at her, suspicion in his furrowed brow, and Ava was painfully aware how poorly she was hiding her alarm. "It's my father's," he finally answered. "But I live there with him. What about it?" 

She searched for a response. "It's just...really nice!" she finished lamely. Thankfully, this had a better effect than she expected.

Abe glowed with pride. "Worked on a lot of it myself," he said, and his chest swelled. "With my father, of course!" Satisfied at this explanation of her apparent shock, he continued down the grass toward the door with an extra skip to his gait. Ava, for her part, breathed a sigh of relief as she followed after him.

This wouldn't take long, she assured herself. Especially if the old man was as easy to maneuver as his cheerful son.

7. The Detour.

They passed under a weak-looking apple tree, and she tried to ignore the glittering spider web that hung heavy with the wet of the fading mist. She hadn't much wanted to leave the house, mysterious parchment or not, but Abe--as he loudly introduced himself through the window--had insisted his father would be able to translate it. 

He looked to be about her age, but he might have been a teenager for all his chatter as they trudged through the muddy field: Who was she? Where did she come from? How did she get into the attic? He barely took a breath between each question, which at least made it easier for her to avoid answering fully. She still needed to find that watch, and she wasn't about to let some farm boy get to it first.

6. The Broken Glass.

She told herself it was just a mistake. She hadn't seen the parchment downstairs because of the light--that didn't mean it wasn't there. The attic light was brighter, clearer, and fuller, albeit somehow more unsettling. The shards of glass lay on the floor, the only mess in the strange silent echo of an attic. 

And then, with a sound like the distant cracking of a whip, the glittering green fragments of the broken bottle disappeared.

5.5 - The Attic, Part 2.

But no--that wasn't possible--it had been empty, she was certain of it! All the bottles had! She took a closer look, lifting the green glass up against the light of the window. Sure enough, folded neatly inside the bottle was a yellowing piece of parchment paper. 

The top was too narrow to reach through. She'd have to break the bottle. She ran down the narrow stairs and into the room again, looking for anything she could use to smash it. "You're back!" the man cried. He was staring through the window as though he'd never left it. "Are you alright?!" 

Ava found a wrought-iron paperweight on the aging desk, twisted in the shape of an open-winged songbird, and wiped the dust off of it. "I'm not the one who left!" she hollered back. She set the bottle on its side and raised the paperweight above it, holding her body back to avoid the splintering glass. Just as she was about to strike, she froze.

The bottle was empty. She held it up into the light again, while the ever-confused man looked on. She shook the bottle and looked through the opening, but it was no good. There was now nothing inside the emerald glass. "This can't be right," she muttered to herself, and made for the stairs to see if it had slipped out on the way.