When Adrian, Marta, and Michael bring home a strange pearl from an antique shop, it begins to react to an old map of their town and hurls them into the past.
The night pressed against the windows of the small top-floor flat, rain drumming hard on the glass and turning the city below into a blur of silver and shadow. Adrian, Marta, and Michael sat hunched around a table littered with maps, notebooks, and the odd relic they collected whenever they thought it might conceal a secret.
Tonight, the secret was a pearl.
It was no larger than a marble, but it caught the lamplight with an unnatural depth, as if something moved inside it. They had bought it in a cramped antique shop at the edge of town, from a shopkeeper who had gone strangely quiet when Adrian asked where it came from. Since then, the pearl had become harder to ignore. At times it changed colour in the dark. Sometimes it gave off a faint pulse, like a heartbeat. Once, Michael swore he had seen it rise a finger’s width above the table before settling back down again.
None of them had said the obvious thing aloud. Not yet.
Adrian broke the silence first. "If the stories are true, we should have seen something by now."
Marta leaned closer, studying the pearl with narrowed eyes. "Maybe it needs the right place. Or the right time."
Michael looked from the pearl to the old town map spread beneath it. The map was brittle with age, its edges browned and curled, showing the streets as they had been in the eighteenth century. It had belonged to Adrian’s grandfather, and until tonight it had seemed like nothing more than a curiosity.
Marta reached out before either of them could stop her. She placed the pearl directly on the centre of the map.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the pearl flared white-hot.
Light exploded across the room. The table vanished. The walls vanished. Adrian felt the floor drop out from under him, as if the flat had been torn away and the whole world had been pulled through a narrow, blazing seam. He shut his eyes against the brightness, his breath caught in his throat.
When he opened them again, the rain was gone.
Sunlight poured over a narrow street lined with timber-fronted houses and muddy cobblestones. People in long coats and bonnets hurried past them, talking in voices that sounded close enough to touch. A horse snorted somewhere nearby. The air smelled of smoke, wet stone, and something sweet from a baker’s cart.
Marta stared at a woman passing by in a lace cap. Michael took one step backwards, nearly colliding with a lantern post. Adrian’s mouth went dry.
They were not in the flat anymore.
They were in the past.
A murmur rose through the crowd, and several heads turned in their direction. Most people looked only curious, but one man did not. He stood half in shadow near the far side of the street, watching them as if he had been expecting them. His face was marked with a web of old scars, and when he smiled, there was nothing friendly in it.
Adrian saw the moment the man recognised them.
The scarred stranger began to move, threading through the crowd straight toward them.