She would have done the same, except that it’s hard to gasp when your mouth is already hanging open. The Roman merchant galley looked as though it was sailing into a tunnel on a cosmic amusement park ride. It was like a massive, sky-sized version of Clare’s personal shimmer effect, Allie thought. As if someone had showered the aurora borealis in pixie dust and rolled it up into a tube. The tunnel seemed to be rotating in a slow-mo barrel roll, but it was hard to tell. The clouds overhead swirled in a large-scale version of Milo’s temporal barrier rift in Glastonbury. The air rippled in sheets—just as it had when she’d been on the open moors with Marcus, running for her life, waves of temporal distortion sweeping over them. As Allie stared upward from the deck of the ship, she thought she could discern ribbons of different-time-of-day skies. Windows of bright noon-blue sky studded with puffball clouds swirled side by side with a slash of moonlit midnight glittering with stars.
