by Catherine Petrini

SYNOPSIS OF FIRST THREE CHAPTERS:

     Alex is a 14-year-old girl who moves with her family from the Washington, D.C., Metro area to her mother's ancestral homestead in the Smoky Mountains. Alex is bright, but at school she's an underachiever and unpopular. She feels like a misfit even in her own family, where she is big and dark-haired while her parents and sister are petite and blond. In the minivan on the way to Tennessee, Alex, a talented artist, draws a scene in her sketchpad without planning to. In it, a frightened little girl is lost in the snowy woods. She wears a beaded bracelet and has big, dark eyes. The drawing unnerves Alex; she has no idea where it came from.

     Alex's bedroom is the part of the house that was the original log cabin, built around 1800. Her first night there, she dreams she is the little girl from her sketch, in the woods in the snow with her mother. But the dream mother has a large build and dark hair, not like Alex's real mother. The next day, while unpacking in her new bedroom, Alex finds some papers behind a loose board in the closet wall -- pages from a diary dated 1838. The writer, an Indian medicine woman named Journeys Far, claims to possess the secrets of time-travel. Just for fun, Alex follows the instructions in the diary, pretending she will travel back to 1838 to meet the diarist. She begins to feel sleepy....

     Like someone awaking from a deep sleep, Alex felt groggy. The last thing she remembered was chanting by the fire. The evening had been cool, but now she lay sweating beneath the blankets, her eyelids too heavy to open. Nothing else had changed. The cabin still smelled of cedar. Crickets still creaked outside.

     She slid the blanket off her face and wondered at the silence. She no longer heard the fire crackling or smelled the resinous pine that had burned there. But that was only because she'd been asleep, she told herself. The fire must have burned itself down. Everything else was exactly the same as it had been. The spell hadn't worked.

     "Of course it didn't work. It's not like I was expecting it to." She thought she was speaking out loud, but somehow she saw the words rather than heard them -- as if they were imprinting themselves on her mind like text on a page, silent.

     A butterfly of a thought flitted through her brain. Something had changed. Something was different. Something was new...or old. It was a smell, an oil smell, stronger than the cedar walls or the pine logs on the hearth. It was something people burned in lamps, long ago.

     Long ago.

     She wrenched her eyes open. The night was darker than any she could remember. She groped for her flashlight, but it was gone. Alex shook her head. "Get a clue. Like I could really throw incense on a fire, say some magic words, and wake up 160 years ago. Right." But again, her words were silent, refusing to take on more than two dimensions.

     The lamp-oil smell meant nothing. Gran used to keep old-fashioned oil lamps. They were quaint. Maybe Mom and Dad were burning one in the next room. That had to be it. Nothing else made sense.

     Gradually the room shifted almost into focus -- a table, a bookshelf -- fuzzy, dark gray shapes against fuzzy black. But the shapes were wrong. Where was the mess Mom had nagged her about? The unpacked boxes were missing. Nothing was where Alex had left it; even the windows were in the wrong places. What had happened to her room?

     "It's a dream," she tried to say. But still she couldn't speak. She was an observer, no more a factor than the strings of onions hanging from the rafters. "Onions?"

     She had to wake up. She pinched herself hard on the thigh. Her knit cotton nightgown was gone, replaced by a stiffer, coarser fabric. Panic stuck in her throat, a sour taste. This couldn't be happening. Slowly she raised the too-heavy blanket, looked down at herself beneath the too-heavy nightgown. Alex gasped. She was small, a child of three or four.

     She began to tremble. "This isn't happening. It's only a dream!" She couldn't just lose ten years of her life and 160-plus years of history. It wasn't possible. But no dream had ever felt so real.

     She knelt on the bed to reach a tiny window concealed behind crude wooden shutters. They weren't the useless, decorative shutters of Arlington's fake-Colonial houses, but the real thing -- handmade, roughhewn slabs of wood that closed over the window from the inside. Clumsily she unlatched them, placed her too-small hand against a pane of wavy glass. It felt cool. Outside no streetlights shone, no passing cars grumbled, no lights from other houses flickered through the trees. Only stars, cold and distant and more plentiful than she'd ever seen, spilled across the sky like snowflakes.

     Sitting down slowly, Alex held both hands in front of her in the pale starlight. No baby fat cushioned these hands; they were smaller versions of a grown woman's hands, with narrow palms and bony wrists. They were nothing like her own wide, capable hands. They were not her hands. But she could feel sweat dampening the palms, could feel the tiny, smooth beads of a handmade bracelet imprinting their memory into her frail wrist. Tentatively she stretched small fingers as delicate as bone china, and the muscles tensed in reply. Tears stung in her eyes. She'd always hated her hands, coveting the graceful, tapering fingers artists were supposed to have. Now that she had her wish, she was scared to death.

     Alex clasped the little hands together tightly, welcoming the twinges of pain. At least she still had that much control. But the fingers seemed fragile, as if the slightest pressure could snap the bones like kindling. Releasing her grip, she breathed one long, shuddering sigh.

     Gradually she became aware of another sound, the murmuring of soft exhalations of a woman's breath. She whirled. Across the cabin, near the only door, an unshuttered window breathed starlight over a second bed, silvering a dark head of tousled hair.

     "Mama," Alex whispered, though the thought was not her own. This time the syllables took shape. Her voice was a little girl's voice, the soft, accented speech of the child she now was. Alex didn't understand how, but she was inside the child's head, a part of her thoughts but separate from them.

     Her mind raced back to her teenage self in her own century, sitting cross-legged on a braided rug, poring over the diary of Journeys Far. The medicine woman wrote that she traveled to other times, but she left out the part about jumping into other bodies. "Why didn't she warn me?" Alex asked, a silent whimper.

     More than anything she longed to throw herself against the pillow and cry. But losing control wouldn't help. Squaring her shoulders, she took a long, deep breath and exhaled. She had to think. She needed to know who she was, and when. And she needed to know just how this body-snatching time-travel thing worked.

     The woman in the other bed was her mother. Of that she was certain. But this was not the petite, strawberry-blond mother from her own century. This mother was tall and large-boned, like Alex. And her hair was the brown-black of pine trees against the snow.

     "This is Rose's mother," Alex tried to say, not sure where the knowledge awakened from. She fingered the bracelet, remembering big, dark eyes pleading from the pages of her sketchbook, from the snowfall of her dream. When she spoke again, the words were audible, a child's soft treble: "And I am Rose."

     As Rose's sleepiness fell away the child's thoughts, her consciousness, rippled over Alex's mind like the soft waves of a gently rising tide.

     "Mama," whispered the little girl's voice again, and Alex felt her own lips shape the word. But they weren't her lips; they were Rose's lips. Alex hadn't meant to speak at all. Now that the child was alert, Alex's wishes held no influence over Rose's thoughts and words -- as if by waking up, the little girl had reasserted control without ever knowing she'd lost it.

     Alex drew a deep, ragged breath and sensed a twinge of mild surprise from Rose. At least, Alex thought, I can still do that much. She stared down at her left hand, the hand with the bracelet, and wiggled the fingers, testing her ability to move them.

     Rose's surprise sharpened into fear. Alex felt bad about scaring her, but she needed to know who was in charge. Then the little girl clapped her right hand over her left and held the fingers still. Alex strained against the child's will, but Rose maintained control. Alex could not move her hands.

     "Mama, I feel strange," Rose whimpered.

     Rose's mother mumbled something that sounded to Alex like "Chicago town" but probably wasn't. Then she turned slowly onto her side to face the wall. A moment later her breath eased back into the soft, regular rhythm of sleep.

     Mother has been ill, Alex suddenly knew, and then realized she was hearing Rose's thoughts. The word wasn't "ill," exactly; Rose was thinking something closer to "out of harmony," which seemed like an odd concept for a little girl to express. With a start, Alex realized she wasn't hearing Rose's thoughts as literal words, but more abstractly -- as meanings, intents. She wanted to ponder that idea, to figure out how it worked - and what it might mean for her chances of traveling back to herself, back to the future.

     Journeys Far, she thought unexpectedly, the knowledge seeping into her consciousness from some part of Rose's mind. The little girl's mother was Journeys Far, writer of the faded diary. Alex squinted at her in wonder across the murky room. This was the Indian medicine woman who could travel through time -- who could tell her how to get home. But first she had to figure out how to ask her, when Alex herself was nothing more than an extra consciousness in Rose's head.

     Rose's body stiffened. Hounds barked in the distance, then stopped abruptly. And Alex snapped to alertness, suddenly conscious of every sigh of breath from the sleeping woman, of the sharp smell of onions, and of the scratch of wool against her fingers as she clutched the blanket. She and Rose turned to the window as one.

     Outside, utter silence blanketed the night. A few minutes earlier, Alex had marveled at the quiet. But then the forest had rustled and whirred with the hush of small movements. Now she heard nothing. No night birds twittered in the trees; no crickets chirped. Even the cicadas' intermittent drone had ceased. People always talked about the calm before a storm, but the summer sky this night was clear; stars still glimmered above the trees.

     Together, she and Rose held their breath, and waited.

     Just outside the cabin, footfalls crunched dirt. Alex smelled smoke. And an inkier darkness blotted the stars for an instant as something man-sized flickered past the window.