


ARK 1
A sample chapter from When in Rome, book one of The Broken Clock Saga, available on Amazon June 15, 2025.
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These prehistoric douchebags seemed to think the Boston Gaol was hell on Earth, but honestly, it was a walk in the park compared to juvie.
Ark would have told anyone who asked that this wasn’t the first time she’d woken up on the sidewalk, completely disoriented and staring down half a dozen deadly weapons. It wouldn’t technically be true, but she’d had her fair share of opps with guns, give or take the exact circumstances. And guns were a lot more dangerous than swords.
At first, she had tried to reason with the blades in her face – then, she had laughingly inquired about the uniforms – then, she had taken a breath, realized she wasn’t hungover, and took stock of her situation. She did surprisingly well adapting to this new environment, but even after accepting what had apparently happened, she was still face-to-face with half a dozen blades.
When she couldn’t explain her unusual clothes and choice of napping spot, Ark was taken downtown. There were no radar-equipped cruisers capable of hitting 60 in 5.2, so she was marched on foot, surrounded by the young men in red coats. While she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of watching her squirm, she found her mouth hanging open at her new environment: whatever the hell was going on, it looked for all the world like she was in the living, breathing, full-color eighteenth (or was it seventeenth? No, the century is always one up) century. Two- and three-story buildings formed shallow canyon walls on either side, looming over streets of cobblestone or hard-packed dirt. All around her were the smells of a city, magnified by poor hygiene: shit, and animals, and the ocean, and a piercing sort of collective BO that embarrassed Ark, as a certified Poor Person. She had been known to skip the daily shower on occasion, but these people…
These people! She had noticed them – first really acknowledged them – on her way to the jail, and some aspect of their reality had socked her in the gut. She was actively refusing to wonder how she had traveled back in time, but pushing through the crowd of men in leggings and tight shorts, of homely women in earth-tone drapes and loose yarmulkes allowing only a few wisps of hair to escape on either side, Ark had been struck by the notion that these people were people, no more or less than herself: they were fully-fledged human beings, and clearly on the shittier end of the income spectrum, who had probably died more than two hundred years before she was born. She didn’t give two shits about anyone she passed – especially not with the way they were all eyeing her, all judgy-like, as if they’d never had a run-in with 12 – but she found herself uncharacteristically swayed by the knowledge that all these people, and billions more, had lived and died before her.
It wasn’t until they had reached the Boston Gaol – a miserable-looking box of a building with thick walls and barred windows – that Ark realized she had been mistaken for a boy. She was indignant at first, but decided to swallow her pride and accept this gift: as long as she was a boy, none of these prehistoric pigs would take her into the back room and rape her. Presumably. She was mad, but she couldn’t blame them. She wasn’t exactly dressed to the feminine nines in her plaid shirt and loose, ripped jeans. And her standard ponytail matched most of the men she’d seen.
When the door slammed on the prison cell, Ark briefly considered revealing herself – verbally, but maybe literally – but she thought better of it and allowed the soldiers to walk away. She had spent enough time in and out of juvie that she knew the difference between a holding cell and a permanent cell, even back in the eighteenth century, when there was no such thing as fingerprinting or due process or human rights in general.
The cell was big – bigger than the drunk tank back home – but a lot less clean, which Ark hadn’t thought was possible. The bars were thick, chipped and rusted, and the other three walls were some sort of ancient drywall long past its prime. The floor was covered in a layer of straw – something that surprised Ark when she first noticed, but immediately seemed to fit the general atmosphere. Beyond the bars was a thin hallway, lit with candles in iron sconces whose flames felt almost too still in what should have been a drafty dungeon.
To Ark’s disgust, she wasn’t alone. A man was curled up in the dark corner of the cell, and closer inspection told her he was either asleep or dead. His rough clothes, already the color of dirt, were filthy and splotched, and his aging face showed several weeks’ worth of beard. A wooden bucket full of piss and shit sat on the straw close by his head. His piss and shit, she had to assume.
When Ark had accepted her new situation in the cell, she leaned against the back wall and let out a deep breath.
So. She had time traveled. Somehow, someway, she had ended up in the eighteenth century.
Shit.
Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to remember anything she’d been told by the soldiers who arrested her, or even by their boss who’d signed off on throwing her in the drunk tank. She’d been a little preoccupied, obviously, but she realized now it would’ve been helpful to know why she was being arrested. Her clothes, probably: even for a boy, they weren’t exactly fashionable here.
Ark found herself pacing across her cell – giving the bearded man a wide berth – or leaning against the surprisingly smooth wall. Her only other option would be to sit in the thin layer of straw concealing the floor, but she would pass out from exhaustion before she sat at eye level with the drunk guy’s shit bucket. The restlessness behind her pacing wasn’t the usual frustration of being behind bars: there was a nervous energy to her, an unfamiliar tightness in her chest, that she quickly decided hadn’t been caused by the time travel itself. She realized that for the first time ever, she was in serious trouble with no guarantee of due process. Gun to her head, she couldn’t even guess how criminals were handled in the Colonial period. Would she be held until her mother bothered scraping up bail money? would she be tried and immediately executed? maybe burned at the stake? The uncertainty, more than anything, made her feel like a trapped animal, waiting to be led to the slaughter. That, and the straw floor.
After pacing what must have been more than a mile, back and forth across the dingy barn of a cell, Ark slumped into the corner opposite the sleeping man, allowing the sturdy walls of the Boston Gaol to support her weight. She leaned her head back, feeling the smooth, unwavering material rub across her already-dirty scalp as her ponytail hung loosely. Pushing back against her fight-or-flight instincts, she closed her eyes.
She had escaped. Well, not so much escaped, as she was let out. Why? Good behavior? Hardly. She had to suspect that the American justice system was feeling the weight of its overcrowded prisons, and even with the quotas she was pretty sure they had eventually decided it was overkill to keep an eighteen year old locked up for her entire twelve-month sentence. They hadn’t shown mercy, or seen the error of their ways, she could say that for sure: to the shadowy figures she imagined dictating the Establishment from behind the scenes, she was just another number in a spreadsheet, another tick in a box. Another brick in the wall. Another kid on the street. She was released for bureaucratic reasons – she knew that for sure, even if she wasn’t totally clear on what bureaucratic meant – and the people who had signed her out wouldn’t give her another thought until she ended up right back where she’d been. They didn’t care that she was the closest thing her mother had to a sponsor – they definitely didn’t care that she was all her brother had.
Stupidly ironic, Ark thought, letting out an involuntary scoff. She had escaped. Even now that she was a legal adult, she had managed to get off easy; at the time, she had thought it was her first streak of good luck, maybe ever. But now, the smell of old hay and drunk guy shit reminded her that someone had already stripped the clouds of their silver linings, leaving people like her with nothing but hot air.
She was back in a cell. An even worse cell, with an even worse cellmate. She had no guarantee of due process, let alone any hope of early release – and to top it all off, she was in the wrong century.
Ark couldn’t guess how long she’d been locked up before the other time traveler arrived, but thankfully it wasn’t long enough for her bladder to rebel. When the hallway door opened, making the candle flames flicker a little, she forced herself to stay leaning against the wall. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
The small party was led by a man in dark clothes, holding an obnoxiously big ring of those, what d’you call them, skeleton keys. Like in the cartoons. She recognized him from before, from the confusing swirl of memories right before she ended up here. He was followed by a woman, flanked by two expressionless guards who shut the door behind them. Ark glared through the bars at the four of them, arms crossed and face disinterested. The man in front – probably their version of a warden, who didn’t have a big enough staff to rack up his desk time – was blustering something she couldn’t quite make out, his expression worried and his tone apologetic.
“This will be fine,” the woman said, and the man fell silent. Ark turned her eyes towards the woman – careful not to move her head – and swallowed hard as she realized what she was looking at.
The woman was middle-aged, heavyset, with coppery skin and straight black hair falling past her shoulders. She wasn’t cuffed, but her hands were held loosely in front of her groin in a gesture of compliance – despite this, her head was held high and her fine features were set in a mask of neutrality, with maybe a hint of defiance. She was wearing a pantsuit.
“I’m so sorry for this, deeply,” the jailer said as he unlocked the cell and slid the barred wall open. Ark briefly considered making a break for it – she could fend off the guards with her Swiss Army knife – but it would be three against one, and her self-defense skills weren’t usually enough to make up for her small body. “To resign a woman to such a place, with these…” He tossed a thick hand vaguely into the cell, seeming to group Ark and the drunk man together, which she took as an insult. “…these brigands. However, my orders are as – ”
“This will be fine,” the woman said again, and entered the cell. If the guards were as surprised as Ark, they didn’t show it. Entering the cell without resistance should have felt like giving up, but somehow, this woman made it feel like a power move.
“Right. Well…I shall keep a man by the door here. I beg you, madame, if either of these scoundrels thinks to lay a hand on you, just scream for help and we shall beat them off.” The jailer glanced at Ark, then to the man passed out in the corner, and seemed to accept that he had nothing left to say. He slid the bar door shut and locked it with his cartoon key. “Men?” The guards turned and left the hallway, followed by the jailer. The door slammed shut, the candle flames danced, and they were alone.
“So…” Ark began, standing up straight and uncrossing her arms. Her fingers twiddled around automatically, and she almost reached for her phone, but she had discovered a while back that it was out of power. Too bad. She had a couple games installed that didn’t need WiFi.
The newcomer didn’t look at Ark immediately. She threw a glance across the cell, to the sleeping man and his bucket of shit, then clocked the dirty straw under her feet, shuffled a few pieces with the toe of her flat. She turned, stepped over to the front wall, and ran a finger across the bar, staring blankly at the iron cylinder. A few flakes of rust floated to the ground.
“If you’re gonna try to break it down, don’t bother,” Ark said. “I tried it a while ago. It’s solid.”
Still, the woman didn’t speak. She stepped over to the other half of the wall – the part that didn’t move – and again ran a finger up and down one of the bars. Ark had noticed that the door of the cell was made up of crossed bars, while those on the other side were only vertical, but she didn’t think it mattered: none of them would budge in their sockets. The vertical bars must have been newer than those in the door, since no rust flaked away under the woman’s finger.
“You gonna say something?” Ark demanded.
The woman turned and looked directly into her eyes. For some reason, this threw Ark – maybe it was the woman’s ethnic features (Indian, Ark thought, tomahawk Indian not curry Indian) or the fact that her gaze was held perfectly still.
“What year did you come from?” the woman asked. Her voice was steady. Cool. Professional. A TV voice.
“2015,” Ark said, and immediately regretted it: something in the woman’s tone made it feel like she had already gained the upper hand.
“Me too,” the woman replied. “What date?”
“Why don’t you tell me first?” Ark shot back, crossing her arms. “Do you know something? What the hell’s going on?”
The woman stared at her for a long moment, then seemed to relax – or, she wanted Ark to think she had relaxed. There was something unsettling about her, like she was performing some kind of low-energy, high-stakes interrogation. “June fifteenth,” she said. “I went to bed on June fifteenth, 2015. And I woke up here.”
Ark nodded, just glad to confirm the woman’s conversational skills. “Me too,” she agreed. “I just went to bed like normal, I wasn’t doing any…sci-fi…time travel bullshit or anything.”
The woman said nothing, allowing Ark to extrapolate from her silence, and extrapolate she did: she felt stupid – and angry – that she had implied that any of this could have been her fault. Of course it couldn’t – she was an eighteen-year-old burnout recently released from William Dickerson Detention Facility, not some mad scientist who messed around with time machines in her secret lab. But she had left this well-dressed woman wide open to assume the truth, or something even more demeaning. Whoever this stranger was, she must have come up with all kinds of ideas about Ark and her history – but she probably didn’t know shit about time travel either.
“You sure you don’t know what’s going on?” Ark demanded. As little as she wanted to inflate this woman’s self-importance, she wanted to stick around in the Dark Ages even less. “You didn’t like – piss off the Illuminati or something?”
“If you’re asking whether I know how we ended up traveling back in time,” the woman replied, “The answer is no. But if you’re asking me if I know what’s going on, then I may be able to shed some light: you and I are in the year 1775, and we are also in a holding cell.”
Ark wanted to say something aggressively snarky in reply to this passively-aggressively snark, but instead she slumped against the wall and kicked at the straw with her Converse. They wouldn’t – couldn’t – get anywhere like this. Best case scenario, they break out of the Boston Gaol – or get released early thanks to bureaucracy, if that had even been invented yet – but all they could do behind bars was guess.
“I’m a girl by the way,” Ark said, not looking at her new acquaintance. “Those assholes probably told you I was a dude, but they just can’t comprehend a woman wearing jeans.”
“They probably can’t comprehend anyone wearing jeans,” the woman replied. Ark glanced up at her, surprised at the tint of humor in her voice, and saw that the woman was almost smiling.
“I’m Ark,” she said. “With a K. Short for Arkangel.”
“Harriet,” the woman replied, and earned a couple points when she didn’t make a snide comment about the name.
“You think there’s anyone else like us?” Ark wondered aloud. “If it was just me I wouldn’t wonder, but if there’s two of us…”
“There may be more,” Harriet agreed. “That would follow logically, but I’m not sure there’s any logic to our situation. This could be a regular occurrence – no one would know until it happened to them.”
A lump rose in Ark’s throat as she realized Harriet was right. How many people disappeared without a trace every year – how many of those cases went cold, without anyone ever knowing that they had just slipped backwards in time? Is that what had happened to her? From Jim’s point of view…what? She had just vanished? Disappeared in the middle of the night? But Jim wasn’t even born yet…would they have to wait three hundred years to observe how her family reacted to her sudden disappearance? How would she react if it happened to Jim? she wondered. She would try to find him, obviously, she would scour the deep web and the rumor mill until she was old and gray, but she would never find him – she would never know that he had already died, centuries before they were born.
Exactly one of their million questions was answered a minute later, when the jailer returned with his guards. This time, the pair escorted a man, also in modern clothes – Ark tried to shoot a conspiratorial glance at Harriet, but Harriet was watching the newcomers passively.
The jailer unlocked their cell, and again, Ark considered going for her knife, and again, she decided against it. She couldn’t know for sure whether Harriet and the new guy would back her up, and time would be of the essence. The guards of the Boston Gaol weren’t exactly carrying Tasers, but they probably knew how to throw down.
“Madame,” the jailer said, addressing Harriet as the man was shoved into the cell. “Sheriff Bloomfield would speak with you personally. We will escort you to meet with him. Er – with your permission.”
Gimme a break, Ark thought. Bad enough women weren’t allowed to vote or wear pants, but they couldn’t even have the honor of being treated like proper criminals?
Harriet willingly left the cell, which didn’t come as a surprise to Ark. Everything the older woman did, every gesture, every word, seemed to be carefully calculated to assume the maximum aura of authority: even in a jail cell full of dirty straw and human feces, she commanded respect. Ark wouldn’t do her the honor of asking her profession, but her official theory was high-paid attorney.
The jailer and his guards escorted Harriet through the door, and once again, Ark was alone with a fellow time traveler. And the possibly-dead guy.
“Oh thank god,” the man said, his words riding on a sigh of relief. “I thought it was just me.”
“Nope,” Ark replied. Still leaning on the wall, she gave the guy a once-over. He was short – only a little taller than her – with close-cropped black hair and the stubble of a man working late nights. His clothes were business casual, down to his black sneakers, and topped with a long wool coat that felt close enough to period looks.
“I’m Mason,” the man said. “So like – you’re from the future too, right?” He seemed worried – hurried – as if he’d already been sentenced to the gallows.
“2015,” Ark replied.
“2015. Good.” Mason ran a hand through his hair. Sweat stood out on his forehead, and Ark wondered if it had occurred to him to take off his coat. “God, that didn’t even occur to me – I just thought of 2015 as modern day, but I guess we all could’ve come from different times.” He paused, thinking, then turned towards the door. “Who was she?”
“Harriet,” Ark said. “I didn’t ask. She’s weird.”
“But she’s from our time too?” Mason’s eyes looked almost pleading, and Ark was reminded of a stray dog she had once tried to adopt. It had died.
“Yeah,” Ark agreed. “June fifteenth, 2015.”
“And you don’t have any idea how this happened?” Mason pressed. “Do you – I dunno – work in quantum physics?”
Ark frowned, realized he was being honest, and smiled a little. “I don’t,” she told him. “Do you?”
“No. Uh…no.” Mason glanced around the cell, looking like a rat caught in a maze. “No, just computers.” He stood there, distracted, for a long moment, then seemed to remember that she existed. “I’m Mason by the way.”
“Yeah you said that,” she replied. “Ark.”
“Ark?”
“With a K. Short for Arkangel.”
This, at least, seemed to distract Mason from his general anxiety, long enough to shoot Ark a frowning up-and-down glance. “Really?” he said.
“Yes, really,” she snapped, feeling a sudden flash of resentment. She never got used to that reaction. “Got a problem with that?”
“If your name was the biggest thing I had a problem with right now, I’d be a happy camper,” Mason replied, and promptly forgot about her again.



