He stared at the dome light. Amanda couldn't figure out why he would do that. For somebody who was smart-and Jeremy was, no doubt about it-he could act pretty foolish sometimes. A microphone right out there in the open where anybody could see it wouldn't make much of a bug.

“Oh,” Jeremy said-much later than he should have. “Sure.”

From Bucharest to Moigrad, the little town by the site of what was Polisso in the alternate and had been Porolissum in ancient days, was a little less than four hundred kilometers. The Fiat wheezed and chugged going over the Transylvanian Alps. They drove through Cluj, the only good-sized town between Bucharest and Moigrad, an hour before they finally got where they were going.

In this world, Porolissum was a ruin, a place where archaeologists dug. A hundred years earlier, they'd rebuilt one gate to look the way it had back in Roman days. Amanda supposed they'd been trying to lure tourists. They hadn't had much luck. If Moigrad wasn't the middle of nowhere, you could see it from there.

The reconstructed gate didn't look much like the one in Polisso. That had bothered Amanda when she saw first one and then the other. It didn't any more. In the alternate, Polisso had been a going concern for two millennia. People there must have repaired or rebuilt the gate half a dozen times.

With a sigh of relief, Dad parked in front of the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad. Two men in the white, grays, and black of urban camouflage came out of the building. They both carried assault rifles. “Are they guards or bandits?” Jeremy asked.

“Guards,” Dad said. In a low voice, he went on, “Romania's poor, and it's proud. Not everybody here likes multinationals.”

Amanda eyed the rifles. That sounds like an understatement, she thought. Her father rolled down his window. He spoke to the guards in Romanian. They smiled, but the smiles didn't reach their eyes. One of them said something. Dad handed him his passport. The guard studied it, nodded, and gave it back. He spoke again.