Daria and Mariam are walking in the park, arguing amiably about their latest job. There's some kind of shimmer in the air in front of them, but it's easily dismissed as just the setting sun playing tricks on them.

There's nothing to indicate the transition: one minute it's dusk in Central Park, the next midday by the side of a road somewhere.

"Brian?"

"You're supposed to be thinking about magic - what is it?"

"I see somebody over there. They look lost."

"Hitchhikers?"

"I don't know."

Brian slows way down.

"What."

"How did we...? where even is this? - someone's noticed us, maybe they know something?" She doesn't sound too confident of that, but waves at the slowing car.

Jackson rolls down the window. "Um, are you lost?"

"We were in New York? We are... obviously not in New York anymore."

"Montana. Which of you is the mage?"

Maybe they call necromancers that in Montana? "Both of us, but there's no way we could've done that, we're decades away from even the theoretical basis for anything that might've been. What's the date?"

"Decades? Wow," blinks Jackson. "Uh, it's June - sixteenth?"

"Seventeenth," corrects Brian.

...

"...sometimes I really hate being right. A minute ago for us it was October. The fifth, I think. Also not the middle of the day, it wouldn't have been this early in Montana even if you account for time zones."

"Whoa," says Jackson. "Mages with time travel."

"I don't know what you think we did but we didn't do it, it's impossible, I can't think where you'd even -"

"Daria," Mariam warns, in a tone that means priorities. "- what year is it?"

"...2006?"

"Two thousand and fourteen," says Mariam slowly.

"Whoa," says Jackson.

"What's it like then?" wonders Brian.

"Obama's President," she says, barely paying attention to the words. "Mariam, what if we try a call, I've got remains from people who aren't dead yet; that might tell us something. And then presumably contact - I don't even know who, we have information from eight years into the future - on second thought maybe do that first."

"I don't have cell service out here," says Brian.

"Do you mind giving us a lift? We don't need to do a diagram or anything, we can do the call in the car, wait until we get somewhere with service." She turns to Daria, "do you remember what phone number you had eight years ago? Or mine?"

"Hop in," says Brian, unlocking the back doors.

"Thanks," says Mariam, smiling automatically as she opens the door.

Daira reads a number out to Mariam, adding, "that was you before you got the new one, I'm almost certain that was before 2006."

After she's seated, she starts looking for something in the bottom of her bag. "Aren't you glad now that I 'always take my work with me'?" she teases.

"Yeah, yeah, you can be smug when it's actually helped, for all you know it just won't go through."

"What are your names?" wonders the driver. "I'm Brian, my sub's Jackson." Brian is generic-looking whitebread, short sandy hair; Jackson has a long dark brown braid and a leather collar tight on his neck.

"And are you guys doms or subs, it's hard to read," says Jackson.