In the 21st-century Kingdom of Versailles, the roads are terrible and Paris is a dirty little town. Serfdom and slavery are both common, and no one thinks that's wrong. Why should they? Most people spend their lives doing backbreaking farm work anyway. But teenaged Khadija, daughter of a prosperous family of Moorish business travellers, is unfazed. That’s because Khadija is really Annette Klein from 21st-century California, and her whole family are secret agents of Crosstime Traffic, trading for commodities to send back to our own timeline. Now it's time for Annette and her family to go home for the start of another school year, so they join a pack train bound for their home base in Marseilles, where the crosstime portal is hidden. Then bandits attack while they're crossing the Pyrenees. Annette/Khadija is separated from her parents and knocked out, and wakes up to find herself a captive in a caravan of slaves being taken to the markets in the south. She's in a tight spot. Then the really scary thing happens: her purchasers take her, along with other newly purchased slaves, to an unofficial crosstime portal…leaving open the question of whether Crosstime Traffic will ever be able to recover her! Jacques, a young messenger in an alternate time line in which the Black Death has kept civilization at medieval or, at best, Renaissance levels of accomplishment, is sent to spy on some mysterious Muslim merchants. Unfortunately for him, they are Crosstimers; that is, employees of a company that dispatches traders to different time lines for the sake of financial gain. More unfortunately, their caravan is attacked by bandits. Jacques and Annette Klein end up slaves in Madrid and, soon after that, even farther away when the corrupt minions of a Crosstime slave-trading ring carry them off. By this time the two teenagers are friends and allies, and Jacques helps Annette escape and inform on their captors, while he plays a leading role in a slave rebellion. Although the last third is a bit jumbled, this is the best Crosstime Traffic yarn to date (the others: Gunpowder Empire, 2003; Curious Notions , 2004), featuring, besides two engaging protagonists, extensive exploration of the ethical issues of slavery. Roland Green Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "The modern master of alternate history." -- Publishers Weekly on Harry Turtledove "Turtledove has proved he can divert his readers to astonishing places…I know I'd follow his imagination almost anywhere." -- San Jose Mercury News on Harry Turtledove "One of the genre's leading purveyors of alternate history." -- Dragon on Harry Turtledove "Readers nostalgic for the juvenile SF novels of Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton will find much to enjoy…Turtledove presents his teenaged heroes with a series of moral choices and dilemmas that will particularly resonate with younger fans. This is a rousing story that reminds us that 'adventure' is really someone else in deep trouble a long way off." -- Publishers Weekly on Gunpowder Empire Harry Turtledove lives in Los Angeles. OneWolves howled in the woods south of Paris. The wind wailed through bare-branched oaks and chestnuts and elms. That nasty northwest wind carried the threat of rain, or maybe snow. Winter didn’t want to leave in the year of our Lord 2096—or, as it was more widely known in the Kingdom of Versailles, the year 715 of the New Revelation.Jacques the tailor’s son trotted through those woods. He hoped the howls would come no closer. A sheepskin jacket and baggy wool trousers held out the wind. He was bareheaded, and had to pause every few minutes to shake straw-colored hair back from his eyes. At not quite eighteen, his beard was still scanty—more orange fuzz on cheeks and chin and upper lip than a proper man’s growth.When a twig cracked not far away, as if trodden underfoot, he slipped off the track and behind the rough-barked trunk of an old oak. His right hand fell to the hilt of his sword. The leather that wrapped the hilt was smooth from much use. The weapon had belonged to Jacques’ father, but he’d been using it for the past three years and more.Worse things than wolves were liable to lurk in the woods. Scouts from the Berber Kingdom of Berry might be spying out Versailles’ defenses. Muslim slave raiders might be on the prowl, too. When they could, they seized believers in the Second Son and sold them in the great markets of Marseille and Madrid and Naples.A doe stepped out onto the track, not fifty feet upwind of Jacques. He could see her nose twitch as she tested the air. Then a swirl of the breeze must have brought his scent to her. She snorted. Her liquid black eyes widened. With a flirt of the tail, she bounded away.He didn’t break cover. He thought she’d stepped on the twig, but didn’t want to take the chance of being wrong. Patience paid. The priests always preached that, and Jacques believed it. People had been patient when God sent the Gr