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!