that’s left for us is just trying to stay hidden. Staying alive. I don’t know. I don’t know what the next few weeks hold for us. Jahulla, I don’t even know what the next day holds for us.
I don’t even know if these last six or so months have even been for real. Maybe it’s all been one big nightmare and I’ll wake up again in my bedroom in Mumbai and it’ll be 2026 again.
Nice dream.
So… I’ve written enough. Maybe too much. I might just rip this up. Burn it. Eat it or something. Or maybe I’ll stuff it into my Burger King box with the rest of the cold fries and floppy gherkin where no one is likely to find it.
But writing this helped a little, I guess.
My name is Sal and, like I said, I’m lost, and quite a bit scared and not at all happy about things right now.
Chapter 2
11 September 2001, New York
Maddy took off her glasses and buried her face in her hands. Air hissed between her fingers: a long, torpid sigh that was a signal to the other two, Liam and Sal, to shut-the-heck-up for just a moment and let her think.
The archway was quiet except for its usual noises: the faint chug of a filtration pump from the back room, a tap dripping somewhere, the soft burr of a dozen PC computers’ heat fans. It sounded like it did on any normal day, except for perhaps the inane trash-talking between Liam and Sal playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo.
‘Hey, what’s up with that girl, skippa?’ chipped in SpongeBubba.
Maddy raised a hand to shush the lab robot. ‘OK.’ Her voice was muffled behind her other hand. ‘This is what we need to do.’ She straightened up, put her glasses back on and turned towards the monitors on the computer table. She addressed the webcam. ‘Computer-Bob?’
A black DOS-like dialogue box appeared on the monitor beside the camera.
› Yes, Maddy?
‘Can you force the archway’s displacement field to reset to Monday?’
Today was Tuesday, early afternoon. Outside the archway a collective pause had settled across the city: a pause in which the sky was clear of planes, television presenters had said all there was to say, and everyone was still busy wondering if the last few hours had been for real and the Twin Towers really had just been completely destroyed.
› Affirmative.
‘Do it, then. Do it now!’
‘What’s going on?’ asked Rashim.
‘We’re all going back in time,’ Sal answered. ‘By one day.’
The young technician still looked bewildered. Only a couple of hours ago — from his perspective — he’d been approached by Maddy and the others back in Roman times as he’d quietly been setting up the receiver array for the rest of his group to home in on. Now that was all history, or not, depending how you looked at it. Now he was here, stuck with them because they couldn’t just leave him behind, dangling like a loose end. And Project Exodus, the project he’d spent the last couple of years of his life working on… well, none of that would be happening now. By grabbing him, they’d managed to prevent a group of three hundred refugees from the future completely throwing history off track.
Job done. But now he and his cartoon-character lab unit were stuck here with them.
‘So, when exactly is this place?’ asked Rashim, looking round the archway. His voice rose with growing anxiety. ‘I mean, this is twenty, twenty-first-century tech by the look of it. Yes? Am I right?’
‘This is the day the towers were knocked down by planes,’ said Liam.
‘September the eleventh, 2001,’ Maddy said quickly. ‘It’s our base-time, our field office. Where we’ve been operating out of for the last few months.’
The cursor on the dialogue box flickered.
› Stand by. Field resetting.
They heard the soft whine of energy discharging into the displacement machine and then the fluorescent lights dangling from the archway’s low ceiling suddenly blinked out and a moment later flickered back on. The archway was still in the mess it had been when she and Sal had fled back in time to the reign of Caligula. Tidying all this up, however, was the last thing on her mind at the moment.
‘And now… it’s yesterday,’ said Maddy. ‘The day before 9/11.’ She sat down in the office chair beside the desk and huffed air. ‘Which now gives us twenty-four hours’ breathing space before those psychotic killer meatbots come back to finish us off.’
Rashim’s dark eyebrows rose, looking from Maddy to the others, for someone to add a word or two more of explanation. ‘Psychotic…?’
‘There’re more of them?’ asked Liam.
‘Two more, we think,’ said Sal. ‘Six of them came through.’
‘What killer things are these?’ asked Rashim.
‘Six! Jay-zus!’ Liam’s jaw dropped. ‘And you two managed to kill four of ’em?’
‘Could someone please tell me what psycho killer things you’re talking about?’
‘Yes. We did pretty good, huh?’
Liam laughed. ‘I’ll say — ’
Rashim closed his eyes. ‘PLEASE, EVERYONE, WILL YOU STOP IGNORING ME!’
The others turned to look at him.
‘I… I’m…’ Rashim opened his eyes and smiled half apologetically. ‘I… I’m very close to… uh, losing my mind. Please — the least one of you people can do is answer just one of my questions.’
Sal pointed at Bob. ‘The psychotic meatbots we’re talking about are clones, support units like these two. Four men and two women. They came from the future to kill us.’
Rashim nodded gratefully, then silently appraised Bob. ‘He’s a military-grade gene product, isn’t he? One of the earlier-gen versions?’
‘Correct,’ Bob rumbled.
‘Computer-Bob dealt with two of them for us,’ said Maddy. ‘And one got taken out by a time wave, I think. The other one… well, you guys saw what happened.’
One of the units had managed to leap after Maddy and Sal as their hastily opened escape portal began to collapse in on itself. It had emerged on the other side missing both its feet and one hand and yet it had still managed to be quite lethal. As Bob held it down, Maddy had put several rounds into its bald human head. The first and last time she ever intended to fire a gun at anything point blank.
‘You said six of them?’ said Rashim.
Maddy nodded. ‘Yup, there are two more of them and they may be out there in New York somewhere.’
Sal sat down on the other chair beside Maddy. She scuffed the toes of her boots against the floor. ‘More of them could arrive,’ she said. ‘Right, Maddy? Another six?’
Maddy nodded. ‘Tuesday morning, sometime during Tuesday morning, that’s when they arrived. So right now it’s twelve noon, Monday. Which means we’ve got eighteen, maybe nineteen hours before they come again. And if another batch — technically, I guess, the same batch — don’t come then we’ve still got those other two to worry about. And they’ll be back from wherever computer-Bob sent them on a wild-goose chase. That’s right, Bob, isn’t it?’
› Affirmative.
‘Affirmative.’
Both Bobs answered the question.
Maddy turned to look at them all. ‘Two of them we might stand a chance against. But if another six turn up right here in this archway…?’ She pulled on her lip, made a face. Not the sort of face to instil confidence in her little team.
‘We could set some sort of a trap for them,’ said Liam. ‘As soon as they arrive, get Bob to open a portal and
