Foster nodded slowly. Sadly. ‘It wasn’t ever meant to last for eternity, this agency. It was a temporary fix to a problem.’ He looked up at her. ‘There’s something you need to know, Maddy.’ He ran his tongue along his teeth beneath pursed lips. ‘Maddy, the agency… it’s just — ’
‘Just us.’ She shrugged. ‘I know.’
‘Seriously?’ He cocked a bushy eyebrow. ‘I already told you that as well?’
‘Yup.’
‘Jay-zus. Must be annoying for you, hearing me — ’
‘We’re leaving, Foster. Leaving first thing tomorrow morning. We’re packing everything we need to set up again, and we’ll find some other place to carry on doing the job.’
‘Right.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s probably very sensible.’
‘And I want you to come with us.’
Foster shook his head. ‘I can’t go back. You know I can’t enter a displacement field again.’
‘I know.’ She reached for one of his frail hands and squeezed it gently. ‘I know. We’re just relocating for now. No time travel, no fields, no tachyon particles. No more damage to you. We’re just taking a drive away from New York. That’s it.’
She realized just how fragile he looked now. When he’d first recruited them, yes, she’d noted he was old, but he’d looked robust-old. Like some seasoned old army veteran, hard as nails beneath a weathered exterior.
‘Maddy… I don’t think there’s much left of me.’ His smile broke her heart. ‘I’m dying. I have cancer. All over.’
She knew that; it was something else he’d already confessed on a previous visit.
‘Foster… I wish I could leave you here.’ Maddy looked around at the park, the sun streaming through September leaves, turning golden and beginning to fall. Beautiful. He’d told her he thought he might have just a few weeks left maybe; if he was really lucky, a couple of months. The rate of cellular damage caused by time travel wasn’t really quantifiable. It happened, that’s all they knew.
‘I know you’ve earned this,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve given the agency your life… and you deserve to choose how to spend the time you’ve got left. But we need you.’ She squeezed his hand again. ‘ I need you.’
‘You know as much as I did… do, Maddy.’
She shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t. I’m making mistakes. We’re screwing up. There are things stitched in history…’ She shook her head. Not quite the right expression. ‘Things pre-baked into history. Messages… written for us, I don’t know, maybe even written by us! Like we’ve been here before or something. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t…’ Her voice hitched with emotion. She stopped and looked across the pigeons at a toddler on reins tormenting the birds on the ground. ‘I can’t do this on my own any more. I’m not ready. And I wasn’t ready when you walked out on us.’
‘And I wasn’t ready for this when I first started,’ he said softly. ‘But you and I? We’re made for this job.’
She looked at his grin. That stupid lopsided old grin of his. ‘You know, sometimes I don’t know whether to call you Liam or Foster.’
He laughed. A dry old cackle. A dying man’s defiant snort.
‘Does Liam know now? About me?’
Maddy nodded. ‘I think actually, in a way, he’s kind of proud that he gets to turn out like you.’
‘But maybe he’s not so happy that’s going to happen sooner than he thought?’
‘I think he’s accepted that.’ She shrugged. ‘Come to terms with it. After all, if you hadn’t grabbed us, we’d all be dead anyway. It’s all extra time. Extra bonus life, right?’
‘Aye.’
They sat in silence for a while, watching a young couple rollerblade past them. He was teaching her, and she was guffawing at how bad she was. Not a care in the world between them.
‘Please, Foster,’ Maddy said again presently. ‘Please come along with us.’
His watery eyes watched the rollerbladers zigzagging up the path and away from them.
‘Don’t make me get on my knees,’ she said.
‘All right,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll come.’
Chapter 4
10 September 2001, New York
‘She’s… what do you reckon? Fourteen? Fifteen?’ asked Liam, peering through the thick protein soup at the murky outline suspended in the growth tube.
‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Sal. Her nose was pushed against the warm perspex. The clone’s body was tucked into a foetal position, knees pulled up, slender arms wrapped protectively round them. The last twelve hours of archway time had taken her body shape from one that was definitely that of a small child to something that looked adolescent.
‘Maybe a bit younger,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to make her out through all this gross gunk.’
Liam wasn’t sure about this. Maddy’s instructions — birth her. They couldn’t leave her behind and probably wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to do that if they had to. She was going to become Becks one way or another. She was part of the team.
The other foetuses in stasis, on the other hand, were simply going to be flushed out. They were all too early in the growth stage to survive for long outside the protein solution. No more than fist-sized bodies and none of them with viable, organic rat brains yet, just sim-card-sized slices of silicon; it wasn’t going to be an easy task to bag up and throw away those pitiful-looking things floating in the other tubes.
Liam looked again at what would become Becks soon. ‘The body’s just that of a child. She’ll be younger than any of us, so she will. What good is that?’
‘She’ll still be stronger than me or Maddy, though. That’s got to be useful.’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose… if we decide to enter her into a schoolgirl arm-wrestling competition.’
Sal sighed. ‘Come on, we should get on with it.’
Liam nodded. Wrinkled his nose in anticipation of what was coming. Sal knelt down and tapped the small glowing display on the pump’s control panel. The soft purring stopped. The first time they’d done this, they’d had state-of-the-art ‘W.G. Systems Growth Reactor’ tubes, with a motor at the bottom that orientated the tube smoothly to a forty-five-degree angle before opening a sluice hatch at the bottom, depositing the clone and protein soup on to the floor. This growth tube was a home-made affair, the pump and control panel recovered from the damaged system, the perspex tube purchased from a defunct distillery. The other growth tubes likewise.
Liam grabbed the top of the cylinder of bath-warm perspex. ‘Give me a hand — we’ll tip it over nice and gentle if we can.’
Sal braced herself against the weight of the tube as Liam pulled. It teetered, the liquid inside sloshing. The foetal shape inside twitched and jerked, finally beginning to wake up, becoming aware.
‘Go slowly, Liam!’ grunted Sal. The tube was impossibly heavy.
‘I got a hold… it’s all right, it’s all right. Just keep taking the weight as I tip it.’
He carried on pulling, the tube canting over enough now that the viscous gloop was sloshing over the top and splatting on to the floor.
‘Liam! It’s too heavy! I can’t — ’
‘Calm down, will you? We’ll just ease it out. Pour it out so it’s a bit lighter.’
‘It’s going to slip! It’s — ’
‘Just relax! I still got a hold of it, so I — ’
The bottom of the tube slipped on the floor under the angled weight and he lost his grip. It swung down to the ground like a felled redwood, Sal lurching back to avoid being crushed. The perspex made a loud thunk on the concrete and a tidal wave of pink soup erupted from the open top and engulfed her.
The clone slid out, riding the mini-wave and all but ending up in Sal’s lap.
‘Ah Jay-zus!’ Liam flapped his hands uselessly. ‘I’m so sorry, Sal! The thing just…’
Sal spat gunk from her mouth and wiped it from her lips and out of her eyes, thick like half-set jelly.
‘I hate you, Liam,’ she hissed, almost meaning it right then. ‘Really hate you.’
