Sal felt her father’s hands on her shoulders. He pushed her roughly forward towards the stranger. ‘You take her! You take her now!’
‘Dadda! No! ’
‘You take her now!’
‘No! Not — ’
They heard a deep rumble and felt the floor trembling beneath their feet.
‘We have only seconds,’ said the old man. ‘Hurry!’
‘SALEENA!’ her father screamed. ‘YOU GO!’
‘Dadda!’ she cried. She turned to her mum. ‘ Please! I can’t! ’
The old man stretched forward and grasped hold of her hand. He pulled her towards him, but she found herself instinctively squirming and twisting her hand to escape his tight grip. ‘ No! ’ she screamed.
The deep rumbling increased in volume, the floor shuddering, and cascades of dust and grit filled the air around them, tumbling down from above.
‘This is it!’ the old man said. ‘Time has come! Saleena… I can save your life if you come with me!’
She looked at him. It seemed madness that he could, but, somehow, she believed him. ‘Your parents want this too.’ His eyes, so intense, so old.
‘Yes!’ yelled her father above the growing roar. ‘Please! Take her NOW!’
Beside his small frame, her mother was screaming, stretching out her hands to hold her one last time. Her father grabbed her, held her back. ‘No, my love! She must go!’
Mrs Chaudhry pushed her boys at the old man. ‘Please! Take their hands too! Take their hands — ’
The floor shook beneath their feet, lurching to one side.
Sal suddenly felt light-headed, as if she was free falling.
This is it, it’s falling!
Then the floor suddenly fractured beneath their feet, revealing an ocean of churning, roiling flames, like gazing down into Hell itself. And the last thing she recalled was seeing that one-eyed bear tumbling down through a large split in the stairwell’s floor into the fire below.
CHAPTER 2
2001, New York
Sal sat upright in her bunk — gasping for breath, feeling her cheeks wet with tears.
The nightmare again.
It was quiet and still in the archway. She could hear Maddy snoring on the bunk below, and Liam whimpering nonsensical words in his soft Irish accent as he stirred restlessly on the bunk opposite.
A muted lamp glowed softly from across the archway, lighting their wooden dinner table and the odd assortment of old armchairs around it. LEDs blinked among the bank of computer equipment across the way, hard drives whirring. One of the monitors remained on; she could see the computer system was doing a routine defrag and data-file tidying. It never slept.
Not it… not any more — the computer wasn’t IT any more. It was Bob.
Unable to go back to sleep, she clambered off the top bunk. Maddy twitched in her sleep, and Liam also seemed to be unsettled. Maybe they too were reliving their last moments: Liam’s sinking Titanic, Maddy’s doomed airliner. The nightmares came all too often.
She tiptoed across the archway, barefoot on the cold concrete floor, and sat down in one of the swivel chairs, tucking her feet under her and sitting on them for warmth. She grabbed the mouse and opened a dialogue box. Her fingernails clacked softly on the keyboard.
› hey, bob.
› Is this Maddy?
› no, it’s sal.
› It is 2.37 a.m. You cannot sleep, Sal?
›nightmares.
› Are you recalling your recruitment?
Recruitment, that’s what the old man, Foster, had called it. Like she’d had any real choice in the matter. Life or death. Take my hand or be mashed to pulp amid a crumbling skyscraper. She shuddered. Great fragging choice.
›yeah, my recruitment.
› You have my sympathy, Sal.
‘Thanks.’ She spoke softly into the desk mic — too lazy to tap out any more. Anyway, the clickety-click of the keyboard echoing through the archway was far more likely to disturb the others than her speaking quietly.
‘I miss them so much, Bob.’
› You miss your family?
‘Mum and Dad.’ She sighed. ‘It seems like years ago.’
› You have been in the team 44 time cycles. 88 days precisely, Sal.
Time cycles — the two-day time bubble that played out and reset for them, constantly keeping them and their field office in 10 and 11 September 2001, while the world outside moved on as normal.
Outside… outside was New York — Brooklyn, to be more precise. Streets she was now getting to know so well. Even the people she had conversations with, people who were never going to remember her: the Chinese laundromat lady, the Iranian man running the grocery store on the corner. Every time they spoke, it was, for them, the first time — a new face, a new customer to greet cheerily. But she already knew them, knew what they were about to say, how proud the Chinese lady was of her son, how angry the Iranian man was with the terrorists for bombing his city.
This morning was the Tuesday, 11 September, the second day of the ever-resetting time cycle. In just under six hours the first airliner was going to crash into the Twin Towers, and New York and all her inhabitants were going to change forever.
‘So what’re you doing, Bob?’
› Data collation. Hard-drive maintenance. And reading a book.
‘Oh? Cool. What’re you reading?’
A page of text appeared on the screen. She could see individual words momentarily highlight one after the other in rapid blinking succession as Bob ‘read’ while they talked.
› Harry Potter.
Sal remembered seeing the old films from the first decade of the century. They didn’t do much for her, but her parents had liked them as children.
‘Are you enjoying it?’
Bob didn’t answer immediately. She noticed the flickering of highlighted words on the open page of text on the screen grind to a sudden halt, and the soft whirring sound of hard drives being spun momentarily ceased. Forming an opinion… that was something Bob struggled with. It required the computer system’s entire capacity for him to actually formulate, or rather simulate, something as simple as a human emotion… a preference. A like or dislike.
Finally, after a few seconds, she heard the hard drives whirring gently once again.
› I like the magic very much.
Sal smiled as she acknowledged how many terabytes of computing power had gone into that simple statement. If she had a mean streak in her, she could have asked him what colour he thought went best with violet, or what was tastier — chocolate or vanilla? It would probably lock the system for hours as Bob laboured through infinite decision loops to finally come up with the answer that he was unable to compute a valid response.
Bless him. Great at data retrieval, cross-referencing and processing. But don’t ask him to pick dessert off a menu.
