slightly ahead of him without any trepidation. Liam realized he felt reassured to have her there despite her diminutive frame. Despite lacking the intimidating bulk of Bob, he had a feeling she was a great deal more dangerous than she looked.
Finally, a yard ahead of him she stopped. Liam stepped round her and looked down.
The blonde girl he’d spoken to earlier — he remembered her name, it was Laura, wasn’t it? — was screaming, her eyes locked on to the thing that was lying in the tall grass beside her.
It took Liam a moment for him to make sense of what he was seeing on the ground, then… then he got it; understood what it was. His stomach flopped and lurched and it took every ounce of willpower he had not to double over and vomit.
The teacher emerged from the tall grass to stand next to Liam. He followed Laura’s wide-eyed gaze and then sucked in a mouthful of air. ‘Oh my God!.. That’s not… that’s not what I think it is,’ he whispered, and turned to look at Liam. ‘Is it?’
Among the tall fronds of vegetation nestled a small twisted mass of muscle and bone. At one end Liam could see a long braid of blonde hair, matted with drying blood, and halfway along the contorted form, he spotted a solitary pink Adidas trainer, hanging half on and half off a pale and perfectly normal-looking foot. It had to be one of the three blonde girls they’d tagged behind on the way into the chamber. He could quite understand the girl, Laura, screaming. They’d been chatting, giggling and exchanging phone numbers only ten minutes ago.
Liam recalled Foster saying sometimes it happened; sometimes, very rarely, the energy of a portal could turn a person inside out. Oh Jay-zus, what a mess.
Half an hour later those of the group that had survived the blast and arrived in one piece had made a rough assessment of their predicament. Dotted around the jungle clearing, they’d made the gruesome discovery of more bodies just like the girl’s, turned inside out and almost unrecognizable as human. Sixteen of them. Of the thirty-five people who’d been in the chamber when the explosion — or, more accurately, implosion — had occurred, only sixteen of them appeared to have made it through alive.
Now, gathered together in the middle of the clearing, well away from the forbidding edge of thick jungle, it was Whitmore who first seemed to be stirring from a state of stunned shock. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve and narrowed his eyes as he studied Becks.
‘You!’ he said. ‘Yes, you! I remember now… you said it was going to explode. Just… just before it actually did.’
Becks’s face remained impassive. ‘That is correct.’
‘Hang on!’ he said again, his eyes suddenly narrowing with dawning realization. ‘You… you’re not one of m- my kids. You’re not — ’
Liam could see where this was going. It was pointless continuing to pretend to be high-school students a moment longer.
‘What just happened, whatever’s just happened,’ blustered Whitmore, ‘you damn well knew it was going to happen.’ His voice rose in pitch. ‘Who are you? Is this some sort of terrorist thing?’
Becks shook her head slowly, her face impassive. ‘Negative. We are not terrorists.’
Whitmore fell silent. His lips quivered with more questions he wanted to ask, but he was struggling to know what exactly to ask. Where to begin.
‘Excuse me?’
Their heads all turned towards a boy with kinky ginger hair, neatly side-parted into a succession of waves, and thick bottle-top glasses that made his eyes seem to bulge like a startled frog. He pointed to his name tag. ‘My name’s Franklyn… you can call me that. Or just Frank will do.’ He smiled at them uncertainly. ‘Uhh… I just wanted to say that… this is going to sound really weird, but I guess I’ll just come out and say it.’
‘What?’ snapped Whitmore.
‘Well — ’ he pointed up at the sky — ‘you see them?’
All eyes drifted towards the top of some trees twenty yards away, a long branch leaning out over the clearing with strange dangling willow-like green fronds drooping to the ground. In among them, a pair of dragonflies danced and zig-zagged with a buzz of wings they could hear from where they stood.
‘Those are huge,’ uttered Kelly. ‘Good grief!.. Two-foot, three-foot wingspan at a guess?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Franklyn. ‘They’re really big and I’m pretty sure I know what species that is.’
The others looked at him.
‘It’s a petalurid, I think… yeah, I’m sure that’s the right name.’
‘Great,’ said Laura, ‘so now we know.’
‘No, that’s not the important bit,’ said Franklyn. He looked at her. ‘They should be extinct.’
‘Well, obviously they’re not,’ she replied.
‘Oh yes they are. We’ve only ever had fossils of insects that size.’
Whitmore stood up. ‘Oh my God! He’s right!’ He watched the two dragonflies emerge from the overhanging branch and dart out into the open, their wings buzzing noisily like airborne hairdryers. ‘Insects haven’t been that size since…’ He swallowed, looked at the others. ‘Well… I mean, millions and millions of years.’
‘Petalurids,’ uttered Franklyn again. ‘Late Cretaceous. I’m pretty sure of that.’
Kelly got to his feet and stood beside Franklyn. ‘What are you saying?’
The boy wiped a fog of moisture from his glasses, blinking back the bright day from his small eyes. ‘What I’m saying, Mr Kelly, is those things haven’t existed, alive… in, like, well, I guess something like sixty-five million years.’
CHAPTER 22
2001, New York
‘Maddy! Where are you going?’
Maddy ignored Sal’s pleading voice as she strode across the archway, cranked up the shutter and stepped out into the backstreet.
I can’t do this… I can’t do this.
She felt the first tears roll down her cheeks as she picked her way along the rubbish-strewn sidewalk towards South 6th Street at the top. Her first proper mission in charge and she was already going to pieces. An impetuous decision on her part, stupid and hot-headed enough to go against Bob’s reasoned advice, and now she might just be responsible for killing Liam and the support unit. Not only that, but she’d probably also caused the deaths of dozens of others. And, most importantly, Edward Chan.
‘I can’t do this,’ she muttered. ‘I’m just not ready for this.’
She stepped out of the backstreet on to the corner and watched the busy intersection for a while: traffic turning right to pick up the bridge road, left towards the river; pedestrians making their way over to their jobs in Manhattan… all of them oblivious to the commercial jets already in the air and heading towards their doom.
She wanted Foster back. Needed him back. What possessed him to think for one moment she was actually ready to run a field office? His pre-recorded ‘how to’ answers stored on the computer just weren’t enough. She needed him to talk to, to explain the technology to her more fully, to tell her more about the agency and their place in it. There were so many gaps in her knowledge she didn’t even know enough to have an idea what questions to ask. She was floundering.
‘Damn you, Foster!’ she hissed under her breath, and wiped at her wet cheeks.
The old man could be anywhere in New York, if, indeed, he’d decided to stay on in the city. He’d walked out on her on one of the Monday mornings, walked right out of the Starbucks with a bag over one shoulder, leaving her alone with her coffee. It was Tuesday today. If he was that desperate to see the world before he died, then he might just as well be on a Greyhound bus to some other state or even on a plane to somewhere exotic.
Face it. He’s gone for good.
‘She just got up and left!’ said Sal.
› I sensed emotional stress markers in her voice.
‘Well, duh! Of course she’s upset! She’s just… I mean, she may have just killed Liam!’
Sal realized her own voice sounded shrill and loud. ‘Oh jahulla! Is he dead? Did she kill him?’
