‘I made it! I’m all right!’ he called across to them. ‘I’m fine! Have you seen the others?’
Becks led them across the clearing towards Liam until finally they converged around the smouldering remains of a campfire.
‘The others have not been located,’ said Becks.
Liam noticed their small turbine wasn’t spinning. The cross-bar was split and the school bag was on the ground, its load of round pebbles spilled. ‘The windmill’s broken. What’s happened?’
There were no answers.
‘We should get that running again first,’ he continued. He looked around at the others. ‘Maybe they’re out looking for us?’
Becks strode swiftly towards the contraption to see whether a quick repair could be made. Liam was about to pass on some instructions to the others to split up and search for the others when he noted Jasmine’s gaze, wide- eyed and lost on some detail everyone else seemed to have missed.
‘Jasmine? You all right?’
She pointed at the ground. ‘That,’ she whispered. ‘What’s that?’
Liam followed her gaze down to the ground. Nestled amid a cluster of pebbles, cones and the dry brown decaying leaves of long-dead ferns, he saw a pale slender object that looked to him like an impossibly large maggot. He took a step towards it and noted the ground was stained dark around it, and at one end of it, pointed yellow- white shards poked out like the antennae of a shrimp.
He felt his stomach lurch and flip in a slow, queasy somersault.
It was someone’s index finger. The antennae, shards of bone.
‘What is it?’ asked Whitmore, stooping to get a better look. ‘My God! Is that a finger?’
The conclusion hit Liam like a punch. ‘They’re here.’ He looked up at them. ‘Those pack hunters are here, on the island.’
Whitmore’s mouth flapped open and shut and produced nothing helpful.
‘How?’ asked Howard. ‘It’s impossible. No way those things can swim across!’
‘They don’t need to.’ He looked at the others. ‘They went and copied us… learned from us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think they made their own bridge.’
CHAPTER 64
2001, New York
Everything in the archway died, leaving them in pitch black.
‘What’s going on?’ cried Cartwright.
‘Please!’ cried Maddy in the dark. ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! It’s nothing I did!’
‘Stay right where you are!’ snapped Cartwright. ‘I hear you move or do anything and I’ll fire!’
‘O-OK… we’re not moving, are we, Sal?’
‘Nope. Sitting still. Doing nothing.’
‘Just hang on, Cartwright,’ said Maddy, ‘just a second… the generator should kick in any time now.’
On cue, from the back room, came the rumbling of the generator firing up. A moment later the strip light in the middle of the archway flickered once, twice with a dink, dink, then stayed on.
They all stared silently at each other as the monitors flickered in unison, the computer system rebooting itself.
‘What just happened?’ demanded Cartwright.
‘I dunno yet…’ said Maddy.
‘That was a time wave,’ said Sal.
‘A what?’
‘Time wave,’ she repeated. ‘Something big changed in the past and it’s just now caught up with us.’
Maddy nodded unhappily. ‘Yeah… she’s right. That’s exactly what that was.’
Cartwright looked at both the girls, then at Forby, who returned nothing more useful than a calm professional stare. ‘Well?’ said the old man. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means outside this archway, outside the perimeter of our field-office time shield, things have changed,’ explained Maddy. ‘Changed a lot… if we lost power.’
‘So, what’s out there now?’ he asked.
Maddy splayed her hands. ‘I don’t know! Another version of New York, I guess.’
Cartwright’s eyes widened to rheumy bloodshot pools. ‘Forby, go take a look.’
‘Yes, sir.’ He stepped across the archway and hit the green button. Nothing happened. ‘Won’t open.’
‘The doorway’s not on the generator circuit,’ said Maddy. ‘Just crank it up with the handle. There,’ she said, pointing. Forby saw the small metal handle, nodded and started turning it round.
The computer had finished rebooting and Bob’s dialogue box popped up.
› We are running on auxiliary power. Resume density probing?
Maddy turned in her chair, back towards the monitors. ‘How much more probing have you got to do?’
› Information: 177,931 candidate density soundings made.
She made a face — less than half the total number that Bob had calculated they needed to make.
‘Are there any good suspects?’
› There are 706 soundings so far in which a density fluctuation occurred.
‘Can you narrow that down any?’
› Affirmative: I can analyse the interruption signatures returned and identify those that demonstrate a repeat or an artificial rhythm.
‘Uh… lemme think.’ She bit a ragged edge around her fingernail. ‘But you’re only, like, halfway through doing the probes?’
› Less than halfway.
‘And if you stop now we might miss them,’ she thought out loud.
› Affirmative.
‘But now we’re on generator power, have you got enough power to do all those probes, and open a window too if we find them?’
› I do not have enough data to answer that question, Maddy.
‘Can you guess?’
› I do not have enough data to answer that question, Maddy.
She cursed. ‘All right… so you’re saying it’s possible we’ll run out of juice if you carry on doing the probes, right?’
› Affirmative.
The rattling of the cranking shutter door coming from across the archway suddenly ceased.
‘OK, Bob,’ she sighed, burying her face in her hands with weary frustration. ‘OK… OK. All right, then. Stop with what you’re doing and analyse what we’ve got already. See if we’ve got a hit.’
› Affirmative.
‘What the — !’ That was Forby.
‘JESUS!’ That was Cartwright.
Maddy spun round in her chair and saw the pair of them standing in the middle of the opened shutter doorway, staring out at a canvas of emerald-green jungle.
She sighed. Oh no, not again.
Last time a time wave had arrived like this one, large enough to sever the feed of power into their field office, it had left New York a post-apocalyptic wilderness of tumbledown ruins under a poisoned rust-red sky. She and Sal hurried over towards the open entrance.
‘Jahulla!’ gasped Sal as they joined the other two.
And Maddy nodded. Jahulla indeed.
This time New York was gone, not just shattered ruins, but gone as in never existed. She looked down at her
