‘Yes?’
‘Keisha Jackson.’
‘Go ahead, Keisha.’
‘How big a hole have you got?’ asked the girl. ‘Is it big enough to step inside?’
‘Good Lord, no! No. It’s tiny. Very small. It doesn’t need to be big. It’s a pinprick.’
One of the boys at the back giggled.
‘Shortly, we’ll be going through into the main laboratory, where you’ll see the containment shielding that surrounds the area of experimentation. I believe the team is due to be opening a pinhole vacuum in the next half- hour.’ He splayed his hands. ‘Wanna go take a look-see?’
Every head in the room wagged enthusiastically.
CHAPTER 8
1906, San Francisco
They returned to their alleyway with half an hour to spare, having spent an hour on the dockside watching the steam ships being loaded and unloaded, Maddy relishing every little detail of the past and giggling with unbridled delight as dockside workers knuckled their foreheads and doffed their caps at her politely as they walked past.
‘Oh my God! I feel like some sort of duchess!’ she whispered out of the side of her mouth to Liam as they turned into the alley. ‘Everyone’s so… I dunno, so polite and proper back in this time.’
He nodded. ‘Especially to a lady… like yourself.’ He nodded at her dress, her flamboyant hat with its ostrich feathers. ‘Them clothes mark you out as a lady of means. You know? A really posh lady, so you are. Now, if you’d found some dowdy dress that made you look common, them workers would’ve walked on past without a by-your- leave.’
‘Oh, right… thanks,’ she said.
Liam grimaced. ‘Ahhh, now see that came out all wrong-sounding, so it did. I didn’t mean to say it like that.’
‘No, you’re probably right,’ she huffed. ‘I’ve always been plain-looking. I’m sure shoving on a frilly dress and some stupid feather hat isn’t going to make much of a difference.’
They walked down the alley, sidestepping a toppled crate of festering cabbages until they reached the spot where they’d materialized several hours earlier.
‘Seems harsh that, though,’ said Liam thoughtfully.
‘What?’
‘That fella back there, Leighton. You sure he’ll die?’
She nodded. ‘Yes… it makes sense.’ Yes, it did. But it was the feel of… the feel of… ruthlessness that gnawed away at her; the agency seemed to know everything about everyone — and exploited that knowledge mercilessly. In less than eighteen hours the young man she’d been talking to would be nothing more than a twisted black carcass amid the smouldering remains of that bank.
And I have to learn to deal with that, she told herself.
Liam seemed to sense her turmoil. ‘Well, this is the job now, Mads. We don’t have much of a choice in the matter. Do we?’
She looked at him and realized it wasn’t just the young bank teller that the agency was ruthlessly using, but Liam too. The side effects weren’t apparent yet: the onset of cellular corruption, the onset of premature old age. But they’d begin to show at some point, wouldn’t they? The more trips Liam was sent on into the past, the more damage it was going to do to his body, until, like Foster, one day he was going to be an old man before his time: his muscles wasted; his bones brittle, weakened and fragile; his organs irretrievably corrupted by the effects of time travel and one by one beginning to fail him.
She so wanted to tell him. To warn him.
How many more trips, Liam? How many before I’m looking at you and seeing a dying old man?
But she couldn’t. Not yet. Foster had told her it would be unkind for him to know his fate too early.
‘ Let him enjoy the freedom of seeing history for a bit; seeing his future, his past… at least give him that for a while before you tell him he’s dying.’
Liam smiled his lopsided smile. On the face of a grown man, it might have been called rakish, charming even. On him it looked just a little mischievous. ‘You all right there, Maddy?’
‘Yeah.’ She nodded. ‘Yeah… I’m fine.’
He let go of her arm and checked his timepiece. ‘Return window any second now.’
Almost on cue, a gentle breeze whistled up the alley, sending the loose debris of rubbish skittering along the cobble-stones. A moment later, the air several yards from them shimmered like a heat haze: a ball of air twelve feet in diameter, hovering a foot off the ground. Through the portal she could just make out the twisting, undulating shapes of the archway beyond and Sal waiting impatiently for them.
You have to tell him, sometime, Maddy. Tell him time travel will slowly kill him.
She didn’t like the fact that Foster had left the decision to her. Having secrets like that, having something she couldn’t share with him or Sal.
And what about that note?
She could feel the lump of balled paper in her glove, something else she was being asked to keep from her friends. And why? And who was Pandora? She didn’t like that… it felt like she was being used.
What? Like you just used that young bank teller?
‘Come on, then,’ said Liam, stepping forward with the jewellery case in his hands.
‘Liam?’
He stopped. ‘What?’
She could tell him about the note. She could also tell him about the damage time travel was silently wreaking on him. That every time he went back in time subtle corruption was occurring to every cell in his body, ageing him long before his time. She decided she’d want to know, to know that every time she’d stepped through a portal she was knocking perhaps five or ten years off her natural life. She’d want to at least be able to choose for herself whether she was prepared to make that sacrifice for the rest of mankind.
‘What is it, Mads?’
Or maybe Foster was right — she should keep the truth from him for as long as possible…
She pulled her glasses out of her handbag and put them on, then took the silly bonnet off her head with its long, ridiculous ostrich feathers. All of a sudden, dressed in her tight corset and billowing lace skirts, she felt dishonest, a phoney, a fake and, her eyes meeting Liam’s, she felt like a liar.
A worn-thin smile spread across her face. ‘Nothing, Liam. Let’s go home, eh?’
CHAPTER 9
2001, New York
‘Are you sure?’ shouted Sal.
‘That’s what Bob says.’ Maddy’s voice echoed from the archway through the open door into the back room — ‘the hatchery’ as they called it now. ‘He says to attach the end of the protein-feed pipe to the growth candidate’s belly button.’
‘How do we do that?’ Liam replied. ‘It’s not like there’s a socket to screw the thing into.’ The small slimy foetus squirmed gently in his hand, stirring in its slumber. He grimaced as it did, feeling small fragile bones shift beneath its paper-thin skin.
It looked as vulnerable as a freshly hatched bird fallen from a nest, and yet he knew that this tiny, shifting, pale creature in the palm of his hand would soon be a seven-foot-tall leviathan, bulging with genetically enhanced muscles, with a deep, intimidating voice rumbling from a chest as broad as a beer barrel.
