a team. There shouldn’t be secrets between them. Not ones like this.
‘You’re the team leader now,’ Foster had told her, ‘it’s down to you how and when you tell Liam about this.’
She watched the seagulls cautiously return to peck and pull at the plastic bags on the silt.
‘Just great,’ she muttered to herself. Something else to churn away inside her, keep her awake at night. Because it wasn’t just the Foster-is-Liam thing, was it? Oh no. There was that other thing, that scribbled message she’d found at their supply drop point … the one for her eyes only.
Maddy, look out for ‘Pandora’, we’re running out of time. Be safe and tell no one.
She wondered what she was freakin’ well supposed to make of that. It meant nothing to her. ‘Pandora’ — what was that apart from being a pretty stupid girl’s name?
‘Why does it have to be me?’ Her soft voice caused a strutting seagull nearby to pause and cock its head at her.
‘I’m not talking to you, dumb bird.’ The seagull resumed its scavenging, one beady black eye still warily on her. She watched lights flickering on in Manhattan as the sun began to settle behind the two tall pillars of the World Trade Center.
Foster recruited you for a reason. Foster put you in charge for a reason. Because he knows you’re smart enough to figure things out, Maddy.
She sighed. She’d really like to believe that … that she was destined to be a good team leader, a good TimeRider. But somehow, with the way things had gone so far, it all just felt … as if she’d been winging it, hanging in there by the skin of her teeth. Lucky not to be dead, or to have caused the deaths of Liam and Sal. Lucky not to have completely messed up the timeline. Lucky not to have destroyed the world.
Way too much stress for an eighteen-year-old girl to have to be burdened with.
‘Darn right,’ she uttered. ‘Way too much.’
2001, New York
Monday (time cycle 57)
I’m watching him now, floating in that tube of gloopy slimy stuff. It’s Bob, but not Bob yet if you know what I mean. It’s a boy actually. Completely hairless and curled up like a baby. You can see the face is definitely him even though it’s not finished yet; all thick bone and that heavy dumb-looking brow. The skin’s not grown on his head just yet. It’s all red-raw muscle fibre and teeth, and two eyeballs that look huge without eyelids. Sometimes they seem to shift, twitch, as if they’re staring at you. But I know he’s not. His baby mind is fast asleep right now, dreaming whatever baby brains dream.
Some first-phase skin has grown across his body, but I can still see patches where it hasn’t. There’s a bit I can see through, just beneath his left arm, where I can still see the ribs, and I think that’s an organ in there. Is it his heart or something? It’s moving. Like an animal in a cage.
Actually, this is making me feel sick. I guess I’m going back to my bunk.
Speaking of puke-making, Liam’s emptying the toilet right now. We got one of these camping toilet things a few days ago. The archway has got a little toilet closet, with a creaky wooden door and a cracked toilet bowl with no seat. It’s totally pinchudda! And it’s not connected up anyway. So that’s why we needed the camping toilet. It has to be emptied every few days cos it stinks the whole place out — when the plastic barrel thing gets pulled out, the back of the toilet comes out and all that ‘stuff’ inside is sloshing around.
Shadd-yah. My turn next time.
Anyway … so we’re going on a trip soon. Somewhere special. You want to know?
I’ll tell you.
Tomorrow we’re going to ‘Sunday’! That’s right, we’re coming out of the loop and going to the Sunday before it. It’ll be my first time travel. Well, no … I suppose when Foster grabbed me from home and took me back here, that was my first time, but I didn’t understand then what was going on. And of course every time the field resets I’m sort of travelling back forty-eight hours in time, right?
But doing this … stepping into the portal, that’s like the real thing. Really being a time traveller. I’ll be stepping through a hole in space and time, through a moment of chaos space. Liam says it’s weird, like all milky white and foggy and there’s creepy movement in there and you can’t see what it is. But he says it all happens so quickly and you’re out the other side before you know it. So not to worry.
Great. Thanks for telling me about the creepy-movey things, Liam.
So, I’m sort of nervous. But excited too cos we’re going to see this rock band called ‘EssZed’. Maddy says they disappeared after 9/11. Just vanished! They’re kind of like meant to be famous for that or something. So this, even though they don’t know it, this is their last ever gig. Maddy reckons I’ll really like them. She played some of their tracks on the computer. They’re total rip-heavy. She says Liam will probably hate them and moan about it not being real music but just noise. Not the sort of ‘ditty’ he’s used to.
LOL.
‘Education’. A ‘field trip’, that’s what she’s calling it. Useful for Becks to get a little more experience playing at being human. She needs it. She’s too serious and robotic. Whereas Bob was dumb — you could pretend he was just an idiot. But Becks is too sort-of ‘cold’. She freaks me a bit when she stares. It’s like she’s looking at you and figuring out the three fastest ways to kill you with nothing but her thumb.
I think I preferred Bob.
2001, New York
The portal shimmered in the middle of the archway, a perfect sphere of energy, and in the middle of it a hint of the ghostly wavering world of a whole forty-eight hours ago: Sunday night. A flickering of neon light and what looked like a twisting, undulating stretch of graffiti-covered brick wall dancing through a heat-haze.
‘Come on, then, Sal,’ said Maddy. ‘Quickly through.’
Sal swallowed back a throatful of nerves and nodded. ‘Yes, all right, I’m ready.’ She stepped forward, feeling the energy lift the hairs on her arms, lift her fringe like a theatre curtain. ‘It tickles!’
Stepping inside the sphere of energy, she could feel the concrete floor beginning to flex beneath her feet, like the canvas of a trampoline somebody else was already jumping up and down on. Then very quickly it softened and sagged like tissue paper … and then all of a sudden the floor was completely gone.
‘Jahulla! I’m falling!’ she yelped as her arms and legs flailed and she felt herself tumbling through air.
‘Don’t worry about it!’ she heard Liam’s voice say, but already it sounded like it had been shouted down a long, long tunnel, distant echoes fast receding. Then it was gone.
‘Liam!’ she cried, but her own voice sounded dampened and swallowed up.
I really am alone.
Just like he’d said, here she was, floating — or falling — through an ocean of featureless white. Like a nugget of breakfast cereal see-sawing down through an impossibly large bowl of milk.
Stay calm, Sal.
Swirling featureless white all around her. She held her hand up only a dozen inches away from her face and it was so faint, fogged by the mist. She waved it around and felt the air, as thick as liquid, resist her movements. She
