boasting more weapons than anyone had guessed. Kibo had to have armed them. Their bullets ricocheted off water casks and brass scaffolding. Cecil couldn’t tell who was who.
“Professor, can you stand?” Verity knelt over Embrey.
Cecil struggled to one knee, then braced his sore leg. His adrenaline seemed to dilute the pain. “Yes, I think so.”
“Then here.” She threw him her pistol. “For God’s sake, shut this machine down. Kill anyone who tries to stop you.”
“What about you?”
“I’m getting Embrey back to the Empress. He’ll die if I can’t remove this bull-”
A tremendous crash shook the factory. The thudding of collapsed masonry and metal brought with it a plaster cloud thick enough to envelop the gunfight and obscure the opposing sides from each another. Cecil looked first to the boiler room. Had that exploded? No, there was no billowing steam. What then?
The firing ceased. Loose bricks clinked one on top the other as they fell somewhere near the front entrance, while the hiss of settling plaster dust wrought quiet tension in this lull in the fighting.
“Be careful, Professor. But hurry.” Verity turned from the cloud and wasted no more time in dragging Embrey over two pipes and behind the left hand piston. From there, she had a straight path to daylight. Cecil prayed she had some surgical knowledge too-removing a bullet wasn’t something one could or should muddle through.
A queer squelching, grinding noise emerged from inside the cloud.
“God, what’s that smell?” someone yelled.
As the next thump, thump trembled the ground, sounding as though it was shifting piles of bricks already fallen, Cecil rolled up his sleeves. He prepared for a last desperate attempt to stop his machine. For time wasn’t just running out, it had come calling…stalking. Summoned by the gunshots.
The baryonyx!
Its giant snout pierced the cloud before the first screams erupted from the Whitehall posse. Its jaws gaped for a vicious lunge into the cornered men, then snapped shut upon two, hurtling them aloft for a fuller bite. The crunching and squelching resumed at a sickening volume. Gunshots from both sides, designed to ward off the baryonyx, merely enraged it further. Its crocodilian mouth beslobbered with fresh blood now thrust even lower, even quicker.
Cecil spied the Harrison clock’s brass lid vibrating as it dripped moisture. The final accelerating process was about to begin. He climbed the first pipe, smacked his sore leg on the second. Those angry cogs and crank wheels were no longer rotating numbered dials-the machine already had her sequence, her key to unlock time. They were powering the energy transfer itself, the unleashing of built-up psammeticum into the intricate array of mirrors, and the boldest clockwork ever devised.
He spun to make sure the dinosaur was not following.
A sudden blow to his jaw sent him reeling. Delaney, another of the lynchers from the first night, picked him up and thumped his gut. Cecil coughed, struggled to breathe. A few feet away, Miss Polperro shook Billy by the scruff of his neck and glowered at Cecil.
“You’re full of surprises, Reardon,” she hissed. “But I warned you what would happen. Say goodbye to this boy. It’s for all our sakes.”
A tiny dark shape emerged from her matted hair. It rushed across her brow. She recoiled and then shook her head. It shifted again, this time with a speed and scurrying motion Cecil recalled from his recent past.
The spider from the platform.
It stopped on her right temple and must have bitten her, for she shrieked and let go of the boy. The baryonyx answered, its rage deafening the entire factory.
Cecil lunged forward and knocked the revolver from her hand. Billy wriggled free and bolted for safety. Run lad, run. Delaney snatched the steam-pistol from the ground. Frantic, Cecil scrabbled for the second weapon somewhere on the floor. He found it between the bastard’s legs and immediately fired up into his groin. Click. An empty cartridge! Instead, he thumped his attacker’s kneecap with the pistol butt, felling him. He cracked the brass gun against Delaney’s forehead with all his might. The son of a bitch went out like a gaslight.
More screams and gunshots from behind, but also from the front, as well. From outside. Verity and Embrey. He heard other voices too.
He made straight for the clock with seconds to spare. He felt the prickly warmth caused by the hurtling, expanding energy. Every hair on his body stood up. A flicker of lilac light appeared through an old screw hole in the brass casing. He unclasped one side, reached for the other. An extraordinary wrench in his scalp pulled him back. It was as though his hair had burst into flames.
A frightful witch clawed at him, her metal spectacles aglow with lilac light. Her shock of hair resembled a penny dreadful cartoon of Sweeny Todd he’d seen in his youth. At once, the hate broiling in her eyes seemed to encapsulate the very thing he’d railed against all these years. Death. That vicious, remorseless force behind the taking of innocent lives: Billy’s, Lisa’s, Edmond’s…
He wrestled her to arm’s length and, summoning all his hate, delivered an uppercut to her jaw with such force it felt as though his fist was made of iron. Her head snapped back, then she flopped at his feet.
“Cecil!” The boy ran to him, flung his arms around him.
“Hold tight, Billy.” Cecil picked the lad up and, calmly inside a torrent of inverted lilac rain, held him like he’d once held Edmond.
“What should I do?” Billy’s dampened words slurred with unearthly resonance, as though time itself were stretching them.
“Think of home, son. Just think of-”
Everything vanished in a blinding flash.
Chapter 18
The second journey through time seemed to pass through an ocean of perpetual, curdled milk. Trapped with Cecil in that timeless, soundless oyster was the sum total of all the hopes and horrors his adventure had fed into the machine: befriending and losing his two sterling companions, Embrey and Verity; saving Billy, the very boy he’d made an orphan with his first time jump; the hideous, engorged baryonyx wreaking havoc in his factory; falling victim to Miss Polperro’s treachery; but also besting those myriad prehistoric hazards to repair his great machine. When all was said and done, even if he could never fully atone for ripping the heart out of London, he’d at least kept his word and conjured this second chance for everyone.
What happened next was out of his hands.
As the whiteness dulled, noises around the factory staggered in repetition as though time’s needle were stuck on a glitchy gramophone disc. Billy’s arms slipped from around Cecil’s waist. A draught whistled overhead, tossing dust. He coughed, then spun at the first uninterrupted roar this side of the time jump. Whenever here was.
Enraged, the barynoyx rampaged toward the aeronauts on the north side of the factory. It crushed one of the primary steam pipes, and backed away from the ensuing hot exhaust. Meanwhile, the aeronauts bolted for the rubble at the back of the factory, while the Whitehall posse-what was left of them-made for the front doors from whence the dinosaur had entered. It made after the latter group, probably following their coughs inside the dust cloud. But as it turned, its massive tail smashed into a primary piston shank. The impact uncoupled one of the steel scaffold supports, and the whole thing began to buckle, to topple…
With his injured leg, Cecil could never climb the pipes in time.
“Get away, Billy!” He grabbed the lad under his arms and hurled him sideways as far and as high as he could. Billy landed on the nearest pipe, his momentum sliding him over the other side.
Tonnes of brass and iron crushed Cecil’s trailing leg as he tried to escape. It hit with the pain of a thousand kiln burns all at once, and held him there, in hell, until his cry exhausted the air in his lungs. Then he cried again. The last thing he saw before he blacked out was the grim, desperate face of his African friend, Tangeni, as the
