‘That sounds promising,’ said Maddy. ‘But I dunno… New Jersey’s still pretty close to where we were. If we’re going to play it safe and put as much distance as we — ’
‘It’s not in New Jersey.’
‘Uh! Where, then?’
‘London.’
‘London?’ She took a moment to take that in. Not in America? She’d presumed just now that something as forward-thinking, something so modern as electricity must have been a solely American thing long before anyone else. Even before the turn of the century.
‘You mean London, England?’
‘Yes, of course I mean London, England. A steam-powered 125-horsepower generator beneath — ’ he traced his finger down through the text to find his place — ‘beneath a place called the Holborn Viaduct. Yes, and that’s in central London.’ He read the article from where his finger touched the screen. ‘It was built to power the lights on the viaduct, but also to premises in the area, the City Temple and the Old Bailey.’ He looked at them. ‘Whatever that was.’
Maddy stroked her chin thoughtfully. ‘Do you think it might have been churning out enough for our needs?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’ Rashim picked up a biro and began scribbling down scraps of information from the article.
‘No need,’ she said. She clicked her mouse on an icon to one side of the screen and smiled. ‘It’s already printing.’
‘London.’ Liam turned to look at her. He was just about to say he’d always wanted to visit the city as a boy. But once again, there it was, stupid circular thinking; he’d never been a little boy with dreams and wishes. He settled for a thoughtful nod. ‘Aye, London sounds like a good enough bet to me.’
Maddy was grinning like a loon. ‘London!’ Truly and genuinely, a terrifyingly Cheshire cat-sized grin. Something she realized she hadn’t done in a while; an honest expression of excitement. ‘Victorian London! All top hats and posh frocks?’
Her growing excitement was wholly infectious. Liam found himself smiling straight back at her. He remembered their fleeting visit to San Francisco in 1906, the childlike beam of pleasure on her face as they’d strutted down that broad and busy thoroughfare: her with a plume of ostrich feathers on her head and wearing a bodice tight enough to make her want to cough up a kidney, and him with a top hat on his head tilted at a jaunty, gentleman-about-town angle.
‘Aye… I think we just might’ve found ourselves a new home.’
She squeezed his hand. ‘Yup,’ she said right back. ‘Rashim?’
‘Yes?’
‘How long do you think it will take you to rebuild the displacement machine?’
She knew he’d do it — the instinctive response habit of any technician, engineer, plumber — he sucked air in through his teeth. ‘I don’t know. We have the key component boards and they’re still intact incredibly. But I’m going to have to, uh… reverse-engineer them. The basic process pipeline is the same as we had on Project Exodus, but there are implementation differences that I’ve got to learn and adapt to work with these components.’
‘Just give me your best guess.’
‘A couple of weeks? A month, two maybe?’
‘You don’t know, do you?’
‘You asked me to guess.’ He shrugged. ‘So, I’m guessing.’
Chapter 42
1 October 2001, Harcourt, Ohio
‘So that’s twenty-seven dollars and — ’
‘Ninety cents,’ Liam finished. He smiled at her and she blushed. ‘I know that off by heart.’
‘And I know what you’re gonna order by heart,’ said Kaydee-Lee. ‘Why do you always order the same thing?’
Liam had been up to the diner virtually every morning since they’d settled into the abandoned elementary school. It was boredom, that’s why he volunteered to do the breakfast bagel run. Maddy, Rashim and SpongeBubba seemed to be spending all their waking hours either poring over pencil-sketched schematics or huddled over a make-do workbench, carefully soldering electrical components together by the light of a desktop lamp. Sal seemed to be busy on the computers most of the time. They had a similar set-up of twelve networked PCs as they’d had back in Brooklyn, the old hard drives from the archway system installed. Once the W.G. Systems operating code had been loaded up and had successfully kicked Windows 2000 to the kerb, computer-Bob was able to talk Sal through installing all the other bits and pieces.
‘I know what bagel filling everyone likes… saves me having to, you know, disturb them from their work.’
Kaydee-Lee narrowed her eyes. ‘So, what are you guys up to down there at the school?’
‘Oh, it’s… it’s just a little science experiment, so it is.’
‘That sounds kinda cool.’
He curled his lip casually. ‘Aw, it’s nothing too exciting really. Uh, we’re… we’re measuring — ’ he scrambled to reach for a few sciencey-sounding terms and words — ‘measuring background particle emissions from, uh… from radio-micron particle toxin materials.’
She gazed at him, none the wiser. An awkward silence hung between them, begging to be filled. ‘Cool!’ she said, smiling. ‘I kinda liked science at school.’ Then she sighed. ‘Wasn’t any good at it, though.’ She huffed a little sadly. ‘Wasn’t much good at anything at school… that’s why I’m here, I guess.’
He followed her doleful gaze out of the broad window of the diner across a high street that was half made up of boarded-up stores. ‘I never see anyone else working in here. Is it just you?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Pretty much in the mornings. Arnie comes in at lunchtimes to cook. That’s when it gets real busy.’ She looked back at him. ‘We get a ladies’ sewing circle come in for lunch, regular as clockwork. Five old dears. The place is totally buzzing then.’
Liam laughed. He picked up the tone of sarcasm.
Yes, it was boredom that brought him up here, that and a chance to get some exercise. It was a fifteen-minute trip into town on the bicycle he’d found in the schoolyard. But… yes, if he was being honest, it was a chance to pop into the diner — always quiet at this time in the morning — and talk to Kaydee-Lee. Over the last few weeks they’d graduated from ‘how ya doing today’ niceties to talking about the weather, to really talking, to finally, politely exchanging their names.
‘Why do you stay here, Kaydee-Lee?’
She filled the silence with getting on with finishing up his take-out order, busy spreading a thick layer of cream cheese on to one of the bagels. She looked up at his question. ‘Harcourt?’
‘Aye.’
She hunched her shoulders. ‘Where else am I gonna go? I got a job and it’s OK, I guess. It’s not like I go home at night all stressed out or anything. I’m bored… but at least I’m not stressed.’
‘But you don’t intend to work in here forever, right? You’ve got a plan, a dream… a goal, so to speak?’
‘Jeeez! I’m, like, seventeen. I don’t even know what I’m gonna cook up for dinner tonight, let alone know where I wanna be when I’m your age.’
‘My age?’
She nodded. ‘You’re what? Like, twenty-five, twenty-six or something?’
Liam stifled an urge to gasp. Twenty-five? I’m sixteen! Sixteen!! But then he reminded himself he wasn’t any particular age. Not really. His false memory calmly tried to reassure him he was a sixteen-year-old boy from Cork, Ireland. But that was all meaningless claptrap now. Someone else’s fiction.
Kaydee-Lee looked up from her work, studied his troubled face. ‘Oh my God, did I just say something wrong?’
‘No… I just, I’m not that old.’
‘Oh God, you don’t have some kinda awful ageing sickness or something? Did I just put my foot in my mouth?’
Liam laughed. ‘No, don’t worry.’ He ruffled the scruffy mop of hair on his head. ‘It’s my grey bit of hair. Some people think I’m older than I am.’ He offered her a disarming smirk: an assurance that he hadn’t taken offence, that she hadn’t clumsily blundered on to uncomfortable ground.
‘Ahh, don’t you worry now. I’ve always had this little bit of grey. Me lucky silver streak, so it is.’