‘Good morning,’ said Maddy.
Liam nodded. He seemed a lot brighter since returning from the Whitechapel jump less than a week ago. ‘Aye, looks like it’ll be nice today.’
She had an enamel mug of coffee for him. Handed it to him and took up a place on the doorstep beside him. ‘I like that we’re not endlessly recycling in a two-day loop,’ she said. ‘Things change. That’s kinda nice.’
‘You sure we don’t need to set up a field?’
‘Yup. We’re quite safe here. No one’s looking for time travellers.’ She laughed. ‘No one in this time has even thought about time travel, I’d say. I mean… wasn’t it that writer guy, H. G. Wells, who first thought up the idea of time travel?’
Liam shrugged. ‘I’m sure somebody must’ve thought of the idea before he did. It must be the oldest fanciful notion ever; that it might be fun to travel backwards or forwards through time.’
‘Yeah, well.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘He was the first one to write a fiction book about it.’
‘Mark Twain.’
‘What?’
‘Mark Twain wrote a book about time travel. I’m sure he did. A Yankee Fella in King Arthur’s Court I think it was called. Or something like that.’
Maddy hunched her shoulders. ‘Oh well, whatever. My point is we don’t have to worry quite so much about staying under the radar here. Nor do we have to worry about time waves. None of us are real. None of us belong in this timeline, so it really doesn’t matter.’
He looked at her. ‘You’re OK, are you? Not… uh, not upset about — ’
‘About not being the real Maddy Carter from Boston?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not really. Not any more. I think I quite like the feeling of freedom. I quite like not missing my mom and dad and my cousin Julian. Somebody made all those people up. Put painful memories of them into my head. I’m damned if I’m going to spend another second grieving for figments of someone’s imagination. Stuff ’em.’
Liam laughed. ‘Aye, that does seem a bit daft.’
‘I am who I am. Right now, in this moment of time, this is who I am. And that’s all.’ She looked sideways at him and smiled. ‘Nice thought that, isn’t it? It’s liberating.’
‘Aye.’
They heard a steam whistle echoing up from the far end of Farringdon Street where the docks and the River Thames were. Barges came in there and loaded and emptied round the clock. A never-ending cycle of trade and commerce.
‘On the other hand, Sal’s not coping so well, I don’t think,’ said Liam finally.
Maddy nodded. ‘You and I should keep an eye on her. After all, I suppose we literally really are family now.’
‘Uh?’
She looked at him. ‘I might just be your sister, Liam.’
‘ What? ’
‘Think about it… we could’ve been grown together as a batch.’ She laughed at her own words. Then curled her lip at a thought. ‘God, I really hope we didn’t share a grow-tube with you. That would be kinda gross.’
‘Charmed.’
They sipped their coffees, blowing clouds of condensation out of their mugs into the chilly morning air.
‘What about you, Liam? You all right?’
‘About being a meat robot?’ He grinned that devil-may-care lopsided smile. She wondered if that stupid smile of his was what kept him sane, made his good nature bulletproof. ‘Aye, I’m not too bothered. So, at least I know now why it is I can cope with all that time travelling and not age so much as a normal person. It makes a bit more sense now.’
She hadn’t told him about the ageing thing. She’d planned to, but never quite got round to it. And yet… it seemed he knew all about that.
‘Don’t look so shocked, Maddy. I’m not completely stupid. I worked out this is how I became Foster. Or I should say, how I become like Foster. I presume Foster was a meat-product like us. Right?’
She nodded.
‘Travelling is ageing me.’ He flicked the tuft of grey hair above his right ear. ‘And I’m not blind. I noticed that.’ He pulled at the skin around his eyes. The faintest of crow’s feet there. ‘And don’t think I didn’t notice this either.’ He cocked his head casually. ‘So? I’m getting a little older. Happens to all of us eventually, doesn’t it?’
She could have kissed him for being so resolutely… Liam. So brave.
So strong. So flippant.
‘You know, Mads, I was thinking about this last night. I presume I must be older now. You know? Physically? No longer just a sixteen-year-old slice of a lad, eh?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Older than you, Mads?’
‘I don’t know. It’s possible. I guess so. What’s your point?’
He grinned. ‘Well now, if I’m the oldest, does that not mean that makes me the boss around here, then?’
She snorted coffee from her nose. There was laughter somewhere in that. ‘In your freakin’ dreams, Mr O’Connor.’
Alex ScarrowEpilogue
2069, W.G. Systems Research Campus, Pinedale, Wyoming
Roald Waldstein stared out of the broad panoramic window of his boardroom. The lemon-tinted sky over the steep slopes promised another downpour of acid rain, further stripping the last vestiges of green from the dying Douglas firs and the hilly landscape.
His forehead pressed against the plate glass, his hands leaving fingerprint smudges. He felt emotionally void. Utterly spent. The last three days of his life had been spent in a desperate panic to get those embryos speed-grown and ready. He was far too old for this damned level of stress. He’d begun to hope it was all long behind him. That his project, the agency, was something he could forget about.
Fourteen years ago.
Fourteen years ago almost to this day it happened. Almost an anniversary. The day Joseph Olivera had turned on him and demanded to know what Pandora was all about.
Back then Waldstein had begun to look on the young man almost as a son. A son to replace his boy Gabriel. (So long ago now that he’d lost little Gabriel and his wife Eleanor. A simple vehicle accident. If his wife had done just one of a thousand inconsequential little things differently that morning, she and Gabriel would still be alive and with him today.) But Olivera had pushed and pushed and pushed, asking questions Waldstein couldn’t possibly answer and then coming to his own paranoid conclusions all by himself.
He’d never had Frasier Griggs killed. The poor man had simply been desperately unlucky. Took the wrong route home one night. But Joseph had been convinced, hadn’t he? And he wanted to know… wanted to know why Waldstein needed to steer history this way.
Why? Why do you want mankind to destroy itself, Mr Waldstein?
If only he could tell the poor young man. But Olivera had gone and panicked. Olivera had garbled something about Griggs being killed because he’d found out too much.
That day back in 2055, poor young Joseph Olivera had convinced himself that Waldstein was going to have him killed. Nothing could have been further from his mind. He wanted Joseph out of that lab, away from the instrumentation panels before he did anything stupid. But Joseph had panicked and hurled himself into an open portal without any preparation, without any density checks. Nothing. God knows what horror happened to him.
Waldstein had cried for him that day.
And then there was the alarming event a few days later. A group of anti-time-travel activists managed to break into a project being secretly developed by the Russians: activists who hero-worshipped Waldstein, regarded him with his anti-time-travel message as some sort of a prophet. It turned out the Russian time-displacement project was a one-way-only technology with a severely limited range. But it was enough for the activists to send a lone assassin back to 2015 in an attempt to kill a young Chinese-American boy called Edward Chan. The young man who would soon write a thesis that would change the world. A thesis Waldstein would read as a young man himself. And there it would be: how time travel could actually be possible.
The assassination attempt was successful and Waldstein had watched from within the safety of his lab’s protection field as the ensuing time wave changed everything outside.