Maddy looked at Sal. She shook her head silently.
Right… they’ll kill us.
‘We know you are in this building. There is no way out.’
Maddy felt her chest heaving, feeling tight, getting light-headed with growing panic. She could see Sal was no better, trembling like a yard dog on a winter’s morning.
Who are they?
‘Madelaine Carter! Saleena Vikram!’ a deep voice boomed. ‘Please reveal yourselves!’
The girls exchanged a round-eyed glance.
Who sent them?
Without any further verbal warning, they moved as one, all three of them, striding forward into the store, each picking a different aisle of goods to walk down. Maddy and Sal dropped down to their hands and knees.
‘Which way?’ mouthed Sal.
Maddy looked around. They were in an aisle stocked with swivel displays of CDs and DVDs or something like that. Nowhere for them to hide, nothing to crouch beneath. She looked down the far end of their lane. There was a service counter with a till and behind it a door that looked like it led to either a stockroom or some sort of staff restroom. She shuffled along the floor on her hands and knees towards the counter, Sal following her.
In the very next aisle to theirs she could hear the slap of heavy bare feet on lino: one of the male support units. Maddy picked up the pace, shuffling along as quickly and as quietly as she could. Her ragged breath was huffing out too loudly like some faltering fairground steam engine… she only hoped the growing deep rumble of the approaching jet plane was covering it up.
The aeroplane? Not the 9/11 one? Surely this was history that had been altered enough?
They were nearly at the end; the swivel racks of cases sporting famous gurning gladiators had given way to racks of plastic toys: swords, spears, tridents. She was beginning to believe they might just be able to sneak out of their aisle and hop round the back of the counter before one of the support units turned into this aisle and spotted them when she caught the strong scent of stale, sweating meat. She looked up from her dirty hands splayed on the floor and saw two equally dirty bare feet in front of her.
Maddy’s gaze rose as her heart sank, drifting up a pair of milk-white shins, smooth, featureless knees on to the frayed, dangling fringe of some old orange hiker’s anorak. It reeked of stale urine and mouldering tobacco. Maddy could only imagine the fate of the hapless vagrant who’d owned it.
‘Please stay where you are, Madelaine Carter.’ A soft, not unpleasant feminine voice.
Maddy’s eyes rested on a familiar, impassive face; a face that could have been convincingly introduced to her as Becks’s slightly older twin under different circumstances.
‘Look, p-please…’ she whispered, ‘we-we’re just…’
Faith cocked her head, her grey eyes bright with intelligent curiosity. She seemed to admire what she saw cringing at her feet.
‘ It is a pity,’ she said softly, a hint of regret on her lips. Then she looked up for the others over the aisle. ‘Abel! Damien!’ her voice barked coldly. ‘I have located the targets. Request authorization to terminate them.’
Behind them Maddy heard the slap of bare feet. She turned and saw the two male support units standing at the other end of the aisle.
The one wearing shorts hesitated, its thick brow furrowed with confusion at the increasing volume of that deep rumble. It turned to look around, trying to make some sense of the approaching noise.
Maddy saw the look on Sal’s face.
That’s not the aeroplane…
CHAPTER 31
2001, New York
They had no more than a second, perhaps two, to realize what could happen to them. Their eyes met in mutual understanding. A time wave. A big one. Not good.
Truth was there was no knowing what reality any wave was going to leave behind. More specifically, there was no knowing what kind of mass, if any, was going to end up wanting to occupy the very same space that they were both occupying.
In the archway with the field switched on they were entirely protected from any mass-intersections brought about by a reality shift. However, outside of the field it was a lottery. A time wave could leave a person merged, fused, with anything that was attempting to occupy the very same space. The likelihood of that varied, of course. On an open, rolling field in the middle of some remote rural county… it was far less likely. But here, inside a cluttered gift shop looking out on to the beating heart of one of the busiest cities in the world?
Where humankind congregated most densely, for example a place like this — New York — that’s where reality really had the most fun and games reinventing itself. Whatever course history had taken, this bay on the east coast of America, a place that was once an Indian settlement, then a colonial outpost, then a thriving trading port and finally a metropolis — this place was always likely to produce a densely populated alternative version of itself in the wake of a full-blown time wave. And the last place they ought to be when a wave hit was here, inside a building of all places.
‘Sal, we need to…’ was all Maddy had time to utter before the wave was upon them.
It went dark as if the sun had gone out. Unlike Sal, it was Maddy’s first time directly experiencing the effect of swimming in fluid reality as it rippled past her, wrapped round her, presenting fleeting images of infinite possibilities.
She screamed. It came out of her mouth sounding like a deep, time-dilated moan, like the protracted, mournful song of some distant whale carried across a hundred miles of water.
Her ears were filled with her own weird voice and a roar like that of a tornado; not the roar of wind, though, but a billion other human voices, female and male, young and old, born and unborn; conscious entities crying in hellish torment and all sharing the same fleeting few seconds of consciousness. A shared awareness of lives stolen away from them, possible lives that could have been, but now would never be lived; of children, babies, loved ones who would never have a chance to exist. It was a billion screams like her own, stretched out and deep and full of grief, anger and fear. If Hell had a voice… it was this awful, protracted, roaring wail of tortured souls.
Then it snapped off. Gone. The dark, swirling tornado of liquid reality was suddenly a placid, milky whiteness. Featureless. Utterly blank.
Oh God.
She could see her hand in front of her face, but that was all.
Oh God, I’m stuck in chaos spa ‘ Maddy? ’ Sal’s voice, the ghost of a whisper.
She saw a grey shape beside her. Faint. Sal.
‘Sal?’ She became aware of other gentle noises all around her: a woodpecker’s jackhammer tap far above them. The echoing cry of a coot? The fidgeting life of a deep, undisturbed wood; the gentle stir of leaves, the creak of swaying branches.
We’re in some sort of forest.
‘Maddy?’ Sal again. ‘ Where are we? ’
She realized the milky white was nothing but a thick morning mist, cold, heavy and damp against her skin, hanging in dense pools. Above them she could see it was thinner, and saw the pencil-line grey streaks of criss-crossing branches swaying gently.
She reached out, grabbed Sal’s hand and pulled her towards her.
A finger to her lips. Shhhh!
Sal nodded. Wherever they were, they were not alone.
They heard the rustle of movement very close. Instinctively Maddy squatted down, crouching lower into the thick, pooling mist around them. She noticed the broad leaves of a large fern swaying gently beside her and ducked down beneath its feathered leaves, pulling Sal down with her.
‘Call in your identification and condition!’ a deep voice boomed out of the mist.
‘Alpha-six. Faith. I am undamaged.’ The female support unit.
‘Alpha-four. I am also unharmed.’