City of Time (2 page)

But it wasn't a dream
, she said to herself.
It wasn't
.

12

Cati turned the slender key in the lock and the stone doors opened.

Before her in semidarkness were hundreds of wooden beds, and in each bed lay a Resister. What light there was came from the ceiling, which was domed and covered with tiny lights like a night sky. The air was warm and still and she could hear gentle breathing sweep the room like a great sigh. She looked at the sleeping faces, recognizing every one--young and old, friend and opponent.

She checked on the Starry once every three or four days. It was part of her job, although no one had ever told her so. Her visits were brief: a glance to make sure all was well and no more. To see so many familiar faces only made her loneliness worse.

She had seen her father wake the Sleepers before. He had simply touched each person's forehead and after a moment the Resister would wake, looking around, a little bewildered until they realized where they were. Whom would she wake first to tell about the geese?
Contessa
, she thought. Contessa, who ran the great kitchens in the Workhouse, who was gentle and wise, a mother to them all. She would know what to do.

Cati walked between the rows until she found her. Contessa was tall, elegantly dressed in a wool gown. Her hands were folded on her breast and even in sleep there was a calm authority to her face. Hesitantly, Cati reached out and touched her forehead. She stood for a

13

moment, feeling the warm skin, waiting for her eyes to open.

Without warning, Contessa started to writhe, her back arching, pain written on her gentle face. "No," she moaned, "stop ..."

Cati jerked her hand back. Contessa's body fell to the bed and she was asleep again, breathing heavily, beads of perspiration on her forehead.

Something was wrong. Cati placed her hand on another Resister's head, a dark-haired young man. He twisted and moaned as if her touch burned him. She snatched her hand away. What was wrong? She should be able to wake them.

Even as she stood there, bewildered and alarmed, Cati could feel sleep start to steal over her, as it did if you remained too long in the Starry. But this sleep felt different. It seemed ...
stale
.

She turned swiftly and walked toward the door. As Watcher, she knew it was not the time to fall asleep. She closed the door behind her and locked it, then ran outside, welcoming the cool night air on her face. Outside it seemed as bright as day. The moon over the Workhouse roof shone with a light that was almost dazzling.

Cati sat down on a rock. Something was terribly wrong. There was only one option. She knew that her father had sometimes called upon special people in the ordinary world. She thought that the shopkeeper, Mary White, was one of them.

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Owen was another. His father had known the Resisters and Owen had joined them to defeat the Harsh. Owen was called the Navigator, for reasons she didn't quite understand, and it was a title that the other Resisters seemed to respect; even, in some cases, to fear.

She would never try to contact him under normal circumstances. But these were not normal circumstances. She jumped up and began to run.

15

Chapter 3

Owen didn't know what woke him. A gust of wind, he thought, or a dog barking? As his eyes got used to the dark he lifted his head from the pillow. Everything in his room was the same as before. His guitar propped against the wall, the model plane hanging from the ceiling, the old chest under the window. Outside the wind stirred the trees.
That was it
, he thought,
the wind
.

He allowed his head to fall back onto the pillow. It was cold and he gathered the blankets around him. He was about to close his eyes when he noticed something odd. He sat up. The air in the middle of the room looked strange. It was shimmering slightly. He rubbed his eyes, but when he looked again, there was still something different. The room looked distorted, as if he was

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looking through old glass. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he sensed a presence in the room, and his heart started to beat faster.

Then he thought he heard a sound, a voice. There
was
somebody else in the room.

Without knowing how, he was out of bed now. The shimmering air was between him and the door. He started to edge around it. He heard the sound again, like a voice, but far, far away, as if in a cave or down a well. The words were mournful and distorted. He tried to squeeze between the wall and the shimmer, but it moved toward him.

He stepped back, stumbling over his trainers, and instinctively put out an arm to save himself. The arm touched the moving air and to his amazement it felt warm and solid, like a living thing.

He jerked his arm away and backed toward the bed. Something was resolving itself in the middle of the room. Suddenly there was a large flicker and he realized that it
was a
person, someone he recognized. He saw a clever girl's face with dark curly hair, then a body wearing a faded uniform with epaulettes on the shoulders. His heart leapt.

"Cati!" he gasped. He could see her lips moving but could not understand the words, which still sounded distant. He grabbed her arm. Immediately he could hear her voice. It had been a year since she had disappeared back into the mists of time, but if he thought

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that she was going to exchange memories with him like two old comrades, he was sadly mistaken.

"Hold on to me, you idiot," she hissed. "It's the only way I can stay stable in your time." Owen grasped her with both hands. The flickering stopped and at last she was standing in his room, flesh and blood. Her expression was serious, but as always, there was a mocking look in her strange green eyes.

"Cati," he said again. "I missed--"

"Never mind that," she said. "There isn't time. I need you to come down to the Workhouse and meet me."

"What's happening? Is it the Harsh?"

"Come to the Workhouse and I'll explain. It's easier to stay stable there." As she spoke, Cati began to flicker again. One moment Owen had hold of solid flesh, the next there was nothing. But just before she faded completely, he saw a cheeky, lopsided grin on her face and thought he heard the words "Missed you too ..."

Hastily, Owen yanked on jeans, a sweatshirt, and a jacket and fumbled for his trainers. Then he opened the door into the hallway. It was flooded with moonlight. From the room at the end he heard his mother's soft breathing. As quietly as possible, he crept along the landing and down the stairs.

Outside it was chilly and he was glad he'd grabbed his jacket. Everything was quiet and still and he could hear the sound his trainers made on the grass. He ran

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lightly across the two fields that separated his house from the river and from the dark shadow of the Workhouse. Its crumbling brickwork and dark empty windows were forbidding enough to send a shiver down his spine. He remembered being inside and seeing cold ghostly shapes moving through the field as the Harsh attacked. He remembered Johnston's men attacking the Workhouse defenses.

When he reached the riverbank he leapt lightly onto the fallen tree. He ran across and jumped down on the other side. It was darker here and hard to see where he was going. He should have brought a torch.

"Cati?" he called out, his voice sounding a bit weak and scared in the darkness. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Cati?" In the darkness something rustled. He ran to the Workhouse door.

"Cati," he hissed, "is that you?" There was a scrabbling sound from inside, like stones and rubble falling. In the darkness he could see the staircase, almost blocked with rocks. Then a small figure dashed around the bend in the stairs, carrying a strangely shaped magno gun in one hand.

She slid to the ground in front of Owen. "I nearly shot your silly head off," she said, starting to brush dust off her trousers.

"I wouldn't have put my head up if I'd known you were armed," he said. "What's going on anyway?"

"I don't know," she said, looking troubled. "If only the Sub-Commandant was here ..."

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But Owen knew that the Sub-Commandant, Cati's father, would never be there again. In the final battle with the Harsh, he had been sucked into the time vortex they called the Puissance and been lost, leaving Cati to inherit his role as Watcher.

Cati turned her face aside and passed her sleeve over her eyes. "You miss him too?" she said, her voice almost pleading.

Owen nodded. The small, stern man had believed in Owen when everyone else seemed against him.

"Anyway," Cati said with an effort, "let's get inside somewhere where we can talk."

"What about the Den?"

"All right," she said. "I should be stable there. Let's go."

They walked along the riverbank, then dived through the bushes into the Den. Inside Owen took the piece of magno from its box and placed it on the table. The blue light illuminated the room.

Cati threw herself wearily down on the old sofa. Owen went to the little box where he kept food and took out tea bags and a packet of biscuits. He had added a camping stove to the Den and Cati watched with interest as he lit it. Owen made the tea and waited until she had drunk half of it before he spoke.

"So what is it, Cati?" he said. "Why did you come looking for me?"

She rubbed a hand wearily over her face and he saw

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the dark shadows under her eyes. "I didn't know what else to do," she said slowly. Then she told him about the flight of geese she had seen and how they had turned into skeletons and then into dust.

"That's like what happened to me!" Owen said. "A girl in school. Freya Revell. I was talking to her and for a moment she turned really old. I mean, her face looked ancient."

"So I didn't dream it!" Cati exclaimed. "It must have happened!"

"I think so," Owen said. "It sounds as if it's something to do with time going weird. You should wake the others. ..."

Cati shook her head. "I tried, but I can't. There's something wrong."

His heart went out to his tired-looking friend. "Maybe I can ...," he began. Cati looked up at him hopefully. He knew that he possessed a strange power to awake those who were in the long sleep, although he didn't understand it.

Cati nodded. "That is why I called you. I don't know if it's wrong or not. There may be consequences. But when I couldn't wake them I didn't know what else to do."

"You did the right thing," Owen said, hoping it was true.

"Do you think you can wake them?" Cati asked eagerly.

"I can try," Owen said, frowning. He had awakened

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people before, but it had felt like an accident. He didn't know if he could wake the whole Starry.

"Come on, then," Cati said, jumping to her feet, her tiredness forgotten.

Owen barely had time to put the cup back on the table before she had hauled him through the gap in the bushes and out onto the path. Within minutes they were standing before a wall of rock. Cati put her hands against it and the outline of a massive door appeared, delicately carved with small, ancient-looking figures and decorations. Cati produced a tiny key and inserted it into an almost invisible lock. Silently the massive door swung open.

Owen stared at the sleeping people. Part of him thought of the Resisters as a dream, but now that he saw them, memories came flooding back.

"Come on," Cati said. "We'll try to wake Dr. Diamond."

Owen nodded approvingly. If anyone would know what to do, it would be the scientist and philosopher. They slipped between the rows of sleeping people and he recognized many of them. Here and there, one of the simple beds was empty. Defending time was a dangerous business.

Finally they came to Dr. Diamond's bed. The scientist's chest rose and fell gently as he slept, and there was an expression on his face somewhere between a smile and a frown, as though he was on the verge of solving a particularly tricky problem that had cropped up in a

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dream. The pockets of his faded blue overalls bulged with mysterious objects.

"Will you try?" Cati whispered. Owen nodded.

He gently placed his hand on the man's forehead. There was a faint tingling in his fingers, but nothing more. He straightened up. A simple touch had worked before, even when he didn't know he had the power. He tried again, with the same result.

"Call him," Cati said. "Call out his name in your mind."

Owen bent forward again. This time he put both hands on the man's forehead and closed his eyes.

"Dr. Diamond," he whispered, then formed the words in his mind.
Dr. Diamond, Dr. Diamond
. Suddenly he felt as if he was sinking in a deep well, going down into the darkness.

"Dr. Diamond," he whispered again. Something was wrong. He felt staleness in the atmosphere, and in the spaces his mind reached out to. He found himself gasping, as if all the air had been sucked out of the Starry. He tried to detach his mind. Then, in the distance, he felt another presence. A warm presence, calling his name, groping its way toward him in the darkness.

Owen had the feeling that another mind gripped his like two strong hands and propelled him upward, out of the darkness and into the light.

"Owen! Owen!" It was Cati's voice. Owen came to and found himself on the floor of the Starry. He sat up and