Crossover (4 page)

Hesitated.

Here goes nothing, she
thought.

She
brought the stick crashing down on the snare drum. The
crack
echoed out across
the auditorium. She was relieved to discover that although the drum
was stuffed with her escape equipment, this wasn't evident from the
sound.

Ash slammed the stick
into the high hat twice before hitting the snare again. Then she
tried some quiet taps on the floor tom before hitting the splash
cymbal with all her strength.

The audience remained
in a state of silent hypnosis.

They're buying it, Ash
thought.

She
went all out, bashing the sticks against every drum and every
cymbal. With her foot, she stomped on the kick drum pedal to make
what she hoped sounded a bit like a heart beat. None of the strikes
seemed to fit with any of the others. She hoped this would be
mistaken for complex rhythm, rather than
no
rhythm.

Abruptly she switched
from using the whole kit to using just one drum – the smallest tom,
which she bashed at as quickly and loudly as she could. After
almost a whole minute, she swapped back, tapping all the other
drums and cymbals quietly and unevenly.

When it felt like seven
of the allotted eight minutes had passed, she started getting
louder. She struck the hat louder and louder, more and more
quickly. Sweat poured down her face. She tried hitting the drums
near the edges of their skins, and then moved back to the middle.
When it felt like she couldn't strike them any harder or faster,
she stopped.

The last echoes died
away, and the auditorium was silent.

Ash put the sticks
down.

Someone clapped.
Someone else joined in.

The claps coalesced
into applause. Ash realised she was still sitting down. She rose
and bowed stiffly. The clapping became louder. Someone
whistled.

Ash walked off the
stage in a daze. In the wings, the stagehand was holding the door
open for her. A distinguished-looking man with a high widow's peak
and short, wavy hair stood next to him, holding a violin.

'Very well done
indeed,' he said, in a way that suggested he thought she would need
the encouragement.

Ash nodded modestly and
slipped back out in the corridor. The door slammed shut.

He seemed like a nice
guy. She almost felt bad about her plan to steal his violin.

* * *

As Ash had hoped, the
green room was deserted. Tognetti was the last act, so there were
no other musicians warming up.

She took the phone out
of her pocket, checked that the call to Benjamin was still
connected, and pressed it to her ear.

'Benjamin,' she said.
'I'm inside the green room.'

'That was the most
ridiculous thing I've ever heard,' he said. 'If you die before I
do, I'm going to make sure someone brings a drum kit to your
funeral and replicates that piece, note for note.'

Ash smirked. 'I think
the other mourners would be less than impressed. But hey, it's your
funeral.'

'Were
you even listening? I said it was
your
funeral.'

'Figure of speech.'
Idly, Ash wondered if there would be any other mourners to upset.
Her father, her school librarian and Hammond Buckland would
probably die before she did. Benjamin might be the only
attendee.

'Anyway, shut up,' she
said. 'I'm trying to concentrate.'

She scanned the variety
of black instrument cases, some hard, some soft, scattered around
the room like the shadows of the instruments they were designed to
carry. They were shaped like guitars, double basses, tubas,
xylophones – and violins.

It didn't take her long
to spot the case she was looking for. She had studied it at length
the last time she slipped backstage at one of Tognetti's
performances.

'Found it,' she told
Benjamin.

'Work fast. Six minutes
until he comes back.'

Tognetti's violin was
two centuries old and worth $11 million. It was never separated
from him by more than a metre – when he boarded a plane, he
wouldn't even put it in the overhead locker, and kept it on his lap
instead.

But whenever he was on
stage, he was more than a metre away from his case.

Ash opened the case and
tipped some handwritten sheet music and a spare block of rosin onto
the floor. Then she took it over to the giant nylon bag which had
held her kick drum.

When she unzipped the
bag, she found a steel box, roughly forty centimetres tall with a
lid which was about eighty centimetres square. A violin case,
exactly like Tognetti's, was fixed to the top of it at a slight
angle.

She put the real violin
case into her bag and closed it. Then she placed the box on the
floor where the real case had been. She opened the fake case on
top, put the rosin and sheet music inside, and closed it again.

She stepped back to
examine her handiwork. When Tognetti entered the green room, he
would see that someone had placed his violin case on top of a box.
He would open it, see his rosin and sheet music, and put the $11
million dollar violin inside. Then he would close the lid and lock
the case.

When he engaged the
lock, the bottom of the fake case would open, dropping the violin
through the hole Benjamin had cut into the lid of the steel box.
When he picked up the fake case, it would detach itself from the
box, closing both the hole in the box and the underside of the
case. Then Tognetti would leave, carrying the weighted but empty
case under his arm, and leaving the expensive violin in Benjamin's
box where Ash could later fetch it.

There were several ways
the plan could go wrong. The box was padded, so Tognetti was
unlikely to hear the violin falling, but he might hear the
mechanism which opened the bottom of the case. Or he could attempt
to move the fake case before he opened it. Or he could decide that
he wanted his sheet music after all, and open the case to find that
the violin was gone.

But this was the best
plan Ash had been able to come up with. And Benjamin's box
functioned so beautifully that she was feeling very confident.

'Hey Ash,' Benjamin
said. 'If something really bad happened, and there was nothing you
could do about it, would you want to know?'

'Yes,' Ash said
immediately. 'Why?'

'Really?' Benjamin
sounded surprised. 'I wouldn't. Ignorance is bliss, I say.'

'What's happened? Tell
me.'

'You know that party at
the building next door? It turns out to be the State Police
Christmas Party. Half the cops in the city are within two hundred
metres of you right now.'

Ash's stomach lurched.
'Well,' she said. 'Nothing we can do about that.'

'Exactly. That's why I
thought you might not want to know.'

'Doesn't matter,' Ash
said. 'I'm all done here.'

She turned to walk
toward the green room door–

And bumped into
somebody.

Ash squeaked and
stumbled backwards, dropping the phone. It felt like she'd hit a
stone wall. The boy – a pale, dark-haired youth of about sixteen –
didn't react to the impact.

'Sorry!' Ash stammered,
wondering how he'd gotten so close without her hearing him. 'Didn't
see you there.'

The boy said nothing.
His blue eyes were wide with horror, fixed on something behind
Ash.

She looked over her
shoulder, and saw nothing but instrument cases.

'Are you okay?' she
asked, turning back. 'I hope I didn't – oh my God!'

The boy had no legs.
But he wasn't in a wheelchair. His upper body hovered in the centre
of the green room, as though he were simply invisible below the
waist.

'Wha...' Ash began.
'What... how...'

As she watched, the
boy's legs materialised beneath him. Slowly. Ash felt like she was
trapped in a photograph as it touched the developing fluid.

The boy still hadn't
moved. Ash suddenly got the impression the he was frozen, a
hologram, part of some elaborate security system.

'Ash!' The phone was
still on the floor, but she could still hear his panicked voice.
'What's going on?'

'I have no idea,' she
whispered. 'There's a–'

'Argh!' The boy's
scream was brief and anguished. Ash got the sense that she was
hearing only the second half of it. Suddenly mobile, he turned to
face her. 'Who are you?' he demanded. His voice was cold and
deep.

Ash
boggled at him. 'Who am
I?
'

'Where am I? What is
this place? What–' The boy's eyes fixed on hers. 'What year is
this?'

Ash raised her hands,
as though he had pointed a gun at her. 'Listen,' she said. 'I don't
know if this is some kind of joke–'

'It worked,' the boy
whispered. 'I don't believe it.'

'How did you get here?'
Ash snatched up her phone. 'What's going on?'

'I...' The boy
hesitated. He looked around the room, wild-eyed, before turning
back to Ash. 'I'm from the future. And I need your help.'

There was a pause.

'I
stand corrected,' Benjamin said, his voice tinny in the phone's
speakers. '
That
is
the most ridiculous thing I've heard all day.'

'You're from the
future,' Ash repeated.

'I need to talk to
someone in charge,' the boy said. 'There's not much time. No!' He
hesitated. 'Wait. There's lots of time. There's decades. I'm in the
past.'

'The past? Decades? In
charge of what?' Ash was aware that she sounded ridiculous, but she
was faced with a ridiculous situation. Surely the boy was insane –
but how had he gotten here? He had appeared right in front of her
eyes.

'In charge of
radioactive materials,' the boy said. 'Rare ones. If you don't know
who that is, perhaps you can tell me–'

'I can tell you you'll
get arrested by the TRA if you ask anyone in charge of anything
about radioactive materials,' Ash said. 'Who are you?'

'What's the TRA?'

Ash was a very, very
good liar, and she could usually tell when someone else was. The
boy looked completely honest. But if he hadn't heard of Terrorism
Risk Assessment, then where had he come from?

The green room door
creaked open. Tognetti stepped in, holding a bow in one hand and
the $11 million violin in the other.

He smiled at Ash.
'Hello again.'

Ash's heart kicked in
her chest. 'Hi – how was the performance.'

'Fine, fine.' He looked
at the boy. 'Who's this?'

I wish I knew, Ash
thought.

'Are you in charge
here?' the boy demanded.

'Mr Tognetti, this is
Quentin James,' Ash said quickly. 'He's my driver. I'm afraid we
really must get going.'

The boy frowned at her.
'Where are we going?'

'Straight to the hotel
tonight, thank you,' Ash said, herding him out the door. 'Lovely to
meet you, Mr Tognetti.'

'Wait.' The boy stepped
around her and walked over to the far side of the room. Ash was
horrified to see him stop right next to the fake violin case, and
pick up a small canister with a pointed nozzle mounted on one
end.

Tognetti frowned.
'What's that?'

'My cutting torch,' the
boy said.

Tognetti's eyes went
back to the fake case.

'Gotta go,' Ash said.
She grabbed the boy's arm – which felt like an iron bar wrapped in
thin silicone – and dragged him out the green room door. It fell
closed behind them.

'Why do you have a
cutting torch?' she hissed.

'I had it with me when
I was captured,' the boy said, frowning. 'Byre must have left it on
me when she sent me through time. I don't know why she would do
that – or why it appeared all the way over on the other side of the
room.'

Stagehands, musicians
and audience members bustled back and forth through the corridor,
chattering excitedly. Their voices bounced off the high ceiling,
magnifying the din. Ash wasn't sure what was causing the commotion,
but she figured she could use it to escape.

'Okay,' she told the
boy. 'Wait here. I'll find someone to talk about radioactive
materials with you.'

To her relief, he
nodded. She threaded through the crowd, looking for a way out. She
had planned to leave by the main exit, but the rest of the audience
was going that way, and they might slow her down, particularly if
they recognised her. Instead, she headed for the rear loading
dock.

As she passed another
television screen, something caught her eye. A metal table stood on
the stage, adorned with nylon straps, designed to restrain someone.
The wood beneath it was cracked, as though the table had been
dropped from a few metres up.

I had it with me when
I was captured. I don't know why it appeared on the other side of
the room.

Ash stared at the
screen, transfixed. Was it possible that the boy really had
travelled through time, and that some nearby objects had made the
journey with him?

And that one of them
had appeared on the stage after Tognetti left, starting a
panic?

She turned back toward
the loading dock–

And saw a group of
police officers swarming up the corridor. Officers from the party
next door. They wore civilian clothes – suits and ties – but they
had badges attached to their belts and guns holstered under their
jackets.

She put the phone to
her ear. 'Benjamin,' she said. 'We have several very serious
problems.'

* * *

'Talk to me,' Benjamin
said.

Ash pushed through the
crowd, back toward the green room. The pale boy was still hovering
beside the door. She ducked so as he wouldn't see her in the
throng.