TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (18 page)

‘Cooper,’ he answered.
‘Agent Niles Cooper.’

‘Cooper, I am Faith. I believe that we
are able to assist each other.’

A deal. She’s proposing a
deal.

‘You want us to let you out of
here?’

‘Affirmative. I can lead you directly
to them. I have data on their likely movements.’

‘And, if you find them, then
what?’

‘I will kill them.’

‘What about their –’ he decided to
use her term – ‘
displacement machine
?’

‘It must be destroyed.’

‘No, we’d want that intact. I
can’t agree to those –’

‘Negative. Allowing you to possess a
fully functioning displacement device is unacceptable. That would be an even greater
contamination threat. You will not be permitted that.’

‘Then I’m afraid there’s
no deal, Faith.’

Her eyes closed and her eyelids began to
flutter. She started to pant and flex again, an unsettling sight like a child sucking in
air and preparing to throw an almighty tantrum. But then she stopped. ‘I am able
to offer you an alternative, Cooper.’

‘What?’

‘My silicon mind, completely
intact.’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘The computer in
your head? Just like the other one … in your dead friend?’

‘Correct. I will, of course, delete
all files associated with time displacement, but you would be left with the computer
architecture entirely intact.’

‘Jesus,’ whispered Mallard.
‘That’s a fifty-year jump in computer technology!’

Cooper nodded slowly.
‘Yes … yes, it is.’

‘Do we have an agreement?’ asked
Faith.

He tapped his chin again. He could feel
those hairs on the back of his neck once more, his scalp prickling.

‘All right. I think we have the basis
of an agreement.’

13 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton,
Massachusetts

It was mid-afternoon the next day when the
debate in her head finally came to an end and she got up off her bed. Sal was still
snoring.

Becks heard her stir, looked up from where
she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. ‘Where are you going, Maddy?’

‘Out,’ she replied softly.

‘Are you going to visit your
family?’

No point lying to her.
‘Yes.’

‘The others are worried about you
doing this.’

‘I need to go.’

She and Becks had had this conversation
before. Back when the archway was a pile of rubble in the bottom of a bomb crater,
barely holding itself together. She’d nearly walked out on Becks and the others
then. She’d planned to somehow make her way back to Boston in the vain hope of
finding an alternate version of her parents, perhaps even a version of herself. It had
been a moment of weakness. A moment when she’d been prepared to leave her friends
to deal with things on their own.

Maddy doubted Becks had a memory of that
particular conversation, of walking out, abandoning her in the archway. At the moment
she wasn’t sure what memories Becks had back in that skull of hers. Bob had been
filling her mind up with as
much as he could over the last couple of
days, a slow process over their nearfield wireless link. Whatever memories she had
on-board now would be Bob’s, not her’s anyway. Becks’s full mind
remained on an external hard drive.

‘Don’t wake Sal. If she does
wake and asks where I am … tell her I’ve gone to get some supplies in or
something.’

‘Yes, Maddy. Be careful, Maddy,’
she added almost as an afterthought.

Half an hour later she was on a Greyhound
bus heading towards Arlington. Maddy realized she’d forgotten how the lines were
organized, which ones went where. And yet once upon a time she must have taken them
everywhere: to school, back home, into the city to meet friends from high school.

I’m nineteen and I’m already
going freakin’ senile. How come I can’t remember which buses I used to
take?
She wondered whether a new bus service had taken over here, and perhaps
that was why none of the numbers or routes made sense to her.

The bus passed a high school and she looked
out on a football field; several dozen young men lined up in their tracksuits, donning
shoulder pads and helmets, preparing to practise a few set pieces. Some younger boys
kicking a soccer ball around on another field. Maddy realized she couldn’t even
remember the
name
of her high school. Not even the name. Nor the names of any
of her teachers. Or their faces. God … nor could she even recall any of her
friends
.

I had some friends, right? At least one
friend … surely?

But none came to mind. Not a single one. She
felt the first stirring of panic set in.

I really am losing my mind!

She could guess what this was – this was
that damned archway field, the time bubble. Those freakin’ particles killing her
mind, one brain cell at a time. She’d just now joked about going senile,
but maybe that was just it. Sitting in that brick dungeon all these
months was gradually, memory by memory, wiping her mind clean.

She was suddenly grateful to be out of there
– OK, they were on the run, but at least they were free from the ever-present corrosive
effect of that technology. And grateful, so grateful that she still had enough of her
mind and memories left intact to at least find her way home.

The Greyhound dropped her off outside a
small 7-Eleven store. She smiled. Her mind remembered
that
all right. The first
familiar sight so far, it was the only convenience store around for miles. The rest of
this suburb was endless loops of road flanked on either side by well-tended lawns and
picket fences, long paved and brown asphalt driveways leading up to grand-looking
white-collar homes.

She passed the store, and second on her
right Silverdale Crescent. Lined with mature maple trees, their leaves beginning to turn
golden for the autumn, not quite ready to fall. She stepped aside for a couple of boys
riding their bikes along the pavement, talking to each other about an upcoming game
console called the Xbox, that was due to be released this Thanksgiving.

Maddy felt an overpowering urge to run the
last hundred yards home. This was
her
street, the place where all of her
childhood years had been spent. This was where her life had once made sense, when it was
simple and stress free. Decisions no more demanding than which cartoon channel to watch,
which flavour ice cream to eat.

Across the road a bed of flowers, Sweet
Carolines, glowed in shafts of warm sunlight, tidy rows of purples and creamy pinks. A
chestnut-coloured Labrador on a long leash followed an old lady wearing gardening gloves
and holding a shopping list in one hand.

She heard the soft boom of rock music and a
Ford Zodiac pulled up a long driveway. It was painted with skulls and flaming guitars. A
young lad with long hair got out, a guitar case over his shoulder and a small practice
amp in one hand.

Band rehearsal.

She smiled. Even only days after 9/11, life
was still going on for everyone. The bad guys hadn’t won. America hadn’t
ground to a halt. Kids were still taking their guitars and doing band practice.

And
God
, it felt so good to be
coming home. Maddy tried to remember the last time she’d been back home to see Mom
and Dad. Because since she’d left home to work for that software games company,
she’d been living in …

Once again her mind was letting her
down.

‘Oh, come on, girl,’ she chided
herself. She’d been living … where? … 
Where?

She stopped. Nothing was coming. She
couldn’t even remember where in New York she’d been staying. Or was it New
Jersey? And yet she’d been on a damned plane when Foster had saved her. Where the
hell was she going? Was she going home for a visit? It must’ve been. Home for
Thanksgiving or Easter, or Christmas or something. But home from
where
exactly?

Her confusion was brushed to one side as she
caught a glimpse of the family house up ahead. Home. Unmistakably home. There it was,
unchanged in all these years. A large family home built in a mock antebellum style.
Covered porch along the front, shingle tiles and white painted supports.

She turned up the empty drive. Dad was
probably still at work and Mom always parked her car in the carport.

Did she actually do that? Did she? Was that
a memory?

Maddy had the distinct impression
she’d just made that bit
up, like someone joining the dots on a
child’s puzzle. Filling in gaps with whatever seemed to fit. Just to hurry up and
finish the picture off – damned if it was a hundred per cent right or not.

She noticed the bedroom window above the
carport was open and a gentle warm afternoon breeze was teasing a pink curtain in and
out. Her bedroom. Now that she was certain of. The front room above the carport, that
was hers all right.

But a
pink
curtain?

I never liked pink … did
I?

She shrugged. She’d still been a bit
girly at age nine. Torn between being like all the other girls or being a tomboy. Maybe
the pink curtain was a phase in her younger life she’d chosen to blot out, to not
remember. A phase where she’d made a half-hearted attempt to appear feminine.
Beyond that curtain, inside the room, she was pretty sure it was all Star Wars action
figures and comic books, Warhammer figurines and models of tanks and guns.

The window being open meant one thing.
I
must be at home.
Maddy stopped before the whitewashed steps leading up to the
front door.

I’m at home. I’m in this
house somewhere. Me. I’m home from school.
Of course she was. It was
after three.

It’s me in there. Me, aged
nine.

She felt an overpowering rush of emotion. It
was going to be so strange meeting herself. Like looking in a peculiar mirror that could
filter away years, allow her to look back through ten years of time and see herself with
braces still welded to her teeth and that always impossible hair of hers dragged into
submission by a brush and pulled tightly into two bobbing Goldilocks ponytails.

She was trembling. It was going to be
impossibly weird.

‘And what the hell do I say?’
she muttered.

She took the steps up to the porch slowly.
There was the garden gnome with a chainsaw. Her idea of a joke present for Mom, who just
hated gardening and could quite happily have taken a chainsaw to all the delicately
trimmed bushes up and down Silverdale Crescent. And there, across the porch, was the
rocking-chair. She smiled at the memory of the thing. Dad’s favourite
chair … where he spent summer evenings smoking a long clay pipe and rocking
back and forth.

Again. She had the distinct impression that
she was
inking in details
, filling in gaps in her mind with memories that
seemed appropriate, most likely. She was creating mental images to fill her blank
memory. Worse still, she suddenly realized, she was borrowing images, scenes, from old
movies, from old TV shows. Why the hell was she seeing Dad with long white whiskers?
Wearing worn old dungarees and a battered straw hat?

‘That’s not
right … that’s
The Waltons
,’ she whispered. It had been
on TV back in the motel room: some old rerun of
The Waltons
on cable. And now
her mind was taking bits of that old show and superimposing it on her scant childhood
memories. Filling in. Filling in.

The front door. Now,
dammit
, she
remembered this for sure. Reassuring, a genuine memory this time. Mint green with that
brass knocker. How many times had she closed that behind her or watched her mother
fumble with shopping bags to find her keys to open it?

She reached for the knocker and hesitated.
What the crud was she going to say to Mom? How was she going to explain who she was?

It was going to be difficult. Mom was in
there somewhere, probably glued to the TV on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, still
watching the news on Fox. Perhaps still crying for her poor older sister who’d
lost a wonderful son in that pile of
still-smouldering rubble. And
Maddy could imagine herself up in her bedroom painting her Warhammer figures. Keeping
her mind occupied. Not wanting to think about the fact that Julian was gone for good.
Not wanting to pester Mom with difficult questions right now.

This was going to be awkward.

She grabbed the knocker and tapped it firmly
against the door.

Hi, Mom. Can you guess who I
am?

No, that wouldn’t do.

Hi. I have something really important to
tell you … Can I come in?

No. That made her sound like a goddamn
Jehovah’s Witness.

Mom, it’s me … Maddy.
I’ve come from nine years in the future.

She heard footsteps inside. The squeak of
trainers on parquet floor, then the rattle and clack of the latch and the door
opened.

‘Yeah?’

A girl. About the age she was expecting,
blonde. She was wearing a Spice Girls T-shirt and pink jeans with a glitter pattern down
one leg and floral pumps.

God! Is that really me!? It can’t
be!

‘Yeah?’ said the girl again with
an impatient shrug. ‘Help you?’

Maddy was tongue-tied.
‘I … uh …’

‘You want to speak to my
mom?’

Maddy nodded mutely.

‘Mom!’ called out the girl.
‘It’s for you-hoo!’

‘Who is it?’ A woman’s
voice from somewhere in the back.

The girl made a wearisome face. ‘Mom
says … who is it?’

Maddy felt her resolve beginning to fail
her. She wanted to mumble something like
I guess I got the wrong house, sorry about
that
, turn around and walk away. But she couldn’t walk away. Not now. She
was past that point, over it. She was here, she’d
already
knocked and waited and now the door was open and she was just seconds away from speaking
to Mom. Too late to run. She was here now and she really needed Mom and Dad’s
help. It was now or never.