TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (2 page)

BOOK: TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6)
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‘Come on. We should get on to
school,’ said Chanice. ‘We’ll be late.’

Roald nodded at her to head back up the
alleyway without him. ‘I’ll come in a bit.’

‘Shizzy.’ She clucked her tongue.
‘You gonna get youself another demerit. You want that, Waldo?’

The kids all called him Waldo. As in
Where’s Waldo?
It took the first five minutes of the first day of
school to get lumped with that stroke-of-genius nickname. The thick-framed glasses and
untameable hair had played their part too.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘OK, your
funeral, Mr Professor.’

He watched her turn and go, weaving her way
up the alleyway, stepping round a dustbin that had spilled rubbish across the
cobbles.

‘I’ll be along in a bit,’
he called after her.

‘Your funeral!’ She shrugged
again. ‘Jus’ don’t miss registration,’ she called over her
shoulder. ‘Or Miss Chudasama gonna get medieval on yo’.’

He turned back to watch the skyline. A train
rumbled noisily overhead across the Williamsburg Bridge, heading into Manhattan. They
were saying the trains and subway into Manhattan were still pretty deserted – easy
seats. Everyone figured something else bad was bound to happen again at any moment:
another plane, a bomb perhaps.

His mother said that too. Just like Chanice,
like every New Yorker, like every American, dull-eyed from watching too much TV.

They’ll be back. They’ll be back to finish us all off. Just
you see
.’

It was just him and his mother and the TV
set in their one-bedroom apartment. She had three different part-time jobs and what time
was left after that was spent microwaving TV dinners or pop-tart breakfasts. Outside
work, her life was Montel Williams, Judge Judy or Oprah Winfrey so she didn’t
really ever have much to say that wasn’t already a newspaper headline. To be
honest, she rarely had much to say that was original or vaguely interesting. But she had
this morning. Something that had lodged firmly in his mind.

She’d turned away from her small
black-and-white TV in the kitchen to look at him, mug of coffee in one hand, cigarette
in the other. ‘Roald, don’t you just wish you could go back to Tuesday
morning and tell those poor souls not to come in to work? Or
just … just … go in there and scream
fire
or
something?’

He nodded now. Such a small step in time
that would be. Just two days to save three thousand lives.

He turned away from the East River. Beyond
the railing the low-tide shingle was covered with rubbish: nappies, shopping trolleys
and plastic bags and seagulls picking for titbits among it.

Just two days.

He started to make his way back up the
alleyway, passing a boarded-up archway to his right. Chipboard panels nailed over old
rust-red brickwork, covered with lurid-coloured spray-paint gang tags. One of the panels
had been pulled away, revealing a corrugated metal shutter that was halfway up. He
squatted down to look inside. Curious. His mother was always cautioning him how
curiosity killed the cat
. That or
got into very big trouble with the
local police department if it didn’t mind its own gosh-darn business.

The muted light of day pushed the darkness
within far enough back that he could see the place had been used by drug addicts or
vagrants. Broken glass, discarded needles, a dirty mattress. A forgotten part of
Brooklyn. He wondered when this place last had a proper use, a
purpose
, other
than being some dark hole for an addict to crawl into, or merely a dark empty space
beneath an old bridge.


WAL-DO!

He looked up the alleyway. Chanice, bless
her, was tapping her toe, waiting for him, acting like she was his big sister or
something. She cupped her mouth. ‘You re-e-eally don’t wanna be late again.
Ya mom’ll kill you!
Come on!

‘Coming!’ He got up and turned round
one last time to catch a glimpse of the smudge in the sky over Manhattan.

10 SEPTEMBER 2001, NEW YORK

‘Mr Waldstein? S-sir?’

Roald Waldstein turned to see Dr Joseph
Olivera approaching. The man joined him beside the railing and together they looked out
at the sedate East River.

‘My apologies, Joseph,’ said
Waldstein. ‘I was a million miles away there.’

‘Uh … that’s OK,
sir.’

Waldstein smiled. He liked Olivera. The
technician reminded him of himself at that age: hungry for knowledge, to show the world
what his agile mind contained. Hungry to show the world an incredible theoretical
possibility: that it was possible to step backwards through the membrane of space-time.
As easy as it was to step through the tattered rip in a bedsheet.

‘You know, Joseph, I came across this
place when I was just a boy. When I was eleven.’

‘S-sorry?’

‘This place,’ Waldstein said,
turning to look back at the alley. ‘The archway. No one comes down here.
It’s a backwater.’

‘You … you
lived
round here?’

‘In Brooklyn?’ He nodded.
‘Moved to Chicago after my mother died. I lived with my aunt after.’

Olivera nodded. He knew that much of this
legendary man’s life – Chicago onwards. Waldstein’s
early
life –
the first years alone with his mother – Waldstein had always preferred to keep utterly
private. A media-stream interviewer had once called him a
biographer’s
nightmare
.

‘Perfect location this,’ Waldstein
said. ‘I never ever forgot about it. This time and this place. You know, Joseph,
tomorrow every New Yorker will have their eyes up on the sky. We could walk in and out
of this alleyway dressed as clowns all day long and no one would remember
that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Perfect location,’ Waldstein
muttered. He smiled wistfully.

They listened to the distant hiss of morning
traffic, the cry of a dozen gulls strutting among the shingle and rubbish below,
fighting for scraps.

‘Mr Waldstein? Can I ask you a
question?’

The old man smiled, pushed a shock of his
wild, wiry grey hair away from his eyes. ‘You can ask, Joseph. I can’t
promise you an answer, though.’

Olivera sucked in a breath. Nervous.
Waldstein suspected he knew what the man was going to ask. At some point or another,
every person he’d ever worked with long enough eventually mustered their courage
and got round to asking the exact same question. He let Olivera continue with it all the
same. Better to get this out of the way.

‘Mr Waldstein, when you went
back … that first time, you know, in 2044? The Chicago
demonstration?’

Here it comes.
He half smiled.
Yup
 … that
question, all right
.

‘Did you … did you ever get
to s-see –’

‘My wife? My child?’

Olivera nodded. Wide-eyed and very nervous.
Waldstein suspected the man must have worked himself up for this moment. Must have spent
the last few months at the institute, and the last few weeks here, waiting for that
perfect moment to pop the question. And here it was supposedly – what this young man
judged to be the perfect moment.

Waldstein sighed as he cast his mind back to
fading memories
of that day. That’s what he’d intended.
Wasn’t it? Just one last chance to say goodbye to both of them. To tell them how
much he loved them. Because he’d been far too busy to say that before the
accident. Far too busy with his work. A chance to say
I love you
. That and, of
course, a chance to demonstrate to the assembled audience of invited journalists that
the Chan–Jackson Tachyon Theory – with a few alterations to neutrino channelling – could
actually be put into practice.

Olivera swallowed anxiously as he waited for
Waldstein to answer. Back home, back in 2054, this precise question actually had its
very own name. The question was known as
the Waldstein Enigma
. Alternatively it
was known as
the Billion Dollar Question
. Any journalist who squeezed the
answer to that out of him was never going to have to chase down a new story again.

Waldstein turned to him. He toyed with the
idea of answering this young man. Or at least telling him what he’d
not
managed to see.

‘Regretfully,’ he replied
slowly, ‘I … never got to see them again, Joseph.’

There you are … more than
I’ve ever told anyone else.
He hoped the young man would be satisfied
with that.

Olivera’s Adam’s apple bobbed.
He was fidgeting. Licking his lips. Eager to ask the inevitable follow-on question.
‘So, what … what
did you s-see
, Mr Waldstein?’

Waldstein laughed softly. Shook his head.
‘Now, Joseph … let’s leave it there, shall we?’

‘I …’ Olivera’s
cheeks darkened. He looked down at his feet, ashamed. Aware that he’d overstepped
a line. ‘I’m s-s-sorry, sir. I –’

‘That’s quite all right.
Everyone asks eventually, Joseph.
Everyone
.’

The silence was uncomfortable for the
younger man.
Waldstein put him out of his misery. ‘I believe you
have an update for me?’

‘Uh? … Uh yes! I do, sir.
The AI imprints are completed now. I’ve checked them through and run simulations.
They’re one hundred per cent stable.’

‘Good. Then I suppose we’re
nearly ready to upload those into the units?’

‘They’re very nearly ready, sir.
Full growth cycle in the next hour.’

Waldstein patted his shoulder gently, a
conciliatory gesture to reassure the younger man there was no harm done just now.

Curiosity didn’t kill this cat.
Did it, Mother?

‘Let’s go back inside and check
on them, then.’

Chapter 1

2001, New York

Wednesday, 12 September 2001

If you’re reading this then I guess
someone, somewhere, does go through the rubbish and read every piece of paper that
gets balled up and tossed away. So then, in that case, here it is – my name’s
Sal.

That’s all you need to know about
my name.

I’m fourteen. I think. Actually, I
might be fifteen now. I’m not sure. I’m from India. And here’s the
tricky bit – I’m from 2026. You read that right. Please … read on.
Don’t throw this away. I’m not making that up, nor am I mad. Just go
with it … for now. Please?

There’s a long story that comes
before this page. But all you really need to know is that right now I feel lost.
I’m scared. I’ve lost another home. We can’t go back to the
archway. The place we were living in. Maddy says we can’t ever go back there.
Like, ever. It’s marked, she said. Compromised. It’s no longer a secret
and safe place.

So now we have nowhere to hide.
It’s just us lot and an old bus-thing that Maddy calls an
‘RV’.

Jahulla, what a collection of freaks we
make. There’s Maddy, she’s a nerd from 2010. This is closest to her
past-life time. She was like nine or ten in 2001, so she actually remembers this
year.

Then there’s Liam, he’s a
ship’s steward. Or was. He was working on the Titanic. Yes. That Titanic. The
one that sank in 1912. He’s
really out of his depth here (ha
ha). Even though we’ve been stationed back in 2001 for a few months now,
he’s still like some confused old fuddah-man even though he’s
technically only sixteen.

There’s Foster, who really is old.
Not just acting old (like Liam). He’s ninety or something and I’m pretty
sure he’s dying. He knows the most about Waldstein’s agency. He was the
one who recruited each of us from our past lives. But even he doesn’t know who
sent those killers after us. Someone’s found out about us, what we’re
doing back here to preserve the timeline.

Then there’s this man called
Rashim. He’s stuck with us for now. We pulled him out of a corrupted version
of Roman times because he shouldn’t have been there. He went back there with a
group of people from the year 2070.

Oh … you should know this.
Really important. The world’s dying in 2070. Or about to. That’s why
they came back. They wanted to start over: to give humanity a second chance to get
the world right. But you can’t do that, see? You just can’t mess with
history. There’s ONE WAY it goes and that’s it. Call it fate, destiny,
kismet. As Foster says, ‘For good or bad, history has only one true course.
You mess with that, and you’re looking at chaos … Hell itself
opening up.’

(He’s actually not as wacko-mad as
I’m making him sound.)

That’s why we were saved,
‘recruited’, to work for this agency set up by a man called Waldstein –
he’s some billionaire inventor type from the future.

And then we have two cloned humans with
computers for brains: Bob and Becks. Gorilla Guy and the Ice Queen. They’re,
well, ‘special’ I suppose. Let’s leave it at that.
Oh … I almost forgot, we’ve also got a robot from 2070 with us that
looks like a cross between a filing cabinet and the old cartoon character from when
my parents were kids, ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’. I think Rashim designed
him as a joke or something.

That’s us. Like I say, a bunch of
freaks and we’re trying to run for our lives across a country that’s
suddenly doing a double-take at anyone who looks remotely out of the ordinary. So
much for remaining deep undercover.

We’re running through an America
that’s still in deep shock from what happened yesterday: 9/11. You can see it
in their faces; everyone expects another terrorist bomb, another aeroplane
attack.

I guess my father would say to these
Americans: ‘Get jahully well used to it.’ After all … he lived
through the Terror Attacks of the Twenty-teens. All those dirty bombs and suicide
attacks in northern India.

Shadd-yah. When aren’t humans
always killing each other?

BOOK: TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6)
3.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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