TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (23 page)

‘Mom!’

Rosalin heard the alarm in her
daughter’s voice and put down the tray of cakes on the counter, vaguely aware that
the oven-hot tray was going to leave marks on the Formica, but Nadine’s shrill cry
sounded unsettling.

She stepped into the hallway to see that a
girl, a teenager, pale and scruffy, had pushed her way into the house past her daughter
Nadine.

‘
What the hell do you think
you’re doing?
’

‘This is my … my
home!’ cried the girl.

Oh my God … maybe she’s
a drug addict. Maybe she’s after money?

‘Get out! Get out of my house right
now! Or I’ll call the police!’

The girl ignored her. Turned to the left and
took the stairs up to the landing, three at a time.

‘Hey!’ called Rosalin after her.
‘Get back down here!’ No answer. ‘OUT! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!’

Nadine was looking frightened. ‘Mom?
Who is she?’

‘It’s all right, honey. You stay
down here.’ She started up the stairs after the teenager.

‘Mom? Don’t go up there.
Please!’

‘It’s all right, honey. You stay
down here.’ The young woman – no, not a
woman
, a kid still, really –
didn’t look dangerous as such. Just confused and frightened. ‘Stay down
there, Nadine. I’ll just go up and speak to her.’

At the top of the stairs she could hear the
teenager had gone into Nadine’s bedroom. She could hear movement from in there.
Movement … and now, what was that? Sobbing?

She approached the open door, spilling
afternoon light out from Nadine’s room across the hallway carpet. And there,
sitting on the end of her bed, was the teenager, rocking gently, her face buried in her
hands.

All of a sudden bellowing at this kid to get
out before she set the cops on her seemed like overkill. She clearly wasn’t a
danger to anyone. She certainly didn’t need to be cuffed like a gangster and
rough-handled into the back of a squad car.

‘Hello?’ Rosalin said softly.
‘Can I help you?’

That had happened two days ago. Now Rosalin
looked at the smart young man and the striking, shaven-headed woman sitting side by side
on her couch. The young man had shown her an FBI pass and said his name was Agent
Cooper. The young woman he’d introduced as Agent Faith.

A cafetière was steaming on the coffee table
in front of them, untouched. Rosalin had no idea why she’d offered them coffee.
Maybe she was just as curious about that poor girl as they were.

‘And what did she tell you?’
asked Agent Faith.

‘All sorts of crazy nonsense really. I
thought she was drunk or on drugs or something.’

‘What
specifically
did she
tell you?’ asked Agent Cooper. Rosalin preferred him asking. At least he smiled
kindly. The
woman on the other hand, Agent Faith, was like a goddamned
robot. Face like an emotionless psychopath.

‘She said some crazy
things … like she was from the future. That she’d died in a plane crash
or something in 2010, but someone saved her from the plane.’

‘Saved her …?’

‘She said the plane was in mid-air.
She said she was “beamed out”.’

‘Beamed out?’ Cooper laughed
politely. ‘What? Like
Star Trek
beamed out?’

‘I don’t know what she meant
exactly. It wasn’t making much sense to me.’ Rosalin shrugged.
‘That’s when I figured she wasn’t a druggy, but maybe some sort of
sick person, you know? On medication or something?’

‘Indeed.’

‘She said she got beamed back from the
future, from 2010, to now. And was working for some sort of time police. Trying to stop
people from the future time travelling.’ Rosalin laughed self-consciously. It was
the kind of make-believe game her youngest son played with his friends, tearing round
the kitchen with plastic laser guns and making
whoop-whoop
noises.

‘The girl is deluded,’ said
Agent Faith. ‘None of this is correct.’

‘Sure, of course,’ Rosalin
nodded. ‘But …’

‘But what?’ asked Agent
Cooper.

‘But … she was saying things
that sounded so …’ She shrugged. ‘
Convincing
, I
guess.’

Cooper sat forward. ‘Such
as?’

‘Well … let’s
see.’ Rosalin narrowed her eyes. ‘Oh yeah, she said that we’ll be
going to war with Iraq again. And after that with some other country called
Afganistan-izan or something. She said some other weird things … can’t
remember them, though. Just odd stuff.’ Rosalin shook her head. As that girl had
sobbed and told her story, she’d almost found herself believing some of it.

‘Did she explain why she came to
your
house?’ asked Cooper.

‘Oh yes … yes. That was the
strangest thing of all. She said she had memories of living here in this house. I
mean … living here right now. In 2001. That she’d lived here as a girl
with her mom and dad. That she remembered the house looking very different on the inside
and –’

‘But she’s never in fact lived
here?’

Rosalin shook her head. ‘No!
We’ve been living here since before Nadine was born. Since 1990.’

‘And this girl is in no way related to
you?’

‘No! Look, of course not! I’ve
never seen her before!’ Rosalin looked at the coffee. It wasn’t going to get
drunk. ‘I told her that. Told her that we’ve been living here for more than
ten years … that’s when she went funny.’

‘Funny?’

Rosalin recalled the girl had abruptly
stopped mid-sentence, as if something in her mind had suddenly snapped. Discovered a
hidden touchstone of truth. ‘She just got up and left. Walked out of the house,
sort of in a trance or something.’

‘And she’s not been back
since?’

‘No. Like I said, that was a couple of
days ago.’

Agent Cooper nodded and offered her another
charming smile. ‘Well, Mrs Kellerman, thank you for talking to us.’ He
shrugged apologetically as he stood up. ‘And for the coffee. I’m sure it was
very nice coffee.’

The woman followed her colleague’s
lead and both agents headed towards the hallway and the front door.

‘But one thing I don’t
understand,’ said Rosalin. ‘Why are
the FBI after her? I
mean … you know … if she’s just some kid who needs
help?’

Agent Cooper shrugged that question away.
But his female partner stopped dead.

‘See, I’m … well,
I’ve got a journalist coming over later today,’ continued Rosalin. ‘I
called the
National Enquirer
.’ She bit her lip, slightly embarrassed.
‘I know it’s a stupid newspaper. They run stupid
My-Uncle-is-an-Alien-from-Mars stories … but they pay pretty well for
them.’

Agent Faith turned to look at her.
‘You will be telling this story to a newspaper?’

Rosalin nodded guiltily. ‘Is that,
uh … you know, a problem?’

Faith’s movement was little more than
a blur. The dull crack of a single gunshot was reverberating around the home’s
hallway before Agent Cooper fully realized she’d reached under his jacket and
wrenched out his standard-issue firearm and used it.

Mrs Kellerman was dead before her legs
buckled and she dropped to the floor. Blood trickled from a tidy dark hole between her
carefully plucked eyebrows and pooled on the waxed wooden parquet slats beneath her
head.

‘Jesus!
What –?
’

‘She was a contamination
risk.’

Cooper realized he was trembling.
‘You … can’t … you can’t just go and shoot
–’

‘My primary mission parameter is to
eliminate the agency team. My secondary mission parameter is to ensure no significant
time-contamination events occur.’

She handed the gun back to him.

‘Thank you for the use of your weapon,
Agent Cooper.’

16 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton,
Massachusetts

So that’s what we all are.
Machines. Meat robots, just like Bob and Becks. Everything me, Maddy and Liam
remember from before arriving in that archway is just a dream. Not even that, just
faked memories.

I’m not Saleena Vikram.

I’m not from 2026.

I’m not from India.

I don’t have parents.

I’m a meat product.

Sal wondered why she was even bothering to
write in her diary. She’d started out writing in it because she thought it would
help her keep her sanity. But why bother now when her mind wasn’t even
hers
anyway? It was the product of some technician or team of technicians.
A faked backstory. An amalgam of images.

I’m even beginning to wonder if
some or all of the stuff that happened to us since we became TimeRiders is faked
memories too. I mean, how do I know for sure? Maybe we never had a German New York,
or that nuclear wasteland? Maybe those dinosaur things never broke into the archway?
Maybe I never met Abraham Lincoln? Maybe someone invented those stories?

Another slightly more comforting thought
occurred to her:
maybe there never was a pitiful eugenic creature
called Sam, massacred along with several dozen others before her very eyes. Somehow that
seemed a small kindness; a teaspoon of comfort in an ocean of cruel.

That blue bear. I think I get it now.
Somebody put that into my memory by mistake. I wasn’t meant to see it in that
Brooklyn shop. Because how could it also be in India, twenty-five years from now?
Someone messed up. Made a mistake. All this time, these weeks I’ve been
wondering about whether that bear meant something special, whether it was important.
And guess what? It was just someone’s dumb mistake.

She shook her head.
‘Jahulla.’

No one was going to hear her, standing in
this place, alone, watching the endless traffic pass beneath her. The overpass ran
across six lanes of interstate traffic. Cars, trucks, buses: a constant stream of
on-off-on red braking lights on the right and glaring headlights on the left, some so
bright they cast stars and streaks across her tear-wet eyes. A stream of traffic in the
early evening, all of them on their way to or from meaningful appointments, running
errands, returning from work, going shopping. Routine events. Life. Dull maybe, but at
least it was
real
life.

She looked down at the dog-eared notebook
resting on the pedestrian railing. Dozens and dozens of pages of her small handwriting.
Scribbles and sketches she’d made of the team. The page corners flickered and
lifted, teased by a gentle breeze. And, by the clinical cyan light of one of the
overpass’s fizzing street lights, she studied one particular sketch. A drawing
she’d made of Liam playing chess with Bob. The pair of them hunkered over a
chessboard placed on a packing crate table in the narrow space between the bunk
beds.

Is that real? Did that really
happen?
She remembered it all right. Remembered that Liam got fed up with being
beaten by Bob over and over and had finally cursed in Irish and wandered over
to play on the Nintendo machine instead. But how much of that was
real? How much, if at all, could she trust the memory?

She turned a page. There was a sketch of one
of those lizard-sapiens, the bipedal descendants of a dinosaur species that should never
have survived.

And did that happen?
She was almost
certain it had. In fact, she was pretty certain that everything she’d recorded in
this notebook must be real. It was surely the things that had occurred
before
these memories on paper; everything that had occurred before she’d awoken in that
archway … all of those things – they were the lie.

Sal looked down at the notebook in front of
her, the pages flapping loosely. She’d been considering tossing it over the
handrail. Perhaps it would land on the flat open bed of a lorry or rubbish truck to be
carried away to some distant landfill site and buried forever. But then she realized
this book of scruffy lined pages full of untidy scrawls was all that was keeping her
rooted to sanity. In a way, this paper and ink was her mind. Her real mind. It was all
that she had, all that she really owned. It was everything that made
her … 
her
.

It was all that she could trust.

I love you, notebook.
She wrote
that at the bottom of one page.
You are me.

She wrote that, then drew a box around the
last three words as if it might protect that single thought for all eternity. A little
blue biro-ink force field.

Liam flicked through channels absently. He
lay on his motel room bed and was steadfastly working his way through a packet of
Oreos.

‘Is this it, then?’ said Rashim.
He’d been in the motorhome for most of this afternoon, picking through the
critical circuit
boards pulled from the displacement machine and, with
SpongeBubba’s help, working his way through the terabytes of data stored on the
hard drives that had been pulled out of the networked computers. Thanks to that process
he had a much clearer idea of the ordeal these three teenagers had been through over the
last few months of their lives, and now had a fair idea of how their little agency
worked together to preserve history. He was making notes, scribbling away on a pad of
foolscap. He didn’t even look up as he spoke.

‘Is this the plan? We stay in these
rooms until what? The end of time?’

Liam shrugged. He didn’t know what
happened next. The last two days had been a strange, disembodied experience. He’d
been lost in his own thoughts. Eaten once or twice maybe and he couldn’t remember
what. He vaguely recalled taking a long walk – hours and hours alongside a busy highway
– then finally coming to a halt, turning round and walking back the way he’d
come.

‘There’s no more money,’
said Rashim. ‘We will have to leave here soon anyway.’

Liam flicked through channels, hardly
hearing the man talk. Sal, he’d hardly seen her all day. And Maddy? Not since last
night.

The team was no more. Broken into shards.
Just three lost individuals, three young adults lost in their own troubled clouds of
thought. His mind kept playing the last thing he remembered from his
‘supposed’ old life: that passageway down on deck E of the
Titanic
,
rapidly filling up with freezing cold seawater. Being certain that the rest of his life
was going to be measured in mere seconds. And then Foster – his older self – like some
benign bigger brother, a kindly uncle, offering a hand to him, offering him a choice.
Offering him a way out.