TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (46 page)

A woman fifty yards down from them screamed
out in alarm as a spectral tendril suddenly curled across the sky, like a negative image
of forked lightning. The time wave was almost upon them. Much closer – Maddy had seen it
coming from across the East River, roiling and boiling – she knew it would no longer
resemble a bank of cloud, more a pulsating school of mackerel, twisting, turning,
extruding tentacle-like outgrowths. As for Rashim, he’d only briefly witnessed it
roar past the archway’s open entrance. This time, they were going to be standing
amid the swirling mass.

‘Don’t let it freak you out,
Rashim!’ cried Maddy. ‘It’s weird but it’s totally
harml–’

Her voice was lost in the sudden roar of a
tsunami.

Wind buffeted and rocked them on their feet.
They all
suddenly became enveloped in a wind tunnel of blurring
reality, streaks of matter twisting, curling, changing. Fleeting visions of Hell and
Heaven like an insane zoetrope.

Sal narrowed her eyes against the onslaught.
She saw gargoyle faces whip past her; one or two seemed to sense her presence, wretched
hands clawing towards her. She thought, in one fleeting moment, that she saw a face she
recognized. A woman … dark-skinned, much older, grey-haired, with bulging
cataract eyes full of raging malice. The face imploded into the snarl of some
beetle-black underworld horror, claws, pincers, teeth.

Standing two feet to her right, yet entirely
alone in her own wind-tunnel Hell, Maddy watched reality-soup conjure up momentary
nightmares. She too thought she spotted a familiar face: pale and slim, a young man,
framed by flailing hair – was laughing or was it screaming? Was that Adam? She reached
out towards him, wondering if she might just be able to rescue him – pull him out of
this swirling matter to have him join them once again. Her hand almost but not quite
touching his slender fingers, then he was whipped away into a swirling reality tornado
and became a thousand and one impossible things.

Then, as always, it was all gone in two
shakes of a lamb’s tail.

They were left staring at a Farringdon
Street busy with the
clop-clop-clop
of horse-drawn hansom cabs and private
carriages. Street hawkers barked the price of their wares; a knot of leering dock
workers passed right in front of them, sharing a dirty laugh at some muttered punchline.
One of them turned to Maddy and Sal.

‘Awl right there, me loves?’ he
crowed, quite obviously drunk – swaying uncertainly on his feet. ‘Come an’
join us lads, eh?’

Sal flipped a hand gesture at him that
wasn’t going to have a proper meaning for another hundred years yet. The drunk
shrugged it off with a grin. ‘Your loss, love!’ He tossed
a good-natured laugh back at them, turned and staggered to catch up with his mates.

Maddy sighed. ‘Men, eh?’

2067, Piccadilly Circus, London

Another warm sunset across the overgrown
ruins of mankind. The cry of a fox, the chirp of crickets. The gently swaying ochre sea
of tall grass. The predatory swoop of a hawk.

A peaceful grave of humankind. Like some
windswept site of archaeological interest – the ruins of Troy, of ancient Sparta,
Babylon. Now, just like those places, worn stubs of masonry overgrown by an emerald
carpet of nature. Tumbledown walls, caved-in roofs. Nothing lasts forever.

Here bleached bones lie amid the tangled
roots of wild grass, doing a far better job of weathering time than the rusting, flaking
skeletons of cars.

Peaceful, like a prairie, like the
Serengeti, like an African veldt.

But now there’s a fresh breeze, and
the faintest distant rumble. The peach-coloured sunset sky has suddenly gained a faint
twisting ribbon of black. At first as thin as a pencil scribble following the line of
the horizon across a landscape painting. But, very quickly, becoming as thick as a
marker pen as it approaches rapidly, and seconds later a looming, dark, continental
crust swallowing the land beneath it.

A dozen seconds of deafening chaos as this
black horizon sweeps in over the ruins of London and this peaceful post-human world is
swept away; a possible future that had its short chance
to exist.
Swept away to join a million other begrudging futures that will never get a chance to
see the light of day.

It’s replaced by noise and chaos of a
wholly different kind.

London, 2067.

The grass is gone. Piccadilly Circus heaves
with humanity, a city crowded with thirty million inhabitants. The statue of Eros looks
up at looming mega-skyscrapers encrusted with holographic displays and garish adverts
for soyo-protein products. The sky buzzes with corporate jyro-copters and police
air-skimmers with winking blue lights and brilliant white searchlights tracking and
monitoring the heaving populace below. A torrential downpour cascades from an unhealthy,
lemon-tinted sky, overcast with polluted clouds.

Rain-slicked pedestrians push and jostle
each other across waterlogged pavements, every last one of them wearing air filters on
their faces.

London: one of a couple of dozen
metropolises around the world playing host to its share of the migrating billions. Even
though this city’s levees that hold back the swollen Thames are sure to fail one
day soon and it will join New York as another city lost to the rising seas, every day
thousands more people swarm in and live cheek by jowl in cluttered tenement blocks that
dwarf the old buildings of Canary Wharf.

In a way it’s not so very different
from the conditions of Whitechapel nearly two centuries ago.

London buzzes like a shaken beehive.
Pounding music from hawkers on the street and second-tier pedestrian walkways above. A
deafening riot of noise and movement and colour. Kerbside bazaars sell snake-oil cures
for toxin-induced asthma. A trader sells slabs of pink-coloured dough that he’s
claiming is real meat. If it is … God knows what creature it once was.
Genetically engineered apelike work-units marked by tattoo
bar-codes
and dressed in orange overalls move sullenly among the press of people, clearing trash,
carelessly tossing the body of some starved-to-death immigrant into the back of a waste
recycler.

This is the London that will exist a mere
five decades after the last-ever Olympic Games are held here. Back in a time before the
inevitable end was writ large for all to see and then foolishly ignored by one and all.
Back before the first big oil shock, when supplies began to falter, before the sea level
really started rising fast, the sky discolouring, crops failing, ecosystems
collapsing.

But of course this is the way it has to be.
This is the timeline a certain Roald Waldstein is so very desperate to
preserve … at all costs. It has to be this.

And nothing else but this.

1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

Wednesday 19 December

This is where we live now. It’s not
so very different to our last home, I guess. I’m getting used to it. We
don’t get the twenty-times-a-day rumble of a train over us. Instead, we have
the constant deep engine rumble of Holborn Viaduct’s power generator. Not so
different, I suppose, to listening to the back-up generator we used to
have.

We’re settled now. Finding new
routines. It’s a different feel in here with Rashim and SpongeBubba keeping us
company. I think I like it. SpongeBubba makes me laugh; the thing looks so
ridiculous with that wobbling nose. We have to keep him out of sight of that nosy
man Delbert. God knows what he’d make of that lab unit.

We have a decision to make about the
killer support unit. Its organic body is being kept alive. It’s like some
person in an almost vegetative state; the eyes are open but there’s nothing
going on inside its head. The thing drools when we try and feed it this barley
gruel. Totally disgusting. Rashim says we can keep it going indefinitely if we keep
feeding it. The big question is whether we open up
its … her … cranium and flip the ‘hard-set’ switch
inside. I’m not sure how Maddy feels.

Liam, of course, says we
should.

Me? I’m not sure. This support
unit spent the last couple of
months wanting nothing more than to
kill us all. I know its programming will all be erased … but will it
really be? Completely?

So, we have our new home. A new place in
history, which I do find very fascinating. In many ways it feels like when we were
first woken up by Foster. Scary, but exciting, new. It does feel a bit like that
again. But it won’t ever be the same. Not now that we know we’re fakes.
Pretend-humans. In fact, there’s only one real person in here.
Rashim.

Perhaps this time around, though,
it’s better. Like Maddy said, we’re in charge now. We can decide whether
or not we want to fix history. And who’s going to stop us now? No one, NO ONE
knows where we are now, not even Mr Roald Waldstein.

I like that. That makes me feel
safe.

Maddy joined Liam standing in their side
door. He was watching Farringdon Street slowly come to life. It was just gone seven in
the morning and wisps of morning mist spun like silk across the wide cobbled street.
Today looked like it was going to be another nice one. A clear blue sky waiting for the
sun to get up and join it. A lamp-snuffer was putting out the street’s gas lamps
with his long-handled snuffer tray. Above them, on top of the viaduct, the
electric-powered lights would be turned off manually by a man from the Edison Electric
Company. They were beginning to learn the morning routine along Farringdon Street.

‘Good morning,’ said Maddy.

Liam nodded. He seemed a lot brighter since
returning from the Whitechapel jump less than a week ago. ‘Aye, looks like
it’ll be nice today.’

She had an enamel mug of coffee for him.
Handed it to him and took up a place on the doorstep beside him. ‘I like that
we’re not endlessly recycling in a two-day loop,’ she said. ‘Things
change. That’s kinda nice.’

‘You sure we don’t need to set up
a field?’

‘Yup. We’re quite safe here. No
one’s looking for time travellers.’ She laughed. ‘No one in this time
has even thought about time travel, I’d say. I mean … wasn’t it
that writer guy, H. G. Wells, who first thought up the idea of time travel?’

Liam shrugged. ‘I’m sure
somebody must’ve thought of the idea before he did. It must be the oldest fanciful
notion ever; that it might be fun to travel backwards or forwards through
time.’

‘Yeah, well.’ She sipped her
coffee. ‘He was the first one to write a fiction book about it.’

‘Mark Twain.’

‘What?’

‘Mark Twain wrote a book about time
travel. I’m sure he did.
A Yankee Fella in King Arthur’s Court
I
think it was called. Or something like that.’

Maddy hunched her shoulders. ‘Oh well,
whatever. My point is we don’t have to worry quite so much about staying under the
radar here. Nor do we have to worry about time waves. None of us are real. None of us
belong in this timeline, so it really doesn’t matter.’

He looked at her. ‘You’re OK,
are you? Not … uh, not upset about –’

‘About not being the
real
Maddy Carter from Boston?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not really. Not any more.
I think I quite like the feeling of freedom. I quite like not missing my mom and dad and
my cousin Julian. Somebody made all those people up. Put painful memories of them into
my head. I’m damned if I’m going to spend another second grieving for
figments of someone’s imagination. Stuff ’em.’

Liam laughed. ‘Aye, that does seem a
bit daft.’

‘I am who I am. Right now, in this
moment of time,
this
is
who I am. And that’s
all.’ She looked sideways at him and smiled. ‘Nice thought that, isn’t
it? It’s liberating.’

‘Aye.’

They heard a steam whistle echoing up from
the far end of Farringdon Street where the docks and the River Thames were. Barges came
in there and loaded and emptied round the clock. A never-ending cycle of trade and
commerce.

‘On the other hand, Sal’s not
coping so well, I don’t think,’ said Liam finally.

Maddy nodded. ‘You and I should keep
an eye on her. After all, I suppose we literally really are family now.’

‘Uh?’

She looked at him. ‘I might just be
your sister, Liam.’

‘
What?
’

‘Think about it … we
could’ve been grown together as a batch.’ She laughed at her own words. Then
curled her lip at a thought. ‘God, I really hope we didn’t share a grow-tube
with you. That would be kinda gross.’

‘Charmed.’

They sipped their coffees, blowing clouds of
condensation out of their mugs into the chilly morning air.

‘What about you, Liam? You all
right?’

‘About being a meat robot?’ He
grinned that devil-may-care lopsided smile. She wondered if that stupid smile of his was
what kept him sane, made his good nature bulletproof. ‘Aye, I’m not too
bothered. So, at least I know now why it is I can cope with all that time travelling and
not age so much as a normal person. It makes a bit more sense now.’

She hadn’t told him about the ageing
thing. She’d planned to, but never quite got round to it. And yet … it
seemed he knew all about that.

‘Don’t look so shocked, Maddy.
I’m not completely stupid.
I worked out this is how I became
Foster. Or I should say, how I become
like
Foster. I presume Foster was a
meat-product like us. Right?’

She nodded.

‘Travelling is ageing me.’ He
flicked the tuft of grey hair above his right ear. ‘And I’m not blind. I
noticed that.’ He pulled at the skin around his eyes. The faintest of crow’s
feet there. ‘And don’t think I didn’t notice this either.’ He
cocked his head casually. ‘So? I’m getting a little older. Happens to all of
us eventually, doesn’t it?’