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

She put down the leaking burrito, licked her
fingers. Buying time … because she simply didn’t know just yet. A part
of her had almost made the decision that the game was up, that their duty as TimeRiders
was done and perhaps they should all just put some clear miles between themselves and
New York, and then all go their separate ways to live whatever was left of their lives
how each of them wanted.

But then an insistent, nagging voice inside
her reminded her of the horrendous timelines they’d narrowly prevented from
happening. And of course that voice had an even greater urgency to it now she knew it
was just their one little team keeping an eye on history. Not some vast agency of
multiple teams, with multiple redundancies, safeguards, fail-safes.

Just them.

So the decision, in truth, was already made
in her mind. But she wanted to hear what the others had to say, particularly Liam and
Sal.

‘We run,’ she said.
‘Then?’ She looked at Liam with a shrug.

‘What do you mean by that?’
asked Liam.

‘I’m putting it to you.
I’m asking what you think, Liam. We run … then what?’

Liam frowned for a moment. Then put down his
burger – no,
dropped
his burger. Suddenly indignant, he exclaimed,
‘Jay-zus, Maddy! Are you asking me whether we give up?’

She said nothing. That was her answer.

‘No way!’ He turned to Sal.
‘Right? No bleedin’ way!’ He looked almost angry. As close to anger as
she’d ever seen him. ‘Now listen here, Madelaine Carter! I’ve nearly
died a dozen times, so I have. To keep that …’ He flung a hand towards the
window and the glistening lights of Times Square. ‘To keep New
York just like it is! I’m not giving up on that now!’

Maddy noted a proud smile steal across
Foster’s lips.

‘Sal? I’m right, am I
not?’ said Liam. ‘We want to go on, right?’

She chewed on the straw in her glass of Dr
Pepper and blew bubbles for a moment before she finally spoke. ‘There’s
things I want to know. I want to know what Pandora is. I want to know what Becks knows;
what’s locked up inside her head. I want to know what
that man
was trying
to tell us.’

That man
. Maddy and Liam knew who
she meant: the poor soul who’d arrived back in New Orleans, 1831, only to be fused
into the bodies of two horses. He’d held on to life for perhaps five, ten minutes,
a gruesome jigsaw puzzle, an inside-out parody of a centaur.

A horror-show freak for the few minutes he,
it, lived.

‘I want to know what’s really
going on, Maddy.’

‘I want to know more about this
Waldstein fella. Aye, and more about this agency,’ said Liam. ‘And the only
way I see it is … we have to keep on doing what we’re doing. Even if we
have to move somewhere else and continue doing it there.’

Maddy tapped the table gently with her
knuckles. Her attempt at calling their meeting to order. It took a few moments. She
would’ve been quicker just telling the pair of them to shut up. But also a touch
rude.

‘OK, it’s agreed, then. We
relocate and we’ll set things up again.’ She looked at them all. ‘And
we will
continue
keeping this timeline on track while we’re still able
to. Because – look – whatever’s really going on, if we’re being played for
fools, if we’re being manipulated by Waldstein somehow … or someone else
inside his agency or someone outside, the truth is … I know what we’re
doing is the
right thing
. And that’s the only, literally the
only
, certainty we can grab hold of.’

The other two nodded. They’d seen enough
alternate timelines to know there could be far worse ways history could play out than
the way it was now.

‘For better or worse, right,
Foster?’

The old man nodded. ‘For better or
worse, history needs to stay on track.’

‘OK … OK, this is what
I’m thinking we do.’ Maddy pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
‘We head north to Boston.’

‘Why? What’s so special about
Boston?’ asked Foster.

‘It’s my home.’

Liam looked up from his burger. ‘You
want to go to your home?’

‘It’s my home turf,’ she
said. ‘I grew up there. I know the area. And look, maybe we can get some help. My
folks –’

‘You
can’t
go to your
home, Maddy,’ said Foster.

‘Why not?’

Sal’s eyes widened. ‘Jahulla!
You’ll be there already, won’t you? Another you?’

Liam stopped chewing. Dawning realization on
his face too. ‘You’d be a little girl! There’d be a little Maddy
there!’

‘Nine.’ Maddy nodded.
‘Yes, I’d be nine.’

‘Madelaine,’ said Foster.
‘You cannot visit your family, you cannot visit
yourself
. Do you
understand me? That’s a very dangerous contamination!’

She stared at him silently for a long while
before finally, reluctantly nodding. ‘All right. I get it. OK, I won’t visit
home. It was just an idea. But listen! I know the area. There are places I know where we
could set up. If we’re going to ground, it’s better we head somewhere that
someone knows. Right?’

‘Somewhere we can easily tap
power?’ said Rashim. ‘We’d need that if you want a viable new place to
operate from.’

‘Sure. There’s loads of places we
could settle in. There’s industrial parks. We could rent a unit, pretend to be
some small business or something.’

Liam nodded, encouraged that she seemed to
have already given the move some thought. ‘Seems like a plan, so.’

Sal smiled. ‘A new home. I’d
like that.’

Foster seemed less than happy.
‘It’s a danger, Maddy. And a temptation. To be so close to your childhood
home.’

‘I won’t go home! OK? I promise!
I mean … what’s the alternative? We stick a random pin in a map of
America and just hope for the best?’ Her burrito drooled gunk on to her plate with
an unappealing
splat
. ‘Seriously, guys. If anyone else has got a better
suggestion … I’m all ears.’

No one, of course, did.

‘Then that’s all I’ve got.
Boston. It’s a start. What do you guys say?’

Liam and Sal nodded.

‘Uhh … so does that answer
your earlier question?’ asked Rashim.

‘What’s that?’

‘Whether I’m coming
along?’ Rashim looked sheepish. ‘Am I in your … what do you call
it? Your
team
?’

‘Yuh … I guess,’ Maddy
smiled. ‘Sure, if you want?’

He smiled. ‘You’re joking,
right? A choice between staying in 2001 or going back to 2070?’ His face cracked
with a wide grin. ‘It’s a head-slap. I’d very much like to
stay.’

‘Then that’s the deal.’
She offered her hand across the table. ‘We need some kind of oath or something,
but I guess a handshake’s good for now.’

They reached across and shook awkwardly. The
sort of uneasy gesture of two geeks unsure whether to high-five, chest-bump or
knuckle-kiss and in the end pulling off a fumbled
combination and Maddy
nearly knocking her drink over. Sal rolled her eyes.

‘So, we’ll set off tomorrow
morning. Have a last night in the arch.’

Liam nodded. ‘A last night to say
goodbye to the ol’ place.’

Maddy sighed. ‘It’s a
freakin’ brick archway. That’s all.’

‘No, that’s not fair. I’d
say it was a bit more than that.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ said Sal.
‘It was sort of
home
.’

Maybe they were both right. It had begun to
feel a bit like that. ‘Let’s just look ahead, guys. OK? We’ve still
got a job to do. And maybe now … we’re doing the job on our terms?
We’re calling the shots.’

That felt like a leader-ish sort of thing to
say. Like the right thing to say. Maddy looked sideways at Foster and he gave her a
subtle wink.

11 September 2001, New York

Liam lifted the last of the bags into the
back of the SuperChief. Maddy took them from him. ‘That the last of the stuff
piled in the middle?’

He looked back into the dark interior of the
archway. ‘Aye.’

‘Good. Because there’s no room
left anyway.’ She ducked back inside, looking down the middle of the vehicle, an
assault course of plastic bags and cardboard boxes. And that was just their essentials.
‘I guess I’ll find somewhere to tuck these. What’s in these bags
anyway?’

‘Some of me books.’

‘We can replace books,
Liam.’

He shrugged. ‘And a few
comics.’

Maddy sighed, leaned over and pulled open
one of the bags. ‘Oh, come on … and the Nintendo too?’

‘Well …’ He looked
sheepish. ‘I thought …’

‘Jesus, we can pick another one of
those up at any computer game store.’ She shook her head. ‘Just the
difficult things. Just things we can’t easily replace, I’m
afraid.’

He sighed and swung the bag ruefully into
the open rubbish bin beside the vehicle.

Maddy poked her nose into his other bag.
‘OK, I guess these books can come aboard.’ She took the bag off him and
disappeared inside the RV.

Liam looked back under the shutter. It was dark
and gloomy: a vacant space once more, strewn with the cables and rubbish, boxes of
tools, cartons of nuts and bolts, spools of electrical wire. A desk with the gutted
remains of a dozen Dell computers left beneath it.

A large wardrobe that had contained, until
this morning at least, a bizarre collection of garments. A twelfth-century leather
jerkin, two Wehrmacht army tunics. Several Roman togas. An Edwardian-era suit and
lady’s gown, a steward’s tunic and more. The clothes were all squirrelled
away aboard the RV now.

It looked like the abandoned premises of
some black-market, cash-in-hand PC repair shop. A sweatshop, a squat, a student
dosshouse; the Aladdin’s cave of some foraging vagrant.

He offered it a lukewarm farewell wave.
Thanks for the shelter.
And smiled with amusement at his own mawkish
sentimentality. How daft it was that a pile of damp bricks and crumbling mortar could
make him feel guilty for abandoning it like this.

The RV’s motor rattled to life.

‘Come on, Liam.’ Maddy’s
head was poking out of the passenger-side window at the front. ‘The sooner
we’re off, the better!’

‘Aye.’ He raised his hand in
acknowledgement and turned back to the dark interior. ‘Well there, Mr Archway,
you’ve still got a job to do,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘After
all … there’s this bridge above you that needs holding up for a while
yet.’

‘Liam!’

‘I’m coming!’

Sal sat in the back of the RV on an
oat-coloured seat worn through at the corners and showing yellow foam. Her seat belt
didn’t work. She decided Bob could have stolen something that
looked a little less old-fashioned, beaten-up and threadbare. She’d spotted
glistening, spotless tour vans rolling through the streets of New York. Ones that looked
almost futuristic, like spaceships on wheels. Instead they had this.

She looked out through the rear plastic
window, scuffed and foggy, someone’s name and a love heart scratched into it. She
watched Brooklyn receding like a movie back-projection: busy with cars, bumper to bumper
at each intersection, waiting to get on the two lanes across the Williamsburg Bridge on
to the lower east side of Manhattan; the morning ebb and flow of commuters, regular as
bowel movements.

There was some relief mixed in with the
sadness of a goodbye. At least she wasn’t going to see this particular morning
ever again. Tuesday 11 September was at last playing through for them the way it did for
everyone else. Once. One terrifying morning albeit seemingly running in slow motion.

Relief she wasn’t going to have to see
that again. The swooping airliner. A sky filled with billowing smoke and the confetti
cloud of millions of pieces of fluttering paper.

But, yes, sadness too. Brooklyn – this
place, this side of the East River, had become so familiar to her. Almost as familiar as
the suburbs of Mumbai that she’d grown up in. The Chinese laundromat with that old
lady so proud of her office-worker son. The coffee shop from which she’d collected
countless cardboard trays of coffee and paper bags of assorted doughnuts. The YWCA whose
skanky showers with hair-clogged drains she and Maddy had had to use more times than she
cared to remember. Their alleyway always cluttered with rubbish, the cobbles underfoot
slightly tacky, the walls with fading sprayed gang tags.

And their archway.

Their home.

The RV juddered to a halt at a traffic light
and just then – Sal knew it was due any second now – she spotted a subtle flash on the
distant skyline: the pale sliver of a fuselage catching the morning light, moving fast
and descending towards the twin pillars of Manhattan shimmering in the sun-warmed
morning.

She lost sight of it among the skyscrapers,
but then a moment later the distant sky was punctuated by a roiling cloud of orange and
grey that drifted lazily up into the empty sky. No sound. Not yet. Just a silent
eruption like an undubbed movie special effect.

Then, half a dozen seconds later, even
through the closed window, over the chugging of the RV’s engine, she heard it. A
soft, innocuous-sounding
whump
. Like the door of an expensive saloon car being
slammed shut. The heads of pedestrians on the pavements either side of them turned to
look towards the sky above Manhattan … and never turned back.

Green light. The Winnebago motorhome crossed
the intersection and turned left on rolling and slack suspension that made the vehicle
sway like a boat on a choppy sea.

Behind a row of apartment blocks, Sal
finally lost sight of Manhattan, the Twin Towers and the billowing mushroom cloud of
smoke and the frozen pedestrians as they headed up Roebling Street – a place where
people and cars and taxis and trucks continued to move from one traffic light to the
next in blissful, clockwork ignorance, at least for the moment.

11 September 2001, New York