Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘I’m thinking the sooner we leave, the better,’ said Maddy. She regarded the gloomy interior. Hardly a place anyone would normally look at with dewy-eyed fondness. But it had become their home. It had become something of a safe haven, a nest, a shelter. And yes, between the seemingly constant firefighting they’d experienced from here, there had been moments of… dare she say… fun.

Fun. Some good memories. Among all the scary ones, that is.

Liam sighed. ‘Ah well…’ was all the consolation he could offer them. ‘Ah well.’

‘It’s just bricks,’ said Sal without a great deal of conviction.

The squat lab robot flexed its pliable plastic face, wrinkling its pickle-shaped nose as its round and permanently staring eyes scanned the gloomy interior. ‘It’s a very messy place. I don’t like it very much.’

‘Yeah, but it’s home,’ said Maddy. ‘Or it was anyway.’

She looked around the pitted and cracked floor to where a shallow scoop of concrete was missing — where so many terrifying and unplanned last-minute portals had been opened up. Where a thick loop of cables dangled from the ceiling — from which a horrific Cretaceous-era carnivore had once dropped down and butchered a man right in front of her eyes. Where power cables snaked from one side of the archway’s floor to the other — there had once lain a carpet of dead and dying Confederate and Union soldiers, men feebly crying out for water amid the acrid smoke of battle, bleeding out for a war that should never have been. Where the walls flanked the shutter door — the probing claws of irradiated mutant humans had once tried to pick through crumbling mortar to get in at them, to eat them.

And, planted on the very desk she was sitting at now, the severed head of a young woman had rested recently. Grey eyes, beautiful grey eyes, glazed over and lifeless, the cranium hacked open to reveal a bloody pulp, and a small, invaluable microchip inside.

Ahhh, memories. Precious memories, Maddy noted unenthusiastically.

‘You’re right, Sal, it’s just a bunch of bricks. The sooner we get the hell out of here, the better.’

10 September 2001, New York

Maddy took the subway across to Manhattan and emerged at 57th Street into the warmth of the sun. Middle of the day, that’s when the old man could be found in Central Park. That was Foster’s pact with her, his tacit promise when he’d walked out on the team after their first mission.

You’ll always find me here at the same time. Feeding the pigeons.

She’d made this trip nearly a dozen times now over the last six months. Six months’ worth of their ‘bubble time’ — Monday and Tuesday, the 10th and 11th, looped over and over again. Every time she sat down with him on that bench by the duck pond, beside the hot-dog cart, it was — for Foster — like their very first meeting after he’d bid farewell and left her in charge of the team. The world outside the archway’s protective field was linear, a sequence of moments experienced by everyone in sensible chronological order.

But, for Maddy and the others, it was time that occurred inside the archway that appeared to be linear, while everything outside was a weird and endless forty-eight-hour Groundhog Day.

She’d asked the old man once why it was that she never bumped into copies of herself. His answer had been both straightforward and oddly cryptic.

‘You’re not of this timeline, Maddy. None of you are. You might as well be aliens visiting from another planet as far as earthly cause and effect is concerned.’

Reassuring perhaps, but she’d still ended up none the wiser.

As always, she caught sight of him sitting on the bench, sitting back and savouring the sun on his wrinkled face, in that dark blue cardigan of his, jeans too big for his narrow frame and that scuffed old Yankees baseball cap clasped in his liver-spotted hands. She stopped for a moment, watching him through the hot-dog queue, watching him through the clouds of billowing steam coming from the cart’s griddle.

A quiff of silver-white hair fluttering on his head: untidy, unruly hair. The likeness was so obvious now Maddy knew, now they all knew. She wondered how none of them had ever noticed, or remarked, how much alike Foster and Liam looked. Yes, age completely alters a person’s appearance, but there are those things that survive the years intact: the shape and set of a person’s eyes, the habitual expression on one’s face, the lazy way you sit when you think no one’s looking — things that are as unique as a fingerprint.

Liam and Foster, the very same person, and she hadn’t seen it until he’d told her.

Foster had given her no explanation for that. None at all. She had her theories. Perhaps one of them didn’t belong in this timeline; perhaps one of them had stepped across chaos space from another similar world and now there were accidentally two of them. She wondered if somewhere, beyond dimensions she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, there was an old-woman version of herself.

She decided probably not. She suspected in any dimension she was the same kind of person, destined to get stressed-out on all and everything and die young. Probably of high blood pressure or a heart attack.

Nice thought.

She emerged round the end of the queue and Foster’s eyes were drawn away from the pigeons chasing each other for breadcrumbs at his feet.

His eyes lit up at the sight of her. ‘Ahhh!’ He smiled. ‘You found me!’

She raised a hand to hush him politely. ‘I always do.’

Foster laughed. ‘I gather from that we’ve met before?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Quite a few times now.’ She looked around at the park, the duck pond, the hot-dog vendor. ‘This is like Happy Days. Like a TV show I’ve seen way too many times.’

‘Talking to me must be like talking to someone with — ’

‘Alzheimer’s?’

Foster grinned. ‘I’ve said that before, haven’t I?’

‘Only every time we meet up. Listen, Foster.’ She sat down beside him. ‘This time’s going to be different, though.’

‘Oh?’

‘We have to leave New York.’

‘Leave? Why?’

Maddy explained as succinctly as possible: the handwritten message addressed to her about Pandora from some mysterious informant; sending through a message to the agency in the future and asking what the hell ‘Pandora’ was all about. And then, in short order, a squad of support units arriving right in their archway hell-bent on killing them all.

‘I don’t know what’s going on, Foster. Maybe our ability to contact the agency, to contact Waldstein, has been compromised somehow. Intercepted by someone else?’

She didn’t bother telling Foster that the last time they’d met here she’d told him about the Pandora message and it had been his suggestion that she ‘communicate forward’ and ask if Waldstein knew anything about it. Maddy hadn’t come here to blame him for that. Neither of them were to know asking about Pandora was going to lead to this.

‘Point is, someone now knows where we are, Foster, and we could be jumped at any time by more of those things. We have to leave. Like… as soon as possible!’

Foster nodded slowly. Sadly. ‘It wasn’t ever meant to last for eternity, this agency. It was a temporary fix to a problem.’ He looked up at her. ‘There’s something you need to know, Maddy.’ He ran his tongue along his teeth beneath pursed lips. ‘Maddy, the agency… it’s just — ’

‘Just us.’ She shrugged. ‘I know.’

‘Seriously?’ He cocked a bushy eyebrow. ‘I already told you that as well?’

‘Yup.’

‘Jay-zus. Must be annoying for you, hearing me — ’

‘We’re leaving, Foster. Leaving first thing tomorrow morning. We’re packing everything we need to set up again, and we’ll find some other place to carry on doing the job.’