Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

He’d even managed to change his accent.

‘Jay-zus.’

Rashim looked up from his notes. ‘What’s up?’

Liam shook his head. ‘Nothing… I was just…’ His voice trailed away into silence.

Foster had still believed in the job. Even though he knew he’d been lied to, set up, manipulated, exploited by this agency… he still believed the job needed doing. What was that? Programmed loyalty? Was that it? Had the mysterious Mr Waldstein written into his mind a mission priority that even if he was to discover that he was a meatbot and that he’d been lied to and exploited, his first instinct would always be to continue doing the job?

Just like Bob. Just like Becks. Both of them standing outside in the car park keeping an eye out for Maddy. Duty first. Always.

The door handle rattled and the door opened, spilling sickly green light from the motel’s glowing VACANT sign outside across the room’s mottled carpet. Bob’s wide frame filled the doorway.

Speak of the devil.

‘She is back,’ he rumbled. He stepped aside and Maddy appeared in the doorway. She waved limply.

‘Hey, Liam.’

‘Hey.’

She turned to Becks, standing outside. ‘Go next door and wake up Sal.’

‘Affirmative.’

To Liam’s eyes she seemed a little more alert than when he’d last seen her. If he hadn’t been so lost in his own self-pity last night, he might have been worried about her state of mind. Worried that she hadn’t come back. Worried she’d gone and done something silly.

‘You OK, Mads? Where’ve you been?’

‘Getting my head straight.’

He heard the door in the next room snick shut and Sal appeared beside Maddy, bleary-eyed, looking as if she’d just been roused from sleep.

‘We’re leaving,’ said Maddy.

‘Leaving?’

‘We’ve had a couple of days of freakin’ navel-gazing, feeling sorry for ourselves.’ She pushed a frizzy spiral of hair away from her face. ‘OK, so we’re clones. We’re meatbots.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I dunno, maybe when we’ve got ourselves sorted one of us should stick our heads in an X-ray machine and see if we’ve got frikkin’ microchips inside us like Bob and Becks. But that’s… that’s for another time, I guess.’

Liam grimaced, remembering hacking open Bob’s skull, months ago, in order to pull out that tiny shard of silicon in there.

‘Yeah, I know. Not exactly a nice thought,’ said Maddy. ‘Well, like I say… maybe it’s on the To Do list, or maybe I just don’t wanna know, but right now I say we’re done with the sulking. OK? That’s enough self-pity. We need to sort ourselves out. Get things up and running again.’

16 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts

Sal’s bleary eyes widened. ‘We’re carrying on?’

‘Damn right we are.’

Maddy ushered Sal and Becks inside the motel room and closed the door after them. Not that there was anyone out there in the car park to eavesdrop — a row of empty chalets and a gravel lot with only their Winnebago SuperChief parked in the middle. All the same…

‘If it’s just us keeping history on track, and no one else — ’ she scratched the back of her head — ‘then we’ve got to keep it up. We’ve got no choice.’

‘But we do have a choice,’ said Sal. ‘We don’t have to get involved any more.’

‘Aye.’ Liam nodded. ‘Let it all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. If that’s the way history wants to take itself then stuff it. Let it.’

‘Dammit, Liam!’ snapped Maddy. ‘This is serious!’

‘And I AM being serious!’ He sat up on his bed. ‘I… I’m not sure I care any more.’ He got up, took a challenging step towards Maddy. ‘This isn’t our world! Do you not see that? We don’t have families to worry about… friends… loved ones. None of us have ever had any of that. Just memories of someone else’s families! So, honest-to-God,’ he said, shrugging, ‘what do I care if a time wave rubs out this whole world? Ireland? Cork… and everyone I was supposed to “know” living there?’

Sal nodded. ‘He’s right, Maddy. We are nothing. We have nothing. No, like, descendants. No ancestors. No family tree. Nothing!’ A faint and weary smile stole across her lips as if something had finally made sense to her. ‘I suppose that’s why we’ve always been sort of unaffected by the waves we’ve been through.’

‘Because none of you are of this timeline? None of you belong in this timeline.’ Rashim stroked the tip of his nose, thinking aloud. ‘All three of you are an artificial intrusion not susceptible to any cause-effect cycle.’ He nodded, satisfied with his train of thought. ‘That would explain how you were never changed by time waves.’

‘Yeah, I s’pose that’s what I mean,’ Sal added. ‘We don’t belong, so we don’t get changed.’

Liam wasn’t so interested in that. ‘Maddy, why should I care? Huh?’ He shrugged. ‘Time waves? As far as I’m concerned, they’re now someone else’s problem, so they are.’ He laughed humourlessly. ‘Jay-zus… I don’t even know why I speak this way. This accent. I’ve never even been to Ireland!’

Maddy had had enough. She reached out and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. ‘Liam, you bubble-head! You don’t need to have been to Ireland… to be you. Don’t you see that?’ She turned to Sal. ‘Both of you! Me too! We’re who we are because of these memories. That’s the same for everyone. Memories… define every person on this planet.’ She had a silent audience, but no one seemed to know where she was taking this.

‘We’re defined by our memories. We’re the product of our memories. That’s it.’

She glanced at both support units — living proof of that. Both of them so much more than the emotionless automatons that had slid out of their grow-tubes on to the floor.

‘So who freakin’ well cares if the bag of memories in our heads are ours or someone else’s? We’re here in this place right now, together, and we’re making our own decisions and goddammit that makes us real!’

‘Not all of your memories are false,’ added Becks to the long silence.

Maddy looked at the small frame of the support unit beside her. ‘You’re right.’ She turned back to the others, particularly Liam and Sal. She let go of his shirt. ‘We’ve been real people since we woke up together all those months ago. Real people!’ She patted down his puffed-up shirt gently, apologetically. ‘ Real people…’ She smiled at them both. ‘ Real friends.’ She grasped his arm affectionately. ‘Real family.’

Sal nodded silently. Maddy thought she caught a glint of the green of the neon sign outside reflected in her eyes, the glint of a tear perhaps.

‘We need to continue doing the job, guys. Come on… we’ve seen some of the horrific results time travel can produce. I don’t suppose we’ve even seen the worst it can do. Not yet.’

Liam gazed thoughtfully out of the window.

Sal too. ‘I hated how those poor eugenic creatures were treated.’

Maddy nodded. ‘And we made that nightmare world not happen.’

The TV still burbled quietly in the corner of the motel room.

‘I don’t see we’ve got much of a choice,’ said Maddy. ‘We have to carry on. No one else is doing it and someone has to grab the wheel, right? Someone needs to be holding the goddamn steering wheel or this world crashes and burns!’

She winced a little at her metaphor. It sounded like typical Hollywood shtick. But whatever. The point was valid. ‘We need to continue doing this job… but this time, let’s do it for ourselves. Not for — ’ she made air quotes with her fingers — ‘the agency. Not for Waldstein. But for ourselves. We decide if and when history needs fixing.’