Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘Yes, I would say so,’ said Rashim. He hunkered forward into the narrow cubicle. He lowered his voice. ‘If Waldstein is determined to locate you, he may decide to send more of those military recon units after you.’ He bit his lip. ‘They may be old genetic hybrid technology, but they’re robust, resourceful, tenacious… and very, very hard to kill.’

‘You don’t need to remind us of that,’ said Liam.

‘If he sends more, you really want to make it as difficult as possible for them to track you down. Remaining in the present simply presents one search vector for them: determining your location. But picking another time adds another search vector… when.’

‘Yeah, so we need to think about less obvious places in time to hide,’ added Maddy.

‘Like the past.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But… but how far back can we go?’ asked Liam. ‘We need some power, do we not?’

Rashim nodded. ‘Quite. And that’s going to be the limiting factor.’

Maddy tapped at the keyboard. ‘So… that does pretty much limit us to the age of electricity. When did we start having electric power everywhere?’

Rashim rolled his eyes upwards, thinking. Guessing. ‘1940?’

‘Ahhh… I think there was power a lot earlier than then,’ said Liam. ‘There was plenty of electric on the Titanic, so there…’ His words came to an abrupt halt. ‘Not that, uh… not that I was ever even on the ship.’ He shook his head and muttered something.

‘Liam’s right. Much earlier than that.’ Maddy typed a phrase into Wikipedia’s search box.

‘My history isn’t very good.’ Rashim tried again. ‘1900?’

‘Nope. Earlier.’

The man’s eyes widened behind his glasses. ‘Really? There was electricity in the 1800s?’

The monitor flickered with the result of her search: a page of text, no pictures or diagrams or embedded video clips. This is old Wikipedia, Maddy reminded herself. Just text.

‘There we go. How about this…’ She read out loud. ‘Electricity remained not much more than a curiosity of nature until 1600, when English scientist William Gilbert carried out detailed observations of the relationship between the apparent visible effects between magnetism and the as yet undefined, unnamed force of electricity. He produced and distinguished the “lodestone” effect from static electricity created by rubbing amber. He named this effect after the Latin word “electricus” meaning “like amber”, which in turn came from the Greek word for elektron.’

‘Really?’ Rashim craned his neck forward to read the small text more easily. ‘I never would have believed…’ he muttered, now silently reading on.

Maddy picked out another paragraph further down the article. ‘In 1800, Alessandro Volta created the “Voltaic Pile”, a structure of alternating layers of zinc and copper.’ She looked at Liam. ‘There you go! The first electric battery!’

‘1819…’ said Rashim, ‘Michael Faraday creates the Faraday disk! The first electromagnetic generator!’

‘ Generator? ’

Rashim grinned at her. ‘Don’t get too excited, it generated about a couple of volts of direct current. We need output that’s equivalent or thereabout to the domestic feed most people are getting today.’ He read on. ‘There… 1876, Thomas Edison builds the first power station in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Built it to supply power for his laboratory and various experiments.’

‘But it needs to be power that’s available for us to get our hands on,’ said Liam.

Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re right, that’s the really important bit. And it needs to be a totally reliable source, not some nutty inventor’s cranky prototype that keeps breaking down or something. We need power that was, like, commercially available… put out for normal people, businesses, to use.’

‘Ahhh!’ Rashim raised a finger. ‘Well then, how about this? The Edison Electric Light Station, built in 1880-81, which then came online in, let’s see… ah yes! 1882.’

‘That sounds promising,’ said Maddy. ‘But I dunno… New Jersey’s still pretty close to where we were. If we’re going to play it safe and put as much distance as we — ’

‘It’s not in New Jersey.’

‘Uh! Where, then?’

‘London.’

‘London?’ She took a moment to take that in. Not in America? She’d presumed just now that something as forward-thinking, something so modern as electricity must have been a solely American thing long before anyone else. Even before the turn of the century.

‘You mean London, England?’

‘Yes, of course I mean London, England. A steam-powered 125-horsepower generator beneath — ’ he traced his finger down through the text to find his place — ‘beneath a place called the Holborn Viaduct. Yes, and that’s in central London.’ He read the article from where his finger touched the screen. ‘It was built to power the lights on the viaduct, but also to premises in the area, the City Temple and the Old Bailey.’ He looked at them. ‘Whatever that was.’

Maddy stroked her chin thoughtfully. ‘Do you think it might have been churning out enough for our needs?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’ Rashim picked up a biro and began scribbling down scraps of information from the article.

‘No need,’ she said. She clicked her mouse on an icon to one side of the screen and smiled. ‘It’s already printing.’

‘London.’ Liam turned to look at her. He was just about to say he’d always wanted to visit the city as a boy. But once again, there it was, stupid circular thinking; he’d never been a little boy with dreams and wishes. He settled for a thoughtful nod. ‘Aye, London sounds like a good enough bet to me.’

Maddy was grinning like a loon. ‘London!’ Truly and genuinely, a terrifyingly Cheshire cat-sized grin. Something she realized she hadn’t done in a while; an honest expression of excitement. ‘Victorian London! All top hats and posh frocks?’

Her growing excitement was wholly infectious. Liam found himself smiling straight back at her. He remembered their fleeting visit to San Francisco in 1906, the childlike beam of pleasure on her face as they’d strutted down that broad and busy thoroughfare: her with a plume of ostrich feathers on her head and wearing a bodice tight enough to make her want to cough up a kidney, and him with a top hat on his head tilted at a jaunty, gentleman-about-town angle.

‘Aye… I think we just might’ve found ourselves a new home.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘Yup,’ she said right back. ‘Rashim?’

‘Yes?’

‘How long do you think it will take you to rebuild the displacement machine?’

She knew he’d do it — the instinctive response habit of any technician, engineer, plumber — he sucked air in through his teeth. ‘I don’t know. We have the key component boards and they’re still intact incredibly. But I’m going to have to, uh… reverse-engineer them. The basic process pipeline is the same as we had on Project Exodus, but there are implementation differences that I’ve got to learn and adapt to work with these components.’

‘Just give me your best guess.’

‘A couple of weeks? A month, two maybe?’

‘You don’t know, do you?’

‘You asked me to guess.’ He shrugged. ‘So, I’m guessing.’

1 October 2001, Harcourt, Ohio

‘So that’s twenty-seven dollars and — ’

‘Ninety cents,’ Liam finished. He smiled at her and she blushed. ‘I know that off by heart.’

‘And I know what you’re gonna order by heart,’ said Kaydee-Lee. ‘Why do you always order the same thing?’

Liam had been up to the diner virtually every morning since they’d settled into the abandoned elementary school. It was boredom, that’s why he volunteered to do the breakfast bagel run. Maddy, Rashim and SpongeBubba seemed to be spending all their waking hours either poring over pencil-sketched schematics or huddled over a make-do workbench, carefully soldering electrical components together by the light of a desktop lamp. Sal seemed to be busy on the computers most of the time. They had a similar set-up of twelve networked PCs as they’d had back in Brooklyn, the old hard drives from the archway system installed. Once the W.G. Systems operating code had been loaded up and had successfully kicked Windows 2000 to the kerb, computer-Bob was able to talk Sal through installing all the other bits and pieces.