Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘Oh yeah.’ She stepped aside. ‘My God, Liam… it’s just like, well, almost like the Brooklyn place.’

‘Aye.’ He grinned. ‘That was my thought too. You like it?’

She smiled, the first time in weeks that she’d felt like smiling. It felt a little like that first time she’d woken up, Foster hovering over her with a tray of coffee and doughnuts. ‘Pity there isn’t a Starbucks nearby, though,’ she said.

‘Well now…’ He laughed. ‘Actually, there is. Of a sort.’

Maddy looked over the top of her glasses at him. ‘What?’

‘Well, sort of. A coffee shop on the back of a wagon, so it is. Roasted chestnuts. Vanilla slices. Fresh baked pies and tarts. You’ll love it.’

Sal looked around the gloomy space. ‘Where do we sleep?’ She turned back to Liam. ‘Where do we do toilet?’

Liam raised his hands apologetically. ‘Me and Rashim have been doing like everyone else seems to do. You sort of find a dark corner in a backstreet somewhere and you just go — ’

‘Not doing that,’ said Sal. ‘Not going to happen.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ added Maddy. ‘Me neither. I want a toilet.’

‘Aye, all right,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I s’pose we can fix something up.’

‘Immediately, I’d suggest. Like, top of the list.’ Maddy turned her attention to Rashim working with SpongeBubba on the cable, slicing strips of insulating rubber away, exposing copper. She looked at the thick cable protruding from the hole in the wall. ‘That’s where our feed’s coming from?’

‘Yes,’ replied Rashim.

‘Have we got some sort of circuit-breakers installed? Some sort of spike protection?’

‘That’s what I’m working on right now.’

‘Right.’ She nodded. ‘Good job.’

She put her hands on her hips and allowed herself a moment of self-congratulation.

That all went rather well, then. Once the displacement rack arrived and they’d set it and the networked computers up and checked that everything had come through unharmed, they were going to be pretty much back in business. Back to where they’d once been, but this time round they’d be pulling their own strings. This time round they were going to be wholly in charge of their own destinies.

How cool’s that? Maddy smiled. Very.

‘Bob? You getting any particles yet?’

Bob nodded. ‘I am detecting precursor particles. The last displacement volume should be opening very soon.’

‘This has really gone smoothly.’ She nodded, satisfied with things. ‘You know, Liam, I think we’re all getting quite slick as a team at this whole time-travel thing.’

‘Aye. Best team in the business.’

‘The only team in the business,’ Sal said drily.

‘True.’

‘Caution!’ said Bob. ‘Maddy, you should stand back now.’

Maddy did as he said and felt the air around her pulse with the sudden arrival of a dozen cubic metres of air and mass. In one marked square, the displacement rack sat on the floor, powering down with a disgruntled whine, freshly severed from its power source.

The other square was empty.

‘Uh… where’s Becks?’

1 November 1888, Whitechapel, London

Faith found herself standing in a narrow courtyard. Dark, damp, grimy brick walls on all four sides of her that rose up to eaves that overhung and narrowed the dull grey sky. A washing line ran across from one wall to the other, from which faded, wrinkled and threadbare rags of clothes hung limply like forgotten dried berries ready to drop.

Rain spattered on her upturned face as she took in her surroundings. She blinked fat drops of it from her eyes as her mind silently assessed the present situation.

[Information: translation error]

Her first thought was how lucky she was not to be partially merged with something. A dense urban environment like this — the odds were probably even between empty and occupied space. She turned her mind quickly to situation-assessment.

The rapidly decaying tachyon particles told her some of the story. She’d been misplaced spatially by — at her quick assessment — one or two miles. She was unable to be sure whether she’d also been misplaced in time: an overshoot of days, weeks, months. It was, of course, a distinct possibility. She had no idea at all when in time this rogue team had decided to head back to, but she was pretty sure, running the figures in her head, that she couldn’t have over — or under — shot by much time. Days or weeks at worst.

Immediate matters first, though. She needed to blend in to whenever this was and certainly not be the cause of any unnecessary temporal contamination or undue attention. Then, when she was suitably dressed for this world, she could run the calculation in her head and work out precisely how far — spatially — she was from the intended location. There was no way of knowing in which direction she’d been offset, but if she could calculate a more precise distance then she’d have a viable search radius to work with.

Faith looked around the small courtyard. The ground was cobblestones covered by mud and rotting vegetable peelings. Here and there mildew-covered nuggets of faeces — animal or human, she couldn’t tell. Clearly this small space was a dumping ground for the effluence and night-water that was tossed out of the small grimy windows that punctuated the towering walls all around this enclosed little courtyard.

She noticed a long wooden pole with a crudely fashioned hook on the end, leaning against one of the walls. That, presumably, was how the clothes were retrieved from the washing line. She also noted in one corner a small wooden door that hung pathetically on failing, rusty hinges.

It took her no more than a few minutes to retrieve the rags and change out of her modern clothes. She bundled them up under her arm and would figure out a way to dispose of them later. Her bullet-shattered lower arm and hand she wrapped up in a linen shawl. The blood had already coagulated and dried. It would eventually heal: the skin would re-grow, the bone and tendon beneath would re-knit.

The doorway took her into a narrow walkway between damp brick walls, covered by a slanted roof of slate shingles that tapped with the rain. At the far end she could see the grey light of this dull day. And a wide street by the look of it.

At the far end she emerged on to a broad cobbled road; rows of three-storey red-brick terraced homes, identical and equally as drab and squalid-looking as those that had surrounded the dingy space she’d just arrived in. The street was busy with people — people who didn’t look occupied. Women sitting on doorsteps looking on as their children played in the street. A pair of men smoking long clay pipes, standing beside an open fire in a grate, poking it to stir the dying embers to life. All of them in rags.

She saw a sign. Presumably the name of this street; flaking paint on rusting tin — GREAT DOVER STREET.

Faith crossed the street towards the fire, approaching the two men. They didn’t notice her coming until she tossed her clothes from the year 2001 on to the glowing embers. The synthetic fibres of her JC Penney office clothes flared up almost instantly.

‘Hoy! Watcha think yer doin’, love?’ Both men turned to look at her.

‘Fuel,’ she replied evenly, ‘for your fire.’

One of the men grinned around the stem of his pipe. ‘Well, hello, m’dear.’ His red-rimmed eyes — one of them opaque like a boiled fish-eye, a cataract — looked her up and down approvingly. ‘Now there’s a pretty, pretty thing.’

Faith offered her hesitant smile and picked what she considered the most appropriate response. ‘Thank you.’

‘You ’ungry, love? Want sumfin’ to eat?’

It had certainly been a while since she’d had a protein refuel. ‘Yes. I am hungry.’