Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

Even only as a silhouette she instantly recognized the young man standing in front of her.

[Target acquired: Liam O’Connor]

Not only that, the target was a mere ten yards away AND in a dead end from which he had no hope of escaping her. Command imperatives screamed inside her head to step forward quickly and get on with the job. One of her fists balled and flexed, keen to get on with the task of killing him. But her eyes darted to the door that led to Mary’s room. The very room Faith had been sharing with Mary Kelly… her friend… for days now.

Her… friend… yes. And her ‘ friend ’ had screamed just moments ago.

Her friend needed help.

Now.

Even now might just be a second too late to save her.

‘Becks?’ whispered the young man. ‘We have to help her!’

Faith realized that he’d misidentified her. He thought he was addressing the child support unit. It was a mistake she could take advantage of right now: draw closer to him while he still thought she was the other unit, perhaps close enough that she could quickly strike with a jab to his fragile neck before he could react and try using that gun he was holding.

But…

But…

Another desperate, dying gurgle from within the room.

But her friend needed help. Now.

‘Jesus! Becks! C’mon… gimme a hand here!’

One imperative won out over the other.

Faith nodded. ‘Agreed.’

No sooner had she taken three steps forward when she sensed movement to her left. A dark blur. Something large and fast looming towards her. She turned to face the threat and was halfway towards adopting a defensive combat stance when every process in her mind, every spinning loop of code, every circuit running hot and over-clocked, every data bus clogged with shuttling bytes like a highway jammed with rush-hour traffic… all of it came to a shuddering, grinding halt, as if an iron bar had been shoved through the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel.

Several thousand volts locked her body rigid.

Her grey eyes fixed on Liam’s for a moment before she keeled over, stiff as a board as the taser bolt, fired into her waist, rendered every muscle in her body as rigid as granite. She landed on the ground like a felled tree. And Liam, close enough to see her face clearly, took a backward step.

‘Jay-zus! It’s not Becks!’ Liam turned to Bob. ‘It’s one of them!’

‘Correct.’

He heard movement behind the window. The Ripper was busy.

‘All right, she’s down! Now let’s go and catch that murdering — ’

‘No!’ Bob reached out for Liam’s arm.

Liam backed away, stepping up against the window. He turned to look over his shoulder — and got a second’s glimpse through a ragged gap in the net curtains of a scene lit by a single oil lamp inside. A scene of ghastly crimson spattered across exposed ghost-white flesh.

My God…

Bob stepped forward and grasped his arm.

‘Let me go, goddammit!’

‘Negative.’ Bob pulled Liam back towards the unconscious body of the unit. ‘Both mission parameters have been satisfied. We have what we came for. We must let this happen.’

‘The man’s an animal! No, worse than that! A monster… a… a…’ Liam realized he was crying; there was a vague acknowledgement that his cheeks were damp with tears for — how crazy’s this? — a complete stranger. A woman he’d glimpsed for less than ten seconds. A poor wretch immortalized in the black and white grains of a scene-of-crime photograph. Forever frozen in her own timeless horror.

Bob gently eased him back from the front door. ‘We must let him go. The killer must escape and must not be discovered or identified.’ His voice managed to soften from its usual Dobermann growl to something resembling empathy. Understanding even.

‘I am sorry. We have to let him go, Liam. And we have to let Mary Kelly die in that room.’

Otherwise stupid, powerful men in the future will blow each other to pieces, right? And not just themselves, but women, children… even innocent young librarians. Why? Because their ideologies don’t agree. Like children who can’t agree on which toys to have at playtime and decide instead to set a match to the lot of them.

Children. No better than children.

He let Bob pull the shotgun out of his hands. The support unit stooped down, picked up the unconscious body of their pursuer of the last few months, their assassin, and hefted her over one shoulder as if she was a pillowcase stuffed with charity shop seconds.

Liam was also dimly aware of the weight of one of Bob’s arms around his shoulders. Not exactly a hug. But the clumsy, heavy-engineering approximation of one.

‘We must go, Liam.’

He nodded. Maddy had a pick-up portal for them arranged for 4 a.m. located down among the warehouses and quays of Blackfriars docks. A couple of hours and change to spare yet, but they would want to get moving away from this crime scene as quickly as possible. The noises out here must have disturbed someone. There might even be people peeking through curtains at them now.

The sooner they were gone, the better. Otherwise, over a hundred years from now a Wikipedia article on the ‘Infamous Whitechapel Murders’ and various ‘Famous Grisly Murders’ anthologies might just feature in their footnotes an eyewitness sighting of ‘ a large ox of a man, almost certainly a labourer, accompanied by a slight and slender younger man with dark hair ’ directly outside the room of the last-known victim of Jack the Ripper at the estimated time of half past midnight.

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

‘This is incredible,’ said Rashim, looking at the others. ‘We will see the wave approach, you say?’

‘Yeah, it’s like a weather front or something.’ Maddy led them outside the dungeon, through their side door to stand on the kerb of Farringdon Street. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for something that looks like a big bank of dark cloud.’

‘It’s always a spectacular sight,’ added Sal, ‘and a bit scary when it hits you.’

Rashim looked giddy with excitement. ‘You know, we argued about this, Dr Yatsushita and I, about how a universe would accommodate an alteration to its past. What form the reality shift would take?’ He gazed down Farringdon Street. Busy once again, although the usual kaleidoscope of activity was heavily punctuated with clusters of crimson tunics of soldiers and the black morning coats and tall pith helmets of bobbies stationed in protective cordons round the few shopfronts yet to have been stoved in by rioters. There’d been rumours that more riots were going to happen again later on today. But of course they weren’t going to happen. The corrective time wave was going to arrive first.

‘I thought reality would flip its state with some sort of global, instant paradigm shift.’ Rashim shook his head in awe. ‘Some sort of a… a pulse of change. Not like a tidal wave.’ He turned to them. ‘How quickly does this wave arrive?’

‘It varies,’ said Maddy. ‘Sometimes almost immediately. Sometimes hours later. It’s not predictable. It almost seems random.’

He nodded. ‘Like some kind of Schrodinger flux? As if quantum particles are deciding to flip state or not?’

‘If you ask me, more like quantum particles are having some freakin’ union meeting and they need to vote unanimously on a change before something happens,’ Maddy replied. ‘Sometimes it’s a no-brainer; sometimes I guess reality has a real struggle agreeing which way it wants to go.’

Rashim chuckled. ‘You make it sound alive.’

‘I do wonder sometimes.’

‘Liam!’ Sal called out for him. She ducked back inside and cupped her hands. ‘Liam, you coming out to watch for the wave?’ Her voice echoed inside the dark brick-built labyrinth.