Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sal eventually.

‘OK.’

‘I was just saying…’

Maddy waved her hand. ‘Forget it. I trust you, Sal. And I trust Liam. We’ve put our lives in each other’s hands, haven’t we? Quite a few times now.’

Sal nodded.

‘And that’s all the three of us have got. Each other. If I don’t even get to have that… then I don’t want to go on doing this. I can’t go on doing this.’

Sal reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Maddy.’

Maddy puffed her cheeks. ‘’s OK.’ Tainted with guilt, though. There was one more secret she hadn’t shared and maybe now was the time for it to come out.

‘There’s more, Sal. There’s more I need to tell you.’

Sal looked like she didn’t want to hear any more right now. But the proverbial cat was halfway out of the bag. Maddy decided she needed to hear this. ‘Foster’s old, right, Sal? Old. How old do you reckon he is?’

‘I don’t know.’ She hunched her shoulders. ‘ Really old.’

‘Come on, give me a number.’

‘Seventy? Eighty?’

‘Try twenty-seven.’

The smoothie almost slipped out of Sal’s hands. ‘ What? ’

‘He’s twenty-seven years old.’ Maddy sipped her coffee. ‘So I suppose we can presume from that that he’s been a TimeRider for ten years. The field office, our archway, this agency… has been doing its thing for about ten years’ worth of two-day loop-time.’

That felt about right. The archway had — from day one — felt as if it had been lived in already. Certainly not brand spanking new. Freshly set up. But that wasn’t the thing she needed to tell Sal now.

‘Thing is… the time displacement aged Foster. Every time he went back in time to fix history it was corrupting him, ageing him before his time. And now the same is happening to Liam.’

Sal stared out of the window for a moment. Maddy suspected she already had half an idea something like that was happening to him. ‘His hair?’ she said after a while. ‘That bit of his hair?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Yup… that was a huge jump for Liam. Sixty-five million years. He took a big hit on that one. I hate to think how much of a bite that took out of the time he’s got.’

‘Chuddah,’ Sal whispered. ‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’

‘Before us… yes… quite probably.’

‘And then?’

Maddy didn’t know what happened then. Perhaps she would one day soon find herself opening a portal on the Titanic, wading through freezing water looking for a young steward called Liam O’Connor.

‘I think it’s also hitting you and me,’ she said. ‘Ageing us too.’ She reached a hand up and traced the faintest lines in her skin beside her left eye. She sure as heck wasn’t going to call them ‘crow’s feet’. Old people had those… but that’s what those faint lines were going to become one day. ‘I’ve done a couple of jumps back, Sal… and I know that it’s affecting me. But I think the archway field that loops us round the two days also has an effect.’

Sal’s eyes were still on the marketplace outside. ‘I thought…’ She turned back to Maddy. ‘I thought we were changing. You and me. I just… I just wasn’t sure if it was my eyes playing tricks on me.’

‘Don’t tell me I’m lookin’ older. I’ll tip my coffee on you,’ said Maddy. She was trying to be funny. It came out sounding lame.

‘Liam must realize it,’ said Sal. ‘Surely he can see it? When are you going to tell him?’

‘I don’t know. When the time’s right.’

‘But it’s obvious now! You have to tell him soon!’

Maddy wondered if Liam was already aware that this was killing him and just putting on a front of not caring. He couldn’t be so thick-skinned not to have noticed anything. ‘Look, I know. I know. It’s just…’ She sighed. ‘I’m just worried that when I tell him he’ll run off and leave us.’

‘But Foster didn’t.’

True. Sal was right. Once upon a time he was younger, he was Liam, and at some point he learned he was dying. But he stayed at his post, didn’t he? Did his duty.

‘I’ll tell him,’ Maddy said. ‘I’ll tell him soon.’

They sat in silence for a while, both lost in their own thoughts, their own worlds.

‘This doesn’t end well for us, does it?’ said Sal presently. ‘All three of us are going to die, aren’t we?’

‘Everyone dies, Sal.’

‘But we’re going to die soon.’

‘Why say that?’

‘Maddy? Come on. What if we are — were — the other team? Are we going to get ripped to pieces by a seeker one day? Does this all happen again and again, going round and round like circles?’

‘Crud, I wish I knew. I wish I could get my head round all of this. Look! Don’t go there. Who knows? Right?’ She took a breath.

‘Anyway, strictly speaking we’re already dead. Or should be.’ Sal looked morose. Maddy could see tears glistening in her eyes, waiting to tumble. She reached across the table for her. She could’ve said something kinder just then.

‘Look. You, me and Liam, we got given an extra helping of life. That’s more than anybody else ever gets. We’ve been so lucky. And think what we’ve already done with that time. What we’ve already seen! And what more stuff we’ll get to see. We can’t waste what we’ve been given… and worry about stuff we can’t possibly predict, you know?’

Maddy realized she needed to take a piece of her own advice. How often had she pined to escape this and be normal again?

‘I know. I just… I think I thought, I hoped we would go on forever maybe. The three of us and Bob and Becks. Sort of like a family. Like a gang of superheroes or something.’ That first tear rolled down Sal’s cheek and hung from her chin.

‘Nothing lasts forever, Sal.’ Maddy squeezed her hand gently. ‘And superheroes? We certainly aren’t that.’

AD 37, Amphitheatrum Statilii Tauri, Rome

The man was useless, absolutely useless. There was no denying that. The lion was clearly dying, the fur on its rear flanks matted and dark with blood from a dozen gaping wounds, a gash along its belly from which a loop of entrails was dangling, and still this stupid man had somehow managed to wind up with his head wedged firmly in the lion’s jaws, almost dead now.

No. Not quite dead yet. His pale arms thrashed pitifully once again.

The crowd jeered and laughed at that. Not even a good-natured laugh. It was disgust at how little the old ex-senator had been prepared to fight for his life, to put on a good show for them.

He looked down from the imperial box at the crowd either side of him, at faces contorted with mockery and anger at the still twitching man down on the blood-spattered sand.

Mind you, how well would you fools fight, hmmm? Would you struggle heroically till your last breath? He imagined the vast majority of them would have done what this weak old man just had: dropped his sword, fallen to his knees and pleaded for mercy until the lion casually swiped at him and knocked the fool on to his back.

He shook his head with disgust at the crowd.

So easy to be brave, isn’t it? When you’re sitting up there, safe, comfortable and entertained.

‘Caesar?’

He watched as the lion lazily crunched on the man’s skull, gnawing at it like a dog on a butcher’s scrap.

‘Emperor Gaius?’

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus turned to his freedman.

So few of the people around him used his name. Instead, to his face, it was usually a deferential term. However, when they thought they were beyond his hearing, it was the name that everyone used for him; the nickname that had followed him all his life from being a small boy.