Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

‘Please stay where you are, Madelaine Carter.’ A soft, not unpleasant feminine voice.

Maddy’s eyes rested on a familiar, impassive face; a face that could have been convincingly introduced to her as Becks’s slightly older twin under different circumstances.

‘Look, p-please…’ she whispered, ‘we-we’re just…’

Faith cocked her head, her grey eyes bright with intelligent curiosity. She seemed to admire what she saw cringing at her feet.

‘ It is a pity,’ she said softly, a hint of regret on her lips. Then she looked up for the others over the aisle. ‘Abel! Damien!’ her voice barked coldly. ‘I have located the targets. Request authorization to terminate them.’

Behind them Maddy heard the slap of bare feet. She turned and saw the two male support units standing at the other end of the aisle.

The one wearing shorts hesitated, its thick brow furrowed with confusion at the increasing volume of that deep rumble. It turned to look around, trying to make some sense of the approaching noise.

Maddy saw the look on Sal’s face.

That’s not the aeroplane…

2001, New York

They had no more than a second, perhaps two, to realize what could happen to them. Their eyes met in mutual understanding. A time wave. A big one. Not good.

Truth was there was no knowing what reality any wave was going to leave behind. More specifically, there was no knowing what kind of mass, if any, was going to end up wanting to occupy the very same space that they were both occupying.

In the archway with the field switched on they were entirely protected from any mass-intersections brought about by a reality shift. However, outside of the field it was a lottery. A time wave could leave a person merged, fused, with anything that was attempting to occupy the very same space. The likelihood of that varied, of course. On an open, rolling field in the middle of some remote rural county… it was far less likely. But here, inside a cluttered gift shop looking out on to the beating heart of one of the busiest cities in the world?

Where humankind congregated most densely, for example a place like this — New York — that’s where reality really had the most fun and games reinventing itself. Whatever course history had taken, this bay on the east coast of America, a place that was once an Indian settlement, then a colonial outpost, then a thriving trading port and finally a metropolis — this place was always likely to produce a densely populated alternative version of itself in the wake of a full-blown time wave. And the last place they ought to be when a wave hit was here, inside a building of all places.

‘Sal, we need to…’ was all Maddy had time to utter before the wave was upon them.

It went dark as if the sun had gone out. Unlike Sal, it was Maddy’s first time directly experiencing the effect of swimming in fluid reality as it rippled past her, wrapped round her, presenting fleeting images of infinite possibilities.

She screamed. It came out of her mouth sounding like a deep, time-dilated moan, like the protracted, mournful song of some distant whale carried across a hundred miles of water.

Her ears were filled with her own weird voice and a roar like that of a tornado; not the roar of wind, though, but a billion other human voices, female and male, young and old, born and unborn; conscious entities crying in hellish torment and all sharing the same fleeting few seconds of consciousness. A shared awareness of lives stolen away from them, possible lives that could have been, but now would never be lived; of children, babies, loved ones who would never have a chance to exist. It was a billion screams like her own, stretched out and deep and full of grief, anger and fear. If Hell had a voice… it was this awful, protracted, roaring wail of tortured souls.

Then it snapped off. Gone. The dark, swirling tornado of liquid reality was suddenly a placid, milky whiteness. Featureless. Utterly blank.

Oh God.

She could see her hand in front of her face, but that was all.

Oh God, I’m stuck in chaos spa ‘ Maddy? ’ Sal’s voice, the ghost of a whisper.

She saw a grey shape beside her. Faint. Sal.

‘Sal?’ She became aware of other gentle noises all around her: a woodpecker’s jackhammer tap far above them. The echoing cry of a coot? The fidgeting life of a deep, undisturbed wood; the gentle stir of leaves, the creak of swaying branches.

We’re in some sort of forest.

‘Maddy?’ Sal again. ‘ Where are we? ’

She realized the milky white was nothing but a thick morning mist, cold, heavy and damp against her skin, hanging in dense pools. Above them she could see it was thinner, and saw the pencil-line grey streaks of criss-crossing branches swaying gently.

She reached out, grabbed Sal’s hand and pulled her towards her.

A finger to her lips. Shhhh!

Sal nodded. Wherever they were, they were not alone.

They heard the rustle of movement very close. Instinctively Maddy squatted down, crouching lower into the thick, pooling mist around them. She noticed the broad leaves of a large fern swaying gently beside her and ducked down beneath its feathered leaves, pulling Sal down with her.

‘Call in your identification and condition!’ a deep voice boomed out of the mist.

‘Alpha-six. Faith. I am undamaged.’ The female support unit.

‘Alpha-four. I am also unharmed.’

A long silence. Then Maddy heard the swish of someone pushing through foliage nearby, the leaden crack of dry dead wood beneath a heavy and carelessly planted foot.

‘I am not picking up Alpha-two’s signal,’ said the female. Faith. ‘He may be damaged.’

‘That is a lower priority. The targets will still be in the immediate vicinity. Spread out and search.’

Something brushed against the fern they were huddled beneath. Maddy felt a long thick twig under her bottom shift as the weight of a foot settled on the other end. Looking up through gaps in the leaf swaying above her face, she could see the female unit — the Becks-lookalike — her grey sentinel eyes slowly panning the mist around her like a guard on a watchtower.

My God… she’s right there! She’s RIGHT THERE!

Maddy held her wheezing breath and screwed up her eyes. She was absolutely certain that any second now, a hand was going to reach down and push that fern leaf aside. That ice-cold voice was going to calmly call out her discovery to the other two.

Maddy could feel her chest collapsing with a growing panic. A faint memory skipped through her mind of her and her cousin, Julian, both much younger. They were play-fighting, wrestling; he had her in a hold, her arms trapped by her side and his dead weight lying across her chest. She’d been squirming, panicking, squealing, and he’d genuinely thought she was just playing around. Until she’d started screaming.

Panic… like that. Breathless panic.

Hold your breath, Maddy. HOLD IT!

For seconds that felt agonizingly like minutes ‘Becks’ remained where she was, scouring the milky mist with her piercing eyes. Then finally Maddy felt that twig shift again, relieved of the weight on its end as the support unit lifted her bare foot and took a step, then another, away from them.

She slowly faded into the mist until she was an unrecognizable blur, another grey pillar, just as easily another tree trunk. Then she was finally gone. They listened to the sound of movement of all three support units receding in different directions, the careless, echoing crack of twigs and cones, the swish of bramble and undergrowth casually pushed aside. The still forest slowly stirred to life after them; a disapproving shake of its head at such noisy and clumsy intruders.

Maddy hoped they were far enough away not to hear her wheeze like a blacksmith’s bellows as she finally eased her breath out. Dizzy and light-headed she quickly drew in another one.