Alex Scarrow - TimeRiders - The Eternal War

‘I missed my fourteenth birthday,’ she added quietly.

Becks cocked her head and the appropriate smile for the occasion flashed across her face, as sincere as a screensaver. ‘Many happy returns, Sal Vikram.’

Liam put down the chocolate muffin he’d been peeling out of its paper cup. ‘Hang on, I’ve missed my seventeenth birthday!’ He reached out and squeezed Sal’s hand. ‘So, a happy birthday to us both, so it is.’

‘Yeah,’ she mumbled, ‘yay for us.’

‘Uhh, so,’ Maddy sighed, ‘this was meant to be fun . Not a freakin’ funeral!’ She turned to Sal. ‘We’ll get a cake on the way home, get some candles on it and you can blow ’em out and … and we’ll play some party games or something when we get back. How does that sound?’

She nodded. The start of a smile back on her face. ‘I’d like that.’

‘Party games?’ said Bob. ‘Please explain how to sub-categorize “party games” in reference to “games”?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘They’re just stupid games. You don’t play to win. You just play because it’s a laugh. Like, I dunno … like Charades or Guess Who, or Twister. The more you mess things up the more fun it is.’

The support units looked at each other, silently discussing how to make sense of that. Maddy chuckled. ‘Twister, oh man! You two meatbots haven’t lived until you’ve played a game of Twister!’

She realized Sal and Liam were giving her the same bemused look. ‘Seriously? You guys never heard of it either?’

Liam pursed his lips. ‘Is it a bit like chess?’

‘What? No!’

‘Fidchell? Brandub?’

‘Whuh? Never heard of it. No, it’s kinda like —’

‘Tafl Macrae?’

‘No … no, nothing like that. It’s like —’

‘Pog Ma Gwilly?’

‘Will you shut up a sec?’ she said, exasperated. ‘I’m trying to explain it.’ Her eyes suddenly narrowed with suspicion. ‘Hang on, Pog Ma Gwilly ? You … you just made that up, didn’t you?’

Liam’s good-natured smile widened to a confessional grin.

She was about to reach across the small round table and playfully cuff his ear when she noticed Sal staring far too intently at the cafe’s hot snacks menu card.

‘Sal? You OK?’

Her brows were locked firmly together.

Liam tapped her arm. ‘You that hungry?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘Thirty-seven items on the snack menu …’

‘Uhh … all right.’ Liam looked at Maddy. She shrugged. ‘Oka-a-y.’

‘That was a minute ago. Now,’ Sal continued, ‘there are only thirty-six.’ She looked up at them. ‘Something just vanished off the menu! Just, like, seconds ago.’

Liam looked down at the menu card he’d been studying earlier. ‘Hey … hang on, it’s not there any more.’

Maddy leaned over. ‘What isn’t?’

He shook his head. ‘I was going to order it … and … it’s, well, it’s gone!’

Sal had the menu memorized, almost word for word. ‘The Lincoln Burger.’

‘That’s the very one!’

‘ Beef patty ,’ she continued, her eyes closed, reciting the missing description, ‘ cheese slice covered in thick Patriot Sauce with Freedom Fries on the side. ’

‘Aye, that’s what I was going to order!’

‘Sal?’ Maddy reached out for her arm. ‘Did you just feel a time ripple?’

She nodded. ‘I uh … I think so. I wasn’t sure. I thought it was just me feeling sick or something. No breakfast. But then I saw the burger was gone.’

They looked at each other in silence for a moment until finally Maddy bit her lip. ‘We should head back to the arch. Check on this.’

The other end of a minute later, the five of them were hurrying down the North American History hall, weaving their way past elbow-high clusters of noisy children, babbling with excitement, clipboards underarm as they raced from one exhibit case to another on a fact hunt.

‘Could we not get one of them yellow taxis back!’ Liam called ahead, his jaw still working hard on the last of his triple-choc muffin. ‘I got a stitch in me side, already!’

‘Subway,’ Maddy replied over her shoulder, ‘it’ll be quicker. Come on.’

They were near the end of a long glass display case containing mannequins wearing uniforms from the civil war when Bob’s voice boomed down the hall.

‘Attention! Maddy! STOP!’

She stopped in her tracks and looked back down the hall, along with every last child now frozen mid-hunt, silent, eyes locked on Bob’s towering form. He calmly raised an arm and pointed towards Sal, standing beside the glass case staring in at something among the mannequins in civil-war costume.

Maddy quickly made her way through the confused children and an elementary schoolteacher regarding them with a bemused expression.

‘What’s the matter, Sal?’ she said, drawing up beside her. ‘What do you see?’

Sal slowly raised her arm and pointed at the back wall of the display, between a mannequin wearing the braided and buttoned dark-blue uniform of a Union general and one wearing a similarly ornate tunic in grey. She was pointing at an oil painting hanging on the back wall.

‘And that’s changed too,’ she uttered.

Maddy looked at the face in the painting … the famous painting every schoolkid in America knew by sight. No longer was there that gaunt face, the dark eyes hidden beneath a thunderously brooding brow and that distinctly Mennonite beard. Instead she could see a forgettable-looking balding and portly man with a salt and pepper moustache and a rosy bulbous nose. Beneath the painting was a plaque:

President John Bell 1861–65

‘Oh my God!’ she uttered. ‘Where’s President Lincoln?’

They were back in the archway less than half an hour later, still huffing and puffing after the jog from Marcy Avenue subway station. Liam whimpering about his aching side. ‘I shouldn’t have rushed that muffin,’ he groaned pitifully to himself.

On the screen in front of them, computer-Bob, their field-office system AI, was already spitting out the data pulled in from the external Internet feed.

‘He’s just vanished from history,’ said Sal.

‘Well, from civil-war history,’ Maddy replied as she skim-read the dossier being assembled, fact by fact, on the screen. ‘Nothing in there, nothing at all about him.’

‘This Lincoln fella was quite important, wasn’t he?’

Maddy turned to Liam. ‘Only the most important figure in the war. The most freakin’ important. He held the Union together.’ She saw one of his eyebrows flicker upwards, a sign that he hadn’t a clue and was hoping she was going to elaborate. ‘C’mon, you’ve been reading up a lot recently, right? Hitting the history books.’ She glanced at a pile of books stacked high beside his bunk bed. ‘So, please, tell me you know which guys I’m talking about.’

Liam frowned for a moment, then grinned. ‘The Northern fellas … them people in blue.’

‘Right. Yes. Abraham Lincoln was the president of —’ she sighed — ‘ them people in blue . Otherwise known as the North, the Union. The point was he kept them together, kept them fighting, led them to victory … but now he’s gone from civil-war history!’

Sal chewed a fingernail absently. ‘That’s going to mean a big wave, then.’

‘Uh-huh … five minutes from now we could be looking out at a world in which the Confederates won.’ She glanced sideways at Liam. ‘ Them fellas in grey. ’

Computer-Bob’s dialogue box appeared on screen.

> Maddy, I have completed a scan of all the civil-war data retrieved and there are no references to Abraham Lincoln in this time period: 1861 to 1865.