Eoin McNamee - City of Time

Without warning, Contessa started to writhe, her back arching, pain written on her gentle face. “No,” she moaned, “stop…”

Cati jerked her hand back. Contessa’s body fell back to the bed and she was asleep again, breathing heavily, beads of perspiration on her forehead.

Something was wrong. Cati placed her hand on another Resister’s head, a dark haired young man. He twisted and moaned as if her touch burned him. She snatched her hand away. What was wrong? She should be able to wake them.

Even as she stood there, bewildered and alarmed, Cati could feel sleep start to steal over her, as it did if you remained too long in the Starry. But this sleep felt different. It seemed… stale.

She turned swiftly and walked towards the door. As Watcher it was not the time to fall asleep. She closed the door behind her and locked it, then ran outside, welcoming the cool night air on her face. Outside it seemed as bright as day. The moon over the Workhouse roof shone with a light that was almost dazzling.

Cati sat down on a rock. Something was terribly wrong. There was only one option. She knew that her father had sometimes called upon special people in the ordinary world. She thought that the shopkeeper, Mary White, was one of them.

Owen was another. His father had known the Resisters and Owen had joined them to defeat the Harsh. Owen was called the Navigator, for reasons Cati didn’t quite understand, and it was a title that the other Resisters seemed to respect, even, in some cases, to fear.

She would never try to contact him under normal circumstances. But these were not normal circumstances. She jumped up and began to run.

Owen didn’t know what woke him. A gust of wind, he thought, or a dog barking? As his eyes got used to the dark he lifted his head from the pillow. Everything in his room was the same as before. His guitar propped against the wall, the model plane hanging from the ceiling, the old chest under the window. Outside the wind stirred the trees. That was it , he thought, the wind.

He allowed his head to fall back on to the pillow. It was cold and he gathered the blankets around him. He was about to close his eyes when he noticed something odd. He sat up. The air in the middle of the room looked strange. It was shimmering slightly. He rubbed his eyes, but when he looked again, there was still something different. The room looked distorted, like looking through old glass. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he sensed a presence in the room, and his heart started to beat faster.

Then he thought he heard a sound, a voice. There was somebody else in the room.

Without knowing how, he was out of bed. The shimmering air was between him and the door. He started to edge around it. He heard the sound again, like a voice, but far, far away, as if in a cave or down a well. The words were mournful and distorted. He tried to squeeze between the wall and the shimmer, but it moved towards him.

Owen stepped back, stumbling over his trainers, and instinctively put out an arm to save himself. The arm touched the moving air and to his amazement it felt warm and solid, like a living thing.

He jerked his arm away and backed towards the bed. Something was resolving itself in the middle of the room. Suddenly there was a large flicker and he realised that it was a person, someone he recognised, a clever girl’s face with dark, curly hair, then a body wearing a faded uniform with epaulettes on the shoulders. His heart leaped.

“Cati!” he gasped. He could see her lips moving, but could not understand the words that still sounded distant. He grabbed her arm. Immediately he could hear her voice. It had been a year since she had disappeared back into the mists of time, but if he thought that she was going to exchange memories with him like two old comrades, he was sadly mistaken.

“Hold on to me, you idiot,” she hissed. “It’s the only way I can stay stable in your time.” Owen grasped her with both hands. The flickering stopped and at last she was standing in his room, flesh and blood. Her expression was serious, but as always, there was a mocking look in her strange green eyes.

“Cati,” he said again. “I missed—”

“Never mind that,” she said. “There isn’t time. I need you to come down to the Workhouse and meet me.”

“What’s happening? Is it the Harsh?”

“Come to the Workhouse and I’ll explain. It’s easier to stay stable there.” As she spoke, Cati began to flicker again. One moment Owen had hold of solid flesh, the next there was nothing. But just before she faded completely, he saw a cheeky, lopsided grin on her face and thought he heard the words, “Missed you too …”

Hastily, Owen pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and fumbled for his trainers. Then he opened the door into the hallway. It was flooded with moonlight. From the room at the end he heard his mother’s soft breathing. As quietly as possible, he crept along the landing and down the stairs.

Outside it was chilly and he was glad he’d grabbed his jacket. Everything was quiet and still and he could hear the sound his trainers made on the grass. He ran lightly across the two fields which separated his house from the river and from the dense shadow of the Workhouse. Its crumbling brickwork and dark, empty windows were forbidding enough to send a shiver down his spine. Owen remembered being inside and seeing cold, ghostly shapes moving through the field as the Harsh attacked. He remembered Johnston’s men attacking the Workhouse defences.

When he reached the riverbank he leaped lightly on to the fallen tree. He ran across and jumped down on the other side. It was darker here and hard to see where he was going. He should have brought a torch.

“Cati?” he called out, his voice sounding a bit weak and scared in the darkness. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Cati?” In the darkness something rustled. He ran to the Workhouse door.

“Cati,” he hissed, “is that you?” There was a scrabbling sound from inside, like stones and rubble falling. In the darkness he could see the staircase, almost blocked with rocks, then a small figure dashed around the bend in the stairs carrying a strangely-shaped magno gun in one hand.

She slid to the ground in front of Owen. “I nearly shot your silly head off,” she said, starting to brush dust off her trousers.

“I wouldn’t have put it up if I’d known you were armed,” he said. “What’s going on anyway?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking troubled. “If only the Sub-Commandant was here …”

But Owen knew that the Sub-Commandant, Cati’s father, would never be there again. In the final battle with the Harsh, he had been sucked into the time vortex they called the Puissance and been lost, leaving Cati to inherit his role as Watcher.

Cati turned her face aside and passed her sleeve over her eyes. “You miss him too?” she said, her voice almost pleading. Owen nodded. The small, stern man had believed in Owen when everyone else seemed against him.

“Anyway,” Cati said with an effort, “let’s get inside somewhere where we can talk.”

“What about the Den?”

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They walked along the riverbank, then dived through the bushes into the Den. Inside Owen took the piece of magno from its box and placed it on the table. The blue light illuminated the room.

Cati threw herself wearily down on the old sofa. Owen went to the little box where he kept food and took out teabags and a packet of biscuits. He had added a camping stove to the Den and Cati watched with interest as he lit it. Owen made the tea and waited until she had drunk half of it before he spoke.