Disrupted (2 page)

I screamed again.

“What the—” started Chris.

I wasn’t around to hear the end. I was being sucked up into a vortex, reluctant bones pummelled and stretched until I felt as if I was the spinning wall. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were pressed as flat as a cartoon character. Then, suddenly the vortex turned on its head, slurping me into a downward spiral…

Chapter 2

N
umbers spinning around and around and around. It was like a living graveyard inside my head, an afterlife for all the unsolved algebra equations in classrooms around the world.

I was lying flat on the floor and I couldn’t breathe. I strained to push up off my stomach. With a loud thump, Chris rolled off my back and onto the floor beside me. I blinked long and hard as the last few seconds of my life flashed before me.

I glared at him. “I told you to run.”

The last thing I’d seen had been a dour-faced guardian angel, and let’s just say I doubted he’d guided me to Heaven. It was that downward hurl at the end that really had me worried. “Why didn’t you run?”

“You screamed ‘run’ at me,” corrected Chris irritably, getting to his feet. “Just before you yanked me down on top of you.”

Okay, but that wasn’t the point. Something really bad had happened, something I wasn’t ready to put words to, and that something could have totally been avoided.

“You should have run at the first sight of Jack’s fists.” I struggled to my knees, tentatively testing my jelly legs. Satisfied they would hold me, I straightened to face off Chris. “And what’s up with goading Jeremy like that? Don’t you know how many kinds of a sadistic moron he is?”

“You would know,” Chris retorted. “Being best friends and all.”

Jeremy and I were barely civil on a good day, but I knew that wasn’t what Chris was getting at. “I suppose you think this is all my fault?”

Chris glared back at me, saying nothing.

I shook my head at him. “Did you really think you could take Jack?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When the two of you have quite finished,” came a new voice, “maybe we could move on.”

I glanced about in surprise.

And grimaced to my tummy.

It was my guardian angel and he wasn’t looking any happier. The brittle sting might have left his silver eyes, but now they were a stony grey in his grim face. Even his hair, blonde and long, was pulled back into a severe ponytail.

Then I noticed his jeans, faded and maybe a little too snug. His white cotton button-up shirt was crinkled and not quite tucked in or out. I didn’t bother checking for wings. I might not be the resident expert on angels, but I strongly suspected this wasn’t one.

Feeling just a little stupid and a whole lot relieved, I did a slow three hundred and sixty degree turn.

Those numbers hadn’t been inside my head after all. The room was tiny, all four walls streaming with crowded binary numbers on a luminous background. If I concentrated really hard, they became a giant black and white striped snake swirling around us at about a million miles per hour.

“Who are you?” demanded Chris, snapping me out of my hypnotic daze. “You were in the woods. What did you do?”

“I’m Drustan,” replied the man cautiously. “I expect you’re slightly bewildered, but there is a good explanation.”

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Ah, excellent.” The man sighed, turning to me with a small smile. “An excellent place to begin. This is TIC, our Time Irrelevant Capsule. And you must be Willow Ervant.”

Two words jumped out at me and put all the others in the shade. “Time Capsule? Is this a joke?”

“Not a joke,” muttered Chris. “He kidnapped us, that’s what. And probably drugged us as well.”

“I do feel kind of hazy,” I said.

“That would be the Leaping,” offered the man kindly. “It takes some getting used to, I’m afraid.”

“No one’s getting used to anything,” Chris said, walking away. “Come on, Willow, we’re leaving.”

I gave the man an apologetic shrug. He seemed quite nice—yeah, right, for a psycho who believed he’d kidnapped us in his time capsule. I looked at him uneasily, expecting a rush of panic. The thing is, there was something comforting about this man. I know, crazy. But there it was. He looked more like a dusty professor who’d come up for his annual airing than a real threat. Not that he was ancient, closer to thirty than forty at a guess.

I swiftly turned and limped after Chris.

It didn’t take long before we were right back where we’d started. Did I mention how tiny the room was? No, it didn’t take long at all to discover there was no door.

“How do we get out?” fumed Chris. “Where’s the door?”

“You must trust me, Christian. I mean you no harm.”

“You kidnapped us.”

“I suppose you would see it that way.” The man rubbed his forehead. “I’d really hoped to explain all this before I brought you here, but I barely made it in time as it is.”

“How did we get inside here?” I wanted to know.

A soft glimmer lit his eyes. “Leaping, of course. Travel outside the linear boundaries of space and time.”

“So,” I said, desperately trying to pretend I was dealing with a rational adult, “this leaping can move us through walls?”

“Through time and space,” he said. “We didn’t just move through walls, Miss Ervant. I brought you back with me to the year 2106.” To Chris, he added, “A temporary measure, I assure you. An absolute last resort. If there were any other—”

“Time travel,” exploded Chris.

“Why, yes,” said the man. “I thought I’d mentioned that.”

Chris narrowed his eyes on the man. “What did you say your name was?”

“Drustan,” he answered in a careful, restrained manner. “Drustan Corwyn.”

“Jack put you up to this, didn’t he? How do you even know Jack?”

“I wouldn’t say I know Jack Townsend,” hedged Drustan, “but I do know he’s involved in this mess.”

“Great.” Chris fell back a step, shaking his head. “Absolutely bloody great.”

“That’s quite enough, young man.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Very well, Christian.”

“Don’t call me that either.”

Drustan frowned at me.

Well, why not? Everything else seemed to be my fault.

I poked Chris in the arm. “You’re acting weird. What’s going on?”

“You were right, that’s what’s going on,” he told me bitterly. “This is all a big fat joke. Jack’s having a good ol’ laugh on me.”

“Jack?” Call me slow, but wherever Jack was, I doubted he was doing much laughing.

“This is about my article in
Zany Science
a couple of weeks ago.” Chris shot a dark look Drustan’s way. “I wrote a piece on the past being an interwoven lattice of hidden dimensions that never fade completely. In theory, it should be possible to find your way back to any event at any point in time, with the right set of coordinates mapped out.”

Chris was still glaring at Drustan.

Drustan had shifted his frown off me and onto Chris.

And I still didn’t understand. “Repeat in English?”

“Time travel,” said Chris impatiently. “Going back to the past.”

You have got to be kidding!
“You actually believe he’s from the future?”

“Of course not,” Chris snapped. “The concept of time travel isn’t unique. The reality is that no one has even found a way of breaking through to those hidden dimensions, let alone setting up a network of satellites in the lattice for GPS navigation.”

So I was back to, “What exactly are you saying?”

“Jack obviously read my article and saw his chance to turn it into this elaborate hoax. He’s probably got web cams aimed all over the place.” Chris started pacing, peering at the monitors that made up the walls. “He must have set the whole thing up, getting me there in the woods with this Drustan chap and—”

He stopped pacing right in front of me. The look on his face was not pleasant. “And you. Of course, how did I not see your part in this? Well, it’s not funny”

I started edging in Drustan’s direction. Right now, he seemed the saner of the two.

Chris beat me to it, lurching to within an inch of Drustan’s nose. “Game’s up. Ha ha. Now show me the way out.”

“You’ve got this all wrong, Christian. This isn’t some joke that’s got out of hand.”

“Just flip open the trapdoor, or whatever it is you need to do, and get me out of here.”

“Chris,” I shrilled.

He looked down at me, his eyes a piercing silver. “What?”

I wasn’t sure what. I just needed a moment to hear myself think.

Drustan took the gap. “We don’t have time for this. You really are in the 22
nd
century and with good reason.”

“Fine. Whatever you say,” said Chris in a deeply patronising manner. “You Leaped me here, so now you can Leap me back.”

“No, I can’t,” said Drustan.

“Of course you can.”

“You’re being very difficult.”

“And you’re lying.”

“I suppose technically I could Leap you back,” said Drustan, quite sharply, “but I’m not going to.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, actually, I’m not.”

As Chris’s voice rose in anger, Drustan’s grew quieter, more flustered, as if he couldn’t believe he was having this argument but didn’t quite know how to stop himself.

“Because of Jack?” demanded Chris.

“I can only return you to the exact moment you Leapt from, Christian. You might recall the nasty situation I pulled you out of? I cannot send you back until the danger has been negated.”

An image of Jack and that glinting blade scratched the back of my eyes, and this time wouldn’t be suppressed. Had he used it on us? Oh my God, what if we really were—?

No!

I might not be able to get the picture out of my head, but I was really good at blotting wayward thoughts. Like why my dad hadn’t moved to Biggs Hill with us. The commute wasn’t that long. Instead he’d elected to remain in our Mayfair apartment and only popped down for the occasional visit.

“Did Jack come up with that all on his own?” snorted Chris, his gaze shooting across the monitors again. “Let me go. I’ll show Jack just what he can do with his danger.”

“You wouldn’t be able to show anyone anything, Christian. You’re dead.”

I’m pretty sure Drustan never meant to deliver that shock. He closed his eyes as soon as the words were out and just stood there, taking a breath so deep and long I felt my own lungs begin to ache.

“It isn’t true.” I reached for Chris’s arm. “We—we can’t be dead.”

“You’re very much alive, Miss Ervant,” sighed Drustan, opening his eyes. “Both now and in your own time. The situation is slightly more complicated for Christian, however.”

They were the most beautiful words I’d ever heard, not excluding, ‘Both now and in your own time.’ The tension rolled from my shoulders. Chris, on the other hand, was rigid and mute, his face screwed into a frown as he stared at Drustan.

“It’s okay,” I said softly, folding my fingers over his arm, “he said it’s complicated, not fatal.”

“Yeah, right.” Chris wrenched his arm away from me.

Drustan came closer. “You’re not supposed to be dead, Christian. The past has been altered. The changes have only just begun rippling through to us, but we’re fairly confident that so long as you’re here with us in the future and alive, that wave cannot actually crash.”

“
Fairly
confident?” I didn’t like the doubtful expression in our expert’s eyes. If he didn’t know, who did? Not me, that was for sure.

“Back in your time,” explained Drustan, “Christian remains dead and the chain reaction will continue weaving through the time lattice, imploding historical fact as we know it. If that reaction reaches certain critical events, the means for me to go back and save Christian may no longer exist. We are uncertain as to how such a paradox will resolve itself.”

This didn’t sound like much of a plan to me. “So Chris could just go ‘Poof!’ at any moment?”

“Be assured, Miss Ervant, we will find what triggered these events and reverse it. We cannot allow Christian to die. Failure is not an option.”

The way he said it was ominously ironic, tagged with unspoken plots and sub plots and alternative endings. The recap went something like this: “We cannot allow Christian to die. Because if that happened, the death of one teenage boy from Biggs Hill will be the least of anyone’s troubles.”

“That’s if I’m even dead,” said Chris, giving Drustan a mutinous look. “Who died and made you God, anyway?”

It would have been cruel to state the obvious, so I didn’t. “Listen to him, Chris. He said he won’t allow you to die.”

“Shut up, Willow.”

“I’m only trying to help.”

“Yes, and every time you help, my life stinks a little worse. So just don’t, okay?”

“I wish you’d both shut up,” muttered Drustan, which was so far from his earlier mild manner, Chris and I did just that.

“Thank you,” said Drustan, reverting to self. He pushed up his left sleeve to reveal a chunky diver’s watch with lots of circles within circles. Before I could get a closer look, he pressed a button and then brought one hand down on each of our shoulders and muttered, “TIC, transmute to my apartment now.”