TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (43 page)

Liam cocked his head. ‘Wasn’t
that round about when Waldstein showed off his first-ever time machine?’

‘Yeah, round about then, I
think.’

‘I wonder if this future has a version
of him in it,’ said Liam. ‘Eh? That would be weird.’

Maddy shrugged. An intriguing idea – that
another version of him lay ahead of them now, perhaps a version of him that was living a
very different life. A happier life perhaps with his wife and his son? A life lived in
blissful ignorance of time travel. An Einstein who remained a humble patent clerk; a
Bill Gates who ended up a computer repairman.

Wouldn’t that be a thing, though? A
timeline that survives this looming nuclear crisis and perhaps finds a peaceful future.
But also a timeline without Waldstein’s displacement machine
in
it. Perhaps even a timeline without a Pandora. Wouldn’t all of that be a wonderful
thing? She could only hope. ‘Rashim?’

He turned to look at her.
‘Yes?’

‘Do it. Set that up, please.
Let’s go get a look at our future.’

2043, the ruins of Piccadilly Circus,
London

The dog, a small, virtually hairless thing
that might, once upon a time, have been mistaken for a Jack Russell, chased the rodent
through a dark maze of creaking wooden tables and desks – furniture that for many a year
had held true until a decade ago a portion of the building’s roof had finally
caved in. Ten years of wet summers and freezing winters had done its work and damp was
rotting the wood.

The dog scurried between chair legs and desk
legs in a desperate, ravenous pursuit. The rat was a good-sized one and yet fast. Its
small feet skittered across a long-forgotten floor covered in grit and plaster;
moistened by the damp, it was almost soil and in several places clumps of weed and moss
thrived.

Out of the maze of the long-dead office, the
rat scampered up a slanted fallen roof timber, on to a chair and over a stick-dry bundle
of bones in rags slumped across the grit-covered surface of a service counter. Its body
and beady dark eyes reflected all but briefly in a mildew-spotted oval of magnified
glass. Along the counter now, it found a dark corner behind a rusting box spewing
corroded wires.

A moment later the dog scampered past the
counter in hot pursuit, out into a large hall of round wooden benches and long tables.
As with the counter, there were other bundles of white
bones and tufts
of hair wrapped up in decaying fibres of clothing to be seen: lying along the benches,
slumped on the reading tables, spread out on the floor. Shards of sunlight speared down
into this place through the collapsed domed roof of the building, and a cheerful,
welcoming blue sky was visible beyond, framed by the broken fingers of iron spars and
crumbling masonry.

The balding dog sensed it had lost its prey
and wandered over to an opening that led out into the warmth of a pleasant
summer’s afternoon. It emerged into the sunlight, blinking back the brightness of
the sun, sat on its haunches and panted. It decided to rest and recover for a while
before returning inside to sniff out another rodent. The pickings were too rich in this
building to give up yet.

Its pink tongue darted out and slapped its
muzzle. Skinny flanks heaved with the rapid in-out in-out in-out of hot breath being
expelled and oxygen pulled in.

And dark beady eyes looked out impassively
on a crowded vista that meant nothing to it. A place once upon a time known as
Piccadilly Circus.

Tall grass and nettles grew waist-high here,
a sea of gently swaying ochre-green giving way here and there to hummocky islands of
rust-red vehicle roofs. Lost to sight, but certainly down there where the wild grass and
the tall weeds spread their roots, was a rich compost of decaying clothing fibres and
bleached bones still able to leak some goodness into the forming soil.

In the middle of this shifting grassland was
a circular plinth topped by a still-recognizable human form with wings. Eros. Its bronze
base was now a peppermint green, the statue itself – aluminium – was a marble-like
pattern of rust spots and algal growth.

Everywhere a pleasing prairie sound. The
gentle murmur of
breeze haunting the skeletons of dead buildings. The
grass whispering a soothing white noise. Crickets chirruping in chorus. Far away another
dog barks to find its pack. And slowly the late-afternoon sun eased across a cloudless
sky towards a craggy horizon of falling buildings. Eventually that same horizon would be
shallow humps beneath a blanket of vegetation. Eventually that horizon would be flat
grassland or a wood or something in between.

Peaceful.

But life goes on. Big bugs eat small bugs.
Rats eat bugs. Dogs eat rats. A dozen crows circle overhead prepared to eat anything.
Life continues despite a gradually decreasing background level of radiation that might
still give concern to a radiologist.

Just over four decades ago, it wasn’t
peaceful here. Just over four decades ago, there was a period of horror and panic. The
sound of wailing sirens filled the air.

Screams.

Prayers.

This same blue sky was criss-crossed with
several hair-thin lines of vapour: the approaching and departing vectors of missiles. A
day in which the skies all over Earth looked largely the same. Vapour trails and
mushroom clouds.

But that’s all long ago. Forgotten
now. Silly, vain, stupid, violent humans are history and in a couple of hundred years
the last visible remnants of their buildings will be too.

Peaceful, except for a tiny disturbance now.
Minute – the size of a mere pinhead. If one knew precisely where to look, you would see
nothing more than a spot of darkness floating six feet above the ground. Like an errant
pixel on a computer display, grain on an old photograph, the tiniest freckle on
porcelain-fair skin.

There for a second, gone the next.

They stared at the low-resolution image on
the computer screen for a long, silent minute before Liam finally spoke.

‘That’s Piccadilly Circus, is
it?’

No answer. In his own Liam way he was being
rhetorical. ‘Well now, that’s not looking very good, is it?’

‘You’re quite right,’ said
Maddy. ‘Not good. Not good at all. I think it’s safe to say we don’t
want this future.’

‘That means we have to make it
right,’ said Sal. ‘Jack the Ripper has to kill this Kelly lady?’

‘And get away … never to be
identified.’ Maddy nodded. ‘Kinda sucks, but yeah. That’s how it has
to be.’

8 p.m., 8 November 1888, Whitechapel,
London

Mary Kelly wiped muffin crumbs from her
lips and smiled across the table at Faith. ‘I ain’t felt so ’appy in a
long time.’

Faith had been gazing out at the street. The
late-night market was closing up for business. By the amber glow of lamplight,
costermongers, butchers, grocers packed their wares away as weary-looking stevedores
returned home from the docks and warehouses along the Thames. A narrow street heaving
with activity; a seething mass of grubby humanity seen through the sooty window of this
small tea shop. Faith had logged, analysed and dismissed seventy-six faces in the last
minute alone.

She levelled her impassive gaze on Mary.
‘Why are you happy, Mary?’

‘I have you.’

Faith had compiled a short list of
non-specific, noncommittal yet reassuring responses that she could trot out in response
to Mary’s endless chatter. She picked one at random.

‘Then I am happy too.’

‘I feel like there’s a hope. A
way out of Whitechapel. A way out of this stinkin’ awful unfair city.’

‘Yes.’ Faith played a smile.
‘We have your plan.’

Mary checked the coins in her purse. The
last few nights their petty crimes had paid off well. Mary had decided they could try
their luck along the Strand. There were a number of members’
clubs along that busy road that disgorged drunken gentlemen into the streets in the
early hours. Faith had played her part well, catching the eye and attention of a number
of them with some suggestive and teasing come-ons while Mary had made quick work of
dipping her hand into their coat pockets.

‘We’ve already got almost a
whole pound! A few weeks like this, Faith love, and we might have enough for tickets to
take us anywhere we want!’

‘The place that you called
“Wales” sounds like a very nice place.’ Faith was vaguely aware that
her AI was adopting some very sophisticated human behavioural traits. She was
‘playing along’. Acting a part. Lying. Faith had no intention of travelling
off to a place called ‘Wales’, but maintaining the illusion that she was
sold on that idea suited her well. Mary was a useful accomplice with useful local
knowledge. More than that, between them they seemed to have developed an efficient way
to accumulate money; something that was needed, of course, to purchase food.

Faith finished her lamb broth. Generously
full of chunks of mutton and other useful proteins.

‘I think you an’ me’s
earned a night off. What do you say?’

Faith was looking out of the soot-smudged
window. ‘As you wish.’

‘We could go down me local, the
Queen’s Head. How’s that sound?’

Faith turned to look at her reproachfully.
‘You intend to consume alcohol again?’

Mary shrugged. ‘It’s just a
little celebration. We done so well, you an’ me. Just one drink ain’t gonna
hurt, is it?’

‘Information: intoxication impairs
performance and compromises judgement.’

Mary laughed. ‘Bleedin’
’eck, Faith. Come on, just one little drink. Ain’t gonna kill me now, is
it?’

The pub – The Queen’s Head – turned
out to be another useful location for Faith to log faces. Her database of stored images
was rapidly increasing in size. She’d spotted, logged, analysed and filed 17,217
faces in London so far. None of them, of course, were the people she was after. But it
meant over seventeen thousand humans ruled out.

As she calmly surveyed the florid faces
around her, through clouds of acrid pipe smoke, Mary was enjoying herself. One drink had
turned into several drinks and she was now in the middle of a noisy muddle of men and
women, leading them in singing along to an accordion player, all of them equally
inebriated. The innkeeper winced at the racket as he collected the empty tankards. Keen
to begin kicking out his patrons for the night.

Faith approved of Mary Kelly. There was an
iron strength in the woman: not physically, of course, but in the way she could command
the obedience and respect of others. The kind of person who, in another life, in other
more favourable circumstances, might have achieved great things. Instead, all she would
ever be was a ‘street woman’, a pauper, quite likely destined for an early
grave. If she could feel any emotion for Mary, it would be fondness. Instead, the best
she could manage was dispassionate approval.

She watched Mary sing tunelessly for a
while, a foghorn voice that carried over the other tuneless voices, then turned back to
the task at hand: observing the faces around her.

And it was then, as she glanced around once
more to check for any new faces, that she caught sight of a dark-haired young man. Just
a glimpse of a face on the far side of the public house. Her breath caught in her
throat.

Liam O’Connor.

[Information: 85% identity
match]

She started to push her way through the fog
of pipe smoke and heaving, sweaty bodies. Florid, bearded faces loomed closely at hers.
Men with gap-toothed smiles leered at her as she squeezed her way frantically
through.

For a moment she lost sight of the young
man. Then re-established visual contact again a few seconds later. Closer now. She could
see his face was slim, his nose prominent beneath two thick arched eyebrows.

[Information: 87% identity
match]

She began to feel adrenaline coursing
through her body. Her mind determining the best strategy. To kill him right here in this
pub? Or better to watch him discreetly and perhaps follow him when he left at the end of
the evening in the hope he was going to lead her back to the others.

Closer now. She could see the young man was
the same height and build.

[Information: 88% identity
match]

She needed to be closer; to not have clouds
of pipe smoke obscuring her view; or red-faced, drunken fools staggering into her,
breathing rancid fumes in her face. She could snap any one of these fools’ necks
with the slightest flick of her wrist, and perhaps no one would notice in the press and
surge of bodies. A man might collapse to the sawdust-covered floor of this pub and they
would all assume he’d passed out from too much drink.

But it wasn’t worth the risk of
alerting the attention of Liam
O’Connor, now just a few yards
away from her, laughing at something being said to him by someone else.

Faith reached to pull her bonnet down a
little, hoping to disguise her face. Too late. She noticed his brown eyes flicker on to
her. Resting on her … and then a smile for her benefit. No alarm. No flicker
of recognition and panic.

No. Just a fuzzy-headed, drunken smile.

‘Hoy! All right?’ the young man
called across to her. ‘Buy you a drink, love?’

[Information: not Liam
O’Connor]

She ground her teeth. Turned on her heels
and started to push and squirm her way through the crowd back to where she’d been
standing moments ago. Only to discover Mary was no longer there with her newly made
drunken friends.

12.30 a.m., 9 November 1888, Whitechapel,
London

Mary guessed Faith had had enough and taken
herself back to the room they were sharing off Miller’s Court. It wasn’t so
far; just a couple of streets away from the pub.