City of Shadows tr-6 Read online

  City of Shadows

  ( Time Raiders - 6 )

  Alex Scarrow

  Alex Scarrow

  City of Shadows

  Prologue

  13 September 2001, New York

  Roald Waldstein stared at the Manhattan skyline. The pallid sky above the south end of the city was still smudged with a faint pall of dust. The thin twist of smoke, coming from where the Twin Towers had stood just two days ago, looked like the careless rubbing out of a pencil drawing, a ghost of the towers that had once been there.

  ‘God,’ he said. ‘And it’s still burning.’

  ‘My dad said it might carry on burning for weeks.’

  Roald turned to look at Chanice Williams. ‘Really?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded confidently, working gum in her mouth almost mechanically. ‘Said so on Fox News too.’

  Like everyone else at Clinton Hill Elementary School, Chanice had become something of a news-station junkie, tuning in before and after school, the cartoon channels completely forgotten for now.

  ‘You think anyone’s alive in there still?’ asked Roald.

  ‘Dunno. I heard they lookin’ just in case, tho’.’

  He watched the puffs of dark smoke rising lazily. ‘I hope there’s no one trapped in that… alive. That would be horrible.’

  ‘Come on. We should get on to school,’ said Chanice. ‘We’ll be late.’

  Roald nodded at her to head back up the alleyway without him. ‘I’ll come in a bit.’

  ‘Shizzy.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘You gonna get youself another demerit. You want that, Waldo?’

  The kids all called him Waldo. As in Where’s Waldo? It took the first five minutes of the first day of school to get lumped with that stroke-of-genius nickname. The thick-framed glasses and untameable hair had played their part too.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘OK, your funeral, Mr Professor.’

  He watched her turn and go, weaving her way up the alleyway, stepping round a dustbin that had spilled rubbish across the cobbles.

  ‘I’ll be along in a bit,’ he called after her.

  ‘Your funeral!’ She shrugged again. ‘Jus’ don’t miss registration,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Or Miss Chudasama gonna get medieval on yo’.’

  He turned back to watch the skyline. A train rumbled noisily overhead across the Williamsburg Bridge, heading into Manhattan. They were saying the trains and subway into Manhattan were still pretty deserted — easy seats. Everyone figured something else bad was bound to happen again at any moment: another plane, a bomb perhaps.

  His mother said that too. Just like Chanice, like every New Yorker, like every American, dull-eyed from watching too much TV. ‘ They’ll be back. They’ll be back to finish us all off. Just you see.’

  It was just him and his mother and the TV set in their one-bedroom apartment. She had three different part-time jobs and what time was left after that was spent microwaving TV dinners or pop-tart breakfasts. Outside work, her life was Montel Williams, Judge Judy or Oprah Winfrey so she didn’t really ever have much to say that wasn’t already a newspaper headline. To be honest, she rarely had much to say that was original or vaguely interesting. But she had this morning. Something that had lodged firmly in his mind.

  She’d turned away from her small black-and-white TV in the kitchen to look at him, mug of coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. ‘Roald, don’t you just wish you could go back to Tuesday morning and tell those poor souls not to come in to work? Or just… just… go in there and scream fire or something?’

  He nodded now. Such a small step in time that would be. Just two days to save three thousand lives.

  He turned away from the East River. Beyond the railing the low-tide shingle was covered with rubbish: nappies, shopping trolleys and plastic bags and seagulls picking for titbits among it.

  Just two days.

  He started to make his way back up the alleyway, passing a boarded-up archway to his right. Chipboard panels nailed over old rust-red brickwork, covered with lurid-coloured spray-paint gang tags. One of the panels had been pulled away, revealing a corrugated metal shutter that was halfway up. He squatted down to look inside. Curious. His mother was always cautioning him how curiosity killed the cat. That or got into very big trouble with the local police department if it didn’t mind its own gosh-darn business.

  The muted light of day pushed the darkness within far enough back that he could see the place had been used by drug addicts or vagrants. Broken glass, discarded needles, a dirty mattress. A forgotten part of Brooklyn. He wondered when this place last had a proper use, a purpose, other than being some dark hole for an addict to crawl into, or merely a dark empty space beneath an old bridge.

  ‘ WAL-DO! ’

  He looked up the alleyway. Chanice, bless her, was tapping her toe, waiting for him, acting like she was his big sister or something. She cupped her mouth. ‘You re-e-eally don’t wanna be late again. Ya mom’ll kill you! Come on! ’

  ‘Coming!’ He got up and turned round one last time to catch a glimpse of the smudge in the sky over Manhattan.

  10 September 2001, New York

  ‘Mr Waldstein? S-sir?’

  Roald Waldstein turned to see Dr Joseph Olivera approaching. The man joined him beside the railing and together they looked out at the sedate East River.

  ‘My apologies, Joseph,’ said Waldstein. ‘I was a million miles away there.’

  ‘Uh… that’s OK, sir.’

  Waldstein smiled. He liked Olivera. The technician reminded him of himself at that age: hungry for knowledge, to show the world what his agile mind contained. Hungry to show the world an incredible theoretical possibility: that it was possible to step backwards through the membrane of space-time. As easy as it was to step through the tattered rip in a bedsheet.

  ‘You know, Joseph, I came across this place when I was just a boy. When I was eleven.’

  ‘S-sorry?’

  ‘This place,’ Waldstein said, turning to look back at the alley. ‘The archway. No one comes down here. It’s a backwater.’

  ‘You… you lived round here?’

  ‘In Brooklyn?’ He nodded. ‘Moved to Chicago after my mother died. I lived with my aunt after.’

  Olivera nodded. He knew that much of this legendary man’s life — Chicago onwards. Waldstein’s early life — the first years alone with his mother — Waldstein had always preferred to keep utterly private. A media-stream interviewer had once called him a biographer’s nightmare.

  ‘Perfect location this,’ Waldstein said. ‘I never ever forgot about it. This time and this place. You know, Joseph, tomorrow every New Yorker will have their eyes up on the sky. We could walk in and out of this alleyway dressed as clowns all day long and no one would remember that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Perfect location,’ Waldstein muttered. He smiled wistfully.

  They listened to the distant hiss of morning traffic, the cry of a dozen gulls strutting among the shingle and rubbish below, fighting for scraps.

  ‘Mr Waldstein? Can I ask you a question?’

  The old man smiled, pushed a shock of his wild, wiry grey hair away from his eyes. ‘You can ask, Joseph. I can’t promise you an answer, though.’

  Olivera sucked in a breath. Nervous. Waldstein suspected he knew what the man was going to ask. At some point or another, every person he’d ever worked with long enough eventually mustered their courage and got round to asking the exact same question. He let Olivera continue with it all the same. Better to get this out of the way.

  ‘Mr Waldstein, when you went back… that first time, you know, in 2044? The Chicago demonstration?’

  Here it comes. He half smiled. Yup… that question, all right.r />
  ‘Did you… did you ever get to s-see — ’

  ‘My wife? My child?’

  Olivera nodded. Wide-eyed and very nervous. Waldstein suspected the man must have worked himself up for this moment. Must have spent the last few months at the institute, and the last few weeks here, waiting for that perfect moment to pop the question. And here it was supposedly — what this young man judged to be the perfect moment.

  Waldstein sighed as he cast his mind back to fading memories of that day. That’s what he’d intended. Wasn’t it? Just one last chance to say goodbye to both of them. To tell them how much he loved them. Because he’d been far too busy to say that before the accident. Far too busy with his work. A chance to say I love you. That and, of course, a chance to demonstrate to the assembled audience of invited journalists that the Chan-Jackson Tachyon Theory — with a few alterations to neutrino channelling — could actually be put into practice.

  Olivera swallowed anxiously as he waited for Waldstein to answer. Back home, back in 2054, this precise question actually had its very own name. The question was known as the Waldstein Enigma. Alternatively it was known as the Billion Dollar Question. Any journalist who squeezed the answer to that out of him was never going to have to chase down a new story again.

  Waldstein turned to him. He toyed with the idea of answering this young man. Or at least telling him what he’d not managed to see.

  ‘Regretfully,’ he replied slowly, ‘I… never got to see them again, Joseph.’

  There you are… more than I’ve ever told anyone else. He hoped the young man would be satisfied with that.

  Olivera’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He was fidgeting. Licking his lips. Eager to ask the inevitable follow-on question. ‘So, what… what did you s-see, Mr Waldstein?’

  Waldstein laughed softly. Shook his head. ‘Now, Joseph… let’s leave it there, shall we?’

  ‘I…’ Olivera’s cheeks darkened. He looked down at his feet, ashamed. Aware that he’d overstepped a line. ‘I’m s-s-sorry, sir. I — ’

  ‘That’s quite all right. Everyone asks eventually, Joseph. Everyone.’

  The silence was uncomfortable for the younger man. Waldstein put him out of his misery. ‘I believe you have an update for me?’

  ‘Uh?… Uh yes! I do, sir. The AI imprints are completed now. I’ve checked them through and run simulations. They’re one hundred per cent stable.’

  ‘Good. Then I suppose we’re nearly ready to upload those into the units?’

  ‘They’re very nearly ready, sir. Full growth cycle in the next hour.’

  Waldstein patted his shoulder gently, a conciliatory gesture to reassure the younger man there was no harm done just now.

  Curiosity didn’t kill this cat. Did it, Mother?

  ‘Let’s go back inside and check on them, then.’

  Chapter 1

  2001, New York

  Wednesday, 12 September 2001

  If you’re reading this then I guess someone, somewhere, does go through the rubbish and read every piece of paper that gets balled up and tossed away. So then, in that case, here it is — my name’s Sal.

  That’s all you need to know about my name.

  I’m fourteen. I think. Actually, I might be fifteen now. I’m not sure. I’m from India. And here’s the tricky bit — I’m from 2026. You read that right. Please… read on. Don’t throw this away. I’m not making that up, nor am I mad. Just go with it… for now. Please?

  There’s a long story that comes before this page. But all you really need to know is that right now I feel lost. I’m scared. I’ve lost another home. We can’t go back to the archway. The place we were living in. Maddy says we can’t ever go back there. Like, ever. It’s marked, she said. Compromised. It’s no longer a secret and safe place.

  So now we have nowhere to hide. It’s just us lot and an old bus-thing that Maddy calls an ‘RV’.

  Jahulla, what a collection of freaks we make. There’s Maddy, she’s a nerd from 2010. This is closest to her past-life time. She was like nine or ten in 2001, so she actually remembers this year.

  Then there’s Liam, he’s a ship’s steward. Or was. He was working on the Titanic. Yes. That Titanic. The one that sank in 1912. He’s really out of his depth here (ha ha). Even though we’ve been stationed back in 2001 for a few months now, he’s still like some confused old fuddah-man even though he’s technically only sixteen.

  There’s Foster, who really is old. Not just acting old (like Liam). He’s ninety or something and I’m pretty sure he’s dying. He knows the most about Waldstein’s agency. He was the one who recruited each of us from our past lives. But even he doesn’t know who sent those killers after us. Someone’s found out about us, what we’re doing back here to preserve the timeline.

  Then there’s this man called Rashim. He’s stuck with us for now. We pulled him out of a corrupted version of Roman times because he shouldn’t have been there. He went back there with a group of people from the year 2070.

  Oh… you should know this. Really important. The world’s dying in 2070. Or about to. That’s why they came back. They wanted to start over: to give humanity a second chance to get the world right. But you can’t do that, see? You just can’t mess with history. There’s ONE WAY it goes and that’s it. Call it fate, destiny, kismet. As Foster says, ‘For good or bad, history has only one true course. You mess with that, and you’re looking at chaos… Hell itself opening up.’

  (He’s actually not as wacko-mad as I’m making him sound.)

  That’s why we were saved, ‘recruited’, to work for this agency set up by a man called Waldstein — he’s some billionaire inventor type from the future.

  And then we have two cloned humans with computers for brains: Bob and Becks. Gorilla Guy and the Ice Queen. They’re, well, ‘special’ I suppose. Let’s leave it at that. Oh… I almost forgot, we’ve also got a robot from 2070 with us that looks like a cross between a filing cabinet and the old cartoon character from when my parents were kids, ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’. I think Rashim designed him as a joke or something.

  That’s us. Like I say, a bunch of freaks and we’re trying to run for our lives across a country that’s suddenly doing a double-take at anyone who looks remotely out of the ordinary. So much for remaining deep undercover.

  We’re running through an America that’s still in deep shock from what happened yesterday: 9/11. You can see it in their faces; everyone expects another terrorist bomb, another aeroplane attack.

  I guess my father would say to these Americans: ‘Get jahully well used to it.’ After all… he lived through the Terror Attacks of the Twenty-teens. All those dirty bombs and suicide attacks in northern India.

  Shadd-yah. When aren’t humans always killing each other?

  So, we are running. I can’t say where. I won’t say where we’re going. Just in case, reader, you’re ONE OF THEM! Can’t be too careful, right? But we have a plan. Sort of. There’s a place we’re driving to and we just stopped here at this roadside shopping mall-diner-service station place. It’s been a crazy two days. A blur. One big panic after another.

  I needed to write this. Get my head on a little straighter. So… there it is. Maybe our job of stopping pinchudda morons from messing with changing time is finished now. Maybe this ‘agency’ thing’s all over. Maybe all that’s left for us is just trying to stay hidden. Staying alive. I don’t know. I don’t know what the next few weeks hold for us. Jahulla, I don’t even know what the next day holds for us.

  I don’t even know if these last six or so months have even been for real. Maybe it’s all been one big nightmare and I’ll wake up again in my bedroom in Mumbai and it’ll be 2026 again.

  Nice dream.

  So… I’ve written enough. Maybe too much. I might just rip this up. Burn it. Eat it or something. Or maybe I’ll stuff it into my Burger King box with the rest of the cold fries and floppy gherkin where no one is likely to find it.

  But writing this helped a little, I guess.
/>   My name is Sal and, like I said, I’m lost, and quite a bit scared and not at all happy about things right now.

  Chapter 2

  11 September 2001, New York

  Maddy took off her glasses and buried her face in her hands. Air hissed between her fingers: a long, torpid sigh that was a signal to the other two, Liam and Sal, to shut-the-heck-up for just a moment and let her think.

  The archway was quiet except for its usual noises: the faint chug of a filtration pump from the back room, a tap dripping somewhere, the soft burr of a dozen PC computers’ heat fans. It sounded like it did on any normal day, except for perhaps the inane trash-talking between Liam and Sal playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo.

  ‘Hey, what’s up with that girl, skippa?’ chipped in SpongeBubba.

  Maddy raised a hand to shush the lab robot. ‘OK.’ Her voice was muffled behind her other hand. ‘This is what we need to do.’ She straightened up, put her glasses back on and turned towards the monitors on the computer table. She addressed the webcam. ‘Computer-Bob?’

  A black DOS-like dialogue box appeared on the monitor beside the camera.

  › Yes, Maddy?

  ‘Can you force the archway’s displacement field to reset to Monday?’

  Today was Tuesday, early afternoon. Outside the archway a collective pause had settled across the city: a pause in which the sky was clear of planes, television presenters had said all there was to say, and everyone was still busy wondering if the last few hours had been for real and the Twin Towers really had just been completely destroyed.

  › Affirmative.

  ‘Do it, then. Do it now!’

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Rashim.

  ‘We’re all going back in time,’ Sal answered. ‘By one day.’

  The young technician still looked bewildered. Only a couple of hours ago — from his perspective — he’d been approached by Maddy and the others back in Roman times as he’d quietly been setting up the receiver array for the rest of his group to home in on. Now that was all history, or not, depending how you looked at it. Now he was here, stuck with them because they couldn’t just leave him behind, dangling like a loose end. And Project Exodus, the project he’d spent the last couple of years of his life working on… well, none of that would be happening now. By grabbing him, they’d managed to prevent a group of three hundred refugees from the future completely throwing history off track.