Flying High (5 page)

He called cheerfully to a passing Earth angel. “Lucius, meet Melanie and Lola! Think you can put them to work?”

If Lucius thought our clothes were weird, he had the good manners to keep it to himself. “But of course,” he smiled. “It will be my
plaisir
.”

Orlando had swiftly shifted into trouble-shooting mode. “The slavers won’t dare to kidnap these kids in public,” he explained. “And the ships don’t sail for another three days. If we all pull our weight, there’s a chance some of the kids will change their minds about going to Jerusalem.”

“Will you please follow me,” Lucius asked us politely.

I flashed him my most professional smile. “Sure!”

But inside I was seething. Why, oh why, wouldn’t Orlando take me seriously? I’ve made a few mistakes in my angel career, I admit. That time I materialised to a human without permission, for instance. Oh, and I once sort of
whacked
an Elizabethan human, accidentally activating his hidden angel powers. OK, so it was William Shakespeare, but it all worked out brilliantly in the end. Yet Orlando still insisted on treating me like this major fluff-wit.

However, in the angel business, as you know, your private life totally has to take a back seat. Actually it was quite a relief to throw myself into work. As well as the actual kids, we targeted local adults. Like Lucius said, some of them must know the slavers’ true intentions. And a cosmic nudge from a celestial agent just might inspire them to tell the kids what was really going on. We even zapped the evil merchants themselves. Well, it was worth a try!

Lola and I got so blissed-out on cosmic energy, I think we could have gone on all night. Lucius actually had to tell us our shift was over.

“I don’t know ‘ow we would have manage wizout you,” he said.

“He’s so charming,” Lola whispered.

Unlike some
, I thought bitterly.

Orlando came to see us all off. “Thanks, guys! I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”

I gave him the briefest possible nod. But he had already turned to talk to his colleagues, totally unaware that he’d been blanked.

We blasted back to Heaven in a blaze of white light.

“I want to sleep for a week,” I moaned. “Plus I want you to swear you’ll never let me go on a field trip in flip-flops again.”

Lola looked dazed. “Uh? Oh, sure.”

“Are you OK?” I asked her.

She gave me a faraway smile. “Just trying to remember something.”

Minutes later we were handing in our angel tags. We dragged ourselves through the Arrivals bay and out into the street, where a fleet of Agency limos waited in the heavenly twilight.

All the way back to school, I was longing to fall into bed. Yet after a long hot shower, my tiredness magically disappeared.

I looked at my nice clean PJs on my pillow and I thought, “Nah!”

I went into a mad whirl of activity. I threw on jeans and a cropped T-shirt, splashed on my favourite fragrance (it’s called Attitude, and comes in the cutest bottle) and grabbed my new beaded clutch bag.

I was just on my way to find Lola when she appeared in my doorway, wearing an almost identical outfit. “The Babylon, right?” she grinned.

We slapped palms. “The Babylon!”

Giggling like idiots, we rushed downstairs and out of school.

These days, when we need to unwind, we head straight for the Ambrosia district and dance ourselves silly at the Babylon Cafe. It only opened a few weeks ago, and already it’s the coolest club in town.

We’d just checked in our jackets when Reuben turned up.

“I don’t suppose you’re up to dancing,” he teased Lola. “Now you’re such an old lady!”

“Hey, buddy, I can dance you off your feet any time!” And Lola dragged him on to the dance floor.

I hadn’t seen Reuben dance since his run-in with Brice, the cosmic outlaw. It was great to see him behaving like his old party-animal self.

After several dances, we went outside to cool off. The gardens at the Babylon are unbelievably lovely, designed so that they literally seem to float in mid-air. We found a private little arbour, all overgrown with passion flower vines, and sat sipping ice-cold fruit punch, gazing up at the glittering fields of stars overhead.

For some reason I started thinking about Stephen. What was it Dominic had said?
Before Stephen came along these kids were like dumb animals, blindly following orders, half asleep…

Lola suddenly blew out her breath with relief. “Oh,
finally
!! I’ve been going nuts trying to think where I’d seen them!”

I shook my head. “I’ve absolutely no idea what you’re on about, babe.”

“Those weird FX of course,” she said as if this was obvious.

I gawped at her. “You’ve seriously seen them before! Do you know where?”

“Sure! On the news!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You mean in your time?”

“Approximately six months before I got shot,” said Lola calmly. “My grandmother was just about to dish up her famous chicken
fajitas
. My brothers were fighting over the TV remote as usual. My grandmother said to cut it out. She wanted to watch a current affairs programme. She switched channels and there was Bernard de Winter talking about how time-travel was finally—”

“De Winter?” I interrupted excitedly. “That is so bizarre. I never even heard that name before today and now it’s cropping up all over the place. That dodgy merchant was called something de Winter, and it’s Dom’s surname too.”

Lola’s eyes widened. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “One of the other kids definitely called him de Winter.”

“So what was your de Winter saying, Lollie?” asked Reuben.

“That I can’t tell you,” she said regretfully. “I shared my house with five hungry brothers, remember, and I was panicking I’d miss out on Gran’s fajitas! I just remember glancing at the TV with my mouth full, and seeing those exact FX. And I remember my grandmother saying this guy was one scientist who actually cared about our planet’s future.”

“Did he?” asked Reuben.

Lola nodded vigorously. “He was definitely one of my century’s good guys -which is pretty amazing considering the rest of his family.”

“I don’t get you,” I said.

“You seriously haven’t heard of them!” Lola sounded amazed. “The de Winters have been creating mayhem since human history began. Of course, they don’t always use that name,” she added darkly.

I gave a nervous laugh. “You make them sound like the PODS.”

Lola took a sip of her punch. “Trust me, the de Winters are like the PODS’ special best friends on Earth. They’re total gangsters. So when they got wind of this device, they went flat out to get the…” She frowned. “What’s that thing that means an invention legally belongs to you?”

“The patent?” I suggested.

“Right, they wanted to get hold of the patent for themselves. There was a major court case. The authorities finally ruled that the time device could lead to dangerous cosmic repercussions, so the court had it destroyed, plus all the relevant computer files were deleted.”

“Yeah, but they weren’t, were they!” Our ice cubes tinkled madly as Reuben jumped up from the table. His face was blazing with excitement. “OK, maybe they destroyed the device, but someone obviously kept copies of the research.”

I gasped. “Someone’s like,
reinvented
the device!”

“But how did those kids get hold of it?” breathed Lola.

“Good question,” said Reuben. “But we’d better get down to the Agency ASAP and tell Michael.”

“Sorry to interrupt, you guys.” Amber had unexpectedly appeared. “Michael wants to see you. He says it’s urgent!”

Chapter Six

M
aybe we should just move our beds down here,” I complained as we flashed our IDs. “It would make things a whole lot simpler.”

“This is my weirdest birthday ever,” sighed Lola. “I can’t believe I never even got to open your present, Boo.”

We jumped into the lift and went zooming up past various brilliantly lit floors with Lola still moaning on about her present. “Mo probably left it on the beach. I’ll never get it now. Won’t you just give me a tiny little clue what was inside?”

“No chance,” I told her.

We sped along the maze of gleaming corridors. Michael’s door stood open. A blaze of diamond-white light poured out. This meant he had at least one archangel visitor.

Uh-oh, I thought. I have this terrible mental block with archangels. (Not counting Michael, who is one of a kind and a total sweetie). I simply can’t tell them apart. For one thing, they generate so much celestial radiance that apart from their eyes, it’s hard to identify any actual features.

I squinted into the light and just made out two dazzling outlines.

“Hi!” I said shyly. “We got your message.”

The light levels instantly grew more bearable, and Michael came sharply into focus. “Come in, come in!” he said warmly.

His visitor gave us a distant nod. It’s not so much that archangels are unfriendly, more that they don’t do small talk.

We perched ourselves on uncomfortable office chairs, waiting for Michael to explain why we’d been summoned to the Agency for the second time that day. His first words made my heart turn over.

“I just spoke to Orlando,” he said.

I swallowed and said, “Oh, really?” an octave higher than I intended. What had Orlando been telling him?

“When you go back to medieval Marseilles tomorrow, your Earth duties will change,” Michael announced with a grave expression.

“Oh, right,” I said bravely, picturing myself scrubbing a huge medieval lavvy with a very small toothbrush.

“Since you were the only agents to witness the illicit time-travellers, this naturally makes you the obvious choice to deal with this anomaly.”

I was stunned. “Orlando told you about that? But he said—”

Michael smiled. “He asked me to apologise for not giving you his full attention. When you reported the anomaly, he was in the middle of a rather sticky discussion with local personnel.”

I was amazed. “So you actually believe us?”

“My dear child,” said the mystery archangel with a sigh. “Do you think we don’t notice when humans go tinkering with cosmic laws?”

“In fact, other agents have detected similar anomalies.” Michael checked his computer screen. “The latest was in ancient Rome.”

“That’s right!” I turned excitedly to Lola. “Lollie, remember that girl saying the gladiators were lush?”

The archangel looked blank. “Lush?”

“It means really fit,” I explained. “Presumably she was into big rippling muscles!” I could feel myself getting seriously flustered and no wonder. I couldn’t believe I was discussing sex with an archangel! It made it worse that I could see Lola trying desperately not to laugh.

Luckily Michael rescued us. “You may find these useful.” He produced three pairs of sunglasses from a drawer and slid them across the desk.

“Oh, cool,” I said.

The archangel sounded tetchy. “These are not fashion accessories, Melanie. They are to help agents detect illicit temporal emanations.”

“Wow! That’s totally incredible,” I breathed.

Michael must have guessed that I had NO idea what his archangel colleague was on about, because he tactfully went on to explain about how each human energy system has to be specially customised, to fit his or her particular slot in time.

“Mr Allbright said something about that!” I said eagerly. “Except for geniuses, he said, who are like, almost always ahead of their times.”

Michael nodded. “That’s true. But even a genius has to share the same time band as her contemporaries. As you know, every time has its different charms and challenges. Its own time ‘weather’ if you like. What you may not have realised, is that this ‘weather’ leaves traces in the human energy field.”

Lola perked up. “So these shades will help us to see auras, is that right?”

I was startled to hear Lola talking about auras as if they were a genuine scientific fact. I’d assumed they were just made up by those dodgy psychics who pretend to get intimate personal info from the dead.

“With practice you’ll see energy emanations quite naturally,” Michael explained. “But for the time being you’ll probably find the glasses helpful.”

Reuben seemed fascinated by his shades, tilting them back and forth, trying to figure out how they worked.

I cleared my throat. “Can I ask something?”

Michael nodded. “Of course.”

“Humans have free will, right? So why did the Agency ban time-travel? If humans have the brains to invent time-travel, why shouldn’t they be able to use it? If I’d had the chance to go time-travelling when I lived on Earth, I’d have gone like a shot, personally!”

“‘Banned’ isn’t quite the word I’d use,” said Michael doubtfully. “But in more primitive eras, yes, time-travel is actively discouraged.”

“But those kids didn’t come from a primitive era,” I objected. “They’re from way in the future.” I remembered how Dom and his fellow time travellers had all that that same inner glow. “They’re almost, well, like angels.”

Reuben looked up from examining his sunglasses. “Mel’s right. It’s almost like they’re evolving into a new kind of human.”