Rifter (The Survival Project Duology Book 1) (9 page)

“Yes, it is.”

“Then, for that reason alone, you have to bring her in.”

“I’ve already told you, we’re not the police.”

“Then, the police need to bring her in.”

“And for that, you need to tell them.”

Mayra slammed her fist down on the counter. “I’m calling my parents. I need to make sure.” She reached for the phone in her pocket, but he grabbed her hand to stop her.

Tears began to form at the corners of her eyes.

“You can’t do that now. It’s the middle of the night. And you’re so worked up. You don’t want to have an argument with them.”

She put the phone back.

“I suppose. But what if she attacks me again?”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“But you don’t know. I’m signed off for two days. I’ll have to be here on my own while you’re at work.”

Here? In his flat? He hadn’t agreed to that, but he supposed it was the wrong time to mention it. He took her in his arms and hugged her close. She’d gone from feisty to vulnerable in no more than a few seconds.

“No, I don’t know for certain, but you can lock yourself in here. Use the bolt if you want. I can knock when I get home.”

“Does that mean I’ll have to stay in all day?”

“Mayra, you can’t have it all ways.”

“No. I guess not.

It was another hour before Mayra was in bed and asleep. Leo wrestled with his thoughts for the rest of the night. He’d been hoping that Mayra hadn’t seen her attacker and now that it had been confirmed that she had, it was one more complication he had to deal with.

Ten

Mara awoke with a start. The physical jolt that had caused it, she realised, was a cat jumping up onto the bench she’d used for a bed and knocking against her legs. Luckily, she hadn’t called out in alarm and no security guards were running towards where she lay. She kicked out and the cat removed itself from where it had settled on the arm of the bench and went wandering off into the bushes. She stifled a sneeze. Cat hair.

When she was sure the sneeze was no more, she lifted her head.

The sky was beginning to show hints of light and the park looked gloomy rather than dark. Not that it had ever been completely dark. Although there were no lights on in the park itself, they didn’t seem to turn the lights in the surrounding streets off at all until daylight took over.

It looked like it was going to be another sunny day. There was barely a cloud overhead.

A heavy dew had descended upon everything. The thick material of her jeans felt weighty against her skin and her hair was stuck to her face in places with damp. She was sure she looked a sight, but there was little she could do about it. She did have a basic comb in her pocket, but without a mirror she’d only end up making things worse.

She pushed up and stretched out her limbs before attempting to stand. Her muscles ached badly, her legs were stiff from being scrunched up and her back hurt from where the slats of the bench had pressed into her spine. At that moment, she couldn’t have run even if she’d wanted to. She knew that if she didn’t ease herself into movement with the speed of a snail, she’d probably pull a muscle and that would not be good. Even her head ached, although she wasn’t sure why. Tiredness, perhaps. The hours of sleep she’d managed could probably be counted on one hand. The tiredness would pass. Even if it didn’t, it made no difference to what she needed to do.

Part of her sleeplessness was undoubtedly down to the fact that a sense of guilt had racked at her brain. Guilt over what she had done, but also guilt over what she hadn’t. So many people back home were depending upon her and on the face of it, she’d done her best to screw that up. But there was also fear. The thought of that faceless man — she never did look properly at his face — when he grabbed her wrist, was a stark reminder that cities weren’t necessarily friendly places. This was not, in any way, like the small farming community she remembered from her childhood, or the close-knit community at The Facility.

She was more shaken than she’d realised at the time. Although her training had been rigorous, she now felt that she’d been too cosseted on The Project. The training she’d received was too theoretical. Being attacked by someone you knew, on a practice mat, was nothing like tackling a person who really wanted to do you harm in the middle of the street, in the dead of night. The concerned gasps and coos of the other students were not comparable to a few distant figures walking past as if nothing untoward were happening at all. She knew she’d have plenty of suggestions if she ever got back.

But the self-defence move she’d used had worked.

And she was okay.

“Thank you, Gordon,” she whispered.

Her stomach growled loudly. She needed to find food soon, and water.

Her thoughts returned to her encounter with Leo. With the daylight coming, she could put the attack behind her, but the knowledge that she thought Leo had called her name wasn’t something easily compartmentalised into her brain where she could ignore it. She was still wavering about that. She couldn’t make up her mind which name he’d said. And she couldn’t reconcile all the facts..

Her head was as screwed up as her heart.

He wasn’t the Leo she knew. He couldn’t be.

What was it he used to say? That was it. An essence. This Leo was an essence of the man she knew and she simply had to accept that and move on. She had to get him out of her mind and concentrate.

Mayra, Mara, Mayra, Mara. Why couldn’t she have been called Annabelle, or Penny, or Trish?

And what was with the box of Parmesan cheese?

It had to be a coincidence, because the thought that he’d planned it, that he was the Leo she knew and he’d planned it, that would imply that he was romantic. He had never been that sensitive, or romantic.

She had to stop thinking about him. She would do better concentrating on the other things. The ones that might have some bearing on her mission. They were no better. They were the things that made her feel like her mission was doomed to failure.

Number one. She had landed in London. A city that existed on her own world, but her version was now a pale shadow of its former self. This London was very different, but then again, it wasn’t. This London was in full swing, using petrol and electricity like there was no tomorrow. Eating food like it would always be abundant.

Number two. English was the spoken language. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because coming from the same root, you would expect there to be similarities, lots of them. But there were so few dissimilarities that she found it disturbing. In the conversations she’d heard there were maybe one, or two words she hadn’t known. This English language was too close to her own. This world was too similar.

Number three. She’d only seen a limited amount of technology, but it aligned very closely with what she’d studied and what she already knew. The technological advances had likely followed the same pattern.

If this world was as similar as she suspected, there would be no solutions.

She couldn’t help wondering what the Leo on this world thought about it. And then she couldn’t help wondering, once again if this was
her
Leo. Her stupid brain wouldn’t let him go.

What was wrong with her? She had to use her logic.

There were an infinite number of worlds. That’s what her training had taught her. Infinite. Never-ending. Limitless. Immeasurable. Boundless. Illimitable. Incalculable.

Too many for any one person to imagine.

She almost shouted that in her head.

That meant that the likelihood of arriving on a world where there was even another version of you, or someone you knew, was the tiniest percentage you could imagine, and also highly likely if you weren’t jumping very far away from your home world.

That didn’t help. The fact was there was a Leo and there was a Mayra.

She tried another tack.

This Leo had a job. If it were
her
Leo, how would he have a job? How would he have become part of this society? He’d been gone, what? Six months? There was no way he’d be that integrated already.

And, he was older. There was no way he was only nineteen still. No way. If he was
her
Leo he wouldn’t be that old.

This Leo was with Mayra. If he was
her
Leo, he wouldn’t be with Mayra. That would imply that he’d sought her out. That would be the kind of thing a desperate person might do, a romantic person, but not
her
Leo.

A tear rolled down her cheek.

The realisation was finally taking hold.

He was Mayra’s boyfriend, not hers. He didn’t love her. He was a different man, and she had to sever the connection in her brain. It wasn’t helping with her research. It wasn’t helping with anything. Difficult as it was to accept, she knew that any contact she’d had with him was wrong. She was doing what they’d expressly been told not to. Interfering. What right did she have to meddle with the relationship Mayra was having with this world’s Leo?

None.

Her mission. That’s what she needed to concentrate on.

She scraped the back of her hand across her cheek and laughed at her own silliness.

“Why do you do these things to yourself?” she said.

Time to focus.

She unzipped her jacket and pulled the gold coin out of one of the inner pockets. The gold coin that she’d been given so that she wouldn’t have to sleep out on benches in the freezing cold at night. She squeezed it tightly in her palm.

Now, all she needed to do was find somewhere she could sell it, and quickly. If only she knew how. For a second she wished she’d taken the other woman’s device so that she could do a search. There were no shops nearby, she already knew that and there was no one around to ask, except for the security guards, and the nearest she intended to get to them right now was exactly where she sat.

She could just walk. Walk. That seemed like such an inefficient way of achieving her aim, but what choice did she have? She didn’t have any money. And there weren’t many people around. And she didn’t hold out much hope that they’d stop if she asked.

Okay, so logically, she needed to get further away from her centre of reference, the disruption, to find what she needed, and given what she’d seen already, she reckoned that south of the river might be better, because the area where she was seemed too, what was the expression, well-to-do. She needed a pawnbroker.

Before moving off, she glanced around to make sure she wasn’t being observed. She noticed that an elderly gentlemen was walking through the park, and if she wasn’t mistaken, she could hear the rattle of keys. She debated whether to wait for him to open the gate, but his stately steps were a little too slow for her liking. She dashed across the quickest route to the fence and hauled herself over before anyone was alerted to her movement.

Eleven

Mara’s search for somewhere to sell her gold coin ended up in the back streets around Waterlea Station.

It felt like she’d been walking for hours, and with the sun rising way before anything but cafes and newsagent shops had opened, she knew that she probably had. She’d found a parade of shops with the kind of one-off stores that she needed for her research. The kind of stores that she was used to back home. Her first task was to gauge what things cost in this world. She definitely needed to do that before she entered a pawnbroker’s shop. She needed to know how much money she was likely to need to survive for just over two days and she also didn’t want to be at so much of a disadvantage in the negotiations that she got ripped off.

To that end, she began to window shop.

She remembered how many times she’d done that in the nearest town to the village where she lived as a child. Sometimes, she had found, simply looking at a loaf of bread in the baker’s window, and imagining the just-baked aroma of the loaves filtering out through the door, was enough to sate her hunger. Other times it felt like torture. Of course, she couldn’t actually smell the bread, because of her air filter and the sealed buildings. She hated those filters so much, but she’d seen what happened if you didn’t wear one. It wasn’t pretty. They were based on the design they used for gas masks, back when there were wars where such things were needed. They were bulky, uncomfortable, and an absolute necessity.

This time, what she looked at was very different. There were no food shops, apart from a newsagent at the end of the row. There was a mixture of loan shops, electrical goods retailers and discount stores, restaurants and beauty services. She looked at the prices of basic clothing and the cost of a haircut, hoping that would give her a reasonable enough idea. The other thing she looked at was the sign on a transport stop, which indicated the cost of a fare, although she had no idea how far the different pricing levels would take her. She even looked in a beggar’s hat on the ground to see what people were prepared to give. And she browsed the newsagent’s shelves for chocolate bars and snacks. Her deliberations led her to calculate that she needed one to two hundred to ensure she would have enough for accommodation as well. With any luck, the coin would give her that. It had the look of age about it, just not age on this world.