TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 (11 page)

‘I am sorry, Dora,’ said Jana, although she was anything but. ‘You were hysterical. Are you both OK? No wounds from shots or shrapnel?’

There was a pause as both Dora and Kaz checked themselves for injuries, then they both indicated that they had none.

‘Where are we?’ That was Dora, skirting along the edge of hysteria again already.

‘Steve said something about a cavern,’ explained Kaz. He then gave a short yell, which echoed back at them tenfold. ‘And this place is big, dark and cold, so …’

‘He knew we were coming here,’ said Jana. ‘Kaz, check the backpack. He’s probably given us flashlights or something.’

Jana heard the rustling as Kaz unslung the pack, unzipped it and began rummaging around inside. A moment later there was a soft click and there he was, holding a small gas lamp, grinning, haloed by his own frosted breath.

The lamp was small but it cast a powerful glow, highlighting the crannies and crevices of the rock that enclosed them. They were definitely underground, in a huge space the size of a cathedral. Stalactites hung from the arches of the roof, high above them, like spears waiting to fall. Dumpy stalagmites dotted the floor, which sloped away to the right. Powerful as the lantern was, it did not entirely reach the edges of the space. Shadows and phantoms danced at the periphery of their light-made world.

Jana took everything in with a glance then turned her attention to working out the implications.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘That lantern’s gas powered. Kaz, are there any spare canisters in the pack?’

The boy rummaged again and then shook his head.

‘That means we’re on a clock,’ said Jana. ‘We need to use the time we’ve got light to find a way out of this place.’

Kaz tipped the rucksack upside down and its contents scattered onto the damp rock. Dora gave a squeal of delight and thrust her hand into the pile of stuff, grabbing a bar of chocolate which she greedily unwrapped and began to devour. Jana did not scold the child – at least this way she was occupied and silent.

Jana joined Kaz in his examination of the bag’s contents as Dora perched herself on top of a stalagmite and watched, the sounds of her chocolate feast loud and distracting; she chomped with her mouth open.

The pile of stuff contained three woolly hat, glove and scarf combos, which Kaz distributed. There were shoes and socks for Dora, and fleeces for both the girls. Kaz helped Dora master the laces after she and Jana had wrapped themselves against the cold that was beginning to numb their extremities.

There was also one pair of binoculars and three plastic boxes, each containing a packed lunch composed of ham sandwiches, water, apple and biscuits. Jana shook her head in wonder. ‘It’s like he’s packed for a school trip.’

There was also a compass and a sharp hunting knife and leather sheath, which Kaz attached to his belt without asking – a unilateral decision which made Jana scowl even as she chose not to challenge it.

‘Pop the lunches back in the bag,’ she said. She wasn’t hungry, but she spent a moment trying to remember when she had last eaten. She was shocked to realise it had only been fifteen minutes since she’d been sat in a café in Beirut eating wild meat and flatbread.

There was a scrunching sound as Dora balled up the chocolate wrapper and dropped it on the ground.

‘I think I have been here before,’ said the girl.

‘What?’ asked Kaz, astonished by her claim.

‘When I crossed the bridge of time I was briefly waylaid in different places before I returned to Sweetclover Hall,’ explained Dora primly. ‘This was one such.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Jana. ‘If you had been here, you would not know it because it would have been too dark for you to see.’

Dora folded her arms and pouted. ‘I do not like the way you talk to me.’

Jana realised her mistake; she had not taken the time to introduce herself to the youngest member of their party. She forced herself to smile, even though she felt sure they did not have time for such chit-chat.

‘I am sorry, Dora. This must all be so confusing for you. My name is Jana, pleased to meet you.’ She held out her hand, but the girl only scowled at it.

‘In my time,’ Jana explained patiently, ‘we shake hands as a sign of greeting and friendship.’

Dora’s face darkened further. ‘So do we,’ she said, keeping her arms firmly folded.

Jana withdrew her hand with as much dignity as she could muster, aware that Kaz was trying, unsuccessfully, to conceal his amusement.

‘We should tell our stories,’ suggested Kaz. ‘If what Steve said is true, we will be spending a lot of time together. Our survival could depend upon trust, but we don’t know each other at all.’

‘Shouldn’t we be spending our limited light trying to find a way out of this place?’ said Jana.

‘Do we need to?’ he replied. ‘When we want to leave, we all join hands and think of somewhere else.’

Jana reluctantly conceded the point.

‘So,’ Kaz continued, ‘I think the best thing we can do is tell our stories. For me, the last twenty-four hours has been very confusing. I want answers. Maybe we can help each other, yes?’

‘I think he speaks sense,’ said Dora.

‘Fine,’ said Jana, trying not to sound too petulant. She did not like being ganged up on and saw no value in wasting their precious light chatting, but she could see that this was not the best time to assert her authority. She and Kaz both perched themselves on lumpy stalagmites, and the boy placed the lantern on the ground in the centre of their little circle.

‘I’ll go first,’ said Jana, determined to retain a little initiative. ‘My name is Jana Patel. I was born, as Kaz already knows, in 2123. I am an American citizen, from New York.’

‘Sorry, I do not understand these names,’ said Dora, seemingly genuinely apologetic at interrupting. Jana sighed. This was going to take a long time.

‘And that’s when I landed at your feet.’

‘Wow,’ breathed Kaz after a moment of silence.

‘Let me save you some time,’ said Jana. ‘No, I don’t know who the men were who chased me. Neither do I know why. One of them did say that “she” wanted my head intact, but I don’t know who they were referring to. I’m just an ordinary girl.’

‘Sorry, but you are not ordinary,’ said Kaz. He instantly realised that he had outraged the girl from the future and tried to explain himself better. ‘Who jumps off a skyscraper?’

‘What is a skyscraper, again?’ asked Dora.

‘Very tall building,’ explained Kaz for the second time.

Jana dismissed his question with a wave of her hand. ‘It was the only option.’

‘Most people would have put up a fight.’ Kaz shook his head, still confused by her explanation. He didn’t know whether to be impressed or terrified by the disregard she seemed to have for her own life, and the dispassionate way she described her decision to take it. He found her calm, logical explanation disturbing. Were all people from the future this emotionless, he wondered? He briefly pictured a world of robot-like people, all emotion purged from their lives, some kind of dystopian future from a sci-fi film. But he dismissed the idea. Nothing in her story supported that vision of the future. He was convinced that her detachment was uniquely hers, a personal quirk.

‘Explain that thing in your neck,’ he said. ‘You said it was a “back-up”. What do you mean?’

Jana indicated Dora, her face a patronising mask. ‘Happy to, but she won’t understand a word of it, no matter how many times we stop to explain.’

Dora stuck her tongue out at Jana.

‘Maybe not, but try,’ replied Kaz.

‘You have the internet in your time, yes?’

Kaz nodded.

‘Mobile phones? Wireless connections?’

Kaz glanced at Dora, who had turned her attention to a nearby stalagmite which she was investigating with exaggerated lack of concern.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘We have that stuff.’

‘Good, well my ENL chip is basically a wireless internet connection. It interfaces with my brain to give me full online access at all times.’

‘ENL?’ asked Kaz.

‘Embedded Net Link.’

Kaz considered this. ‘How do you access information without a screen?’

‘Most people use special glasses that beam the information into your retina,’ explained Jana. ‘Kind of like a screen. But that’s the cheap option. If you’ve got more money, you can have your auditory and visual cortexes wired up so you can see and hear whatever you want to access. And then, if you’ve got even more money, you can interface your memory.’

‘How does that work?’

‘Impossible to explain the sensation to someone who’s never experienced it. It’s kind of like you ask a question in your mind and the answer pops into your head, like a memory, like you learned it at school.’

Kaz shook his head in wonder. ‘I have so many questions.’ He registered Jana’s look of both tiredness and warning. He took the hint. ‘We haven’t got time, but quickly: you have the best version of this chip thing, right?’

Jana nodded.

‘So you are super-rich or something?’

‘Or something,’ Jana replied curtly.

‘OK, so what do you mean “back-up”? Back-up what?’

‘If you’re really, really super-rich,’ she glanced at Kaz, ‘or something, you can set the chip to transmit all brain activity, in real time, to remote servers. That way, if something happens to you, you’ve got a back-up of yourself, of your personality and experiences, stored away in case of accidents.’

Kaz thought about the implications of this for a moment but in the end he shrugged and decided to let the questioning lie for now. ‘So many questions,’ he said again. ‘Last one: what use is the chip to you if you’re not connected?’

‘There’s some internal storage on the chip itself,’ said Jana. ‘Not much, a couple hundred petabytes. Pitiful really. But you can take some stuff with you when you go offline.’

‘Anything in it that will help us?’

Jana’s forehead creased in puzzlement. ‘Weirdly enough, there may be. I found it full of stuff about seventeenth-century England earlier today, but didn’t put it on there. I think maybe it was hacked sometime last night, but I can’t be sure.’

‘How about you, Kaz?’ interrupted Dora, her examination of the limestone concluded. ‘Can you tell us your history in a way that a peasant like me can understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Jana, much to Kaz’s surprise. ‘You know enough about me for now. What’s your story?’

Kaz shrugged. ‘My story is not interesting, like Jana’s.’

Dora folded her hands in her lap and gave him a smile that told him she would find anything he said utterly enchanting. He tried not to smile at how obviously this annoyed Jana.

‘All right. Um, my name Kazik Cecka, born 1995. I grew up travelling with my parents.’ He stopped for a moment as the memories of the explosion, so shockingly fresh and vivid, washed over him again. When the moment passed he glanced up to see Dora looking concerned. Jana just looked impatient.

‘I travel with my father to where he works,’ Kaz went on. ‘But last month we had a big fight and I ran away from home. If you can call it home. I came to England to work on a farm in Cornwall, but conditions were bad and the farm owner was a bastard. So I walked out. I was looking for somewhere warm to sleep, I found the old house, you two – BOOM! – arrive out of air.’ Kaz shrugged, apologetic that his story was so simple. ‘You know the rest.’

‘That wasn’t boring at all,’ said Dora sweetly, with a snide sideways glance at Jana.

‘Interesting, though,’ said Jana. ‘You’re the odd one out here, Kaz. Dora and I were both snatched from our own times for whatever reasons. You weren’t. But according to Steve you also have the power to travel in time. One more question we need an answer to – why did Dora and I travel through time but you didn’t?’

Remembering Steve reminded Kaz of yet another question he’d been pondering earlier. He focused on Dora.

‘When we were prisoners, they took Jana’s chip out,’ he said. ‘I think they did that to get her memories. At the same time, they connected me to some kind of machine that made me tell my life story. They were gathering intelligence about us. What did they do to you, Dora?’

Dora bit her lip and thought hard. ‘Lord Sweetclover made me wear these silly clothes, gave me some very strange food … oh, and a doctor stuck a metal leech in my arm and sucked out some of my blood.’

‘That doesn’t fit the pattern,’ said Jana curiously.

‘Hang on,’ interjected Kaz. ‘Dora, you knew Sweetclover from your own time, yes?’

Dora nodded. ‘He was older on this side of the time bridge, but yes.’

‘So have you known him your whole life?’

‘I do not know him at all. His family have lived at the hall since before I was born, but his sort don’t mix with the likes of me.’

‘But you come from a nearby village, yes?’

‘Yes. Pendarn.’

Kaz turned to Jana. ‘So he does not need her story. He knows it already.’

‘But why the blood?’ asked Jana. ‘They didn’t take any of mine …’

Kaz interrupted. ‘How do you know? You were unconscious.’

Kaz could see she was surprised to have missed something so obvious, and to have it pointed out. He thought maybe his question had garnered a smidgen of respect, but he sensed that getting her to like or trust him was going to be hard work. She did not seem the kind of person who made friends easily, or at all. But by proving himself to be clever, asking the right questions, he was slowly making headway.

Dora coughed, pointedly. ‘Don’t you want to hear how I crossed the bridge of time?’

Kaz turned to Dora, who sat prim and straight backed with her hands folded in her lap. ‘Absolutely,’ he said.

‘Then hark, for this is a tale most strange and terrifying …’

‘And thus was I magicked across the years.’

For the first time since she had met the bossy brown-skinned woman, Dora felt she had her complete attention.

‘You saw us on your journey? Jana and me?’ asked Kaz.

Dora nodded.

‘I wonder …’ said Jana slowly. ‘Dora here encounters a strange woman from the future who’s been injured by being thrown back in time. Steve told Dora that the operation at the lab was being run by the same woman. I was attacked by guys who said “she” wanted my head.’