TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 (16 page)

‘Stop it,’ she hissed, clenching her fists, willing herself to think clearly. She had never been the kind of girl who talked to herself before, but in a day of changes this was one that she was willing to accept without argument. ‘There must be something you can do,’ she implored herself. Nothing sprang to mind.

As she stood there, fighting to conquer her indecision and fear, the door to the bakery swung open to reveal a soldier, silhouetted in the sunlight, a sword hanging casually from his right hand.

There was nowhere for Dora to run.

‘Strip,’ ordered Jana when they reached the top of the bakery stairs.

Kaz was so astonished by her curt instruction that he stood there dumbfounded.

‘Come on,’ she urged him, unzipping her fleece and throwing it on the floor.

So many thoughts ran through Kaz’s head that he felt dizzy. ‘Um …’ was all he could muster.

‘Are you blushing?’ asked Jana, displaying the first signs of genuine amusement he’d seen from her.

‘No,’ he snapped back, painfully aware that the heat given off from his cheeks was probably equal to that of a two-bar electric heater.

Jana stepped forward, reached up and pinched his cheek, smiling up at him. ‘I hate to admit it, but that’s actually kind of sweet.’

Now she was showing signs of affection. What was going on?

‘Hey.’ He brushed her hand aside. ‘What …’ but again, he ground to a halt.

This time Jana actually laughed. Kaz couldn’t decide which was more surprising – that she had done so, or that it sounded so nice.

‘You are actually, genuinely speechless, aren’t you? Oh, you are priceless,’ she said.

Kaz tried again to spit out a sentence, and again failed. ‘Look, I don’t know what you think … I mean …’ He stopped himself, for he realised he was so befuddled he was speaking in Polish. He was amazed when Jana answered him.

‘Relax, you lunk,’ said Jana, pulling off her T-shirt to reveal a simple black bra. ‘Even if you were my type – which you absolutely are not – then this would hardly be the time and place, would it?’

‘You speak Polish?’ he asked.

Jana looked as surprised as he was. ‘Apparently I do,’ she replied in perfect Polish. ‘Never did before, but my chip apparently has Polish now.’

‘OK, so then, um, what …’ Kaz cursed himself again. Even in his native language he was stammering like an idiot and couldn’t get his words together. It was taking all of his considerable willpower not to stare fixedly at Jana’s chest.

Jana did not help by arching her back and smiling broadly.

‘Yes, that’s right, these are my breasts,’ she said. ‘I am a girl. We all have them. Which, right now, is a bit of a problem. So I’m going to need you to ignore your embarrassment – or any other feeling you may be feeling – and come over here and make them go away for me.’

‘You are strangest girl I’ve ever met,’ said Kaz, pleased that he had finally managed to construct and articulate a coherent sentence.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ replied Jana. ‘Now, take the sheet from the bed and rip a strip off, about a hand’s width should do it.’

Shaking his head in confusion, Kaz did as he was told. He leaned down and pulled the rough linen sheet from the bed. It tore with surprising ease and he turned back to Jana holding a long strip of linen.

He gave a cry of alarm and averted his gaze. The bra was now on the floor, too.

Jana laughed again. ‘Kaz, listen, this is the seventeenth century,’ she said. ‘I am a foreigner with brown skin. That’s bad enough. But I’m also a girl. The chances of me lasting a day out there without being arrested as a spy, accused of being a witch, or taken off and raped by some soldier who’s been on the march too long, are about zero. In fact, I’d lay good money that all three could happen simultaneously. My only chance of moving freely in this time period is to become a boy. Luckily my hair is already short, and my breasts, as you would see if you weren’t studying your shoes so intently, are A cup. Which means that one good, tightly bound piece of linen and a baggy shirt are all I’ll need to remove at least one of my problems. So would you please try and forget that you’re a teenage boy for a minute, and come over here and help me bind these bad boys up.’

Kaz nodded once, swallowed hard and told himself that she was right, he was being silly, her plan was sensible and logical. That didn’t entirely quell the potent mix of mortification and uncomfortable excitement he was feeling at finding himself alone with a half-naked girl, but it did at least allow him to muster the self-control necessary to look up and walk across to Jana, who was standing with her hands on her hips.

‘Do you not feel even a little bit embarrassed standing there like that?’ he asked as he held up the linen strip and handed it to Jana.

‘Not even the littlest bit,’ she confirmed as she pulled the linen across her chest and held out either end.

Kaz walked behind her, took hold of the ends of the linen and pulled it tight. He absolutely refused to pay attention to the soft warmth of her skin as his fingers brushed against it.

‘Nudity taboo’s stupid. The body is just biology,’ she said. ‘Nothing special. The only reason you’re in such a fluster is because you’re eighteen and basically suffering from hormone poisoning. It’s not your fault, you’ll grow out of it.’

Kaz pulled the linen even tighter and began to knot it against the curve of her spine. ‘Hey, you’re actually younger than me,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but I’m a girl,’ she said, as if stating the most transparently obvious of all possible facts. ‘We’re just, y’know, better.’

He gave a final, slightly vindictive tug, and finished the knot, then he stepped back. ‘Done,’ he said.

Jana stepped forward, grabbed one of Dora’s father’s discarded shirts, pulled it over her head and turned back to Kaz, arms out wide. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Will I pass?’

Forced to consider her appearance seriously for the first time, Kaz was alarmed to notice that he found her very attractive indeed. In a defiant, bossy, American kind of way.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Your face is very … girly. You just look like a girl with very small breasts. Sorry.’

Jana sighed. ‘It’ll have to do. You’ve got to remember that this is a different time. People here are very set in their gender roles, there’s not a whole lot of androgyny in seventeenth-century rural Cornwall. The people we meet are far more likely to think that I’m a very effeminate boy. I’ll have to lower my voice slightly, though,’ she said, doing exactly that. ‘Now your turn. You’ve got to ditch the modern clothes, you’ll stand out like a sore thumb.’

Jana was already pulling down her trousers, so Kaz was grateful for the distraction as he collected together all the garments he could find. Dora’s father was a total slob, and the few items of clothing he had were scattered randomly across the floor.

He found another shirt, one pair of leather trousers and a kind of smock thing made of rough cloth. He held the trousers up to his legs and then threw them to Jana.

‘Too small,’ he explained. ‘I’ll stick with jeans.’

Jana considered him as she pulled the trousers on. ‘Lucky they’re black, not blue,’ she said. ‘Rub some mud over them when we get outside, it should do unless we get a close inspection.’

Kaz held the shirt up and recoiled as he was hit in the face by a potent whiff of old sweat. ‘Wow, stinky,’ he said, pulling a face.

‘Mine too,’ said Jana. ‘No showers here. No soap either. Just the manly musk of unwashed baker.’

Kaz pulled off his jacket and jumper, but left his thermal top on; it was white and would be hidden by the shirt, which he pulled over his head and left untucked at the waist to help disguise his jeans.

‘This thing is too small,’ he said, throwing a jerkin to Jana. ‘Dora’s dad is tiny.’

‘So is Dora,’ replied Jana as she tried the jerkin on. ‘People are smaller in this time. Actually, I hadn’t thought of that. You’re going to look like a giant.’

Kaz felt stupid in his jeans and smelly shirt, but then he realised there was another problem. ‘Shoes,’ he said. He scoured the room again, but found no footwear at all.

‘He probably only has one pair, and he’ll be wearing those,’ said Jana. ‘I think I’ll be OK. My leather boots will probably pass, once I get them nice and muddy. But yours …’

Kaz looked down at his bright blue Gore-Tex walking boots and shook his head. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘These were a present from my dad.’

‘We are so doomed,’ said Jana, shaking her head but still seeming to Kaz as if she was more amused than scared.

Kaz laughed at the ridiculousness of their situation. He knew that he and Jana were acting recklessly, dressing up and playing at undercover spies, but he didn’t really care. ‘Are you enjoying this as much as I am?’ he asked.

‘Are you kidding me?’ she replied. ‘I woke up this morning and the most exciting thing I could think of to do was give my bodyguards the slip and play hooky from school. Now I’m hundreds of years in the past, disguising myself so I can go mingle with soldiers and peasants as I make my way to a fortified manor house in search of a woman from the future who wants to kill me. Call me insane, but it sure beats hanging out at the mall.’

She and Kaz smiled at each other, a moment of shared excitement that was broken when Kaz heard the distant rumble of hooves. He could see that Jana heard it too.

‘Come on,’ she said, heading for the stairs.

‘Wait,’ he replied. ‘Sooner or later we’re going to jump back to the future and I don’t want to be walking around looking and smelling like a seventeenth-century peasant.’ He began bundling up their discarded clothes and shoving them into the backpack as Jana impatiently tapped her foot and peered out of a dusty window, trying to see what was going on outside.

‘We can’t carry that around with us, you know,’ she said, over her shoulder.

‘We can bury it in the woods, collect it later. Shall we put the guns in it?’

Jana pulled a face that told him exactly what she thought of that idea.

‘OK, we keep the guns.’

‘I can’t see much, but I think there are soldiers on a patch of grass outside,’ said Jana as Kaz joined her at the window.

‘Village green, I think,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ asked Jana.

‘Oh, something you don’t know.’

She scowled at his sarcasm, so he explained. ‘A patch of common land at the centre of the village, used for keeping animals and playing cricket. England still has them in my time.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied frostily. ‘Come on, let’s go take a look.’

They hurried downstairs. While Jana cracked the front door open to get a better look at the new arrivals, Kaz nipped out the back door and found a pile of leaves in which to hide the backpack. Having stashed it safely, he joined her at the front door.

‘Roundhead troops,’ she said, with the brisk functionality of a TV voice-over. ‘Forces loyal to Parliament. They’re often Puritans, fundamentalist Protestants. They’ll defile churches that display anything they think smacks of Catholicism, and be that bit harder on the population of a village or town that tolerates such a church.’

Something about the calm, dispassionate way Jana imparted this information gave Kaz a chill. She was regurgitating it from a chip in her head, not speaking from her own learning or experience. He thought it made her seem slightly robotic, a million miles away from the cocksure, amused girl who had teased him only minutes before. She was a mass of contradictions. One moment funny and excited, the next cold and inhuman. He found himself wondering how much of her warm, approachable self had been an act, carefully calculated to make him like her.

The sound of smashing glass snapped Kaz’s attention back to the soldiers.

‘That’ll be the church windows. Stained glass, at a guess,’ said Jana.

‘Forget that,’ said Kaz. ‘What about Dora? The village is deserted. What will they do if they find her?’

‘Nothing good,’ muttered Jana. ‘You’re right, we have to try and find her before they do.’

‘They’re coming,’ Kaz observed, pointing to a group of three soldiers who were walking towards the collection of houses that included the bakery. ‘They’ll go house to house.’

Jana shut the door and turned. ‘Out the back,’ she said.

They slipped out the back door and began to work their way around the perimeter of the village, checking houses as they went, staying ahead of the Roundhead soldiers, hoping against hope that Dora hadn’t done the obvious thing and run straight for the church.

Dora came running from the opposite direction and re-entered the bakery mere seconds after Jana and Kaz moved out of sight.

Dora balled her fists, ready to fight back if the soldier tried to force himself upon her, as she expected he would.

She forced defiant words through her tightly clenched teeth. ‘I warn you, I will not submit easily.’

The soldier stood there, seemingly as surprised as Dora. Then he took a single step forward, crossing the threshold of the bakery, his features sharpening as he emerged from the sunlight.

‘I would expect no less of you, Dora,’ he said, his voice deep and rich.

He stood there, examining her face and clothes, puzzled but stern. For her part, Dora stared hard at his face, trying to make sense of its odd familiarity. There was a strong chin hidden underneath the straggly beard of early manhood; the grime accumulated from a long military campaign caked high cheekbones and framed piercing green eyes. In a flash, she recognised him.

‘James?’ she said, amazed.

The soldier nodded, and Dora ran forward and flung her arms around her long-lost brother.

It took her a moment to realise that he was not hugging her back. She awkwardly relinquished her grip and stood back to regard him more closely. ‘You have changed so much,’ she said as she examined his face, his height, the broad expanse of his chest and his thick arms. ‘You are a man now. And a soldier.’ She smiled, teasingly, even though she instinctively knew he would not respond with the easy smiles of his younger self, the boy she remembered from long childhood days spent playing in the fields and forests.