TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 (8 page)

‘But you said that sometimes innocents are hurt.’

‘Well, yeah, if you’re thick enough to go walking down Kingswood with a red scarf on or summat then yeah, you’re gonna get stuck. But that’s your lookout. Shoulda done your homework.’

Dora sighed, finally accepting that the situation Simon described was as arbitrary at it had first appeared. ‘This lacks all sense,’ she said. ‘Were such gangs to arise in my village, the boys would be soundly whipped on the orders of the magistrate and that would be an end to it.’

Now it was Simon’s turn to look astonished. ‘Whipped?’

‘Yes,’ replied Dora, matter-of-factly. ‘On the green, for all the village to witness their shame. The oldest Watkins boy sought to force himself upon little Milly Allan three weeks ago. He was in the stocks for two days and then received thirty lashes upon the post. I wonder that your magistrates do not lock these gang boys in the stocks and let the local citizens put them in their place.’

Simon shook his head in wonder. ‘Where did you come from, Duchess?’

‘Cornwall,’ replied Dora with a mostly successful attempt at haughty pride.

Somewhere in the depths of the building there was a muffled explosion which rattled the glass tubes in the cold cabinets.

‘What was that?’ asked Dora, belatedly remembering her predicament. She had been enjoying her conversation with Simon.

‘Sounded like another bomb,’ said Simon, as he pulled a short black pistol from a leather pouch on his hip. Dora had never seen such a weapon before, but it was sufficiently similar to a flintlock for her to guess what it did.

‘Simon,’ asked Dora, eyeing the weapon nervously. ‘Are you my protector or my gaoler?’

The boy bit his lip nervously, momentarily betraying his youth and inexperience. ‘Bit of both, I reckon, Duchess, if I’m honest.’

This answer did not reassure Dora one little bit.

The weapon felt comfortable in Kaz’s grasp.

He’d never fired one in anger, but that didn’t mean he was unfamiliar with guns. He had grown up around soldiers, and even though his parents had disapproved, he’d always been able to find a squaddie willing to let him take a few shots on the range when they weren’t around. His parents insisted that Kaz should pursue his studies, get qualifications, find a safe job somewhere, even as they travelled the world dragging him from one war zone to another. Their lives were full of danger and excitement, but they told him every day that he mustn’t be like them, they wanted better things for him than that. Do as we say, not as we do. The hypocrisy of it had infuriated him, so he had trained in secret, finding allies amongst the troops, willing to teach him to shoot, to fight, to plan and strategise.

Then his mother died, and everything changed. His father had brought him back to Poland, tried to build a normal, stable life. But neither of them had taken to it. Undone by grief, they had fought almost constantly, until eventually his father had threatened to put Kaz into a Catholic boarding school that would fence him in with rules and regulations, curfews and timetables, the tedium of routine. He’d run away at the first opportunity. It hadn’t been difficult, not after the preparations he’d spent his life making. And now here he was, eight weeks later, being pursued through a building in a strange country, outnumbered and outgunned.

He knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t help it – he was enjoying himself. He was surprised to find, though, that he wasn’t entirely sure he had it in him to actually shoot anybody.

The girl ahead of him, Jana, seemed to harbour no such doubts. A couple of times they almost ran into the riot guards, and each time she let off a few shots in support of Steve’s more focused fire. She did not hit any of them, but it was not for want of trying. To Kaz, Jana did not seem to be enjoying herself. She just seemed really, really angry. He was glad she was on his side.

The guns she and Steve were using did not fire bullets, but projected a single beam that shot out like an extending tape measure and then switched off. It seemed more like stabbing than shooting. It buzzed when it fired, like a crossed wire in a light fitting, sparking and live.

They hit a long corridor, the longest yet. It stretched out ahead of them, its numerous side corridors offering a world of cover for potential attackers. It was silent and deserted but Steve slammed to a halt so unexpectedly that Jana and Kaz barrelled into each other. There was a momentary scrabble for balance.

‘What is it?’ asked Kaz.

‘Those doors at the end, that’s the lab,’ said Steve softly.

‘Come on then,’ said Jana, pushing forward. Kaz grabbed her shoulder to hold her back. She angrily shook herself free and turned to scowl at him.

‘I think he’s about to say something like “it’s too quiet”,’ said Kaz.

Steve nodded as a clatter of footsteps echoed around them. There were definitely guards behind them, and almost certainly guards waiting for them in the side corridors up ahead, ready to cut them down in a crossfire if they attempted to run the gauntlet to the lab.

‘If we can get through those doors and secure our position, we’ll only need a few minutes,’ said Steve.

‘For what? Won’t we be stuck in there?’ asked Kaz.

Steve smiled knowingly. ‘Oh no, we’ve got an escape route. We could leave right now, but we can’t abandon Dora, and we must retrieve Jana’s chip at all costs.’

‘Think fast, because those guards are getting closer. I say we run,’ said Jana, tensing as if to sprint. But before she could take off there was a massive unified stamp, as if a battalion had stood to attention. A phalanx of riot guards stepped out ahead of them, two from each cross-corridor entrance. Kaz found the unnatural synchronicity of their movement chilling.

He turned as if to run back the way they had come, but a group of four guards rounded the corner of the corridor behind them.

They were trapped.

It would have surprised Kaz to learn that Jana felt afraid.

Not the almost-fear she had felt on the rooftop as she had leaned out into the crosswinds, but proper, bone-deep terror of death. She’d been feeling it ever since she had been rudely awoken in her cell and, after a moment of disorientation, remembered that her ENL chip had been removed. That chip was her ticket to immortality, the safety net that made her invulnerable. It was because of the chip that she had been so devil-may-care throughout her short life, so reckless that only the craziest of her classmates had anything to do with her. Jana, they all knew, was willing to push it one degree more – swim that bit further from the shore, take a corner a few mph faster than the car was designed to handle.

It made her fun to be around. And dangerous.

More than once a classmate or friend had been injured trying to emulate or impress her. The pattern was always the same – they’d try to push things as far as Jana but, at the last minute, realising how much of a risk they were taking, they would lose their nerve and try to pull out of whatever mad death-spiral they had committed themselves to. There was a look they got in their eyes as they recalculated the odds, Jana had seen it many times, a mixture of fear and surprise. She wondered if that was what she looked like now, as she stood trapped by an army of faceless kidnappers in a building farther from home than she had ever thought it possible to be.

The secret, she had learned, was to follow through, to never back out once you’d committed to a course of action, no matter how risky. Whatever danger you were in, it was always more dangerous to second-guess yourself at the last instant.

Gripping the gun tight in her right hand, she forced herself to wait. Normally she would have taken charge, but not today. Instead she looked to the man called Steve and said, ‘What do we do now?’

Steve paid her little attention. He was assessing the forces arrayed ahead and behind them. The guards stood there, unmoving, implacable, penning them in but in no hurry to disarm or capture them. Their immobile calm was terrifying.

‘Come on, what are you waiting for?’ yelled Kaz.

The guards did not respond in any way to his taunt.

‘They’re waiting for Sweetclover,’ said Steve, almost absent-mindedly, his gaze now fixed firmly on the lab doors at the end of the corridor before them. ‘He wants to be in at the kill.’

‘You said we could leave right now if we wanted,’ said Jana, alarmed at the tremble in her voice.

Steve nodded. ‘But I may have a better idea.’ He glanced down at his watch, then turned to face Jana and Kaz. ‘When the bomb goes off, stay focused on me,’ he said. ‘We need to hold hands to form a circle and you must, absolutely must, empty your minds of all thought.’

Jana didn’t even know how to begin to respond to such a bizarre order, so she decided to go with it.

‘OK,’ she said.

‘What bomb?’ asked Kaz.

‘Not a place, not a time in your life, not a person. Nothing, understand?’ Steve continued. ‘Think of the colour white. Empty, blank, void. Can you do that?’

Jana nodded. Kaz just looked confused. ‘Um, I’ll try,’ he muttered.

‘Hello there.’ It was Sweetclover. He had stepped out into the corridor ahead of them, about halfway to the lab door, flanked by guards. He was waving and smiling. ‘I must say, you are the most handsome terrorist I’ve ever met. Dashing, too. When this is over we really must share grooming tips.’

Steve did not smile as his doppelgänger made jokes.

‘You can drop the disguise now,’ Sweetclover continued, his fake smile fading away. ‘It’s not fooling anybody any more and I would so like to look you in the eye.’

Jana slowly slipped her gun into her pocket so that her hands were free. She caught Kaz’s eye and, with a glance, indicated that he should do the same. He gave an almost imperceptible nod and did so. He reached for her hand but a single red spark arced between their outstretched fingers and he whipped his hand away again. If Sweetclover noticed this, he gave no sign of it. His attention was focused tightly on Steve.

‘You did Kaz no favours, you know,’ Sweetclover was saying. ‘By destroying the recording you merely ensured he’ll have to go through the mind probe again. I imagine he’d prefer to avoid that, wouldn’t you, Kaz?’

‘Screw you,’ Kaz shouted, an act of defiance that finally earned him a smidgen of respect from Jana.

Sweetclover tutted and shook his head. ‘Such manners. When I see your father, I’ll have to tell him the kind of man he raised.’

Kaz balled his fists and took a step forward but Steve held out his arm, not touching the boy, but blocking his way.

‘Calm down, Kaz. He’s playing with you,’ he said. Then he whispered to them both, ‘Look at the lab door and get ready.’

Jana squinted down the corridor. She could see silhouetted figures moving behind the frosted glass windows of the central lab doors behind Sweetclover.

‘I suppose you want us to lay down our weapons and come quietly?’ asked Steve.

Sweetclover shrugged theatrically. ‘Do or don’t, makes no odds to me. Either we kill you here and now, or you surrender and let us put you on ice until we’re ready to do it properly. Your call.’

‘But why?’ screamed Jana, finally allowing her own frustration to boil over. ‘Who are you? What is the point of all this? What do you want?’

‘Oh, Jana. Dear sweet Jana. What would be the fun if I told you that? Let’s say we had history, you and I. But we won’t have had soon.’

Jana shook her head as he mangled his tenses. ‘What does that even mean?’ she yelled, more in confusion than anger. The shadows behind the lab window drew her gaze. Someone was holding up a hand, pressing it to the glass with their fingers spread wide.

‘Five,’ muttered Steve.

The thumb bent inwards under the palm.

‘Four.’

The hand was withdrawn and a shadow seemed to hurry away from the doors.

Jana unfurled her own tight fists and got ready to grab the hands of Steve and Kaz.

‘Three,’ whispered Kaz, taking up the countdown.

‘Guards.’ At Sweetclover’s bark, all the guards raised their weapons.

‘Two,’ muttered Jana and Kaz in unison, raising their hands.

‘Hands above your heads, I think,’ shouted Sweetclover. ‘We don’t want anybody—’

Before he could finish his sentence, the lab doors blew off their hinges in a ball of flame and spun down the corridor, cutting down the row of guards. The blast wave toppled many more, and Sweetclover himself was engulfed in smoke.

Shots rang out ahead in the confusion.

‘Now,’ yelled Steve as the smoke reached them, shielding them from the view of guards both ahead and behind. Jana reached out and grabbed Kaz’s hand, lighting up the smoke with red fire from within. Her hand tingled where it touched his, like static electricity or the feeling of pins and needles you get when the blood returns to a numbed limb. Then both she and the boy leaned forward to take Steve’s outstretched hands as they did their best to empty their minds of all thought. Steve grasped their fingers tightly and the world exploded in a riot of firework red. Jana felt a familiar lurch in her stomach, the same as she had felt when she had vanished in mid-air above New York. She realised immediately what was happening.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to relax, surrendering to the pull of whatever force it was that had snatched her away from certain death once already.

And the world reshaped itself around her.

Kaz had seen the two girls appear in mid-air, but in many ways that had been the least unexpected thing to happen to him since he had fled the farm in search of a bed for the night. Since that first flash of red fire he’d been granted no time for reflection, no opportunity to consider the events of his day, the things he had witnessed or the things that had been done to him. He had spent the last twenty-four hours reacting to events he did not understand, hoping that at some point everything would become clear to him and he could begin to take an active role.

But as his hand found Jana’s, and he felt the tingle in his fingers, he realised that things were only going to get stranger. When Steve grabbed his other hand and completed the circle Kaz felt such power flowing through him that his vision, already fogged by smoke, blurred even more and began to speckle with tiny firework flashes of red and white. He was unsure how much of this was real and how much a result of trauma from the shock wave. He was part of a circuit, power flowing in through his right hand and out through his left.