Ninety-seven percent? thought Chevie. I bet those hazmat guys didn’t see the monkey arm, or they’d insist on waiting for a hundred percent.
The black-clad hazmat team climbed through the hatch into the vehicle and sat on a low bench that ran around the wall. They were a cramped bunch in there and suddenly looked a little less tough, in spite of their scary suits and weapons. Chevie was reminded of her little foster brother and the night he and his buddies had camped out in the backyard, and were all tough as nails until something brushed against the tent at 2 a.m.
Smart gave Chevie the Timekey he was holding. “I’ve cloned keys for me and the team, but this is still the prime key with all the access codes. In fact, the entire history of the project is on this key. Don’t lose it.”
Chevie hung the key around her neck. “I’ll keep it under my pillow beside my photo of you.”
Smart lowered his face mask, and Chevie saw that for the first time in nine months, he was genuinely smiling. “I’m going to miss you when this is all over, Savano. None of these guys ever gives me lip. Having said that, if you foul this up, I will have you stationed in the Murmansk office.”
“We don’t have a Murmansk office.”
“Oh, we’ve got one, but it’s really deep under the ice.”
“I get the message. Don’t worry, Felix. The boy is secure, and I won’t let anyone else touch this Timekey.”
Smart fixed his mask. “Good. Then in ten minutes, you get to go home early with a commendation and a clean record. But if any strangers come through that pod, remember your training: always go for the chest shot.”
“I remember,” said Chevie. “Chest shot. The biggest target.”
They shook hands, something that Chevie did not particularly want to do, not because of any germ phobia, but because in the boredom of the last nine months she had developed a fondness for action movies—and as any film buff knew, when two cops develop a grudging respect for each other, then the supporting cop is about to die.
And if anyone’s a supporting player around here, she thought, it’s me.
Smart ducked into the pod, squeezing onto the bench beside his teammates.
He counted down from five with his fingers, then the entire team reached into the middle and overlapped hands. As they all touched, Smart tapped the pendant around his neck, the pod bloomed with orange light, and there was a loud whoosh, which immediately collapsed in on itself, creating a vacuum that Chevie could feel even from her position behind the computers.
The noise rose to hurricane level, and Smart’s crew jittered as their molecules were torn apart. They turned orange, then split into orange bubbles, which spiraled into a mini-cyclone that spun faster and faster in the center of the pod. Chevie swore she could see body parts reflected in the bubbles.
Reflected from where? Sub-atomia?
The wormhole opened like a drain of light, a little smaller than Chevie had expected, if she was honest, yet it was big enough to slurp down the atoms of the hazmat team and their leader. The bubbles spiraled down, forcing themselves into the pulsating white circle at the pod’s base. It shone like a silver dollar, then spun as though someone had flipped it, each revolution sending a blinding beam across the basement.
Chevie closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the wormhole had closed, leaving behind a wisp of smoke in the shape of a rough question mark.
You and me both, Chevie thought, stepping forward warily, around the bank of computers, and peering into the pod’s belly. It was cold in there, and blobs of orange gel shivered on the steel walls.
I hope those blobs weren’t important body parts.
Smart and his team were gone, there was no doubt about it.
I didn’t believe Orange’s story until this moment, Chevie realized. Not for a second. I am not sure if I believe it now.
But there was no denying that her partner had disappeared, whether into a wormhole as planned, or boiled to jelly by old-school laser beams.
I can worry about all of this when I am home in Malibu. Until then: act like a professional.
Chevie decided to use the ten minutes to check through the video on Smart Sr.’s Timekey. See if there was anything more she could add to her report. And, you never know, there was always the ghost of a chance that Riley was telling the truth. But even if he was, there was no way the bogeyman he was so afraid of could make it to the future.
Chevie suddenly saw a flash of Riley’s face: blue eyes wide, soot-blackened brow.
No way in heaven, but perhaps a way in hell.
She shivered. Maybe that boy was lying, but he sure believed he was telling the truth.
Alt-Tek
BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. 1898
Albert Garrick hummed a nursery rhyme he’d learned on the knee of an Irish woman who had nannied for half of the Old Nichol back in the dark times. If there was one truth that Garrick held like iron in his core, it was that he would never return to the Old Nichol, not even to dodge the noose.
“I would swing before I’d go back to that cesspit,” he vowed quietly through clenched teeth, as he did most nights.
And in this case the term cesspit was not simply a storyteller’s exaggeration. The Old Nichol Street rookery was bordered by the common sewer and had been spared by the Great Fire, but the area had not seen refurbishment for its pauper residents since that time. A true cesspit. A great ditch of putrefaction, dotted with sties, hovels, and dung heaps, where the air sang with the sharp tang of industry and the lusty howls of hungry babes.
Hell on earth.
As Albert Garrick hummed, the words fluttered from the dark shadows of his past and the assassin sang them in a sweet tenor:
One little babby, ten, twenty,
Only last week I had wages plenty
Then Nick came a-stealin’ my babbies away
Now I begs for me supper every bloomin’ day.
Garrick gave a dour chuckle. A cholera nursery rhyme, hardly the subject to soothe a little one’s fears, and more often it would keep him awake than send him to sleep, but then Garrick had lost a family of nine to the disease, and it would have claimed him and his father had clever Papa not slit the Adelphi Theatre’s caretaker’s throat in an alley one night, then turned up to claim his place the following morning. The caretaker had been Father’s bully chum; but it was life or death, and the Thames was chockfull of best friends. Barely a tide passed without someone’s bosom pal washing up on the mud banks at Battersea.
For over a year the father and son slept in a secret space behind the Adelphi’s green room until they could afford digs far away from the Old Nichol.
Garrick knelt on the elaborate fleur-de-lis rug in front of him, banishing memories of his past and concentrating on this night’s business. Carefully he placed the tips of his blades on the central petal of the pattern. Six knives in total, from stiletto to shiv to four-sided bo-shuriken throwing knives; but Garrick’s favorite was the serrated fish knife that had lived under his pillow since childhood.
He tapped the wooden hilt fondly. It was true to say that Garrick held this blade in higher regard than any person of his acquaintance. Indeed, the magician had once risked prison by dallying to reclaim the blade from a mark who had snarled the knife in the farrago of his entrails.
But I would sacrifice even you for a taste of magic , he admitted to the knife. In a heartbeat and gladly.
Garrick knew that men would come to this place when their own magician was returned to them a cold corpse. The old man had promised as much—if you harm me, men will come to make sure you didn’t take my secrets—and Garrick believed those words to be true. The old man’s secrets were magical ones, and the men would come, because magic was power, which in turn was knowledge. And he who controlled knowledge controlled the world. Knowledge was a dangerous thing to have skittering around loose, and so men would come.
A hanging circle of bats clattered in the broad chimney flue, wings slapping like a tanner’s brush.
Perhaps they sensed something? Perhaps the great moment was upon them?
Come, gods of magic. Come and meet Albert Garrick’s steel, and we shall see if you die like men.
Garrick pocketed his blades and melted into the basement shadows by the grandfather clock. When a traveler emerges from a wormhole and the quantum foam solidifies, there are quickly forgotten moments of clarity when the time traveler feels at one with the world.
Everything is all right and outta sight , as Charles Smart quipped in the famous talk at Columbia University during his U.S. lecture tour. When those little virtual particles annihilate, a person gets literally plugged into the universe.