The Time Shifter (3 page)

They strode through the long grass to Grawk, who was waiting for them beside a shallow hole. Without even slowing his pace, Charlie swooped down and lifted the glowing white sphere that Amelia had known would be there. Currents of blue light swirled in multiples over the surface of the sphere and it gave off a high-pitched hum. Charlie’s hair stood on end and his eyes filled with recognition as he spun around and looked back the way they had come.

‘Oh, yes – I see something. Three, now.’

Amelia took the sphere from him and felt a strangely familiar and lovely coolness wash through her whole body. She felt more awake than she ever had in her life – as though she weren’t awake only now, but awake to every possible
Now
that could ever be. Like Charlie, she looked behind her. She saw faint figures of people floating in the air – like temporary tattoos that had nearly washed away, leaving only ghostly bits of outline here and there.

Three shapes about her size were walking toward her, one after the other. They were like copies, each doing exactly the same thing, but separated by a second or two. Then she froze as she noticed another set of moving transparencies hovering their way toward Charlie.

She turned to tell Charlie what she’d seen, and then saw a
third
set in front of her, on the opposite side of Grawk’s hole. They were just as vague and barely there as the others, except for one vivid detail: a spectacular bracelet.

‘That woman!’ Amelia dropped the sphere back into the hole. ‘She’s in my bedroom, isn’t she?’

Dumping their schoolbags, barely even nodding to Grawk, they sprinted the last rise of the headland to the hotel. Amelia was pink-cheeked with indignation at the thought of a stranger going through her things. It was bad enough when she came home from school and Mary had changed the bedsheets or left a neat pile of folded laundry on top of her chest of drawers. Even that felt embarrassing and invasive, like she was a tiny kid too young to care about privacy – and that was when
Mary
did it. And she
liked
Mary.

She definitely didn’t like this pushy, time-bending alien creep.

‘Can you remember what she’s doing in there?’ Charlie puffed beside her.

‘Not yet.’

They leapt up the main steps, threw open the double doors and barrelled across the lobby, heedless of any human guests.

‘Hoi! Slow down!’ Dad snapped, looking up from his mopping as they swerved around the oozing black puddle on the floor.

‘Plenty of work here for any kid who wants his pocket money,’ Mary added.

But Amelia and Charlie were already galloping up the left-hand stairs, ignoring Mum’s disapproving ‘
Amelia!
’

‘What are we going to do?’ Charlie asked as they reached the gallery overlooking the lobby.

For a split second, Amelia hesitated. It was a good question. They knew nothing at all about this woman, really. They didn’t, for instance, know if this time business was all part of some hilarious practical joke, or if she was actually dangerous. They didn’t know why she wanted to get into Amelia’s room, of all places –

Amelia stopped. ‘The safe.’

‘What?’

‘
That’s
what she’s doing in my room – she’s trying to crack the safe.’

This changed things. The Gateway Hotel was full of secrets – strange comings and goings by Leaf Man, a Keeper who could travel through the Nowhere; all the things Gateway Control tried to keep them from knowing, some of which were so important that someone had filled the walls and floors and ceilings with cyborg rats to spy on them; there was even a genuine hidden trapdoor in the library annexe, for goodness’ sake! Amelia knew there was more going on at the hotel than she could possibly imagine, but she could tell pretty quickly when something wasn’t right.

And a time-warping alien cracking hundred-year-old safes in Amelia’s bedroom was definitely
not right.

But she still didn’t know what to do about it.

She looked desperately toward Lady Naomi’s door – Lady Naomi, who might just be the biggest mystery of all, with her secret research out in the bush. But she was kind and brave and hadn’t hesitated to help them out before. She was exactly the person they needed to help confront an alien.

Amelia turned back to Charlie. All these thoughts had flown through her mind in only the briefest of moments, but he was already frustrated by the delay.

‘Come on, Amelia! We’ve got to get in there before she –’

‘But what if Lady –’

‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘No way she’s home at this time of the day.’

He was right. Whatever Lady Naomi was researching, she started first thing in the morning and rarely came back until well after dark.

So they were on their own. Unless James …?

But Charlie was already heading for her room.

Squaring her shoulders, Amelia followed him around the corner into the corridor. And saw that her door was shut.

Charlie strode over to it as though he knew exactly what he was doing and said, loudly, ‘All right, we know you’re in there! You might as well give up and come out now with your hands up!’

It was pretty ridiculous, a kid trying to bluff a grown alien that he was some kind of cop, but Amelia admired his nerve.

He banged on the door, wrenched the handle, then turned to Amelia.

‘It’s locked.’

Amelia pulled at the handle uselessly, while Charlie kept banging against the door.

‘Let us in!’ he yelled, which was obviously a pointless request, but Amelia could barely keep herself from shouting along with him,
It’s my room!

Whatever the woman with the bracelet was doing in there, though, she didn’t make a noise.

‘The window!’ Amelia gasped – if the woman hadn’t already escaped out of the big bay window, then at least Amelia and Charlie could glimpse her through it. But that would mean leaving the hotel altogether and going out to the lawns.

‘We need someone to guard the door,’ said Charlie, thinking the same thing.

‘James is home.’ Amelia went two doors down the hall to his room, and found him sprawled on the bed with Tom’s charts and his own hand-drawn spreadsheets around him as he tinkered with a box of cogs and gears. A set of Napier’s Bones was jumbled in his lap. He looked up and regarded his sister coolly.

In fact,
coolly
was the only way to do anything in James’s room – the place was practically a fridge. After complaining about being too hot to study, James had taken matters into his own hands: he’d rigged up an ordinary desk fan with a huge battery and super-charged the motor so that the fan’s blades spun much faster than was truly safe. Amelia was surprised it didn’t rise off the table like a helicopter. It was so powerful it had blown a number of James’s smaller gadgets right off the desk, and a stack of Tom’s papers – pinned down by a geode the size of a grapefruit – were fluttering so violently, it sounded like a library in flight.

‘What?’ said James.

‘Trouble.’ Amelia didn’t have to say anymore. James was already on his feet and pulling on a T-shirt.

‘What do you need?’

She could have hugged him. ‘Someone’s in my room – can you guard the door while Charlie and I go round the front?’

Charlie started heading for the stairs the moment he saw them coming. ‘I heard the window opening,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Hurry!’

Amelia and Charlie sprinted back through the lobby (more cries of protest from the three parents) and out to the grass below Amelia’s window, just in time to see the woman, whom Amelia now remembered enough to recognise, perched calmly on the edge of the open bay window, at least eight metres above the ground. In one hand, she held a small black canister. On the opposite wrist, her spectacular bracelet caught the light and sparkled so brightly that for a moment Amelia was blinded.

She blinked, then saw the woman step from the windowsill into thin air – falling two storeys and landing on the lawn as lightly as though she’d skipped down a single step. Amelia was so astonished that she stared, open-mouthed, as the woman ran down the hill in the direction of Tom’s cottage.

‘Quickly!’ said Charlie, and Amelia snapped out of it, running with him after the thief.

But they had only run as far as the rose garden before she stopped dead again – not only astonished this time, but horrified too. Grawk had burst out from the long grass and was charging at the escaping woman. His ears were flat against his head, his wide yellow eyes narrowed to slits, and his many sharp white teeth were bared in a vicious snarl. He was so swift and sudden that the woman didn’t know he was there until she was already falling with Grawk’s teeth in the back of her ankle.

The blood drained from Amelia’s face. She’d never seen Grawk like this. He’d always been her funny, brilliant little not-quite-a-dog. Now, though, so fast that the wretched woman barely had time to react, Grawk let go of her ankle, sprang up the length of her body and began biting furiously at her
neck
.

Amelia moaned, aghast.

‘He’s going to kill her!’ Charlie yelped, as he leapt forward to help. He was only a metre away from them when Grawk wrenched his head back, his teeth clamped together. Amelia expected such a violent action to be followed by a spray of blood, but what flew through the air instead was a tiny clockwork cylinder.

He isn’t trying to kill her
, Amelia sighed.
He is tearing off her holo-emitter!

Grawk pounced again, this time at the woman’s hand, and then bolted off toward the bush, the stolen black canister in his mouth.

Closest to the fallen woman, Charlie was the only one who could see the shape she’d reverted to when the holo-emitter was torn out. He gave a strangled cry and stumbled backwards through the long grass as fast as he could.

‘Amelia! Charlie!’

Behind her, Amelia could hear the frightened, cross voices of all three parents, coming closer. She didn’t turn her head for even a second. Though she was glad to have the adults coming to the rescue, she knew they were still too far off to be of any real help. Charlie gasped again in fear as the alien calmly rose to its feet.

It was like oil climbing into the sky – impossible, beautiful and
wrong.
Sunlight scattered into tiny rainbows as it bounced off the matte, black skin, and the alien arched its long, elegant neck and rolled its shoulders as thought it had been cramped inside its holo-disguise. A long, sinuous tail flicked in the grass.

Krskn!
Amelia knew they were all as good as dead. Or rather, they’d be better off dead than let Krskn get his revenge on them for last time.

Amelia heard a little whimper and realised it was coming from her. The alien turned to them, and Amelia saw its huge jewel-coloured eyes were blue, not red, and that its skin wasn’t uniformly black. Dappled along its –
her?
– throat and belly were leopard spots of electric blue.

Not Krskn
, Amelia realised.
But one of his kind.

Now that she looked more closely, differences were obvious. Not just the blue spots – where Krskn had been as wiry and lithe as a trapeze artist, this creature was
thin
. And where Krskn’s red eyes had been hypnotically focused and intense, these blue eyes were slightly glazed, as though the mind behind them were somewhere else.

Still behind Amelia and Charlie, but closer now, Mum cried out fiercely, ‘Don’t you touch those kids!’

The alien sighed and clicked her tongue in frustration as she glanced in the direction Grawk had taken the canister. She pressed her spectacular bracelet, and Amelia braced herself for the blinding flash of white light streaked through with blue.