The Time Shifter (4 page)

Amelia finished washing her hands at the sink, and shuddered with relief. She and Charlie were safe.

But no-one at the hotel is
, she realised.

‘Not again!’ came Charlie’s voice from across the room, loud and careless in his exasperation.

‘Hey, Charlie,’ said Sophie T, weaving her way between the tables with her jar of filthy paint-water and the palette of paint. ‘When are you going to stop being such a total weirdo and yelling random stuff?’

‘Hey, Sophie T,’ he snapped back. ‘When are you going to stop being such an epic fail and chucking paint everywhere?’

Amelia held her breath as Ms Slaviero raised a puzzled eyebrow, but Sophie T just gave him a pitying look.

‘
Seriously
, Charles? Do I
look
like I’m throwing anything anywhere?’

Then with a great show of condescension, she stepped right over Charlie’s bag and as far away from him as she could, sighing heavily.

Charlie couldn’t have cared less. Like Amelia, who by now had grabbed her bag, he just wanted to get back to the hotel.

The bell rang loudly.

‘Yep!’ Charlie said briskly over his shoulder to Ms Slaviero as he and Amelia headed straight for the door. ‘Excursion notes for next week – we’re on it.’

‘What do you remember?’ said Amelia as soon as they were past the school gates. They were both walking fast.

‘Danger,’ said Charlie. ‘I know something really bad almost happened. Or is it about to happen? I’m not totally sure …’

‘Same as me.’ Amelia nodded. ‘I’ve got flashes, but it’s a bit muddled.’

‘But we have done this before, right?’

‘I think so. And I think we’re getting better at it.’

They jogged a little faster.

‘I remember that woman,’ said Charlie. ‘And that bracelet thing – she’s controlling all this, right? And …’ he fell silent.

‘Something like Krskn?’ said Amelia. ‘Yeah, I remember that too.’

‘Who could forget?’

‘Well, everyone apparently. As far as I can tell, no-one else has a clue we’re stuck in some … loop or whatever.’

‘Grawk knows,’ said Charlie, watching as the not-quite-a-dog bounded out from the bushes, his paws covered in dirt.

Amelia looked at Grawk with apprehension. There was something strange going on with him, and, though she couldn’t remember why, Amelia now felt slightly scared of him. Not because he’d been moody and sour lately, but because she suddenly realised that no-one knew exactly what he was capable of – or what he might become.

‘But why us?’ she puzzled. ‘Why do we remember and no-one else?’

They thought hard for another few steps, then cried out together, ‘The sphere!’ and pelted as fast as they could up the steep hill to the headland.

Grawk led them to the hotel’s gates and over to the left, but by the time he had stopped at the shallow hole in the grass, Amelia knew exactly what to do.

She and Charlie bent together to pick up the glowing white sphere, and in their two cupped hands they saw currents of blue light marbling its surface. It made a shrill whining noise, and their hair stood on end as coolness washed over them. Amelia felt a dizzying rush of knowledge, as though she had stepped out of time itself and could see all eternity laid out like a map in front of her.

Keeping hold of the sphere, she turned to look behind her. Eight figures were walking toward them: two sets of four, walking in single file, one set heading for Amelia, the other for Charlie. The figures were all translucent, so that as Amelia looked at the ones going for Charlie, it was like looking through gauze. But then she saw the ones coming for her, all four lined up, and in overlapping they became substantial enough for her to see properly.

‘It’s
me
!’ she gasped. ‘Oh, and that must be you. It’s like the trace left behind from the other times we’ve been here. So –’

She turned to see the Krskn-woman. Yes, there she was. Amelia saw her trace selves lighting up the sphere and dropping it, and the sphere disappearing through the grass and into the earth. ‘Look, Charlie – there she is, starting it all.’

‘So let’s go end it all,’ he said, dropping the sphere back into its hole.

‘How can we? She knows we’re onto her, and as long as she has that bracelet, she’s always a step ahead of us.’

‘All right, then, so what do we do?’

‘Tom,’ Amelia said simply, and they both ran.

It was only a short crash through the grove of magnolia trees to reach Tom’s cottage, and it felt great to Amelia to finally be doing something different – like they were changing the game, making their own decisions rather than merely reacting to the alien’s.

Across the clearing, Amelia thumped on Tom’s door, but Charlie just threw it open, and Amelia followed him in.

‘What do you want?’ Tom growled, not even looking up from his charts. It wasn’t the friendliest greeting, but actually better than his usual.

‘We need your help,’ said Amelia.

‘You’ll have to wait, then. There’s a dangerous connection about to align.’

‘How’s it dangerous?’ said Charlie. ‘Like, an earthquake-y wormhole, or an unstable one with blowbacks?’

Tom finally sat up straight, pushed the charts away, and swivelled his chair to glare at them. ‘Neither. The wormhole is solid – one of the most reliable ones we have. The problem is, it connects with MN-5.’

Amelia blinked.

Tom looked grimmer still. ‘MN-5,’ he said bitterly, ‘was a major Guild stronghold, back during the –’ he caught himself, ‘– trouble.’

Trouble? What trouble?
Amelia had no idea what Tom was talking about, but by now she knew better than to interrupt him with questions. The trick was to listen and remember now, and try to figure it all out with Charlie later.
If
they could remember it later …

‘By the time Gateway Control got organised, the Guild was a thing of the past. Or so we thought. Now we hear that MN-5 is active again. No-one’s saying it’s Guild, of course. No-one’s stupid enough to say anything like that out loud, but mark my words: anything that comes out of MN-5 is no friend to us.’

Amelia gulped. ‘I think someone like that is already here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Someone’s messing with time,’ said Charlie. ‘This is the first time we’ve come to you, but we’ve done everything else like five times.’

‘You’re saying events are repeating?’ said Tom, a glimmer of recognition in his single remaining eye.

‘Yes,’ said Charlie.

‘And you
remember
?’ said Tom.

‘
Yes
,’ said Amelia.

‘Then you must have found the recursor.’

‘The what?’ said Charlie.

‘The time-control device.’

‘Mm … what’s it look like?’ Charlie asked, shiftily.

‘I have no idea,’ Tom said dourly, brow furrowing over his eye-patch. ‘They’re insanely rare, expensive and dangerous. But seeing as you know what’s going on, you must have not only seen the recursor, you must have
touched
it.’

‘We have,’ Amelia admitted.

Tom snorted and shook his head. ‘Hopeless. Don’t you two listen to anything I say?
Touching
alien technology before you know what it is? You’d be better off running round the bush trying to catch snakes with your bare hands.’

‘On the other hand,’ Charlie said in a sarcastic voice. ‘
Thanks, kids, for discovering we’re all stuck in a time-loop with Krskn’s twin
.’

Tom turned white. ‘What did you say?’

‘Last time, Grawk bit the holo-emitter off the bracelet woman and she turned into the same sort of alien as Krskn,’ said Amelia.

Tom held up both hands. ‘Whoa whoa whoa! Start again: what woman?’

Jittery with impatience, not knowing how long they had before the woman reset time on them again, and not seeing the point in explaining it to Tom if he was only going to forget it all anyway, Amelia hurried through the story as best she could recall it.

‘She was in your room?’ Tom gasped. ‘Trying to unlock the safe door?’

He slumped in his chair as Amelia went on, then sat bolt upright, his face stark with terror. ‘She got it
open?
’

‘She had a black can thing when she jumped out the window.’ Charlie shrugged. ‘I don’t think she got
that
open, but I suppose she got the safe open to get it.’

Tom groaned but gestured for Amelia to go on.

‘So then Grawk stole the thing from her and ran away with it, and we all saw that she was like Krskn, only with blue eyes instead, and then she pressed her bracelet and … that was it.’

Tom rubbed his forehead wearily. ‘Too old for this now …’

‘So what do we do?’ said Amelia.

Tom looked up, and Amelia was shocked to see that instead of his normal grumpy expression, he appeared utterly defeated.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, shoulders sagging. ‘I told you, recursor technology is rare and dangerous. Obviously, it’s highly illegal, too. Creating a localised temporal field, like a bubble, and manipulating the fabric of time and space within it – well, it’s beyond risky. Each instance of rewinding time inside the bubble wears away at the connection between the bubble and the rest of existence. Rewind time once or twice, you might get away with it – the bubble might just slide back into the flow of the universe when you turn the recursor off. But each time after that, you increase the chance of tearing a hole in existence itself.’

‘Meaning what?’ Amelia asked quietly.

‘No-one knows. It could be that you tear a new gateway into being, or that you let the Nowhere leak into our world. It could be the start of a black hole, or perhaps the bubble just pops free of the rest of space and time and we spend eternity reliving the same fragment, over and over. There are lots of different theories, but as each of them is equally terrible and unthinkable, no-one has ever gone far enough to find out. So. How many times do you think she’s used the recursor so far?’

Amelia and Charlie looked at each other.

‘We saw …’ She paused to re-count in her head, just to be sure. ‘We saw four copies of ourselves.’

Tom closed his eye. ‘Four times, then. Heaven help us.’

‘So should we just let her steal that thing?’ said Charlie. ‘Whatever it is, it can’t be worth letting her tear up time forever?’

‘No!’ Tom blurted. ‘The opposite! Better we all be sucked into a black hole or lost in the Nowhere than to let that canister fall into the Guild’s hands!’

‘But that won’t happen,’ Amelia soothed him, her own heart pounding at the fear Tom had for this Guild. ‘The woman must know better than anyone how dangerous it is to keep using the recursor. Surely she won’t risk destroying herself just for some robbery.’

‘You saw her,’ said Tom. ‘She’s like Krskn – do you think Krskn would care about risk, however bad the odds?’

‘Well …’

‘And worse than that,’ Tom went on, ‘if she’s a time-shifter – I mean, if she’s done this before, somewhere else – then she’s far more dangerous than Krskn himself.’

‘Why?’ said Charlie.

‘Because the time-shifting becomes addictive, they say. That ability to control time, the feeling of power and insight it gives –’

Amelia thought about the tingling rush of awareness and wisdom she had felt touching the recursor, and swallowed hard. Oh yes, a being could easily get addicted to that experience.

‘I don’t know,’ Tom went on. ‘I can only guess what the thrill would be for one of those punks, but from what I hear, time-shifters get so arrogant that they start to think they’re invincible. If they go too far with the recursor, they don’t get more cautious – it’s the opposite! They’re more convinced than ever that they have everything under control.’

‘I thought no-one had gone too far before,’ said Charlie.

‘Not in one place, at one time, no,’ said Tom. ‘But several years back, a rumour came through Control that they’d managed to catch a time-shifter. He’d become so addicted to the recursor that he kept rewinding time, just once in each moment, but for periods of time so close together the Keepers had notified Control that the Nowhere was being affected.’

‘So what do we do?’ Amelia asked again. ‘Stop her or let her go?’

‘We should break the bracelet!’ said Charlie.

‘But does she have the canister again this time?’ said Tom. ‘Where is she up to?’