The Time Shifter (5 page)

They heard Grawk bark in the distance.

‘Last time she got it, she headed here,’ said Charlie. ‘So I think we’re about to find out.’

Amelia and Charlie were already halfway to Tom’s front door, anxious to see what was happening with Grawk and the Krskn woman, when the cottage seemed to sigh.

Instinctively, all three of them stopped and turned to face the gateway room – a bare space visible through the doorway at the far end of Tom’s main room. There was nothing in there but a dark shadow in the corner where the wooden floorboards stopped and a stone stairwell led down into the cave system beneath the cottage.

Amelia breathed in and smelled the cold, strange air of another planet seeping from beneath the gateway room’s door. The wormhole from MN-5 had aligned.

Tom waved his hand frantically at Amelia and Charlie. ‘Get back! Get down!’ he mouthed, pointing to the little alcove that was his kitchen.

As quietly as they could, Amelia and Charlie slid around the bench and crouched down. Tom walked past them to the front door, opened a narrow panel in the wall next to it that Amelia had never noticed before, and took out a shotgun.

Charlie gasped. ‘A gun?’

Tom glared at him furiously and made a ‘zip it!’ motion over his own mouth.

Amelia felt sick to her stomach. She bit her lip and tried to breathe steadily so she wouldn’t start to panic, but there was something grim and terrible about watching someone you knew pick up a weapon and – what? Were they about to watch Tom
shoot
someone? Or, even worse, about to watch Tom being shot instead?

But she said nothing, just sat crouched next to Tom’s saucepan cupboard, listening desperately. There was no further sound from Grawk outside, but that didn’t mean much. He could be as silent as an owl when he wanted, and now that Amelia thought about it, he hadn’t even made a sound when he’d bitten the Krskn woman last time.

Amelia was assuming that if the Krskn woman had managed to get around Grawk this time, she’d be heading for the cottage – undoubtedly intending to catch the MN-5 connection. Amelia didn’t know how long this wormhole would stay in place, but that must be another reason time was so important to the thief: it wasn’t enough for her just to steal the canister, she had to get it done within a strict timeframe.

Maybe that was why she rewound time the first couple of times when nothing had really gone wrong with her plan – she’d just been slightly delayed by Mum, or by Amelia and Charlie bothering her in the bedroom. Which meant that either the connection with MN-5 was going to stay open only a very short time, or the people the Krskn woman was dealing with were so dangerous, she didn’t dare be late for them.

Either that
, thought Amelia,
or she has become so addicted to the recursor that any old excuse will do to rewind time.

A dreadful possibility occurred to her then: she and Charlie had seen the shadows of their other selves, one for every time they had found the recursor. But what if there had been
other
times, when they hadn’t found it? What if, instead of being the fourth time around the loop, it was just the fourth time they knew about? What if they were really up to the twelfth, or the twentieth, or the fiftieth time, and it was already too late to stop her?

What if …
Amelia gulped.
What if this bubble of time has already drifted away from the rest of existence, and we’re already trapped here forever?

The feeling of panic increased. Amelia forced herself to hold her breath and count to ten. No – if they’d drifted out of existence already, how could a gateway connection have just opened up from halfway across the galaxy?

Tom limped softly back to the main room, the shotgun held ready to fire. He looked very familiar with the firearm, as though it were quite comfortable for him to nestle the stock of the gun into his shoulder and walk with his one eye sighting along the barrel. Concentrating hard on her breathing, Amelia couldn’t help but wonder what Tom had got up to during that
trouble
years ago.

Beside her, Charlie began to shift, and Amelia knew he wouldn’t be able to sit still much longer – and yet, apart from the constant ticking of all Tom’s clocks, there was total silence in the cottage.

There’s no reason to think anyone is coming through from MN-5
, Amelia assured herself.
It’s just the Krskn woman leaving. Tom’s not going to shoot her, he’s just being cautious …

And then sound exploded through the cottage, shockingly loud and brutal.

Charlie leapt to his feet to look over the kitchen bench, and even as Amelia thought what a stupid thing to do that was, she realised she was standing next to him. Tom was standing in the gateway room, pumping the shotgun to reload. The wall above the stairwell was a mess of torn plaster, shrapnel and scorch marks from the gunpowder.
That’s
how closely Tom had fired.

But at what? There was no other person in the room that Amelia could see.

‘Tom?’ Charlie called.

‘Get out!’ he barked, pointing the gun down the stairs. ‘Now!’

But Amelia couldn’t move. She was so fascinated and horrified that she could only stand and watch as a silent wave of water lifted itself out of the stairwell. Perfectly transparent, it rippled upward until it was higher than Tom. It was like one of those nightmares where everything happens in slow motion, and it was quite beautiful – though that just made it more terrifying.

Very gently, without any hurry, the water gathered itself into the shape of a human being and reached out for the barrel of Tom’s gun.

Tom fired again, blasting through the body of the thing. The alien staggered, shock waves distorting it so badly that Amelia thought it would collapse into a puddle, but in less than a second it had reformed itself and stepped into the gateway room itself. It snatched the gun out of Tom’s hands.

Tom grunted, retreated slightly, and then threw himself at the alien. Amelia thought he was trying to grab the gun back, but Tom went for the water creature’s legs in a sort of desperate rugby tackle.

Being completely fluid, the creature simply flowed out of Tom’s grip. It dropped formlessly to the floor, washed along a couple of metres past him, then rose up again in its blank human shape. Tom landed heavily on the floor, his arms in an empty embrace. He was too slow to put out his hands to catch himself, and Amelia heard his knees and forehead hit the wooden boards. He let out a moan, but before he could move, the water creature lifted a transparent arm toward Tom.

Tom was much farther from the alien than the length of a human arm, but this watery limb kept stretching out, longer and longer, until it was a liquid crystal tentacle, tapering off to a point like a needle. Tom raised his head and was about to get up when the tip of the tentacle tapped him on the shoulder.

The effect was instant.

Tom slumped to the floor, motionless.

Amelia and Charlie also hit the deck, their legs giving way in shock, so that they were hidden behind the kitchen bench once more.

The door to the cottage flew open, and the Krskn woman – still appearing human – leapt inside. Grawk hadn’t got her holo-emitter this time. She was less than two metres from Amelia and Charlie, and if she had looked down there would have been no chance of escape for them, but the woman never looked. Amelia couldn’t tell whether she was so brimming with confidence from the recursor that she had forgotten to check her surroundings or was just too focused on looking for the water creature. Amelia only knew she was grateful.

‘You’re late, Trktka,’ said a bubbling voice that had to be the water creature.

‘Late?’ Trktka scoffed, walking farther into the cottage and (thankfully) past the kitchen alcove. ‘Early, late – what do these words mean to me?’

‘Do you have the Essence?’

If it meant the black canister, Amelia knew Trktka must have it, seeing as she hadn’t triggered the recursor.

Trktka nodded, switching off her holo-emitter and stretching her neck out as her true form reappeared.

‘At last!’ the water creature burbled. ‘Well, then, come along. The Guild are –’

But a flash of black had streaked into the cottage, and suddenly there was chaos. Peeking out past the edge of the bench, still on her hands and knees, Amelia saw Grawk had knocked Trktka down, forcing the canister from her hand, and was now launching himself at the water creature.

Stuffing her fist in her mouth, Amelia expected to see Grawk paralysed as easily as Tom has been. But Grawk was unstoppable. A kind of wild fury seemed to have come over him, and he charged through the water creature so fast it had no time to evade him. It staggered and Grawk turned and forced his way back through it a second time before it could recover. Tom, Amelia noticed, had not moved during any of this. His eye was open, unblinking.

Grawk was pouncing a third time when Charlie bolted out from the kitchen, heading for the black canister.

But Trktka was getting to her feet, her eyes slitted in anger, her tail lashing.

Charlie was almost at the canister when Trktka snapped out one hand and threw him hard against the cottage wall, where he collapsed among boxes of clocks.

Amelia thought he’d been knocked unconscious, but to her relief Charlie groaned and looked fearfully up at Trktka. The alien’s chest was heaving as she stood over him, and the blue markings along her neck flared violet. Amelia saw what Tom had meant about her being more dangerous than Krskn – not because she was stronger, or smarter, or faster than he was, but because she was on the verge of
losing it
.

Grawk, seeing the problem, leapt between them, standing protectively before Charlie, his fur drenched by the water creature. He narrowed his yellow eyes and growled ferociously.

Amelia knew she had to do something – but what? Tom was down and scarily still, Charlie was hurt and cornered, there were two aliens about to get away with something catastrophic and only one Grawk to stand up to them. Amelia couldn’t see any way to save the day. Her only advantage was that neither alien knew she was there – and that only stayed an advantage as long as she did nothing.

Trktka suddenly laughed. It did nothing to make her sound less crazy. ‘Oh, Frrshalla, what have we become that the Guild has sent us out against pups? We’re being paid to fight an old man, a boy and a baby grawk. I feel rather insulted.’

Charlie struggled to sit up, pushing the boxes off him. He had a bad cut over one eye, and blood was trickling down the side of his face.

‘
That’s
not an insult,’ he said, his voice shaky but the tone as rude as could be. ‘
This
is an insult –’

But without Grawk to keep splashing it into disarray, the water creature, Frrshalla, had reformed. Charlie, his eyes fixed on Trktka, didn’t see the glassy finger worming its way toward him. He was just pulling himself to his feet to deliver a truly wicked mouthful of insult when the tip of the water tentacle hardened into a tiny point and jabbed him in the neck. It was as though someone had flicked a switch: Charlie dropped bonelessly to the floor.

Amelia flew from the kitchen.

Before even Grawk could react, in a rush of pure, focused rage, she threw herself at Trktka’s back and grabbed for that grotesque bracelet. Sure that she was about to tear a hole in the universe itself, and not caring at all, Amelia wrapped her hand around Trktka’s whole wrist and squeezed. She was filled with vicious satisfaction as she was blinded by a flash of white light streaked through with blue.