The Time Shifter (6 page)

As the water hit her hands, Amelia let out a low sob of grief. She spun on her heels and turned frantically to look for Charlie –

He was there, white-faced by his desk, his hand over his eye. Without warning, he stumbled and gave a groan of agony.

‘Charlie?’ said Ms Slaviero, alarmed. ‘Are you –?’

‘We’ve got to go!’ Amelia yelled. She was vaguely aware of the whole class gaping at her, but it was totally irrelevant.

Without waiting for the bell to ring, or bothering to grab her bag, Amelia ran to Charlie and pulled him from the room.

‘Amelia!’ Ms Slaviero cried out after them, but Amelia ignored her.

Charlie lagged heavily for a few seconds, and Amelia had to drag him along, but he rallied by the time they reached the school gates. Together they ran with hectic speed up the steep hill to the headland. Grawk joined them halfway, bursting from the bushes as they passed. He gave Charlie an anxious sniff, and then bolted ahead of them to the gate.

This time, when they reached the hole, Amelia’s ears rang with the shrill whine of the sphere. She saw it glowing blue, shot through with swirls of white.

‘Do we pick it up?’ Charlie asked. ‘I remember everything already.’

‘No,’ said Amelia. ‘We destroy it.’

‘We can’t!’

‘We have to. You heard what Tom said about using a recursor more than
twice
in one place and time. And as long as Trktka can rewind time, she’ll just keep going until she wins.’

‘But –’ Charlie stopped, gulped. ‘It’s just that –’

‘What?’

‘Well,’ he said in a rush, ‘it’s just that if you break the recursor and I get killed again, I won’t get another chance.’

Amelia stared. ‘You were
dead?
I thought you were just –’

Charlie shrugged, not meeting her eyes. ‘Look, I don’t know, OK?’

‘You died …’ Amelia whispered. ‘And Tom …’

Charlie drew a shuddering breath, then squared his shoulders and looked hard at Amelia. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘Of course it does!’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t.’ He looked at the recursor with loathing. ‘You’re right: if this thing goes around once more, we might as well all be dead. So, whether we break the recursor now or not, the stakes are exactly the same as they always are:
real
.’

Amelia dithered. In her head, she knew they had to break the recursor – the logic was clear. But in her heart, she couldn’t bear the thought of destroying the only chance to save someone from whatever was about to happen.

‘I’m not sure …’

‘I am,’ said Charlie, and smashed the heel of his school shoe through the recursor where it hovered in its hole.

Amelia braced herself for an explosion or some sort, but the recursor quietly crumpled in on itself with nothing more than a vague crunching sound. When Charlie pulled his foot back, she saw it had disintegrated into a small pile of glittering crystals, as harmless-looking as bath salts.

At once the air was still, the recursor’s piercing whine silenced.

‘Well,’ said Charlie, very pale and solemn. ‘That’s that.’

Amelia patted his shoulder awkwardly.

‘Right,’ he went on. ‘Last go – let’s make it count. And this time, I’ve got an idea.’

‘Go on.’

‘We don’t have time,’ said Charlie. ‘I mean, now we
really
don’t have time. You go straight to Tom’s and tell him everything. I’ll meet you there.’

Amelia nodded, and ran across the lawn to the magnolias, and Charlie headed uphill to the hotel. Grawk cut across the headland, passing the hedge maze, and disappeared in the direction of the bush.

Crashing through the undergrowth and across the clearing, Amelia burst into Tom’s cottage and found him sitting back at his desk, poring over his charts.

‘What do you want?’ he growled, not turning round.

‘A time-shifter is coming. She’s stealing the canister from the safe in my bedroom, then coming here to meet a water monster from MN-5.’

Tom swivelled in his chair and stared at her.

‘Quickly!’ Amelia urged. ‘Only don’t bother getting your shotgun – it didn’t help at all.’

That seemed to convince Tom, and he pushed himself out of his chair without arguing. ‘The recursor –’

‘Charlie destroyed it. We’ve already gone around too many times, so –’

Tom nodded and said something amazing: ‘Good work. That was clear thinking.’

Amelia was so shocked by the praise, she blurted out, ‘But we shouldn’t have! Tom, last time – I think you got killed!’

Tom stiffened, but then nodded. ‘Still the right thing to do. You have to make tough calls in battle, and you did. And now, this time, I’ll be better prepared. Tell me about the water alien.’

‘It looked like pure water, but it could take on any shape, and it got you and Charlie by just touching you with one tip of itself. I don’t think it’s poisonous, though, because Grawk jumped through it over and over.’

‘A Breel,’ said Tom.

‘It was called Frooshall or something, and the time-shifter is the same as Krskn. She’s called Trktka.’

Tom’s face, if possible, looked even grimmer. ‘A Breel and a time-shift-addicted Hkryk, and they’re after the canister – no question over the Guild’s return now. OK … what’s the plan?’

But he wasn’t asking Amelia. He picked up the phone on his desk and dialled. ‘Skye,’ he snapped to Amelia’s mum. ‘You’ve got a Guild operative in Amelia’s bedroom – no, don’t approach her! She’s like Krskn, only highly unstable. Is there any way you and Scott can – no, not capture her, but if you can keep her, I don’t know …
contained
or something. Yes. OK. Yes. No, she’s here with me. Of course. Good luck.’

‘So what do we do?’ said Amelia as Tom slammed down the phone.

He rubbed his face roughly, his eye closed. ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘A Breel … extreme temperature change is the only effective defence, freezing or evaporating. If only I had a laser canon … a flame-thrower, even …’ He looked around his cluttered cottage for an idea. ‘Do I burn this place to the ground …?’

‘Couldn’t we just lock the door to the gateway?’ Amelia asked. ‘Stop it getting through the wormhole in the first place?’

Tom shook his head. ‘The door only closes off access to this stairwell. The gateway itself occupies a huge cavern beneath us – wormholes can be enormous, you know, and even the smaller ones need room to wag around in. They don’t just pop open in a fixed spot. And then the cavern itself connects to half a dozen different tunnels through the headland. You’ve been in one yourself.’

It was true. Under the hotel Amelia lived in, there was another, even bigger hotel carved out of the natural caves that riddled the headland. This mirror hotel was for aliens who couldn’t stay above ground with the humans, and it could be sealed off at either end with huge metal doors and flooded with seawater, but –

‘There’s no time, is there?’ Amelia groaned.

‘No time, and not enough doors to seal off every tunnel. We could protect ourselves –’

‘But only by sending the Breel directly to the hotel and endangering everyone else,’ she finished.

There was a gentle sigh from the gateway room. A cold, strange air wafted through the cottage, and Amelia knew that the wormhole from MN-5 had just aligned.

It was too late. Even with all her foreknowledge, Amelia hadn’t been able to change a thing. The only difference was that this time it would be her dying next to Tom, not Charlie. She was glad that Charlie wouldn’t have to go through that again, but she wished she’d known to call out goodbye to Mum when Tom was on the phone. She felt numb.

They waited in absolute silence, and Amelia wondered if the Breel’s touch would hurt. It looked quick, at least. She tried to steel herself for the moment – her time was almost up – second by second. She was getting down to her last heartbeats – if the suspense didn’t kill her first …

A crazed scream, half-fear and half-triumph, echoed up the stairs. Amelia looked at Tom in confusion, and then, bizarrely, she heard James yell, ‘Charlie!’

For a moment, Amelia was so disoriented that she thought James and Charlie were coming through the gateway from MN-5. Then she realised that of course they must have gone through the library trapdoor and the tunnels under the hotel. They were coming up to the gateway from the other side.

What are they doing?
she thought, as another puff of air came up the stairwell. This one was somewhat smoky, or cloudy – Amelia coughed. No, it was
dusty
. Ugh, she could taste it now in the back of her throat.
Flour.

She heard Charlie squawk in alarm, the sound booming in the caves, and then a scuffling of feet, and an almighty crash as something heavy and metallic hit the stone walls.

James yelled, ‘Run!’ and seconds later he and Charlie sprinted up the stairs into Tom’s room, both of them white with powder.

‘It’s still coming!’ Charlie shouted. ‘Run!’

‘Go!’ Tom ordered Amelia as Frrshalla emerged from the stairwell.

But where was the effortless crystal fluid? Where was the weightless rippling? The thing that came into the gateway room was opaque and sluggish, blobbing its way slowly up the last steps. Its whole body was a cloudy snow-dome of half-mixed water and clumps of flour.

Unbelievably, somehow, Charlie and her brother had turned the Breel to …
glue
.

‘Go!’ Tom bellowed again, and this time Amelia ran, following Charlie and James out of the cottage.

The three of them crashed through the door into the clearing. Charlie and James got running, but Amelia cried out, ‘We can’t leave Tom alone with it!’

‘Tom’s got it sorted,’ said James, but then doubled back and looked through the window to check. To Amelia’s surprise, he began to smile. ‘Actually, yeah – he really has.’

She and Charlie joined him at the window and peered in. It wasn’t what she expected. Curdled with flour, the Breel was all but helpless, and Tom was whomping it with a walking stick like it was an old rug. Amelia grinned with satisfaction. Slow and pathetic looking as it was at the moment, the Breel was still deadly, and who knew what it might be capable of if Tom gave it a moment to regroup?

‘It’s getting slower every time he hits it,’ she said, watching as the Breel seemed to solidify yet further.

‘Ha!’ James laughed. ‘It’s the gluten! We got Dad’s extra-strong bread flour, and now Tom’s kneading it like dough!’

Amelia grinned. ‘What did you two
do
down there?’

‘We got James’s fan,’ said Charlie, happily.

‘It was all Charlie’s idea,’ said James. ‘He got the flour, and we used the fan to drive it toward the gateway.’

‘It was like a smoke machine!’

‘It was brilliant! It filled the whole cave like a cloud, and once the alien started to absorb it and clog up, we chucked handfuls of flour at it.’ James grinned, and added more soberly, ‘Then it tried to grab us.’

‘And I panicked and chucked the fan at it.’

‘Well, it worked,’ said Amelia. ‘Although, actually, you are both idiots, you know. What if you’d got sucked through the gateway to MN-5? Or worse: the Nowhere?’

‘I know,’ said Charlie. ‘But what if we’d all sat around waiting to get death-tapped instead? Or let the universe get turned inside out by Krskn’s crazy cousin? Or –’