The Time Shifter (8 page)

Tom shrugged. ‘Blast it again with your gas. We’ve only got to contain it until Control get here.’

‘Uh, Tom?’ Dad grunted. ‘Don’t suppose you could – oof!’

Trktka had started thrashing around again at the word ‘Control’.

‘Some rope would be good,’ James chipped in.

‘And cake,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s been about a week since school finished and we still haven’t had afternoon tea. Hey, where’s my mum, anyway?’

‘Inside with the guests,’ said Mum. ‘Poor thing. I have no idea what she’s told them is going on out here, but she can’t be having fun.’

‘Yeah, not like us,’ said Charlie, sarcastically.

‘We need some buckets,’ said Lady Naomi, adding to the list. ‘This ice is already starting to melt and –
no
, Grawk,
no!
Oh, bad dog! Oh, really!’ Grawk dropped his leg and scratched up some dirt and grass over the shimmering pile of now-yellow ice. Charlie laughed.

‘Grawk?’ said Amelia, smiling. ‘Come here, you funny thing.’ But Grawk only blinked his huge eyes at her. ‘Grawk?’

He barked sharply, just once, and then bolted away down the hill.

‘Well,’ Lady Naomi corrected herself. ‘Now we need buckets
and
rubber gloves.’

‘What about this one?’ said James, trying to sound cool and unbothered in front of Lady Naomi, but actually quite red in the face as he lay clinging to Trktka’s legs and tail.

‘All right, I’ll get the rope,’ Tom grumbled, setting off down the hill.

‘Shall we bring her down to you?’ James called after him.

‘Not on your life!’ Tom snapped. ‘I don’t want her anywhere near the MN-5 connection. Last thing we need is to carry her back to her escape route.’

James blushed.

‘We still need those buckets!’ said Lady Naomi, giving the ice another blast of gas. She looked meaningfully at Amelia and Charlie.

‘But what about my cake?’ Charlie whined. ‘Seriously – I will have a meltdown of my own if I don’t get something to eat! I mean –’

‘Come on,’ said Amelia, grabbing him by the arm. ‘The buckets are in the kitchen anyway.’

‘Oh.’ Charlie smiled and trotted alongside Amelia to the hotel.

They trudged up the main steps of the hotel, suddenly weary as the adrenalin began to wear off.

‘Do you think Control will finally cut us some slack around here?’ Amelia asked. Her stomach was rumbling too.

‘Just because we stopped an intergalactic robbery, caught two Guild mercenaries and saved the universe itself from being torn in half by illegal time-shifting technology, you mean?’ Charlie asked. ‘Fat chance.’

Ms Rosby and her team were at the hotel within the hour. As head of Control’s department regulating the use of the Earth gateway, she was in charge of any illegal entries and was going to personally escort Frrshalla and Trktka to Control Headquarters.

The other Control agents they’d met had been unpleasant, but Amelia and Charlie were always genuinely happy to see Ms Rosby.

‘Not bad, old man,’ she grinned, clapping Charlie on the back with one tiny gnarled hand. The other hand was gripping tightly to her silver-topped walking cane. ‘Well done, old girl,’ she beamed at Amelia.

Amelia smiled back. She knew that she and Charlie must actually seem old to Ms Rosby who, despite being holo-disguised as an ancient crone, was really only six.

‘I couldn’t believe it when Tom told me you’d caught two Guild mercenaries. And then when he told me that in fact you had Frrshalla in your jolly deep-freeze, in sixteen different ice-cream containers packed in among the fish fingers,
and
that you had that ghastly Hkryk, Trktka, tied up like a ballerina’s ballet boot – well, I thought it was an April fool’s joke!’ Ms Rosby gripped Amelia’s arm tightly as she tottered up the stairs to the hotel. ‘But then – ah,
then
Tom told me you two had been on the case, and it suddenly all made sense.’

‘It wasn’t just us, you know,’ said Amelia, wanting to be fair.

‘It was
mostly
us,’ Charlie countered.

‘Charlie!’

‘Well, I admit we couldn’t have done it without Tom, James, both your parents, Lady Naomi, and Gr–’

Amelia coughed loudly. Grawk was one of the illegal, or at least unapproved arrivals on Earth that Ms Rosby was supposed to stop. If she ever found out about him …

‘Frog in your throat, old girl?’ asked Ms Rosby curiously.

‘But, the point is,’ Charlie went on, ‘who destroyed the recursor? We did!’

Ms Rosby was serious at once. ‘Yes, and we need to have a little chat about that, to be honest.’

Charlie was crestfallen. ‘Did we do something wrong?’

‘Heavens, no, man! You did exactly right! But this is the first sign there’s been of time-shifting in nearly twenty years. The chaps at HQ thought we’d successfully suppressed the tech. And now we find out that not only was someone out there actively using a fully functional recursor, but it was in service to the
Guild
.’ She shook her head and paused, just inside the lobby, to catch her breath. ‘So we really need to know anything and everything you can tell us about the recursor you saw. It’s brilliant we have the remote setting device –’

‘Huh?’ said Charlie.

‘The bracelet,’ said Amelia.

‘Yes, that’s a real help, and there’s a lot of data we can glean from it, but any detail you can add will help HQ determine exactly which model of recursor Trktka was using. If we can trace where she got it, or who helped her get it …’

Dad and Tom came out of the common room, and Dad’s face lightened when he saw Ms Rosby.

‘Metti!’ he grinned, hurrying over. ‘How’s tricks at the office?’

‘Same as ever,’ she said wryly. ‘I’m sure you can guess: Arxish banging on about needing to intensify Control security at this gateway, those little creeps Snavely and Tavnik agreeing with every word, and me and Stern bored out of our gourds having to go over this ground
again
.’

‘They still want to shift us out and let them take over the hotel?’ Dad said, his smile fading.

Ms Rosby snorted. ‘Let them try! I may have wondered aloud how long Frrshalla and Trktka have been on the run. Could it really be
twelve
times they’ve evaded arrest by our people? No? Thirteen, then, was it? And then I asked how successful our investigations into Guild activities had been – had we, for instance, been able to get any firm evidence that the Guild were organising a resurgence? No?’ She smirked at Tom. ‘It’s quite marvellous to be able to ask these questions and have everyone remember that I’m only six years old. I only started working at Control when I was two, and absolutely none of this nonsense happened when I was in charge, I assure you!

‘Anyway, when everyone got remarkably quiet, I simply mentioned – just in passing, understand – that it was the humans who had saved the day.’

‘Thank you, Metti,’ said Dad.

Tom nodded fervently.

‘Don’t thank me,’ said Ms Rosby. ‘I’m thanking
you
. But back to all the hoo-ha here: do you know yet what the Guild were doing?’

Dad and Charlie opened their mouths at the same moment to speak, but Tom said quickly, ‘No! Not a clue. Nothing’s been damaged, as far as we can tell. Nothing’s missing …’ He finished lamely with a shrug.

‘Really?’ Ms Rosby pursed her lips. ‘How odd.’

She looked sharply at Dad, but he followed Tom’s lead and just shrugged.

‘Right …’ said Ms Rosby. ‘Well, then …’

‘There is one matter I’d like to raise with you,’ Dad said brightly, taking Ms Rosby’s arm from Amelia and leading her to the kitchen to see the prisoners. ‘It’s … it’s about money, actually. A number of our regular guests were very upset by the, uh, kerfuffle, and Mary offered to cancel all their payments for staying here, and so …’

‘Oh, don’t fret over
that
,’ Ms Rosby laughed as they reached the kitchen door. Dad grimaced back over his shoulder at Tom.

After a long interview with Ms Rosby, where Amelia and Charlie were separately questioned three times about the recursor, each answer checked and rechecked until she was quite sure they could remember nothing more, the kids finally got to rest. More importantly, after endless rib-cracking hugs and kisses from Mary, Charlie finally got his cake.

He and Amelia sat down on the foot of the stairs in the lobby, concerned with nothing more than blissfully working their way through vast slabs of banana cake.

‘Do you hear that?’ said Charlie, after a while.

‘What?’

‘I thought I heard “Greensleeves” playing …’

Amelia listened. She heard it, too.

Curiously, they got to their feet and opened the entrance doors of the hotel. And there was Mr Snavely – Control’s infamous ‘health inspector’ – his pinched little face even more disgusted than usual as he drove up in a cheery pink and white ice-cream van.

Actually, it was far simpler than that. Ms Rosby had arranged an extremely nice exchange for the Walkers: Mr Snavely would empty the truck’s supply of ice-cream, sorbet, gelato and frozen yoghurt into the hotel’s freezer, and in return the Control agents would transfer the sixteen containers of frozen Frrshalla to the truck.

Trktka was another matter, though.

First Mary had to coax all the guests into the library, promising them a special historical reel-to-reel film of Forgotten Bay – ‘and choc-tops!’ she promised – as an excuse to keep them all inside with the curtains drawn. Once the library doors were closed, two broad-shouldered Control agents bundled Trktka out under a blanket while she struggled and gnashed at them.

‘Thanks for coming, lovely to meet you!’ Charlie called as the group crossed the lobby.

Amelia elbowed him in the side.

‘What?’

She smiled and shook her head at him. ‘Does nothing bother you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ Amelia shrugged, heading for the stairs up to her room. ‘I just … After all that, I don’t know how you can feel like provoking her.’

‘Well, she deserves it!’ said Charlie, following. ‘As if a bit of provoking comes anywhere near to what she did to us!’

‘No, that’s not what I meant. It’s more … I was really scared it was the end for us today. You one time, me another, maybe all of us, if we hadn’t broken the recursor … I’m just surprised that doesn’t upset you more.’

Charlie stared at her for a moment, then dropped his head. ‘It does.’

Amelia heaved a deep breath, and waited.

Charlie shrugged. ‘I don’t know … maybe Tom’s got to me at last, but you know the bit that I keep going over in my mind? What would have happened if James and I had fallen into the Nowhere. It was so rushed at the time, we didn’t stop to think about it, but now …’

At last he looked up at her. ‘Do you think we would have really been lost forever?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Amelia. ‘But I’m glad we don’t have to find out.’

They were both very quiet for a while.

They heard Dad come out of the kitchen downstairs with Ms Rosby, walking her to her car. Amelia crept out across the gallery overlooking the lobby and peered over the railing at the hotel’s main doors. She heard Dad and Ms Rosby farewelling each other, and Ms Rosby’s last ‘Bravo!’ as she drove off down the gravel driveway. Dad plodded back into the hotel and closed the door behind him with a sigh.