‘Medscan say he not Shade nor Scender. No tag or tainted. He pure — no rads.’
Lilz grudgingly moved away as the man walked around the group showing everyone the results on the small, green LCD display. They jostled each other to take a look, and when Josh saw their reactions, he knew that whatever they saw was important, and that could give him a chance.
‘No kill?’ asked Benny, a little disappointed.
‘No kill,’ replied the voice inside the mask, reaching up to unclip the straps that held it in place.
Josh immediately understood why he didn’t recognise the voice: the filters distorted the tone, making him sound older.
‘We go to E,’ ordered Gossy, staring directly at Josh as if he were a total stranger. ‘He know best.’
4
E
They cut the ties on his hands to let him eat. Josh had never tasted anything quite like spit-roasted Frankencat. It made for an unusual meal, especially when smothered in the contents of the oldest tin of baked beans he’d ever seen. He was too hungry to care.
All eyes were on him as they ate, warily shovelling food into their mouths with dirty, greasy fingers. He saw how malnourished they’d become: hollow, sunken cheeks and grey skin from lack of sun and vitamins, all of them showing signs of premature ageing and other conditions — they were a pale imitation of the friends he’d left behind.
After the meal, Lilz tied him up again. She took her time with the zip ties, and Josh felt her breath on the back of his neck, her breasts pressing into his shoulder blades.
‘You pureblood,’ she whispered in his ear, pulling the ties tight. ‘You mine — after E.’
Josh winced as the plastic cut into the chaffed skin of his wrists.
‘Yeah, sure,’ he replied, wondering what exactly ‘E’ would have in store for him.
Gossy poured something onto the fire to put it out, and in the guttering light the gang stood as one and silently slipped out into the darkness. Lilz and Benny pulled Josh along by his arms until he kept up with the pace. They moved quickly, weaving through the pipes and tunnels in total darkness.
The route was littered with rubbish. Josh found it nearly impossible to avoid the unseen obstacles, until Benny got so frustrated with his slow progress that he put a pair of night-vision goggles over his head. Finally, Josh was able to see what they could.
The tunnel network was extensive and impossible to navigate without having grown up within it. Josh lost all sense of direction as they switched back and forth through the warren of service ducts and access tunnels. Every so often the passage would open out into larger spaces where floors had collapsed to create vast cavern-like chambers and they would have to stop while scouts were sent ahead.
While they waited, Josh had time to study the surroundings. They were made up of half-crushed old buildings, layer upon layer of collapsed construction that had been buried below the foundations of the newer superstructures. He realised that these larger areas must have once been streets and looked around for a name or a signpost, but there were none: anything useful had been stripped for salvage.
It was hard to imagine what could have caused so much destruction, so much rebuilding, and all in the streets that he’d once called his home town. As happy as he was to see the Bevin estate pulled down, it wasn’t so they could build a bigger one on top of it.
Watching them carefully, Josh realised that the buildings weren’t empty. The Shades, as they’d called themselves, had made their homes amongst the rubble, like a lost tribe surviving on the discarded trash of a previous civilisation. His mum watched a show about it once, about Mexico City, the kids lived on a rubbish heap.
Moving through the underworld, Josh realised there were probably hundreds, if not thousands of them, all with the same look of desperation and fear.
After a couple of hours of agonising, back-breaking tunnels, they began to climb upwards. Using old staircases and fire-escapes, they ascended through the floors of semi-collapsed buildings. Now and then Gossy would stop and check the readouts on his scanner, then hand out medicine.
Josh moved closer to Lilz as she was taking some pills. ‘Are you sick?’
Lilz shrugged. ‘Rad meds.’
Josh had begun to feel odd, but had assumed it was the food. ‘Shouldn’t I take something?’
‘Got to keep you pure!’ She smiled wickedly, grabbing his crotch with her hand. ‘Precious cargo!’
Gossy walked towards them, and Lilz sloped away.
‘Rad levels high,’ he warned, giving Lilz a surly glare. He took off Josh’s night vision goggles and cut his ties.
‘You need this,’ he said, and gave Josh his gas mask.
Josh nodded and put it on. It was hot, sweaty and smelled of old rubber, the eye lenses were fogged, and the air tasted of charcoal when he breathed. He could feel Gossy adjusting the straps to make it tighter. Sounds grew muffled and his vision blurred, but he guessed it was better than breathing in radioactive dust.
Gossy put on what looked like an emergency mask from an aeroplane over his nose and mouth, then made his way up the collapsed floor to the level above. The others followed behind, everyone wearing some kind of protective headgear.
‘He like you,’ Lilz chuckled as she passed him.
A long, laborious climb through the ruins of countless car parks and office buildings brought them up into an old shopping mall. Although it was still buried under thousands of tons of rubble, by some quirk of fate its structure had managed to survive intact. The interior, however, had been completely gutted, and what were once shops had been converted into a thriving shanty-town. The place was buzzing with people.
‘Welcome to E. Town!’ Lilz announced as she pulled off Josh’s gas mask.
The centre of the mall was like a street market in Marrakech — lit with ropes of low-voltage bulbs strung across the atrium. It was the first time Josh had seen anything resembling normal since he’d arrived — the lights reminded him of the ones they used to hang around his mum’s flat at Christmas, when they still bothered with Christmas decorations, though he couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a tree or presents.
A few opportunists casually wandered over to check out the new arrivals. Gossy seemed to know some of them; others were just looking for news, and most drifted away when they realised there was nothing to trade.
They walked down into the main concourse. Ragged-coated merchants stood next to upturned crates selling anything they could scavenge: clothes stitched together from plastic packaging, batteries, tins of cat food, matches and scraps of old tech — nothing that had a useable past.
Lilz and Benny went off to peruse the stalls while Gossy took the rest of the gang aside and gave them orders. Each one nodded and moved off as he finished their instructions. Lilz, meanwhile, had taken a fancy to a small plastic flower and was having an argument with the seller over the price.
With them all distracted, Josh saw his first real chance to escape, but then a merchant appeared out of the crowd and took a shine to his robes — talking gibberish at him while checking for holes.
Lilz caught sight of the commotion and reluctantly pulled off one of her many bangles and threw it at the man. She came back and took hold of Josh’s arm, berating the trader in a language that sounded mostly like pure swearing until he gave up and sloped off.
‘Nice?’ she asked, placing the flower into her hair with a pout.
‘Pretty,’ Josh agreed, noticing a small tattoo on her neck. It was a crude drawing of a winged serpent.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, tapping the spot on his neck
‘Dragon.’ She touched the tattoo. ‘For luck.’
Josh thought it looked more like a Draconian symbol, but thought it wise not to ask too many questions.
Lilz zip-tied their hands together.
‘Just in case,’ she winked.
Gossy motioned for them to follow.
At the far end of the mall stood an old cinema with an array of reclai
med neon signs flickering above the entrance. Josh couldn’t understand any of the languages they were written in, but the sounds booming out through the doors were unmistakable. In the midst of all the post-apocalyptic gloom, somebody was rocking out some serious techno.
Gossy handed something to one of the doormen as Lilz tightened her grip on Josh’s hand. The guard, who looked like he’d been jacking steroids since he was a five-year-old, took his time examining the object, turning it over in his meaty hands and talking to someone on his headset. Two others joined him, and Josh realised, as the man showed it to his friends, that it was his tachyon. They must have all received the same message at the same time, snapping to attention in unison, pocketing the watch the guard waved them inside. Lilz waltzed in on Josh’s arm like she owned him, and no one took any notice of the zip ties as they entered.
They walked across the dance floor, which was packed with an eclectic ensemble of pierced, tattooed and mutated freaks. The sound system was intense — the bass was so deep it made it hard to breathe. If there was one thing about this new timeline Josh had to admire it was how the acoustics seemed to get inside his skull.
The air was full of sweet-smelling narcotics, and though everyone was high, no one was smoking. It was as if the dancers were sweating out pure dope. The decor had a retro-recycled-industrial vibe about it, built out of reclaimed parts; the lights looked like they had been ripped out of old cars and lashed to exposed pipes, the cages and platforms that some of the more daring danced upon were straight out of a breakers yard.
Lilz and Benny dragged Josh through the writhing crowd after Gossy as he struggled to get to the other side of the dance floor. Suddenly, the bass dropped on the track, and everyone went crazy, bodies crashing into one another as they became a seething, rhythmic frenzy of limbs.
Josh considered whether this would have been the perfect time to make a run for it, except he was still tied to Lilz, and the effects of the drug-infused smoke had dulled his senses, so he just let the others pull him along.
The DJ was some white-haired guy in a seriously psychedelic coat and the most unusual pair of sunglasses. Lines of code flickered across the lenses as his hands typed out commands onto keyboards mounted on the heads of two heavily tattooed albino girls — who in turn were mixing tracks on makeshift computers. It was too weird to work out how, but they were creating the most amazing sounds.
Gossy signalled to one of the guards that stood by the mixing desk and pointed at Josh. The female guard pulled down her shades to check him out then tapped something into a device strapped to her wrist.
A door slid open behind the DJ, and they were escorted through to the ‘VIP’ room, as the flickering red neon sign on the wall declared.
The door closed behind them and shut out the sound of the club entirely. It was a chill-out room, a sanctuary for the elite to relax, and judging by the activities that were taking place on the luxurious couches they weren’t too shy about the ways in which they chose to unwind.
Lilz tutted enviously and yanked Josh’s arm to get his attention.
Gossy was talking to a well-dressed man in a purple suit: they were studying the medscan device and haggling over a price.
Josh’s drug-addled brain took far too long to realise who the man in the suit was — Eddy, with considerably more hair and no beard, but the nose was unmistakable, as were those large, doleful eyes.
Gossy motioned to Lilz to bring Josh over and cut the zip ties.
Eddy looked Josh up and down as if examining a piece of meat, and produced a more sophisticated scanner of his own.
‘No Tag,’ Gossy assured him.
Eddy played with the controls of his device and finally nodded in agreement. ‘No taint either,’ he added. ‘Where he snatch?’
‘Base. 12-240.’
Eddy stroked his chin, his fingers searching for the beard that had once grown there.
‘Any scav?’
‘Just the ‘tique,’ Gossy replied.
‘Any marks? Tats. Scars?’ asked Eddy, narrowing his eyes.
Gossy shrugged.
Eddy turned to Josh. ‘Where scav?’ he asked, holding up the tachyon.
‘Oldspeak,’ Gossy intervened.
Eddy’s eyes widened a fraction and Josh thought his hand trembled a little as he held the tachyon.
‘Inside,’ he ordered, nodding towards an office at the back.
‘You know what this is, don’t you?’ asked Eddy, holding up the tachyon to Josh.
Gossy, Lilz and Benny stood at the back of his private office trying hard not to stare at the shelves of treasures: hair dryers, jars of USB sticks, a games console with a stack of cartridges and a whole set of encyclopaedias. It looked like something from a garage sale, but Josh knew to them it was worth more than a lifetime of scavenging.
To him, it was a ticket out of this madness.
‘Of course I do, Eddy,’ replied Josh.
Eddy’s eyes narrowed at the sound of his name. He studied Josh suspiciously, as though he was trying to decide if Josh was a threat.
‘I’m guessing you’re not from this timeline?’
‘Nope.’
‘You have the mark — the Ouroboros?’
Josh pulled back his sleeve, revealing the circular snake tattoo on his forearm.
‘Tempos Fugit,’ Josh quoted.
Lilz and Benny both made similar ritualistic signs with their hands and whispered ‘Magii! Shield protect us,’ before spitting on the floor.
Josh realised that they knew something about the Order. The colonel had told him once that the Copernicans could only predict accurately if their existence were kept secret — their algorithms failed if the population became aware of the Order’s existence. Yet this timeline was using holocene dates and recognised the mark of Ouroboros — even if it was seen as a curse.
‘Trap shut,’ barked Eddy, switching back into their dialect. ‘When did you snatch?’
‘Day back,’ Gossy replied.
Eddy took out a blaster from his coat and twisted a dial on it.
He pointed the weapon directly at Josh’s head. Gossy was about to protest, but Eddy held up a hand to silence him.
‘What’s your name?’ Eddy demanded.
‘Joshua Jones,’ Josh replied, his hands going up automatically.
‘Guild and rank?’
‘Watchman — fourteenth.’
Eddy looked dubious for a second. Josh could see a few different ways this could go, and none of them were good. The barrel wavered ever so slightly in front of him, and then it moved a fraction to the left, and he felt the bullets fly past his ear. The first hit Gossy, followed by two more that took out Lilz and Benny. Josh heard their bodies slump to the floor.
‘So, Jones of the Watch,’ Eddy said, pointing the gun back at Josh. ‘Would you mind telling me exactly what you’re doing here?’
‘You killed them?’
Eddy snorted. ‘Their last twenty-four hours. It’s a memory tranquilliser that suppresses short-term recall. They won’t remember what happened here, or that they managed to catch themselves a Magii.’
‘Magii?’
‘Long story,’ Eddy sighed, lowering the gun. ‘The Order isn’t held in high regard down here. Thanks to the ministry, the Shades have been taught to believe our abilities are like a dark art. It’s like trying to explain an astronaut to a caveman. Which returns us to my original question. What are you doing here?’
Josh relaxed a little and dropped his hands. ‘I’m looking for someone,’ he replied, ‘a girl: Caitlin Makepiece.’
Eddy’s face hardened, and his finger stiffened on the trigger, bringing the gun back up. ‘And why would you want to find her?’
‘Because —’ Josh wasn’t sure what to say next. The way Eddy reacted was not a good sign, ‘— she owes me something.’
A kiss, thought Josh.
Eddy’s trigger finger relaxed a little. ‘You mean Caitlin Eckhart, or the “History Burner” as she’s more commonly k
nown.’
Josh shook his head. ‘Doesn’t sound like her. The Caitlin I know loved history — she was a Scriptorian.’
Eddy scoffed. ‘Obviously, the timeline you left deviates significantly from this one. I can’t say how much, and we don’t have time to compare notes, but Minister Eckhart is not generally someone you want to go looking for. In fact, most of us try to avoid her and the rest of her Ministry altogether.’
Josh was relieved to hear she still existed, but he couldn’t imagine how she would have ever been persuaded to marry Dalton, let alone done something so bad as to be named “History Burner”. Something was very wrong if Caitlin had started burning books.
‘What about the colonel? I mean Rufius Westinghouse? Do you know him?’
Eddy’s expression softened at the name of the old man, and he lowered the gun.
‘Rufius, he was a good friend. Resisted them for as long as he could, but in the end we all found the Determinist purges too much. Last I heard he’s hiding out somewhere in the sixteenth century, before the Ostryanyn blockade.’
Josh wondered whether it would be better to go back and look for the colonel first; he could really use a little of the old man’s advice right now.
‘Can I have my watch back?’
‘Of course,’ Eddy replied, handing the tachyon to him, ‘but it won’t be much use to you.’
‘Yeah, I think it’s broken,’ Josh agreed, snapping it back onto his wrist.
‘More like disabled. The tachyons weren’t the only thing that shut down in the blockade — the shield has some kind of dampening effect, and no one’s been able to move backwards since.’
‘How do they maintain the continuum?’
‘They don’t. The Determinists have taken total control. They obliterated or confiscated every historical artefact, killed every Copernican they could find. The past is off-limits, and access is governed under strict ministerial oversight. This timeline has had a catastrophic couple of centuries, and everyone has suffered. It’s a police state up there.’ Eddy rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Down here, amongst the discarded, we still have an element of freedom.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 37
