The Last Beginning

by Lauren James

  Ella immediately began setting up the coordinates on the Skim to take them back to the motel. “Everyone, come over here!” she called when she was ready.

  Clove wrapped an arm around Ella’s waist again, leaning against her side. Kate took Ella’s free hand and Matt held onto Kate. Clove closed her eyes, preparing herself for the tug of the wormhole and savouring the joy of finally finding both of her parents.

  After a few seconds, she opened her eyes. “Ella?” she asked. “Why are we still in the cell?”

  Ella prodded at the Skim. “It’s not working…”

  “Crap,” Kate said.

  “What? Why?” Clove leant in to look. Despite the tension of the situation, she was desperate to get her hands on the Skim and find out how the intricate technology worked.

  Ella pushed her forehead away. “Let me see.”

  “Is it broken?” Matt asked, less curious and more intensely worried.

  “Quiet,” Ella said, her voice strained. Everyone held their breath while she pressed her wrist, trying to make something happen. The Skim’s glow had dimmed to a weak shine.

  “It’s out of battery,” Ella said, eventually. “Shit.”

  “Ella!” Clove said, horrified. “Didn’t you charge it?”

  “I didn’t realize how much power it would take to transport so many people. I don’t have enough charge to get us all home.”

  “What do we do?” Matt asked, a tremor of panic in his voice. “There aren’t any plug sockets in here.”

  “Is it solar powered?” Clove asked.

  Ella nodded. After pulling a solar-powered battery out of her pocket, she showed Clove how it worked. It wasn’t that different to how Clove charged her watch.

  “So we wait until dawn,” Clove said firmly, squeezing Ella’s hand. “It can charge when the sun rises, then we’ll be ready to go before anyone wakes up.”

  “I don’t know how long it will take to charge,” Ella admitted. She looked wide-eyed and terrified. “It could be hours.”

  “We’ll manage,” Clove said.

  “It’s hours and hours until dawn,” Matt said.

  “We can start now,” Kate said. She shone her tablet’s light on the solar panels of the battery charger. “It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. Clove, use your computer’s light too.”

  They all waited in silence. After what felt like an eternity, the battery percentage flicked up a single per cent.

  “It’s working!” Ella said.

  “We’ll be OK,” Clove said, reassuring herself as much as anyone else. “This will work. It’s going to be OK.”

  “Only six hours to go,” Kate said, trying for a feeble smile.

  “What a great escape plan you lot came up with,” Matt said, and sat down heavily on his bed. “Let’s get ourselves trapped in there with him, that’ll work!”

  Eventually, when Clove had started to feel like time was standing still, the sun began to turn the sky a light grey. When Ella saw the light trickling into the cell, she hopped onto Matt’s bed to put the battery on the lip of the window, angling it towards the rising sun.

  “How long do you think it’s going to take?” Matt asked. His arm was around Kate’s shoulders, fingers tangled in her hair. Much like Ella and Clove, they’d sat close together all night.

  Ella shrugged. “At least twenty minutes.”

  “What time does everyone wake up, Matt?” Clove asked.

  “Half seven.”

  “Thirty minutes away.” Ella’s expression tightened. It tightened even more when they heard a noise from the next cell: a cough followed by the sound of feet hitting concrete. A moment later came the noise of the toilet being flushed. Matt’s neighbour had woken up.

  “Be very quiet,” Matt said, the words barely more than a breath. “Noise travels.”

  Returning to sit next to her, Ella took Clove’s hand.

  They all waited, trying not to move or rustle or even breathe.

  It was still barely light enough to make out each other’s faces. Despite Matt telling them to be quiet, Ella kept standing up to look at the battery. She was too nervous to sit still. After the third time, Ella shook her head. “It’s charging so slowly,” she mouthed. “Another ten minutes at least.”

  Noises came from the other cells around them as more inmates woke up. When the lights in the corridor flickered on, Matt whispered, “We have to go. Now.”

  “Is it enough?” Kate hissed. “We don’t want to get stuck somewhere between here and there.”

  “It has to be,” Ella said, taking the battery from the windowsill. She tapped it to her wrist, letting the charge transfer into the Skim.

  “Leave me here if it can’t transport all of us,” Matt said. “Leave me here, and get yourselves to safety.”

  “No way!” Kate said. She grabbed onto his arm, her expression indicating that she would have to be physically removed from his side.

  Ella turned on the Skim, her inhale of anticipation loud in the silence. As she was setting up the coordinates, footsteps could be heard outside the cell door, followed by the noise of a key turning in a lock.

  “Ella!” Clove yelled, but it was too late.

  The door slid open, and a guard stared at them from the doorway.

  “Stop!” he yelled, and made a move to grab Matt’s wrist.

  Clove acted without thinking. She stuck her foot out and tripped up the guard. They were all sucked into the wormhole as he fell to the floor. He was left staring in surprise at the empty space where they had been.

  CHAPTER 37

  newsbreaking.com

  Home > News

  Prison break confirmed

  14 Comments

  European terrorist Matt Galloway’s escape from Wakefield Prison yesterday was assisted by three unidentified females, it was revealed in a police statement earlier this morning. The whereabouts of all four people is currently unknown.

  The police have issued warrants for the arrest of Matt Galloway, now 19, and the other suspected terrorists. A prison guard who witnessed the breakout, and wishes to remain anonymous, told this newspaper that they were “a blonde, a brunette and a redhead”.

  No images of the prison break were available due to an apparent malfunction with the prison security cameras. However, this correspondent suspects that the redhead in question may be none other than Katherine Finchley, Galloway’s accomplice and fellow student at the University of Nottingham.

  Finchley, 19, fled across the border into Scotland after Galloway’s arrest, aided by Matthew Galloway’s brother, Tom Galloway. Tom, 23, is also known by his infamous hacking alias Spartacus. Their location for the last nine months has been unknown.

  Police gave no information about how the escape occurred or whether they have any leads in their investigation.

  Follow @newsbreaking for more updates as the story develops.

  Folios/v8/Time-landscape-2040/MS-1

  LEEDS, ENGLAND, 2040

  Even before the raging hurricane of the wormhole had disappeared, depositing them in the motel room, Ella was laughing. “Did you trip the guard?” she asked Clove, between giggles.

  “Oh my God,” Clove said, resting her hands on her knees and trying to catch her breath. She felt sick. “That was terrifying.”

  “It was really hot,” Ella told Clove, fluttering her hand by her face as if she was swooning. “Seriously. Do that again.”

  “She got that ridiculous bravery from you,” Matt said to Kate.

  “I know,” Kate replied, looking proud and a little smug.

  All Clove could think about was having a long, peaceful nap. Her head was spinning as fast as the phosphenes under her eyelids. The constant time travel was taking its toll on her. “Can we go home now?” she asked. “I never want to time travel again. This is painful.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I have some bad news.”

  Everyone jerked around to stare at her, except Matt, who already had been.

  “We still ha
ve to get the bacteria,” she said.

  “What?” Clove said, and dropped down onto the bed. “When will you all just let me rest?”

  “This is the last thing we need to do, I promise,” Kate said. “You know how we stole a vial of bacteria from a government lab to use as evidence that the English government was planning to undertake biological warfare in the war against the EU? Well, we lost the bacteria when Matt was arrested, because it was in his pocket. And so nobody believed me when I told the press. The English government still has a massive quantity of it, and if we don’t make people believe us, there is nothing to stop them from releasing it and destroying the entire world.”

  “You want us to steal another vial,” Clove guessed. “From the lab?”

  “We need to stop it from being released,” Matt confirmed. “Thankfully you have a time machine to help. That would have made things so much easier the last time, by the way.”

  “You’ll have to give me a few minutes to plug in the Skim and recharge it properly,” Ella said, and then she looked guiltily at Clove. “I mean, if doing another break out is all right with you, Clove? It’s your decision.”

  Clove smiled at her, then nodded.

  CENTRAL SCIENCE LABORATORIES, WEST MIDLANDS, ENGLAND, 2039

  They landed in the deserted car park outside a huge derelict building, covered in green mould.

  “This is the secret location of the English military’s supply of bacterial weapons of mass destruction,” Kate said. “They made me and Matt create the bacteria – the versions of us in 2019, I mean. We worked here then.”

  “We didn’t know what we were making,” Matt added. “We thought it was a pesticide for crops. We would never have worked on it if we’d known it was a weapon.”

  “And they still have it. If it’s ever released, it could kill billions of people,” Kate added.

  Clove looked up at the building, amazed. She knew the events from the movie The Bacteria Conspiracy, but it was hard to believe it was really real. Just inside those doors was a substance lethal enough to wipe out the entire human race. It wasn’t just a story. It was real, and it was happening right now.

  Following Kate’s lead, they tentatively approached the entrance. The door had been smashed and glass scattered across the floor.

  “I did that,” Kate said, kind of proudly. “Last time we were here.”

  “This is the same day as your break-in,” Ella said. “If I timed it right, you’re still here.”

  “What if we run into ourselves?” Matt asked.

  “We’ll just have to make sure we don’t. I didn’t want to risk changing things by coming earlier,” Ella explained. “If we had broken in first, the lab might have increased security, which would stop you from getting in. That would start a time loop.”

  “And we couldn’t come after we left that first time,” Matt said thoughtfully, “because they’d have set up guards then, too. It could only be today.”

  “We’ll just have to be careful,” Kate said. “Come on.” She led the way into the laboratory, glass cracking under their feet. The foyer of the building had a curved reception desk and a small waiting area. Everywhere was dusty but neat, as if it had just been abandoned at the end of a working day.

  “We need to go down to the basement,” Matt whispered. “Through that corridor, then down the stairs. There was no one here last time. It should be easy.”

  Clove wanted to disagree – in her experience, going into the past was never easy – but she bit her tongue. Maybe this time everything would go right. Maybe this time they wouldn’t destroy the future.

  Ella took Clove’s hand as they followed Kate and Matt down the corridor. Clove was nervous. They had to get this right. They needed a sample of the biological weapon, so that they could prove its existence and alert the world to the fact that the English government was planning to use it in the war against the EU. If they couldn’t, then Clove might return to 2056 to find a desolate wasteland, with every plant, animal and human destroyed. The thought sent a shiver down her spine. She knew now how easy it was for the future to change.

  Ahead of her, Matt and Kate had paused in front of one of the office doors. The derelict building was like a time capsule. Everything was half-finished: experiments were laid out on benches, lab books still open.

  “Holy crap, that’s us,” Kate said, peering through the glass window of the door. Matt shushed her while Clove stood on tiptoes to stare over Kate’s shoulder. Inside the office, watching a projected video play on a blood-splattered wall, were Kate and Matt. The very same Kate and Matt that Clove was with right now. The sight of them made her head spin.

  The Kate in the office was holding a small ornament of a fox in one hand. Clove’s heart jolted. That ornament was on her desk at home. It had been in the box that Kate had left for Clove as a baby − the box that had started this whole thing for Clove. This must be where it had come from, then − the science labs where another Katherine had worked in 2019.

  “We should go,” Ella whispered. “It never ends well when time-displaced versions of people meet each other.”

  They carried on down the hall, trying to walk as quietly as possible, and then went down a flight of concrete stairs to the basement. It was lit with a narrow line of fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. At the other end was a heavy metal door. Spray-painted on it in yellow were the words: BACTERIAL STORAGE ZONE. DO NOT ENTER.

  In front of the door, head down and playing a game on his tablet, was a soldier. Everyone froze.

  Without speaking, they all started back up the flight of stairs. At the top, they stopped.

  “He must be guarding the supply of bacteria for the army,” Clove whispered. The military clearly didn’t trust that the quarantine warnings outside the building would be enough to keep people out. They must have set up a guard as an extra precaution. “Ella, is there a way you can Skim inside the freezer and pick up a sample without him noticing?”

  Ella shook her head. “I don’t have the exact coordinates, so I’d probably end up opening a wormhole inside a wall. Besides, he might hear me. It’s too risky.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kate said. “There wasn’t a guard when we came last time. We just walked right up to the freezer.”

  “Then we need to get rid of him,” Matt replied. “Quickly! Before the past versions of us walk up and get themselves shot.”

  “I’ll distract him,” Clove said. “I can go to the other side of the building and make some kind of noise so he has to go and investigate it. While I’m gone, you can get a vial.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Ella said immediately, to Clove’s relief. Her stomach was already tying itself in a knot at the thought of somehow evading a trained soldier with a gun. At least Ella had an exit strategy built into her arm.

  “We’ll meet you by the main entrance,” Clove told Kate and Matt. “Try not to get killed or captured, or run into yourselves and destroy the universe.”

  “We’ll try,” Kate said, and saluted her.

  Clove pulled Ella back down the corridor. As they passed the office again, Clove peered in. The past versions of Kate and Matt were still inside, watching the video recording. They had no idea what lay ahead of them: Matt would be arrested the very next day. Kate must already be pregnant with Clove, even if she didn’t know it yet.

  Clove made herself look away.

  Once they were back in the foyer, Ella pushed open a door, revealing another flight of stairs. It must lead down to the other end of the basement. “Lucky guess,” Ella said, starting down them. “So what’s the plan?”

  Clove hadn’t given it any thought. “Make a loud noise, draw him close, run away?”

  Ella half laughed. “Sounds reasonable.”

  At the bottom of the stairs was another door. Clove slammed it shut behind her. The loud thud as it hit the doorjamb sounded deafening in the quiet. “He definitely heard that,” Clove said. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait.”

  “Ella, he�
�s got a gun,” Clove said. “Let’s go!”

  “Hang on a minute.” Ella was staring intently down the dimly lit corridor, waiting for the soldier to appear in view. After a few more heartbeats, there was the noise of running, and the soldier came sprinting out of the darkness, gun raised.

  “Come on. Ella!”

  “Not yet.”

  Clove’s heart felt like it was beating ten times as fast as normal. She didn’t know if she was more scared or angry. “Ella!”

  “Stay where you are,” the soldier called. “Don’t move!”

  Clove tugged on Ella’s wrist. “Come on. They’ve had enough time to get a vial. We need to go.”

  “He’ll follow us,” Ella said, voice tight. Then she jerked out of Clove’s grasp and ran at the soldier full speed.

  They collided.

  And disappeared.

  Clove stared, open-mouthed, at the space where they had been.

  “I told her to tell me stuff before she did it,” Clove said aloud, to no one.

  She waited a few seconds to see if Ella or the soldier would reappear, and then ran back up the stairs. Ella had said to meet at the main entrance. Clove could shout at her there, if she reappeared at all. Clove wouldn’t let herself think about that.

  When she reached the ground floor, the foyer was deserted. She stood still, at a loss as to what to do next. Should she leave? Should she go back to the basement, to see if Ella had reappeared? What if everyone had found each other and they were all looking for her?

  Before she could make a decision, Kate and Matt came sprinting down the corridor, holding hands. Her Kate and Matt. She could tell because Matt was still in his prison uniform.

  Almost breathless with relief, she asked, “Did you get it?”

  Matt leant his hands on his knees, panting. “Yes.”

  Kate held a glass vial out to Clove. It was filled with a creamy gel-like substance and there was a black skull-and-crossbones printed on the label. Clove’s momentary happiness was erased as soon as she remembered that Ella was still missing.“Ella’s gone! She took the soldier somewhere!”