Losing Time (Lost Time, Book 1): A Time Travel Romantic Suspense Series

by Nicola Claire

  “Yes,” Jack said, his eyes still on me. “Mimi?”

  This was it. This was me accepting my fate. For now, letting Carrie go. Letting this new time she’d helped create evolve. Choosing where I wanted to be in it. What side of the line I stood on.

  Carrie was my family. My only living relative. I should have been with her. By her side. Keeping her safe.

  But Sergei Ivanov was destroying Time not mending it.

  My decision had also already been made.

  I chose RATS. I chose this year, whatever the hell this year was. I chose these people, who were trying to save history and Time, not shatter it.

  I chose to see what those dreams actually meant.

  My eyes met Jack’s. Not such a hardship. I’d lost Carrie. My heart would never fully repair. But I’d gained something else, something extraordinary. Something I had not expected ever to have.

  I’d gained Jack.

  I nodded my head and accepted the hand he held out to me. Accepted our fate.

  It hurt so much, even as my heart accelerated in anticipation. Even as my fingers tingled with his touch. It hurt to admit defeat. It wasn’t in me. I am not a quitter. This last year had been a challenge, for sure, but one I was about to emerge from. I would have returned to my doctorate. I would have returned to life in Auckland, New Zealand.

  I would have returned to Carrie.

  But Sergei Ivanov happened.

  I took the pistol Jack offered me, thankfully not one of those stretched guns, and let him show me how to use it. The others were already outside the door to the Orion, scanning the empty hangar, listening out for approaching feet in between the sounds of explosions at the back of RATS.

  “What if she’s here?” I asked Jack quietly.

  He lifted his head, his hands still on mine on top of the firearm.

  “Then she’s here, and you have another chance to convince her to abandon him.”

  All my breath left me in a rush. He couldn’t have said anything better.

  “You think I can still save her?” I asked, my voice trembling with too many emotions.

  Jack’s hand came up and cupped my cheek, his thumb swiping at my tears. “I think you’ll never stop trying. It’s not in you. I think there’s always a chance if you never give up hope.”

  I nodded my head, tipped my cheek into his palm, and just breathed.

  “But you have to be aware, sweetheart,” he said softly, “that Time has changed. And so might Carrie. Sergei has seen to that. We’ve repaired the rips, we’ve done what we can to fix his mistakes, but I fear he’s been playing with the failsafe. Expect the unexpected, Mimi. Then it can never surprise you.”

  “Jack!” Rafe shouted. “Get a move on! Our people could be dying.”

  “You can do this,” Jack whispered. “Stick close to me.” I nodded. “Miss Groves, you glue yourself to Dr Hoffman. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jack met Rafe’s eyes. “Let’s move out. We’ve got surprise on our side, don’t waste it.”

  “Agreed,” Rafe said with a curt nod of his head. “Don’t care who the fuck they are, they’re shooting up RATS. This ends now.”

  That’s what I was afraid of. This was getting out of hand. Ivanov. The rips. The failsafe. Time. It was all about to converge. And Carrie was right in the middle of it. On the wrong effing side.

  “Please don’t shoot Carrie,” I whispered to myself. “Please don’t hurt my sister.”

  Please God, let her survive.

  The hallway was dark. Plaster and chips of wood scattered across the floor. A window had been shattered, a soft breeze bringing the smells of autumn inside the building. Our footsteps echoed as we jogged down the corridor, my heart setting up an accompanying beat. Sweat beaded my brow even though the temperature was cooling. Night had fallen, shadows stalked. Stars winked up in an unforgiving sky.

  Somewhere out there was the International Space Station, or whatever acted as it in this time. Somewhere out there, up in the infinite vastness of space, was a Crew Vehicle like ours. Not surfing dimensional time waves, but space itself.

  Somewhere out there is where it all began.

  But we were finishing it tonight.

  If Sergei Ivanov were here at RATS, then I’d shoot him. Damn Time and failsafes. Damn it all to effing hell.

  I’d reached my limit, and so had Rafe. By the looks of Sally, who held her long-nosed gun with expert hands devoid of tremors, so had she. Jack was his usual unflappable self. But we’d been through too much already not to be prepared to do what’s right.

  I only prayed what we were about to do was right. And that Carrie was missed in all the crossfire.

  We rounded the end of the hallway and came out in the cafeteria to a sight I never wanted to see again. Something had gone wrong in here. Something large and catastrophic. The night sky lit up the destruction through a broken ceiling. Tables and chairs were thrown haphazardly outward from one place. A shoe. The flash of blue clothing. A hand covered in blood.

  “Oh, God,” Sally whispered.

  “Hold it together, Miss Groves,” Jack ordered, leading the way across the room, gun muzzle swinging, body rigid but flowing through the debris with apparent ease, and hardened eyes.

  Rafe and Sally covered the right-hand side, while Jack and I stalked through the left. There was more than one body. I stopped counting at ten.

  My hand fisted the gun harder. My heart turned to ice. I wanted to face him. I wanted to lift my firearm and shoot him in the forehead. I wanted it so badly in that second that I could taste success. I could taste his blood on my tongue.

  We came out on the other side of the cafeteria into more hallways that branched off in two different directions. The sound of intermittent battle could be heard farther ahead, but which direction to take was uncertain.

  Jack hesitated. To the left were the offices. To the right the accommodation. Jack met Rafe’s eyes and nodded. In silence, Rafe and Sally peeled off and headed towards the bedrooms. Their shadowed forms lost to the darkness within seconds making my breath catch uncomfortably in my throat.

  Please God, let Rafe Hoffman and Sally Groves survive, I prayed. Adding their names to the mental list.

  “Stay behind me,” Jack whispered as we moved forward down our corridor. Darkness engulfed us; there was no light for shadows.

  My ears rang with the silence, only shattered now and then with a small pop or muffled cry. Whatever had happened was nearing its end. Because there were no RATS survivors?

  Damn Ivanov for this. Taking Carrie had been hard enough to swallow, but I realised in the darkness and unknown shadows filled with silence that RATS had a place in my heart as well. That this building with its eccentric Surgeons and surreal time machines was important to me. Not just because through them I could reach Carrie. But because of who they were and what they did. Where was Dean? Where was Dr Crawford? Fawkes and Malcolm? What if something happened to Jack?

  This was their home, their world, their time. This was all they knew. Jack had been right. Even to save Carrie I couldn’t turn my back on any of them. To rescue my sister at the expense of RATS was not an option anymore.

  My eyes landed on the back of Jack. His gun was raised, pointing forward in front of him, his head cocked to the side as he listened for threats, his steps sure and steady. He headed into danger without hesitation. He went forward when retreat was safer. He pushed on when things looked grim. He would fight to his last breath for his people.

  He believed in RATS. He believed in what they were doing. If RATS didn’t exist who would stop people like Ivanov? I knew the Russian wasn’t alone. He had Carrie. He had a Lunik. Who’s to say he didn’t have more than that?

  Kill Sergei, and we’d maybe buy us some time. But only if we didn’t wipe RATS.

  This was going to be so much harder than I’d thought. How the hell did we make sure we weren’t killing an earlier version of Sergei who was needed in order for certain things in our time to transpi
re?

  I shook my head, making a sharp pain start behind my right eye. I lifted a hand to my forehead, feeling the makeshift bandage Sally had made, and that’s when they fired.

  Thankfully not at us, but outside the window of one of the offices, we’d just cleared. Their guns pointed towards a contingency of blue covered security guards. RATS jumpsuits blending into the night sky, which finally made sense of the colour choice. Flashes of gunfire illuminated their determined faces for split seconds at a time. They were doing their jobs, but they were scared.

  Jack rushed into the office in a low crouch, his hand out behind him motioning for me to get low to the ground as well. I crawled in behind him, coming up beside his vibrating form at the window ledge. The window was intact, making firing out of it a difficulty. With infinite care, Jack slowly opened the latch and pushed the window up centimetre by centimetre, both of us holding our breaths.

  But they didn’t hear us over the rapid gunfire. And they didn’t see us with muzzle flashes blinding their eyes. But we saw them.

  Two people hunkered down by a Lunik.

  The world froze. Time stalled. My eyes fixed on the couple as they fired at random, seemingly haphazardly toward the guards.

  “Get inside,” a male voice ordered his companion at the Lunik.

  “That’s not Sergei,” Jack said and my world shattered.

  No, it wasn’t Sergei. I’d heard him speak Russian. He’d threatened my life in a whisper at my ear. I knew how he sounded now. I knew his non-accent.

  It wasn’t Sergei.

  But I also recognised this new voice. Recognised this new twang. This new drawl.

  My head shook from side to side, my eyes wide trying to focus, trying to see in the intermittent flashes of gunfire if what my mind was telling me was right.

  It couldn’t be. There was no way it could be. It didn’t make sense.

  I let out a soft cry.

  “Mimi?” Jack said, swinging his gaze to me and not at the people attempting to flee on the Lunik. “What is it?”

  I kept shaking my head. No. This wasn’t right.

  “Flick the switch!” the man yelled at his partner.

  No.

  I started to cry. Silent tears burning.

  “Are you sure?” the woman replied. “I don’t know!” she wailed, her hands wringing in a fashion I also recognised.

  I started to hyperventilate.

  “Mimi!” Jack said, dropping his gun on the ground and reaching out to cup my shoulders. He squeezed them, then shook me slightly. “Slow down!” he pleaded, the whites of his eyes too bright.

  “This is for Carrie!” the man yelled, and I sobbed out a stuttered breath of air. “Do it, or she dies.”

  The woman rushed inside the Lunik; I watched it all in a frozen moment of utter terror and disbelief.

  Don’t shoot! I wanted to shout to the RATS guards.

  Stop this! I wanted to scream at the Lunik.

  No!

  No words came out. The world kept on spinning. Time kept on surfing its own dimensional wave. This was happening.

  I should have known by now: Time marched to its own beat.

  A rumble started out across the grounds of the Royal Academy of Time Surgeons. The building shuddered and groaned. The floor beneath our feet lurched, making us lose our balance. Making me lose sight of the world outside. Dust rained down on our heads as windows shattered and walls collapsed. And screams went up into the night.

  I heard the roar of rocket engines. I felt the electricity in the air. I tasted burned argon. And then silence.

  Outside a nebula would have formed. Stars twinkling in a cloud of gas and light. Blue, red, orange, purple. The Lunik had taken flight.

  And on it, my parents. My supposedly dead parents. The people I’d been mourning for the past twelve months.

  Time Drove Us All Now

  Jack

  There was no way to process this sort of loss. There was no way to comprehend its fruitlessness. Its inevitability. Its reality. Its emptiness. There was simply no way to accept any of this.

  We’d counted twenty bodies. All ours. All RATS. And an untold number of injuries. Clive was alive, at least. So were Fawkes and his team. Sebastian and his. Mine. But we’d lost eight security. Five hospitality. Four technicians. And three flight.

  Her name was Susanne. Two Ns and an E. I remembered it now. I would never forget. The dispatcher had been at her console when the attack had begun. She’d been one of the first to die.

  Susanne. We all grieved.

  But none so much as Mimi. I had never seen such raw grief before. Never felt it as if it was my own when it clearly was not. She wouldn’t share. She wouldn’t open up. She’d closed down, doing what was necessary to help the wounded, to find some order in amongst the chaos, to fortify our resources in case they came back.

  No one could reach her; not even her friends. Sally and Dean had tried. Bryan and Rafe had tried. Hell, even Crawford had tried. But none could break through the ice she’d surrounded herself in.

  I understood. She’d lost Carrie. But we’d lost twenty good women and men.

  I watched her now as she took water to the injured, wiping their foreheads with a damp cloth, straightening their bedclothes, fussing her way across the infirmary. I watched her when I should have been strategising with Clive. Discussing options with the Surgeons. Addressing the elephant in the room.

  They’d had a Lunik.

  They’d had explosives from our time.

  They’d spoken with a Kiwi accent.

  Mimi had known them.

  I bunched my fists and turned back down the corridor, making my way to the meeting. I was late. I was in a foul mood. I wanted to hit something. This was not going to go well.

  As suspected, I was the last to arrive. Sebastian Winchester sat in the corner drinking a glass of whisky. It was far too early for that, but no one objected. Bryan Fawkes leant back in a chair tossing peanuts up in the air and catching them in an open mouth. Dave Sanders, head of security, watched from his lean against a bookshelf behind the door. And Clive had his back to the room, staring out of the window at the scorch marks on the green outside.

  “You’re late,” he said when the door shut quietly behind me.

  “Just checking on things,” I murmured and took a seat beside Bryan.

  “Checking on your Kiwi?” Sebastian asked. His would be the face I undoubtedly hit first.

  “Three more have been released from the infirmary,” I offered in reply.

  Clive grunted but didn't turn to face us.

  “We’re almost back to full staff,” Dave added, clearly keen to get on with this debrief. “Had a couple in training; I’ve raised them to full-time. You know, to cover the losses.”

  Silence. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Clive didn’t move a muscle.

  “Are we going to dance around the real issue?” Sebastian asked, swirling his whisky in its glass, making the ice clink annoyingly.

  “They were Sergei’s, no denyin’,” Bryan offered. “A Lunik is a Lunik is a Lunik. Try sayin’ that three times too fast,” he added in a mock whisper to the side.

  No one chuckled.

  “But they weren’t the Russian, were they?” Sebastian countered, his eyes boring into mine.

  Clive turned to face us, his arms clasped behind his back, his chest puffed out, the walking stick nowhere in sight. He let his eyes roll over each of us in turn, making sure we saw him. Making sure we understood he was still in charge.

  I was relieved. I trusted Clive Crawford. I trusted him to do what was right when I couldn’t. When I wouldn’t.

  Right now, all I wanted to do was bloody my knuckles.

  “What are we going to do about the girl?” Winchester demanded.

  “What girl?” Bryan asked, all innocence.

  “You know damn well, Yank, which fucking girl we’re talking about. The Kiwi! One of four we know are embroiled in this mess.”

  “She’s not embroi
led in this mess,” I said before I could stop myself. “She’s as much a victim here as we are.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Enough!” Clive bellowed. “We are not school children fighting over a piece of candy in the park. We will discuss this as adults. Taking all evidence into consideration.” His eyes met mine. “She recognised them?”

  I let out a slow breath of air; it did nothing for my anger levels. “Yes.”

  “There you have it. She’s a spy!” Trust Sebastian Winchester to go for the bloody convenient. We needed someone to blame. We didn’t have Sergei Ivanov to hang. We didn’t have the couple responsible for all the deaths to punish.

  But we did have Mimi Wylde.

  “Who are they to her, do you know?” Clive asked.

  “No. She won’t talk.”

  “Have you asked her?” Dave pressed.

  “She won’t talk at all. To anyone. About anything. She’s shut down. Operating on automatic.”

  “All the better to avoid admitting duplicity,” Sebastian offered.

  I clenched my fists tightly.

  “He’s upped his game,” Bryan supplied, drawing everyone’s attention away from the ticking time bomb. If I could think straight, I’d have thanked him.

  Not gonna happen.

  “Two-pronged attack,” he continued. “Cape Canaveral in Mimi’s time. Greenwich in ours. He couldn’t be in two places at once, so he used associates. I gotta say, boss, his associates weren’t professional.”

  “They knew how to operate a Lunik,” Winchester pointed out. “And how to plant explosives.”

  “They couldn’t fire their weapons for shit,” Sanders argued. “They missed more than hit their targets. The only way people were killed or injured was from fallout from explosions.” He growled out the rest. “They had a fucking lot of those.”

  “Current explosives. Appropriate for our time,” Clive said.

  “How is that relevant?” Sebastian demanded. “So, Ivanov didn’t want to wipe RATS, just rattle us. He needs us to exist.”

  “Exactly,” Clive said, moving forward to finally take his seat. “He almost destroys Miss Wylde’s time but not our time.”