A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  She snorted in amusement.

  “No, Smith. It's not. I'm a game developer. I wrote a game, an app. It sold a fuck ton of copies.”

  He understood the words, even the unusual swearing, but not the meaning. She discerned his perplexity.

  “And this is why I didn't bother trying to explain,” she said. “I build games,” she said. “People play them on their phones.”

  “And you got ten million dollars for this?” he asked. Frankly, he was stunned.

  “Yup,” she said, still carefully watching the street. It remained quiet. “But I would probably have made less if I hadn't disappeared and become a mystery girl for months.”

  She bit her lip. Something was worrying her.

  “I guess Matt helped with that.”

  “Miss Georgia's feller?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The one you plan to leave behind here?”

  He could see her lips pressed to together with irritation, but she said nothing. The silence between them grew heavy, like a weight held at arm's length.

  “My apologies,” he said at last. “That was unworthy. I understand you have instructed the lawyer Calvino to attend to his case. I imagine nine million dollars will be more than sufficient to buy his freedom from this wall.”

  “I hope so,” she said and her voice sounded small.

  She came to a decision then, fetching the phone out of her jacket.

  She held a thumb to it and the front window glass lit up.

  A finger dance followed and she put the device to her ear. After a moment she spoke in a low voice.

  “Georgia,” she said, “it's me. So, you got your birthday pizza?”

  Cady listened to whatever her friend said before she spoke again.

  “I know it's not your birthday. It's a fucking ruse, bitch.”

  Smith could not fathom the way they spoke to each other in this way. It seemed they should come to blows but never did.

  “Babe, I'm sorry about today,” said Cady. “Like, really. I didn't know, I just …”

  She went quiet while Georgia spoke, but Smith could not hear what passed between them. The conversation proceeded in this lopsided fashion for another minute until Cady got to her point.

  “Georgia, I need you to do something. I need you to trust me. I'm gonna get you out of this. I promise.”

  Another pause.

  “No. I don't mean that. The lawyers will look after Matt. I've set that up. I mean you, babe. I can get you out of this. Out of the country. Completely gone and free. But you have to trust me. And you have to come, right now.”

  More quiet as Georgia undoubtedly sought further and better particulars.

  Cady did not provide them.

  “Babe,” she said, her voice hushed and sincere, “all I can tell you is you wouldn't believe me. And I'm serious about Calvino. He will get Matt out, no matter what happens with us. With you. He has instructions and money. That's all a lawyer needs. I can get you out, but you can't come back. You have to understand that. We'll leave and we'll never come back here. But it has to be now. And it has to be forever.”

  There was another pause, but not a long one.

  “Okay. Don't worry about the collar. I can fix that.”

  She fell quiet again before saying.

  “With bitcoins. Use the phone to find us. See you soon. Move quickly.”

  Cady cut their telegraphic connection, but did not return the phone to her pocket. Instead she did the little finger dance again. The phone made some funny noises and then she did put it away.

  “She's coming now. And we're getting the hell out of here.”

  “They'll be watching for her,” Smith warned.

  “They'll be watching for her collar,” Cady replied, “and I just paid a guy in Latvia about a hundred thousand dollars to deal with that. As far as Homeland or the NSA or anyone but us knows, she's still at home, eating pizza and watching the Bachelor.”

  “I'll not inquire further,” said Smith.

  “Best you don't.”

  Everything that happened then, happened very quickly. Not at first. There were a few minutes of waiting before a wedge of light spilled out into the darkness of the street from the front stoop of Miss Georgia's apartment building.

  She appeared wearing a hooded jacket and holding the phone Cady had given her. Smith could see the bright beacon of its illuminated glass. The hooded figure appeared to consult the glass and compare it to the street before stepping quickly in their direction.

  “I do not feel right about this, Miss Cady,” said Smith. “She has no idea what she's agreed to.”

  “I'll explain while we drive over to the jump point,” said Cady. “Once she's committed, she won't turn back. She can't. And we'll jump tonight. I know it's not the plan, but…”

  She trailed off.

  “But you want to get gone,” said Smith. “Fair enough. Won't be the first time I've tucked my tail between my legs on this trip.”

  They watched as Georgia hastened toward them, looking from side to side and back over her shoulder the whole way. Cady opened the door and hopped out.

  Smith did too, coming around to doff his hat. It was simply a matter of courtesy.

  They waited in the shadows of the street while Georgia approached. Smith found himself nervous, expecting Homelanders or Desperados to leap from the shadows at any moment.

  They didn't. Not then.

  They waited until Cady and Georgia had embraced.

  Then the very night itself seemed to split apart in a shrieking riot of light and sound and color and noise. Giant voices roared from all around.

  “HOMELAND SECURITY. GET ON THE GROUND. FACE DOWN. HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEADS.”

  And Smith leapt, diving for Cady and Georgia, enfolding them within his arms and clicking the crown of the watch twice as soon as he had them within his embrace.

  It was a difficult venture, all told, and in the chaotic moment of action, his thumb slipped.

  26

  INTERLUDE.

  He remembered the feeling of placing his hand on her throat. It would have been so easy to finish her then. She had even taunted him to strangle her.

  But of course, he could not do that.

  Not with so many witnesses.

  Not with the other one watching. That one was well armed and had proven himself more than willing to offer resistance, more than ready to generate yet another complication.

  So far, the man called Smith was uniquely responsible for twenty-six complications. With the woman, McCall, he had created a further two; now three, the senior apprentice supposed. But she was the greater danger. From the moment of her involvement, the potential complications multiplied in fractal complexity and amplitude. The Watchmaker viewed her as uniquely disruptive.

  The senior apprentice strode through the small huddles of men and women nervously circling the place from which the three fugitives had left. There was nothing to mark the spot, not even the faint, metallic burning smell which often lingered at such transit points. It had already dissipated.

  “Hey, Bowers, you believe this shit?”

  The question was for him, but his name was not really Bowers.

  Bowers was an alternance, carefully inserted into the mechanism of this complication by the Watchmaker himself.

  “No, I don't,” the apprentice said, speaking in the mild tone he had chosen for this character. “Please check the sewers. They could have dropped down into the pipes. And keep canvassing the neighborhood. Eliadis lived here. She'll have friends who'd take her in. Even now. Especially now.”

  The local law enforcement officer did nothing to hide his low opinion of that suggestion, but the man who was not really Bowers did not care. He was done with this time and place. The elusives were gone and the seven months he'd invested in the identity of Mike Bowers had been wasted.

  Just like the two months spent waiting in London, one hundred and thirty years ago.

  That was so often how it went.


  The Watchmaker had studied this complication when it arose and determined that the best chance of intercepting the elusives was to be had when the woman attempted to make contact with her family. But McCall had not done that. She had behaved erratically.

  For all of the precision engineering that went into a crafting a timepiece, the weave of time itself was coarse-grained and dishearteningly inexact. People were the problem. They were always the problem. Time would lose nothing without them to mark its passage. The man who was not Bowers had seen time described as an arrow, which was laughably wrong. He'd also heard it compared to a raging river, beset with treacherous eddies and whirlpools, which was better, but not by much. Most interestingly, he had once read of the cosmos in all of its epochs as a library. In this last metaphor, time was an infinitely vast world constructed of hexagonal rooms, each lined with shelves, and upon those shelves, random volumes written in every possible ordering of 25 characters; twenty-two letters and three punctuation marks. Because of the infinite number of rooms and books, most volumes contained utter gibberish, but there also existed on those shelves every book that ever had been or ever would be written in every language, and somewhere, lost on some far away shelf, or maybe just across the room, there was a perfect index which would bring order to the whole collection.

  The man who was not Bowers, who had no name other than “Apprentice,” liked this metaphor most of all. It whispered to him of the unbounded futility of time; of moving through it, or attempting to bring order to the infinite.

  Each book he imagined as a complication. Smith, and now McCall and this other woman, were writing new volumes, adding them to the infinite collection. But of course, he conceded with some melancholy, time was not a library either.

  The senior apprentice examined the scene.

  The truck's engine had been running when they left, but was not now. There were two bags in the cabin; a large pink sports bag in the rear, loaded with food stuffs, weapons, ammunition, survival equipment, and wet gym clothes. A second, smaller bag lay in the front, on the passenger seat. It contained a water bottle —half-full— protein bars, a cheap cellphone, and notebooks.

  The man known as Bowers examined the notes. Nobody attempted to stop him. Nobody offered to help. Bowers' clearance was rumored to be so far above theirs they'd need a telescope to find it.

  This Bowers was an unremarkable man. You could sit beside him in a briefing at Homeland, or the FBI, or at any one of a dozen inter-agency taskforces, and two minutes after the meeting adjourned, you would be unable to recall a thing about him.

  The notebooks in the truck would disappear, but nobody would question the disappearance.

  It had been … that guy.

  The one from … Washington.

  He'd secured them.

  They'd be in the system … somewhere.

  The senior apprentice quickly scanned three pages of handwritten notes. It seemed the woman McCall had written them. The vernacular was early twenty-first century American. The technical knowledge and cultural paradigms spoke to a greater familiarity, if not understanding, of the chronological arts and sciences than Smith had yet demonstrated.

  The marshal had been difficult enough to hunt and, so far, impossible to erase.

  She was going to be worse.

  The senior apprentice placed the notebooks into a plastic evidence bag. None of these people would ever see them again.

  He left the vehicle and walked up the street toward the apartment where Eliadis had lived. It was unlikely there would be anything of interest there for him, but he had his procedures.

  He would spend some time familiarizing himself with her, the latest elusive. Then Mike Bowers would take his leave of this world. He would not be missed.

  Part III

  27

  The warmth and sweetness of the air was not the first thing she noticed. First was Smith crash-tackling her to the ground.

  Then the soft grass where they landed.

  Not the hard road surface of the street outside Georgia's apartment.

  Then Georgia.

  She was with them.

  She had escaped.

  They had all escaped, and now they rolled on soft grass under a warm sun and Smith was apologizing and Georgia was swearing and Cady was laughing even though she had no idea where or when they'd landed. All she knew was they were free and gone from the nightmare of that broken future.

  “Dang, but I'm sorry, ladies,” said Smith as he rolled to one side and climbed to his feet. “But I did not see no other way.”

  “It's cool,” Cady assured him as she stood up and took in the view. A green and lovely countryside, shot through with rivers of bright yellow and red flowers, dotted here and there with small white buildings tied together with winding, unmarked country roads. “It's all good,” she said.

  “FUCK!” shouted Georgia, who remained on the ground, shaking like a small dog shitting razor blades.

  Cady took a second to enjoy the sun on her face, closing her eyes and telling herself it would get better, but for now this was pretty damn good.

  And then she looked to her best friend who was, understandably, freaking the hell out and peeling off one WTF after another, each louder and more plaintive than the last.

  “Ma'am, please,” said Smith.

  “Georgia, it's cool,” Cady said, as Smith wiped grass and dirt from his butt and scowled at their surroundings as though they hadn't just escaped a fascist clusterfuckturducken of epic scale and infinite suckage.

  Cady held out her hand and Georgia took it, finally getting to her feet with Cady's help. She was still shaking as Cady hugged her and rubbed her back, shushing her like a child.

  “It's okay, baby. We're good. We're safe. I promise. You're safe.”

  “Where … w-where …”

  “Where are we?” Cady finished for her. She turned to Smith. “Marshal?”

  He looked deeply unhappy.

  “Looks like a few places I been,” he said, but he kept any further thoughts to himself.

  “Well, it looks a helluva lot better than those cells at Homeland,” declared Cady, as if that settled everything.

  Georgia pushed her away so fiercely that she tripped and fell on her ass. The ground was soft and the grass thick, but it still hurt. She jarred her arms trying to break the fall. Pins and needles shot up from her hands.

  “Georgia. Quit it!”

  “What have you done?” she shouted. “Where am I? What the fuck is this?”

  Her fear was palpable, but anger was catching up with it.

  “Ma'am,” said Smith. “If'n you'll hush, I can explain, and probably should, since this is my fault.”

  Cady decided to stay seated for the time travel lecture. She shaded her eyes to scope out more of the countryside. Gentle plains, divided into large fields of irregular shapes and different colors, rolled away in all directions. A line of dark mountains shimmered in a heat haze far to the north.

  “I can't say exactly where we fetched up, Miss Georgia,” Smith explained, “but it's not your home. Nowhere nearby from the look of the land hereabouts.”

  “No shit!” Georgia spat back, and Cady waited for Smith to give her his stump speech about profanity and womanly virtues. She was a bit surprised and perhaps a little put out when he didn't.

  “Can I ask you to believe something?” Smith asked, sounding as though he regretted the necessity of asking.

  Georgia was turning around, first one way and then back in a small circle, shaking her head, but not at him.

  “Go on,” she said.

  He held up Wu's golden watch. Passed it to her.

  “Hey,” she said, mildly.

  It had probably just cleared up her nausea and headache.

  Cady felt fine, unlike her first time. Another data point?

  Smith took the watch back.

  “This here device is not as it would seem at first, ma'am. It has carried us away from hazard in your time and place, and delivered us into un
certainty. Where, I do not yet know. But I can tell you that you are not in Seattle, and this is not your time.”

  Color flushed into Georgia's face. She looked first to Smith and then to Cady, who finally climbed back to her feet.

  “We time traveled, Georgia. How cool is that? We slipped those Homeland assholes like a bad Tinder date.”

  The bright pink flush which had colored her friend's cheeks, drained away and her eyes rolled back in their sockets.

  “Whoa, look sharp,” Smith called out. “She's a-gonna swoon.”

  “No way,” Cady protested, but Smith ignored her and swept Georgia into his arms for a second time, saving her from another fall to the ground.

  He laid her down gently and shaded her face with his hat.

  “Some water …” he started to say, and then “Damn it!”

  Cady was surprised, as she always was when Smith uttered even the mildest curse, but then it struck her too. They had no water. They had no food. They had nothing. Not even the contents of the little go-bag. She'd left that in the pick-up, back in Seattle. Her oversized pink gym bag, which she'd so enjoyed making Smith carry around, was back there too.

  And in it, every piece of carefully chosen equipment they had bought in London. Including his rifle and ammo.

  The clean light of this new day did not seem quite so delightful after all. She could feel it burning her exposed skin, baking her in the cold climate outfit she wore. Her mouth was dry and her nostrils itchy with the dust of an unfamiliar land.

  None of those little white buildings looked like they had a drive-thru.

  She knelt down next to Smith, who was fanning Georgia with his hat.

  “We don't have any water,” she said.

  The look he gave her was a frontier version of, Well, duh.

  But he said, “I hear some nearby. And we need to get off this ridge.” He squinted as his eyes traversed the landscape, looking for threats.

  “Come on,” said Smith.

  He picked up Georgia again and carried her, at a crouch, over the small hilltop, down a gentle slope into a gully shaded by a stand of trees. The trees, Cady saw with relief, spread their branches over a small stream. Georgia was stirring when Smith lay her down in the shade, making a pillow for her head with his jacket, just as he had done for Cady back in London.