by Sharon Sant
‘Where have you been living?’ For the first time, Grace looked them over properly, and realised how scruffy and small they were. Their homeless story began to seem convincing. She looked at Dr Sethi for approval. ‘Perhaps we could take them over to the canteen for something?’
Dr Sethi seemed less certain. ‘I’ll go over and fetch something. I think that’s best.’ He looked at Elijah and Sky. ‘Anything in particular you want?’
‘No,’ said Sky, ‘I don’t think we mind what it is, do we?’
Elijah eagerly nodded in agreement.
When Dr Sethi returned laden with cola, crisps, sandwiches and fruit, their uncontained delight drew puzzled looks from the two doctors. They had never seen such a reaction over everyday, and not even good quality, food. Elijah and Sky could hardly help slurping and munching in a way that made Grace wince as they sampled every new delicacy.
Grace spoke in low tones to her colleague as they watched. ‘There’s something really weird about this. They seem absolutely genuine, but…’ She faltered, trying to frame her thoughts into words.
‘I know,’ Dr Sethi continued, ‘I was thinking the same thing. It’s like they’ve been dropped in from some third-world country.’
They were interrupted by a phone ringing. Grace frowned as she took the call, listening intently but not speaking. She clicked off the phone and turned to Dr Sethi.
‘We’re needed.’
The two scientists left the cabin, calling the soldier back to keep watch. The change in guard subdued Sky and Elijah, who exchanged furtive glances as they continued their meal.
Grace returned alone half an hour later. Her voice, for the first time, had a hard edge. ‘How about you start telling me the truth?’
‘We’ve already told you everything.’
‘I don’t think you have.’
Sky shrugged. ‘What do you want us to say?’
Grace tapped a key and tossed her mobile onto the desk. ‘You can leave us,’ she said to the guards. ‘You two,’ Grace pointed at Elijah and Sky, ‘don’t move a muscle. I’ll be back in a minute.’ She followed the guards, leaving them alone.
They exchanged puzzled glances as she left and the soldiers did not return to the room, but remained outside. After a few minutes, Elijah’s curiosity overtook his fear. He got up and wandered slowly around the room, taking stock of his surroundings. He stopped and stared at the wall.
‘Look at this calendar.’
Sky wandered over to look more closely. ‘It’s an old calendar.’
‘It’s one hundred years out of date! Who keeps a calendar up for one hundred years?’
‘One hundred and three years out of date, actually,’ Sky corrected, gazing at the calendar.
Outside, Grace had another mobile phone clamped to her ear. She had heard every word and was excitedly forming theories of her own.
Nineteen: Grace and Favour
Grace burst into the room.
‘You’re not in trouble, I’m not going to call the police or the… the…. CM… whatever they are, the army…no one. Ok?’ She threw them a pleading glance. ‘I’ll probably get sacked for this, but… I just need to know exactly how you got here. Did you go anywhere near the temporal-spatial manipulation equipment?’ She looked at their blank expressions. ‘The place with the strange atmosphere?’
‘Well,’ Elijah began uncertainly, ‘If you mean the weird thing in the field over the hill, well, I think we might have. That’s kind of how we got here…’
‘Where did you come from?’ Grace pressed.
‘Hampshire,’ Sky said, a puzzled frown creasing her brow.
‘No! Tell me about where you live, your lives, your background. What year were you born?’ She paused, ‘What year is it now?’ They stared at her stupidly. She bounded over to the calendar. ‘This calendar, why did you think this calendar was out of date?’
‘Hey… how did you –’ Elijah began.
Grace waved a hand impatiently. ‘Never mind. The point is, this calendar is right. That’s this year.’
Elijah gazed at the calendar, grappling with a theory that didn’t relate to any realistic possibility. And yet, there was no other explanation. He found himself quietly mouthing a reply. ‘I haven’t been born yet.’
Grace gave an exclamation of triumph, her grey eyes alive with excitement. ‘No matter how mad it sounds, I want to know everything.’
‘But what is that thing?’ Elijah shook his head slowly, still in shock.
‘You wouldn’t understand if I told you,’ Grace replied. ‘Anyway, I’m bound by all sorts of Defence of the Realm and Official Secrecy Acts.’
‘But how do we know we can trust you?’ Elijah wasn’t altogether sure that this wasn’t some elaborate trick. ‘How do we know you’re not CMO?’
Grace hesitated. ‘Sit down then,’ she said finally. ‘I can tell you a bit, but then I want you to be absolutely frank with me. Agreed?’ Elijah and Sky returned to their seats, which Grace took as a sign of their cooperation. ‘Very basically, we’re interested in the theories of moving matter from one place to another without the need for conventional transportation. We’ve been working with ideas based on the theory of Lorentzian wormholes, trying to manipulate spatial and temporal… well… glitches, I suppose you could call them.’ Grace began. They looked at her blankly. Grace sighed and chewed her lip, grasping for the words to explain herself in a meaningful way, before finally continuing. ‘We’re looking at the theories of hyper-fast movement from A to B - like the sort of thing you may see in science fiction on TV.’
‘We don’t know anyone with a TV,’ said Sky.
Grace continued, ignoring her. ‘God, I’m sure I’m going to regret telling you this – this whole project came about by accident. A physicist from Edinburgh discovered a weak spot in reality, a wormhole if you like, a point where we thought he could open up a shortcut between one place or time and another to transport matter…. or people…. one day. It was right here, where we have now set up this research base. We plan to look for more, assuming this one is not just some bizarre fluke. The alternative is that, if we can learn how to master this one, then maybe we could learn how to open up channels for ourselves and link them to other places on demand. We expected to achieve spatial or dimensional movement, probably nothing else. Time movement would have been amazing but unlikely and wasn’t really what we were after; the mechanics of the whole process, the amounts of negative energy needed to stabilise the breach are so vast and consume so much power. We never dreamed… but then you turned up. And, obviously, we had no idea that we had actually already succeeded in opening up the channel, or that it was already accessible from the exit point, which is something we’ll need to look into. I’ll have to call a meeting…’ She began to pace up and down feverishly, her thought processes going into overdrive, talking to herself now. ‘No… I need to know everything before I tell anyone. The whole complexion of the project has altered beyond recognition. We’ll have to take new readings, look at the existing data differently, start from scratch, more funding…. much more funding…’
Elijah listened to her, incredulity in his features. ‘Did you even know where your channel came out?’
Grace shook her head. ‘We’ve only just discovered there was an exit point, to be honest… where is it?’
‘So you carried on without knowing?’
Grace clenched her teeth as she fixed him with an icy look. ‘You don’t know what you’re taking about.’
‘What about the other people?’
‘What? I don’t follow…’
‘If we’ve come through then maybe others have come through. That place is well known for disappearances.’
‘Really?’ Grace’s eyes widened. ‘You’re the first as far as I know. But we’ve only recently been getting better results.’ She paused with a thoughtful, distant look as she mulled over what he had said, and then suddenly looked at them, as if she had just remembered they were there. ‘Can you show me? Is it possible for me to g
o back to where you started out?’
In spite of all that was going on here, both their thoughts were still very much with the others, possibly captured and being held who knew where. Maybe there would be a way of getting them out of trouble if Grace went with them. She was an adult. Just how far would she go to get the information she was so clearly desperate for? Would she lie for them?
In a split second Elijah had made his decision. ‘I’ll take you back.’
As if she had read his mind, Sky nodded. ‘Me too.’
Grace beamed. ‘You can finish your meal first.’
Grace listened as, between mouthfuls, they recounted carefully edited information about their lives. They told her about the endless war, global bankruptcy, extreme climate, food and fuel shortages, widespread poverty and disease and the draconian justice system. Grace sat with her chin cupped in her hand, leaning an elbow on the desk, concentrating hard to take in so much new information. When they had finished, she shook her head in disbelief.
‘This could be our future?’ she said, not entirely convinced by their story. She was beginning to wonder whether she had been strung along by an elaborate joke. ‘What about advances in technology, world peace and human rights? Could we really go full circle back to some sort of Dark Age version of society when we’re supposed to be heading for a bright shiny future full of hope? How can that happen after we have come so far? There’s conflict now abroad, but I can’t imagine how it would come to such a point that it would cause a longstanding global war. The same goes for climate change; there’s never been a model that has predicted it to such severity. It’s hard to believe. It doesn’t seem feasible in one hundred years to go from what we have now to what you have described.’
‘We’ll take you there – you can see for yourself,’ Elijah said. ‘We’re not making this up. It’s real… it’s how we live. Technology and human rights are for people with money.’ He paused for a moment, gazing into the distance as he grappled with a new idea. ‘Perhaps we landed here for a reason…’ he said slowly, ‘I know it sounds nuts but maybe we were meant to come here… like a warning about the future.’
Grace smiled indulgently. ‘We don’t know for sure that it is the future, at least, our future. Maybe you’re someone else’s warning, not this world’s.’ She checked her watch. ‘Wow. It is late, actually. We need to move soon.’ The initial excitement had worn off and Grace was beginning to doubt her own convictions about what she had discovered. How on earth was she meant to present these theories to her colleagues in a plausible way when they even sounded crazy to her? She wanted concrete proof, and the only way to get it was to go back with them. ‘You ready to go?’
Elijah nodded. He looked across at Sky and she reached for his hand.
Grace led them out of the cabin. The soldiers outside the door started to follow but Grace waved them back. ‘It’s fine, we won’t be long.’
Elijah and Sky followed her up to the field where the gateway stood glimmering and dancing in the sun. The skies were a perfect azure blue; the dazzling fields whispered in the gentle summer breeze, stirring grassy perfume into the air. It was the kind of day they never saw in their world. With the taste of good food lingering it was harder to leave this place behind than either of them expected, but they knew what they had to do. As they drew close to the shimmering slit of air, Elijah grabbed Sky’s hand. They stepped through and disappeared. The portal suddenly began to flicker and spit. Grace called out but they were beyond hearing. The portal shrank to nothing and Grace was left behind.
Twenty: The Road to Lymington
The crack that reverberated around the forest told them both that something had gone very wrong.
‘What happened?’ Sky asked, her eyes wide.
‘Not sure. Somehow, I don’t think she’s coming with us, though.’ Elijah put his hand out to the still air. ‘Doesn’t seem to be open anymore.’
He gazed into the darkness, tugging a hand through his thick curls. He had no idea how long they had been missing, but it must have been a long time. The dark shrouded silence told him that their friends were probably no longer there either, though there was no way to know for sure, other than to go and look for them. He found himself plagued with indecision about their next move. Did they wait for Grace or move on? How had he let them become so distracted when their friends had needed them most? He should have prompted the move away from the army encampment sooner. Anger at his stupidity threatened to get the better of him, but Sky’s urgent tones brought him back.
‘What do we do now?’
‘Perhaps we should wait. Don’t know what else we can do right now. Maybe Grace will come later.’
‘D’you think we really went back to the past?’
‘Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?
Elijah sighed and reached for her hand, grateful that she was there. As he made contact a shock ripped through him, like nothing he had ever felt before, and he stiffened as the vision came through, unable to let go…
He was clinging on to Sky under blackened, apocalyptic clouds as they teetered on the edge of a ragged precipice. Deafening screams, grating and ripping filled the air. The whirling maelstrom below held trees and gas and stars and dust, the very atoms of everything, spinning away. Elijah fought for breath; his existence slowly crushed. Then they fell. Sky screamed, a chilling never-ending scream, and they joined the cataclysmic whirlpool as it dragged them down… down… down…
Elijah threw off Sky’s hand and drew back, sweating. ‘What the hell was that?’
‘You saw it? You were there?’ Sky looked as shocked as he did.
Elijah gulped, still trying to catch his breath and make sense of what had just happened. ‘I don’t know how…. maybe some kind of telepathic connection or something…’ He closed his eyes tight and covered his face with his hands. ‘My God, Sky, is that what it’s like for you? All the time?’
She smiled slightly. ‘That was a bad one, even for me. And I’m not usually awake like that. I dunno…’
‘I feel like I’m going mad. Nothing makes sense anymore.’
‘I don’t know what it means either. Maybe it’s nothing or maybe it will all become clear soon enough.’
‘Was it a… you know… a vision, then?’ Elijah looked up at her, hoping vainly that she would say no.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes, though, if it makes you feel better, they’re not quite as they seem.’
Elijah shook his head miserably. It didn’t make him feel better, not in the slightest.
Elijah’s aching ankle woke him. For a moment he was unsure where they were, until he remembered that they had huddled together under a tree the night before. Criss-crossed by branches, the sky above was grey and pink, the colour of a feeble dawn. Sky’s head was on his shoulder, her breathing slow and regular. He tried not to move, though his muscles were frozen and his stomach raw. The woods were between sleeping and waking, a time of silence and stillness. Elijah listened to the forest, wondering about the others, trying to imagine what sort of night they had had, where they were now. He could see no way of tracking them down. And there was no Grace. Whatever had happened to her and her gateway, she clearly wasn’t coming. They would have to accept that she and their friends were gone. Sky would react badly, but he had saved her, at least. Surely that was worth something?
Sky shifted. He pulled her close and folded an arm round her. ‘Did I fall asleep?’ she croaked.
‘We both did. You alright?’
‘Bit stiff. What about you?’
‘The same.’
She straightened up. ‘I’m starving. Have we got anything to eat?’
Elijah shook his head. ‘Sorry, it was all in the backpacks.’
‘Oh.’ There was a pause. ‘Grace is not coming is she?’
Elijah shrugged.
‘What about the others? Do you think they’ll still be in the woods?’
‘I doubt it, to be honest. Maybe if we ask around we can find out where the homeless kids
get taken to.’
‘Who are we going to ask?’ Sky sat up and faced him. ‘Who are we going to ask, Elijah? Who wants to help us find kids that have been cleared away by the CMO? They’ll just turn us in the minute we arrive in any town.’ She fought back tears. ‘We should have gone back; we should have been there for them…’
‘Then, we’d be with them now. What use would that be? This way we have a chance to do something. I just don’t know what yet.’
They fell silent. Sky hugged her knees and hid her face in them.
‘You know in these woods people go missing? People have been going missing for years,’ she said, looking up.
‘That’s just stories.’ Elijah said, despite not believing the statement himself.
‘What if it’s not?’
‘You mean the place we went to? But Grace said no one else had ever come through.’
‘They might not have come through there. She said they’d been perfecting the equipment. What if it didn’t work properly before? After all, look what happened when she tried to follow us.’
‘But they’ve been disappearing for years.’
‘Yes, I know that, but –’
‘So, where are all those people?’
‘Exactly. Where are they? Elijah, I think that last vision was a warning. Something’s coming.’
They both gazed into the distance, each one occupied with the sobering thought that they could have been marooned, separately, in some unknown place or time. Elijah had tried not to dwell on the experience they had shared the previous night, it unnerved him; it was something way beyond his understanding. But an experience of such power was not easy to dismiss. He shook himself, his thoughts returning to the one group of missing people they could help.
‘Perhaps we should go back to the place where we left the others. Maybe there will be something there. They might even still be there if we’re lucky.’ He scrambled to his feet and held out a hand for Sky. ‘Come on. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’
She looked up at his hand. ‘We don’t even know where we are, Elijah. How are we going to do that?’
