and surveilled beyond the point of protest. He remembered something his father had told him after a peacekeeping effort had been besieged by an army of angry citizens demanding their departure. Kaz had asked why they hadn't shot at the people throwing stones and bottles at them, and Zbigniew had told him that his job was to protect the people's right to protest and that if the army ever forgot that, and started telling people what to do, a very dangerous line would have been crossed.
Kaz didn't think the soldiers he was walking towards would have any qualms about crossing any kind of line and he wondered whether Jana was right about the clean-air protestors being tolerated because it improved sales. He toyed with the authorisation card in his pocket, turning it over and over in his fingers nervously. If it tripped an alarm, he had no illusions about what would happen next - he'd vanish into a deep dark hole. He was lucky, he knew he could jump out of a holding cell at any moment, slip away through a crack in time. But he didn't fancy the beating he'd take before he was left alone long enough to make his escape, and once he left it would be no easy feat to return.
'Stay cool,' said Jana, who walked alongside him. 'We're both going in on forged authorisations, but we need to swan through, make eye contact, smile, be relaxed. Don't let your body language give you away.'
'How is this so easy for you?' whispered Kaz. 'It's like lying is your superpower.'
They reached the barrier and handed their cards to a soldier who ran them through a scanner and waved them through.
'Piece of cake,' said Jana once they had passed beyond the cordon.
'OK. Yeah,' said Kaz, sarcastically. 'That's the hard bit over. Now all we have to do is identify and stop a professional assassin - assuming we're right about all this - and prevent a war. Piece of cake.'
Kaz stopped walking as he found Jana's hand on his chest. She looked up at him, not angry but definitely pissed off.
'Listen Kaz,' she said firmly. 'I don't know what's up with you. One minute you're flirting, the next minute you're pretending like you're a secret agent in a cheesy movie, the next you're a petulant boy. You're part of the team, and if we have any chance of pulling this off, it's only with your help. So please just pick an attitude and stick with it, at least that way I'll know which version of you I'm dealing with.'
Kaz looked down at Jana, unsure how to respond. Part of him wanted to fly into a temper and tell her to get lost, another part wanted to grit his teeth, take the criticism and apologise. Unfortunately another part of him entirely won out, and he leaned down to kiss her.
The look of disgust on her face as she realised what he was doing wasn't something he was going to forget in a hurry. She backed away, holding up her hands.
'Jesus, Kaz,' she said.
'But, I thought . . .' Kaz didn't really know what he thought.
'What did you think?' Jana shook her head in astonishment and dismay. 'That I was going to swoon into your arms?'
'Urn,' Kaz mumbled. He felt his face going red and he wanted to be anywhere but there.
'Well I'm not,' Jana continued.
Now she was angry, but even through his embarrassment Kaz caught an unexpected tone in her voice, as if she was more angry at herself than at him. This made him even more confused.
Jana put her hands on her hips and stared at him for a moment. 'Kaz. I like you. I really do,5 she said. Tve never liked a boy this way . . .5
Kaz5s heart leapt.
'. . . As a friend, I mean,5 Jana continued.
Kaz5s heart fell.
'I don't have friends,5 she said, looking both defensive and slightly scared. 'Not really. Not in my own time.5
'You mean boyfriends?5 said Kaz.
Jana shook her head. 'I mean friends,5 she said firmly. 'Any friends. Real friends. People you trust your secrets with. I can't trust anybody with my secrets so it's always been easier not to have friends. I have acquaintances, buddies even, but not any friends. Not like you.'
She reached out, took his hand and looked up at him imploringly. Kaz felt more confused than he'd ever felt in his entire life. Was she telling him she loved him or what?
'Kaz, I like you,' she said. 'I think maybe you're my first ever true friend. I haven't told you all my secrets yet, but I will. I think. Soon, probably. But . . . but we can't date. We can't be a couple, you and me.'
'Why not?' said Kaz, raising his free hand to her cheek, completely at a loss to understand what the problem was.
'Because I'm gay, you moron,' said Jana, sighing.
'What?' he said, aghast, pulling back his hands sharply.
'I was waiting for the right moment to tell you,' Jana continued, more apologetic than he'd ever seen her.
Kaz suddenly felt like the stupidest person in the history of the world. He was engulfed with embarrassment so profound it made his stomach feel hollow.
'Oh man,' he said softly.
Without even consciously deciding to do so, he closed his eyes and willed himself elsewhen, feeling the sensation creeping up on him, the pull of time itself taking him by the hand and shepherding him out of the real world.
Then he felt a very hard sting on his cheek and his eyes snapped open and he was still on Mars.
Jana's face was an inch from his. 'Don't you dare!' she shouted.
'Did you just slap me?' he asked, stunned.
'Damn straight I did,' she hissed. 'And I'll do much worse if you try to run away again!'
'I wasn't running away,' he protested. 'I was just going to clear my head.'
'Bullshit,' retorted Jana. 'You do this again and again. As soon as things get tricky, as soon as you're not in control, you try and jaunt off to God knows when and take a holiday. Your first instinct is to run away.'
'I came back for you in Pendarn!' Kaz shouted back. 'I came back to the quantum bubble after Beirut.'
'Yeah, you come back and help out until the next time things get difficult and then off you go again, leaving us in the lurch,' she said hotly. 'And you know what, I can't really stop you. You could spend your whole life jumping from time to time, place to place, always excusing yourself from your life every time you get uncomfortable. But it's pathetic, Kaz. What kind of a life is that? You're better than that, smarter than that. We need you. I need you.'
'I thought you were gay,' Kaz said, surprised at his spiteful tone. He regretted it even as he said it, so he didn't protest when it earned him another ringing slap.
He didn't get a chance to apologise because Jana turned her back on him and walked away. 'Screw you, Kaz,' she shouted over her shoulder.
Kaz stood there, cheeks on fire, unsure what to do with himself. Jana's revelation, and her contempt at his response, had got to him. He trusted her and liked her, and her good opinion was important to him.
He took a deep breath and watched her walking away. She was gay? He really hadn't seen that coming. Could he have screwed things up more entirely if he'd tried? He ran after her, caught up and walked alongside her. She didn't acknowledge his presence at all as they entered the plaza, which was dominated by the conference centre, a dome of entangled wood at the very centre point of the city, mirroring the dome above it in miniature.
'I'm sorry,' Kaz said eventually.
Jana grunted so Kaz stepped ahead, turned to face her and stopped. She stopped too, folded her arms and stared him down.
M mean it, I'm sorry,' said Kaz. 'You're right, I do run. And I shouldn't. But ... it all gets too much and . . . Look. I am your friend. Really. I don't want to let you down, OK? Any of you. I'm here and I'm going to help. I promise I won't run. Everything else can wait, but for now . . . I'm sorry.'
Jana considered him. 'Idiot,' she said, not unkindly.
'Yes I am,' agreed Kaz as he stepped aside and Jana continued walking. He fell into step beside her.
'All business?' he asked.
'All business,' agreed Jana. 'For now. I've been thinking about how we handle this and I can only come up with one plan.'
'I'm listening.'
; 'I think we split up, take one delegation each and tell them everything we know,' she said. 'We say we're investigative journalists, that we think we've uncovered a plot and they need to respond.'
Kaz was confused. 'Both delegations? Why both, surely we only need to tell the Godless? I mean, the assassin must be working for Earth, right?'
'And if the assassin has been hired by a Godless traitor, someone who wants Quil out of the way?' asked Jana. 'Maybe one of her generals thinks she's being weak by attending the peace talks, wants to push the advantage and carry straight on to Earth. Having her bumped off would remove all obstacles.'
Kaz nodded agreement and mentally kicked himself. He should have realised that without having it pointed out to him.
'So one of us tells the Earthers, one of us tells the Godless,' he asked.
'Yes.'
'You know this means one of us will draw the short straw,' said Kaz. 'One of us is going to basically surrender to the people who called in the hit.'
'Yup,' said Jana. 'Got a better plan?'
Kaz shook his head. 'Nope.'
'So one of us is probably going to get a bit roughed up and thrown in a cell,' said Jana wearily.
'Terrific,' said Kaz. 'Which do you think is the most likely source of the hit, Earth or Godless?'
'Godless,' said Jana after some thought.
'OK, so I'll take them, you take the Earthers.'
Jana looked at him, concerned. 'You sure?'
'Arrr,' he said.
Jana stood before her suite's bathroom mirror checking that her chameleon shroud was working. She had opted to be someone else for the duration of her stay on Mars, and the holographic disguise made it easy.
The nose was bigger, as were the ears, the eyes were wonky and the lips were thin to the point of non-existence. Mousey hair, dull grey eyes. She wasn't ugly, just plain. Jana had deliberately selected the kind of face no one would look at twice if they passed her in the corridor. The less attention she drew to herself, the better.
Dora and Kaz had questioned her decision to adopt a disguise on Mars. Neither of them felt it necessary, so why did she? She'd avoided the question until they got tired of asking it. She couldn't tell them the real reason - that she was afraid of what might happen if she were recognised. That might raise too many awkward questions that she wasn't yet ready to answer.
Jana had been conscious of her attractiveness from an
early age, of the way it made her peers act towards her, the way it made adults favour her over her classmates even when there was no logical reason for them to do so, but she never felt she really owned it. The day she realised who she was, what she was, she had stared at herself in the mirror for hours, studying the contours of her face. It didn't feel like she was looking at her own face, more like a painting or a photograph. Her beauty was borrowed, stolen from that first version of herself, the one who died so stupidly, so young. She had become distanced from her own face, resentful of the way she looked. She wanted to mix it up a bit, claim it, stamp her ownership on the face that had been forced upon her.
She was thirteen when she sneaked away from school and got her first tattoo, an intricate laser-burned stark white fractal pattern on her right cheek. Her mother's response had been exactly what Jana had expected and wanted. The fight went on for a week, her mother coldly furious, her father trying to be the peacemaker, seeing both sides, vacillating helplessly between the twin poles of his family, well-meaning but ineffectual. When the week was done, her mother's patience gave out and she ordered her security team to literally drag Jana to a clinic where she was strapped into a chair and drugged so they could pin her head still and remove the offending pattern.
Having made her point, Jana moved on to more subtle forms of modification. She could pop her piercings out during school hours, and whenever she went home her mother never looked at her closely enough to notice the various holes in her nose, ears and lips. It took about a year for Jana to grow tired of this approach. Most of the kids she knew made fun of her increasingly extreme appearance, and she was bored by those who thought she was like them and tried to claim her as part of their tribe. The black-clothes body-mod crowd were as hidebound by convention as their more mainstream classmates, although they wouldn't admit it. So at around fifteen most of the piercings came out, just a nose stud and double earrings, nothing too attention-seeking, and Jana began to consider the advantage her borrowed face gave her, the tool it could be.
She'd been ruthless in the exploitation of her beauty, even after she came to understand that she didn't give a crap what adults thought, and it wasn't boys she wanted to attract. Twisting boys round her little finger was the easiest thing in the world, once she put her mind to it. Sweet ones, dumb ones, jocks and brains, rich and poor, white and black - they were all basically the same in Jana's eyes. If a boy was straight, she learned how to make him pay attention to her. They were useful in all sorts of ways, but mostly for amusement value. She would see how far she could push them, how extreme they'd be willing to go in order to gain her favour. It had become second nature to her.
So as she stood there in the bathroom on Mars, staring at her new face, the one she had chosen for herself, she wondered what her choice of disguise said about her. Could she ever, really, own her own face, feel it was hers and hers alone? Maybe after a lifetime of therapy. Maybe after it had started to show its age, etched into something new by the wrinkles and creases created by experiences she alone had had.
Maybe when somebody truly loved her.
She regretted having given Kaz the wrong impression. She hadn't meant to do it, but it seemed flirting and manipulation had become second nature to her and she knew she'd done damage by encouraging him without even meaning to. She felt her face, her real face, blush with shame as she remembered the way she'd stripped down in front of him in the bakery in Pendarn.
Here on Mars, where she'd been hiding behind a plain face/mask for over a month, he'd obviously still harboured feelings for her, feelings that had continued to grow. She wasn't sure what it meant for him to be attracted to her even when she had denied herself her beauty, but it made her afraid and happy at the same time, even as she knew there could never be anything truly romantic between them. She simply wasn't wired that way.
She flashed her eyes at her reflection, liking the way they looked. She briefly wondered how Dora felt about the new look, then dismissed the thought, irritated with herself. She had things to do, she couldn't afford this self-indulgence.
Her disguise was good enough, she decided. She was ready to face Quil, mask to mask.
Dora's head felt heavy and tight but her body was warm and distant. She knew she'd been drugged, but she couldn't recall why or by whom. Thinking was hard, but she tried to marshal her thoughts, concentrate on her breathing and settle herself. After a few seconds - or maybe minutes, or hours - she felt centred enough to try to open her eyes. The light made her wince and it took a few moments for the blur of colour to swim into something like focused shapes.
She was looking into a pair of brown eyes rimmed by metal.
'I'm sorry,' said Quil. She sounded it, thought Dora. She actually sounded sorry.
Dora tried to reply but her tongue was too big, her mouth felt like it was full of sand. After a few tries she managed, 'Wha for?'
'I had to make sure you couldn't run, you see,' said Quil. 'I mean, not literally. Well, actually literally, yes, but also through time.'
Dora couldn't formulate a question, so she just looked quizzical.
'You're like me, aren't you?' asked Quil, her astonishment apparently undiminished. 'You can travel in time. The sparks proved that, the reaction that occurred when we touched. I can't control it, not properly. Not yet, maybe never. But I have to assume you can. I have no idea where or when you really come from. You might be telling the truth, you might be some kind of researcher from the past trying to shape events, but you could also be a killer from the future, or some meddler who wants to change history. Wh
oever you are, it's not a coincidence, you being here at this moment. These talks are a turning point. The outcome will determine the course of history and I have to assume you're here to affect them. Until I know for sure, I can't risk letting you go. But how do I imprison you? A cell won't hold you, chains either - I bet you can jump off to another time whenever you want. I had to find a way to keep you here, you see. That's why I did it.'
'Di wha?' asked Dora,
'Sliced your feet off.'
Dora felt a surge of panic and fear. She remembered the unimaginable sight of her own feet, cut off at the ankles. She tried to move her head, look down at herself, but her movement was very restricted, though whether by the drugs or by restraints she really couldn't tell.
'You may not know this, but at this point in history it's child's play for us to grow you new ones and attach them,' explained Quil. 'In a week's time you'll be good as new, but until then you're stuck here. You can't risk jumping off through time with no feet, can you? A quick slice of the laser and you were cut and cauterised in an instant. It isn't permanent, but
I get to keep you exactly where I want until we fix you. We're going to have plenty of time to get to know each other, Dora. And I have so many questions.'
Dora tried to look past Quil, to see where she was, but her vision was swimming in and out of focus. All she could really see were those eyes. They were calm and unemotional, but not unsympathetic. There was still no sign of real madness. Dora tried to consider Quil's point and could see the logic of it; cutting her feet off was an extreme course of action but it was expedient, reasonable and had a point. Quil may be calculating and pragmatic, thought Dora, but she still isn't insane. Not yet.
'We gave you a strong anaesthetic,' said Quil. 'You've been under for a few hours. You shouldn't feel any pain now, but you will be uncomfortable for a while. The wounds are clean and dressed but you're in shock and we need to monitor you carefully.'
'Quil, we need you.' This was the general's voice, originating somewhere beyond Quil's eyes, in the great blur. Dora's eyesight was next to useless, but she could hear perfectly.
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