He was bone tired, emotionally drained, unsure what tomorrow would bring. The only thing he knew for certain was that he would be better able to face his problems after a good night’s sleep. Having identified that as his top priority, he banished all thought from his head and closed his eyes.
He opened them again immediately as the room crackled and burned. A circle of firework-bright crimson snapped into existence near the ceiling and spat out a young woman, who crashed to the floorboards with a heavy thud.
The fire vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Silence and darkness reclaimed the room. The only evidence that something unusual had occurred was the fading patterns that danced on Kaz’s retinas, and the swirls of disturbed dust that billowed in the single shaft of cold, blue moonlight.
Kaz’s exhausted body had been sinking into sleep but now it flooded with adrenaline. He leapt up and stood ready to defend himself from … what? He forced himself to take a few deep breaths and relax. He wasn’t under attack, not as far as he could tell. But what had just happened?
A groan from the centre of the room reminded Kaz that he was not alone. He ran to the girl, who lay on the floor. He reached out to touch her, but as his fingertips approached her they crackled with sparks of crimson, and he leapt back in alarm. The sparks vanished.
‘What … happened?’ gasped the woman on the floor.
Kaz had no idea how to answer that, so he said nothing.
The woman slowly raised herself up on her arms and glanced around the dim grey room. Kaz could see that she was dressed in a plain shirt and trousers. When the woman noticed Kaz she jumped, startled, and quickly tried to rise to her feet, but her legs gave way and she crumpled to the floor in a heap. She swore.
Kaz felt he’d better say something. ‘I am called Kaz. What is your name?’ was the best he could come up with.
‘Yojana,’ replied the heap in an American accent. ‘Sorry, no, Jana. My name’s Jana.’
‘Hello, Jana.’
Jana managed to raise herself again but this time she went for the less ambitious option of sitting up.
‘Hi,’ she replied.
Before either of them could start asking the questions that were forming in their minds, there was another burst of vivid scarlet light. They both scrambled backwards to clear a landing space for the dripping-wet girl who dropped from nowhere with a piercing scream and crashed in the spot vacated by Jana only a second before.
Once again the fire vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Dust billowed and swirled in the moonlight.
Then the two main doors groaned in protest as they were forced inwards. A tall man stepped forward, framed in torchlight, looking down at the three figures sprawled on the floor.
‘Welcome to Sweetclover Hall,’ he said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’
The wet girl looked up, apparently recognising the man’s voice.
‘My lord?’
‘Hello, Dora,’ said the man. ‘Welcome back. You’ve been away for a very, very long time.’
Kaz smiled to himself; maybe he’d found the adventure he’d been hoping for after all.
Steve the security guard leaned forward and grabbed the CCTV control, zooming in on the face of the man in the doorway. He was a tall man in his early forties, dark haired with thick streaks of grey at the temples, heavy browed, with deep brown eyes and a square jaw. Solid was the best word to describe him.
He could see the man’s mouth was moving so he turned up the sound.
‘… sure they don’t touch each other. We move them in separate vans. Quickly.’ Four men in generic security guard uniforms entered the room, grabbed the three protesting teenagers and bundled them outside.
As the dust settled in the now silent room Steve saw a small flash, like the glint of moonlight on the blade of a sword.
An external camera displayed three black vans with their rear doors open. Steve watched the captives being forced into them. Jana wasn’t putting up much of a fight, and Dora seemed cowed by the unexpected presence of her lord and master. Kaz punched the man carrying him hard in the stomach, but his burly escort barely even flinched.
The van doors slammed and the engines revved. Steve didn’t stay to see them drive away. He was already pulling on his coat and reaching for the keys to his motorbike.
The black-clad figure stood in the shadows of the treeline and watched Steve roar away on his motorcycle, then vanished in a flash of red fire.
3
Soft. That was good. She liked soft. Warm, too. Nice.
Dora nuzzled down into the pillows, comfortable and cosy in the seconds of amnesia that accompanied her waking. She felt odd. There was a pain in her arm and an ache in her head. What had …?
She froze rigid. She felt the panic rising in her again but she forced it back down. She was warm, in a bed, although a softer bed than any she’d slept in before. That implied safety, at least for the moment.
Keep calm, Dora, she told herself. Take a moment to compose yourself before you open your eyes. You may not be alone. This thought led swiftly to the realisation that she was naked, which led to an involuntary cry of alarm. So much for remaining composed.
She admonished herself. Of course she had been undressed, her clothes had been wet through. To leave her in them would have caused a chill or worse. Whoever had undressed her – and she shied away from considering the possibility it had been Lord Sweetclover – they had done her a kindness.
The room was silent except for a strange background hum, similar to that she had detected in the clean white room with the tall, fat man. Was that where she was? From the way her cry had rebounded from the walls she could tell she was in a small chamber unlike any she’d known before; the sound lacked the reflected warmth of wood panelling, the cold reverberation of plaster, or the dull absorption of wattle and daub.
Her head, poking out from under the bedclothes, allowed her to establish that the room was pleasantly warm. The air was dry and had a strange, subtle odour that she was unable to identify.
She feared what she would see when she opened her eyes but there was nothing else for it, so that’s what she did.
The walls were plain white, smooth and featureless, the floor a chessboard of black and white squares. The light came from a long, glowing, buzzing cylinder that neatly bisected the ceiling; one more impossible thing for Dora to contemplate. She gave an involuntary gasp as she saw the fourth wall of the room. It was a single sheet of the most flawless, unmottled glass she had ever seen. She could see no doors. She was trapped.
The bedclothes were not what she was accustomed to. The pillowcase was fine cloth, like thinly spun wool but softer, and instead of sheets and woollen covers there was one thick blanket draped over her. It was light and airy but still warm. Most odd. It, too, was plain white. She could see a chair beside her bed. The smoothly curved greyness of it was totally alien to her, but a chair is a chair, that much she could divine. The clothes draped across it were similarly extraordinary, but at least someone had left her some. That was an encouraging, generous gesture.
Eventually she decided to accept the offer implicit in the clothing-draped chair. She sat up in bed, careful to keep the strange, thick blanket pulled high to preserve her modesty.
A buzzing above her head caused her to glance up. A small black box was pivoting down to stare at her with its beady black eye. If Dora had known what a CCTV camera was, she would never have climbed out of bed, scurried over to the chair, grabbed the clothes and run back to the safety of the bed. But she was only concerned in case someone appeared at the glass wall.
The clothes were a mystery to her. The black undergarment was tiny and edged with lace, the white blouse fitted and buttoned, the thick woollen smock a bright red that seemed to hint at wantonness. At least the drab grey skirt she had been provided with reached all the way to the floor. She had little clue what to make of the complicated wire and canvas garment, although its form gave some hint as to its function. She tossed it back onto the c
hair suspiciously. It did not seem to her that it would be a comfortable thing to wear.
She dressed under the bedclothes, then tried and failed to get to grips with the laces on the shoes that had been provided for her. She was accustomed to slip-on footwear, so she eventually discarded them in favour of stockinged feet.
She stood in the centre of the featureless room, nervous and uncertain. The floor felt cold and dead beneath her feet. The black and white squares weren’t stained wood, as she’d supposed, but neither were they tiles of clay or stone. They had a slightly sticky feel to them, as did the chair.
She did not like this unnatural place. She did not like these clothes, the noise and the taste of the air. Most of all, she didn’t like being caged.
As she stood there, Dora found her anger. It helped her focus her thoughts for the first time since she’d stood in the kitchen holding the fire tongs what already seemed like a lifetime ago. She was still afraid, of course, but now she was annoyed as well. And as her brother and parents could attest, in spite of all her natural meekness, humility and stay-at-home unadventurousness, Dora was very formidable indeed when she was angry.
Which is why, when the glass wall began to rise into the ceiling with a hum, and Lord Sweetclover stepped into the room, he was smacked in the face by a bra.
‘My dear Dora,’ he said, bending to pick up the bra, ‘is that any way to say hello to an old friend?’
With so many things to be confused and angered by, Dora didn’t stop to wonder at the unbecoming familiarity of Sweetclover’s tone.
‘Where am I?’ was all Dora could think to say.
‘Home. Where else?’ Sweetclover turned and walked out of the room, across the corridor that faced it, and stood beside a window set into the plain white wall. He turned back to Dora and smiled. ‘Come and see.’
Dora tentatively followed him but stopped short, unwilling to come too close. Sweetclover stepped aside. Dora approached the window and gasped at the view that greeted her.
She was on the third storey, looking across a mad confusion of buildings and roads. The details were overwhelming. A million little impossibilities blurred her vision.
She gritted her teeth and concentrated on one recognisable landmark. There in the centre of all this confusion stood the church in which she had been christened. Sweetclover was right; this chaotic, unreal modernity was her sleepy village of Pendarn, transformed.
Mud tracks replaced by a smooth black surface; horse-drawn carts supplanted by shiny, coloured boxes that rolled along on wheels with no identifiable means of propulsion; a small collection of thatched dwellings swept away by endless rows of brick houses, and metal and glass blocks that towered higher than any spire. The huge village green, utterly gone.
‘But … how?’ she asked.
‘Time, Dora. Nothing more. Just time.’
She looked up at Sweetclover, eyes wide, helpless, her anger and fear draining away to be replaced by numb incomprehension.
He gently took her arm.
‘Come with me, I’ll explain everything, I promise. But first we need to perform a few simple tests.’
He led her down the hall to a thick metal door, punched a key-code into a beeping panel, and steered her through into the infirmary.
The doctor was waiting.
‘Name?’
Kaz stared at the interrogator sitting across the table from him.
‘Name?’
Kaz smiled at the man and shook his head.
‘NAME?’
Kaz stuck his tongue out and blew a raspberry at his interrogator, which earned him a slap.
‘Kazik, tell me your name.’
Kaz let out a short laugh and flashed the man a look that told him exactly what he thought of his absurd demand.
The man leant forward, calm and reasonable.
‘Listen, Kazik, don’t make this any harder than it has to be. You’re a long way from home. No one knows where you are. No one is coming to find you, nobody cares. If, heaven forbid, you were to suffer some kind of accident in this room, no one would ever know. Another illegal immigrant gone underground, probably selling drugs somewhere. You’d just be a footnote in a file in some bureaucrat’s computer.’
Kaz shrugged.
The man licked his lips as he sat back in his seat.
‘All right,’ he said, nodding to the other man in the room, the one with the truncheon. ‘Knock yourself out.’
Then he got up and left the room, closing the thick, soundproofed door behind him.
Kaz braced himself for a blow, but it never came. Instead there was a rising hum of power from the next room and then his mind unfolded like a flower in bloom and he began to tell his life story to the table.
Jana knew it would be pointless to resist.
She took one look at the operating table, the array of instruments laid out in the shiny metal tray beside where her head would soon be resting, and knew what they were planning to do. She knew that it would be quick and painless, and that she would survive the procedure. She saw no advantage to putting up a fight.
Plus, there were five of them and one of her.
She remembered what the well-dressed man had said on the roof, something about wanting her head intact. Now she understood why.
She lay down on the operating table, face first, and felt the doctor’s cold hands probing at the nape of her neck. Then the prick of a needle, and oblivion.
Steve removed his helmet and placed it on the warm leather seat of his cooling motorbike. He ruffled his flattened hair, took a long, deep breath and considered his next move.
The complex of buildings stood across the road from him, gleaming white in the soft, early morning light. From the outside it could easily have been taken for another anonymous light-industrial building in some barren enterprise park in the suburbs of a small market town. Only the high fence, topped with coils of razor wire, the guards in smart, military uniforms with batons, tasers and hungry-eyed Dobermanns, and the security checkpoint at the main gate gave any indication that this was far from an ordinary building.
A large sign proclaimed this to be the headquarters of Io Scientific, a private research and development organisation.
He activated his eye-mods and zoomed in on a figure that had just appeared at a third-storey window. It was the girl, Dora. He watched her face change from confusion to recognition to astonishment as she gazed at the landscape.
He didn’t have much time.
He pulled off his thick leather gloves and laid them beside his helmet, then he unzipped his biker jacket and reached inside. There was a tiny click, as if a switch had been flicked. Steve shimmered for a second, blurring and changing. Then he snapped back into focus.
Except now he looked exactly like Lord Sweetclover.
He began walking towards the main gate.
4
As the ENL chip was removed from her neck, it bestowed upon the sleeping Jana a vivid bright flash of memory that was not, strictly speaking, her own. Her brain, dulled by anaesthetic, was unable to shut the memory down, to divert her thoughts. As she lay there floating in the darkness she relived, in a split second, an afternoon from ten years ago. It was not a normal memory, though. This was far more real and vivid than a simple recollection; less remembrance than reliving. Her numbed body could touch, smell, hear and taste the things that she – no, not she, the other one – had felt on that cold, wet afternoon.
The rain is heavy and cold, but Yojana doesn’t mind a bit. Although only six years old she has already realised that her daddy’s time is a rare and precious commodity. She does not see him at all during the working week, for she is tucked up in bed before he returns from the office, and he is already at the gym by the time she is woken to begin another day at school.
Yojana sees her mommy a little more often; she makes it home in time to read her a bedtime story most week nights. But from Monday to Friday, Yojana’s life is run by her nanny – a young woman so lacking in personality that Yojana
has nicknamed her ‘the clone’ – and a selection of teachers who range from ‘lovely’ to ‘smells-like-poop’.
The weekends are rarely better. Normally at least one of her parents has a conference to attend or a foreign trip to take. Yojana can count on the fingers of one hand the number of days she has spent with both her mom and dad, doing something fun as a family. But sometimes, when one parent is at home on a Sunday or Saturday, they carve out a little time for her. She doesn’t mind what they do – cuddle up and watch a movie on a winter’s day, read a book together, play a game, even help her with her school work. When those rare moments of time come around she basks in their undivided attention. It makes her feel special. The smile she is wearing, even in the cold September rain, is evidence of that.
He father, balanced above her on an old wooden stepladder, throws down another handful of fresh, ripe plums. Yojana catches them in a bucket which is now so heavy with harvested fruit she can’t lift it above her waist.
Some of the plums are overripe and have split in the bucket. The sweet smell of them is almost worth the cold and the wet. Her daddy smiles down at her and tells her it is OK to go inside now. She turns and hurries across the lawn towards the kitchen door.
(Deep in her numbed mind, future Jana tried to stop the young girl crossing the threshold, tried to summon songs to sing or sheep to count – anything to stop the relentless unspooling of unwanted recollection. She did not want to go where this memory was taking her, but she was helpless.)
Dropping the bucket on the floor, Yojana kicks off her rainboots. She does not bother to pick them up and place them neatly on the step as her nanny has taught her. She is too excited for that. They spin wetly across the floor tiles, instantly forgotten. Yojana hears the creaking of the ladder in the garden as her daddy climbs down from the tree. She reaches up and strains with all her might to reach the jug with the sharp knives in it. She is forbidden to touch these, but she has seen her daddy use the small knife to cut the soft plum flesh from the hard stone within and she wants to try. She also remembers him telling her never to bite into an uncut plum, as they often harbour maggots and other larvae which may not otherwise be seen.
TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 Page 3
