She has grown a lot in the last few weeks and her fingers just reach the knife, enough to pull it free of the block so it falls to the wooden surface within reach. She grasps the metal handle and steps backwards from the kitchen counter, turning towards the bucket, already leaning forward to grab a plum.
As she steps backwards, her foot rests on one of her discarded boots and, slick with rain on the polished tiles, it slips away, throwing Yojana’s balance off. She falls forward heavily, banging her chin on the tiles. She feels her teeth crack. She opens her mouth to cry but no sound comes out.
Her vision becomes blurred, her hearing muffled. She can see Daddy’s feet running towards her, hear his voice shouting, as if underwater. She only vaguely registers him lifting her up off the ground.
Why do her fingers feel wet and sticky?
Jana cried out as, with one hard tug, the doctor pulled the chip free. The doctor assumed it was a cry of pain.
He was right, kind of.
… what time do you call this Kaz, I know, just like a cheap sitcom, right, and dad just looks at the clock and says nine, why what time do you call it, and mum doesn’t laugh, so I go upstairs and put my records on and drown out the arguing, because there’s always arguing, and then it’s the morning and I’ve fallen asleep on the floor again and Mum is shaking me awake and calling me useless and lazy and there’s dad behind her telling her not to be so mean to me and she turns and snarls, like a cat or something, and they start again so I shout at them to stop and they kind of do but there’s a sullen silence all through breakfast until I can get out of there and head to school and it’s a Thursday so I meet up with Tahmina on the way and we chat about stuff and there’s the call to prayer in the distance and the sky is a beautiful deep orange and her eyes are like, well I don’t know what they’re like but they’re amazing, and I try to kiss her and she slaps me so that sort of sucks and I don’t know what to do so I laugh and pretend I was joking and then I see her looking past me at the road and I follow her gaze and I see this car that’s kind of following us and it speeds up as I look at it but as it passes I see her brother looking at me and he looks really pissed and I think oh shit, and I turn to Tahmina but she’s turned and walked off so I run after her and I’m talking and she turns and says Kaz what do you think you …
Sweetclover had thought this through. He knew that Dora would be disorientated and scared, so he had instructed the doctor to conduct the simplest examination possible and to use only manual instruments. Of course, the girl had never seen a stethoscope or a blood pressure pump, but they were likely to be far less frightening than an ECG or an ultrasound.
When Sweetclover had made his decision earlier in the day, the doctor had reluctantly agreed to the conditions but had muttered something about ‘the bloody Stone Age’ under his breath as he’d left the meeting. Now, as Sweetclover watched him trying to persuade the girl to offer her forearm so he could take a blood sample, he wondered whether the doctor hadn’t been right all along. It probably would have been simpler to keep Dora sedated and conduct the examination before she awoke. But something about this proposal had made him uneasy; it was a violation that he could not in all good conscience support, and while his wife would probably have overruled his objections, she was not here at present. He had no such qualms about the other two prisoners, but would have been unable to explain why. Perhaps he felt a lingering duty of care, perhaps he felt solidarity with someone from his own time, perhaps he felt guilty about what had transpired in 1645. Whatever the reason, he was determined to treat Dora with kindness.
‘It will not hurt, Dora,’ he said, trying to be reassuring as he ignored the doctor’s scornful look. ‘Think of the syringe as a mechanical leech, nothing more. It will suck out a tiny drop of blood and then we will be done and can have some lunch.’
Dora did not look convinced, but she stopped resisting and held out her arm, biting her lower lip nervously and screwing her eyes closed as the doctor extracted the necessary. Sweetclover found the look of triumph in the medical man’s eyes off-putting even though it was his orders that were being carried out.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You may go.’ The doctor nodded and scurried away to his lab. He knew the importance of the blood and the tests he was about to conduct and he obviously couldn’t wait to get started.
‘Come, my dear, let us eat.’
Sweetclover held out his hand and Dora unclenched her fist, opened her eyes and took it, grateful for his kindness.
He knew she would not be so pliant if she knew the truth.
Jana opened her eyes but the light hurt too much so she screwed them tightly shut again. The pain at the base of her skull was sharp and insistent but it was nothing compared to the hot knives that twisted in her brain with the slight movement caused by her every breath.
She had grown accustomed to the migraines that accompanied hot weather, but this was worse even than the worst of those. Zigzag lines flashed and danced in her vision even when her eyes were closed. The fingers of her left hand were numb and cold.
She experienced a flash of total fear. What if they’d removed the ENL chip incorrectly? Could they have done some permanent damage to her spine? In spite of the pain she wriggled her toes and then tested her limbs one by one, grateful when even her numbed fingers responded.
Among its many functions, the now absent chip could act as a delta wave emitter, counteracting the migraines. She felt sluggish and spaced out when it did its work but it was better than hiding in a dark room with a cold compress on her head, trying to make the pain go away by force of will.
She desperately needed time to think, to calmly and logically puzzle out what had happened to her, but the migraine left no room for anything else. So she stayed where she was, eyes closed, trying to stop the agony from driving her mad.
At least the memories had stopped.
… and then there’s dust and smoke and glass everywhere and I look for her but I can’t see anything, really and there’s noise like you can’t believe, screaming and sirens and the sounds of things falling over and crashing and cars and more screams, so I start to shout out ‘Mother! Father? Where are you?’ but nobody calls back so I know that they’re either dead or wounded but certainly unconscious so I wipe the dust from my eyes with the back of my hand and my eyes are watering but it’s the dust not tears and I try to get my bearings and I see a car on its side next to me, blue Audi, and on top of it is a big black lump which I realise is the engine block of another car, broken and charred, and I think ‘car bomb’ which makes sense and I’ve seen things like this on YouTube and I know it’s going to be grisly because the news doesn’t show you what it’s really like, doesn’t show you the body parts and the blood because people don’t like to see that while they’re eating their tea, but I’ve seen it online so I know what I’m going to see but I don’t want to see it because who knows if the blackened arm that I trip over is my father’s or my mother’s but I have to find them so I shout again and I begin working my way through the smoke and chaos hoping that I will find them alive and then I do actually trip, but it’s a leg not an arm, and I can taste blood in my mouth and I scramble to my feet quickly, repulsed and flailing and then I see Dad’s backpack in the road and the straps are shredded and he’s not there, and then a shoe I recognise and I run to it, and then a siren, really close and then …
Dora wasn’t really hungry. Her usual diet consisted solely of bread, cheese, meat and seasonal fruit and vegetables, so she was unprepared for the place Lord Sweetclover called the ‘canteen’.
‘I am sorry, I should have thought. I am careless, forgive me,’ he said as he noticed her confusion. ‘I forget, sometimes, that we have travelled so far.’
Dora did not know where to begin. She was slowly becoming accustomed to the unnatural light, the strange permanent rugs that were stuck to the floor, the perfection of the glass windows which would not open, and the ever-present hum of the ‘aircon’, but the large room that lay before her
was so bewildering that the fight-or-flight reaction she was working so hard to quell threatened to send her scurrying away in search of a nice, dark cupboard.
To her left stood a large metal sideboard containing three shelves upon which were arrayed a collection of bright colours and shapes that she could not interpret. A cold breeze wafted from it. Ahead of her was a metal table with depressions in the surface within which some foul-smelling orange stew bubbled underneath hot lights. There were other cabinets and tabletops as well, but she found that focusing on one or two things at a time helped control her unease.
Lord Sweetclover laughed softly and although he turned a kindly countenance towards her, Dora found that she did not entirely trust his benevolence.
‘Let me help you,’ he offered.
Dora nodded and bit her lip.
‘This’ – he indicated the top shelf of the cold cabinet – ‘contains drinks made from crushed fruit. They are called smoothies and they are most pleasing. The shelf below contains sandwiches. A sandwich is composed of two slices of bread with some cold meat or cheese pressed between them. It is a staple food of this time. So you see, although the containers and presentation are confusing to you, things have not changed so very much – fruit, bread, meat and cheese. Would you like me to make a selection for you?’
Dora nodded once more.
‘I suggest something simple,’ mused Sweetclover as he reached into the cold cabinet and handed her a bottle that was made of a kind of light, flexible glass. ‘A berry smoothie, nothing controversial there. And how about a ham sandwich?’ Dora accepted the strange triangular box, which was made of a kind of stiff paper.
‘Ah, but you must have some dessert,’ said Sweetclover with a smile that implied this was the best bit. He reached onto the lowest shelf and pulled out a slab of something hard wrapped in paper. ‘This is called chocolate, Dora. Trust me, it will change your life.’
‘Thank you, my lord,’ mumbled Dora, determined to be gracious and grateful despite her uncertainty.
‘I shall have the curry, I think,’ said Sweetclover, stepping forward, taking a plate from the hot light-table and scooping some of the strange orange stew onto it with a shiny metal ladle. He then led her through a doorway into a large room filled with round tables surrounded by more of the smooth grey chairs. He chose a table and they sat.
‘We have the place to ourselves,’ he said. ‘It is a Saturday, so there is only a skeleton staff on site.’
Dora struggled to grasp his meaning, but kept her lips shut tight as she sat, awkward and uncertain, staring at her meal. She considered the bottle. There was no cork or stopper so she had no idea how to open it, but she was determined not to ask for help. If she could not divine the means of access to so simple a thing, then she would be doomed in this strange place. Not for the first time, she told herself to concentrate and think.
There was a cap of some sort at the top of the bottle’s short neck. She could tell by its different colour and texture that it was not part of the bottle’s body and was thus removable. She grasped it and pulled, but it did not pop off. Undaunted, she looked more closely and registered the inclined horizontal lines that ran around the bottle’s neck. She had never seen a screw in her life so it did not instantly occur to her to turn the cap, but as she looked at the lines she realised what she had to do. She took hold of the cap and, with a firm hand, twisted it off. Her smile of triumph gave way to embarrassment when she realised that Lord Sweetclover was observing her closely.
‘Try some,’ he said.
Gingerly, Dora raised the bottle to her lips and took a sip. It was overpoweringly sweet, and the texture was thick and unusual. It was also unnaturally cold, which she found disconcerting. But she could tell that she had not been lied to; it was indeed only fruit. Reassured, she turned her attention to the sandwiches. The thick paper container yielded far less willingly to enquiry and after a minute of turning it over in her hands Dora decided that the best course of action was to grab a corner and tear. The box ripped open and the sandwiches flew into the air. Sweetclover chuckled as Dora scrabbled to catch them.
‘I do not think it kind to laugh at me,’ said Dora, her frustration and embarrassment bubbling over into an act of defiance that only that morning she would never have thought herself capable of.
She carefully put her sandwich back together and took a bite. It too was so cold it made her teeth ache, and there was a taste to it that was slightly unnatural, as if it had been seasoned with some strange herb. But she chewed and swallowed.
‘I promised you an explanation,’ said Sweetclover, laying down his fork on his empty plate.
‘Are you a witch?’ asked Dora, the words slipping out from her sandwich-full mouth before she had consciously thought them.
Sweetclover smiled. ‘Do you know what technology is, Dora?’
She shook her head.
‘It is another word for machines,’ he said.
Dora still did not know what he was talking about. He sighed and then said, ‘A wise man once said that you can make machines so complicated that they look like magic, but if you don’t know what a machine is, even Clarke’s Law isn’t going to help.’
Dora took a mouthful of sandwich and chewed slowly, waiting for Sweetclover to try again. When he did not, she decided to take the initiative.
‘My lord, you told me that the village has been changed by time. How much time?’
‘Three hundred and seventy-three years have passed since the morning you disappeared from Sweetclover Hall,’ he replied.
Dora could see that he was studying her closely, gauging her reaction as he said this. Some instinct told her that a display of weakness would be dangerous so instead of screaming that this was impossible, or crawling into a corner and crying – both of which seemed like reasonable responses to her – she nodded once, sagely, as if she had just bitten a tree apple and found that it was ripe for harvest.
Her father had told her tales of Merlin and Arthur when she was younger, and Dora remembered the ice cave in which the great wizard was frozen for eternity.
‘Did I sleep for this time, or was I frozen in ice?’ she asked.
If she was pleased that Sweetclover was impressed by her composure, she did not allow her satisfaction to show on her face.
‘Neither,’ he replied. ‘You travelled here directly. How can I explain … when you cross a bridge from one riverbank to another you travel from land to land without actually needing to swim the river itself. You passed over a kind of bridge from then to now without having to live through the intervening years.’
Dora considered this. ‘A magic bridge that I could not see?’
Sweetclover smiled and shrugged. ‘If you wish. But a bridge nonetheless.’
‘Good. For a bridge may be crossed in both directions, may it not? I can go home again.’
‘Ah, I’m sorry to say that no, you cannot. The bridge has a toll gate on this bank and neither you nor I have sufficient coin to pay for passage back across.’
‘Magic coins?’
Sweetclover noticed a hint of a smile on Dora’s face and realised she was, ever so gently, teasing him. ‘Something like that.’
Dora took another bite of sandwich. Sweetclover waited patiently for her to process his answer and formulate her next question.
‘Who was the woman in the undercroft?’ she said eventually.
‘You will meet her presently, for she is quite recovered. In fact, this is really her building, not mine. When you encountered her she had also just crossed the bridge but for her it was a much longer crossing, from many years to come, and she had been wounded by the journey. In your kindness you tried to offer assistance but when you touched her it propelled you across the bridge in turn. I must confess that I do not understand how or why.’
‘A woman from centuries forward travels across a bridge in time and then, by her touch, sends me across the bridge to this strange place. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
Do
ra laughed. ‘You are jesting with me, my lord. For surely this woman is a witch. You speak of spells and magics. Well, I will be strong in the face of them. I will pray for deliverance from this evil.’
As she delivered this rejoinder, Dora had been peeling the paper from the slab of brown stuff and, without even thinking about it, she took an absent-minded bite. Upon which all thoughts left her head and her eyes widened to the size of saucers.
‘By the lord, this is wonderful. What do you call this?’
‘Chocolate.’
Dora took another huge bite. Finally something new which did not fill her with dread. If this strange and alien world had such a thing as chocolate in it, then perhaps it was not the hell she feared.
Sweetclover laughed. ‘I told you it would change your life.’
Dora murmured her assent through a mouthful of melting cocoa, all her questions temporarily forgotten.
So the explosion took her completely by surprise.
5
… and the wind is blowing really hard so I am worried the plane is going to crash as we land but we don’t and so I am back home in Poland for the first time in ten years and as soon as the doors open I feel the cold and I look back at my dad as he struggles with the bags and then … and then … and then … what the …?
Kaz felt the table shake as he stopped speaking. He heard a deep, resonant rumble vibrating through the structure of the building. Even in his confusion, as his mind tried to process what had just happened and reeled in response to the onslaught of unexpectedly detailed memories that had poured from his lips, dry and bleeding after his monologue, his sense memory identified the shock wave of a bomb.
It was not an unfamiliar sensation to him.
His immediate instinct was to rise to his feet and hurry towards the site of the explosion, to see if he could offer assistance to anyone who might have been hurt by the blast, but his vision was blurred, his hands and feet were numb and he found it difficult to think straight. He still had no clue what was happening to him, why he’d been taken prisoner, where he was, what kind of machine had forced him to spew his life story, and why the people holding him were so interested in the first place. But answers could wait. If someone was bombing this building, it meant there would be distraction and confusion, which meant he had a chance to escape.
TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 Page 4
