by Femi Fadugba
Hope.
If we got this right, I’d get my mum back and he’d get his Nadia. The fifteen years that he’d spent trawling through physics books and that I’d wasted without her would all be rewritten, renewed. I promised to make every second I got with her count. I’d make sure she knew how much I loved her. And I’d never leave her to suffer alone again.
Dr Esso’s confused face finally came into view.
‘Yes, if you’re selling cookies,’ he said, not knowing which stranger was knocking today. ‘Hell, no, if you’re shotting vacuum cleaners … or neon … or God.’
It wasn’t the magical opening line for our reunion that I’d imagined. But at least he was here.
Thank fuck. He was here.
‘It’s me,’ I said, watching his feet go rigid, just like they had the day we met. ‘It’s Rhia.’
He put his fist to his mouth, his eyes bulging and bloodshot. But on top of his obvious fatigue and shock was a look of gratitude. And, on top of that, an expression that almost seemed … expectant.
I wasn’t sure what to say next, and Olivia shoving me to hurry up wasn’t helping. In the end, I dug deep and told him exactly what I would have in more familiar times.
‘You been working out?’ He had on the same LBF T-shirt he’d worn to either our first or second lesson and a rounder body inside it. ‘Your top’s looking extra fitted now, that’s all.’
‘Piss off, Rhia,’ he replied.
Olivia raised an eyebrow at our back and forth. ‘Are you two always this rude to each other?’ she asked.
‘Yep,’ we answered at the same time.
Dr Esso smiled, and I couldn’t help doing the same. I’d spent weeks building up to this moment – months if you counted from when we first met. And, meanwhile, he’d waited half his life.
My phone vibrated in my pocket – a message from a coded number.
1133:
A PROXIMITY ALERT HAS BEEN TRIGGERED. OFFICERS ARE ON THEIR WAY. STAY CALM AND ALERT.
‘That was them, wasn’t it?’ Olivia pressed. ‘How long have we got?’
I watched the next two messages arrive in rapid fire and had to fight the urge to panic. ‘Six minutes.’
‘Quick,’ Dr Esso said, flinging his door open. ‘Let’s do this inside.’
We rushed into his front room, where Dr Esso waved at a couch barely wide enough for two toddlers. Olivia and I managed to squeeze into it with some painful compromises. I hadn’t known what to expect in terms of living-room decorations, but not much could have prepared me for the walls: reams of equations covering every patch and scribbled in this thick ink that had left ridges he could feel to read. The place smelt quietly loud too, which probably had something to do with the weed burns on the carpet. Rings of shelves went round the room, one on top of the next, each one filled with books. Emmy Noether’s Theorem was the title of one textbook, and the one next to it, called Gravitation, was massive enough to live what it was teaching. Partway along was a paperback with Relativity slapped on the spine – authored by Albert Einstein himself.
Dr Esso crossed the short distance to his recliner, kicking two empty Red Bulls out of his path. He put his microwave meal on the table, while leaving his retro radio on his armrest.
‘All right, sis,’ Olivia said. ‘You got this.’
Five minutes was a third of the time I’d planned for, and we’d already wasted a chunk of it warming up at his door. The margin for error left was nil.
‘I’ve waited a while to hear this,’ Dr Esso said, balancing on the edge of his cushion. ‘But unfortunately time’s not on our side.’
I sprang back to my feet. An ocean of nervous energy was rising in me. I could taste the urgency. I understood the stakes. But now I also understood something else.
‘That’s the thing,’ I said, correcting him. ‘Time is on our side.’
CHAPTER 30
Esso · Now
The rain had stopped and the police sirens, which had begun as an airy whisper minutes earlier, were now screaming off the walls of the alleyway.
Bloodshed was staring at the shank he’d just lodged inside me. He had this look in his eyes like he could feel what I was feeling in his own flesh; like my pain was flowing through the knife that connected us and back into him. A snarl spilled out of him, words I couldn’t understand, as if he was speaking in tongues. Even his face didn’t make sense any more, so twisted with anger that he could have been a different person.
He must have needed to prove to himself that taking a second life wouldn’t hurt as much as the first. Because he pulled the rambo out of me, then stabbed me even deeper.
I barely felt it at first. When I did, it was different to how I’d always imagined it might feel. Each slash was like getting punched in the gut by someone with bony hands. Then the two craters in my stomach started radiating waves of pain outwards, along with gushes of blood. And, like at lunch, the pain demanded my attention jealously, not letting me divert any effort to crying, panicking or even thinking. Everything went blurry, and I started going faint. Vex, who’d been restraining me, tried to let go, but I was the one holding on to him now, gripping his arm as tight as I could to stay upright.
‘Let’s dust, fam,’ Vex shouted. ‘Feds are coming!’ He shrugged me off, swooping up D’s gun as he and Bloodshed made a run for it.
But, just as they reached the end of the alleyway leading to the deserted estate, their path was blocked off by eight bodies entering from the same direction. It was Spark and his Peckham yutes, all in black, responding to the text I’d sent in the Penny Hill bathrooms that morning.
With nothing holding me up, I dropped to one knee and my hand sank into a pile of soggy leaflets wedged in the space where the tarmac met the wall. Stay off the ground, I said silently, using all my effort to obey my own orders, knowing that, the closer I got to the ground, the nearer I got to death.
I was meant to be at home.
I imagined Mum alone on the couch with an uneaten plate of fish and chips steaming next to her. I pictured her wondering when I’d arrive, glancing at her phone every other second and rising to her feet each time the wind rustled the door knocker.
D was first to run to my side. Nadia, Kato and Rob followed right after.
Vex and Bloodshed looked like they were thinking about running back to the opposite end of the alleyway, but Spark’s boys had cornered them on both sides.
Spark smiled as he pressed forward, probably not believing his luck that three T.A.S. boys had turned up with nothing more than a gun and a couple knives between them. But when Spark turned to me and saw the blood seeping through my school shirt, and the stained shank in Bloodshed’s hands, his smile faded and his focus turned to violence.
No words were spoken. No words were needed. Skengs just started coming up out of nowhere – three nine-millimetres, a snub-nosed shotgun, a couple of other semis. The other seven Peckham yutes kept their guns by their sides, but Spark lifted his at Bloodshed, who had the face of a man who’d just realized he’d brought a knife to a gunfight.
‘I guess it’s blood for blood. Right, Bloodshed?’ Spark cocked the gun and leaned in. ‘You got my bro, so I gotta kill yours, innit.’
Then, way too fast for any of us to react, Spark spun round to D, who was standing next to me. He walked forward until his stick was kissing D’s forehead. Then he shot him point-blank in the face.
A red mist filled the air as D dropped to his knees. Where smooth skin should have been, a gaping hole now lived. He used his last seconds of life to gaze at Nadia, staring at her like he wanted to say something but couldn’t. A second later, he fell nose flat to the concrete.
Nadia screamed, throwing herself to the ground next to him.
This can’t be happening, I thought. I had no idea what to do with myself because I was too busy denying what I’d just seen. Spark did not just shoot D in the head, I told myself. D is not dead. I couldn’t even entertain the idea of it.
And yet, I could. I had. I’d
seen all of this coming. And I still hadn’t been able to stop it.
Instead of words, a stream of vomit flew from my mouth.
Nadia started wailing hysterically, trying to flip D on his back. Maybe to try to breathe life back into him, maybe just to see his face. Kato and Rob, realizing how serious the mess they’d walked into was, started backing away from the narrowing circle of death in the alleyway.
A few wise words right then might have de-escalated the whole thing. It didn’t have to end in total annihilation. One boy was dead, and only one other boy was hurt. The destiny part was over, which meant nothing else terrible had to happen. But, with everyone now cocking and raising their weapons, no one dared say a thing.
Vex pointed his gun at Spark.
Spark’s right-hand man, the same one who’d eyed me suspiciously in West End that Wednesday, pointed his snub-nosed shotgun at Vex.
Spark turned his stick over to Bloodshed.
Bloodshed was standing in the middle of it all and didn’t seem to care. His big brother was dead. What else was there? He dropped his shank to the ground, staring zombie-like at D’s spiritless corpse.
The sirens grew louder, drowning out all my other senses, and then a line of armed cops in Met SWAT gear swung round the corner from the main road, shouting, ‘Police!’ with their assault rifles trained on everything with a pulse. Red laser dots appeared on Nadia’s, Rob’s and Kato’s foreheads.
The first gun went off. And, in that precise moment, a powerful jolt of déjà vu seized me. I’d experienced this all before. The feeling multiplied until it was like a thousand déjà vus springing on me all at once. And, all the while, the words I’d read in my dad’s notebook that morning, about the Upper World, were running through my head at the speed of light.
The WINDOW is a memory from the past or the future. A memory unique to each individual, often so severe or traumatic that our minds force us to forget it …
As my vision faded, the world around me dissolved into black nothingness. The violent bang of the bullet leaving the chamber had turned into a slow, winding drawl – as if the sound waves were rippling through tar to reach my ears. Even the silence between my heartbeats was widening. And so I waited, praying the next thump would arrive.
CHAPTER 31
Rhia · 15 Years Later
Olivia and Dr Esso were leaning in, waiting. We had three minutes left.
I lifted up Dr Esso’s microwave meal from the coffee table. ‘I’m holding your dinner in my hand right now, but I need you to imagine it’s a Tesla.’
‘Done,’ Dr Esso replied.
He couldn’t see the prop – it was mostly for me, anyway. I needed to picture what I was thinking, say everything right. ‘Now, if you wanted to drive this car along a road, you’d obviously need some sort of energy source, right? Basically electricity or hydrogen to power the engine.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘It makes sense,’ I agreed, ‘because we all know that moving around every day in three-dimensional space requires energy. Standard stuff. But how about moving through time? We’re all doing it right now, but where’s that energy coming from? Where’s the energy that’s propelling all three of us from the past to the present and into the future? The answer is: it’s hidden.’ I lifted the lid off the tray to find some half-eaten bangers and mash buried inside. ‘Before, we had no way of touching or seeing this other kind of energy. Not until Einstein found a way to unleash it.’
‘E = mc2,’ Dr Esso whispered, sliding further forward till he was barely clinging to his seat.
‘Exactly!’ I said, my confidence climbing. I could see something rising in him too. I’d run out of tricks to keep calm so was rushing it all out instead. ‘In general, our everyday experiences tell us that, the more mass something has, the more energy you need to drag it around. And that, the faster you want to drag something along, the more energy you need as well. Einstein’s equation is saying exactly that: the amount of Hidden Energy – E – that something needs to zoom through time is equal to its mass – m – multiplied by –’
‘The speed of light squared!’ Olivia answered, now sounding the most impatient of all of us. I’d have kissed her on her long-ass forehead, but I couldn’t afford to waste the five seconds it would take.
‘Exactly, sis – which happens to be the speed we’re all travelling through time right now.’ I doubled down. ‘And it can’t be a coincidence that Einstein, the guy who came up with the maths for time travel, also discovered the equation for Hidden Energy a few months later. It’s not luck that all the physicists after him found this same link between time and energy in their equations as well.’
I looked down at my phone: one and a half minutes till the cops arrived.
‘You’ve clearly read Noether’s stuff,’ I said, looking at the book I’d spotted when we first arrived. ‘She proved time and energy are symmetrically linked a century ago. And look at all the quantum maths: Schrödinger’s equation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. In all of them, time and energy are basically stapled together.’
I paused for a breath and Olivia chimed in, saying, ‘You proper earned that oxygen, sis.’ But I wouldn’t breathe properly till we got my mum back.
‘Time is also meant to be hidden from our eyes, Dr Esso. But when you went to the Upper World that day, you saw it – your whole life from start to finish cast in a string of projections.’
Thunder rumbled. But, at the speed my brain was rolling, nothing could shift me off course.
‘And now, with everything you know, if you went back there you could see Hidden Energy as well. You could lift mountains, light up a whole city if you needed to. You could change what happened that night to your friends. To my parents. To us.’
Olivia drew closer, resting a hand on my shoulder. I’d got it all out – all we could do now was hope that the impossible became real in the forty-five seconds we had left before the feds arrived.
Dr Esso sat with his hands clasped in front of his lips. He looked like he’d already gathered his thoughts but was hoping one last piece of inspiration would strike him.
‘I’m gonna say this with all due respect,’ he began. ‘Because I massively respect the fact you’re literally spitting uni-level physics right now. And that you learnt it on your own.’ His palms slid up to his forehead until his face was sheltered behind them. ‘But everything you’ve said. All that stuff about Einstein and time and energy and how it’s all connected – I already know all that. I learnt it ages ago, Rhia. It didn’t make a difference then, and it won’t now.’
My chin started trembling. I had nothing left to say. Of course he already knew. The very room we were standing in was fenced off with thousands of pages of this same maths – his own fucking shrine to it. He’d probably been studying this stuff since he was my age. And yet I’d somehow fooled myself into thinking I could top that in weeks. Worse, I’d convinced myself that my entire existence, and his, had been building up to this night – the stale moment that was now behind us.
I felt even smaller, even dumber, than when I’d stood in Tony’s living room and had my dreams shattered. ‘I guess I just figured that if you went back –’
‘That’s the problem,’ he shouted. ‘I can’t go back. I don’t know how!’ It was like listening to a mountain crumble and implode. ‘I haven’t been back to the Upper World since that night. I don’t even remember what happened.’
BANG, BANG, BANG was the stiff beat on the door outside. That was 12 knocking – no two ways about it.
‘We are done out ’ere,’ Dr Esso said. Stones were cracking against the window so hard I wondered for a second if it was possible for hail to break glass.
‘There’s a staircase through the back door,’ he continued. ‘You lot need to get out before they burst in swingin.’
Before I could blink, Olivia grabbed my arm and pulled me into the corridor leading to the back exit. But not before I saw Dr Esso’s bag leaning against the wall. Not before I broke free
from Olivia’s hold and snatched his tattered notebook out of there.
As Olivia scurried towards the door, I hung a metre behind, flipping through the pages at lightning pace and doubling back each time I’d gone too fast to absorb what I was reading.
A cave … Prisoners lived in chains … The Upper World …
Next page.
Language influences what we see …
Scroll down.
And yet our ability to tap into chronosthesia (mental time travel) was not destroyed …
Please let this be it, I begged.
Only unplugged. Locked inside a crevice of our minds called the WINDOW.
Dr Esso had mumbled something about a window that night he’d come clean – said it was the part of the mind where you accessed the Upper World. Maybe this is it, I thought to myself. What gets us back to Mum. But, if it was, how come he hadn’t figured it out himself? He’d had the notebook all this time, so what piece was he missing that only I could give him?
‘Police!’ At the far end of the corridor came the next round of whacks. ‘Open up!’
A hard shoulder from Olivia later, the back door opened and the narrow fire-exit stairs came into view. I reread the passage, searching for a final clue, something practical.
Then I scanned it again. And again. Nothing was clicking.
‘We’ve done all we can,’ Olivia yelled over the gale. ‘We have to leave! Now!’ Behind her, a web of lightning dazzled across the thick violet sky, as if in some electromagnetic realm out there a war was being waged.
I looked back one last time to the door leading to the front room, to Dr Esso. I had nothing left to offer him, not with the few seconds we had left. Nothing.
Unless.
‘No,’ I said, breaking Olivia’s grip. ‘This isn’t how this ends. I think it’s how it begins.’
‘Rhia, don’t –’
I ran back and smashed open the living-room door. Dr Esso was on his feet, and I lunged into him, wrapping my arms round his back in a desperate hug.
