Josh got to his feet and picked up the knife. It was a small hunting knife. He remembered Lenin bragging about how many people he’d cut with it. The blade was too short to be fatal. Lenin had never been a killer — a sadist and an egomaniac, yes, but never a killer.
The sound of the gun going off brought Josh’s head up. He saw Gossy had the gun. At first he thought he’d shot Lenin, then Gossy’s legs crumpled, and he collapsed on to his knees. Lenin was injured too, but Gossy had a dark red stain on his back that was spreading fast.
Josh crawled over to Gossy, the pain throbbing in his side. His friend was still holding the gun, but his eyes were glazing over.
‘Hey, Joshman,’ he said weakly. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah. Just a scratch,’ Josh whispered as he tried not to look at the hole in the front of Gossy’s chest. He managed to push himself upright.
‘Couldn’t let him take out my wingman.’ Gossy tried to laugh, but the pain made him cough. There were bubbles of blood in his mouth. He fell forward on to Josh.
Josh held him, trying to think of what he could say. Lenin lay on his side, not moving, and the others hadn’t noticed he was down. He felt the weak panting of Gossy’s breath against his chest as his life slipped away. His blood was all over Josh’s hands. Somewhere in the background noise he heard Caitlin shouting a warning to him as he studied them — he ignored her as his friend’s lifeline spread out before him.
Just like the colonel’s, Gossy’s timeline was an elaborate web of interconnecting events and emotions. He could see and feel every experience that his friend had ever had — his life laid bare — not just crystallised points in time, but snapshots of his consciousness. It was hard to resist. There were so many emotions bombarding him as he immersed himself in Gossy’s history.
There were good times and bad: Josh experienced the elation of his friend’s first skateboard, the pain of the break-up of his parents, the kiss of Marie Withershall — all the little formative moments that went into making him who he was.
Then he came to the crash. There was something strange about the way the lines of time coalesced around the accident. Josh could see other fainter lines ghosting around the node as though it had been repaired. He could see that there were other ways, other paths that Gossy’s life could have taken, and he couldn’t help but explore them.
It was an odd sensation, as if he were looking down from the top of an enormous skyscraper. He could see the many different lines stretching out from the day of the crash — some much longer than others. He saw how Gossy’s life could have simply ended that day, whilst in others he lived — there was even one with a wife and kids. None of them ended in old age. There was something wrong with his heart, a biological time bomb waiting in his future. Josh knew then that Gossy was never meant to make ‘old bones’. Nothing was ever going to change that. Was it better to live a short and happy life or a long and painful one? Josh couldn’t make that choice. Gossy had chosen for him.
In the distance, the darkness was approaching, a numbing void that consumed the timeline as everything was drawn to it. Josh was still deeply embedded, unable to extract himself. The lines around him were burning out to nothing like sparklers on bonfire night.
He stared into the abyss, captivated by the hypnotic patterns of dying futures that coalesced along its edge. As he studied the emptiness that raced towards him, he was sure he could feel something inside the blackness: a malevolent presence watching him silently from the other side. This was what reavers like Lyra found so addictive, he thought. Why they risked everything to get close to death — they wanted to know what was beyond the veil.
He remembered Lyra’s beautiful skin and the scars that she had carved into it, her lingering kiss in the deep waters of the baths and then something she’d said — a word, or more like an idea.
A remembering — a way back.
Gossy had stopped breathing, and his eyes were closed. Josh looked up and found Caitlin and Sim standing over him with weapons drawn and a look of shock on their faces. Around them everything had stopped. It was as though time had been paused. No one was moving; they were like a photograph of a moment.
From between the frozen fighters walked a set of dark figures in long sweeping robes, their faces obscured by masks. As they approached, Josh could see their insignia, the clock with no hands — the symbol of the Protectorate. They were searching everyone in the hall, using something in their gloves to scan them. When they reached Josh, their leader made a silent sign to the others.
Josh was sure he saw Phileas and Lyra at the back of the squad, but he had no time to wonder why before the officer’s gloved hand touched his temple and the world vanished.
64
Lenin Recovered
Professor Fermi found Lenin lying on his side. The other members of his gang had fled — their loyalty dissolved at the apparent demise of their leader.
There was another body nearby, still holding the gun. Fermi knelt down beside the boy and checked for a pulse, but found nothing. He could hear Lenin’s laboured breathing and went over to him. He was badly injured, the gunshot wound in his lower abdomen slick with dark blood.
‘Can you hear me?’ Fermi whispered into Lenin’s ear.
Lenin grunted in response.
‘You are going to die unless I call for help, but before I do you are going to tell me what happened.’
Lenin’s eyes opened slightly, and he swore through gritted teeth.
‘We had a deal. You were supposed to deliver me the boy, remember? Now tell me!’ the professor demanded.
Lenin groaned, and through gasps of pain he told the professor what he could remember.
The professor pulled out his phone.
‘Get the medics in here stat,’ he ordered. The words appeared on the screen followed by ‘encrypting’ and then ‘delivered’ underneath it.
He swiped the app away and pulled up the data that his monitors had captured. A series of graphs appeared, overlaid on a video feed of the hall. He sped through the first twenty minutes of the steady sinusoidal shape of usual background gravitational waves until he found the three-minute burst of activity. There was a cluster of lines overlapping each other, like a series of echoes. Each line registered a set of changes except one that started erratically and then went flat for over a minute — either one of his sensors was faulty, or someone had literally stopped time.
The medics arrived and went to work on Lenin. They turned him over on to his back and began to work on his injuries. One gave him CPR while the other unpacked the mobile defibrillator and switched on the charger.
‘Wait!’ said Fermi, as they tore his T-shirt open to place the paddles on his chest.
Fermi stood over them and held out his hand. ‘His watch, if you please.’
The medic stopped his compressions, unstrapped Lenin’s watch from his wrist and handed it to the professor.
‘Now let’s see if my theory was correct.’
He’d given the digital watch to Lenin before the meeting. It had been synchronised to the nanosecond with his own. He compared the two and as the screens lit up in the harsh red glow of their LEDs he smiled — there was a difference of 0.0000000022 seconds.
Lenin had travelled in time.
65
Awakening
[Bethlem Hospital, London. Date: 11.666]
Josh woke gradually, the sounds of the room seeping into his dream until he surfaced into consciousness.
‘Josh?’ whispered Caitlin. ‘Are you awake?’
‘I am now,’ he replied sleepily.
She was close by, but not in the bed. He felt her weight shift the mattress as she sat down beside him.
When he opened his eyes, Josh realised he had no idea where he was.
The room was panelled in dark wood and sparsely furnished with a few chairs and a wardrobe that could comfortably house a small family. There was a real fire burning in the massive fireplace, and a tapestry of some idyllic hunting scene covered one ent
ire wall. Through the door he could hear the muffled screams of the insane.
‘We’re in Bedlam,’ she said in response to his unasked question.
‘We’re in trouble,’ added Sim, who was sitting in a wing-backed chair by the fire.
‘Your messing around with time alerted the Copernicans. They sent out an entire Protectorate brigade to investigate.’
Josh sat up and absentmindedly scratched at his belly. There was a bandage wrapped round his stomach where Lenin had stabbed him.
‘Try not to scratch it,’ Caitlin said, inspecting the bindings. ‘Doctor Crooke says the wound will take another couple of hours to heal properly.’
‘What about my mum?’ Josh asked as his memory of the events returned.
‘She’s fine. They’ve taken her back in time to the neuro ward at Barts. It’s like she never left.’
Then Josh remembered that Gossy had died before he could rewind again.
‘The Protectorate — did they actually stop time?’
‘More like slowed it right down,’ Sim muttered. ‘The armour they wear has tachyon tech built into it — they call them “stillsuits”.’
‘I thought I saw Lyra and Phileas.’
‘Methuselah insisted they went along as witnesses. They do that when there’s going to be an inquest.’
‘An inquest?’ Josh groaned.
‘Oh yes,’ she sighed, ‘the court of inquiry has already been invoked. Officially we’re all under arrest.’
‘Thanks to Dalton’s mother,’ added Sim, swearing and prodding the fire with a metal poker.
Caitlin shook her head. ‘I think it’s bigger than that. This is political — the Determinists will use this to directly challenge the Founder’s authority. They will use every trick in the book.’
‘Looks like you’re going to meet the man himself,’ Sim said to Josh with a smile.
‘The Founder?’
‘Lord Dee. The founder of the Order.’
‘And what’s he going to do to me?’
‘If you are found guilty, it could mean excision,’ Caitlin said quietly.
Josh stared at her blankly.
‘They go back and remove you from history. Everything you’ve ever done, who you were, just disappears as if you were never here.’
‘Shit!’
He sat in silence for a while and tried to contemplate what that would be like.
‘No matter what I did I couldn’t save everyone,’ Josh said to Caitlin. ‘It was a choice between my mum, you or Gossy. I couldn’t see a way to make it end well — and then they turned up.’
‘Interdiction,’ Sim interjected. ‘There are only so many times you can rewind before the Copernicans will pick it up and send the Protectorate to investigate.’
‘Something catastrophic must have been about to happen,’ Caitlin added glumly.
‘I was inside Gossy’s timeline when he was dying. I saw something in the darkness.’
‘You were reaving?’ exclaimed Caitlin. ‘I warned you about that!’
‘There was a kind of presence, like something was watching me.’
‘The dying are in a state of flux. Only very experienced seers are able to deal with the unravelling timeline of the dying. You were lucky you didn’t end up scrambling your brain.’ Caitlin tapped the side of his head.
‘You could have ended up in here for good’ said Sim solemnly, pointing at the walls.
‘I saw other versions of his life, what it could have been. Is that what Lyra sees when she —’
‘It’s why most seers end up going crazy, those that didn’t start off that way. It’s an overload, too many choices, too many possible futures.’
‘And they just lock them up in here?’
‘It’s for their own good,’ she said, getting up and walking over to Sim. ‘Many reavers get obsessed with the idea that there is something beyond the continuum. They have to be restrained to stop them from killing themselves.’
‘Religious nutters,’ added Sim. ‘They believe they can commune with elder gods.’
Josh thought back to the dark things he had sensed waiting in the void and a shiver ran down his spine.
There was a knock at the door, and Phileas came in. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week.
‘Good, you’re awake. The court is ready for you now.’
66
Star Chamber
It was unlike any courtroom that Josh had ever seen: a vast circular auditorium with tiers of benches, stepped in concentric rings that went up into the dark ceiling hundreds of metres above him. He stood in the centre of a golden, six-pointed star that had been laid in to the chequered marble floor. Round him, sitting behind a raised desk, were the members of the High Council — made up of a single representative from each one of the guilds. Josh studied every one of the six in turn: there were four men and two women, each dressed in the ceremonial robes of their particular guild.
The audience was made up of the most eccentric collection of people, dressed in clothes from their respective periods. It looked like the annual gathering of the costume department of the V&A. Josh had spotted Caitlin and Sim sitting in one of the front rows with Methuselah, the colonel and Eddy. They were all in deep conversation, he assumed about him. Caitlin caught his eye and tried to smile reassuringly, but failed to pull it off and went back to the discussion. The colonel kept pointing at someone as he spoke and when Josh followed the line of his finger he found Dalton and his mother, the chief inquisitor, sitting on the opposite side of the round. Dalton looked very smug. The smile thinned a little as he caught Josh’s eye.
The spectacle of a ‘Grand Trial’ had drawn a large crowd, and the chamber was buzzing with the sound of a hundred different voices all talking at once. Caitlin had warned Josh that these were rare events and would probably pack the house. There were Scriptorians in their dark purple robes and ridiculously thick glasses; Copernicans with their complex abacuses, calculating the probabilities of the outcome while making side bets with the Draconians; Antiquarians sitting awkwardly as far away from others as they could; and a whole host of minor guilds that he had never met.
It was the first time Josh had seen so many of the Order in one place. It was much larger than he’d imagined; Sim had said there was no official census on how many there were, but Josh had always assumed there were more chapters, like the one that Methuselah managed, spread out through time. Seeing everyone brought together in one place somehow made it more real. There were literally thousands of them, a well-organised gang with their own traditions and laws — ones that he had just violated.
A sudden hush swept around the chamber as a hooded figure appeared from the shadows and walked slowly out on to the floor, leaning heavily on a cane, which marked each step with metallic tap.
The whole court stood up in unison.
‘Apologies for my tardiness,’ the Founder spoke from beneath his cowl. His voice was deep but old and tired. He bowed to the council of six and took his seat on the far side of the circle.
‘Proceed.’
So this was the Founder, thought Josh, the man who has the final say over my existence.
Dalton’s mother stood up and walked into the circle. Her features were thrown into sharp relief by the harsh light. Like a circling bird of prey, she paced around the marble floor. The gold thread of her lawyer’s robes shimmered as she addressed the gathering.
‘Founder, honourable members of the council, delegates of the guilds of Copernicus, Scriptoria, Antiquaria, Draconii, men of the watch . . .’ Josh tried not to zone out, but the list of names was extensive and apparently a legal requirement.
‘. . . we have been assembled on this occasion to hear the case of the Order versus Master Joshua Jones, initiate and lately apprenticed to Rufius Westinghouse. He stands accused of temporal malpractice on three counts: the first, that he did willingly and with malice aforethought, endanger life in going beyond the temporal limitation; that on a second separate occasion did change the
continuum without proper authority causing the continuation of war or wars beyond their original course; and, lastly, that he was found to have maliciously altered the outcome of an event to his own personal benefit, requiring the need for an interdiction. He stands before the court for judgment.’
One of the council of six stood up.
‘Call the first witness for the defence!’
The colonel stood up and made his way down the steps and on to the floor. Josh could see that he’d attempted to comb his hair and had dressed in his most formal robes, on to which he’d pinned a set of medals.
He came and stood next to Josh without acknowledging him.
‘For the record, please state your name,’ ordered another of the six.
‘Rufius Vainglorious Westinghouse,’ the colonel repeated in a flat tone.
‘Rank?’
‘Guardian of the Twelfth, Master of the Initiates, Seventh brother of the Watch — you know the rest, Paelor Batrass.’
The man who was scribbling furiously on to a large piece of parchment looked up from his notes and waved the quill as if to say: ‘carry on’ and the colonel sighed and relaxed his shoulders.
‘Master Westinghouse,’ asked the inquisitor, ‘for the records of the court, can you formally identify the accused standing before us today as one Joshua Jones.’
‘I can.’
‘And can you tell us how you came to meet the accused?’
‘He broke into my house.’
There was a collective gasp from the crowd.
‘And yet you chose to take him on as your apprentice?’ the inquisitor continued.
‘I did. He isn’t a bad lad, and he showed incredible potential.’
‘Yes. I believe you are referring to the second charge, that of changing the outcome of the Second World War.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 32