One Word Kill (Impossible Times Book 1)

by Mark Lawrence

  ‘No.’

  He shrugged and started to unwrap it for himself rather clumsily.

  ‘Hurt your hand?’ I asked, impatience gritting my teeth together.

  ‘Fractured a knucklebone punching that idiot.’ Demus winced. ‘Totally worth it.’ He took a bite of biscuit. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, there are two reasons why every past moment isn’t besieged by time travellers. The first reason is a practical one. It’s not the real reason but it’s interesting. The thing is that it takes a vast amount of energy to travel through time; the sort of thing that requires a nation to put some effort in. And the theory is really complicated. I mean really. It will take you two decades to figure your way through it, and that’s after I’ve sketched out the solution for you. But – and this is the important bit – it requires very little energy to create enough temporal micro-distortion to make that nation-sized effort fail. A small generator can make it impossible for thousands of square miles around it. And the theory behind the disruption is much easier. So, the cure is always discovered before the disease, and so if any government were worried that history might be rewritten by another government or that criminals might escape into the past . . . they build a few dozen disruptors as a precaution against new discoveries, and that’s an end to it.’

  ‘What the hell!’ I pointed to the two phantoms running straight at us across the mist sea: Mia and me, terror on our faces. And behind us, sprinting with deadly intent, someone with a long blade . . . a machete! ‘Is that . . . Rust? Ian Rust?’

  The phantom Mia ran through us in a cold wash. Demus winced. ‘It’s an echo of a possible future.’

  ‘Well, fuck that!’ I raised my arms as the ghostly maniac ran at us and then broke into swirls.

  ‘Pay attention.’ Demus clicked his fingers. ‘The second reason. The real reason that we’re not deluged in time travellers is this: the arrival of the time traveller is an event like any other and branches a new timeline off from the reality he went back to. So, it’s never crowded. And because his arrival creates a new branch he can do all those paradoxical things you hear about. He can kill his father as a little boy to prevent his own birth. He can meet himself. It won’t matter, because he isn’t affecting the timeline that leads to him, he is changing events on a new timeline.’

  I nodded, still watching the mist nervously, then thought of the message I had scratched onto Simon’s table. The one that had never reached me. ‘So it’s pretty useless to the traveller themselves, then. Because nothing they do has any bearing on the world they came from. You could go back and kill Hitler, but it wouldn’t save anyone you knew.’

  ‘Bingo.’ Demus put a finger to his nose and pointed at me with the other hand. ‘There are altruistic arguments to say you might want to kill the bastard anyway, and give another possible world a better deal . . . but we don’t care about that, do we?’

  ‘I guess not . . .’ In a universe where everything happened somewhere, every good thing, every bad thing, it seemed pointless to care about anything but the world you were given. ‘Is that—’ Out on the field phantom Mia was wrapped in an embrace with . . . I couldn’t say for sure. Now that I stared at them I wasn’t even sure it was Mia. The figures were breaking apart, becoming hard to see. ‘Was that—’

  ‘So.’ Demus waved the question away and leaned forward to stare at me. ‘You know who I am?’

  I did, though I felt silly saying it out loud. ‘You’re me. A me who survived leukaemia, but somehow never grew his hair back.’ His face was proof enough. Now I saw it I couldn’t un-see it. Two or three decades stood in the way, but we were twins. More than that, now I looked closely, I saw that he even had the faint, white seam of scar on his forehead where I had head-butted the coffee table at age two. ‘You’re a me . . . And, bizarrely, I’m as pissed off about the hair as I am pleased about the living . . . though common sense does say that one should throw the other in the shade.’

  ‘I am.’ Demus nodded. ‘Technically it was our knucklebone I broke.’ He leaned back and surveyed the park. ‘It’s more remarkable than just me being any old time traveller, though. I’m a you who remembers all this. A you that really shouldn’t happen. I remember sitting where you are and having this conversation from your side. I remember me telling . . . me . . . about those dice rolls. You have to keep that piece of paper for the rest of your life, by the way. Or at least remember the numbers.’

  I patted my pockets, suddenly terrified I’d lost it already. ‘I can’t—’

  ‘It’s under your pillow.’ Demus grinned. ‘So . . . I remember all this, and as long as I play my part, then what we do here really will impact my world. Our world.’

  ‘Play your part?’

  ‘I’m working to a script here, Nicky boy. I’m telling you what I remember me telling you. If I do something that I don’t remember doing – say I threw you on the ground right now, or shot you – or even if I don’t do something that I do remember doing – say I didn’t explain this bit . . . Well, that could happen, there’s nothing to stop it, but then we’ve branched away from my reality and I’ve lost my chance to make any difference.’

  ‘If that happens . . . If you killed me, for example, then how do you explain your memories?’

  Demus shrugged. ‘Worst scenario would be that they’d be part of a genuine and dangerous paradox that could cause problems for the timeline as a whole. More hopefully they could be put down to madness, delusion, false memories created by a broken mind desperate for a solution to its woes. Even now, while we’re still on track, all of those things are way more likely than an actual closed loop where I can come back and change my future. That should be impossible. But it seems to have happened. Maybe the right number of stars went supernova all at once and tied an impossible knot in space-time. Who knows? It should be impossible, but here I am, making my own memories.’

  I tried to focus, but whatever this resonance he talked about was it was making it difficult to just stay upright and not vomit.

  ‘OK, then why are you here? And can I have the cure for leukaemia that you must have brought back with you?’

  ‘Sorry, Nick.’ And to be fair, he did look sorry. Also pale and sweating, as if he was suffering, too. ‘It turns out that unravelling the fundamentals of the universe is easier than stopping the human body self-destructing. Einstein had nailed the theory of special relativity and given us E=MC2 on zero budget before people could listen to the radio, before the Wright brothers got a patent on their flying machine, and decades before antibiotics. By the time you’re my age you’ll have seen smart phones, the internet, and watched robots crawl over Mars, but we still won’t have cured the common cold. Or cancer.’ Demus finished his biscuit and wiped his mouth. ‘It may sound creepy because I’m forty and she’s fifteen . . . but I’m here for Mia, and I need you to get her to trust me.’

  CHAPTER 8

  Dizziness had swamped me and Demus had left before I collapsed. I’d started feeling better almost as soon as I lost sight of him.

  It felt strange to know that the leukaemia wouldn’t kill me. I should have been elated, jumping for joy, albeit like an old man. But instead I didn’t feel anything really. Just burned out and empty. I still had to endure the treatment, the symptoms and the side effects. And as far as I understood things, if Demus’s game didn’t play out exactly the way he remembered it, then my survival would be up for debate again, too. The world would branch and I would no longer be the me who lived to become him.

  The whole time travel claim seemed both ridiculous and, at the same time, the only possible explanation. And honestly, nothing had seemed quite real since Dr Parsons had sat me down to tell me that I had cancer two weeks earlier. A part of me had immediately started to expect a film crew to jump out from behind the curtains shouting, ‘You’re on Candid Camera,’ and that part had been waiting ever since. Demus’s appearance had only deepened my sense of the surreal and the hope that I might just wake up soon.

  The thing about cancer, and I gu
ess any disaster, is that it doesn’t just go away. You don’t wake up. And, in the end, you just have to get on with things exactly like everyone else does. Demus’s appearance was the same, a strange fact I had to bend my life around.

  Demus’s parting words had been to get Mia to meet him in the park on Saturday evening. So now, in addition to having my own little voice inside my head telling me to call her and ask her out, I had . . . my own, older voice outside my head telling me pretty much the same thing. And I desperately wanted to ignore them both.

  I wished Demus had told me more, but I guessed he could only tell me what he remembered telling me. He probably remembered my frustration, too. But somehow this loop of recollection and action had been frozen in place into Demus’s memory, and if we broke it then all of Demus’s certainty about what happened next would vanish along with whatever he was hoping to achieve. And since he was me, I assumed that his ambitions were in my best interest. At least he got to punch Michael Devis in the face. I could imagine how satisfying that felt, especially after twenty-five years waiting for it. I just wished Demus had shown up when Ian Rust did and kicked the shit out of him, too. Though, thinking about it, that guy was scary as hell whoever you were, and I guessed I was probably going to be no keener to meet him at forty than at fifteen.

  Mia then. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, seeing her face. I could imagine doing it. Creeping to the telephone in the hall, dialling her number, easing the dial back after each digit so the noise of it resetting wouldn’t bring Mother out as witness. ‘Hi,’ Mia would say. ‘Hi,’ I would say back, voice low, hopefully sounding seductive rather than like a boy scared his mother might come into the hall to ask what he was doing. ‘Hi, Mia. Nick here. We should get together again. My place?’ It seemed almost easy. I was admittedly slightly high on cannabis resin. The stuff had taken my pain and nausea and squeezed them into a corner where I still noticed them but wasn’t tripping over them all the time.

  I would, of course, need her number first. John had it, but he’d be full of questions. For all I knew, they were going out together already. Holding hands, snogging in the park . . . But then, if that were true, why had they come for me that night? Three’s a crowd.

  I could call John and he’d give Mia’s number to me, but I would have to pay for it. Not in money. He had plenty of that. But in other less substantial currencies. And I wouldn’t hear the end of it. ‘Did she say no, Nick? Was she gentle with you? Did she laugh?’ I didn’t want John as an audience to this any more than I wanted Mother listening in the background. No, it had to be Elton.

  Elton’s comprehensive had the Wednesday off that week; Founder’s Day, or something. I told Mother I was too sick for school, but not sick enough to stay in bed. She let me stay home and went to teach science to her current crop of students in the vague hope that, this year, at least one or two of them would make it into university. I’d never really understood why she had decided to teach. She wasn’t what you’d call a people person any more than I was. I understood the choice of the sciences, though. It wasn’t a subject traditionally sold through the warmth of the teacher’s personality or their passion for the material.

  She let me stay home with a defeated kind of air, where once she would have encouraged me to try to study and spoken of upcoming exams. Watching her leave and walk into the street it suddenly struck me quite how hard all of this must be for her. And, at the same time, I knew that Demus must have understood this thing for many years. Widowed by cancer, her only child struck down with another flavour of the same disease. It’s always been hard for me to see myself through others’ eyes, but I suppose that seeing Demus helped with that. Normally, just being fifteen wholly occupied my mind. The baby crawling toward the camera in the photo albums, the toddler with his bear and a red plastic car, that string of little Nicks linking this gangling teenager to the moment of my birth . . . none of that had shelf room in my thoughts. But Mother must see those children queued behind me every time she looked my way. And all of us were at risk.

  I guess if either Mother or I had been a little less awkward in our skins, a little more Elton and a little less Simon, we would have been able to talk, to hug, to do the right thing and make all of this mess a little less terrible. But we weren’t born like that, and couldn’t.

  I found myself hoping very much that Demus had found something useful to say to Mother that first night in the hospital corridor. From where he stood, she was of similar age. Perhaps in his future she was dead already, and he carried that around with him. My eyes misted and I realised that there was at least one thing about the future I didn’t want to know. It would be enough to know that he’d found the words I couldn’t and said something to help.

  I took my bike from the shed and cycled to Elton’s house. I may have wobbled a little and ignored the odd traffic light, but oddly cycling was less painful than walking, and a hell of a lot quicker.

  Elton lived two miles away on the far side of Richmond Park. His flat was about halfway along the line that joined the gentrified heart of Richmond, with its stockbroker mansions and well-heeled townhouse terraces, to the concrete jungle of Brixton. During the Brixton riots last autumn – the second set of riots within four years in that area – you could see the smoke from Elton’s window. A month later, they had another riot north of the river in Tottenham, and tried to stick a policeman’s head on a pole. I’d asked Elton what he thought of it. He just shook his head. ‘Nothing to do with me. That’s Jamaicans, man. Is ten thousand miles from Jamaica to Madagascar.’

  I’d considered saying the arguments behind the violence might have had more to do with the colour of people’s skin rather than where that skin sailed to England from, but I didn’t. The truth was I didn’t know anything about it really. Not even what Elton and his family went through. And according to John it wasn’t good. So, I shut my mouth.

  When I pulled up, Elton was outside the block eating rice and chillies from a bowl. He always seemed to eat outside, unless it was raining. Cold, though, not a problem. He’d stroll back and forth along the strip of dying grass that ran between the flats and the low wall to the street. In the summer, other kids would lean out from their windows to chat. They all knew him. It seemed odd to me that Elton spent so much time learning to fight when he was the person least likely, out of anyone I knew, to have to. People just liked him.

  The blocks were four storeys high, and sometimes when the little kids called to him, Elton would climb up the outside Spider-Man style to say hello. He had fingers like steel rods and zero fear of heights.

  He saw me as I chained my bike to the gatepost and came across frowning. ‘That won’t last. Gotta bring it in.’

  ‘Your place? Won’t your mum mind?’ The idea of cramming my bike into their tiny hallway worried me, muddy wheels on Mrs Arnot’s linoleum. The woman was fiercely house proud, endlessly kind, and I lived in terror of her disapproval.

  ‘She’ll mind more if I have to chase down whoever takes it.’ Elton nodded me toward their door. ‘It’s not locked.’

  I took the bike in, leaning it against the radiator. The hallway was dim, the wall-space crowded with little knickknacks. The sort of comfortable clutter I always hankered after. Though Mother would never entertain that sort of thing on the empty magnolia acres of her walls. I breathed the place in. There was always something cooking, and it always smelled good. The TV burbled in the living room. Elton’s brothers would probably be in there, maybe all four jammed on the sofa, watching a martial arts film on their Betamax.

  Elton still had his frown when I came out again. He offered me his bowl.

  ‘Hot?’ I asked.

  ‘A bit spicy.’ I could see a light sheen of sweat on his brow despite the January chill.

  ‘Best not.’ I grinned. When Elton called something spicy it meant it would remove the skin from most other people’s tongue. Everything smelled good at the Arnots’ house, but you took your life in your hands if you put it in your mouth without a taste t
est first.

  ‘I’m not happy with you,’ Elton said.

  ‘Me?’ It was the last thing I was expecting to hear. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Mia.’ Elton narrowed his stare and took another spoon of rice.

  ‘What?’

  Elton ringed his left eye with finger and thumb.

  I realised he meant the black eye Mia had at the last session. ‘Me? You don’t think—’

  ‘I know you didn’t hit her, moron.’ He scraped up the last of the bowl’s contents.

  ‘What then? Who did hit her?’ I’d been wanting to ask on Saturday, but never got the chance.

  ‘I’m not happy with John, either,’ Elton said.

  ‘John didn’t do that.’ I couldn’t believe it of him.

  Elton waved the idea away. ‘Both of you been getting her back with the wrong people. Dangerous people, Nick. A punch don’t make no never mind. Those folk will cut you over nothing. Push them and you’ll turn up on a missing person’s list. These guys will wrap you in bin bags and sink you in the river. I ain’t kidding.’

  ‘But . . .’ I raised my palms. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There’s good places to get a bit of weed, Nick, and there’s bad places. The people Mia knows are too far up the chain. Smart money pays a little more and buys off a local pothead, way down the chain. Mia’s dealing with Sacks, and getting store credit.’ Elton shook his head as if this was madness of the worst sort. ‘And don’t say that name to anyone.’

  ‘I . . . I didn’t know.’ I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. I’d never heard of a ‘Sacks’.

  ‘Well, now you know.’ Elton nodded. ‘She’s a nice person. Do her a favour and tell her you got another source. This ain’t her thing, man. Girl’s just trying to impress you.’

  ‘Me?’ I gave a hollow laugh and pulled off my hat. ‘Really?’