Million Eyes

by C. R. Berry

  She’d gone back in time, to a fairly distant past it would seem.

  Not ideal.

  She looked up, drawn by the familiar caw of seagulls.

  At least they weren’t pterodactyls.

  She reached inside the large front pocket of her hoody for the bottle of chronozine.

  Her hand touched the transcriber. Still there, still safe. Her phone was still there too. She dug past them – no bottle.

  Panic speared through her. “No, no, no, no.” Her eyes combed the ground. She couldn’t see it. She dived to her knees, scrabbling through dirt and grass and weeds. Nothing.

  She stood, spun round, returned to her knees and repeated the search she’d just done.

  “Shit, shit, SHIT!”

  Could it have fallen out of her pocket?

  When?

  Jennifer’s search was in vain. It wasn’t there. What now? She plunged her hand in her pocket, pulled out her phone instead. She wasn’t sure why, what it would achieve, but she did it anyway.

  The phone was dead. The screen wouldn’t turn on. She pressed every button she could. Nothing.

  “Aaaarrrrghhh!”

  A fierce caterwaul erupted from her throat and she hurled the phone forcefully at the nearest tree. Then she fell limply onto her back and stared up at the sky. Her stomach rolled, churned and convulsed and before long a fast torrent of vomit was snaking up her throat. She turned quickly onto her side and released it heavily into the grass.

  She was stuck here.

  Actually stuck here.

  Approaching hoofbeats jolted her. She lifted stiffly onto her elbows. Two dark brown horses, ridden by silver men, cantered towards her.

  She’d risen to her feet by the time the horses scraped to a halt in front of her. Both riders wore boots, stockings, knee-length skirts of silver chainmail, and pointed, dome-shaped helmets with protruding strips extending over their noses. They each carried a kite shield bearing different motifs, and a sword fastened at the waist by a leather belt.

  Knights. The ones Jennifer saw, right before she blacked out.

  The knight with a three-headed red dragon emblazoned on his shield looked her up and down and said something to the other, whose shield displayed a vulture inside a ring of fire. The words sounded French – she could gauge that much.

  The vulture knight responded.

  Definitely French.

  The Normans spoke French.

  If only she’d done French and not German at school.

  The dragon knight spoke again, signalling the vulture knight to dismount his horse. He approached her, glaring eyes probing her every curve. He circled her, leaned, smelled her hair. Then he grabbed the shoulder of her hoody roughly and rubbed the purple fabric between his fingertips.

  “Get your fucking hands off me,” she barked, pulling away.

  The vulture knight hissed a reply and yanked her back by her hood. He continued circling her, brushed his thick fingers over the thigh of her blue jeans. Another garment that would’ve looked super-strange to a Norman knight. Then he noticed the stains on the front of her hoody – Sarah’s blood – and his eyes narrowed.

  He inspected the large front pocket of her hoody, stuffing his hand inside and pulling out the transcriber.

  He raised it, gestured to his colleague, then babbled something in French. The dragon knight held out his hand and the vulture knight passed it to him.

  Should she run? Should she try to escape?

  It wasn’t like she could do anything with the transcriber anymore. They could keep it. That ship had sailed. The Queen was on her own.

  And while they were distracted looking at it, she could slip away…

  No, Jen. Don’t be an idiot. They’ll chase you. They have horses. And swords.

  She waited, watched as the dragon knight flicked through the book and, frowning, found the transcription on the opening pages.

  He showed the vulture knight. They wittered in French.

  The two knights huddled around the book and went silent. They seemed to be reading it, although Jennifer knew they wouldn’t be able to understand a word – it was all in Modern English, a language totally alien to two Norman knights.

  But then the dragon knight gasped. And the vulture knight’s face was rigid with the sort of horror you’d expect if he realised that the transcription was about murdering a future monarch of Britain.

  Except he couldn’t have realised it. Neither of them could. Why were they reacting?

  Jennifer watched as they continued reading. If they couldn’t understand the words they would’ve given up by now. And yet both their faces displayed the same pointed alarm that had probably seized her own features the first time she heard this heinous and treasonous plot being hatched.

  They did understand. But how?

  A moment later, the dragon knight shut the book and conversed with his colleague. Then the vulture knight faced her, grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly towards his horse, snarling something at her.

  “Wait – stop! Let go of me!” she hollered, yanking back.

  His grip was too strong. The dragon knight threw down a long rope, which the vulture knight used to tie her wrists.

  Realisation struck her in that moment.

  These two knights were probably about to take her to London and bring her before the king.

  She knew which king. William II. The king killed for a book. History was coming full circle and Jennifer was along for the ride. Was this really her destiny all along?

  She felt a twist of dread in her gut. They probably thought she was part of the plot. She urged, “Please, I’m nothing to do with this. I’m not one of them.” She wasn’t sure what she was hoping to achieve, given that neither of them understood her, nor she them.

  Then the vulture knight got right in her face and barked a string of ferocious-sounding words, his hot, stale breath wafting over her, a couple of beads of saliva hitting her nose and cheek. And though she spoke no French, certainly no 11th-century Norman French, one of the words he shouted was obvious: “Traître!” Traitor.

  The dragon knight kept hold of the transcriber. The vulture knight finished tying her wrists with the rope, then tied the other end to his saddle. He remounted and urged his horse into a walk – Jennifer had no choice but to follow or be dragged. The dragon knight brought up the rear, probably to keep an eye on her.

  They went north, away from the sea, towards London.

  She had to find a way to communicate. She needed to prove to William II that she was nothing to do with Million Eyes, or she was in for a rendezvous with the gallows.

  But then she wondered if that would be such a bad thing. She’d lost her mum, Jamie, Adam – and now Toasty. The girl she loved, murdered by someone she thought was her friend.

  She’d lost everything. Everything and everyone. And now she was stuck in this century forever.

  She started seeing flashes of Toasty’s face. Her dead stare. All that… blood. She wanted to be sick again. She gagged a couple of times, nothing came out. She had nothing left in her.

  So she just sobbed.

  30

  October 13th 2021

  Erica Morgan was in her office on the top floor of the gargantuan glass and concrete skyscraper that stood on Puttenham Lane in Central London, looking out of the window and blowing rings of cigarette smoke at the glass. Nicknamed the Looming Tower for its coarse, Brutalist architecture and intimidating appearance, the building had been Million Eyes’ corporate headquarters since 1998, thanks in part to a substantial investment from billionaire Arthur Pell, whose statue graced – or more aptly spoiled – the gardens at the front. A condition of the investment, this creepy eyesore was forged from solid eighteen-karat gold provided by Pell, or so everyone thought. In reality, Miss Morgan had used the gold to buy another building in the city, then had the statue constructed from bronze and gilded.

  Something was wrong. Miss Morgan hadn’t heard from her operatives in Brighton in twenty minutes. She th
umbed her silver Zippo lighter into life and lit cigarette nineteen of a twenty-pack she had opened less than two hours ago.

  She picked up her phone to call Susan Hicks, who was coordinating the operation to kill Victoria Moore and destroy the transcriber. As she did so, Hicks called her. Miss Morgan answered, “Jesus, Hicks, take your fucking time down there.”

  “Miss Morgan, you need to raise the Shield.”

  A pang of dread. “What?”

  “Ma’am, raise the Shield. Now.”

  Miss Morgan threw her phone down, tapped a few keys on her MEc and called the Time Travel Department. Deputy manager Rupert Whistler’s face appeared on screen.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Raise the Shield,” said Miss Morgan immediately.

  “But there aren’t any scheduled –”

  “Raise the Shield now!”

  “Y-yes, ma’am.” She saw Whistler nod to a couple of colleagues. A moment later, the main panel lights in Miss Morgan’s office dimmed and the red pyramid lamp at the centre of the ceiling came on, giving everything in the room a crimson tint. The lockdown light. There was one in every room. Its purpose was to tell all staff that the Shield was up and the building was sealed. Normally the Shield was raised during time travel assignments, protecting everyone inside from potential changes to history, while the purpose of the lockdown was to stop staff from leaving the building and getting absorbed into an alternate timeline.

  “Shield’s up, ma’am,” said Whistler.

  “Thank you.”

  “Can I ask wh – ?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know as soon as I do.”

  Miss Morgan ended the call and picked up her phone. “Hicks, you still there?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I’m afraid Victoria Moore has travelled back in time.”

  Suddenly this mess with Miss Moore had got a whole lot worse. “What! How?”

  “We were able to apprehend Miss Moore on the intersection of Marlborough Place and the Old Steine. But she had a bottle of chronozine. She took a pill before we got to her.”

  “Did she take the transcriber with her?”

  “I… think so.”

  “Damn it, Hicks! What’s her exact destination?”

  “1100. Juuulyyyy theeeeee…”

  Hicks’ words became strangely distorted. Miss Morgan yanked the phone from her ear and glanced at the display. The call was still connected, no sign of any signal interference.

  She returned the phone to her ear and heard, “Eeeeeaaaarrrr…”

  “Hicks? What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

  The call went dead.

  Before she could call back, the floor quaked, vibrations travelling up her chair to her rear, tickling their way to her fingers. Soft at first, the vibrations rose quickly and were soon drilling through the floor and walls with an almighty, ear-pummelling roar, as if the huge skyscraper was trying to shake free of its foundations. Miss Morgan’s chair shook violently – she braced her hands against the arms, teeth chattering, vision jittering. The lockdown light blinked, her laptop rocked across her desk and her mug skittered off the edge, smashing, cold coffee spilling across previously immaculate carpet tiles. Outside her office, yells and screams proliferated through the C-Suite.

  Then it stopped, just like that. The light stopped blinking. Everything was still – like nothing had happened.

  Oh no…

  She stood and bolted out of her office into the open-plan area of the C-Suite. There for the night shift were five executive assistants, her PA, Lara Driscoll, among them. Her chief technology officer, Juanita Salazar, was also there. She hadn’t actually been home in three days due to a big fuck-up in the Internet Services Department.

  All six of them were at the windows and staring, lips parted in horror, across night time London. Miss Morgan joined them.

  Jesus H. Christ.

  Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, normally beautifully aglow at this time of night, were gone. A smaller building stood in their place, cloaked in darkness. St James’s Park, Green Park and Hyde Park had been swamped by buildings, and Buckingham Palace had been replaced by a football stadium. On the other side of the Thames, the London Eye, County Hall and a dozen other buildings were missing, replaced by an illuminated parade of skyscrapers and an enormous bronze statue – taller than some of the skyscrapers – of a woman with the head of a frog who bore a close resemblance to the Ancient Egyptian goddess of childbirth, Heket.

  Miss Morgan pulled her gaze back to the immediate vicinity. The streets below, glimmering orange as they reflected the light from shops, restaurants, houses and cars, had moved and changed shape. And Miss Morgan’s favourite Starbucks on Puttenham Lane was now a topiary garden sparkling with fairy lights.

  The only welcome change, from what she could see, was that the statue of Arthur Pell had been replaced by a fountain.

  “Miss Morgan, this is bad,” said Juanita Salazar quietly. “How could this have happened?”

  Miss Morgan looked around at her employees. The executive assistants were back at their desks, some tapping away at their MEcs, others making calls on their personal phones. She heard Melanie Cox shout into hers, “Damn it, it’s me. You know who I am. I’m your fiancé!”

  Then she heard Anthony Graves shout into his phone, “Pick up the fucking phone!”

  This had never happened before. Not on this scale, anyway.

  Thank God for the Shield.

  Miss Morgan projected over the jangle of shrill, panicked chatter, “Everyone, could I have your attention. Put down your phones and listen.”

  They did as asked and stared at her, features stiff with dread.

  “I want you all to calm down,” she said. “Look around. We’re okay. We’re all still here. The Shield is holding and whatever’s happened to the timeline will have no effect on us while we remain in the building. Which means we can fix this. Alright?”

  A few uncertain nods.

  “Alright. Miss Cox, send a message to all departments. Let them know that we’re handling this.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She stepped closer to Lara Driscoll’s desk. “Miss Driscoll, call Rupert Whistler in Time Travel and tell him to initiate a sensor sweep. I want a full report on the changes. I also want to know the status of the Shield and who else is on duty down there.”

  “Already done, ma’am,” said Driscoll.

  Not a surprise. While the others had families and friends they might’ve lost, Lara Driscoll – a former detective chief inspector – had none. It was useful, actually. Her lack of emotional ties meant she was always on task and never lost her cool in a crisis.

  “Asha Wilkins, James Rawling, Parker Scott, Sheila Ruben and Robert Skinner are all on duty tonight,” said Driscoll.

  Miss Morgan nodded. “Okay. Good.”

  “But they can’t initiate a sensor sweep. Whistler says there’s never been a temporal incursion of this magnitude and it’s overloaded the sensor grid.”

  A few of the staff overheard. Melanie Cox shouted, “What does that mean?”

  Miss Morgan replied calmly, “It means we can’t tell exactly what changes have occurred beyond looking out the windows. But don’t panic, because I’m pretty sure I know what caused this.”

  “Ma’am, there’s something else,” said Driscoll. “The Shield. Whistler says that, due to the scale of the incursion, the Shield’s using up a lot more energy than normal to protect us from it. Which means it won’t hold for long.”

  “What?” Melanie Cox’s piercing voice once again. “The Shield’s gonna fail?”

  “Miss Cox, calm down,” said Miss Morgan. “That’s not what she said.” Looking at Driscoll, “How long do we have?”

  “Six hours. Max.”

  That wasn’t a lot of time. It would have to do. “Plenty of time,” she fudged for the sake of morale and Melanie Cox’s blood pressure. “Now, what do we have on
Victoria Moore?”

  Still earwigging like a champ, Melanie Cox piped up, “Did she cause this?”

  “Miss Cox, why don’t you concentrate on what you’re doing and let me handle this?”

  Cox retrained her worried eyes on her screen.

  Driscoll answered, “I did some digging before the incursion. It turns out we’ve had a run-in with Victoria Moore before. She changed her name to Victoria Moore two years ago, but she used to be Jennifer Larson.”

  “The girl who was working with Gregory Ferro? The one Robert Skinner was supposed to have killed?”

  “Same night he killed Ferro, yes.”

  Miss Morgan dug her fingernails into her palms. She could see that Melanie Cox was trying not to react. “Can you access her file?”

  “I’m afraid not. I was just about to retrieve it when the incursion happened. It’s disrupted our access to the cloud.”

  “What about the paper file?” Million Eyes always kept paper files as back-ups, in case something like this happened, though the archives were bursting at the seams and discussions were ongoing on what to do about it.

  Driscoll looked uncomfortable – more bad news. “It’s… been misfiled.”

  Great. There was no way they’d be able to find a misplaced file in their labyrinthine and overflowing archives in six hours. So much for their back-up system.

  “What about the paper file for Gregory Ferro?”

  Driscoll’s cheeks reddened. “I’m afraid we can’t find that one either.”

  Miss Morgan smashed her palm against the nearest desk, which happened to be Melanie Cox’s. The anxious analyst nearly jumped out of her skin.

  Sucking in a breath, Miss Morgan said to Driscoll, “Skinner’s working the night shift, isn’t he.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Get him up here – now.”

  31

  Robert Skinner had no idea why he was the one being summoned to Miss Morgan’s office after such an enormous temporal incursion. He was only promoted to the Time Travel Department two months ago. Why not James Rawling?

  When he exited the lift into the C-Suite, all the night shift staff were looking at him gravely. A couple of the executive assistants even shook their heads at him.