by Debbie Moon
He tossed his head, blond fringe flopping in a manner that was probably supposed to be sexy and commanding. He looked plumper, and there was a slight scar on one temple that hadn’t been there before. Future-Schrader? she wondered absently. Or uber-Schrader, the sum total of all Schrader-ness from all periods of his life?
‘I should have told you what you were,’ he admitted, without making much of an effort to sound remorseful. ‘But then we didn’t know ourselves until fairly –’
Swallowing bile, Jude retorted, ‘Until you threw me out of a window, you mean?’
He spread his hands in half-hearted apology. ‘Now, now, Jude. What’s a little defenestration between friends?’
She was too winded – or too worried – to find a come-back line. Instead, she stepped back to take a real look around to supplement the quick scan for danger she’d taken as she entered.
It wasn’t a big operation. Or particularly well-equipped. You didn’t have to be an expert to tell that. But it was definitely a gene lab. Big refrigerators labelled with typed notes, names and dates. Centrifuge, microscope, analysis machines of some kind. A little neat for the white heat of scientific progress, surfaces dull with a layer of dust. No one had worked down here for a while; maybe even before the raid this week.
He must still have the notes; the potential, at least. Or they wouldn’t be here.
‘Oh hell,’ Martin sighed, jolting down the stairs behind her. ‘How did all you people get in here?’
Jude glanced back at him, deadpan. ‘I hate to say “I told you so”, but…’
He shook his head. Clinging to rational explanations. ‘If you’re the police, I surrender. If you’re another hallucination, then remind me to engineer a cut-off time into my next batch of dope, and go back to hell where you belong.’
‘Get him down here,’ Schrader said, without even looking at him.
Little Miss Prim smiled, tilting her hips a little in invitation, and beckoned him further into the lab.
‘Run,’ Jude told him. ‘Now.’
He wouldn’t. She knew that. Not with everything he cared about down here, vulnerable to these hallucinatory strangers. But she said it anyway.
Martin looked from her to Schrader and back, and slouched down the last two steps into the lab.
‘You people, right,’ he said, after clearing his throat. ‘I know my Freud. You’re some kind of manifestation of my inner paranoia, aren’t you?’
‘Actually,’ Jude told him, ‘these delightful people are what’s going to happen if you don’t complete the research you’re doing here.’
Schrader blinked, a ‘Didn’t you get that the wrong way round?’ look crumpling his mouth, narrowing his eyes. But then, he never had been smart.
Martin frowned too. To give him his due, he was very good at it. ‘It’s too hard,’ he slurred. ‘These days. No money. Got raided last week. They didn’t find the good stuff, but the harassment, you know? And too much dope, I guess. It’s just too hard.’
‘I know,’ Jude murmured. Though she didn’t, not really. ‘I know. But what you’re doing here is very important. World-changing. I think you know that.’
‘Sure,’ DiFlorian said. ‘If you’re a body purist. A fascist by any other name. If you want a world where everyone’s the same, everyone’s “perfect” –but by whose definition?’
‘Yours, I presume. If you get control of biotech at its earliest stages, only give it to those you consider fit. Or unfit.’ Anger flared in Jude, fed by garbled memories of late nights in Club Andro, strange and ecstatic creatures flitting in the shadows. ‘And you say I’m a fascist. What are your parameters going to be? Who deserves biotech, in your brave new world? And who’s going to get it, whether they want it or not?’
Schrader tossed his head. He probably wasn’t used to being disagreed with. ‘The alternative is the world we grew up in. A world where everyone has to follow fashion. Obsessed by the skin-deep. Everyone has to have the latest body, the latest face. Is that right, or fair? You were lucky, Jude, you look pretty much okay even without bioteching –’
‘You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you?’
‘But what if you didn’t match up to the accepted norm? Imagine the pressure. The whispers. Isn’t it better to keep biotech for the sick and the diseased, the ones who really need it, than to allow criminals to coin new identities –’
‘Sheesh,’ Martin muttered, following the conversation round the room with those wide, startled eyes. ‘I’m hallucinating ethical philosophy.’
‘Yeah,’ Little Miss growled. ‘You should really take a holiday.’
Jude shook her head. ‘You don’t give a damn about anyone but yourselves and your bloody superhuman powers. The only people you’d be “keeping” the technology for are yourselves. And what you need,’ to Martin, backing unsteadily up the steps now, ‘isn’t a holiday. You need to carry on where you left off. Finish the research, distribute it as widely as you can. Share the secret. They’ll rip you off, and you will get pretty bitter about that – but you were never that interested in big business anyway. You just want to change the world. And that’s exactly what you’re going to do.’
You’re going to give me a little time with the woman I love, who wouldn’t be a woman at all if it wasn’t for your dope-filled experimentation. A little time being better than no time.
Which is about what I have left here.
Schrader took a step forward. ‘It’s unfortunate, Jude, but we just can’t allow that to happen.’
She returned his stare. ‘Well, yes, Schrader. That is unfortunate.’
Mainly because I have no idea how to stop you.
I should never have listened to Warner, that’s for sure. Should have joined the Ferrymen while I had the chance. Moved in with mummy dearest and started imagining towers into existence. Should have stayed Adrift.
Of course. And how did I end up Adrift in the first place?
I died. My physical body died.
‘Martin. Why don’t you wait upstairs for a moment? Let me and the Hitler Youth here sort this out between ourselves.’
Miss Handbag blew air through her teeth. ‘There’s no need for that sort of association. GenoBond has no racial or –’
‘Now, Martin.’
Blinking in panic, he backed up the last two steps and closed the door on them. The click of the latch echoed strangely off the tiled walls, the glistening metal cabinets.
Schrader regarded her sourly across the heaps of jumbled equipment. ‘If he makes a run for it while we’re down here…’
‘Fat Boy’s not going anywhere,’ DiFlorian muttered. ‘His whole life’s work is here.’
Jude turned her attention to the bench in front of her.
Yeah, I really should have paid more attention in Chemistry, too. When I get all this over with, I’m going back to evening classes, to patch up all these irritating little holes in my education. It’s not like I won’t have the time, because, after all, I won’t have a job after I break Mr Warner’s nose…
Little Miss Handbag was looking at her. ‘Let me get this straight. You want to work things out?’
That flask there should do the trick. If she could only get to it.
‘Well, you know me. Always the accommodating type.’
Schrader pulled a face.
‘No, really. I mean, what’s the point? The way I see it, you people have everything worked out. Control bioteching, control people’s desires. No more nasty incidents with people convinced they’re a llama trapped in the body of a man. The way you see things, you’re making everybody happy, healthy and compliant to the New World Order.’
‘Jude –’
‘And that’s all very well.’ One more step; no, another, just be sure it was well within reach. ‘But the thing is –’
‘Stop.’
Schrader, abruptly still, frozen, his gaze fixed to her hand as she leaned forward, oh so casually, to rest against the bench. ‘Whatever you’re going to try, d
on’t.’
‘Sorry guys.’
Her fingers closed around the glass flask, flipping it up into the air. Little Miss was going for the ugly-looking revolver holstered under the arm, but it was too late for that. The flask clipped the edge of a ceiling beam and shattered, broken glass and fumes spiralling in an expanding cloud. Schrader, closest to her, fell back, choking. For a moment, he was there, reaching for her and also on the ground, clawing at his raw throat, spitting blood
And then the air conditioning kicked in, a long, laboured rattling that barely thinned the white and spiralling fumes. And the smoke of her burning, some garbled memory chimed in, goes up for ever and ever…
And she just stood there, listening to three people dying.
Not dying, really. I mean, they’re dead the same way I’m dead, and here I am, happy as a sandboy. Whatever a sandboy is. And they’re criminals, killers, I mean, how did I end up dead in the first place?
I’m still killing human beings.
I’m going to break a lot more than just Warner’s nose when I get home.
The air conditioning was making headway now, clearing a small and continually threatened space immediately below the out-take vent. For a moment, there was just the machinery hum.
Then DiFlorian stumbled forward into clean air, brushing ineffectually at the acid splashes on her sleeve. ‘That was so childish. I don’t know what you thought you’d achieve –’
‘Bang, bang,’ Jude said, finally allowing herself a smile. ‘You’re dead.’
It wasn’t a thing you could see, as such. It was more a feeling, an unconscious reading of tiny clues. The thinness, the fading, the brittle look in their eyes. The way they looked at each other, the widening of pupils, the terrible, laboured slowness of their realisation. Oh, and the way she could see right through the trailing edge of Miss Handbag’s skirt.
No wonder Doctor Gene’n’stein there thought we were hallucinations. We’re worse than that. We’re ghosts. Revenants. Beings caught outside their own time.
Tossing that overgrown fringe back out of his eyes, Schrader pushed DiFlorian aside and kept coming.
‘Time,’ he muttered, ‘to see if you really can kill the dead.’
Jude just smiled.
‘Don’t you feel it, Schrader?’
She could. Exactly as she’d felt it in the street, as she looked back at her own dead body. The swirling, the vertigo, the beginning of the end.
One moment Schrader was there, reaching for her; then the floor gave way beneath him, and he was falling.
Instinctively, Jude jumped back, cursing herself for not having anticipated the one small drawback to the plan. The fact that she, also being somewhat dead, might get sucked in too.
The wall was at her back, and, even if there’d been room to run, it wouldn’t have helped her. The whirlwind that had once been the floor was expanding too fast. Jagged fragments of time spinning like an exploding mirror, reflections still trapped behind the glass as it came apart. Sucking DiFlorian and Little Miss down like spiders in a bath tub, plucking at her toes, tugging at the hem of her jeans – and then vertigo engulfed her, and, for the last time, she was falling.
SIXTEEN
Adrift
It was going to end the way it had started.
Four ReTracers, all Adrift. All points of reference wiped by their deaths, each lost in the cracks between the moments of their lives. She’d been here before, of course, and found a way out. But it had been her life passing her by in fragments and glimpses, hers alone: now the flashes of time flickering past were the lives of strangers, the men and women trapped there cried out for people she’d never known, and she wasn’t sure her luck was going to hold.
The others were trying to save themselves, just as she’d done. Lunging and clutching at whatever passed, at the slivers of reality that danced between them like snowflakes, groping for the detritus of past and future, slashing their naked hands on the edges of time. Some of those lives flashing by were theirs. All they needed was the right moment to jump to, and they were safe.
Looking back, she saw DiFlorian catch a hold on the jagged edge of a place she didn’t even recognise, orange-skied and whirlwinded by dust. She looked into it like a mirror, just for a moment; then she had to accept that she didn’t belong there, and the fragment twisted from her hand and vanished into the dark.
It was a pity she was never going to get to report back to Warner, the bastard. He’d have loved this story. Well, Mr Warner, once I’d traced the minions of evil to the secret laboratory, I killed them – and then, as the laws of physics seem to require of dead ReTracers, we all ended up Adrift…
Maybe one day someone would realise that it wasn’t a mistake but a higher level, a short-cut through time, a new way to play the game. The game that Schrader and friends were playing – that she’d so recently learned – whether they realised it or not. A whole new level to be exploited, a whole new way to waste official time and money.
Not to mention your own. Spending your life going backwards, revising the opening chapters and forgetting to live the middle and the end. An evolutionary dead end.
I want to go home.
Even above the wind-rush, she could hear Miss Handbag swearing. Colourful vocabulary, bet she hadn’t learned that in the manicurist’s…
But she was way behind, way above, barely visible through the flicker of fragmented realities. She was irrelevant. It was Schrader who was the problem.
He was catching up with her.
Not that he was doing anything, physically, but this place didn’t seem to work by the normal rules. No, he was definitely accelerating, and any moment now…
Jude reached out and snatched at the jagged slice of time at her right hand. Solid. Cold. Flickering with trapped movement. A jumble of ferns and grey sky and women’s laughter. It would only take a moment’s concentration, a moment’s will, and she could tumble through it like Alice through the rabbit hole, thrown stunned and trembling into an alien world.
Not yet.
Averting her eyes from the shimmering summer’s day she held between forefinger and thumb, she hurled it at Schrader.
It smacked flat against his crooked knee and shattered, spilling shredded hysteria into the up-draught like shards of glass, bright and brittle. Several gashed his face on the way, but he only blinked away the blood – yellow blood, releasing the scent of roses and the cries of fledgling birds on a warm spring day – and reached for her.
She ducked. Grabbed another fragment out of the nothingness and hit him again. A fragment of pain and someone screaming abuse in a language she’d never heard before. Nice shot. Right in the chest. Must have hurt.
But he understood the game now. He lifted one hand, waiting for something to drift within reach. Then lunged at the next flicker of light, caught it, hurled it like a discus. Flames danced across its surface, and Jude knew instinctively that it wasn’t going to be a good place to end up, dead or undead.
She leant back into the airstream, and it hit a passing fragment before it hit her, shattering a pseudo-operatic chorus of monks in a shower of screams. Diamond-edged shrapnel flowered between them, pushing them apart. She drew her knees up to her chest, trying to make herself a smaller target. Schrader was shouting, curses ripped from his mouth by the wind, as he lunged, fingers clawing for her eyes.
Little Miss Handbag slammed into him from above. A tangle of legs, arms and immaculate stockings laddering under Schrader’s nails, pawing and scrambling like an erotic carving, locked together as they fell and fell and fell–
And, looking down, Jude saw the light and knew that they weren’t going to fall forever.
Schrader was screaming – screaming into the light, the nuclear-white thunderflash brilliance, and all she could think of was helicopters and music and the world in flames –
This is the end, beautiful friend, Warner, I’ll be back to haunt you, I swear –
No safety or surprise, the end, dying, finally, and still al
l my brain has to offer is old movies –
I’ll never look into your eyes…
Hurtling up at her out of the dark, a half-familiar face frowned concern at her from the brittle surface of a slice of time.
Again.
EPILOGUE
If she thought back, just a few seconds further, she ought to be able to remember the moment the bodies actually hit the ground.
Because there they were, only four paces away. Just a glimpse of splayed limbs and crushed torsos flowering blood onto a dirty pavement. People pressing in around it now, coming out of the office block foyer or peeling away from the kerbside stalls to gather and stare. Not move, not help; just stare. As if that was a valid response, as if their rapt attention was a necessary part of the process.
‘Mass executive suicide,’ one of the stallholders muttered, rolling his eyes theatrically to the iron-grey heavens. ‘For goodness’ sake. Thought we’d done with that when most of them moved out to the Hursts.’
‘And who’s responsible for the clearing-up?’ a man in a greasy apron growled. ‘I got a living to make. People don’t buy fajitas if they have to step over bodies to get to them.’
‘You could put ‘em all in the fillings,’ the woman at his elbow suggested, triggering a ripple of nervous laughter. ‘Seems a pity to waste them.’
Jude blinked.
What the hell am I doing here?
A thin trickle of blood ran from beneath an impact-scuffed leather handbag and down into the gutter beside her.
Didn’t that look familiar?
A hand fell on her shoulder and she turned. Remembering.
All of it. Warner, Miss Leather Shoes and Handbag, her mother and the tower, Little East Bankside, a hotel room, a river of death, a hole in time and always falling…
The young man with his hand on her shoulder took a step back, brown eyes widening. The eyes of the young man on the Ulti-Mall sliproad. The rest taller, broader across the shoulders, neatly honed in the way that only a new incarnation could be, before good living and bad living and living in general had screwed it up.