“Maybe they’re just less theatrical, or less compassionate, than the last mob,” Varya shrugged. “And the connection to me, what do you make of that?”
“Like I said, possibly just coincidence. You said, yourself, that you’ve been incognito these past years. Nobody mentions you in the media anymore, nobody at the research facility knows who you really are.”
“Unless somebody found out.”
Sebastian sighed. “Yes, unless somebody found out. But Varya, I think you’re being a little paranoid, aren’t you?”
She glared at him then. He hung his head a little and took a swig from his glass.
“I’m tired,” she announced.
Sebastian nodded. “Of course, it’s late. I could do with some rest myself.” He stood and placed the glass on the little table next to the couch. “I’ll see myself out.”
“Let me know if there are any developments,” she called after him.
He turned on his heel. “I’ll call Connor?”
She shook her head. “You have my number.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, then. Good-bye,” she prompted, when he didn’t move.
As soon as the door clicked shut, she stood to refill her glass. She stared towards the spare room, where she knew Elena would be dosing Kir with Entiac to get eight hours of daily peace. As she sipped her third drink, she decided that she would use her own magic potion to get her eight hours tonight. The time tabs were a vice she wouldn’t readily give up. She made a note to avoid telling Sebastian about them, even if she had to come clean about other things. For now, she needed to just wallow a little in her own guilt.
Chapter forty-five
Elena
This time when I give Kir his Entiac I measure out a dose for this newcomer Daniel as well. We have little to say to each other and it is too much to ask him to stay in his room for eight hours at a time, doing nothing. He is still a child. He does not yet know how to fill the expansive hours. He seems relieved when I offer him a small plastic cup of liquid, just the right amount fuller than Kir’s.
I tuck them both into their beds, leaving Kir’s door open so I can hear if I need to go to him again. I sit in my comfortable chair and I count to one thousand. Then I steel myself and stand. My Varya has not visited as she should this evening. She is avoiding us. But she needs to know about Kir. She has been avoiding the inevitable for too long. It’s time for her to face it. Though I know I don’t need to, I hold my breath as I walk through the shimmering curtain.
Chapter forty-six
Varya
Varya was unsteady on her feet as she placed the two empty crystal glasses in the sink and reached for the top cabinet. Two paracetamols for her headache and two time tabs for her fatigue. As she placed the boxes on the counter, she heard a faint sizzling, followed by footsteps. She turned, her heart beating.
“Mama!” Varya stacked the paracetamol on top of the time tab case, guiltily hoping her mother didn’t notice. “Mama, what are you doing?” Alarm replaced the guilt as she glanced at the clock on the wall. “You don’t have much time left on your Chip.” She walked forward and tried to turn her mother around, to return her to the safety of the Time Lock. Elena sidestepped her daughter and drew herself up to face her. Her several inches less of height did nothing to diminish her authority.
“Then I’ve got plenty of time to talk some sense into my daughter.”
Elena pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down heavily. She nodded to the chair opposite her. Varya lowered herself into it obediently.
“What is it, Mama? What’s happened?”
“Kir has had another seizure.” She said it quietly and calmly but Varya shot up out of her seat and scrambled toward the door. Elena put her arm out to block the doorway. “He’s okay for now; he’s asleep.” She pointed at the chair this time. “Sit.”
Varya sat but turned to the side, her weight on the balls of her feet, ready to leap up again at any moment.
“I may not be a fancy scientist like you, but I know a thing or two about life. And that, in there…” Elena poked a finger towards the Time Lock. “That is no life for a child.” She let this sink in for a moment. “He needs other children to play with, wind on his face, music in his ears. A frozen second lasting for many years, this is no life for anyone. This isn’t a life at all.”
Varya sat, fidgeting and gazing longingly at the doorway. “You don’t want to look after him anymore,” she said softly, without turning. “Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll get someone else. Zoe has offered. She can look after them both. If you…”
Elena slapped her palm on the table. Varya flinched.
“Don’t you dare misunderstand me, girl. You know that I would do anything for that little boy. I have done everything for our Kir.” She sighed, sorrow outweighing her anger. “But I’m not sure that you’re doing everything you can do.”
“I’m trying, Mama. I really am.”
“Have you asked him yet?”
Varya stilled. She wondered, if she stopped breathing altogether, whether her mother would go away and stop torturing her. It was much easier when she thought of the Time Lock as a one-way door. Varya could leave whenever she wanted to, and her mother could not follow her.
“Soon. I will ask him soon. I just need a little more time, there have been a few complications…”
“Sweetheart, you’re not listening to me,” Elena said, this time with tears in her eyes. “Our little boy doesn’t have much more time to spare. You need to make a decision.”
“While he’s alive there’s still hope.”
“While he’s alive he’s suffering and he’s afraid, my dear girl. And by refusing to ask for help you’re making him suffer even more,” she said gently. “Either face his mortality bravely and comfort him at the end or play your final cards now. Otherwise he’ll be gone, and you won’t have a chance to say goodbye.”
Varya nodded and swallowed, blinking rapidly.
“The time thieves are back, Mama.” She turned to show her face—and with it the full depth of her fear and grief—to her mother. “It’s all my fault and I have to fix it. I have to fix it first before I can get help for Kir. Then, I promise, I’ll ask Sebastian for help.”
Elena nodded too, wanting so fiercely to believe her daughter’s words. Knowing that her daughter barely believed them herself.
“I’m sorry, my Varya. I know that you feel like you’re to blame for what these evil people do to children. And you believe that Kir’s illness is your fault. But just remember this: you are not the all-powerful God. You cannot take responsibility for such things. You are not the sun around which everything revolves. But you are Kir’s sun, and he wants his Mama to be with him very much.”
Elena glanced at the clock. Varya followed her gaze.
“I’ll get some medicine to try to stop the seizures for a while. Zoe will help, I’m sure. You go back to the Time Lock now, and keep yourself safe as well,” said Varya.
Elena stood and held out her arms to Varya. Varya walked forward and allowed herself to be enfolded for the second time that night. This time she found a sense of peace she hadn’t with Sebastian. Her mother knew all her faults and all her secrets. She couldn’t hide anything from her, not really, unlike Sebastian. Elena moved back and held Varya at arm’s length. She looked at her for a moment, then shook her slightly.
“When this is all over, when you’ve cured our Kir, you’ll need to find a way to let me go, too. Remember that.”
Varya nodded and smiled weakly. “Not yet though, Mama. Not yet.”
“Soon.”
Varya waited for the tell-tale sizzle that let her know her mother was safely back in suspended animation. Then she walked over to claim her tablets and her time tabs and went to bed.
Chapter forty-seven
Daniel
The Entiac was enough to make him drowsy but, try as he might, for what felt like many hours, Daniel just couldn’t seem to fall asleep. His head felt heavy and fuzzy and his li
mbs were like lead. He considered getting up again, asking Elena for a higher dose, but the thought of getting out of bed was too exhausting. He was certain he’d just fall on the floor if he tried. He wondered if this ever happened to Kir, or whether the dose was more accurately calibrated for his small body. He wondered what went on in the younger boy’s head each day that he was stuck in here, whether he wanted to get out and go home. Or maybe this was home. After all, he was just a little kid, he didn’t know any different.
But the way he’d stood looking at the Time Lock’s portal, after Varya went back through it. Shoulders slumped, head still. It was as if a switch had been flicked in the small boy. Daniel had stood in his bedroom doorway, watching him, unsure if he should call out to him or go to him.
“Kir?” he tried softly. “Kir, you okay?”
Kir’s only response was to sink down onto the carpet, crossing his legs and settling in, never once taking his eyes off the shimmering curtain. Was he really waiting for his mother to come back so soon?
“Come away from there, Kir,” Elena called from the kitchen.
Daniel stepped back into his bedroom, afraid to be caught staring. But Elena hadn’t come.
“She’ll be back again soon enough; you know she will. Come and have something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry!” Kir shouted.
Daniel took one last peek at Kir, then crept down the hallway to the kitchen. He sat down at the table, watching Elena prepare the food that Marisa had brought for them. Tomatoes, cheese, and whole wheat bread.
“Is Kir okay?” he’d asked.
Elena turned to look at him briefly, frowning in surprise, as though she’d forgotten he’d remained in the apartment. She turned back to slicing the tomato, sawing thin segments directly onto the bread. Daniel noticed she only had two sandwiches set up on the board. She glanced at him again and reached for more bread. A slice of cheese on top of each collection of tomato, then she closed the sandwiches and plated them up.
“Kir misses his mother.” Elena sighed heavily as she balanced all three plates in her hands and placed them on the table. “It’s good that you’re here. Good for him, I mean.” She flicked her head towards the hallway. “Bad for you, obviously. But good for him. He will miss you, too, when you leave.”
“But he’ll leave too, one day, won’t he?”
“Maybe he will. But maybe not. It all depends on what his mother decides.” Elena seemed to speak to herself as much as Daniel. “He needs other children; he needs to live in the world. But his mother, she has trouble accepting the cruelty of the true world. She refuses to let the universe run its course, thinking she can always intervene to change the path of fate.”
“She seems to be pretty good at intervening so far,” said Daniel.
Elena glared at him. “Kir! Come and eat your sandwich! Right now!”
Kir’s stomping footsteps approached down the short hallway. He stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. After a moment he stood on his tiptoes so he could see over the back of the chair, to find out what was on his plate.
“I don’t like tomato,” he announced.
“Yes, you do. You had it yesterday and you loved it,” said Elena. “Now sit down and eat.”
“I don’t like tomato!” he shouted, punching his fists downwards and lifting his chin. He advanced on the plate then, shouting alternately, “I don’t like tomato!” and “I don’t like you!” Elena sat silently as the little boy picked up each sandwich quarter and flung it at the wall. Finally, he picked up the plate, hurled it on the floor and jumped on it.
“Are you done?” asked Elena, her lips pursed.
Kir flopped to the floor and started to sob, his shoulders heaving, struggling for breath.
Elena calmly stood and went to him, patted his head, and murmured into his ear before retrieving the sandwich pieces and putting them on a fresh plate on the table. She lifted Kir onto his chair where he sat, hunched over his sandwich, not eating.
Daniel had lost his appetite, too, though he ate mechanically so as not to attract attention to himself. This wasn’t a happy place. And Kir wasn’t a happy boy.
In his bed, he rolled over to face the wall and lazily pried his eyes open to look up at the print which adorned it. A wide, thin black and white printed photograph of a long, old-fashioned pier stretching off into the distance.
Kir had cheered up a little as the day went on and they’d headed outside for some fresh air and a walk. Daniel had looked around and realised how much the same everything was. He thought he knew his own neighbourhood and that it was pretty boring. Nothing happened except that people went about their business every day.
But this frozen world didn’t even have that. In Daniel’s world, the balls were different shapes and colours some days. The teams of kids would swap and come out at different times on different days. People would get new cars or put dents in old ones. In Kir’s world, the children wore the same clothes and the same pose every day. The sun was always in the same position, the air was the same temperature, and the light made the same shadow patterns around the trees. The shadows didn’t even dance in the wind. The whole world was still.
Daniel heard the creak of floorboards as Elena paced down the hallway, away from his room and towards Kir’s. He waited a few beats before tracking the sound of her moving towards his own room. The door swished softly against the carpet as it opened. Daniel stayed very still until he heard the door close. Soon after, the warmth of the room, his own weariness, and the strength of the Entiac combined to finally lull his senses enough for him to slip into a synthetic sleep.
Chapter forty-eight
Varya
The prototype time transfer device that her team at the Minor Miracles Foundation had built looked almost identical to the one she had searched the archives of Rest Time Corps for, albeit a little rougher around the edges.
“Stand by, ready to test,” she warned.
Varya’s hands trembled slightly as she typed in the coded sequences that would trigger the transfer of ten days’ life span from Gamma mouse to Delta mouse. The mice twitched every now and then. They were sleeping, but still alive. They’d been dosed with a sedative to prevent them running about and shaking off the wires which attached them to one another.
This time it would work, she willed silently. She looked up at her colleagues peering into the side of the glass container before hitting enter on the keyboard. They all waited. Three minutes. That was the minimum amount of time that needed to lapse before they could re-test the life span of each mouse. For once, Varya wished she could speed up time rather than freeze it or slow it down. This was the eleventh live experiment in the past twenty-four hours. They were nearly there, though there had been problems getting the calibrations right. The first six experiments didn’t work at all; there was no change. The seventh and eighth resulted in drained span from one mouse but didn’t transfer it to the other. The ninth had killed both mice and the tenth had successfully transferred life span but had continued to drain the donor mouse entirely until it dropped dead. The recipient mouse was still happily running around its cage, and likely would be for quite some time.
“Ready?” asked Connor, holding a black wand-looking device aloft.
Varya nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
He tested the donor mouse first. Its life span was twenty-two days, ten fewer than it was three minutes ago. Varya breathed in sharply as he reset the scanner and moved it over the recipient mouse. The green numbers glowed – thirty-four days, exactly ten days extra. She blew air out in a great sigh and grinned. Connor grinned back then turned to face the other scientists who had crowded around to watch.
“Success!” he declared. A cheer went up. There were high-fives, back-slapping, and a sudden increase in chatter. Connor turned back to Varya. “You want to call Sebastian, or shall I?”
“It’s okay, I’ll call him.” She picked up her phone from a nearby desk and carried it out into the corridor, where there was rel
ative peace.
“Varya.” Sebastian answered immediately. She ignored the strained note in his voice.
We did it, she tried to say, but it caught in her tense throat. She took a breath and tried again. “We did it. The time transfer tech is ready.”
“That’s… that’s great. Thank you. That’s really great news.” He sounded distracted. Varya frowned.
“Sebastian? Is everything okay? Has another child been… has there been another abduction? Or…”
“We have a few leads, but we won’t need the scanner just yet. There’s been another body.”
Varya leaned heavily against the wall. “Oh, no.”
“You’d better bring it over here anyway, so it’s ready when needed. I won’t be here, but just leave it with…” his voice became muffled. Varya heard another male voice in the background. “Jonathon. Ask for Jonathon Wilde when you get here. Don’t entrust the tech to anyone else, okay?”
“Okay,” she replied hesitantly.
“Varya, this is important. Don’t trust anyone else. Only Jonathon. Got it?”
“Yes, Sebastian. I’ll leave now and bring it to Jonathon. I understand.”
“And Varya, are you sure you haven’t had any contact with Reg recently? None at all?”
“No. I already told you.”
“No calls, no texts, not even a friendly beer?”
“No, of course not. I know what ‘contact’ means, Sebastian. I haven’t heard from him or seen him since I left.”
“And nobody else has access to your apartment? Nobody else has a key?”
“It’s not key-operated. It’s coded to me only. And no, I haven’t given anyone else access.”
“Not even Marisa?”
“No, she has scheduled times she comes in, and always only when I’m there, although…” Varya trailed off, her scalp suddenly feeling tight and cold. “She hacked the system one time. Sort of as a joke. Met me inside the apartment. I got so angry at her; she’s never done it again.” Sebastian was silent. “Sebastian? Why does this matter? Is someone trying to break in there? Are they… I mean, am I in danger?” Varya’s mind raced, calculating the number of minutes it would take to get back to her apartment to check on the Time Lock.
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