Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  ‘But you lost Mia.’

  I winced at that. ‘Won’t happen again.’

  The thudding stopped suddenly. That’s what brought me back to it, back to the power station. Sometimes you only notice something when it’s gone.

  The running feet were silent, but there was still sound. A panting, gasping, almost sobbing. Hands rattling a door. ‘Open! Open!’ Eva’s voice. I was back to seeing the world through her eyes. Our connection had survived Demus’s death. It had been weakened, though. I couldn’t feel her exhaustion.

  A flash of torchlight back along the corridor. A man’s voice ringing out sing-song through the darkness between them. ‘Eva! Eva!’ Rust, drawing closer. ‘I won’t hurt you. I just want to know where the boy is.’

  Suddenly I was invested in the situation – not for myself; I doubted I’d live long enough for him to find me – but for my daughter. I’d like to think I’d care for anyone being pursued by a monster, but the fact that it was Eva pulled me out of the hole of my own defeat. If she could escape him she could stay here, decades away from the consequences of my failure. Live a life. Travel, love, party, do all the things I wanted for her, for both of us.

  ‘Eeeeeeva!’ Rust made a slow advance, either to terrorise her or because Demus’s bullets had slowed him down. He must have got Demus’s destination from the men who attacked him in London. Probably got the station floorplans from them, too. Knew the areas they would be taking control of.

  Claxons were ringing out. There would be police and security guards flooding the buildings. The army was probably on its way, too. But I doubted any of them would reach Eva quickly enough to save her from Rust.

  ‘I just want to know where our boy Nicky’s at.’ He was lying, though. He did want to hurt her. He couldn’t leave an angry time traveller on the loose. Those are hard to deal with, even for someone like Charles Rust. ‘Eva . . .’ Closer now. Too close.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ Eva managed to work the door bar and stumbled through into a long laboratory lined with workbenches. Acrid smoke hung in the air, thick enough to obscure the far end of the room. The time hammer appeared to have knocked out the power station’s lights, but the laboratory lay illuminated by an unworldly blue glow hazing through the smoke. The quality of the light wasn’t unlike that from the Cherenkov radiation bathing the reactor room.

  Eva covered her nose and mouth with her arm and hurried towards the source of the glow. Demus’s two techs had been busy before they ran. A ring of eight large electromagnets had been constructed on the floor at the far end of the room. Each one must have required a strong man and a lifting trolley to move. The main power line was thicker than my leg. The insulation had burned away from the metal. Here and there the copper had melted into gleaming puddles. A forest of cables snaked from each magnet, linking them to a bank of computer terminals, some still smoking slightly, that lined the nearest bench. During the power surge needed to strike the time hammer’s blow, the equipment before us had siphoned some of the current to drive an energy spike back through the past. The net result shimmered in the space between the magnets. A dancing blue fracture in time. Whatever Eva had done was very different to the solutions I envisioned for time travel, but there are many ways to crack a nut, and doubtless hers was cleverer than mine.

  ‘Got you!’ Rust lunged out of the dark doorway, catching Eva’s shoulder in a pincer grip.

  Somehow she twisted away to leave him holding just her jacket.

  ‘Run!’ I shouted voicelessly.

  Eva ran.

  Rust roared in fury and limped after her at a frightening speed. ‘You’re mine now, bitch! And I’m going to—’

  But she was through. Gone. Leaving only blackness behind her.

  I saw daylight, a grey sky. Eva stood up, checked herself. Under the jacket she’d sacrificed to escape she had on a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ . . . a favourite food in the new millennium? Quite how she had managed to bring clothes through the time fracture when Demus had to arrive naked after each jump I wasn’t sure, but I was glad she’d cracked it.

  ‘Quickly . . .’ she muttered, pressing fingers along her cheekbone as if she were typing something. I saw goosebumps on her arm. Wherever we were, it was cold. A near-deserted city street . . . It looked a little familiar. Without warning, a glowing map overwrote her vision, a green dot pulsing at its centre. She had implanted technology! I was very impressed both by the tech and by how she hadn’t boasted about it before. ‘Come on . . .’ A red dot began to appear on the map close to the blue one. A legend flashed: ‘Warning: temporal anomalies.’

  ‘Crap, that was fast.’ Up and down the street the wind swirled in curious eddies, raising litter into dirty miniature tornados. The nearest one collapsed, and suddenly a glassy replica Eva was running at her. My Eva turned and fled.

  All along the street, replica Evas started to give chase. Some kind of defence mechanism the universe employed against paradox, maybe . . . Like antibodies created against an invading virus. Natural consequences of the energy gradient she would create when she did whatever it was she was going to do back in the past.

  Eva rounded the corner, and on the display overlaying her vision we both saw a blue dot begin to pulse just a few blocks away. A helpful line joined Eva’s green dot to the blue one, mapping a path through the streets ahead.

  Eva sprinted, gaining a lead, but as the yards went by in their dozens, then scores, then hundreds, her breath started to grow ragged, her stride uneven. Glancing back at the next corner she saw that her pursuers seemed untroubled by issues of stamina and were closing the gap rapidly. And at the rear of the ten or so giving chase came a large tornado. Like the replicas, it was glassy and hard to see, merely rattling the trees as if in premonition instead of ripping them from the ground. But even as she watched, it spat out yet another replica.

  On the overlay, the blue dot had begun to blink as if it might not stay for long. With a sob of frustration, Eva lurched around the corner into the next road. Whatever the blue dot was, it lay halfway down this residential street lined with tall townhouses. I could see nothing unusual ahead of us, though.

  Eva broke into a sprint that she wouldn’t be able to maintain for very long at all. The green and blue dots practically touched and still nothing . . .

  Then suddenly there I was. Me and John, strolling down the street without a care in the world, both of us in school uniform. This was Cambridge. This was that February day we both skived off and came to see Halligan!

  On wobbling legs, Eva practically crashed into me. I gave her a gormless stare as she grabbed my arms.

  Streetlights flared and died all around us. The headlights of cars, the lighting inside the houses to either side, too. I’d noticed none of it the first time. Somehow my daughter had filled my vision.

  ‘Nick, help me.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘Keep them off me,’ Eva panted. She hauled a large and peculiar key from her trouser pocket, then stumbled up the steps to the door of the townhouse just beyond John and me. Already I was moving forward to intercept the things chasing her. I hadn’t known why I did that. But of course I would. She was my daughter. Helen’s baby. I would lie down in traffic if she needed me to.

  Eva struggled with the key in the door, some kind of lock pick, though where and why she had learned to use it I had no idea. Within fifteen seconds she was through while I lay convulsing in the street behind her. She didn’t spare me a glance, but I guessed she already knew I’d be fine afterwards. Well, fine-ish. Actually, truth be told, my acting as a lightning rod for what was following her was probably the reason for all the subsequent freak accidents and weird coincidences. A second Rust brother on my case, for instance. Or Waugh and his friends busy kicking me to death. Still, I didn’t hold it against her. I just wanted her to escape and be safe and happy. I guess that’s what any father wants for their child.

  ‘Thank you!’ Eva burst through the front door into a tiled hall. Blue
light flooded from a doorway at the end of the hallway and an old man in a dressing gown stood bewildered, staring at the source. Eva barged past him and through into what turned out to be the kitchen. And there it was, a fierce blue fracture in time, barely wide enough to admit her and standing ragged-edged before a shuddering washing machine. The washing machine seemed to have been driven into such overdrive by the power surge that it was actively vibrating itself out from under the counter and across the floor. If Eva didn’t win the race to the fracture, then a nearby spot some unknown number of months or years in the past would be receiving a brand new Zanussi washer!

  Eva fell through the fracture a heartbeat before the runaway appliance reached the spot, and was gone, sinking through a sea of yesterdays.

  After that I caught only flashes. One chase after another. A desperate race to reach the cracks that the time spike had driven back through the world’s history before they healed over and left her stranded in the wrong year.

  In between Eva’s pursuits, I caught fragmentary images of a night sky emblazoned with exploding stars. I thought at first I might be seeing some grand cosmic event: the universe consuming itself at the end of time, perhaps. But no, a gleaming black shoe swung across my vision, having sent my head snapping to the side. I was seeing fireworks, and not the cartoon variety that follow a blow to the head. These were the midnight display being launched in salvos from the opposite side of the River Cam.

  It seemed the kicks rained down in slow motion, the pyrotechnic flowers unfurling overhead with a leisurely grace, blues and greens and reds so lustrous that any true bloom would hang its head. I floated in a timeless, painless, velvet silence and knew that I was dying. I had let go of fear, and only sorrow kept me company in those last infinitely extended moments. A profound sadness that I had to let this go, the sunsets and sunrises yet to be seen, places unvisited, secrets yet to be unlocked, girls unkissed, lives untouched, songs neither heard nor sung. I even felt sorry for the idiots kicking me. That their lives of privilege were now to be brought low by this murder that forces beyond their understanding or control had edged them into.

  Suddenly I was in a brightly lit kitchen. The reflection in a glass-fronted cabinet showed me Eva. That connection she and Demus and I had forged, that tenuous quantum entanglement wrapped about with the strands of our paradox, still linked us across unknown years. Eva and I only glimpsed her reflection, but it told a story. She looked tired. Her hair was almost to her shoulders now. She wore different clothes. Whatever she was doing, she had been at it a while.

  ‘Give it to me!’

  ‘Come and get it, runt!’

  In a nearby room two boys were shouting at each other. Something crashed to the ground as they wrestled. Quickly Eva opened the cutlery drawer before her and took out the bread knife. She rooted in her bag through a collection of over a dozen other bread knives and brought out a very similar one. She measured it against the one she’d taken. Her new one was about an inch and a half longer. Without delay she substituted the longer one, put the shorter one in her bag, and left by the door to the back garden.

  Eva retreated to the bushes at the rear end of the sun-dazzled lawn and inserted herself among the dark and glossy leaves of an overgrown rhododendron.

  A minute passed. Another. And in the next moment someone burst out of the door from the kitchen. A boy of about twelve, his dark hair messy, clothes tugged about, a wild grin on his face. He wiped at his mouth, scanned the garden with beady black eyes set either side of a blade of a nose, then turned back towards the open door.

  A smaller figure flung itself after him. A similar boy, but half his age at most, and wielding a long knife. The bread knife that Eva had left as a replacement.

  Charles Rust managed a disbelieving laugh before his little brother stabbed up at his face. To his credit, the older Rust managed to interpose his left hand with snake-quick reflex. The blade went right through his palm. For a moment it seemed as if he had stopped the point from reaching his eye, but no, in the next heartbeat he was reeling back, clutching his face, careless of the blood spurting from his hand.

  His high-pitched screams became the wailing of rockets spiralling into the air.

  ‘Get up!’

  ‘What?’ I mumbled the word as a hand hauled me to my feet.

  I found myself eye to eye with Charles Rust on that same Cambridge lawn with the rockets bursting into sparkling blossoms overhead. To be more precise, eyes to eye. Rust wore a black eyepatch. I stared at it in confusion. A large part of me knew he had worn that same eyepatch every time we’d met. He’d even told me the story of how he’d lost it in a fight with his brother . . . Another part of me, however, smaller, and fading like a waking dream, knew that Eva had changed something small but important.

  Glancing around I saw the big ginger lout sitting dazed on the grass nearby, nose broken, blood streaming from it. Two more of his punt buddies lay groaning. The rest seemed to have scarpered. Simon stood a safe distance from Rust, but from the missing buttons and torn shirt I guessed he’d stood up for me before my guardian devil pitched in. A circle of shocked guests hemmed us in, watching open-mouthed.

  Rust let go of me. ‘I know what you did, Hayes. I know you come back from the future and end my brother. I had the DNA results. It’s you in those morgue shots. I even know the unmarked grave where you’re buried. That little shit owed me an eye, but family rules meant I could never collect. So, I owed you a debt. Consider it paid.’ He spoke into a brief gap amid the din of the fireworks overhead.

  I coughed and flexed, expecting to find myself in agony, but apart from a bruised arm where I’d landed after Ginger’s initial shove, I seemed uninjured. Rust must have stepped in pretty quickly. ‘I thought it was your job to make sure I do mine. So keeping me alive just seems like what you’re paid to do.’

  Rust gave me a nasty smile full of thin, predatory teeth. ‘Don’t push it.’

  I turned to go. I could see the girls in the distance, still sitting just a yard from each other.

  Rust caught my elbow and paused before speaking as rockets exploded the night sky. ‘I saved you. You need me. So remember that, if you’re ever tempted to mess with my past.’

  I held up both hands. ‘Honestly, I never would.’

  With that he let me go. I still felt like I’d been run over by a steamroller, but the codeine kept my legs moving. If Rust were here, he couldn’t be in Bradwell. That timeline had been pruned from the tree . . . or at least, if it still existed it wasn’t me who had died there. My Demus had completed his mission and would have already headed back to January 1986, where I would meet him for the first time. Or perhaps he never came here at all. With the paradox removed, his calculations should be sound. My head hurt and I gave up thinking about it. All I really knew was that our daughter had saved us both. Or me, twice. Either way, she’d done well, given the limits to the change she could make.

  Simon returned to my side to help me while the onlookers began to disperse, distracted once more by the pyrotechnics overhead. The echoes of the time hammer still reverberated around me, flexing the night as I made my slow pain-filled walk across the lawns, drawn on by glimpses of Mia and Helen still at their table.

  The hammer’s aftershocks filled both the flashes of brilliance and the darkness between them with possibilities. New tomorrows streamed away from every moment, a billion billion versions of me, each heading into the next heartbeat on slightly different trajectories. I walked through it all, spawning an infinity of futures, just as all of us do every second of our lives. I held tight to myself, to me, this me, the one I cared about. Ten yards from the girls I shook Simon off and made my own way.

  Helen and Mia had their eyes on the sky now, watching the explosions. Neither noticed my arrival, even when I sat between them.

  Shockwaves from the hammer blow tore through me, and this time I let them do their work. Two versions of me sat in the same space and time, one written over the other. One me reached for Helen’s han
d, and she turned with fire-bright eyes to see me as if for the first time, her fingers curling around mine. The fireworks shattered the heavens with one final crescendo and fell silent. She told me that Piers had gone off with a boy from London. She told me how silly she felt, not ever having realised he was gay. How Piers had been using her to deflect attention from other girls, to stop his friends and family asking questions or trying to set him up with eligible debutants. She’d been pretty enough to be believable, and too common to be drawn too far into his circle. No invitations to meet Mother and Father. Even now she worried for him, how his coming out would affect his chances of the political career he wanted, whether his friends would desert him. I told her times were changing, perhaps faster than we knew, and soon maybe there would be no more need to hide and lie about such things. And as we talked, behind me Mia noticed us, stood quietly and walked away.

  The other me reached for Mia’s hand and she turned with a smile of relief and concern, hugging me. She told me that her relationship with Sam had been something of convenience to both of them. A place to take shelter while they both tried to make sense of their lives. She would understand if I’d been too hurt to try again, but she wanted to. Seeing me in hospital had made her see how fragile happiness was, and she wanted to try for hers while she could see it in front of her. And behind us Helen rose from her chair and walked away beneath the cloud of her own misery.

  I could see both futures. I wanted both. A Nicholas Hayes would have each of them. But this Nicholas Hayes, my own mote of sentience, could have only one. Eva had given me my limited wish, got me to this moment where the day could be saved, along with all the days that followed. I could untangle the timelines. But there were limits. I couldn’t have it all. Whatever I did, someone would be hurt. I would hurt someone.