Feeling the Vibes (8 page)

“You’re not alone. Open your eyes…”

I’d programmed my phone to play our cosmic theme tune. I stared at my ringing bag like it was a snake.

“You should probably take that,” said Reuben.

“What if it’s the Agency?” I gulped.

“You’ll have to tell them what happened,” he said.

I rooted frantically in my bag: cherry flavoured lip salve, a half-eaten bag of trail mix. “Where the
sassafras
is my
freaking
phone!”

Brice took my bag, located my phone, checked the caller ID, then walked away to take the call leaving me open-mouthed.

“What have you done with our
bodhisattva
?” he blazed at my unknown caller.

I was so horrified, I literally backed through two old Kashmiri guys; I genuinely believed the PODS were going to come down my phone.

Lalla was pale. “How did they get your number?”

But I instantly knew the answer.
Maia
. When she got back to the Hell dimensions, she must have circulated my contact info to every cosmic lowlife in existence. She probably did it as a joke.

Brice ended the call looking totally stricken. “You were right,” he said to Reubs. “They don’t have Obi.”

It was the best news. I couldn’t understand why he looked so upset.

“So who—?” I started.

“The PODS were planning a snatch like we thought. When Obi was spirited away from under their noses, their first thought was we’d beaten them at their own game.”

“They thought
we
made him vanish?” said Reubs, amazed.

“Until some PODS techie ran a check on the local energy levels and figured out what happened.”

“So they know where he is, right?” My heart was thudding so hard I thought I’d choke.

“No, and they couldn’t give a monkey’s.
The bodhisattva’s
out of the picture; that’s all they care about. He said ‘If you can find him, you can have him ha-ha-ha, but you won’t find him.’”

”
What
?” I said in horror.

“He said, ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news? The good news is he’s still in India. The bad news is we don’t know when.’”

I covered my eyes.
If I get lost in India this time, will you come and find me
?

But Obi wasn’t just lost in India, he was lost in Time.

“Poor little boy,” Lalla whispered.

I made a huge effort to pull myself together. “Can that - can that happen? Can someone really come unstuck in Time?”

Brice nodded. “It happened to an angel girl I knew. She’d just started training. Some scary situation came up. She was in some unfamiliar time period. She just lost it, literally ripped her energy connection out of the temporal grid and went freefalling through history.”

I pictured Obi at the fair, like a frightened baby deer, not knowing where to run.

“How did they stop that angel girl, you know, falling?” I asked huskily. “The Agency stopped her, right?”

“Florentina? She stopped herself,” said Brice. “She popped in and out of a few time periods, finally found somewhere she recognised and got it back together. Up till then, she said it was like reality had gone totally haywire. She kept gatecrashing all these different scenes and events; she just didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

“Brice, Obi is
four
!” Lalla was wringing her hands. “How can a little four-year-old get it back together?”

“He can’t,” I said fiercely. “I have to go and find him. I can calm him down until the Agency gets his time-slip problem under control.”

Brice gave me a disbelieving look, probably remembering my feeble attempts to control Obi at the fair. “And how are you planning to find him exactly, angel girl?”

“I did a time-stream course,” I said, slightly huffy. “Quite recently actually. I’m surprised you don’t remember that.”

“An introductory course for beginners,” he pointed out. “Most of which you missed because you got time-napped.”

“I can
do
it,” I said stubbornly.

“Sweetheart, an agent with decades of time-stream experience would find this a challenge.”

“I don’t care! I promised I’d keep him safe - and that evil creep made that innocent little boy think he’d - he’d killed the - the—”

I started sobbing like a two-year-old. I just couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. That set Lalla off and gradually all the other angel girls in the vicinity joined in.

A cafe full of weeping, wailing angel girls was too much for their macho male buddies. Through my sobs, I was aware of them moving off into a huddle with Reubs and Brice. After a while I heard raised voices.

I hastily dried my eyes. I saw Reubs try to walk away, but Brice yanked him back.

“Hey, these guys have shown us a way out.”

“A mind-blowingly
stupid
way out,” said Reuben.

Brice still had a grip on his arm. “It’s the only one we’ve got,” he said roughly. “Can you honestly think of another one?”

“Right at this moment, no. But—”

“There
is
no other way, admit it!”

“I don’t know! I just know you’re risking everything you care about—”

“There’s only one thing I care about right now. Saving Obi!” The skin round Brice’s eyes had gone totally white.

“We could be thrown out of school,” Reubs said.

Brice gave a slightly wild laugh. “Everyone should get expelled at least once. It’s character-forming or whatever.”

Reuben quickly looked away and I knew he was consulting with his inner angel. He said quietly, “OK, I’m in.”

I felt my stomach clench as the boys came back over. They both had the same grimly determined look.

“These guys have come up with a plan,” Brice said.

“They’re going to use the time tunnels,” Lalla told me, wiping her eyes.

Brice looked shocked. “How—?”

“All Earth angels learn about them,” she said. “Though these days trainees aren’t supposed to use them.”

She explained that these time tunnels aren’t tunnels in rock, they’re like corridors in the fabric of reality. Invisible to humans, they’re a cosmic anomaly left from the days of Creation. The Creation angels continued to use them for centuries, and they still occasionally use them to this day, if they urgently need to zip from one time to another. Inevitably, though, the PODS got to hear about them and in some time periods they had virtually taken them over. The tunnels gradually acquired a reputation for being a kind of dodgy cosmic no-man’s-land, which is why they were forbidden to trainees.

Brice said he’d used them himself in his cosmic outlaw days. “But now that I’m a good boy, I’m banned.”

He said it like it was a joke, but I didn’t feel like laughing. When I first met Brice he’d gone so far into the Dark, it was scary. But Michael gave him one last chance and he took it. He was back in angel school, winning awards and, more important, earning everyone’s respect. Now he was offering to risk it all for Obi.

I shook my head. “There has to be another way.”

“There isn’t,” he snapped, “and while we’re standing here arguing, that sweet little kid is who knows where, with who knows who, so the question is, do you want to save him or not?”

If I get lost, will you find me
?

My eyes brimmed over with tears. “I want to save him.”

We were in a small steamy cafe on Planet Earth, but it felt like I’d jumped out into space.

I’d broken a major cosmic law once before, but then I’d just started my training. I didn’t know what I’d be giving up.

This time I knew.

Chapter Ten

I
t was six in the evening. Outside the cafe the streets were almost empty. A military curfew meant people had to stay indoors now until morning.

Everywhere in the town you could hear madly rushing water. When we reached the bridge, the frothy cappuccino below was now a roaring torrent. Spring had come too soon this year, the local angels had said. The Himalayan snows were melting a little earlier each year, because of global warming.

In the strobing red of the setting sun, the town looked like it was on fire.

I wished my world was in better shape, I really did.

I turned back for one last wistful look, thinking of Fareeda and Nansi, and all the other orphans I’d never really got to know, and almost missed Brice casually chucking my phone into the river.

I gasped. “Are you insane?”

“The PODS had your number,” Reubs reminded me.

“Yeah, you didn’t want to keep that one.” Brice was unconsciously wiping his hands on his jeans.

“You guys brought yours though?”

Reuben shook his head. “But I know where it is!”

“I’ve got mine; don’t panic,” said Brice. “As soon as we find Obi we’ll phone in his new co-ordinates.”

I had a sudden surge of hope. “You really think this will work?”

He patted my shoulder. “Totally! The tunnels will take us to him in a heartbeat.”

“Not to seem stupid,” I said humbly, “but how will the tunnels know where he is?”

Brice chuckled, “They don’t, darling, but your divine radar does.”

“OMIGOSH,” I squeaked. “HELIX!”

Isn’t that shocking? I had totally slipped back into my old habit of going it alone. I hadn’t thought of Helix
once
since we’d arrived!

I beamed a HUGE apology into inner space and got an instant crisp response.

Oh, finally! Set me to work, angel girl, to do your bidding
.

I had to smile. Helix can be quite sassy when she wants.

“Sorry, honey, I got too used to doing without you,” I told her. “If you need me to grovel, though, I’ll grovel because just now I REALLY need you to get me a Time-Space fix on Obi.”

I was just playing with you, sweetie! Helix beamed back. I’ll get a fix once you’re in the time tunnel. You and Obi have such a strong connection I could track him anywhere.

The local time-tunnel entrance turned out to be behind a burned-out mosque. We picked our way across bits of charred wood and twisted metal.

“Keep moving forward unless I say stop,” Brice told us.

With Brice crushing my left hand and Reuben gripping my right, I pretty much had to move forward whether I wanted to or not!

We took one step then another.

“What is
that
?” I said in alarm.

The object in front of us didn’t look like an entrance. It looked like a REALLY bad cosmic migraine: a glittering, zigzagging, flowing curtain of light.

Noises reached us through the curtain: rumblings, bubblings, like escaping jets of steam or gas. The Creation angels probably heard sounds exactly like these when the planet was new and volatile and still kind of explosive.

I had a sudden huge pang of doubt. “Is this wrong?” I asked Helix. “Should we be doing this?”

Sweetie, you know sometimes the wrong thing is the only thing.

“Keep moving,” Brice warned, feeling me hang back.

“I’m
moving
, jeez!”

Three more steps took us through the Curtain of Migraine and out the other side.

“We’re in,” I told Helix.

I’m on it. Just focus on Obi
.

The instant we were inside the time tunnel, all the laws of Space and Time went to pot. We went through the motions of walking, out of habit, but it was the time tunnels that were moving now, not us.

I say “moving” - it was more like whooshing along in a bullet train, if you can imagine a train without walls or a floor or any kind of beginning or an end, just raw cosmic energy looping around and over us.

It didn’t feel evil, interestingly. It felt humongously unpredictable, like you’d expect in a cosmic no-man’s-land, but not evil. In fact the energy traces of the original Time angels were still surprisingly strong.

Sometimes the wrong thing is the only thing
. I repeated Helix’s words over and over in my head like a mantra, needing it to be true, because then we’d find Obi.

The energy coils grew looser, brighter.

Got your little boy
, Helix told me triumphantly.
Jump on three
!

“We’re there! We’re jumping on three!” I shouted to the others above the hiss and roar of the tunnel.

One, two, go go GO
! said Helix.

And we went tumbling into a world of sunlit green.