Falling (23 page)

DiFlorian. Well, that explains why I was never meant to find out what really happened to her. I was the dupe, supposed to walk in, make routine enquiries, report that everything was in order. But I was already ReTraced and looking for answers of my own, and I found out things I was never supposed to even guess at.

‘We call them Travellers,' Warner was saying. ‘They're due to ReTrace to Year Zero in a couple of hours. That's why you've ended up here. You're being drawn to them.'

‘Because I'm one of them.'

Oh boy. That actually makes sense. The fortune-teller in the park mentioned Year Zero. If they didn't want me to know what they could do – what I could do – that would have been enough to get her killed. And Schrader, in the Hurst. Vanishing into thin air.

I do hate it when Warner's right. It goes against the natural order of things, your boss being right.

‘All right. Let's say I believe this. Just for the sake of argument. First problem: I can't control where and when I ReTrace to. It's involuntary, instinctive. I can't just select Year Zero and off I go.'

‘Travellers can.'

Ah. Good point.

‘Anyway. You don't need to.' Warner fixed her with an icy stare. ‘Stopping them is the key to your current problem. So, now you have all the facts, as soon as you ReTrace, you'll end up in the right time and place.'

‘Yeah, I've heard that before. And how can you know what the key to my problem is when even I don't know?'

Warner sighed. ‘I'm sorry to have to break it to you like this, Jude,' he said, soft and clear as a father with a dying child. ‘But stopping the Travellers is definitely the answer to your problem. Because, when they realised that you could stop them – that you were the only person who could – they ReTraced to the year '27, and at 2.43 in the afternoon, they threw you out of a ninety-first storey window. It took the police four hours to scrape you off the pavement.'

Glancing down, Jude realised that she'd dug her nails into her palms until they drew blood.

‘They killed me. Schrader and his buddies – he's one of them, isn't he? I mean – I did actually die?'

‘I'm so sorry. There was nothing I could do. All the official channels were closed, everyone I approached had their orders and their excuses ready to hand. I've spent years trying to work out how to get a message back to you, find a way to warn you.'

‘I'm dead.' The padded space blurred strangely, her cheeks stung; Jude realised abruptly that she was crying. ‘My God, what must Fitch think?'

Hands closed around her wrists. Warner was kneeling in front of her, staring up into her face, cool and stern. ‘Jude. Listen to me. You're not dead. Not really. Because you're here. As long as you're still ReTracing from that day, looking to find a way to reverse things, your death hasn't happened yet. You're outside time. Alive. And you can stop them.'

Jude held her breath until her vision swam red, then exhaled. She felt tired, ragged and not a little stupid. ‘Right. I get it. But I still have one question. Why do I have this feeling that you're not doing this out of the kindness of your heart?'

He shrugged. ‘I don't think that messing with history is a good –'

‘Then you've been in the wrong job for twenty years. Come on, let's have the truth. What's in it for you, Warner?'

‘Remember Andrew Marcus?'

Jude frowned with the effort. ‘Your son. Yeah. I suppose.'

‘Miserable kid, wasn't he?'

‘I don't really –'

‘Delicate. Bookish. Clingy. And those are the good points.'

Jude leant back in the chair, closed her eyes. ‘Let me guess.'

‘I now have a daughter named Andrea May. And she's happy. Biotech has changed all our lives – and what's wrong with that?' Warner touched her shoulder lightly; opening her eyes, Jude felt obliged to meet his gaze. ‘Go and stop them, Jude. For her. For all of us.'

‘Oh, cut the politicking crap, Warner. I don't have any choice and you know it. If I stay here, I'm a lab rat for GenoBond. If I do manage to ReTrace to another part of my life, I have nowhere to settle, no one to go to. And now these Travellers of yours know I'm still around, and I'm a threat to them, they'll track me down, right?'

‘I would imagine so.'

‘But I want you to know that you're a liar, a traitor and an accessory to illegal and treasonous activities, and I'm not doing it for you.'

His jaw tightened, just a little, and he stood up. ‘I don't give a shit who you do it for, Jude. Just as long as you do it.'

Year Zero. This is nuts. I wasn't even born then. I'll probably get lost – or arrested as a lunatic or something.

‘Got a sedative in that medical kit?'

‘But of course.'

Jude rolled up her sleeve.

As the needle went in, she thought back to the Hurst, and Schrader, fading like a good memory the morning after. ‘So, when I ReTrace, will I disappear, like Schrader did? Completely?'

‘I'm not sure,' Warner admitted, depressing the plunger. ‘I've never actually seen them in action. Why don't you pop back, after you've finished the job, and I'll buy you coffee and tell you all about it?'

FOURTEEN

Year Zero

Bang.

For a moment, Jude thought she'd run out of time and hit ground, future/present/now. Expected to feel herself bleeding, slipping, falling away for good into whatever not-darkness lay beyond.

Then the sound came back on. Caught up with her, snap, like someone had leant on the mute button. And there was noise. Traffic, voices, music, hurry-bustle-chatter-desperation-noise.

Jude was face down on the pavement, too winded to cry out, one arm trapped under her, and people were stepping right over her.

To be fair, they had to. There was no room on the pavement to step round. Wall to gutter people, shoving, squirming, pushing, clinging to a partner's arm as if afraid to lose them. Children squeezed between their feet. Dogs squeezed between the children.

It was like the worst ever fire evacuation from Club Andro – the one where every single customer seemed to be doped and couldn't tell the fire exits from the wall paintings – but with purpose. Going places, and fast.

What the hell was happening?

To her right, a glimpse of the wall, and safety. She took it. Concertinaed to her feet like a gymnast and leapt for it, screaming.

People got out of her way. The look on her face, they'd have been stupid not to.

A moment's deep breathing, sweaty palms pressed to the cold metal of locked security shutters, and Jude felt ready to lift her gaze from the few precious inches of empty pavement between her feet, and take a look at the street.

Solid with people. Faces at all the windows, on the doorsteps, huddled on the traffic islands. All the way to the blinking stop-go lights and the snail's crawl of cars, glistening from recent rain. Attack of the Sardine People.

And most of them didn't smell so good, either.

Crowds were one thing; but the noise, the cars, the way the air hung heavy around her, thick with other people's sweat? The sheer pressure of being hemmed in by buildings full to the brim with people, and people's things, and the things people were about to buy and make and consume? There was no way she could cope with this.

And then she remembered. The heat, the exhaust haze, the smell of random, entangled perfumes. Being carried on her mother's shoulders though a crowd so deep that she couldn't see the other side, leaning down to listen to murmured reassurances: ‘Just a couple more shops now, Jude, and we can go home.'

It really was like this, before the Migration.

‘All right?'

An old woman, leaning in to frown at her. Too close: close enough to smell her hair lacquer, see the red veins of her eyes, an unimaginable invasion of space outside a club or an extremely intimate relationship.

Wrinkled fingers poked her in the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. ‘I said, are you all right?'

Resisting the urge to shrink back into the shutters, Jude managed a nod. ‘Fine. I just – fell. I'm fine. Thanks.'

The woman nodded, as if she was relieved not to have to get any further involved, and slotted herself back into the contraflow of the crowd. Within seconds, she was gone; another perfectly fitting piece in the ever moving puzzle, another drop in the ocean.

Jude exhaled.

This wasn't going to be a pleasant trip.

For a start, just look at these people. Oh yes, there were some ugly bastards working for GenoBond. No gene jobs, no quick fixes for them, with their talent hanging in the balance every time someone stirred up their DNA. Some had the free plastic surgery the company offered – though more for self-preservation than aesthetics. People who looked like that and didn't do something about it were obviously anti-bioteching Luddites, and in most areas of the city, Luddites were only safe while carrying serious armaments.

Even if they didn't have the surgery, most people in her time were born of variously ‘perfect' parents, inheriting whatever genetic fixes they'd had. None of them looked like this.

Scowling, limping, hunching, hobbling and crawling. Sick. Old. Anorexic with self-disgust, swollen with self-pity. Unrefined, random and different.

And there were millions of them.

Pressing her back against the metal, reminding herself that she was safe from one direction at least, Jude spent a while just concentrating on breathing. Standing here, that was fine. That was manageable. And if she got desperate enough, she could always climb the drainpipe, hopefully there weren't laws against that…

Year Zero. Yeah, great idea.

As soon as she caught up with Warner again, she was going to break his immaculately re-gened nose. Of course, he wouldn't know why, because things would be dealt with, the loop would be closed, he would never have met her in '32 and told her to do any of this. She'd probably get fired.

Yes, that was definitely going on her ‘to do' list.

She shrugged, trying to shift the weight of her heavy jacket. Leather. Probably real leather, too. That was vile. Plain top, jeans, running shoes. Pretty much what the downmarket end of the crowd were wearing. Some things hadn't changed much in the last few decades.

This looks like my body – but I wasn't even born in this year. Did I create it as I arrived? Bringing it back with me from '32? How?

You could definitely go crazy thinking about all this.

A child's arm lashed out, catching her across the knee. A boy in ugly trousers, one arm locked in his mother's deathgrip, the other flailing in wild aggression at anyone within reach. Jude understood exactly how he felt.

Sooner or later, she was going to have to move from here.

What was it they said in school, about the time the Migration started? That urban overcrowding caused aggression, and the only way people could cope with it was to ignore each other, dehumanise each other, treat people the same way as the lampposts and litter bins. And that, of course, led to all kinds of problems. Crime and aggression and lack of social skills, all the way down to mass murder and dropping litter. So they'd said. ‘Of course, it'll all be different out in the Hursts…'

Treat people as fixtures and fittings. Fine. She could do that.

That bastard Schrader did it all the time.

Trying to disguise her trembling as an occasional shiver of cold, Jude took a sidestep into the crowd, and somehow made it all the way to the curb without screaming.

It was quite easy, once you got the hang of it. She let the crowd carry her around for a while. Cushioned by a ring of arms folded, eyes-averted people, even crossing the road was easy. Green light or not, any car faced with that amount of mass was going to let it through.

She even knew where she was. Up on the northern edge of the main commercial area. Shop signs, brighter than she remembered, drew her in, a moth to a half-familiar flame. Dark windows crammed with dusty salvage had given way to sparse and brilliantly illuminated displays of pristine boxed electronics. Most of the contents would be back here, displayed in the same windows, in her time, hawked for a few coins or for barter.

These were even the same people. Tourists and time-wasters, the rich and the under-employed. Kids skipping school; an easier proposition in her time than in this, from the furtive way they watched any uniform appearing in the crowd. Teenagers, lacking all sense of urgency, squandering money and time with equal abandon. All the same types, just multiplied a hundred-fold.

The pub they'd raided to furnish the house for Fitch was just round the corner. She ought to go round and check out the decor. See if the bead curtains were up yet. They'd certainly looked old enough.

Someone jogged her arm, startling her, and she decided it was time for a rest. Lean into the crowd, turning yourself to signal which way you were going. Use your hands if you have to, but subtly. Casual gestures that just happened to have the effect of moving people aside. Some people gave way, others didn't. But that was all right. You moved in stages, taking whatever room you were given. Keeping your arms folded in to keep other people's hands out of your pockets – and to keep everyone else that little bit further away. Keeping yourself safe.