Rifter (The Survival Project Duology Book 1) (3 page)

But it wasn’t the primary objective. It wasn’t the reason she’d come here. That was to find solutions.

And here she was, following Leo. And her heart was racing.

She could walk right up to him and say something, rather than stalk him. That was certainly a possibility, but could cause all sorts of problems if she didn’t find out a few more facts first. The most important being, was he friend or foe? The answer wasn’t obvious from what she’d seen so far. Friend, meaning he would let her go about her business and return home. Foe, well, the opposite.

She’d always thought travelling to different worlds was a confusing enough situation to find yourself in, but coming across your boyfriend living in a different reality, that took it to another level. A screw-with-your-mind level.

Already, the counter on her brac was close to clicking past the first half hour. Seventy-two hours had sounded like a long time before she left the comfort of The Facility, but now it seemed like nothing at all.

And she continued to follow Leo through the streets.

She still hadn’t decided where she was. She hadn’t seen any landmarks that would indicate she was in the capital, although, in all likelihood, she was. The buildings all around were old and grand, determined by the fact that the carvings and gargoyles that decorated them were slightly worn from erosion, and the fact that they had carvings and gargoyles. Many were made of stone rather than brick or concrete, which gave a feeling of wealth. The roofs were tiled with pink-tinged slates, not something she’d heard of before. She supposed, that was different realities for you. Many of those roofs were domed. In her society, that usually denoted religion, but here, she imagined not, unless their whole society was based on religion, which was a possibility. Everything was a possibility. The roads were wide, and there were lots of vehicles. So many vehicles — none of them horse-drawn. Crossing a road every couple of minutes scared her witless, but if she didn’t cross them, she couldn’t follow, and there was no way she wasn’t going to follow.

It was fairly obvious that it was a prosperous place. It was also fairly obvious that it was heavily populated.

The clothes people wore weren’t much different from her own, except more expensive, she imagined. The cloth looked finer, the execution more precise and detailed. But shirts, trousers, tees and jackets, formal and informal, were pretty much universal.

After they’d been walking for ten minutes, he entered a large, imposing building. She concluded that this had to be where he worked. Once he was out of sight, she moved a little closer. The sign outside said MoD and underneath, Ministry of Defence. It was worse than she’d thought. He was working for some kind of government organisation, and given that defence was in the title, that meant they, rifters, were seen as a threat.

She rubbed at her arms, even though she wasn’t cold.

It was clear to her that she’d made the right decision. She needed to find out more, and the only way to do that was to have some kind of contact with this Leo. It would be dangerous, but she’d been trained. She could deal with most situations, in theory. But she couldn’t contact him here, not outside the place that he worked, where there would be others who would come to assist him, if necessary. She needed somewhere where she could catch him off-guard. So, how? She stepped back into the shadows while she thought things through, only to look up at the building again a couple of minutes later, to see herself walking up the steps.

“Impossible,” she whispered.

But she knew that wasn’t true.

Every reality was possible.

A different world, the same couple? Or, perhaps, they were work colleagues.

She didn’t look exactly the same as Mara, just as this Leo didn’t look exactly the same as hers. The shape of the woman’s face was a little more angular than hers, her nose possibly a touch longer, and, if she wasn’t mistaken, this woman was a tiny bit taller. That didn’t seem fair. She’d always wanted to be taller. But she had the same long, dark brown hair (except Mara’s was pinned out of the way with a ponytail clip), the same pale white skin, the same gait. She was Mara’s equivalent, of that she had no doubt.

Seconds later, Leo emerged from the building again, arms linked with the woman, and walked off along the street. A couple. No doubt about that, either.

But something didn’t sit right with her. It seemed far too casual a way to be behaving after just finding out that a disruption had occurred. Were rifts that common here? Or was this Leo the same as hers, doing only the things he enjoyed, giving the rest the minimum attention so that he could get by without being balled out? Concentrating on his own agenda rather than the greater good?

There she was again, imprinting her Leo’s personality on this one. She had to stop doing that. They were different people.

Her jacket dragged against the stone wall, as her body slumped down to a crouch. The confusion in her head had just multiplied by many folds.

She had to work this out on her own. They’d trained in problem-solving, in keeping a calm and reasoned mind no matter what the situation. Some help that was.

She waited. What else could she do? He had to come back.

It was nearly an hour later when they returned. They parted with a kiss and a jab of jealousy hit her.

Mara did now have a plan. It was risky, probably suicidal, but it was better than nothing. She had her stun clip ready. It was set to medium. Medium was more than a simple shock to give you a few seconds’ head start. Medium would disable someone, knock them unconscious, but wouldn’t kill them. It would allow you to search through someone’s belongings and find out an address. Because that was what she was going to do. Find out where Leo lived, then go to his house and find out what he was while he was still at work. It was the safest way to get the information she needed, because it didn’t involve too much face-to-face contact, or any if she got the stun procedure right. The trick would be to choose the right location. The problem was that she didn’t know which way the woman was heading. But she would soon find out.

If she was Leo’s partner, she would have his address.

After taking a couple of turns down busy streets, her double finally slipped into a narrow alleyway. It looked like a short-cut between two major thoroughfares. It was probably the only chance Mara was going to get. She took a deep breath for courage and proceeded to rapidly reduce the distance between them as quietly as she could. At the last moment, the woman turned. The look on her face was one of complete horror, understandable when you’d just come face-to-face with yourself, but she didn’t get a chance to voice anything. Mara rammed the stun clip against the woman’s bare arm. It was safer than touching it to her torso — farther away from the vital organs. The woman slumped against her and Mara let out a loud, “Oomph.” For some reason, she’d expected the woman to fall back, not forward, but at least it meant there would be no fatal head injury. She really should have considered that possibility before she started. After a cursory glance either way, she dragged the woman behind a large bin and began going through the contents of her bag.

Her device had no safety codes set and the simple touch screen button and list structure was easy to navigate. It took no time at all to find out Leo’s address, because it was signposted with a big Leo in capital letters and a grinning picture of him alongside. Leo’s address. She realised she hadn’t even considered that his name might be different. This could have been someone else’s address if there hadn’t been the picture.

Same name. Same face. Same girlfriend.

She gnawed at the skin on the inside of her cheek. Take the device, or not?

She could memorise his contact number and address, but she decided that would just give her more opportunity to confuse things in her mind, but taking the device might mean they could track her somehow. She found a notepad and pen in the bag. Paper. Real paper. Her hand shook as she picked it up. It felt wrong to be using it like this, for a throwaway note, but this was not her world.

She wrote down the details and ripped out the sheet of paper, carefully replacing the pen and pad in the bag.

One last thing. The woman’s name.

It took some searching, but she eventually realised the device had been designated with her name. Mayra Smith. So close. Her mother’s family were Smiths.

There was no time to dwell. Accept it, and move on.

A bruise was already forming on the woman’s arm where Mara had used the stun clip, angry-looking much like storm clouds. She would be awake in another few minutes. Mara needed to get away. She threw the device down and saw it scoot beneath the bin, but there was no time to retrieve it.

In an attempt to distance herself from her victim as quickly as possible, she jogged in the opposite direction to which they’d travelled, what she believed to be south from the readings on the brac. After a few minutes, she found that she was approaching the banks of a large river. Her breath hitched in her throat as she saw the familiar tower across the water. The Ben Tower. It had the same pink slates on the roof that the other buildings had and the clock face had large Arabic numerals instead of Roman, but it was indisputably the same building. It was an icon so familiar to her, if only through pictures. This was London. A different London. A different bustling city. But London, all the same.

And it was twenty past two.

She adjusted the timekeeper on her watch to local time.

One of the things she’d been most afraid of was landing in a location where nobody lived. Even the thought of landing in a place where she couldn’t understand the language, or the people were hostile to her because she looked so different to them, would have been preferable to a barren and bleak landscape that held no hope. The worst nightmare would’ve been landing in the exact equivalent of where she’d come from. Then, she might not even have been able to make it back home and would’ve died a cold, lonely and wet death.

London, a major city with all the resources that encompassed, was beyond her wildest dreams.

For a moment she stood still and took it all in. She watched the boats travelling along the water, the vehicles crossing bridges to her left and to her right, the people milling along The Embankment. She listened to the sound of engines, the chatter of voices in more than one language. She drew in the discordant scents of life on another world. Everything mingled into one almighty blast of delight.

And then she was torn between two equally compelling paths.

This truly could be the place that held the solution, and she was getting herself side-tracked. But if she could find out what Leo did, and what side he was on, maybe he would want to help. What could be better than getting the information she needed first hand, without having to sneak around like she shouldn’t be there?

She was justifying her actions to herself again. No matter.

She needed to locate the address and do her research before he left the office for home. If this London had working hours similar to the ones that used to exist in her world, she had a minimum of about three hours, a maximum of six.

She scanned the people around her and chose a friendly-looking woman carrying a bag of groceries. She had to be a local.

“I was wondering if you could help me,” she said, “I’m trying to find this address.”

Four

“Tell me,” said Debra, in her usual, curt fashion.

Leo was used to her manner. He’d decided over the years that it was borne more out of efficiency than any overt rudeness, although he knew she was bound to be irked by the fact that he’d taken a lunch hour rather than staying on the site to investigate further. He didn’t care. Some things were more important than following her orders.

Debra Neville ran The Department. She was Leo’s boss. She was everybody in The Department’s boss. No one who worked on The Anomaly Project answered to anyone else. No one who didn’t work on The Anomaly Project knew anything about it unless they were the Prime Minister or the Head of the Security Services.

She was younger than you might at first think on seeing her walk into a room, her white hair belying her age and her athletic ability. Her mind was also agile, able to retain many seemingly insignificant facts, process them and regurgitate them at the most inopportune moments, from his perspective, of course, not hers. She had caught out everyone in The Department on more than a few occasions. And when she spoke, it was in clipped sentences with the minimum of fat hanging off them. Answers were what she wanted, and answers were what she got.

Leo straightened his posture and held his hands together behind his back, so as not to give away the tension he was feeling, and that had plagued him for the last three hours since the disruption had formed. He spoke in the most confident voice he could muster. He looked her straight in the eyes. “Ma’am. The disruption appeared at precisely 12.41 pm in Golden Park.”

His mobile rang. She flinched.

“Turn that off, McNaught.”

Leo bit back a retort. It wouldn’t do him any good to anger her further.

“Ma’am.” He retrieved his phone from his pocket, disabled the ringtone without looking at the details of the call and replaced it. “Francis and I proceeded to the site on foot,” he continued.

He used the protocol that Debra favoured, surnames only, apart from herself. She preferred the lofty Ma’am that made her sound like royalty.