TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 Read Free Page B

and explosions. Impossible butterscotch sky. A tank, hovering above the rubble, floating towards her through the smoke. A hand on her shoulder, turning to face … herself, with a gash across her forehead and blood in her eyes. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she told herself. ‘I can’t tell you how or why, but you’ll be all right. I promise. Oh, and—’ Then …
    Freefall …
    Dora had witnessed plenty of awful things in her life.
    There was a man in her village with a gaping wound on his neck that had oozed pus since before she could remember. Her grandfather had a tumour on his face when he passed away, as big as his nose. Her younger brother had died after a tiny cut on his leg had become infected, and an infection had taken him from the world in the slowest, cruellest way possible.
    Dora had seen all these things and accepted them as normal. Deformity and sickness did not disturb her. She had a strong stomach.
    But the woman on the undercroft stairs wasn’t sick, she was
ruined
.
    She was covered in terrible burns. Her clothes had melted into her skin, and one of her legs hung down over the stone steps at an angle that told of numerous broken bones. She was barely breathing.
    But that wasn’t the worst.
    Her right arm reached out towards Dora as though grasping for aid, but the other was withered and bent, and it was blurry, faded, as if seen through water. One second it was there, the next it was transparent, then it was back again.
    The woman was not only entirely beyond repair, she also wasn’t entirely there.
    Dora had no idea what to do. She couldn’t imagine what could have happened to this poor woman, or how she had found her way to the undercroft. It was plain that no physician could save her.
    If she shouted for help, the master may come running. But what if he had done this terrible thing? And what, then, might he do to her?
    She stood in the doorway, looking down at the woman, frozen. Then she heard the noise of a door opening upstairs, and footsteps on the landing above her. Her scream had woken the house.
    ‘Dora,’ gasped the injured woman, as if squeezing out the syllables was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
    Dora felt helpless. She peered more closely, trying to reconstruct the ravaged face. Was it someone she knew? The footsteps above reached the top of the main staircase.
    Dora scurried down the undercroft steps until she reached the prone figure.
    ‘Mistress, pardon me, but what can I do to help?’
    The woman reached her hand up and grasped at the air.
    ‘Hand …’ she wheezed.
    So Dora, eager to give comfort to the dying woman, fought back her revulsion and reached out to take the offered hand. But before she could make contact, a spark of crimson fire leapt from the woman’s fingers, arcing between her and Dora and then …
    Dora was suspended in mid-air on a bright sunny day, screaming in alarm as she fell onto a cushion of bright fabric, the likes of which she had never seen before. She bounced clumsily back up into the air, her skirts flapping and her arms waving. Then back down again and a series of lessening bounces until she sprawled in a heap and looked up into the eyes of ten startled children, all in their stockinged feet, wearing the strangest garments she had ever seen. ‘Big kids aren’t allowed on the bouncy castle,’ said one prim, outraged little girl. And then …
    Sprawling on the floor of a chamber hewn from rock – large, silent, ice cold – was she in a cavern? A grey half-light picked out floor-to-ceiling racks of cocoons, each containing the blurred outline of a person. There were thousands of them, stretching away into the darkness. She rose to her feet and saw movement in the distance – three tiny figures, so far away. They were waving. She raised her hand to wave back and then …
    Water, shockingly cold, up to her neck. She sank beneath the surface before she could even take a breath. Her clothes dragged her down into the dark, suffocating