TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) Read Free

dream.
    So … I’ve written
     enough. Maybe too much. I might just rip this up. Burn it. Eat it or something. Or
     maybe I’ll stuff it into my BurgerKing box with the rest of
     the cold fries and floppy gherkin where no one is likely to find it.
    But writing this helped a little, I
     guess.
    My name is Sal and, like I said,
     I’m lost, and quite a bit scared and not at all happy about things right
     now.

Chapter 2
    11 September 2001, New York
    Maddy took off her glasses and buried her
     face in her hands. Air hissed between her fingers: a long, torpid sigh that was a signal
     to the other two, Liam and Sal, to shut-the-heck-up for just a moment and let her
     think.
    The archway was quiet except for its usual
     noises: the faint chug of a filtration pump from the back room, a tap dripping
     somewhere, the soft burr of a dozen PC computers’ heat fans. It sounded like it
     did on any normal day, except for perhaps the inane trash-talking between Liam and Sal
     playing
Mario Kart
on the Nintendo.
    ‘Hey, what’s up with that girl,
     skippa?’ chipped in SpongeBubba.
    Maddy raised a hand to shush the lab robot.
     ‘OK.’ Her voice was muffled behind her other hand. ‘This is what we
     need to do.’ She straightened up, put her glasses back on and turned towards the
     monitors on the computer table. She addressed the webcam.
     ‘Computer-Bob?’
    A black DOS-like dialogue box appeared on
     the monitor beside the camera.
    > Yes, Maddy?
    ‘Can you force the archway’s
     displacement field to reset to Monday?’
    Today was Tuesday, early afternoon. Outside
     the archway acollective pause had settled across the city: a pause in
     which the sky was clear of planes, television presenters had said all there was to say,
     and everyone was still busy wondering if the last few hours had been for real and the
     Twin Towers really had just been completely destroyed.
    > Affirmative.
    ‘Do it, then. Do it now!’
    ‘What’s going on?’ asked
     Rashim.
    ‘We’re all going back in
     time,’ Sal answered. ‘By one day.’
    The young technician still looked
     bewildered. Only a couple of hours ago – from his perspective – he’d been
     approached by Maddy and the others back in Roman times as he’d quietly been
     setting up the receiver array for the rest of his group to home in on. Now that was all
     history, or not, depending how you looked at it. Now he was here, stuck with them
     because they couldn’t just leave him behind, dangling like a loose end. And
     Project Exodus, the project he’d spent the last couple of years of his life
     working on … well, none of that would be happening now. By grabbing him,
     they’d managed to prevent a group of three hundred refugees from the future
     completely throwing history off track.
    Job done. But now he and his
     cartoon-character lab unit were stuck here with them.
    ‘So,
when
exactly is this
     place?’ asked Rashim, looking round the archway. His voice rose with growing
     anxiety. ‘I mean, this is twenty, twenty-first-century tech by the look of it.
     Yes? Am I right?’
    ‘This is the day the towers were
     knocked down by planes,’ said Liam.
    ‘September the eleventh, 2001,’
     Maddy said quickly. ‘It’s our base-time, our field office. Where we’ve
     been operating out of for the last few months.’
    The cursor on the dialogue box flickered.
    > Stand by. Field
     resetting.
    They heard the soft whine of energy
     discharging into the displacement machine and then the fluorescent lights dangling from
     the archway’s low ceiling suddenly blinked out and a moment later flickered back
     on. The archway was still in the mess it had been when she and Sal had fled back in time
     to the reign of Caligula. Tidying all this up, however, was the last thing on her mind
     at the moment.
    ‘And now … it’s
     yesterday,’ said Maddy. ‘The day before 9/11.’ She sat down in the
     office chair beside the desk and huffed air. ‘Which now gives us