TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) Read Free Page B

leave, the better,’ said Maddy. She regarded the gloomy interior. Hardly a place
     anyone would normally look at with dewy-eyed fondness. But it
had
become their
     home. It
had
become something of a safe haven, a nest, a shelter. And yes,
     between the seemingly constant firefighting they’d experienced from here, there
     had been moments of … dare she say … fun.
    Fun.
Some good memories. Among all
     the scary ones, that is.
    Liam sighed. ‘Ah well …’
     was all the consolation he could offer them. ‘Ah well.’
    ‘It’s just bricks,’ said Sal
     without a great deal of conviction.
    The squat lab robot flexed its pliable
     plastic face, wrinkling its pickle-shaped nose as its round and permanently staring eyes
     scanned the gloomy interior. ‘It’s a very messy place. I don’t like it
     very much.’
    ‘Yeah, but it’s home,’
     said Maddy. ‘Or it
was
anyway.’
    She looked around the pitted and cracked
     floor to where a shallow scoop of concrete was missing – where so many terrifying and
     unplanned last-minute portals had been opened up. Where a thick loop of cables dangled
     from the ceiling – from which a horrific Cretaceous-era carnivore had once dropped down
     and butchered a man right in front of her eyes. Where power cables snaked from one side
     of the archway’s floor to the other – there had once lain a carpet of dead and
     dying Confederate and Union soldiers, men feebly crying out for water amid the acrid
     smoke of battle, bleeding out for a war that should never have been. Where the walls
     flanked the shutter door – the probing claws of irradiated mutant humans had once tried
     to pick through crumbling mortar to get in at them, to eat them.
    And, planted on the very desk she was
     sitting at now, the severed head of a young woman had rested recently. Grey eyes,
     beautiful grey eyes, glazed over and lifeless, the cranium hacked open to reveal a
     bloody pulp, and a small, invaluable microchip inside.
    Ahhh, memories
.
Precious
     memories
, Maddy noted unenthusiastically.
    ‘You’re right, Sal, it’s
     just a bunch of bricks. The sooner we get the hell out of here, the better.’

Chapter 3
    10 September 2001, New York
    Maddy took the subway across to Manhattan
     and emerged at 57th Street into the warmth of the sun. Middle of the day, that’s
     when the old man could be found in Central Park. That was Foster’s pact with her,
     his tacit promise when he’d walked out on the team after their first mission.
    You’ll always find me here at the
     same time. Feeding the pigeons.
    She’d made this trip nearly a dozen
     times now over the last six months. Six months’ worth of their ‘bubble
     time’ – Monday and Tuesday, the 10th and 11th, looped over and over again. Every
     time she sat down with him on that bench by the duck pond, beside the hot-dog cart, it
     was – for Foster – like their very first meeting after he’d bid farewell and left
     her in charge of the team. The world outside the archway’s protective field was
     linear, a sequence of moments experienced by everyone in sensible chronological
     order.
    But, for Maddy and the others, it was time
     that occurred
inside the archway
that appeared to be linear, while everything
     outside was a weird and endless forty-eight-hour
Groundhog Day
.
    She’d asked the old man once why it
     was that she never bumped into copies of herself. His answer had been both
     straightforward and oddly cryptic.
    ‘You’re not of this timeline,
     Maddy. None of you are. Youmight as well be aliens visiting from
     another planet as far as earthly cause and effect is concerned.’
    Reassuring perhaps, but she’d still
     ended up none the wiser.
    As always, she caught sight of him sitting
     on the bench, sitting back and savouring the sun on his wrinkled face, in that dark blue
     cardigan of his, jeans too big for his narrow frame and that scuffed old Yankees
     baseball cap clasped in his liver-spotted hands. She stopped