City of Shadows

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. You might 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 for a moment, watching him through the hot-dog queue, watching him through the clouds of billowing steam coming from the cart’s griddle.

A quiff of silver-white hair fluttering on his head: untidy, unruly hair. The likeness was so obvious now Maddy knew, now they all knew. She wondered how none of them had ever noticed, or remarked, how much alike Foster and Liam looked. Yes, age completely alters a person’s appearance, but there are those things that survive the years intact: the shape and set of a person’s eyes, the habitual expression on one’s face, the lazy way you sit when you think no one’s looking — things that are as unique as a fingerprint.

Liam and Foster, the very same person, and she hadn’t seen it until he’d told her.

Foster had given her no explanation for that. None at all. She had her theories. Perhaps one of them didn’t belong in this timeline; perhaps one of them had stepped across chaos space from another similar world and now there were accidentally two of them. She wondered if somewhere, beyond dimensions she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, there was an old-woman version of herself.

She decided probably not. She suspected in any dimension she was the same kind of person, destined to get stressed-out on all and everything and die young. Probably of high blood pressure or a heart attack.

Nice thought.

She emerged round the end of the queue and Foster’s eyes were drawn away from the pigeons chasing each other for breadcrumbs at his feet.

His eyes lit up at the sight of her. ‘Ahhh!’ He smiled. ‘You found me!’

She raised a hand to hush him politely. ‘I always do.’

Foster laughed. ‘I gather from that we’ve met before?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Quite a few times now.’ She looked around at the park, the duck pond, the hot-dog vendor. ‘This is like Happy Days. Like a TV show I’ve seen way too many times.’

‘Talking to me must be like talking to someone with — ’

‘Alzheimer’s?’

Foster grinned. ‘I’ve said that before, haven’t I?’

‘Only every time we meet up. Listen, Foster.’ She sat down beside him. ‘This time’s going to be different, though.’

‘Oh?’

‘We have to leave New York.’

‘Leave? Why?’

Maddy explained as succinctly as possible: the handwritten message addressed to her about Pandora from some mysterious informant; sending through a message to the agency in the future and asking what the hell ‘Pandora’ was all about. And then, in short order, a squad of support units arriving right in their archway hell-bent on killing them all.

‘I don’t know what’s going on, Foster. Maybe our ability to contact the agency, to contact Waldstein, has been compromised somehow. Intercepted by someone else?’

She didn’t bother telling Foster that the last time they’d met here she’d told him about the Pandora message and it had been his suggestion that she ‘communicate forward’ and ask if Waldstein knew anything about it. Maddy hadn’t come here to blame him for that. Neither of them were to know asking about Pandora was going to lead to this.

‘Point is, someone now knows where we are, Foster, and we could be jumped at any time by more of those things. We have to leave. Like… as soon as possible!’

Foster nodded slowly. Sadly. ‘It wasn’t ever meant to last for eternity, this agency. It was a temporary fix to a problem.’ He looked up at her. ‘There’s something you need to know, Maddy.’ He ran his tongue along his teeth beneath pursed lips. ‘Maddy, the agency… it’s just — ’

‘Just us.’ She shrugged. ‘I know.’

‘Seriously?’ He cocked a bushy eyebrow. ‘I already told you that as well?’

‘Yup.’

‘Jay-zus. Must be annoying for you, hearing me — ’

‘We’re leaving, Foster. Leaving first thing tomorrow morning. We’re packing everything we need to set up again, and we’ll find some other place to carry on doing the job.’

‘Right.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s probably very sensible.’

‘And I want you to come with us.’

Foster shook his head. ‘I can’t go back. You know I can’t enter a displacement field again.’

‘I know.’ She reached for one of his frail hands and squeezed it gently. ‘I know. We’re just relocating for now. No time travel, no fields, no tachyon particles. No more damage to you. We’re just taking a drive away from New York. That’s it.’

She realized just how fragile he looked now. When he’d first recruited them, yes, she’d noted he was old, but he’d looked robust-old. Like some seasoned old army veteran, hard as nails beneath a weathered exterior.

‘Maddy… I don’t think there’s much left of me.’ His smile broke her heart. ‘I’m dying. I have cancer. All over.’

She knew that; it was something else he’d already confessed on a previous visit.

‘Foster… I wish I could leave you here.’ Maddy looked around at the park, the sun streaming through September leaves, turning golden and beginning to fall. Beautiful. He’d told her he thought he might have just a few weeks left maybe; if he was really lucky, a couple of months. The rate of cellular damage caused by time travel wasn’t really quantifiable. It happened, that’s all they knew.

‘I know you’ve earned this,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve given the agency your life… and you deserve to choose how to spend the time you’ve got left. But we need you.’ She squeezed his hand again. ‘ I need you.’

‘You know as much as I did… do, Maddy.’

She shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t. I’m making mistakes. We’re screwing up. There are things stitched in history…’ She shook her head. Not quite the right expression. ‘Things pre-baked into history. Messages… written for us, I don’t know, maybe even written by us! Like we’ve been here before or something. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t…’ Her voice hitched with emotion. She stopped and looked across the pigeons at a toddler on reins tormenting the birds on the ground. ‘I can’t do this on my own any more. I’m not ready. And I wasn’t ready when you walked out on us.’

‘And I wasn’t ready for this when I first started,’ he said softly. ‘But you and I? We’re made for this job.’

She looked at his grin. That stupid lopsided old grin of his. ‘You know, sometimes I don’t know whether to call you Liam or Foster.’

He laughed. A dry old cackle. A dying man’s defiant snort.

‘Does Liam know now? About me?’

Maddy nodded. ‘I think actually, in a way, he’s kind of proud that he gets to turn out like you.’

‘But maybe he’s not so happy that’s going to happen sooner than he thought?’

‘I think he’s accepted that.’ She shrugged. ‘Come to terms with it. After all, if you hadn’t grabbed us, we’d all be dead anyway. It’s all extra time. Extra bonus life, right?’

‘Aye.’

They sat in silence for a while, watching a young couple rollerblade past them. He was teaching her, and she was guffawing at how bad she was. Not a care in the world between them.

‘Please, Foster,’ Maddy said again presently. ‘Please come along with us.’

His watery eyes watched the rollerbladers zigzagging up the path and away from them.

‘Don’t make me get on my knees,’ she said.

‘All right,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll come.’