City of Shadows

Chapter 49

8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio

‘But it’s going to be dangerous, isn’t it?’ Sal looked at Becks. She was no taller or bulkier than any normal twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. But she, like Bob, was originally engineered for military purposes, a killing machine; if she got the idea into her head while Bob was not around, there’d not be much of any of them left.

Maddy clucked her tongue. ‘I’ve got no idea how she’ll behave. But if she bugs out on us, we’ve got Bob right here to restrain her, or…’

‘Kill her?’

‘Look… it won’t come to that, I’m sure. More likely she’ll just swoon and pine for Liam like some pathetic fangirl.’

Sal snorted. That was kind of funny despite the seriousness of the situation. ‘But why now? Why don’t we wait until we’re settled in London?’

‘I’m not sure we’re going to have enough power back in 1888 to sustain our back-up frozen embryos. Once we go through to the past, we may not be able to regrow replacement support units. It might be just Bob and Becks… one of each. We lose them, we won’t have any back-up support units to grow.’

‘What about the San Francisco drop point?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea going anywhere near there. They’ve got to be watching that place now. No… it would be dumb for us to go back there.’

Sal nodded.

‘We can take the foetuses with us, just in case there’s some way we can find a way to grow new support units if needed. But, really, I think we need to sort Becks out now, once and for all. We need both our support units fully loaded and functional.’ She turned to them both. ‘Once we go back, we may have to ditch our embryos and that means no more support units. We’ll have to rely indefinitely on these two. Which is why… we need to test her mind out now, Sal, while we’ve got a chance here in 2001 to grow a new one from scratch if… you know… this doesn’t work out. Anyway,’ she added, ‘while Liam’s in London it might be easier. We don’t want Becks hurling herself his way and slobbering all over him.’

Sal curled her lip. An ‘eww’ written all over her face.

Maddy pulled a hard drive out of her duffel bag. Masking tape with ‘Becks’ felt-tipped across it. Becks’s complete, original consciousness, her mind, right there in a hard plastic case. Maddy held it up. ‘You ready for this, Becks?’

‘Affirmative. I am ready.’

‘All right, then.’ Maddy wasn’t entirely sure this was the sensible thing to do. But what was locked away on there, in an encrypted folder, was knowledge that was far too important to remain there forever… a decoded portion of the Holy Grail. A message sent by someone, quite possibly the previous team. Quite possibly a previous version of Maddy herself. And God knows what the message was. Another warning like that scribbled Pandora one? But whoever had sent the message from two thousand years ago, they’d thought to pass along an instruction to Becks to keep the secret locked away until certain unspecified conditions were met. And now all of that was sitting on an external hard drive: on a piece of hardware that was unable to process these thoughts; on hardware that was merely able to store them. They needed Becks’s knowledge, her memories installed back on-board a support-unit mind where, hopefully someday soon, Becks would be able to announce that these mysterious ‘conditions’ had been met, and let Maddy know what the big secret was.

And now they were acting entirely on their own, beyond the agency’s original remit, Maddy realized they had twice as much need to know what dark secret had been transported across a thousand years of Roman history and the Dark Ages, across another thousand years of Holy Grail history for their eyes only.

A warning? A truth? A threat? A revelation?

‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘This won’t do itself.’