Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 1

2001, New York Monday (time cycle 77)

Something’s wrong. I know it. I think there’s something big going on we don’t know about. Something Foster should’ve told us and didn’t. Maybe he really wanted to, but couldn’t. Wasn’t allowed to. Maybe that’s why he left us?

Sal put down her pen and looked around the laundromat. Just like it always was at this time on a Monday morning, it was empty. She was the only customer there, sitting on one of the row of plastic chairs facing a grubby window. She watched a removal truck outside the window trying to squeeze past a kerb-parked yellow cab, the drivers of both vehicles winding down their windows and barking abuse at each other.

Men. Always so aggressive. Sal wondered for a moment what a world free of testosterone might be like. Surely a better place without men beating their chests and acting like apes.

She looked down at her notebook again. That thing. That stuffed toy. The bear. Somehow that’s at the heart of everything. I’m sure of it.

The man that came through, that poor, twisted mess that was once a human being, she was sure he’d been trying to tell her something about the blue bear as he died. Something for her ears alone. She wondered how a stuffed toy, a threadbare, scruffy-looking one at that, could ‘mean’ anything to anyone — except comfort for some child.

She scribbled again in her diary. And then there’s Liam’s tunic.

Sal was certain of one thing: that she could trust her own eyes, what she actually saw. She’d taken a close look again at the tunic that was hanging in a closet just outside the nook where their bunk beds were. The clothes they’d all been wearing the day they’d arrived in the archway hung in there. No longer worn because they were so precious, a last link to the lives they’d lived before this. Before becoming TimeRiders.

She’d unhooked Liam’s tunic, the very same one he’d arrived in the night the Titanic had gone down. The tunic, complete with two rows of brass buttons and the White Star Line’s star symbol on its purple collar. And yes… there it had been, the thing she was looking for, that ever-so-faint, comma-shaped red wine stain on the right shoulder. So faint. Somebody had once gone to a lot of trouble to try and remove it and failed.

And here’s the thing. The exact same stain… the exact same stain

… was on the tunic hanging in that odd little antique and costume-hire shop a few blocks away. An exact duplicate of Liam’s tunic. Sal scribbled the obvious question in her diary. So, how come there’s a duplicate of what he was wearing hanging in that shop?

The question begged all sorts of answers, none of which Sal thought she liked the sound of. The answer that unsettled most was the one she decided to write down. Does that mean we’ve been here before?

She looked up from her scribbling. The removal truck was still trying to inch past the taxi, and both men were still enthusiastically haranguing each other, their Brooklyn voices lost beneath the frenetic whir of tumble dryers in the laundry. She turned to look at the round porthole of the nearest of them, spin-drying her and Maddy’s clothes. They were all clothes from 2001 now, garments that allowed them to blend in. Her eyes were drawn to a pale green ankle sock spinning round and round, pushed up against the window, caught in a spiral of forces it couldn’t escape.

Like us. Her, Maddy and Liam, three unfortunate souls unknowingly stuck in an endless loop they were doomed to live over and over again.

She looked down at the biro in her hand. At the diary, a nondescript notebook of lined pages that you could pick up in any stationery store. She leafed through the pages, realizing she had filled more than a quarter of it with her small, tidy handwriting and sketches and doodles. And before the first of her entries, written months’ worth of ‘time-bubble days’ ago, right there… the torn edges of dozens and dozens of pages ripped out by someone.

A thought suddenly occurred to her that left a chill running down her back, like a ghostly finger tracing her vertebrae, making the flesh on her bare arms pucker into goosebumps.

Oh shadd-yah. Was that me?

She wondered if the pages of this diary had been used by her… before.

Another me? A previous me?

She felt sick. Hadn’t Foster said something about the fate of the previous team? Something about ‘being torn to pieces’, something about ‘there being little left’. She remembered that first day vividly. Being awoken on her bunk, meeting Maddy and Liam for the first time, seeing Foster’s old face leaning over her and realizing it was the same face she’d seen just before she’d died, just before her home in Mumbai had collapsed into a raging inferno.

And there was that thing… that ghostly form in the dark that he’d had to hastily usher them away from. The seeker. Didn’t he say it was that ethereal, glowing shape — little more than fragile membrane, like a jellyfish, like a plume of smoke — that had ripped the previous team to unrecognizable shreds?

The previous team.

Us?