The Eternal War

CHAPTER 1

2001, New York

Sal stared at it through the grubby shop window.

She was standing outside Weisman’s Stage Surplus on a pavement filled with bric-a-brac that the owner had allowed to spill outside: an old five-foot dime-store Indian carved out of mahogany, a treasure play-chest full of children’s dressing-up clothes, dusty books stacked in greengrocer’s crates.

It was the store fifteen minutes away from their archway that she’d used to find suitable clothes for Liam, Bob and Becks’s recent mission. That last visit, she hadn’t been sure this little place would have what they’d need to go about their business anonymously in the twelfth century. But, surprisingly, among the laden racks of clothes reeking of mothballs and lavender soap, she’d managed to find enough bits and pieces for them to pass unnoticed as three grubby peasants.

A good place to use again, she’d noted as they’d made their way home through the backstreets of Brooklyn with their medieval costumes in plastic bags.

But today she wasn’t here looking through the dusty window at the pitifully sad-looking store display to find something for the others to wear. She was here because of the thing she was looking at now, the thing sitting on the rocking-chair just inside the window. A row of soft toys and dolls sat together on the worn wooden seat side by side like they were posing for a family photo. Several dolls, a clown that would give any child nightmares, an elephant with big ears, a frog with stuffing bursting from a torn seam … and one small sky-blue teddy bear with a single button eye and the loose strands of stitching where another button eye must have been once.

‘I know you,’ she whispered.

She’d spotted this teddy bear the last time she was here. But with one thing and another she’d forgotten about it, let it go.

Now here she was, drawn to the shop, drawn to gaze at this sad-looking bear. It reminded her of something. A digi-stream show from her time maybe? A character in an old cartoon? Something, a wisp of a memory that vanished from her mind like a curl of smoke as she reached out to grasp it.

Last night she’d had that dream — no, not dream … nightmare — again. The moment the old man — Foster — had pulled her out from certain death to be recruited to the agency. Their apartment block, one of the super-tall glass and steel tenement towers that you saw everywhere in Mumbai nowadays, was on fire and its steel superstructure had been buckling, preparing to collapse in on itself.

Nowadays? She checked herself. She came from 2026. Nowadays was where she was based, 2001. Her new home … of sorts.

Foster had plucked her from the very last seconds of her life. Given her a choice: to work for the agency or join her family and die in the flames of the collapsing building.

Some choice.

Not that she actually got to choose. Dadda had chosen for her, thrusting her towards the old man … Mama screaming and crying to hold her one more time.

Stop it! Stop it!

Sal bit her lip. She didn’t need to replay the memory again in her head. It was all still fresh enough, thanks. That awful moment was done, her parents gone, dust, and she was here in New York instead of Mumbai. All done. Or, more accurately, yet to be done. Yet to happen twenty-five years from now.

Yet to happen … that at least stole some of the sting of losing her parents, of knowing that they died along with everyone else when that tower block collapsed in on itself. Because — and this is the bit that really messed her head up — they were alive right now. At this moment in time they were children, her age, and they were yet to even meet each other. That was going to happen in twelve years’ time, 2013. They were going to meet at a consumer electronics show in New Delhi. Both their families were going to thoroughly approve of the match, and within the very same year Sal was going to already be a bump growing in her mama’s tummy.

And now she was looking at a small blue teddy bear that had absolutely no logical reason to be sitting here in New York in 2001. A bear, unmistakably the same bear, that she’d seen her neighbours’ — Mr and Mrs Chaudhry — youngest boy, Rakesh, always clinging on to and slobbering over.

Unmistakably.

The same teddy bear.

It was the very last thing she’d seen from the final second of her old life of 2026 … that teddy bear, spinning head over heels into flames as the floor had suddenly collapsed beneath their feet and the building shuddered in on itself.

Then she’d awoken here in New York, 2001.

‘It’s the same … I’m sure,’ she whispered to herself, a confused frown stretching from one brow to the other. Her eyes had never let her down. She saw little things, the tiny details: the way the button eye drooped at an angle, the stitching through only three of the four holes; the bear’s pale blue material threadbare on the left arm but not the right, as if the right had been replaced at a later time.

The tiny details. Her eyes and her mind were compulsively drawn to those sorts of things. An obsessive habit. She tucked her drooping fringe back up behind one ear and leaned forward until her forehead thudded softly against the shop window. She’d always been able to spot the little things that others missed, seen patterns in a seemingly random mess. That’s why she’d been so good at playing Pikodu.

‘It’s the same,’ she whispered.

How the shadd-yah is that even possible?

Her mobile phone suddenly vibrated in the pocket of her jacket. She fished for it and pulled it out.

‘Yeah?’

‘Had you forgotten?’ Maddy sighed impatiently.

‘Forgotten? What?’

‘Today? This morning? Trip to the museum? Remember?’

Sal winced then bumped her head against the window again. Yes of course, they’d been discussing it last night before turning in. But with her dream … no, nightmare … that horrible memory … she’d completely forgotten. She cursed under her breath. ‘I’m on my way back.’

‘Meet us there if you like. On the front steps of the museum?’

‘Right.’

‘About an hour?’

‘OK.’

Sal snapped her cell closed, once again faintly amused at how old-fashioned it looked compared to the T-buds almost everyone back in Mumbai had looped over their ears.

She looked once again at the blue bear. The blue bear that shouldn’t be there.

It stared back at her with one button eye, almost challenging her to explain why not.