Falling (11 page)

Seeing the looks that flickered, oh so briefly, across her friends' faces, the uneasy combination of hostility and panic, Jude had to smile.

They'd been inseparable, Farah, Jude and Yona. The hold-outs. The ones whose parents hadn't noticed their child's peculiar ability to get their own way, after a split second's dead-eyed mental ‘absence'. The ones who'd denied it or hidden it or been afraid of it. The ones who hadn't realised.

They were late arrivals, sharing classrooms and exercises with squealing, infantile eight or nine-year-olds. Yona, a Bankside girl herself, had introduced herself in the traditional manner, confronting them both within half an hour and picking a fight. Still confused, afraid and looking for someone to take it out on, neither Jude nor Farah had bothered to pull punches.

They sat out a week's loss of privileges together, and that sealed the matter. Bestest friends, the graffiti said. Yona, Jude and Farah forever.

‘Anyway, I don't think they could if they wanted to,' Farah pointed out, undoing another shirt button as if that would free what remained of her courage. ‘We're ReTracers. We could just go back and unkill ourselves.'

Jude heard herself say, ‘It's not that simple.'

Emma looked up, grey eyes suddenly narrow with interest, and Jude wondered if she could tell.

But there'd never been a way to tell what was going on in Emma DiFlorian's head, and it wouldn't help her if there was.

Yona grunted. ‘We know, Jude. We were in the lectures too, remember?'

‘Unfortunately.'

‘Yeah. Metaphysics with Boring Bardsley. Do you think he'll ever turn up to a lecture with his pants actually zipped up?'

‘Now that really would break the laws of physics!'

They laughed together, high and in perfect unison, the way girls do. The teenaged Jude should have been cackling along with them, but the amusement caught in her throat.

What has this got to do with windows and conspiracy and people trying to kill me? We were children. This was just a prank. We didn't even get into trouble about it, not real trouble.

There's no connection to my future –

Except for her.

Emma DiFlorian, leaning forward now to draw shapes in the gravel with the end of her pencil. Spirals and swirls, the kind of intricacies her leisure time, her world, was made of.

She was tall, Emma, and her hair hung in rats' tails because she didn't comb it much. She spent a lot of time up here, and by now the others probably didn't even notice her. Which was fine, because she didn't notice them. Or the teachers, or the counsellors, or anyone else interested in getting her to participate in training. They knew she had it, the ability, the gift, but no one could get her to use it. The only reason she was still here was because no one knew what else to do with her.

Jude watched as Emma got up and strolled to the far side of the flat roof, behind the rusted water tower. After a moment, she took two steps forward, positioning herself perfectly like a dancer finding her mark, and swung her foot out in a perfect arc.

The gravel shifted before her. Same pattern, different scale.

‘They'll stop selling tickets for tonight's draw in just over an hour.' Yona glanced at Jude. Demanding support. ‘We don't want to be late, draw attention to ourselves. We have to make a decision.'

Farah stood up, stretching her legs exaggeratedly. Her shoes were new and built up like clogs; the latest, most desperate last gasp of the fashion industry. The beautiful people were neglecting to alter their clothes so often, now they could alter their faces instead, and the rag trade was suffering. And jewellery, the diet business, all the ways people compensated for the body their genes had foisted on them. The TV pundits were talking about imminent economic collapse.

Not that Jude cared. She was fed, clothed, protected. Paid, though she wouldn't get most of it until she turned sixteen. Her mother was out there somewhere – a sudden brutal kick of guilt, quickly suppressed – but her mother was a survivor. Always had been. No need to worry about her.

She swallowed hard, choked by hindsight.

‘This won't work,' Farah was saying. ‘I mean, we can't just go where we like, right? There has to be a crisis, and we get pulled back to the crisis point? Right?'

She'd forgotten how annoying Farah could be. The way she said ‘Right?' all the time. The way she tossed her head to get her hair out of her eyes. Like a horse. Been in the Stables too long and coming over all equine herself.

‘Oh, that's done,' Yona giggled. ‘I created one.'

‘What?'

‘I told Ahmed Saxton that Jude had won some money on last night's InstaLotto. Wasn't sure how much, but she looked pretty happy. Happy enough for him to pay her a visit.'

‘Yona!' Farah shrieked, sending the pigeons on the building opposite into a flapping, cooing spiral of alarm.

‘So, now we have a crisis – or at least, Jude has – and consequently, as soon as she ReTraces, she'll come back here. With tonight's InstaLotto numbers, thus ensuring that we win and have enough to pay off Ahmed.'

Farah pouted. ‘The idea, wooden-head, was to get the money for ourselves – not Ahmed and his aggro boys.'

‘If we hit the jackpot, there'll be plenty to go round.'

‘I don't know. Ahmed has a lot of friends.'

Yona sighed, as if irritated by the questions of a small child. ‘If there's any real trouble, I'll have a crisis of my own, won't I? And then I can skip back to the moment I told him – and not say anything.'

‘You're sure that won't lose us the money?'

‘Of course I'm sure. Unlike some people, I was paying attention in theory class, instead of flashing my chest at Carlos.'

‘I was not. It's not my fault people stare.'

‘That doesn't mean you have to stare back.'

‘It's rude to ignore people.'

‘Particularly when they look like Carlos.'

Farah tossed her head again, about to get up and flounce away.

‘Of course,' Jude said, ‘I could just skip back to the moment before you tell Ahmed, and break your jaw before you even set eyes on him.'

Farah seemed quite amused by that.

Yona scowled. ‘And how does that makes us any richer?'

‘It doesn't. But it solves the crisis. Going back to the day before I was brought here and running away would solve the crisis. Not being born would solve the crisis.'

‘But –'

The sun was giving her a headache. The sun, her friends, and the burden of all the things they didn't yet know.

‘You can't rely on when and how the crisis will get solved, or knowing what to do when you get there. Or how many shots it'll take, or what else you'll change along the way.'

Yona was squaring her shoulders for a fight; probably didn't even realise it. ‘Well. Hasn't Miss Academia got a piece to say.'

‘Miss Academia is being far from academic,' Jude snarled. Hearing the difference in her own voice – the bitterness, the maturity – and knowing they did too. ‘And she hasn't finished yet. The heist's off. I can't ReTrace and get the lottery numbers, because this isn't fifteen-year-old Jude you're talking to.'

Emma's foot swished through another arc, dividing the virgin gravel into strange new territories. Order out of chaos.

‘Oh,' Yona said, her voice high and thready. ‘Oh.'

Farah stepped back as if she'd been slapped.

‘And no, I don't know why I'm here. Or what you have to do with the fact that I've just been thrown out of a skyscraper window and I have to find out why before I hit the ground.' Her breath was coming in fierce, shaky gasps. She was angry, angry with them and with herself. ‘And for the record, it didn't work anyway. I ReTraced and gave you the numbers, but when the draw happened – second time round, for me – the numbers they drew were completely different. Training Officer Anderson won. Gave it all to a kid's charity. Just to prove that nothing's ever as easy as you think.'

‘Who told him?'

‘No one had to tell him, Farah. Three ReTracers hitting the jackpot, pretty suspicious. And since he's supposed to stop us exploiting our abilities for personal gain, it constituted a crisis, for him. And back he went, to sort it all out.'

‘My head hurts,' Yona muttered. ‘My head really hurts.'

‘Imagine how mine feels.'

Emma's foot inscribed another section of the ever-expanding pattern. Jude wondered if she'd even heard.

Farah stood with her head cupped in her hands for a moment. Finally, she emerged, her expression locked into a sweaty frown. ‘So, you're from the future, right?' A faint grin, a desperate attempt to make meaningful contact. ‘Just like that robot movie you're always hunting the schedules for.'

‘Yeah. I guess it's true that you turn into what you loved the most.'

‘I thought it was me you loved the most.'

Jude hung her head.

The stairwell door slammed shut in Yona's wake, echoing and final. Perhaps she'd gone to report a glaring breach of the Recommendation, or perhaps she just couldn't face the Ghost Of Autumn Future.

‘We didn't get hitched, did we?' Farah observed. ‘Didn't turn our backs on the capitalist hegemony for the open streets of anarchy and freedom. Or any of that crap you gabble when you're high.'

‘No.'

‘So what did happen?'

‘Farah, you know I can't –'

‘Oh no, of course you can't. You can break the Recommendation to tell us how childish we are, how stupid you find us now you're a professional, but you can't tell us anything that matters. Anything that would actually help us get through this place. And if you're so bloody professional, how'd you get thrown out of a window in the first place, eh?'

Turning her back on a question she couldn't answer, Jude stalked across the rooftop towards Emma.

She looked up, briefly. Good sign. The convulsions of a leaf in the wind could fascinate her for hours, but she wasn't usually much interested by human movement.

Then Jude looked down, at the trailing end of a spiral inscribed among the gravel two steps ahead of her, and understood why.

She didn't want her work of art ruined.

‘Emma?'

No reaction.

‘I really don't have time to mess around here. Let's make a deal. You help me with my little crisis – because I think you can, you keep cropping up in my life for a reason – and I'll warn you about something in your future that, trust me, you're going to want to avoid.'

DiFlorian sighed. ‘You don't know what I want to avoid. You don't even know who you're talking to.'

Jude opened her mouth to say the obvious; and then she got it.

‘Oh, yeah. You're just here on vacation as well. How are you finding it? Being your child-self, I mean. It's never quite the way you remember, is it? And the food's not up to much.'

‘That's not actually what I meant.'

Sitting down in the gravel, Jude fixed her with a hard stare, and settled in to wait.

‘The problem is,' Emma said, ‘that we can never change our own past.'

‘Parallel universe theory? There's an infinite number of universes, and in each one, a version of us living some slightly different life. So when we alter things, we're actually moving into that universe. Nothing ever changes – we just go to the place where that option always was and always will be.'

No wonder my head hurts.

Emma wriggled her toes until flecks of gravel worked their way out from between them. ‘Good theory.'

‘I think it's nuts.'

‘But what I mean is – the past changes for everyone except us.'

Because we always remember.

The UN President was assassinated on his first visit to the Reclaimed Lands. Someone had told her that at a social. Just came up in conversation. Then he'd stammered and blushed and had to retreat to the bathroom, because, for everyone else, it had never happened. He'd ReTraced and made sure it didn't. But for him, it was part of his memory, part of his life.

‘How does that help me?'

‘It means you know things that other people don't.'

‘Because for them, those things never happened.'

Emma nodded.

‘But that's no help, if those things aren't of any use.'

‘What do you know that no one else does?'

‘I know…'

I know that Emma here ends up in a jar, being modified into something GenoBond wants and isn't getting – very often – through the normal course of evolution. I know that people want me dead because I know these things. I know that a woman with a bad-taste handbag tried to kill me when I was a kid, though how that connects is anyone's guess.