“An opinion we shared until recently,” said Riley, cocking his head to one side to dislodge a shrill ringing that he suspected was an aftereffect of the explosion. “We really should scram, Chevie. The beaks will be whistling at the door, and p’raps Farley ain’t the only Johnny Future in the vicinity.”
“Let me just ignore whatever the hell you just said and do this,” said Chevie. She lowered herself into the pit and relieved Farley of his bag, then pried the revolver from his hand. “I feel better now,” she said, hefting the large weapon. “Less naked.”
Riley pointed at her outfit. “You are more or less naked, as usual. That ain’t much more than a bathing costume what you’re sporting there.”
Chevie took a moment to check her outfit, which she hadn’t done since tumbling from the Smarthole. Just as her alternate personality had emerged from the time tunnel, so, it seemed, had some of her old clothing. She now wore a strange hybrid outfit with elements of both possible futures. In essence she still wore her Youth Academy navy jumpsuit, but its heavy wool had become spandex, and the golden symbol had morphed to FBI. She had lost the hat when Director Gunn clocked her with the computer tablet.
I look like SuperFed, she thought.
Chevie realized that she was feeling inappropriately buoyant, in light of the dead bodies littering the theater aisle, the stink of cordite, and the fact that she was possibly stranded in the wrong time zone.
But I am me again, and perhaps the future doesn’t have to happen. DeeDee doesn’t have to die.
“This outfit is like a metaphor for how my brain is,” she said, spreading her arms. “I am mostly old Chevie, the one you know. But some of the new girl is still here.”
Riley decided that he would quiz Chevie later on the subjects of apparel and metaphors, and Malarkey reacted to all this exposition with a twitch of his head, which, being connected to his torso, set many of his wounds a-pumping blood.
“Dandy,” he said, being further from the grave than he looked. “Nuffin’ I likes better than a nice metaphor of an afternoon. But while you two are playing bo-peep, I am spilling me life’s fluids onto this here stage. So if you wouldn’t mind…”
Chevie tossed Farley’s bag onto the stage and swung herself after it.
“Sorry, Otto. Riley and I haven’t seen each other for a while, so we gotta bo-peep it up for a little. And anyway, the last time our paths intersected, your fingers were around my throat, so pardon me if I put you on the bottom of my priority list.”
Otto shook a fist at her. “Why is you talking like this? Speak plain, girl.”
Riley donned his cloak, then helped Otto to his feet. “Let me interpret, Your Majesty. Chevie ain’t all that pushed about yer welfare, on account of you being murdering scum.”
Otto leaned over, weighed down by a head that suddenly seemed to be composed of lead.
“The Injun said that, did she?”
“Give or take,” said Riley, ducking his own head under Otto’s left armpit to support the Ram king.
Chevie propped up Malarkey’s right side. “Let’s talk politics and allegiances later, shall we? After we put some space between us and this bloodbath. I’d say there were bad people after all of us.”
Riley did not comment. He did not, for example, point out that it was Chevie herself who was delaying their escape. He knew from experience that there was nothing his friend from the future liked better than a protracted squabble, and the more inopportune the timing, the louder she argued.
And this ain’t the time for a barney.
They dragged, coaxed, and heaved Otto Malarkey’s mammoth bulk to the stage door, and lurched outside as one, all exhausted by the effort of moving a frame the size of a dray horse.
“I have a bad case of the pants,” Riley declared, gasping for air, his cheek slick with Malarkey’s blood. “We can’t lug this bruiser far.”
Chevie leaned against the wall. “No kidding. What’s stage two of the plan?”
Riley thought fast. “We need to get ourselves in lavender, and I mean sharpish. A quiet lurk somewhere, not no penny gaff neither. Bacteria would be the death of King Otto at the mo.”
Chevie found that her mind was beginning to wrap itself around Riley’s lingo.
“Somewhere nearby while we’re at it. This big lug is bleeding all over my FBI super suit.”
Riley was being drizzled by a fair deal of blood himself. “It’s a good plan, just a deuced shame that I don’t know any such place.”
Otto gathered his feet and took some of his own weight.
“Fetch a Shoeblack and have him summon a cab. It ’appens that I might know a place that would be just the ticket.”
“Someplace unknown to your confederates,” said Riley. “The Rams had one rotten apple in the barrel and it may have been contagious, if you know what I mean.”
Malarkey hawked and spat a ball of blood to the dusty sidewalk.
“Oh, believe me, Ramlet, there ain’t no one who knows about this gaff.”
Riley steadied King Otto against the brick wall and ran down the alley to Holborn proper, whistling for a Shoeblack boy as he went.
Chevie and Malarkey were left alone. King Otto looked down at the girl through heavily lidded eyes.
“Murdering scum, is it?”
Chevie realized that she was in quite a weak position should Malarkey decide to regain his prodigious strength.
“Well, murdering, at the very least.”
Otto closed his eyes. “Fair enough,” he said, and he had himself a little rest, leaving Chevie to gaze anxiously down the length of the alley at her disappearing friend.
Ouroboros. The snake that eats its own tail—that’s the time traveler. Going around in circles, destroying his own past. Crapping out a whole new future. Apologies. Pooping out a whole new future.
—Professor Charles Smart
Victorian London was not kind to visitors. It lured them into its soot-stained labyrinth with a vague fairy-tale promise of streets paved with gold, then sucked their coin through the slitted windows of gin houses and opium dens. The Great Oven trod hard on the souls of outsiders with a life of slave labor or destitution with naught at the end of the struggle but an ignoble death, tied to a sleeping bench in the bone house. Every year, thousands of cheery country stock rolled into London as though the land was on a tilt, and every year thousands more were rolled into unmarked paupers’ graves, if they were lucky—and pig troughs or furnaces if they were not. While it was true that murder was rare, it wasn’t classed as murder if the city did the killing. If a factory swallowed a dozen limbs a week, then that was just the price of employment. If a person’s hand was fast enough to grasp a shilling, then it ought to be fast enough to stay out of the grinder. It stood to reason. And anyway, what matter if a few bumpkins went into the earth before their terms? There were always scores more in a shuffling line outside the factories.
For a stranger to English shores come to town off the gangplank, London was a series of local hazards designed to strip Johnny Foreigner naked and toss him on the slag heap without a farthing to his name. The population boom was due in some part to the fact that naval types couldn’t afford to quit the place until a boat docked with an empty berth, and there was a long line for those planks. Jack Tars would gladly jump on a deck bound for the dark heart of cannibal country rather than spend another fogbound night in the Great Oven, and often committed some deliberate crime in order to secure a yard of floor space in one of the metropolitan jails, bridewells, or penitentiaries along with forty thousand of their fellow city-dwellers each year.
In London town, a soul was never more than a dozen paces from an open cess ditch or rat-infested garbage heap. And if the streets had ever truly been paved with gold, it would have long since been eroded by the torrents of acidic filth flung from the high balconies that teetered over rookery roads.
In short, London was a grimed blemish on England’s fair soil.
Clover Vallicose was having the time of her life.
HALF MOON STREET, MAYFAIR, LONDON, 1899, TEN MINUTES PREVIOUSLY
The Thundercats had wallowed in the Zen Ten for a further minute after Chevie’s departure, and then stumbled from the terraced house, supporting each other with meaty arms and blocky shoulders. Lunka Witmeyer’s good mood was truncated by a bout of retching that bent her over a water barrel in the yard at the rear of the house on Half Moon Street, on the border of Soho and Mayfair.
Witmeyer had never traveled well on a train, so the time tunnel had a violent effect on her gut.
While her partner endured the cramp daggers in her abdomen, Clover Vallicose straightened her greatcoat and the splashback visor slung below her chin, and then ventured into the alley that ran from the rear of the house to Half Moon Street proper. Everything beyond that yard was strange to the Thundercat and yet strangely familiar, too.
I know this place, she thought. I have studied this place.
And she had, for Half Moon Street had a particular significance in Boxite history. Following the Emergence from London’s catacombs, the hangman for Box, Major Anton Farley, had set up his operations headquarters on this very road. In fact, he had occupied the top-floor suite of a hotel that had previously gone by the name Flemings, which overlooked Smart’s town house. Farley’s first move had been to hang half a dozen of the writers and artists who infested the area and move in his own Box-fearing people.
Clover Vallicose had no qualms about hanging artists who would much rather take up the pen or brush than the rifle in support of an empire that needed them. She herself had once shot a Welsh mime who had constructed a pantomime that could be interpreted as saying that the Thundercats were a bit trigger-happy, even though the wounded man had sworn that all it said was that he was stuck in a well.
Happy days.
And here she was on Half Moon Street, where it all began. And apparently when it all began.
Vallicose had spent countless hours poring over microfiche and photographs from the period, fascinated by the Empire’s origins, regretting bitterly that she had not been there at the birth of the glorious reign.
And now I am here. Is it possible that God has granted my wish?
There was a lot more pondering to be done on this subject, and a lot more information to be beaten out of people; but that would have to wait, because Clover spotted Chevron Savano running away. Fleeing, Jax scum that she was. And no matter the circumstances, Clover had been given an order from the Blessed Colonel himself.
Kill the spy.
And she could no sooner forget that order than she could forget the existence of Box himself.
She sensed rather than heard her partner approach.
“What’s happening, Clove?”
Clove. Lunka rarely used that endearment. Too much blood had stained the earth under their feet for them to be true friends. That’s not to say they wouldn’t die for each other. But that was duty.
“Later, Sister. The Jax coward runs from her fate. We must follow.”
“Wait,” protested Witmeyer, wiping sheaves of her long dark hair between gloved thumb and forefinger. “I need to…”
But her partner had engaged in her most annoying habit of leaving in the middle of a discussion. And to make her departure even more irritating, Vallicose tossed a comment back over her shoulder.
“That’s why I keep my hair cropped. In this occupation, one never knows when one might need to vomit.”
It was always duty first with Clover Vallicose. First and last. Duty was the steel at her core, and it strengthened her resolve to serve Box every minute of every day. Duty helped Vallicose sleep at night, wrapped her in layers of absolution, and dispelled the dark dreams brought on by any remaining scraps of conscience. She was that most dangerous of adversaries: a true believer.
At age six she had been plucked from her orphanage by an army scout who had seen a video of her beating up a boy twice her size for not making the sign of the Box as he passed a portrait of the Blessed Colonel. In the orphanage Clover had shared a sleeping cupboard with eight other kids, whereas in the academy she was given her own cubicle and three square meals a day. Her faith grew even stronger as a result.
The Blessed Colonel had chosen her for something great, she believed. And her belief never faltered through those years in the academy. Through the decade of service in France her belief grew even stronger, and she was promoted from regular army to Thundercat. The most public of secret police.
My time is at hand, she thought every day.
And on this day, perhaps she was right.
If Vallicose was a true believer, then Witmeyer, on the other hand, was an opportunist. To Lunka, the Thundercat badge was a free pass to act as she pleased. Oh, she could quote scripture all day long if it aligned with her chosen course of action; but with Witmeyer the action came first, then the scripture to back it up. Neither Thundercat was naive enough to think the other shared her beliefs or lack thereof, but both knew they could rely on the other in a tight spot, and each knew very well how to turn a tight spot to their own advantage.
The spot they found themselves in on this particular day in 1899 was tighter than most, even for a couple of seasoned Thundercats with buzz batons and automatic sidearms. Witmeyer, normally the optimist, was finding it hard to put her finger on the upside. But Vallicose, usually the truculent grunter, was positively ebullient as they followed Chevie’s boot heels across London.
“Oh, praise be,” Vallicose gushed. “There is Victory Square, where they dragged out Queen Victoria herself. Swore like a fishwife, apparently. That devil spawn ruled over Albion like a dragon squatting on a tower. They say her blood still stains the cobbles.” She elbowed her partner. “Perhaps we will witness that happy day when her neck gets stretched.”
Witmeyer walked stiffly, like a drunkard imitating the sober. “Smart’s machine sent us into the past, Clove. Is that what you’re telling me?”
Ahead, Chevie grabbed a lamppost, swinging herself around a corner onto Piccadilly. Vallicose settled into double-time to keep her prey in view.
“Of course. Smart was conducting illegal experiments, obviously. Savano nearly escaped, but thank heavens we have managed to follow.”
Witmeyer matched her partner’s pace. “Thank heavens,” she said weakly.
The street widened to a thoroughfare, and the Thundercats drew stunned gazes from a bunch of shady loiterers warming the seats of their pants by a brazier.
One character, a pale streak of a man, decided to make a remark. “What ho!” he called. “The oxen have shrugged off their yokes.”
Witmeyer channeled her anxiety into an uppercut that drove the man into the brazier, sending coal and sparks tumbling into the street. The remaining vertical loiterers were too shocked to even contemplate reprisals.
Vallicose grunted her approval, a familiar sound that comforted Witmeyer somewhat.
They double-timed on, Vallicose apparently delighted rather than perturbed by the absolute strangeness of their circumstances. Witmeyer found that the best strategy was to bite down on her knuckles and focus on their prey. Once Savano was dead she could deal with her unexpected situation.
“This is Picadilly as it used to be,” breathed Vallicose. “I’ve seen pictures.”
Witmeyer was in no mood for a history lesson, being up to her neck in it, so to speak; but Clover seemed on the point of fainting from excitement.
“Piccadilly,” said Witmeyer, unimpressed by the entire avenue and the smell of animal doings hanging like a pall over the street.
“You don’t understand, Sister,” said Vallicose. “After the first round of Boxstrike, Farley used these lampposts to hang any royals or politicians who survived the missiles. This is Swingers’ Row, but it was known as Piccadilly
.”
I don’t believe this, thought Witmeyer, biting her knuckles. None of this is happening.
They tailed Chevie from a distance, their trousered legs, flesh-colored greatcoats, and splashback visors drawing double takes from the throngs of office clerks, corner boys, street vendors, and fella-me-lads spilling over the footpaths onto Piccadilly. Dozens of comments were thrown their way, but the Thundercats were forced to bear these insults or risk losing Chevie.
Vallicose and Witmeyer were seasoned trackers, having honed their skills in the poppy fields of Normandy, hunting down shooters from the notorious Jax guerrillas division, Les Invisibles. They could have taken Chevie at their pleasure but held back, timing their swoop to coincide with a break in the crowds. This was not their London, and more attention on their heads was the last thing they wanted.
There was no danger of Savano escaping. Her run was like that of a headless chicken. The girl was dead already but didn’t know it.
This would indeed have been the case had not a constable appeared before them on the footpath three turns later, blocking their way.
“Halt!” he said, raising a baton. “I want a word with you two…ladies.”
As a representative of the era’s law keepers, the man was a disgrace. He was unshaven and generally unkempt, with a uniform that seemed to bear the grime of several years upon it and the stink of stale gin on his breath.
Vallicose was loath to slow down, but the only alternative was to incapacitate a policeman in broad daylight on a crowded avenue.
“Is there a problem, brother?” she said testily. “Because much as I respect your office, I have no moments to spare at this particular time.”
Witmeyer and Vallicose towered over the scruffy constable, but he appeared not to notice their threatening loom.
“Not a problem as it were…eh…ladies. I just fancied a closer look at the pair of you. Foreign, is it? From overseas?”
Wordplay, falsehood, and bogus reportage were Lunka’s areas of expertise, so a question like this would generally fall to her, but today she was chewing on her fist and rolling her eyes.