“I don’t…” Winchester started, then entered a few more commands. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  I stared at his back, at his hunched shoulders, at his dishevelled hair and his stubbled cheeks. It had only been a short time since we took flight from RATS, but it felt like it had been weeks.

  I looked at the image on the screen trying to recognise anything. Part of me didn’t want to see something that would prove we were in fact at RATS. That this…destruction was all that was left of the Academy. Of the people who had worked and lived there. Of Jack.

  My heart missed a beat, and I dropped my eyes to the dimpled floor, staring instead at the dried blood covering it. Michael’s dried blood.

  It hadn’t honestly occurred to me how dangerous time travel actually was. Certainly, Sergei Ivanov had proved to be a treacherous aspect of travelling through Time I had not envisaged. But actually dying while on board a Vehicle had never crossed my mind.

  My eyes lifted to the screen again of their own accord. I didn't want to see any more, but I couldn’t help it. Was Jack out there? Dean and Sally? Clive Crawford?

  “We should check,” I said, nodding towards the screen when Winchester turned back around.

  “Yes,” he said, sounding as defeated as I did.

  He unbuckled himself and gingerly stood from his seat, steadying himself when the MPCV shuddered. Everything was arse about face, the hatch at the top, the seats on their backs, the screens off to the side. Somehow, Winchester managed to gain his footing.

  And then the Orion rolled over with the displacement of weight and his hand came down on the launch button.

  No, I thought as stars began to unfurl around us. Not the launch button, but the Return.

  “Not again,” he muttered as the engines roared to life and then silence engulfed us.

  4

  And I Hit The Button

  Jack

  I was going mad. Snapping at anyone and everyone. My vision blurring for no apparent reason. My fingers shaking when I tried to type in commands. My voice damn near cracking when Dean Jordan asked me if I was going after them and I had to reply I wasn’t; that I was in effect grounded.

  It had got to the point where it was best if I stayed away from everyone, which served several purposes at once. No one needed to see how affected I was by this; how utterly incapable of functioning appropriately I was. How close to Prophetic Dream Realisation withdrawal I was.

  And it also hid my attempts to unhook Orion 2 from its coupling surreptitiously.

  No one certainly needed to see how I was trying to steal an MPCV and disobeying direct orders of the Chief Surgeon.

  If they suspected me of anything, they’d assume I’d go for my Orion; Orion 1. But no one would think I would steal another Surgeon’s Vehicle.

  Our Crew Vehicles were our lifelines to our own time. They were our anchors. Our home away from home. Our refuge and saviour. Every single Surgeon had a deep and abiding connection to their MPCV. The thought of pilfering someone else’s left me feeling decidedly ill.

  Or that could have been the dreams.

  Not that I’d had any; there hadn’t been time nor the inclination to sleep. But I recognised the symptoms; I’d seen them before. When a subject of shared dreams lost their dream counterpart for whatever reason.

  Several Surgeons had started going mad, themselves, when Ivanov took our Interns. Without the subject of your prophetic dream, your dreams and therefore your memories become faulty somehow. As if they can’t exist without that other person existing.

  We’d thought, at first, that Sergei must have killed the Interns he’d taken. But when Time didn’t spring back and slap us all upside the head, and occasionally those prophetic dreamscape withdrawals subsided for our people, it became evident that he’d done something else entirely.

  But what? And did it mean that wherever Mimi was was similar to wherever the Interns were?

  Or that Sergei had interfered in Mimi’s flight?

  I made a sound, more growl than an expletive, but it was enough to give away my position.

  “And how exactly,” Rafe Hoffman’s voice muttered from behind me, “do you plan to fly a Crew Vehicle without an Intern?”

  I glanced over my shoulder and then returned my attention to the couplings.

  “Go back to the others, Rafe,” I murmured.

  “Should I run and hide, too, sir?” Groves asked from behind Rafe’s more substantial form.

  I let out a sigh.

  “It’ll be like old times,” my Intern offered. “You know, before Mimi hitched a ride and broke our little team up. You, me and Sally. Fighting the good fight.”

  “This isn’t your fight,” I snapped.

  “Of any of us,” Groves said softly, “this fight belongs to me. Mimi took my shift,” she explained.

  “And how exactly did you manage to convince Mouse to swap a shift with you and fly with Sebastian Winchester of all people?” Rafe asked.

  “Tequila,” was all the Novitiate said.

  Rafe chuckled. “Yeah, she sure does like tequila.”

  Silence descended for a brief moment, and then the coupling sprang free. Finally!

  I stood up and stared at the two pains in my arse. They blinked owlishly back at me.

  “So,” Rafe whispered, “have you got her last coordinates?”

  “You’re not going,” I said, and made to move past him.

  Both Sally and Rafe shifted in unison as if they’d practised the manoeuvre, and blocked my path. I glowered at them, but they didn't seem remotely cowered. I was losing my touch. It could have had something to do with the meltdown I’d had in the middle of Dispatch an hour earlier.

  It was going to take a lot of effort to regain any ground I’d lost with this lot.

  I sobered and shook my head.

  “I’m going against direct orders,” I said. “Clive grounded me.”

  “And?” Rafe asked.

  “Never stopped Mouse,” Sally offered.

  I gritted my teeth. “You’d be guilty by association.” They smiled. “Grounded as well. Possibly permanently.”

  “So,” they both said, lengthening the word until it was several syllables long. “Coordinates?” they both asked.

  “I’m going alone,” I reiterated.

  “Look, sir,” Groves said. “The sooner you realise we’re a team, the easier this will go.”

  “She’s right, Jack,” Rafe said. “Besides, one scream from Sally here and this will all be over.”

  “I do not scream,” Groves said.

  “Squeak?” Rafe asked.

  Mouse.

  “Bloody fucking bollocks,” I muttered.

  “There he is,” Rafe remarked.

  “About time,” Sally murmured.

  Rafe thumped me on the shoulder. “Coordinates?” he asked pointedly.

  “I have them,” I reluctantly admitted.

  “Great,” he said, shifting to look at Sally. “If you please, Miss Groves.”

  “Certainly, Dr Hoffman,” she replied and pulled a cellphone from her pocket.

  I watched as she fired off a text. Somewhere in the hangar, a phone went off. I scowled at them both.

  And then the fire alarm went off.

  “What the bloody hell…?” I exclaimed.

  “Done,” Sally said.

  “Give it a couple of minutes,” Rafe offered. “He’ll need to make sure everyone is preoccupied.”

  “Who’ll need to make sure everyone is preoccupied?” I demanded.

  Sally’s cellphone went off. She read the text message and then pocketed the device.

  “Dean says the coast is clear.”

  “You’ve dragged Dean Jordan into this as well?” I growled.

  “He offered,” Sally advised.

  “Got a crush on…” Rafe trailed off, his eyes darting to Groves, and then he coughed into his hand awkwardly.

  “Mouse,” Sally finished for him with a prim smile. “Shall we?” she indicated the open hatch around the front of the Vehicle. “The clock is ticking, after all.”

  “Time stands still for no man,” Rafe offered, slipping past me and entering the module.

  I was surrounded by madmen.

  Which should have made me feel right at home. But as my head started to throb and memories of my last dream with Mimi became evermore fuzzy, I felt only nauseous. The hangar spun momentarily, and then Groves was assisting me into the MPCV and Rafe was staring at me with a horrified look on his face, and the module door clanged shut.

  “All right?” I asked, sweat beading my brow and my hands shaking.

  Neither one of them said a thing.

  “Last chance,” I offered, entering the coordinates.

  “Let’s bring our girl home,” Sally said quietly.

  “Maybe leave Winchester behind,” Rafe offered, but even his tone of voice was unusually subdued.

  “God help Jessop,” Sally said, attempting to lighten the mood, I should think. “Standing between those two.”

  “He’s a bigger man than me, that’s for sure,” Rafe muttered.

  I watched my hand as it hung suspended over the launch button. I watched as my fingers trembled and the intercom light started flashing brightly, and the cameras on the screen showed Sanders and his men racing across the hangar outside the MPCV with their guns drawn.

  “Bloody hell,” Rafe muttered. “Are they going to shoot us?”

  “You,” I said, “probably not. Me on the other hand.”

  And I hit the button.

  5

  At Least It Wasn’t Russia

  Mimi

  “Location: Tokyo. Time: 1982,” Winchester said. “It worked,” he added, sounding surprised.

  “That looks like Tokyo,” I agreed, taking in the street-wide zebra crossing on the screen before us. Minus all the people, of course, as we’d arrived a dimension apart from reality, making us undetectable to sight. But also making those people who were in Tokyo, on this street at this time, undetectable to us, as well.

  Winchester spared me a glance, but his hands continued to fly over the keyboard in front of him. The Orion let out a hiss and a clank, a few solitary sparks emitted from behind the central console. The smell of overworked electrical wiring met my nose, the taste of aniseed burst to life on the back of my tongue. The sine wave on the one screen still working was a soft orange, but nothing alarming.

  I held my breath and waited for the world to explode. It didn’t.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “We fix the tear before it becomes a rip,” Winchester replied, working to do just that; his fingers flying, his eyes darting over the scrolls of information and graphs appearing before him.

  I glanced across the module to Michael and bit my lip. How could Winchester just carry on as if nothing had happened? Michael was dead. Right there in his Intern’s seat. Blood coated the floor of the MPCV. Even Winchester was covered in it. RATS had disappeared back in their time. Back where Jack had been.

  How could Winchester just carry on?

  A small sound emerged from the back of my throat. At first, Winchester ignored it. But when I sucked in a ragged breath of air and then made the sound again on the exhale, he stopped typing on his keyboard and turned to glare at me.

  “What is the matter with you?” he demanded.

  My eyes flicked to Michael.

  His face didn’t soften in the slightest.

  “We have a job to do, Miss Wylde. I suggest you buck up and push all superfluous thoughts and emotions from your mind. Time needs to be fixed, and we must do it.”

  He turned back to his console as if the conversation was finished.

  “What if we’re the only ones left?” I asked.

  “What if we are?” he snapped. “Time still needs to be fixed. Or did you join RATS for reasons other than keeping Time intact?”

  He peered over his shoulder at me, eyes narrowed.

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “you joined RATS because of your family, didn’t you? Not Time. But to save your own family’s arse.”

  “I joined RATS because you needed me,” I growled.

  “Please,” he said, rolling his eyes. I hadn’t realised he could do that. “RATS doesn't need you. You’re more a pain in our arses than a cure-all for Time.”

  “I never said I could cure Time. But Sergei Ivanov…”

  “Yes?” Winchester said with faux enthusiasm. “Just what exactly do you think you can do to stop Sergei? Did you even comprehend what has happened to RATS? Or were you only pretending to be distraught? What would Jack say if he knew you mourned him only theatrically?”

  “What is wrong with you?” I whispered.

  “Oh, you’ve got the gall to ask that?” He sneered at me and shook his head. “What did you do to that Return? Tell me! What did Sergei have you do that resulted in the destruction of RATS?”

  “I..I didn’t do anything.”

  “Y..you didn't do anything?” he said in imitation of my stutter. “Pathetic! Well, whatever it is you did, you will not be meddling with Time again.”

  He pressed a few buttons on the console and then stood up from his seat, crossing to the hatch, which was where it was supposed to be on this landing. The screen flickered, casting a rainbow of colours across the blood caked floor. Winchester started to turn the wheel on the hatch, opening it.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded, my eyes flicking from his actions to the people who had suddenly appeared on the screen, crossing the street-wide pedestrian crossing in Tokyo.

  The hatch swung open. Exclamations of alarm and shock sounded out. Words tripped over themselves in Japanese.

  And then Sebastian Winchester, sanctimonious prick and arrogant Surgeon, grabbed hold of my flight suit and hurled me out of the MPCV.

  I stumbled down the steps, frantically taking in the eighties styled clothing, the wide-eyes and startled glares, the bright neon signs and honking horns, the smell of gasoline and smog and cigarettes.

  I spun back to face the module, once I’d regained my balance. My eyes connected with Winchester’s. He smirked.

  “I believe somewhere out there, one of the first CD players is being sold,” he said. “Have fun!”

  And then he promptly slammed the hatch door closed.

  I raced up to the Orion and banged on the metal siding. Around me, 1982 Tokyo stood still and watched the madwoman in strange clothing rage inarticulately at something reminiscent of an Apollo capsule, and then fall flat on her face when it shifted dimensions and winked out of sight.

  “Oomph!” I managed as the air was knocked out of my lungs.

  I rolled onto my back in the middle of the road and stared up at a murky sky. The thunderous sound of hundreds of feet marching reached me as the public started walking again, some of them right at my side. A forest of legs surrounded me, the tar seal of a main road in Ginza met my back, and the reality of the situation crushed into me from all sides.

  “Bastard!” I muttered and pushed to my feet.

  I turned in a circle and noticed the street was clearing, the traffic lights changing, the cars beginning to move. I stood where I was and waited for Winchester to return, because there was no way he’d leave me here, out of time, and risk effing up his precious timeline even more. No way.

  But the cars kept coming, and someone yelled at me from the sidewalk in Japanese, and a horn blasted not two feet from where I waited. And Orion 3 stayed inconveniently and alarmingly absent.

  I couldn’t even yell at him; he wouldn’t be able to see me, even if he was still hanging around. In a different dimension, he’d see the inanimate objects and any changes to them that animate objects made. But he would not see me.

  And hanging around was, I was beginning to think, not something Sebastian Winchester did willingly. He’d already fixed that tear. I’d seen a brief glimpse of the sine wave on the screen before it had changed, and it had been pale blue; not soft orange.

  Time had been mended, and then he had left me here.

  A car horn blasted out beside me, making me jump. I staggered a step, banged my hip into the car’s fender, received a string of abuse in a language I did not understand, and then someone grabbed me by my upper arm and hauled me across the road to the relative safety of the footpath.

  Bystanders stood about and watched, even as busy workers and harried shoppers pushed past, bumping shoulders and banging my legs with their bags and briefcases. Some of those who witnessed my shocked state even took pictures with old styled SLR cameras. The click and flash of the photos being taken made me blink back at the world like a stunned mullet.

  I rubbed my arms and blinked my eyes and tried to think what the effing hell I should do now.

  The guy who had pulled me off the road tried to talk to me. He was in uniform, I realised; a cop. He kept asking me questions, but when I just stared at him and shook my head, he pulled a walkie-talkie off his belt and said something into it.

  I had no identification on me. I didn't speak the language. And as more than one person came up to the cop and held up their cameras, wide eyes staring at me, I realised just how much trouble I was in.

  Not just out of time, but in a time where technology existed. Enough technology to document an Orion module appearing from out of nowhere and then disappearing out of sight. Leaving me behind.

  1982 Japan. At least it wasn’t Russia. I started to laugh.

  The cop glared at me. Someone took a picture.

  And still, Orion 3 did not return.

  6

  But Where Were They Now?

  Jack

  We touched down in a textbook landing. The screen showed a pale blue sine wave and information pertaining to Tokyo in 1982. Outside the Orion, stars dissipated on the air as the large billboard signs across the wide road flashed in bright red and neon yellow.