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hands and resumed watching the world going by.
    And then it happened,
    Just as she was looking right at it, before her very eyes, the sign above a fast-food restaurant flickered and changed. For a moment she thought she might have been gazing at an LED screen that had finally decided to move on to the next picture in its image list. But it was just a scuffed plastic sign above the glass windows of a fast-food bar. One moment it had said KENTUCKY-STYLE FRIED CHICKEN , the next it simply read FAST FRIED CHICKEN .
    She cursed under her breath, pulled out her mobile phone and dialled Maddy.
    ‘Yeah?’ she answered on the third ring.
    ‘I think I just saw a … No, I’m certain I just saw another time ripple, Maddy. A small one. You want to know what it was?’
    ‘It’s OK, Sal, it’s OK. We think we’ve got it nailed. Abraham Lincoln went and got himself squished by a cart in 1831. You better get yourselves back here, asap. If that’s another change you just spotted, then maybe the big time wave is coming right on its tail.’
    ‘OK.’
    She snapped the phone shut and stuffed it back in her pocket. ‘Back home, Bob.’ She punched his arm. ‘Time for us to get busy again.’

CHAPTER 9
    2001, New York

    ‘Can I go this time?’
    Maddy looked at Sal. ‘No … that’s not your job.’
    ‘But I always end up in here … I never get to see anything interesting!’
    Maddy shook her head.
    ‘But why?’
    ‘Too dangerous.’ Maddy mentally winced at that. That was a lame reason. The poor girl had been in almost as much danger here in 2001 as she might have been with Liam in the past. And Sal could see that too.
    ‘Come on, Maddy, it’s just as bad here! We’ve had mutants, soldiers … those weird dinosaur things. You’re telling me “here” is safe?’ She shook her head. ‘That is totally shadd-yah!’
    Liam and the two units were listening to the row as they were getting dressed.
    Maddy closed her eyes tiredly. She didn’t need this. How could she explain to Sal that every trip through a portal could quite possibly strip another year or five off her natural lifespan? That the bombardment of tachyons, the immeasurable forces of chaos space, had a lethal effect on the body: aged it, corrupted it … eventually killed it. How could she explain that to her with Liam just yards away, unaware that soon – far too soon – he was going to be a dying old man?
    But then she and Sal were experiencing a milder form of that contamination themselves, living as they did in the archway’s resetting temporal bubble, weren’t they? It was coming for all of them one day, death.
    Something her cousin Julian had once said: ‘We’re all dead the moment we’re born. Just, some of us get there faster than others.’ Prophetic really since he died not so long after, lost in the rubble of the World Trade Center’s north tower.
    ‘Please!’ said Sal. ‘I want to see some history too!’
    We’re all dead  …
    At least this wasn’t a huge jump. A hundred and seventy years. Nothing really in the grand scheme of things, she supposed. The shorter the jump, the less the damage. Their jump to Sunday a while back had probably been little more a dose of poison than the normal Tuesday-night bubble reset. She sighed. Why not? Living here in this archway like mole people wasn’t really the sort of dream life a person would want to last forever, anyway. One trip into history … this trip, a relatively safe trip. Why not?
    ‘All right,’ she sighed.
    Sal yelped and clasped her hands together with excitement.
    They had some clothes in the archway that they used to travel back to their 1906 ‘drop point’ in San Francisco. The ‘drop point’ was a stash of support-unit embryos held in suspended animation in the safety deposit box of a bank that was due to be reduced to rubble and ashes by the infamous and imminent Californian earthquake. With a little customization and by losing the headgear – hat fashion seemed to