She sighed. She’d really like to believe that … that she was destined to be a good team leader, a good TimeRider. But somehow, with the way things had gone so far, it all just felt … as if she’d been winging it, hanging in there by the skin of her teeth. Lucky not to be dead, or to have caused the deaths of Liam and Sal. Lucky not to have completely messed up the timeline. Lucky not to have destroyed the world.
Way too much stress for an eighteen-year-old girl to have to be burdened with.
‘Darn right,’ she uttered. ‘Way too much.’
CHAPTER 2
2001, New York
Monday (time cycle 57)
I’m watching him now, floating in that tube of gloopy slimy stuff. It’s Bob, but not Bob yet if you know what I mean. It’s a boy actually. Completely hairless and curled up like a baby. You can see the face is definitely him even though it’s not finished yet; all thick bone and that heavy dumb-looking brow. The skin’s not grown on his head just yet. It’s all red-raw muscle fibre and teeth, and two eyeballs that look huge without eyelids. Sometimes they seem to shift, twitch, as if they’re staring at you. But I know he’s not. His baby mind is fast asleep right now, dreaming whatever baby brains dream.
Some first-phase skin has grown across his body, but I can still see patches where it hasn’t. There’s a bit I can see through, just beneath his left arm, where I can still see the ribs, and I think that’s an organ in there. Is it his heart or something? It’s moving. Like an animal in a cage.
Actually, this is making me feel sick. I guess I’m going back to my bunk.
Speaking of puke-making, Liam’s emptying the toilet right now. We got one of these camping toilet things a few days ago. The archway has got a little toilet closet, with a creaky wooden door and a cracked toilet bowl with no seat. It’s totally pinchudda! And it’s not connected up anyway. So that’s why we needed the camping toilet. It has to be emptied every few days cos it stinks the whole place out — when the plastic barrel thing gets pulled out, the back of the toilet comes out and all that ‘stuff’ inside is sloshing around.