community are against us. Rania: she's pretty much one of the Wise already. Hiero - '
'Don't get me started on Hiero,' Zhen muttered under her breath. 'As my mother would say, he runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds.'
'And as for your boy - '
'Sometimes I wonder. You know the old theories about how children were conceived? How the entire person was encased in the male sperm, and the female egg was just a vessel for the pre-made, male-generated embryo? Well, that's how I feel about Kai. I see none of myself in him.'
'You can say that again.' He paused for a moment, thinking. 'That's the only thing that doesn't add up, though.'
'What?'
'Volus. Why did this... thing kill him?'
'Harland, all we know is that he died. The Wise have no evidence to suggest it was that spooky otherworldly 'force' they keep banging on about. They could be claiming it was to scare us, to divide us. You want to know the truth?'
'What?'
'The first thing I felt, when I heard he was dead, was relief.'
Harland raised his eyebrows and took a sip of his tea. 'I don't blame you.'
Thirty-three
Elra came back late that night. She'd spent most of the day thinking about Cali, sitting on a low rooftop overlooking the Thames, watching London bustle with its vibrant, ceaseless activity. When she eventually started getting cold, she opened a discreet rift into the hideout's living room.
She found Rania and Kai sitting on a sofa, the distance between them awkwardly small for two people who weren't a couple. Kai was startled by Elra's dramatic entrance, but Rania just smiled her faraway smile.
'I'm going to have to start getting used to that,' Kai said, uncomfortably, getting up and poking the coals in one of the stoves.
Elra wondered what had been going on between them. She couldn't help but feel a wave of jealousy rise within her, making her cheeks flush. Don't be stupid, she thought to herself. These are silly thoughts. Why should she care who Kai fancied?
'You'll be glad to hear they've all gone to bed,' he announced. 'I'm sorry about earlier. They can be pigs sometimes. You showed them, though.' He turned, grinning widely. 'That was quite a spectacle.'
'They fear your power,' Rania said, her delicate eyes piercing Elra's, somewhat uncharacteristically. 'Yellow fear. Practically radiating it. They are right to be scared.'
Kai looked at Elra, a cloud of worry covering his features. 'We have to get you to the Wise. They will know what to do. They'll know how to get your friend back, and how to end this craziness.' The cloud passed, and his tone took a turn for the jovial. 'Given the atmosphere here, I think I'll come with you. I could do with a break, especially after learning about dad.'
'About that: how are you feeling?' Elra asked.
'As I was just telling Rania here, it's kind of strange. I haven't seen him for years, so I guess losing him wasn't that much of a loss; but at the same time, I feel like I've lost... a future, instead of a present. I could have contacted him, rebuilt our relationship.' He paused, looking off into the middle distance. 'But then again, he was the one who left us. The burden to reconnect was on him just as much as me. Families, eh?' he chuckled, looking like he was on the verge of tears. 'I might turn in for the night. Guess we'll be leaving tomorrow. Need sleep.'
And with that he left, making a point of hiding his face as he left the room.
As soon as he departed, a strange thing happened. Rania jumped up and grabbed Elra with an urgency she'd never displayed before. 'We need somewhere quiet to talk,' she hissed, her gaze flitting from door to door with the intensity of a paranoia sufferer.
'We could... go to my room?' Elra hazarded.
'No! Somewhere else, outside the hideout.'
Elra had an idea. She grabbed two tartan blankets off the nearest sofa and stuffed them into Rania's arms. 'Hang on,' she said, standing back.
Thirty seconds later the two of them were standing on top of Tower Bridge. Elra immediately got vertigo and had to sit down.
'Whoa.'
From their perilous position the view was even better than from the downstairs windows. It was somehow different than looking at it from the other side of a pane of glass: more immediate and imposing.
Rania wrapped a blanket round her slender shoulders and sat down with Elra. 'I've been looking for an opportunity to talk to you one-to-one. There's something very compelling about you, Elra.'
'Why... thank you.'
Rania's expression turned dark. 'But you don't understand the danger you're in. And I don't just mean from those Red People in the desert. It's not just them, Elra. Here, in this very building, there are people who want to harm you.'
'Zhen? Oh, Kai told me. I know all about her bigotry.'
Rania grabbed her arm. 'It's more than that! A split is coming amongst the Marked, and you are the catalyst. I don't think the Wise can see it, or if they can, they don't know just how significant it'll be. And it's coming at exactly the wrong time. Now, more than ever, we all need to stand together. Humanity itself needs to stand together. But whereas world governments can be excused for not doing anything, since they're not aware of the situation, we cannot!'
'How am I the catalyst?'
'I'm not going to pull punches, Elra: you are going to be one of the most important people with Knowledge in living memory, but you're not even Marked. It's going to divide people right down the middle. Yet you are their one hope, if only they'd see it. You’re everybody’s hope. You have an extraordinary ability, and one that is going to turn the tide in the war.'
'War?'
Rania stared deep into Elra's eyes, and for a split second Elra saw the vast clairvoyant spaces that Rania's mind inhabited. 'War's coming, Elra,' she said, as her eyes began to cloud over and defocus. 'You don't understand the half of it. You don't see, but then again, I can't expect you to.'
'What do I need to do?'
'You need to get to the Wise. Not for answers: you're the one with answers, little do you know it. You need them for their abilities, for their Knowledge. Before all this is over you'll have seen other worlds, experienced the depths of time and sampled the vastness of infinity. You can't do these things alone.'
'How do you know all this?'
'I know this because my future self knows this.'
Elra didn't know what to say.
‘I have lucid moments, like this one now, but most of the time my consciousness is in some other temporal frame of reference.’
Elra frowned.
‘My consciousness is usually in a future self,’ she clarified.
‘How...?’
‘I can think back and forth across four dimensions.’
This wasn’t making any sense to Elra. ‘So, you can... remember forwards in time?’
‘You could look at it like that. You could also say I was born with all my memories at once. But what’s closer to the truth is that my consciousness, as in the me that’s here now, can move forwards and backwards through my life-line as and when I please. It can only be in one place at a time, though. Not two at once.'
'So, when we finish this conversation, you can go and talk to me in the future?'
'In short, yes, but only because we've had a conversation in the future. Many, actually.'
'Have you always been able to do this?'
'Yes. I am unmarked, like you. My father was Marked however, and fearing the stigma that would be attached to me, tells everyone he had me scribed at a young age. Same goes for a lot of us.'
'How many others are unmarked, but have innate Knowledge, like you and me?'
'Well, it's me, you, these two Wise twins in Tanzania, a man with exceptional Change Knowledge in this town in the States, a few Chinese groups, probably many unmarked who live 'normal' lives... and one other person I know.'
'Who?'
'That would be telling.'
Elra grinned. 'You don't want to spoil it for me?'
'No, it's just that I'm worried about paradoxes. About how your actio
ns might change if you knew. This Wise woman called Olympia once told me the universe doesn't work like that, but you can't be so sure.' She smiled wanly. 'There's one other thing you can do for me, though.'
'Oh yes?'
She got up and beckoned to Elra to follow. She navigated the struts and supports of Tower Bridge's upper gantry with ease, until they were on the downriver side facing the north bank.
'You see that road down there?' She pointed, at a main road running parallel to the river among new office blocks and smoke-stained Victorian townhouses. 'That's Whitechapel Road, where I live. Would you mind opening a rift down there?'
'Gladly,' she said, tearing a hole in the air.
'Well, it's been fun, Elra. As my father's family say, ma'a salama. Go in peace.'
'You too.'
Before Rania stepped through, she turned to Elra one last time. Her gaze was intent. 'Don't worry about tonight. Morwen will save you. I've told her.'
'Morwen? Wait, what?' Elra asked, confused.
But on that note, she stepped through the rift and was gone.
Thirty-four
Cali's first thought, when she finally came round, was this is really growing tiresome. Her second was the recognition of just how hot she was, and how badly she needed a drink. This time it wasn't her head that ached, it was her neck. It felt heavy, warm, restricted... her fingers searched for her throat area and found a metal collar instead. In fact, one side of her head now felt distinctly metallic.
This information rapidly brought her to her senses. She was lying on... sandy wood, it seemed. The air she breathed was heavy with the smells of spice, rotting fish, sweat, excrement... it tasted