Kez looked closer at the gold-trimmed logo that had been etched into the life-pod, and grinned a bit. Well, at least everything wasn’t bad. She was aboard the Chaebol. She let herself grin about her good fortune for a minute or two before she tried to remember why it was such good fortune and failed. It was ridiculous to think that she knew someone rich enough to be on board one of the great space liners—especially one that was privately owned.

  ’Ang on, she thought suspiciously. I know it’s privately owned. Wot else do I know? An’ how come I know it?

  She wanted, very desperately, to kick someone in the shins.

  And then, all of a sudden, as if the furious desire to strike back had jostled something loose, Kez remembered.

  She was in another version of now. Uncle Cheng was messing with Fixed Points, and she and Marx and TuanTuan had decided they needed to do something about it; but no one had been quite sure what except for TuanTuan. He had done something—she couldn’t remember what, exactly, right now—but Kez knew she had expected to go into that other reality with Marx to help her, occupying the bodies of the alternate versions of themselves. So where was Marx? More importantly, why wasn’t he with her?

  He was supposed, thought Kez, her eyes prickling with hot tears of rage, to always be there. The world looked blue and cold around her and she didn’t know why, and she didn’t know how to change it.

  The Chaebol, she now remembered, with a sudden surge of almost overwhelming relief, was a good place to find herself, for the simple reason that she might be able to find a version of TuanTuan here—if she’d come to the right time as well as place. And TuanTuan would be able to figure out what had gone wrong, and why she had arrived in another reality by herself when they had prepared for her and Marx to go together.

  If Marx wasn’t here, she was going to get this reality’s TuanTuan to help her go back and kick her TuanTuan in the shins for getting it wrong.

  Kez sat where she was, angrily plotting, until a staff member came up to check on the life-pod and looked a bit too kindly at her. Then she rose, hauled her stockings up, and trotted away in search of food. The kindly-looking staff member might have given her some, but then Kez would have felt that she had to either be grateful or bite the woman, and most places caused a bit of a fuss when you bit staff. No, she would much rather steal the food; it would save her from the annoyance of knowing that she was supposed to be grateful but somehow only able to bite.

  Kez found her way to the staff mess hall quite easily; it was also very easy to slip into a recently vacated booth and eat the remains of the meals of the two people who had just quitted the booth. There were enough kids around that she didn’t look out of place, either.

  That done, Kez swiped the back of her arm across her mouth to evenly distribute the remainder of food there, and tried to think what she should do.

  Marx should be here, with her, she thought, picking at the scar on her arm. But he wasn’t, and she couldn’t look for him because—because—

  Kez tried to push that thought away. Her best option was still to look for TuanTuan if she couldn’t find Marx. And after that—or maybe before, depending on where she had arrived in the timeline—she was going to find out what had happened to Marx in this reality so that they could stop it. Because if Marx wasn’t here with her, it was because there hadn’t been a body in this reality for him to come to. He was dead.

  At least she’d come out aboard the Chaebol: in her own reality, it was home to the Li family even if it no longer housed their heir, Tuan Li, who had legitimately escaped from his family and earned his freedom. Kez was pretty sure they still kept tabs on TuanTuan. He tended to duck about in the WAOF these days, though she knew he occasionally saw his family, so if he wasn’t home for a visit, it might be hard to find him.

  Kez remembered roughly where the family quarters were, in the bit of her brain that had her own memories and not the memories of this Marxless Kez. She made a quick slip upward and inward, careful to avoid the centre of the ship on the vague memory of something huge and toothy and clever, and came out a bit too early.

  Noise and lights burst into being around her as she stepped out into a party, fending off fronds from some exotic plant that tickled across her face. She’d come out behind the potted plants.

  Kez chuckled beneath her breath. She might not have come out in just the place she wanted, but at least she’d come out where no one could see her.

  Well, not quite no one: someone was leaning against the bar a few steps away from her, dressed in blue silk and blue suede shoes, and his eyes were on her when she noticed him. He stood alone, which worried Kez a bit when she could see that the room was really very crowded.

  What worried her more was the fact that she recognised him and didn’t recognise him at the same time. Here was TuanTuan, but he wasn’t exactly TuanTuan as she remembered him. The TuanTuan Kez knew was all softness and fluffiness, his mono-lid eyes shadowed but shyly shining below the full, heavy fringe of his hair; the thumb and forefinger of one hand always tugging at the bit of hair behind his ear. This TuanTuan was glittering and bright, his eyes brilliant and very hard, and beneath the collar of his shirt and the frothiness of his cravat, she saw the gleam of a familiar collar, too.

  Kez stared right back at him, then took a few steps toward him, her eyes running over the collar once again.

  “Flamin’ ’eck!” she said, colder and bluer than before. “Wot you still got that thing for? Got rid of that ages ago!”

  He looked at her curiously. “Where did you come from?”

  “Same as usual,” Kez told him, batting away the last of the fronds from the nearby plants. She grinned at him by way of welcome, trying to banish the cold feeling. Even if he did still have his collar on in this reality, he should recognise her. “Wot you all dollied up for, TuanTuan?”

  “My mother prefers me to look my best,” said Tuan. “What did you mean, why have I still got that thing?”

  “Heck,” said Kez, the grin of welcome withering away utterly. She hadn’t wanted to let the memories of this Kez bubble up, but she ought to have done so. The memories of this Kez had nothing in them that related to Tuan outside their first meeting in the Institute; no further meeting when she had released him from his collar—no meeting later still, when they had found that the death of his real parents was a Fixed Point and that they couldn’t get close enough to rescue them.

  Furiously, she said, “Wot ’appened? ’Oo went and messed that bit up as well, I’d like to know!”

  “I have questions, too,” said Tuan, pushing away from the bar and stooping just slightly to adjust his height closer to hers. “For example, I’d very much like to know why your presence here is making this do this.”

  Kez peered at the tiny box he thrust in her direction, and saw numbers flashing up and up and up. “Wot the flamin’ ’eck’s that?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” he said, pushing the little box back in his pocket. “For your information, this is a little device that measures increments of change to the fabric of reality.”

  “See you still don’t speak like a normal person,” Kez observed. “Guess that ain’t changed, anyway.”

  Tuan opened his mouth to make what she was quite sure would have been a hot reply, but shut it again. After appearing to struggle with himself for another few moments, he said, “I’ve been tracking warped reality since last Tuesday LRT, but I’m quite certain it goes back further than that.”

  “’Ow’s that, then?”

  “It’s like trying to explain to a cat with sunstroke,” muttered Tuan. “Something happened last Tuesday that did something odd to reality. I only noticed it because I was looking for something else and I know a little about memories that aren’t real. I made this little thing so I could keep an eye on it and establish a pattern. Then you come along and it’s going crazy.”

  “Yeah, I s’pose that could ’appen,” she said. “’E reckoned people might be able to tell where we’d been over ’ere, even if we weren’t here, like.”

  “Which brings me right back to the question of who you are,” said Tuan, with another cold smile.

  “At least I’m meself,” Kez told him accusatorily. “Ain’t all dollied up wiv different expressions an’ stuff.”

  She hadn’t expected this. None of them had.

  “Nobody knows why those points are fixed,” Marx had told her, after they received the portentous Newlands Box the last time. “But we know they have to stay fixed, or the universe falls apart.”

  “One or two might be all right,” her TuanTuan had said. “The universe as we know it wouldn’t still exist, but it wouldn’t fall apart straight away, either: it’d just be a different one. Maybe a few different ones. But we also don’t know how many points have to be unfixed before everything does fall apart.”

  “Exactly,” had said Marx, smiling grimly. “We don’t know. And we don’t want to know. So we’d better do something about it.”

  Yeah, thought Kez now, fiercely. Well, I’m gunna. An’ if you blokes aren’t here to help me, I’m gunna do it by myself this time. I’ll save yas and then you’d better flamin’ let me fly the Upsydaisy!

  But there was no Marx in this version of the universe to hear her, and that made Kez even angrier.

  “Get yer mug outta my face,” she muttered at Tuan, and stomped away to the buffet table. What she wanted to do was blow up the soup in the faces of all these well-dressed, rich, sharp-toothed people, but if she did that, there was no Marx to take advantage of the distraction and do…something. Something, what? What would Marx have done?

  Marx would have figured out the problem, and then decided on a solution.

  What was the problem?

  The problem was that Kez needed to get home.

  No, the problem was that she needed to find out exactly where Uncle Cheng had dislodged the Fixed Point in this part of space and time so that TuanTuan could link it to a time in their own reality where they could do something about it.

  Then she had to get home.

  Solution, thought Kez. Now she needed a solution.

  “I wish you wouldn’t look at things like that,” said the Tuan whose expressions she didn’t recognise. He had followed her from the bar, slowly and leisurely. “It worries me.”

  “Yeah, well, some things never change, eh,” Kez said absently. She would have punched the TuanTuan she knew—told him to mind his own business and not to tell her what to do with her own face.

  Kez found that she almost didn’t dare to do it to this Tuan, and that annoyed her so much that she kicked him instead.

  “Don’t tell me what to do wiv me face,” she told him as he gasped, clinging to the thin shank she’d assaulted. “Tryin’ to figger out me solution.”

  “Oh, is that all?” panted Tuan, straightening with less dignity than before. “I should have you thrown out, you awful little feral!”

  “Ain’t no fun in that, TuanTuan,” Kez told him. “I’d only get back in, anyways.”

  What she needed was—actually, what she really needed was TuanTuan. She wasn’t clever with figuring out things like TuanTuan was; he was the one who’d pinpointed the Fixed Points that were most likely to be in danger in the first place.

  This Tuan wasn’t as good as her TuanTuan, but he was the only thing she had.

  And Kez’s thought process grew crystal clear.

  Problem: What had caused the Fixed Point to become unfixed? And how would Kez get home?

  Solution: Get Tuan to figure out both problems.

  Something of her TuanTuan must be in there somewhere, even if he didn’t recognise her: he would help her if she asked him—if she explained to him exactly what had gone wrong. That was another problem, because Kez only very loosely understood exactly what had gone wrong with the universe. She was quite certain that TuanTuan would know, anyway.

  “Oi,” she said, by way of getting the conversation back along the lines of what was useful. “That liddle box. Wot’s all that about, then?”

  “Something very odd has been going on in the universe lately,” said Tuan thoughtfully, flexing the leg she had kicked. He almost sounded like her TuanTuan, which was disorienting and annoying.

  Kez had to try very hard not to scowl at him, but some of the pebbly hardness must have returned to her eyes, because he looked away.

  “Connections in the universe that were once in one position are now in another. And the funny thing about those—”

  He stopped and seemed to fall into deep thought, which Kez knew in her own TuanTuan was a matter of him forgetting the world around him as he considered the problem at hand deep in the recesses of his own mind. He would come out of it sooner or later, with something very important to say.

  Sometimes, it was necessary to prod him out of such moods by the application of a very clammy, very surprised toilet-clinger frog to the back of the neck; it never seemed to affect the usefulness of his conclusions, and it did streamline things.

  Kez considered her options, weighing up the usefulness of cold jelly as opposed to the less cold flummery with its likelihood of swiftly growing discomfort, but Tuan came out of his thoughts as suddenly as he’d become lost in them.

  “Whatever it is, it’s firmly fixed to you,” he said. “As far as I can work out, last Tuesday has been fused with today, and I’m certain you arrived today.”

  “Your liddle box tell ya that?”

  “Indirectly,” he said. “Until last Tuesday, there was another thread pulling along with yours—as soon as that disappeared, there was a great big twitch of time and space and something vanished.”

  “Wot vanished?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the thing about existing in a reality—if someone goes changing things that should happen so that they don’t happen, you don’t know what that thing was. It doesn’t exist here anymore. I can only see the currents of where and when it was.”

  “Last Tuesdee,” said Kez, nodding.

  “Yes,” Tuan agreed. “And you.”

  “Me, wot?”

  “And it was connected with you.”

  “Wasn’t ’ere last Tuesdee,” she said instinctively, although she knew better. “Weren’t me.”

  Someone ain’t just messin’ wiv Fixed Points, she thought. They’re messin’ wiv Fixed Points what affect us. The flamin’ cheek!

  Or, she wondered suddenly, meditating for perhaps the first time on the cluttered mess of destruction and chaos she had left in her wake for as long as she could remember, was it that the particular gift she had been born with had so much affected the universe around her that those Fixed Points, those necessary actions that must happen to keep the universe in its current state, had been formed from the detritus of her chaotic passage? And having been formed from her passage, the destruction of them was tearing away from her every loved thing and necessary adjunct?

  Things like Marx, who should have come along but hadn’t.

  A thread that had once been tangled with hers but wasn’t in this reality.

  Something that happened last Tuesday, or didn’t happen last Tuesday, and changed the whole course of reality in this version of the universe.

  She remembered TuanTuan from her own reality saying, “We’ve passed through a statistically large amount of Fixed Points at the moment of their fixing—all three of us. Sometimes two or all of us at once. There are more Fixed Points than the ones we’ve been through, but—”

  “But we’ve seen more than our fair share,” Marx had said grimly.

  But here and now, Marx was dead. And him being dead had made such a big problem for a Fixed Point that it had begun to come apart, which was bad for reality as well as for Kez.

  Suddenly, the memory that had been floating around in her head came back again. Marx saying, “I ever tell you about that time I nearly died?” and “Right in the middle of a Fixed Point. Tuesday morning, bright and early—too bright and early, if you ask me…”

  Kez thought about that very carefully, then asked Tuan, “Wot ’appens—wot ’appens if someone wasn’t meant to die and there’s a Fixed Point kinda dependin’ on ’im not dyin’? And then someone goes and makes perishin’ sure ’e dies?”

  “I would assume that the Fixed Point would become unfixed,” said Tuan, very thoughtfully. “Shedding warped reality everywhere. Leaving a scar where it once was, surrounded by more warped reality. I knew—oh I knew this was going to be an interesting week!”

  “’Ow d’you fix summink like that, then? Wiv that liddle box?”

  “You don’t,” Tuan said. The other TuanTuan had tried to explain it to her, too, she rather thought. Some of the memories still weren’t quite all there yet. “You can’t—not personally, anyway, I should think. A person responsible for forming a Fixed Point going back to that exact point would be in great danger of unmaking the Point themselves. So would anyone too closely connected with them.”

  Kez, with a vague memory of having asked much the same question of her own TuanTuan in her home reality, asked, “Yeah, but wot if you was really careful an’ stuff?”

  “It doesn’t matter how careful you are,” Tuan said, surprisingly patient. She had an idea that she had managed to capture his imagination with her questions. “You wouldn’t be able to touch it again without doing what you’re trying to prevent.”

  Kez, who when she was told to get her hands off something was inclined to reach out to touch it with her feet out of pure spite, made a very important connection between that pernicious part of her personality and her current situation.

  Tuan said, “What a dreadful grin! Whatever are you going to do now? You better not be thinking about kicking me again.”

  “Nah,” she said, grinning even more savagely. “Got n’idea.”

  “Murder, by the look of it,” said the Tuan who was not TuanTuan.

  “Wish you’d stop lookin’ at me from ’is face,” Kez said irritably. She stabbed a finger at his collar. “Oi. Want me to get rid av’ that for ya?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21