Be Bold

Chapter Four

Nash

Her dark eyes looked up into mine. "Ready to do this then?"

I nodded, not exactly sure what I was getting myself into, but for the first time in a long time, ready to take a risk.

Ruby closed her eyes, pressing her free hand down on her watch, and as she did three trestling blue streams of light pulsed from her wrist like spraying ocean water, covering the park in its crystalline droplets. And then the sun hit the streams and I could see everything. Billions and billions of faces, flickering forms sat on the grass, running around, tossing freebies, laid down sunbathing. Across multiple time periods, different styles of clothes, long dresses, tunics, breeches, overcoats, shoulder pads, denim bodysuits.

It must of felt like I was watching several lifetimes but it only lasted a few minutes, when Ruby brought her hand down again, and the streams retracted, vanishing into her watch. All of the faces, the flickering forms of light, extinguished like a great hand had clamped down on the grass, smiting everything out again.

It was just us in the park now.

Ruby shook her head. "No time disruptions here. Everything's normal, but I felt—a pull—." She looked back at me and saw my confused face, and let go of my hand as if she was really realising I was there. She sat down on the grass suddenly and patted the spot next to me, hoping I join her. "Basically, if something is wrong, all those faces, you can't see them, it distorts. This location isn't where the time disruption is. But I felt a pull –disruptions are like temporal wormholes, they drag everything towards it. That one physical location where an event that isn't supposed to happen will happen. So I'm close."

I nodded along, kind of getting it. "So you'll just have to travel around London and try and find that location?"

Ruby nodded. "Yes, the telepad tells me roughly the area, but once I'm in the location I can't pin point with the pad. I have untapped potential energy so I have to use it to find the disruption."

"And you've done this loads of times before?"

"Yes."

"And it just feels like a feeling?" I pushed his glasses up my nose, grinning.

"Yes. Nothing scientific about it," Ruby huffed, but she turned away slightly, feeling herself beginning to smile.

She coughed, and walked further away. The park was mostly large patches of rolling glass, but she felt herself being pulled towards the pavement path where the benches lined up down the park in adjacent rows. At the bottom of the path was a large fountain, and as she stared at it, it started to distort slightly in and out of the air, like it was fading.

It was just me and Ruby in that area, because we had passed a dog walker and a Mom with two kids at the entrance.

So why, as the fountain flickered in and out of view, did I see faint flickers of people. She knew they didn't belong in modern London because of the long parasols they held in their hands, the two piece suits on the men and the women in dresses of flowing petticoats and skirts.

Did disruptions do that? Let time bleed through?

Before she even thought about what she was doing, she grabbed my hand and we were running towards the fountain. I let out a startled squeak, but let her run with me, grabbing the bridge of my glasses so they didn't fall off.

Ruby skidded to a halt once she got to the fountain, almost plunging us both into the fountain in the meantime. She let go of my hand and pressed both of hers to the stone.

Ruby's eyes blared white as she threw her head back, like she was seeing through time. Nash felt himself slowly pull away, a more than a little freaked out by the twin blazing streams of light coming out of the fountain. And then Ruby was shaking, shaking like someone possessed out of a horror movie, and I was grabbing her arm, and it shot through me, the vision; A cyclist, losing control, pelting full speed towards the fountain, breaks broken. He can't stop. He falls forward once his bike hits the fountain and his head hits the middle tower of the fountain, and his neck is at an angle with a horrible crack...