unfortunate ➸ primeval

Chapter 5

Clara slammed her fist onto her alarm, stopping it from blaring the horrendous noise it made to wake her up. Lazily, she rolled over onto her other side, allowing herself a few more blissful moments of silent sleep.

Her sleep was short-lived, however, as not ten seconds later her door burst open and Nick Cutter entered the room, his arms laden with a large breakfast tray. He set it down on the bedside table and perched himself on the side of the bed. "Clara," he gently shook her shoulder to wake her. "Come on, you need to eat before work."

She mumbled something incoherent before sitting herself up, brushing stray strands of hair out of her face. She didn't even dare to think what Nick saw every morning; the thought was too horrible. She didn't look good in the morning. But she guessed he was used to it by now; she had been living there for just over a month, as Stephen had been gone all that time with no contact since the day he left.

As expected, she didn't like to dwell on Stephen too much.

"Morning," he smiled, amusement laced in his tone as he watched her tiredly reach for her toast.

"Morning," Clara groaned in response, biting into her toast. It was silent until she was about halfway through her bread. "What time is it?"

"Just after eight," Nick answered, suppressing a smirk at her widened eyes. Clara had always hated early mornings. "I want to get there early - Connor and Sarah have something to show us, apparently."

"Fabulous," Clara muttered, polishing off the rest of her toast. "Just what I want first thing on a morning: the excitable Connor Temple shouting about mythological creatures. I can't wait."

——

Nick and Clara got to the ARC just before nine, flashing their ID cards to security on the way in. The moment they properly entered the building, they were apprehended by Sarah and Connor.

"I've, um, been trying to trace the origin of the Qilin," she told them, swinging her high ponytail out of her face as she spoke.

"Also known as the Chinese Unicorn," Connor chipped in, brandishing a visual representation of it on a piece of paper. Clara took it and peered at it curiously.

"Exactly," Sarah nodded. "Now, the earliest reference I could find was in the fifth-century book, Zuo Zhuan, so I made a rough calculation and put it into the matrix." She ended her sentence with an excited smile as they stepped into the office containing the matrix.

As Cutter flipped the light on, Clara and Connor stared at the metal metropolis in awe. The matrix was something Cutter - along with Sarah, Connor and Clara's help - had invented just over a month ago, when Sarah was recruited, to calculate every anomaly that ever was and was going to be. It was a complicated mass of metal wires, all bent in different angles, to represent the entire timeline of the universe. In other words, it was absolutely incredible.

"I love this thing!" Connor marvelled, as always. He reached up and fiddled with one of the metal poles.

"Connor?" Nick said, rolling his sleeves up absently as he did so.

"Huh?"

"If you touch that, you could be changing the entire destiny of the universe," he told him, his voice even yet firm. Connor instantly pulled his hands away.

"I'm not gonna touch it," he decided, stepping out from underneath it. Sarah and Clara watched, exchanging an amused glance with one another.

"Good man," Nick nodded.

"Whoa!" Jenny Lewis' voice came from the doorway as she entered, obviously bewildered by the giant model in the centre of the room. "Please tell me this all means something."