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“What a load of old poo,” said Landen, giving Tuesday a boiled egg for breakfast and putting one in front of Jenny’s place, then yelling up the stairs to her that breakfast was on the table.
“What time did Friday get in last night?” I asked, since I had gone to bed first.
“Past midnight. He said he was making noise with his mates.”
“The Gobshites?”
“I think so, but they might as well be called the Feedbacks and working on the single ‘Static’ from the White Noise album.”
“It’s only because we’re old and fuddy-duddy,” I said, resting an affectionate hand on his. “I’m sure the music we listened to was as much crap to our parents as his music is to us.”
But Landen was elsewhere. He was composing an outline for a self-help book for dogs, called Yes, You CAN Open the Door Yourself, and was thus functionally deaf to everything.
“Land, I’m sleeping with the milkman.”
He didn’t look up, but said, “That’s nice, darling.”
Tuesday and I laughed, and I turned to look at her with an expression of faux shock and said, “What are you laughing about? You shouldn’t know anything about milkmen!”
“Mum,” she said with a mixture of precocity and matter-of-factness, “I have an IQ of two hundred and eighty and know more about everything than you do.”
“I doubt it.”
“Then what does the ischiocavernosus muscle do?”
“Okay, you do know more than I do. Where is Jenny? She’s always late for breakfast!”
I took the tram toward the old SpecOps Building to do some investigations. The escape of Felix8 was fresh in my mind, and several times I saw someone who I thought was him, but on each occasion it was a harmless passerby. I still had no idea how he had escaped, but one thing I did know was that the Hades family had some pretty demonic attributes, and they looked after their friends. Felix8, loathsome cur that he was, would have been considered a friend. If he was still in their pay, then I would have to speak to a member of the Hades family. It had to be Aornis: the only one in custody.
I got off the tram at the Town Hall and walked down the hill to the SpecOps Building. It was eerily deserted as I stepped in, a strong contrast to the hive of activity that I had known. I was issued a visitor’s badge and headed off down the empty corridors toward the ChronoGuard’s office. Not the briefing hall we had visited the previous evening but a small room on the second floor. I’d been here on a number of occasions, so knew what to expect—as I watched, the decor and furniture changed constantly, the ChronoGuard operatives themselves jumping in and out, their speed making them into little more than smears of light. There was one piece of furniture that remained unchanged while all about raced, moved and blurred in a never-ending jumble. It was a small table with an old candlestick telephone upon it, and as I put out my hand, it rang. I picked up the phone and held the ear-piece to my ear.
“Mrs. Parke-Laine-Next?” came a voice.
“Yes?”
“He’ll be right down.”
And in an instant he was. The room stopped moving from one time to the next and froze with a decor that looked vaguely contemporary. There was a figure at the desk who smiled when he saw me. But it wasn’t Bendix or my father—it was Friday. Not the mid-twenties Friday I’d met at my wedding bash or the old Friday I’d met during the Samuel Pepys Fiasco but a young Friday—almost indistinguishable from the one who was still fast asleep at home, snoring loudly in the pit of despair we called his bedroom.
“Hi, Mum!”
“Hi, Sweetpea,” I said, deeply confused and also kind of relieved. This was the Friday I thought I was meant to have—clean-cut, well presented, confident and with an infectious smile that reminded me of Landen. And he probably bathed more than once a fortnight, too.
“How old are you?” I asked, placing a hand on his chin to make sure he was real, and not a phantasm or something, like Mycroft. He was real. Warm and still needing to shave only once a week.
“I’m sixteen, Mum, the same age as the lazy slob asleep at home. In a context that you’d understand, I’m a Potential Friday. I started with the Junior Time Scouts at thirteen and popped my first tube at fifteen—the youngest ever to do so. The Friday you know is the Friday Present. The older me that will hopefully be the director-general is the Friday Last, and because he’s indisposed due to a mild temporal ambiguity caused by the younger alternative me not joining the Time Scouts, Bendix reconstituted me from the echoes of the might-have-been. They asked me to see what I can do.”
“Nope,” I replied in some confusion, “didn’t understand a word.”
“It’s a split-timeline thing, Mum,” explained Friday, “in which two versions of the same person can exist at the same time.”
“So can’t you become the director-general at the other end of time?”
“Not that easy. The alternative timelines have to be in concurrence to go forward to a mutually compatible future.”
I understood—sort of.
“I guess this means you haven’t invented time travel yet?”
