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  ‘She’s alive!’ He heard the surprise in the male voice.

  ‘But not for long!’ A woman’s voice this time. ‘So much damage!’

  ‘Get her a clone!’ Julio screamed at them, suddenly energised at the news there was still hope.

  ‘She has none,’ someone answered.

  ‘Use a spare!’

  There was confused silence for a moment. He knew what was going through their minds. Although integration with a clone body not of your DNA had been proven to be possible by Jac Ulster, less than a year ago, it had not been tried since. The chances that this girl could successfully take on a body that was not hers were remote.

  ‘We have a few spares available in the research centre. I approve the use of one now,’ said a quiet, authoritative male voice. Julio had never heard more welcome news.

  While Julio sprawled in the blood, the team whisked the mangled torso away. Sometime during the chaos, the Portal had been closed, and the world became suddenly quiet. He lay back on the sticky floor, and covered his eyes with his arm. The light was too bright. His limbs were too heavy.

  Shock, he was in shock. If he didn’t move soon, he would start shaking.

  ‘Julio, are you injured?’

  He shook his head, but couldn’t speak.

  ‘Dorothy has taken the boy to the medical centre to be checked out. Can you get up?’

  He nodded his head, and tried to sit up. Strong hands were quick to assist him.

  ‘Gotta go to Jane…’ he managed to get out.

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘Has to be integrated.’

  ‘The girl you rescued? They’re taking care of her now, Julio. I’ll get you to your dorm.’ Now he could recognise the voice. It belonged to Jac Ulster, his boss. He liked Jac. Just like he liked his Bonded mate, Cara.

  ‘No. Want to go to Jane. Have to know if she … makes it.’

  Strong arms helped him to his feet, and he looked around the huge, brightly lit cavern where the Time Travel Start Point was located. Across every rocky surface ran threads of light in billowing waves, their cumulative effect a brightness that rivalled midday. The usually ordered spokes of the wheel, which radiated out from the stone dais on which the ancient stone doorway sat, were in disarray. The rows of high tech computers, with their ubiquitous technicians sitting silently before them, were empty. Operated by mind control, few had the needed calmness required to operate the computers at that moment. People were rushing around like ants in a disturbed nest.

  Jac kept his arm around Julio as he made his way down the dais steps, and headed for the back of the cavern. The marble floor seemed to go on for ever. But finally they reached the far wall, and entered the lift that would take them to the surface.

  ‘What happened?’ Jac asked, as they made the quick journey to the surface hundreds of feet above them.

  ‘She must have got pulled into the propellers. God, the pain she must have felt!’

  ‘You only had one Target, Julio.’ Jac’s voice contained no censure only uncertainty.

  ‘The computer would not have selected her because she fell between the two age groups. Not a child, not a productive adult. But a little peripheral information was in the dossier on her. So I spent time checking her out. I determined that, given her historical disappearance, her act of heroism, and proximity, it was worth the risk to Retrieve her. She is worthwhile, Jac. A girl of incredible potential.’

  He had enough energy to revert to the more formal idiom of New Atlantis to make his point. He knew he would need to Report ‘on record’ later, but it was enough to clue his boss in on what had happened, and why, in this moment.

  ‘And you are sure she was never found?’

  ‘So the dossier said. I read the news story that called her “the tragic heroine whose body was never found”.’

  ‘We might have to run a peripheral check to make sure no body washed up months later.’

  Julio stopped in his tracks. He had not even considered that possibility. He’d only dealt with the immediate findings, and the fact that no body for Tommy had ever been found. Jane may well have washed up some time later. But as her body was so badly mangled, it was more likely it would have become food for the fish and sharks of the bay.

  That idea made him nauseous, and it took all his will power to keep from throwing up in one of the neat flower beds they were now passing.

  To go from stormy night to sunny day, in a matter of minutes, was one of the phenomena he found most disconcerting about time travel. He had Jumped on several training sessions with Jac or Cara, and had been on one Retrieval before this one. But Time Travel was still new to him, and though it was interesting, he still wouldn’t have been breaking down any doors to do it, if not for the children.

  Strange. His obsession had all been about the children, and yet he’d paid Tommy no more than nominal attention during this Jump. All his focus had been on Jane from the first day he met her. What did that tell him?

  That he needed her to live. That he needed her to be their second miracle. That he needed her to show them what he had seen in her. Potential. She was a well of limitless potential.

  Chapter Four

  Jane returned to consciousness to find herself surrounded by light. Her first thought was that she was dead and that she was in Heaven. There was a cloudlike quality to the whiteness. But then she heard a familiar voice that she knew couldn’t be in Heaven. Julio was talking to her, and his blurry outline separated itself from the white background.

  ‘Hey, Jane. How’re you doing?’

  How many times had she heard him say those exact words in the last week? She wanted to smile, and say hey back. But her mouth felt funny. And though she could think the words, she couldn’t work out how to say them.

  ‘It’s okay, Jane, it’ll take you a bit to get control. You’re our latest miracle, and it will be a while before your new body comes on line. Everything is blurry right now, but your eyes will soon start to be able to differentiate objects. After a while, you’ll start to be able to move and talk. All you have to do is concentrate hard, imagine yourself doing whatever it is, and your body will respond… slowly at first. But it will get better.’

  She tried to understand what he was telling her. Blurry eyes? Yes, that explained the clouds. She’d be able to talk and move soon? Why would she have to concentrate to do that? Where was she? What had happened?

  ‘Wh … at h … ap …’

  ‘What happened to you?’ Julio finished her question for her. She tried to nod but only managed a slight shift of her chin.

  ‘You tried to be a hero and jumped in Sydney Harbour after a boy called Tommy fell overboard. You got pretty mangled by the experience, but you are fine now. You’ll be fine now.’

  The memory of the water came back to her and she gasped reflexively. That terrible nightmare came true. The dark water had dragged her along and then pain … the terrible pain.

  She felt no pain now. Surely, if she was in a hospital recovering, she would feel pain. Maybe she was paralysed from the neck down and that was why she couldn’t move or feel anything. Panicking she struggled to move her arms. They flopped around at her sides like landed fish. But at least she moved. And she could feel the bed beneath her body.

  ‘Calm down, Jane. You are all in one piece and you will have all your faculties, I promise. It just takes some rehabilitation.’

  The image of those huge spinning propeller blades came into her head and she couldn’t dismiss them. There was no way that she had been able to avoid them. She was being sucked into them when she lost consciousness. They would have cut her to pieces.

  But wait, hadn’t he said something about mangled? And new body? Had she been given an organ transplant, like the heart transplant Christaan Barnard had done in Cape Town just before Christmas? But his patient had died hadn’t he? The body rejected the tissue that wasn’t its own. But Julio had called her a miracle, so maybe she’d survived. For now. The idea that she had someone else’s body parts wa
s a bit freaky; like she was Frankenstein’s monster.

  Her thoughts began to slow down, and soon she was drifting back to sleep, safe in the knowledge that Julio was with her. She hadn’t lost him after all. Next to that, nothing else was important.

  ‘Well, it looks like your Jane is going to make a full recovery,’ Karl Ontario, the head of the medical research team, announced with a broad smile.

  Julio looked down at the unfamiliar body, and nodded. ‘Yes, that is Jane. But she is going to have a lot of shocks coming her way. I hope she will be able to withstand them.’

  ‘She did not Crash and Burn during the integration. That is very promising. I think this young lady has a very powerful will to survive. But you are right. She will have a great many challenges ahead of her. She will need stability and familiarity. You are the only person she knows. Are you willing to put the time in to help her, or will I start making inquiries amongst the Newcomers?’

  ‘Cara Westchester has already approved my appointment as her guide for the foreseeable future. Jane knows and trusts me. I will need to draw on that, if I am to help her come to terms with her sudden, and shocking, change of fortune.’

  ‘Good fortune. This clone is lovely.’ Karl brushed the fine copper coloured hair back from the porcelain face. The delicate features reminded Julio of a princess in a fairy-tale, fragile and beautiful.

  Julio bit back the urge to tell the other man to keep his hands to himself. It was an irrational urge that was totally out of place. If anyone had the right to touch her, he did. Karl had been the driving force behind the ground-breaking attempt to integrate Jane into a clone body that was not created from her DNA. It had only been successful carried out once before. Up until a year ago, they had thought it impossible.

  But his resentment toward Karl remained, and to stake his claim in some tangible way, he picked up the limp hand and studied it closely. It was a pale, long-fingered, feminine hand with beautifully formed nails that were in need of a trim. Turning the hand over, he looked at the palm. As yet, there were not many lines on the hand. They would start to appear, the further into the amalgam she went. Soon, the lines on her hands would be identical to those on the hands of her Original, although the shape of them would remain those of the clones.

  Karl had gone now and Julio was left to safeguard his protégé. After a lifetime of solitude, he now found himself seeking out another’s company, risking his mission for another’s life. And his choices had not been easy ones, nor were they going to bring him much comfort in the days to come.

  But, just as he had felt the call to change the comfort of his old life for the danger and uncertainty of the new role as Retriever, now he also knew he had made a commitment to the girl lying here. What that commitment would mean, he didn’t know. But it was as firm a bond as any that was made of blood

  The next time Jane surfaced, she could see the room in which she lay more clearly. The blurred edges had sharpened, and objects now had definition and were recognisable. She was in a hospital ward, an ultra-modern hospital ward, from the look of some of the equipment.

  Of course, if she had undergone a transplant, she would be in the most modern of facilities. This was ground breaking stuff, and would require an isolation ward to limit the risk of infection. Why would Julio be allowed in to visit her if she was in an isolation ward? So many questions.

  But the most pressing question at the moment was where Julio had gone.

  She turned her head to look at the rest of the room. It was reassuring how easily it responded to her thoughts. But though she looked into every corner, there was no sign of the Brazilian. Anxious, Jane braced her arms and levered her torso off the bed. If she had to, she’d go looking for him. He hadn’t been a hallucination had he? The thought that he wasn’t real was too terrible to contemplate.

  Looking down at her body, as she tried to work out what part to move next, to get herself off the bed, she was suddenly struck by the strangeness of what she was seeing. The torso she looked at was slim and delicate, dressed in a white Grecian gown made from the softest material she’d ever felt. The legs poking out from beneath the gown were long, shapely and fragile, the bones beneath the pale skin, as fine and light as a bird’s. What was going on? How could she be looking down at herself, and yet seeing someone else? Was this an optical illusion done with mirrors?

  The sound of approaching footsteps had her looking away from the offending body in the direction of the sound. Julio, fresh from a shower and dressed in a roman tunic that fell to half way down his thighs, appeared in the doorway. Absently, she noticed the tunic was pulled in at the waist by a gold linked belt. His legs beneath the white tunic were muscular, and he wore roman sandals on his feet.

  What was this, a movie? Had she turned up on the set for Ben Hur, or something?

  ‘Jane, be careful, you’ll fall.’ He sounded reassuringly like her Julio, and his eyes were still that same intense, chocolate-brown. And that unconventional lock of hair still fell across his brow. So the differences in him were just his clothing.

  He reached out for her, steadying her, as the torso she knew was not her own, swayed slightly.

  ‘Wh…at… is… this?’ she managed to form the words, as she held out an arm that rocked unsteadily before her eyes. Eyes, she realised with a start, which seem to be able to see far better than normal. She didn’t have to squint at all to bring distant objects into focus.

  ‘Ah, yes. This is your new body. I told you it would take some time to get control of it.’

  ‘New..w bod…dy? Wher…ere old…’

  ‘Your old body was damaged beyond repair. We were lucky to save your life. You were bleeding out when I got you here. The only way to save you was to integrate you into a clone.’

  ‘Clo..ne?’ The strange voice went higher as her shock increased.

  ‘Yes. Please, Jane, lie back. I have a lot to tell you.’

  Reluctantly, she allowed him to ease her back onto the cot. Then she turned her head to watch him sit down on a chair beside the bed. He smiled gently at her, his eyes anxious.

  ‘Did you ever wonder who I was and where I came from, Jane?’

  She nodded, not wanting to risk the haphazard results of vocalising again.

  ‘I was different to the people you knew. I spoke differently. I probably behaved differently at times, too, although I tried to blend in as much as possible. We are trained to blend in.’

  How strange, that was how she always saw him – blending in like a chameleon, observing, but not participating. Even the cigarettes were part of that attempt to be like everyone else.

  ‘W..e?’ she managed.

  ‘Time Travellers. Like your Dr Who, but without a Tardis.’

  She closed her eyes, unable to deal with the absurdity of his words. He couldn’t be a time traveller. That was just fiction. No one could travel through time.

  ‘I can see by your expression that you don’t believe me. That’s all right. You will. I come from a time in your future – 2331 is the current year. I’m what’s called a Retriever. People like me Jump to different times in the past, and Retrieve specific targets. I am part of the newly formed Child Retrieval Project. We target children.

  ‘Up until last six months ago, we hadn’t had children in our world for more than two hundred years. The human race is sterile. The only way we can repopulate the planet is to offer asylum to people from other times, who have ended their lives in their original time line.’

  Jane was reeling under the onslaught. How could he possible think she could believe all this rubbish? Why was he doing this to her? He wasn’t a cruel man, even though he could be superior and sarcastic when he wanted to be. But not cruel. This game he was now playing with her was just cruel.

  ‘When I met you, I was doing preparation for the Retrieval of the boy who fell off that ferry. Tommy is his name. You will be pleased to know he is well, and already in the care of his new parents.’

  ‘Ne..w par..nts?’

  ‘Ye
s. Targets are Retrieved, and assigned parents in our world to take care of them. It is a new program. Tommy was the eleventh child we have rescued.’

  ‘Stol..en.’

  ‘No, definitely not stolen. We Retrieve people who, historical records tell us, disappeared intheir own time, and whose bodies were never found. We cannot disturb the time line. Taking a child, who might have grown up to be a world leader, would cause immeasurable harm to the Time-Space Continuum we traverse. We rescue people who no longer have lives to live in their own world.’

  Jane tried to make sense of this. They had records of her time, and in her time the boy she had tried to save had drowned, and his body never found? In fact, he hadn’t drowned. He’d been taken by time travelling kidnappers. His parents thought he was dead, but he was alive and well, here. How cruel was that!

  ‘I… want to ..go… ho…me.’

  Julio’s face reflected his devastation. Then he gritted his beautiful white teeth, and looked at her in the way he would have, if she’d said something stupid.

  ‘You would go back to a life where no one even remembered your birthday? Where your sole purpose for being was as a meal ticket and a skivvy? You would go home, when you haven’t even looked at the opportunity that has been presented to you?’

  She gritted her own teeth and stared him down, angrily. How dare he belittle her life like that? It might not have seemed much to him, but it was all she had.

  But no, it wasn’t all she had. That was what he was trying to tell her. She’d been given another chance. Somehow, she’d been given another alternative.

  ‘You weren’t meant to be Retrieved, Jane.’ His voice dripped acid, and she cringed. ‘I only knew about your part in the scenario because of newspaper stories of the day. I went against Protocol to save you. And you are damn lucky to be alive. If you went home, it would be to bleed out in a few minutes, and become food for the sharks. Is that what you really want?’