Paula Aamli

The Time Rift

Novel extract

In-Between

First thing you bang up against is noise. Shriekingly loud. Pummelling the side of your face. Forcing you to pay attention when all your instincts are to slide down into the velvety deep, the caressing swirl of unconsciousness. So seductive. Awareness weighty. Burdensome.

But the universe is pulsing with screeching metal-on-metal and your attention is snagged. There’s something – wrong. There’s something wrong with the word pulsing. Suggests a soft naturalness wholly lacking as you are rag-dolled between too much and nothing:

// noise // absence of noise // noise // absence // 
// mind-splitting cacophony // gone // 
// noise again // abrupt jerk and you’re 

– back into muffled, stifled lack //
// noise now – boom and shout 
– shuddering yell // nothing // 

// noise, noise, NOISE // 
// again noth– //

Losing your grip on the enfolding calm, you are dragged into the outline of your body. Arms and legs thrown outwards. A crooked, mis-shapen H. 

Wait for solidity to re-contour your limbs into some kind of solidity and – 
Nothing. No ground underfoot. Not in the noise-storm. Not in the silence.
No breeze whipping hair across cheek and chin. Then vortex. Gone again.
In the intermittent close-muffled silence, no purchase at all on Up/Down.
No light source in the silence. No horizon. Then glare and noise. Glimpses.

It feels like – it feels like you’re tumbling through time. 
Into the in-between. Pulled back into time. Gone again.
No controlling the oscillation. No space for sense-making.
Except – leaving time required skill, focus, effort. Years of training before it was effortless. And was access ever gained unintentionally? Was that possible? Vague sense it wasn’t.
And yet, here we are. Herenow. And therenow. Whenever those moments are located.

Which is the moment you finally realise – 
You don’t remember anything from your life before this spinning, tumbling fall. 
There is only drowning noise / light / panicked shouting – or – muffled nothing.
The before-this is walled off, no way through. An inkling of companionship, individual voices in the melee that you can almost grab hold of – then recognition evaporates.
You are alone in the disquiet of this bifurcated sound/silence. 
Alone. Unmoored. Tumbling. Spinning. Is the falling endless?

Think… Think! 
You trained – For this? For something like it?
Find a way back into control. Find a toehold.

You can do this. Come on. 

*

Mallory Reddy here. Post-hoc voice note on the events starting 415 CE, Foundation 12. As accurate as I can make it but inevitably there’ll be artistic license. No, it’s not objective. Relative to my personal bio-line, these events happened c. nine years ago. I was sixteen.

Closed Zone
Beyond Hambleford
Sector Pastoral
Raynovia
415 Current Era
Foundation Month 12

Training with Jared

I’m finally ready to try to make sense of that last trip to the Closed Zone. 

And the things that followed on from it. 

Do I need to record, explicitly, that we weren’t technically allowed to be there?

It’s called the Closed Zone for a reason, right? 

Thing is – jump-tracking isn’t active in the Closed Zone but honestly? Not being tracked by Hambleford Watch was actively useful since I’d been benched and Jared wasn’t supposed to be training with me. Why was I benched? The specifics are too tedious to recap but in brief, I was rude to someone pompous. Not even in public! But it was enough. 

I don’t blame the organising committee for scrubbing me from the Foundation Day celebrations at month-end. Just unfortunate that it meant Jared was reassigned and was no longer supposed to help me train for the linked Expedition Corps PreQual assessment.

That said, J’s a soft touch and I’m persuasive, so he agreed to help me, off-books. 

Ironic in the light of subsequent events which have left me as, I believe, the only Time Tumbler to have been neurologically blocked from time-jumping – hopefully reversible…? Let’s see – but at the time, I was dead set on serving in Expedition Corps and time-jumping for the service period as my officially required contribution to our collective well-being.

The first week of unsanctioned training was uneventful. 

We relaxed, got confident. Over-confident. Then – Foundation 12 happened. 

A day I wish we could un-do, that I’ve been trying to undo ever since.

On Foundation 12, Jared and I set out for the Closed Zone mid-morning, separately from Hanne (Marten) and Shalva (David), J’s classmates in the graduating class of Fifteen and our accidental co-conspirators. At least, they overheard us talking about the Closed Zone at break and were extravagantly curious about it and insisted on coming along. No objections from JG. He’d had the biggest crush on Hanne for who knows how long. And the two of them were good company and excellent time-jumpers so – no objections from me, either. 

That day, Foundation 12, H and S were able to get away earlier than we could, I no longer remember why, so they went ahead and we agreed a time-point to meet them, there.

Jared and I headed out along a paved route that headed north-east out of Hambleford. 

Roughly speaking, we were heading seaward but everything that half of the compass hit seaboard eventually. It’s how it was, living in the top slice of a massive continent.

Jared was on a push scooter; I was on a contraption of my own devising, from an abandoned trolley bottom at the back of the grain store that I’d cut down and modified. 

The trimmed-down board was just wide enough to stand on with both feet pressed together, but I wouldn’t advise it. At a standstill, the board moved around unpredictably due to the two small sets of wheels I’d fixed to it, front and back. 

Crazy-looking contraption but quite stable once I was moving at speed. I called it the Slim-Slider. At the time, I fondly imagined the design was a product of my unique inventive brilliance, but with everything I’ve seen since, I’m now certain someone else invented it first. 

When we got to the place where we planned to leave the paved route, Jared hid the scooter under a low, scrubby brush-tree. He made enough room for me to hide the board, too, but I preferred to take it. It wasn’t heavy and it could be fun to ride in some parts of the Zone. 

‘Suit yourself,’ Jared said with a shrug, then he turned and loped easily along a dirt track that wound through the grasslands, heading east. 

I was no match for my older, lankier cousin and was soon sweaty and out of breath from my efforts to keep pace with him. Jared got to the edge of the Closed Zone well before me and waited there, as I knew he would, so that we could go in together. By the time I arrived, Jared was showing no signs of exertion and seemed like he had enjoyed the exercise while I was questioning the wisdom of having weighed myself down with the Slim-Slider.

This approach, from the west, brought us to the lip of a large, circular depression and it was possible to make out that the Closed Zone was located inside the remains of a crater. 

I could see a number of tracks leading down into the valley. Most or all of them looked to be from our recent excursions and it occurred to me that if anyone decided to take an interest in what we were up to, it wouldn’t take long to figure things out. 

No point in worrying about that, I decided. The Time Tumbler insistence on carefully narrowed fields of inquiry and on cultivating a studied lack of general curiosity, was on our side here, annoying as it was. It’s ridiculous, in my view. People should poke about and ask inconvenient questions. How else are we going to learn new things or invent them?

Dismissing a lingering concern and eager to get started on our training, I pushed past Jared towards the basin and, hurrying, not paying attention, I lost balance momentarily. 

My centre of gravity lurched forward into the downhill gradient, so that I slid and skidded on the loose dirt of the path. No fall, though. I recovered easily and used the momentum to skip-trot towards the valley floor, throwing up a cloud of dust behind me. 

Two-thirds of the way to the bottom, the path shifted from exposed to shaded, since the lower edges of the crater bowl were thickly covered in vegetation – a mix of spiky bushes and low, twisted trees. Temporarily blinded by the abrupt change in light levels and moving too fast to stop safely, I trusted my feet to manage the now-unseen trail ahead of them. 

Luckily there were no obstructions. I arrived unscathed at the edge of the place we’d agreed to meet up with Hanne and Shalva. It was a favourite spot, in the south-west of the Closed Zone, near the corner closest to Hambleford, with a large clearing, grassy, with patches of clear earth. It offered decent space for jumping despite, like the rest of the zone, being littered with long-abandoned detritus, scraps of equipment from a former age.

The shapes had become familiar from our trips here but were otherwise mysterious. Some exposed edges looked metallic while others had smooth-coated surfaces. I thought I could sense a residual sadness emanating from them, or at least from the pieces that looked broken and shredded. Jared said this was just my imagination working overtime. In other words, we had no solid idea why they were there or what their intended purpose was. 

On training days, we simply used them for shade and to jump from.

I dropped the Slim-Slider board onto the floor next to me and listened for signs that our friends were in the area. Apart from a residual settling of air from the ruckus I’d made emerging from the undergrowth, nothing moved. The place felt deserted. Unnaturally so. No sounds registered. I couldn’t even hear Jared making his way down the crater side behind me.

A few more moments passed and then he appeared, having descended more sedately.

‘Not exactly sneaky, Mal,’ Jared said.  

Now it was my turn to shrug and grin a little.

‘What do you want to do about the others? They’re not here – not now, anyway.’ 

Jared checked his watch. ‘We’re early. Hanne suggested we coordinate the jump schedules for time-overlap to begin at 3pm, current-present.’

‘So, the running we just did?’

‘Is good for you. Think of it as bonus training, Mal.’

I scooped up a couple of small pebbles and tossed them towards my cousin. It was a half-hearted throw, and Jared dodged the pebbles easily. ‘You realise I’d have hit you if I wasn’t weak from exhaustion after all the unnecessary running, though,’ I said. 

‘Not a great way to persuade me that we shouldn’t run here next time,’ Jared replied.

Since, on reflection, I agreed with him, I changed the subject again. 

‘So, we’ll run some jump-drills, just the two of us, until they get here?’

‘Of course. Didn’t come all this way just to light-bathe,’ Jared said. ‘Did you?’ 

He pulled a slim notebook from a pocket stitched into a hem at his thigh and gestured to a patch of bare earth, near a freestanding piece of debris that was mostly rectangular and upright. ‘How about we sit down while I talk you through the jump plan?’ 

We settled ourselves on the ground, leaning our backs against the comforting solidity of the old machine, then Jared riffled through the pages of his notebook for that day’s drill. 

In this part of the Closed Zone, several pieces of ancient junk were very large. Some were curved, some were boxy. A few had jagged angles. All were topped by dirt and smoothed over by the green of climbing plants, but the sharp metal underneath was not entirely concealed. 

These largest pieces, we discovered, made magnificent launch sites for time tumbling. 

At first we worried they would be unstable, easy to dislodge by our movements as we trained. However, some cautious exploratory jumps reassured us that the junk stood, unchanged, in the same configurations as far in time as we cared to check. Even the ‘dune’ debris had become locked into sturdy, quasi-solid structures where it stood, with the dirt, weeds, and scrubby bushes that collected on top acting as a semi-reliable extra binding layer.

The elevated pieces were perfect for our favourite – terrifying – new jump-drill, a twist on somersault jumping. Even cautious Jared agreed to use them as a base to jump from.

Somersault jumping is akin to diving into water from height. It stops being terrifying once your body has drilled enough to understand how to move through the in-between to land safely and as soon as you can stop your screaming that fall is going to kill you.

Before we could start drilling the jumps, though, we needed to pair our KeepSafes. 

This usually has a double function, boosting the intuitive connection between partners and providing a tracking device that syncs to monitors at the Time Tumbler’s home location. That didn’t apply in the Closed Zone, but we still wanted to boost our partnership capabilities.

To pair the devices, I clicked open the compartments in the wooden upper and shook out one of the tokens stored there. I offered it to Jared and took the replacement token from Jared’s KeepSafe in return, dropping it into place, before closing the lid. 

I tested the seal, then, satisfied that the join was closed fast, I smiled at Jared, who smiled back. In a slightly unplanned synchronisation, we each stowed our KeepSafe back into its habitual travel-pocket, moving in time together, to the same rhythm. 

‘Ready,’ Jared said.

‘Ready,’ I replied. 

We got to our feet. 

‘Let’s start from up there.’ I jerked my head sideways at one of the junk-hills rising from the valley floor. Underneath the greenery that had grown over and around it, we could see that it was a particularly large piece of metallic junk. The wing of an abandoned flying machine, perhaps. It was lozenge-shaped, poking up from the ground at an angle.

It was higher than anything we’d jumped from before, but the climb wasn’t difficult. The gradient was surprisingly forgiving, and a tangle of climbing plants had covered the structure with plenty of step-like footholds. I did have a woozy moment when I breached onto the shoulder of the curved piece – that sudden sense of being under observation – but it happens all the time when you’re jump-training. 

Jared stopped in a sheltered dip before the top edge and I took positions facing him, a couple of strides apart. Jared made eye contact and on my nod, rocked his weight forward on his left foot then threw himself back as if the ground behind him was a pit of cushions. 

Halfway through the fall, he made a twist with his upper body and vanished. 

Vanished from physical view in my time-point, that is. 

Part of me was aware of myself as standing on the top of the junk-hill in present-time, shivering a little at the wind that was slicing along the valley and grateful for the dense weave of my sturdy wool jacket, resisting the wind’s bite. Another part of my awareness synched to Jared’s movements in not-time, mentally twisting-tumbling alongside him in that not-place. 

Strangest of all, yet another part of me had the impression of standing in a near match to this present landscape, only a version that was sunnier and where I was seeing the scene from a different perspective. I was looking through Jared’s eyes, towards the space Mallory would-land-in-had-landed-in, but which, from my present-position, did not yet contain me. 

These were fabulous sensations if you happened to like motion sickness. 

I swallowed hard, seeking the still centre, a balanced now to jump from. 

I fell backwards, twisting, and it seemed that the world warped around me. My body mimicked the same shapes I experienced from the outside when Jared jumped – I twisted and turned in the same sequence or as close to matching as my instincts could make them.

I concentrated. I engaged the other kind of sense that could judge time-distance. 

I looked for my target. No, not looked. This wasn’t sight, and it wasn’t hearing either, though I guess the principle might be similar to what bats do, using sonar to navigate.

And there, in that time-spot, I had my target. That’s when Jared was. 

In the not-time not-space, if it’s going well, the overwhelming feeling is that of not being in a hurry. I slowly, carefully, almost casually, checked that my landing zone was clear and lined myself up towards it in an approximation of upright. 

I landed smoothly, a clean, confident entry into the time-moment, my arriving body scarcely disturbing the leaves of the plants already growing across the structure back then.

‘Nice’, said Jared. ‘Great technique. No notes.’

Pleasing feedback, but I elbowed him in the side just the same. 

After that, we did a few dozen more drills before heading to meet the others. I was broadly pleased with my performance but ready for a break and starting to lose concentration.

On our way home, we pair-jumped what should have been an easy forty-five minutes forward, but I landed clumsily and was skidding towards the void beyond the debris before Jared caught me. Recovering ourselves, both a little shaken, we spotted Hanne and Shalva sprawled on one of the larger patches of grass in the clearing, waiting for us. 

Shalva waved enthusiastically in our direction while Hanne, beside her, grinned squintily into the light, her hands folding round the edges of her face to shade her eyes. Jared inched closer to the edge of the junk-cliff and lifted a hand in greeting. I echoed the gesture but resisted going any closer to the drop. Instead, I scrambled down the sloping side of the junk-hill and this time Jared followed close behind me.