‘At my wedding.’

Flanker frowned and looked at his notes.

‘You married? When?’

I told him and he squiggled a note in the margin.

‘And what did he say when he turned up at your wedding?’

‘Congratulations.’

He stared at me for a few moments, then changed tack.

‘This incident with the Skyrail operator,’ he began. ‘You were convinced that he had a soap gun hidden about his person. According to a witness you thumped him on the chin, handcuffed and searched him. They said you seemed very surprised when you didn’t find anything.’

I shrugged and remained silent.

‘We don’t give a sod about the Thal, Next. Your father deputising you is one thing, replacing you out of time is quite another. Is this what happened?’

‘Is that the charge? Is that why I’m here?’

‘Answer the question.’

‘No, sir.’

‘You’re lying. He brought you back early but your father’s control of the timestream is not that good. Mr Kaylieu decided not to threaten the Skyrail that morning. You were sideslipped, Next. Joggled slightly in the timestream. Things happened the same way but not exactly in the same order. It wasn’t a big one, either—barely a Class IX. Sideslips are an occupational hazard in ChronoGuard work.’

‘That’s preposterous,” I scoffed. Stiggins would know I was lying but perhaps I could fool Flanker.

‘I don’t think you understand, Miss Next. This is more important than just you or your father. Two days ago we lost all communications beyond the twelfth of December. We know there is industrial action but even the freelancers we’ve sent upstream haven’t reported back. We think it’s the Big One. If your father was willing to risk using you, we reckon he thinks so too. Despite our animosity towards your father he knows his business—if he didn’t we’d have had him years from now. What’s going on?’

‘I just thought he had a gun,’ I repeated.

Flanker stared at me silently for a few moments.

‘Let’s start again, Miss Next. You search a Neanderthal for a fake gun he carries the following day, you apologise to him using his name, and the arresting officer at the Skyrail station tells me she saw you resetting your watch—a bit out of time, were you?’

‘What do you mean—”for a fake gun he carries the following day”?’

Flanker answered without a trace of emotion, ‘Kaylieu was shot dead this morning. I think you should talk and talk fast. I’ve enough to loop you for twenty years. Fancy that?’

I glared back at him, at a loss to know what to do or say. Looping was a slang term for Closed Loop Temporal Field Containment. They popped the criminal in an eight-minute repetitive time loop for five, ten, twenty years. Usually it was a laundromat, a doctor’s waiting room or a bus stop, and your presence often caused time to slow down for others near the loop. Your body aged but never needed sustenance; it was cruel and unnatural—yet cheap and required no bars, guards or food.

I opened my mouth and shut it again, gaping like a fish.

‘Or you can tell us about your father and walk out a free woman.’

I felt a prickly sweat break out on my forehead. I stared at Flanker and he stared at me, until, mercifully, Stiggins came to my rescue.

‘Miss Next was working for us at SO-13 that morning, Commander,’ he said in a low monotone. ‘Kaylieu had been implicated in Neanderthal sedition. It was a secret operation. Thank you, Miss Next, but we will have to tell SO-1 the truth.’

Flanker shot an angry glance at the Neanderthal, who stared back at him impassively.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me this, Stiggins?’

‘You never asked.’

All Flanker had on me now was a slow watch. He lowered his voice to a growl.

‘I’ll see you looped behind the Crunch if your father is up to no good and you didn’t tell us.’

He paused for a moment and jabbed a finger in the direction of Stiggins.

‘If you’ve been bearing false witness I’ll have you too. You’re running the Thal end of SO-13 for one reason and one reason only—window dressing.’

‘How you managed to become the dominant species we will never know,’ Stiggins said at last. ‘So full of hate, anger and vanity.’

‘It’s our evolutionary edge, Stiggins. Change and adapt to a hostile environment. We did, you didn’t. QED.’

‘Darwin won’t mask your sins, Flanker,’ replied Stiggins. ‘You made our environment hostile. You will fall too. But you won’t fall because of a more dominant life form. You will fall over yourselves.’

‘Garbage, Stiggins. You lot had your chance and blew it.’

‘We have right to health, freedom and pursuit of happiness, too.’

‘Legally speaking you don’t,’ replied Flanker evenly. ‘Those rights belong only to humans. If you want equality, speak to Goliath. They sequenced you. They own you. If you get lucky perhaps you can be at risk. Beg and we might make you endangered.’

Flanker shut my file with a snap, grabbed his hat, removed both interview tapes and was gone without another word.

As soon as the door closed I breathed a sigh of relief. My heart was going like a trip hammer but at least I still had my liberty.

‘I’m sorry about Mr Kaylieu.’

Stiggins shrugged.

‘He was not happy, Miss Next. He did not ask to come back.’

‘You lied for me,’ I added in a disbelieving tone. ‘I thought Neanderthals couldn’t lie?’

He stared at me for a moment or two.

‘It’s not that we can’t,’ he said at last. ‘We just have no reason to. We helped because you are a good person. It is enough. If you need help again, we will be there.’

Stiggins’s normally placid and unmoving face curled up into a grimace that showed two rows of widely-gapped teeth. I was fearful for a moment until I realised that what I was witnessing was a Neanderthal smile.

‘Miss Next—’

‘—Yes?’

‘Our friends call us Stig.’

‘Mine call me Thursday.’

He put out a large hand and I shook it gratefully.

‘You’re a good man, Stig.’

‘Yes,’ he replied slowly, ‘we were sequenced that way.’

He gathered up his notes and left the room.

I left the SpecOps building ten minutes later and looked for Landen in the cafe opposite. He wasn’t there so I ordered a coffee and waited twenty minutes. He didn’t turn up so I left a message with the cafe owner and drove home, musing that with death by coincidence, the world ending in a fortnight, court charges for I don’t know what and a lost play by Shakespeare, things couldn’t get much stranger. But I was wrong. I was very wrong.

Landen’s absence made me feel unsettled. All sorts of reasons as to why he wasn’t waiting for me ran through my head as I pushed open the gate and walked up to our front door. He could have lost track of time, gone to pick up his running leg from the menders or dropped in to see his mum. But I was fooling myself. Landen said he would be there and he wasn’t. And that wasn’t like him. Not at all.