City of Time - Eoin McNamee

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formation from north to south and Cati could hear them honking. She watched them cross the face of the moon until they were framed in its circle. They are free and I am not, she thought sadly.

      Then she froze to the spot. A second before, there had been birds on the wing. Now they were skeletons, all flesh and feathers gone! For a moment they hung in the sky, a great silent flock of the dead, their bone wings fixed in flight, their beaks agape but noiseless. Then they turned to dust which fell earthwards in a great plume until it was swallowed by the darkness below.

      Cati wondered if her heart had stopped. For a long moment she stood staring at the moon, wondering if she had hallucinated the whole thing. But the geese had been there; nothing could have been more real than their wild honking high in the sky. She forced herself to think. No weapon could have reduced the geese to dust. No storm or wind or lightning strike. Only one thing could have happened. Somehow, time had changed them and they had aged many years in a single second.

      Her job was to watch for a threat to the fabric of time and to wake the other Resisters if they were needed to defend. Was this one of those times? Her heart told her that it was. She turned and plunged down the stairs.

      In two minutes she stood at the doors which led to the Starry, the great chamber where the Resisters slept. As she fumbled at the lock, doubt began to creep into her mind. What if she was wrong? She thought about Samual, one of the Resister leaders. The warrior was a brave fighter, but his tongue was acid and he had not approved of Cati’s friendship with Owen. She could almost hear his sarcastic words. Geese turning to dust? You woke us because you had a silly dream?

      But it wasn’t a dream, she told herself. It wasn’t. Cati turned the slender key in the lock and the stone doors opened.

      Before her in semi-darkness were hundreds of wooden beds, and in each bed lay a Resister. What light there was came from the ceiling which was domed and covered with tiny lights like a night sky. The air was warm and still and she could hear gentle breathing sweep the room like a great sigh. She looked at the sleeping faces, recognising every one – young and old, friend and opponent.

      She checked on the Starry once every three or four days. It was part of her job, although no one had ever told her so. Her visits were brief; a glance to make sure all was well and no more. To see so many familiar faces only made her loneliness worse.

      She had seen her father wake the sleepers before. He had simply touched each person’s forehead and after a moment the Resister would wake, looking around, a little bewildered until they realised where they were. Who would she wake first to tell about the geese? Contessa, she thought. Contessa, who ran the great kitchens in the Workhouse, who was gentle and wise, a mother to them all. She would know what to do.

      Cati walked between the rows until she found her. Contessa was tall, elegantly dressed in a wool gown. Her hands were folded on her breast and even in sleep there was a calm authority to her face. Hesitantly, Cati reached out and touched her forehead. She stood for a moment, feeling the warm skin, waiting for her eyes to open.

      Without warning, Contessa started to writhe, her back arching, pain written on her gentle face. “No,” she moaned, “stop…”

      Cati jerked her hand back. Contessa’s body fell back to the bed and she was asleep again, breathing heavily, beads of perspiration on her forehead.

      Something was wrong. Cati placed her hand on another Resister’s head, a dark haired young man. He twisted and moaned as if her touch burned him. She snatched her hand away. What was wrong? She should be able to wake them.

      Even as she stood there, bewildered and alarmed, Cati could feel sleep start to steal over her, as it did if you remained too long in the Starry. But this sleep felt different. It seemed… stale.

      She turned swiftly and walked towards the door. As Watcher it was not the time to fall asleep. She closed the door behind her and locked it, then ran outside, welcoming the cool night air on her face. Outside it seemed as bright as day. The moon over the Workhouse roof shone with a light that was almost dazzling.

      Cati sat down on a rock. Something was terribly wrong. There was only one option. She knew that her father had sometimes called upon special people in the ordinary world. She thought that the shopkeeper, Mary White, was one of them.

      Owen was another. His father had known the Resisters and Owen had joined them to defeat the Harsh. Owen was called the Navigator, for reasons Cati didn’t quite understand, and it was a title that the other Resisters seemed to respect, even, in some cases, to fear.

      She would never try to contact him under normal circumstances. But these were not normal circumstances. She jumped up and began to run.

       CHAPTER THREE

      Owen didn’t know what woke him. A gust of wind, he thought, or a dog barking? As his eyes got used to the dark he lifted his head from the pillow. Everything in his room was the same as before. His guitar propped against the wall, the model plane hanging from the ceiling, the old chest under the window. Outside the wind stirred the trees. That was it, he thought, the wind.

      He allowed his head to fall back on to the pillow. It was cold and he gathered the blankets around him. He was about to close his eyes when he noticed something odd. He sat up. The air in the middle of the room looked strange. It was shimmering slightly. He rubbed his eyes, but when he looked again, there was still something different. The room looked distorted, like looking through old glass. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he sensed a presence in the room, and his heart started to beat faster.

      Then he thought he heard a sound, a voice. There was somebody else in the room.

      Without knowing how, he was out of bed. The shimmering air was between him and the door. He started to edge around it. He heard the sound again, like a voice, but far, far away, as if in a cave or down a well. The words were mournful and distorted. He tried to squeeze between the wall and the shimmer, but it moved towards him.

      Owen stepped back, stumbling over his trainers, and instinctively put out an arm to save himself. The arm touched the moving air and to his amazement it felt warm and solid, like a living thing.

      He jerked his arm away and backed towards the bed. Something was resolving itself in the middle of the room. Suddenly there was a large flicker and he realised that it was a person, someone he recognised, a clever girl’s face with dark, curly hair, then a body wearing a faded uniform with epaulettes on the shoulders. His heart leaped.

      “Cati!” he gasped. He could see her lips moving, but could not understand the words that still sounded distant. He grabbed her arm. Immediately he could hear her voice. It had been a year since she had disappeared back into the mists of time, but if he thought that she was going to exchange memories with him like two old comrades, he was sadly mistaken.

      “Hold on to me, you idiot,” she hissed. “It’s the only way I can stay stable in your time.” Owen grasped her with both hands. The flickering stopped and at last she was standing in his room, flesh and blood. Her expression was serious, but as always, there was a mocking look in her strange green eyes.

      “Cati,” he said again. “I missed—”

      “Never mind that,” she said. “There isn’t time. I need you to come down to the Workhouse and meet me.”

      “What’s happening? Is it the Harsh?”

      “Come to the Workhouse and I’ll explain. It’s easier to stay stable there.” As she spoke, Cati began to flicker again. One moment Owen had hold of solid flesh, the next there was nothing. But just before she faded completely, he saw a cheeky, lopsided grin on her face and thought he heard the words, “Missed you too …”

      Hastily, Owen pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and fumbled for his trainers. Then he opened the door into the hallway. It was flooded with moonlight. From the room at the end he heard his mother’s soft breathing. As quietly

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