Falling by Debbie Moon Page B

the wind could fascinate her for hours, but she wasn’t usually much interested by human movement.
    Then Jude looked down, at the trailing end of a spiral inscribed among the gravel two steps ahead of her, and understood why.
    She didn’t want her work of art ruined.
    â€˜Emma?’
    No reaction.
    â€˜I really don’t have time to mess around here. Let’s make a deal. You help me with my little crisis – because I think you can, you keep cropping up in my life for a reason – and I’ll warn you about something in your future that, trust me, you’re going to want to avoid.’
    DiFlorian sighed. ‘You don’t know what I want to avoid. You don’t even know who you’re talking to.’
    Jude opened her mouth to say the obvious; and then she got it.
    â€˜Oh, yeah. You’re just here on vacation as well. How are you finding it? Being your child-self, I mean. It’s never quite the way you remember, is it? And the food’s not up to much.’
    â€˜That’s not actually what I meant.’
    Sitting down in the gravel, Jude fixed her with a hard stare, and settled in to wait.
    â€˜The problem is,’ Emma said, ‘that we can never change our own past.’
    â€˜Parallel universe theory? There’s an infinite number of universes, and in each one, a version of us living some slightly different life. So when we alter things, we’re actually moving into that universe. Nothing ever changes – we just go to the place where that option always was and always will be.’
    No wonder my head hurts.
    Emma wriggled her toes until flecks of gravel worked their way out from between them. ‘Good theory.’
    â€˜I think it’s nuts.’
    â€˜But what I mean is – the past changes for everyone except us.’
    Because we always remember.
    The UN President was assassinated on his first visit to the Reclaimed Lands. Someone had told her that at a social. Just came up in conversation. Then he’d stammered and blushed and had to retreat to the bathroom, because, for everyone else, it had never happened. He’d ReTraced and made sure it didn’t. But for him, it was part of his memory, part of his life.
    â€˜How does that help me?’
    â€˜It means you know things that other people don’t.’
    â€˜Because for them, those things never happened.’
    Emma nodded.
    â€˜But that’s no help, if those things aren’t of any use.’
    â€˜What do you know that no one else does?’
    â€˜I know…’
    I know that Emma here ends up in a jar, being modified into something GenoBond wants and isn’t getting – very often – through the normal course of evolution. I know that people want me dead because I know these things. I know that a woman with a bad-taste handbag tried to kill me when I was a kid, though how that connects is anyone’s guess.
    GenoBond does pass instructions backwards. Someone ReTraces back ten or twenty years to when they first joined, gives the message, and someone in that time-frame takes it back to when they first joined and in the end… What if someone wanted me dead so badly that they tried to get me killed before I’d even been spotted as a potential ReTracer? Before any of this ever happened, just wiping out a vast chunk of history – my history, anyway. Who has the authority to order that?
    Warner. Oh yeah, I bet Mr Black Espresso can pull some pretty hefty strings within the organisation. But he’s never seemed the sort to –
    Schrader. Now there’s a suspect. But he’s just a ReTracer – kind of senior staff, gets to issue the odd order on Warner’s behalf, but surely not powerful enough to…
    â€˜Parallel universes,’ Emma said suddenly, startling her, ‘have one big advantage.’
    â€˜Yeah?’
    â€˜Every single possibility exists somewhere within them. If we keep going long enough, eventually we