The Hangman's Revolution by Eoin Colfer Page B

I’d say there were bad people after all of us.”
    Riley did not comment. He did not, for example, point out that it was Chevie herself who was delaying their escape. He knew from experience that there was nothing his friend from the future liked better than a protracted squabble, and the more inopportune the timing, the louder she argued.
    And this ain’t the time for a barney.
    They dragged, coaxed, and heaved Otto Malarkey’s mammoth bulk to the stage door, and lurched outside as one, all exhausted by the effort of moving a frame the size of a dray horse.
    “I have a bad case of the pants,” Riley declared, gasping for air, his cheek slick with Malarkey’s blood. “We can’t lug this bruiser far.”
    Chevie leaned against the wall. “No kidding. What’s stage two of the plan?”
    Riley thought fast. “We need to get ourselves in lavender, and I mean sharpish. A quiet lurk somewhere, not no penny gaff neither. Bacteria would be the death of King Otto at the mo.”
    Chevie found that her mind was beginning to wrap itself around Riley’s lingo.
    “Somewhere nearby while we’re at it. This big lug is bleeding all over my FBI super suit.”
    Riley was being drizzled by a fair deal of blood himself. “It’s a good plan, just a deuced shame that I don’t know any such place.”
    Otto gathered his feet and took some of his own weight.
    “Fetch a Shoeblack and have him summon a cab. It ’appens that I might know a place that would be just the ticket.”
    “Someplace unknown to your confederates,” said Riley. “The Rams had one rotten apple in the barrel and it may have been contagious, if you know what I mean.”
    Malarkey hawked and spat a ball of blood to the dusty sidewalk.
    “Oh, believe me, Ramlet, there ain’t no one who knows about this gaff.”
    Riley steadied King Otto against the brick wall and ran down the alley to Holborn proper, whistling for a Shoeblack boy as he went.
    Chevie and Malarkey were left alone. King Otto looked down at the girl through heavily lidded eyes.
    “Murdering scum, is it?”
    Chevie realized that she was in quite a weak position should Malarkey decide to regain his prodigious strength.
    “Well, murdering, at the very least.”
    Otto closed his eyes. “Fair enough,” he said, and he had himself a little rest, leaving Chevie to gaze anxiously down the length of the alley at her disappearing friend.

Ouroboros. The snake that eats its own tail—that’s the time traveler. Going around in circles, destroying his own past. Crapping out a whole new future. Apologies. Pooping out a whole new future.
    —Professor Charles Smart
    V ictorian London was not kind to visitors. It lured them into its soot-stained labyrinth with a vague fairy-tale promise of streets paved with gold, then sucked their coin through the slitted windows of gin houses and opium dens. The Great Oven trod hard on the souls of outsiders with a life of slave labor or destitution with naught at the end of the struggle but an ignoble death, tied to a sleeping bench in the bone house. Every year, thousands of cheery country stock rolled into London as though the l and was on a tilt, and every year thousands more were rolled into unmarked paupers’ graves, if they were lucky—and pig troughs or furnaces if they were not. W hile it was true that murder was rare, it wasn’t classed as murder if the city did the killing. If a factory swallowed a dozen limbs a week, then that was just the price of employment. If a person’s hand was fast enough to grasp a shilling, then it ought to be fast enough to stay out of the grinder. It stood to reason. And anyway, what matter if a few bumpkins went into the earth before their terms? There were always scores more in a shuffling line outside the factories.
    For a stranger to English shores come to town off the gangplank, London was a series of local hazards designed to strip Johnny Foreigner naked and toss him on the slag heap without a farthing to his name. The