The
hotdog-eating contest was going badly.
“It’s
not funny,” Arthur whinged, clutching his bloated tummy. “It feels like my
stomach’s about to explode.”
His
friend Ren laughed and slid another hotdog across the picnic table on a plate.
“Ready to forfeit?”
She
was much smaller than him, but dressed in her ripped black jeans, hooded tank
top and massive combat boots, she looked ready for battle. Her silky black hair
was fixed in a high ponytail with a thick fringe covering half her face. Arthur
doubted that his baggy shorts and The Mandalorian T-shirt were as
intimidating, so he adopted his most threatening game face as he pulled the
plate towards him. “No chance.”
They’d
wagered that if Ren ate the most hotdogs that afternoon, Arthur would be her
spotter every time she went rock-climbing during the rest of the summer
holidays; but if Arthur ate the most, Ren would give him her copy of the latest
Spider-Man game on Xbox – something he’d need five weeks of paper-round
money to be able to afford otherwise.
“Can
one of you please puke already? This is getting ridiculous,” their
friend Cecily complained beside them. If Ren had dressed for battle, then
Cecily had styled herself for a photo shoot with a fashion magazine. Her
amethyst-purple braids had been twisted into an impossibly intricate up-do, and
she was modelling a vintage denim jacket and floaty maxi-dress. Sat in her lap
was a scruffy white terrier, who yapped excitedly as Cecily unfastened the lead
from around his red collar, and then scampered off to the pond at the bottom of
Ren’s garden. “See – even Cloud’s had enough.”
“It’ll
all be over when Arthur admits defeat,” Ren promised, lifting her hotdog to her
lips.
But
as she opened her mouth to take a bite, a splash sounded at the end of the
garden. Arthur glanced at Ren’s pond and spotted the tip of a stubby white tail
disappearing below the strangely misty surface…
“Cloud?”
Cecily sprang to her feet. “Cloud, be careful! You might not be able to swim!”
With the dog’s lead flapping in her hand, she raced towards the bottom of the
garden.
Arthur felt way too full
to run anywhere, but Cecily was right to be concerned. Although Cloud looked
like a typical West Highland terrier – with a fluffy white coat, round face and
pointed ears – he was, in fact, a very advanced robot, or mimic, from
four hundred years in the future. He’d been entrusted to their care by a
twenty-fifth-century inventor named Milo Hertz, and there was still so much
they had to learn about him … including whether or not he could swim.
With a glance at the back
door to check all their parents were still inside, Arthur pushed himself up and
hurried after Ren and Cecily. When they all got to the pond, the mist had
dissolved and the water was still. A dragonfly darted over the surface, but
there was no sign of Cloud anywhere.
“I don’t understand,”
Cecily said. “I saw him fall in.”
Arthur knelt down and
thrust his arm in up to the elbow. Wiggling it around, he could only feel slimy
weeds. “Maybe he jumped out and we missed it?”
“Couldn’t have,” Ren
said, nudging the pebbles at the water’s edge with her boot. “These are all
dry.”
Cecily surveyed the rest
of the garden. “So, then, where is he? Cloud!” she called. “Here, boy!”
Arthur
waited for an excited ball of fluff to come bounding out of the bushes, but it
didn’t appear. His gaze drew nervously to the abandoned cottage behind Ren’s
garden, where, last year, the three of them had accidentally followed Cloud
through a portal to the year 2473. After getting trapped in an in-reality
adventure game, or I-RAG, called the Wonderscape, they’d barely escaped
with their lives.
With
a growing sense of unease, he searched the pond again. Buried in the silt at
the bottom, he saw something glinting and reached towards it…
“Arthur,
look out!” Ren yanked on the back of his T-shirt, just in time, as a jet of
mist shot out of the pond with a loud hiss, narrowly missing Arthur’s head.
“What’s
happening?!” Cecily cried.
Arthur’s
pulse quickened as he scrambled to his feet and saw that the mist had swirled
around them, caging them in a spinning vortex that obscured Ren’s garden. He
grabbed his friends’ arms and pulled them closer. “Stay together!”
There was a thunderous boom and the vortex
rippled. Arthur felt a stab of brain freeze followed
by the stomach-lurching sensation of ascending in a fast-moving lift. “Werrrr—!”
As he spread his arms and legs for balance, the taste of fried onions burst at
the back of his throat and before he could do anything to stop himself, he
leaned forward and vomited. He briefly hoped the vortex wouldn’t function like
some kind of puke-nado and hurl the contents of his guts right back at him. “Ren?” he croaked, watching the mist
curl around his toes. “Cecily?”
He flinched as something
brushed his arm.
There was a high-pitched
bark and Cecily yelled, “Cloud!”
Staring at his trainers,
Arthur tried to steady his breathing. The vortex seemed to be moving slower and
the mist was thinning. He could almost see the ground. He wiped his mouth clean
on his T-shirt sleeve, lifted his head …
… and let out a small
yelp.
Ren’s garden had
vanished. They were all now stood on the floor of a
vast concrete warehouse, filled with industrial-sized shelving units. Dim
spotlights dangled from the ceiling, illuminating hundreds of coloured metal
crates, organized in rows of blue, green and red. Several nearby crates had
toppled over and a trail of sooty footprints led away from them, into the
shadows. As the residual mist faded around Arthur’s feet, he rubbed the sides
of his face, convinced he was hallucinating. This couldn’t be real.
“What
happened?!” Cecily spluttered, pressing Cloud tightly to her chest. Strands of
pondweed clung to the dog’s damp fur, but his tail was wagging. “Where are we?”
Arthur
shook his head, lost for words. He scanned the perimeter of the building,
checking for whoever had made the footprints. At one side of the warehouse,
stairs climbed up to a balcony with doors leading off into other rooms, but
there was no sign of movement anywhere. Goosebumps prickled along his forearms
as his skin adjusted to the cold. The place had to be a storage depot, although
there were no clues on the walls or crates to indicate who it belonged to.
Shaking,
Cecily fastened Cloud’s lead to his collar and lifted him to the ground.
“Hello?” she called. “Is anybody here?” Her voice echoed several times, but there
was no reply.
“Never
mind where we are,” Ren muttered, rubbing her mouth on the shoulder of
her tank-top. (Arthur guessed she’d suffered her own post-hotdog-eating
misfortune.) “I’m more concerned about when we are. I got brain freeze.
Did either of you?”
Arthur
went rigid. The dull headache you sometimes get after eating ice cream too
quickly was also a side effect of time travel. “For a split second,” he
admitted. “But there’s no way we’ve time-travelled.”
“No,”
Cecily said. “I mean – yeah, I felt brain freeze, too – but we can’t
have time-travelled.”
They
all looked at each other uncertainly.
“Maybe
we should check our phones,” Arthur suggested. “When we time-travelled before,
they stopped working.” He slipped his Samsung out of his pocket and his blood
went cold. The screen was blank.
Cecily
frantically pressed the power button on her dead iPhone. “But this makes no
sense! We haven’t walked through a Wonderway.”
It was an excellent
point. The portal they’d time-travelled through last year, a Wonderway, was
opened using a small obsidian prism called a time-key; and Arthur
hadn’t seen either device in Ren’s garden. He replayed
the details of everything that had just happened, searching for an explanation.
“When Cloud fell into the pond, there was mist on the water,” he remembered.
“It might have been the same fog spinning around us. Maybe when we thought we
saw him sinking under the water, what we actually saw was him
disappearing through the same portal we have?”
“So,
it wasn’t a Wonderway,” Ren said. “It was a portal made of … gas?”
“You
can only get into the Wonderscape through a Wonderway,” Cecily reasoned,
starting to pace, “which means if we’ve travelled here through this … this mist-portal
… we must be somewhere else in the future.”
Arthur cast a nervy
glance around the warehouse, knowing they could be anywhere – a different
planet, a different solar system, a different galaxy… His chest tightened as
the true horror of their situation hit him.
They were lost. In space and
time.
“Great, and now we’re
facing the prospect of being turned into slime again,” Ren grumbled, jamming
her phone back into her pocket.
With
a jolt, Arthur realized what Ren meant. When they’d time-travelled before,
they’d upset the balance of the universe, triggering a sort of astrophysical
autocorrect mechanism. As a result, if they hadn’t returned home soon enough,
their bodies would have broken down into a gloopy substance called protoplasm.
“Oh no…” He fumbled to set the stopwatch on his Casio. “We don’t know when it
will happen.”
Cecily
stopped pacing. “What do you mean we don’t know? We had fifty-seven hours to
get home last time.”
“Yes,
but some of our variables will have changed, so it’ll be different now.” Arthur
wished he’d paid more attention to the formula Sir Isaac Newton had used to
make the calculation. The famous scientist had been one of many real-life
heroes they’d met in the Wonderscape. “All we can measure is how much time has
elapsed since we arrived – that’s why I’ve set a stopwatch.”
“So
then … it could happen at any moment,” Cecily realized. “One minute we’ll be
standing here, and the next we’ll be you-know-what.”
Arthur
tried to think of something positive to say, but there was no silver lining to
this nightmare. He didn’t know where they were, how they’d got there or how
long they had to get home. The truth was, there was only one thing he knew for
certain:
…
a countdown had begun.
Legendarium is out now!
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