StAPD • Initial Incident Report – Restricted (when complete)
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ST ANDREWS POLICE DEPARTMENT
Initial Incident Report
| Case number: | 00-24601 | ||
| Location: | University of St Andrews | ||
| Date: | 22 July 2056 00:22 |
Incident:
At 12.22 a.m. officers responded to a call from a security guard in the School of Physics, who reported a break-in. He claimed that a young girl, roughly 5’3” and wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, had disappeared into a huge, whirling hole in the basement.
Action taken:
Investigating officer found no sign of a break-in.
CJ Act 1964, S.9; MC Act 1980 SS. 5A(3)(a) and 5B; Criminal Procedure Rules 2012, part 22
File note: St Andrews police report, dated 22 July 2056
Clove lay still for a long time trying to summon up the courage to open her eyes. She couldn’t hear anything. She couldn’t feel her body. She could smell the plastic of her suit, which meant she was still alive, probably. She watched the spiralling patterns of light on the back of her eyelids: circling and sparking in the dim pink. Phosphenes, bright and sharp as fireworks. Her head felt numb.
Carefully, she tried bending a finger. It tingled as the inside of her glove brushed her skin. She opened her eyes. White flooded her vision, resolving into a blindingly bright blue. Through the visor of her helmet, she could see brightness, scattered in thick reflections through the blue, moving and refracting overhead. A flock of birds fluttered past in the sunlight, and then she realized they weren’t birds at all, but a shoal of fish. Was she under water?
She struggled to move, but the heavy suit weighed her down, pressing her into what she now realized must be the rocky bed of a river. Clove tried to kick up to the surface. She rose a little, but her suit was too heavy, and she immediately sank downwards, knocking her helmet on a rock. Her vision blurred.
Clove swayed in the current, staring at a slime-covered pebble and trying to calm the painful reverberations echoing across her skull. She could feel herself breathing faster, but the air didn’t seem to be working the way it should. She was going dizzy. The air trapped inside her suit must be running out of oxygen. She was going to suffocate if she couldn’t get out of the water and take off her helmet.
She pulled her knees up, ignoring the pain in her head, and tried to push off the bottom again. After several minutes of frantic effort, she managed to reach the surface. There was a clump of reeds within reach, so she grabbed onto it with both fists, clouds of silt dirtying the water as she moved.
A startled toad swam at her helmet. It bounced off and jumped away onto the riverbank. She watched it go, wishing she could do the same. She desperately tried to summon up the energy to pull herself ashore. Just the thought of it made her dizzy. Her eyes drifted shut, but she forced them open. She stared at the sky and tried not to slip back under the water.
As she watched, an angel appeared. Glowing gold, it reached down to pull her out of the water and onto the riverbank. The angel tugged on the straps of Clove’s helmet and removed it. Fresh air rushed in.
After a few deep breaths, Clove’s head stopped spinning and she could take in her rescuer.
It was Meg.
“Meg?” she choked out, amazed. Meg had found her. Somehow she’d saved her. She’d come to take her home.
Meg’s golden blonde hair seemed to sparkle in the sunlight. It swelled and glowed, making everything else fuzzy and smeared in comparison.
“Definitely not,” Clove thought she heard Meg say, as her vision went cloudy and she let herself sleep, just for a second.
> CLOVE?
> CLOVE, wake up. We need to go.
> CLOVE?
* * *
Clove opened her eyes with a jolt, automatically fighting against the water that was tugging her down towards the deep, black depths, before she realized she was safe on dry land, and it was just a dream.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at the leaves of an overhead tree. Birds were chattering noisily to each other in its branches, and there was a red tinge to the sky that made her think it was early morning. She was alone.
She blinked, trying not to cry. Carefully, the movement sapping all of her energy, Clove struggled to sit up. She thought about standing, and then reconsidered. She was still wearing the radiation suit. The orange plastic was even heavier now that it was wet. Clove pulled off her gloves and unbuttoned the suit, then shrugged it off her shoulders and slid out of it. She immediately felt more alive.
She sat on the grassy bank and glared at the suit. It may have saved her from radiation poisoning, but it had almost made her suffocate underwater, because she’d been unable to swim to land. Her parents would never have found out what had happened to her. The thought made her shudder.
She had been pretty lucky. If she hadn’t managed to grab the bank and pull herself out, who knows what would have happ— Clove’s thoughts stuttered.
Had she pulled herself out of the water?
That didn’t sound right.
She seemed to remember … something. Someone. Pulling her out of the river.
Or had that just been a dream?
She could have sworn it had been Meg grabbing her arms and tugging her onto dry land. But surely that couldn’t be right.
Could it?
Clove shrugged off the thought. She had more important things to worry about, anyway – like where she was. She had set the time machine to take her to the centre of Carlisle on 10 September 1745, but somehow she had arrived in the middle of a river instead of the city. Who knew what else had gone wrong, or even what year it was?
The river cut through a cornfield. Bright gold crops filled a rolling landscape. Clouds floated serenely across a calm sky that had been undisturbed by the appearance and immediate disappearance of a wormhole that had deposited a sixteen-year-old girl on the ground.
Clove could be anywhere. In any place, at any time.
Despite all of this, she found herself smiling. She had travelled in a wormhole. Even if it was just to the next postcode, she had travelled in a wormhole and survived. Even if she never achieved anything else, never found her parents or fixed her relationship with Tom and Jen, she would always have this.
She pushed up her sleeve and peered at her watch. “Spart?” Her voice sounded dulled, muffled, and very unsure. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Spart?”
A message appeared on the screen.
> I am here.
A coil of anxiety left her. Spart was here in her watch. And as her watch was solar powered, she had him for as long as she was here – wherever “here” was.
“Where are we?” she asked.
> I don’t know.
“I thought you knew everything. Isn’t that the point of you?”
> I know everything which I am able to search online. I can’t connect to a network here.
Her watch couldn’t get any signal. That meant she must be in the past, before they had the internet. She must have travelled over fifty years into the past. She rolled over, pushing up onto hands and knees and ignoring the sudden pounding headache spreading across her forehead.
“Urgh. Time travel really isn’t designed for passenger comfort.”
She stood up and then leant against the trunk of a willow as she tried to conquer her exhaustion. Thinking of everything she still had to do made her want to cry.
Right now, when she was so tired that she couldn’t move even her hands properly, deciding to time travel into the past to get the DNA of people who may or may not be her parents seemed like the worst idea in the world.
She let herself cry, pushing out all her worry and exhaustion. She wanted Jen. She wanted Tom. She wanted a hug from her parents − her real parents, whatever genetics said. She wanted to go home, but a small, stronger part of her knew that she couldn’t, not until she’d done what she came here for. She had to find out whether Katherine Finchley and Matthew Galloway did exist in this time. And if they did … well, then there would be no end to her questions. Did they look identical to her birth parents? What did that mean – a genetic anomaly, however impossible that was? Or … could they possibly somehow be her Kate and Matt, her parents? And if that was the case, then how?
After a little while, her tears stopped. She wiped her face. The skin around her eyes felt sore and swollen. She hiccupped.
She was freezing.
Her head hurt.
She wanted a painkiller.
As carefully as a newborn foal, she pulled her rucksack out of the tangle of the suit. She opened it with trembling fingers, pulled out a bottle of water and then unzipped her first-aid kit.
She was thirstier than she’d realized, and she gulped down the whole bottle after she’d taken a paracetamol.
Clove sat under the willow tree and watched the sun climb the sky, feeling pathetically sorry for herself. She was so tired; she could just lie down on the riverbank and sleep for hours.
Eventually she found the energy to move. She stretched tentatively, and discovered that while she didn’t hurt much any more, she was starving. She repacked her rucksack, filled with a sudden determination to find some kind of town or village, so she could work out where she was − and also get some breakfast.
After pulling off her T-shirt, Clove took her freshly printed dress from her bag and put it on. The long sleeves would hide her watch. Then she wrapped the suit around the helmet and stuffed the bundle into the bottom of her rucksack.
Clove had arranged with Spart – the version of him that she had left on a memory card in the lab – that at an agreed time in a week she would use her watch to broadcast a radio signal. Spart-in-the-Lab should be able to pick this up and use the signal to find her exact location. Then he could reopen the wormhole. It should work − if she didn’t lose the suit or the watch.
Telling herself firmly that she could definitely, absolutely do this, Clove began walking.