The Golden Minute Read online

  The Golden Minute

  A Girl in Time Novel

  John Birmingham

  GWC

  Copyright © 2018 by John Birmingham

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Other books in this series.

  A Girl in Time.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  The past was another sushi restaurant. Or the same sushi restaurant, just different.

  Cady settled in at the same booth. There had been four empty beer bottles the last time she’d sat here for an interview with a Buzzfeed reporter, Matthew Aleveda. Now there were none. Previously, she’d been late, and Georgia and Buzzfeed Guy were tipsy and flirting when she’d caught up with them. This time they’d arrived as a group after spending the day together, she knew Buzzfeed Guy as Matt, and everybody was sober. Cady remembered these differences. Georgia and Matthew did not and never would.

  There were a few seats available at the sushi train. They’d all been occupied when she was last here, but she’d arrived a few minutes earlier this time and turnover was brisk. Cady took the same booth and ordered fresh from the menu, because even if you were Groundhogging this day, you never really knew how long that raw salmon had been rolling around the tracks. Some things did not change. Matthew Aleveda was still a devastatingly handsome slab o’ man meat, and Georgia was duly cock-shook. Second time around though, Cady was not. Lots of shit stayed the same and eerily fucking so. It was like playing an on-the-rails shooter. A few minutes after their first course arrived, so did the poor man with his three daughters. The family group took the same booth and sat in exactly the same seats as before. Cady’s skin tingled when she recognized them, but they did not recognize her. They had never seen her before.

  Once upon another time, she had paid for the meal they were about to eat. At this very moment in her previous play-through, Cady had got into a fight with Georgia over that Bieber-class douche move—lavishly offering to pay for their dinner, but flicking the tab to Buzzfeed Guy.

  “Choose careful, girls,” the man said, looking pained all over again as his daughters squealed at the approach of the tiny train engine. “I only got thirty bucks to get us through. Maybe some avocado rolls?”

  Cady excused herself from the table, scoping in on the waitress working their section. She smiled and slipped the woman three c-notes, shielding the move from Georgia and Matt. The money was from a very different America, but it would spend just as easily here.

  “I want to pay for that family who just sat down,” she said quietly. “No, don’t look at them, look at me.”

  The waitress, whose name tag read ‘Tyffanee’, mostly just looked confused, which is the inescapable fate of all Tyffanees throughout history, but Cady gave her a smile and a reassuring squeeze on the arm.

  Do not startle the Tyffanees.

  “You don’t need to tell them I did this. Just tell ’em they’re like the lucky customer of the month or something. It doesn’t matter. Just let them eat as much as they want. You can keep the change.”

  Tyffanee’s eyes went wide and she nodded quickly. “Okay.”

  “And we could totally murder three beers at our table when you’re free.”

  “You got it!”

  Tyffanee hurried away to the bar, as Cady returned to Georgia and Matt.

  “Sorry to ghost you like that. Needed more beer. Much as I love to talk about myself, I’ve been doing that all day and I’ve got a thirst that could cast a shadow.”

  Georgia tilted her head, and queried Cady with an odd look.

  She’d been channeling Smith, she realized. A thirst that could cast a shadow? That sounded like something he would say.

  “Did you just pay for our dinner?” Georgia asked.

  Cady tried to hide her surprise.

  “No.”

  “I saw you palm a coupla bills off to that chick. I thought you were broke until Apple paid up.”

  Cady relaxed, just a little, and improvised.

  “I am, but turns out when Tim Cook owes you money, your bank manager will wet himself with excitement if you ask for a loan. Then he’ll just start throwing money at you. But it will be moist.”

  “Eew,” Georgia said.

  Matt leaned back, but Cady could sense his radar sweeping her and locking on.

  “You mind if I ask what sort of a payday you are looking at?”

  It was spooky the way the past looped back on itself. He’d asked exactly that question in exactly those words just three days ago.

  Three days for her, anyway. Three days, a couple of thousand years, a dead friend, a Roman slave riot, a time-traveling cowboy, some quality time with Jack the Ripper and a truly disturbing side quest in a bugshit crazy alternate America where Donald fucking Trump was president.

  All of these insane, impossible thoughts and memories discoed down behind the lazy smile Cadence McCall sketched in reply to the reporter’s question. As far as he was concerned they were just eating sushi and chilling while she talked about her iPhone game: Murder City.

  And maybe a bit about gamergate and the douchebros of the video game industry. For the clicks.

  But mostly about Murder City, because it’d been number one in the paid app store for six weeks now; a first for a premium AR game, a first for an indie developer, a first for a girl.

  That had all seemed very important once.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “I checked this morning. Should be about four and a half million simoleons for my first payday.”

  “Simoleons?” Matt asked.

  Georgia rolled her eyes and reached for a piece of tuna sashimi with her chopsticks.

  “Stupid gamer joke. Dollars. She meant dollars, Matt.” She turned to Cady. “And to think you owe it all to your shills in the crooked gaming press.”

  Matt whistled.

  “Nice payday,” he said. “I guess that’d explain all the clones copying your game.”

  Cady realized that he was baiting her, looking for a clickable reaction, and remembered that she’d given him one last time they’d had this conversation. She hadn’t seen the lure. She’d just jumped at it in full rant mode.

  “All artists copy,” she smiled now, with a detached zen master cool that surprised even her. “Great artists steal.”

  “Did Steve Jobs say that?” Matt asked.

  “I think he stole it from Picasso,” Georgia mused.

  “So what’d you steal, Cady?”

  “That last piece of fried crab.” She grinned, snatc
hing at the plate in the middle of the table.

  It really was like Groundhog Day, she thought, getting to relive a night like this, and doing it better the second time around. It also made her just a little sad. She’d have to leave soon, and it would be a long time before she’d see any of her friends or her family again. At least two months, and maybe thousands of years. There was even a chance she would never see them again.

  She quickly glanced back at the lone dad and his little girls in the booth behind them. The girls were all hideously thrilled to find out they’d been chosen as Customers of the Month. Their father looked even more excited. He was ordering the crab too.

  Some of the wait staff were glancing at Cady, giving her the side-eye, but she didn’t think it likely they were part of any time-traveling black ops wet-work squad. Tyffanee had probably just told everyone in the kitchen about the stupidly generous customer at table fourteen and they were all trying to work the angles for a crazy big tip.

  She didn’t care.

  Her stalkers, the Apprentices, whatever they called themselves, could be here sitting at the sushi train, leaning back in a booth, ordering a beer. She’d felt the creepy sensation of being watched a couple of times through the day. At coffee with Georgia. Walking to the meet-up with Matt. And once or twice while trawling the city with him today, pointing out all of the software houses and start-ups from which she’d been fired. You know, before writing her own game and making out like a bandit. She didn’t understand how the Apprentices moved with such ease and precision through the years, but she was going to find out.

  Before then, however, she was going to say good-bye and cover her tracks.

  “So, I’m sorry I messed with your schedule today, Matt.”

  He waved her off. “No biggie. You got something special happening tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” Cady said. “Things are getting crazy, and I think this story you’re doing is going to make that worse.”

  Georgia kicked her under the table.

  There’s my girl.

  “S’cool but,” Cady hurried on, “I’m grateful. But you know what happened to Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian when they put their heads up.”

  “They got kicked,” Matt said.

  “Kicked, doxxed, piled and dragged.”

  “You think that’ll happen to you?”

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice.

  “No. Because I’m going to chill like a boss in Tasmania or Bali or somewhere like that for the next month or two. Just take Apple’s money and disappear off the grid. You can have that story, Matt. Exclusively.”

  Georgia slapped at her. “Bitch, are you crazy? You’ve got the hottest game in the world and you’re walking away? You’re pulling a Flappy Bird?”

  “I’d rather be the Flappy Bird guy than the Angry Birds morons at Rovio. Think about it, G. He piled up his credits, checked out and retired to a pool bar somewhere in Vietnam. Angry Birds are circling the drain because nobody wants their shitty merch anymore. They look like losers. And their apps piss data directly into the servers at the NSA.”

  “So you’re retiring?” Matt asked, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. This story would trend, even go viral, for at least a few hours.

  “No,” Cady said, shutting him down. “But I am gonna cash out and take some time off. I’ve earned it. Just gimme one day before you publish.”

  Matt shrugged. “I wasn’t going to file until the end of the week.”

  “That’s your call, but a day is all I need to go dark. Give me that, and I won’t talk to anybody else.”

  Cady saw that Georgia looked pissed off, which meant she was hurt, and getting angry with being hurt.

  That was an old tune in their playlist.

  “Baby, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before now,” Cady said. “But I know you. The second you heard I’d stepped away from the keyboard, you’d be trying to get me into Bungie to retool the entire VR division. And I need the break. I’ve been coding twenty hours a day and living off rice and grungy fish sticks for a year. Remember the fish sticks? They gave you food poisoning.”

  Georgia was young, but she was also Greek, and inside every smokin’ Greek hottie is a fussy Greek grandmother just waiting to get out.

  “All right, I suppose,” she conceded. “As long as you really are chilling. And not doing something stupid. Like signing on with EA.”

  “Pinkie promise,” Cady said, holding up her little finger.

  Georgia linked her own through Cady’s and they shook on it.

  Cadence McCall felt a weight lift from her back. At least nobody would worry about her disappearing tomorrow, when she planned on doing something way stupider than taking a job with EA.

  1

  Time travel, Cady thought, was crazy expensive. The equipment laid out on the floor of the hotel room cost thousands of dollars, and she wasn’t close to being done yet.

  “I think we need another tent,” she said, already typing the search query into the Amazon app on her iPhone. Same day delivery was the time traveler’s friend. But instant approval for no-document loans and credit cards was a really hot friend with all the benefits.

  “I done told you, Ms Cady,” Smith grumbled, “we don’t need but none of this folderol and equipage. I am perfectly content to sleep under the stars.”

  Marshal John Titanic Smith sat with his boots up on a coffee table and arms folded on his massive chest. He was a hundred and forty-one years out of place and yet, Cady thought, she could Instagram his mournful expression right now, hashtag it #SadMenInShoppingMalls, and everyone would figure he was just some worn down suburban dad trapped in some Texas retail Hell furnished by IKEA.

  “I’m gonna get another one of those Hilleberg Nallo tents,” she said, hitting the one-click buy button. It would be delivered to the hotel, like the rest of their ‘folderol and equipage’.

  “I know it looks like a mini-habitat for a Martian colony,” Cady conceded, “but we won’t always have rooms at a handy tavern or hotel. Mostly we’ll be camping out miles from anywhere, so it won’t be a problem.”

  “Until it is,” Smith protested.

  “You’ll thank me when it’s cold and raining and you’re snug and dry inside your little space cowboy survival pod, watching Longmire on your iPod… which reminds me, I still have to download The Crown and charge up the Mophies.”

  Smith made a show of checking his watch, the timepiece they’d be using to leave Seattle and the twenty-first century later that evening. Cady ignored him. She was wondering whether to ditch the hatchet from Smith’s go-bag, which he still called his ‘possibles bag’, to make a little more space for another couple of pounds of emergency chocolate. You never knew what emergency might be waiting for you in ancient Rome or Victorian England, but you could bet that not having enough chocolate would make it so much worse. And anyway, Smith did have his big-ass Bowie knife for chopping up things… and, you know, people.

  Cady shuddered and pushed away that thought—and the unpleasant memories which came with it.

  She tentatively moved the hatchet out of the dense grid of survival gear she’d arranged on the carpet.

  “Might need that,” Smith said.

  “I thought you said we didn’t rightly need but half ‘o all this durn fooferall,” Cady said, imitating his thick, cowboy drawl.

  Smith let that particular affront roll off of his wide shoulders, but being Smith he would not let the general point lie.

  “If’n you’re lookin’ to save weight, you should be lookin’ to save it sensible,” he said. “A hatchet can get a feller out of all manner of trouble. We get downstream a-ways in the calendar and I guarantee that one of your me-pods will only serve to get us into trouble.”

  “It’s an iPod,” she girlsplained him, leaning into the ‘i’. “A two-forty gig iPod Touch, and I’ve got the full text of Wikipedia, saved as an offline app, on both the pods and my phone. That’s why we need all the power packs. It could be a couple of wee
ks before we pass through anywhere with a grid, and info is ammo, Smith.”

  “We could do with more ammo, too, the real kind,” Smith said.

  She ordered more chocolate.

  He stared out of the window, over the gray, white-capped waters of Puget Sound.

  Cady walked all the way around the kit she had so carefully arranged on the floor. It was hard to imagine it fitting into the medium-sized leather backpack which sat at the top of the layout, but she’d bookmarked a page on a prepper site with a helpful video explaining exactly how to pack light and tight for the end of the world. Disaster nerds and apocalypse geeks, she’d discovered over the last couple of days, were your go-to guys for this sort of shit.

  Taking a quick, silent inventory of everything she’d laid out, she couldn’t help shaking her head at just how much survival gear you could get into a small backpack—and wondered at how she’d ever managed without it before. Of course she hadn’t asked for this adventure. Smith had all but kidnapped her when they first met, even if it was with the best of intentions. One short week and an ocean of time ago, Cadence McCall had been a game developer. She had a hit, too, a massive, life-changing number-one seller on Apple’s iTunes store. Cady, behind in her rent, hiding from repo men and living on fried spam and rice, was just a few weeks and one bignormous payday away from cashing out of her broke-ass indie coder-girl lifestyle when she was ripped out of that life, and time itself, by Deputy US Marshal John Titanic Smith, that feller sitting in the armchair over yonder.