Stealing Time

so Zoe could wrap her armsaround him. The pale colour of his face, the haunted look in hiseyes, and the nature of his return told them everything they neededto know.
“We’re taking you to the hospital,” Varyawhispered.
Daniel stared blankly at her over hismother’s shoulder.
Thirteen minutes later they walked throughthe hospital’s staff entry and were greeted by Dr Falk, a short,dark man who was naturally inclined to silence and seriousness. Heushered them through to the same examination room Ben Williams hadsat in only a few days earlier. They all held their breath as hescanned Daniel’s Chip.
Zoe turned her face from the machine to DrFalk, her expression a question mark.
“Seven hours,” he proclaimed softly. “He hasseven hours left. I’m so sorry.”
Varya nodded. “We’ll take him with us now.You’ll sort out the paperwork for us, as we discussed?”
Dr Falk had already turned away to tap atthe screen receiving data from the scanner.
“Yes, of course.” He turned and lookeddirectly at Varya. “I wish you all the best. I don’t want to haveto use this again any time soon,” he said, weighing the scanner inhis hand before placing it back in the drawer.
“And you’ll call me if there are any otherchildren. Anyone else who is returned and needs help?”
He nodded. “I have your number.”
They bundled Daniel back into Zoe’s car anddrove straight to Varya’s apartment. With six hours andtwenty-three minutes of life left, he stood at the shimmeringthreshold into the Time Lock.
Varya had explained as best she could as shedrove the quiet, dark roads that led from the hospital to her home.Daniel would step through a portal into a world where time wasfrozen in a single moment five years ago. Inside that world wasVarya’s mother, Elena. She would look after him and Kir—Varya’sson, who was already there—until the technology to reverse the timedrain was found.
“I’m not going to die?” he asked in a smallvoice.
Zoe squeezed his hand and started to cry.“No, sweetheart, you’re not going to die. I promise.”
Varya glanced in the rear-view mirror asDaniel buried his head in his mother’s chest and sobbed againsther. She fought the urge to release her own tears. Tears of angerand frustration. This shouldn’t be happening again. The timetransfer technology, though it wasn’t destroyed, was well secured.She’d watched with her own eyes as it was placed in a vault deepunderground. Could somebody really have re-invented it? Only aperson with access to the complete body of time engineeringknowledge and a few strokes of good luck could possibly haveachieved such a feat. After all, that was how they’d developed thetechnology in the first place.
The aim of the research project had been todevelop a new, more reliable calibration test for the Time Chips,to make sure they would only fire as programmed. There had been asmall but problematic number of Chips which had misfired, causingthe death of the host a few months earlier than their allocatedsixty-five years. During trials of the calibration tests, one ofthe lab techs had fiddled with some of the specs, mostly out ofpure boredom, and discovered the Chip could be rewound, sort oflike putting an old car in reverse to make the odometer tickbackwards. The problem was, once rewound, it wouldn’t go forwardany further than it had previously been programmed to and seemed tothen lose more time. If you took a twenty-minute Chip that hadalready run ten minutes, and rewound it back to five minutes, itwould trigger five minutes later. It made no sense—it simply didn’tadd up.
The trials were paused while the mechanismthat enabled the rewinding was encrypted more securely.
But, of course, scientists being theinsatiably curious creatures that they are, Varya and a few othersset about trying to find out where the time went. They hypothesisedthat the Chip hadn’t actually been rewound, but drained of time,which was why the twenty-minute Chip didn’t give the host extratime after being ‘rewound’. The time had to go somewhere. Theyeventually figured out that the time could be syphoned and capturedin a partially full Chip using a transfer device. A neat trick, butnot one they thought would ever be particularly useful. After all,nobody would ever want to lose time. They filed a report, lockedaway the transfer device prototypes and forgot about it.
When one of the more troublesome lab techsleft the project a few months later, everybody breathed a sigh ofrelief. Lance was the kind of guy who argued the point with peoplewho had years more experience than he did and whined when hisbreaks were three minutes shorter than the statutory minimum. Hewas also caught taking chocolate from the charity box withoutpaying, on more than one occasion.
What nobody realised was that Lance was alsothe kind of guy to take the time transfer technology and Time Chipencryption codes and sell them on the black market to the kinds ofpeople who could definitely benefit from the ability to take time.Especially if those years could be transferred to somebody else forprofit.
Varya and Zoe sat on the bed in Varya’sspare room with Daniel between them. Varya caught a glimpse ofherself in the mirrored wardrobe doors. Guilt seemed etched intoher tired face. Was history repeating itself? Was this all herfault, again? She looked away quickly. There would be time forself-flagellation and blame allocation later.
“When I press this button, the portal to theTime Lock will appear. Once you step through it your Time Chip willpause. It won’t re-start until you come back through.” Varya heldup the black box to show Daniel.
“Does it hurt?”
“No. It feels a little like walking througha cool, gentle waterfall, except you won’t get wet.”
“Why can’t Mum come with me?”
The corners of Zoe’s mouth twitchedagain.
Varya touched Daniel’s shoulder and shesteered him back to meet her eyes.
“The Time Lock is not legal,” she saidplainly. “It’s not that it’s illegal, technically, but it existsoutside of the law. I’m afraid that if it’s discovered theauthorities will shut it down. It’s possible they would eventuallydecide it’s not dangerous and allow it to be in use again, but thatwould take a lot longer than six hours and…” She paused to consulther screen, on which she’d set a countdown timer. “… sixteenminutes.”
Zoe recovered herself enough