Free The Hangman's Revolution by Eoin Colfer Page B

wormhole before. Remember?
    And she did remember something. It seemed like a déjà vu or maybe a dream fragment.
    Don’t worry, said Traitor Chevie. I’m coming any second now. All will be revealed.
    Chevie clasped the key tight in her fingers, and orange light glowed through her skin, because her skin had become translucent.
    Translucent skin. Rarely a positive development.
    The table! Chevie threw herself spread-eagled on the metal kitchen table and hoped that whatever the term anchoring meant in this situation, it would be good.
    She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t terror-stricken.
    I am afraid, yes, but not terrified.
    Covered in blood in the midst of some supernatural event—and yet, while she had been shaken to her core a minute earlier, Chevie felt as though she was discovering a core of steel.
    That’s me. I’m coming.
    The Traitor’s voice seemed louder now, part of the real world.
    No, that was wrong. She was part of the Traitor’s world.
    Take me, God. Take me to your bosom.
    That was Clover Vallicose thinking out loud.
    You are not rid of us, Chevron Savano. We have a mission.
    And there was Witmeyer—not dead, then. Wishful thinking.
    The orange glow spread until it filled the space inside and outside Chevie’s head.
    Perhaps I have shrunk.
    A wind howled around her, tossing Chevie like a twig in a hurricane, then the orange light exploded, lifting Chevie and the table on the head of a giant geyser. Maybe liquid, maybe imaginary; but there was no pain, just the balm of helplessness.
    Whatever is happening is going to happen, no matter what I do.
    She saw Smart fall away below her and felt herself borne far away from everything she knew.
    Traitor Chevie tutted. Isn’t there anything familiar about all of this? Haven’t you dreamed about orange light?
    It was true. Chevie had woken several times in the past weeks with a quickly evaporating sense of orangeness , which had seemed stupid to think about, but maybe wasn’t so stupid now.
    The geyser was suddenly spent, and Chevie found herself suspended by something in a sea of something, and that was about as well as she would ever be able to describe it.
    This could not get any stranger, she thought. A notion that held true for a moment or two, until a second version of herself appeared in front of her. It was definitely her, but different. Harder. More combat miles.
    Traitor Chevie, she thought, and the thought carried outside her head.
    Her doppelganger reached out, grasping Chevie’s skull in both hands.
    “I’m gonna open your mind,” she said. “It might not hurt.”
    But it probably will, thought Chevie.
    And she was right.

Time travel causes chaos, and chaos doesn’t follow your rules. That’s why it’s called chaos, dummy.
    —Professor Charles Smart
    T HE O RIENT T HEATRE , H OLBORN , L ONDON , 1899
    A nton Farley firing at his lord and benefactor with some kind of futuristic multi-shooter? Well, it was more than a brain could comprehend. Meek and mild Farley? Farley the ink man, who was content to be the butt of jokes? Farley the complacent, who bore without complaint the jibes of the Battering Rams, who could often be a cruel bunch, especially when the grog took control of their tongues?
    Malarkey had a vague memory of one drunken night in the Hidey-Hole when Pooley had referred to Anton Farley as that doting simperling with his bag o’ colors.
    Malarkey was not certain whether or not the word simperling was an actual soldier in the army of the queen’s own lingo, but it got the message across. Farley had never so much as batted an eyelid.
    It’s been simmering, thought the Ram king now. All the slights been festering in his gnarled old heart.
    Still, festering slights could not explain this sudden display of marksmanship, not to mention the fantastical weapon currently being brandished to devastating effect by the disgruntled tattooist.
    In the twinkle of an eye since Farley had set his weapon a-spitting bullets, Jeeves and