The mayan prophecy (Timeriders # 8) by Alex Scarrow Page B

work, soldering a circuit board. One of their computer’s motherboards had something or other wrong with it. Rashim had explained it to her once already – it was all blah, blah, blah to her.
    Her mind was elsewhere anyway, nostalgic for the good old days. The first few months after the three of them had been recruited. After the Kramer incident. That was when they had most felt like a team. They’d managed to pull themselves together – straight out of the training Foster had been putting them through, and straight into action – but they managed it, they’d put things right. And then there’d been some timeafterwards in which they’d got to know each other better, to settle into a routine of sorts living in that Brooklyn archway. Become almost like a family.
    Then there’d been the next big crisis: Liam blasted back to dinosaur times. But again, even though they were still pretty green as a team, they’d pulled it off, they’d steered things back on to the right course.
    Good times. They’d been such a great team together. And, dare she admit it, she’d even grown to love those two, like an older brother and sister.
    But everything that had changed between them, all of it could be traced back to the moment Maddy found that note in San Francisco. That was the first secret between them. Now they were in such a different, uncertain place.
    Maddy and Liam – but particularly Maddy – seemed intent on messing with things they didn’t understand. There was a reason that Waldstein wanted history headed this way. She didn’t buy the idea that the man was insane. An insane man couldn’t invent time travel and countless other things. An insane man couldn’t run a multi-billion-dollar corporation making hundreds of millions of dollars of profit while the world economy plummeted into a bottomless abyss.
    Insane – it was too easy an answer. Too lazy an answer. Sal suspected Waldstein knew a truth that no one else knew. A truth. Perhaps an unpleasant one … and he was doing what he thought was best.
    So, if that was the case, if she truly believed Waldstein’s agenda was a good one, the right thing … then working against that made Maddy and Liam a problem. No wonder Waldstein had sent those support units back in time to find them.
    She shook her head.
Are we the bad guys now?
    ‘You all right, Sal?’ asked Rashim.
    She met his gaze and flickered a smile his way. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’
    Thinking about it all gave her a migraine. She wondered how nice it would be to be an ordinary fourteen-year-old girl. An ordinary girl with ordinary girl problems.
    Boys.
    That made her smile, made her think of something else. There was actually someone she wished would do just a little more than shyly wave at her every time they caught sight of each other. She found his tall awkwardness, his gentlemanly ways – even his shyness – cute.

Chapter 13
     
1994, San Marcos de Colón
     
    ‘Mr Pineda, is it?’ Liam leaned over the choppy gap between the pier and the boat: a scruffy-looking fifty-foot-long vessel made of wood and ringed by old, bald rubber tyres slung over the side to protect the paint-chipped gunwale. An old mint-green canvas awning stretched along most of the length of the deck, shading the weather-worn planking. Halfway down, a wheelhouse, little more than a toilet-cubicle-sized shack of loose wooden slats and a viewing shutter propped open by a small straight branch from a tree.
    ‘It
Captain
Pineda!’ Tall and whippet-thin, skin so dark that the whites of his eyes seemed almost luminous. ‘This me
lanch
, man. This
Mrs
Pineda
!’
    Liam was stumped by his Creole accent. ‘Sorry. This is …?’
    ‘Me lanch!’ He slapped a hand on the side of his boat. ‘Me
lanch
!’
    ‘Uh.’ Maddy was equally bemused.
    Adam stepped in. ‘It’s his launch. His boat.’
    Pineda nodded his head, a threadbare and faded captain’s cap, one size too big, wobbling uncertainly on top of his wiry coils of hair.