It blinded him momentarily, and in that second all he could see was 
light. Then it faded and he saw he knelt on a grassy hillside under a 
blue sky, a hedgerow of tangled vines and nettles blocking the view 
over the cliff, but the horizon extending beyond it in a way that can 


only be experienced when there is truly nothing else there but open 
water reflecting the light. Above him, he saw little holiday chalets 
clinging to the hillside, a long way from civilisation for those inclined 
to be alone. Below him, a distant holiday park, caravans stretching 
out in neat little rows, a narrow curving path leading off down the 
cliff. He bowed his head, prostrating himself over the grass, smelling 
it and the soil beneath. 


A distant throb of pain caught his attention, and for the first time 
Keagan—the name jumped back as soon as he turned his attention 
inward—thought to examine himself. His hands, of course, were 
pebble-dashed and scraped from clawing his way over the bare 
earth under the machine; his knees felt similarly ill-used beneath the 
stained orange jumpsuit. His torso... 


A series of evenly-spaced puncture wounds dotted his torso, crusted 
dried blood caking the jumpsuit to his torso. The shock made him sit 
down on his bottom—he plucked at the cloth with shaking hands to 
try and get a better look at the injuries, distantly worried that it would 
cause them to start bleeding again. Once the jumpsuit had been 
stripped half-off he could see the wounds—deep but not enough to 
penetrate any organs, and scabbed-over, already healing. 
Something bothered him, something he'd missed. He looked back at 
his hands, at his left wrist, then at his chest. No tattoos; his 
designation, D-8671, had been excised as though it had never 
existed. He prodded at the areas, as though there might be some 
residual discomfort from whatever had sucked the ink out of his 
cells. 


He looked back at the rusted iron edifice on the hillside. This, then, 
was 554, the device he had seen on the monitors back in the 
darkness of Dr Barker's laboratory. He tried to remember whether 
he or Dr Skinner had given away any indication as to the location of 
the object, but came up blank. One thing Barker had said stuck with 
him, though. 


The object itself is now on high surveillance. 


Keagan jolted up, looked around, shaking his head to try and clear 
change-blindness. He half expected the blue-hats to pull their 
appearing trick again, reveal that he'd been sitting there like an idiot 


while they strolled up and surrounded him. What would that mean? 
It had been abundantly clear that they had not expected him to 
survive the transition, which as far as he could make out from the 
convoluted experiment Dr Barker had devised necessarily involved 
the transformation of the subject from living human to a corpse 
bundled up in a bin liner. Probably they would decide to take him 
apart to try and see how he had accomplished the feat of avoiding 
this process. 


He glanced up at the cliffs, along the coastal walking paths, but the 
only people he saw were distant blobs of colour, families walking 
together in the sun. Even so, he reasoned, the fact that the machine 
was relatively open, albeit isolated, strongly implied some kind of 
ongoing surveillance to avoid hikers stumbling over it and its grisly 
cargo. Accordingly, he decided it would be best to put some 
distance between himself and it, and he set off at what he judged to 
be an inconspicuous jog in the direction of the holiday park, quickly 
joining an overgrown National Trust trail. 


His first priority was finding out where he was... no, scratch that, he 
thought, catching sight of his bloody jumpsuit out of the corner of his 
eye as he jogged, his first priority was to look less like someone 
fleeing the scene of a gruesome murder. He paused underneath a 
weeping willow and stripped off the jumpsuit to the waist, ripping the 
garment away from the waist up and tucking the excess fabric into 
the waistband of the grey and undoubtedly fifth-hand underwear the 
Foundation had issued. He held the torn upper half of the jumpsuit in 
the shallow river running down beside the path and dabbed at his 
injuries until the crusted blood around them was gone, leaving only 
the narrow scabs over the wounds themselves. 


He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass of a large conservatory 
jutting out onto the back of the trail—the remainder of the jumpsuit 
could pass for a pair of jogging bottoms, at least at a decent 
distance, and the wounds at least looked merely sore, rather than a 
reason to call the police. He actually passed another jogger, a 
middle-aged man isolated from the world by a set of earphones, 
coming the other way—Keagan nodded to the man and received a 
perfunctory nod in return. 


The trees parted ahead of him and a sign proclaimed that he was 


entering Culver Down Caravan Park—he vaguely tried to remember 
whether he had heard of Culver Down but decided he had not. 
There were relatively few holidaymakers around—most of them 
presumably gone off on various sightseeing expeditions. Keagan 
slowed to a trot as he passed the first row of caravans and 
eventually found what he was looking for—each had at its back a 
simple clothesline suspended between two posts hammered into the 
ground, and it wasn't long before Keagan found a shirt and trousers 
that looked like it might be in his size. 


He stopped, quickly scanning the windows but not taking too long to 
check he was alone before calmly removing the garments and 
changing into them behind the shelter of a beach towel. He tried to 
project the impression of a man on holiday having just completed his 
morning and changing into the clothes in which he intended to go 
about his business in the rest of the day. There was nothing he 
could do about the grubby off-white plimsolls right now, of course, 
but with any luck they would simply reinforce the impression of the 
casual but energetic holidaymaker. 


Thus attired, he walked into the holiday park reception, hoping the 
owner of the shirt wasn't doing some early morning shopping. He 
gave a friendly smile and wave to the plump blonde woman at the 
kiosk and wandered over to the leaflets section. "Wildlife Parks and 
Zoos on the Isle of Wight", "IOW attractions and things to do", 
"History of the Island", and so on. Keagan was stunned. 554 had 
apparently transported him a good 50 miles south and off the 
mainland. This would present additional challenges, of course. The 
receptionist saw him staring uncomprehendingly at the leaflets and 
came over, asking him if he was OK. 


"Sure," Keagan managed to say. "Just a bit overwhelmed. | haven't 
been on holiday for a while." 


She beamed back. "It can be difficult to know what to do first. Did 
you come in last night? | don't think | saw you." 


Think. Does that mean she wasn't on duty? Too risky to assume that 
and say someone else signed him in. He plumped for something 
generic. 


"Yeah—thoughNt I'd have a lie-in." 


That seemed to do the job and she floated back to her desk where 
she was halfway through a Sudoku puzzle. 


The leaflets were close enough to the newspaper rack that Keagan 
was able to peruse the front covers without any reasonable 
expectation of him buying them. The park shop carried The Times, 
The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and a couple of local newspapers like 
the Wight Herald. But it was the date that struck him most—Monday, 
15th August. Keagan blinked. As far as he was concerned, it was 
Thursday—two days after Goettsch had confirmed the date from the 
computer in the medical wing, the day after he had broken out of D- 
Block Alpha-2. 


There were a couple of possibilities: 


That Goettsch had lied about the date, hoping to disclose Keagan's 
escape attempt in return for privileges or perhaps a stay of 
execution at the end of his shift. Possible, but the elusive convict 
had seemed genuine in the medical wing about a cessation of 
hostilities. 


That Culver Down Holiday Park was so laughably isolated that it 
could not maintain a current stock of newspapers. Unlikely—the 
shop seemed well stocked with perishables and given the size of the 
island could not be far from a town or village. 


That 554 had somehow transported him backwards in time. If this 
was true, somewhere to the north, another Keagan, or rather his 
previous self, would be waking up in the medical wing after attacking 
Patrick Goettsch. Thinking about it made his head ring slightly, and 
he decided that it probably didn't matter. 


He left the shop with his questions about his location answered, but 
a host of seemingly insurmountable obstacles in his place. With no 
money, even getting off the island and back to the mainland was 
impossible—with the best will in the world he didn't feel up to 
swimming the 5 miles from the Isle of Wight to Southampton. And if 
he did, what then? Questions of chronology aside, he had just 
escaped from a top secret pseudo-governmental facility, to whose 


custody he had been transferred from a Category B prison where he 
had been serving a life sentence. Was he now a fugitive, he 
wondered? 


His stomach rumbled, and he realised he was terribly hungry, as 
though he hadn't eaten for days. Fuck it, he thought. The notion of 
looting one of the caravans was tempting, and it seemed likely that 
more than one had been left unlocked as their occupants bundled 
off to the beach or a local heritage site. However, the layout of the 
park meant he would be extremely visible while trying the doors, and 
the receptionist was likely to recognise him as the guy she didn't 
remember booking in. Instead, he set off again over the countryside, 
this time walking over the fields in the bright sunlight. He walked 
uphill, into the sun, and it warmed his skin and made him narrow his 
eyes. 


Eventually he found what he was looking for—a lay-by where 
several cars were parked, unattended, their owners having left to go 
rambling over the downs. He had been prepared to knock out a 
window—easy enough if you know where to hit it—and trigger a car 
alarm but in the end it proved unnecessary. One of the vehicles was 
a Fiat Eper, a beautifully designed but incompetently produced 
vehicle from the late 90s that was always a nightmare to find parts 
for because it had been officially recalled due to a rather glaring 
security flaw. To whit, if you pressed down on the rubber sealing 
around the driver's side door window in just the right spot, it 
actuated the interior locking mechanism. He gouged his thumb hard 
into the corner of the window, feeling the loose plate that connected 
directly to the interior door handle mounting, and shoved at it. The 
door opened with a sleek hydraulic whisper and Keagan got in, 
hoping any other walkers would just see a man casually opening his 
own Car. 


The glove compartment was empty, but underneath the passenger 
seat he found a zip-top bag the owner had presumably deemed too 
heavy to carry with them while hiking. Opening it, he found water in 
a Coke bottle—he sucked at it thirstily as he rummaged through the 
other items—a wallet containing debit and credit cards, the owner's 
driver's license and about £300, probably the owner's holiday 
money. Keagan checked the inside of the wallet to make sure the 


owner hadn't been stupid enough to write his PIN number there, 
then took the money and tossed the wallet back in the bag. A 
chunky feature phone, which he pocketed. This seemed to exhaust 
the possibilities of the bag—he discounted the towel and floppy 
beach hat as too bulky and incongruous respectively to consider 
taking with him. Keagan stuffed the bag back under the seat and left 
the Eper, and the scene of the crime, as swiftly as he dared. The 
Eper was easy enough to get going without a key—the key 
mechanism could simply be pried off with a butterknife or similar to 
reveal the rotation switch—but whilst a stolen car would probably be 
passed onto the authorities within hours and leave him an easy 
target, he hoped the missing phone and money might go unnoticed 
for a little while longer, or even written off by the owner as lost 
somewhere on their journeys. 


Accordingly, Keagan continued walking along the road, letting the 
sun play over him. With the orange jumpsuit discarded behind him 
and his identification tattoos mysteriously vanished, it was easy to 
imagine that he had hallucinated everything that had happened to 
him (but just how far back?, the little voice said in a meaningful 
tone), been attacked and left for dead in the countryside and in his 
fever dreams concocted Creepy Bastard, the Judge, the 
Foundation... But at length he became aware of a dull ache at the 
back of his head, and reaching up found where he had clocked his 
head on the rim of the viewing apparatus in Dr Barker's laboratory. 
The injury was fresh—when he withdrew his hands a little liquid 
blood adhered to the fingertips. As far as that part of him was 
concerned, the experiment had taken place mere hours ago at most. 


After a while, the distant caravans began to give way to cottages, 
which showed increasing signs of permanent occupation, and at 
length he arrived in a village the signs proclaimed to be Bembridge 
—he stopped at a pub that looked as though it still existed in the 
1950s and ordered a steak and kidney pie and chips. It came 
doused in a rich gravy that he could feel bulking up the inside of his 
arteries, but he felt a lot better for the meal. As he paid up with the 
stolen money he realised it was the first meal in four months he had 
chosen for himself. 


He walked out onto the harbour and looked out at the ocean. After a 
few minutes he tabbed on the phone. It had about half its battery 
charge remaining. He thumbed in 150 and was greeted with an 
automated recording informing him he had one pound and eleven 
pence remaining. He should of course have considered the 
possibility that the device would be pay-as-you-go and attempted to 
top it up using the owner's debit card, but he supposed he could 
always get a new SIM card if need be. The first thought he had was 
of Lauren, and he entered her landline number (why had he never 
bothered to remember her mobile number? because it had been the 
first contact on his list and it was easier to scroll down one notch, of 
course). He expected to get the answerphone but instead it was 
picked up within the first three rings. 


"020 5640 7864. This is Callum." A man's voice again, the one he 
had heard before. 


"It's Keagan," Keagan said through gritted teeth. "Is Lauren there?" 
"Who?" 


"Keagan O'Neill. Look, | just need to talk to her for a couple of 
minutes, tops. I'm on pay-as-you-go and..." 


"This some kind of sales call? | don't think we're interested, mate." 
"What? No, this is Keagan O'Neill. Her old boyfriend." 
There was a long pause. 


"Well," the voice said. "I'm her current boyfriend and I've never 
heard of you. Think I'd like it to stay that way. I'm gonna hang up 
now." 


"Wait, don't—” 

Dial tone. Keagan stood, watching a distant yacht moving impossibly 
slowly over the horizon. What, exactly, was he supposed to make of 
that? He thumbed 150 again. 


"You have seventy-nine pee remaining." 


Keagan exhaled and tried to remember the contact details that had 
been given to him by the court reporter, eventually coming out with 
what he was reasonably certain was her mobile number. He 
thumbed it in and listened to it ring. 


"Sam Deloitte speaking". 
"Hello, Sam? This is Keagan." 
"Oh, right. You'll have to remind me, what was this about?" 


Not this again, thought Keagan. He pressed on, hoping that she had 
just forgotten about him in the weeks since she had visited him in 
Wormwood Scrubs. 


"Err, | was doing a life sentence in Wormwood Scrubs. You came to 
visit, remember? In July."