The brickwork was warm to the touch, sandpaper stone that grazed her fingertips. She wondered how they were made. She knew it had to do with clay, and kilns, but nothing beyond that.
Bricks turned up everywhere here - spilling out of skips, or casually chucked through a window. Where did they come from? Were they the trappings of dead houses, ruins picked through for pieces of others' lives, or were they surplus, somehow finding their way into the general population?
She wasn't sure she wanted to know, because then she wouldn't be able to look at them as she did now. Nobody ever asked these questions - or, she supposed, someone did, in a little office in a masonry company somewhere south of the river, bordering onto a sand-waste builders' merchants. But outside of that little world, they were more like vagabonds, travellers turning up with their own premade underground of signs, symbols, communications.
One brick talked to another brick about the conditions in Southwark, for example; the places to hide, to avoid humans. Campfire talks revolved around dreams of being part of a house again - or perhaps a fear, a desire for individuality, for independence, a revulsion towards their mortar-glued cousins. Revolutionary tracts were passed around - freedom! An end to the mortar, which binds and annihilates us! - until one of them was picked up by a passing vandal, and the rest scattered, to turn up on a roadside somewhere in Aldershot many months later.
Nieves was contemplating this at a little cafe near Waterloo. The sun shone on mudstained groundwater, covering a bit of cobblestone. It was one of those cold, sunny days where a preceding rain had blown everything up. It was just London.
One hand lay on a notebook, another held a coffee mug. It was actually hot chocolate inside the mug - she was wiling away the time by waiting to see when Simon would notice. He would, probably, scold her for drinking something so inappropriate to the scene. He was always doing things like that. He had images in his head, specific and well-drawn pictures, lively portmanteaus he wanted so badly to bring into the world - and, in this vision, espionage was properly conducted with black, severe coffee.
The sun was starting to turn red, framed by two long hedges either side of a residential street. She cocked her head on one side and made a note. The sunsets here came a fraction earlier than one would expect them to. She shifted a leg uncomfortably, and swatted at a fly on the table.
The timeline was a splinter of Sol. She wasn't exactly sure when it was, but some time in the 1960s. The cars were oddly rounded, great caps over the wheels, all flowing curves and frontal grills. It was like art deco was catching up forty years too late.
But - had it been the 1960s a few minutes ago?
She sighed, and took a sip. No. It hadn't. This kind of life used to seem so glamorous to her, once upon a time.
She got up and headed down the street. There was absolutely no point trying to keep her notes straight now; clearly, time had indeed got muddled here. Again. Her contact would have been long since thrown into another reality, and there was absolutely no point in her tarrying in this reality.
The road was one of those residential London streets that could be anywhere else in the country, but which have some specific shape or structure that marks them out as being inextricably, invariably London. Flags marking the coronation were strewn from house to house, winking in the sunlight. A street party was going on, people chatting as they held glasses and pitchers of punch or beer, the children darting between their legs in petticoats -
Damn. Ten more years gone, just like that. 1953.
Nieves sighed. She really did not want to be doing this. She did not, in general, like time travel; she much preferred skipping between universes to having the temporal ground shift beneath you. Her newly regained sense of solidity could do without the constant rewriting of time itself.
She turned a corner, and a bomb swooped down and blew her into shreds.

Nieves sighed. She really did not want to be doing this. She did not, in general, like time travel; she much preferred skipping between universes to having the temporal ground shift beneath you. Her newly regained sense of solidity could do without the constant rewriting of time itself.
She turned a corner, and a bomb swooped down and almost blew her to shreds.
She pinched herself. Now it's the Blitz. She remembered seeing the images of Toulouse burning during the Third Global War back on Orchard; it seemed very similar to that, except that the English had won their war, and the Occitans had not.
She stepped forward, gingerly. The street was fine. Smokestacks blew up into the air, crowding out the sky. There was no bomb, no broken shrapnel. The bricks hummed in the walls, forming their first songs of rebellion.
England was full of places like this; those dull suburbs stretching in time, remade and reconstituted with the seasons but always the same place, the same concrete or tarmac. This was just their precursor. A man strode across the street in a top hat and tails, holding a copy of a newspaper under his arm. She moved forward, glancing up at the towers, barely noticing as the thief's knife slid between her ribs.

She moved forward, glancing up at the towers, barely noticing as a thief leapt forward at her. She dodged aside as the neighbourhood's respectability collapsed into the past. A loud and well-built man was decrying the French invasion of Russia to some friends. His voice carried over the thick August air.
Her clothes were now of the time, stifling and hot. She fanned herself vaguely, enjoying the summer sun. A cart rattled by; she plucked up her skirts as she stepped over a muddy street. She turned a corner and gasped, collapsing from the smallpox -

No, wait, that wasn't right.
Nieves rolled her eyes. She wasn't happy with this particular job. She did not enjoy moving through time. Throwing herself between one solid universe and another was much more her style. Her experiences at Site-01 seemed to have bolstered her sense of self, and she didn't want to see that crumble so soon.
As she turned into the next street, a bomb fell and -

Nieves hated time travel. She'd been born in Asturias, a country that knew the value of long and bitter time. It was part of the national culture; the ancient and neverending raids against Andalus, the long-spent dream of seizing Toledo, the wars over Saragossa and Lishbuna that had all seemed to blur into one, as she wrote down dates in a tired history class. She did not want to muck about with the past, dredge the old traumas past her waking eyes. She wanted to -
The bomb went off slowly, teasingly. The first licks of flame burst from its skin, like crushed fruit; then they expanded, floating up and around as a great and ragged orb absorbed everything into itself. She felt herself burnt, caressed by the flame, as she moved her languid arms to embrace it.

Nieves turned a corner and saw herself die.
Shit. That wasn't good. There were dozens of herself, entering the same street and being blasted apart. She turned and ran the other way, and felt herself crumble and fall with others of her as the smallpox clung onto the intestines, made them bend and bleed.
Was that how smallpox worked?
Multiplying time avenues. She hated time travel, but - no. No, she didn't. Let's try that, twenty of her thought, as they ran in a third direction.
Nieves loved time travel. As a girl, she had consumed adventure novels, books about knights shattering the formations of Moorish invaders. She'd wanted to join the army and march south, shattering all that came before her. Nieves del Rio was a fantastic name - snow of the river! Meaningless, but so romantic!
Nieves had wanted to go back so much. And then, one day, as a Foundation operative, she did go back, and saw the suffering, the poverty, and each individual human being ground down into nothing. So after that she hated time travel. She never wanted to see another past again.
She ran down another street. Westminster Cathedral stood out, stark, in front of her, its faux-Byzantine facade towering over her. It shone red in the half-light of evening. She'd read somewhere…
Or Simon had told her, the many hers, about this place. It was entirely constructed out of brick - no steel supports. A new cathedral for the post-emancipation Catholics. Christ's cross shone bright under the dome's gloom. She headed for the door, but was dragged away, the Puritan black cloaks taking her to be hung.

It was getting less clear…
Nieves had wanted to go back so much. And then, one day, she went back, and saw the suffering, and the poverty, and each individual human being ground down into nothing. But she came to accept that. Each one was a person. Even if they did not realise their own humanity, they were still people. Life was a vast and rich tapestry, and each moment of suffering was another thread.
She headed for the door, and swung it open. The bricks here were covered in soot - was that soot? No, this was a cathedral. But they were dark, Victorian, solid and uniform. Each individual brick did not matter; what mattered was the pattern, the whole, the bright and humming song that each of them contributed one strand to.
And in her mind's eye she saw all the bricks, each and every one. All their supports, their struts, their competing claims to the building's support, stretching out and multiplying in London, in England, all across the isles. So many bricks. So many of them, screaming and shouting, unified and unified, rising and falling even as the people moved through them, passed away from them, struck their heads on their corners and drowned beneath their archways.

Nieves had wanted to go back so much. And then, one day, she went back, and saw the suffering, and the poverty, and each individual human being ground down into nothing. And she didn't know that she had any thoughts at all.
She moved through the cathedral as it became Tothill Fields again, a prison of incarceration and redemption. She heard the screams of such a place, smelt the straw and dung, fell again into the cathedral, into the marble floor. She righted herself, and ran to the altar as the bricks fell around her, the naked sky of the future and the violet yawning maw that would, God willing, take London into its own -
She fell upon the altar, and stared at the inscription. It was not the right inscription. Someone had changed it.

For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.

She felt the last of the bricks fall, and then there wasn't a London, or an England, any more. It was just a group of people, praying beneath the widening maw.

One of them got out. One of them had to get out, because there was nothing that had actually happened that was fatal. She'd just fallen into a distortion in time; that was not fatal in and of itself. Sometimes two or three could emerge from them, but in this case, it was just one.
Simon apologised profusely. "I didn't know. I'm so sorry, Nieves - I didn't know. All the reading pointed towards it being a standard temporal anomaly, I didn't - are you alright?"
Was she alright?
She looked out at the river. She was sitting at a little cafe on the waterfront. Snow was falling onto the water.
"Nieves, are you alright?"
The girl said she was, and said some other things to shut Simon up, to placate him. She took out a book, but she wasn't much in the mood for reading. She didn't like to use her name. She wasn't really sure what it was, any more.
That morning, someone called Nieves del Rio, having newly regained her name, had sat down at a cafe. But now, in the evening, someone sat outside another cafe and stared at the bricks. If you listened very closely, you could hear them sing.
She looked at her hands, critically. She wanted the skin to slough off again, but it wouldn't. It just stayed exactly where it was.

Vast Suspended Ruins

Foundation of Nomads

Irene in Leafy English Suburbs