But track it, he did. Jeb hopped seamlessly between streetlamps—every kilometer, a lamp contained a hidden pocket mirror—until he got to the one that lit his front stoop.
He was always invigorated after jumping, and this was no exception. His weariness and frustration had left him, and his strong heart beat was even and perfect.
That flutter of purity and purpose only lasted a few moments before Jeb's gaze caught a wisp of paper thumb-tacked to his front door.
Jeb strode to it, tearing it off the highly polished surface. The rare species of wood had been forever marred by some Adlaine lowlife.
The note read very simply:
Mongrel-lover.
Or perhaps it was not from an Adlaine. The Adlaines loved Beth. One of theirs was a Reflective. It was a first in their history.
Merrick ran his finger over the pockmark on the door and his lips flattened in anger, his fist crushing the paper.
If they only fucking knew.
He didn't want to be with Beth Jasper any more than they wanted him to.
Rachett had insisted.
He'd promised to cut Jeb's term short if he partnered with the only female Reflective The Cause had seen in the last ten years.
Principle, what have I agreed to?
***
Beth absently scratched at the disc embedded underneath her ear, right at that bone that protruded. Everyone who possessed a pulse communicator had an implant, but she had never gotten used to hers. Its very foreignness made itself known day in and day out. No matter how many times her fingertips ran over nothing but smooth, perfectly healed skin, Beth knew what lay beneath.
Her uniform was neatly tucked away with the other ten, which were perfectly laundered. It was the only break she’d caught; the Reflectives were required to look shipshape, and they had people who made sure of it. So she didn't have to do her own laundry, which was excellent, because she wasn't the best housekeeper.
Beth took pride in the sheer wealth of vocabulary, idioms, and other slang she had at her disposal. Because she was a half-breed female, slight of build, she’d done everything in her power to be the best, the brightest, the most cunning, and the most merciless.
Being merciless was not her best thing.
She had told no one, but she had many small pets in her domicile who eased her in the life she was destined to live.
Beth had not confessed because others could hurt the defenseless creatures she loved. The Papiliones did not care that she stood only five feet two and had the unsightly coloring that was not the ideal.
Her butterfly menagerie greeted her in the same way whenever she returned—with reverence.
Beth was honored that creature for whom their world had been named had chosen to roost in her humble abode. Actually, she was of the opinion that she could not have begged them to leave, which pleased her to no end.
Beth ruminated in English and spoke in Latin. The practiced effort to remain fluent in both languages had never let her down.
All other sectors had reverted to English as their primary language, leaving behind the ancient Latin long ago. But the people of Papilio had never thrown it out. Papiliones were an atypical people who were steeped in traditions but embraced technology.
And she would travel to Sector Three that night. She would speak only English for as long as the reconnaissance would last.
Beth couldn't help the nervous flutter in her stomach as she lay on her bed, arms folded neatly over her mid-twenty-first-century Sector Three costume.
The butterflies felt her heartsick anxiety and floated in a cyclone of spotted, iridescent beauty.
They landed along Beth's folded arms, their wings swaying to balance themselves on her flesh.
The small hairs of her arms rose at their touch, and she settled peacefully into a fragile hiatus before the jump.
CHAPTER SIX
Jeb stood beside Jasper, whose small hands were clenched.
“Relax.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “You've jumped before.”
He didn't mention that she'd jumped to ditch him just hours before. He would not queer the jump because she'd been a bitch.
“I know.”
They were partners. In a way, it was more than a marriage. They were responsible for each other. Liking didn't enter into it. That was why he’d fed Beth in the hospital.
He agreed more with Ryan than he should have.
Jeb would have killed Ryan if he'd tried to hurt her. Hell, Jeb would have ended it when they were in the ring had he known that Rachett had caught on she'd been assigned as his partner.
Beth Jasper would do the same for him.
Jeb couldn't deny that he agreed with Ryan about Reflective females in combat. He also remembered Rachett's words when he'd balked at the pairing.
*
“The Reflective can't help being a warrior.”
His eyes nailed Merrick to where he stood. “The Principle decides, Merrick. And It has decided that Beth Jasper is a warrior. Hades…”
Rachett raked a hand through graying hair.
He was nearing a thousand years old.
“In all my years as Commander, I've never seen one jump like she can. Even for an unbeliever, it means something.”
Jeb agreed.
But a female in combat? “You remember what happened to our last female Reflective in combat.”
Rachett's chin dipped. “Yes.”
The ensuing silence possessed the horrible quality of knowledge too terrible to speak of. Yet, Merrick spoke.
“How many Reflectives died trying to save her?” It was Jeb's turn to plow fingers through his hair in frustration. He had grown it long in preparation for the jump to Sector Three.
“Too many.” Rachett exhaled in a rush.
Jeb leaned forward, capturing his Commander's steely gaze. “Exactly. We are instinctively protective of females. She was a seasoned warrior… but what they did to her… our males died because they could not stand what was happening.”
Rachett's gaze did not flinch. “I was there.”
“Then you know.”
Rachett nodded.
“Better than most.” They stared as quiet bloomed between them. “I should know—I killed her.”
Shocked, Merrick stepped back from Rachett.
“What? Why? I thought her injuries were too grievous…”
“They were.” Rachett stood straighter. “They had wrecked her in a way she could not heal from.”
“Yet you sent Ryan to Sector One.”
Rachett nodded grimly. “He'll heal.”
“He'll hate you.”
Rachett shrugged. “He should have thought about that before he tried to kill Beth Jasper.”
“Why her? Why not keep her safe, let her live out her term as… like Daphne.”
Rachett's lips quirked, and Merrick understood that he knew about their roll in the sheets.
Swell.
Merrick opened his mouth to defend it all, and Rachett raised his palm.
“Don't bother. I know males have needs. I am one, remember?”
Jeb wasn't likely to forget. Rachett was the most brutal male he'd ever known. He'd seen everything… and done everything.
“Beth Jasper is my absolution.”
Jeb's chin jerked back. He searched Rachett's face, gleaning nothing.
“The female Reflective that I killed as a mercy was Beth's mother.”
Jeb staggered back, shock running through his body like the electric current of the past.
“Does anyone else know this?”
“Just you.”
“Principle, I wish I didn't.”
Rachett shrugged.
“Jasper is important to The Cause. She could not have survived the training without the blessing of the Principle.”
True. “What of the father?”
Rachett turned away from Jeb, pacing to the window inside the office and plucking the gauzy drape aside.
“He is Sector One.”
&nbs
p; Jeb sat down on the closest horizontal surface that presented, his breath leaving him like air escaping a deflating balloon.
It just keeps getting worse.
“Those fucking creatures…” Jeb spit into the room.
“Clearly not all.”
“She was raped,” Jeb stated, struggling to reconcile why any female would couple with a Sector One inhabitant.
Rachett shook his head as he gazed outside at the vineyards on the distant emerald hills.
He turned to Jeb.
“No. Not by her lover.”
Jeb paused.
He recovered. “Then what?”
“They were as enraged about the union as we were.”
Jeb sucked in a breath, standing.
“It was revenge?”
Rachett nodded. “Yes.”
His gaze hardened on Jeb.
“That is why we must never divulge Beth's true lineage until we are bound to do so at her twenty-first cycle.”
“I would never, Commander Rachett.”
“I know that, Jeb.” Rachett clapped him on the back.
“But the information in the wrong set of hands ...”
“Because they have jumpers.”
Rachett nodded. “They're not always as skilled as our Reflectives, they don't have the training, and are very rare.”
“That might be why Beth is ...”
“Such an anomaly. Such a wild talent.”
Jeb palmed his chin.
“Yes,” Rachett sighed.
“It has come to our attention that there are powerful jumpers in the sector. A primitive, volatile, and barbaric society that believes in survival of the fittest as its modus operandi. However…” He hesitated, plowing his fingers through his shorn hair again. “I think there's a simplicity to their Reflection. They use it sporadically, without gaining control because it's not something they rely on, but something buried within the basest fabric of their genetic composition.”
“So Beth is the product of a Reflective female and a Sector One male.”
Rachett nodded.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I met him.”
“No fucking way!”
Rachett scowled at Jeb’s use of Earth language but Jeb continued unabated.
“What happened?”
“He cradled her mother’s body like a man broken.”
“Why did he not defend her?”
“He did not come in time.”
Rachett looked away again, his mind seemingly on memories that Jeb couldn't see and didn't really want to.
“Maybe that wasn't Beth's father,” Jeb said, stumbling over the title.
“He was.”
“How can you be sure?”
Rachett tapped his fingertips on the edge of his desk.
“She's his spitting image.” He gave a short laugh, more like a bark.
Jeb didn't think anything could be funny right then.
“Then there was the matter of the rain… it fell… and the male rose from her dead body.” Rachett continued to stare at Jeb, though he appeared to look through him at another scene, at a different time.
“The water washed his black hair into his face. His skin was like marble. He was a hard male, a big one. He howled into that dark storm like he was a part of it.”
Rachett's eyes fell on Jeb's.
“Then he was.” Rachett finished quietly. “He had jumped through the storm, leaping between raindrops.”
Amazing.
Terrifying.
A Reflective buried in that uncivilized Earth, surrounded by savagery.
“He took her with him.”
It shocked Jeb out of the moment. “He—what?”
“I didn't say? He stood with her in his arms and bellowed his anguish into the sky and jumped with a dead Reflective through the water as it fell.” Rachett's voice went low, and Jeb leaned forward to catch the last word.
Moments filled with nothing but the sound of their breathing ticked by.
“Do you understand the importance of this?”
“If he knew of Beth…” Jeb said.
“He would come after her.”
“And leave a tailwind for every Sector One to follow.”
Rachett smiled, the first real one of the conversation. “Precisely.”
As they said on Three: no pressure.
“And, Jeb?”
He turned back, his hand on the old brass knob.
“She could be important.”
That bit of Sector One blood could be harnessed to allow Reflectives to jump through theoretically anything.
Jeb tried to wrap his mind around someone jumping through the rain, with no locator, while holding a dead body.
He couldn't. That kind of raw ability would be… dangerous.
Jeb thought of Beth jumping through mist. However, she'd been solo. Her father had carried another with him, who was not living. Jeb certainly had food for thought.
*
A swift jab to the ribs brought him back to himself in a hurry.
“What in the Hades, Merrick?” Beth glared at him angrily.
He shook off the memory with effort. “Sorry, got lost for a second there.”
“Way to instill the faith, Merrick.”
“Okay,” Jeb nodded at Jasper, and she withdrew the sphere, placing it on the pedestal.
They were in the jumping room. Jeb had always found the title humorous, as if the room were bouncing around rather than being the location the jumpers leapt from.
The small sphere stood dead center in a niche perfectly formed to accept the locator.
Its deep-pewter luster shone under their gazes.
The scientists of Papilio had studied the senses of the Reflectives and found them fifty times more acute than non-Reflectives’.
Their sharpened eyesight allowed the partners to narrow their vision on the sphere, tuned to Sector Three by their guidance.
There was windows of non-reflective glass that bordered every wall and the moon slanted inside, white-washing the ancient floors to a pure carpet of low sparkles like ice.
“Ladies first,” Jeb mocked, knowing it would get a rise out of Jasper.
Beth raised her middle finger, so ladylike and violent at the same time Jeb chuckled.
He had never really analyzed her jumps.
She folded her hands like a high diver on a cliff above a deep pool of water.
Jasper dove, and a riptide of energy tore at Jeb.
He had jumped many times, and each Reflective's “signature” was distinctive.
Beth’s feminine energy was a kaleidoscope of meshed color that ripped through the room, fracturing the moonlight into shards of shining rainbows.
Jeb almost missed his cue.
He went from a standstill to a sprint, the last of her departing ribbon snapping out of existence just as he leapt after it.
Then he was hurtling into the nothingness of the pathway the Reflectives traveled.
*
Principle—what the Hades is that damn word?
Ah yes! Déjà vu.
“Beth!” Jeb hollered hoarsely. He possessed just enough wherewithal not to lose his diction on Three and slip into Latin.
Jeb didn't believe that it was spoken in Sector Three, except for in some religious temples. As least they were not in Thirteen again, though Principle knew, jumping with Beth felt like a do-over. That odd sense of doubling swept through him again, then she answered him.
“I'm right here. Stop braying like a sheep.”
Relief poured through him when he heard her trademark sarcasm.
Beth studied his expression and frowned. “What is that face for?”
He needed to be more careful to school his expression around her. The information about her father was not to be shared with anyone, especially her.
It was in her nature to be curious.
Jasper would be better off being curious about things that wouldn't get her killed.
�
��Rough landing.” He shrugged, sliding his eyes away.
Beth looked at him a heartbeat longer. “Seemed smooth to me, but whatever.”
She was already using Three lingo. He needed to shake off his archaic speech. Jeb had adopted some Three vernacular, but it wasn't where his talents lay.
Beth slid her pulse out of her tight denims and swiped it with her thumb to initialize. Her first and last names appeared. But instead of her home world of Papilio, it read:
Quadrant: Kent, Washington—Greater Quadrant, America—Year 2030.
Jeb switched dialects, moving smoothly into English.
“How are we doing?”
Beth rolled her eyes at him. “We hit the target quadrant and year.”
He frowned. “Okay, so why are you making faces?”
“You're using British English. We're trying to blend, doofus.”
“I am?” Jeb asked.
Beth nodded. “Snap out of it. We're way west, pal. You'll stand out like a turd in a punchbowl with that Greater Quadrant upper-crust lingo you got going on.”
Jeb began to grin. “You've really studied this?”
She put on her familiar bored, I'm-superior look.
“Ah-duh. We're here to recon, and we can't do it with that stick-up-your-ass Brit accent.”
Jeb was offended. He felt—and thought he sounded—smooth.
“I mean”—Beth put her hands on her hips—“that's fine if you want to stay here and listen to yourself talk, which might please the hell out of you.”
Jeb laughed.
“But we do have an objective.” Beth raised her eyebrows.
“Principle, you're a bossy thing.”
“Stop using Principle… it's God here.”
Jeb frowned.
In the most recent past, Jeb had been partnered with an adept linguist. Allowing him to speak for the pair had been easier. Jeb had always taken over with the physical work.
Jeb threw his hands in the air. “I give up. You do the talking.”
“Yes,” she hissed, leveling a fist by her hip and popping it straight up into the air.
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