“I don’t know how much they can hear. I put my shirt over the camera, but he’ll notice soon enough.”
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Take it off, then. I can talk with my eyes closed.” She shifts away from the camera as I stand to remove it.
I pull it back over my head and resume sitting on the floor. “I went to the library, where they have these cool holographic things to search for information. I didn’t find much beyond the map of the city.”
“What were you hoping to find?”
I can barely hear her, but I don’t dare turn any further in her direction. “I thought maybe I’d try to find Cedar’s double. See if he can help us get out of here.”
“Good idea.” Admiration rides in Cascade’s voice.
“I couldn’t find him. There aren’t enough people here. I thought you said everyone had a doppelganger.” I frown as I remember the population of Eagle Valley. “But that can’t be true. There’s not even half as many people living here as there are in Castle Pines.”
“Everyone does have a doppelganger,” she says. “They don’t all live here, though.”
I can’t help it. I swing my head toward her. She hasn’t moved a muscle. “Where are they then?”
“Orville sends them to other Verses. The bad ones go to the Neapolitan Verse. The good ones come to ours. It seems like only the ones who are average, who won’t cause any problems, stay here.”
I curse under my breath. “So Cedar’s doppel might not be here.”
“My guess is he is.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I’m still here.”
“You know who you are?” My heartbeat races, but I’m not sure why.
“I saw it in my medical file after I woke up,” she says. “Since I existed in the past, I have a counterpart in each of the Verses. I’m thirty-six years old, and I go by the name of Iris Harvey.”
“Iris Harvey.” The name gets stuck in my mouth. It doesn’t fit Cascade at all.
“If I’m here, and I’m somewhat like myself, I’ll be friends with Cedar’s doppel.”
“So I find you, tail you, and see if I can find Cedar.” My fingers flex again. “It’s not much of a plan.”
“It’s better than nothing.” She shifts on the bed, but her eyes stay closed. “I can’t leave this room.”
I suck in a breath. “What do you mean?”
“My dad didn’t say as much, but I don’t think I can just wander the city. Number one, my alternate personality still lives here. Number two, I’m some sort of ‘exception’ to Orville’s dimensional travel rules. I guess only he gets to decide who gets to go where.”
“Okay.” I stand. “Then I guess I’m going to go find Iris, and see what I can figure out.” I make it to the door before Cas moves.
“Heath?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
I don’t like the way she infuses so much fear into her tone, but I nod and leave her in that prison of a room.
Twenty minutes later, I have an address for Iris Harvey. The apartment sits on the outskirts of the city, and I could take a bus there. Instead, I walk, needing the extra time and the cool air to think through what I’m going to say, what my options are.
The moment I leave the tallest buildings behind, I know I’m being followed. Whoever it is doesn’t have much experience tailing someone. Their footsteps are loud, and when I check over my shoulder, the man ducks into the florist’s doorway like he wants to buy a dozen roses.
I quicken my step and dodge around the edge of a building. The man in the black jacket never passes. I suppose he could’ve just been going to the florist. Maybe he has a girlfriend.
Still, my gut sits right against my throat, and I can’t relax. I double around the building and continue in the general direction of Iris’s place. I wonder what she does for a living. I wonder if she’s married. I wonder what she’ll say when I tell her I’m from another Verse and another time completely.
I’m suddenly glad I don’t exist in twenty-twenty-eight, that I can’t look myself up in this Verse and find out what kind of life I have. I’m sure Cas doesn’t want to know either. I arrive at Iris’s building and realize that just because it’s farther from the city’s center doesn’t mean the technology keeping strangers out has been lessened.
Because of the shortened winter days, the sky begins to darken while I linger across the street, watching the entrance. A few people pass the building, but no one goes in. No one comes out.
The rumble of the bus breaks the silence in this neighborhood, leaving several people behind. They move down the street, their collars turned up against the wind and the night. A man climbs the steps to the building, pressing his palm against the middle pane of glass. It shimmers a lot like the holo did as it encircled me and allows him to enter.
The door closes before I’ve even taken one step. A woman turns toward the building, but pauses at the bottom of the stairs as her ringtone slices the air. She fumbles in her jacket pocket for her device, smiling when she sees the screen.
“Will.” She turns back toward me, and the smile has faded. “Where are you? I thought you were going to meet me at my office.”
Her voice sounds older, a bit more mature, but the undertones of frustration are identical to Cascade’s.
“I had to take the bus!” She rolls her eyes, though Will can’t see her. “It was the last one out of the city, and I didn’t want to walk an hour after waiting for you for so long.”
Seconds pass while Will talks. While the woman’s face pales. “Yes, I’m home. Buzz me when you get here.” She glances left and right, looks across the street where I’m sitting on the garden wall.
Her eyes meet mine. Her eyes widen. Her eyes fill with fear. She spins and climbs the steps. When she places her hand against the computerized pane, her fingers tremble.
She enters the building and disappears without looking back. I keep my perch lest she think me a creepy stalker—though I guess that’s exactly what I am—and wonder what Will said that freaked her out so much.
A man wearing a black jacket turns the corner and heads my way. It’s my turn to be freaked out, and I lift my legs over the wall and drop down behind it. Because of my height, it’s barely enough to conceal me, though I’m crouched as low as possible.
Footsteps pass, slow and deliberate, much more like how I imagine a spy would walk.
“Good-night, Iris,” a man calls, opening the gate to the building I’ve been sitting in front of.
Spy or not, I have to see who Iris is. I poke my head over the wall as a tall woman makes her way up the stairs. Her dark hair hangs from a ponytail, almost to the middle of her back. She’s wearing a tailored dress coat, where a skirt peeks out from underneath, and black heels.
I can’t imagine any circumstance where Cascade would wear a skirt and heels. I’ve never seen her wear anything but jeans and combat boots.
Iris presses her hand to the pane, throws a wave over her shoulder to the man still standing at the gate, and enters her building.
I glance at the man, who’s wearing a smile like he’s just witnessed one of the seven wonders of the world. He’s clearly in love with Iris.
Making a decision I hope I don’t regret later, I step toward him. “Hello.”
He yelps and startles away from the gate. “Who are you?” He peers behind me. “Why were you hiding in the garden?”
“I wasn’t hiding. I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about Iris.” I wave toward her building and paste on a bright smile. “I’m doing a…news feed on her for an award…at her office.”
I hold my breath, as I have no idea if Iris even works in an office. But with those heels, she’s not performing surgeries or constructing roads.
“What kind of award?” He focuses on Iris’s building.
“Employee of the month?” I wish my words didn’t come out like a question, wish the man’s eyes didn’t narrow quite so swiftly.
>
“Sorry, I can’t help you.” He shakes his head, still watching the building across the street. “I barely know her.”
Before I can call his bluff, the man in the black jacket enters my line of sight. My heart catapults into my throat. “Okay, well—”
The man beside me sucks in a breath, grabs onto my arm, and stumbles backward. “Let’s go inside.”
I go with him, mostly because he seems as upset about the man in the black jacket as I am. And hiding in someone’s apartment is better than lurking behind a too-short garden wall.
Heath
“MY NAME’S GREG,” THE MAN SAYS once we’re behind the safety of his printed door. “Who are you?”
“I’m Heath.” I shift away from him as his jaw tightens. “I need your help.”
Greg growls. “You brought that time lord here.”
“I’m—what? Time lord?”
“That guy in the black jacket.” He turns toward another set of stairs and begins climbing. “He works for Orville Openshaw. When Orville’s men come calling, nothing good happens.”
I can barely keep up with him. “So, wait. You know all of Orville’s men?”
“Everyone knows Orville’s men.” He finally stops on the fourth floor and pushes out of the stairwell. “The last thing I need is one of his time lords to start sniffing around here.”
I wonder why, but I don’t ask. I need Greg on my side here, not chucking me out into the street where a feared time lord waits. I remain silent while he unlocks his apartment and shoos me inside.
“You married?” I ask.
“No.” He hangs his coat on a hook by the door and steps into the kitchen. “Coffee? Then you can tell me why you have a time lord on your tail, and what you want with Iris.”
“Coffee would be great.” I glance around the apartment, which is one large room designated into separate areas by furniture. The living room has a decent couch and loveseat that face a seemingly empty wall. Lamps sit on end tables, and the dining room table holds a variety of gadgetry and discarded panels.
“You’re an inventor?” I ask, mostly because I’ve seen piles of junk like this in Price’s bedroom.
Greg winces, his eyes sweeping the piles of tech on his dining room table. He turns his back to fill the coffee pot. “It’s a hobby.”
“How much do you know about…?” I can’t even bring myself to say the word rift. I grind my teeth together. “How much do you know about time rifts?”
A loud thunk answers my question as Greg drops the full coffee pot into the sink. He curses and reaches for it. I watch him, sure he knows some thing.
“You’re not from here,” he says as he pours the water into the maker.
“No, I’m not.”
“What year were you born?”
“So you know about time travel?”
Greg faces me, a hard edge in his eyes. “Everyone knows about time travel, the same way we all know about Orville’s time lords.”
I slide a glance out the window, which I notice faces Iris’s building. “What do you know about dimensional travel?”
Greg frowns. “Dimensional travel?”
I take a step toward him, the urgency inside me desperate to come out. “Not only am I from a different year, Greg, I’m also from another universe. An alternate universe. A universe connected to yours through the same time rifts you know about.”
He blinks as the color leaves his face. “That can’t be true.” His words shake as they leave his lips.
“Why can’t it?” I fold my arms. “And you really expect me to believe you know about time travel but not alternate Verses?”
He shakes his head and moves around the island to the dining room table. Scattering devices and bits of devices, he selects something and activates it.
“Iris?” He waits a moment for her to answer.
“Greg?” Her voice sounds tinny and far, far away.
“I think you need to come over. There’s someone here you need to meet.” Greg won’t look away from me, those wide eyes so full of terror I want to reassure him.
“I can’t leave the building,” she says. “Karen says there’s a time lord on your garden wall.”
“That wasn’t a time lord,” Greg says. “That’s who you need to meet. But there is a lord out there.” He moves to the window and peers into the street.
“Greg, I’m confused.”
“I don’t see anyone in the street right now. I’ll come down and meet you. Hurry.” He discards the device and heads for the front door. “That window opens. Call to me if you see someone. Anyone.”
He waits for me to nod before he leaves the apartment. I open the window a crack and study the street, the shadows along the sides of the buildings. I see nothing nefarious.
The door to Iris’s building opens, and she exits, clutching her coat closed at the throat. She doesn’t look left or right, but flies down the steps, across the street, and through the gate leading to Greg’s building.
I close the window just as a man separates himself from the bushes lining the garden of the building next to Iris’s. He’s not watching the street. Or Iris’s building.
He’s staring straight at me.
I instinctively duck—a good thing as the window above me explodes. I speed-crawl away from the opening, standing as I reach the door. I grab Greg’s coat and mourn the loss of hot coffee as I whip open the door and step into the hall.
I meet Greg and Iris on the third floor. “Can’t go up there,” I pant. “Someone shot your window in.”
“Shot my window in?” Greg’s voice strays too high. He grips Iris’s hand in his. I stare into her face. She’s close to the same as my mom, but I see all the right pieces of Cascade in her features. The gray eyes, the heart-shaped face.
“We need to leave,” I say. “Where else can we go?”
“Nowhere!” Greg yells. “There’s nowhere to go.” He faces Iris, his jaw set but his eyes panicked. “Iris, go to Lisa’s. She’ll keep you out of this.”
“I’m pretty sure he saw her cross the street,” I say. “We should get out of here while we still can.”
Below us, a loud shattering sound urges Iris and Greg into motion. “Up,” he urges. “Get to the roof.”
Those loud footsteps come our way, and Greg doesn’t need to tell anyone twice.
Though the buildings out here are shorter, by the time I’ve raced up fifteen flights of stairs, I’m winded. It takes precious seconds for Greg to print-open the door before I burst into the cool night air, sucking for oxygen.
Greg pushes Iris in front of him. “Over here, Iris. I have wings.”
“Wings? Greg, those are regulated. If we’re caught—”
“We’re not going to get caught. That’s the idea.” He looks at me as he pulls a tarp off an air conditioning unit. But it’s not an air conditioning unit. It’s only the casing, and Greg pulls two round, flat bags from the bottom.
“You have somewhere we can go?” he asks me.
I have no freaking clue where to go. My silence must say as much, because Greg curses again. “I’ll have to carry you, Iris.” He unzips a bag and toes the other one toward me. “Help me out.”
I copy him, surprised at what I find inside the bag. It appears to be a black pair of folded wings, the kind little kids wear on All Hallow’s Eve. No way these are made for flying.
I slide them out of the bag, and they spring open, revealing a wingspan of fifteen feet. Maybe these do fly.
I watch as Greg shrugs into the wings, and tightens the harness around his waist. He retrieves another harness from the air conditioner casing and hooks himself to Iris. “Let’s go to my brother’s. That ought to buy us at least the night.”
“I can’t believe you have wings,” Iris says as I try to fit my boxy shoulders into the much smaller wings. I don’t quite have them on when Greg moves to the lip of the building, and panic pushes against my blood.
“I don’t know how to fly these,” I say.
A
crash lands on the door we used as our exit. Greg motions me toward him, and I run, still trying to secure the harness and make the straps sit higher on my shoulder.
He grabs the tip of my right wing and does something. “Now all you need to do is jump.”
A humming sound fills the space—a sound I wish I didn’t know so well. But the sonar pulse required to break glass is unmistakable.
“Jump!” Greg yells at the same time I think it. He launches himself off the roof with Iris in his arms.
I take a moment to glance behind me, where I see the bulky, jacketed arms of the time lord clawing his way through the window, the way a baby chick pecks his way out of his shell. The man bellows when the steel and glass don’t bend as quickly as he wants them to.
I don’t waste another minute.
I jump.
By the time my wings descend to a remote cottage nestled among pine trees, the fun of flying has worn all the way off. I crash to my knees, trying to get a proper breath while shrugging out of the traitorous wings.
“Hold still, and I’ll help you.” An older, wiser voice says. I freeze. I’ve heard that voice before. In Cascade’s basement, in another time, another Verse.
“Trader?” I look up into the man’s brown eyes, filled with sympathy. His hair has started to go gray, just like the Trader who came to Cas’s rescue.
“My name is Victor,” he says.
“Are you a doctor?”
“Yes.” He finally frees my shoulders from the wings and gestures toward his house. “They’ll have the drones out by now. Please come inside.” He collects the wings and follows me up his back steps and into his cheery kitchen.
Iris and Greg follow a few seconds later, and the door is secured behind us.
“I don’t normally have this many lights on at this time of night.” Trader gestures for us to move out of the kitchen. After we do, he snaps off the light.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
I sit on the hearth, wishing it held a blazing fire. Flying through blackness for thirty minutes has a serious wind chill factor.
I think I’ve found Cedar, his brother Trader, and Cascade. Their older selves. Their older selves that exist in another Verse. But still. It’s them. The very people I was looking for.
Mend: A YA Time Travel Thriller (Rift Walkers Book 2) Page 17