by Liana Brooks
“I can do that,” Miss MacKenzie said. “I’m just putting the finishing touches on some spaghetti sauce for my hosts. Want me to bring you something?” she asked in the same breath as, “Are you allergic to anything?”
Ivy shook her head. “No, I’m not. And you don’t need to worry about me.”
“Please, I bet your fridge has a couple of full-nutrition smoothies, granola bars, oatmeal, and maybe some skim milk. Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong.”
She wasn’t. “That’s a good guess.”
“Good ol’ Shadow House food,” she said. “I know the diet.”
Ivy pulled the phone away from her ear and blinked at it in confusion. Had Rose MacKenzie just admitted to being a clone? Or was she saying she’d worked with Shadows before? Reflex made her curl up on herself. “Um . . .”
“It’s not what you think,” the other woman said as if she was reading Ivy’s thoughts. “One of my best friends was raised as a Shadow. Her gene donor was killed in a car wreck, and poof! That was it. She was a free woman. Crazy stuff.”
“That’s what happened to me!” Ivy blurted out.
“It’s not that uncommon, really,” Miss MacKenzie said casually. “So, spaghetti or no spaghetti?”
Ivy smiled and relaxed. “I’m fine, thank you. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll see you soon.”
“Later, gator.” The phone clicked off with nothing more.
It was nearly an hour before Ivy realized that she hadn’t given Miss MacKenzie directions to her apartment, and by then, the doorbell was ringing.
Sam shifted from foot to foot and cursed the existence of fire ants. Blah, blah, blah, all God’s creations were beautiful! The world was excellent! The Psalmist had never met fire ants, or there would be a Bible verse that read, “Ye, and the ants of fire, they are abominations before God and ought to be burned.”
Maribel insisted that poisoning them was not a natural, harmonic way to coexist. But neither was waking up with seventeen welts on her feet because the ants liked the taste of her lotion.
Sam rang the doorbell again and debated whether investing in boots would be a good idea. Probably, because when she got Henry out, they’d be building the machine in the swamp.
I miss Australia.
The door swung open to a surprised Ivy. “Miss Mackenzie, I didn’t realize I’d given you directions.”
Dang it! She’d slipped. Time to fake it. “I took a wild guess on what government Shadow housing might look like, then came to the only door with a light on in the window. Nine o’clock is the usual bedtime at the Shadow Houses, right? It can be a tough habit to break.”
She held out the organic, hand-woven hemp bag full of goodies from Tickseed Meadow and hoped Ivy wouldn’t question her logic.
Ivy took the bag and held the door open. “It’s not hard to change your body clock when you work the graveyard shift for two years straight.”
“That would do it,” Sam agreed.
Ivy was looking in the bag with a face of resigned horror.
“I know what you said, but when I told Maribel I was going to visit a friend, she insisted. I cook when I’m stressed, and I guess they’re running out of cupboard space. Yesterday, the local soup kitchen took a donation of two hundred homemade cookies because Tickseed Meadow needed their fridge back.”
“Oh,” Ivy said in a tiny, defeated voice.
“It all freezes,” Sam offered. “Or you could throw it out. I promise not to be offended. It’s your body, and you get to choose what goes into it.”
Ivy smirked. “You really have spent time around clones.”
“A few,” Sam said with a nod. “Actually, probably more than I ever realized. The difference between you and me is negligible.”
“I have a clone marker.”
“That doesn’t make you any less human.” She smiled and tried not to bite her lips in anticipation. “Where’s this mystery fingerprint?”
Ivy took the bag of food and stuffed it into the mostly empty fridge before coming back to the living room floor covered in papers. “It’s not a mystery print. It’s Lexie’s. On the Jane Doe’s body from District 18 in October.” She held out the file. “It’s clone-on-donor violence.”
“You don’t know that,” Sam said as she sat down to read through the autopsy. “Do you know if . . . oh. There it is.” She sucked air in through her teeth. “I was hoping they hadn’t found that.”
“Found what?” Ivy asked, sitting down beside her.
Sam pointed out the tiny circular patterns on Lexie’s bones. “This.”
“The little Zen circles you hate.”
“Yes they are.” Sam put the file down and stared into space. “That complicates things.”
“How?”
“It means I made a mistake.” Henry had already built the time machine. History was wrong, and people were dying. She could feel the first push of tears behind her eyes. The bitterness and frustration of the past month threatened to crush her.
Sam choked it down, letting anger burn through the other emotions until there was nothing but fury.
Ivy scooted a little closer. “Are you okay?”
“I’m not, but I will be. Thank you for asking.”
“Your voice sounds very . . . flat,” Ivy said.
“Only because screaming won’t help.” Sam sighed. She patted Ivy’s knee. “Your report?”
“It’s going to get someone in trouble.” Ivy looked at the ground. “I hate doing this. We’ve fought so hard for rights, for the chance to be human, and I’m going to betray one of us. It doesn’t matter that she’s a killer. All I can see is clone.”
Sam shook her head. “Lexie didn’t have a Shadow. I checked. I double-checked two hours ago when they found her body. The MO is the same. So, even if something had happened with a clone, the Shadow couldn’t have been the killer. Lexie wasn’t much larger than me.”
It was Ivy’s turn to shake her head in confusion. “But, I saw her body. I saw her.”
“You saw someone.”
“With the same fingerprints? That’s impossible.”
“Obviously not.” Sam flipped through the rest of the files, then frowned. “There was a fingerprint found on one of the bodies?”
“Oh, yeah, the investigator didn’t say anything about it, but it belongs to an Agent MacKenzie. He’s a . . .” Her sentence trailed off. “Miss MacKenzie?”
“Hmm?”
“You have a funny look on your face.”
Sam shook her head. “Just a strange thought. Don’t think anything of it.” Mac wouldn’t have hurt anyone. The fingerprint had been dismissed as a protocol error—Mac forgot to put on his gloves. But what if things had gone differently? What if Mac in another iteration had fallen not into depression but into rages?
She looked at the victims again. A pattern started to form. “The killer had training.”
Ivy peeked over her shoulder. “How do you know?”
“Look.” Sam pointed at the left shoulders. “There’s a rhythm here. The same set of moves every time. A punch to stun the victim, a kick to the left shoulder to keep them down, two more well-placed kicks.”
“Is it enough to find the killer?”
Sam shut her eyes tight. “That’s going to be a problem. Ivy, I know this is going to sound like a very bad idea, but you weren’t officially on these cases, right?”
“Right.” Her voice was soft, almost beaten.
“I’m going to strongly recommend you not write a report.” Sam looked at her, hoping and praying she could sway Ivy to her point of view.
Ivy looked appalled at the thought. “This is new evidence!”
“This”—Sam tapped the files—“is a death warrant. You haven’t seen this before, but I have. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I wound up in a ve
ry bad situation. The people responsible for letting the killer loose are way over your pay grade and mine. The CBI has specialists for this.”
“So we contact them,” Ivy said. “We give them this information.”
Sam shook her head. “You can’t explain it.”
“You can.”
“I signed a nondisclosure agreement. If anyone in that organization thinks I talked, I will lose all freedoms. They will lock me in the deepest, darkest hole they can find in the penal system, and I won’t even have a trial. I don’t know what they’d do to you.”
Ivy frowned. “What if I hinted at the right people that I might know something.”
“No. Don’t. If it ever comes up. If anything similar crosses your desk, and the CBI loops you in, act shocked. Act surprised. Protest. It’ll keep you alive.”
“But . . .” She looked at the lineup of the victims’ faces. “How do we stop this from happening if we can’t get the CBI involved?”
Sam pressed her lips together. “I do something really stupid that I hope I won’t regret, and I go after them.”
“I’ll go with you,” Ivy offered.
Sam smiled. “I wish I could let you, but it would mean uprooting you and dragging you across the country. Possibly out of the country. You’ve got a future here.”
With a resigned sigh Ivy looked at the floor. “No, I don’t.”
“Call it a hunch,” Sam said. “Better times are coming. Bigger cases.”
Ivy looked at her. “This is a really bad idea.”
“Sometimes those are the only ones that work.” Sam gave her a sideways hug. “Do you want to do breakfast tomorrow before I take off?”
“I can’t,” Ivy said sadly. “I have to get to work early. Will you call, when it’s over, and everything is okay?” Ivy asked.
“Yeah,” Sam lied. “I can do that.”
CHAPTER 31
“A lie becomes truth if it is spoken enough.”
~ from The Handbook of Modern Politics by Feror Delgado I3—2067
Day 201/365
Year 5 of Progress
(July 20, 2069)
Central Command
Third Continent
Prime Reality
“How could this happen?” Donovan asked, as Emir handed him the black band to wrap around his arm. “Commander Rose was always so cautious. For her to miss a jump is unthinkable.”
Emir’s face was set in a permanent scowl. “You are certain you gave her the proper coordinates?”
“Yes, sir,” Donovan lied. He secured the band in place. “I gave Senturi the new jump location, and he was in contact with Commander Rose the whole time.”
“Senturi didn’t come back either.”
Donovan tilted his head to the side, pretending to think. “I can’t think of a less likely pair of coconspirators, sir.”
The scowl turned to a sneer. “You aren’t kept around for your brains, Captain. Rose didn’t agree with Senturi’s politics, but they were a team. I’m not sure if the concept has ever crossed your mind.”
Donovan’s hands fisted at his sides.
Emir opened his office door without noticing. “Prepare your team for another jump in three days. This whole day was a fiasco.”
“But the iteration is gone,” Donovan said. “We’ve regained prominence.”
Emir looked at the ceiling. “Captain, if I ever come to you for advice, please do me the courtesy of taking me directly to the medic for a full mental evaluation. No. The iteration didn’t collapse. No. We are not in the Prime position. We’re rapidly slipping away from dominance. We are missing a node!” he shouted. “Do you know what that means? No, of course you don’t. You’re an infantile man whose only focus is on his own base need for approval from underlings.”
“You should learn respect, Doctor,” Donovan said. “Before anyone else realizes that the iteration that is the Prime is the iteration where you are dead.
The old man looked at him, and Donovan saw death in the man’s eyes. “Don’t test me, Captain. I don’t need you to survive, but you still need me.”
Donovan walked out, fear running down his spine like icy water. He’d seen Emir play vicious little games. He knew all the rumors about dead rivals and people who existed and were then erased from history. But he’d always thought that Emir had someone else do the dirty work. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
He looked over his shoulder, wondering if he ought to have left Emir behind and let Rose return.
CHAPTER 32
“If one is ruled by destiny, then every choice one makes is pre-scribed into the foundation of the universe. It presupposes that the individual has no choice. Destiny is finite. It is only through the belief that the individual choices we make determine our future that one can grasp the infinite and the divine.”
~ Treatise on the Divinity of Science by Lara M. Rushell I3—2071
Monday January 20, 2070
Florida District 8
Commonwealth of North America
Iteration 2
Sam leaned against the hood of her rental car while Bosco hung his head out the window, panting in the chilly sixty-degree weather. A sizable puddle of drool had collected in the pothole by the car. He whined, and Sam reached out to scratch his ear. “Wait for it. Henry should be out in a few minutes.”
Ten minutes later, Henry appeared, walking through the glass-lined hall leading out of the correctional facility. He’d grown a scraggly beard and was wearing a pair of slacks with a white undershirt. Probably the same clothes he’d been arrested in. The desk clerk scanned him out, handed him a receipt for something—possibly his shoes since he was shuffling in prison slippers—and he stumbled to the door.
He stepped outside with a bitter glare at the clear, afternoon sky.
“Henry!” Sam waved her hand.
His shoulders slumped, and he shuffled across the broken parking lot. “I told Devon I’d pay the gas.” He stopped a few feet from the car. “Agent Rose?”
“In the flesh.” Sam put on her friendliest smile.
He stepped backward. “I really was hoping my roommate would pick me up.”
“In the car, Henry. We need to talk.”
“Do I have a choice?” he asked as he skulked closer to the car. “This is about the machine, isn’t it?”
Bosco’s tail thrummed on the roof of the car. He leaned out, trying to lick Henry.
“Ni-nice dog. Agent Rose, I’m sorry. I’m tired, and I’m . . .” He let out a deflated sigh. Shaking his head, he said, “This is too much. I’m going to the apartment, buying the plane tickets, and flying home to Palawan. It doesn’t have the kind of physics research the Commonwealth has. It doesn’t have much except for views, but it’s home, and it’s safe. I can let things calm down. Maybe get a job somewhere else. Start over.” He shot an angry look at her. “Did you have to tell them about Krystal?”
Sam waited for him to finish whatever it was he was ranting about, resting her elbows on the roof the car. When he was done, she asked, “Do you believe in destiny?”
Troom frowned at her in derision. “What?”
“Do you believe in destiny? That you have no choice in what the future holds? That every action is set in stone, even before it happens?”
“No. That’s utter nonsense. You can only believe in destiny if you don’t believe in science. It’s nonsensical. Ridiculous. Why do you ask?”
Sam snapped her fingers and pointed to the rear seat. “Bosco, trô lai.”
Bosco climbed into the backseat and lay down.
“You are destined to die in nine weeks. I know, because five years ago, I was the agent called to the lab to identify your body.”
Henry opened the car door and sat inside. “Nine weeks in the future was five years in your past?”
“Yes.�
�� She dropped into the driver’s seat, shutting the door behind her. “Want to close the door, so I can turn on the AC?”
He shut it. “You’re talking about time travel.”
“Yes.”
Henry buckled his seat belt. “Dr. Emir never achieved time travel.”
She was glad he caught on quick. “Oh, he did. He just didn’t know what he had.” She turned on the car and drove toward A1A. “The Emir you worked with didn’t fully understand what he’d created. He thought he could send messages to the past, to warn himself about upcoming events.”
“To warn the government,” Henry corrected primly.
She shrugged. “Either way, he meant to send messages. His machine didn’t work like that.”
“I know!” Henry huffed and crossed his arms across his chest. “One of my biggest regrets is that he never got to see that dream come true. He worked so hard for it. It kills me he couldn’t have it.”
“Oh, he got it,” Sam said. “That’s what killed him.”
“Huh?”
“The machine doesn’t connect a single stream of time—it connects with alternate versions of reality. In some realities, Emir is alive and well. In some, I’m a psychopathic husband-napper. In some, things are really terrible. And, probably, in some of them, things are really great.”
He held up a hand. “Go back to the bit where Emir fulfilled his dream, and it killed him.”
“Another Emir from another reality killed our Emir,” she grumbled. “Well, technically, he convinced Marrins to kill our Emir by promising Marrins a chance to go back in time and stop the nationhood vote. But then he betrayed Marrins and left us for dead. Except now he’s back, I think, and someone’s kidnapped Mac.”
“Mac?” His expression had grown more and more confused as she spoke, and it was clear he had latched onto the last piece of information to formulate the first question he could think of.
Henry shifted in his seat. “What are you doing here?”
“I need you to finish rebuilding Emir’s machine. You started it, didn’t you?”
He looked out the window.