by Liana Brooks
“Dead bodies get noticed.” Sam nodded to Donovan’s hands as she reached for his legs. “You leave one lying around long enough, it’s bound to cause trouble.”
They carried Donovan over to the sledge and dropped him beside the other-Sam, his feet dragging on the ground.
Landon shook his head. “Wouldn’t get noticed before we get gone is all I’m saying.”
“You’re going to push the same button to haul them out as you’re going to push to haul yourself out,” Sam said. “The extra weight won’t slow you down. Now, I need her uniform, I think.” Shooing Landon around the corner, she unlaced the commander’s boots, stripped her down to her base layer of jogging shorts and tank top, then switched clothes with her. The uniform was heavy. How the other-Sam had run comfortably in it she wasn’t sure. But it fitted, and that, she told herself, was the main thing. “Oh!” She reached down and grabbed Melody Chimes’s truncheon from her pocket. The faded Auburn sticker gave her hope.
“You can come back out,” she called to Landon.
He turned the corner, did a double take, then frowned. “Your hair is wrong.”
Sam pulled hers into a high bun on her head. “How’s this look?”
“Anyone who knows this lady well is going to know you aren’t her. Not once you get close.”
“As long as they don’t notice until I’m close enough to knock them out, it doesn’t matter. I still have me splat gun. I could use it.” Could being the operative word. If she could get away with not hurting anyone else, she would. “And I have Bosco.”
Landon didn’t look convinced. “How many of those little magic bullets you got? Besides, that dog may look fierce, but he’s not vicious.”
“The splat gun has nine bullets left.”
He nodded. “So, I’ll expect you to come running with a fully armed battalion chasing you?”
“It will only be because they want to remind me of their love.”
Landon’s eyes went wide as his lips rolled into his mouth and vanished. After a long moment, he asked, “Is everyone in your reality this crazy?”
“Nah. I’m one of the normal ones.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me? ’Cause it doesn’t.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sam said. She realized she was using the voice she usually reserved for tourists and felt a little guilty. With a little placating smile, she said, “Everything’s going to be fine. If all goes well, I won’t even bother you again. You can jump to the Shadow Prime. I can go back to my life. It’ll be great.” She rubbed her neck. She had a headache building and an uncanny sense of déjà vu about this whole place.
He grunted and shook his head. “Fine. Help me load him up?” He nodded to the cursing Donovan.
“Tase him first,” Sam said. “Otherwise, he’s likely to bite.”
Five minutes later, both the unconscious other-Sam and Donovan were loaded up.
“I’ll get them to the rail line, load them there, and the auto transport can haul them the rest of the way.”
“Be careful with them,” Sam warned. “I don’t trust either of them farther than I can throw them.”
“One of them is you!”
Sam nodded. “I know, that’s why I don’t trust her. I fight like a mongoose when I’m cornered.”
In Florida—her first time through 2070—Sam had found a warehouse full of paintings done by Dr. Emir. As Mac walked into Emir’s private office in the Prime, he realized this was the parallel. The paintings weren’t all the same. There were more cities and fewer depictions of Sam, but the thought behind it was the same. Emir had tried to capture the memory of the worlds he’d destroyed in his conquest of time.
Emir watched him as he walked a circuit around the room before coming to the oversized desk Emir hid behind. The doctor steepled his fingers together. “What do you think?”
“What a waste,” Mac said.
Emir cocked his head to the side. “Of paint? Of time?”
“Of life. Of possibility. Look,” Mac pointed to a painting of a glass-and-steel building shaped like a ship’s sails. “Where was that? Who created it? What happened to the architect and the builders? To all the people who worked or lived there? They’re gone, aren’t they? Lives wasted. Because of you.”
“There can only be one iteration of each person,” Emir said.
“Why?”
The doctor blinked in surprise. “It is a matter of logic.”
“Of hubris,” Mac argued. “I know two variations of the same person can share a timeline because I’ve been living side by side with my younger self for five years. We shared an apartment for a few days. Neither of us imploded.”
“It isn’t safe,” Emir said. “All these worlds were flawed.”
“All worlds are flawed. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because something’s gone wrong in your perfect world?” It was supposition only. The command tower had been quiet for the past twelve hours. The cantina had been empty when he’d gone for food. Jane was missing. Everything about the situation said trouble with a capital T. Emir’s summons was all the confirmation he needed that the Prime had just gone to hell in a handbasket.
Emir turned at his desk. “We reached decoherence this morning. These pieces of art are all that remain of those worlds. My memories have become imaginings.”
The spark of hope that had kept him going was extinguished with one thought: Sam was gone.
Mac couldn’t cry. He couldn’t even find a nameable emotion. Only a coldness that swallowed him whole and left him empty.
The last time he’d felt like this, he’d been carrying a dead soldier across his back in the deserts of Afghanistan. Then, all that mattered was putting one foot in front of the other as he tried to outrun death. Now there was nowhere to run. His eye twitched.
“You shouldn’t have said that.”
“I shouldn’t have warned you?” Emir’s patronizing grin seemed to mock him. “You would have wanted to know. The decoherence was softer than I imagined. The iterations ran parallel for several hours this morning until they showed up as a thick black line on my machines. There’s no more probability fan. We only have one choice, and that is to go forward as we are, with what we have right now.”
Mac’s hands became white-knuckled fists. It didn’t matter what happened. He was going to kill Jane for this. Donovan, too, if he had the chance. Emir. It didn’t matter. They’d taken him away from Sam. They’d destroyed the life he’d worked so hard to put back together.
Emir’s explanations became white noise.
Memories of Jane Doe’s broken body slipped through his mind like a mission briefing. A hit here. A boot there. It all fit.
The dehydration and abuse he’d seen on her corpse wasn’t from imprisonment as he’d assumed, it was from living here. This iteration had leached the very marrow from her bones. Now they were weak enough for him to snap them with icy precision. Only, this time, she wouldn’t be buried in Alabama District 3 because she had destroyed it.
Humanity better pray there was a probability fan Emir couldn’t see, some rogue iteration spinning off by itself, because he was about to burn this one to the ground.
Donovan rolled sideways as the auto transport rattled away from him. He stayed still, hoping no one noticed, and as the auto transport turned a corner, he stood up. He was torn, for a moment, between chasing after the unconscious Rose and the man guiding the sledge, or going back to Central Command. The need to treat his injuries won out. There’d always be another Rose to kill.
Especially today.
His head was still ringing when he had returned from the rogue iteration to the Prime, but he swore he’d seen two Roses after the commander tied him up.
Gripping the belt strap between his teeth, he pulled it loose, freeing his hands.
At a steady jog, he could reach the low
er levels of the command tower in good time. He knew the tunnels better than anyone. Knew where the old medical bays were, where the supplies were. From there, he could plan his assault.
It took him less than an hour to clean up, take a few stimulants to clear his head, then he was ready to deal with humans again. He ran a hand over his short hair and looked in the mirror. A little worse for the wear, but he’d looked rougher after a hard day in training. Soldiers weren’t meant to look clean cut. Not if they were fighting men.
Donovan pushed a heavy shelf to one side and pulled out a metal wall panel. When he’d brought the old comm kit down here, he’d meant to use it for listening in on Emir’s plans. But he’d also given Senturi permission to use it to contact the Council as needed. He punched in the code from memory.
Gray waves appeared on the screen, then the tight face of an older woman. “Who are you?”
“Captain Donovan, reporting in for Senturi.”
She nodded, iron-gray curls catching the light. “Is he ready for us?”
“Yes.” The lie slipped off his tongue with ease.
“Do we have the coordinates?”
“As soon as we have the control room, coordinates will be provided.” The second door in the badlands worked well for getting in and out of the Shadow Prime, but he needed to find the red-haired woman. He swayed on his feet, the memory of his dead-self holding her mixing with the memory of the same woman trying to cave in his skull as he rescued her from himself.
“Captain?” the Councilwoman asked. “Are you in good health?”
He wasn’t, but that was not for her to know. “Yes, ma’am. When will your troops arrive?”
“They are in place and will breach the command tower in eight minutes.”
“I’ll go meet them,” Donovan said.
“To the Council goes the victory,” the woman said as she signed off.
“And the power.” He remembered that line from training. Wiping away fresh blood from his nose, he stared at the metal walls of the medical bay. In retrospect, he should have waited to kill Senturi. It would have made retaking the control tower easier.
He shook his head and went to the stairs.
Decoherence was coming—it was the ache in his bones and the confusion in his mind—and there was much to do before the probability fan closed completely.
“Right or left?” Sam asked Bosco. They’d been following signs of habitation—stairs, open doors, litter—and she was fairly certain they were near the top of the tower. But she’d stopped counting floors after thirty.
He sniffed at a door that looked no different to her than the other dozen doors they’d passed.
“Okay, doors are good.” She waved the stolen ID in front of the lock, and it swung open revealing six rows of heavily armed SWAT with weapons. There was a moment of stunned silence from both parties, then Sam dodged to the side and hit the lock again. Someone had called in reinforcements.
“Wrong door. Bosco, chay.”
They skidded around the corner as gunfire sprayed down the hall.
“I told Landon dead bodies would cause trouble. They weren’t even dead!” She opened another lock, slammed the doors behind her, and searched desperately for something to barricade it with. The hall was as empty and sterile as an abandoned hospital. “St. Jude, St. Samantha, help. Oh, golly, Bosco. Why did we leave home?”
He sniffed at the door and growled.
Sam snapped her finger and took off running, looking for a side hall or an exit. Anything that would get her away from the police.
Up ahead, a door swung open and slammed shut. Unbelievably, MacKenzie—or at least some version of MacKenzie—turned to her.
The rattle of gunfire swallowed her cry.
MacKenzie walked toward her, eyes burning with fury.
“Mac.” He didn’t recognize her. She wasn’t even sure it was her Mac. “Bosco, tân công.”
The sound of gunfire drew Mac into the hall. He saw Rose running toward him, face full of fear. He was going to push her back at the attackers. Drag them both into the hail of bullets.
Then Bosco knocked him to the ground.
The dog licked his face.
“Off, Bosco, off. You’re crushing me.”
“Oh my . . .” Sam shook her head in stunned belief. “It is you. I found you,” she said, as she choked on tears.
Mac held up a hand, and she helped him up.
“Sorry. You looked very not yourself.” She ran her hands across his face. “Mac . . .”
There was so much more she wanted to say, but a percussion grenade went off in the distance. She took a deep breath. “I love you. It’s good to see you again. Where is the exit of this insane place? There’s a SWAT team after me, which is really overkill considering I only knocked out two people.”
“What are you doing here?” Mac demanded, grabbing her arm and pulling her away from the sounds of fighting.
“Rescuing you—kind of.” She smiled apologetically. “The SWAT team was not planned. I was going to try to sneak in and out.”
Emir stepped into the hall, looking around in confusion. “MacKenzie, Rose, what is the meaning of this?”
Sam looked up at Mac, then back at Emir. She shrugged. “There seems to be some technical problems with this evening’s entertainment.” It was a joke from a TV show she liked, and it went straight over Emir’s head.
With a frown, Emir stormed back into his fortress of an office.
“He’s going to call for help or come back with a weapon,” Mac predicted. “We need to get out of here. The jump room is down this hall. Do you have a key?”
Sam held up Jane’s ID. “I borrowed this when I showed up. She’s alive, if you’re wondering.”
“I really don’t care.” He took the lead, unlocked the jump room, and pulled Sam close as the heavy doors silenced the coup outside.
She was here.
She was here.
With him. Gently, he tilted her head back and kissed her, claiming her. Reassuring himself that she was alive and his Sam. Tears stung his eyes and blurred his vision. “You’re here.”
“I am.” She ran a hand through his hair. “I love you.”
“I love you, and nothing else matters.”
A look of panic suffused her face. “Oh, no. Other things matter. Like the fact that we are leaving, Linsey Eric MacKenzie. I don’t care how much this little military-complex life appeals to you. I have eaten the food here. We’re not staying.”
He laughed. “I don’t like it here.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” She sighed with relief and smiled. “I saw all the uniforms and everything and thought you would probably fit in.”
“I do fit in, but that doesn’t mean I want to stay here. There’s no beaches. The beds are awful. And you’re so right about the food.” He shook his head in disgust.
She nodded. “Okay. Do you need to pack anything? Bring a souvenir gun or whatever it is husbands pick up on vacation?”
He brushed her cheek with his thumb. “No. I’m good.”
Bosco rubbed against his leg. “You brought the dog?”
“I didn’t want to leave him alone if we didn’t make it back to the right iteration.”
“According to Emir, there are no more iterations.”
Sam grimaced. “There was when I left last night.” Her face suffused with horror. “Did I kill us? Do you think I caused the collapse by jumping over?”
“I don’t care. Emir and Jane kept saying that after decoherence, there was an expansion. I’m willing to believe in that. Come here. I think you can get this machine to work,” he said as he walked to the inner door and jiggled it. “Locked.”
“Try the swipe card.”
The light glowed red.
“Wait,” Mac said,
“This is a hand-scan door. You have to do it. Um, left hand. Jane always used her left hand here.”
Sam reached out her left hand. “It’s warm.” With a muffled click, the door slid open. “It worked!”
“Of course it did. There are two more doors, and a lock on the machine itself. Left hand for all of them.” He checked the corridor behind them, made sure Bosco got through, and forced the door shut. This wasn’t a defensible position, and getting caught was out of the question. He looked around, lifting the chairs to see if they were heavy enough to work as weapons if Emir woke up and came after them.
“Here,” Sam said with a put-upon sigh as she held out her backpack.
He unzipped it. “Ah, honey, you brought my gun.”
“And my splat gun.” She unlocked the inner door to the main jump room with the spiraling floor. A dull, purple light filled the room with a sickly glow. “And there is my least favorite piece of technology.”
Mac gently pushed her through the door. “Right now it’s my favorite. Start it up.”
“Do you know how to set where we’re going?”
“The last time Jane’s team used it, they said there was a convergence—our iteration and theirs are spiraling around each other.” He shrugged. “At least we’ll be at home.”
“But when?”
“Does it matter?”
Sam looked at him, then at the door locking behind them. “Guess not.” She held up her hand. “Here we go. Open sesame.” She scanned her hand as she’d done on the locks.
The light glowed green, the portal began to swirl faster, and a red light flared on the lock.
“Um . . . Mac . . . it just rejected me.”
“Try it again.” His heartbeat sped up like the rhythm of soldiers running. Even through the thick walls, he could hear the percussion of the fight. “I think someone is using grenades.”
“Not helpful!” Sam said. She scanned it again and shook her head. “It’s saying something about 83 percent match?” She looked at him in confusion. “Mac, how can I only be 83 percent me?”
“Maybe this one scans more than genes?”