by C. B. Lewis
Chapter 2
THE BACON was crispy and still hot, which was rare in the canteen.
Kit grabbed the tongs, piling a thick layer onto his toast. Someone in the queue behind him made a sound of indignation, which Kit studiously ignored as he moved on to the eggs.
By the time he was finished, his sandwich was a masterpiece of five perfectly balanced layers of cholesterol, slathered in brown sauce. Sometimes an engineering degree could have practical applications. He set it down proudly on the table and sat down, picking up his knife and fork.
“Jesus Christ! Are you trying to build a food fort?”
“I like a filling breakfast.” Kit looked up with a grin.
Dieter, the lead historian and linguist of the Temporal Research Institution, was standing over him with a mug in one hand and a toasted bagel in the other. He raised a pierced eyebrow, looking at the heart attack on a plate. “How the fuck do you stay so skinny?”
Kit stabbed into the mountain of food, cutting right down through it. “I need it to power my cunning little brain,” he said cheerfully. “You want to join me?”
Dieter glanced around, then shrugged. “Why not? They’ve called everyone in here anyway. Might as well get a seat.”
“They have?”
Dieter nodded distractedly as he buttered his bagel. “Whole agency, apparently.” He lifted blue eyes to Kit. “Don’t you check your e-mails?”
Kit gulped down a mouthful of runny egg and sausage. “I was hungry. Breakfast always comes before work.” He hacked into another part of the tower. “But the whole agency? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole agency together. Has that ever happened before?”
“Twice. Before your time.” Dieter rose from the chair and raised his hand in greeting. Kit followed his line of sight and spotted one of the communications technicians weaving his way toward them. “This isn’t the same as those situations.”
He smiled up at the big blond man as he joined them and slipped into the vacant chair beside Dieter. Dieter said something in a language Kit didn’t recognize, but Janos Nagy clearly did. His stern mouth crooked up at one side. As far as Kit knew, that was the closest the guy got to laughing.
“Morning, Mr. Nagy.” Kit waved his fork.
Janos nodded in greeting. He was one of the better-looking men in the TRI, but from the first day Kit had been in the building, he had been cautioned in no uncertain terms that flirting with Janos was a fool’s errand, no matter how buff he was.
“Everyone is coming,” he said to Dieter.
Kit glanced around the room. “Why do they need everyone in anyway? I mean, you guys were here last time. What were those meetings about?”
Dieter’s expression gave nothing away. “Major incidents.”
Janos said nothing. He picked up Dieter’s coffee cup as if it were his own.
It was common knowledge that the two men were a couple and had been for some time, but for the life of him, Kit couldn’t work them out. Janos was the quiet, introvert type, but Dieter was as colorful and flamboyant as they came. Opposites attracted, Kit guessed.
There was something big in their history that no one talked about in the agency. The people who had joined the TRI in the last three years were all as oblivious as each other, and no matter who they asked, everyone said that Dieter and Janos’s affair was no one’s business but their own.
“Major time-travel incidents? Or major ‘everything is going to explode’ incidents?”
Janos looked over at him. “You ask many questions for so early in morning.”
“I don’t usually work with people who do any interesting talking. It’s all tools, cables, synchronizers, stabilizers and stuff.” Kit waved his fork at him. “Not that you do much talking anyway….”
Janos looked at Dieter, raising his eyebrows, and Dieter smacked him lightly on the chest, a smile breaking onto his lips. “Shut up.”
“I said nothing.” Janos’s expression was innocent.
Dieter snorted. “Like fuck you didn’t.” He bit into his bagel, chewing on it thoughtfully. “If it’s whole-agency business, it’s probably about some system overhaul or bullshit like that. If it’s something that’ll affect everyone, they have to tell us. If it’s just about a temporal jump, that’s restricted to whichever team is involved.”
“As long as we’re not being fired,” Kit declared.
“We will not be,” Janos said. There was an audible slap when Dieter smacked him on the thigh. Janos looked at him, offended. “What I said?”
“You were being a dick,” Dieter replied and shoved the rest of the bagel into Janos’s mouth. “Ignore him. They wouldn’t fire us en masse.”
By the time everyone filed into the dining room, Kit’s tower had been reduced to a few stray beans and a smear of sauce on the plate. He swiped the sauce up with his fingertip, which he then licked clean and wiped on a napkin.
“You could just lick the plate,” Dieter said with a snort.
“Never in company,” Kit replied virtuously. “I do have some standards.”
“Everyone!” A voice was calling from somewhere in the mass of people. The owner climbed up on a table to make herself visible. Kit squinted at her. It was a small lady in a hijab. He’d only ever seen her in his first weeks on the job, but he had heard of her. She was one of the coders who worked on level ten.
“That’s Mariam Ashraf, isn’t it?” He looked at Dieter inquiringly.
Dieter was pale, sitting bolt upright. “Fuck….”
Janos said something low to Dieter, his hand on Dieter’s shoulder, but Dieter didn’t even seem to notice. Kit looked between them and Mariam. Dieter looked like he was about to have a panic attack. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t good.
“Everyone!” The woman stamped her heel until silence fell. “I need your attention now. We have a code red situation.”
“Shit shit shit shit….” Dieter’s voice was breaking.
“We have received notification this morning that a temporal gateway opened close to Tom Sanders’s house,” the woman said, short and crisp. “It was not opened from within the TRI facilities, or at least it has not knowingly been opened yet. We have lost communication with Sanders and have not heard from him since the anomaly occurred.”
Kit felt like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach.
Sanders wasn’t just the chief of the TRI itself, he was the man who had handpicked Kit to work alongside him. He was a bloody brilliant scientist, one of the few people to have ideas that were even wilder than Kit’s own, and more importantly, he was the man who had made time travel possible. He had pioneered the system, honed it, made it work.
Kit had been both awed and terrified by him.
“What does that mean?” he asked, looking around.
One look at Dieter told him that wasn’t going to get any answers. Janos had pulled his chair closer to Dieter’s and had his arm around Dieter’s shoulder. He was murmuring to him, a low, steady, repetitive thrum of words in that strange language again, and Dieter was leaning into him, shivering.
“The police force are currently on site,” the woman continued. “We didn’t have time to get someone there before the police were called, and now, we won’t be able to get access until they have finished their operations. There will be questions asked, so we need to be prepared. Report to your department. Your section leaders will be notified which protocol we will be following in this situation.”
People around the room started moving for the doors.
Kit got up, looking around uncertainly, then back at Dieter, who had his eyes closed and was breathing hard. Sanders gone. Dieter, who was normally so calm and collected, having a panic attack. Janos saying more than Kit had ever heard him say before.
Something was very, very wrong.
It wasn’t just an anomaly. It wasn’t just someone going missing.
Dieter was whey-faced, and Kit knew his own rising alarm wouldn’t help anyone. “Can I help?” he asked Janos. “I mean, i
s there anything I can do?”
Janos looked back at him blankly. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”
Heels clattered on the floor nearby, and Kit turned to see Mariam approaching. She didn’t even seem to notice him. He shied back, tugging at the end of his shirt, wondering what he was meant to say or do.
“Dieter,” she said, approaching the table. “I’m sorry.”
He looked up at her. “That was fucking tactful.” His voice sounded brittle. “Couldn’t have said something before? Taken us aside instead of shouting it from the fucking rooftops?”
“I realize that now,” she replied. She looked at Janos. “Get him up to my office. We’ll talk there.”
“You can tell me what you need me to do. I’m not fucking deaf, Mariam,” Dieter snapped, rising. He reached out, gripping Janos’s arm. He looked like hell. “Christ. Not again.”
Kit shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Mrs. Ashraf was watching them too. “I want to help,” he said quietly.
She glanced at him. “Dieter?”
“Or Tom.” He hesitated, then asked, “Do we have any idea what happened? I mean, he was always going on about security here. Surely he must have had something in place there….”
“I can’t answer that, Rafferty.” She sounded tired, and she looked worse. “You heard your orders. Report to your section leader. You’ll be told what you need to know.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He left his tray where it was and joined the crowd working their way out of the doors. Most people headed for the elevators, but he retreated for the almost empty staircase to avoid the crush of people all speaking in urgent voices.
It took longer, but it meant he had time to try and even out his breathing and not let himself get worked up. They didn’t know what was going on yet. Better not to think of the worst. It gave him time to put together what he knew, and, more specifically, what he didn’t.
The rest of his team was already waiting. The engineering team was made up of seventeen people of all ages. Some of them had been with the TRI for years. Kit was their most recent arrival, and normally that didn’t make any difference: an engineer was an engineer, after all.
Now, though, they were talking and lowered their voices when he entered.
Kit made a beeline for Reggie O’Conner, one of the longest-serving members of the TRI and the oldest member of their team. Normally, he was the first one to be helpful. “Reg—”
“Don’t ask me,” Reggie said, holding up both hands. He looked drawn and grim. “I don’t know anything more than the rest of you lot.”
“That’s a load of bull,” Kit protested. “You know why Dieter and Janos would get a private meeting with Ashraf.”
Reggie’s pale eyes narrowed. “They are, are they?” He didn’t look surprised.
“She apologized to him for telling him with everyone else. Why would it bother him?”
Reggie shook his head, the light gleaming off his slicked-back white hair. “Not my business to talk about it with anyone,” he said. “If they want you to know, they’ll tell you. For now, leave off.”
Kit reluctantly subsided. He retreated to his workbench, looking around at the others. Some of them had clearly overheard him and were speaking in whispers. He frowned, turning back to his bench. Fair enough, they were worried, but being fenced out of their discussions reminded him that he was still considered a new arrival, even after three years.
There were so many things classed as necessary secrets in the TRI.
He didn’t understand all the rules when it came to time travel, but he knew they were the only known agency that worked with it. Well, “known” was a generous way of putting it. Everyone who worked in the building was under a confidentiality contract, and even their customers and clients didn’t know what they were paying for.
If someone wanted to clarify a historical incident and there were no available records, they could pay the TRI to research it. What the clients didn’t know was that “research” involved temporal agents going back to the moment of the incident to see what had happened.
There were strict guidelines in place about what temporal agents could and couldn’t do. The agency was run under a code of noninterference. Nothing was to be changed or amended. No one was meant to interfere with people, and that was why people were on edge now.
The fact that a temporal gateway had opened, and it wasn’t from in-house, was worrying.
They didn’t know where the gateway came from.
They didn’t know when.
Maybe it had happened before, back in the days before he signed up. Maybe Dieter had been involved. Or maybe he was just speculating a lot about a whole lot of nothing.
He turned back to his workstation.
He was working on a new security function based on Sanders’s original temporal gate design. The gates could be held open indefinitely with a sustained flow of power, but the risk was people breaching the gateway from the other side. Humans were curious by nature, and a doorway hovering in the middle of nowhere just begged for someone to stick their head through to see what was on the other side.
For some time, the TRI had been reducing the portal as soon as the agents were through, but there was a risk of the gateway collapsing and closing.
Kit had been brought in to be a fresh set of eyes. He’d had no idea he was dealing with time travel, and just took it as a standard engineering problem that needed to be solved. He’d immediately offered a dozen solutions: some the TRI engineers had thought of before, some they hadn’t imagined were possible.
That was the day he’d met Sanders and got himself a job in time travel.
He’d had no idea who he was dealing with when a skinny, fox-faced man hit him with a rapid-fire series of questions and problems, pushing him to think faster and harder than he ever had before. He was sure he’d made a balls-up of the whole thing, but then the man had smiled, held out a hand, and it was that simple.
Sanders had given him challenges and he’d met them every time.
Now, Sanders was gone.
No. Missing. Only missing. Not gone.
Kit picked up his magnifiers, setting them on his nose, and turned on the light over the bench. He couldn’t help Sanders in any other way right now, but at least he could work on the last task that Tom had assigned to him, and get it as close to finished as possible by the time Tom got back.
Sometime later, a hand tapped him on the shoulder.
Kit looked up, blinking, as Hamid Johnson’s face spread across his vision. He yelped, pulling off the magnifiers, bringing his section leader’s face back to its more normal proportions. “Boss?”
“Need your ears for a minute, Kit,” Hamid said. He was another long-standing member of the TRI, short and stocky with a square block of a beard and an equally square mass of dark curls on his head. “Everyone, you heard Mariam in the mess room. We don’t have many details of what’s happening, but this much I can tell you: Sanders is missing in action. We know he had facilities in his home where he developed new technology, but we don’t know if he had developed it to the point of doing a solo jump.”
“So he could have opened the gate himself?” one of the other engineers asked.
“Possible,” Hamid said, hooking his thumbs through his belt, “but unlikely, given that his son was staying at the house with him.”
There were murmurs again, a ripple around the room.
“Is the lad gone too?”
Hamid grimaced, and Kit could tell he didn’t want to say much more. “Mariam got a call while we were up there,” he said. “Ben was still in the house. The police found him and he’s with them just now. Mariam’s their emergency contact, so she’s headed down to the police station.”
“Sanders wouldn’t leave him alone,” Reggie said at once. A couple of people nodded in agreement. “He wouldn’t have opened a gate with Ben there.”
“That’s the general consensus,” Hamid agreed. “I know some of you haven’t been he
re through a code red, and normally, we would restrict the information as much as possible to ensure minimal damage, but the police have been involved in this situation, which means we all have to be able to answer questions, in case we’re asked.”
“Is that likely to happen?” Kitty McAllister inquired.
“Right now, we don’t know, but best be prepared in case.” Hamid looked around at them. “I’ll be talking to each of you individually, but for now, I need you to get back to your workstations and focus on your current task. I’ll come to each of you in turn.”
They nodded and moved off, but Kit hesitated, sorting through the mess of questions he had. There were no more answers to be had about Tom yet, but there were plenty of other questions. Hamid raised his eyebrows.
“Something to add?”
“I was wondering if Dieter’s all right,” Kit said. “He didn’t look well after the meeting.”
Hamid scratched the back of his neck. “Didn’t know you were friends with him.”
“I’m not,” Kit admitted. “I mean, we talk to each other sometimes in the canteen, but….” He frowned. “I don’t know. He looked awful.”
Hamid smiled briefly, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Long story,” he said. “He’s a lot tougher than he looks, that Dieter. You just worry about your work and what you’ll need to say if the police come calling.” He reached up to pat Kit on the shoulder. “You go back to work. I’ll call you.”
Kit returned to his workstation, looking down at the circuit laid out in front of him. He remembered Mariam Ashraf’s expression, the grim look on Janos’s face, and how pale Dieter had gone. He could feel the tension in the air, the edge of fear and suspicion. They were saying Sanders was just missing, but from their expressions, it was a lot more serious than that.
Suddenly, building a temporal keyhole didn’t seem all that important.
Chapter 3
THE SANDERS boy was asleep.
The only problem with the situation was that he was asleep in Jacob’s lap.
It was difficult to run a team when you couldn’t raise your voice above a murmur and couldn’t even get up from your desk. He’d left Foley and Singh to fill in the gaps in the briefing room in his absence while he went over the evidence again.