Erasing Time

by C. J. Hill

  The man turned it over in the palm of his hand. “What is this? A tracker?”

  “A project I’m working on.”

  The waiter grunted and slipped it into his pocket with the rest of the things. He eyed Echo suspiciously, then gestured for the group to follow him down the hallway.

  He stopped at what appeared to be a normal stretch of wall, took a small disk from his belt, and inserted it into a nearly invisible slit in the top of the molding. Immediately the outline of a door appeared amid the wall markings. It slid open, and the waiter moved aside so they could go in.

  A desk stood at one end of the room and chairs sat at the other. Abstract paintings hung on two of the walls, and low cupboards topped with counters lined the other two. The waiter motioned for them to have a seat. He went and sat on top of the desk with his arms folded. “Pues, tell me who the three of you are.”

  Before Echo could answer, Sheridan leaned over and whispered what to say.

  Echo hesitated, as though he hated saying these things that made no sense, but he repeated her answer anyway. “We’re people searching for a Good Samaritan.”

  The waiter’s eyes narrowed. He looked from Echo to Sheridan. “How come you don’t answer for yourself?”

  “She has a sore throat,” Echo said.

  Sheridan smiled, which was probably not the best indication that she was ill. She couldn’t help herself, though. She wanted to go hug the stern look from the waiter’s face. He could help them.

  The waiter’s eyes remained narrow. “Who sent you here?”

  Echo opened his mouth, and Sheridan thought he was going to say Elise’s name, but his gaze went to something behind the waiter. Echo folded his arms. “You told us we were going to see the chef—your boss. If we answer questions for anyone, I want to answer to the person in charge.”

  The waiter briefly glanced behind him, checking to see what Echo was looking at. “You’re afraid to answer to me?”

  “I’ll answer for your boss.”

  The waiter slid off the desk and sauntered over to Echo. His eyes were cold with barely masked anger. “Bien. I’ll tell my boss you want to talk, but you’ll have to wait. He’s busy running the foodmart.” The waiter strode to the door, put his disk into the wall again, and went out. His footsteps thudded down the hallway away from them.

  Echo leaned back in his chair and let his head fall against the cushion. “I don’t have my laser box, my lock disabler, or my disrupter, and now we’re locked in.”

  “Why didn’t you answer his questions?” Sheridan asked. “Why antagonize him by insisting on seeing his boss?”

  Echo turned to her, and she could see the exhaustion in his eyes. “Because these people aren’t Doctor Worshippers; they’re Dakine.”

  chapter

  38

  The room felt hot, small, and suffocating, yet the room hadn’t changed. It was only Sheridan’s dread wrapping around her in an oppressive blanket. “You’re wrong. How could they be Dakine when we used Christian symbols to find them?”

  Echo reached out and put his hand over hers, a gesture of sympathy. “Maybe there was a trail here once. Maybe this used to be a contact place, but if it was, it’s been taken over by Dakine.”

  Taylor turned to face him, mouth open in disbelief. “How would you know that?”

  He gestured at the paintings. “Christians aren’t the only ones who have symbols. Dakine have them too. They’re in the artwork.”

  Sheridan’s gaze swung to the first painting, and then the second. It was abstract art; basically it looked like someone had emptied a bag of shapes and squiggles onto the canvas. “Where?” she asked.

  “The one behind the desk has their most important symbol in it.” Echo stood up and began checking the cabinets. They were locked. “Only sworn Dakine members know it. It’s a way they identify each other.”

  Sheridan stared at the painting. Which of the squiggles was the Dakine symbol? She supposed it didn’t matter. Tears stung at the back of her eyes, and then just as quickly were replaced by anger. Anger at the Dakine. Anger that she’d worked so hard to find a way out of the city and had only gotten them captured again. Anger at Echo for all of his secrets. “I thought you weren’t a member of the Dakine. How do you know their symbols?”

  Echo tried the last cabinet. It was locked too. “That isn’t important right now. We need a strategy.” He looked across the room, thinking. “There are several different organizations within the Dakine. This one might not realize that others are looking for us. If we pretend to be Dakine and say we’re searching for contact places in order to trap the DW, they might let us go.”

  “How did you know the Dakine symbol?” Sheridan stood, facing him square on. “Are you Dakine or not?”

  Taylor folded her arms. “We’re just taking your word for it that there’s a symbol there. How do we know these people aren’t really DW, and now that you know how to find them, you want to leave to go report it to the Dakine?”

  Echo held up one hand as though trying to make his logic appear in visible form. “If I thought these people could get us out of the city, I’d be the first one to strap provisions on my back, but the DW wouldn’t have two pictures with Dakine symbols in them. These people aren’t who we thought they were.” Echo walked over to Sheridan and put both hands on her shoulders. Gently, he said, “I’ll talk to the boss. It’s our only chance to get out of the building.”

  And then what? More running, more fear, more of Echo’s half answers?

  Taylor looked to Sheridan, waiting for her input. Did they trust Echo now or not?

  Sheridan turned back to Echo, searching his blue eyes as if she could see past them into his soul. “Why do you want to leave the city?”

  He dropped his hands away from her shoulders in frustration. “Ever since you arrived, you’ve told me how horrible Traventon is, and now you’re asking why I want to leave?”

  Sheridan lifted her chin. “If you want us to trust you, it’s time to tell us the truth. All of it. Are you trying to leave the Dakine? Is that why you need to leave the city?”

  “Something close to that.”

  “Because they killed Joseph and Allana?” she asked.

  His eyes flashed. “Because they killed my brother.”

  He hadn’t cared about Allana—no, it was worse than that, Sheridan realized. Echo blamed Allana for Joseph’s death. “Why did the Dakine kill Joseph?” she asked.

  The muscles on Echo’s jaw pulsated, and every part of him looked stiff and pained. He didn’t answer.

  “Was it something Allana did?” Sheridan prodded.

  Echo looked away from her, his expression still tight. “It’s hard for me to talk about it. There are things you don’t understand, things about my past.”

  Sheridan put her hand on his arm. Her anger had been replaced by concern. “Then tell it to us like a story, like it’s just the story of two brothers you know—Echo and Joseph.”

  He gave a half smile then, the kind that isn’t really a smile but an acknowledgment of the bitterness of life. “If I tell you, will you trust me enough to do what I say?”

  “I hope so.”

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you the story of Echo and Joseph.” His gaze traveled past the desk to the painting on the wall, but he didn’t seem to be seeing it. It wasn’t a confession he was offering, or even an explanation. It was an accusation against fate. “People don’t understand how close brothers are, because hardly anyone has them anymore. No one has a twin brother. It was just Echo and Joseph in the whole city.

  “There are two sets of identical twin sisters living in Traventon, both of them very old. One of the sets visited the boys when they were seven. Back then, the boys were too young to know what questions they should have asked. They hadn’t thought much about the tracking crystals at that point. But then, the sisters’ crystals might not have worked the same, and sometimes asking the wrong questions brings more trouble.”

  Taylor turned in he
r seat to better see Echo. “What didn’t you ask them?”

  Echo waved off her question. “I’m sorry. I’m telling my story out of order. I’ll go back to the beginning. Only sometimes I don’t know where the beginning is or when things changed. But in the beginning, Joseph and Echo had no secrets between them. They could work together to create or destroy a program like they had one mind. Sometimes they used to switch places to see if anyone noticed. Every once in a while their caretakers would catch them at it, but more often the caretakers would accuse them of switching places when they hadn’t. No one could really tell because they were so good at being each other.”

  Echo began pacing, his hands thrust into his pockets. “The problem was that things changed for Echo, and Joseph couldn’t see it. Echo wanted to be more than a wordsmith. He wanted prestige, rank. Once the Dakine found out about his computigating skills, they offered him a membership and promised him a rank that would always be under a hundred thousand.

  “I suppose the Dakine would have gone after Joseph too, but they didn’t need to. Joseph shared everything he knew about computigating with Echo, helped him with any problems.”

  Echo let out an angry grumble from the back of his throat, almost a growl. “Allana dated both of the brothers. She was beautiful, influential, and used to having everything she wanted. Why she wanted both of them, I still don’t know. Perhaps it was the novelty. Perhaps she wanted to see if she was powerful enough to destroy a bond that nature had created. Maybe she just couldn’t decide. Whatever the reason, there began to be …” He paused, searching for the right twenty-first-century word.

  “Friction?” Sheridan supplied.

  “Yes. Echo shouldn’t have been jealous. He had enough charm to spin with anyone he wanted. But you see, Joseph was the one the caretakers always favored. He was the son who Jeth talked to the most, so it was important to Echo that he be the one the girls liked best.”

  Echo shook his head, his eyes so cold they seemed brittle. “Allana was good at playing the brothers on different sides. She knew how to push them apart from each other and pull them toward her. It was entertainment to her—manipulating other people’s lives.”

  Echo reached the wall of the room and paced back the other way, unable to stand still. “One day Allana chose between the brothers, and she chose Joseph. The problem was that Joseph was still too loyal to Echo. He didn’t want to hurt his brother. Joseph knew Allana meant too much to Echo, so he told her no.”

  Echo’s voice was calm, barely raised, but there was a churning intensity in his eyes. “Allana told Joseph that he didn’t really know Echo, and Joseph laughed because he knew his brother better than anyone. He could be Echo when he wanted. The more Allana tried to convince Joseph, the more he laughed. And then she told him that Echo was part of the Dakine.

  “She knew because she had recruited him.

  “Of course, Joseph didn’t believe her. He went straight to Echo and confronted him.” Echo paused for a moment. “No, that isn’t right. Joseph did believe her. He went to Echo not to confirm the story, but to yell at him. He kept saying, ‘How could you be so stupid? How could you align yourself with the Dakine? Don’t you know what you’ve done?’”

  The pain on Echo’s face grew as he spoke. Sheridan walked to him, wishing she could take the hurt from him, and feeling helpless because she couldn’t. “I’m sure Joseph didn’t mean it.”

  “Oh, Joseph meant it.” Echo turned away from her. “Echo didn’t defend himself. He couldn’t admit that what Allana said was true, or reveal his membership to anyone who wasn’t in the organization. It’s against Dakine rules.

  “So when Echo went to the Dakine base that night, he was furious at Allana. Furious because she’d chosen Joseph, and furious she’d told Joseph about him. To reveal your own membership is forbidden; to reveal someone else’s, to put them in danger that way, is to break the first Dakine law.

  “I’ve thought about it over and over again, and I’m still not sure why Echo told his superiors what Allana had done. If only he had put away his anger and pride, if only he’d considered the consequences of what he was doing—but he never realized how dangerous the Dakine were. He only thought of punishing Allana, not about endangering her or his brother.”

  Echo grimaced and rubbed absently at the crescent moon on his face. “I guess that’s a fault both the brothers had: acting in anger. If only Joseph hadn’t confronted Echo that way, yelling about his stupidity. So many ifs. So many trips in the wrong direction.”

  Echo’s jaw tightened. It hurt him to say the next words. “That night Lobo decided the punishment. Allana was to be executed for revealing a Dakine membership, and Joseph was to die for hearing it.

  “Echo never imagined such a harsh sentence—not for Allana, and certainly not for Joseph—but once a sentence is given, nothing can reverse it. With tracking crystals, you can’t hide from the assassins. Only those in the government who warrant bodyguards are safe from the Dakine. For anyone else with a death decree, it’s just a question of when the assassins will find you vulnerable. All Echo could do was beg for time to say good-bye to his brother. They granted him that, because as you heard Lobo say, the Dakine are fond of their families. So Echo went to see Joseph.”

  Echo’s voice grew heavy and uneven, and then he stopped talking altogether.

  The tears Sheridan had pushed away earlier spilled onto her cheeks. “You don’t have to say any more.”

  Echo shook his head with resignation. “I have to finish it. I can’t let you think that Echo didn’t care about his brother.” His gaze slid away from Sheridan, shifting back into his memories. “Echo told Joseph he wanted to switch places with him for the evening. Joseph didn’t know what Echo had planned, but he went along with it because he felt bad about their fight. It wasn’t until after they had reversed their hair and face colors that Echo told Joseph the switch needed to be permanent. He told Joseph what he’d done, and what the Dakine had ordered.”

  Echo’s voice dropped until it was hardly more than a whisper. “Joseph didn’t want to let his brother die in his place. There was nothing he could do, though. Echo stood there writing down every Dakine fact he could think of—locations, passwords, symbols, everything he’d computigated for the organization—all to help Joseph play the part of Echo. Joseph kept refusing, but Echo told him he wasn’t about to let Joseph pay for his stupidity. Echo wouldn’t live with that debt in his heart. Either they would both die, or only Echo would die, and Joseph needed to think about Jeth.”

  He let out a shuddering breath, as though the story had exhausted him. “So I thought about Jeth, and I let my brother die in my place. And I’m still not sure I did the right thing.”

  Sheridan put her hand to her lips. “You’re Joseph.”

  “I am, and I’m not. I died with my brother on that day. I can’t ever be who I was before.”

  Sheridan leaned over and put her arms around him, holding him tightly. Joseph. He was Joseph, and he’d carried the staggering weight of his brother’s death. She wanted to speak but found her voice was caught behind a tight ball of sorrow in her throat. Such things shouldn’t happen. They just shouldn’t.

  Joseph put his arms loosely around her and rested his cheek against her head. “Now do you trust me? Now do you understand why I have to get out of the city before the Dakine discover what’s happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the tracking crystals,” Taylor said, still sitting on her chair. “Why doesn’t your crystal reveal who you really are?”

  Joseph lifted his head, keeping his arms around Sheridan. “The crystals work with a person’s DNA. Identical twins have the same DNA. Supposedly the scientists did something to the crystals to make them work for twins, but whoever was in charge of that project must have decided it would be easier to fix the data than the problem. I’m sure he got paid the same, and what few twins there are in the city never brought the matter to the government’s attention. Echo and I learned early that if our car
etakers were trying to track one of us, the tracker picked up whichever one of us was closer. After Echo died, I made sure I was closest to the records building, so it was my crystal that the government turned off and not his.”

  “Which is why when someone tracks you, you show up at the cemetery,” Sheridan said. “Echo’s crystal is the one that’s still on.”

  Joseph nodded. “I answered my comlink as much as possible so that no one needed to track me. I spliced into the life bank and the car systems’ computer logs to make them keep my account open. Sooner or later someone would have noticed that a dead person was eating three meals a day. I was planning to leave the city before I was caught. Although now …” He didn’t finish the sentence, but his meaning was there anyway. Now that everyone is looking for us, now that we’re locked in a Dakine room, now that things are hopeless, it doesn’t matter.

  chapter

  39

  Joseph turned away from Sheridan’s embrace and walked across the room. He suddenly wished he hadn’t told the truth. As long as he had pretended to be Echo, it was almost as if Echo hadn’t really died. Now that he had admitted to being Joseph, in one short moment Echo had disappeared entirely. No, not disappeared. The memory of that day stayed with Joseph. Always. Like a data loop in his mind. A horrible memory, and yet somehow the most vivid one of Echo that Joseph could recall. Horrible and comforting. He clung to it.

  Joseph tried to clear his mind from the past and concentrate on this room, on this problem. He glanced back at the painting behind the desk. The Dakine symbol stuck out like a giant snake wrapping itself around the rest of the lines in the picture.

  How often had he seen that symbol before he switched places and not realized what it was? Now he saw it everywhere. In stores. In offices. On the clothing people wore.

  He pulled his gaze back to Sheridan. She would be the hardest to convince. “We need a plan. When the boss comes, I’ll pretend to be angry with him. I’ll claim his organization hasn’t properly revealed itself to mine. We’ve spent weeks closing in on the DW, and all of that could have been avoided if they’d followed the correct protocol. They’ll ask us to swear an oath that we’re Dakine and not DW. I’ll need to teach it to you—”