by Elise Kova
“No. . .”
She inhaled quickly, as if trying to revive her suddenly deflated hope. Of course he wouldn’t. If everything Jo had assumed was true had actually come to pass, then this was a new—
“Tell me why I should?” Something in his voice was far too curious and far too knowing to be mere chance.
“We met in a different world,” Jo blurted, out with the truth. “‘Different time’ might be a better statement.”
“Excuse me? I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.” But his eyes said otherwise.
Jo put her palm on the door, stopping him from closing it. They had never finished the wish. Which meant it would still be outstanding. At least, she speculated that’s what it would mean. She looked him dead in the eyes and spoke.
“I know that inside your house you have a terminal, first floor, down the hall to the left.”
His eyes widened. It was a good start. “I don’t know what kind of stalker you are but—”
“I know about Primus Sanguis.”
Charlie froze. In a blink, he turned from concerned homeowner to deadly android who would murder for his secrets.
“I know what you do with bones.”
“What do you want?” he whispered.
“Do you really want to have this conversation here?” Jo motioned to the front porch. “Let me inside.”
He debated this for a long moment, eyes darting about.
“Do I really look like someone who’d be associating with the cops?” Jo motioned to her strange garb, “I’m here alone.”
“Come in, then.” He stepped aside.
“Thank you, Charlie.” Jo used his name for emphasis, and to underscore her certainty that they’d met before.
He closed the door behind her, locked it, and folded his arms. “You’re welcome, Josephina.”
Jo stopped dead in her tracks. Slowly, she turned her attention to Charlie. He had yet to move, even though she’d taken five bold steps into his home.
“You do remember,” she whispered.
“Not quite.” He finally stepped forward, brushing past her as he walked toward the back hall. “Come, it’ll be easier to show you.”
She followed behind him, into the back hall, down to the end, and back into a familiar server room. By her count, it had only been two days since she’d last stood in the same spot with Takako. Jo couldn’t help but wonder how long it’d been for Charlie.
“Close the door behind you, so you don’t let out the chill.”
What a blissful chill it was. Jo felt every sensation of cold prickling her skin, puckering it into goosebumps. She happily obliged him, shutting them into the dimly lit room. It felt like a safe haven, the hum of computers like a familiar blanket. Even though Jo had every right to be off-kilter, afraid, and keenly aware of the fact that she was in a small room with a serial killer—she didn’t feel the least bit scared.
If anything, Jo felt oddly jubilant. Though she worked to curb the emotion. There were still too many important things yet to confirm.
Charlie sat down at his terminal, not hesitating to lift his shirt and plug himself in. Jo didn’t even bat an eye at the sight. At least they weren’t going to waste time playing dumb with each other.
“Look, here,” he pointed to the screen.
Jo walked over to the file he’d opened. It was a long string of code—server data. Something had been stored, tagged, yet. . .
“It’s corrupted.”
“Not corrupted.” Charlie shook his head. “Fragmented.”
“How do you mean?”
“Ever since I was born—” Jo couldn’t help but note the fact that he specified born, and not made. “I have possessed this data. It is on a file, hard-coded into me, that no one else seemed to be able to see—not even my core programmers.”
Jo looked back at the data, but her ability to make sense of any language seemed to have left with the Society. That, or it was far too broken for even the demigod of destruction to decipher.
“What is it?” she finally asked.
“You.”
“What?” Jo straightened away from inspecting the monitor. She felt her mouth hanging open, but Charlie did not remark on her shock.
“I have always had these snippets, but I never knew why; I could never get a full picture. A name. . . sensor readings. . . nothing more. And I had never seen anyone—or any thing—give off readings like this.” He paused, giving her one more look up and down. “Until now.”
He remembered her through a jump.
No, not quite remembered. A memory he’d stored in data format had persisted even though the world had changed. Why? It was a question to explore later. For now. . .
“What are you?”
“A demigod.”
The mood broke when Charlie laughed. “Excuse me?”
“I’m a demigod and I met you in a different time when you invoked the Society of Wishes to grant you the ability to murder those related to Primus Sanguis at will, without ever being caught.” As she spoke, Charlie’s smile fell.
“This is certainly . . . odd.” She could hear it in his voice: he wanted to believe her. Jo couldn’t blame him for the skepticism, however. She was selling him a truly impossible tale.
It was then that she spotted a pair of scissors on his desk. Jo moved without thinking.
Her fingers closed around the bright red handle of the scissors. She lifted them as though they were Excalibur itself. Her hand fell to the desk, palm up, knuckles rapping against the wood.
“Watch,” she commanded.
Gripping them in her right hand like a dagger, Jo recalled the last time she had been wounded—or should have been wounded—in Charlie’s home. The USB had exploded, embedding into her hand harmlessly until she plucked out the pieces. Jo plunged the scissors down, stabbing the blade clear through her hand and into the desk.
A sensation seared through her—not pain, but pleasure. It was as if her body relished the feeling of her skin tearing, as if her mind sung at the sensation of something about her being torn apart. She stared at her impaled hand for one more long moment, then withdrew the blade.
Her skin knitted quickly. There was no blood and no mark. Charlie grabbed at her hand, running his own over the mended flesh.
Air continued to fill her lungs, but her body now seemed very distant from her. She had truly become another being altogether. Her mind knew the form she was in as Josephina. But it also knew the magic that flowed in her as Destruction. She was real, and she thrived off of her namesake but her heart still clung to the memories she’d made in a different reality.
“All right,” Charlie said in amazement, leaning back in his chair. “I’ll buy it.”
“Good.” Jo ran her fingers over her palm for a moment. Sure enough, as Charlie had seen, there was no sign of the wound. “Because I need some information.” She found it ironic that it was not the first time he’d functioned as her minion of sorts.
“About what?”
“Everything.”
Chapter 28
Dragonback
“You’re going to have to give me more of a starting place than that.”
“Fair.” Jo folded her arms, leaned against the wall, and stared at the computer, debating what to ask first. “What’s today’s date?” That seemed like a good place to start.
“January 13th, 2058.”
So it was roughly six months after she’d joined the Society in her timeline. Jo’s mind decided to spin out from there—focus on finding differences and similarities. But first, something more urgent.
“Have you seen anyone else like me?” she asked, her breath catching on the end of the question in fear of what the answer may be.
“Like you?”
“An odd signature.” Jo motioned to the fragmented data still up on his screen.
“There is another here.” Charlie turned back to the screen, analyzing silently. But he must’ve come away empty-handed, because he said nothing else. “Bu
t you are the only one I’ve ever encountered who matches these readings.”
Snow hadn’t been here, then. Jo looked to the door, wondering what had happened to the rest of the Society, as though her friends would come walking through behind her. What if, when she’d ended the Society and the Age of Man, they’d. . . Jo couldn’t even bring herself to think it.
“Has anyone else come to you, or shown up in your yard unexpectedly, claiming to know you or recognize you in any way?” Jo attempted.
“No.” Charlie shook his head. “You’re the first to visit me from another dimension. At least that I’ve been made aware of.”
Jo took in a slow breath, forcing herself to remain calm. She tightened her arms around her chest and suppressed a shiver. Just because they hadn’t come to Charlie’s house, or woken here, didn’t mean they were gone. It didn’t mean Pan had the last laugh about Jo destroying the Society.
“I need you to look something up for me.”
“What is it?” Charlie asked, pulling up a browser in the monitors with a thought.
“Me. Josephina Espinosa.”
He gave her a skeptical look but keyed in the query anyway. Nearly a thousand names pulled up across various records. “Care to narrow it down a bit?”
“Search in the LSR. Near El Paso.”
“Where?”
“LSR,” Jo repeated. “The Lone Star Republic.”
Charlie merely stared at her. He squinted his eyes, but not in a way that indicated he was trying to refuse her or be difficult. He was genuinely confused.
“Where’s that?”
Jo opened her mouth and closed it again slowly. Time itself had been changed in a major way. “Pull up a map of the world,” she whispered.
Charlie obliged.
Jo stared at the map that took up an entire screen before her. It looked like the earth she’d known, at a glance. But key differences began to set off alarms in her head—like the fact that Greenland was connected to North America, and South America was not. Or the fact that the Pacific Islands seemed to trail straight down from Japan like perfectly aligned stepping stones, rather than in a sort of arcing scatter.
Or the fact that North America, Greenland, South America, and Japan weren’t even labeled on the map at all.
“This . . . is earth?”
“Yes,” Charlie paused for a moment. “Was it different in your time?”
“Very. Right now, in my time, I’d be in United North America . . . Not the Kingdom of Aristonia.”
“North America?” Charlie repeated, utterly fascinated at the mere words. “What else is different?”
“Just about everything other than the broad strokes of the continents.” Jo leaned away from the monitors, trying to re-file her thoughts.
She was in 2058, but it wasn’t the 2058 of her world. The Society had been broken, by her, and Snow must’ve recreated the world in a new design—one that seemed to deviate greatly from what she’d known.
“Are there gods in this world?” Jo asked, thinking that Snow may have rebuilt the world back to before the Society.
“Not until I met you.” Charlie folded his hands. “At least, none that I know of.”
So it wasn’t the Age of Gods reborn. That left one thing . . .
“Magic. Do you have magic?”
“I do not. But I know many who do.”
“The Age of Magic,” Jo breathed, stepping away to lean against the wall again. It was a reset back to when the Society was formed. But it hadn’t been formed in the Age of Gods—no, Snow had said Pan trapped him while he was weak from rebuilding time into the Age of Magic. It was like Mt. Fuji all over again, but on a much, much larger scale. “He reset everything—reverted, that was the word he used…”
Another thought struck Jo. If Snow had rebooted the world, then perhaps she didn’t exist because she should’ve never existed—because she was never meant to be from this time. But the other members of the Society?
“I need you to look up another name.”
“Go ahead,” Charlie said, pulling up the browser once more.
“Wayne Davis. . . He should be in New York City.”
Charlie looked at her dumbly. “New York City? Another one of your alternate dimension cities?”
“Pull up the map again?” The moment it filled the screen Jo pointed to where New York City was in her time. “About here, big city.”
“Oh, you mean Yorkton City.”
“Sure, try that.” It sounded close enough that Jo wondered what alteration in the time line had led to such a similar but different name.
A few names pulled up, but Jo didn’t have to go very far down the list. She thrust out her finger, pointing to the headline right at the top of the page: “Mogul Wayne Davis Finds Big Payday With Risky Bet”.
“This one.”
Charlie clicked and Jo’s eyes didn’t even have a chance to skim the article before they fell on the photograph of a familiar face, hair slicked so far back it had passed the point of ridiculousness. Wayne stood out like a sore thumb, wearing clothes that he had no doubt had to request custom, since no others in the lineup of businessmen he was with wore anything like it.
“Wait. . . I recognize him.”
“You do?” Jo turned, surprised.
“Yeah, he made 1.46 billion kernits overnight.”
“Kernits?”
“Money?”
“Oh.” There was going to be a significant learning curve to this world. Everything in due time. She would roll with it like she rolled with joining the Society, like she rolled with every job before that. The only thing that mattered was her goal, and right now, that goal was to get to Wayne, then the rest of the team. It would be far more effective to discuss the differences between this world and her own with someone else from the Society.
That was, if he remembered at all.
The thought nearly stopped her heart. What if this was Wayne, but not her Wayne? Like Yuusuke was still Yuusuke after her wish, but had never known Josephina.
“I need to get there.”
“Okay . . .”
“Can you make that happen for me?”
“I see . . . And what do I get out of all this help?”
“You met a real live demigod and received an answer you were looking for your whole life.” Jo should’ve known that wasn’t going to be enough for Charlie.
“Fascinating? Yes. Explains something I’ve always wondered about? Also yes. Though, looked for my whole life sounds a bit dramatic. . . But you’re asking me to spend actual money on booking you travel.” He tapped his hands on the desk, as if impatiently waiting for her to connect the dots. “I’m giving you my own funds to get you where you want to go. I’m going to need something more than a fun party story.”
She could see it on his face. “Tell me, why are you killing them?”
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
“You should, though.”
“Is that a threat?” Charlie’s face couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to look amused or nonplussed.
“I hope it doesn’t have to be.” Jo tipped her head back, looking down at him. “Tell me why.”
“Because the world needs to know the truth of Primus Sanguis and what N.A.I.S.—”
Jo held up a hand to stop him. “That’s all I needed to hear.” It was enough to prove a key similarity in the character of the Charlie in this world, and the Charlie she’d known.
She looked to the computer and for a brief moment, her consciousness waged against her. Even if she could argue that she was in a glass house and shouldn’t throw stones, and even if she found herself agreeing with Charlie in a way, did she have an obligation to stop him? After all, people were dying.
But they weren’t innocent people. Who got to draw the line between vigilante and serial killer? The people in power? It was best to keep her hands off the whole affair, Jo decided. Plus, there was a more pressing matter—Pan. If Jo was alive, her other half was too, somewhere, and who knew
what havoc she was currently unleashing on an unsuspecting world.
“I won’t tell anyone what you’re doing,” Jo vowed. “No anonymous tips. No turning you in. If you get caught down the line due to your own stupidity, that’ll be on you. But do this for me, and I walk out the door—out of your life forever. You get my silence, and the chance to close the file that’s been bugging you.
“A fair deal? Right?”
Charlie studied her. Jo wondered what he was looking for—if he was trying to use his sensors to pick up perspiration, or changes in heartbeat, or any other physiological clues that she was lying. That was, if Jo could even give off those signals in her current state. Whatever mental test he was putting her through, she must have passed, because Charlie turned back to the computer.
“You want to go by rail, or by air?”
Jo took it to be a sign that their deal now stood. “By air. It should be faster, right?”
“Without doubt . . . I just didn’t know if you wanted to be on dragonback for forty minutes.”
Jo stopped all movement. “Say that again?”
“What?”
“The last bit.”
“Forty minutes?”
“The other last bit.”
“Dragonback?”
Oh, yes. She’d have a lot to learn about this new world.
29. Far From Over
Two hours later, nearly all of one spent on one of the most thrilling and terrifying flights of her life, Jo was standing in front of a large, glass skyscraper, legs like jelly and heart threatening to beat its way out of her chest. She told herself it was leftover adrenaline from her first time flying dragonback, but she knew it was more than that.
It was fear. Fear of the unknown, of all the differences this world could hold over her head. Fear of what she might find when and if she managed to reach Snow, of what Pan have been doing all this time.
Fear of the man on the other side of these glass walls, who she hoped would have all the answers.
Wayne and she had left on some awkward terms, if he even remembered her at all. What if she’d come all this way only to be laughed at and sent packing? Or worse, what if he remembered her and refused to help, wiping his hands of their situation, of her, altogether.