“I told you my name was Courtney,” I said, a few hours ago for me, eleven years ago for her. Consequences of events that hadn’t yet occurred, Nicole’s story like a figure eight, an infinite loop crossing a central moment: when I was in the brig and told Nicole she’d once known me as Courtney Gimm. Imagine that the forest fire that burned the tree won’t happen for another three hundred years or three thousand, Njoku had said—there had been reverberations of my hours in the brig long before Hyldekrugger had ever brought me to the brig. All my past pain and the sorrow of my childhood rushed over me in waves of sickness. Nicole thought my name was Courtney.
“And when the ship crashed, we left through the woods, along the path of trees,” said Nicole. “All of us. And Karl knew we should stay hidden while he figured out what to do, that we would be wanted for treason, would be put to death if we were ever found, and so I told him—”
“You told him you saw an NCIS agent named Courtney Gimm,” I said as I wept. “Oh, God, no—oh, my God.” It’s my fault, I thought, Hyldekrugger’s killing Courtney, or Mursult’s killing her, or Cobb, they had thought Courtney Gimm was an agent, a mistake in identity, a mistake. My mistake.
It’s my fault she’s dead.
“I told them about you,” said Nicole. “And Karl told Mursult to find Courtney Gimm, to kill her. And he found her, a sixteen-year-old girl—”
“Please,” I said, “please this can’t be. Did he kill her?” I asked, the feeling of loss coring me. “Oh, God, please tell me this isn’t real, this isn’t happening. Did he kill Courtney because of me? Because I used her name? Did he kill her?”
But Nicole said, “No. She was already dead before he found her. So Mursult moved his family into the dead girl’s house—her older brother rented it out. Patty would ask about the dead girl whenever her brother collected rent, trying to track who it was that had been in the brig, thinking Courtney Gimm might show up someday. But it was you.”
Mursult living in Courtney’s house on Cricketwood Court—asking about her because he thought that someday an agent named Courtney Gimm would investigate the mutiny on Libra. I hadn’t caused her death—but even as the wrenching guilt that I’d inadvertently played a role in my best friend’s death drained from me, a colder sorrow gripped me. For a moment it had seemed that all of existence had revealed its shape, a purpose of cruelty, a terrible irony that the contours of a childhood death that defined me seemed to fit into grander patterns hidden until now. For a moment, when I thought that my use of her name had killed Courtney, it seemed that on some depth all tragedies and ecstasies were part of a great design that my limited mind couldn’t scope, a looping scheme where all actions and their consequences are tallied. For a moment Courtney’s death had made horrifying sense, had an identifiable cause, a reason. But the pieces slipped apart. There was no center, no reason. Courtney’s death was random, banal viciousness inflicted by one organism upon another. There is no design. The universe isn’t kind or cruel. The universe is vast and indifferent to our desires.
“And at my apartment all these years later, you showed up with your badge and introduced yourself as Shannon Moss, NCIS,” said Nicole. “You said that you had traveled to a future and that in twenty years we met for the first time at a place called the May’rz Inn. You said that we were once very close, that we were best friends. You told me things about myself, about my life—”
“I never told you anything,” I said. “This never happened.”
“And so I agreed to show you the Vardogger, the thin space, but you told me that I needed to run. You told me to disappear to save myself, before I could be arrested by the FBI or before Hyldekrugger would find me and kill me. You told me that you were going to come here, to the Vardogger, that you would come here soon, and so I ran, but I remembered.”
“You remembered,” I said. “You remembered speaking with me here in the prison when you were a young girl, you remembered meeting me during the mutiny, a woman in the cell—Courtney Gimm, eleven years ago,” I said. “That was eleven years ago for you. I told you my name was Courtney Gimm.”
“I want to exchange the kindness you showed me, Shannon,” said Nicole. “You told me to run, to save myself because of our friendship. You didn’t arrest me, you warned me. And so I want to save you, too. Who knows? Maybe in twenty years you’ll show up in a bar one night and offer to buy me a drink.”
“But that wasn’t me,” I said. “That was some other . . . I was never there in your apartment, with Nestor. I never had a chance to tell you to run. That wasn’t me, Nicole. That was an echo of me, someone else.”
“Different paths along the Vardogger trees,” said Nicole. “Shannon, we’re all echoes here.”
I felt the air leave my lungs and heard what sounded like a swell of sighs. I seemed to glimpse for a moment every iteration of Shannon Moss and Nicole Onyongo flowering outward, growing together and growing apart, infinite interactions between the two of us.
“You probably felt the B-L drive misfire,” said Nicole. “Whenever the drive misfires, it creates another path of those trees, another universe. We have to be off this ship before it misfires again—otherwise we’ll be here forever, having this conversation forever. We have to go.”
“What do I do?” I asked.
“Jump.”
Nicole grabbed the handle of the airlock and pulled inward, opening the portal in a sucking rush. I tried to find purchase, anywhere to grip, but my fingers slipped and I held my breath and stepped into the stars, a suicidal act of free fall into outer space. Daylight flashed, and I landed on the gangway stairs, the winter cold piercing me like spears of ice, the inferno in the trees ripping at the sky around me. Wind gusted me down the first few steps before I regained myself and halted my fall. Nicole stepped out behind me, helped me crawl down the last stairs into the snow. Hyldekrugger had taken my prosthesis, so I couldn’t stand.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll distract whoever is keeping watch. Go.”
Nicole ran from me, and I saw her figure obscured by the blowing smoke and snow. She will die. The sentinels will kill her. I wanted to run but could only crawl, scrambling, two hands and one leg, pulling myself forward, heaving myself toward the Vardogger trees, the path that had brought me here. Ice cut into my palms, my elbows, burned my skin. Snowflakes and flakes of ash, the orchard flashed in my mind, of me running through the lines of trees and the swirl of petals, and just like in the orchard I heard a death scream: the cry of a woman’s suffering carried over the rush of fire and wind.
They will come after you, Nicole had said, and so I kept pushing, crawling along the path of identical fires in identical trees, and only when my arms collapsed did I stop to catch my breath. I hadn’t gotten very far, but already the intense cold burrowed deep into my exhaustion, a serene pull toward sleep, as if I could lean back and let the snow bury me here. My arms shook, I could no longer feel my fingers, and my chest was soaked through and my skin was slick with ice. My hair and eyelashes were brittle with ice, my toes had lost all feeling.
Someone else would quit.
So I crawled, a bear crawl, hands and knee, snorting out blood and mucus, wheezing, but I screamed out, “Someone else would quit!” and gutted through with an animal savagery against my own body, feeling the searing frost breaking me apart, the deep freeze in my breath and my core, my heart, thinking, I’ll reach warmth if I can make it across. I reached the fallen tree that forded the river. I looked back and saw that a man followed me, running along the Vardogger path, still distant but swiftly approaching. When I was halfway across the fallen log, the winter melted around me into a warm spring, and I made my way into the clearing, the warmer air like a scalding bath, thinking, Hide. You can only hide from him, you can’t fight him. Hide, hide.
I crossed the clearing to the tree line and crawled beneath one of the evergreens there, curling myself around a trunk. I watched across the clearing to the fallen Vardogger tree, the bridge, waiting for the man to appear out of the air, m
y body shaking, still frozen, my skin like it had been boiled, crimson and purple. The ice that had accumulated in my hair had begun to melt, dripping over my skin in icy rushes, and I thought I should keep going, that I should run, but was unable to move. Run, run from here—
That’s when I saw her, crossing the river: I saw an echo of Shannon Moss rise from the water, climb onto the near bank. She had crossed the river here, as Marian’s echo had done. Her hair was long, much longer than I had ever kept mine, and she paused by the shore to squeeze water from it. Run! I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t speak, my voice gone, jaw chattering. She was dressed in dark fatigues, a tank top. She wore her prosthesis, an advanced mechanized limb, unaffected by water. I wondered who she was. She was Shannon Moss, she was me, but she was an echo of me, an echo of an echo. She would have been in the woods, tracking Hyldekrugger, and she would have become hopelessly lost. She would have recognized the pines, the clearing, the river. She would see me here, at the tree line. If she looked this way, she would see me, and she would think of the woman in the orange space suit. The woman in the orange space suit had been here, where I am now.
“Run!” I managed to yell. “He’s coming!”
She turned toward my voice, she saw me. Our eyes met.
“Run,” I said, but it was too late.
Cobb appeared over the bridge. He shrugged off his fur wraps, caught sight of Moss standing in the clearing. She didn’t have her holster, didn’t have her sidearm, only a black leather sheath she wore on the thigh of her residual limb, above her prosthetic leg. She pulled the knife, a twelve-inch hunter’s knife, readying to fight. Cobb had a rifle, leveled it right at her.
“Come on—fight me,” she said. “Fight me—”
Cobb threw down his weapon, raised his fists, his face twisted with a smirk—but Moss was pure reaction. She charged him, catlike, her prosthesis mimicking natural movement. Cobb took a step backward as Moss jumped at him, slicing with her knife but missing. She punched him with her left, caught his chin, followed with her elbow. She slashed with her knife for his eyes, but Cobb pushed her away as easily as if she were nothing. He was wary of the knife but rounded on her, threw a punch, and caught Moss in the side of her head, stunning her. Cobb threw a second punch, connected. Moss’s body went limp, she fell forward, a knockout blow. Nausea swept through me at what I was witnessing. Cobb knelt over her, pinning her shoulders with his knees, and rained punches down on her. They were only a few feet away from me. I could see every punch sink deep into her, I could hear his blows landing, knuckles mashing meat. I could hear Shannon moaning, a crying moan. I heard breaking bones and saw Cobb’s fists covered in Shannon’s blood when he finally stood from her and spit at her.
“Fuck!” he said, screaming down at her. “Fuck you! You’re dead! You’re dead now!”
I could see her, could see her face crushed, could see that one eye had slipped the socket and hung to the side of her face. I heard her breathing, that terrible sucking moaning. She was alive, my God, she was still alive, but I stayed there, hidden, and watched as Cobb picked up his rifle, aimed, and fired. A spray of pink mist.
Tears streamed from my eyes. I was shaking. I saw myself die, but I prayed, Don’t look this way, don’t look this way, as Cobb circled the corpse, but he wandered away to sit on the riverbank.
Now.
He was watching the river, catching his breath. I could see his shoulders heaving. Were there others coming? How many were on their way?
Now, run—
I rolled from beneath the tree, crawled quietly, as quietly as I could, treading the carpet of needles, my body trembling as I followed the Vardogger trees, but soon the forest changed around me. I found the dry creek bed and followed it to the clearing where Nestor had killed Vivian, but the clearing was empty now.
I crawled from the clearing, sliding down the access route, and collapsed on the side of the forest road. A night passed before a forest ranger’s SUV pulled beside me. The driver helped me into the backseat, calling on his radio for help. I remember an ambulance, I remember being delivered to the gates of Oceana. A Navy surgeon did his best to realign my nose, but Cobb had eviscerated the bones when he struck me at the Vardogger tree, had damaged the cartilage. My nose would look like malformed putty without extensive plastic surgery. A dental surgeon removed the shards of my broken teeth, fearing further injury or infection, and left a gap where my left front tooth should have been, a larger gap at my left bicuspid. I looked at myself in the mirror following the procedures but didn’t recognize the woman there.
PART FIVE
1997
Where are the snows of yesteryear?
—FRANÇOIS VILLON, “Ballad of Women of Times Past”
ONE
An echo, insubstantial.
A woman in orange, a woman from the river, a woman on the cross. NSC engineers lifted Moss from the cockpit when she landed at Apollo Soucek, a figment of a dream intruding on the real. Intravenous fluids, medication.
They’re keeping me alive.
O’Connor arrived at her bedside, startled by her disfigurement. “They told me you suffered injuries commensurate with car-crash victims,” he said, eyeing her marred nose and gapped teeth, an eyelid droop that might not ever heal. He touched her face the way a father might touch a broken daughter’s. “Shannon, I’m so sorry,” he said. “For everything that’s happened, I’m sorry.”
“We’ve done this before,” she said, remembering O’Connor at a different bedside of hers, apologizing for her blackened toes and fetid gangrenous shin—I’m an echo—but she couldn’t bring herself to admit this to him, not yet. She feared O’Connor’s reaction. She didn’t want his pity, his regrets, and she feared that his care and friendship would drain away if he knew she was a phantom of an IFT, a revenant from an existence that had blinked away when she was taken from the cross. I’m not real, she wanted to say, but she feared he would sigh at the revelation, disappointed in her, like a man giving up on an aimless child. She feared he would leave her here in this hospital, alone.
“I found them,” she said. “I found Libra.”
“Tell me.”
The path of trees, the Terminus winter, she remembered the shipwreck sputtering blue flame, but in the half-forgotten way she might have recalled a reverie. You will see things your mind will not understand. Already her mind rejected what she had seen. They have my leg somewhere, she thought, remembering V-R17, dissected, sealed, stored.
“Let me start with what I’m certain of,” she said. “The Terminus isn’t fate, it’s not certainty—I think the chances of the Terminus reaching terra firma are so great that it feels like a certainty.” I came from a future without a Terminus. “But it’s not, it’s not fate.”
“Explain,” said O’Connor.
“Hyldekrugger believes that NSC will bring the Terminus to terra firma, that there are certain events that will lead this to happen. I’ve heard him refer to these events as a ‘chain,’ a chain of information that will allow Naval Space Command to rediscover the planet that Libra had encountered. NSC will bring the Terminus home.”
“That can’t be right, Shannon.”
“All the murder, the attacks they’re planning, the chemical weapons?” she said. “They’re trying to break the chain, to keep NSC from bringing the Terminus to terra firma. They’re trying to weaken our resolve to sail Deep Waters. NSC causes the cataclysm, NSC brings the Terminus.”
“You can’t listen to that man’s poison,” said O’Connor.
“I think Patrick Mursult was preparing to sell the location of Esperance to the Navy, to sell where the QTNs came from, or sell the location of Libra,” said Moss. “He wanted protection because he knew Hyldekrugger would kill him, he wanted a new identity. There’s a lawyer named Carla Durr, Mursult’s lawyer.”
Doubt shuddered through her. Carla Durr had to die, Dr. Peter Driscoll had to die. According to Hyldekrugger everyone had to die, all the physicists at the Naval Research Lab who wou
ld one day form Phasal Systems and all the sailors of Deep Waters, brave boys with bodies polluted by QTNs, everyone . . .
I protect the innocent.
“What about the lawyer?” asked O’Connor.
“She’s innocent,” said Moss, and seemed to feel the weight of the future avalanche into the present. Whether she held her peace and let the lawyer die or spoke now to save the lawyer’s life, every choice seemed like the wrong choice, the last meaningless moves of an endgame. A great weariness swept over her, and she wanted to hide herself, retreat beneath her covers as a child might hide from imagined fears. A disquiet worked through her thoughts; she wondered what would happen if she saved the lawyer’s life. Would she hasten NSC’s discovering Esperance? The lawyer would remain alive, would sell Mursult’s information. No, no, she thought, that’s Hyldekrugger’s way of thinking, but she felt bound. Protect the innocent. “Carla Durr, the lawyer,” she said. “Patrick Mursult had been meeting with her, and she wants to parlay his secrets into protection, money. But she doesn’t understand the consequences of what she’s involved in. Hyldekrugger, or one of his followers, will kill her on March twenty-fourth in the Tysons Corner mall food court because she’s met with Mursult. They think of her as part of the chain. The gunman will use an echoed firearm, a Beretta M9 probably pulled from a dead echo of a Libra sailor, identical to the guns we recovered from the Blackwater Lodge and from the remains of Torgersen’s house.”
“The twenty-fourth is three days from now.”
“I want to request a pre-crime warrant,” said Moss. “We can save this woman’s life.”
“We can justify pre-crime,” said O’Connor, “to save her life. I’ll write up the paperwork. We’ll be able to hold her for possession of classified intelligence on the suspicion that Mursult talked to her about Deep Waters or Libra. We can question her, find out what Mursult was preparing to sell. That should protect her past the twenty-fourth. I’ll call the Fairfax County Police, ask them to apprehend her for us. If they can’t find her, we’ll set up a direct intervention at Tysons Corner. Carla Durr, we’ll find her. Now, tell me about Libra. Do you know where she is?”
The Gone World Page 31