—and instead he saw Jon asleep in a corner, his feet propped up on a stool and a thin hospital gown thrown across his shoulders like a blanket. An array of colors caught Aiden’s attention and he looked up. A television. The nightly news.
Aiden saw a picture of Jin and a picture of him. He read the words across the bottom of the screen. His face cracked, and his bottom lip trembled before he turned his head into his pillow. He wanted to go back to sleep, to shut up the voice whispering in the back of his head.
She’s gone.
Chapter Nine
Office of Chief Medical Examiner
October 7; 4:22 a.m.
Parker grabbed the hem of a shroud and pulled it back, grimacing at the sight. It wasn’t as bad as it’d been when the ambulance delivered her here. That had been grisly—the splatters of blood, bone, tissue—fragments that, in this instance, would never be whole again. Whatever had been useful to the forensic team had been taken, bagged, and collected as evidence. Much of that wasn't needed. Everyone with a brain knew why Jin wasn't with them anymore or, moreover, who was the cause of it. Still, there was no justice that came along with that knowledge.
She looks so cold.
Parker glanced at the gunshot wound to her head, noticing it had been cleaned. The stitching across her chest was dark and macabre, painful looking, yet neatly and precisely done. Her face was washed and her hair was pulled back from her face. She was pale, a shadow of her former shelf. An empty vessel.
He briefly glanced up at the three others with him, here in secret. Everything they did nowadays felt like a secret. The four of them looked down at the cold slab between them. She looked a normal corpse except for one thing—the golden inscription etched across her forehead that only they could see.
“Vita ante acta. A life done before. Fitting. Weird, but fitting.”
“Seff! Have a little compassion! A little respect!” Bon Baji admonished.
“Well, it is weird,” Seff answered back.
“I know it’s weird,” Baji whispered, smacking him on the arm. “That doesn’t mean that you can just…” She rubbed her forehead and sighed. “Okay, so technically she’s dead—again—so someone say a prayer…or something.”
“Humans pray, Baji, we watch,” Parker replied. He ran his thumb across the corpse’s cheek. “Do you think they can handle it? This is twice.”
Baji nodded. “I have faith. I’ve always had faith in them.”
“So much faith, and yet we’ve decided to keep our reasons from them?” Seff asked.
“Unnecessary details they won’t need right now. The only reason they have gained so much knowledge thus far is because Pythia Phi couldn’t keep her girls quiet about Tambour’s reading. For now, all they need from us is permission to do their job,” Ahn said simply.
“They are going to be furious,” Parker said.
Ahn nodded, sadly. “They will be, and we are to blame. She shouldn’t have died in the first place. Not then and definitely not now.”
Baji pinched the bridge of her nose. “This event is so uncommon…”
“Uncommon.” Ahn snorted. “Do you know how adorable you are when you’re downplaying our predicaments?”
“And,” Baji continued, pinning him with her stare, “she’s a rare artifact that has to be kept safe…”
“An artifact,” Ahn said, disbelievingly.
“Ahn, Baji, please,” Parker pleaded. If they started arguing, the four of them would never get out of there unnoticed. The last thing they needed was Key, Tahir, or Rooke to sense them.
“My point is,” Baji said, “nobody here knows what this ordeal means, and there has been no message from The Glory Beyond to help us. Nothing is more important than this.”
“Then why,” Seff asked, “is Fox being allowed to handle this? Why not deploy Seraphim?”
“Fox is a well-oiled machine. Seraphim haven’t deployed since the War.” Baji turned to Seff. “All you need is faith the size of a mustard seed. They can do it.”
“They can. Tell Key to leave the boyfriend his memories,” Parker said. “If we’re going to have faith in them, we should give them as much help as we’re allowed. This,” he said as he looked down at Jin’s corpse, “can’t happen again.”
Chapter Ten
“Eat, Aiden,” Jon said gruffly.
They were sitting in a hotel room, stuffy and fancy, with overpriced room service. Jon slid a box of cheap Chinese takeout toward Aiden, using the room service menu as a placemat.
Aiden’s lip curled and he pushed the box away. “I’m not hungry.” His mouth was heavy with the taste of sleep, his body felt like it hadn’t been used in years, and each muscle complained when he moved. Jon was ignorant of all of that, pulling the box back across the table and grabbing a fork.
Jon was a good friend. He hadn’t left Aiden's side since he’d got the call about Jin’s murder. He was on the first flight to New York, was the first in the hospital room and the last to leave. He’d even taken Aiden’s phone calls when Jin’s parents would try to reach him. He’d been the one to drag him from Jin’s funeral when his sobs-turned-screams echoed out over the cemetery the moment the dirt hit the top of her coffin. Jon had done everything short of bathing him or force-feeding him. Aiden took that back. He watched, irked, as Jon twirled the noodles around the fork and maneuvered it toward his mouth as if Aiden were some invalid.
He pushed the fork away. He could feed himself. He just didn’t want to eat.
Jon sighed and lowered the fork. “Mr. Amaris called. He wanted to know if you’d been outside today. Have you?”
Aiden laughed because Jon knew the answer to that. “What’s out there?” He pushed back from the table and meandered to the couch, lying down and burrowing deeper into the cushions. He snatched the scratchy hotel throw from the back of the chair and jerked it over his head. “There’s nothing out there.”
“Christ! There’s…there’s fresh air outside. There’s life! You have to…” Jon bit off his words as Aiden waved him off, and followed him to the couch, box of food in hand. He hovered over Aiden for a moment before he set down the food container and reached over to open the blinds.
“You have to find a way to start living again. You’ve been on hold since you met Jin. Everything has been about her. Everything.” Jon yanked the throw from over his best friend's head. “I know this hurts, but you still have a life to live.”
“You have to feel alive to live.” Aiden blinked, and suddenly, he was mad at everything—Jon’s voice, the spring in the couch poking him in the back, the smell of food that was making him nauseous, the rays of sunlight slapping him across the face. “And close those fucking blinds.”
“You want to do this? Wallow?” Jon crossed his arms over his chest. “Fine. I understand, I do. I’ve never lost anyone like this, so what do I know? But at the risk of sounding like a pot boiler, I have to say she wouldn’t want this.”
Aiden laughed again. “You met her—what, like three times?—and now you’re a scholar on how she feels?” Aiden cut himself off with a catch in his throat. “How she would have felt?”
Jon opened his mouth but Aiden cut him off. “I feel like I’m dying, Jon, okay? I am dying and I can’t escape it. It’s everywhere and you’re right, you don’t know how this feels. So you can’t tell me how not to be sad. You don’t get to tell me to move on. You can’t police that and fuck you for trying!”
“Aiden, dude. I didn’t mean—”
“Get out of my face!” Aiden lunged for the cardboard box full of his untouched dinner and flung it. The box smashed against the wall behind Jon, and a heap of wet, soggy noodles landed on him.
Jon huffed, wiping the liquid off his face. “Fine.” The door to Jon's suite slammed closed.
Chapter Eleven
Caeli Central
5th floor, Causatum Room, Tower Barracks
“Be merciful and turn that crap off.”
Kithlish glanced up from his book with a look of distaste befo
re narrowing his olive-green eyes at the open pages, trying to remember his place before laying it down against his chest. He reached over to the coffee table, his tan hand maneuvering around the cup of steaming tea for the remote to the record player. The crisp wool of his dark-gray uniform stood out against the white fabric of the chaise. Regulation uniform wasn’t the highlight of his work day, but Key had to admit he looked good in it. “And why, may I ask, am I turning this off?”
“That’s a really stupid question,” Tahir said, tossing a long, copper brown braid over her shoulder. When Key continued to glare blankly, Tahir huffed, and rolled her gray eyes at him. “You’re turning it off because I can’t concentrate and I can’t hear, and I need to concentrate and I need to hear.” Tahir lowered her head back to her work.
If Key hadn’t paid a small ransom for this tea, he’d throw it at her. But if he got Tahir’s hair or her suede boots wet, she’d kill him. If he had to name the hardest-working member on their team, it was her. Her family were laborers in the old days, and even as they moved up in society, that sense of diligence never wavered. He’d never tell her that, however.
Tahir squinted at the blueprints laid across a high, heavy table and pushed the sleeves of her uniform up her arms. The lacquered surface was scarred from frequent use and it wobbled sometimes, but Tahir had stuffed an old shoe under one of the legs, so it didn’t wobble…as much.
Tahir raised her head to gaze at the giant monitors mounted on three of the four walls, all of them connected wirelessly to her computer. Black and white dots raced soundlessly over all three screens, and she tapped the CTRL key like she was possessed, as if pounding it would give her the control she wanted.
It didn’t. The video feed was gone, and they’d been reduced to static exactly fifty-four seconds ago. The only sounds coming from the speakers were random squeals of feedback and barely audible scratches. Tahir scowled at the speakers before turning to the frequency tuner.
“He’s not going to fail,” Tahir muttered as her sun-kissed fingers worked, turning the dial back and forth.
Key scoffed. “You sure? Because I've never seen such copious levels of failure before to be quite honest.”
A single thin, manicured brow arched up. “Yeah, because saving the life of a loved one is such an easy ordeal. Because you've done it so many times before.” Tahir raised a finger to her lip in thought. “Oh, wait, you've never done it.”
“If you don't shut your mouth, I'll send you to a place where there'll be no one to save you either,” Key bit out as he reclined against the pristine white chaise. He grabbed his tea and took a sip. “Your affection for her is bit lofty, don't you think?”
“There is nothing wrong with caring, Key.” Tahir tapped the keyboard again. “You should try it once or twice or ever.”
Key appraised the young woman with a tilt of his head, surprising himself momentarily when long brown hair didn’t cascade down over his shoulder. He hadn’t gotten used to his new haircut and in times like these he missed his long hair. “I care about you and Rooke.”
“You’re supposed to care about us. But there is nothing wrong with caring about these people.”
With a curled lip, Key turned back to his book and decided to ignore Tahir.
Why? Because he did care, and Tahir knew that, his attitude notwithstanding.
They had to deal with facts. The last sounds that came from the speakers were a single shot followed by a round of gunfire before the static took over. They had no clue what was happening on the other side, and a heated sheen of sweat that he’d rather pretend didn’t exist coated Key’s forehead. He had hoped the last pulse event had been a mistake, but he knew it wasn’t. Simply changing a few things as they’d done in past Causatum had not been enough. Still, he couldn’t allow his subordinate to have the last word.
“Rooke is somewhere busy trying to fix this technical disaster, so one of us has to be level-headed, and that apparently isn’t going to be you,” he argued, despite the fact that Tahir was the one hunched over a table in concentration while he lounged.
Tahir rolled her eyes again, giving him her back as she returned to her work, presumably rewinding the live feed they’d recorded—seeing Jin entering the apartment, reaching for the gun, entering the room—before it went dark.
She cursed, slamming a fist on the keyboard. “Of all the godforsaken times to lose the feed and the sound! How are we supposed to do this correctly with no eyes and no ears? Is it too late to get down there?”
“Those outside of the Causatum,” Key lectured, “have the choice of choosing the playing field up until the moment the time line begins, at which point their location is locked and no cross-sectional travelling is allowed. Should anyone break this rule, the flux continuum could be shattered along with everyone in—”
“I know that,” Tahir whined. She turned back to her computer again and delicately tapped the camera-control joystick, likely trying to pick the feed up from another angle—an attempt that had failed previously—when the large mahogany grandfather clock in the corner chimed.
Both of them froze as each chime rang. Tahir’s eyes closed slowly as the hollow metallic notes rang crisply through the air, and Key pushed his tea away from him so he could massage his temples. At the fourth chime, Key cut his eyes toward the brick Writing Wall covering the entire expanse of the far wall.
A holographic apparition of Jin Amaris, draped in a white dress that pooled around her feet, appeared in front of the now blood-red bricks. The sending spoke, their monotone voice filling the chamber. “Jin Amaris. Date. October fourth. Time of death. Eleven forty-two p.m.”
“Damn it!” Tahir yelled, lashing out at everything on top of the desk in a fit of fury, ignoring the loud clang as the items hit the floor. “She’s dead.”
Key sighed. “It was unavoidable at this point. You knew that,” he admonished softly.
“It was not the only outcome. We don’t know what could have happened in that room! It could have been anything. It could have been anything else but this.”
Key frowned and set his tea down. “You're being extraordinarily daft today,” he told his younger associate plainly. He whipped around to point at the Writing Wall. “The chime for the pulse event went off hours ago, the moment Aiden opened that door. There was no other outcome but this one.”
As if to punctuate his statement, the second of the three stones sitting opposite the grandfather clock rattled inside its glass case before it cracked, and then exploded.
Tahir rolled her eyes and threw her hands in the air. “This is ridiculous! How could that even be a possibility? We know the outcome!” She inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, and released it before she turned to her leader. “So what do we do now?”
Before Key could answer, the power in the Causatum room stuttered and shut off, cloaking the chamber in darkness. Key’s lips edged into a soft smile as the monitors came back to life, blanketing them with diffused light. They watched on the screens as a realm outside of their own warped and bent, fast forwarding to the end of the current timeline, and then reversing. The flow of time paused, ebbed, unhinged, and then smashed together. The people in its current drifted with it, becoming one with the flow before being ripped away.
How do you save the life of someone who has already died?
“What do they say? Three times the charm?” Key said intently. “Time for a personal touch.”
Chapter Twelve
It was a dream.
A strange one, because there wasn’t the disassociation of feelings that often came with dreams. This was different. The sensation of being awake was there. But Aiden wasn’t alone. Someone was there who let him know that this couldn’t be anything else but a dream.
Jin sat at the end of a lone bench facing the ocean. A walkway of planked wood led to the shore, with pampas grass and dunes rising high on both sides of it. The sun was halved over the horizon, spreading an orangey haze over the water. The air was warm. Aiden joined her on the benc
h as if this were any normal day. This could be his reality.
Aiden slipped his fingers in between the spaces of hers. “I want you to have this,” he whispered, his warm breath ghosting across the back of her hand as he brought it to his lips for a kiss. He lowered her hand, placing it between them.
Jin looked from the orange glaze coating the sand and sky to where Aiden had set her hand. There was a box—shabby, threadbare, and worn at the corners—set between them on the wooden bench.
“I can tell by the look on your face that you’re about to be melodramatic,” she said dryly, the smirk he loved curving her mouth. “What is this? Wait—don’t tell me. It’s the bullet that your partner took for you that saved your life. No, that can’t be it. Jon would never shut up about it. Maybe it’s an heirloom? One that your mother’s-mother’s-mother’s-mother’s-mother passed down through generations, and she wants you to give it to me? It’s something as antiquated as that, isn’t it?”
Aiden sent her a scathing, pointed look even though his insides were fluttering. “Why can’t you just shut up and take it?”
“Because, honey, that would be too easy.” Aiden pulled a face at the pet name but laughed when Jin smiled up him and batted her eyes. “But no, really,” she asked. “What is this?”
“Opening it is usually the quickest way to find that out,” Aiden said pointedly. He looked down at the box. He knew what was in it—an old gift, given to her for a birthday years ago. She wore it all the time. He wondered why it had shown up here and why he was giving it to her again…but a lot didn’t make sense here. Like her…
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