by Liana Brooks
Gant offered him a grim smile. That was not going to be an easy neck to snap. “And you are?”
“Donovan.”
“Should that mean something to me?”
“Right now, it won’t mean a damn thing. A year from now, I’ll be the difference between your life of ease and your life behind bars.”
Gant raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening, and when I say that, I mean I’m listening for exactly three minutes because the police will be here in five.”
“Did you call them?”
“No, but my landlord is picky.”
“He’s dead.” Donovan’s grin widened. “We’re the only two people still breathing in this complex.”
“You don’t do subtle very well.”
“You don’t do smart very well.” Donovan chuckled. “How long did you think you’d be able to keep the Wilhite thing going? Another week? Two at the most?”
“No one even knows Wilhite’s the body they found in the parking lot. I made sure of that.”
“They did an autopsy.”
“Let them. The dental records were switched months before I left.”
“But you forgot his bum knee,” Donovan said. “He had it replaced three years ago after he ran into a particularly nasty bank crew. My crew. There’s a serial number in him, and his friends reported him missing.”
“Wilhite didn’t have friends.”
“He had more than you, but I’m about to change that.”
“Are you now?”
“What if I told you I could take you to a place where the cops would never find you? All your crimes vanish.”
“You have the shallow grave already dug?” Gant smirked. This was going to be a fun fight.
“Better than that,” Donovan said. “Ever heard of the Timeyst Machine?”
“I’ve seen the ads. ‘Visit history! See your own birth!’ ” Gant shrugged. “It’s a toy for the rich and stupid.”
“It’s also an escape route. A one-way ticket to the day before you committed the crimes.”
“Are you saying I should stop myself?”
“I’m saying you should go back and skip town before the cops ever have you on their radar. You can leave the country before anything happens. Have a new identity before the cops find your fingerprint. It’s foolproof.”
“And you need me because?”
“It’s a two-man job. My crew’s in the clink. I could break them out, but then I realized you were loose. You know security. You’re not afraid to get dirty. You can think faster than most cops. You can say no, but you’ll regret it.”
“Will I now?”
Donovan looked at the TV, where Detective Rose’s muted mouth was still flapping open as she lied to reporters. “You think she’ll let you go?”
“She doesn’t know I’m out.”
“She knows. She’s hunting you. She’s going to find you.”
“Unless I go with you?”
“That’s about the shape of it.” Donovan’s smile returned. “One little heist. One little trip back in time. You go your way. I go mine. No one ever finds us again.
“You’ll be the first criminal to ever escape Detective Rose.”
CHAPTER 6
We do not know what effect traveling through time has on the human body, let alone the human soul.
~ activist Dr. Annie Lowell speaking at the Conference for Time Theories I3- 2071
Wednesday March 19, 2070
Florida District 8
Commonwealth of North America
Iteration 2
Some people kept statues of the Madonna in their house. Little altars to the saints who cared for the small people. Ivy didn’t pray to any god. Her altar was built to a living hero, living, but no less distant than the gods.
She stopped in her morning routine to look at the poster of her hero. It was the eyes that always got her. The dark eyes filled with fear, sorrow, and a newborn, burning rage, like the look of a child who finally reaches for their abuser’s hand to stop the next blow.
Ivy’d seen the look a few times in the Shadow House before the city took her. The look of flowering hatred as the children there realized what their names meant. That the name Shadow was a death sentence for all but the lucky few.
Until the day the real Jenna Mills died, that had been her future. One day, the workers in white coats would come take her away from her group to a small room where her last sight would be a cold needle plunging into her arm. Her organs, genetically identical to those of Jenna Mills, would be harvested to repair the real Jenna Mills. If she was lucky, she’d only wake up with a limb missing. Most shadows never woke up at all.
Then the real Jenna Mills died.
The coroner said it was instantaneous. The driver of the car—the reports never said who had been driving—fell asleep at the wheel, and the whole family was killed. Police came to the Shadow House. She was sold to the city as a drone under the only name she’d ever known: Jenna’s Shadow.
Now she was legally Ivy Clemens, police officer. She stopped to check her uniform in the mirror, brushing her fingers along the rough embroidery of her chosen name. And then, like the ritual it was, she looked back at the woman on the poster.
Agent Samantha L. Rose, the first clone to ever hold a bureau rank. Her brief speech on humanity had won the hearts of the clone population, maybe even swayed the hearts of the uterus-born idiots who still thought slavery was a good idea.
“I am not a thing. I am not your possession. I am a human being,” Agent Rose had said when accosted by reporters at the Atlanta airport last summer.
Ivy had watched the speech live. When the poster with Agent Rose’s stern visage and the words I AM NOT YOUR POSSESSION emblazoned went on sale, she bought it. The very first piece of art for her tiny apartment that was now, finally, legally hers.
Her phone buzzed. “Officer Clemens.”
“This is Dispatch Operator Bogumil. We have a report of a dead body floating in the water south of Twenty-seventh Avenue Park.”
“Great, why aren’t you calling a patrol car?”
“I did, they told me to have a drone take care of it. A drunk swimming into a riptide is a waste of an officer’s time. That’s a direct quote.”
Taking a deep breath, she looked at the angry-eyed poster. What would Agent Rose do? Silly question. Agent Rose would handle it. Agent Rose could handle anything.
Sam sat at her desk glaring at the dates on Henry’s request forms that Dr. Morr had sent over from the lab. Something about them was troubling her, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. They seemed . . . out of order almost.
Raw metal requested in late January, was that for the machine or for another project? The radio parts the second week of February . . . And then the answer formed like the shape of a rabbit coalescing in the clouds overhead. Tuesday, February 18, Dr. Troom went from ordering everything through the standard channels to applying for rush deliveries. Six extra forms to change the delivery date of the laser diode by a week. March 3, he’d paid triple the standard rates to have special silver and gold wires shipped from San Martin de Bolaños overnight.
Why was the original delivery date of March 26 not enough? A few weeks was nothing.
No, that wasn’t quite right. A few weeks should have meant nothing. Unless Dr. Henry Troom needed his machine working before a certain date because something significant was going to happen. She stared at the large calendar hanging where a window would have been in a building with a more open design.
She shook from the memory of a purple light. The memory of a room that smelled both sterile and cruelly alien assaulted her.
The other iteration. He comes to my lab. He is stealing my work. Changing my formulas.
Agent Rose! Yes. Yes, of course, the paladin rushing to the rescue. It makes perfe
ct sense.
The doctor, the soldier, the paladin, all the local einselected nodes near the machine have been deactivated.
I feel confident that we have reduced this iteration to yet another bad dream.
A gnarled brown hand gripped her shoulder, pulling her into the purple light. Cold air bit at her cheeks as her mirror image pulled a gun.
Sam tore herself away from the memory. From the hallucination. It was a stress-induced dream caused by an overdose of the drug Senior Agent Marrins had administered when he kidnapped her. Dr. Emir was dead, shot through the throat behind his laboratory by Agent Marrins. He hadn’t come to rescue her from the small storage room.
The bureau therapist had reviewed it very carefully with her.
Sam escaped by herself. Picking the locks on the manacles chaining her to the wall, she’d kicked the door down and run for safety, only stopping because Henry Troom, then an intern at the lab, was captured.
She’d done the right thing, going back to save Henry, but the episode with Dr. Emir was a dream. Something conjured up by her subconscious to protect her from reality.
It didn’t matter how many times she repeated the mantra, nothing made it real.
The memory of that other iteration was burned into her mind like a brand. Haunting her. Torturing her with a possibility she couldn’t confirm.
Unless Henry had rebuilt the machine.
Grimacing, she checked the address of the shipments again and dialed a number from memory.
“Sammie!” Bri answered on the third ring. “Long time no contact, chica! What’s up?”
“Not much, whatcha doing this week?”
“Aerial yoga instructor training and a half marathon on Saturday. You?”
“The usual: beach runs, weight lifting, and tracking down sociopaths. Want to do me a favor?”
“Always,” Bri said cheerfully.
Sam smiled. “You remember that little self-storage place on the edge of town?”
“The one with the green roofs? Yeah, what about it?”
“My junior agent has been trying to reach someone at their office all morning, but no joy. Could you stop by there sometime this week and see if one of their boxes is still being paid for? I’ll send you the number.”
“Am I being recruited as a minion?” Bri asked suspiciously.
“Yes.”
She laughed. “Sure; I can’t make it today, but I can get there later this week. No rush, right?”
“No rush. It’s a loose end. Probably nothing.” Sam sighed and poked her pen at the pile of papers.
“You okay?” Bri asked.
Sam shook herself back to reality. “Yup. Never better.”
“You are such a liar.”
“Nah, I’m fine. Really. I’ll call you this weekend and fill you in.”
“I worry about you, Sammie. You need to be calling me more for sanity checks.”
Sam smiled. “You’re the best thing for me. Down-to-earth and always there.”
“Hmmm.” Bri didn’t sound convinced. “But what are you going to do if I’m not here?”
“It’s never going to happen,” Sam said. “You’d give up oxygen before you gave up your phone.”
Bri laughed again, a happy, carefree sound that was as alien to Sam as peaceful slumber or loving parents. As much as she’d hated Alabama, she missed having a friend like Bri nearby.
There was a knock at her office door. “Agent Rose?”
“I’ve got to get back to work,” Sam said with a sigh. “Tell everybody I say hi, and I’ll send them some more seashells after our next big storm.”
“Love ya, Sam,” Bri said. “Take care of yourself.”
“Will do.” Sam hung up and dropped the phone on its charger. “Come in, Edwin.”
He had to duck to get through the door. “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but there’s an Officer Clemens here about a dead body.”
“Is she the one who notified Dr. Troom’s next of kin?” Henry hadn’t updated his contact information when his parents moved, and the police were having trouble tracking them down.
“No, ma’am—she’s here about a different body.”
Sam raised her eyebrows. “Another body? Our quiet little district is getting all kinds of wild and crazy. I’ll be there in a moment.”
Agent Edwin nodded and returned to the waiting area. Sam took a deep breath to compose herself, pushing the memories of the last summer away. Here and now was what mattered. Emir was dead and buried. Nothing she did would change that. She couldn’t be allowed to change that. Even if the temptation and means were there, tampering with history was a crime, at least in her mind. Now all she had to do was convince the rest of the world she was right.
She slipped her shoes back on under the desk and went out to the lobby.
Edwin sat behind his oversized desk that almost met the proportions of his larger frame. In the metal-and-faded-fabric chair across from him, a thin woman with razor-thin nose and strawberry blonde hair tightly braided like a whip sat waiting.
“Officer Clemens?” Sam smiled.
“Senior Agent Rose, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Clemens said as she stood up.
“Is it? I didn’t realize I had any fans at the police department.” She’d yet to make any real allies over there.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Red flags went up. The little officer was buttering her up for something. “There aren’t many people who could honestly say that.”
“Most people don’t have my background, ma’am.”
A strange statement, but not one Sam felt like chasing to the ground just yet. She tucked it away for later examination. “Agent Edwin says you have a corpse for us?”
“Yes, ma’am, a man washed up on the shore with the tide this morning. He’s late teens or early twenties and doesn’t match any missing persons we’re aware of. I had the EMT drop him at the morgue and came to report to you myself.”
“Great.” Of all the miles of shoreline in all the world, this drunk washed up on hers. “Good thing we have an ME on staff this week. Can you fill me in on the details as we walk to the morgue, or is the chief expecting you back before lunch?”
“I’m free, ma’am.”
“Then let’s walk.” Sam led the way down to the morgue, Officer Clemens nipping at her heels and practically vibrating with suppressed enthusiasm. “First DOA case, Officer?”
“Yes, ma’am. My first real case ever, actually.”
Sam glanced at the freckled woman out of the corner of her eye. “And they sent you alone?”
“I’ve served in the New Smyrna Police Department for ten years, but they were never my cases.” Clemens lifted her chin. “I’m a clone.”
She jerked her gaze toward the doors ahead. Bloody, bloody clones. It wasn’t clones that were the issue, really. She supported the Caye Law—which said clones were not to be enslaved—and accepted that clones were human beings. But after being accused of being a clone last summer, and facing the possibility of execution for impersonating an officer of the law, she’d been skittish around them. The Caye Law hadn’t granted clones equal rights to natural-born humans. They still couldn’t hold elected offices or obtain a gun permit of any kind, and there was a strong anticlone coalition running the government right now. Her career wasn’t stable enough to be seen sympathizing with clones.
“That’s why I wanted to meet you,” Clemens continued in a tone of hero worship, unaware of Sam’s thoughts. “You’re the only clone in the bureau.”
What the heck? Did Clemens hate her? “I’m not a clone.” Sam was amazed she managed to keep her voice calm. What this young woman was claiming—even as hearsay—could be the end of her. The bureau probably wouldn’t hang her, not after they’d made her the sorta hero of last summer’s debacle, but th
e rumor alone could kill her—literally. She’d find the other districts slow to respond for calls to help. Never know if the person backing her up would let her take a hit before they actually moved to help. Not unless she kept Mac as her backup permanently.
Clemens’s jaw went slack with confusion. “B-but, what about all the reports from this summer? Every one said the bureau was covering up the fact that a clone was working as an agent.”
“There was a cover-up, but it didn’t involve clones.” The icy-cold fear wrapped around her again. Jane Doe wasn’t a clone. And Sam wasn’t a clone of Jane Doe. They were the same woman separated by five years and one machine that broke the limits of time.
“Not even the Chimes girl?”
The memory of a young college student with tightly curled black hair and skin darker than Sam’s rose in her memory. “Melody had a shadow, but that clone was never involved with the case.” And she hadn’t had the courage to follow up with Melody’s family to see what had happened to her shadow. She hoped that they’d let the girl go in deference to the Caye Law, but she doubted that Melody’s shadow had survived past the funeral.
Clemens deflated. “I’m sorry to have brought it up, ma’am.”
“Don’t be. It doesn’t bother me,” Sam lied. “I supported the Caye Law, and I support the integration of clones and shadows into society. Your humanity isn’t based on how you were born.”
“I hope so,” Clemens said as she rolled her shoulders back.
Sam hid a smile. The little officer was a scrapper. “Stop hoping and start proving,” Sam said as she keyed in the password for the morgue. “Now, tell me about our John Doe.”
Clemens’s pale face regained a little color as her confidence returned. “At 7:03 this morning, we received a call from a jogger who thought there was a dolphin or sea turtle wrapped in the kelp. They didn’t want to get too close.”
“A dolphin or a sea turtle?” Sam asked not sure how the two could be confused.
“The caller spotted the lump from the boardwalk. We’re lucky they saw anything at all from that angle.”
Mac peeked his head around the corner. “Hello?”
