by Liana Brooks
He stood, unfolding and stretching as if she needed the reminder how physically imposing he was. “I’m so glad you brought me to this little piece of paradise, Jane. It’s charming.”
She stiffened her spine. “My name is Commander Samantha Lynn Rose.”
“The only Sam Rose I know is my wife: former CBI Agent Sam Rose, now MacKenzie. You aren’t her.”
“I’m her original,” Rose argued, as her heart drummed with anger. “I’m what she can only aspire to be.”
“That’d be a serious step down for Sam.” For all his smiles and relaxed posture, MacKenzie’s eyes were cold.
She shook her head. This was going all wrong. MacKenzie was a soldier, he was supposed to understand survival and the need to adapt. He just needed time, she counseled herself. And she needed him so she could buy time to stabilize the iterations. “I’m not arguing with you,” she said. “You have the understanding of an infant. In a year, if you want to hold this discussion, I’ll consider you qualified to have this debate.”
His sharp smile said he thought she was wrong.
Rose turned away and hit the unlock code for her dresser, hyperaware of the man in her room.
“Would you like me to leave?” MacKenzie asked, his arms still folded across his chest.
“If my clothes make you uncomfortable, turn around. I have no intention of showering or changing in front of you. But I accept the mental limitations that were imposed on you by a backward iteration.” A place that smelled of salt, flowers, and strange foods in the kitchen she’d found him in. It was alien as the surface of the moon. She pulled the dresser open and lifted a silky, canary-yellow camisole off her uniforms. It hung as limply as the dead woman it belonged to.
There was a suppressed cough from behind her.
“You have a comment?”
“Is that blood?”
“Yes.” Cold, dried blood that spread like across the shirt in rivers of death.
“Is that your shirt?”
She hoped the look she gave MacKenzie conveyed how truly stupid she thought he was. “No.”
“Then, as much as I hate myself for saying this, put that down before you contaminate the evidence any more.” He sighed, then wrinkled his nose. “Sam would laugh if she saw me right now. That woman . . .” For the briefest moment, a smile flitted across his face. “My badge is showing.”
Rose looked him up and down. He was still wearing the same clothes she’d found him in, long, black sleep pants and a gray shirt, with an unseemly stain on the bottom left corner. There was no badge, tattoo, or identity card. A sudden change in his mental stability was not what she needed. “What are you talking about?”
MacKenzie pointed to the shirt. “That belongs to a murder victim.”
“Yes, a young female in her late teens or early twenties.”
“Did you kill her?” MacKenzie asked in a slow, almost patronizing voice.
“Certainly not.” Rose lifted her chin. “I only make authorized terminations of einselected nodes who need to be removed to collapse an unwanted iteration.”
“Do you know who killed the woman?” MacKenzie asked in the same tone as if she hadn’t said anything.
“Of course not.”
“Then you are currently smearing your holier-than-thou DNA all over evidence.”
She stared down at the shirt and tried to adjust her brain to think like the primitive man MacKenzie so obviously was. “You want to find out who killed her?”
“Yes, after I find out who she was and report the death to the proper authorities, the killer will need to be found, put on trial, and dealt with in the manner appropriate to the current laws.”
Understanding crept over her like a winter sunrise clawing its way through the mountains and clouds. “You think this should be investigated?”
“Yes, of course I do. A woman is dead—that’s grounds for investigation in every iteration I’ve heard of.”
“But she’s not from our iteration.” Rose held up the shirt. “This color doesn’t come from here! She’s not one of us. Would you investigate the murder of a body that came in from another iteration?” She shook her head with a wry chuckle. “It’s . . . you’re not laughing.” They stared at each other for an uncomfortable moment. “You’re serious?”
MacKenzie nodded. “My specialty is forensic medicine. I solve murders all the time. Two cases I know for sure were from another iteration: Jane Doe and Juanita Doe. Juanita was Captain Samantha Rose from the Federated States of Mexico. Her killer is a man named Nialls Gant. He’s in jail.” Mac stopped and shook his head. “No—he will be in jail in spring of 2070.”
Rose shook her head. “I’m not concerned about finding a stranger’s killer.” She held the bloody shirt up. “I’m concerned with finding out who put a dead woman’s clothes in my locked room.”
CHAPTER 17
“Day by day, memory by memory, mistake by mistake we built a life of love and dreams and forgiveness.”
~ excerpt from Love, Lies, and Happiness by Erin Li I2—2076
Thursday December 5, 2069
Cannonvale, Queensland
Australia
Iteration 2
A gray mist of soft rain swathed the house like a familiar blanket. Sam stretched, peeking out the window as fat teardrops fell from the clouds. This was orange-juice-eggs-and-bacon rain—rain meant for cuddling or reading books. This was the rain meant for cartoon mice with heart-shaped noses and daisies for umbrellas. The shops would be empty of tourists today. A sad, still end to the week.
“Mac?” Her voice echoed down the tiled hall. Neither Mac nor Bosco was in the kitchen. The stove sat cold, the curtains closed. A chill premonition of danger crawled up her spine.
From the back door, she heard Bosco whimper, the sorrowful whine of a puppy in the rain.
Shaking off her nerves, Sam went and opened the door. “Hey, love . . .” Her sentence trailed off as a soaking-wet Bosco stepped into the kitchen and shook off. There was no way Mac would have left the dog out in the rain long enough to get that wet. A lump of fear formed in her throat. “Hey, Bos. Where’s Mac? Where’s your other human?”
Bosco shook again, then walked over and flopped onto his oversized mat with a grumble.
Sam went back to the bedroom. Mac’s phone was still on his nightstand. His keys were in the hall, and his car was in the double-wide garage. She checked for his gun under the mattress and found nothing.
Tight jawed, she grabbed her CBI-issued splat gun from the bedroom closet and stepped into the armory-turned-office that they’d set up a few years ago. Originally, it was intended to be the nursery, with pale blue walls and glass hot air balloons hanging near the window to catch the light. After the miscarriage, she hadn’t been able to walk past it without crying, and Mac had decided to turn it into a fortress.
Metal plating in the walls, rows of weapons and currency, and several sets of identity papers from around the world for both of them. While he turned it into a bunker, she’d read physics papers about time travel and other theories aloud. They’d made contingency plans. Talked about what they’d do if Emir came for her, or for both of them. The idea that Emir would only target Mac had never crossed her mind.
Now she flipped on the computer and pulled up the security-camera footage from around the house. It had seemed like overkill at the time. Cannonvale was hardly a bustling hive of crime, and between Mac’s Ranger training and Bosco’s loyal bulk, she’d felt perfectly safe.
The black-and-white image on the screen came on, the cameras tripped and turned on by movement in the kitchen. Sam crossed her arms. The face on the screen was familiar . . . thin, too bony to be healthy, but still hers.
She had seen this woman once before, in Alabama, when an Emir from another timeline insisted she come home with him. They’d stood face-
to-face for seconds before Sam bolted for safety, but the woman’s burning hate and contempt was seared into Sam’s mind.
Bosco nudged her knee and whined.
Out of habit, she petted him, rubbing his ear like a lucky penny. “Want to go on a trip, Bosco?”
His ears perked up, and his heavy tail thrummed with excitement.
“Car ride?”
Bosco’s bark made the grating of the gun case rumble in response.
“Good boy. Let’s go pack. We have to fetch Mac.”
CHAPTER 18
“One day I woke up and realized I would never wake up again. I would never sleep again. This was the day time would end.”
~ excerpt from “Final Thoughts on Decoherence” Dr. M. Vensula, head of the National Center for Time Fluctuation Studies—I4—2069
Day 190/365
Year 5 of Progress
(July 9, 2069)
Central Command
Third Continent
Prime Reality
History was divided into epochs. The whole world chopped into easy-to-define chunks with tidy labels. Mac’s personal epochs were Home, Army, Disaster, Sam. He’d have to sit and do the math to figure out how many years had been lost to the ambush in Afghanistan and the resulting depression and addiction to sleeping pills. It hadn’t mattered after Sam came into his life. Scientists sometimes tossed around the phrase Extinction Level Event, and that’s what Sam was: his own personal ELE.
Sam was perfect.
Everything that had been missing in his life, Sam offered. Now, trying to sort through data on the tiny datpad left to him by Sam’s evil twin in a room that smelled of gun cleaner and despair, he realized Sam was probably half of his brain, too. He couldn’t describe her absence like a hole in his heart or a lost limb. Those were cutesy phrases that were far too weak to explain what he felt. It was like half of himself was missing. He needed her here to talk to, to toss ideas around with, to . . . be.
Every minute that ticked by on the clock was one where Sam was alone without him. She could protect herself. He’d made sure she could, above and beyond the training she’d received in the CBI. But they both knew Sam wouldn’t pick up a gun unless it was a matter of absolute last resort. She wouldn’t hurt someone unless there was no other choice.
She’d probably even sit down and weigh the risks of altering some hypothetical timeline before doing anything about his absence.
He looked up at his broken reflection in the metal wall of the evil twin’s room. Yeah, Sam would come for him. Or wait for him. She’d think of something. That’s why he’d married a woman who was smarter than he was, so she could come rescue him. Right?
Right.
“Why can’t I print these?” he whined at the empty room. His voice echoed in the cloying silence. “I need my murder wall and my maps. This is ridiculous.” Borderline impossible. The datpad required him to see the big picture in his head, keep track of everything with no visual aid, and that was making his gray matter melt. There had to be some way to do this . . .
Several hours later, the evil Sam walked through the door, and he had the pleasure of watching her jaw drop.
“What did you do to the walls?”
“I used them as whiteboards,” Mac said around the pen cap he was chewing on. “Found the pen in the closet next to the first-aid kit. Don’t worry,” he added as he took the cap out, “it washes off. You’ll be able to get your security deposit.”
“I won’t be able to pass inspections, though.” She stared incredulously at the walls, walked, and smeared the ink.
“How are you going to pass inspection with me here anyway?” He shook his head. “By the way, that is my timeline of the crime that you’re erasing, thank you very much. Stop destroying evidence.” Worst cop he’d ever seen. And that included Marrins, his former Senior Agent who had kidnapped Sam and tried to change history so the Commonwealth never united. He frowned at the evil Sam. She really did look like Jane Doe from Alabama.
Awful as it sounded, he hoped she was Jane Doe from Alabama. The possibility that it might be his Sam that died was too much for him to contemplate. He couldn’t lose Sam without losing himself.
“This is not how things are done here.”
“Sam would approve.”
She stilled. “Again, I must insist you stop using the awful shortened name on me. You can call me either Commander, or Rose, or Commander Rose.”
“I meant the real Sam would approve.”
“We are identical,” Jane said with a little foot stomp that, in real Sam at least, meant she was dangerously tired. “We are genetically identical. Our life histories ran parallel. The differences between us are minimal.”
“The difference between you two is everything.” He didn’t want to get into it because it made him angry. All day he’d been pushing it back, trying not to think about what had happened to him. His voice was arctic cold when he said, “In every way that matters, you are not Sam MacKenzie. You don’t think like her. You don’t act like her. In every way, she has you beat.”
Jane crossed her arms. “You love her.”
“There was never a question about that. I love her. She loves me. We love being together.”
“If you loved another Samantha, you can learn to tolerate me. In a few years, you’ll see, you’ll have forgotten her entirely.”
“Not going to happen.”
She threw her arms in the air in frustration. “Why are you so stubborn?”
“My mamma said it came from my dad’s side.” The words were flippant, but the glare accompanying them would have made anyone who knew him back off. Jane’s lack of reaction only underscored how alien she was.
“I am Samantha Rose.”
“You’re a pale imitation. The cheap, knockoff copy sold at marked-up prices to dumb tourists, but you’re no Sam. Sam would never, ever rip apart someone’s world for her own selfish reasons. She wouldn’t kill anyone, not even if her life was in danger. I know because I’ve been the one pulling her out of scrapes before. You can be whatever you want, but you’ll never be my wife or the real Sam.”
Jane stalked around the room, angrily glaring at him, the walls, even her shoes at one point. “Fine. It’s obvious I can’t make you see reason.”
“You’re not presenting reason. You dragged me to this hellhole and told me that if I stay, this will be the future. No Sam, no trees, no beaches, no food . . . you do realize the nightmare you’ve created here? You abducted me. You presented me to Emir like your pet. You have me confined to this room like a prisoner of war. This is not my first time behind enemy lines. I got out once. I can get out again.”
She rolled her eyes. “You have this all wrong. I am trying to help you. You have to understand, this iteration may seem less than desirable at times, but it isn’t hurtling toward humanity’s extinction at breakneck speeds; yours is. There is only one way through decoherence, and that is for the Prime to hold the line so whatever disaster is coming to obliterate humanity, someone survives. We’re it. We’re the only ones who can survive.”
Mac lifted an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
“Yes!” The word snapped like a whip.
Yet she wasn’t sure at all. It showed in the crinkles around her eyes, the tiny frown lines by her lips, in the sleepless shadows under her eyes.
She wasn’t sure—she was scared.
And she looked just enough like Sam that he wanted to reach out and pull her close, protect her. He turned back to the scribbles on the wall. Advice columnists wouldn’t even have ideas on how not to feel an emotional pull from a wife’s other-self. Words of prayer tugged at his lips but stayed a silent petition to the heavens.
Let me get home to Sam.
He didn’t bother promising God anything—they both knew there was a long walk between him and heaven—but if he
could get home to Sam, maybe he would at least consider checking a map for directions.
Her voice cut through the thickening silence. “I have a proposal.”
“You apologize for kidnapping me and return me to my home? Fine. I accept.”
She ignored him. “Before your arrival, I found a dead woman in a locker that is a known anomaly point. It’s created by the MIA, and usually controlled, and because I knew the dead woman was from another iteration, I let the matter go.”
Mac glared at her.
“There was a blood sample, but it belonged to Donovan, whose locker is right next to the anomaly point. He was scratched during hand-to-hand training, so it was a dead end. The woman was pulled through another anomaly, so I let it go. But someone went, found her, and took her clothes to leave in my room as a warning. Help me find the person who left them, and I’ll let you go back to your iteration. It won’t do you any good. You’ll cease to exist when the decoherence event arrives, but it’s what you want. I don’t have a habit of saving fools from their own stupidity.”
There was a catch there. It might have been an outright lie. Still, it was a chance—the only one he had right now—so Mac nodded. “Fine. Quick question, what did the victim look like?”
Jane wrinkled her nose and shrugged. “I don’t know. Average height, above average weight for the Prime, but probably normal for other places, she was just a young woman. Like everyone.”
“Brown hair, brown eyes, dark tan skin?” Mac guessed.
Jane frowned. “Yes.”
“Want to see what I have?”
Jane eyed the walls with suspicion.
“There have been murders here in Prime. All those sirens yesterday. You have access to the personnel files, so I looked up the phenotypes, and I have a theory. These murders and one I investigated several years ago are connected. Agent Parker, who hopefully will never have the misfortune of meeting you, connected the case to a new string of murders.
