by Liana Brooks
She looked around at the long, dry grass.
Mac searched the darkness, too. “You get a feeling like this place is familiar?”
“It smells like magnolias and summer,” she said. “Like Alabama.”
“That’s what I thought, too. It feels like going home.”
“This is certainly the adventurous route,” Sam said. Despite herself, she was smiling. Exhausted, dehydrated, bruised . . . but they were home. Somewhere near here was a cozy old house with wooden floors and a giant kitchen table worn by loving memories. There was Miss Azalea and her fried chicken, Bri, and Hoss.
“Hoss!”
“What?” Mac looked around in confusion.
“We might be near Hoss!”
“No, Sam.”
“What? Bosco would like a friend.”
“We could easily be in post-Gant Alabama with Hoss dead and us listed as wanted fugitives.”
“Pessimist,” she grumbled.
“You still love me,” Mac said. “I can see lights up ahead. There’s a house or a building.”
“A recharge station would be best. They’d have food, and we could probably borrow a car.”
“Of course, if we landed after we stole the machine, then we’ll be on camera and likely to be arrested,” Mac pointed out.
“Hopefully our younger selves were smart enough to head to Australia, making this irrelevant.” A disturbing thought occurred to her. “We can’t be stuck in a time loop. Can we? Is that a thing?”
Mac shrugged. “According to what they said in the Prime, none of this is possible. Our iteration should have collapsed when they killed Emir. Or when you left. Or, there were half a dozen other reasons why that Prime was going to survive and the rest of the iterations were doomed. I think this proves Emir was very, very wrong.”
“Fantastic. So we could get stuck in a time loop. Just what I always wanted.” She sighed. “I wonder who the patron saint of time travelers is.”
Mac laughed. “If you’re really good, maybe you can claim the title.”
“I’d need to do a miracle.”
“We’re alive . . .”
Mac stopped walking. “I know that building.”
Sam had to stand on her tiptoes to see over the crest of the hill and past the scrub to the building. “That’s Emir’s lab. Makes sense. Every portal needs to open near another portal. At least we know they’ll have a phone available. What are the chances we’ll not run into anyone we know?”
“Statistically, the odds are in our favor,” Mac said.
But Sam knew with a dark certainty that their luck had run out. She could all but feel the weight of time pushing her forward. Rushing toward her inevitable death.
Donovan looked the building over. This is where Emir had died, but there was no sign of the police from this iteration. He stepped closer to the glass and peered into the dimly illuminated lobby. A tree planted by the door of the glass atrium shuddered in the breeze of the temperature controls. The room was empty except for a single young woman, black hair twisted up, bent over a book . . . she was no guard.
He smashed his fist into the glass.
The girl looked up. “Hey! This is a private laboratory! You can’t be in here.” She approached him with nothing more than a truncheon and a glare on her delicate face.
“You should run. I don’t usually kill girls who look like you, but I will.”
“Sir, this is a private facility. The police are on their way. I’m going to need you to sit down and wait until they arrive.”
His first punch knocked her to the floor, cracking her skull on the tile. The truncheon she’d held rolled away under the desk. He listened for alarms or sirens and heard nothing. She’d been bluffing.
Donovan looked down as the girl’s eyes opened wide in shock and pain. She looked everywhere, her desperation palpable and intoxicating.
“I told you to run. You should have. I’m a bit shattered. It’s seeing yourself die that does it. Nodes are supposed to be stronger,” he confessed, “but I’m not. So I go for walks. Long walks. Sometimes I get lucky and find someone who looks like her.”
The girl’s face wrinkled in pain and agonized confusion.
“You don’t look like her, but you got in my way. Sorry ’bout that.” He stomped his boot down on her face as hard as he could, crushing her nose into her skull and ending her terror.
The first thing he was going to do when he found his red-haired woman would be to explain to her how fragile she was. She needed him near her at all times. During the day, she’d stay safe at home while he went to work. He’d make sure she understood. Leaving the house had gotten her husband killed the last time, and she didn’t want that.
She wouldn’t want that at all. Because she loved him.
He wiped the blood of his boots off on the dead girl’s green shirt, then walked over to her desk. A textbook with pictures of paintings lay open. He pushed them aside and pulled up the computer’s main screen.
Sunday May 19, 2069.
That wouldn’t work at all. He’d seen the red-haired woman in this iteration in 2070. She had to be within a few hundred miles of the machine, but he wasn’t going to wait another year for her to appear. She belonged to him. They were happy together. He needed—
Donovan turned at the sound of voices.
“And someone’s here.” That was MacKenzie.
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this, Mac.”
Donovan’s nostrils flared as he heard Rose’s voice. The cadence was wrong, but it was her. She’d followed him. She wasn’t dead.
He watched MacKenzie shoulder the door open. The other man swore at the sight of the girl on the floor, and looked up too late.
Donovan was already running down the hall to the jump room. They weren’t taking him back to Prime.
Sam ran to Melody, but Mac pulled her back.
“We can’t touch. We can’t disturb anything here. And we can’t stay here. Melody’s body was flung back in time. We either need to get to the machine or get out of range before Donovan turns it on.”
A square tile lifted up and floated to the body.
“Cleaning bots,” Sam said. “Why didn’t we think of that the first time? There was no blood because the cleaning bots tidied everything up. Melody must not have triggered the alarm.”
“No alarm, no police, and no reason for the bot to leave a foreign liquid on the floor.” Mac said. “The bots were fried, so we didn’t have any logs to check.”
“Because of a power outage. We thought that came before the break-in, but it must be coming.”
“Or not be coming at all. Things are definitely changing.”
Bosco barked angrily.
“Our cleaning bot has friends,” Sam said. “Gotta love security bots.”
MacKenzie swore as the dark gray cylinders vacated their charging spots on the wall and moved toward them. “We need to leave.”
Sam knew the hall. She’d walked through the rubble the morning after this incident. It hadn’t happened yet, though. “Mac . . .” Sam stood on tiptoe and kissed him. “In case this doesn’t work out. I’m sorry about dragging you into this. I love you.”
He kissed her back. “We’ll be fine. Stay here while I take care of Donovan.”
She crossed herself as he went, hoping no one else died tonight. Except for Donovan. She was not going to cry any tears if he wound up dead. If they’d arrived ten minutes earlier, Melody Chimes could have lived to finish college.
She let out a sharp whistle, and Bosco appeared, trotting through the trailing security bots, who were trying to figure out what he was. “Bosco,” she said, pointing at the lead bot, “pee.”
Tongue lolling out of his mouth, he lifted a leg and peed on the bot.
The others went crazy. It was a flaw in the programm
ing. If the module leader was incapacitated, they fell apart like a hill of ants on acid. Circuits fried, the bots started stabbing each other, and when the cleaning bots came in, there was a merry war.
“Sam!” Mac shouted.
Sam snapped her fingers to call Bosco over. “We’re here.”
Emir’s workroom was empty. The machine quiet.
“What happened?” Sam asked. “Where’s Donovan?”
“I don’t know. I searched the place. There are no exits, and the machine wasn’t on.”
Sam walked in and kicked the door shut behind Bosco.
Mac peered around her, looking out through the lab windows, which were about to be blown to smithereens. “What did you do?”
“Security bots in medical research facilities have a limited AI, but they can detect hazardous materials. They self-destruct if they sense ammonia or urea. Call it a fatal flaw.” She smiled at him. “Don’t worry, the cleaning bots will pick up everything. By morning, it will be nothing but fried bots and no organic trace materials for the crime lab.”
“That is a major design flaw,” Mac said, his horrified look turning to a grin as a security bot was flipped over by a cleaner and squirted with cleaning solvent.
“They get recalled in September.” Sam looked around. “I kind of want to leave myself a note.”
“Don’t,” Mac warned. He pointed at something on the screen. “Here, what’s this?”
“Donovan was doing calculations,” Sam said, scrolling down the screen. “These are similar to the Fountain Variance Calculations Henry did to get me to the Prime. When the iterations run too close together, there’s, um, basically friction sparks, I guess? Little bursts of energy that create side portals. Henry figured out how to calculate where they were and which iteration they would lead to. Donovan must be looking to use one near here.”
Bosco bumped Sam’s leg and whined.
She looked around. “Mac?”
“What?” He was walking toward the other computer station. “We’ve almost got this figured out.”
“Where’s the light coming from?” None of the overhead lights were on, but the room was glowing. Lit up and bright as day. Or as bright as a portal.
Warm air circled her legs. “Mac?” He was across the lab. A few meters, but now it felt like miles.
He looked up in horror.
“Come back!” Sam screamed.
Mac was already running, closing the distance . . .
“Mac!” Her scream was swallowed by the portal, giant and terrifying. He was a shadow, a blue-gray figure on an expanding horizon. All around her was the white-hot fury of a portal collapsing and moving everything but her.
CHAPTER 42
“You only have one chance to get today right.”
~ Elosia Travkin I3—2061
Wednesday April 2, 2070
Florida District 8
Commonwealth of North America
Iteration 2
Ivy was almost certain she’d been sent to the abandoned town of Eldora to get her out of the way.
Agent Rose’s house had been attacked. Agent MacKenzie was injured, there was a dog in the hospital, and Gant and Donovan were still tearing a trail through the quietest district in Florida. If the bodies were any indication, they’d been steadily working their way south. Killing a college student for his car and laptop, then breaking into the apartment of Henry Troom and Devon Bradet, then assaulting a biker outside the Gator Trap . . . that had seemed to break the chain of attacks. Something there had changed things, but repeated visits—all which involved Agent Edwin trying to get her to eat a fried-gator sandwich—hadn’t turned up anything useful.
Gant was obsessed. Donovan was angry. Together, the pair became a nigh-on unstoppable force.
Half of Florida’s CBI agents were in town now. They were fussing over Agent Rose and edging the police out. Ivy knew there were things she wasn’t allowed to know, things too classified for the CBI to share with the local police, but she wished they weren’t so obvious about it.
It felt deliberately insulting.
She tugged at her half-broken radio and hoped it worked. “Dispatch, this is Officer Clemens. I am pulling into the second parking area on River Road going south. There’s a light there.”
Probably a fisherman coming in late. She’d write a fine and continue driving the loop down to River Trace Lane, east on Eldora Road, then south on AIA to South Road, and back north on the mazing stretch of River Road. Again.
“Acknowledged,” the dispatch said, voice cracking as the radio Gant had broken lost its connection again. “Check-in—” The voice was cut off.
Ivy stuffed the radio back down in its patch and checked the charge on her phone: thirty percent and no signal. Of course. She was in a ghost town. Having cellphone service was probably listed under “unnecessary human encroachment on wild habitat” because the local protestors thought sea turtles were confused by cellphone towers.
Cursing protestors, tourists, and people in general, she grabbed her flashlight and the gun Miss MacKenzie had given her months ago from under her seat. One close call with these bastards was enough. There was playing by the rules, and there was being smart. And when it came to tromping around abandoned buildings in the swamps, she’d learned her lesson.
Anyone who jumped out at her tonight was getting a warning shot in the kneecaps.
Exiting the car, she took a moment to soak in the beauty of the night. Over the inland estuaries, the clouds were grumbling and spitting lightning. Here, she stood outside the storm. The stars were bright and clear in the black sky. Tree frogs were singing to welcome the first warm week as the harbinger of spring. The scent of magnolia blossoms mixed with the brine of the brackish river and aroma of sea grass from the dunes on the other side of A1A. It was the perfect night for a stroll on the beach.
Too bad she was on the riverside looking for fish guts and drunks.
Ivy sighed and flicked on her flashlight. The parking lot had two older cars that had been abandoned the year before and still not towed. Eventually, someone was going to break them down for parts and save the city a few hundred dollars. Or maybe they’d get washed away in the next hurricane.
She pointed her light at the water. Then, realizing that finding a light with a light wasn’t going to work, she turned it off. A crescent moon spilled silver moonbeams over gentle waves. A bat swooped past her ear, clicking.
New Smyrna Beach was a gentle glow on the northern horizon. The next nearest city to the south was Port Canaveral, and she was certain there wasn’t a launch scheduled from the space center. Which left only bioluminescent algae or humans as the cause of the glow that had attracted her attention, and it was the wrong season for glowing blue waves.
She gave up on the idea of stealth. “Hello?” Her voice carried over the water and was lost in the mangals.
“Hello.” The voice that floated back through the darkness filled her with terror.
Ivy pulled the strange gun out of the shoulder holster. “Donovan?”
“I came back for you. Even though you ran away.” He stepped out of the shadow of a palm tree. In the moonlight, he was a broken man made of a sharp, jagged darkness and ghostly-pale skin.
She stepped back as her heart rate sped up. “You are under arrest.”
“No. I’m not. You can’t arrest me. You can’t hurt me. You belong with me. To me. This is my future.”
He fell backward on the ground, and Ivy stared for a long, breathless moment before realizing she’d raised the gun and fired.
In the silence, the radio in her car crackled. She needed to check in. In a daze, she walked back to the car. “This is Officer Clemens checking in.”
“You find anything?” dispatch asked.
Ivy stared at the body lying on the sand, waves lapping his shoes as the ti
de came up. “I’ve found Donovan. He . . . he attacked me. I shot him.” She lifted the gun so the starlight sparkled on the barrel. “He’s dead.”
“We have an ambulance en route,” dispatch said. “Were you injured?”
“No. No, I’m fine.” She dropped the gun on the seat and sat down. Clones couldn’t kill in self-defense. All she could hope for was that the court believed she was human.”
CHAPTER 43
“You only have one chance to get today right.”
~ Elosia Travkin I3—2061
Thursday April 3, 2070
Fort Benning, Georgia
Commonwealth of North America
Iteration 2/ The Nova Prime
Director Loren watched the live feed of Agent Rose’s exit with a frown. Agent MacKenzie had gone with her, just as the file said.
Now he was waiting for the second event. Or for death. He wasn’t sure what that would look like. How it would feel if he suddenly ceased to exist because this iteration failed. The notes hadn’t been helpful.
It was a quarter to five in the morning, and he was losing hope. The machine was crippled. The silence of the facility was daunting. But better the sepulcher silence than the screams of people dying because he told them to hold the line against the impossible.
He must have drifted off to sleep because a barking dog jolted him awake. The sun was barely warming the horizon, which meant it couldn’t be much past seven. Loren stretched, stood, and opened the door.
There, two frazzled agents and a dog were trying to open the barricaded door. “Agent Rose.”
She turned slowly. “Director Loren?”
“You look worse than when I last saw you.”
“Which was when, sir?” She stepped closer. This Rose was older, a little beaten, and perhaps a little more fragile-looking. She wasn’t yet the cold woman he’d seen in his office, and she wasn’t the young woman he’d seen rush through the portal a few hours earlier.
With an enigmatic smile, he pointed two fingers at Agent MacKenzie and Agent Rose. “You two, into my office.”
The dog followed after, looking cheerful despite the hunted looks of the two agents.
