Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  Epitaphs

  A Novel of the Echoverse

  Therin Knite

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by Therin Knite

  Dedication

  EPITAPHS

  November 2712

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  To Be Continued!

  Epitaphs

  Copyright © 2015 Therin Knite

  Cover Design by Adam Hall at Around the Pages

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

  For more information:

  www.therinknite.com

  To contact the author:

  Email - tknitemail@gmail.com

  Twitter - @TherinKnite

  Also by Therin Knite

  NOVELS

  Echoes (Echoes #1)

  Othella (Arcadian Heights #1)

  Solace

  SHORT STORIES

  Venus in Red

  To whom it concerns,

  which, I now know, is someone.

  EPITAPHS

  November 2712

  Chapter One

  I’m holding an eight-pound turkey like a newborn in my arms when a flying bag of yams breaks a man’s jaw.

  And then someone is murdered by a dream.

  (Because this is my life we’re talking about.)

  To be clear, I’m in a grocery store called Edmund’s Organics, one of those ultra-expensive, “all natural” wholesale shops in the Wilson Sector of downtown Washington. Frequented by in-home chefs hired by the wealthy, middle-class stay-at-homes who like to pretend their cooking skills extend beyond macaroni and cheese from a box, and the occasional elderly man or woman recently warned by his or her doctor to clean up the diet before congestive heart failure sets in. Today, these types are here in droves—last-minute supply hoarding before Thankfulness Day—and the narrow aisles of Edmund’s are so jam-packed that I’ve been forced into a corner. Between two sets of ice cream freezers. Hugging a turkey. And watching.

  Watching Jin, that is.

  I spot the man’s cropped dark hair bobbing up and down in the middle of the writhing throng as he hunts for the remaining items on his grocery list. He smartly grabbed a basket instead of a cart as we entered, allowing him to slip in and out of the smallest gaps between the sweaty, stressed-out bodies of other shoppers. Good thing, too. Not five minutes into this insane venture, he came around the end of the bread aisle as a woman was throwing a pack of soda to her shopping partner. Jin evaded a collision by lunging forward. If he’d had a bulky cart in the way, we’d be in an ambulance right now.

  Kind of like yam guy.

  Jin’s shuffling along in front of the refrigerated meat and cheese section when he passes within five feet of yam guy, which is why I catch the drama unfold. A teenager—maybe yam guy’s son—is grabbing things and tossing them into his father’s waiting hands, the man parked in a space between two display racks of holiday-themed candy. The tossed items gradually grow heavier and heavier, chip cups to soup cans to the massive bag of yams. Unfortunately, a split second after the bag leaves the teen’s hands, one of those aforementioned elderly people bumps into yam guy’s cart, which rolls forward just far enough to ram into a display rack just hard enough to cause every single box of candy to tumble over, off the rack, and onto the floor. This commotion distracts yam guy for about a second and a half. The exact span of time needed to allow the yam bag to wallop his jaw so hard I hear it crack over the tumultuous crowd.

  Ouch.

  That’s going to be fun to explain to the hospital staff.

  As the teen rushes over to his father to help him out of the store, Jin reappears from behind a burly man who’s carrying a full metal cart of groceries. Jin’s basket is filled to the brim, and he scuttles toward me, back bent, head low to avoid any more projectiles, a smile plastered to his face. His light brown skin is flushed pink from the heat and exhaustion, but his eyes are bright and excited. Like he’s won some sort of prize for making it out of a life-or-death arena match.

  “On this week’s episode of Battle Game,” says the announcer in my head, “the players will face the most dangerous challenge in the history of the sport! A grocery store six days before a major commercial holiday!”

  The audience in the arena gasps in horror.

  “No,” they say. “Anything but that! It’s too dangerous! Someone could get seriously hurt! Someone could die!”

  And all the while they itch and itch to see some bloodshed.

  Bah.

  That’s modern entertainment for you.

  Jin maneuvers around a group of women clustered in front of a pastry stand and invites himself into my little hideaway, breathing hard. “Damn, Adem. Is this a trip or what? I mean, I’ve always seen those news stories about grocery store fights during the holidays, but I thought they were exaggerating.”

  “Obviously not.” The corner of his basket pokes my ribs, and I jab his gut in response.

  “Sorry.” He relieves the basket pressure on my chest by backing up an inch. “I feel all jittery. This is like a circus on crack. It’s nuts. You think there’s something in the air? Like at the Beacham restaurant? They drug all the shoppers to make them act a certain way?”

  “Yes, they put cocaine in the air to ensure all their merchandise gets destroyed. It’s all part of a nefarious plot to make themselves go out of business.” My tone must hint at the way I feel about Jin mentioning Beacham Inn because he clears his throat and changes the subject.

  “Got everything I need,” he says. “We can leave now. I hope. If there aren’t enough registers open, we could be here for six hours trying to check out.”

  “Well, if you hadn’t invited fourteen extra people to your holiday dinner, we wouldn’t be here at all because you’d have enough food for all your guests in your ridiculous walk-in pantry.” I lean out of my hiding place and survey the area around us, calculating the probability of surviving various alternative routes to the checkout lines. “Trim the guest list next time, will you? It’s currently double the capacity of your living room.”

  “Hey!” He flicks my temple with his index finger. “No fair, Firecracker. It’s not my fault a bunch of assholes invited themselves to my party. They caught me in a trap, you know? If I try to dump them all, it’ll make me look bad.”

  Jin made the amateur mistake of inviting the wrong coworkers to his dinner. The sort of coworkers who like to invite other coworkers to tag along with them to parties that aren’t theirs to invite others to. For example, Jin invited Carl from Homicide, who then took it upon himself to invite Gloria, also from Homicide, who in turn invited Sally from SWAT, who in turn invited Aiko from Operations, who in turn invited Bill from Statistics—because that poor guy never gets invited to anything, so why not invite him to something you’re not paying for?

/>   Before Jin knew what hit him, he had twenty-six “guests” instead of twelve.

  And if he tries to reject any of them, they’ll talk shit about him around the water cooler for months.

  It’s times like this I remind myself that leaving the grand old IBI, the Interdistrict Bureau of Intelligence, to go work for an organization that hunts dreams instead was a calculated, intelligent decision.

  And it’s times when my Ocom starts screaming an emergency alert that I remind myself it was simultaneously a stupid decision.

  Like now.

  I wriggle my way out from between the freezers and pull the squawking tablet from my pocket. On the screen is a flashing message:

  LEVEL THREE BREACH IN PROGRESS.

  NIGHT TEAM ONE CALLED TO ASSEMBLE.

  “Damn,” I mutter.

  Jin peers over my shoulder. “Duty calls?”

  “Yeah, we need to leave. I have to get to the office.”

  “Right.” Jin scoots past me and dashes toward the checkout lines. Instead of the exit.

  I take off after him, grabbing his arm. “Jin, there’s an echo crime in progress. I don’t have time to wait for you to buy food. Someone could be dying.”

  Because that is what dreams tend to do these days: come to life and murder people.

  Fun times.

  Jin yanks his arm free. “Calm down. The speedy checkout’s open.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Not joking.” He continues on in the same direction.

  “Jin!”

  “What?” He reels around and snatches the heavy turkey from my grasp. “Chamberlain and crew got on just fine without you for years, Adem. Don’t tell me you’ve become invaluable in two months’ time. And don’t tell me you think you can make any sort of major difference in whatever crime is happening by showing up four minutes sooner than you will if I buy my groceries first. If the crime’s already in progress, then odds are it’ll be over by the time you get there. Right?” He dances around a table piled high with bananas and backs into the speedy checkout lane. “Isn’t that what you told me, like, last week? That ninety percent of all violent crimes occur start to finish within twelve minutes?”

  I slow to a crawl and brace myself against the railing of the yogurt section, suppressing a sigh. Leave it to Jin to use my offhand ramblings against me. Though he does have a point. Most level three echoes, breaches into reality, last fifteen minutes or less. And Edmund’s is twenty out from the office. By the time I arrive, groceries or not, it’ll all be said and done. “Fine. But I’m directing Dynara toward your ass if she decides to kick one for my tardiness.”

  Jin sticks his tongue out at me and starts dumping groceries onto the conveyor. “I’ll remember to wear my buns of steel. Go warm up my baby, will you?”

  I roll my eyes and turn on my heels, retreating toward the exit with automatic doors that haven’t closed for hours due to the ever-growing glut of customers streaming in and out. There’s a right-sized space in between two conversing middle-aged men I take advantage of, and after forcing my way around an abandoned cart full of sardine tins, I emerge—Freedom!—onto the sidewalk and stumble into the overfilled parking lot. Sweat cools on my face in the frigid air, my breath puffing white, and my feet crunch the thin layer of snow freshly fallen from the overcast sky.

  I head for the farthest corner of the lot, where Jin parked his brand-spanking new car. Six years’ worth of savings for a sleek red number with a high-end manufacturer’s emblem on the grill. That, to my amazement, no one managed to scuff or scratch or dent or steal while Jin and I were shopping. I was sure that, despite parking it between a grassy knoll and a tree, someone would ding Jin’s new baby. People have this funny tendency to “accidentally” ruin things that cost an obscene amount of money.

  But unlike yam guy, it seems Jin got lucky today.

  With my thumb, I wipe a melting snowflake from the screen of my Ocom, the emergency message still displayed, and then glance up at the gray clouds. I smell another snowstorm in the distance, crisp and cold and tangy. Like metal.

  It reminds me of something else that smells like metal. Something that tastes like copper. Something that might now be spilling from someone somewhere in this city, as he or she or they are attacked by a dream brought to life in glorious horror.

  Yam guy was unlucky today, for sure.

  But there are people who will be unluckier.

  And odds are I won’t meet them until they are dead.

  * * *

  The city is a legion of steel ghosts in the haze.

  As Jin’s “baby” weaves through six lanes of traffic along the Capital Beltway, we cross the Talladega Overpass, and for a moment, as we’re fifty feet in the air on a sharply curving road, the winter cityscape of Washington rises up beside us. Washed pale by the worsening midday snowstorm, all that’s visible are the outlines of cloud-cutting towers and a flurry of rainbow-colored lights—the ad boards and massive window screen displays from the skyscrapers of the Central Business Sector and beyond. Somehow, the bright blue moniker of the Chamberlain Corporation building breaks clear through the blanket of white, the enormous letters vertically filling all one hundred seventy-five stories.

  I wonder if Dynara Chamberlain, my lovely new boss, was there before the level three breach, going about her day as a genius inventor and a downright ruthless Board member of the world’s most powerful technology company. Slicing through proposals with smiles sharp enough to sever limbs. Sitting on her head-of-table throne in development meetings. Discussing contracts with the military, offers lined with threats and spikes. The sorts of things normal businesswomen do.

  A sharp contrast to her moonlight hours as a hunter of dreams.

  …Or is it?

  We descend into the Government Sector, rows of apartments and small businesses replaced by middling-height federal agency buildings. The IBI’s Columbian headquarters blurs past, and a fleeting sensation of wrong way settles in my gut. I’ve had that feeling every day of my commute since I jumped the IBI ship, that mental tug to resume my regular route to a job I no longer have. I refuse to look at the slate gray walls and dark windows of the office for more than a moment; instead, I focus on the central console of Jin’s car and read the auto-drive AI’s latest weather statistics. Twenty-nine degrees outside. Overcast. Snowing. Predicted precipitation of two to three inches. Freezing—

  “You don’t regret leaving, do you?” Jin nudges me with his elbow. He’s nestled into his heated seat, reading an article about some celebrity’s latest social faux pas. “Quitting the IBI?”

  “You’ve asked me that question at least once a week since I left, Jin.” I stuff my hands in my coat pockets, like my fingers are still cold inside the leather gloves.

  “And I’ll keep asking it until you stop making that face every time we go by the building.”

  “What face?”

  He twists his lips into an awkward grimace and half cocks an eyebrow. “This one.”

  “I don’t make that expression.”

  “You do, too.”

  “I can’t make that expression, Jin. My eyebrows are physically incapable of arching at such a weird angle.”

  “You know what they say about denial, don’t you, Adem?”

  “Sure. Deny everything. The golden rule of working at EDPA every time there’s a risk of public exposure.”

  Jin stifles a laugh, exits the article, and sets his Ocom in his lap. “Seriously though. You’re okay at EDPA, right? I mean, besides the way that Chamberlain treats you in combat training. Which is unacceptable! Someone needs to break her—”

  “Let it go, Jin.”

  “Fine.” He snorts. “But besides that, it’s okay, right? The work suits you?”

  “The work is having my mind dragged into other people’s dreams so I can stop them from coming to life and killing people.”

  “Which sounds like the most awesome job in the history of forever.” His fingers tap on his tablet screen. “But is it? Was t
he job swap worth it?”

  I press my temple against the cool window glass. “I wish I could give you an honest assessment, Jin. But the fact of the matter is that my first six weeks at EDPA have consisted of training, training, more training, some additional training, and one single mission where I got to enter a child’s dream about riding ponies for five minutes. Dynara hasn’t let me anywhere near a real battlefield since the dragon dream.”

  Jin chews on his bottom lip. “I can’t help but wonder why. She had no problem at all throwing you into that Brennian nightmare completely unprepared, but now she’s overly cautious with your wellbeing? Seems a little backward to me.”

  “Glad I’m not the only one who noticed that. I feel like there’s something I’m missing. About Brennian. About that whole incident. Something Dynara isn’t telling me.” Something my new boss wants to hide about the case that tore my life apart, where my so-called IBI mentor went off the rails and murdered a lawyer who knew too much about a sordid affair. (Murdered him with a goddamned dream, of all things.)

  “So you don’t trust her?” A growl accents his words. Jin hated Dynara in the beginning—when my involvement with her got my torso shredded by an angry dragon—and he hates her now. She’s a keeper of secrets and a master of lies, and Jin is the sort of person who can’t stand being left out of the loop. Especially when that loop concerns people he cares about. “Two months in, and you still don’t trust her?”

  “I never will, Jin. She’s got too many faces, all of them false. Too much history crossed out in black ink. Too much power. More than any person could hold without being corrupted by it.” A pause. “I can work with her. I have to work with her to get what I want out of EDPA. But trust isn’t in the vocabulary I share with Dynara Chamberlain. Not on my end or on hers.”

  “Hey.” Jin’s hand squeezes my shoulder. “You really need to ditch that whole penance mentality. What happened with your mother—“