Recursion

by Marion G. Harmon

  Since I was not there, and did not fight Tin Man and Flash Mob (who I’d obviously never met), Blackstone had me write up an unfiled after-action report while he thoroughly interviewed Irons and Eric. Then he read my hand-delivered report.

  “Do you understand what you did wrong?” he asked, lowering my epad to look at me. His always-open office door was closed again, because this conversation wasn’t happening either.

  I nodded. “I should have cleared it with you, first.” And I should have; here, now, it was months until the Wreckers would make their debut. But then Shell had confirmed that Eric had become a Foundation member. Worse, he’d been on a retreat to a place I was very familiar with—I’d been held there, shared a terrifying dinner conversation with the Ascendant there. I’d panicked. Eric was doing it again. I’d seen every future crime he’d be charged with, like a PTSD flashback (flashforward?), and had to stop him now.

  Blackstone sighed. “Quite right. Your heart was in the right place, my dear.”

  “So, what happens now?”

  “Now, Eric is cooperating. He really doesn’t know anything, yet, other than that your Dr. Pellegrini is a breakthrough capable of boosting breakthrough powers. With your report and his confirmation, I’ve turned over everything Shelly gave me to the DSA. They may be able to do what you say has taken several years to accomplish—shut this particular foulness down. I don’t believe your misstep is irreparable.”

  Hearing a total lack of condemnation or even disappointment in his voice, the knot inside me unwound a little. But I wasn’t ready to let myself completely off the hook. “I could have handled this a lot better.”

  “Yes, but that can nearly always be said. And now we have a new puzzle. Shelly has filled me in on Villains Inc., and the corruption in the police department. Invaluable intelligence, jobs for the DSA and FBI to handle. Also, thank you for my life. But this attack? Tin Man and Flash Mob?” He shook his head. “I’m at a loss. Were they targeting you? Were they targeting Mr. Ludlow? This breaks all of the future continuity you’ve provided us. Do you have any ideas?”

  “No.” I slumped in my seat. I’d been fooling myself, really. I’d made notes of all the other discontinuities I’d seen, then forgotten about them. “The changes didn’t start with me, at least I don’t see how they could have. It makes no sense.”

  Blackstone rubbed his eyes.

  “Well, it’s late. Tomorrow, fresh eyes and all that. Call it a night.” He passed my pad back as I rose to my feet. “And see Chakra. She doesn’t usually do cosmetic repairs, but we really need to keep the marks of your fight off your face.” He chuckled. “Since it didn’t happen.”

  “I will. Thank you, for— Thank you.”

  He waved it away. “It’s been less than a day with your new reality, Hope. You’ll get your feet under you. Good night, my dear.”

  On that note, I slipped away, stopping by Eric’s guest room to make sure he was okay and settled, and then called it a night. It had been an eternity since I’d woken up to find Kitsune on my bed. After I showered and changed for sleep Chakra came and used her magic hands. She didn’t stop with my face, and left me feeling warm, energized, and incredibly drowsy. Shell dimmed the lights as my head hit my pillow, and I was out.

  * * *

  “Love is patient, love is kind.” Petals falling from the flowering cherry tree dusted Quan Yin’s hair and robes, her divinely beautiful face serene as she recited the holy words. “It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”

  Cutter stood witness on her right, Faith and Shell on her left, Faith smiling happily and Cutter looking as grimly serious as ever.

  “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

  With Kitsune’s hand warm in mine, I looked beyond the goddess and her tree to the great River of Stars surrounding our island and its sisters, so wide I’d mistaken the High Plain of Heaven for a great lake or inland sea. The rising sun bathed the perfection of the tree, the grass, the waves, and us, in golden glory.

  “And now abide faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love,” she finished. Kitsune shifted his grip, fingers curling around mine as I looked up. He smiled down at me.

  “May I kiss the bride?”

  “You may.” But laughing, I kissed him first.

  I jackknifed upright, coming half off the bed as my inhaling gasp echoed in my head.

  “Hope?” Shell popped in beside me. “What’s going on?”

  “I— Not—” my brain finally found traction, not that coming fully awake helped. “I’m— Kitsune and I are married.”

  Chapter Ten

  “You know those rom-coms where a couple who can’t stand each other, or who are just fundamentally incompatible, wake up together and discover they’re wearing wedding rings? Las Vegas figures in a lot of those plots, but no, the story of Kitsune and me wasn’t like that. It still had its share of spit-take scenes, though.”

  From the Journal of Hope Corrigan.

  * * *

  Five minutes of pacing my bedroom didn’t help. I was married. To Kitsune. And somehow I hadn’t remembered. If I’d woken to find that tricky fox bogarting the bed again, he would have found himself running for his life without knowing why.

  We eloped! Oh my gosh, Mom’s going to kill me!

  Really? That was my big problem with this? But people wake up married in the movies! And in Vegas! What the heck?

  Shell sat on the bed, knees-up and arms around her legs, watching me pace. My bark of hysterical laughter didn’t reassure her.

  And I couldn’t connect it to anything. Five steps and turn, five steps and turn, I was getting dizzy and I couldn’t remember anything leading up to or past that (beautiful) scene.

  “We’d only just started dating!” I directed my protest at the universe, but Shell answered for it.

  “Really? Is she a good kisser?”

  “Yes! I mean, no! She’s a he! Sometimes!”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know, it really won’t matter since you wear a wig most days, but you might be strong enough to pull your own hair out.”

  I dropped my hands and growled at her, but my horrible evil BF just laughed. “I get that you don’t remember how it happened?”

  “No.” I dredged up my last Kitsune-memory, weeks after I’d gotten back from my cross-reality trip, and it had no connection at all to that. And that wasn’t a dream; I’d long ago learned to distinguish dreams from the crystal clarity of that (beautiful) place. Where a breakthrough who thought she was a Chinese goddess officiated a semi-Christian ceremony for a Japanese kami and a Catholic girl. How ecumenical of us. I smothered hysterical laughter.

  And . . . I’d been happy, in that memory. Blissfully happy, though how much of that was because of the baseline of bubbling happiness that was part of being there, in that extrareality High Plane of Heaven, and how much was because of getting married to Kitsune I really had no idea. But—

  He promised! He promised to love me!

  I groaned and dropped to the bed, hiding my face.

  “And now you’re freaking me out,” Shell said drily. “Talk.”

  I did. It took a while.

  “Okay. And can I just say, wow.” I could hear the laughter in her voice. “So your two big issues here, besides not remembering anything but the wedding, are a) your mom’s gonna kill you for eloping to get married by a goddess, and b) Kitsune’s a kami and she told you before that when kami make promises they, what, change to make it happen? Like reprograming themselves?”

  I uncovered my eyes and looked up. Shell was grinning ear to ear.

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “Oh, but it is. And you’ve really got to tell me how a part of me, the soul of a sword, and Faith from another reality, wind up as witnesses in a piece of Japanese Heaven.”

  “You— Later, okay? When we’ve got a day or two?” After that she could research the metaphysi
cs of it herself. I was stuck on trying to figure out how it had happened.

  My relationship with Atlas had been intense. Learning he’d reciprocated my feelings had intoxicated me. And he’d said I was strong. He’d loved me because I was strong, but in the awfulness of the wreck of LA, the horror of little broken bodies, he’d known when I couldn’t be strong, when I was ready to break. He’d held me together. I’d known then that he would always hold me together.

  And then he’d died.

  With three years of distance, I thought I understood. Both of us had needed each other. We’d fit, two half-traumatized people coming together in what was really the middle of a war zone. Even now I had no way of knowing if the vision I’d later experienced at the hands of the shinigami in Japan, of what might have happened if Atlas hadn’t died, had been a true one. Would we really have had a slower, two-year engagement while I gained experience as a cape, and married in a public ceremony that nearly shut down Chicago? But whether it had been a true vision of our future before Seif-al-Dinn had taken it away, or a manifestation of my wished-for Happy Ending, our love had been real.

  And Kitsune?

  I rubbed my eyes and groaned again.

  If Atlas was a rock, Kitsune was water. Enough exposure to him had shown me his innate goodness, but it had also shown me his completely changeable nature; Kitsune could mimic the physical form of literally anybody, and with enough exposure to them could mirror and model their personality, even their knowledge and skills. And when he did, his core remained but his personality changed.

  He loved it; to him it was like trying a new and exotic dish, and it made dating him interesting. He liked to share his “favorites” and none of my dates-with-a-thousand-faces were ever un-fun. And that was because he’d had enough exposure to model me; he knew what I needed, whatever form he was in.

  He knew what I needed him to be, and that’s what he’d made himself with me even before we’d “sealed the deal.”

  “Would you undo it if you could?”

  “What?”

  Shell chewed on her lip, suddenly pensive.

  “Because if I’m right that these are just implanted memories, then it hasn’t happened to you yet and may never happen. But . . .”

  “But, what?”

  She sighed. “You may not be the only one remembering.”

  “Why— Oh my gosh.” I jerked upright, almost jumped off the bed but made myself sit still and think. “Kitsune’s here. Why? And . . .”

  “And why did she sneak into your bed her first night in the Dome, if the two of you haven’t really met yet? And why is the night you ‘sleep together’ the first night you have a triggering dream-memory of your future?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.” I agreed weakly, clutching my head. Because it was going to fall right off my shoulders. I actually felt dizzy as my world shifted again. It was disturbing enough for me to pass right over Shell’s insinuative sleep together. “Where is she, anyway?”

  Shell’s eyes unfocused. “She hasn’t been in the Dome since yesterday. Blackstone has her listed as In the Field.”

  So my husband wasn’t around to question. Fisher’s investigation. She was working with Fisher, and he and Ambrosius were after a very bad man. I rubbed my face, pulled my hair back. “What’s the status of the investigation?”

  “No official progress, yet. They’re—”

  My phone chimed and when I looked the text read Assembly Room, ten minutes. It was from Blackstone.

  * * *

  Freshening up and speed-dressing took five minutes. Quin passed me in the Residence Level hallway and stopped to give my new two-piece outfit a look over, a thumbs up, and an “I can work with that. See me later.” Laconic Bob gave me a nod as I fast-walked through the public level lobby. I’d been the only one headed upstairs to the Base Level, and walking into the Assembly Room I saw why; I was the only Sentinel attending besides Blackstone. Fisher and Ambrosius waited for me—no Kitsune—along with three more gentlemen, one that I knew.

  Crap. Also nuts, shoot, darn, phooey, and other G-rated expletives.

  I’d recognize Veritas’ care lined face anywhere. The square-lensed sunglasses hiding the DSA agent’s eyes were as much a part of him as his close-cropped but still mussed hair. The two men with him were another mismatched pair. One looked like a fellow college student, with an easy smile and light blue eyes under tousled blond hair. He wore a t-shirt under an open plaid button-down, a frat star or dude bro ready to go to class. The other . . . not so much. Asian, weathered face salted with scars on one side. It looked like he’d been close enough to a frag grenade’s kill-zone to be lucky he still had his sight, and he studied me with a veteran’s eyes behind his shades. He wore military cargo pants and a tailored armored vest under a dark coat long enough to hide a bunch of pointy and shooty things.

  Which I’d be willing to bet he’d brought with him; he spent a lot of time on a shooting range and his clothes smelled of spent Boxer primer.

  “Good morning, Astra,” Blackstone greeted me. “Of course you know Veritas. Allow me to introduce Agent G and Black Powder.” He indicated the student and gunman respectively, waving me to the empty seat beside him.

  I sat carefully, folding my hands on the table in front of me. “Hello, everyone.” Willis didn’t immediately materialize with coffee. Instead I distinctly heard the Assembly Room doors bolt. “We are now activating the Cone of Silence,” Shell whispered before fading out with a wink. Okay . . .

  Blackstone looked at his epad and cleared his throat. “I passed all the intelligence you provided along to the DSA, along with your unofficial report of yesterday’s action. Veritas and his team are here because of that. Veritas?”

  The man took off his shades, playing with them as he rested his hands on his cellphone. “Hello, Astra, it’s good to see you again. Before we continue, can you tell me the purpose of our conversation between Christmas and New Year’s?”

  I relaxed. “I questioned a man about the crimes attributed to the Teatime Anarchist.”

  “Correct. And now you are in possession of memories belonging to an Astra from three years in our future?”

  “Yes, give or take a few months.”

  He nodded, his power telling him that I believed it, whether it was true or not. “And one set of these memories is regarding Dr. Pellegrini, who you know to be a breakthrough and the Ascendant, the terrorist who claimed responsibility for the Lucas Oil Stadium Massacre?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you confirm that Eric Ludlow has indeed been boosted, by, as you understand it, Dr. Pellegrini?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” Releasing his shades, he punched a text into his phone and sent it.

  “Do I get to know what’s going on?”

  “Indeed. We have just launched Operation Icarus. We already have eyes on Dr. Pellegrini’s current location and those of his known associates, and secret warrants for his organization’s accounts, entry into his computers, bugs, wiretaps, all of the usual have just been served.”

  A thrill shot through me, my breath catching. “You— All that since last night?”

  “Yes. You yourself confirmed the doctor’s breakthrough status with your match against Mr. Ludlow, at least sufficiently for the preliminary warrants. The data and evidence-gathering phase of the operation will continue until we have what we need to roll up his entire conspiracy, or until he takes any actions that endanger lives or indicate he is aware of our activities.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “That’s— My punch-fight with Eric was all that you needed?” I’d expected something to come out of it, but this. . ..

  “Indeed.” His smile was the definition of dry. “Blackstone tells me you consider your impulsive actions a mistake. Well. If you were on my team we would certainly be discussing your enthusiasm for taking the initiative. But yes, your ‘physical confirmation’ made our fast response possible. Since the Foundation of Awakened Theosophy had not previously been on our rada
r, at least no more than any other organization that works with breakthroughs, we’re in your debt.”

  “So—what happens next?”

  “My team goes to work. Agent G?”

  Agent G grinned at me and melted. Before I had a chance to inhale, he went from college-boy to a kind of amorphous gray humanoid blob to Eric. Who winked at me.

  “Agent G can physically mimic anybody he’s had a good look at, and he ate an early breakfast with Mr. Ludlow this morning. He can also make his form dense and strong enough that he’ll be able to take Mr. Ludlow’s place with the Crew and do his job for as long as we need. Mr. Ludlow will remain in voluntary custody.” His hands stilled. “And so will you.”

  * * *

  I missed Veritas’ next few words but my filter was getting better; I stomped on my first response—I need to get out of here and go track down my sneaky varmint possibly-husband! Privately! I shut up and listened, and Veritas’ reasoning was chilling; it was safest to assume that I had been the target of yesterday’s attack, and if that was the case then someone with Bad Intentions knew who I was and had decided to attack me Out of Uniform.

  Maybe my going straight for Eric had triggered it, but probably not. Which hinted that they’d been following me with a willingness to attack me anywhere. They could have attacked me at home.

  The alternative theory, that they’d targeted Eric or another of the Crew and been willing to give a good try at perpetuating a massacre to get them, wasn’t much better.

  My bet was on me. And if they’d followed me and had no idea I’d chosen to walk into the woods with a bunch of super-tough construction workers. . . “They didn’t come loaded for the Crew.”

  “No, they didn’t,” Blackstone agreed. “Your notes yesterday named them as members of the new Villains Inc. What do you know about them?”

  “Tin Man was a thief, before he popped up with them. His identity was unknown, but he deployed his metal puppets for second-story work. In and outs, low or no conflict. Flash Mob was just a mercenary.”