The Gone World

ONE

“Grey Dove actual, on your go.”

“Go,” I said.

The engines fired, I was pressed into my chair, hurtling along the runway, and as the Grey Dove lifted into the night, my belly flopped at her steep ascent. The Earth rushed from me. The Grey Dove rattled around me, shaking me. I used to pass out as she climbed, the g-forces whipping blood from my brain, but I’m used to her now and grip the chair and watch the lights of cities as they recede below, turning into skeins of light as delicate as illuminated webs, as they disappear from my view, replaced by the vast blackness of the ocean at night.

“Grey Dove, please dim the lights,” I said.

The cockpit lights go dark, and the heads-up display vanishes, and far above any cloud cover or light pollution the stars reveal themselves, countless points of brilliance. Overwhelming beauty.

“Bird in flight’s looking good, all systems go,” from the Apollo Soucek tower, and the Grey Dove climbs ever steeper, and I’m soon facing upward, on my back, the Earth directly beneath me. The nuclear thrusters fire, and the sudden force crushes me, difficult to draw breath, but the pain lasts only a few seconds, thirty seconds at most before Grey Dove escapes Earth’s clutching gravity and I’m weightless. The Earth dwindles beneath me, behind me. I feel the rumble of the firing thrusters vibrate through the ship, and I feel like I’m falling, like everything’s floating and falling.

The lunar approach was a trip of only a few hours, but I didn’t dock at the Black Vale; I accelerated past the moon. And as the moon’s silver face diminished, darkening, the Black Vale’s Lighthouse tower locked into the Grey Dove’s computer and performed a final check of the Brandt-Lomonaco Quantum-Foam Macro-Field Generator. The Grey Dove entered the area of space NSC called “Danger Sector,” as it was pocked with B-L space-time knots, points of instability created by B-L engines as we sail Deep Waters.

The B-L drive switch lit green.

I peered through the Grey Dove’s cockpit glass back toward Earth like a sailor stealing her final glimpse of shore. Earth in the ocean of space, a tearful rush, a vast sense of the fragility of life—these were the rare moments I felt a spiritual swell.

“March 1997,” I said, reminding myself of what I was soon to leave, and flipped the switch.

The B-L drive fired, creating a quantum-foam macro-field. For a brief moment, I felt as if all future possibilities existed with me, a melancholy sweetness that dissipated. A q-foam macro-field was nothing I’d ever see, even if the Grey Dove had been enveloped within one, a roiling system of wormholes flashing into existence and collapsing out of existence, all in just a Planck unit of time. The Earth, moon, and stars were blacked out. I sailed a wormhole. Which wormhole out of that turbulent foam the Grey Dove penetrated was just a matter of chance, each a tunnel to a distinct tine of the future multiverse.

I would sail three months through the quantum foam, the only light the Grey Dove’s cabin lights. Outside was depthless darkness, void. I unstrapped from the cockpit, the sounds I made strange in that eerie silence. I floated into the larger section of the ship, the interior curvilinear, white. A solitary passage. I read my case notes, reread them, and as days passed, I cycled through the ship’s library of films—Jean Seberg, Bardot, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg—and listened to the Cure and Shania Twain and Nirvana, long stretches of classical music—Rachmaninoff, Ravel. Diminishing muscle and bone mass a constant concern without gravity, so my daily routine was to exercise, fastening myself to the treadmill with broad shoulder straps, jogging with my prosthesis. Elastic bands and vacuum resistance. Miles of stairs climbed on the elliptical.

A three-month journey to travel nineteen years.

I was startled when the Grey Dove’s alarm sounded, alerting me that she had made contact with the Black Vale’s Lighthouse, that a new existence had coalesced around me. I dressed in my flight suit and floated to the cockpit, buckling myself in. Earth had reappeared in the void as if a blue light had been switched on. I checked the heads-up display: SEPTEMBER 2015. Relieved that my voyage was closing, but arrivals were different from departures, no exhilaration at seeing home after so long an absence; Rather, seeing this future-Earth was like staring into a mirror and discovering someone else’s face.

Approaching Naval Air Station Oceana from the Atlantic, 2:00 a.m., the Grey Dove a needle passing over the black fabric of ocean. Rain-swept cockpit windows, lights of distant ships bobbing in the breakers, the coastline of Virginia much brighter than I remembered, even in this dismal weather.

“Oceana Approach,” I said, calling to the airfield, “Cormorant Seven Zero Seven Golf Delta, level fifteen thousand with information Kilo—”

A blast of static, a woman’s voice: “Cormorant Seven Zero Seven Golf Delta, Oceana Approach, turn left heading three two zero, descend and maintain nine thousand.”

First voices on arrival were always eerie, echoes of sounds that hadn’t yet been struck. The woman on the comm might have been only a child in 1997, or if she was young enough here, might not have been born, might not ever be born. Her entire life was only a possibility of the conditions of 1997, nothing more—brought into existence by my arrival, blinking out when I leave. She was a ghost, haunting her own potential.

Before experiencing IFTs, I imagined time travel as something concrete, that knowing the future would be as certain as knowing the past. I imagined that knowing the future might help me cheat at something like the lottery, seeing winning numbers before the numbers were ever pulled. This was before attending lectures at the Black Vale, before struggling through the mathematics-laden booklet explaining the physics of the Brandt-Lomonaco Quantum-Foam Macro-Field Generator. When I mentioned the lottery to our instructor, he’d said that every lottery number existed as a possible winning number until the moment when the winning numbers were observably pulled. What I would experience when traveling to an IFT, he’d said, wouldn’t be the actual observed outcome of the lottery but only a possibility of the winning numbers. “In other words,” he’d said, “don’t place your bets.”

“Cormorant Seven Golf Delta,” said the flight controller, “intercept the localizer runway two eight right, cleared ILS two eight right.”

Reflections of raindrops were like shadows boiling on my flight suit. I followed the ramp handlers’ neon batons, taxiing. What would one day be real? IFTs felt like being lost in a house with a floor plan similar to your own, returning and returning to not-quite-familiar corridors, not-quite-familiar rooms. A team of engineers surrounded the Grey Dove once she was through the hangar doors—they wore reflective vests marked NETWARCOM and tended to the B-L drive, housed in the ship’s engine room, astern.

A ladder rig to the cockpit. One of the engineers knocked on the canopy of glass.

“Welcome to Apollo Soucek,” he shouted. “Naval Air Station Oceana.”

I unlocked and lifted the canopy—an irrational panic at the prospect of breathing hypothetical air, holding my breath as I removed my breathing mask, savoring my last breath from the oxygen tank until I couldn’t hold out any longer and filled my lungs with the place. Unused to the pull of gravity as I tried to unbuckle and climb from the cockpit, gravity like hooks tugging downward. The NETWARCOM engineer draped my arm over his shoulder, assisted me from the flight chair, down the ladder rig. I’d lost weight in my three months aboard the Grey Dove, my prosthesis had lost its proper fit. The engineer eased me into a waiting wheelchair.

I felt like I’d only closed my eyes, but when lights swarmed back, I’d already been moved from the hangar and hooked up to an IV for hydration. A medical facility, a hospital room. A team of nurses, two men, transferred me from the wheelchair to a firm mattress, handling me like I weighed little more than a husk. Weary—my body felt like it was shutting down. A blush of modesty as they undressed me, removing my sweat-sodden flight suit, my underclothes. The last thing I remember before depths of sleep swallowed me was saying, “At least change the channel”—the flat television tuned to The X-Files, an episode I’d never seen.

Two weeks shy of six when my father left us. Mom moved her rocker into my room and sat with me until I fell asleep, each night saying the Sandman would come and sprinkle dreams in my eyes. When once I asked who the Sandman was, she told me he was a shadow who crept into rooms where children slept, bringing dreams to kind children, removing the eyes from children who were rotten. When I asked what the Sandman did with those eyes, she said he passed them on to children waiting to be born so they would have eyes to see. Every night when I closed my eyes, I heard Mom rocking in her chair and feared the Sandman would come for my eyes, and although I was used to falling asleep with the thought of the Sandman approaching, every night the fear was new.

Time travel evoked similar anxieties. I had traveled to IFTs seven times before but never grew used to the dread of existing in a future; I was a splinter of the real that had pierced the membrane of a dream. Everything that followed my induction into NCIS had felt dreamlike, following that first moment in the Cormorant when my recruitment class had experienced weightlessness. While we were at the Black Vale, our instructors taught us the riddles of Deep Time—how we couldn’t effectively travel to the past except for those rare occurrences called space-time knots and closed timelike curves, how we can travel to the future, but only possible futures. Only the Present is real, only the Present is terra firma. We were warned that no time passes in terra firma while we lived lives in IFTs—and yet IFTs weren’t real, not “objectively” so. We were told that we affected IFTs even as we observed them—that they would bend around our psyches in subtle ways, but as surely as intense gravity bends light. The effect was called lensing, the sensation bizarre, our instructor saying that IFTs could feel like dreams within dreams. One session our instructor had asked us, “What would happen if you met someone in the future and brought him home with you to live in terra firma? What would happen if that person already exists in the present?” Another man had entered the classroom, an exact duplicate of our instructor, a double, a doppelgänger. “You would have what we call an echo,” the double had said.

I woke in the hospital room.

“What year is it?” I asked the technician who came to take blood.

“2015,” she said.

“September?”

“You haven’t been asleep that long. Yeah, it’s still September.”

Bone-density tests, eyesight tests, MRIs. A physical-therapy regimen to recover from three months without gravity, but I’m a quick study, my body accomplished in adapting to new movement. The routine to manage the effects of gravity was not unlike the physical-therapy routine following my amputation, the hours of rehabilitation when teams of physical and occupational therapists taught me how to live with a missing limb. Severe weight loss aboard the Grey Dove—I hadn’t realized just how many pounds I’d shed, but my facial features were drawn, my ribs and the points of my hip bone visible, my figure diminished in the full-length mirror. An enormous appetite—daily protein shakes, sometimes twice daily, easy to exceed the recommended caloric intake, the past three months nothing but Protein Fillets, Russian Vita-Sticks, foil envelopes of fruit paste. I’d need to bulk up to endure the return trip home.

A soft knock at the room door the afternoon of my fifth day. I thought maybe one of the lab techs for another round of blood work, but when I opened the door, I found a hulking man, slightly stooped with age, bald except for a cottony tonsure and a flowing white beard. He wore a brown suit and a robin’s-egg pocket handkerchief that matched the vivid blue of his shirt. When he saw me, a grin spread warmly across his face, like the sun revealed from behind clouds.

“Ah, there you are,” he said. “I’ve been waiting nearly twenty years to meet you.”

I recognized him, remembered him when he was middle-aged, a six-and-a-half-foot physicist with a startling Mohawk, reed thin back then in a cardigan and large black-framed glasses, now hunched and thicker, the top of his head as smooth as a river stone. Dr. Njoku had already been a star investigator by the time I saw him speak at a training session in Savannah because of his work on the Faragher case, a policy setter for investigations involving echoes, those individuals brought from IFTs, doubling someone already living.

Cases of misconduct among NSC sailors were common, an epidemic of drugs and money stolen from IFTs and distributed in terra firma. While fallout from Tailhook reverberated through the Navy, however, NSC sailors went without reform because actions committed in Inadmissible Future Trajectories had always been considered inadmissible, as if those actions had never occurred. Njoku’s work had helped change the culture. He had spent years investigating Petty Officer Jack John Faragher, a sailor authorized to travel solo missions to Deep Waters but who had instead made several runs to near futures to kidnap the wives of friends, to bring these doubled women back to terra firma to defile and eventually murder. Faragher had pleaded innocent—but the court found, based on Njoku’s work, that echoes brought to terra firma should be considered “alive” in every sense, afforded the rights of nonresident aliens. The charges against Faragher stuck, resulting in court-martial—and, after a series of appeals, the death sentence.

“Dr. Njoku,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m honored—I heard you speak in Savannah.”

A summery vitality percolated in his eyes even though he moved with difficulty. Stiff knees, orthopedic shoes. He held a slim silver laptop, manila envelopes.

“The honor’s mine,” he said. “You’re a bird in flight, a time traveler—the rest of us are just ghosts. Here, I brought you some housewarming gifts.” Njoku handed me an envelope. “O’Connor wanted to bring these to you himself, but he just couldn’t make the trip. Some health issues.”

Mortal revelations were common in IFTs, but always jarring. “I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say—I tried not to imagine O’Connor suffering, told myself that whatever the circumstances here, he was still healthy in 1997.

“He has his good days and his bad days,” said Njoku. “He lives out in Arizona, says the dry air helps. He so wanted to see you again, but some days he… he can’t even speak some days. He endured a series of heart attacks a few years back. He had to send me in his place.”

We were trained not to take personal revelations like these as fact, not to let ourselves be snagged with worry over the possibilities we see unspooled. O’Connor’s series of heart attacks might not ever occur. I opened the envelope he’d left for me: a Visa, a bank card, driver’s insurance, and a license. Five hundred dollars in twenties. A slim-profile cellular phone that looked like a handheld television.

“Ever use an ATM?” Njoku asked.

“Sure, but we travel with cash. I brought enough to last.”

“Use the debit card, you’ll have an endless supply—save you some paperwork when you return home. Your PIN is 1234. Everything’s registered under the name you provided us with.”

State of Virginia license, my photograph taken from my NCIS ID card, altered so that I was a brunette. Courtney Gimm. I’d asked O’Connor before I left to have this identification ready, knowing I’d be traveling under a different name. Almost twenty years after I’d filled out the paperwork, here it was.

“That one’s a burner phone,” said Njoku. “Disposable, biodegradable.”

“You don’t have Ambient Systems here?” I asked, thinking of other IFTs I’d visited, futures misty with nanotech, the air shimmering gold like fairy dust, hallucinatory images, illusions, voices that answered when you spoke their names. Cellular phones were obsolete in other futures.

“No, nothing like that here,” said Njoku.

We shared a pot of oolong tea, watched a video montage on his laptop of what I’d missed in the intervening years, Highlights of the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries, the death of Diana and the semen-stained dress, the thousand dead at the terror attack on the CJIS FBI facility—a bitter jolt seeing images of the office where I worked engulfed in flames, the dead draped in sheets. The election of Gore, the towers falling. An Iraq treaty, the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some of these images were familiar from other IFTs, but in other IFTs history had played out differently.

“What about the Terminus?” I asked.

“Recorded at the year 2067 by the crew of the USS James Garfield.”

Within a lifetime.

“Show me that part about CJIS again,” I said.

“The largest act of domestic terror since the Oklahoma City bombing,” said Njoku. “Over a thousand casualties. A sad, terrible day.”

Internet images of the immediate aftermath, the dead laid in the fields surrounding the CJIS facility and in the vast parking lot. I wondered who I’d known that would be among the dead. Rashonda Brock, it occurred to me, and the kids, Brianna and Jasmine—I wondered if they would have died in the CJIS attack, thought of Brock just before he’d opened the door to Courtney’s old bedroom. “I have two beautiful girls,” he’d said. His entire family might have been stricken from him in a single morning.

“My office is in one of the burning sections,” I said, my corner of the building obscured by smoke in nearly every image—the sensation was like seeing a house you’d once lived in burn to cinders. I thought of the faces I would have recognized. Rashonda Brock running through corridors opaque with smoke, searching for her children. “Was,” I corrected. “I might die in this attack. Or I might have died, except I know—”

“A suicide bomber, an individual who worked for the FBI, his office was in the CJIS building,” said Njoku. “He had security clearance.”

Then the bomber is employed at CJIS now, I thought. I might have passed him in the hallways, might have interacted with him. I didn’t recognize the photographs of the suicide bomber or his name: Ryan Wrigley Torgersen. “What happened?”

“April nineteenth, 1998,” he said. “Torgersen reported to work like any ordinary day, breezed through security—he had a bomb sewn inside his body, nasty stuff—and he’d spent some time planting other bombs in the building. The explosions themselves caused some damage, but he’d rigged the fire-suppression system with sarin.”

Sarin. Even a whiff of sarin gas was lethal within seconds. Imagining my colleagues in those narrow corridors, sarin spraying from ceiling sprinklers.

“Why did this happen?” I asked. “What was the motive?”

“Antigovernment paranoia,” said Njoku. “Inspired by Timothy McVeigh, more than likely. Torgersen had purchased blueprints of the CJIS facility from a militia member active in West Virginia. He must have figured that destroying CJIS would cripple government law enforcement.”

Njoku refilled our cups with tea, placed two manila envelopes on the table between us, both sealed. One envelope was marked MURSULT, PATRICK. The other, MURSULT, MARIAN.

Whatever hopes I harbored that Marian Mursult would have been found alive, safe, in the years between her disappearance and now dissolved at the sight of her name. I tore open the seal on Marian’s file, slid out the thin sheaf of papers, and wept when I saw a photograph of partially buried bone fragments, a rush of mourning that had pent up in my heart ever since learning that the girl was missing. Marian’s remains had been found in the summer of 2004, buried in the vast wilderness of the Blackwater Gorge. A photograph of the site showed a nondescript patch of mud in a verdant forest. Another showed bones in the earth. Despite the recovered remains, no suspects other than her father had ever emerged and no criminal charges were ever filed. Njoku had collected a few newspaper clippings from the time, the papers already yellowed. Another run of the familiar picture of Marian from the Amber Alert. A few quotes from Brock—reaffirming an already established narrative that Patrick Mursult had murdered his wife and children before killing himself. A confusion, there—Patrick Mursult had been executed, clearly a homicide. I scanned the news items, the obituary. Only an aunt and an uncle from Ohio to feel the relief at Marian’s discovery, to bear the public grief—and then it was over, the Mursult family filed away.

“The file’s wrong,” I said. “Patrick Mursult was murdered. He didn’t kill himself.”

“The decision was made by NCIS and the FBI to control the narrative to the public, the media. A story of murder/suicide helped close up outside inquiries. We continued to investigate Mursult’s murder, but nothing turned up. The trail ran cold.”

“Hikers found her,” I said.

“A fluke. Nothing stays buried,” said Njoku. “When her remains were discovered, one of our guys reconvened with the FBI, but nothing was discovered to warrant reopening the case.”

“She’s still alive. Marian might be still alive where I come from,” I told him, setting aside Marian’s file as if the pages themselves were fragile.

I opened the file MURSULT, PATRICK.

A swift-boat gunner in Vietnam, the connection to Elric Fleece confirmed. Pictures of the two men together on their boat, Fleece lean, almost unrecognizable from the obese body we’d cut down from the tree made of bones, younger. The file contained photographs of the mirrored room, the sculptures. The pictures of Kennedy, the Challenger, the swift boat covered in chips of fingernails.

“What about this?” I asked him. “Anything with the fingernails?”

“They were all Elric Fleece’s,” said Njoku. “No break there.”

“Any guess as to what the ‘ship made of nails to carry the dead’ is?”

“It should be in the notes. A Viking myth, something about the end of the world.”

I found the annotation: Naglfar—a ship constructed from the fingernails of the dead, sails the end of the world to wage war against the gods.

Another set of photographs, copies of the twenty-four explicit Polaroids we had found in Fleece’s house, in the duffel bag in his spare room: Nicole Onyongo.

“This woman was identified?” I asked. “Who is this?”

“A day or two after Patrick Mursult’s body was discovered,” said Njoku, “Special Agent Philip Nestor tracked her down, using license-plate information the lodge kept. Questioned her, but she wasn’t involved in our homicides beyond a sexual relationship with Mursult. She’d been having an affair with Mursult for a number of years but was shocked and saddened by what he was wrapped up in, what happened to his family. I remember she took the news of his death very hard.”

Nicole Onyongo, a registered nurse at the Donnell House, hospice care associated with a hospital in Washington, Pennsylvania. Her address was up to date, the Castle Tower apartments not far from her place of work—notes about her life, her routine. It looked like she spent most every day shift at the Donnell House before heading to a nearby bar, the May’rz Inn, where she drank until walking home at night. One of the pictures in the file was a copy of the woman’s work ID—she was stunning, almost intimidating. Her eyes were a light shade of hazel. I compared her work ID to the sex pictures, the same rich color of skin. How did she strike up a relationship with a man like Patrick Mursult?

“Nestor interviewed her? I’ll want to see any paperwork he kept about this woman,” I said.

“We can track him down,” said Njoku. “He was never briefed about Deep Waters, and he left the FBI some years ago. I think he sells guns.”

“Nestor?” I asked. Not uncommon for FBI agents to make the jump into a second career, parlay their leadership skills into higher-paying office jobs, but selling firearms was a surprise. I’m not sure why—I’d only worked with Nestor for an afternoon, I didn’t know him, but I’d thought of him since then, an infatuation. Soft-spoken, a photographer. I wanted to hold him apart from the jocks and gun geeks I met on the job, but maybe I was imagining Nestor as something he wasn’t. Or maybe something had happened to him since I’d known him, something that had changed him. Strange paths lives can take. I thought of Nestor’s story of his father, doorways in the forest that led to other forests. “Yeah, I’ll track him down. See what he can tell me.”

“Anyone else you’ll want to talk with, anyone associated with the investigation?” he asked. “We can reach out on your behalf.”

“The woman, Onyongo,” I said, and I considered speaking with Brock—but Brock was dangerous to me here. He had been briefed about Deep Waters, he’d known about Deep Space then, and it was possible he had learned about Deep Time in the intervening years. We were trained to avoid contact with government or military personnel who might understand the mechanics of time travel, who might understand that our appearance in their world meant their world would cease once we left. I knew an agent once, had known her as a twenty-four-year-old woman when she launched and saw her a few months later, after she’d returned to terra firma, deteriorated with weariness and old age. She had been imprisoned in her IFT by someone from the Department of Homeland Security, was kept as an inmate at Holman supermax for over fifty years. We called what she endured becoming a “butterfly in a bell jar,” a present danger to agents working in Deep Time. If Brock knew about time travel, he might capture me here and hold me for as long as I could be kept alive. “Only Nicole Onyongo and Nestor,” I said. “At least at first. But I’ll make contact with both of them on my own. I don’t want to approach them as law enforcement. They might clam up.”

Investigating cold cases almost twenty years gone. Disheartening how little progress had been made in this investigation in all this time, as if the Mursult deaths were simply a fluke of violence, stormy weather that struck and was swept away. Still, new information would shake out. Tracking down Nestor, tracking down Nicole Onyongo, interviewing her myself—people will often speak freely about tragedies long buried, will say things that they wouldn’t have said in the heat of their involvement. Relationships evolve, sour—people who wouldn’t have talked then might talk now.

I flipped back to Mursult’s service record. “Still not much,” I said. Unauthorized absence, desertion. Zodiac, Libra. “What about this?” I asked. “Any information about Libra? Or Zodiac? O’Connor tasked me to discover anything about Libra and why Mursult and Elric Fleece weren’t accounted for.”

“Nothing,” said Njoku. “Their appearance remains unexplained. Libra is still assumed lost.”

There was a slim document, a perfect-bound booklet, the cover illustrated with the icon of the Naval Space Command, a gold anchor and ropes spanning an image of the globe. There was a second icon as well—a woman with flowing auburn hair raising a set of golden scales, the figure outlined by the house-shaped constellation.

United States Navy, Naval Space Command, Crew List, USS LIBRA.

I flipped to Petty Officer First Class Patrick Mursult, Special Warfare Operator, and saw his photograph, flint-hard before the American flag, dress blues and white combination cap. Elric Fleece was here, too, rated as Electrician’s Mate—nothing like the obese suicide I’d seen, but handsome, with full lips, and studious in thick-lensed glasses. He’d worked odd jobs as an electrician, I remembered—and in this photo he looked like an earnest graduate student. I had no trouble imagining this man tinkering with motherboards in a basement workshop cluttered with wires, a soldering iron in his hands.

“NCIS tracked surviving relatives of every sailor listed for Libra, but we were asking questions about ghosts,” said Njoku. “Mursult and Fleece were posthumously convicted of desertion. We assume they weren’t on Libra when it launched.”

Libra’s commander was a woman, Elizabeth Remarque—I scanned her service record. An academic, a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT. Her hair was silvery, a feathery pixie cut. She was a young woman when she was given command—born in 1951, she would have been thirty-four when she launched. Her eyes were deep blue, matching the star field of the flag behind her.

“I knew Commander Remarque,” said Njoku. “She was a friend.”

“Did you serve together?”

“I was the agent afloat on the USS Cancer,” said Njoku. “Remarque was our engineer officer, distinguished herself—she saved all our lives. They gave her command of Libra because of how she handled herself on Cancer.”

“Only three Zodiac ships survived,” I said. “The Cancer—”

“We launched in 1984, were scheduled to make five separate jumps to Deep Time, but Remarque discovered problems with the O-ring seals on the B-L Drive,” said Njoku. “The seals were brittle, weren’t holding up—a common problem with ships of that era. We all thought the B-L would misfire or explode. We thought we would all die, were certain of it, like we were living our last days in a floating tomb. But Remarque and her team went to work. They made eighteen separate space walks over the course of a month, replaced what they could, rebuilt the rest. Our commander aborted the rest of the mission, ordered us to sail home. The B-L drive held.”

“You did complete a jump, though?” I asked. “The Cancer must have been the last ship to see a future without the Terminus.”

“We sailed five thousand years,” said Njoku. “And I saw… wonders, Shannon. Wonders I will never comprehend. The oceans were thick like honey. Fifty-five billion people or more. Deserts—everything sand-swept. The old cities had fallen away, but new cities were built, entire cities in the shape of black pyramids, pyramids carried on the shoulders of the millions who lived in their shade. Entire generations were born, lived, and died beneath the cities they carried. Moving cities, wandering to find water. The people below were starving, naked, subsisting on scraps and detritus left by the kings who lived inside the pyramids.”

“Maybe the Terminus is a mercy,” I said.

Njoku snapped from his reverie. “I can tell you the rich were doing well for themselves,” he said. “Inside the pyramids were pleasure gardens, grottoes, fountains. Our crew was welcomed like we were long-lost children, prodigals shown every comfort. Every illness cured if you could afford the cure. And some people had left their bodies entirely, had become immortal, living as waves of light—but once they could no longer die, the immortals begged for death, because life without the passage of time becomes meaningless. It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.”

Njoku finished the last of his tea, checked the time—nearing ten at night. “I should let you sleep,” he said, “but I’m curious. What was the last moment you remember before coming here?”

“Hale-Bopp was in the sky,” I said.

Njoku’s smile seeped through his concentration. “Of course, of course I remember—I remember that time very well. You launched in March, didn’t you? Of 1997, my God. I was stationed at the Boston office—so I’m still in Boston, in terra firma. I was collaborating on a project with physicists at MIT. Wave-function collapse. Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots. Just a few weeks later, I met Jayla… She was a professor of saxophone performance, played in a trio at the time. I remember watching her play, I remember the sounds she made, her fingers pressing the keys, the sound of her breath. We’ve been married now for seventeen years, but oh, I remember that time.”

“So in terra firma, you only have a few weeks to live before your life changes forever,” I said.

“Lovely, Shannon. That is a lovely thought.”

“I am ready to relieve you,” I said once we shook hands good night—the traditional phrasing NSC sailors spoke on parting, the tacit acknowledgment that when I returned home aboard the Grey Dove, every moment of Njoku’s life that had been lived after March of 1997 would blink out of existence—this entire universe, the fully formed entirety of this IFT would vanish as suddenly as a passing thought. Rather than the traditional response of “I am ready to be relieved,” however, Njoku merely smiled.

“It was difficult to accept that my life was an illusion,” he said. “Whether you’re NCIS or NSC, when you’re told the secrets of Deep Waters, you agree that you might have to lay down your life for your country—that theoretically, at any moment, you might come into the realization that your life is an illusion. You rationalize it, you say that soldiers give their lives for their country, that police officers give their lives… ‘They lay down their lives,’ for a greater good… But still, even though I know the physics, on some level I refused to believe that if I ever encountered you, Shannon Moss, it would prove that this entire universe was just some sort of ‘pocket universe’ that would blink out once you’d left. When O’Connor assigned you to me, it was like he handed down my death sentence. Can you understand that? I’m married, I have children, and my children have grown and are ready to have children of their own, but every happy moment in my life was tempered by knowing that what I was experiencing wasn’t real.”

“But you are real where I come from. You’ll still live this life,” I said.

“Dr. Wally Njoku might be real, he might meet Jayla in a few weeks, like you said, he might even have a family, but he won’t have the same family. What are the odds of one particular spermatozoon fertilizing one particular egg? Njoku might have children, but they won’t be the same children, they won’t be mine. He’ll be happy, but it won’t be my happiness—”

“I know,” I told him. “I understand, I do.”

“But I came to accept that my existence is an illusion. Have you ever seen a flower called the ‘falling star’ as it blooms?” he asked. “I saw one—this was several years ago, in summer. I was taking a walk with Jayla when we passed a neighbor’s garden and noticed a certain flower in early bloom. She pointed it out to me, and I was transfixed. A single stem, every bud perfectly symmetrical—the color was orange, almost like fire. I was struck because the first two buds to bloom, at the base of the stem, were in full flower, but the next two buds up the line had only just begun to bloom, the next two buds were smaller still, and so on, all the way up to the tip of the stem, where the flowers were merely two closed buds that had yet to open at all. This was the Crocosmia, the ‘Lucifer,’ but Jayla knew it as the falling star. I understand that we physicists interpret existences as something like a symptom of wave-function collapse, some quantum illusion to exploit, a brief fermata of indeterminacy, but I prefer to think of myself and all my selves as the falling star, every permutation of every choice I’ve ever made and ever will make existing in every moment, forever. ‘Merrily, merrily’—isn’t that what the truest sailors say? Nothing blinks out, nothing ends. Everything exists, always exists. Life is but a dream, Shannon. Self is the only illusion.”

I left Oceana the following morning, in the car that had been requisitioned for me, a beige sedan. I drove from Naval Air Station Oceana north through D.C. to pick up the Pennsylvania Turnpike West, thinking of the falling star. My car was electric, battery-powered, the engine silent, a constant worry that I had slipped into neutral and was coasting. Caffeine helped me overcome the sensation of being caught in a waking dream—I ordered a black coffee at a Starbucks near an outlet mall in Fredericksburg. Country music on the radio, songs I’d never heard before and might not ever hear again, but once the mountains turned FM into static, I scanned AM until I found a minister speaking about the Resurrection. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?—something Nestor had asked me. Through the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel. Isolated houses, tobacco barns fallen into ruin. I watched hawks circle above conical saltcellars. What had this drive been like the last time I’d made it—less than a year ago in my world, but almost twenty years ago in this one? What had the scenery been? Trying to figure out what was new, what was lost. Yards full of junk and houses lined with rusted scaffolding. Communications towers, a white church in a valley near Breezewood. Newer service plazas, motion-sensor toilets that flushed by themselves. I had to charge my engine by plugging in. The changes of the intervening years registered more acutely as I neared Canonsburg—industrial parks and gleaming office cubes and sprouts of housing developments in what had once been only vacant green hills. The hills were cluttered with white windmills, lazily spinning, and I saw entire fields of solar panels where there had once been crops. Driving into Canonsburg still felt like coming home. The drive downhill on Morganza was the same, as was the Pizza Hut that edged Chartiers Creek.

I checked with the Canonsburg Police Department and found my mom still alive, her address listed as Room 405 at Townville Health and Rehabilitation. Up the hill on Barr, already dusk when I pulled in to the lot. Women in wheelchairs taking in the evening air, old men smoking. Jeopardy! in the rec room, a hand of euchre—I scanned the card players, nervous to see her, wondering how much she’d changed. An elevator to the fourth floor, framed paintings of cottages, flora. Mom often said she never wanted to end up in a place like this, said I should kill her before I let that happen.

The door to 405 was open, the television blaring. The room was sterile in the way of doctors’ offices, the color scheme nothing that would have been chosen for a home—blue and fuchsia with white-flowered wallpaper. A food tray was swiveled over the bed, plastic dishes and a carton of milk, the same sort kindergartners would drink from. Potted hyacinths were on the nightstand, filling the room with sweetness that masked the earthier smells of my mother’s body.

“I think my dosage is off,” she said. “I’ve been drowsy—”

I flinched at the concavities of her face when she turned toward me. The shape of my mother’s head was different, tucked in; a significant part of her jaw had been removed. She looked mummylike, bandage-wrapped bedsores on her forearms and bedsheets over her legs.

“Mom,” I said.

“Oh?” she said. “Oh, I thought you were the nurse. Shannon?”

“It’s me, Mom.”

“It can’t be. I don’t believe you.”

Mom propped herself up on her elbows, her gown falling away to reveal the skin of her shoulders, even more supple with age, softer, it seemed, and coated with white down. Her hair was mussed—it looked greasy, like it hadn’t been washed in several days.

“You haven’t changed a day,” she said. “Look at you, Shannon. Where have you been? You left me. You left me bereft. You left me alone.”

“I was deployed,” I said, a lie made no less vile because it was in some sense true. “I had to go.”

“I’m… look at me,” she said, tugging her gown back over her shoulders. “I’m so embarrassed. You shouldn’t see me like this. You shouldn’t see your own mother like this. You should have told them you were coming, I could have dressed.”

Her expressions were altered because of her surgeries, scars like white worms wriggled on her jowls and throat when she talked. I said, “Mom, it’s all right, I like seeing you.”

“New nurses come in here every day, and they don’t take care of me. Sweetie? Sweetie, are you out there? Come here, Sweetie—”

“I’m here,” I said, but when I took a step closer to the bed, Mother said, “Not you.”

A woman appeared in the doorway, a hoary woman in a wheelchair, her hair a tangle of steel wool. Sweetie pulled herself along with her white sneakers and her hands on the wheels, tucked herself inside the room and stared at me.

“This is the one I told you about, Sweetie,” said Mom. “The daughter.”

“I’m Shannon,” I said, realizing I’d been damned during my years of absence. “A pleasure to meet you.”

Sweetie laughed, a horrible wheezing.

“Sweetie’s my friend, my only friend,” said Mother. “We call this place our ghost house, because we feel like ghosts here.”

“Sure enough,” said Sweetie.

I pulled a chair over to my mother’s bedside, took one of her hands. She was insubstantial, just bones and veins and a wrapping paper of skin.

“What happened?” I asked. “You’ve been sick.”

“I’m told I’m a tough old bird, Shannon,” she said. “Too gamy for death to eat.”

Cancer in her intestines and in her mouth, she explained. The doctors broke her jaw and removed the cancerous half. They cut apart her throat. Cut open her intestines and clipped out the effected lengths, leaving her with a colostomy bag.

“All I ate was Ensure,” she said. “Seemed like years. I had a feeding tube right in my stomach for such a long time, right here,” she said, pointing just above her belly button. “I turned skinny.”

“You were always skinny,” I said.

“It’s hard for me to chew, even still—I can’t eat very much. I don’t think these nurses know what they’re doing.”

She’d barely nibbled the cut of turkey and mashed potatoes on her dinner tray.

“Nineteen years,” she said. “You disappeared in 1997. You never came back, you never said good-bye. What do you think about that, Sweetie? Your boy’s no good, I’ve met him—always trying to take your money, but at least he comes to see you. My daughter left me.”

“No good,” Sweetie said.

“They experimented on me,” said Mom. “After they butchered me like this, some doctor paid me a visit, this salesman—said I was terminal but an ideal candidate, and they wanted to know if I’d accept a thousand dollars to be part of their trials. I was one of the first in the entire country. Three injections, that’s all. Tiny robots swimming in my blood, finding cancer cells and killing them. After all these years, all this suffering—three injections. You can tell your children someday how their grandmother was part of the first trials.”

A cure for cancer. “That’s… miraculous,” I said. I’d heard rumors of far-future IFTs where diseases had been solved, but a cure for cancer by 2015? “They cured you?”

“A guinea pig,” she said. “I got lucky—could never afford it otherwise. Can I tell you about a dream I had? A dream about you. After you’d disappeared and I gave up hoping you’d ever come back, I dreamed I was walking down a street, one of those streets in Europe—old buildings, old apartments. I heard a cracking sound—and saw the wall of the building had cracked. I heard snapping wood—the floorboards. The apartment was on fire, and I saw flames rush from the windows, bright orange flames that reached into the sky. You were just a child, playing on the sidewalk, my sweet child. I ran to you, I scooped you up—just before the house collapsed. I saved you, Shannon, but when I looked to see you in my arms, you’d disappeared.”

“Only a dream,” I said.

“A horrible thing, to dream,” she said.

We sat with Sweetie for over an hour, most of the time passing in silence, the three of us staring passively at the television—a singing contest, with judges spinning in futuristic thrones. A nurse changed my mother’s colostomy bag—a flush of embarrassment on my mother’s behalf, a woman given up to this male nurse who handled her body like it was nothing, nothing more than a trash can that needed emptying.

“You left me. Just like he did,” she said, knowing where to bury the knife.

“I was deployed,” I said again, the lie hollow this second time.

“Deployed, always deployed—you lost your leg, you aged, you aged horrifically, always so old, too old, always getting so old I thought you and I were the same age, but now you’re here and you haven’t aged in twenty years. It’s a sickness—”

“I was at sea.”

“Nineteen years without a word, you and your father.”

“I know,” I said.

“Do you even remember your father?” she asked. “He left when you were young, but I bet you remember something.”

Nothing but images—shattered stained glass I hoped could be re-formed into the image of a saint.

“I remember the photograph we had of him on the mantel,” I said. “That’s mostly how I remember him.”

“That’s how I wanted you to remember your father when you were younger. I wanted you to have good memories.”

“I remember him lifting me into the air,” I said.

“I used to wonder if you could smell that other woman on him,” said my mother.

“Please don’t—”

“You’re not that delicate, are you? You come back after all these years and you expect me not to compare you to him? We’re all adults here. Or is it that you want to be faithful to him?” she said. “He’s not worth it. I could smell her on him when he came home too late for dinner, and then he’d hug you and I’d wonder if you could smell her. Isn’t that awful, a woman wondering if her baby girl knew what the smell of another woman was?”

Father smelled like pipe smoke. His breath sometimes like wintergreen.

“We don’t need to talk about this,” I said.

Very few memories of my father. Flannel shirts and blue jeans—or maybe just one memory spread out over years. Pipe smoke, wintergreen. Scruffy—I remembered him with a beard, or stubble, even though the image of him that I remember most clearly was the picture on the mantel, a young sailor, clean-cut.

“I remember his flannel shirts,” I said.

“I don’t believe in you,” said my mother. “I think you’re a dream, or a nightmare I’m having. Am I dreaming, Sweetie?”

“I hope we’re dreaming, you and me,” said her friend.

“You can’t just disappear for nineteen years,” said Mother. “You and your father.”

“Excuse me,” I said, stepping away, refusing to cry in front of her. The hallway air was stale with medicinal smells and disinfectant. Somewhere, in some other room, a woman screamed, and it sounded like she was burning alive. I had to remind myself that this world was false, that her accusations against me were false; it was my father who’d abandoned us. I felt guilty for something I hadn’t done—I never abandoned her, would be with her again when I returned from this IFT as if no time had gone by. No time for her at least. When I thought of the picture of my father on our mantel, I always gave him the benefit of the doubt, always on some level blaming my mother for his leaving us—unfair of me, but I’d think of my mother at the call center, a failure at her grander dreams, a drunk, the hours at McGrogran’s siphoning off her life, and I’d think, No wonder the man left us. I resented her for losing him. She gave him away. She gave away everything and kept nothing.

Sweetie and my mother had returned their attention to the television, a vacant smile twisting my mother’s face as she hummed along with one of the contestants on the show.

“Mom?”

“Too late, too late,” she said. My mother settled into her pillow, closed her eyes. I kissed her forehead—her skin clammy, sweat-scented. I began to cry harder, this IFT dredging up too much pain. Only a version of the truth, I told myself, IFTs warping around the mind of the observer, a black hole warping light. I always wondered if I took after my father, sometimes hoping I took after him, imagining his intricate inner life—a marked contrast to Mom, who always looked outward. I felt so alone after Courtney had died, and I wanted her then, wanted my mom, wanted her to show me how to bear such loss, but she was distant. Her circle at McGrogan’s, her late nights, while her daughter drifted unmoored. I used to think that my father had tried to love her but that she was never there for him, that she had eventually pushed him away. I used to daydream of leaving her, too, resentful. But she was the one who stayed for me when he had left us. She had stayed even while everyone in her life abandoned her—while I abandoned her.

Sweetie’s brown eyes were pools inviting me to drown. “We’ll keep each other,” she said. “When she wakes up, I’ll tell her you were just a haunt, a wayward.”

I found one of Mom’s nurses at the call station, clicking fingernails against the screen of her phone.

“Excuse me,” I said. “My mother was treated for cancer—she mentioned an injection therapy? Amanda Moss?”

The nurse seemed annoyed to have been pulled away from her screen—she slapped a pamphlet down on the counter: Non-Invasive Cancer Therapy. Phasal Systems. I was aware of Phasal, a spin-off company from the Naval Research Lab—in most other IFTs, Phasal had grown into a communications and entertainment behemoth, the makers of Ambient Systems. Phasal was pharmaceutical here—other IFTs might have the miracle of Ambient Systems instead of smartphones, but here there was a cure for cancer. Cell-specific medicine delivery. Smart meds, nanotech injections.

“She got the cancer cure through government assistance,” said the nurse, “but you have to be rich to live forever.”

I checked in to a Red Roof Inn that accepted cash. A business center, a room off the lobby equipped with computers, a printer. I logged on with my key card, Google easy enough once the front-desk clerk showed me where to click. Hours researching Marian, scribbling notes on hotel stationery. Philip Nestor + West Virginia hit a Web site called the Eagle’s Nest. World War II memorabilia. The SHOP tab displayed a grid of Nazi artifacts, flags and antique weapons. I bristled at the swastikas, wondering if this was even the same person I had known or if I was tracking the wrong Philip Nestor. Not much information on the Web page, but APPEARANCES listed upcoming shows, the Monroeville Guns and Ammo Show a few weekends away. I could find him there.

Scant results for Nicole Onyongo, the woman in Mursult’s photographs. I landed on a pdf of a sheriff’s document that indicated a stint in county jail, drug-related—even more reason not to flash a badge and pepper her with questions about a past murder. Njoku’s file mentioned she was habitual at a bar called May’rz Inn. I thought of my mother, how if she wasn’t at home she would be at McGrogan’s. The name of Nicole Onyongo’s bar rang a bell, and I checked the address, knew where the place was, just a ten-minute drive from the Red Roof into downtown Washington, on South Main. Almost midnight, but a good chance it would be open, so I took my key card from the computer and drove over. The May’rz Inn was a dive in a row of mostly abandoned storefronts nestled near the Bradford House, a stone Georgian from the 1700s, a Whiskey Rebellion house. No windows, just an emerald-green front door beneath an awning. SMOKING PERMITTED. WEDNESDAY WINGS. I parked out front on the empty street.

May’rz was lit with neon, and the television glow above the bar was vague with hanging smoke. A narrow space, the clack of pool balls in a back room, Zeppelin on the jukebox. The place was nearly empty, but she sat at the bar, her cigarette smoldering as she spoke with the bartender. Nicole Onyongo was older than in the photographs I’d seen of her, taller than I would have guessed, but her movements were as sinuous as the trail of smoke that rose from her cigarette. She noticed me watching her—her eyes were startling, the color of teak, but laconic, her expression like she already doubted anything I would ever say.

“Can I get you anything?” from the bartender.

“Just looking for someone,” I said, leaving.

The FBI had interviewed the woman, Nestor had interviewed her. NCIS would have talked with her, too, maybe O’Connor. Even if she’d been emotionally insulated near the time when Mursult was killed, she might talk now. She had been close with Mursult, her memories of the man were valuable to me.

A dilapidated building stood next door to May’rz, a sign out front—ROOM VACANCY. I jotted down the landlord’s number, called once I was back at the Red Roof. Almost one o’clock in the morning, expecting to leave a message on a machine, but a man’s voice answered, his accent Eastern European, almost too thick to understand.

“Come by tomorrow,” he said. “Morning. I’ll give you keys then.”

“Is it okay if I pay with cash?” I asked.

“Cash only,” he said.

I handed him the security deposit and first month’s rent the next morning—no lease, month-to-month payments. I moved in that afternoon, the apartment a one-bedroom unit on the third floor, no elevator. Musty. I used a butter knife to chip away paint from the windows before I could slide them open. Worn wood floors, the molding painted with several coats of cream. The kitchen sink had the same faucet I remembered from my grandmother’s house, the cabinets were similar, too—a moment of lensing, I guessed, details existing only because I was the one here to observe them. This apartment might be slightly different in terra firma. I had brought tablets of Red Roof Inn stationery with me, sat at an antique writing desk that had come with the room, sketching—eventually sketching skeletons, crucified.

Patrick Mursult, I wrote. Elric Fleece. Libra.

I thought of Remarque, the commander of Libra, of how she had saved the Cancer. O-ring seals, I wrote, wondering if Libra’s O-ring seals had failed… but wouldn’t Remarque have known? Wouldn’t she have saved Libra as she had saved Cancer?

I tore my notes into small pieces and looked again at Remarque’s picture in the Libra crew list. An attractive woman, dashing—even in this photograph she looked like she could outmaneuver the world. What happened to you?

Several weeks before Nestor would be at the gun show in Monroeville, where I would ask him what he remembered about Patrick Mursult and Marian’s death and discovery, how it had all played out. I had time on my hands. I wandered downtown Washington most mornings, picking up the texture of this place, and spent some time at the mall, where I bought clothes to match the styles of other women I saw, comfy clothes, a Mountaineers sweatshirt, athletic-fit tank tops, yoga pants. L’Oréal rinse-out dye to match my driver’s license, a luxurious brunette color that brought out my sharper features, my cheekbones, my jawline—I felt tougher, more pugnacious than as a blonde.

May’rz most nights, becoming a regular, and Nicole there most nights, too. She came there to smoke and drink and watch TV, the two of us sitting just a few seats from each other, passing the time in silence until a week or so had passed, rounding toward midnight on a Thursday, after we’d both built up a pretty good buzz. An early snowstorm had kicked up, people coming into May’rz stamping their shoes and shaking snow from their collars. I’d learned she drank manhattans, so I bought her a drink.

“I’m Courtney, by the way,” I told her, thickening the Guntown drawl that had always played at the edge of my voice anyway. “About time I introduced myself.”

“Cole,” she’d said, her African accent lilting, melodic. We shook hands, her palms rough, almost callused, it felt like. She wore a bracelet in the shape of a serpent. Nicole slid a seat closer to mine, lit one of her Parliaments. “You live around here?”

“Right next door,” I said. “In that shithole, the white building. I got an apartment there a few days ago, so I drink here and just stumble upstairs when they kick me out.”

“At first I thought maybe you were with the gas companies when you started showing up,” said Nicole. “But then I thought I recognized you. Have we met before?”

“I don’t think so. You go to high school around here? I was at Can-Mac.”

“I grew up in Kenya,” she said. “What do you drink?”

“Rum and Cherry Coke.”

She bought our next round. She proved chatty, eager to talk, filling my ear with the details of her routine, the grind of working in hospice care. I pushed her toward her past, blunt questions about old boyfriends, hoping she would mention something about Patrick Mursult that I could pry into, but I learned the minutiae of the Donnell House instead, the staff there, the joys of helping people and the guilty relief that flooded Nicole whenever one of her more difficult residents finally succumbed—occurrences she celebrated with a shot of Jägermeister.

I saw Nicole nearly every night at May’rz, some nights just enjoying the bar, the atmosphere, enjoying her company, her chatter. Some nights I let myself forget all about Shannon Moss and lived as Courtney Gimm. Easy to adopt a new life and let my old life dissolve—nothing was urgent here, no matter how long I lived here I would return to the present in the moment I had left. I could let time pass here, live whatever life I wanted. I could forget myself here, so I reminded myself often of why I’d come. Every night before I slept, I looked at a photograph of Marian Mursult I kept on my writing desk. You’re alive, I’d whisper. You’re still alive. I placed a sheet of Red Roof stationery beside the picture and wrote in black Sharpie, LIFE IS GREATER THAN TIME.

TWO

Signs lined Old William Penn Highway, GUNS AND AMMO—THIS WEEKEND. I found the convention center out by the Monroeville Mall, next to a Babies “R” Us, the lot full, spillover parking in the lot of the abandoned big box across the street. Nine-dollar tickets to get into the show, the ticket taker asking if I was carrying a weapon.

No need for pretense, fake IDs, as Nestor might recognize me anyway. I showed my badge. “Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”

“Are you with Gibbs?” he asked.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“From the TV show,” he said, tearing my ticket, stamping my hand with an eagle.

“I’m a federal agent.”

“You know, the TV show,” he said.

Snaking lines of folding tables filled out the convention hall. I looked through the crowds for Nestor. Ammo and beef-jerky vendors, some tables like a flea market of random junk, old AK-47 banana clips and rusted-out Winchesters. Tables of blades—switchblade knives with jewel-colored handles. Neon-green axes labeled for hunting and killing zombies, I wondered if that was actually a thing. Someone asked if I needed a canister of mace to keep in my purse.

“You’d look good in this one,” one of the sellers said, a woman with platinum curls, holding up the skimpiest pink tank top, Hello Kitty with an AK-47: KALASHNIKITTY.

Other T-shirts, the Pillsbury Doughboy in a Nazi armband WHITE FLOUR, shirts for the USMC, the Screaming Eagles. Browsing guns, I liked the feel of weapons with wooden stocks, the warmth and heft, rather than the plasticky feel of some semiautomatic rifles. My attention caught on pink camo shotguns meant for gun babes, I figured, but there were only a half dozen other women here, and they didn’t look like the pink-camo type to me.

“My God, Shannon Moss—is that you?”

“Nestor?”

In his thirties then, he’d be in his fifties now. Handsome still. His eyes were still stunning—I’d almost forgotten how brilliant. Powder blue, lit from within. His hair had grown a shade darker, and his mustache and scruffy beard had gone gray at the tips. He’d been thin before, but even so he’d lost weight—wiry, like a long-distance runner. Flannel, blue jeans. His table was called the Eagle’s Nest, a pickers’ table. Nazi gear, almost all of it—antique rifles, bayonets, a glass case of pistols, P38s and Lugers, matched with patches from the officers who’d carried them, letters of authenticity. Some American stuff, an autographed picture of Patton. Nestor came around from behind his table.

“It is you,” he said, and he hugged me. Pipe smoke. It felt good to put my arms around him. “You haven’t changed,” he said. “I mean, you haven’t changed—you look just like I remember you. Look at you. How long has it been?”

“Nineteen years, about,” I said.

“Nineteen,” he said. “You know, when I first saw you coming up the aisle, I thought I recognized you, but my first thought was you might be your daughter.”

“Ha, no—no kids—”

“Let me look at you,” he said. “God. You look… you look damn good, I’m telling you. You took care of yourself.”

“Well, I don’t feel so young,” I said. “Dying my hair now.”

“I noticed, it looks good,” said Nestor. “I like the dark hair.”

“All the gray, I had to do something.”

“I’ll be honest, I’m happy to see you. You just left,” he said. “And then, I thought you might have, you know, with CJIS. When CJIS was attacked. Your office was in CJIS, wasn’t it? I’m remembering that right?”

“It was,” I said. “But I was at sea. I’ve been at sea.”

“You know about Brock?” he asked. “I mean about his wife? Lost his wife at CJIS, his two daughters also.”

“Rashonda,” I said. “I haven’t seen Brock since Canonsburg. How is he?”

“They used the day care at that building,” said Nestor. “He lost everyone. And never really got over it, never remarried or anything, just buried himself in his work, kept busy. He’s all right, last time we talked—you know, he got all those promotions. He’s at Quantico now. I used to ask him if he knew what happened with you, but he didn’t know. No one seemed to know. We figured you might have been caught up in the attack, too—but you’re here. I used to look through the names of everyone that was killed, all those memorials they televised. But you’re here. My God, Shannon. It’s good to see you.”

His demeanor had changed, chattier, a man used to patter, but his voice had the warmth I remembered.

“How about you?” I asked him. “What is all this stuff?”

“The Eagle’s Nest, takes up all my time. This was my dad’s collection. He was a hoarder—anything military. World War I or II. I was just going to sell all this stuff off at once, but a buddy of mine convinced me to do gun shows, and I’ve been at this… almost six years, I guess. I do American memorabilia, British, but the Nazi pieces are the big sellers here. It beats a desk job.”

“You aren’t with the Bureau anymore?”

“Not for a long time,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, let me get my neighbor over here to watch my table for a while. Do you have a few minutes? I’ll buy you some lunch. Their chicken fingers aren’t bad.”

I accepted a cup of coffee. The convention center’s café was near the bathrooms, a few tables set out. The coffee Nestor handed me smelled a little like barbecue sauce, and I barely sipped it but was happy to hold something warm. Nestor’s forehead wrinkled as he talked, just like I remembered, only the creases were deeper. His eyebrows were bushier, softer.

“It’s good to see you,” I told him.

A familiarity between us—I had barely known him in 1997, and even though the years were a gulf between us, I felt like no time had passed at all, like we were resuming a conversation neither one of us had wanted to end.

“What brings you around?” he asked.

“You,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

“I quit the Bureau—2008. Did some freelance photography for a while. The work I do now suits me. I travel the circuit, meet people. It’s all right. I’ve always been interested in history.”

“You’ve lost weight,” I said. “You’re just a skinny thing, look at you.”

“Yeah, well,” he said.

“Moved back to West Virginia?” I asked. “You grew up in Twilight?”

“Always been my home. I have a house just outside this little town called Buckhannon,” he said. “Quiet. Away from everything. They have a good strawberry festival every year.”

“I used to go there as a kid,” I said. Strawberry parfaits and idolizing the Strawberry Pageant queen in the parade. I imagined Nestor with his camera, snaps of Americana. “I haven’t been in years.”

“Sure, you grew up around here,” he said. “You grew up in Canonsburg, right? You grew up in our crime scene—”

“Why Buckhannon?” I asked.

“Things just came together. I needed a place with a garage to store all my junk. The place I have has a small barn on the property. You should see it sometime. I get pickers coming through to look at the war stuff.”

“That sounds like a nice life.”

“It’s a better life than the one I had,” he said.

“I don’t want to dance around something,” I said. “What happened? Why’d you leave the Bureau?”

“You know, you take something like what happened out in Nevada a couple years ago,” said Nestor. “All the FBI ready to storm that man’s ranch—and for what? Over cattle grazing? What’s the point of that? Of all that violence? I just… couldn’t take part anymore, I guess. Couldn’t be a jackboot.” He lost himself staring out over the heads of everyone at the gun show, the clamor of the convention hall grown distant. He cleared his throat, coughed. “I was involved in a ‘use of force’ incident—I took someone’s life. That shook me, almost destroyed me. I was having trouble handling what happened and just couldn’t deal with all the political bullshit. All the Bureau’s bullshit,” he said. “Drank too much, I admit. For a time… I had to come to terms with a few things.”

“You’re all right now?” I asked.

“I’m all right,” he said. “So you tracked me down. Came all the way out to Monroeville to see me.”

“I need to talk with you about Marian Mursult,” I said.

“Marian Mursult,” said Nestor, running his palm over his chest, reacting as if the name wounded him. “Why her?”

“She was found,” I said.

“We found her, long after.”

“I read up about the investigation, but I need particulars,” I said.

“After all this time? For what?” he asked, his forehead rippling, an expression like begging for mercy. “Why?”

“I’ve been assigned to a review board,” I told him, a standard cover that didn’t inspire questions—vaguely administrative, the tediousness of paperwork. “She was found out near Blackwater Falls?”

“Out in the woods, that’s right. Buried out in the Blackwater Gorge,” he said. “You, showing up here. You’re like a ghost, asking about ghosts. You really want to talk about that? Marian Mursult.”

“I need to know what you can tell me about her,” I said.

“Why don’t you go through the Bureau? Why track me down? Brock’s still around, out in Virginia. He can talk with you. He’d know more.”

“I need to talk with you,” I said.

“Not here, though,” said Nestor. “I don’t want to get into all that stuff here. Hell, most of these people, if they found out I used to work with the FBI, they’d blacklist me, they’d think I was spying on them. Can you meet up? Tonight even? This whole show closes down at four.”

“Anywhere,” I said. “Where are you staying?”

“I’m heading back home tonight,” he said. “You want to have dinner before I go? There’s a place over here some of us went to last night, the Wooden Nickel.”

“You’re down in Buckhannon, that’s not too far from the Blackwater,” I said. “Can you show me where you found her?”

“Seriously? After all these years, you track me down and want me to take you out there? Well, what the hell. It would take a few hours to get there and back,” said Nestor. “It’ll get dark. How are you with your leg? Can you hike at all?”

“I can hike.”

“All right. Well, why don’t we meet at the lodge, then—Blackwater Lodge. I can leave a little early from here, meet you down there, let’s say by six or six-thirty. I didn’t get a chance to buy you chicken fingers, but I’ll get you dinner after. I know a place.”

I arrived early, twenty minutes or so, waiting in the car with the radio on, shredding the napkin that came with my Starbucks into tinier and tinier scraps of confetti, ashamed at how nervous I was. Nestor had said I was like a ghost asking about other ghosts. Waiting for him outside the Blackwater Lodge, not yet dark, but I remembered how black the woods were that night—the hemlock pines around the lodge seemed to have grown denser over the years, this whole place thick with ghosts, a feeling like I could walk back to Cabin 22 and still see Patrick Mursult slumped there, drained of life.

Nestor pulled his F-150 beside my Camry and waved me into the cab.

“Are you driving?” I asked.

“We can only get one car up there.”

We left the main roads, taking narrower routes that cut uphill, the towering pines cooling what little remained of the day.

“Shannon, I don’t understand how you can still look so young.”

“Come on,” I said.

“I’m serious, Shannon,” said Nestor. “I turned into an old man, and you look—”

“Thanks, but I don’t know. I work out, I eat right,” I said.

“Well, you figured it out,” he said. “You should write a book about the fountain of youth, I’m telling you. You could be a millionaire, on the talk shows.”

Nestor turned onto a path just wide enough for his truck, an access route or maybe a logging road, that rushed uphill at a dizzying incline. The truck wheels spun out, but Nestor gunned the gas—the tires caught and the truck lurched upward. I leaned back in the seat, holding on, imagining the truck would tip backward, like we’d fall end over end.

“Here we are. They still have the trail marked.”

Nestor pointed ahead, and I saw an orange ribbon tied around a tree trunk. He maneuvered his truck, scraping against the pines, to where the path leveled out into a narrow clearing where he could park.

“This was as far as any of the trucks could get,” he said. “Couldn’t get an ambulance up here, so they brought her body down in the back of a pickup.”

Her body. Careful of my footing, climbing from the cab. The pines were silhouetted, but the sky overhead was a circle of evening, a violet eye staring down on us. Colder, here.

“We still have to walk,” said Nestor. “A little.”

The trail we followed was obscured by underbrush, but Nestor could still pick it out, stomping at the growth and holding back branches so I could make my way behind him, single file. We climbed a progression of naturally formed steps, clinging to trees for balance. He brought me to a runnel that might have been a creek, long dried. A bracket of five hemlock trees, black soil, emerald moss furring half-submerged stones.

“Here,” said Nestor.

Marian, I thought. This is where they found your body…

“This place was discovered by accident,” said Nestor. “A couple ginseng diggers came through, had gotten lost higher up the elevation and figured they would hit the river if they just kept walking downhill, figured they could follow the river back to the falls. Up the hill a bit, they found the first of what we called ‘cairns’—these stacks of flat rocks. Markers. They figured maybe some other diggers were marking a patch, so they came further down and spotted another cairn, and another. The cairns seemed to lead them to this spot, where we’re standing. I don’t see the cairns anymore. Someone must have knocked them down. Do you know what I’m describing, these markers?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Stacks of rocks.”

“So these guys stopped to take a look around. Well, they spotted the red berries, so they knew they actually found some ginseng here. They dug for roots but found bones instead—thought maybe an animal was buried here but knew the whole setup wasn’t quite right. They abandoned their dig and called in what they’d found.”

“You dug her up?”

“Park Service,” said Nestor. “Found human remains, called us in. And we figured right away, we just knew. It’s funny—I remember when Brock came into the meeting room, he said, ‘They found Marian.’ All we knew at the time was that Park Service had dug up some bones, but Brock knew it was our girl. Instinct. Got her ID by matching against her dental records.”

I breathed—the air rich with pine sap, the smell of damp stone. A beautiful place to rest.

“I read what Brock said, in the newspapers,” I said. “That stuff about Mursult killing himself? He knew that Patrick Mursult was murdered. He never believed Patrick Mursult killed his own family, did he? I was told his story was a cover.”

Nestor laughed, “Yeah, you could say that,” he said. “In fact—you asked why I quit the FBI? There were other things, but we had Patrick Mursult’s body. It was a clear homicide, but word comes down through Brock that we talk about it like a suicide. We were told a man killed his family, then killed himself, stick to the script. I couldn’t handle that, the outright lies we were supposed to live with. Then we find Marian’s body years later but hold to that same line. Patrick Mursult was killed, plain as day—he didn’t kill himself. It just didn’t wash with me.”

“They still investigated the homicide, though, didn’t they?” I asked. “You interviewed a woman? Onyongo?”

“Nicole,” said Nestor.

“We found pictures of her at Fleece’s place,” I said. “I saw in the case file she was having an affair with Mursult, lasted a few years.”

“Yeah—I remember who she is,” said Nestor. “If I remember right, the lodge kept license-plate numbers, tracked her down that way.”

“Nothing panned out with her?”

“No, not at all,” said Nestor. “We brought her in the day after you found Mursult, maybe a day after that. I interviewed her for two days straight, but she couldn’t tell us much.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Mursult picked her up in some bar,” said Nestor. “Knew that Nicole was a nurse and wanted to talk with her because he was suffering PTSD. She worked at an assisted-living facility, didn’t know how to help him, but that interaction started their relationship. They’d meet at the lodge.”

I recognized the Nicole I knew—she inhabited that bar like a conversation piece hung in a dull room. Maybe only a trick of fate that Mursult had drifted into May’rz, but once he saw her, once he heard her speak, he wouldn’t have wanted that voice to silence. I knew nothing about Mursult but pictured him falling in love with Nicole, a quick fall.

“Did you talk to her again once you found Marian? Ask her again about the daughter?”

“No,” said Nestor. “We took another look at the case when we found Marian, wondering if we’d missed anything, seeing if any leads would come out of the discovery. But this was… what, 2003? 2004? Our priorities had changed after 9/11. We didn’t have the resources to track down all the loose ends with this—our office was focusing on cybercrime and the war on terror. Brock had made peace with Patrick Mursult, the DA was happy. NCIS was still investigating, but without our involvement for the most part. We tried to consult with you, actually, bring you in, but no one could track you down. I thought you would have wanted to be here when we found her.”

“I would have, yes,” I said. “Where was she laid to rest?”

“Back in Canonsburg, with her family.”

“Her dad, too?”

“Yeah. They were all cremated.”

“You remember Fleece’s place?” I asked. “The ship made of fingernails?”

“I remember.”

“Whatever came of that?” I asked.

“Fact, I remember we were working with the coroner,” said Nestor, “trying to figure a way we could tell if the fingernails and toenails were missing on Marian, but it was impossible.”

“What happened when you found her?”

“Nothing. There was some play in the newspapers,” said Nestor, “but Brock didn’t want to release all the details, didn’t want people traipsing up here.”

“You never came close to figuring out who killed her?” I asked. “After all this time?”

Nestor shook his head. “Never came close.”

Shadows had gathered in the trees. I saw fireflies. Nestor sat on a rock, bundled in his wool jacket. We can observe this place, I thought. There’s plenty of tree cover. We can have someone posted in a blind, watch who shows up, who builds the cairns.

“I need you to show me this place on a map,” I said. “I need detailed instructions on how to get up here. What roads, and that access route you took. Detailed enough so that if I had to get back up here sometime and didn’t have any of these markers, I could still get here. Can you do that for me?”

“I’ll mark it all out on a map for you,” he said. “You must be freezing. Let’s get you back. I’ll buy you some supper.”

Nestor lit our path with a Maglite, but even so, finding my footing was difficult coming downhill. Never sure where to plant my silicone foot, I couldn’t feel if dirt or rocks were about to give way in slides. I misstepped, tumbling, gashed my knee. I held on to branches and grabbed hold of boughs, still slipping, my palms sap-sticky and roughed up from catching myself on needles.

“Here,” said Nestor, offering his arm. I took it, steadied myself against him. I put my arm around him, clamped myself to him, walking hip to hip the rest of the way down the hill. He held me beside him.

“Thank you,” I said, frustrated that I’d needed his help at all. “I don’t like to get myself in a position like that—to rely on people.”

“I was all right with it,” he said.

We ate together in Buckhannon, at a place near the river called the Whistle Stop Grill. We sat in one of the booths, the tablecloth brown gingham covered with a heavy plastic sheet. The decor was like a country kitchen—an old hutch, a fireplace. The walls were wood paneling hung with wreaths. We each ordered steak, onion rings. Nestor poured from a pitcher of Yuengling.

“I like this place,” I told him.

“Yeah—I’m kind of a regular here. They have good food.”

“She’s pretty,” I said, catching sight of the bartender, a woman who looked black Irish. “You ever talk with her?”

“Annie, yeah,” he said. “I bet I’ll have to explain you the next time I’m in.”

“Is she your girlfriend? I don’t want to mess things up for you.”

“No, not a girlfriend. I had someone serious for a while, a few years back, but one day you wake up and realize you’re ruining each other,” he said. “Sometimes even the good things don’t quite stick. Sometimes they do.”

Warmed by the flirtation kindling between us. No consequences here. I wanted to take his hand in mine. I brushed my knee against his, and he didn’t pull away. “Thanks for taking me out there,” I said.

“You think that’s everything you’ll need?” he asked. “Do you have to present your case review or anything? Write a report?”

“Not for a little while yet,” I said. “I’ll be around.”

“Good. It’s been good seeing you,” he said.

I lingered with Nestor out by his truck, wishing he didn’t have that muff of a beard, but when he said, “I’ve thought about you so much over the years,” I kissed him anyway, finding his lips soft through the field of hair. I could tell he wasn’t expecting me, not so readily, but he kissed me and gave in like he was trying to drink me—I could feel the want in him. He cupped my breast as he kissed my neck.

“There’s people around,” I said, and Nestor said, “I’m sorry,” stepping back like he’d offended me or had transgressed, so I said, “Where do you live? Near here?”

I followed his taillights down 151, Old Elkins Road, about twenty minutes until he pulled in to the long gravel drive. A front-porch light. I parked behind the truck, followed him to the side door. “I could never fix this lock,” he said, nudging it open—he let the dog out, a jumpy setter, who scrambled into the yard and ran off into the dark. Nestor kissed me in the mudroom—pulled me to him. I kissed his eyes, kissed him. I felt him hard through his jeans, so I touched him, rubbed him while we kissed. He touched my hair like something precious and kissed the strands. He led me through the kitchen. “Through here,” he said, into the living room. A mirror above the mantel reflected our dark forms. He approached in the mirror behind me. His hands folded over my breasts—I felt him push against me from behind. Breathless, he turned me toward him, fumbled at my shirt buttons—so I helped him, spreading open my clothes, revealing myself. Nestor unbuttoned my jeans, fell to his knees as he guided my clothes down over my hips. He kissed my prosthesis, kissed my other thigh, kissed the length of my leg, higher, tasted me. He reached up and held my breasts, and my knee went weak, and I collapsed down with him to the carpet. I helped him remove my prosthesis, laughing with him at the release of the vacuum seal, the sound it made, peeling off the liner, embarrassed when he kissed my stump, knowing how it would smell—how the liner would have made my skin smell—but he kissed me there, kissed me. He kissed the line above my hair, golden there, working his way up my belly before taking each breast in his mouth and sucking. I shivered, arched myself, welcoming, and he pushed at me, entering me, pulling out only as he came. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that was so fast, I’m sorry,” and he used his mouth and then his fingers until I clenched and shuddered and cried out, panting. We slept for a little over an hour on the living-room carpet, woke up kissing. I used my mouth on him, then guided him into me. We watched each other’s eyes this second time—less needy than before. Throw pillows and a blanket from the back of the couch, we curled up together on the floor. He touched my left thigh and kept his hand resting there—I wondered if he thought it was a sign of courage to touch me there, or a gesture of acceptance, or if he was attracted to the missing limb, as some men were, but I didn’t want to ask him, just wanted him to indulge in whatever he needed from me.

“How did you lose your leg?” he asked, sometime after midnight. “Or were you born like this?”

My eyes had adjusted, and in the ambience of moonlight I noticed the strange painting above the television. A painting of a body, lying supine, and I worried it might be a naked woman, something tacky like Davy Gimm’s swimsuit posters, but realized it was a painting of a dead man.

“What is that?” I asked. “You didn’t paint it, did you?”

“No, I didn’t paint it. It was here when I bought the place, and I just never took it down,” he said. “The guy who facilitated the sale of the house wanted me to have it, said it has something to do with a Russian novel. It’s just a poster of some old painting. A picture of Jesus.”

“You could hang one of your own photographs,” I said.

“A painting of the dead Christ is worse than crime-scene photographs?”

“You’ve got to have something else.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I’ll swap it out. I have some shots of Yellowstone I like, one of the Grand Prismatic Spring. But you know, that painting—I used to be religious, I was raised in the church.”

“I remember you asked me if I believed in the Resurrection,” I said. “You thought it might help me, being around so much death.”

“That’s right,” he said. “That sounds like something I would have said. But I had an experience around that time. Like a religious experience, but in reverse I guess you could say. Have you ever had a religious experience? Like you heard the voice of God?”

I thought of seeing Earth from the distance of space, the near-holy connectedness to every facet of creation in that moment. “No,” I said. “Nothing religious, nothing like that. I’ve found beauty in nature, but nothing like hearing voices.”

“I had—it was like I had a vision of God, but God was like a black hole,” said Nestor. “The vision overwhelmed me. People talk about what infinity is, and they think of things that are never-ending, but infinity cuts the other way, too. Infinity can be a negation. We grow from dirt, and our cells multiply, and we grow and wear out and rot, and more are taking our place—it’s disgusting, all the bodies and death, billions of us, it’s like the tide, washing in and washing out. All that religion, that bullshit about God, it’s like that shit you believe as a child and one day wonder how you ever believed anything at all. Childish things. And everything changed for me after that vision, that experience. I started drinking to blunt the terror I’d felt. I was just so scared of the world. I couldn’t stomach the Bureau anymore, I moved out here, just drinking to lose myself. And I would watch that painting of Christ, convince myself that he might sit up, hoping he would somehow sit up to prove me wrong, but every night… I figure this painting is a depiction of Jesus after he’s been taken from the cross, and he’s just dead, a dead body, and everyone’s waiting for the Resurrection, and he’s waiting for his own Resurrection, but it’s not going to happen. I hated that painting because of how unchristian it felt to me, but then I realized what its message was. I dug deeper, found deeper meaning.”

“You’re an atheist,” I said.

“No, I believe in God. I believe God exists. I had an experience, I had that vision, and in the vision I saw God. God is a pestilent light ringed with black stars. I’m still a man of faith because I believe, but when I think of God, I think of something like a parasite.”

His heart was racing; he had broken into a cold sweat. His body was silvery in the moonlight. A small constellation of moles dotted his chest, like the belt of Orion over his heart. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry—and I’m sorry I asked about your leg,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. You must get tired of everyone asking you about it.”

“The truth is, I don’t even remember it happening,” I said. “I was lost in the woods, hypothermia had set in. My leg had turned gangrenous. They had to amputate. I remember the amputation.”

A car passed on 151, and the headlights flashed momentarily on the wall, crept in a grid of windowpanes across the ceiling. I wondered if we had turned cold to each other—just like that, after getting what we’d wanted, but Nestor put his hand on my hair, petted me, pulled me closer to him. I put my arm around him, and he lowered his head onto my breasts. I felt the rising and falling of his breath, knew he could hear my heartbeat.

“I had a local anesthetic, but was awake,” I told him, remembering the surgery in zero-g, the blood globules squirting in rushes, smearing against the ceiling, the walls. “I was awake, but I couldn’t watch. I just looked at the ceiling the whole time. They cut across my shin first, removed my ankle and foot. That’s the cut I sometimes think I still feel—a phantom sensation. Sometimes I feel a sever across my shin. The infection had already risen to my knee, though, so they had to take the rest.”

After a time Nestor helped me put on my prosthesis. He said, “It doesn’t bother me, just so you know. The moment I first saw you, I wanted to be with you—”

“You don’t remember when you first saw me,” I said.

“I saw you for just a second that night at the crime scene. You caught my eye. And in that meeting room the next morning, I was supposed to introduce myself to you. I already knew you were good-looking, but Jesus Christ, Shannon, when I saw you that morning—”

“All right, that’s enough.”

“And after you left, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. There was this other case, and I thought we might cross paths, but we never did. I was hoping—”

“I would have liked to cross paths,” I said. “What did I miss?”

“Just a waste of time, for us. Some guy from Harrisburg, some lawyer,” said Nestor. “He was killed in a carjacking. We wanted to consult with you.”

“What did he have to do with me?”

“Nothing. Erroneous reports,” he said. “We were working with a database of ballistic fingerprints, and the bullets they recovered from this lawyer matched the bullets we’d recovered from Mursult, so I thought of you, but we’d had the gun in our evidence room all that time. We wanted to call you in, to testify that this match was a false positive, but we couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find you.”

“What happened with the prosecution?”

“The judge threw everything out,” said Nestor. “That damn database spit out a handful of ballistics matches, everything went under review.”

“You miss the work?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he said. “But after I—”

“You don’t have to talk about this.”

“I shot a man, in the line of duty. It was justified, in self-defense, but I couldn’t live with what I’d done,” said Nestor. “He’d pulled a gun on me, fired shots.”

I tried to reconstruct him, reconstruct his past—a past he might not ever come to have. Visions of God, a parasite, a pestilent star. Some sort of break maybe. Or maybe killing the man had broken him.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“Some big shot, a computer guy—an engineer,” said Nestor. “His name came up as part of an investigation, military secrets used for private gain. I went to interview him, that’s all—we weren’t even targeting him, but he panicked. I was put on leave, the shooting became an internal matter—they tell you you’re innocent until proven guilty, but that wasn’t my sense. I was ostracized within the Bureau even though I was cleared. Graham v. Connor.”

“And you left the FBI,” I said.

“I hope this doesn’t sound pathetic,” he said, “but I’d search for you on the Internet, hoping for a picture. Just one picture of you. But there was nothing. I would just let my memory of you play around in my mind, imagining what a life would have been like with you. I even asked around about you, but no one knew. Brock didn’t know. But here you are.”

“Here I am,” I said. “And I’m thirsty. What do you have around here?”

Looking at the picture of the dead Christ while I waited for my drink. The body was gray. Holbein, it read. The canvas was narrow, the body stretched out. Impossible to imagine that the body would breathe again.

We sat in lawn chairs out on his front porch, bundled in quilts. We drank cognac from coffee mugs, watching distant headlights. Nestor’s dog, Buick, curled at his feet, snoring as he chased some rabbit in his dreams. Comfortable in each other’s silence nearing 3:00 a.m., my mind wandered to Marian’s body buried among the pines and roving cities built in the shape of pyramids.

“What’s deeper than Christ?” I asked. “You said you looked at that painting and found something deeper than the miracles you once believed in. What’s deeper than Christ?”

“The eternal forest,” said Nestor. “All around us. Everything you can see.”

Too cold to stay outside. We went to his bed, and he drifted off but I stayed awake and watched the dawn glow pink and orange on the walls. I remembered Nestor’s father’s dream. He had dreamed he was trapped in a mine and crawled through the black tunnels until he came to a labyrinth of forest. The mirrored room, the tree of bones. I, too, had been lost in the eternal forest. I considered waking Nestor, to talk with him or kiss him one last time, but left my cell number on the nightstand and let him sleep.

THREE

Miserable weather, spring slush glazed the sidewalks like a skin of chilled pudding. Six months living here. I was Courtney here, I belonged here, a cripple on disability checks, Mountaineers sweatshirts and baggy sweatpants, my hair scraggly and long, unkempt. Six months and I blended in, part of the fabric, like the abandoned storefronts, the grimy windows curtained or covered with plywood, façades browned with rain-streaked muck. The stairs of the palatial Beaux Arts courthouse were filled with smokers, ratty men with nothing to fill their time but loiter, their bodies bent against the rain. Sleet soaked my sweatshirt, my hair, a heavy weight, cold.

I’d made myself a regular at May’rz on nights without Nestor, settling into this IFT—I spent New Year’s here, Christmas. I shook off the slush, took my seat at the far end of the bar, an end stool where I could see the TV but still have my view of the room. May’rz in neon-blue cursive behind the bar, cigarette smoke like gauze. The regular bartender was a young woman named Bex, her left arm sleeved with tattoos, hyacinths and vines. She poured my first drink, rum and Cherry Coke.

“Starting a tab tonight, Courtney?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I’ll pick up Cole’s tonight, if she comes in.”

She swept in from the rain nearing seven, her routine—long-limbed and elegant, her presence a glamour undiminished by middle age, even rain-soggy and exhausted from her shift. Powder-blue scrubs, a cherry-red raincoat. She took her usual stool next to mine.

“Cole,” I said.

“Gimm.”

Already smoking a Parliament, she pulled over one of the plastic ashtrays and blew a smoke ring my way before tapping out her ash. I puckered and kissed the center of the smoke as it melted across my face. Menthol and wet fabric and a whiff of body odor, maybe from the elderly bodies she’d handled and washed and wiped through the day at the assisted-living center. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she seemed drowsy tonight, lighting a second cigarette before finishing her first, the two smoldering together in the ashtray. Vicodin, I guessed—easy to know when she was using.

“I need a manhattan,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Long day,” she said, her voice graced with that musical accent. I’d learned that she’d moved from Mombasa when she was a teenager.

“I’ve got your drinks tonight,” I said.

“Ah, your SSI check must have cleared,” she said. “Largesse.”

I raised my glass. “To life in the welfare state,” I said, but after a pause, “I remember what today is—”

“April sixteenth.”

“April sixteenth,” I said.

Her husband had passed away from thyroid cancer, I knew, ten years ago today, too early for the cure. I didn’t know much about him, a guy named Jared. They’d married young, and I had the impression her marriage to Jared had been troubled from the start. He had abused her—she told me once she’d suffered a broken jaw, that he had hit her. I knew they’d been estranged for a number of years before he died. Nicole and I had grown close these past few months, and I felt like she poured her life into me, like I was her vessel. She talked freely about her painful past, a hard life, chasing drugs after her husband died, waking up in strange rooms with men, trading favors for stamp bags. Her life wasn’t as wild now, age had mellowed her, but she still used, still drank, still tried to erase the ache that coiled within her.

“I almost forgot,” she said, digging through her purse, drawing five scratch-off lottery cards from a side pocket. She fanned them out, slid them to me. “I didn’t win shit with mine,” she said. Pills mixed with liquor—she was woozy, moved like her bones were liquefying. Tonight might end like some of our other nights together when she was using—pushing her to drink, pushing her to more pills if she had them. Sometimes she’d pass out and I’d get her to my apartment next door, stay up with her to make sure her breathing didn’t stop—but other nights the pills and liquor just made her lose herself, stripped the shell from her, and I’d turn off the apartment lights and listen to her stream of chatter. Those nights I’d lead our conversations, tell her I wanted to hear about old loves, just two girls talking, and she’d talk about her dead husband and affairs she’d had and her regrets over a lover who had died. Mursult, I’d think, and ask for more, but she would mix her stories of dead lovers with violent nightmares, carry on conversations without me as if she could hear the dead speaking to her from a great distance until she slipped under.

She finished her manhattan, called for a second. I flipped through the lottery cards, the Gold Mine. I scraped silver crud from icons of miners’ tools but came up a bust.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Don’t scratch them all at once,” said Nicole.

May’rz had always been a bar for regulars but had been adopted by frackers. Southerners, mostly, coming through southwestern Pennsylvania to tap the shale. Truckers and roughnecks, a scourge that would pass once this area was depleted. They filled May’rz almost every night now, turning the dive rowdy. A group of men played pool, talking loopholes in the dumping laws. They were boisterous and drank too much, their southern twang somehow a more foreign sound than even Nicole’s Kenyan lilt. Nicole was known here, had been coming to May’rz since the early nineties at least—the bar about a half-hour walk from her apartment over at Castle Tower and within walking distance of her job at the Donnell House. Two decades, the same routine, and I was part of her routine now, too. The bartenders called us “Cole and Court,” like we were a set, or “The Odd Couple,” and eventually we spent some time together outside of May’rz, on weekends, visiting each other’s apartment and taking quick road trips in Nicole’s Honda, usually up to Pittsburgh to pick through the record stores, Nicole an eclectic collector of chansons and medieval polyphony and dissonant classical music, strange things she said reminded her of childhood.

She swirled the ice in her drink. Prone to tunnel vision tonight, I noticed—usually Nicole was erratic when she was using, but tonight she was turned inward.

“They’re having a memorial service for Jared,” she said. “Out on their property. They want me to come out, but I haven’t seen those people in ages.”

“What people?”

“My in-laws,” said Nicole. “Jared’s mother, Miss Ashleigh. She has a large property, wants to have the family over—”

“Is that a good idea?”

Nicole shrugged, took a drag from one of her cigarettes. She had told me about her husband’s suffering, the cancer, how he’d begged her back following his diagnosis, how she’d nursed him until he died. His family was close-knit, his cousins or close friends of his, and they were an unhealthy influence on Nicole. She used heavily after the last time she saw them, she said, a spiral that had flattened out only after some time had passed, but the damage was done, and she could never quite kick the heroin.

“For a few days, what could come of it?” I asked.

“I could tell you,” said Nicole, gazing at the television. KDKA teased their eleven-o’clock news—a family killed, a lethal crash on 65, a pit bull burned alive. “I could tell you some things…”

The pills were affecting her—she seemed like she was dissolving. Her gestures were loose, and she drank her manhattan in gulps. “So tell me,” I said, trying to make myself seem hollow for her, like anything she’d want to unburden would fit inside. She thought I was simple, I knew that—I helped her feel that way, that I was good for a laugh and to talk shit about the men at the bar but wasn’t someone with greater designs, that talking to me was almost like talking with an empty room. “Cole,” I said.

“I fucked a friend of his, I didn’t care,” she said. “I wanted to hurt him.”

I tried to focus through my own wash of alcohol, the glare of the television, a rise of voices around the pool table, Tim McGraw on the jukebox. I waved at Bex for another round. “Who was the guy?”

“Patty,” said Nicole. “Patrick,” taking another drink. “He was married, so we met in hotels—in a cabin he used to rent. He would fuck me, then take pictures so I could mail them to my husband, so he would know I was with someone else. Jared would drift in and out of my life, bring all his shit with him. I wanted to hurt him.”

Patrick Mursult, I thought, a rise of heat through my neck. Imagining Mursult and Nicole’s adultery, Nicole posing for him in the cabin at Blackwater and mailing photographs to her husband like she was sending packets of poison.

“What happened?” I asked.

Nicole gestured at the TV. “It was on the news,” she said, her eyes welling. She wiped away tears, seemed nauseous—some memory passed over her, and she shook her head.

“Did your husband kill him?” I asked.

“Jared was a coward,” said Nicole, vacant, delayed, the liquor pushing her deeper. “I fell in love with him because he had this tattoo, and I was just seventeen when I met him, and that tattoo was all it took to impress me, this eagle on his chest. He said he liked my jacket. He was my worst mistake.”

“Jesus, Cole. What are you telling me? Did your husband kill someone?”

“His friends did, our friends—Cobb did, and Karl,” said Nicole. “And after, he would call every night and threaten me, said he would kill me for what I did to him, or if I said anything. He ruined everything about me, he took everything good and ruined it—I wish I would have died when I was seventeen instead of living this hell.”

“Who are these guys?” I asked her. “Karl and Cobb? You never mentioned them before. They were friends of yours.”

“That was a long time ago,” said Nicole, finishing her manhattan. She chewed the ice.

“I’ll go with you to the memorial service,” I said, wondering who would gather at a service for her husband. A man named Cobb and a man named Karl had killed Patrick Mursult, and Nicole’s husband, Jared, was involved somehow, too. In this IFT Jared had died of thyroid cancer in 2006, but he would still be alive in 1997. I can find him. “Take me with you.”

“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Nicole. “These people—”

“You shouldn’t go alone,” I said. “After what you just told me? I can’t let you go alone. Christ, Nicole. I’ll come with you. It will be all right. You need a friend with you.”

“I guess so, maybe,” she said. “Let me think about it. I guess I don’t want to be alone.”

Nicole excused herself to the bathroom, and I ordered us another round. I wasn’t a friend, I was a manipulation, I was a lie, but every truth here was a lie. I was buzzing, three suspects for the Mursult deaths. I texted Nestor, let him know about the weekend, that I wouldn’t be around. COME OVER TONIGHT, he wrote back, but I texted, IT’S LATE, and he replied, TOMORROW.

“Ah, hell,” said Bex.

Nicole returning from the bathroom, stumbling. She bumped into someone and almost sprawled.

“Hold on a sec,” I said. “Bex, go ahead and swipe my card. I’ve got to get her out of here.”

A twenty on the bar, a tip. I looped Nicole’s purse over my shoulder. “Come on, Cole,” I said. “We’re going up to my place.”

Her arm draped over my shoulders. Nicole just a slip, like she was made of air. “You’ll be all right,” I said, “you’re just drunk, that’s all. We’re getting you home.”

“You need help?” asked Bex.

“We’ll manage,” I said. “She can still walk,” knowing how ridiculous we looked. May’rz hadn’t been rollicking, but outside, the night was silent. Rain fell, an icy haze. I tested the sidewalk to see if it was frozen before trusting my fake foot. We made our way up the flight of stairs to my room, spotting her as we climbed. 3-B, I unlocked the dead bolt. “Just lie on the couch.”

She sagged to the futon, coughing, her legs hanging over one of the armrests. A gurgling belch—I smelled the tang of boozy vomit and checked her over. She had messed her shirt, her cardigan. I took off her shoes, her soiled clothes. Her breasts were small, her body emaciated, her arms pocked with track marks. She wore her serpent bracelet and a necklace I first thought was a vivid sapphire because of its brilliance, but when I looked closely, I saw the iridescent blue was actually the petal of some exquisite flower embedded in resin. The necklace was stunning, the shade of blue unreal. I dressed her in one of my sweaters, covered her with a blanket, the blue of the flower petal such a strange blue, I thought, turning out the apartment lights, such a breathtaking blue, unlike any shade I’d ever seen. I sat near her, on the floor. Nicole’s fingers touched my head, and I realized she was petting me, almost, running her fingers absently through my hair.

“You want anything?” I asked, but Nicole had closed her eyes. Her mouth hung open, and soon she snored lightly, like a purring cat.

I left the bedroom door open a crack to hear if she stirred and slid my briefcase from the closet floor, hoisting it to the bed. Printouts I’d made from the library the previous weeks, articles about the CJIS attack, about Marian Mursult. I glanced at a poster that had been distributed in the years before Marian was found, a HAVE YOU SEEN ME? poster created by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. There were other folders, information about Patrick Mursult. I pulled my copies of the Polaroids we’d found at Elric Fleece’s house, in the duffel—close-up photographs of a black woman’s thighs, breasts, stomach, feet. Nicole was healthier then, nineteen years ago, her body less worn.

Nicole believed that Patrick Mursult had been killed out of jealousy, but Patrick Mursult hadn’t been the only victim—his entire family had been killed. Nicole’s story had omissions; time had made her too innocent. Her version of the past was the only version here, but there must be something more. I could imagine a man shooting another man over an affair, ambushing the adulterer at his love nest at the Blackwater Lodge, but I couldn’t make the leap into believing that Nicole’s husband or his friends had butchered Mursult’s entire family over an affair, that they had taken Marian Mursult to the woods. A failure of imagination maybe, an inability to assume the utter worst of people, but someone had killed a woman and two children with an ax and then killed a seventeen-year-old girl. I couldn’t imagine.

I looked out the bedroom windows. A snow squall had swept through, dusting the streets a glistening white like crystallized sugar. I took off my sleet-damp sweatshirt, draped it over the shower-curtain rod to drip dry, then removed my prosthesis and plugged the knee-joint battery into an outlet to charge. Patty, Nicole had said. Patrick. I wondered if his killers were still alive in this IFT. It would have been twenty years ago that they had found Mursult in the Blackwater Lodge and executed him. I remembered the pitch-darkness of those cabins at night, stars and moonlight choked out by pines. I imagined the knock at the door, the interrupted silence, and it occurred to me that Patrick Mursult might have known his killers. Nicole had confessed that she had wanted to hurt her husband when she slept with Patrick, that Patrick was a friend of his. Maybe Mursult knew his killers when they arrived in the night, and maybe they had told him that they’d killed his family, that they’d killed his oldest daughter and left her in the gorge not far from the cabin where they would leave his body, that only a few miles would separate him from his daughter.

I went back to the briefcase and pulled Libra’s crew list. I found his name: Jared Bietak—Machinist’s Mate, Engineering Laboratory Technician. Nicole’s husband had been a sailor on Libra, had known Mursult because they’d served together. As the ELT he would have worked with the B-L drive, would have been the engine-room supervisor. Fleece would have reported to him. Heart pounding, I found Cobb, Charles—Special Warfare Operator, another SEAL. And there was a Karl Hyldekrugger—the CEL-NAV, the ship’s celestial navigator. They were all sailors on Libra. Mursult wasn’t the only MIA surfacing. Libra had returned, or it had never launched. Where was the rest of the crew? These men knew one another, they all knew of Mursult’s affair with Nicole. If I could track them down in terra firma, I might find Marian.

Nicole’s breath occasionally hitched—she’d wheeze and roll over. I brought down a comforter to sleep on the floor next to her and sat up through the night when her sleep was disturbed. Staring at the ceiling much of the night, imagining my sight could pierce every impediment, through the ceiling and the apartment above, through the cover of rain clouds, straight into the night sky, the stars. I tried to imagine that love triangle, Nicole and Jared, Patrick Mursult, but grew distracted by the shadows of the rain, my mind wandering to Fleece, to the tree of bones in the mirrored room, to the ship built of nails that will carry the dead. Missing fingernails. Whoever had killed Mursult’s family had taken their fingernails. Nicole gasped, sounded like she’d swallowed a spurt of vomit before rolling over and breathing again. What would happen if Nicole actually were to die? No one would find her body until the landlord came through. If Nicole were to die during the night, I would pack everything and walk out the front door without turning back, return to terra firma, let this possibility blink.

FOUR

Buick ran from the mudroom to meet me when I pulled down Nestor’s drive, to get his ears rubbed and sniff my tires before scampering through the lawn. Nestor came out onto the front porch, said, “There you are,” and kissed me as I came up the front steps. He offered me a record in a brown paper sleeve.

“What’s this?” I asked him. The last time I saw him, he’d wanted to know how I filled my time when we weren’t together, and I’d said my favorite thing in the world was to lie in bed and listen to music.

“Just take a look,” said Nestor. “Let yourself be surprised.”

A cross of skulls, Nirvana’s Leadbelly.

“I thought you might like this one,” he said. “You don’t have it, do you?”

“Not on vinyl,” I told him. “Good choice, I love it.”

“I wanted to give you something from ’97, when we met,” said Nestor. “The first time we met. This had just come out.”

“I used to have a Nirvana T-shirt, back in college. The one with the transparent angel, all the anatomy. I tore off the sleeves, made a tank top out of it.”

“I used to do the same thing with my shirts,” he said, lighting a cigarette. Nestor had cleaned up for me, shaved off the beard—he looked years younger without the scruff. “See, if we were friends back then, we could have borrowed each other’s clothes.”

“I don’t think mine would have fit you.”

A breath of summer had pushed through, melting the glaze of snow from the other night, turning the ground muddy. We passed the afternoon in wooden rockers, pulling chilled Yuengling bottles from a cooler, watching Buick chase butterflies. We played “In the Pines” loud enough to hear his living-room speakers out in the yard.

Steaks and zucchini from the grill for dinner, and after we washed dishes, we took a walk around his property, an expanse of field that stretched for close to seven acres before a strip of woods marked the start of the neighbor’s farm. Buick trotted along without a leash, running out through the longer grass before loping back. Nestor and I held hands intermittently, and when I clutched him for balance on the uneven ground, he didn’t let go. We reached our usual turning point, out near a ruined Ryder truck, something the previous owners had abandoned in the field. The neighbor’s barns were newer, bright red corrugated metal lit with floodlights. Buick barked at the air, probably catching scent of the neighbor’s shepherds.

“You’re distracted,” said Nestor.

“Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know.” Easy to forget myself here, with him, to forget that this world was like a dream, but learning the names of Mursult’s killers had been a touch of horror. I wondered if Marian was already dead in terra firma or if I had an opportunity to save her—I wouldn’t know until I stepped back into the rushing river of time. Life was perfect here in its way, perfect with Nestor, out here in Buckhannon. I found myself trying to memorize Nestor, every detail, knowing I’d leave him someday.

“Let’s head back,” I said.

We walked in silence for a time, finishing our walk through his uneven side yard, a half acre overgrown with wildflowers. Nestor helped pick foxglove and aster, Buick running ahead of us to the level grass. Darker here, Nestor’s house occluding the front-porch light and the light from the neighbor’s barn. I was remembering nights as a child out in the country like this, the stars so numerous that sometimes I could see the hazy band of the Milky Way.

“I can’t stay the night,” I said. “I’m taking a trip with a friend of mine, for a memorial service. She’s picking me up in the morning—”

Nestor kissed my forehead. He held me, breathed in the scent of my hair. “I’ll miss you.”

“Just a few days.”

The sky was clear, and as night fell, I saw stars, but not the ineffable brilliance I remembered from childhood. The horizon glowed, always faintly glowed—light pollution from somewhere, light interfering with light.

Nicole picked me up in her Fit, our first time seeing each other since the other night. She’d slipped away that morning while I still slept, left a handwritten apology and a thank-you for the spare sweater. A further act of contrition that she’d brought me a coffee and a croissant for breakfast, something for the road.

“You look nice,” she said. “I’ve never seen you dressed up.”

I’d found a carnation-pink day dress at Avalon. It had a tailored fit, nice lines, with a black belt to cinch the waist. “You look good, too,” I said, Nicole effortlessly graceful in her navy-blue pea coat and white linen dress. “I thought you only owned scrubs.”

We left Washington south to West Virginia, to Nicole’s mother-in-law’s home on an orchard outside Mount Zion. Country roads, a stop at a gas station, the only restroom housed in a cinder-block hut. I wondered what Nicole remembered from the other night, if she regretted having told me so much. She was quieter than usual, I thought—or maybe I was reading too much into her not being such a morning person. She put on music to fill the silence, fiddling with the dial until she slid in a CD. I watched birds gliding on outspread wings, riding gusts.

“You all right?” asked Nicole. “You turned pale.”

“I’m… yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Will any of the people who—”

“Let’s not talk about that,” said Nicole. “Just forget it, right?”

Wondering what faces I would see—other sailors than Mursult assumed lost but were here, living, as if returned from the dead. And Nicole was in the center of these men, somehow. She sang softly to the music, the color of her true love’s hair, a resonant voice. Difficult to measure her against her past, a past I didn’t fully understand. A murmuration of starlings stippled the sky: they turned together, changed direction like a sentient cloud.

“You won’t be at the memorial,” said Nicole. “That will just be family. I don’t know who will come back to the house after, but some might.”

We turned from the main road onto a private drive and passed through rows of fruit trees, some sickly or dead, most erupting in glorious white blossoms, petals on the grass like a spring snow. The house was at the top of a shallow rise. It had a gabled roof, twin stone chimneys. A barn was set on the far side of the rise, a gable roof echoing the house, a saltbox shed attached. Neither the house nor the barn was painted, both just the grayed color of plank wood, the lawn dried brown. Nicole parked near the barn.

“This is beautiful, Cole,” I said. “How often do you make it out here? It’s peaceful.”

“Never,” said Nicole. “Almost never.”

The house had spacious rooms, hardwood floors. The windowsills were decorated with antique bottles of colored glass that cast rainbows across the walls. A memorial display had been arranged on the coffee table, I noticed, a small selection of items: a photo album, an American flag in a triangle display case, a pocket watch on a strip of velvet. An old long rifle hung above the fireplace mantel, from the 1800s or maybe earlier, a bag of powder dangling from the muzzle. I wondered what Nestor would have made of it. The smell of simmering chili filled the house, bread baking.

“Miss Ashleigh?” Nicole called out.

A woman answered, “Cole, oh—I’ll be right with you!”

The woman was stout, with white hair in ropy braids, her broad cheeks and thick neck marshmallow soft. “Here you are,” she said, and although she used a cane, she enveloped Nicole in a crushing hug, “You’ll slip through my arms, Cole. You’re scrawny, you’re too scrawny.” And when Nicole introduced me, Miss Ashleigh shook my hand and said, “Courtney, we’re well met. Look here, we’re each missing something.” She lifted her hem and showed off her prosthetic foot.

“Diabetes?” I asked.

“That’s right. Had neuropathy,” said Miss Ashleigh. “Type 2, all of a sudden. Lost my vision also, but had a doctor prescribe me those nanobot gelcaps, cured me up. You don’t mind a cot in the den, do you?”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Thanks for having me.”

“Pish,” she said. “A friend of Cole’s, you know. Shauna and Cobb have their stuff in the spare bedroom. Some of the others got a hotel closer to Spencer.”

Cobb. In the same house with him, the SEAL.

I brought my suitcase to the den, an addition to the main house—brown carpeting, a breakfront with American Bicentennial plates, a cherrywood eight-gun display case that was empty. I had a view of the wide lawn and the distant orchard. A woman sat on a stool in the side yard, out near an antique horse-drawn plow that was left as decoration, a burlap sack and a bucket at her feet, shucking corn. Her hair fell in copper waves, a bottle color. This must be Shauna, I thought. I watched her with the corn, breaking off the husk and peeling leaves, picking off strands of silk. She wore camouflage pants and a long-sleeved thermal shirt that hugged her chest. Athletic, but out of her element with the corn. The kind of girl that might buy a pink shotgun.

Nicole knocked at the door. “Will this be all right?” she asked. “Comfortable?”

“Yeah,” I told her, looking around at the room, the foldout cot. “This will be perfect.”

“I’ll have to leave you alone for a little while,” she said. “Miss Ashleigh and I are going to meet some of the family. We’ll be back for dinner. Cobb’s driving us.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Will you be all right?”

She was thinking it was a mistake to have brought me, I could tell. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Listen, about all that stuff from the other night. I don’t know what I was saying. I don’t remember, but I’m sure I was—”

“Cole, I understand,” I said, “and I was drinking, too. I don’t even remember.”

“These people, they’re my family,” she said. “I’ll be fine. They’re good people.”

We had coffee at the kitchen table while she waited for Miss Ashleigh to get ready. Heavy footsteps clambered down the stairs. The man who entered the kitchen was gargantuan, a full foot taller than me at least, and broad, the sleeves and back of his suit coat tight against him. Muscled, the bearing of a wrestler gone bulkier as he aged. Scandinavian, by way of the Midwest—corn-fed, in his fifties at least, if not older, his white-blond hair a tight crew cut that fuzzed the pinkish folds of his neck. His eyes were close set and uneven, one slightly higher than the other—dumb eyes, some people might have thought, but to me his eyes looked like something gone feral.

“Who’s this?” he asked when he noticed me.

“Courtney Gimm,” I said, and we shook hands—my hand in his like a petal wrapped in meat.

“A friend of mine,” said Nicole.

“Gimm,” he said. “All right. I’m Cobb.”

“Cobb,” I said, and he seemed to like that, hearing his own name repeated. He smiled, a sort of squint-eyed smirk. I imagined him killing Mursult, I imagined him killing a girl. I imagined him killing a girl with his bare hands, strangling the life from her, breaking her neck.

“We’ll be back soon,” said Nicole.

I watched them leave, Cobb’s truck kicking up a plume of dust down the long dirt drive. The floorboards whined as I walked through the house alone. The light fixture at the top of the stairs was pink glass. I found the bedroom Nicole was staying in, wondered if this was the room where Jared Bietak had grown up. If it was, all traces of him were gone. White walls, a whiter rectangle where a picture once hung. I went back downstairs, opened the cover of the photo album that was part of the memorial display: A Mother’s Love Never Ends. Photos of Jared Bietak from elementary school, high school. He looked like a tough kid, I thought, but Miss Ashleigh had saved every report card, a straight-A student. There was a graduation picture, then grad school. A Ph.D. in chemistry, Penn State. I turned the page and saw a picture of four men: Cobb, shirtless, muscular, his arm around Jared Bietak. Patrick Mursult was in the picture, smoking a cigar, but I didn’t recognize the fourth man. About as tall as Cobb but leaner, a corona of reddish gold hair. The man’s head was like a death’s-head, sunken cheeks and bony cheekbones, his lips parted, his teeth visible. Shadows covered his eyes.

“You shouldn’t be looking at that.”

Startled, I closed the album. “I didn’t mean to,” I said, turned to see Shauna standing in the doorway. “I was curious, I’m sorry—”

“I’m not mad at you,” said Shauna, “but they wouldn’t want you looking through their stuff. Miss Ashleigh shouldn’t have left this out.”

She was my age, about, or a few years younger, somewhere in her thirties. When she pulled her hair back, a sensation of déjà vu washed over me, like I had seen her pull her hair back before. I noticed a tattoo in the cleft of her left hand, a black circle with crooked spokes.

“I just wanted to see what Jared looked like,” I said.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” said Shauna. “I’ll show you the orchard.”

There were paths through the fruit trees that led to the road. The trees bloom but get blitzed by late frosts each year, so some of the petals had browned, fallen. Apple and pear trees mostly, nothing ready to pick yet, but Shauna spoke fondly of walking here in summer, gathering fruit for pies. My mind wandered as we walked, thinking of Njoku, of his ship, Cancer. Cancer had sailed Deep Time, and I wondered if the same had been true of Libra. I wondered how Libra had returned, seemingly without anyone noticing, or if it had ever launched.

“So you’re close friends with Nicole but you never met Jared?” Shauna was saying.

“I only know what Nicole’s told me about him,” I said.

“He passed a few years before I was with Cobb,” said Shauna. “They were close. Cobb talks about Jared all the time, their time in the Navy.”

“How’d you and Cobb hook up?” I asked her.

“I used to go to this roadhouse, this biker bar out in the sticks,” said Shauna. “They did all the MMA pay-per-views out there, and he started chatting me up. He introduced me around to everybody, all the river rats.”

We walked the far side of a strawberry bush, past an old outhouse made picturesque by falling into disrepair. We saw Cobb’s truck pull through the orchard, returning toward the house.

“We should get back,” said Shauna. “We should be there to meet them.”

“What is that you mentioned?” I asked her. “You said the river rats?”

“They were in the Navy together. Jared and Cobb and the others,” she said. “Hyldekrugger.”

“Is that what they call themselves?” I asked. “Are they a gang or something?”

“They called themselves that in Vietnam,” said Shauna. “River rats. They patrolled the rivers over there, talk about it all the time, all the shit they’ve survived. Hyldekrugger always says they’re the survivors, that lambs are sacrificed but rats survive.”

We walked alongside the old barn, spotting wildflowers. There was a hayloft still piled with bales, but Miss Ashleigh used the barn as a garage. An old Winnebago was parked inside, coated with dust. We rounded toward the house.

Jared Bietak. Charles Cobb. And the others, Shauna had said. The crew of Libra were the survivors, she’d said. River rats. They aren’t the lamb. It’s often quipped that the most important personnel in the Naval Space Command are the two dozen psychiatrists who work with sailors home from Deep Waters. Deep Space and Deep Time are irreality—and beliefs built on irreality are beliefs built on quicksand. NSC sailors who have witnessed Deep Time are often haunted, reacting to events that haven’t yet occurred, may never occur. And many sailors who have seen Deep Space return hollowed, overwhelmed by the immensity of the cosmos. The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars.

We ate dinner together in strained silence, the five of us seated around the kitchen table, the quiet punctuated only by the clink of silverware against china, the sound of our chewing. Chili, the corn Shauna had shucked, bread. Nicole hadn’t spoken since the three of them had returned—more sorrowful than I’d seen her, and I wondered just how deep her mourning for Jared ran, if it was coming back to her or if something might have happened while she was away. I tried to compliment the food, and Miss Ashleigh and Shauna responded with smiles, but Cobb ate quickly, staring into the screen of his phone, and left the table in a temper.

I washed the dishes while Shauna dried, Miss Ashleigh at the kitchen table having late coffee as the light outside faded. I wasn’t sure where Nicole went, or Cobb. I joined Miss Ashleigh for a cup of coffee, then went outside. Gorgeous here, the house and barn stark against the deepening twilight. I walked around the far side of the house and caught sight of Nicole, leaning against the edge of the open barn door smoking a Parliament. Ghostly in her flowing white dress, her pea coat draped over her shoulders.

“There you are,” she said, her voice velvety between breaths of smoke. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around. I should have been with you today.”

“I’ve been finding my way all right,” I said. “Shauna’s nice, so is Miss Ashleigh. How are you holding up?”

“We buried my husband again today,” said Nicole.

I came up near her, wishing I was still a smoker, wanting to pass the cigarette between us and enjoy the night.

“You don’t let on how much you miss him,” I said.

“Sometimes I do,” said Nicole. “I’ll find myself thinking of Jared, and then I’ll realize all over again that he’s gone and think of everything that’s happened, and the pain hurts new, every time.”

“After all these years,” I said.

“Have you ever lost someone close?” she asked.

“I have.”

“You forget the bad, your memory tries to heal the past. Years don’t matter either,” said Nicole. “Time just burns. Time burns, and you think the wounds are cauterized, but they open up raw, again and again.”

She looked away from me, into the outer darkness. In what must have been a reflection of the last stray light from the sinking sun, her eyes seemed to flare with an olive shine that gave her face a feline complexity. Her expression was expectant, terrified, as if she were keeping watch against unseen predators that might manifest from the night. The sunset was red tonight, the sky a lake of fire. She turned back to me, and the glow in her eyes was gone, a trick of the light that had passed.

“How was the family? Were they a comfort?” I asked. “I know you don’t get along with some of them.”

“Shake a damp rag and watch water run like diamonds.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, but she pinned me with her glare. She took a drag on her cigarette. I breathed deeply the taste of her smoke, the sweetness.

“You do understand,” she said. “I know now that you of all people would understand what I mean.”

Water without gravity, I thought. Water wriggles away like iridescent worms—or like jellied diamonds. But how could she know? I thought over the afternoon, trying to remember if I had somehow slipped, if I had somehow betrayed myself, but no, she wouldn’t know, she couldn’t.

“I’m growing so old,” said Nicole, “so fast. I sometimes think I can hear my body aging. I forgot how much I like it out here, how slow the orchard feels. I spend every day helping the elderly, and I see them die, and it seems like waves breaking against the shore, but out here everything is slow. It reminds me of home.”

“Kenya?”

She nodded. “Mombasa. They made the trees to look like emeralds. Everything was engineered, nothing grew naturally—all the irrigation, all the straight lines. You pick a fruit and the fruit grows right back, there was never any want. I was never hungry as a child. Seeing the perfect rows of fruit trees reminds me of home. I didn’t miss it until I realized I’d never see it again.”

“You can go back,” I said. “If it’s home—”

“No, my home is gone,” said Nicole. “My home never was. I went with her because my father met her at a reception in our village, a reception for the crew of Libra, and he made arrangements for me to leave with her.”

Libra—the shock of the word. “Why are you saying this? Cole—”

“No more time for lies,” she said, her eyes smoldering with what might have been hatred, or cunning. “You’re like a message in a bottle to me now. Sometimes the bottle breaks and sinks in the sea, but sometimes the bottle reaches the shore. I can’t control which.”

Her name hadn’t appeared on the crew list, but Nicole knew Libra. She had been aboard Libra. I’d met her and thought she was a barfly, an addict. I’d thought the surface of her life was all there was, the Donnell House and May’rz Inn, years of drinking and pills and never-ending shifts tending to the elderly, but she had sailed on Libra, her life was luminous with memories of Deep Waters.

“How do you know?” I asked. “Who are you?”

“I had been through medical school,” she said. “My father convinced her I could help. He wanted a life for me. I loved her the moment I met her. I was inspired by her. I wanted to go with her. She had that quality about her—people wanted to follow where she led. We wanted to follow.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Commander Remarque,” said Nicole. “Forty-seven-man crew. Libra was tasked with missions to the galaxies NGC 5055 and NGC 5194, the Sunflower and the Whirlpool. A six-year mission.”

Nicole lit a new Parliament, flicked the smoldering butt of the old cigarette into the grass around the barn. It flared an orange arc, winked out.

“We first transitioned to NGC 5194 and observed for two and a half years, transitioned to Earth-side IFTs for shore leave and resupply,” she said, “but the Whirlpool was barren, so Remarque ordered us to our second location, the Sunflower Galaxy, and that’s where we found the miracle.”

“What miracle?” I asked.

“Life,” said Nicole. “We found life.”

QTNs would appear like disease through the future White Hole, but throughout NSC’s odysseys the universe had revealed itself as nothing but flaming gas and dead stone. The notion that Libra had discovered a planet supporting life was almost too large to grasp, a great plume swelling within me. The stars above us suddenly swarmed, it seemed—no longer the cold fires of heaven but pulsing with life like the frenetic masses of organisms contained in a droplet of water.

“A planet in liquid,” said Nicole. “The atmosphere was a methane-and-carbon mixture. Nothing to support human life, and yet the planet was teeming. It was a small planet circling a binary star. Its surface was an ocean with crystal shapes that swam like leviathans, crystals like latticework, mammoth polyhedrons that bobbed and dived in the ink. The crystals sang when they noticed us—you know the sound when you run your finger around the rim of a wineglass? Remarque named the planet Esperance, meaning ‘Hope.’ There were landmasses, a crinkle of fjords, and I was on the exo-team, twelve of us. Three Quad-landers, we left Libra in orbit and descended through the atmosphere. The binary suns were distant, dying. Winds battered our landers, the air was full of ice. We landed, and we made camp.”

We all trained on mock alien surfaces, pitching inflatable concrete domes to use as semipermanent houses, camping in Arizona deserts and Arctic planes of ice, using self-heating burners and smokeless chemical fires, nights spent in my space suit, limited oxygen. I never descended to the surface of a crystal island or an alien sea, but we all trained for such things. Nicole had walked on another world—I imagined her searching out constellations in an unfamiliar sky, like trying to read the braille of foreign tongues.

“We had two SEALs—Mursult and Cobb,” she said. “Jared landed, and so did Beverly Clark, a botanist, and I was assigned as her assistant. Patricia Gonzales was with us, a geologist, and Nate Quinn, a biologist. Elric Fleece and Esco were from engineering, mechanics for the landers. Tamika Ifill, Takahashi, and Josephus Pravarti were our pilots. We were nearly four billion miles away from the planet’s suns. We called them the Pilot Lights, because they were ghostly blue. There were three moons, the largest a crater-pocked gargantua that hovered massive wherever we looked, almost like an entire second planet encircled ours. The other moons traced their own arcs, barely visible at times, the smallest circling twice before the largest had even seemed to move. We had difficulty distinguishing day from night because of the frequent eclipses, and even the strongest daylight felt like dusk. The ground was slush and soft like putty.

“And that slush sucked at our boots and splattered our suits like a fine dust of silica, playing havoc with our electronics. Our communications with Libra were spotty, fragmented static blasts. But the beauty of those ridges, the way the oceans stained the ice blue… After two days we found that the land tapered, began to level off, and we descended shelves of ice and entered into swampland. This was our first physical contact with life, a band of fauna like a borderland to the ocean beyond, razors of wild grass and floppy squills with closed bulbs, their stalks more grayish than green. Things with broad leaves like lily pads and stringy moss carpeted the icy mud, and clusters of reeds as tall as trees arced above us, grew together like archways, like the entire swamp was one body that had grown in a kind of geometric architecture. It’s almost… like I thought there was a structure we were inside of but that I couldn’t see, that was invisible. And these plants covered the structure like ivy. Do you understand?”

I imagined the exo-team picking their way through the swamp, traversing the fauna like tourists passing through a cathedral. “I think so.”

“And we came out to a beach made of pebbles of metal, almost like ball bearings instead of sand, and the black ocean beyond. Beverly Clark had grown uneasy—she hadn’t wanted to land on Esperance to begin with. She had been afraid to cross the swamp, and she panicked at the sight of the ocean. She was hysterical, she told us the ocean wanted to consume us, that she thought the ocean was this planet’s mouth. Her fear spread to Quinn and Fleece, and they told us they wouldn’t carry the equipment any further, they refused. So there we were, in this abundance of life, and we fell to bickering. Cobb decided we would sleep in shifts, to get rest before heading back to our base camp and to Libra. In the meantime the rest of us gathered samples, filling tubes with the ocean, collecting soil samples, rocks, cuttings from the leaves. We tried to force those flower bulbs open, but they were clamped shut. We tried to dig up the larger plants with the root systems intact, but Beverly Clark and Quinn and even Patricia Gonzales fought with us—”

“They were losing their minds,” I said. “Overwhelmed.”

“Not until the moons passed together,” said Nicole, “the three moons in conjunction, an eclipse, circles in circles. You could actually feel the change in the gravity they produced together—a lightness, a lift, being pulled upward by the moons like a thread in your chest had been tugged. And the oceans responded, receding from the shore, following the moons’ pull, a waning tide. The beach elongated as the ocean retreated, and the ocean floor was covered in lichen, a luminescent carpet that grew in the furrows leading deeper into the ocean. There were glassy rocks in twisting shapes like lava as it curls through water, and farther out still we saw crystals that dazzled like diamonds. The water receded far enough to expose the body of one of the leviathans, the ringing bodies we had seen from above—or rather the crystal shape of the leviathan. It was at a distance but seemed more like a shape than a body, the same shapes the plants had grown into—or maybe it was once a body but was crystal now. I don’t know how to… I don’t have the words… A crystal shape, like interlocking diamonds or pyramids inside of pyramids. A fractal. But the most beautiful sight, all the closed buds in the swampland and the plants along the shore responded to that greater tug of gravity, and all the flowers spread open their leaves, the buds bursting, blossoming in heavy flowers with burgundy organs and long blue petals that glowed. The flowers’ blue light almost hurt to look at, you had to squint.”

“Your necklace,” I said. “A blue leaf.”

“Here,” said Nicole, removing her necklace and handing it to me, the pendant of luminescent blue. I received the necklace in cupped hands just as I had once received a human heart, trembling at the thought of holding an artifact of alien life. I looked closely, saw veins in the blue—a pressed petal still glowing with spectral light.

“Oh my God,” I said. “My God,” but I was uneasy holding it. I returned the necklace to Nicole, who slipped it away into her pocket, the blue light extinguished.

“All the flowers opened,” said Nicole. “In the swampland and all along the shore—so many flowers had grown beneath the ocean, the exposed sand was like a field of blossoming wildflowers. And as we watched, their spores, or their pollen, lifted toward the moons, fuzzy lights like blue-and-gold rain, but rain in reverse. And that’s when… that’s when it happened to Quinn, when Quinn began to scream. We all stared at him, standing in that field of flowers, the spores lifting around us. The spores had sunk into him—they passed through his space suit, into his body, like he was absorbing those blue lights. His face, through his mask—his eyes bulged and bled, and I saw his suit pulled from him, his helmet, but they were held in the air beside his body. And he was lifted, naked, several feet off the ground, his arms spread, his legs spread, his skin burning in the alien light. This all happened so quickly—I screamed. I thought I was screaming. His neck opened along a seam, and blood sprayed from him, filling the air with mist, and other seams opened along his arms, along his thighs, and blood rushed from him for several minutes. His body shriveled, but the droplets hung suspended like a fog around him. His skin peeled away, the skin of his hands came off like gloves, the skin of his arms like sleeves, his chest like a long coat—the skin floating like scarves caught in the wind. He was floating, a floating body, clouds of meat, white tendons, and a shape opened in his chest, opened in him like an eye, a polygon, its points connected, and I could see through that shape into another place, as though a portal had opened in him, another ice landscape and another and another. I looked through him, but I felt something look back into me. I felt as if something had reached through him and I had been touched. His body was sectioned apart, his skeleton separated, and soon he was only an outline tracing of nerves and veins, like a man made of lace. Each of his organs lined up in the air and formed a cube around him—everything was displayed.”

Nicole moaned like a dog dreaming, and her eyes rolled to the night sky. I felt faint, thinking of the silence of the universe and the sounds of crystal bodies ringing. Nicole had seen a body opened in midair, like a cadaver opened on a table. The thrum of the circulatory system, the nervous system, ringing, the wet bellows of the lungs. I was filled with fear. Bodies stripped of skin, muscles hanging displayed in the air, zygomaticus major, depressor anguli oris, orbicularis oculi, orbicularis oris—an autopsy.

“Beverly Clark was next—she ran and crawled but was lifted into the air and dismantled. She was a fractal, all her pieces. Her blood was a mist we ran through, and we had lost our minds. I was burning inside, like my brain and my eyes were fire, like my skin would burn from me—and Takahashi screamed, and I saw him fall on Patricia Gonzales and beat her to death, break apart her face mask and beat her as she choked on the air. And I couldn’t endure the burning anymore. I wanted to die, anything to end the pain. I wanted to run into the black ocean to drown, but Jared, my Jared, was screaming, burning, and he tried to kill me—”

“He had changed,” I said. “That place drove him mad, turned him murderous.”

“Only Cobb and Mursult were sane,” said Nicole. “They saved us, the SEALs. They were able to keep their minds, maybe because of their training. Cobb was able to pull Jared from me. He got through to him somehow. And Patrick lifted me from the ground, and I heard his voice like through water, but eventually his words came to me: Run, run. We left Takahashi, and I saw Esco run into the ocean, disappear into the ocean. Fleece had snapped, but he came with us—Cobb carried him. We lost Tamika Ifill at base camp, but the rest of us launched in the Quad-landers. We peeled off our clothes, scratching at ourselves—our bodies were burning. We docked with Libra, and Remarque retreated far from the planet. We heard the crystalline ringing, and the space around us turned brittle, like ice, shimmering like diamond dust. Remarque launched the B-L drive before all the space around us had gone brittle, and we transitioned, but it followed.”

“What followed you?” I asked.

“That white light. It traveled the negative energy the B-L drive left in our wake, the negative energy sailors call Casimir lines. Remarque transitioned again and again, but the white light was always above us, always surrounding us. And we were running low on food—”

“And so you left for Earth,” I said, realizing that Nicole was describing the birth of the Terminus.

“A far future,” said Nicole. “We jumped to the far future, thousands of years, hoping a civilization with technology greater than our own would be able to help us, but when we came through, the white light had appeared, that second sun. We saw the future of mankind dissolve. We saw men running to the seas to drown and saw men hanging in the air. We saw men, their mouths filled with silver. Remarque transitioned into other futures, but the white light shone above every sky, fouling every possibility.”

I thought of something like wildfire scorching the skies of infinite Earths. I thought of the White Hole shining like a dead eye.

“Remarque knew,” said Nicole. “She gathered us together in the enlisted men’s mess hall, the only place large enough to gather as an entire crew. She talked to us about Everett space, about how we were travelers in futures called Everett spaces that were carved from our observations, our experience. She told us that if we committed suicide, all of us, that if we all killed ourselves, then everything we had seen, everything we had discovered, would blink out. We could jump to a new future and commit mass suicide, and everything that we had seen and experienced aboard Libra would cease to exist. Terra firma would never know about Esperance—the planet would go unfound, because if we blinked, then it would be like we’d never found it. We could save humanity. She told us she would start the sequence to create a ‘cascade failure’ in the B-L drive, that the destruction of the engine would obliterate us and everything we had uncovered. She said it would be painless.”

“But you refused,” I said.

“Hyldekrugger didn’t want to die,” said Nicole. “Remarque had her supporters—Chloe Krauss, she was our WEPS, and there were others. But there were more people who were ready to listen to Hyldekrugger, who joined with him when Remarque ordered us to kill ourselves. He gathered people around him.”

“Mutiny,” I said.

“I’m innocent. I’m innocent in all this, everything that happened, everything that will happen. I hid from the fighting in the life-support room, and when I heard the fighting come near me, I hid in the brig, where I knew I could lock myself away. Don’t you remember? We met once, years ago.”

“What?” I asked, confused. “No, that’s not possible. How could I remember?”

“We don’t have time for your lies, Courtney,” she said, and took a long drag on her cigarette. “We need to leave here. You need to get your things—”

“Tell me what happened to Remarque.”

“They killed the crew loyal to Remarque,” said Nicole. “They captured her. They cut Remarque’s throat in front of everyone—they were cheering at her death. They killed her. Hyldekrugger killed her. They passed the body around, everyone involved in the mutiny despoiling her. They spared me, because I was Jared’s wife. They killed everyone else, but they spared me. I’m innocent.”

“What happened to the ship?” I asked. “You came back here, you brought the Terminus with you. What happened to Libra?”

Nicole’s eyes welled with emotion; a memory fluttered over her face, gone in an instant. She reached for my hand, squeezed it. She said, “I know a story, of ghosts in the forest who precede the living, like spirits born before their bodies. The spirits live life, and then their bodies live the same life, but always a few steps behind.”

A flashlight winked in the distance, a sweep of light out near the orchard. Someone searching. Nicole said, “We should leave. Wait here until I come for you.” She retreated into the night, her white clothes like a radiant spill of moonlight before she was swallowed by the dark.

“Nicole, wait,” I said. “Nicole—”

Her cigarette smoke hung in the air. They killed her, she had said, and my heart quickened—a damp rag, water like diamonds. I was alone here, I realized. Twilight had deepened, the house lights were the only lights except for the red rim of the horizon. Miss Ashleigh was baking, it smelled like—the air was scented with apples, spices. Chillier now, without my jacket. I shivered, thinking of spores like rain, of autopsies in the air. I thought of Libra. Mutiny—

The glare of the flashlight swept closer, swept the lawn, the grass nearer the barn.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Quiet.” Shauna’s voice. She killed the flashlight. “Wait,” she said.

“What’s going on?” I asked, but she didn’t answer until she had come close enough to whisper.

“They’re going to kill you tonight,” said Shauna. “You have to leave.”

“Who is? What are you talking about?” But I felt adrenaline pump through me, my teeth chattered.

“Don’t go back to the house. Run in this direction,” said Shauna, turning me toward the orchard. She flashed her light once, pointed ahead of us, at the ground. “Go straight through the row of fruit trees and you’ll hit the road, right where we walked earlier today. Head away from the house and get to the road—”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“Shannon Moss,” said Shauna. “NCIS.”

The shock at hearing my real name, my cover wiped away. I thought of Shauna’s face—her dark eyes—but no, there was no recognition. How would she know?

“I don’t—”

“They ID’d you,” said Shauna. “When Cobb and Nicole left this afternoon, they must have met up with Hyldekrugger. They have names of agents who’ve investigated them, stretching years back. Cobb checked. They ID’d the name Courtney Gimm, but I know who you really are. You have to go. I’ll have transportation once you hit the road.”

“Are they Libra?” I asked. “Who else is involved?”

“I don’t know what Libra is,” said Shauna. “I don’t know what angle you’re working. I’m working domestic terrorism.”

“Who are you?”

“FBI,” she said. “Go.”

The hovering thought that I might die here beat like wings around my skull. When Shauna turned toward the house, I ran for the orchard. I tried to control my breathing like I’d been trained, tried to keep my wits despite my fear, tried to think. Cold sweat damp on my forehead, my back. I had crossed in front of the house, through the spill of light on the lawn, and had made it down the rise into the longer grass when I heard a scream. I lost my footing and fell, looked back toward the house. The gabled house and gabled barn crested the rise, silhouetted black against the hellfire-red sunset glow of the horizon. The screaming continued, the piercing shriek of utter shock, of death.

Run. Get up, Shannon. Run—

Down the rise, quickly, I gained the orchard, followed the straight rows, careful of my footing. Above me the trees were vaulted shadows, the sky an outpouring of starlight. The ground around me seemed to glow, moonlight reflecting on the carpet of petals. I hurried, but I heard deep breathing somewhere behind me. Heavy footfalls and breaking branches, someone crashing downhill. A dark shape swept toward me. A man, tackling me to the ground. Wind rushed from my lungs beneath his weight, I couldn’t breathe.

The man punched wildly, struck my shoulder, my forehead, but glancing blows. Cobb—his hands were crushing weights. If he caught me square, he would knock me out, I knew, but the darkness worked in my favor. I scuttled from him, and when he fell on me again, he didn’t land with his full weight, didn’t pin my arms. He swung, his fist a brick colliding with my eye socket, flashes of light. Dazed, I clutched at his chest, hugging him, pressing my head to his armpit, held close to minimize his swings, as much as possible. He struck my back. I readjusted my grip, and my hands found his belt, found the sheath clipped to his belt, the handle of a knife. He pounded my back, kidney punches I felt deep in my trunk, but I was quick with the knife in the moment he relented to find a better position against me. I slid the knife from its sheath and plunged the blade through his shirt, into his soft belly. He winced, and I stabbed into his armpit, heard him grunt, felt the strength leave his arm. He let go of me, but I stayed close, slashed higher, dragged the blade across his neck. Hot blood sprayed over me, squirting my face in gushes. Cobb gurgled, belched. He stumbled, toppled. His eyes groped uncomprehendingly at the fruit trees for only a few moments.

What had Shauna said? Transportation… FBI. The trees ended, and I stumbled into the road. Distant headlights. The car rushed toward me, stopped several yards away. I was pinned in its headlights, dripping with Cobb’s blood. A woman stepped from the passenger side, a petite blonde with wide blue eyes, a porcelain doll in jeans and a windbreaker.

She pulled her firearm. “Drop the knife—do it—”

I let the knife fall to the ground.

“Where’s Vivian?” she said.

“I don’t know—I don’t know Vivian,” I said. “A woman named Shauna—”

“Let’s go,” said the woman. She ushered me into the back of the SUV. A man drove, his hair cropped short as a chestnut bur. He gunned the engine. The orchard was far behind us when the woman asked, “Do you need a hospital?”

I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror, doused in blood. “It’s not mine,” I said. “I’m hurt, but no, not a hospital.” My left eye, the one Cobb had struck, pounded with my heartbeat, I realized I could see with only one eye. “I just need to clean up.”

“We’ll stop somewhere,” said the woman.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Special Agent Zwerger,” she said, holding out her credentials—FBI.

“Egan,” said the driver.

“Call your supervisor,” I said, spitting blood all over their seats—I must have bitten my tongue in the fight. “Tell them you have ‘Grey Dove.’ Shit—my eye. What’s wrong with my eye?”

“It’s swollen shut,” said Zwerger. “We’ll get someone to look you over once we’re safe.”

We would never be safe. We were bodies in hell, and the White Hole was our dead sun. I wept, exhausted. Fresh blood filled my mouth, and I swallowed. Cobb’s blood turned cold on my skin. Some time later Egan pulled into a CVS, where Zwerger bought bandages and Neosporin. She sat with me in the backseat while Egan paced outside, arguing with someone on his cell. Zwerger washed my cuts with alcohol wipes, cleaned my face. Gentle, motherly. A whiff of baby powder and lipstick when she leaned close. I winced when I caught the reflection of myself in the rearview mirror, the overhead light on—my closed eye was deformed from swelling, yellowed, purple. She covered my eye with a wide bandage. “There,” she said.

“Where are we going?” I asked once Egan pulled back onto the road. We’d been driving well over an hour; we’d crossed out of West Virginia into Pennsylvania.

“You aren’t FBI,” he said.

“NCIS. What are you investigating?”

“Persons of suspicion relating to domestic-terrorism charges,” said Zwerger. “I’m guessing you have a similar interest. Vivian might have blown her cover to get you out of there. We lost contact with her.”

Whose scream had I heard at the house before I ran? Cobb surprising Shauna—Vivian? Murdering her? I closed off the thought. The windows were tinted, but I caught illuminated signs and placed myself. Connellsville, Uniontown. National Pike, Business 40, the landscape mostly hills with trees and scrub, occasional little strip malls.

“Some of those people have militia ties,” said Egan. “What’s your interest?”

“Domestic terrorism,” I said.

Zwerger kept quiet, looked out the window. I saw the reflection of her face, an awkward expression like she was about to sit through a marital feud.

“I talked with my supervisor,” said Egan. “We’ll sort this out.”

Egan turned in to the parking lot of the Blue Mountain Motel, just a dozen or so units huddled beneath a low-slung roof, the entire lot lit only with the neon Vacancy sign and a vibrant red Coke vending machine that hummed between the middle units. Only one other car in the lot, a silver sedan parked near the office, an old car. The sedan’s interior light was on, a soft shine. Someone was inside, but as Egan pulled through the lot, the sedan’s light went dark.

“There’s nothing for us to sort out,” I said. “Tell them you have Grey Dove. The rest is between the NCIS director and your director.”

“What’s the name of the NCIS director?” asked Egan, parking in front of Unit 3. I couldn’t answer him; he knew I didn’t know the answer. Egan stepped from the car, stretched. “Give me a sec,” he said. Near the light of the vending machine, again on his cell. This was a shorter call, and when he finished, he unlocked Unit 3, stepped inside. A moment later the room lights glowed behind the heavy curtains.

Something isn’t right. Egan must have called his superior, must have mentioned Grey Dove, and either didn’t believe I was NCIS or the FBI knew exactly who I was. Egan and Zwerger might take me into that room, ask a few questions, then let me walk—or they might never let me go. Even if Egan and Zwerger didn’t know what I was, their superiors might. Their superiors might have flagged “Grey Dove” and ordered them to interrogate me here, apprehend me. There are prisons in America far from the public view: no charges, no trial, a butterfly in a bell jar. They could hold me here so their existence wouldn’t blink. I tried the car door, but it was locked, the interior handles disabled.

“Don’t do this,” I said to Zwerger. “You don’t understand what you’re doing.”

“You’ll be all right,” she said.

“The whole fucking world will die if I don’t get out of here,” I said. “Call Apollo Soucek Field. Speak with Special Agent Wally Njoku.”

“We’re just going to have a conversation,” said Zwerger. “Sort everything out. Calm down, otherwise we’ll be forced to restrain you.”

Kill her, I thought. Kill her and take the car. But Zwerger stepped outside, opened my door. Weighing options: I might be able to outrun her, even with my leg I might outrun her, but there was nowhere to run. I followed her from the SUV. I could scream. There was someone sitting in the silver sedan, and maybe he would call the police if I screamed. Zwerger clutched me by the upper arm. She walked me toward Unit 3, gripped me like I was her prisoner.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “Let me go. Everything you love will die if you don’t let me go, a hole will open, a White Hole will open, and everything will die—”

“Enough,” she said.

The driver’s-side door of the sedan popped open, the driver stepped out, an older man. A raincoat over a gray suit, a black man with a head of woolly hair.

“Help me!” I called to him. “You’ve got to call the police! Help me!”

“What does this prove?” he said, taking hesitant steps toward us, his hand on the car, steadying himself.

“Egan, come out here,” said Zwerger, seeing the man. “Police business,” she said to him. “Do not approach.”

Something familiar in the way the man moved—then I recognized him as he came closer: Brock. His build thinner than it once was, the bulk of his muscle gone soft. He no longer needed to steady himself, moving swiftly as Egan came out from Unit 3.

“Brock?” said Egan. “Why are you here?”

Brock reached beneath his coat, pulled his sidearm from the belt holster. He raised the gun and took a step closer to Egan. Egan lifted his hands, saying, “Billy.” Brock fired. Egan crumpled, clutching his belly—a glottal moan, he doubled over on the curb.

Zwerger reached for her weapon, but Brock had already swung toward her and fired, clipping her neck. The woman fell, yelping, sputtering for breath. She reached to hold her throat with both hands, but blood pulsed between her fingers, her mouth round with agony.

Egan crawled toward the lights of Unit 3, draining out from his gut. Brock put the barrel to Egan’s head, fired. Egan dropped. I looked to Zwerger, but the light had left her eyes. I reached for her gun, but Brock had returned to me, his gun raised to my chest.

“Brock,” I said. “Please.”

He looked like he was possessed, like his mind had betrayed him. His face twisted into a rictus. He laughed, the sound like barking.

“What did I do?” he said. “Jesus, Jesus Christ, what did I do?” He looked over at Egan’s body, said, “Get up. Come on, Egan. Say something. You’re all right. Jesus, what did I do?” He holstered his weapon, stood over Zwerger. He said, “She had a child.” He seemed to remember I was there, and he asked me, “What did I do?”

“We’re okay, Brock,” I said, trying to pacify him. “Everything will be okay—”

He grabbed my chin, angled my face toward the light of the vending machine, studying me. “What do you prove?” he said. He stared hard into my eyes. He would have crawled inside me if he could have.

Something spooked him, some sound I hadn’t heard. He flinched, pulled me with him across the lot, to his car. Brock pushed me into the passenger seat, hurried to the driver’s side.

“We have to get out of here,” Brock said, reversing from the lot onto National Pike. “I know who you are,” he said, gunning the car to sixty, to eighty. “They’ll be after us soon. I should have put their bodies in the room. I wasn’t thinking. I can’t think. I should have moved them. I can’t think straight.”

“I don’t know who you think I am,” I said, “but this—”

“Don’t you fucking lie to me,” he said, drawing his gun, pressing the barrel into my cheek—I leaned away, ear against the window. “I could kill you now, and… if I killed you,” he said, “this would all go away, wouldn’t it? This would all just disappear, right? Egan and his partner, it would be like I’d never killed them, right? Right? Talk to me.”

“Please, lower your weapon,” I said. “Pull over and we’ll talk.”

“Talk now,” he said. “Talk right fucking now.”

The road swam before us, headlights on black tar. The gun barrel caused pain, digging into the side of my head.

“I don’t want to die like this,” I said.

“Can you change what’s happened?” he asked. “Is that why you’re here? To change all this?”

“What do you think I can change?” I asked. “Please lower your weapon. Please—”

“CJIS,” he said. “When they attacked CJIS, I lost Rashonda, my girls. Shannon, I lost both my beautiful girls, oh, my girls—”

“Pull over and we’ll talk,” I said. “Please, lower your weapon and pull over.”

He lowered the gun. His hands shook. He holstered the weapon. I stayed against the window, vision blurred with tears. His entire family would have been laid out in the surrounding fields, in white sheets. They would have breathed sarin and died instantly. I imagined the body of his wife. I imagined the CJIS day care full of dead children.

“The people who killed them thought they were fighting against the end of the world,” said Brock. “That’s why my wife and girls were killed.” He heaved with sobs. “Why do they have to die? And here you are, all these years later. You haven’t aged.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry about the pain you’re in—”

“You’re here to study CJIS,” said Brock. “To save all those lives.”

Patrick Mursult. His name would seem insignificant—one life next to a thousand. What could I tell Brock? I could tell him about Libra, could tell him about the Terminus. I could tell him that the Terminus cuts across every future, killing everyone who is alive, killing everyone who might ever be alive, killing every possibility in every possible world.

“I can save your family—I want to save them, I want to save Rashonda,” I said. “We can talk.”

Brock found a Sheetz gas station on Route 51, outside Belle Vernon, a twenty-four-hour convenience store. We wiped off as much blood from ourselves as we could with Handi Wipes he had in his glove compartment. Even so, I wore Brock’s raincoat, cinched over my blood-soaked dress. I looked like a horror show. The self-serve restaurant was empty at this hour. The clerks were teenage girls, a blonde and brunette paging through a Hustler, laughing, listening to the radio up near the registers. I cleaned myself in the bathroom, picking out dried blood from my hair, washing my hands and face with foam soap from the dispenser.

Brock waited in one of the restaurant booths out of sight from the registers. I joined him. He had diminished with age, with grief. Deep creases furrowed his eyes and mouth; his hair was like cigarette ash.

“I was told to imagine a wall made out of doors,” said Brock. “I was told that if I was falling through space toward a wall made of doors, I would fall through one of the doors. Whatever door I fell through would take me into the future. Different doors are different futures. Different versions of the future.”

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“After CJIS, after the funerals,” he said, “you came into my mind. Nestor and I used to talk about you. You’d worked at CJIS. I wondered if you had died that day with my family. The way you’d vanished, I thought you might have died. And I’d think about Deep Space—and I’d think about Patrick Mursult. And then I caught something on the news, I saw something on 60 Minutes when Naval Space Command was absorbed into a different agency. Mothballed projects, things that wouldn’t mean a damn to anyone who wasn’t looking, goofy things—Chinese satellites, lasers on the moon—but I wanted to know more. And I asked questions. I couldn’t let go. And one morning I had a message from the director—sealed—telling me about a restaurant in Silver Spring, Maryland, called TJ’s. Says I’m expected there. The Bureau had the noose around a physicist who used to work at the Naval Research Lab, we had evidence he accepted classified information from the Senate Armed Services Committee, used classified military secrets to start a company, Phasal Systems. Medical tech, the cure for fucking cancer—all gained from top-secret intelligence. We leveraged him, and he spilled. That’s how we learned about Deep Waters. I was brought into the fold. I had lunch with him, this old man who introduced himself by saying he was still like a child, that he should only be forty-two in the summer—but he was old, Shannon. He showed me his birth certificate, an early driver’s license. He was working at Phasal Systems on the cancer cure, but he knew everything about NSC. He talked about quantum foam and wormholes, and when I wasn’t understanding, he told me to imagine a wall made of doors—”

“Think of it like a whisk,” I said.

“Think of what?”

I slid from the booth, poked around behind the food counter, rummaging through kitchen drawers. Spoons, Saran Wrap, old rags. I found a whisk hanging on a pegboard near the utility sink.

“A whisk,” I said, returning to our table. “This is how my instructor taught me.”

I held the whisk sideways. Pointed to the tip of the handle. “Beginning of time,” I said. I ran my finger along the handle. “All of history—the observed past.” At the top of the handle, I said, “The present.”

“And then you hit the wall of doors,” he said.

I touched each of the wires of the whisk. “Possible futures, possible timelines—infinitely possible,” I said. “Imagine this whisk with an infinite number of wires.”

“What’s up here?” Brock asked, pointing to the tip of the whisk, where all the wires bent, looped toward one another, joined.

“Terminus,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“The end of the world.”

“All right,” he said, cupping his hands in front of his mouth. Vitality had returned to him, a frantic energy. His eyes seemed to be gulping at ideas like a drowning man would gulp at air. “And where is… this?” he asked, pointing to the end of the handle, the present.

“March 1997,” I told him.

Brock’s face cracked into a manic, openmouthed grin, his eyes frenzied—a glee that terrified me.

“And you… traveled here? You flew here? You’re an astronaut, aren’t you? Like Mursult was an astronaut. I remember asking if he was an astronaut, and you didn’t blink. You didn’t blink because you’re like him, aren’t you? You time-traveled here—”

“I don’t know if I’m here or still there, technically. It’s called ‘superposition entanglement,’ but I was never great at math,” I said. “You used to chew licorice gum, in 1997.”

He laughed, a sound more like a cry. “I gave it up,” he said. “Licorice—that gum was from Italy. I used to buy it from the import store, by the box. The only licorice strong enough—turned your spit black, your teeth and tongue black. But that day, CJIS, I was frantic, because I knew they were dead, my family, I just somehow knew my family was dead, that they were all dead. And I got through the security and ran through the rows of bodies, lifting white sheets off people’s faces, each time thinking I’d see one of my girls, but I only saw the faces of strangers, dead faces. I never saw my girls, never found them. I was eating my licorice that whole time, a nervous habit, but the next morning I ate a piece of that gum and the smell of licorice filled my mind with all those dead faces. I spit it out—”

“You’re still looking for your girls,” I said. “You think I’ll be able to help you find them.”

“Why now?” he asked. “Why did you come now?”

“I don’t control it,” I said. “There are shapes that appear in nature—the shapes of seashells, the spiral shapes of some galaxies. Snowflakes, the swirl pattern of seeds on a sunflower’s face, on and on. You see this same pattern repeated everywhere. Leaf fronds, the way a toilet flushes.”

“Fractals,” said Brock. “The same pattern, repeated forever.”

“Quantum foam grows like that, too,” I said. “It’s shaped like that. There is a set of numbers that makes those shapes, called Fibonacci numbers—that shape is everywhere in nature. I don’t have to travel this far, or I can travel much farther, but the protocol for most investigations is that we travel about nineteen years, 6,765 days. I came with the hope that the truth would reveal itself in time. I came to investigate the death of Patrick Mursult and the murder of his family.”

“Why? Why him? What’s his life worth?” Brock asked, but he didn’t want to hear my answers about Libra or the Terminus—he was burrowed deep within himself. After a moment he said, “So this physicist said he enjoyed my company, enjoyed talking with someone who wanted to believe him, and said he wanted ice cream after lunch. There’s a Baskin-Robbins right next door to TJ’s, so I took him over, we ate ice cream cones together. All theoretical, he told me. He was bullshitting me maybe, but as we were leaving, he said that if I ever met a traveler, I should capture him, put him in handcuffs, lock him away in solitary. Supermax. Lock him away without a key and keep him alive for as long as possible, alive and comfortable, because the moment he dies or goes back through that wall of doors, back to the real present, the true present, everything I know about life—every memory I have, everything, every person I’d ever known, every atom in existence—will disappear.”

“Blink out,” I said.

“Gone,” said Brock.

“We call that the butterfly in the bell jar,” I said. “It’s happened to people like me. Being held captive in these futures by people who can’t face the awareness of their nonexistence.”

“But what would happen if I came back with you? Could you bring me back?”

“I could,” I said, knowing the case history, the quasi-legal status of individuals NSC ships brought home from futures, the strange lives of these doppelgängers, people we called echoes.

“I could see her again,” said Brock. “My girls. I could… I could hold them, couldn’t I?”

“You’d only bring confusion and pain,” I said. “You’d only scare your girls. They’d see you as you are now, as an old man who bears a strong resemblance to their father. Your wife will joke that William Brock, her husband, might look like you when he’s an old man. If you tried to go home, you would be a double, nothing more. They wouldn’t want you. You’d be an echo of William Brock, you wouldn’t be William Brock. Ask yourself—how much do you love them? Do you truly love Rashonda, your wife? She already has her husband. Do you truly love your daughters? They already have their father.”

Brock coughed, a guttural sound, either wild laughter or choking on grief. He drew his weapon, the Glock pistol he had already used to kill that night. He pointed at my sternum, and my heart dissolved. If he were to shoot me, I felt that my blood would never stop flowing.

“I could keep you comfortable here,” he said.

“Were Egan and Zwerger going to keep me comfortable here?” I asked.

“They didn’t know what you were,” said Brock. “There are people who know. A colleague of mine, Whittaker. He’d ordered you to be questioned, imprisoned. ‘Grey Dove,’ he said. Egan and Zwerger were going to hold you, but they didn’t know why. What is the term you used? A butterfly?”

“A butterfly in a bell jar,” I said.

“Funny thing,” said Brock. “Nestor called me a few months ago. I was surprised as hell. Out of the blue. I hadn’t heard from Nestor in years. He says, ‘I just saw Shannon Moss, can you believe it? Hasn’t changed a day.’ I knew I had you then. I knew I had you. I told him to turn you over, but he says it was just in passing, said you spoke for a few minutes and then you were gone. I worked every connection I have in the Bureau, told everyone that if you ever turned up, to let me know. This friend of mine, Whittaker? He called earlier tonight, said he had Grey Dove. I begged him, I made calls, I begged everyone I could, I pulled strings, lobbied to give the order to bring you to Uniontown, where I could intercept you. On some level in my gut, I still didn’t believe—just because you turned up here, what did it prove? But you haven’t aged, Shannon.”

“Think of your love for them,” I said.

“My wife and kids are still alive,” said Brock. “They’re still alive where you come from.”

“Yes.”

“And you can keep them safe,” he said.

“Yes.”

“What will happen to me here? When you go, what will happen to all this pain?”

“There is no you,” I said. “There is no pain.”

Brock placed the gun in his mouth and shot. The top of his head opened, blood poured from every hole. Brock’s body slipped from the booth to the floor, crimson spreading in a grid along the tile grout. The clerks ran over, one of them screaming. I shook, struggled to breathe—but my life hung in the balance here, in this moment. One clerk stood transfixed by the bleeding body, but the other clerk was already on the phone. I pulled Brock’s keys from his pocket and hurried from the store, seeing their mouths open but hearing no sound, only the blaring ring of temporary deafness caused by the gun blast. I fumbled with Brock’s ignition—how long from here to Virginia? How long before the police were searching for this car? The engine caught, and I drove. Case notes on Marian, my notebooks—lost, irretrievably lost. What had I gained? Nicole. Libra. Hyldekrugger. Nestor, I thought—imagining that he waited for me out on his porch, looking over his yard at dusk, Buick barking at the cars on 151. I imagined Nestor spotting headlights of every passing car, wondering which car would be mine. The night seemed deeper than any night. I thought of Nestor as I drove, thought of his lips, his body so familiar to me now, the constellation of freckles over his heart. Hoping he would forgive me—forgive me for always disappearing, but soon there would be nothing to forgive, soon there would be nothing.