The Gone World

ONE

The Grey Dove was tethered to terra firma by bursts of negative energy called a Casimir line—for Moss, a three-month return through the void of quantum foam. The wounds she’d suffered in the orchard had healed, but their psychological effects would linger. She woke from nightmares thinking she’d heard screams. Floating in her sleeping cabin’s dim light, sweating and claustrophobic, listening to the whir of the life-support system as she emerged from dreams of Charles Cobb, a dark shape smothering her, the scent of fruit blossoms pulling at the edges of her memory…

Voices swam through the Grey Dove—auditory hallucinations, but they sounded like Nestor’s voice when he spoke her name in the night. Or she would startle at the crack of a gunshot and realize the sound was nothing but the sound of Brock’s suicide reverberating in her mind. The gas-station cafeteria, the flow of blood. She played music to drown out the noises in the silence. She wrote notes in pencil and erased them, a method for memorization—Esperance, the Terminus followed Libra—imagining crystallized space. So much of what she had heard was extraordinary, beyond her comprehension. Where is Esperance? she wrote. Can NSC return there? She drew a polygon in the stomach of a man. Autopsy. Nicole had seemed to recognize her that last night—but she recognized me as Courtney Gimm, she wrote. Shauna had said Hyldekrugger and Cobb ID’d her as “Courtney Gimm.”

Elizabeth Remarque, she wrote, then erased the name. She wrote it again: Remarque.

Where was Libra?

She erased the question.

When?

The engineers at the Black Vale who had observed the Grey Dove’s launch to Deep Waters now saw her return within a moment of her launch, disappearing and reappearing in the span of a heartbeat, the ship merely shimmering even though Moss had lived for over a year during that time. The days’ transit from the Black Vale to Earth filled her with anxiety, true time counting against Marian now. Where was she? Already lost, her body left to the woods? Or somewhere else, alive? The Grey Dove pierced Earth’s atmosphere, flaring like a burning filament, and landed at Apollo Soucek under cover of night. NSC engineers assisted Moss from the cockpit and ferried her to the “clean room,” an on-base house with a view of the Atlantic. The three-month journey through quantum foam was sufficient quarantine, time enough for any exotic viruses Moss might have contracted from the future to have incubated and run their course. Even so, her first few hours in the clean room were spent with doctors in hazmat suits inspecting her body for traces of illness. Culture swabs, blood work. The last of her doctors left a little after 3:00 a.m. Moss drew a bath, soaked away three months of the Grey Dove’s circulated air. She hadn’t noticed how she’d aged during the past year, but she realized now, swiping away a streak of fog to examine herself in the bathroom mirror. She saw a striking resemblance to her mother. Confused as to how old she really was. Biologically, she must be closing in on forty, she thought, but she had lost track. Thirty-nine? Chronologically, she should only be twenty-seven. Moss bundled her hair in a towel, wrapped another towel around her body. Almost four in the morning. She hesitated at the hour but called Brock’s cell.

“Hello?” he answered.

Her eyes filled at the sound of his voice. Still alive, she thought, swallowing back tears, relieved that his suicide bore as little weight as a daydream.

“Brock, this is Shannon,” she said.

“Where have you been? It’s been days. I haven’t heard from you,” he said—and Moss heard a woman’s voice soft in the background, “Who is it, baby?”

Brock was alive, his wife was alive, his little girls sound asleep. Moss closed her eyes and saw flashes of color that looked like veins traced in light. Exhaustion, she knew. A year since Marian had vanished—No, only seven days—

“I can’t talk for long,” she said. “Not tonight. I’ll be back with you in a few days, but you have to listen to me. Do you have a pen?”

“Hold on. Yeah, go ahead.”

“Jared Bietak, Charles Cobb, Karl Hyldekrugger, Nicole Onyongo,” she said.

“We talked with Nicole Onyongo,” said Brock. “Nestor questioned her for several hours, tracked her down using license-plate information the lodge kept. Identified her as the woman in the Polaroids we recovered at Elric Fleece’s residence—she’s been having an affair with Mursult but isn’t connected. She was distraught but cooperative, answered everything we asked. Nothing panned out.”

“We need her,” said Moss.

“We haven’t been able to get back in touch with her,” said Brock, unwelcome news. Moss tried to remember what will happen. Nicole had been questioned by the FBI, by Nestor—but she had been threatened by her husband, Jared Bietak. She had gone into hiding, Moss remembered. Out of reach.

“Please keep trying to track her down,” she said. “She knows more than she told you.”

“I’ll send someone to her apartment, see if we can pick her up,” said Brock. “Who are the others?”

“Persons of suspicion,” said Moss. “I think these men are the killers, Brock. I think they killed Mursult, his family. Put out their names, take them into custody. I don’t know which one pulled the trigger on Mursult or who took Marian or the family, but they’re all involved. Now listen closely. I need you to search a location. Bring a K9 unit, trained to mark human remains.”

“Where?”

“There’s an access route labeled TR-31 on some forestry maps of the Blackwater Gorge,” she said. “An old logging route, easy to miss. Take that access route uphill. You’ll eventually come to a clearing.”

“What am I going to find?” said Brock.

“Look for piles of stones set out as markers. They’re called cairns. Small stacks of flat stones. Search wherever you find the markers. But it is imperative, absolutely imperative, that your men aren’t seen by anyone. Do you understand? Search that site, but no one can see you. I believe that the actor or actors have accessed or will access this site. If they’re made aware of your presence, we might lose our chance.”

“Will I find Marian?” he asked.

Already the future receded from her, like images half retrieved from dreams or like her memories were waves breaking against the shores of the real, washing away. She was cold, exhausted and cold, and visions played in the darkness of her closed eyes like lucid dreams. She saw Nestor, the forest in the night, pine sap, damp stone, a beautiful place to rest.

“Moss, is this about Marian?” asked Brock.

“I don’t know what you’ll find,” she said. “I hope nothing.”

She slept for sixteen hours. When she woke, she worked through the paperwork that Naval Space Command required to document every IFT. The packet resembled a tax book: Assurance of Fact and Statement of Faith, with Sheet 34 and Waivers 1–13. Her portion began on page 6 of 116 pages. Line 1: Did you witness any event that might compromise the national security of the United States of America? She spooled the first worksheet into her electric typewriter, three empty lines. On April 19, 1998, she typed, the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) facility located in Clarksburg, West Virginia, will be attacked. A thousand people will die, killed by sarin gas delivered through the fire-suppression system…

A quick breakfast the following morning, then her debriefing: a seaman drove her to the NCIS Resident Unit office, where she was shown into the conference room, a cramped space with mustard-colored walls. A single chair at the front table, a microphone, her name printed on a cardboard table tent. NSC brass from Dahlgren clustered together, talking. She spotted Admiral Annesley, who would question her. She recognized NCIS special agents from the Norfolk field office. O’Connor was there, in his seventies but spry. His nose was bulbous, lined with violet veins. His creased forehead and the wrinkles beneath his eyes were like a map of rivers run dry. O’Connor smiled when he saw her, worked his way to her. His eyes seemed like they should belong to a younger man—they belied his age, sparkling with a rich blue vitality.

“How long have you been gone?” he asked.

“Arrived September 2015, stayed through the spring,” said Moss. “With travel time about a year, slightly longer.”

“Just make sure you put in for OT pay and to count toward your retirement,” he said. “Talk with Human Resources when you have a chance. You must be getting close?”

“To retirement? I think I’m about thirty-nine, biologically,” said Moss. “A few years yet. If I met some of my high-school friends, they would think… I don’t know what they’d think. Twelve years older than they are. They’d think I wasn’t taking care of myself.”

O’Connor laughed. “I’m older than my father,” he said.

These debriefings were called informal, but Moss, who had gone through seven of these productions, knew what significance they carried. This roomful of men would evaluate her performance over the next several hours, would consider the overall viability of her operation. She was nervous, doubting herself—doubting her memories, worried she would contradict herself. A cassette recorder had been placed near her on the table, a stenographer typed her words. The Navy representatives sat together like a bell choir, deep blue uniforms, the sleeves heavy with golden stripes and piping. They watched intently as Moss read her opening statement, a summary of her IFT. She spoke about the crimes of the crewmen of the USS Libra, their alleged mutiny, their alleged participation in the murder of Patrick Mursult and his family. Admiral Annesley was genial, but his mind sprang like a lawyer’s, questioning Moss and cross-examining her answers. A politician, one of Reagan’s men, with smallish eyes that gleamed like dark gems, seeming to smile even as he peeled away at Moss’s responses—his onslaught abating only when Moss described the death of Elizabeth Remarque. A pervasive grief settled over the assembly—many of the men here had known Remarque personally, it seemed. Remarque had suffered a public execution, according to Nicole’s story, and Moss told them how Remarque’s corpse had been paraded among the sailors in the mess. Annesley was curious about Libra, curious to hear Nicole’s story of Esperance a second time, confirming that the planet was in NGC 5055, the Sunflower Galaxy. Had Libra brought the Terminus to Earth, then? Moss surmised that Libra had been responsible—that at any rate it was certainly the first ship to observe the Terminus, rather than the USS Taurus, as had been previously thought. What do you believe was the mental state of the surviving crew? Moss described Nicole’s abuse at the hands of Jared Bietak and her subsequent troubles with drug addition. Annesley picked at her answers but didn’t linger over this part of the interview. Rather he surprised Moss by his overriding interest in the cancer cure, something she initially mentioned only to color her description of the IFT. He wanted to learn about her mother’s cancer, when she was diagnosed, her initial surgeries, and how she had apparently been healed—who had healed her, how she had been chosen for the clinical trials.

“My understanding is that people with the right insurance could just walk into a clinic, receive three injections,” said Moss. “Nanotech delivery to cancerous cells.”

“And this was developed by a company called Phasal Systems?” asked Annesley, Moss confirming the information she had already repeated. “Who developed the cure?” he asked. “Do you know any of the names of the doctors involved?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t—”

“Did Phasal Systems develop communications systems, too, or were they only active in the medical sector?”

“Medical, I believe,” said Moss, struggling to recall anything she might have picked up about Phasal Systems while in her IFT, some information she might have absorbed even if on the periphery of her attention. The scientist Brock had spoken with might have had something to do with the cancer cure, she remembered—Imagine a wall made of doors. She remembered Brock had said the scientist had worked for the Naval Research Lab before moving into medical tech. “I think Phasal Systems might have had a connection to the NRL,” she said. “A spin-off company. I think Navy scientists worked on the cancer cure once they left NRL. We didn’t have Ambience, though, or Intelligent Air, if that’s what you’re asking, or any of the environmental nanotech-saturation systems popular in other IFTs. Most people still used cellular phones. But they had cured cancer.”

“Had they cured every disease?” asked Annesley. “Did Phasal Systems solve disease?”

She remembered the words of her mother’s nurse. “There was still disease,” said Moss. “My mother’s nurse told me you had to be rich to live forever.”

The debriefing ended, a flurry of handshakes, Moss realizing that Annesley hadn’t asked certain questions she was accustomed to answering: what year the Terminus had been marked, for instance. It had swung closer, to 2067 in her IFT—but Annesley hadn’t asked. He hadn’t followed up about the CJIS attack either, she realized, or even about her investigation into Patrick Mursult, or about the mutiny. There would be more paperwork, forms to fill out, she knew, and she knew she could be recalled to answer further questions at any time, or to provide clarification on statements she’d made, but the admiral’s focus on the cancer cure surprised her, the focus on Phasal Systems, a company that didn’t even exist in 1997. Her debriefings often concluded with this feeling of anticlimactic uncertainty over how much good she had actually contributed; her reports on future terrorist attacks, future wars, future economic conditions never seemed to amount to much in the way of prevention, many of the events she warned about still occurring. She felt like an American Cassandra when events she warned about came to pass. Her only solace was the belief that there was a bigger political picture the Navy accounted for that she wasn’t privy to—she saw only brushstrokes, never the entire painting.

“You did well,” O’Connor told her, back at her on-base housing. He wasn’t staying long, but he accepted a cup of coffee, sitting with Moss in the house’s enclosed back porch, the Atlantic a twilight glow beyond the reach of sand.

“Seven hours with those men,” she said. “Almost eight. I’m exhausted. And I’m never sure what they’re asking, what they’re trying to get at.”

“NSC has Senate oversight. They have their own concerns, which don’t always line up with ours,” said O’Connor. “Every IFT costs millions of U.S. tax dollars. I understand that the admiral went straight to a dinner meeting with Senator C. C. Charlie about your debriefing. He’ll have a long night ahead.”

“I’m testifying about Hyldekrugger and Cobb, killers at least, guilty of mutiny on the Libra, and the admiral didn’t seem to care,” said Moss. “These men murdered their commanding officer, and they’re tied to the Terminus. Libra might have brought the Terminus. Annesley hardly asked about Libra, or what Nicole Onyongo told me about Esperance. I was prepared to talk about Nicole.”

“I know that Annesley cared about Remarque. We all did,” said O’Connor.

“You knew her?”

“She was clever. She’d get this look in her eye, and you knew she was already a few steps ahead of you,” said O’Connor, smiling at the memory. “I didn’t know her well. We did some joint training sessions together. I remember stories—she would float the passageways of her department, make rounds, and everyone would be nervous because they knew she could do their jobs better than they could. Very high standards, very exacting. But she was patient. Everyone wanted to be assigned to her ship. Your testimony about her death was very difficult to listen to.”

“All Annesley seemed interested in was nanotech medication, cancer.”

“Well, you never know what cards Annesley is holding,” said O’Connor. “He might already have other reports about Libra that have been corroborated, or facts that contradict yours. Besides, Nicole Onyongo was never NSC, which makes her legal status somewhat hazy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No one named Onyongo was on Libra,” said O’Connor. “The other names you provided, but not Nicole Onyongo. She wasn’t a sailor. She doesn’t appear anywhere in NSC. She was never in the Navy. NSC believes that Nicole Onyongo was picked up in Libra’s future, which is highly irregular. We can only guess why Remarque would have done such a thing, but there you go. Nicole Onyongo doesn’t exist, not the way you and I do.”

Moss felt affronted, surprised that Nicole wasn’t born in terra firma. But the strange story about Kenya—Nicole saying that the people of Mombasa had welcomed the crew of Libra, that Nicole had followed Remarque only after her father had intervened on her behalf. Nicole was a stowaway from a world that never was. A ripple of uncertainty passed through Moss. Nicole was a specter, just one of countless shadows cast by Libra.

“What about the others? You found the other names I gave you? They were on the Libra crew list.”

“We did—and Hyldekrugger, he’s an interesting case,” said O’Connor.

“The celestial navigator.”

“The ship’s CEL-NAV, yes,” said O’Connor. “Vietnam. Studied philosophy and religion at the University of Chicago before NSC. He earned a master’s studying Viking death cults and rituals, a thesis on the pagan symbolism of the Black Sun. I tried to read some of it, but it’s steeped in academic jargon.”

“The ship made of nails, that’s a Viking myth,” said Moss. “Something to do with the end of the world.”

“Clean record,” said O’Connor. “But Hyldekrugger has two uncles involved in the ‘sovereign citizens’ movement, and one is serving life for the beating death of a black man. I’m assuming a connection of that type of extremist thinking to the events in your report.”

“Maybe. Yeah, probably,” said Moss, ruminating on the violence that had swept through Libra, the mutiny, the massacre. “Hyldekrugger and his followers—they killed everyone on the ship,” she said, and they had somehow survived reentry to terra firma; they had somehow returned. Moss had learned so much about the fate of Libra, but other questions grew around the missing ship like mushrooms in the dark.

“We have warrants for Hyldekrugger, Cobb, Bietak, and Nicole Onyongo,” said O’Connor. “We’ll pick up their trails, arrest these individuals, and question them about Mursult and Libra. I want convictions, but don’t be surprised if they’re offered bargains.”

“They murdered children,” said Moss. “They’ll murder Marian. She might still be alive. These men might have her—”

“Shannon, you have to understand, things have changed since you’ve been away.”

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“The Terminus has been marked at 2024. Less than thirty years from now,” said O’Connor. “Before your debriefing we received word that the John F. Kennedy marked the Terminus at 2024.”

“Within our lifetime,” said Moss.

“Within our lifetime, within our children’s lifetime. The last generation is already alive,” said O’Connor.

“Maybe we can still stop it, maybe if we—”

“Maybe,” said O’Connor, his voice, though, that of someone who’d already accepted a terminal stage. “Annesley is prepared to offer plea bargains to Hyldekrugger and Cobb, and any other conspirators they bring to the table, for information about their involvement in the Terminus, the location of Esperance.”

“This is bullshit.”

“And the Navy is greenlighting Operation Saigon,” he said. “Prioritizing which civilians will be included in the evacuation, if it comes to that. Thirty years is too close. NSC is mandated to load ships and launch to Deep Waters within forty-eight hours of the appearance of the White Hole, and they’re worried it might appear now, at any moment. We’ve been pulling agents from lower-priority investigations, reassigning them to Saigon. NSC wants as many of our Cormorant shuttles as we can spare. They’ll requisition them all soon.”

Moss wanted to argue, but fear clenched her, a bolt of panic at the imminence of the White Hole—2024. What would happen when the White Hole appeared? Would billions lift into the air, opened and displayed? Would they run, mindless, or stand staring? Moss felt the helplessness of a child. She felt like she couldn’t comprehend the true scope of the end. She imagined Operation Saigon, Cormorant shuttles launching in waves, the entire NSC fleet at the Black Vale at capacity with soldiers and civilians, mixes of talents and genetics, each ship launched in search of exo-Earths, each ship a seed to grow a new humanity even as humanity perished. She thought of the escaping ships, the abandoned Earth, and grew anxious at the thought of what would be left behind. She felt like she was being asked to leave Marian behind. What was one life set against every life? A despondency churned in her heart, Marian’s life abandoned for the lives of others. But maybe she wasn’t too late. She was sure she wasn’t too late. Her mind rebounded to Marian, how Marian might still be alive, how Marian might still be saved.

Moss received her discharge papers the following afternoon. She found her pickup in the lot, surprised that her battery wasn’t dead, and had to remind herself that only a few days had passed since she’d parked here. Evergreen air freshener and the reek of prosthetic liners she’d flung behind the passenger seat, just her little red Ford, but the familiar odors and the sensation of sitting behind the wheel comforted her, situated her in her own life after so long an absence. She left Naval Air Station Oceana through the main gates. Returning to terra firma was like stepping into the same river twice: everything the same as when she’d left, but it didn’t feel quite the same to her now. The year 1997 felt hopelessly retrograde in some ways, a recovered past. Returning was like traveling to a poorer foreign country where the fashions and cars, the technology and architecture lagged decades behind.

An eight-hour drive from Oceana, Moss’s house was northwest of Clarksburg, West Virginia, a ranch seated on four acres of wildflower-strewn lawn. She loved the house, loved the solitude, the single-floor layout amenable to her situation. Only a week’s worth of mail had piled up inside the front-door slot. Moss divided bills from junk mail before changing into pajamas and settling into her leather couch. The VCR had recorded The X-Files in her absence, her hero Scully, a new episode—but she grew anxious when the plot veered into spaceships and nine minutes of missing time. Her telephone rang, and she paused her show, bands of static blur over Scully’s face.

“We found something,” said Brock.

“Marian?” she asked.

“Not Marian. We found the clearing. Nothing there. We brought a K9 and scoured the area for human remains, but there was nothing.”

Too early, thought Moss. Marian could have been buried at this site at any point between now and 2004, when two men lost in the woods would dig for ginseng but find bones. Something Moss remembered of her father—how he let hose water pour down their front sidewalk and would watch the water branch out in different rivulets, diverging paths, around cracks and stones. Futures were like those forking paths of water. Marian might not ever be left in those woods.

“We broadened our search,” said Brock, “found one of your rock formations about a half mile north-northwest of your initial location. I posted two men in blinds, told them to enjoy the wildlife for a few days.”

“What did you find?”

“Rainey called it in,” said Brock. “He spotted a guy building one of your rock piles.”

“Did you ID him?”

“Not a chance. Not at that distance,” said Brock. “But Rainey tracked the actor, found that he drove a black van, a GMC Vandura, early eighties. We spotted the van twice in the area.”

“What about the plates?” she asked.

“The van’s registered to someone named Richard Harrier.”

Harrier, thought Moss, with desperation. “I don’t know that name,” writing out the name on a sheet of scratch paper: Harrier, Richard. “He might know where Marian is.”

“Shannon, I’ve met you halfway on this,” said Brock. “More than halfway. I need more from you. I need probable cause. More than just your word, or some hunch you’re playing. Otherwise whoever these guys get as their defense attorney will shred us and we’ll squander whatever intelligence led you to target them. We can’t harass someone for building rock piles. What else do you have?”

“Just stay with me on this,” said Moss, but doubt crept over her. There had been no tangible proof linking these cairns to Marian’s body. “What else do you know about this guy? Richard Harrier?” she asked. “His address? Priors? Anything?”

“No priors, absolutely clean. Harrier works at a Home Depot in Bridgeport, the vehicle is registered to his Bridgeport address. Married, has three kids—but I had one of our guys trail the van, and it looks like the driver’s been spending time at a house just outside a small town called Buckhannon—”

“Buckhannon,” said Moss, and when Brock read the address, “Off 151,” her world warped. She ran the kitchen tap, held her hand beneath the warming water until she scalded herself—the pain jolting through her incertitude. She knew the address, Nestor’s address, the house with the black van in Buckhannon was the same house she would sleep in with Nestor nineteen years from now.

“I’m going,” she said. “I have to see—”

“Moss, wait—”

The porch with the wooden rockers, walks along the acres, Nestor, the constellation of freckles over his heart—Why there, why of all places there?

She threw on jeans, her holster. Imagining Nestor—Maybe Nestor didn’t know, she thought. Nestor’s connection to the house in Buckhannon might not exist yet, might not ever exist. This might all be a coincidence, she thought, a coincidence of houses, like Courtney’s house. Desperate to believe that Nestor was innocent, that right now he might still be innocent, that he might have always been innocent.

A half-hour drive from Clarksburg to Buckhannon, after midnight. She pushed a hundred on empty rural roads thinking of Marian buried in the woods. Wild thoughts of Nestor, of Nestor kidnapping Marian, of Nestor killing her, of Nestor as he would look years from now, of Nestor here at this house in Buckhannon, here, here. She pulled from 151 into the gravel drive, skidding as she braked. A pear tree grew in the front yard, and there was a hedgerow in front of the porch, but otherwise the house was the same as it would be years from now. Moss left her truck, every fondness for this place curdled. A black van with a red racing stripe was parked near the house. The barn doors were lit with a floodlight set to a motion sensor that had tripped. Around the far side of the barn, a Winnebago without wheels was up on cinder blocks—I’ve seen that before, she thought. The house itself was dark, but the living-room windows pulsed blue with television light. Someone was home.

Moss pulled her weapon. The van had been left unlocked, and she swung open the rear doors, found blood on the walls and floor, a rumpled plastic tarp and twine. Marian’s blood. Anticipating where to find Marian, she remembered the flimsy side-door lock that Nestor had never bothered to fix. She looked in through the side-door window, but the interior was too dark for her to see, so she braced herself, shouldered the door, and it gave inward with a snap. Loud volume on the television, moaning, the sounds of sex, like an echo of her memories here. Weapon leveled, through into the kitchen, television glare across the linoleum, through into the living room. A naked man sat sprawled on the couch, his head leaned back. A woman was on her knees between his legs sucking him off, her body rippled with cellulite and waves of fat, her hair a brown mess.

“Federal agent. Get down on the floor,” said Moss. “Get on the fucking floor.”

The woman yelped and shrieked, clutching her heart. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” flopping forward, breasts flailing, her hands spread in front of her, gripping the carpet. The man skipped up onto the couch like he’d just seen a rat scurry, covering himself with a throw pillow and bawling, body lit by Playboy Channel lesbians. “Jesus, lady, don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me!” The woman’s hair would one day gray like a mop of sooty yarn—Miss Ashleigh, Ashleigh Bietak, Nicole’s mother-in-law.

“On the fucking floor,” Moss said again, and the man dropped to his knees next to Ashleigh and spread his arms out wide, ass in the air. The living room was the same as Moss had known it—the same mirror hung above the mantel, the painting of the dead Christ hung in the spot it would hang when Nestor would live here. Her confusion and heartbreak screamed like twin sirens in her mind. Marian, she thought, her name an anchor. Moss cuffed the man but only had one set of cuffs so had to leave Ashleigh free.

“Where is Marian Mursult?” asked Moss. “Miss Ashleigh, where is she?”

“What is this?” said Ashleigh. “What girl? This is bullshit, is what it is. Fucking, I want my lawyer. Who are you? Where’s your warrant? Fuck this. You can’t be here—”

“Marian Mursult,” said Moss. “Where is she? You, where is she?”

“I don’t know,” said the man. “These are too tight, these cuffs. I want my clothes. I’m not supposed to be here, I’ve got a wife. Please, I shouldn’t be here. My wife will find out.”

“Where is Marian Mursult?” she asked again, shouting, but didn’t wait for their answers. She went down the hallway toward the back rooms, the bedroom, Nestor’s bedroom where she had slipped from her clothes and slept so many nights. Wooden gun racks, rifles and machine guns. “Fuck me,” said Moss, recognizing the German antiques, the stock of the Eagle’s Nest. “Damn, no, no…” Circling back to the living room, she checked the two and found them still facedown on the carpet. She found the basement door just off the kitchen and climbed downstairs, aware Miss Ashleigh wasn’t cuffed, aware the woman could fetch any one of those Nazi guns and ambush her while she was down here or as she came back upstairs.

“Marian?” Moss called out. “Marian, I’m a police officer. Are you down here? Let me know if you’re down here. Say something, please.”

A dank basement, the stink of bleach. A metal weight-bearing column near a central floor drain. Browned rags and bloodstains on the concrete floor, stains on the cinder-block walls. There were gags, restraints. Moss pictured the girl tied to the metal column, hands bound behind her back. Brown stains in the utility sink doused with bleach. Marian had been tied up here, brutalized…

Rumbling across the ceiling. Moss heard them run, Ashleigh and the man, Harrier. Fuck, she thought, pointing her gun at the ceiling, contemplating shooting up through the floorboards, maybe hitting the bottoms of their feet or passing up through their groins for a kill shot, but she wasn’t justified. She lowered the gun toward the stairs to shoot if she saw their legs descending but heard the slap of the side screen door and knew they’d sprinted from the house. She took a breath, knowing she was making mistakes. She climbed the stairs to the kitchen, alert—but there was no one.

Moss followed outside, where the barn floodlight blazed the darkness white. Miss Ashleigh and Harrier must have run this way, she thought, must have tripped the light. Maybe they’d gone into the barn or to the far side of the Winnebago. The Winnebago looked like it was a fixture of this place, weeds grown up around it. As Moss crossed the lawn, the Winnebago’s door opened and a man stepped outside—blue jeans and old combat boots, an olive-drab shirt unbuttoned, exposing his chest. A huge man with tawny hair cut into a ratty mullet. Cobb, she realized—twenty years younger than when she had first seen the man, when she had grappled with him in the orchard and slit his throat. Charles Cobb, she was sure of it. He held a tallboy beer and took massive swigs, looking out over the fields—he hadn’t seen her, didn’t know she was here, she realized, not yet. Wherever Miss Ashleigh and her man had run off to, it wasn’t to the Winnebago.

“Federal agent,” Moss said, sighting her weapon to the center of Cobb’s mass, thinking, If he moves, I can kill this fucker twice. “Get down on the ground. On your fucking knees. Now. Now.”

Cobb flinched at her voice—she’d surprised him. He set his beer can on the step of the Winnebago and raised his hands in surrender but didn’t go to his knees. This man has walked on an alien world, she thought. This man has seen his friends flayed and spread in the air. Sirens on 151, Moss noticed, distant blue lights. Brock must have called the Buckhannon PD, figured she would come here alone.

“Do you have a warrant to be here, Officer?” asked Cobb, his voice measured if not calm. His voice unnerved her, and she felt the moment slipping from her, an intuition that she wasn’t in control.

“On your knees,” said Moss. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“You’re a cripple,” he said. The barn light timed out. Pitch-black. Cobb ran—she heard him, taking off around the far side of the Winnebago. She heard him crashing through the field beyond and knew there was no way she could chase him down, no way she could outrun him through the tall grass. Everyone was escaping—she felt like they were melting from her.

The dark was pierced by the firelight of muzzle flashes, automatic-weapon fire. Bullets zipped overhead and chewed into the mud several feet behind her. The darkness had saved her; whoever was shooting couldn’t see her, didn’t know where she was, and she dropped to the grass, a second volley whining past. She saw the muzzle flash from the Winnebago window, trained her weapon on the flash. She took a shot. A second shot. A third.

Sirens pulled in to the driveway, blue waves against the barn and Winnebago, a half dozen vehicles at least, more arriving. Another round of fire chewed into the cars, shattered windshields.

“Shannon?” she heard—Nestor exiting one of the cars. She turned her gun on him, aimed at his chest, an easy shot from this distance, felt herself apply pressure to the trigger.

“It’s me,” he said. He knelt behind the open driver’s-side door of his car, an FBI vest, his sidearm pulled.

Moss’s vision had tunneled, focused on his gun. This is his house. This will be his house.

“Shannon, it’s me—it’s Nestor. Lower your weapon, please.”

The world rushed to her. He was still just a young man, still FBI. “One person, on foot through those fields,” she said. “Two more at large, might still be on the premises. One in handcuffs. The shooter’s in the Winnebago.”

Racket of automatic fire. Return fire from the police—they filled the Winnebago with hundreds of rounds. Nestor emptied his clip, but another volley of fire roared from the Winnebago. Bullets shattered his windshield and door, pumped into Nestor’s chest. He spun to the grass, yelling. Moss emptied her gun at the Winnebago. Reloaded. Shot again. Someone shouted—the gunman inside the Winnebago was hit. Nestor was alive. He made it back to his knees, the sleeve of his shirt ripped and soiled with blood.

“Vest,” said Nestor. “I’m all right. I’ve got a vest—”

Relief, seeing Nestor safe. Other officers, men in uniform, fanned out across the lawn—a squad from Buckhannon, along with state police. Nestor advanced on the Winnebago, gun in his left hand, his right arm hanging. Moss followed. Nestor crept up alongside, yanked open the door. Moss saw blood. She climbed the step into the Winnebago. Blood spattered the floor, the kitchenette. Nestor followed inside, moving past the kitchenette to the sleeping cabin. The side of the Winnebago had been perforated with bullets, and light from the barn streamed in through the holes. The gunman had collapsed onto the foam bed, shirtless, bloody. A tattoo on his chest, a golden eagle, wings outspread. Jared Bietak, she realized. Blood gurgled from the man’s mouth and sucked from the wounds in his chest as he tried to breathe.

“Apply pressure,” said Moss. She found a blanket and pressed it to the man’s chest, but she knew he would die. The man coughed out a gulp of blood. Too slippery—she wiped the blood off Bietak’s chest with the blanket and tried to reapply pressure but felt his body go still.

“We need to check the barn,” said Moss, giving up on him. “Marian’s here, or was here.”

The barn doors were padlocked and chained. One of the state officers pulled bolt cutters from his trunk, snapped the chain, slid open the doors. Enough light from the floodlights to see a lemon-yellow Ryder truck—rusted out years from now, abandoned in the field, the turning point on our walks together. Nestor followed into the barn, said, “What is all this?” Someone found the lights, revealing a series of tubes that ran the length of the rafters, illuminating stainless-steel drums and plastic barrels, glass equipment, flasks and beakers. The place looked like a methamphetamine lab.

“Everybody out,” said Nestor. “Move.”

“No, I need bolt cutters,” said Moss.

She cut the lock on the Ryder’s rear doors, swung them open, and a wave of rot rolled over her. She fought her rising vomit but heard a county cop retch. A heap of bodies had wasted away in the back of the Ryder truck, their eyes covered in weeping sores, their skin burned—their flesh raw and red where it was still flesh, their mouths nearly sealed shut by blisters and screaming red wounds.

“Oh, God,” said Moss. “My God, my God—”

She saw the girl. Moss started to climb into the truck, but Nestor grabbed her shoulders, held her back.

“Get off me,” she said.

“Chemicals,” said Nestor. “You can’t breathe this.”

The girl was in the heap. Her head was so thoroughly burned that she had lost all but a few clumps of her raven hair. Her teeth were exposed through gashes in her cheeks. Only a few white patches of her body had the soft smoothness of a young girl’s body, the rest wrinkled and ridged with scar tissue and wounds, covered in so many maggots it looked as if someone had dumped rice over her. Marian. Marian. Marian.

“Find a blanket,” Moss cried to Nestor. “We need an ambulance, please. Please call an ambulance.”

“This place is a gas chamber,” said Nestor. “Get outside.”

She buried her head into his chest and wept and let him lead her from the barn. The lawn was alive with siren light, the hectic business of police flooding the scene, but a hush had descended over the rumors of what was inside.

“The dead outnumber the living,” Nestor said. “My father used to say. But my father told me about the new bodies we all receive at the end of days, bodies robed in light. What a glorious thought, to be reborn in God. The dead will receive new bodies.”

Moss separated from him. No one should see her being coddled, not here—she didn’t want these officers to see the only woman on scene being coddled by a man. Moss wiped her eyes.

“Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” Nestor asked. “For that child’s sake, please believe.”

Moss imagined the entire history of the dead beneath the soil climbing up to claim the Grace of God and receive new bodies made of light. She imagined the corpses in the Ryder truck receiving bodies unfettered by pain. Sirens and the sound of engines, two trucks pulled in to the field. New bodies made of light—naïve hopefulness, the dreams of children. She was touched on the hand, and she found Brock’s brown eyes, eyes that had seen pain before but that still broke with sorrow, eyes that still longed for some kind of peace.

TWO

Another crime scene had twinned within her.

Cricketwood Court with her past, this house in Buckhannon with her future. A false future, she told herself.

I failed her. The failure was real, the finality of Marian’s death was leaden, suffocating.

Too late to save her, I was too late.

She tarried on the front porch, alone, the expansive lawn a lake of darkness. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body? Nestor had asked. Across the shadowy lawn shone the garish interior of an ambulance. Moss watched as EMTs tended to Nestor. His right bicep had been torn in the firefight, the bullet passed through. They removed his shirt, revealed bruising across his sternum, purple welts where bullets had struck his vest, lumps swollen red at the edges. He would be taken to St. Joseph’s, examined for internal bleeding.

Nestor, why would you live here? Of all places.

She studied his face in the ambulance light as he laughed with the paramedic who checked his bandages—so much younger now. This wasn’t the same man she had known, this was only a shade of him, younger even than she was. And he was innocent now, innocent of whatever threads would one day stitch him to this place. She had confronted Nestor in the moments following their discovery of Marian—out near the pear tree, she’d asked if he knew this house, but no, Nestor had never been here, he’d never been to Buckhannon before.

But you would have known about Marian then, Moss thought, when we were together. All their nights together here, he would have known that Marian’s blood was in the soil. Ill at her memories of him, humiliated. He had been beautiful then, their brief life together, serene, but it had come to this: six corpses in a Ryder truck.

Nestor’s ambulance pulled from the property, and she watched its sirens spark red, recede. A trick she’d learned as a child: someone had told her she would never fold a sheet of paper more than eleven times, no matter how large the sheet. She’d tried wispy leaves of newsprint, giant rectangles, folding, but never past eleven, the last folds minuscule and difficult, the paper compressed into a small brick. The seams of her life were folding in on themselves, Nestor’s house and the house where Marian had died, Courtney’s house and the house where Marian’s family had died, her emotions roiling and overwhelming, so she envisioned her life as those sheets of paper folding, as large as white sails folding, until her emotions compressed into a small brick without folds, diamond-hard in her heart.

A tense several hours followed the discovery of the mass killing, the forensic technicians and investigators anxious for access to the crime scene, the state and county medical examiners instructed to remain on hand and wait. There had been some initial confusion over what chemicals were inside the barn, stored in plastic drums, some questions, too, about the purpose of the lab equipment, so Brock had cleared the area as a precaution. On Brock’s call Governor Underwood requested the assistance of the nearest bomb squad, the West Virginia Army National Guard’s 753rd Ordnance Company. Lockdown while guardsmen in padded armor worked the barn, their line of swamp-green trucks edging 151, idling engines, diesel fumes.

The house was accessible, the basement taped off, the stains marked. Miss Ashleigh owned this place, purchased ten years ago. She had lived here while prisoners languished in the basement. Had she fed them, kept them clean? Moss recognized Miss Ashleigh’s touches throughout the place: varicolored glass decorating the windowsills, the dinner plates in the sink—Moss had used those plates years from now. The painting of the dead Christ was an oddity. Agents cataloged the Nazi artifacts in the bedroom—firearms, bayonets, service patches, flags in glass cases. In the future Nestor had told her these guns were his father’s—a lie. The service patches reminded her of what she might find here, in a house where Jared Bietak and Charles Cobb spent time, and so she opened closets and drawers, sifted through boxes she found beneath the bed, hoping to find evidence of Libra, a flight patch or the album of photographs she’d seen in the house at the orchard. She came up with old shoes and costume jewelry, bills, receipts, medical records. There was nothing.

Dawn broke. Fog hung knee-level over the grass, the surrounding landscape looked flooded with watery milk. A search-and-rescue team had arrived from Charleston, the handler of a cadaver dog swept through the property, out in the side yard, where the ground was furrowed with mounds and would one day be covered with wildflowers. A clamor of emergency when the dog stood immobile, staring. Men with shovels, eventually a backhoe, uncovered the remains of twenty-two people, their skin liquefied with lye. They had been killed in the Ryder truck, they had been buried beneath the mounds in the yard. Brock found Moss watching the dig. He wore his exhaustion openly, just like the first time she’d seen him, at the house on Cricketwood, crossing steel risers over blood—he was washed out, his eyes weary, but he wasn’t a broken man, not like the version Moss had known in the future. Brock was the center here, the calm. The forensic techs and Buckhannon cops and the National Guard in their bulky green seemed to swirl around him like ghosts in the early-morning vapor.

“Shannon, you stuck your finger in a hornet’s nest,” he said.

“Did they finish with the barn? What is it?”

“Chemical weapons,” said Brock. “No, they haven’t finished. They’ll be at this all day. Blasting caps, C-4. And the chemicals.”

“What are we talking about, Brock?”

“Sarin, mustard gas, all in small batches. Ricin. They found Ebola,” said Brock. “Our guess is they were making small doses of various agents, testing their lethality in that truck, the Ryder truck. Maybe testing dispersal methods to see what would reliably deliver a lethal dose.”

“Testing on a seventeen-year-old girl,” said Moss. “Jesus Christ.”

“Copycatting the Japanese subway cult from a couple years back,” said Brock. “In the production of sarin at least. We have people coming in who worked with Tokyo during that investigation. They want to take a look at what we’ve found.”

Sarin released in the Tokyo subway system, Moss remembered images on the news. The sarin had been liquid, stored in plastic bags the cultists had tossed to the subway floor and punctured with umbrella tips, gas seeping into the air.

“I’m taking a team with me out to the Blackwater, where we found the cairns,” said Brock. “I’ll bring the K9 unit with me, the cadaver dog, search a wider area. I’ll need to know how you knew about this place, Shannon. I’ll need everything you know.”

“I want to help you,” said Moss. Towers of stones marking the wilderness. She’d thought the cairns marked the location of Marian’s body, where she had been dumped—but Marian was here. What did the cairns mark? Other victims? Six in the Ryder, three at Cricketwood, Fleece in the mirrored room and Mursult at the Blackwater… bodies in the side-yard mounds, a swelling atrocity like discovering a rush of worms in a dead dog’s heart. “I’ll tell you what I can, but I’m still catching up with all this.”

“Come with me. I want your take on something.”

A haunted image, the Winnebago emerging from the milky mist. She remembered where she had recognized the Winnebago; she had noticed it at Miss Ashleigh’s, dust-caked in the orchard barn. “Three hundred rounds, a conservative guess,” said Brock, guiding her inside. The Winnebago’s entire wall was shredded where the barrage of bullets had pierced it. “He was only hit four times. You can ID him?”

“Yeah, I can,” said Moss, approaching the corpse in the sleeping cabin through the galley kitchenette. “His name’s Jared Bietak.”

“One of yours?”

“Navy,” she said. “NSC, just like Mursult.” Bietak’s body was a waxy presence, cooling, not yet cold. Nicole had once confessed that Jared Bietak’s tattoo had impressed her; to Moss it looked like the logo of a Pontiac firebird. There was another tattoo, script: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM, a new order of the ages. Moss thought of the days of the dying earth, when pyramids would wander for water, but she thought, too, of this age, of the paranoiacs who believed in the imminence of the New World Order, a world government as enslavers of mankind. Two bullet wounds on his chest, another through his neck, she couldn’t find the fourth. Jared Bietak’s blood filled the foam bed cushion. His eyes were half closed. The West Virginia state medical examiner would perform a forensic autopsy on him, and Moss wondered if they would find evidence of the thyroid cancer that would have otherwise taken his life. “Jared Bietak is Nicole Onyongo’s husband.”

“She’s gone,” said Brock. “I sent a team to her apartment, on your request. She hasn’t shown up to work either.”

“Gone,” said Moss, remembering Nicole’s eyes glassy, her manhattan, the smoke of two Parliaments rising to the ceiling. But then, she might appear before too long. Nicole had continued working at the Donnell House in her IFT, had become a regular at the May’rz Inn. But the chemical weapons hadn’t been discovered in that timeline; who knows what that would change? “All right, keep looking for her,” said Moss, fearing how radically the future might already have changed from her experience of it. “We need to find her.”

“Come over here,” said Brock. “I want you to take a look at these.”

They wore blue nitrile gloves to study the sheaves of documents Brock had recovered from an unlocked safe in the front of the Winnebago. They sat together at the dinette table, Brock spreading out maps and sets of blueprints. The Red Line of the D.C. Metro, the Capitol Building, detailed notes on the Senate chamber.

“And this,” said Brock, unrolling schematics of NSC launch pads in Kodiak, Alaska. There were others: the Air Force Space Division headquarters in Colorado Springs, the Naval Space Command headquarters in Dahlgren. There was information about Cape Canaveral, the military floor at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Maps of their ventilation systems, security profiles. Brock showed her similar information about the United Nations General Assembly in New York, but it was the blueprints of the FBI CJIS facility that chilled her. On some level she knew. On some level, throughout the hours of waiting here, as rumors stirred about what had been discovered in the barn, the contiguous pieces of her investigation started to meld. Moss absorbed the rich irony of Brock’s having discovered these plans—that he was preventing the attack on CJIS that one day would have destroyed his wife and daughters.

“They’re a terrorist militia,” said Moss. “Ex-military.”

“And these are the targets?” asked Brock.

“Yes,” she said, “or potential targets.” These other locations hadn’t been attacked in the IFT she’d traveled to, but she wondered if other IFTs would have played out differently; she wondered about the cataclysms that might have been, or still might be. The enormity of her mistake rushed into her like water rushing into a gap: she had hurried to this house, heartbroken at the doubling of Buckhannon, hurried here in a mania to try to save the girl, but she shouldn’t have. She should have been methodical, should have called O’Connor, should have waited. Jared Bietak had been here, Cobb had been here—who else would they have found if she’d waited? Now Bietak was dead and Cobb and Miss Ashleigh had scattered, seeds to the wind. She had lost touch with the greater mission.

“White supremacists?” asked Brock. “The Nazi paraphernalia in the bedroom here.”

“No, I don’t think so, not primarily,” said Moss, trying to recover, to see past those missed chances. “Antigovernment for certain. Karl Hyldekrugger. He acquired blueprints for CJIS two years ago, sold by a member of the Mountaineer Militia shortly before your people arrested him.”

“We’ll try to track these chemicals, try to track the sale of the equipment,” said Brock. “I’ll run Hyldekrugger’s name by our domestic-terror people, see what they can come up with. We’ve learned a lot since McVeigh.”

Moss remembered the name of the CJIS suicide bomber, memorized from books that would never be written: Ryan Wrigley Torgersen. He worked at CJIS, would have reported to work with explosives sewn into his body. There were constitutional protections against pre-crime, Fourth Amendment applications that complicated NCIS investigations. She would have to talk with O’Connor, apply for special warrants through the military courts to arrest this individual.

“Alert your colleagues at CJIS immediately,” said Moss. “I think the discovery of these blueprints is enough to suggest you search the ventilation system and the fire-suppression system. I doubt you’ll find anything. But they should increase security, they should consider CJIS an active target. There is an individual to consider a person of interest, a potential bomber. He’s an FBI employee, Ryan Wrigley Torgersen.”

“Torgersen, I know him,” said Brock. “I’ve met him. He works in my wife’s department at CJIS. Are you sure? He’s meek, Shannon. Torgersen… I’ll ask for surveillance, see what we can dig up about him.”

The National Guard allowed access to the barn much later that afternoon. They had rendered safe the recovered chemicals, had eliminated the threat of explosives. The medical examiner of Upshur County had been waiting on site since the bodies were first discovered. He was a young man, a skinny doctor who wore a shirt and tie and a cowboy hat the color of calfskin that he removed and held reverently as he approached the barn doors. He’d been told there were a number of bodies, and he’d brought three men with him, older men who seemed more like ranch hands than medical techs. They wore protective suits, a precaution against chemicals that might still be trapped in the victims’ hair or might escape from the cavities of their bodies.

Moss stood at a distance, examining the Ryder. A hole had been drilled through the passenger side of the cargo space, and a rubber tube dangled from the hole. A mobile gas chamber. The barn itself was equipped with a ventilation system and safety showers, protective suits in lockers. Moss imagined Jared Bietak and Charles Cobb in these yellow suits dispersing poison gas or acid or disease into the back of the truck, measuring their victims’ suffering.

They would have moved Marian from the basement in the middle of the night, the barn floodlight disconnected, the house lights off. She would have been bound, gagged, and no one would have heard her anyway, not out here. A favorable wind might have carried her screams—but only so far.

This is how my life will end, Marian would have thought. In the back of a Ryder truck, gagging on the stink of the previous dead. She might have realized she smelled her own death. She might have scratched at the walls of the truck, she might have been senseless with terror—Moss imagined Marian weeping for mercy. She would have heard the purring of an engine or the whir of a box fan pushing gas through the rubber hose. Marian’s photograph had anchored Moss to terra firma those nights when she felt adrift in her IFT. Life is greater than time, she had written. A false hope.

The Upshur ME and his men wearing hazmat suits laid out plastic sheets, gingerly removed each body from the truck. Four males, two females—one of them Marian. All were naked, all significantly damaged by chemical or acid burns, most of the bodies bloated and glossy, facial features distorted or altogether missing. Some of the bodies fell apart like jelly in their hands.

KDKA News: Marian’s picture cycling with helicopter shots of the house and barn, maps of Buckhannon, interviews with neighbors, sound bites from Brock. Mug shots of Ashleigh Bietak and the man she had fled with, Richard Harrier, captured hiding beneath the front porch of a property three miles down 151. Harrier a Home Depot cashier, shots of the Home Depot in Bridgeport. Blanket coverage of sarin gas, reprising coverage of the Aum Shinrikyo subway attacks, of Oklahoma City, and soon the house on Cricketwood Court had become a shrine to the slain family. At first just a few bouquets wrapped in green tissue and cellophane, pops of color left on the front stoop, but within a few days the stoop was mounded with flowers, framed photographs, white crosses. Moss sat in her truck and watched as people arrived and departed from the makeshift memorial, remorseful that no memorial like this had been made for Courtney, a personal regret that she had never laid flowers here. Later that evening Moss returned and added her own bouquet, a burst of roses.

She worked the phones late that afternoon, tracking down the owners of the apple orchard where Miss Ashleigh had lived years from now, where she had hosted the memorial for Jared Bietak. Moss remembered Nicole mentioning that the place used to be owned by ceramicists and soon found that the property was still owned by Ned and Mary Stent, the proprietors of the Pot and Kettle. She tracked Ned Stent to an art fair in Atlanta, Ned speaking with her from his hotel room, explaining the differences between earthenware and raku, describing the ceramics classes they offered at their orchard, the dimensions of their kiln. No, they’d never met anyone named Ashleigh Bietak, had never met Jared Bietak, and no, they weren’t planning on selling their property. “Not for a few years as of yet, at least.”

There was no viewing of the Mursult family’s bodies, though their five caskets were established in separate rooms of the Salandra funeral home on West Pike for a gathering of friends and family before the funeral Mass across the street at St. Patrick’s. So many children had come to grieve. High-school and middle-school children in their nice clothes, their church clothes, outfits that would double as Easter clothes in the next few weeks. Posters covered with the Mursult family’s pictures leaned on easels next to their caskets. Moss touched the lacquered wood of Marian’s coffin. She stood with her head bowed, falsifying prayer for the sake of the other mourners in line to pay their respects.

At the funeral Mass, Moss sat alone in the back pew while the priest blessed each of the five caskets, as the faithful took Communion and prayed. St. Patrick’s was Moss’s childhood church. She’d been raised Catholic, had memories of Sunday school here, remembered her Communion dress, the taste of the Eucharist. St. Pat’s wasn’t a stone colossus like the older churches of Pittsburgh, but rather a contemporary remodel, with ocher walls and cobalt trim, stained-glass windows of pink, green, and yellow squares. The altarpiece was a brash design of crimson and gold diamonds. The sculpture of the Crucifixion above the altar held Moss’s attention through the service, a crucifix bathed in color cast by the sunlit stained glass. Christ seemed to levitate above the altar, as if the arms of the cross were wings—if it weren’t for the pins at his ankles and wrists, she imagined he might simply float away.

Suffocating, the agonized sound of children crying, the unbearable sorrow. Moss left the service before it had concluded—a familiar release she remembered, escaping church. News vans had set up across the street, parked where they could capture establishing shots of the funeral home, the church, probably hoping for shots of children leaving in tears.

Chilly air but warm in the sun. She walked West Pike, to clear her head. She crossed the tracks and the busier intersection at Morganza. The parking lot of the Pizza Hut was full, families eating lunch together. A ridiculous place to mourn, between the blue dumpsters, but this is where Courtney had died, this is where Moss had found her friend’s body. One of the dumpsters had been replaced in the past several years, but the other looked like it could have been left over from 1985, nearly twelve years ago. Moss leaned against the brick wall, remembering—and she cried for Courtney, for Marian, for Marian’s family, for her own. She remembered her father in dim flashes, how he would lift her from bed, how he would lift her and spin, wintergreen on his breath and pipe smoke in his hair. She cried for every lost thing, everything gone. Chartiers Creek ran behind the Pizza Hut, a narrow trickle of water bounded on either side by weeds. Moss sat on the bench of a picnic table that the Pizza Hut kids used on their smoke breaks. She watched the murky water. Trash littered the muddy banks. Peaceful, in its way—she felt removed from Canonsburg, the noise of traffic just a background of white noise. Sunlight hit the water like a speckle of silver fire, glorious. But Moss resented the thought. This place wasn’t beautiful—it was the end of everything.

Her cell phone rang, the sound startling her. She let it ring. A few moments of silence before it started ringing again. She checked the number: BROCK.

“Hello?” she said.

“Moss,” he said, his voice cracking with enthusiasm, ecstatic. “Moss, is that you?”

“I was at their funeral,” she said. “Marian and—”

“Shannon, I have wonderful news,” he said, overcome by emotion, ebullient. “I don’t understand this, or how it happened, Shannon, but I have truly wonderful news. We found her.”

Moss didn’t answer, only tried to puzzle out his meaning. We found her. Trees grew like a canopy over the water. Their leaves dappled the muddy banks and swept into the creek. She watched the leaves clot in an eddy before disappearing beneath the shadows of a corrugated-steel tube that took the creek underground.

“We found her,” said Brock. “She’s alive. We found her in the woods, but she’s alive, Shannon. We found her.”

“Who?” said Moss.

“Marian,” said Brock. “We found her. Marian’s alive, Shannon. She’s alive.”

THREE

A mistake, Moss’s first thought. A misidentification.

But she had seen the body, had seen Marian in the back of the Ryder truck. The girl’s aunt and uncle had identified her, had traveled from Ohio to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Charleston to view the remains. Marian’s aunt had stomached a fuller study, had inspected the cadaver and spotted the dimple scar on her interior left knee, a gymnastics injury, and the scar from her removed appendix. Without a doubt her sister’s child.

Brock must have found some other seventeen-year-old, a similar but different girl…

Marian, Brock had said. She’s alive.

A fuller search of the forest near the Blackwater Falls, where his men had spotted the cairns. They had fanned out through the forest at dawn, searching for other cairns, to figure out what the cairns might mark, when one of his men shouted. A frail body, pale and bluish, hair the color of the soil. Clothes stiff with frost, no shoes. She was found in the channel of a dried-up creek. Her skin was wet, her hair was damp and frozen. A resemblance to Marian, Brock had thought. Brock put his palm to her neck, and the skin was cold, but he felt her pulse…

What would have happened had Brock never found her? Moss wondered. She would have died, she thought. She would have been in the forest for years, her body in that dried-up creek, decomposing, until men digging for ginseng spotted red berries and started to dig.

“She’s traumatized,” said Brock as Moss was shown into Preston Memorial’s boardroom. Unadorned walls, a blond-wood conference table. He chewed his licorice, pulverizing the gum.

“Talk me through this,” said Moss.

“Either we… we buried the wrong girl or we’re making a mistake now,” he said. “I was staggered by the resemblance. I thought that maybe I was deceiving myself. I thought she must be someone else, but she told me her name—”

“She’s conscious?” asked Moss.

“She’s weak.”

“Who else knows about her?” Moss asked.

“Lockwood, the CEO here,” said Brock. “A small team providing care. Nurses, Dr. Schroeder. My men, there were six of us. My supervisor. They know we found a young woman.”

“You haven’t called her relatives?”

“No.”

“And you talked with Marian?” she asked.

“Shannon, she’s identical. She’s the same, but nothing makes sense,” said Brock. “She says they killed the wrong person. She’s terrified. The remains we found, they were marred by chemicals. When her aunt identified the body, she was expecting Marian, and so maybe she convinced herself that body was Marian. I think we should test this girl, compare DNA with the corpse.”

Echoing, Moss thought. Someone would have had to travel to an IFT, would have had to find a future Marian and bring her here to terra firma. That didn’t seem likely, but it was the only way she knew.

“What does she say happened?” she asked.

“Fleece is the one who took her,” said Brock. “Elric Fleece picked her up from the Kmart. She knew him.”

The name withered in Moss’s ear. Fleece, a sailor on Libra, the suicide in the mirrored room. Marian had known him, a friend of her father’s.

“Has anyone told Marian about her family?”

“She knows,” said Brock. “She’s been watching TV.”

Preston Memorial’s shift supervisor, Dr. Schroeder, was heavily made up, her hair a silver sweep. An elegant woman who spoke with a southern softness, her heels clacking like a quick-tempo metronome.

“Cold and wet. She says she swam through a river. Extreme hypothermia when we brought her in. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t very hopeful, but she’s doing well now, all things considered. Her feet worry me. The flesh was severely damaged. The poor thing didn’t have any shoes, and it’s been cold these past few nights. She hasn’t been able to walk much without pain, though she can make it to the bathroom and back.”

Moss’s breath caught. “Will she keep her feet?”

“We’re not out of the woods,” said Dr. Schroeder. “No gangrene, though. She’s responding very well. Whatever happened to her out there—she hasn’t gone into much detail, which is common with people who’ve been through trauma. She’s very confused, I think. Hypothermia can affect memory, so you’ll have to be patient with her.”

Brock had posted sentries outside Marian’s room, someone from the hospital security staff and an FBI agent whose face Moss recognized from the other night in Buckhannon. They nodded a greeting to each other.

“She should be awake,” said Dr. Schroeder. “Her core temperature was low, so she’s been sluggish.”

“I’d like to speak with her alone,” said Moss. “Can I find you once we’ve had a chance to talk a little?”

“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Schroeder. “I’ll check back with your colleague, or I’ll be in my office. Let me know if you need anything. And, of course, there’s a call button on her bed if you need something from the nurse on duty.”

Moss heard the television from within the room, a laugh track. Anxious to meet this young woman. Moss knocked.

“Come in.”

Marian was sitting up in bed. She looked comfortable despite the tubes threading her arms to IV drips and the oxygen tube lacing her nostrils, the splay of wires monitoring her vitals. She was awake but wan, exhausted. Her hair was pulled back, accenting the oval cast of her face. Although Moss knew of echoes, she had rarely been in their company. She had thought of echoes as duplicates, but that wasn’t true, she realized now—this young woman was Marian Mursult.

Marian turned toward Moss. “What’s wrong with me? Everyone stares when they come in.”

Bandages wrapped her wrists—from the exposure? Moss wondered. Or a suicide attempt? No one had mentioned anything. Seinfeld was on the ceiling-mounted television.

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” said Moss, aware of emoting the same scrabble of uncertainty that annoyed her so often when people first noticed her prosthesis. “Are you Marian?” she asked, guilty again of pretending nothing was wrong. “I’m Shannon. I’m with an agency called the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Can I talk with you about what’s happened?”

“I don’t remember everything,” said Marian.

“That’s understandable,” said Moss. “Do you mind if I have a seat?”

There was only one chair, already beside the bed. The heart monitor’s sonorous tones and the hushed sounds of machines Moss didn’t recognize made the room feel fragile. She had been at Marian’s funeral earlier that morning, had watched a priest bless her closed casket with holy water.

“I know you’ve already told your story to some others,” said Moss. “My colleague, William Brock. You might be wondering why we don’t just talk to each other, why I’m going to ask you to tell me what you’ve already told him.”

Moss noticed that Marian was shaking. Cold? Terror at her memories?

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Marian.

Moss used the call button, and a moment later a nurse checked on her, helped lift Marian’s blankets to her shoulders without disturbing her tubes or wires. Marian asked for a cup of tea, and the nurse returned with a plastic pot of hot water and a few Lipton tea bags.

“I’m all right, and I understand,” said Marian. “I don’t think that man, Brock—I don’t think he believed me. So you want to hear for yourself, right?”

“It’s not a question of believing you,” said Moss. “But I’d like to hear from you. I don’t want to hear your story from someone else.”

“I saw myself, did he tell you that? I saw myself out in the woods,” said Marian. “I think they wanted to kill me, but they killed her instead.”

A surprising sense of recognition. I saw myself out in the woods. Sideways-winding snow, the woman in the orange space suit reaching to her. “I believe you,” said Moss. “Tell me everything. How did you get out there?”

“My dad has a friend, this guy named Fleece,” said Marian. “A war buddy. Dad took care of him, like he couldn’t take care of himself, there was something wrong with him, he was… I think his brain was injured. They went riding together, motorcycles. He met me after my shift, told me I was supposed to go with him, that something had happened to my family.”

“Why didn’t you drive?” asked Moss. “You left your car in the parking lot.”

“He told me something terrible happened, said I shouldn’t be driving when I found out. I was so scared—”

A hitch in her breath. Moss took the girl’s hand in hers. “It’s all right if you need to cry,” she said. “Take a minute, it’s all right.”

“Did he kill my mom? Is my family dead, is that true? Why?”

Moss held her hand, “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why this happened. I want to find out why.” She wanted to comfort Marian but knew Marian would never truly recover from these deaths. “Tell me about Fleece. Where did he take you?”

“He wouldn’t tell me what happened. He said he was taking me home,” said Marian. “But he was going a different way, and when I asked him where he was taking me, he pulled over, tied my wrists. He put me in the back of his truck.”

“He tied you up back there?”

“Tied my wrists with twine,” she said. “I was gagged. I can’t… This is… Things don’t make sense.”

“I believe you,” said Moss. “I need to hear what happened to you.”

“That man from the FBI, who was here before you—he didn’t believe me. He kept trying to catch me in a lie, asking me all sorts of questions, the same questions again and again, but I’m not lying, I swear to you. I swear to God I’m not lying. I’m just confused.”

“Marian, where did Fleece take you?”

“There was a place my dad used to take me to,” said Marian. “Family vacations, but back when my sister and brother were too small, my dad just took me. He called it our Vardogger. Just some made-up word, I guess. Like Never-Never Land.”

“Vardogger,” said Moss. “Where’s the Vardogger?”

“I was just a kid, I don’t know. We were in the woods, but there was this lodge where he’d meet with his friends, sometimes their families too. Pine trees that Dad called hemlocks. There was a river. He liked to fish. A waterfall. All sorts of caves, crevices in the rocks I could squeeze into and hide out.”

“Was it the Blackwater Lodge?” asked Moss.

“I think so, maybe,” said Marian. “He hasn’t taken us for years, though. We’d go there, and I loved it because sometimes I thought that the mirror in the lodge would come to life. Sometimes I’d see myself at the river in the woods and think it was the mirror girl. My reflection, following me. You know, like Peter Pan and his shadow? I only saw the mirror girl a few times, standing across the river. My dad told me she wasn’t real, that she was just my imaginary friend, just a daydream because I was a bored kid with no friends around.”

“And that’s where Fleece took you?” asked Moss. “To that lodge?”

“Not that lodge, but it was the same place, those woods,” said Marian. “I don’t know how long we drove. The ride rattled me, and I got hurt. It seemed like forever, but when we stopped and he opened the rear door, I could see it was still dark and still a long way off from morning. Fleece pulled me from the truck, pushed me deeper into the woods. He said ‘I’m sorry’ over and over, telling me that he wanted to keep me safe, but that it was too late and he had to do what they told him to do. He said my family would be dead in a day, but he didn’t want me to die, so we should just do what they say.”

“Who?” asked Moss.

“I don’t know. Voices?” said Marian. “He was scared. I could tell he was terrified of something, and then he threw me to the ground, all of a sudden, and that’s when I recognized where I was. He’d taken me to the Vardogger.”

“How could you tell?” asked Moss. “This was the middle of the night, out in the woods—”

“Because there’s a tree that marks the Vardogger, this old dead tree that looks like a skeleton. It’s all white, with no leaves. The Vardogger tree. And I heard the river I remembered as a kid, right there past the tree.”

The Vardogger tree—Moss knew the tree. When she was lost in the woods, Moss had seen the tree repeating, Fleece’s tree, the tree of bones in the mirrored room. Marian’s father called it the Vardogger; Patrick Mursult had known this place.

“I said to him, ‘Christ have mercy on your soul,’ and he told me he was going to show me the end of time,” said Marian. “I was scared of him and didn’t know what he was talking about. He told me that things were knotted up all around us.”

“A place near the Red Run?” asked Moss. “A river, a clearing surrounded by pines.”

“He took me past the Vardogger tree, and we stepped out into that clearing, saw the river in front of us. We were in some other place in the woods, there were other trees—other Vardogger trees, a lot of them, in a line. He was pulling me along—we crossed the river over a fallen tree, and the weather turned to ice. That can’t be real, can it? On the far side, our feet sank into the mud, and the sky was ridged like I was looking at the roof of a mouth, and we saw ourselves reflected outward, like I was looking at myself through a kaleidoscope—over and over and over, all around me. I couldn’t look anymore and started to pray, but he said he wanted to show me God, and he lifted my head to the sky, and I thought I saw Jesus on the cross appearing over the river, but the cross was upside down and his mouth was bloody and, oh, God, oh, my God, the body had no skin…”

Moss wanted to scream, but for Marian’s sake she crossed the room to collect herself. She looked out the window but saw her reflection in the glass. Marian had seen the Terminus. She had seen the hanged men.

“Fleece told me he had to tie me up again,” said Marian. “He took me back to the Vardogger tree and pushed me down. He pushed me against the tree and tied my wrists around the trunk. He said that someone would come for me, to take me somewhere else. I asked him where they would take me, but he said he didn’t know, that he wasn’t allowed to know. He said, ‘I’m damaged, so I’m not allowed to know.’ And then he just left me there, out in the middle of the woods. It was so quiet. Everything was silence.”

“How long were you out there, tied up like that?” asked Moss.

“I don’t know,” said Marian. “Not long. Not even an hour. When I knew he was gone, I pulled at the twine and felt it give a little at my wrists, like it had a little play. It took me a while, but I was able to pull my hands free.”

She held up her wrists, showed the bandages. “Bloodied myself up pretty bad,” she said.

“But you were free,” said Moss.

“Yeah,” said Marian. “I was freezing, my hair and clothes were wet, because it had rained. I didn’t know where I was, but I remembered the lodge my dad used to take me to, figured it must be close. I thought I could find it.”

“You knew where you were?”

“I thought I was on the wrong side of the river from the lodge. I couldn’t find that tree we’d used to cross the river, but I knew I could wade across, or swim if it was too deep, so I stepped in,” said Marian. “It felt like ice, the water was so cold, and there were rapids there. The water came up to my neck, but I could walk. I lost my footing, and it swept me down, but I came to the far side and crawled out. I’d never been so cold. I crossed this little meadow. I couldn’t even feel my toes in the mud because I was so numb.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t die,” said Moss.

“I could hardly walk, because I couldn’t feel where my feet were beneath me, but everything still seemed the same, like I had wandered in a big circle. Then I realized that I’d somehow come back to where I’d started from, still on the wrong side of the river. I came to softer mud that had been chewed up by truck tires—from Fleece’s truck, I thought. I could see where the tires had scooped out the mud. I ran back through the trees, and that’s when I saw her.”

“Who?” asked Moss.

“The mirror girl,” said Marian. “I saw the yellow of her shirt at first, just like mine, and then I realized I was looking at someone tied to a tree, just like I’d been, the same white tree. I came closer and saw her hair hanging, wet. I circled the tree to come up on her from the front, so I wouldn’t scare her, and when she saw me, she said, ‘I remember you,’ and I told her, ‘I remember you, too.’”

“You were children the last time you saw each other,” said Moss.

“I wanted to help her get free, and so I told her to pull out her wrists like I had done, and she pulled but couldn’t get free. I tried to help her, but she wasn’t tied up with twine—her wrists were tied up with wire. Her hands and arms were bloody, they were real bad. She’d been trying to pull free but couldn’t do it, and the wire wouldn’t break. It wasn’t loose at all. I tried to help but caused her so much pain when I pulled. I didn’t know what to do. So I stayed a little while with her.”

“You had to leave her,” said Moss.

“I was worse off than she was because of the river,” said Marian. “I was so cold. I was turning to ice. I was wet, shivering so much. She told me to get help. She told me she’d be all right, that her dad would be coming for her, that her dad would know where to find her.”

“And so you tried to find help.”

“I don’t remember what happened after I left her. I thought I was dying. My memory’s just gone. I just woke up here, in the hospital. She might still be out there. She’s still out there.”

“We’ll find her,” said Moss, thinking, One Marian here, another in the Ryder truck. “Marian, why would someone want to attack your family?” she asked. “Can you think of anyone who would want to do this to you, and why? Anyone that was upset with your dad?”

“It’s sick,” she said. “I don’t know who would do something like this.”

“Any old Navy buddies? Anything like that?” she asked, already knowing who might have killed her father, Hyldekrugger, Cobb, but wanting to hear Marian say the names. Victims of violent crimes often knew who the perpetrators were and why the crimes had occurred. “Had your father been in touch with anyone?”

“You have to understand that my dad was different,” said Marian. “He had thoughts that intruded on him. He said he was recruited for some Navy program. Mom never liked him to talk about this stuff with us, but he couldn’t help it sometimes, like it all just came rushing out of him. He said… he told my mom that the Navy had recruited him to build a ship made of fingernails, I know that sounds crazy, like I’m not remembering right, but that’s the way it was. He said the ship will sail carrying the bodies of the dead.”

“What does that mean, Marian?”

“I don’t know. My dad spent a lot of time away from home,” said Marian. “He spent time with his friend Fleece. They’d drink together. And his lawyer, he saw her a lot.”

“Who was his lawyer? Why did he need a lawyer?” asked Moss.

“I just heard my parents talking a few times after I’d gone to bed,” she said. “He was drawing up contracts for something. Needed a lawyer’s help. My mom asked if the lawyer would be able to help with our move, but my dad didn’t want to drag her into everything.”

“You were moving?” asked Moss. “Do you know why?”

“I wanted to finish high school to graduate with my friends, but she said we were leaving, just as soon as my dad was ready. Mom didn’t know when that would be, maybe after graduation or maybe next week. They wouldn’t even tell me where we were moving, but I heard them talk about Arizona a few times.”

“Think of everyone that your father spent time with,” said Moss. “Is there anybody that I should know about? You mentioned a family lawyer. Do you think your dad’s lawyer is involved somehow?”

Marian furrowed her eyebrows. She said, “I don’t think so, I can’t think of why. Although there was something—” But she stopped herself.

“Let me know,” said Moss. “It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong or right, but I want you to fill me in so I can follow up on everything.”

“My dad was cheating on my mom,” said Marian. “I don’t think she knew, but I figured it out, figured out something was going on. I heard him on the phone this one time.”

Nicole. “Do you know who he had a relationship with?” asked Moss, but Marian shook her head. “You heard him on the phone?”

“He was using a pager, always taking calls in private, and I knew what that meant, I had an idea,” said Marian. “My mom must have looked past it, let herself be lied to. But there was this one morning a few weeks ago, I heard him fighting with someone on the phone. Someone was threatening him. I heard him say, ‘Don’t tell him,’ and I thought he meant this woman’s husband or boyfriend. ‘I want to see you. Don’t tell him, not yet,’ and he hung up. Once he left the room, I hit Star 69, and a woman’s voice answered. I just hung up.”

“Who do you think this woman was going to tell? Someone your dad knew?”

“I guess so,” said Marian. “Yeah, it sounded like he knew him.”

“If I say someone’s name, would you recognize it?”

“I can try.”

“Charles Cobb?” asked Moss. “Jared Bietak?”

“I don’t know,” said Marian. “I don’t think so.”

“Karl Hyldekrugger?” asked Moss.

“Yes, my dad mentioned him,” said Marian, her eyes haunted as if a ghost walked among them. “My dad was scared of that man. He used to talk about him sometimes. My dad called him the Devil. He sometimes said the Devil could eat people with his eyes.”

Hospital corridors were unnerving spaces: blank corridors, turns, further corridors, fluorescent glare on glossy floors, innumerable doors. What would have happened had we never found the Ryder truck? Moss wondered. Jared Bietak and Charles Cobb would have disposed of Marian’s body—where? In the mass grave, in the mound at the house in Buckhannon. And this Marian? Hikers would have found her where she died in the woods. Moss imagined this young woman’s life, the bewildered grief and insomnia, the late-night television, cyclic news of friends mourning her death even though she was alive—Marian would be alone tonight, she would be alone every night for the rest of her life.

“What’s going on, Shannon?” Brock asked when Moss had returned to the hospital boardroom. Moss closed the door behind her, poured herself a cup of coffee from the plastic decanter. Powdered cream, sugar, stirring with a red plastic straw. Fleece had taken Marian, had driven her to the woods. He had shown her the end of time, had tied her to the Vardogger tree. An echoing, one Marian tied with wire, the other Marian tied with twine. One Marian found dead in a Ryder truck, the other Marian found alive.

“It’s scary what they can— You see that lamb Dolly on the news and you think how terrifying it really is, the age we live in,” said Brock. “Impossible things. That lamb should be an impossibility, but everyone just accepts it. We doubt the existence of miracles, but when they happen, we treat them like they happen every day. Clinton signed that ban just last week, I saw on the news. President Clinton banned human cloning, but I’m realizing now what’s going on here—”

“That’s not what’s going on here,” said Moss. “Let her sleep tonight, if she can sleep. But guard the room. Her life is still in danger, I think, if anyone learns that she’s here. No one can talk about this, Brock—what we’ve seen. I think we should push for WITSEC if we can. At least we should move her from here, and soon.”

Moss tarried after Brock left, alone in the half-light of the closed cafeteria with her thoughts, drinking coffee and eating vanilla Oreos from the vending machine until Dr. Schroeder informed her that Marian had finally accepted a sedative, had fallen asleep. There were three special agents who would spell one another through the night, guarding Marian’s room. Before he left, Brock had told Moss he would broach the subject of witness protection with his supervisor, coordinate with NCIS and the U.S. Marshals. He would call Marian’s aunt and uncle, he would figure out a way to tell them that one of the children they’d buried had lived.

Moss filled napkins with a blue ballpoint pen, at first just lines and shading until her thoughts untangled. A place in the woods, the Vardogger, she wrote, then wrote the word a second time, and wrote, One with wire, one with twine. Ten agents could travel to ten IFTs and report back different details from each. Existence was a matter of chance, of probability, as infinite futures became one observed present. Life and death often hung on details—in one existence Marian’s wrists had been tied with wire, but in another her wrists had been tied with twine. How had she echoed? Moss wrote, The mirror girl, and lost herself in thought.

She shredded her notes and called O’Connor before she left the hospital—after midnight, but he was awake. He had seen the reports coming out of Buckhannon and had already spoken with his counterpart in the FBI, but the news concerning Marian’s echoing stunned him, and by the end of their conversation, he’d promised that he and another special agent would arrive in Clarksburg by the following day.

“What’s your next move?” he had asked.

“We have to find the Vardogger.”

Nearing 1:00 a.m. when Moss left Preston Memorial, an hour’s drive home. The country roads she drove were twisting paths obscured by trees, pitch-black, but occasionally the view ahead cleared and she saw the moon and fiery pinpoints of stars and the silver of Hale-Bopp, its streaking tail like flowing locks of a woman’s hair.

She remembered the enclosing pines here, the canopy choking out light, but that had been with Nestor, years from now, when she’d been anxious over seeing the place where Marian’s bones were found. This morning, though, the Canaan Mountain bore little resemblance to her memories of the place, the approach serene glades and sods, spruce, balsam fir, hemlock doused in buttery sunlight. Rangers had marked the access route with an orange ribbon. She came to the clearing where the incline leveled and found O’Connor’s Subaru already nestled beneath an overhang of branches. Only a short hike from here. The path was cleaner than she remembered, after what would be twenty years of growth, when Nestor had pulled back branches for her, when he had stomped down weeds in her way. Much easier to find her footing now, a thin path simple to follow. She wore hiking boots this time, which helped, and made it to the dried runnel where just yesterday morning Brock had found Marian alive.

“Shannon, over here.”

Two men, a little ways off. O’Connor had driven overnight from D.C. to meet Marian for himself and to see this place in the woods, the Vardogger. An avid outdoorsman, he looked like an Edwardian painting of a gentleman hunter this morning, with a walking stick and rubber galoshes that reached to his knees. Moss would have recognized O’Connor’s partner by his height and bulk alone, she was sure, but otherwise the man bore little resemblance to the sage she had once met. Njoku was shaven bald, his beard a chiseled black strip. Golden hoops dangled from each of his earlobes. He smiled as O’Connor introduced him, was pleasantly bewildered when Moss said, “We were well met once before, Dr. Njoku.”

“I asked Njoku to red-eye from Boston because of the developments with Marian,” said O’Connor. “He has experience with echoes, and his work at MIT focuses on thin spaces.”

“Collapsibility of Everett space and Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots,” said Njoku. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Shannon. Or I should say it’s a pleasure to meet you again for the first time.”

She was delighted to see this man with years peeled from him, but Moss remembered there was a woman whose fingers made beautiful sounds on saxophone keys. She remembered when Njoku was to have met this woman. “Wally, you should be in Boston right now,” she said. “There is someone you were supposed to meet.”

Doubt fluttered over his face, the shadow of a falling leaf, but soon he smiled. “There are many paths,” he said.

O’Connor trudged ahead, pulling through long strides with his walking stick. Moss kept an easier pace with Njoku. Have you ever seen a falling star as it blooms? Easy to imagine Njoku lingering in a neighbor’s garden, philosophizing over the beauty of flowers. He paused frequently here in the woods, allowing Moss to catch up with him, running his fingers over the flesh of a petal, or crouching low to inspect an insect or remark on a spider’s funnel.

“Here’s a cairn,” said O’Connor, ahead.

The spot was marked by powdery orange spray paint, a cross on the ground that would wash away with the first rain. The cairn was what she imagined it would be, though more carefully constructed: it was a pyramidal stack of flat river stones, a foot and a half high. The cairn was balanced on a fallen log barnacled by plump fungus and carpeted with moss.

“The FBI found four so far,” said O’Connor. “Two are on the far side of the river.”

“I thought the cairns would have marked the location of Marian’s body,” said Moss. “I thought they would lead the way to the burial site.”

“The cairns mark the location of Marian’s Vardogger tree,” said O’Connor.

“Look at this,” said Njoku. He folded open a pocket notebook and showed Moss several pages of inky dots he’d connected with sketchy lines into various shapes, several-pointed stars. “The cairns are equidistant,” he said. “If you imagine each cairn as a point…”

“We found a burnt tree at the center of the star,” said O’Connor.

“I want to see it,” she said.

Blueberry thickets, burs and thistles that clung to Moss’s sock. A meadow strewn with flattop boulders. The rush of a river as they neared the Vardogger, a swift sound as if the forest whispered where she should walk.

“When O’Connor called about Marian, I thought her Vardogger might be something we call a ‘thin space,’” said Njoku. “The Naval Research Lab calls them Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots.”

“I’ve heard that term before,” said Moss. “We talked about them in training. B-L knots, the residue of quantum foam.”

“You’re exactly right. Residue, almost like pollution. The B-L drives affect space-time,” said Njoku. “Knots are locations where an infinite-density singularity event breaks down effects of quantum gravity, allowing superposition. Wave-function collapse sometimes doesn’t occur. Simultaneous Everett spaces—”

“Whoa, you’re losing me,” said Moss.

“Echoes,” he said. “Here we are, here is the tree we found.”

The husk of a pine, a stark white tower of ash surrounded by verdant evergreens. “Yes,” said Moss, recognizing this ashen tree, “here we are.” Lost in the Terminus when she had last seen this tree, she’d been confused by it then. It had seemed to repeat, recursively, like a mirror image of a mirror. She had searched for the tree in the years since but hadn’t been able to find it and had grown to think of it as a mistake of memory, a hallucination—seeing it now was a relief, a confirmation. There was nothing fearsome about this place, however, not with Njoku here, and O’Connor, the noon sun almost too warm for her jacket.

Nothing fearsome, but still unnatural. The Vardogger was burnt, but not burned away. Moss had seen scorched woods before, the remains of forest fires, carpets of ash, charred trunks branchless and sooty like lines of spent matchsticks. The Vardogger looked preserved by fire rather than consumed. The trunk was barked with crackled ash so light gray it seemed luminous white, but when Moss touched the trunk, it felt more like petrified wood than seared wood. She touched the branches and was startled to find they felt as smooth and as brittle as glass.

She was nearer the rush of the river now. “I’ll be back,” she said, leaving Njoku and O’Connor at the Vardogger. She hurried toward the sound of water and came through the tree line, emerging onto an outcropping of boulders. The Red Run was a turbulent set of rapids before her, twisting drops, whitewater crashing through gaps in the jagged stones. Where the river was calmer, the water was the color of tea, dyed by the tannin of the surrounding hemlocks. Moss recognized the future of this place. It was the winter of the Terminus then, and instead of the goldenrod and willows and bushes of flowering mountain laurel along the banks, there’d been pinions of ice that had seemed to impale her in the air. This is where she’d been crucified. Her reflection had been here, an echo. Moss glanced back toward the tree line, half expecting a woman in orange to reach for her, beseeching her, but there was no one.

“I’ve been here,” said Moss, returning to Njoku and O’Connor. “This is the place where I had my accident,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I saw another version of myself here. I saw my echo.”

“Thin spaces are unpredictable, unstable. Sometimes they’re inert, but sometimes they’re spooky as hell,” said Njoku. “Reflections, echoes, closed timelike curves.”

“Wally’s explanations sometimes assume a Ph.D.-level understanding of quantum mechanics,” said O’Connor. “Maybe he can slow it down for us.”

“I understand echoing,” said Moss. “But this whole place should repeat,” aware she wasn’t sure exactly how to describe her experience with this place. This was the same white tree, the same area of pines, the same river as she remembered, she was sure of it, but it was off somehow, as if she were looking at a stage set of a place she remembered rather than the place itself. “It was like I could see a hundred of these trees, thousands, in every way I looked, in every direction. Like the world receded from me—”

But she was interrupted—by what first felt like the onset of a seizure or a stroke, some swift mental aberration, or a fault in her eyes as the forest changed around them. The pines were denser, the growth heavier. Njoku pushed through the branches, Moss and O’Connor following, and they came to the clearing, the Red Run—but they seemed to be on the wrong side of the river. The white Vardogger tree was visible on the far side rather than behind them.

“Over there,” said Njoku. “We got turned around somehow. We have to cross.”

Moss held him back. They trekked back the way they had come and passed the white tree. They tried to find the dry creek bed, to follow it back to their cars, but they were lost and passed the white tree again, Njoku chuckling in frustration. They broke through the surrounding pines and returned to the white tree.

After a moment the sensation passed. They were again in the recognizable woods near a single white tree, as though the denser pines and repeating woods had only been a trick of the eye.

Njoku’s laughter was like the clarion pealing of a bell. “Like I said, spooky as hell!”

“Let’s go, away from here,” said O’Connor, leaning on his walking stick, dizzy or untrusting of the earth. “We shouldn’t be here.”

Closer to what she remembered of her experience with this place, the disorientation, the repetition, Moss was eager to distance herself from it, and she hurried on ahead, almost running, her heart pumping fear of this place. O’Connor and Njoku caught up only once she had reached the cairn on the soft log, the Vardogger no longer visible.

“It was like the moment when the B-L drive fires, as you travel to an IFT,” said Moss, “that moment you think you can feel every possibility at once.”

“Wally thinks a B-L drive made this place,” said O’Connor. He was sweating, flushed.

“I think a B-L drive might have made this extraordinary place,” said Njoku. “The tricky thing about Brandt-Lomonaco knots is that they exist outside of time. Almost a paradox! If we assume that a B-L drive created this thin space, the ‘Vardogger,’ then the B-L could have fired at any time, including at any time in the future or in the past. We think of time as set, but time is mutable, nonlinear. Imagine,” he said, “you see a burnt tree, coated in ash.”

Moss nodded.

“Now imagine that the forest fire that burned the tree won’t happen for another three hundred years or three thousand—you see? Things like that can happen in a thin space, quantum tricks. Time is like water here, water that sometimes flows uphill. This thin space might be a consequence of an action that hasn’t actually happened yet.”

Nicole might have described this place, obliquely, Moss realized. She had described ghosts in the woods that preceded their bodies. Marian, thought Moss, and another Marian.

“I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand what this place is,” said Moss.

“Not what this place is, but what this place might be,” said Njoku.

“Are you all right?” she asked O’Connor, who sat on the log wiping his face with a handkerchief.

“I’m fine. It was just disorienting,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

“One Planck unit past now is the multiverse,” said Njoku. “Quantum gravity is like a zipper, pulling all those possibilities together into one, single, truth: terra firma. The thin space is like a moment when the zipper gets stuck a little.”

“How large is this thin space?” asked Moss. “Just the tree? Or do you think it’s the entire forest?”

“I don’t know! It’s marvelous, but I can’t even guess at the size,” said Njoku. “Most B-L knots are only hypothetical shapes, more like math problems than geolocations that you can measure. There are only a very few B-L knots that have actually been observed on Earth, and this one is very, incredibly unique.”

“These things are pretty rare, then,” said Moss.

“Rare on Earth, but our launch sites at the Black Vale are riddled with them. That’s one of the reasons NSC launches from space,” said O’Connor.

“What’s the other reason?” she asked.

Njoku laughed. “Oh! Well, you see,” he said, “back in the early eighties, the Naval Research Lab published a report proving that a B-L drive could spark the creation of a massive black hole. Theoretically, anyway. Our ships sail black holes in the quantum foam, but if something went wrong, frankly, the moon base wouldn’t be far enough away.”

“You’re kidding me,” said Moss.

Njoku shrugged, smiling. “Math problems,” he said.

“We tend not to mention that fact in our annual reports to Congress,” said O’Connor. “I’m all right, we can keep going.”

“Black holes, thin spaces,” said Moss, grabbing O’Connor’s hand, helping him up. “Where are the other thin spaces?”

“One in Los Alamos, three in the Pacific—all at early B-L drive test sites,” said Njoku. “Most of these things only affect particles. The thin space out in the Pacific, though, that is an interesting one.”

“Like this one?”

“Nothing is like this one,” said Njoku. “The size of this one—we were inside this one. The space-time knot in the Pacific is considered very large, and that’s only a few feet in volume. Not like the Vardogger by any stretch, but large enough to echo fish as they swim through.”

“Echoed fish?” she asked.

“Pacific jack mackerel,” said Njoku. “You can catch a mackerel but still have it get away.”

“The one that got away would always be bigger than the one you caught,” said O’Connor.

“We’ve observed the Pacific thin space echoing fish, but it is also a ‘Gödel curve’—that is, a specific kind of closed timelike curve,” said Njoku. “It’s a very odd part of the ocean.”

“You mentioned that before. What is that?” asked Moss.

“A four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, it… well, listen, if you watch that particular thin space long enough, you will actually see the moment all the original fish in the system ‘reset’ to their start positions at the beginning of the cycle. Closed timelike curves are the closest we’ve come to traveling backward in time.”

“The fish repeat?” she asked. “You mean they’re stuck in a loop?”

“Looping is a good way to think of it,” said Njoku. “There are various types of closed timelike curves, ways information loops through wormholes, going forward in time but also backward, arriving at the moment it began. I’ve dipped my hand into the water, and when the water looped, it was like I held a fish inside my hand until it flopped and squirmed out, swimming away. It was a very strange sensation, slimy. You could cast your line into the water and catch the same fish over and over again.”

“Or pick a piece of fruit and see it regrow the moment you pick it,” said Moss, remembering Nicole smoking her Parliament, describing something like a Gödel curve when she had reminisced about her childhood home. When was she a child? Moss wondered. When were miracles like Gödel curves practicable, common on orchards in Kenya, put to use for agriculture? Nicole had never been hungry as a child, the fields never fallow.

“The Navy will want this place. I have to make arrangements,” said O’Connor. “They’ll need to fence this off, shut it down. The whole area. Let’s get going.”

The stones were smooth along the dried creek, polished from the water that used to flow here—Moss stepped stone to stone as she walked back, following Njoku and O’Connor. Easy to dig out the flat stones for cairns, she thought—they were everywhere. Who had marked this place? The FBI had spotted the driver of the black van here, Richard Harrier, and had trailed him to Buckhannon. But he wouldn’t have been marking this place, she thought. It must have been the survivors of Libra. A B-L drive had made this place. She peered through the spaces between trees, wondering if she might see a ship here. Nothing but trees, and in the distance more trees.

“What was her name?” Njoku asked once they’d reached their cars.

“Whose name?” asked Moss.

“You said there was someone in Boston, you think I’m supposed to meet her.”

“Jayla,” she said. “Jayla, but I don’t know her last name. She plays the saxophone.”

Moss waited in her truck while O’Connor maneuvered his Subaru from the clearing, fluttering brake lights as he inched down the precipitous drop. She was worried about him; he’d looked pale as they’d said their good-byes. O’Connor would be heading back to D.C. by the afternoon, a several-hour drive. The Navy would occupy this place soon, the first contingent by nightfall, if not earlier. Njoku was flying out from Pittsburgh but would return in a few days with physicists from the Naval Research Lab to study the Vardogger. She was disoriented, still—thinking of the way the forest had seemed to fragment and multiply was like remembering a cramp in her eye. The coffee in her thermos was warm—it was peaceful here, though she felt like a leaf caught in an eddy. She had been drawn to this place in her far future, when she’d suffered crucifixion, and she had also been drawn here in her recent past, when she began the investigation into the Mursult deaths that had led her here now. A leaf caught in a whirlpool, a wheel within a wheel.

Wendy’s on West Pike in Clarksburg, scribbling on napkins, Everything has changed, but nothing has changed, spicy chicken, no mayo, paper place mat, dipping fries in paper cups of ketchup, writing, The anatomy of men and women laid out across the sky. Sipping Pepsi, sounds of ice cubes in a waxy cup, writing, A rain of pollen in reverse, writing, a strange symmetry: cadavers in the sky and the hanged men, a pollination of flowers and the running men. Clouds had accumulated through the afternoon, a cold front sweeping in. A fine rain misted outside. Moss stepped out for fresh air, huddled beneath the Wendy’s overhang. Wishing she still smoked—the old addiction never entirely dies. Perfect time for a cigarette, the late hour, solitude, something for her nerves, a forest with doors that led to new forests. She could almost taste the tobacco, wondered where she could buy a pack around here, or even just one, bum a cigarette if a man walked by. Her cell buzzed: BROCK.

“IDs came back on one of the Buckhannon bodies we pulled from the truck with Marian,” he said. “I told the doctors to sit on this information. I thought I should tell you first before we proceed.”

He cleared his throat. She heard him struggling with this.

“Positive ID,” he said. “No mistakes. Ryan Wrigley Torgersen.”

“Our person of suspicion for the CJIS bombing,” she said.

“He’s like… Torgersen is like Marian,” said Brock. “There are two of them, two of each of them. They’re clones, or they’re doubled somehow.”

“Focus on Torgersen. You’ve had him under surveillance?”

“I just talked with Rashonda, checked to see when Torgersen had last been at work, and she told me he was sitting at his desk all day. Shannon, this guy can’t be at his desk all day and in the autopsy room, he just can’t be… I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand Marian—”

“Where is he now?” asked Moss.

“My wife just called over to Torgersen’s place under some pretense, spoke to his wife. He’s there now, at home.”

“Let’s talk with him,” said Moss. “I’m already in Clarksburg, nearby CJIS. I can meet you at Torgersen’s. What’s his address?”

Ryan Torgersen’s house was one of a newer construction north of Clarksburg, a development built in the small boom following the CJIS facility’s arrival, one of sprawling identical houses with prefab design her mother would have called “McMansions.” Moss found her way through the planned neighborhood streets, streets that were copies of one another, repetitive, plotted all at once yet strangely incomprehensible in their design, cul-de-sacs and loops. Night had fallen, windows of most of the houses bright at the edges of drawn curtains. Brock waited in front of the neighboring house, sitting in his silver sedan, a new model. The repetition prickled Moss, a shiver of gooseflesh. She parked behind, joined him in the front seat of his car. She wanted to tell him that the last time she’d sat with him like this, he had just murdered two special agents. She wanted to tell him what he had lost in that future and what he had already saved by finding Torgersen here.

The scent of licorice, classical radio on low volume, Brock’s face dewy with sweat. “How do you want to play this?” he said. “Ask him about the body we found?”

“No,” said Moss. “Ask about his life, his career here. He might not even know about that other body—in fact, I bet he doesn’t. We need to poke around a bit. I don’t want to just lay that on him.”

“Ashleigh Bietak claims she didn’t know about what was happening in her barn, claims she didn’t know what her son was up to.”

“You got her to talk?” asked Moss. “How about the guy she was with, Harrier?”

“He hasn’t told us much of anything that we didn’t already know,” said Brock. “And Ashleigh Bietak just lost her son. When we broke the news that Jared had been shot in the firefight, she broke down, only talked off and on before her counsel arrived, outbursts of grief, sometimes not even comprehensible. We asked her about Mursult, and she said something about a lawyer he knew. Marian mentioned a lawyer, too, didn’t she?”

“She did,” said Moss, indistinct thoughts flickering in the back of her mind, something she was trying to recall, pieces she needed to fit together. “I don’t know if his lawyer is important, but we should track this lawyer down,” she said.

“I asked for the lawyer’s name. Ashleigh Bietak can’t tell us, or won’t tell us,” said Brock. “She’s demanding a quick burial for her son, but the Navy confiscated his remains. She’s not cooperating.”

Ashleigh Bietak had lost her son, but Brock had won the lives of his children.

“How old are your girls?” asked Moss.

“Two and four,” said Brock.

How old would his girls be in the year 2024, when the Terminus was marked? Twenty-nine and thirty-one—his girls will be young adults when the White Hole opens in the sky. All of life was in a gyre, channeled to the same waste.

They approached the house together, Brock knocking on the front door before ringing the bell. A light in the living room snapped on, the door opened inward, no security chain. The woman was slight, a loose sweater and slacks, house slippers. She seemed puzzled by their presence but smiled, a suburban graciousness.

“Ma’am, my name is Special Agent William Brock, I’m with the FBI. This is Special Agent Shannon Moss, NCIS. Is Mr. Torgersen home? May we have a few minutes of your time?”

“Yes, let me just—just one moment, please,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “Please, come inside. I’ll get him for you.”

Twin skylights were night-violet squares in the foyer’s cathedral-style ceiling. The floor was marble, a swirl of salmon and beige. Mrs. Torgersen showed them into the formal living room before excusing herself to find her husband. Moss heard her recede through the house, calling out, “Ryan?”

Torgersen and his wife returned together, Torgersen dwarfing his petite wife, the contrast almost humorous. Khaki slacks and a striped polo shirt that hung untucked, his hair thinning silver. A meek man, Brock had said—soft, thought Moss, but with a nervous edge. He’d been drinking, the air wet with the stench of liquor.

“What is this about?” he asked.

“Mr. Torgersen, do you have a few moments to answer some questions for us?”

“Of course,” he said. “Honey, would you mind putting on some coffee?” His wife vanished farther into the house, and Moss heard the kitchen tap spray water. “Or would you like tea, anything else?” Torgersen asked. “Not sure if you’re drinking—if you’re on duty or if we’re after hours. Please, have a seat. Come on in. What’s going on?”

“Coffee’s fine,” said Brock, taking a seat on one of the leather couches in the formal sitting room. Torgersen sat adjacent, hands folded in his lap. He bounced his knee, the sound of his heel against the carpet a repetitive swishing.

“Mr. Torgersen, can you tell me when you began work with the FBI?” asked Brock.

“Sure,” said Torgersen, his forehead growing pasty with sweat. He wiped it with the back of his hand. “Ten years ago, I guess—no, maybe eleven years ago now. Are you here because of some problem with work? I can’t guess what that might be. I’ve worked in fingerprints. I was one of the few who came over from D.C. when they opened the new facility a few years ago. I can’t think of anything that’s wrong.”

“The Criminal Justice Information Services building,” said Brock.

“That’s right. Did you say your name was Brock? I work with a Rashonda Brock, I don’t suppose you’re related?”

“She’s my wife,” said Brock. “She’s mentioned you to me.”

“Mind telling me what this is all about?” he asked. “I’m happy to help you. I just don’t know what’s going on.”

“How are you settling into your new space?” asked Brock. “Quite a difference, D.C. to West Virginia. You volunteered to come out this way? Are you getting along all right?”

“I’m sure Rashonda’s told you about the stresses. We’re working toward a state-of-the-art computer system, a national fingerprint database, but all we hear are budget problems and software glitches. False positives, incomplete records. We’re still working off of fingerprint cards, for the most part. Some of the bigger cities are already computerized, and it’s embarrassing, because they hit on matches in a fraction of the time it takes us to work through our boxes.”

Torgersen’s body found burned in the Ryder truck, the burned body in an autopsy room in Charleston, but here he was in his living room, an echo, another echo. Moss watched the man perspire, though his demeanor was jocular. He seemed like he wanted to help however he could, but he was fidgety, moving strangely like an animal grooming itself, running his hands over his silver hair, running them along his arms, pulling at his shirt, little tugs. Glass crashed in the kitchen.

“I’ll check on her,” said Moss.

The house felt open-ended, rooms branching off from the main hallway, leading to other unseen hallways and rooms. No kids, Moss thought—the place uncluttered, clean. The kitchen was expansive, a cooking area centered by an island counter, a breakfast table and French doors that opened onto a patio and manicured lawn. Mrs. Torgersen had dropped the coffeepot, had knelt to sweep up the pieces of glass with a dustpan. She was visibly unnerved, crying.

“We heard the glass,” said Moss. “Here, let me, I’ll clean this up. Are you all right?”

Mrs. Torgersen’s friendly demeanor had decayed since she’d opened the front door, her complexion withered by weariness and sorrow, or terror. She sat at the kitchen table, apologizing while Moss tore off sheets of paper towel from the roll, picked up the larger pieces of glass.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Mrs. Torgersen.

“Whatever it is, we can help you,” said Moss, joining her at the kitchen table once she’d swept up the floor.

“Arrest him,” said Mrs. Torgersen, a whisper, almost too quiet for Moss to hear. “He’s changed, he’s so different now.”

“Has he hurt you?” asked Moss.

“No,” said Mrs. Torgersen, almost exasperated to have to explain. “No, it’s not that, he talks about things. He drinks so heavily.”

“What does he talk about?”

“He wanted to move here,” she said. “He had heard about this new building, CJIS, and was obsessed with moving here, I don’t know why. West Virginia. We had no reason to transfer, but he was fixated on the idea. He talked nonstop about West Virginia, about Clarksburg.”

“That was the change you noticed?” asked Moss.

“No, he’d changed before then,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “He’d… have these mood swings, highs and lows, and when he told me we were moving to West Virginia, I asked him not to. We started fighting, we’d never fought before. And that’s when he started telling me his fantasies.”

“What sorts of things?”

“Violent fantasies,” she said. “He’d never spoken like this to me before, but he came home one night with blood on his clothes.”

She cried heavily now, her face crimson, her jaw clenched. “He was younger, he seemed younger. Thinner. He was drenched, soaking wet and dirty with blood.”

“Blood on his clothes?” asked Moss. “Was he in an accident?”

“He wouldn’t tell me what happened,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “I thought he was hurt. The physical change in him, the weight he’d lost. At first he told me he’d hit a deer in his car and tried to save it, but his story kept changing. And later that night we fought. When we were in bed together, he asked me if I wanted to die, if I was trying to kill myself by refusing to move to West Virginia.”

“What did he mean by that?” asked Moss.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking now. “I don’t know. He told me that he had seen me die and he never wanted to see me die again.”

“Was he threatening you?”

“He was trying to protect me from something in his mind,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “He asked me if I remembered the night we had my boss and his wife over for dinner—this dinner party we’d hosted, years ago in D.C., years ago. He told me that after my boss went home and we were alone cleaning up the dishes, he said several men broke into the house. Of course I didn’t know what he was talking about, some delusion. I thought he was having an episode. I was terrified—he told me several men had come into the house and had tied him up, had held him down, and forced him to watch while they… while they decapitated me, cut my head off in front of him. He said he saw this, he said that they had made him hold my head in his lap and he was screaming, just begging for them to stop, but that I was dead, and they…”

Moss held Mrs. Torgersen’s hands, said, “It’s okay. We can help him—”

“And he said these men waited until midnight before they left our house. They put him in the back of a van and drove him somewhere, drove him off into the woods. And he said he saw things—he couldn’t describe what he’d seen, but it was morbid. He said the men made him cross a river, and on the other side these men asked my husband if he wanted to see me alive again. They could give me back to him, and he said the men drove him home and there I was, still alive—asleep, like nothing had ever happened.”

“And he thought he had to keep you alive,” said Moss. “Is that right? Moving to West Virginia would keep you alive?”

“He said we had to move to West Virginia when the time came,” she said. “That he had to be ready to do certain things, but anything he did was for my own good, that no matter what happened, he would protect me, but he’s been drinking so much more, and now you’re here, and I don’t know what he’s—”

“What is he prepared to do?” asked Moss. “What ‘certain things’?”

“I don’t… I don’t know, but he isn’t the only one. He said there are others. He doesn’t know who they are, but they all play a part. Someone from the Secret Service, he said there were more in the FBI, he said there were people in the military. Ryan has a gun up in the nightstand—he never owned a gun before. I told him I wanted it out of the house, but he needs to sleep with it nearby.”

There are others. Torgersen pulled from the Ryder, and there were other bodies in that truck, maybe their echoes still alive. Moss thought of Torgersen crossing the black river, his clothes stained with his wife’s blood—but his wife was alive. Hyldekrugger, the Devil. Can he cross through the Vardogger? Was it permeable, a doorway to pass between worlds? Hyldekrugger somehow traveling between timelines like a spider crawling across the strands of a web, murdering husbands, murdering wives, as threats. Bringing echoes here to terra firma. Secret Service, FBI… Moss imagined sleeper cells in high-security facilities, placed just like Torgersen, waiting to pull the trigger… How many others were there? An army of echoes.

Shouting, from the other room—indistinct sounds, accusations. Moss heard Brock’s voice, calmer. Mrs. Torgersen stood from the table, said, “Ryan?” She took two steps before the blast. A fleeting image of fire like liquid orange light cascading over the ceiling and walls before Mrs. Torgersen was lifted from her feet and Moss was blown backward.

Moss swam upward from darkness. Ringing in her ears, a tinny ring, silence otherwise. Where? Where am I? A kitchen. She could see flames. Siren light. She was on her back, she was on a kitchen floor. I can move, she thought, righting herself. She tried to stand but wobbled and sank back to the floor, dizzy. Her leg was missing, her prosthesis. Where? She looked around her, saw a body, a woman. Mrs.—but her name escaped. Tor… The woman was on the kitchen floor, screaming. The woman was at an awkward angle. Moss crawled.

Brock.

“Brock!” she screamed, but her voice was underwater. “Brock!”

The house in flames. There had been a blast, she realized. She made her way through the hall, crawling—drywall collapsed, exposed timber, dust, smoke. Shrill sounds of smoke detectors competed with the ringing in her ears. What was left of the living room was on fire, the walls had disappeared. Black smoke crawled along the exposed timber where the ceiling had been, billowed from holes that had opened in the roof. Firefighters were on scene, flickering red siren lights.

“I’m all right,” she said to one of the men. “Brock,” she said. Someone lifted her, held her. “Brock,” she said.

“Out, out.” A firefighter carried her, saying, “Out, out.” Flashlight beams, someone screaming.

“There’s a woman in the kitchen,” said Moss, recovering some of her sense.

She followed the beams of the flashlights and saw the bodies in the living room, barely visible because of black smoke, but she saw Torgersen’s body shredded, she saw his head in separate locations. She saw Brock—his legs had been removed from his torso, one arm was gone. White bone, red meat. Moss screamed. Coughing, smoke burning in her lungs, she screamed and cried. Brock was dead. Moss was carried outside, a mask placed over her mouth, fresh oxygen to cleanse her lungs. She watched the house on fire, a radiant light.