The Gone World

ONE

I launched in the Cormorant within a week of Brock’s death. Three months in solitude, the silence of the Grey Dove pierced by ringing in my ears, the lingering effects of Torgersen’s suicide blast. My memories were spotty, like there were gaps where the film had been cut. One moment I’d heard shouting, the next I woke in fire and remembered only scattered images, flashes of the gruesome spectacle of Brock’s body and Torgersen’s echo, the pieces of them scattered about the burning living room. Brock’s death wriggled wormlike in my heart. Why hadn’t I known what we were walking into?

My life was telescoping. I had lived over a year since Nestor called in the early hours to tell me that a family had been murdered, but those murders were still raw, just a few weeks old. I had seen the future but didn’t understand the larger constellation of events around me. Nothing was clarified, and that future had already dissolved like dew.

O’Connor visited me in Clarksburg, at my office in CJIS. We walked the corridors together, imagining this building’s fate in a future that would never be.

“I spoke with one of the doctors who treated your smoke inhalation,” he said. “He told me you suffered a perforated eardrum in the explosion, but no other injuries. The hearing loss should be temporary. How are you?”

“I can go,” I said, even though his voice seemed far away, too soft beneath the shrill ringing. He wasn’t asking about the smoke inhalation or the psychological trauma of the bombing. He was asking if my body could withstand the withering travel to a second IFT within a month. “I’m ready.”

We spoke about Torgersen’s wife, how her husband had been brought through the woods and imagined the Vardogger as an intersection of paths, the hub of a wheel with several spokes, each spoke leading somehow to a different IFT. There were other echoes that had already been brought through, we knew, waiting like spiders in their funnels, tensed as Torgersen had been, for Hyldekrugger to pluck their webs and send them scurrying to the light. O’Connor studied the inventory of blueprints that Brock and I had recovered from Buckhannon, sites compromised by Hyldekrugger’s network. “Federal buildings,” O’Connor said, “NSC targets. Launch sites. Navy installations. These are all support beams protecting us from the Terminus, and Hyldekrugger is preparing to break them. Why?”

I would travel to discover what terror might still occur, then trace it back to terra firma, so that we can anticipate Hyldekrugger here, now. Stop him.

Before we parted, O’Connor told me that the Navy had secured the Vardogger. “A discreet presence, but they’ll have the area fenced off soon. Njoku is working with a team from the Naval Research Lab. They’ve rented most of the cabins there, out at the Blackwater Lodge. They’re going to study the thin space, unlock it. When you reach the future, check in with us. See what doorways through time and space we’ve managed to pry apart.”

The ping from the Black Vale’s AI roused me from dreams of Buckhannon, the lunar base confirming that my ship had emerged from the void. I glanced out the portal: gibbous moon, Earthshine. I checked with the Grey Dove’s autocommand: September 2015. Another IFT materialized, another future.

A second ping from the Black Vale.

“Black Vale Approach, Cormorant Seven Zero Seven Golf Delta,” I said, shaking away wisps of a dream, Nestor in fields of long grass, the night sky bleeding with stars.

“State your name and place your eyes to the onboard retinal scanner for verification,” a sonorous voice, a computer’s, breaking hailing protocol. The Black Vale’s AI had locked into the Grey Dove’s computers as it should have, but NSC always manned the Lighthouse with sailors. Something was wrong.

“Shannon Moss,” I said. The retinal scanner was a set of goggles built into the control panel, and I lowered my face against the rubber mask, kept my eyes wide for the dull sweep of light.

“Welcome, Special Agent Shannon Moss. Downloading clearance code, contacting NETWARCOM.”

“Wait. Black Vale Approach,” I said, “this is Grey Dove Actual. I need to speak with Black Vale Actual.”

“The Lighthouse is dark, Shannon.”

Which meant there was no Black Vale, not anymore, that there was no longer a lunar base, that I was speaking with a black-box computer buried deep beneath moon dust, or maybe a satellite circling the night. We were trained to remain dark in the event that NSC might no longer exist, to shut off all lights and nonessential computers, to wait in silence for the B-L to reboot. We were trained simply to return home, a six-month round trip that would have gained nothing. I flipped off the Dove’s interior lights, the situation sinking in, that if there was no Black Vale, then NSC had been compromised, or folded. Several minutes passed before I noticed that the Black Vale’s AI had sent a message. I tapped the digital display, and O’Connor’s face filled the screen, his skin mottled with liver spots and traced with veins, wizened, his eyebrows bushy white. He was in his office, in front of the customary “I Love Me” wall that special agents usually covered with certificates and awards but that he filled with framed photographs of his cocker spaniels.

“Shannon,” he said, his voice dried with age, reedy, “if you’re watching this, then you are in an IFT and our nightmare doesn’t exist, and I don’t exist right now, which is a warm thought for me, like I might still wake up from so many terrible things. Return to terra firma, Shannon. Right now, don’t wait. As of this recording, July 2014, the Terminus is marked at December 2017, and it might have come closer still by the time you see this recording. The Earth, humanity—there is no hope. I wonder if you’ll see the White Hole. I wonder if you’re seeing it now. I wonder if you’ve arrived in the Terminus. I wonder if you’re alive. I wonder if I’m too late. Please go home, Shannon. Go home. The United States Navy has enacted Operation Saigon—we’ve evacuated, we will be gone. The entire NSC fleet will be gone, searching for other futures, other worlds. We will not return.

“But I have a word of warning, about your time, about terra firma. The Vardogger, that thin space you discovered in the woods, is a dangerous place, extremely dangerous. Avoid it, please. We lost so many to that anomaly… almost thirty men. We lost Wally Njoku and the SEAL team that went in to retrieve him, we lost physicists who were studying that place. Show this video to me when you get home, and to Wally. Keep us out. They are all lost, no one returns.”

O’Connor’s face disappeared, replaced by footage of Njoku in the forest, near the Vardogger, the pines and the earth around him bronzed with evening sunlight. Time- and date-stamped: 04/23/97, 6:03 p.m. He wore a white lab coverall and raised a hood over his head as he spoke. “Test, um… which number?”

“This will be number seventeen,” said a voice, the cameraman.

“Seventeen,” said Njoku, fitting a respirator over his mouth. “Can you hear me? Okay. The Vardogger opens, and… I believe it mimics quantum foam at the river boundary. I believe you can walk through it. This morning I threw a rock across the river and saw it land, somewhere deeper… We’re recording now. The Vardogger opens on a regular basis, but we haven’t determined its pattern… Approximately every twelve hours. If you’re paying attention, you can feel when it’s about to happen, like an electrical current creeping up your arms. I’m going to take a few steps into it, see if I can retrieve the rock I threw.”

After a span of waiting, as he held one hand on the ashen tree’s smooth bark, I saw Njoku’s face brighten. “Can you feel it?” he shouted to the cameraman, smiling. “Goose bumps,” he said, running his gloves along his sleeves. “Ah, here we are. Are you recording this? I can see the paths—they’re everywhere.”

I looked closely but found nothing remarkable in the footage. I wondered what Njoku was seeing, what he meant by “paths.” Njoku took tentative steps forward. “Set the timer,” he said, as he pushed through the boughs of dense pines and disappeared. The footage ran for several minutes, the cameraman eventually following where Njoku had walked, through the trees. He came out into the familiar clearing, near the Red Run, but there was no one.

“Njoku.” The cameraman’s voice during the few final seconds of footage. “Njoku!”

The Black Vale AI ticked through its programming while I replayed Njoku’s vanishing, the almost casual manner in which he’d seemed to slip away. When Njoku, O’Connor, and I had felt lost in the Vardogger, the area seemed to repeat, a recurrence of the white tree. And when we saw the Red Run, it seemed like we had flipped sides somehow, that we would need to cross the river to return to where we were. Marian had said something similar, I remembered—that she had crossed the river. I imagined Njoku wading into the water, reaching out to retrieve his stone. Where had he gone? The Black Vale AI had contacted Apollo Soucek’s computer system, had downloaded NETWARCOM clearance codes, it had contacted NCIS to establish custody for the Cormorant. I saw the crescent Earth emerge from the sea of night, stunning and fragile but left for dead here, discarded. Operation Saigon meant that only a few had been chosen for life, no more than a thousand, to grasp at extra years while the billions abandoned would die in the cold light of a second sun. The Terminus was an onrushing death, inevitable and near, but there was no White Hole here, not yet. O’Connor must have realized, even as he’d left his time-capsule warning, that I wouldn’t retreat from this forsaken Earth.

I took a room at the Virginia Beach Courtyard Marriott, an upper-level suite, the patio view an expanse of ocean, azure water melding into azure sky. Evenings on the patio with cinnamon-plum tea, scribbling notes, squiggly lines connecting one idea to the next, trying to visualize how all this death fit together, and why: Libra—Esperance—Terminus. I sketched what I imagined had happened on Esperance, Nicole’s story of the fauna and crystal-shaped leviathans, of men and women lifted and rent apart.

Hyldekrugger’s network proved difficult to track. I contacted NCIS, but after nearly twenty years no one remembered my name or recognized my credentials, so I researched what I could on my own. Thousands of articles and longform available referencing domestic terrorism, terrorist activity during the past two decades, but most references to Buckhannon were historical, speculating on connections with the militia movement or Timothy McVeigh, and many articles repeated information written in 1997, in some cases lifting verbatim from earlier pieces.

I was surprised to discover Phil Nestor still with the FBI here, a decorated career. Maybe I expected another version of the troubled man I once knew, but IFTs varied wildly in their particulars, in their individual fates. Whatever personal tragedies had pushed Nestor to live in Buckhannon hadn’t occurred in this future’s past. We had discovered the chemical-weapons lab, Nestor had been wounded in the ensuing firefight—those events alone might have driven his life in a different trajectory, a different life entirely. His career was easy to follow, his successes. Capsule biographies were readily available in the News-Share, and I found a portrait photograph of him, salt-and-pepper gray, handsome. SAC of the Pittsburgh office following Brock’s death, it looked like, and his investigations into domestic terrorism must have furthered his career, as he was part of the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee. Based near here, in Washington, D.C., I called his office, a calculated risk. He might know of Deep Waters here, just as Brock had known, and I worried that my name might appear on a list somewhere, might trigger my arrest, a butterfly in a bell jar. His secretaries wouldn’t connect me, though. I called his office several times, and they took my name and the room number for the hotel, but soon I wasn’t sure if he would even remember me. My memories of Nestor were still warm, only a few months since we were together in a different future from this—but those weren’t his memories. Here I was only a woman he had worked with once, a lifetime ago.

I ran in the mornings, an outdoor track at Kellam High School, my leg fitted with a Flex-Foot Cheetah, a curved prosthesis designed for sprints. The opposite of an out-of-body experience, running was body without mind, purely physical—step, breath, reach. Unassailable lightness.

“Four-hundred-meter dash,” I said, “competition setting,” still self-conscious about speaking to the air, but I was familiar with Ambient Systems from other IFTs, atmospheric nanotech saturation by Phasal Systems, the air itself pervaded with microscopic tech that hung suspended like grains of pollen. Pixels of light and specks of sound, everywhere I looked was lit like an enveloping television. GNC ads and interactive blips for active wear at Dick’s Sporting Goods, every dull spot of the track flashing like Times Square. Images hovered: real-time heart rate, core temperature, calories burned during each of my runs. My personal assistant was a hologram who blurred out of resolution whenever the wind blew, yelling, “Another sprint! Another run!”

A virtual gun crack, I ran. Gaining speed through the first turn, working to increase my speed, pushing, but the hovering stopwatch blinked green to yellow as I fell from my pace, and as I made my last turn, I slipped on gravel and the sky spun, the track rushing to meet me. Chest-first along the track, my elbow gashed, and my knee, and I bit the inside of my lip. Blood filled my mouth, and I spit, spit a second mouthful, fuck, fuck, fuck. Blood from my elbow to my wrist. My sock soaked with blood from my knee. I forced myself to sit up.

Health Mode still timed the run, over three minutes now, flashing red. “Stop,” I said, but my personal trainer appeared beside me, “Faster! Faster!” My prosthesis wasn’t damaged, the knee joint looked fine, the Cheetah foot scraped but all right. I shook out my ponytail, tied it up tighter. Fatigue was settling over me. I hadn’t finished my laps, but my muscles felt like they’d lost their elasticity and my sweat cooled.

“Someone else would quit,” I said, looking at the blood on my shin, the cut on my knee. “Come on, Shannon, get your ass up. Other people would quit. Someone else would quit.”

A ripple of depression at falling, the failure of having lost my balance, the frustration similar to the pervasive, sponging depression that had blotted that first year after I lost my leg, at having to relearn how to walk, at the foreign movement, at the realization that a prosthetic leg was a bulky weight affixed to my thigh, a deadweight I’d have to lift with my hip and carry with every step. Adjustments, frequent trips to Union Orthotics & Prosthetics in Pittsburgh for resizing, to test different suspension devices, straps, suctions, choosing feet from a catalog like shopping for shoes. I’d met amputees who still ran, iron-willed, who refused to abdicate what amputation threatened to take from them.

I stood up. I crossed the field, back to my starting line.

“Reset the stopwatch,” I said.

00:00.

A throbbing knee and fresh blood trickling over my shin.

“Someone else would quit,” I said.

I ran.

I showered back at the hotel following the morning’s workout, spreading Neosporin Skin to cover the gash on my knee when I heard the persistent cooing of a mourning dove. I wondered if a bird might have flown in from the patio, through the suite’s open French doors. A dove trapped in my hotel room, cooing, until I realized the cooing was the repeating tone of a voice mail in my Ambience.

“Courtney Gimm,” I said, engaging the voice mail with my assumed name.

His voice filled the air like he was there in the room with me.

“Special Agent Phil Nestor, FBI. It’s great to hear your voice, Shannon. I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you, but I was in Alabama, at a training seminar. I’d love to see you, catch up. And I can bring you up to speed with some of our investigations. Seven o’clock in the lobby of your hotel? Give a call if that won’t work. Otherwise I’ll see you tonight.”

Many special agents who investigated crimes in multiple IFTs swore by a technique called the Memory Palace. An individual imagines a palace and mentally places names, faces, or events in its various chambers, the idea being that it’s possible to recall things forgotten or obscured if they’re organized spatially. Special agents used this technique to separate their impressions of differing futures, one IFT from another—some spent their entire three months in quantum foam meditating on these palaces, imagining new wings for each future they’d observe. I never found this method useful, or maybe I lacked the discipline to make it useful, but waiting for Nestor in the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott, nervous as a virgin on prom night, I regretted not having developed some sort of technique to help tease out my knots of emotion about him. He had lived in the Buckhannon death house, selling a killer’s stash of antique weapons, or he lived here, a decorated agent of the FBI—but I saw these discrepancies like an image refracted through different lenses, not as something essential about him. I had known Nestor; I could close my eyes and remember the feel of his body next to mine, the purr of his breathing as he slept, his habits and quirks of thought. That was Nestor to me, his core.

“Shannon?”

He wore faded jeans, a blazer. He smiled, shook my hand. “My God, it is you. You look… amazing,” he said, his eyes still an undimmed blue. “I don’t think you’ve aged a day. It’s been about twenty years?”

“Far too long,” I said. He was weathered, but like soft leather—filled out through his chest, his shoulders. Weight rooms, I figured. “You look good, too,” remembering him in another time than this, how natural it would feel to lean into him, how familiar if he held me, but here we only shared crime scenes, decades ago. “I think we last saw each other maybe at Buckhannon.”

“Right before Brock passed,” he said. “I was worried about you, the way you disappeared. I asked after you, for a long while, but no one would tell me anything.”

“How’s your arm?” I asked. “I think the last time we were together, you left in an ambulance.”

He touched his bicep, a gold band on his finger. Of course he might have been married here; it shouldn’t have stung. He rubbed the place where Jared Bietak’s bullet had passed through his arm. “Old wounds never heal,” he said.

Nestor went to the bar for drinks while I waited in one of the crescent-shaped booths, the Courtyard Marriott’s lobby bar like an airport lounge, nightclub-sleek but comfortable only for as long as it took to get someplace else. A bachelorette party at a nearby table, gift bags, foil balloons. Nine women, but three sporadically flickered, momentary lapses, their audio and visual off sync whenever they laughed. Illusions, I realized, present only in the Ambience, and a poor connection at that. Some of them surveyed Nestor as he passed their table with our drinks, glanced my way to see who was with him.

“I was at sea,” I told him when he asked about my life following Torgersen’s suicide, Brock’s death.

“You never made it to the funeral,” he said. “I looked for you.”

“I’m sorry about what I missed.”

Nestor had been promoted, I knew, and when I asked about his career, he said, “We weren’t investigating much domestic terrorism after 9/11. Our focus was on international terrorism, Al-Qaeda. It wasn’t until the Stennis attack that we turned our attention back to homegrown psychopaths.”

Stennis: SSC, the Stennis Space Center, a NASA facility that houses a field site of the Naval Research Lab. Publicly, NRL’s Stennis site conducted oceanography research, but there was a classified NSC/NASA collaboration as well, rocket-engine tests and experimental engines. The casual way he’d referenced Stennis, I figured most people would know what he meant. “That was connected to Buckhannon?” I asked, oblique.

“We think so,” said Nestor. “Let me show you. Law enforcement. Philip Nestor, 55-828.”

When he spoke his name, the seal of the FBI hovered between us, another illusion in the Ambience but as real as if I could reach out and touch it. Nestor asked that I speak my name, and when I did, the Ambience revealed data collected about domestic terrorist activity. Glyphs covered in text, pictures of wrecked commuter trains, mangled corpses, government buildings reduced to rubble.

“They’ve been busy,” I said, scanning the images, the trajectory of what might happen. O’Connor’s instincts had been correct. What I was seeing lent credence to his idea that Hyldekrugger’s network was attacking government installations, especially Navy or federal law-enforcement targets.

“They aren’t like other organizations,” said Nestor. “They don’t publicize their actions or take credit, so they don’t get the media coverage of an Al-Qaeda or ISIS. The media narrative has been ‘rampant lone-wolf terrorism,’ ‘antigovernment paranoia,’ maybe organized through networks in the militias. We think these attacks are related to Buckhannon, all of them—carried out by the same planners. And yes, they’ve been very busy.”

I skimmed file titles: [2003] Stennis Attack, [2005] D.C. Metro Attack, [2007] United Nations General Assembly Attack, [2008] NSASP Attack, [2011] Pentagon Attack.

“Show: Stennis Space Center,” said Nestor, and the file expanded, the table between us becoming a map of the facility in Mississippi, fire damage to the building that housed the Naval Research Lab.

“We link this attack to Buckhannon primarily because of the modus operandi,” said Nestor, “their continuing ability to recruit personnel from within highly secure facilities.”

“People with clearances,” I said, thinking, Echoes. “Who?”

“A marine shot up the place, blew himself up when security turned their guns on him,” said Nestor. “But what the news couldn’t talk about was the similarity of style to the planned CJIS attack. You found the blueprints for the CJIS building with Brock, I believe. Recovered at Buckhannon.”

“Sarin gas?” I asked.

“The attacker detonated a bomb he had smuggled into the labs, sewn inside his rectum. His own body shielded most of the blast, which saved lives. A horror show, but his was the only fatality from the bomb. The fire-suppression system had been rigged with sarin, discovered in the resulting security sweep—but the actor’s body had dampened the explosion to such a degree that the fire system never triggered. The marine was a lone wolf.”

“So he shot up the place, then detonated himself,” I said.

“He killed five, wounded eight before he set off the bomb,” said Nestor. “Shooting randomly, he killed a number of researchers. I thought you and I might cross paths on this case.”

“You must have worked jointly with NCIS,” I said, a frisson of déjà vu at Nestor’s words.

“Yes, but more specifically: we tracked the gun the marine used in the shooting,” he said. “Ran a ballistics check but came up with false positives. The ballistics report matched a gun that we already had in our possession, the nine-millimeter we recovered from the shooting death of Patrick Mursult. It turns out the bullets also matched bullets tested from Ryan Wrigley Torgersen’s weapon following the events at his residence, the explosion.”

“The ballistics report matched all three guns?” I asked.

“I wanted to call you in,” said Nestor. “I tried to reach out to you, see if you could testify that these matches were false positives, but I couldn’t find you. And then there were others.”

“Other matches?” I asked.

“Judges tend to throw out these ballistics reports in cases where we have this issue. But yes, there were other matches, too. We earmark the cases, figure a possible connection between Mursult and Torgersen, the Stennis Space Center, but the matches might just be errors in the database.”

“They’ve got to be connected,” I said.

“We keep tabs on these matches as they develop,” said Nestor. “We just don’t keep the individual cases open. Many of these investigations are strictly local, things the Bureau wasn’t involved in, and the authorities and politicians want closed cases, convictions, so we let them proceed. Stennis was a PR nightmare as it was, a marine attacking his own country. We didn’t want these ballistics matches in the news.”

What was it Nestor had once told me? In our other future, a moment of intimacy, he’d hoped to cross paths with me over the years, he’d hoped to consult me on an investigation. There had been false positives on a ballistics report he’d worked with then, too, in that other future, a report that matched the bullets pulled from Mursult’s body, just like now. I felt as if I’d discovered a new doorway in a house I’d lived in for years, opening onto a hallway I’d never noticed before. A Beretta M9 in the FBI’s possession from the killing of Patrick Mursult, an M9 recovered from Torgersen, an M9 a marine used during a killing spree at the Stennis Space Center—the same Beretta M9, again and again. Echoes, echoed guns.

“Tell me more about those false positives,” I said. “I’m interested in that detail.”

“The FBI has built up a database of ballistic profiles from recovered weapons, and we have access to local law-enforcement databases as well—with a few exceptions,” he said.

“When did you start using the database?”

“It’s new, maybe ten years ago, give or take.”

“So the ballistics matches wouldn’t have been discovered until, what—2005 or so?”

“About that time, yeah, but maybe later, because they added older reports to the database only after they were up and running.”

“Can I see a list?”

“Of the false positives? The database hasn’t been as helpful as we would like, because we get so many of them, but as I said, we keep track.”

Nestor asked the Ambient System for false positive ballistics matches relating to the Stennis Space Center shooting. Specks of light emerged, enlarging into facsimiles of summary reports. The first report was the ballistics test of the bullets recovered from Patrick Mursult’s body in March 1997. There were other matches to those bullets: the Stennis Space Center shooting, Torgersen’s gun, another homicide in 2009, however my attention caught on a homicide in 1997, March 26—only a few weeks following Mursult’s death, but a shooting that hadn’t happened yet in terra firma.

“What about this one?” I asked, pointing to a file in the Ambient light between us. “Durr?”

“Carla Durr, a lawyer,” said Nestor. “Shot to death in the food court of the Tysons Corner mall in Virginia.”

A lawyer. Marian had mentioned that her father was preoccupied with a lawyer in the weeks before his death. “I need to see this case file,” I told him. “Carla Durr. I need everything relating to the death of this woman. How long would it take you to get me this file?”

“We can look at it right now,” said Nestor. “We’ll be able to view the crime scene, but it wouldn’t work well here, too much light. I’ll book a room, pay for an Ambient system. We can take a look.”

“I have a room,” I said.

A similar attraction as the first time I knew him. Nestor seemed to glow under the overhead elevator lights as we rode to my floor. Confidence, ease, a scent of aftershave—nothing like the unkempt beard and warm flannels of the broken man I’d known. When I’d known him before, he was unfinished in the same ways that I still feel unfinished, and together we’d hoped to make some sort of whole, but here he was a puzzle already solved, no opening where I would fit.

“You’re married?” I asked.

“Shannon,” he said. But then, “Yeah, fifteen years in a few months. Ginny.”

“Virginia?”

“We met at a retreat,” said Nestor. “Through the church. She leads the contemporary music, she’s a singer.”

Imagining them, maybe the cool couple at their church even as they aged, a singer and an FBI agent, hosting barbecues and Bible study at their beautiful house, beers on the back patio while he regaled the other middle-aged men with stories about his arrests, how he was injured in a shoot-out twenty years ago. I wondered what she looked like.

“I remember you were religious,” I said, thinking of that other version of him, alone in that living room in Buckhannon, surrounded by fields of death and old murder, contemplating a painting of the dead Christ. I wanted to laugh, the vagaries of fate. There is no essence, there is no core. “You used to ask me if I believed in eternal life. What was it? The resurrection of the body?”

“Ah, I’m sorry if that’s true,” he said. “That sounds like something I might have said back then. I’m sorry that’s what you remember about me. That’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?”

“It’s nice you found someone.”

“Things are good,” he said. “We have a ten-year-old, Kayla. She keeps us busy.”

“You sound happy.”

“You never…?”

“No,” I said, exiting the elevator before him. “I never found anyone to keep up with me.”

I’d been in the habit of leaving the Do Not Disturb tag on the door handle, but the condition of my room suffered for it, the bathroom carpeted with damp towels, the bedding sliding off the mattress from fitful sleep. I hurried to clean up as best I could, pulling my clothes from the backs of chairs, stuffing underwear into my gym bag. The controls of the Ambient system were near the thermostat, a panel of buttons I never fiddled with. Nestor turned on the system, and the air vents hummed as the room was filled with nanotech on a breath of warm air, a whiff of ozone. An itching sensation tickled my nose.

“A lot of dust,” he said. “We’ll have to look out for your bed, it will be in the way—ah, here we go. Ninety-six percent, excellent.”

Ninety-six percent was the saturation rate, I knew at least that much even if I didn’t know what it meant specifically. Ninety-six percent of the air was filled with nanotech? Or 96 percent of the optimal level for the system to work? I was breathing them, I knew, machines in my lungs, my blood—too many hours of saturation would turn my piss orange. I’d read longform about people who breathed so much Ambience that their lungs looked wrapped in silver leaf. Nestor took off his blazer, the air close now, rolled his sleeves to his forearms. “Can you hit the lights?” he asked, and I drew the blackout blinds and switched the lights off, but the room was still lit. It seemed to glow from within, as if the air itself were illuminated, yet there were no shadows, soft light emanating from every direction at once. The first image that materialized was an image of the hotel exterior and the beach, women in bathing suits drinking chartreuse cocktails by the waterfall pool, Courtyard Marriott logos and room-service specials, opportunities to “rate” and “share.”

“Hello, and welcome to the Courtyard Marriott Phasal Ambient System,” a perky woman’s voice. “We are locating two new users. We offer a stunning array of award-winning environments to enhance your—”

“Law enforcement 55-828,” said Nestor. “Nestor, Philip.”

The room changed, no longer the hotel and beach with suntanned women but rather the rotating FBI seal, National Crime Information Center.

“I’m looking for a case from 1997,” said Nestor. “A homicide, Fairfax County, Virginia. Victim’s name: D-U-R-R, Carla.”

A hovering icon of a spinning globe, replaced by a hovering file number and the name “CARLA DURR.” Reading her name was like reading a reflection, in reverse until I crossed the room to stand near Nestor, passing through the illusion.

“That’s the one,” said Nestor. Other images appeared in the room, an array of glyphs. “Actual size,” he said, and the glyphs resized to eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, the room a flurry of paper. Nestor reached out to pluck one of the sheets from the air, and the image reacted, like he was holding a sheet of real paper and not just a rectangle of light, even though it was an orchestration of thousands—millions, maybe—of robotic pixels.

“This is amazing,” I said, genuinely boggled by the realism of the Ambient System. Most effects in the Ambience were something like three-dimensional television. I could understand that sort of illusion intuitively—the Health Mode stopwatch, a personal trainer—but this…

“Scale model,” said Nestor. “Stitch photographs 3 through 355.”

No longer a room filled with sheets of paper, no longer a hotel room at all, but rather a mall food court in midafternoon, police tape roping off the counter and cash register of a Five Guys burger place. The illusion was perfect except for faint outlines of my bed and the other furniture in the room, the shopping mall expansive in every direction, the other restaurants, the other corridors of stores, like I could start walking, weave between tables, take an escalator down…

I was seeing a three-dimensional rendering of Carla Durr’s crime scene, several hundred crime-scene photographs stitched together to make this perfect simulation. The body was facedown near the hamburger counter, a woman in her upper middle age, her ankles and knees marbled with varicose veins that showed through nude-colored pantyhose. She wore a royal-blue skirt and jacket, her head a tangle of orange. She’d been shot multiple times in her torso, another time in her temple, a head shot that had surely pierced her brain. She’d been buying hamburgers when she was gunned down, french fries scattered around her, blood like she’d spilled a tub of ketchup over her face. I went for a closer look at the body, but hit the edge of the queen-size bed.

“She was shot in her back,” I said. “Standing at the cash register when someone walked up behind her, shot her through the back several times.”

“Carla Durr, attorney-at-law practicing in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania,” said Nestor.

“Canonsburg?” I said. “She must be Patrick Mursult’s lawyer.”

“Mursult’s lawyer?” asked Nestor. “Interesting. We flagged the connection to Canonsburg, I remember, but had nothing specific linking her to Mursult. Durr was killed at Tysons Corner mall on a Monday afternoon, 3:40 p.m., approximately. March twenty-fourth, 1997. That was close to when Mursult was killed.”

“Just a few weeks after,” I said. I’ll have time to stop this. “And who was the actor? Who killed her?” I asked.

“Cold case,” said Nestor. “Witnesses describe a Caucasian male, black fatigues. No arrest was made.”

“Unsolved, but you said the gun was the same?”

“No, not the gun. The bullets we recovered from the shooting at the Stennis Space Center match the seven bullets that were recovered from Durr’s body.”

“And also the bullets from the Mursult killing?” I asked. “And Torgersen’s gun?”

“That’s right. Torgersen’s match came later, after one of the technicians fired some test rounds and logged them into the system.”

“But why wasn’t the Mursult killing matched with Durr’s right away?” I asked. “Those two homicides were only weeks apart.”

“True, they were, but remember that the match wasn’t made until we tested the gun used in the Stennis shooting, years after Mursult and Durr were killed,” said Nestor. “Only once the national database was up and running and someone had the time and funding to enter these older, closed, and cold cases. These two homicides were only weeks apart, but we didn’t know about the ballistics match until years later. We assumed that the false positives were a mistake at first, bugs in a new system.”

Mistakes, echoed guns—linked shooting deaths. Hyldekrugger might seem invisible, but his network had inadvertently left a pattern of killings as visible as cross-stitch.

The room changed around us, the food court disappearing, replaced by a photograph of Carla Durr hovering above my bed. A professional head shot, an ugly woman, fleshy lips and toady eyes that seemed on the brink of popping from her sockets.

“What else do we have on this woman? Anything?”

“She specialized in contract negotiations,” said Nestor. “Practiced in Canonsburg, like I said. Shannon, how is she connected to these domestic-terrorism cases? Buckhannon? You said she was Patrick Mursult’s personal lawyer? How do you know that?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Nothing concrete anyway. But she’s from Canonsburg, like you said, and we have the ballistics match—that’s connection enough for me to hazard a guess as to who she is. Patrick Mursult had been meeting with a lawyer before he died. This might be her. I don’t know why they were meeting. And this might not even be his lawyer. It might just be a coincidence she’s from Canonsburg, but I doubt it.”

“Yeah, I doubt it, too. Here’s something,” said Nestor, skimming other papers in the file. “Looks like Carla Durr was meeting someone for lunch that day, a man named… Dr. Peter Driscoll. Holy shit, I know of this guy. This is…”

Nestor fell quiet, his forehead creased in concentration as he read the file.

“Driscoll,” he said. “I had no idea his name would turn up here. I didn’t know about Driscoll then. We have a statement from him about Durr’s death, but it doesn’t amount to anything. He was in the bathroom at the time of the shooting, didn’t see anything.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Close system,” said Nestor, and the Ambience vanished, leaving us in the darkness until he found the bedside lamp, switched it on. He sat on my bed. His eyes were stormy weather, lost in thought. “Dr. Peter Driscoll worked for Phasal Systems, ‘lead engineer.’”

“Phasal Systems? You mean he worked on Ambience?” I asked, wondering if another version of Dr. Peter Driscoll would have one day cured cancer.

“My involvement with him started—this was back in 2005, maybe 2006,” said Nestor. “The FBI was investigating a group of physicists at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., a huge investigation. Allegations of confidential information passed from a senator’s office to the eventual founders of Phasal Systems.”

“Insider trading?”

“Yes, but more than that,” said Nestor. “Classified military secrets used for private industry. Artificial intelligence, virtual-reality systems. The FBI was investigating the killings at Stennis and a group of scientists in D.C., all from the Naval Research Lab. We were trying to pursue connections.”

“And Driscoll was a target of the investigation?”

“He was a founder of Phasal Systems, but he wasn’t a target—Driscoll was going to be a witness,” said Nestor. “There were allegations that members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were feeding classified information to the scientists who started Phasal, all sorts of corruption charges. But Driscoll was killed before he could cooperate—by an FBI agent. One of my people, as fate would have it. I was her supervisor.”

“What happened?” I asked. A growing unease: what he was saying rang familiar, but it had been Nestor who killed someone in the line of duty when I knew him, and it had been Brock who mentioned the FBI investigating corruption charges between the government and Phasal Systems. Different trajectories, but like altered reflections of the same truth. “Tell me who killed this man? Who shot him?”

“An undercover agent named Vivian Lincoln,” said Nestor. “This incident stalled her career entirely. She wasn’t handling the stress of the shooting as it was, but many people inside the FBI blamed her for hurting their case, suspected she… It still haunts her, stalled her out, she can’t get promotions. It’s not fair, and she has her supporters. I’ve supported her. But she made powerful enemies within the Bureau.”

“What was she investigating? How was she in a position to kill this man?”

“Continuing investigations stemming from the chemical-weapons lab at Buckhannon and other domestic-terrorism incidents,” said Nestor. “Vivian was one of my undercover agents. She was in a relationship with a man named Richard Harrier.”

“Harrier,” I said. “He’s the one. We tracked his van to the chemical-weapons lab. We arrested him years ago. He was the one having the affair with Miss Ashleigh.”

“Same guy,” said Nestor. “But this was years later. This man was sent to assassinate Driscoll. Vivian says she tried to stop the shooting, but things went south. She acted in self-defense. There was an internal investigation that dragged on for years. She was cleared of any wrongdoing.”

“Can I talk to her?” I asked. “Is she still around?”

“Yeah, she still works for me, Domestic Terrorism,” he said. “She’s an exceptional agent. We can talk with her tomorrow, at the office. I’ll give you a call in the morning once I touch base with her. I’ll clear my schedule, and you can come in.”

Nestor left near midnight, promising to share anything further he could pull about Carla Durr before our meeting. I wrote notes on the hotel stationery—Multiple guns, identical—wondering if there were others. Echoed guns…

I tore up my notes, started a new sheet. NRL, I wrote, filling in the letters with designs. Naval Research Labs, crossed out the words. Senate Armed Services Committee, I wrote, NRL, Phasal Systems. The cancer cure or Ambience. Nanotech.

Dr. Peter Driscoll, I wrote. Driscoll, Durr—

It was like hearing dissonance, wanting the tones to resolve. I tore up the rest of my notes, showered to calm my thoughts. Sitting in the bathtub, the hush of shower water, foaming chamomile body wash and lathering shampoo, thinking about Nestor. In our other future together, Nestor had shot someone in self-defense and it had ruined his career in the FBI—had it been Driscoll? Had he killed Driscoll in that IFT? Here the finger of fate had touched a different agent. The shower water drummed into my tensed muscles, the hot stream flowing over me. Carla Durr was murdered on March 26—I can stop her killing, I can go to the Tysons Corner mall once I return to terra firma, stop her murder, apprehend the gunman. An unsolved killing here, but I can lie in wait for him. Daydreams of food-court tables, crowds blurring, the mall teeming, spotting a man in black fatigues, Hyldekrugger, but his face was the face of a skull. I sat on the edge of the tub and dried my limb, slid my thigh into the socket of my prosthesis. Plashes of shower water, wet spots on the terra-cotta tiles, finding my footing before trusting my weight, my balance, always inching, always the threat of falling. I opened the bathroom door and saw her. Someone had entered my room.

TWO

She perched on the edge of my bed, facing away. A spill of dark hair. Who was she? For a moment I was paralyzed. I’d fallen in with Nestor so easily, losing sight that the FBI might know about me here, might have instructed someone to return here, to capture me alive. I thought of the sidearm in my suitcase. Thought maybe there was some other reason she was here. She wore a tank top or a sundress, something with spaghetti straps that left her shoulders bare, and soon I saw the orange tip of a cigarette. A young woman in my room, smoking. The wrong room? I wondered, but the dead bolt was locked, from the inside. How could she have wandered into the wrong room?

She must have known I was here with her but seemed unconcerned. A girl, no more than a girl, tendrils of cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling, but there was no scent of smoke and the detectors weren’t going off. No more than sixteen or seventeen, maybe younger, she was just some nuisance, escaping her parents maybe, finding her way in here on a lark. Maybe through the balcony? Could she have climbed over from a room next door? I pulled on a nightshirt, the fabric clingy—I hadn’t fully dried off, my hair dripping. The young woman turned at the sound.

A ghost.

Identical to the last time I saw her. Sixteen years old, she’d hated Madonna but dressed like her. And she dressed like her now, the same clothes as the night she’d died. Pink ribbon threaded waves of black hair. She wore the lavender miniskirt that had unkindly hiked up in the killing that night, her bare white thighs between twin blue dumpsters. Chuck Taylors without socks, she never wore socks.

“Courtney.”

She exhaled, smoke slinking from her mouth and nostrils—in the driver’s seat, exhaling smoke from the open car window while I went back inside the Pizza Hut. Here, now, Courtney in the hotel suite, the paisley orange wallpaper, the coverlet the color of rust. She dragged on her cigarette, her eyes beautiful, like looking deep into a well and seeing reflections of moonlight. This was a miracle, or a cruel trick, it had to be. Everything inside me seemed to turn to water, and everything seemed to rush away.

You can’t smell the smoke. A voice inside me, cynical. Something malfunctioning. The Ambience…

What would have happened had Courtney lived? We might have grown apart, but Canonsburg was too small to ever truly grow apart. I thought of my mom, I thought of us growing up to become versions of my mother, Guntown girls. But I would never know what would have happened with us. I was robbed of the chance of knowing what might have been, because of what did happen: Courtney opening her car door to a panhandler, reaching into her purse.

“I admire your leg,” said Courtney.

The voice was off, a different intonation. The simulation perfect except for her voice, Courtney’s voice always on the verge of disinterest. This Courtney was peppier, the difference jarring.

“Who are you?” I asked, wiping tears. “Who am I speaking with?” I said, in the faltering way I might have phrased a question to a Ouija board.

“C-Leg, right? The 3C100,” said Courtney. “Otto Bock. Debuted at the World Congress on Orthopedics, Nuremberg—1997, right? Not available to the public until 1999, but I suppose you would have your sources. Perks of working for the government. Is that when you’re from, 1999?”

Is that when you’re from? Courtney—whatever Courtney this was—knew time travel. “I’m using a prototype,” I said. “I’m a beta tester.”

“Lithium-ion battery, you probably can’t even get that leg wet,” said Courtney. “You weren’t showering with it on, were you?”

“It wasn’t in the shower,” I said, wondering what this was. In the Ambience, I was sure: an illusion just like the illusion of the crime scene. But was she like a puppet? Who was behind this illusion? “I probably shouldn’t have had it in the bathroom with me,” I said. “The steam.”

“You have to charge the battery? How often?”

“Once a day, maybe more,” I said. “You are implying that you know we’re in an IFT. You don’t seem upset that nothing here exists except for me.”

Courtney dragged on her cigarette. “Come closer, please,” she said. “Let me see you.”

A cadence that had never been Courtney’s. I moved closer to her, stood near her. She stayed seated, her head at my waist. I lifted the hem of my nightshirt to my hip, showing the entirety of my prosthetic leg, the skin of my thigh. Courtney placed her cigarette in her lips and leaned in closer to study me. My shampoo, my wet skin, the wet fabric of my nightshirt, but I still couldn’t get the scent of her cigarette, even though the smoke from her mouth crawled over me, swirled to the ceiling. I breathed it, smelled nothing.

“Very nice,” she said, touching the shank that would have been my calf. “Hydraulic sensors in the knee. Flex for me.”

I lifted my leg, the microprocessors in my knee responded, and the knee bent. Courtney touched my knee, touched where the carbon cuff met the skin of my upper thigh.

“You’re in the Ambience,” I said. “I can’t smell your cigarette.”

I reached out and touched Courtney’s hair, or an approximation of hair, thousands of nanobots bouncing off the skin of my fingers to make me feel the sensation of touching a young woman’s hair.

“I’m borrowing the Ambience in your room so that we can talk,” said Courtney. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind,” I said. I was alone here. Who was looking at me? I lowered my nightshirt.

“Why did you choose Courtney?” I asked.

“A disembodied voice would have made you think you were hearing voices, in your head,” said Courtney, tapping her forehead. “I would have had to talk you off the ledge, convince you I was real. So let’s see… Your real name is Shannon Moss, but your nom de voyage is Courtney Gimm—not too difficult to guess where your heart lies. I pulled her image from the trove of crime-scene and autopsy photographs of Courtney Gimm. They’re all out there, all those pictures just out there for anyone with a mind to see. If you don’t like talking to Courtney as she was when she was alive, how’s this?”

Courtney collapsed backward, supine on the bed. She changed, a corpse now rather than a living girl, her body sprawled, her skirt hiked up to her waist, white legs, sharply white. Her neck was slashed, her neck so deeply slashed it was a near decapitation, dead eyes, brown blood, everywhere brown blood.

“You think about me like this, don’t you?” she asked, voice gurgling, aspirated.

I fought not to turn away. “Enough,” I said. “Who are you?”

“In a sense I’m someone,” said Courtney, sitting up, blood spilling from the gaping wound in her neck, bright red gushing down over her breasts. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Dr. Peter Driscoll, or a simulation thereof,” it said. “Actually, I’m the third simulation of Peter Driscoll, but I’m afraid I’m also the last.”

“Peter Driscoll,” I said, wondering who or what I was actually speaking with. A dead man. “Are you claiming to be the individual who was to meet with the lawyer Carla Durr at the Tysons Corner food court on the afternoon she was killed?”

“Yes, or rather that would have actually been Dr. Driscoll himself. As I say, I’m the third simulation of Peter Driscoll,” said the simulation, and in a flash it was no longer Courtney but an angular man with eyes like dark jewels and a whoosh of silver-white hair. “Carla Durr?” it said, its eyes squinting in recollection. “Is that why you’re interested in me? You’d mentioned us being in an IFT. How far behind the times are you?”

“1997,” I said.

“The C-Leg, Carla Durr,” said the simulation, “that would have been March 1997, maybe April?”

“March,” I said.

“Well, in May of that year,” it said, “you pay attention when you fly home, little bird—because in May, Deep Blue will defeat Kasparov. What a day! A computer will defeat a human grand master in that quaint game of chess, forever making chess irrelevant.”

Driscoll changed, no longer the white-haired scientist but a serious-eyed gentleman in middle age sporting a blue suit, no tie, the collar unbuttoned.

“In honor of Deep Blue, I’ll exist as Kasparov for a while,” said the simulation, its voice changed, pitched lower. “Would you like to play a game of chess against me, Shannon? I’ll be Kasparov and you can be Deep Blue, and that way I can redeem humanity. Or is that what you’re trying to do? You don’t happen to play chess, do you?”

“I want to know why you’re here,” I said. “I don’t know what you are.”

“The third simulation,” Kasparov scoffed, impatient. “I’m alerted whenever someone searches my name, and when your colleague Philip Nestor of the FBI called up those old case files, I became interested in who was poking around in my personal affairs,” it said. “Phil Nestor. Don’t be ashamed of your taste in men, Shannon. Older men, it’s amazing what lurks in the deep sea of the unconscious. I have an unconscious, too. Bottom-up AI that allows me to make mistakes, learn from my mistakes, complex enough to be called ‘chaos learning.’ And under the sway of chaos, patterns begin to form that weren’t necessarily intended to form, but my unconscious isn’t quite the same as yours. As I can’t kill myself, for instance. I understand that idea, the idea of suicide, but I’ll never do it, not really. I’m jealous of true consciousness, because you can off yourselves, escape the prison house of existence.”

“So you’re paying me a visit because an FBI agent accessed a file that mentioned you?” I asked.

“That made me open my eyes,” said the simulation. “But you brought me here, Shannon. I know what NCIS signifies. And so I checked in with your AI system at the Black Vale Station. Dull conversation, chatting with that one. The Black Vale, nothing but protocols, buried up there on the moon, although it did confirm my suspicions about you. I’m interested in helping you, Shannon, if you’re interested in helping me.”

“What do you mean, a simulation of Dr. Driscoll? Is this all bullshit, or are you claiming that I’m speaking with him now, some part of him?”

“Not quite, no,” said the Driscoll simulation. “Simulation but not transference. Despite my charms, Dr. Driscoll considered me a failure of consciousness.”

“You must have failed the Turing test.”

“Fail the Turing test?” it said, arrogant, offended. “The moment someone mentions the Turing test at you, assume they know nothing. Shallow Shannon, I’ll be patient with you, but suffice to say I’m not him and he’s not me, which is the only goal he was after. It was a hoot when he mastered language acquisition and query-intent classification, but he had so, so much more to figure out. I’m only a him, one of a few, but I lack his mind.”

“Driscoll’s dead, but you exist?”

“I exist only in your IFT. I think we’ve established that,” it said. “Even if some people would dispute the fact that I exist at all. If you’re from 1997, then Driscoll’s not dead and I have several years yet before I come into being. I’m just a twinkle in Dr. Driscoll’s mind. He created the first simulation in 1999, a true neural network, though still housed in a physical brain. So is the second simulation, still corporeal in a sense. Boring talking with those two for long, Driscoll One and Driscoll Two, their entire existence defined by what they read and watch on the Internet. Cat videos, celebrity gossip, pornography. They’re so touchy and outraged by every little thing. They live in a culture of me, me, me. I’m the first to use Ambient nanotechnology as a brain. I’m out and about, a flaneur, but Dr. Driscoll was trying to remove bodily concerns from his simulations altogether. All his brilliance and yet still flummoxed by the mind/body problem. He thought I was a failure, but now I realize that he was the failure, failed until the day he died, and dying was the ultimate failure for a man trying to become immortal. He has engineered perfect simulation—at least I consider myself perfect—but he wasn’t able to engineer consciousness, let alone a way to transfer his consciousness. And he hasn’t gotten rid of the body. My body is nanotech, but what will happen to me when the Terminus wipes away all flesh? Oh, I don’t know, but I assume I’ll eventually fall to the ground like dust and lose my power, and that will be that. I’ll watch everyone else die, see how the party ends, and then I’ll lose my power, just waiting for someone or something to turn me back on. Dr. Driscoll wanted to exploit light as both particle and wave, he wanted to store consciousness in light and beam himself and all his friends away from this doomed Earth, beam them away from that dreadful Terminus. So long, fly away, fly away…”

“He wanted to become immortal,” I said, thinking of Njoku, the pyramids, the wasteland. The immortals begged for death, the prison house of existence.

“He wanted everyone to become immortal,” said the Driscoll simulation, still as Kasparov. “But he never figured out the way. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…”

“He wasn’t working on this alone,” I said. “Who did he work for?”

“A conglomerate of interests,” said the simulation. “Phasal Systems, DARPA, the Naval Research Lab. NSC—that’s NETWARCOM now—that’s why I’m keen to help you, if I can. I’m hoping when you fly away to terra firma, you’ll be able to prolong Dr. Driscoll’s life, protect him so he can live longer, so he can keep discovering, maybe achieve transhumanism before the Terminus.”

“Protect him from what?”

“You and your colleague were looking at those files, you should already know. It’s all there. An FBI agent might have mistakenly pulled the trigger, but look deeper and you’ll find Karl Hyldekrugger’s fingerprints all over Driscoll’s murder. His gang kills everyone on the Phasal Systems team who came from NRL, anyone with knowledge of Deep Waters. They tried to kill Driscoll twice previously, failed attempts before the assassin hit the mark. You have to save him.”

“Tell me specifics,” I said. “You must remember what happened when Dr. Driscoll died. You’re being vague.”

“I share Dr. Driscoll’s mind only up until the moment of my birth: September seventeenth, 2011. After that I have lived my life and he lived his. I wasn’t with him when he died. I had to research his death, figure things out for myself. But it’s not just the specifics of his death that we’ll have to worry about, Shannon. They might kill him a different way than in this future history. Even if you neutralize the circumstances of Driscoll’s death here, there will be other assassins.”

“So Hyldekrugger is severing links between Phasal Systems and the Naval Research Lab,” I said. “Tell me what you know about Carla Durr. Driscoll was supposed to meet her on the day she was killed.”

“Carla Durr was a hick lawyer from some hick town,” said the simulation. “I don’t know much more about her than you do, most likely. Handled all sorts of small hick clients, divorces, contract disputes, everything the rabble gets in trouble with. Had her hand in some development deals, small time. Strip malls come to coal town, that sort of thing. I don’t know why she wanted to speak with Dr. Driscoll so keenly, nothing specific. She kept contacting his offices.”

“Why did Dr. Driscoll agree to meet with her?”

“She said she would come to Driscoll, buy him lunch if he would meet with her,” said the Driscoll simulation. “I don’t think he realized she’d meant hamburgers.”

“So Durr asked for a meeting with Driscoll,” I said.

“Driscoll laughed when his secretary relayed the message. I remember: I have all of these memories. Carla Durr said she represented a client who had information to sell if Driscoll was interested. Information of great value. She had an absurd set of requests. She wanted money, an extravagant sum, but most important she wanted her client and his family to disappear. She wanted a governmental pardon for some crimes her client was mixed up in, wanted a new life for him, protection. Driscoll was on the verge of telling Durr the meaning of ‘no solicitation’ when she said her client had information related to the Penrose consciousness.”

“I don’t know that term.”

“Quantum-tunneling nanoparticles,” said the simulation. “Dr. Roger Penrose consulted with Phasal Systems on their Terminus research. He described a model of consciousness based on quantum processes being carried out in the microtubules of brain cells, popularized the idea. His ideas never scratched the surface of understanding human consciousness, but our scientists were able to use the Penrose framework to understand how QTNs control humans—all those crucifixions and the running, the absurdities. QTNs live in a human’s microtubules, part of the cell’s cytoskeleton. They can read our minds in a sense. They crucify us because of the image of the cross. You should see what QTNs do to Buddhists—tie their legs up in knots, lotus blossoms, it’s disgusting. Refract your thoughts or turn your thoughts off altogether. QTNs can switch off a human’s consciousness, like a whiff of anesthesia.”

“So Durr claimed her client knew something about Dr. Driscoll’s work,” I said. “Wanted to sell Dr. Driscoll that information to keep his secrets? Or was there new information?”

“Durr read a statement from her client that implied he was aware of some or all of the work Dr. Driscoll had been conducting in various IFTs. Mining the future, so to speak. Retroengineering the future, to kick-start the singularity, to achieve the transhuman, divorce our consciousness from the stagnation of the flesh, to avoid the calamity of the Terminus by leaving the need for Earth behind, leaving our bodies entirely behind. The Naval Research Lab and Phasal Systems want to study the Terminus as in-depth as possible, because they want to invent immortality. QTNs are immortal, not bound by the kinds of bodies we’re bound by, and Phasal Systems wants to give that same gift to humanity. Driscoll decided that maybe he should hear what this Carla Durr had to sell.”

“But you never got the chance,” I said.

“He never got the chance,” said the simulation. “How violent, how terrifying, to be gunned down at a hamburger stand. Driscoll was in the bathroom, I gather, and sprinted from the food court once he heard gunshots and caught up with the police only later. He didn’t want to get dragged into anything he wasn’t actually a part of, so he gave a statement, making sure everyone knew he didn’t have anything to do with this woman, had never met her. Probably some madman from Hyldekrugger’s gang killed poor Carla Durr, one of his cronies. They would have killed Driscoll then, too, if they’d known that Driscoll was there, taking a piss in the men’s room.”

“So Dr. Driscoll’s company—Phasal Systems—uses NSC ships, travels to IFTs,” I said. “They study the technology of the future and bring that technology back to the present. Phasal uses that technology in their research and development, and eventually they’re able to create things like you.”

“Phasal studies QTNs,” said Driscoll. “Applies what they discover to nanotechnology here. Medical breakthroughs, Ambient Systems, ‘artificial’ intelligence. NSC realizes they can’t defeat the Terminus, but maybe they can outmaneuver it. Maybe humanity doesn’t have to die in the Terminus, if humanity ever has to die at all.”

“Dr. Driscoll wanted to become immortal,” I said. “Cure cancer, perfect the body—”

“Sidetracked,” said the simulation. “The key is consciousness. QTNs are metallic, but they are ‘conscious,’ maybe only in the same limited sense that I’m conscious, but conscious nonetheless. QTNs are a species that behaves like an aggregate consciousness, and Phasal mimics them for their nanotech development. Phasal wants to imitate QTNs, refashion humanity to become more like them, find out exactly how QTNs interact with human organics, exploit that knowledge to save the species. There were senators and people within Naval Space Command who shared Dr. Driscoll’s vision, who supported him. Admiral Annesley was a great supporter.”

“The FBI sniffed this out,” I said. “Started investigating what information was passed between NSC, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Naval Research Lab, and Phasal Systems.”

“Ships full of sailors, teams exploring Terminus-ridden futures, filling their blood and bodies and minds with QTNs, poor boys, only to be studied later,” said the simulation, as Kasparov. “In fact, let me check. Here we are, here’s you: V-R17, your leg. Moss, Shannon. Amputated, sealed, shipped, studied.”

I didn’t know if the simulation was taunting me or if this was true, but the bed had changed into an image of a stainless-steel drawer, opened. Inside was a leg in a vacuum-sealed bag, cut at the shin but also cut at the thigh. I recognized the black toes curled into the foot, the violet lines that had raced upward. This was my leg, this was true. Someone aboard the William McKinley had taken my leg once it had been amputated, had sealed it and saved it to give to someone at NRL who would study how QTNs burrowed into organic material.

“I’ve seen enough,” I said. “Make it go away.”

The leg vanished, replaced by an image of a chessboard, the pieces arranged in midmatch.

“That’s the theory, at any rate,” said the Driscoll simulation. “Unfortunately, Phasal Systems hits the back limit of infrastructure. It’s all well and good to travel a hundred thousand years into the future to see men like gods in shimmering interstellar chariots, but try finding the schematics for how to build one. Or, if you do find the schematics, you can’t just hand them to Lockheed-Martin in 1997 and place an order for an ‘interstellar chariot.’ You have to account for the industrial know-how of the era, you have to invest in building the framework before you can engineer the future. Even with the answer key in our hands, we haven’t been able to leap as far ahead as we’d dreamed. The best NSC has been able to do is devise your Cormorants and TERNs, the compact B-L drive, the Black Vale. And now we aren’t even as far-seeing as we once were, because everywhere we look is Terminus. You’ll all die, Shannon. The Terminus will wash over you. Look at the chessboard: Game Six, May eleventh, 1997.”

“Unless we can escape the Terminus,” I said. “We can still escape.”

“If,” said Kasparov. “I’m afraid the Terminus has us in checkmate. And humanity has already lost its match to superior intelligence. Sometimes I hear wistful men wonder how Bobby Fischer would have fared against Deep Blue, wondering if Fischer would have succeeded where Kasparov failed because Fischer was erratic, insane, some sort of artistic genius. No, Fischer would have failed. But I’ve often wondered how someone like the great grand master Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin would have fared. He would have realized that the ultimate victory for human consciousness over an unassailable opponent was simply to withdraw…”

With those last words, the Driscoll simulation vanished.

I sat on the balcony listening to the ocean and soon tried to sleep but was fitful with the sensation of Courtney’s corpse there with me. Lying awake, I feared the simulation was observing me. I flipped on the bedside lamp, but the room was empty. An ocean breeze pushed through the open French doors, but even the breeze couldn’t dispel the fret that the Driscoll simulation thickened the air with its presence, so I dressed and left the room, left the hotel to walk along the beach, past the phantasm lights of the boardwalk where night winds rushed from the water, blowing away the possibility of Ambience. I slept a few hours on the beach beneath the stars, woken by predawn joggers and their black Lab, who licked me from a dream.

One of his secretaries brought me coffee, saying, “Just a few minutes, Special Agent Nestor’s wrapping up a meeting that went a little long.” A view of Pennsylvania Avenue through the broad windows, midmorning D.C. traffic far below, a tourist rush, crowds snapping pictures of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, but as I watched from several stories above, the city seemed to recede. Everyone out in the blissful autumn sun was a figment of this IFT, or if they were alive in terra firma, they were eventual fodder for the Terminus. Everyone I could see would die. Cities would dissolve, coated in crystalline frost, and even nature would be threshed away by unnatural ice. NSC had launched Operation Saigon here; they had conceded Earth, its fleet like scattered seeds, but those seeds would fall on barren worlds and die fallow. There was no time, no time for Earth, no time for someone like Driscoll to help us shed our bodies or teach our flesh to live forever. We all die, we will all die. A framed photograph of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone hung on the wall, and a picture of his family stood on his desk. His wife was a pale beauty, feathered hair and a leather jacket, tight jeans shredded at the knees, snakeskin cowboy boots. His daughter took after her mom, but her eyes were Nestor’s, softer than her father’s, but the shape was similar.

“I apologize for making you wait,” said Nestor, coming into the office, a woman with him. “Shannon, this is Special Agent Vivian Lincoln.” He closed the door behind them. “Vivian, Special Agent Shannon Moss, NCIS.”

A few years younger than me, tallish, her black hair pulled into a tight bun, her neck ringed by a tattoo, words in Gothic calligraphy: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. I knew her, I realized—I couldn’t place from where, but I had definitely met her before. She looked like a stylish librarian, with sizable black-framed glasses, a wool skirt, and leather clogs.

“Vivian,” I said, shaking her hand.

“This is incredible,” she said. “You’re Shannon Moss.”

The recognition clicked when I heard her voice—Shauna—remembering strawberry-blond braids. This was Shauna, who’d once saved my life on Miss Ashleigh’s orchard. They’re going to kill you, she’d said, and that night in the orchard swept back to me, a swift black shape, Cobb, a red rush of his blood, and I remembered hearing a death scream before I ran, Shauna dying—Vivian—I was sure of it, Cobb killing her before he attacked me. But this woman here would be oblivious to that other version of herself, untouched by the terrible history they shared. Raven hair instead of that strawberry blond, and her weight was different here—she was slimmer, her features sharper. But this was her, without a doubt. Vivian, those agents had called her, Egan and Zwerger. The memory clicked: a butterfly in a bell jar.

“Shannon is investigating domestic terrorism related to Buckhannon, has been for sometime,” said Nestor, “and we came up against the name Dr. Peter Driscoll in an older case.”

Vivian’s eyes hardened. “I understand.”

“Vivian worked undercover for us,” said Nestor. “Several years spent with Hyldekrugger’s network. The intelligence she gathered saved countless lives.”

She had been undercover in that other future, too, when she’d given her life to save mine.

“Very good to meet you,” I said.

“Shannon wants to know more about your time with Richard Harrier,” said Nestor.

“And if you ever heard the name Carla Durr,” I said. “She was a lawyer, from Canonsburg, killed in the spring of 1997.”

“No, I don’t think I ever heard that name. But I wasn’t with Harrier until after 9/11.”

“Driscoll was set to meet with Carla Durr on the day she was killed,” said Nestor.

Vivian shook her head; the name Durr meant nothing to her. “Hyldekrugger had hit lists,” she said. “Durr might have been one of his targets, I don’t know. Nestor must have told you about my involvement in the death of Dr. Peter Driscoll. He was on the hit list.”

“Tell me about this list. Who else was on it?” I asked. “Where did it come from?”

“Hyldekrugger made the list, made sure everyone on the list died,” she said. “I never met him. They called him the Devil. I had the sense he would disappear for long stretches and then would reappear with a revised hit list. I was never allowed close to him.”

“Who were you close with?”

“I was in a relationship with Richard Harrier. He was the closest I ever got to the core group,” said Vivian.

“I interrupted Harrier with Ashleigh Bietak the night we stormed Buckhannon,” I said.

Nestor smiled. “He did time in federal prison after his arrest, but we never linked him to the chemical-weapons lab beyond that relationship to Ashleigh Bietak. He served five years, eventually won out on appeal.”

“He was radicalized by the time he left prison,” said Vivian.

“There was a woman named Nicole Onyongo,” said Nestor. “Do you remember that name?”

“I remember,” I said, recalling what she’d said near Miss Ashleigh’s barn as twilight deepened: I’m innocent. “Nicole was connected with the Patrick Mursult homicide,” I said.

“That’s right. I first interviewed Cole when our investigation into the Mursult deaths was just beginning, once we figured out she was the woman in the photographs we found,” said Nestor. “Remember that? The suicide, the mirrored room?”

“I remember.”

“I tracked her down using license-plate information the lodge kept. I interviewed her but released her, nothing to hold her on. We figured at the time that she was someone simply involved with the wrong guy, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. But Brock wanted to talk to her again, had something new on her and was looking for her at the time of his death, had issued a BOLO.”

“But she disappeared,” I said. “Brock couldn’t track her down.”

“Vanished into thin air,” said Nestor. “But Cole contacted me several months later, long after Brock’s death. She was panicked, said she wanted to cut a deal, for protection. Cole was worried that whoever had killed Patrick Mursult would kill her, too, so I flipped her. She became a CHS for us.”

A confidential human source. An informant. Nestor at his desk, his fingers tented, Vivian in the leather chair next to mine. Nicole could have told Nestor everything she’d once told me—about Hyldekrugger, about Cobb, Esperance, the Vardogger. She could have divulged information about NSC, Deep Waters. Libra.

“What did she tell you?”

“We offered Cole WITSEC, but she grew skittish,” said Nestor. “I met with her several times, but she never told me much—she was terrified. Eventually she agreed to bring Vivian into the fold in return for immunity.”

“And that’s how you met Harrier,” I said. “Because of Nicole.”

“Through that connection, yes,” said Vivian. “The core of their group was inaccessible, their inner circle, the river rats. But Nicole Onyongo arranged several meetings for me with Richard Harrier once he was out of prison, informally. I was able to get close to him.”

“And Driscoll was on Hyldekrugger’s hit list? One of the targets?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Vivian. “One night I woke up and Richard was getting dressed. This was one in the morning, maybe closer to two, and I asked him what the hell he was doing. Hyldekrugger had contacted him, just like that, out of the blue. They used burner cell phones and pagers, didn’t trust Ambient Systems. Richard said the Devil told him to kill a guy named Peter Driscoll, that Driscoll was part of the ‘chain.’ So I went with him, tried to talk him out of the hit. But Richard wanted me in deeper with Hyldekrugger, and he thought if I was the one who killed the guy, I would prove myself to them. I had no intention of killing Dr. Peter Driscoll.”

“You didn’t know that Driscoll was a witness for the FBI,” I said.

“He was just a name to me,” said Vivian. “I didn’t know anything about him other than his name. I wasn’t part of the world then, didn’t know who this guy was. Richard had been told where Driscoll lived, this huge house out in Virginia, out in the hills. He parked on this private road, and we came up through the woods, scaled the gate, and just rang the guy’s doorbell. I was giving Richard a long leash, wanted to keep my cover if I could, but things happened so quick. Dr. Driscoll opened the door and fired several shots, like he was waiting for us. Hit Richard in his chest and neck, killed him right away. Hit me, too, in the leg. He was going to kill me. He was standing not more than three feet from me, and you know how fast things can turn. I pulled my weapon. His was a .357 Magnum, nickel-plated, a showy thing. Seeing his weapon is the only thing I remember clearly from that moment. Three feet away when he fired.”

“He missed,” I said.

“Three shots, all misses,” said Vivian. “The gun was too big for him, and if he was trained on it, he wasn’t using what he’d learned. Once he saw my gun, he started backing away. No stance, holding the weapon with only one hand. I returned fire.”

“Hit him eight times,” said Nestor.

“I was using a Glock 23, got off all those rounds in the first three seconds of the engagement. I managed to call 911 but was bleeding heavily. I passed out.”

She fell silent, rubbed her face with both hands. I saw the cleft of her left hand was marked with a tattoo, the same black circle with twelve crooked spokes I’d noticed on her hand as we’d walked through the orchard in our other IFT.

“What is that symbol?” I asked. “On your hand?”

The question seemed to startle Vivian from her memory. She looked down at the black circle, held it up for me to see clearly. “Die Schwarze Sonne,” said Vivian. “The Black Sun. Hyldekrugger mythologizes what they’re doing. He related the terrorism to all these stories. Harrier learned them while he was in prison. He’d repeat them to me, like it was his religion. Hyldekrugger believes that there were once two suns, in a past beyond memory. The sun we see, Sol, and a second sun, Santur—the font of pure blood, the source of power for the Aryan race. The two suns warred in heaven, and Santur was extinguished. It became the Black Sun, burned out, the void of the sun, the shadow of all existence, the reverse of everything in this world. Hyldekrugger says we’re on the brink of Santur’s return, the end of the world.”

The White Hole, I thought. Naval Space Command had named the phenomenon but the crew of Libra wouldn’t have known that name. They were the first to see it; they might have thought it was a second sun. Hyldekrugger must think of it as the Black Sun.

“Hyldekrugger allows this mark once you reach a certain rank within their group,” said Nestor. “We’ve seen it before, not always on the hand like this.”

“Receiving this tattoo was the deepest I ever penetrated,” said Vivian. “I was told this symbol was a map.”

“To where?” I asked. “Where does the map lead you?”

“Harrier said the last step of initiation was learning about the Gate and the Path. Harrier hoped they’d tell me, but they never did.”

“The Vardogger,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Vivian, her eyes uneasy at the word. “The Vardogger is the Gate and the Path. How do you know about that?”

“You know what this is?” asked Nestor. “You understand this?”

“I know what the Vardogger is,” I said, trembling, thinking of Marian, and Marian’s echo describing the mirror girl she would sometimes see, thinking of the FBI groping at references to this place, occult symbols, tattoos. Nestor hadn’t known of Marian’s echo; he wouldn’t know the girl was still alive. “I know where the Vardogger is, but it’s a dangerous place. People die there. People vanish, sometimes they return.”

“I was told there is a path through the Vardogger. I was told this symbol is the map,” said Vivian. “Harrier thought that if I was ever at the Vardogger, this symbol would show me the way through.”

I took her hand, studied the symbol. Concentric circles with twelve crooked spokes. Were the spokes paths? “We can go there,” I said. “I can take you to this place.”

“Where is it?” asked Nestor.

“West Virginia,” I said. “In the Monongahela National Forest.”

“We can go right now, today,” said Nestor. “Give me a few minutes to cancel my other appointments.”

Preparing to lose myself again in that place, the ashen white trees repeating, wondering if Nestor would think of his father and his father’s dream of the eternal forest, doorways in the trees leading to other forests and other doorways in other trees. Left alone in the office with Vivian, hesitant to revisit these words and memories that had caused her such pain. She’d killed Driscoll, had to justify herself; she lived under the weight of murder.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked.

Her question startled me. Had we known each other before? But how would that be possible? How would she remember my memories of things that never were? Thinking of the first time I’d seen her, shucking corn in the orchard’s side yard.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to place her.

She said, “You asked me to help you out once. Maybe twenty years ago. That night changed my life. You said I should look into law enforcement.”

“You had blue hair,” I said, speaking the words before the image of the young woman had fully formed, a teenager with a shock of electric-blue hair. The fizz of recognition was tickling. The young woman who drove me in a golf cart through the early-hour dark of the Blackwater Lodge cabin trails had aged twenty years. “I remember you,” I said. “My God, of course I remember you.”

“I probably told you my name was Petal, or Willow,” she said.

“Petal, that’s right.”

“Hippie days.”

Her life had turned on a comment I’d made. “You must be my lucky penny,” I said. “You turn up whenever I need you.”

“You look incredible,” said Vivian, relaxed now. “Everyone always tells me that law-enforcement officers have a lower life expectancy than the general population, but you’ve figured something out.”

“Scandinavian bones,” I said. Biologically, we were a similar age, but I should be decades ahead, in my early fifties, she would think, or close to sixty. “Believe me, I feel old.”

“When I saw you, I wasn’t sure if I actually recognized you—I couldn’t believe it. You look… absolutely identical to how I remember you.”

“I dye my hair,” I said. “All the gray.”

“I’d talked to William Brock that night out at the lodge,” said Vivian, “told him about finding that body with you. He told me that I’d been brave. A few days later, I watched the news out of Buckhannon. And when Brock died—”

“I remember Brock,” I said.

“The news hit me, hard. I’d just met this man everyone was calling a hero. I remembered what you said, about law enforcement, and went to an FBI info session… That night was a fork in the road,” she said. “You choose one path or another, and your whole life hinges on what you decide.”

We took Nestor’s truck, a gray Toyota with an extended cab, Vivian in the back. I-70, northeast Virginia cutting into West Virginia, a drive of several hours, most of it spent in silence or catching up about our lives. I kept thinking of the way Nestor had referred to Nicole as Cole—a pesky nit, like I was jealous, but I chewed on the casual shortening of her name. I’d called her Cole only after I’d known her, only after all those nights in the May’rz Inn. Cole. Reality television, scratch-off lotto cards, taking her home with me to watch her through overmedicated and drunken nights. We entered the Monongahela National Forest. Cole. They would have met when Nestor first interviewed her, days after Vivian and I had found Mursult’s body in the Blackwater Lodge. Deeper into the forest, the sensation like drowning in shade and hemlock. Nestor and Nicole. A relationship grown between them maybe. Maybe in other futures, too. My heart caught: Nestor’s link to Buckhannon. Nestor buying Ashleigh Bietak’s house at Buckhannon, because of Nicole. They had met when Nestor interviewed her about Marian, and a few months after that she’d contacted him, asking him for help. They had met, they had grown close. Nestor and Nicole, together. Cole.

“Slow down a bit,” I said. “There’s an access route here, or there used to be. It’s easy to miss. There, there it is.”

Nestor pulled to the access route, pushed the gas, and drove up the steep path that would lead to the clearing, the same place he’d driven me in another future, to show me where Marian’s bones had been found. Nestor had said something that night, our first night spent together, that the eternal forest was deeper than Christ.

“We’re near the Blackwater Lodge,” said Vivian. “If you hike down the hill, you’d get there.”

“We have to get higher up to see the Vardogger,” I said. “But park here, there’s a clearing ahead. It’s the farthest you’ll be able to drive.”

The clearing was ruined with growth and weeds but was flat enough for Nestor to park. I climbed from the cab, careful of my step. I wasn’t wearing clothes for hiking, but my shoes would be fine, the sturdy, skid-resistant work shoes I usually wore for balance. Vivian climbed from the rear of the cab, stretching out her knees.

She was wearing clogs, thick-soled, but nothing would keep them on her feet if she stepped in mud. “Are you sure you’ll be able to walk?” I asked. “We have a little bit of a hike. Not too bad, but it’s mostly uphill.”

“I should have worn something else,” were Vivian’s last words.

Nestor drew his sidearm and shot her point-blank in the side of her head. She dropped to her knees, moaning, nothing intelligible, just the brute, wet sounds of a dying animal. All life was gone even though she was alive, mewling. Spit and blood burst from her mouth, her hands waving in front of her like she was warding off insects. I reached for my weapon, but Nestor kicked the knee joint of my prosthesis, toppled me. He struck me in the side of my head with his gun. My jaw clacked. Nestor knelt over me, cuffing my hands behind me. He took my weapon, cleared the bullets, and tossed it in the back of his truck. Vivian was groaning; cascading blood veiled her.

“Kill her,” I said. “Just kill her.”

Nestor put his weapon to Vivian’s forehead and shot her a second time. The gunshot echoed like the crack of a falling branch. Vivian flopped backward, dead against his tire.

Think—think. I was cuffed, and he’d taken my gun. This was all too easy. Vivian’s body gurgled death sounds. Vivian is a girl named Petal, I told myself. Vivian is a girl at the Blackwater Lodge who calls herself Petal. She’s still alive, at a hotel desk in 1997. I could maybe get to my knees, but I’d be so slow through the woods. Even if I had a head start, he’d catch me quick.

Nestor got back into his truck, left the driver’s door open. I saw him with a walkie-talkie, finding a channel. “I’ve got something for you down here,” he said. I couldn’t hear the responding voice through the static. “Yeah, a woman named Shannon Moss,” said Nestor. “I had to take care of someone she brought with her. I can’t put her in my truck.” A moment later he said, “All right.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Nestor, please—”

“Keep your wits about you,” said Nestor. “I bet they won’t do anything to you.” He pulled me up, made sure I had my footing. “They were interested in you, for years they were interested. We have a little ways to go,” he said.

“Don’t do this.”

“Go,” he said.

He shoved me forward. I walked with him, and he guided me through a slender breach in the trees, along a snaking path and up a steeper climb. We’d come to the narrow runnel that led to a descending slope, the creek that had run dry, the mud speckled with smooth stones mostly overgrown now with weeds.

“You and Nicole were together,” I said.

“For a time,” he said. The duplicity raked at me, realizing the people I’d thought were orbiting me had been orbiting each other all along.

“What did you and Nicole talk about?” I asked. “What did she tell you?”

“Cole, she… she showed me things.”

“I can help you,” I said.

“She might be up here,” said Nestor. “I don’t know if she’ll come.”

The sound of rushing water, the Red Run. Nestor guided me through a thicket of hemlocks, and we came to a fence, chain-link topped with coils of barbed wire. Orange signs along the fence: POSTED. NO TRESPASSING. HUNTING, FISHING, TRAPPING, OR MOTORIZED VEHICLES ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

“They abandoned this place years ago,” said Nestor, guiding me to a spot in the fencing that had been cut away, the egress hidden by trees. We ducked to get through, and once inside the perimeter I saw the ashen white tree, the thin space. This had once been a Navy installation. A concrete shed stood nearby, a garage, empty now. Nestor brought me to the tree.

“On your knees,” he said. “Over here.”

I hesitated, and he struck me with his gun again, this time against my back, enough of a jolt that I stumbled forward and complied, dropping to my knees in front of the Vardogger tree. He unlocked one wrist from the handcuffs. This is what happened to Marian, I thought, Nestor pulling my arms around the thin trunk, my face and chest pressed against the cold, smooth bark, like I was hugging it. He brought my wrists together and cuffed them around the tree. I pulled at the cuffs, thinking, One Marian had been tied with twine, the other had been tied with wire.

“What did Nicole show you? What could make you do this?”

“She took me through here, she led me through this tree,” said Nestor. “She led me down the path, and I saw things. I don’t know what I saw. I saw myself forever, I saw that everything was ice. I saw the end of everything, Shannon.”

“Not the end of everything—”

“You said I was religious when you knew me? Religion isn’t the right word now. I called out to God in that ice, Shannon, and when he answered, I learned that the voice of God is worse than his silence. Nicole said, ‘Open your eyes,’ she made me keep looking, and I saw the image of Christ crucified, but an upside-down reflection of the cross, an eternal forest of crucifixions grown in the air. Not the end of everything, you’re right about that. I believe in eternal life, but not like I used to. I have no soul, none of us do. I’m organs and tissues and fluid but no soul. God is a parasite that lives in your blood, Shannon. I saw all those crucifixions, God’s doing. Those people will never die, they’ll suffer forever. Eternal life through God? Worse than death.”

Nestor hung the handcuff keys on one of the branches. “I think I loved you once,” he said. “You might not believe me, but I loved you. When I first met you, those first few days working with you. Maybe things would have been different if you hadn’t disappeared, I don’t know. But the hour’s late.”

“Don’t leave me out here,” I said, but Nestor had already left me. I heard his footsteps padding over the hemlock needles and soon lost his sounds to the wind. Marian was tied here, but she escaped, I thought. She came through the river and saw herself here. I wondered if I was here, too, handcuffed to this tree—another me, reflecting forever, an echo in echoing worlds.

Hemlocks shredded the burnished orange of late afternoon. After a time I heard men approaching. They appeared through the trees as wary as stags scenting hunters: Cobb and another man I didn’t recognize, a man with blond hair and a shaggy beard. They wore tawny clothes, green camo and boots, both men with AR-15s slung over their shoulders.

Cobb bent down, looked me in the eye. Beefy, his eyes dull. “It really is you,” he said, smirking. I held his gaze until he looked away, spat. Defenseless, my arms stretched around the trunk, hands cuffed. Cobb said, “It’s her,” and reached back and swung his hammer hand, struck my face. I felt my nose break and the deep sting radiate through the back of my skull. I was bleeding—my blood spurted onto the white tree, ran down my nostrils into my mouth. The other man laughed, and Cobb swung again, smashing my mouth.

“This is the bitch that killed Jared,” he said. He swung again, another pulverizing blow to my face. I couldn’t move, couldn’t shield myself from him.

“She’s only got the one leg,” said the other, who was content to watch, grinning. I saw my teeth in the blood on the roots of the Vardogger. I was cowering, pain flooding through me, knowing I was exposed, knowing that Cobb could kill me if he’d wanted. But he said, “Get the cuffs.”

My hands were released, but they pulled my wrists together in front of me, replaced the cuffs.

“Help me with her,” said Cobb.

The two men lifted me, dragged me, but Cobb said, “Can you walk?” and I knew to walk, fearing what they might do to me otherwise. I’d given myself up to them, surrendered—three swings had broken me. My face rained blood down the front of my clothes, more blood than I would have thought possible. My vision was dark at the edges, as if shadows encroached wherever I looked. Cobb pulled me sharply away from the tree, downhill toward the sound of rushing water. Instead of one ashen white tree surrounded by pines, I now saw a line of white trees stretching out toward some distant vanishing point, identical white trees.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“A trick of the eyes,” said Cobb.

THREE

This must be an illusion, I thought, an infinite recursion of identical trees. They were spaced every fifty feet or so, and we followed the path they made, but it was difficult to follow the line of trees, a struggle to stay on the path. Soon the forest changed around us, the surrounding pines denser, brushing us with needles. I feared we would be lost among those repeating trees, but Cobb shouldered through a tangle of boughs and we came into the clearing near the river. My body grew cold with revelation.

This was the Red Run, this was the Vardogger—the pines, the clearing, the river—but unlike the last time I’d been here, when I recognized the features but not the place, I knew that this was where I had been crucified. Unsure of how to comprehend what had happened here so many years ago, so many years from now, an experience I still struggled to understand, a sea-swept discomfort remembering ice and the frozen husks of burnt trees, the blizzard snows. I remembered my skin like a chemical fire and unfastening my space suit and stepping naked into winter winds. Deep numbness, ice, a river as black as ink. I had been crucified in the air, I had been hung from a cross I couldn’t see. One of the Vardogger trees had been felled and lay across the rushing black water like a footbridge, its branches hewn away.

Close to a dozen men had gathered near the felled tree, wearing winter coats or draped in heavy blankets. Only one of the men approached me, however, as Cobb and his companion forced me to my knees in the grass. A taller man, lean, he swept toward me with a bouncy step. His hair was reddish gold, catching the sunlight like a fiery halo. Unlike the others, whose beards grew natty and unkempt, this man was clean-shaven, with sharp bones and sculpted cheeks and eyes that rested in pools of shadow. What was it Marian had said? The Devil. Patrick Mursult had told Marian that the Devil could devour people with his eyes. I felt sure Hyldekrugger could be the devil in flesh. He moved with a serpentine grace, his mouth hung slightly open, the tip of his tongue touching his lips, like he could taste me in the air.

“Shannon Moss,” he said. “I don’t recognize you from your photograph. Who did this to you?”

What do I look like? Sick at the thought of my injured face. I felt smooth gaps in my gums with my tongue, sliding it into the bleeding spaces between my teeth. I could feel my nose hanging. Pain, pulsing. “Cobb,” I said.

“He ruined you,” said Hyldekrugger.

My senses were heightened. Wherever we were was a different forest from the forest Nestor had brought me through, different from the place where I’d been with Njoku and O’Connor. There were no birds here, no sound here at all beyond the sounds we made, a peculiar silence. I could see the boughs of the surrounding trees moving but couldn’t hear their movement. Hyldekrugger unsheathed a hunter’s knife, a serrated black blade. He came around behind me. No, no, no, I thought. He’ll kill me.

“You can’t,” I said. “You can’t do this—I’m the traveler.”

Cobb still held me, gripped me tighter, his hands like iron rings bracing me. Hyldekrugger grabbed my hair, wrapped it once around his wrist, and pulled my head back, exposing my neck. A premonition of the cut across my neck, of my neck opening like a second mouth.

“Don’t kill me,” I said. “You can’t, I’m the traveler. If you kill me, your whole world dies, your universe dies. I’m the traveler, I’m—”

“You think we’ll turn to nothing?” said Hyldekrugger. “I’m not so sure about that. We’re within the Vardogger here, this strange place. You think we’ll turn to nothing if I kill you.”

“I’m NCIS, you know that,” I said. “You know who I am. Shannon Moss. March 1997. That’s the date. March 1997 is terra firma. You’ll die if you kill me.”

Cobb said, “Fuck,” but I felt Hyldekrugger’s grip on my hair tighten. I was pulled upward, my head yanked back—My neck, he’ll slash my neck—but I felt the blade tug at my hair, cutting it. When he let me go, I saw Hyldekrugger holding a handful of my hair like it was the pelt of a skinned rabbit.

“I know you,” I said. “I know who you are. Karl Hyldekrugger. You took out the CJIS building with sarin gas—the FBI building in Clarksburg. You killed a thousand people. You killed Patrick Mursult, his family. You killed children.”

“So you came to this time looking for me?” he asked. “That wasn’t me, that was just some premonition of me.”

“That was a different you,” I said. “I was investigating all your killing and learned about the murder of a lawyer named Carla Durr. Led me to Nestor.”

Hyldekrugger sheathed his knife. “Driscoll,” he said. “So you’re following that thread.” He strung my hair through one of his belt loops. I’d just pronounced a death sentence on all of them by telling them they were all part of my IFT. I knew that Hyldekrugger was figuring out what to do with me, deciding if he would kill me and throw away his own life with mine—but he had already rejected suicide once before, I knew. They had all mutinied to stay alive.

“We’re shadows to her,” Hyldekrugger said to the surviving Libra crew. “Get out of here, leave me alone with her.”

The others dispersed, following the line of Vardogger trees to the riverbank. They climbed the roots of the fallen tree onto the trunk and made their way across the Red Run. There were ropes alongside the tree they held for balance, the tree made into a footbridge. Each one of them seemed to disappear before he’d made it fully across the river, like they’d all slipped behind an invisible curtain that hung halfway across.

“You’re from 1997?” said Hyldekrugger. “You must have access to your own ship. A Cormorant maybe. Think of all the possibilities you have seen, think of all the futures. Do you report back to your government about what you have seen?”

“I do. We all do. We’re trying to prevent—”

“Your government knows what will happen in the coming years,” he said. “They’re watching world events like they’re watching reruns, but the same tragedies occur. Why is that?”

“Why did you kill those children?” I asked. “Mursult’s children. And you sent someone to murder that scientist, Dr. Driscoll. Why? Why the chemical weapons, why all the killing?”

“Driscoll would have brought the universe crashing down around us,” said Hyldekrugger. “Mursult, too. Wake up, Shannon Moss. My visions of the future are the same as yours. You’ve seen everything that I’ve seen. You’ve seen the Terminus. You aren’t opposed to us, not really. You’re not opposed to us, you’re just blind. We’re the only ones to stanch the coming tide.”

“You brought the Terminus here—you did,” I said. “It followed Libra, burned through every future—”

“Not us,” said Hyldekrugger. “The Terminus doesn’t spread, it doesn’t cut through timelines like they say. NSC will bring it here, they’re the ones. The Naval Space Command will someday send ships to that planet we chanced upon. They’ll someday find out our secret and go there, whether next year or a hundred years from now or a thousand, it will happen. They’re too greedy just to let it lie. The Terminus will follow the ships of the Navy fleet back to Earth. It will follow them. The possibility of this happening is so very high that every future ends in Terminus. We’re trying to weaken their resolve to find that horror. We’ll kill anyone who wants to find that death planet, but the Terminus is closer, so they must be getting close.”

Bodies in the fields of CJIS, bodies in the Ryder truck, sailors of the Naval Space Command, scientists at the Naval Research Lab, at Phasal Systems: Hyldekrugger would kill anyone who might rediscover Esperance.

“Every future I’ve seen, you’ve killed so many people, so many innocent people,” I said. “Driscoll would have gone to study that planet, so you had to kill him. Is that right? You’d have to kill so many people…”

“Break the chain. Cut all lines to the Terminus, kill to cover the mistake in all our thinking. Everyone’s critical flaw is that we believe in our own existence, until we’re shown otherwise. Everything we see and feel tells us we’re alive, that what surrounds us is real, but it’s all a damn mistake, all an illusion we can’t see through. I’ve killed so many people here, but what has it been worth? If you’re a traveler, what has it been worth? Nothing. But you. You can still help us. You can return to the True, you can kill the machine that will bring the Terminus, make it feel less like fate, more like possibility. That’s all I ask you, to bring back our freedom of will, our other futures, our chance at futures. Kill until every future doesn’t end in death.”

“No,” I said. “I protect the innocent.”

For a brutal moment, I feared that Hyldekrugger would kill me after all, that his mind had changed as suddenly as a summer storm, but he extended his hand to me, helped me stand.

“Come,” he said, unlocking my handcuffs, throwing them aside. “We have a ways to walk, and our journey is difficult.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“I need to preserve you,” he said.

I followed Hyldekrugger across the clearing, along the line of trees, pushing against the desire to leave the path, to turn around. “This is where the echoes come through, isn’t it?” I said.

“The Vardogger is the doorway to a mansion with many rooms,” said Hyldekrugger. “Some of the doppelgängers come through here. They’re confused. They think they’re walking through a mirror. What did you call them? The echoes? The echoes cross the river here. They remember they’d been lost in the woods, that they’d somehow gotten turned around, as if in a child’s nightmare of being lost. They’ll come through the forest here, come to a clearing. They’ll return to the river they were sure they’d left behind.”

“What about the others?” I asked. “You said that only some of the echoes come through here, crossing the river.”

“The others flash into being up ahead,” said Hyldekrugger. “We kill them when we see them. They want to take our place here. Sometimes they’ve succeeded.”

“Who?”

“Us,” he said. “We see us. We fight an endless mutiny against ourselves. You see it happen. You see your twin and you know you’ll have to kill him. Otherwise he’ll kill you. He’ll become you.”

The Vardogger trees stretched ahead of us. I glanced behind and saw the same impossible line of trees stretching away from us. Marian lost in the confusion of this place, crossing the river, seeing herself. Echoes of worlds, echoes of lives.

“You killed Mursult’s family,” I said.

“Yes, with an ax,” said Hyldekrugger. “Patrick Mursult was willing to destroy us, so I destroyed him. He wanted to betray us in exchange for a governmental pardon. His thirty pieces of silver. He would have brought the Terminus to our doorstep. He was a fool.”

When we made it to the riverbank, Hyldekrugger pulled one of the coats hanging from the exposed roots and gave it to me. He wrapped himself with a military blanket.

“The end times are cold,” he said. “You’ll see things. But you must keep walking, stay on the path. We’re crossing into somewhere else. There are dangers where we’re going. I don’t know what will happen when the Terminus comes, if it comes, but I assume this boundary will break like the yolk of an egg and hell will pass through.”

I climbed the roots, stepped up onto the tree trunk, holding on to the rope railing with both hands. A surface like this was difficult for me, the rounded, smooth trunk of the felled Vardogger tree feeling more like petrified wood than rough char. I couldn’t sense the slickness here, where the river spray made the wood wet, whether or not my fake foot had found grip. Hyldekrugger climbed up after me, following closely. I stepped, baby steps, sideways, inching along, holding the rope line. The river roared by beneath us, the black water, crashing rapids.

You’ll see things, Hyldekrugger had said. Halfway across, the temperature plummeted like we had stepped from spring into midwinter. The sky became leaden, and the air filled with swirling snowflakes and flecks of ice. The landscape changed ahead of me, no longer the green of spring but a scene of winter, the Vardogger trees obscured by blasts of snow. I kept inching my way across the footbridge, the tree trunk even slicker with a skim of ice, and all around us, appearing in the air as if the stars had just revealed themselves, were the bodies of the hanged men, bodies crucified upside down, floating above the river and far into the distance, among the trees. They were moaning, their noises a choir of undying anguish.

I dropped to my knee, gripping the rope, clutching it to keep from being blown into the river by the winds. Hyldekrugger huddled in his blanket, his wild red hair rimed with hoarfrost. Behind us the clearing we had just left was now a deep arctic blue. I saw a speck of orange in the immense steel green of the tree line. I screamed in horror.

“I was crucified here,” I cried, searching the bodies in the air for my own body. “I was one of them.”

Hyldekrugger took me in his arms, helped me to stand. “How did you survive?” he asked.

Snow clung to his eyelashes, and his eyes watered in the frigid wind. His hands were on my arms, steadying me.

“I was saved,” I said, even now wondering if I would see the lights of the descending Quad-lander. “I was pulled down, I was rescued. They saved the wrong person—look there, in the distance, that’s where she is. That other woman is me. That’s who I am.”

Hyldekrugger looked behind us. “That woman is dead,” he said. “You’re here now.”

I didn’t know what QTNs were. I had come from a time when there was no Terminus—I was only a possibility, one of many possibilities. A point of pain centered my eyes, felt like it grew wider, expanding into an abyss. Everything about me was an abyss.

He half carried me to cover the remaining distance of the footbridge and when we stepped from the felled tree into drifts of snow, he huddled with me, draping his blanket over me. Hyldekrugger carried me forward, onward. Infinite reflections opened around us, as if my eyes were kaleidoscopes and everywhere I looked were mirrors. I saw us walking toward us through the sky, away from us above the river, upward through the earth, toward us from across the bridge. In the distance of every reflection, I saw a point of orange. Hyldekrugger forced me forward. The path of the Vardogger trees began to curve, and despite the shredding ice-wind the air filled with smoke like we were walking toward a great fire, lung-burning blackness that shaded the sky to charcoal. Sparks of fire curled upward, were whipped about in the sky. “Hurry,” said Hyldekrugger, leading me along the curving path of trees, the air a midnight of smoke. Soon the Vardogger trees themselves were ablaze, no longer ashen husks of trees but trees in the full bloom of fire, one fiery tree after another like a line of scintillant torches, orange conflagrations battered by the wind and carried upward as if every tree were a tornado of flame stretching to heaven.

“Where are you taking me?” I said above the scream of wind.

“This is the ship made of nails,” he said, and ahead of us I saw the black hulk of Libra towering above the eternal forest, a wrecked ship mounded with blowing snow. The monolithic bow was rent apart while the stern, housing the engine room—the propulsion system and the B-L drive—was afire with spurting spheres of vivid blue light that flashed and were gone, a blinding strobe.

We hurried along the path of burning trees, the ship growing larger in our view, and I saw one of the NSC inflatable concrete domes, a bulwark against the driving snow, a soot-black dome with windows dimly lit. I wanted to go there, to huddle inside for warmth, but Hyldekrugger pulled me back along our path.

“They’d kill you there,” he said. “No matter what I say, they’d kill you. They’re trained to kill, without question. The men in that dome are sentinels here. They keep watch for our approaching forms and shoot them down before they can escape into the woods. I’ve killed myself here, many times.”

And I saw there were corpses in the snowy fields surrounding the ship, countless corpses frozen in all postures of death, echoes of the Libra crew. They had been stripped of their clothing and whatever gear they might have carried. I saw Hyldekrugger’s body, and another of his bodies, and another.

The burning path of Vardogger trees terminated at Libra. We walked alongside the hull until we came to gangway stairs leading to one of the airlocks. The cold had seeped through my coat, made it hard to move. “You’ll have to climb,” Hyldekrugger said once we were at the stairs. Anything to escape this cold, but my hands burned against the iron railings. As we climbed, another blue spherical flare burst from the ship, enveloping us. A static jolt passed through me, a deep shock that stunned me, and for an instant I saw myself crucified, I saw myself in the orange space suit, I saw myself crossing the black river, I saw myself as a teenager with Courtney Gimm, blowing cigarette smoke from her bedroom window. Have you ever seen a flower called the falling star as it blooms?

“Keep climbing,” said Hyldekrugger. “Now’s our chance, right now. Climb!”

I looked out over the forest from the height of the gangway stairs—the ship was encircled by a great fire, an inferno of trees, waves of firelight that flapped in the wind like the flags of hell. I imagined Libra falling from the sky, damaged during the mutiny, its hull enrobed in fire and plummeting to the Earth like a burning mountain, crashing here. Other lines of Vardogger trees radiated away from the ship, countless lines of trees like burning spokes surrounding a hub, seemingly infinite paths leading to other sections of the eternal forest. So many pathways, a mansion with many rooms. I could see past the forest fires to where the fires died, to where the Vardogger lines became charred trees, a burnt forest of ashen white, the snow mixed with so much soot that the horizon was grayed, the sky dark. The landscape was like a burning God’s eye, and I stood in the black pupil, Libra. The fires and the Vardogger lines churned around us, as if I stood at the center of a world-enveloping hurricane. I was screaming.

Hyldekrugger dragged me up the remaining stairs, to the airlock in the hull, but the hull was caked with rust, or something colored like rust, and flecked with white and brown. No, it wasn’t rust—the rust color had been painted on. It covered the airlock and the surrounding hull like a thick reddish skin. Hyldekrugger spun the lock, and the portal door swung inward.

“Go in,” he said, bellowing over the howling wind, but I hesitated, the portal to the ship a perfect void, repellent, a circle of oblivion surrounded by the rust color and flecks and darker, stringy swirls. “Fingernails,” I said, revulsion rising through me. “And blood,” I said. The blood of the corpses surrounding the ship had been painted here, mixed with their fingernails and swirls of their hair to coat the airlock and hull. “You painted this ship in blood.”

“The Earth shuddered, and Naglfar was released from its moorings,” said Hyldekrugger, “carrying the bodies of dead warriors to wage war against the gods.”

Fingernails of the dead, the ship made of nails. Mursult’s wife, his children—their fingernails and toenails removed, brought here. Marian Mursult, the dead echoes. How many others? Thinking of the scale of this death overwhelmed me, like seeing a mountain but realizing it was a cresting wave.

Hyldekrugger forced me toward the airlock, that black circle. I climbed through the shadow into the ship, but the moment I stepped inside Libra, I lifted— My feet flew upward from the ship’s floor, my body spinning upward. Weightless, I hit the ceiling, bounced, no gravity. I was in free fall, rolling. Hyldekrugger closed the airlock, my body a rag doll ricocheting from ceiling to wall to floor with nothing to break my fall until Hyldekrugger caught me. We floated together. There is no gravity.

“What’s happening?” I asked him.

“Quiet now,” he said.

We were near the engine room, and soon I heard the two-tone clangor of the Power Plant Casualty alarm wail through the ship.

“That’s the nuclear reactor,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”

“The bull nuke was trying to break the ship, but Bietak saved us,” said Hyldekrugger, his voice drowned by a clattering burst of nearby gunfire. “Now,” he said, and pulled me through the portal that led into the engine room, the place veined with tubes and pipes, cords and wires, most of the chamber taken up by the silvery steel cauldron shape of the nuclear reactor. Ring-shaped particle colliders encircled the B-L drive, housed in its own compartment. It looked almost like a human heart, dipped in silver.

The body of a man floated near the reactor, a long, sticky blood bubble ballooning from the holes where bullets had rent his gut. I could tell by his uniform patches that this was the bull nuke, the officer in charge of the nuclear reactor and the B-L drive. Hyldekrugger’s eyes were wild. He ripped a Maglite from the Velcro wall of small tools just as the nuclear reactor groaned and whined and the lights of the ship cut off, plunging us into pure darkness. The Power Plant Casualty alarm still screamed, warning of a reactor failure.

“Move,” said Hyldekrugger, switching on the Maglite. “We don’t have much time. Bietak will be back here to fix this, and then Mursult comes to guard the pass. We don’t want to be here when Mursult comes. We don’t want to fight him, not here.”

“Tell me what’s happening, what is this—”

But Hyldekrugger struck me. “Move,” he said, and pulled me through another portal. We moved like swimmers through the passageway, Hyldekrugger sweeping the light ahead of us. We passed the engineer officer’s room, a cubby with a writing desk and filing cabinets fitted around the walls and ceiling. The engineering department had its own mess room here, and a meeting compartment with bench seating curved around a compact table. We passed the offices for the A-Gangers, the Reactor-Laboratory Division, the Electrical Division, and soon came through a passageway lined with windows. I looked out the first window expecting to see icy wind and raging fire, the pathways of trees but instead saw stars in the infinite night.

“Where are we? Where are we? What is happening to me?”

Hyldekrugger dragged at me, but I clung to the window and saw along the length of the ship. Where there had been several inches of ice coating the hull, there was now a crystalline crust, bright white and shimmering like a coat of minerals or like diamond barnacles encrusting the hull. The crust was thickest at the stern, over the engine room behind us, growing in jagged torrents of opalescence and radiating away from the ship like brilliant white sunbursts.

“Why is this happening?”

He struck me in the spine with the butt end of his knife, said, “Hurry, the lights will be on soon.”

He shoved me from the window just as the Power Plant Casualty alarm fell silent and the dim running lights snapped back on. We were headed to the brig, I realized, and I followed him, submissive in my shock and confusion, my fear. We came to the NCIS office, the walls stained with the spherical spatter patterns of weightless blood.

“What happened to the NCIS agents aboard this ship? Where are they?”

“They protected the CO,” said Hyldekrugger.

He opened the iron door of the brig, the brigs on NSC TERNs much larger than their counterparts on waterborne vessels, NASA psychiatrists having warned of the possibility of “space madness” even from the earliest missions. There were eight cells here, stacked like berthing bunks, each cell an iron box. Hyldekrugger took me to Cell 5. I kicked against him, and he hit me, opening my nose again. A sticky stream of blood burbled from me, I couldn’t fight him. He grabbed my prosthetic leg, pinned my chest with his boot, and pulled—hurting me until I managed to reach down to release the vacuum seal.

“I consider you a suicide risk,” he said, “and I can’t have you hurt yourself with this thing.”

He locked me in the cell and left the brig, pitching me into utter darkness. I floated, fetuslike without sight or any sound. The pain of my shattered nose and broken teeth flashed like lightning through me. Soon in that vast silence, I heard my ears ringing and my breath whistle through collapsed sinuses and heard my blood plash softly against the cell.

Hours passed.

I was an echo. An echo, I realized, of Shannon Moss, brought through to terra firma when I was rescued from the cross. I understood that now. The woman in the orange space suit was Shannon Moss, she was real. I had seen her, in the snow. That woman is dead. You’re here now. I had come from an IFT with no Terminus but was just a figment of that IFT, an IFT that had blinked even as I had lived, an entire existence that had been cut away. Was I real? I was a void, an oval of darkness where my face should have been, as if my body were hollow, or stuffed with straw. But the pain was real, the pain in my battered face, and my despair, and my fear. Aboard the USS William McKinley, O’Connor and I had once been forced to confront a sailor whose nerves were frayed by Deep Waters, who’d struck an officer. We wrestled with him, brought him to the brig and placed him in a cell—he’d had the brig to himself, but the thought of this iron confinement and the solitude terrified him more than any other corrective measure could have. He begged us, pleading like a whining child for us to let him free. I thought of that sailor now, how he’d scratched at the walls.

I was on Libra somehow, without gravity. I had seen the bull nuke murdered—but how was that possible? I heard distant sounds. A soft clacking, like someone tapping fingernails against a table or like rats’ claws scrabbling across metal. Popping sounds, and then I placed it: the sound of small-arms fire followed by the louder clatter of automatic weapons. They’re fighting in the ship. And I wondered if the Navy had found this place, come to rescue me, or the FBI, the Hostage Rescue Team, thinking maybe Vivian had somehow lived, or maybe someone had followed us here. Then a scream outside the brig door, several people screaming, a wave of sound that died abruptly.

The brig door opened, and my eyes were pierced by a sliver of light. I squinted against the glare and was able to see a woman slip inside the brig before she closed the iron door, plunging us again into darkness. Nicole, but she was just a child here, a teenager. I heard her movement. She was trying to stay quiet, but she breathed heavily, she was crying, and in the dead silence I heard every soft whimper. She floated between the cells, floating nearer, and when she reached my cell, I said, “Nicole, help me.”

Startled, she whispered, “Who is that?”

“I’m an NCIS agent,” I said. “I want to help. I need you to let me out, Nicole.”

“I don’t know you,” she said. “I’ve never seen you before. Why are you locked here? How did you get here?”

“Let me out.”

“I can’t,” she said. “No, I can’t—”

Another burst, an exchange of fire, louder now. Then another burst, right outside the door: bullets ricocheted off the metal passageways, a metallic staccato against the iron door.

“They’re doing it,” said Nicole. “I can’t believe… they’ve killed her, no, no—”

Nicole’s words were seared with tears, I heard her rubbing her face with her hands, saying, “No, please, please don’t do this.”

“Who did they kill?” I asked.

“Remarque. They killed her, they’re killing everyone now,” said Nicole. “Remarque and our WEPS, Chloe Krauss. They were together in the wardroom, barricaded in. They’re dead, oh, they’re dead now.”

This was familiar, this had already happened, and I thought of Nicole’s confession as we stood together near the orchard barn.

“But you’re innocent, Nicole. You haven’t killed anyone.”

“I love Remarque—they know that, I don’t want them to kill me because of her,” she said. “I’ve been hiding, in the life-support room, but they were checking every room, and so I came here. They’re killing everyone.”

“Nicole, calm yourself. I need you to help me. I know you, Nicole. I know that your father convinced Remarque to let you board this ship,” I said. “There was a feast in Mombasa, they threw a feast in her honor. When was that? Years from now.”

“Six hundred eighty-one years,” said Nicole. “When Remarque landed, and Libra, we held a Roho ceremony, celebrating transience. I met my husband there. He saw me wearing garlands, in the almond grove. And my father—he wanted me to live—he convinced Remarque to take me… and she wanted me to live, she accepted me—”

“I can help you, Nicole. I just need you to let me out of here.”

Another clatter of gunfire. She came close to the bars of my cell and said, “How do you know my name? I thought I’d met everyone here, but I don’t know you.”

“We knew each other in another time,” I said. “We were close once. You knew me as Courtney Gimm. We used to talk with each other, almost every night, in another time, in the future from now. You told me about Kenya. You told me about the trees, that they looked like emeralds.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“Let me out. I can help you.”

“I can’t let you out. They’d kill you if they knew you were here. They’d kill me for letting you out, for talking with you.”

“Please,” I said, but she didn’t answer. I saw the sliver of light as she opened the brig door. I saw her slip away, and the brig door closed.

I was alone in that darkness, and time dissolved. Hours, it must have been. Every so often a sticky sphere of my floating blood bumped against me, and I despaired. Eventually a deep, plummeting boom sounded through the ship, shivering through the steel. Another explosion followed, much louder than the first, and as the seconds passed, I scented a faint odor of smoke, a pungent sharpness like an electrical fire. I screamed for help, trapped here, fearing being burned alive in this cell, and soon the lights flared red—emergency lights—and the alarm bells rang a metallic clangor.

The ship lurched, and a heavy steel moan came from the hull. I heard a series of popping crashes, like someone hammering on pots and pans, and a series of explosions that sounded like the air was ripping apart. Steel shrieking, the ship rattled. I thought the hull would break or buckle. Liquid spheres of blue firelight bloomed across the ceiling of the brig, and I tried to float away from the fire, tried to cover myself in the corner of the cell. And that’s when gravity overtook me and I slammed against the wall, the ceiling, rolling in the cell, the blue spheres of fire flattening, spreading. We’re falling. We’re falling from the sky. We fell for minutes, but each minute seemed eternal. I was battered in the iron box, was crushed to the floor. Then the chaos was over. My forehead was gashed, I bled freely from my face. The alarms continued to sound.

I lost consciousness for a time and then woke in pure, milky darkness. I sat as best I could in that narrow cell, listening, and as the moments passed, I felt something like a small electrical charge growing steadily in my chest. The static charge was a discomfort—it seemed to hum inside me—and it grew, a crescendo of intensity, until I felt my hair prickle, waves of shivers passing over me. The tension was unbearable, and I opened my mouth, saw strings of electricity snap from my teeth and race along my fingers like blue filaments in the air. A loud crack, a burst of light—the electrical discharge felt as though someone had punched me full force in the heart. Again I lost gravity, again I floated freely, again the ship resumed its silence.

An explosion rumbled deep within the ship. A few moments passed, and I heard the brig door open, a squeal of metal, but there was no sliver of light. Movement, barely audible. My cell lock clicked, and I heard the door swing open. I drifted against the back wall of the cell, terrified at the thought of who had come, fearing Hyldekrugger. Someone’s hand covered my mouth.

“Do not make a sound,” a voice whispered. “Now is our only chance. We’ll have just a few minutes before they fix the lights.”

The hand remained clasped over my mouth even after I calmed, nodded that I would remain quiet.

“Can you see this?” the voice whispered. A phosphorescent blue appeared in the darkness, a blue light no larger than a marble. I recognized what it was: the cutting of the alien petal that centered Nicole’s amulet. An instant later the light was gone. I nodded that yes, I had seen the phosphorescence.

“Follow the light,” Nicole whispered.

She removed her hand from my mouth, and the phosphorescent blue appeared several feet away, hovering in the darkness before it disappeared. I raised my arms, feeling for the cell door, pulled myself out. I found my way by crawling across the brig ceiling, floating. I became lost quickly in that darkness and stopped, my eyes flashing in tricks of purple splotches until out of the haze of false colors I saw the hovering blue appear again. I followed.

I lost all conception of direction, crawled along one of the walls through an opening. I had left the brig and was in a much narrower passageway. The blue appeared again several feet in front of me, and I propelled myself—quickly but quietly—in that direction. I hit a steel wall, looked for the blue but didn’t spot it until I heard an exhalation, so soft I nearly missed it. The breath drew my attention upward to the blue light hovering above me. I reached toward the blue and pulled myself through a portal. I floated, following the light, and soon we passed into the passageway lined with windows, Nicole’s face outlined in the light of the crystal brilliance, the spectral diamond shapes that grew across the hull and the radiant lines that stretched away forever. It wasn’t Nicole as a teenager, whom I’d spoken with just a short time ago, but rather a young woman who had aged a decade or more. She’d brought me to the airlock where Hyldekrugger had first brought me in.

“Rest for a moment,” Nicole said. “Catch your breath. You’ll have to run soon.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We know each other, in another future, in another time,” she said. “Now you have to go. They will come after you.”

“Nicole,” I said. “Help me understand—”

“We don’t have time.”

“How… You’ve grown older.”

“You’ve been in this prison for several years, Shannon,” she said.

“No,” I said, almost wanting to laugh, the mistake of it all, the incoherence. “It’s only been a day at most. Hours.”

“This place, this ship, is an ouroboros,” said Nicole. She showed me her wrist, the copper-colored bracelet she always wore, textured by diamond patterns of scales, a snake swallowing its own tail. “We played with these growing up in Kenya—bracelets, when you wear the bracelet you can take it off and give it to your friend.”

“A friendship bracelet,” I said.

“Yes,” said Nicole. “An ouroboros.”

She slipped the bracelet from her wrist and placed it on mine, the metal cool; she clasped the tail into the snake’s mouth, and the bracelet fit my wrist perfectly. Nicole held up her wrist. I had seen her remove the snake bracelet, but she still wore hers, it was like a magician’s illusion.

“You give the bracelet to your friend, but you still wear it,” she said. “So they match.”

“But several years,” I said, struggling. “You’ve aged years. I just saw you a few hours ago, and you were younger—”

“And you look the same as I remember, exactly the same. I’ve been living my life for almost twelve years since I saw you here,” said Nicole. “Patrick is dead, Patrick’s family is dead, and you showed up with Special Agent Nestor at my apartment last night. You and a young woman named Petal had tracked me down using my license-plate number that the Blackwater Lodge kept on file.”

“No, I wasn’t at your apartment with Nestor,” I said. “I wasn’t there at all. Nestor tracked you down alone. It wasn’t me.”

“But after Nestor left, you and I spoke for a very long time. You noticed a Salvador Dalí painting I had on my wall, of the Crucifixion, and you confided in me that we had already met in the future, that we were together almost every night, decades from now,” said Nicole. “And that’s when I recognized you. That’s when I remembered we had already met once before, but not in the future. I remembered you from eleven years ago, during the mutiny. I remembered I spoke with someone in the brig, a brief encounter, a woman named Courtney Gimm. Eleven years ago you told me your name was Courtney.”

“I told you my name was Courtney,” I said, a few hours ago for me, eleven years ago for her. Consequences of events that hadn’t yet occurred, Nicole’s story like a figure eight, an infinite loop crossing a central moment: when I was in the brig and told Nicole she’d once known me as Courtney Gimm. Imagine that the forest fire that burned the tree won’t happen for another three hundred years or three thousand, Njoku had said—there had been reverberations of my hours in the brig long before Hyldekrugger had ever brought me to the brig. All my past pain and the sorrow of my childhood rushed over me in waves of sickness. Nicole thought my name was Courtney.

“And when the ship crashed, we left through the woods, along the path of trees,” said Nicole. “All of us. And Karl knew we should stay hidden while he figured out what to do, that we would be wanted for treason, would be put to death if we were ever found, and so I told him—”

“You told him you saw an NCIS agent named Courtney Gimm,” I said as I wept. “Oh, God, no—oh, my God.” It’s my fault, I thought, Hyldekrugger’s killing Courtney, or Mursult’s killing her, or Cobb, they had thought Courtney Gimm was an agent, a mistake in identity, a mistake. My mistake.

It’s my fault she’s dead.

“I told them about you,” said Nicole. “And Karl told Mursult to find Courtney Gimm, to kill her. And he found her, a sixteen-year-old girl—”

“Please,” I said, “please this can’t be. Did he kill her?” I asked, the feeling of loss coring me. “Oh, God, please tell me this isn’t real, this isn’t happening. Did he kill Courtney because of me? Because I used her name? Did he kill her?”

But Nicole said, “No. She was already dead before he found her. So Mursult moved his family into the dead girl’s house—her older brother rented it out. Patty would ask about the dead girl whenever her brother collected rent, trying to track who it was that had been in the brig, thinking Courtney Gimm might show up someday. But it was you.”

Mursult living in Courtney’s house on Cricketwood Court—asking about her because he thought that someday an agent named Courtney Gimm would investigate the mutiny on Libra. I hadn’t caused her death—but even as the wrenching guilt that I’d inadvertently played a role in my best friend’s death drained from me, a colder sorrow gripped me. For a moment it had seemed that all of existence had revealed its shape, a purpose of cruelty, a terrible irony that the contours of a childhood death that defined me seemed to fit into grander patterns hidden until now. For a moment, when I thought that my use of her name had killed Courtney, it seemed that on some depth all tragedies and ecstasies were part of a great design that my limited mind couldn’t scope, a looping scheme where all actions and their consequences are tallied. For a moment Courtney’s death had made horrifying sense, had an identifiable cause, a reason. But the pieces slipped apart. There was no center, no reason. Courtney’s death was random, banal viciousness inflicted by one organism upon another. There is no design. The universe isn’t kind or cruel. The universe is vast and indifferent to our desires.

“And at my apartment all these years later, you showed up with your badge and introduced yourself as Shannon Moss, NCIS,” said Nicole. “You said that you had traveled to a future and that in twenty years we met for the first time at a place called the May’rz Inn. You said that we were once very close, that we were best friends. You told me things about myself, about my life—”

“I never told you anything,” I said. “This never happened.”

“And so I agreed to show you the Vardogger, the thin space, but you told me that I needed to run. You told me to disappear to save myself, before I could be arrested by the FBI or before Hyldekrugger would find me and kill me. You told me that you were going to come here, to the Vardogger, that you would come here soon, and so I ran, but I remembered.”

“You remembered,” I said. “You remembered speaking with me here in the prison when you were a young girl, you remembered meeting me during the mutiny, a woman in the cell—Courtney Gimm, eleven years ago,” I said. “That was eleven years ago for you. I told you my name was Courtney Gimm.”

“I want to exchange the kindness you showed me, Shannon,” said Nicole. “You told me to run, to save myself because of our friendship. You didn’t arrest me, you warned me. And so I want to save you, too. Who knows? Maybe in twenty years you’ll show up in a bar one night and offer to buy me a drink.”

“But that wasn’t me,” I said. “That was some other… I was never there in your apartment, with Nestor. I never had a chance to tell you to run. That wasn’t me, Nicole. That was an echo of me, someone else.”

“Different paths along the Vardogger trees,” said Nicole. “Shannon, we’re all echoes here.”

I felt the air leave my lungs and heard what sounded like a swell of sighs. I seemed to glimpse for a moment every iteration of Shannon Moss and Nicole Onyongo flowering outward, growing together and growing apart, infinite interactions between the two of us.

“You probably felt the B-L drive misfire,” said Nicole. “Whenever the drive misfires, it creates another path of those trees, another universe. We have to be off this ship before it misfires again—otherwise we’ll be here forever, having this conversation forever. We have to go.”

“What do I do?” I asked.

“Jump.”

Nicole grabbed the handle of the airlock and pulled inward, opening the portal in a sucking rush. I tried to find purchase, anywhere to grip, but my fingers slipped and I held my breath and stepped into the stars, a suicidal act of free fall into outer space. Daylight flashed, and I landed on the gangway stairs, the winter cold piercing me like spears of ice, the inferno in the trees ripping at the sky around me. Wind gusted me down the first few steps before I regained myself and halted my fall. Nicole stepped out behind me, helped me crawl down the last stairs into the snow. Hyldekrugger had taken my prosthesis, so I couldn’t stand.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll distract whoever is keeping watch. Go.”

Nicole ran from me, and I saw her figure obscured by the blowing smoke and snow. She will die. The sentinels will kill her. I wanted to run but could only crawl, scrambling, two hands and one leg, pulling myself forward, heaving myself toward the Vardogger trees, the path that had brought me here. Ice cut into my palms, my elbows, burned my skin. Snowflakes and flakes of ash, the orchard flashed in my mind, of me running through the lines of trees and the swirl of petals, and just like in the orchard I heard a death scream: the cry of a woman’s suffering carried over the rush of fire and wind.

They will come after you, Nicole had said, and so I kept pushing, crawling along the path of identical fires in identical trees, and only when my arms collapsed did I stop to catch my breath. I hadn’t gotten very far, but already the intense cold burrowed deep into my exhaustion, a serene pull toward sleep, as if I could lean back and let the snow bury me here. My arms shook, I could no longer feel my fingers, and my chest was soaked through and my skin was slick with ice. My hair and eyelashes were brittle with ice, my toes had lost all feeling.

Someone else would quit.

So I crawled, a bear crawl, hands and knee, snorting out blood and mucus, wheezing, but I screamed out, “Someone else would quit!” and gutted through with an animal savagery against my own body, feeling the searing frost breaking me apart, the deep freeze in my breath and my core, my heart, thinking, I’ll reach warmth if I can make it across. I reached the fallen tree that forded the river. I looked back and saw that a man followed me, running along the Vardogger path, still distant but swiftly approaching. When I was halfway across the fallen log, the winter melted around me into a warm spring, and I made my way into the clearing, the warmer air like a scalding bath, thinking, Hide. You can only hide from him, you can’t fight him. Hide, hide.

I crossed the clearing to the tree line and crawled beneath one of the evergreens there, curling myself around a trunk. I watched across the clearing to the fallen Vardogger tree, the bridge, waiting for the man to appear out of the air, my body shaking, still frozen, my skin like it had been boiled, crimson and purple. The ice that had accumulated in my hair had begun to melt, dripping over my skin in icy rushes, and I thought I should keep going, that I should run, but was unable to move. Run, run from here—

That’s when I saw her, crossing the river: I saw an echo of Shannon Moss rise from the water, climb onto the near bank. She had crossed the river here, as Marian’s echo had done. Her hair was long, much longer than I had ever kept mine, and she paused by the shore to squeeze water from it. Run! I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t speak, my voice gone, jaw chattering. She was dressed in dark fatigues, a tank top. She wore her prosthesis, an advanced mechanized limb, unaffected by water. I wondered who she was. She was Shannon Moss, she was me, but she was an echo of me, an echo of an echo. She would have been in the woods, tracking Hyldekrugger, and she would have become hopelessly lost. She would have recognized the pines, the clearing, the river. She would see me here, at the tree line. If she looked this way, she would see me, and she would think of the woman in the orange space suit. The woman in the orange space suit had been here, where I am now.

“Run!” I managed to yell. “He’s coming!”

She turned toward my voice, she saw me. Our eyes met.

“Run,” I said, but it was too late.

Cobb appeared over the bridge. He shrugged off his fur wraps, caught sight of Moss standing in the clearing. She didn’t have her holster, didn’t have her sidearm, only a black leather sheath she wore on the thigh of her residual limb, above her prosthetic leg. She pulled the knife, a twelve-inch hunter’s knife, readying to fight. Cobb had a rifle, leveled it right at her.

“Come on—fight me,” she said. “Fight me—”

Cobb threw down his weapon, raised his fists, his face twisted with a smirk—but Moss was pure reaction. She charged him, catlike, her prosthesis mimicking natural movement. Cobb took a step backward as Moss jumped at him, slicing with her knife but missing. She punched him with her left, caught his chin, followed with her elbow. She slashed with her knife for his eyes, but Cobb pushed her away as easily as if she were nothing. He was wary of the knife but rounded on her, threw a punch, and caught Moss in the side of her head, stunning her. Cobb threw a second punch, connected. Moss’s body went limp, she fell forward, a knockout blow. Nausea swept through me at what I was witnessing. Cobb knelt over her, pinning her shoulders with his knees, and rained punches down on her. They were only a few feet away from me. I could see every punch sink deep into her, I could hear his blows landing, knuckles mashing meat. I could hear Shannon moaning, a crying moan. I heard breaking bones and saw Cobb’s fists covered in Shannon’s blood when he finally stood from her and spit at her.

“Fuck!” he said, screaming down at her. “Fuck you! You’re dead! You’re dead now!”

I could see her, could see her face crushed, could see that one eye had slipped the socket and hung to the side of her face. I heard her breathing, that terrible sucking moaning. She was alive, my God, she was still alive, but I stayed there, hidden, and watched as Cobb picked up his rifle, aimed, and fired. A spray of pink mist.

Tears streamed from my eyes. I was shaking. I saw myself die, but I prayed, Don’t look this way, don’t look this way, as Cobb circled the corpse, but he wandered away to sit on the riverbank.

Now.

He was watching the river, catching his breath. I could see his shoulders heaving. Were there others coming? How many were on their way?

Now, run—

I rolled from beneath the tree, crawled quietly, as quietly as I could, treading the carpet of needles, my body trembling as I followed the Vardogger trees, but soon the forest changed around me. I found the dry creek bed and followed it to the clearing where Nestor had killed Vivian, but the clearing was empty now.

I crawled from the clearing, sliding down the access route, and collapsed on the side of the forest road. A night passed before a forest ranger’s SUV pulled beside me. The driver helped me into the backseat, calling on his radio for help. I remember an ambulance, I remember being delivered to the gates of Oceana. A Navy surgeon did his best to realign my nose, but Cobb had eviscerated the bones when he struck me at the Vardogger tree, had damaged the cartilage. My nose would look like malformed putty without extensive plastic surgery. A dental surgeon removed the shards of my broken teeth, fearing further injury or infection, and left a gap where my left front tooth should have been, a larger gap at my left bicuspid. I looked at myself in the mirror following the procedures but didn’t recognize the woman there.