“One day I woke up and realized I would never wake up again. I would never sleep again. This was the day time would end.”
~ excerpt from “Final Thoughts on Decoherence” Dr. M. Vensula, head of the National Center for Time Fluctuation Studies—I4—2069
Day 190/365
Year 5 of Progress
(July 9, 2069)
Central Command
Third Continent
Prime Reality
History was divided into epochs. The whole world chopped into easy-to-define chunks with tidy labels. Mac’s personal epochs were Home, Army, Disaster, Sam. He’d have to sit and do the math to figure out how many years had been lost to the ambush in Afghanistan and the resulting depression and addiction to sleeping pills. It hadn’t mattered after Sam came into his life. Scientists sometimes tossed around the phrase Extinction Level Event, and that’s what Sam was: his own personal ELE.
Sam was perfect.
Everything that had been missing in his life, Sam offered. Now, trying to sort through data on the tiny datpad left to him by Sam’s evil twin in a room that smelled of gun cleaner and despair, he realized Sam was probably half of his brain, too. He couldn’t describe her absence like a hole in his heart or a lost limb. Those were cutesy phrases that were far too weak to explain what he felt. It was like half of himself was missing. He needed her here to talk to, to toss ideas around with, to . . . be.
Every minute that ticked by on the clock was one where Sam was alone without him. She could protect herself. He’d made sure she could, above and beyond the training she’d received in the CBI. But they both knew Sam wouldn’t pick up a gun unless it was a matter of absolute last resort. She wouldn’t hurt someone unless there was no other choice.
She’d probably even sit down and weigh the risks of altering some hypothetical timeline before doing anything about his absence.
He looked up at his broken reflection in the metal wall of the evil twin’s room. Yeah, Sam would come for him. Or wait for him. She’d think of something. That’s why he’d married a woman who was smarter than he was, so she could come rescue him. Right?
Right.
“Why can’t I print these?” he whined at the empty room. His voice echoed in the cloying silence. “I need my murder wall and my maps. This is ridiculous.” Borderline impossible. The datpad required him to see the big picture in his head, keep track of everything with no visual aid, and that was making his gray matter melt. There had to be some way to do this . . .
Several hours later, the evil Sam walked through the door, and he had the pleasure of watching her jaw drop.
“What did you do to the walls?”
“I used them as whiteboards,” Mac said around the pen cap he was chewing on. “Found the pen in the closet next to the first-aid kit. Don’t worry,” he added as he took the cap out, “it washes off. You’ll be able to get your security deposit.”
“I won’t be able to pass inspections, though.” She stared incredulously at the walls, walked, and smeared the ink.
“How are you going to pass inspection with me here anyway?” He shook his head. “By the way, that is my timeline of the crime that you’re erasing, thank you very much. Stop destroying evidence.” Worst cop he’d ever seen. And that included Marrins, his former Senior Agent who had kidnapped Sam and tried to change history so the Commonwealth never united. He frowned at the evil Sam. She really did look like Jane Doe from Alabama.
Awful as it sounded, he hoped she was Jane Doe from Alabama. The possibility that it might be his Sam that died was too much for him to contemplate. He couldn’t lose Sam without losing himself.
“This is not how things are done here.”
“Sam would approve.”
She stilled. “Again, I must insist you stop using the awful shortened name on me. You can call me either Commander, or Rose, or Commander Rose.”
“I meant the real Sam would approve.”
“We are identical,” Jane said with a little foot stomp that, in real Sam at least, meant she was dangerously tired. “We are genetically identical. Our life histories ran parallel. The differences between us are minimal.”
“The difference between you two is everything.” He didn’t want to get into it because it made him angry. All day he’d been pushing it back, trying not to think about what had happened to him. His voice was arctic cold when he said, “In every way that matters, you are not Sam MacKenzie. You don’t think like her. You don’t act like her. In every way, she has you beat.”
Jane crossed her arms. “You love her.”
“There was never a question about that. I love her. She loves me. We love being together.”
“If you loved another Samantha, you can learn to tolerate me. In a few years, you’ll see, you’ll have forgotten her entirely.”
“Not going to happen.”
She threw her arms in the air in frustration. “Why are you so stubborn?”
“My mamma said it came from my dad’s side.” The words were flippant, but the glare accompanying them would have made anyone who knew him back off. Jane’s lack of reaction only underscored how alien she was.
“I am Samantha Rose.”
“You’re a pale imitation. The cheap, knockoff copy sold at marked-up prices to dumb tourists, but you’re no Sam. Sam would never, ever rip apart someone’s world for her own selfish reasons. She wouldn’t kill anyone, not even if her life was in danger. I know because I’ve been the one pulling her out of scrapes before. You can be whatever you want, but you’ll never be my wife or the real Sam.”
Jane stalked around the room, angrily glaring at him, the walls, even her shoes at one point. “Fine. It’s obvious I can’t make you see reason.”
“You’re not presenting reason. You dragged me to this hellhole and told me that if I stay, this will be the future. No Sam, no trees, no beaches, no food . . . you do realize the nightmare you’ve created here? You abducted me. You presented me to Emir like your pet. You have me confined to this room like a prisoner of war. This is not my first time behind enemy lines. I got out once. I can get out again.”
She rolled her eyes. “You have this all wrong. I am trying to help you. You have to understand, this iteration may seem less than desirable at times, but it isn’t hurtling toward humanity’s extinction at breakneck speeds; yours is. There is only one way through decoherence, and that is for the Prime to hold the line so whatever disaster is coming to obliterate humanity, someone survives. We’re it. We’re the only ones who can survive.”
Mac lifted an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
“Yes!” The word snapped like a whip.
Yet she wasn’t sure at all. It showed in the crinkles around her eyes, the tiny frown lines by her lips, in the sleepless shadows under her eyes.
She wasn’t sure—she was scared.
And she looked just enough like Sam that he wanted to reach out and pull her close, protect her. He turned back to the scribbles on the wall. Advice columnists wouldn’t even have ideas on how not to feel an emotional pull from a wife’s other-self. Words of prayer tugged at his lips but stayed a silent petition to the heavens.
Let me get home to Sam.
He didn’t bother promising God anything—they both knew there was a long walk between him and heaven—but if he could get home to Sam, maybe he would at least consider checking a map for directions.
Her voice cut through the thickening silence. “I have a proposal.”
“You apologize for kidnapping me and return me to my home? Fine. I accept.”
She ignored him. “Before your arrival, I found a dead woman in a locker that is a known anomaly point. It’s created by the MIA, and usually controlled, and because I knew the dead woman was from another iteration, I let the matter go.”
Mac glared at her.
“There was a blood sample, but it belonged to Donovan, whose locker is right next to the anomaly point. He was scratched during hand-to-hand training, so it was a dead end. The woman was pulled through another anomaly, so I let it go. But someone went, found her, and took her clothes to leave in my room as a warning. Help me find the person who left them, and I’ll let you go back to your iteration. It won’t do you any good. You’ll cease to exist when the decoherence event arrives, but it’s what you want. I don’t have a habit of saving fools from their own stupidity.”
There was a catch there. It might have been an outright lie. Still, it was a chance—the only one he had right now—so Mac nodded. “Fine. Quick question, what did the victim look like?”
Jane wrinkled her nose and shrugged. “I don’t know. Average height, above average weight for the Prime, but probably normal for other places, she was just a young woman. Like everyone.”
“Brown hair, brown eyes, dark tan skin?” Mac guessed.
Jane frowned. “Yes.”
“Want to see what I have?”
Jane eyed the walls with suspicion.
“There have been murders here in Prime. All those sirens yesterday. You have access to the personnel files, so I looked up the phenotypes, and I have a theory. These murders and one I investigated several years ago are connected. Agent Parker, who hopefully will never have the misfortune of meeting you, connected the case to a new string of murders.
“If I’m right, you are the Jane Doe Sam and I found in Alabama. We buried you, and we know what the murder weapon was, and we know Emir’s machine was used to dump your body, just like the victim in the yellow shirt was dumped using Emir’s machine. We never found the killer—there wasn’t enough evidence—and we had reasons not to pursue the case.”
Jane nodded slowly. “So what do you want to do?”
“I’m going to find out who killed you.”