“Of all the possibilities I’ve seen, only the future remains a mystery.”
~ excerpt from the private journal Agent 5 of the Ministry of Defense I1—2063
Day 186/365
Year 5 of Progress
(July 5, 2069)
Central Command
Third Continent
Prime Reality
Lockers rattled and the building shook as Donovan’s team jumped through time. The MIA was getting a workout this week. Futures were fracturing as the world government argued. Jump teams sent to ensure the future of humanity were leaving on an almost hourly basis, reacting to the splintered paths of probability.
Rose slammed her locker shut, avoiding the mirrored, chrome surface and the wraith’s face she knew she’d see there. Lack of sleep was catching up with her. That, and the constant barrage of the war with time. She tugged her thinning hair into a tight ponytail and shoved away the memory of thick black waves curling over a face fat from luxurious living.
In other iterations, she was a pampered diva, a politician, a police officer, and a motivational speaker. She’d watched her other-selves from a sniper scope and pulled the trigger without hesitation every time. Those Samanthas were a lie, the person she would be if she were willing to trade fame and luxury for the future of humanity.
Not even an option.
Metal rasped against metal as the MIA warmed up again. In the far corner, a locker painted matte black popped open.
With a curse, Rose crossed the room, then crossed herself. She believed in no god, unless feverish devotion to the math equations of time counted as a religion, but the motion of her hands touching forehead, heart, and shoulders was grounding.
The Locker of Doom rattled, the engraved plaque with the warning never to store anything here and the number 666 swung loose. Rose caught the plaque, rehung it, and glanced inside.
Silky black curls damp with blood obscured the face of a woman wearing a lacy canary-yellow camisole. She’d been folded in thirds, legs tucked up close to her chest, and placed in the locker. This was exactly the sick sort of joke that she didn’t have time for.
Automatically, her hand went to the comm unit hooked on her belt, then she hesitated. There was no one to call. Emir had ordered the police force out of Central Command four months earlier. The military police loyal to Central Command weren’t equipped to handle an investigation, and they weren’t allowed in the building anyway.
The closest thing to a detective who was available were the forensic techs who worked with the infiltration teams exploring new iterations.
Rose knelt, anticipating the first round of questions: Who was she, and where was she from? Brushing aside the hair so she could see the girl’s face, she tried to match the deceased with anyone she’d ever seen. Elegant lines of a thin, aristocratic nose and high cheekbones—one cracked by the force of a blow—with skin the color of dark sandstone, and all unfamiliar. The woman could have been any of the millions of women in the world with the dominant genes for darker coloring. Smeared black eyeliner and gold eye shadow gave her away as a stranger, a victim from another timeline. There was no makeup in the Prime. Little wastes, that’s what they were . . . paints and colors and brushes that served no purpose and squandered workers’ time.
Emir would never authorize a tech to investigate. There was too much at risk right now and too good a chance that the dead woman had come from a now-vanished iteration.
Rose closed Locker 666, shoving it shut and checking the lock. The murdered girl didn’t belong here. Didn’t belong to her.
Yet she felt the dreaded tug of curiosity and guilt. She was the Paladin, after all, a node who held the future together simply by existing. Paladins were meant to be champions who could see past the surface to the potential of a person. It sounded strangely unscientific the first time Dr. Emir had explained her role in the world. Math and physics she understood. Gravity was the same anywhere (or anywhen) on the planet. But intuition?
Her fingers lingered on the lock.
Intuition said this wasn’t just an anomalous murder victim who had been picked up by the MIA’s oft-generated temporal cyclones. She wouldn’t have been able to explain why she felt it, but this felt intentional.
She’d been on the team that had calculated where the temporal cyclones could appear in Prime, and all of those were sealed with black pillars. Their work had taken the bulk of a year because the calculations required working with complex equations. For someone else to do the math and find an unguarded touchpoint was unlikely, but the Locker of Doom had its name for a reason. Every so often, the temporal waves shifted just right, and everything in Locker 666 was pulled into another iteration.
Usually, the temporal cyclones brought back odd things. A lost sock, a patch of grass, a set of unfortunate koi from someone’s pond. To the best of her knowledge, a temporal cyclone had never brought in a body. It wasn’t impossible, of course. Her team had used the anomalies to infiltrate well-guarded iterations before, then made every effort to prevent intruders from using the same manner of ingress.
She bit her thumbnail and looked back at the locker. Somewhere among in her infiltration gear she had a fingerprinting kit. No one would raise an eyebrow if she searched the massive database stocked with information from thousands of variations of history.
The building shook again, and as the locker rattled, the sound hollowed. Without looking, Rose knew the girl had been swept away, another piece of flotsam in the ocean of time. Her body perfectly hidden from all authority. Taken by time, and with her, time took Rose’s chance to make a different decision.
She stood, studying the locker until she saw what her intuition had picked up before her conscious mind acknowledged it: blood drops on the outside of the locker. Jane Doe had been outside Locker 666. Child of another time though she was, Jane Doe had been here. Possibly even killed here.
She grabbed her travel kit from her locker and pulled out an evidence bag for the blood sample. Central Command probably didn’t have the woman’s files, so there was unlikely to be a way to look for a genetic match, but it didn’t matter. Even when a timeline was destroyed, there were echoes.
Every crime left a trace.
Swabbing the sample, she cleaned the floor with a frown and marched out of the locker room. No one looking would see a change in her behavior, but it was there as she watched the techs run past. She saw the morass of humanity swirling around her and watched for the killer who hid in the crowd.