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.