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.