An echo, insubstantial.
A woman in orange, a woman from the river, a woman on the cross. NSC engineers lifted Moss from the cockpit when she landed at Apollo Soucek, a figment of a dream intruding on the real. Intravenous fluids, medication.
They’re keeping me alive.
O’Connor arrived at her bedside, startled by her disfigurement. “They told me you suffered injuries commensurate with car-crash victims,” he said, eyeing her marred nose and gapped teeth, an eyelid droop that might not ever heal. He touched her face the way a father might touch a broken daughter’s. “Shannon, I’m so sorry,” he said. “For everything that’s happened, I’m sorry.”
“We’ve done this before,” she said, remembering O’Connor at a different bedside of hers, apologizing for her blackened toes and fetid gangrenous shin—I’m an echo—but she couldn’t bring herself to admit this to him, not yet. She feared O’Connor’s reaction. She didn’t want his pity, his regrets, and she feared that his care and friendship would drain away if he knew she was a phantom of an IFT, a revenant from an existence that had blinked away when she was taken from the cross. I’m not real, she wanted to say, but she feared he would sigh at the revelation, disappointed in her, like a man giving up on an aimless child. She feared he would leave her here in this hospital, alone.
“I found them,” she said. “I found Libra.”
“Tell me.”
The path of trees, the Terminus winter, she remembered the shipwreck sputtering blue flame, but in the half-forgotten way she might have recalled a reverie. You will see things your mind will not understand. Already her mind rejected what she had seen. They have my leg somewhere, she thought, remembering V-R17, dissected, sealed, stored.
“Let me start with what I’m certain of,” she said. “The Terminus isn’t fate, it’s not certainty—I think the chances of the Terminus reaching terra firma are so great that it feels like a certainty.” I came from a future without a Terminus. “But it’s not, it’s not fate.”
“Explain,” said O’Connor.
“Hyldekrugger believes that NSC will bring the Terminus to terra firma, that there are certain events that will lead this to happen. I’ve heard him refer to these events as a ‘chain,’ a chain of information that will allow Naval Space Command to rediscover the planet that Libra had encountered. NSC will bring the Terminus home.”
“That can’t be right, Shannon.”
“All the murder, the attacks they’re planning, the chemical weapons?” she said. “They’re trying to break the chain, to keep NSC from bringing the Terminus to terra firma. They’re trying to weaken our resolve to sail Deep Waters. NSC causes the cataclysm, NSC brings the Terminus.”
“You can’t listen to that man’s poison,” said O’Connor.
“I think Patrick Mursult was preparing to sell the location of Esperance to the Navy, to sell where the QTNs came from, or sell the location of Libra,” said Moss. “He wanted protection because he knew Hyldekrugger would kill him, he wanted a new identity. There’s a lawyer named Carla Durr, Mursult’s lawyer.”
Doubt shuddered through her. Carla Durr had to die, Dr. Peter Driscoll had to die. According to Hyldekrugger everyone had to die, all the physicists at the Naval Research Lab who would one day form Phasal Systems and all the sailors of Deep Waters, brave boys with bodies polluted by QTNs, everyone . . .
I protect the innocent.
“What about the lawyer?” asked O’Connor.
“She’s innocent,” said Moss, and seemed to feel the weight of the future avalanche into the present. Whether she held her peace and let the lawyer die or spoke now to save the lawyer’s life, every choice seemed like the wrong choice, the last meaningless moves of an endgame. A great weariness swept over her, and she wanted to hide herself, retreat beneath her covers as a child might hide from imagined fears. A disquiet worked through her thoughts; she wondered what would happen if she saved the lawyer’s life. Would she hasten NSC’s discovering Esperance? The lawyer would remain alive, would sell Mursult’s information. No, no, she thought, that’s Hyldekrugger’s way of thinking, but she felt bound. Protect the innocent. “Carla Durr, the lawyer,” she said. “Patrick Mursult had been meeting with her, and she wants to parlay his secrets into protection, money. But she doesn’t understand the consequences of what she’s involved in. Hyldekrugger, or one of his followers, will kill her on March twenty-fourth in the Tysons Corner mall food court because she’s met with Mursult. They think of her as part of the chain. The gunman will use an echoed firearm, a Beretta M9 probably pulled from a dead echo of a Libra sailor, identical to the guns we recovered from the Blackwater Lodge and from the remains of Torgersen’s house.”
“The twenty-fourth is three days from now.”
“I want to request a pre-crime warrant,” said Moss. “We can save this woman’s life.”
“We can justify pre-crime,” said O’Connor, “to save her life. I’ll write up the paperwork. We’ll be able to hold her for possession of classified intelligence on the suspicion that Mursult talked to her about Deep Waters or Libra. We can question her, find out what Mursult was preparing to sell. That should protect her past the twenty-fourth. I’ll call the Fairfax County Police, ask them to apprehend her for us. If they can’t find her, we’ll set up a direct intervention at Tysons Corner. Carla Durr, we’ll find her. Now, tell me about Libra. Do you know where she is?”
The eye of God is on fire, and the pupil is black. “Libra is caught inside the Vardogger,” she said. There is a whirlpool of fire, and it burns through every existence. “I don’t know how else to explain it. Inside the Vardogger there are paths that open from the trees. You saw it. Libra is caught inside there, and so is the Terminus somehow, or a part of the Terminus. Like a pocket universe, almost like it’s in a different time, or not in time at all. Njoku said thin spaces exist outside time . . .”
“SEAL Team 13 has been searching near the Red Run,” said O’Connor, “but Commander Brunner hasn’t found anything like you’re describing.”
“You can slip inside it,” said Moss, remembering when she’d been lost in the thin space, as easily as losing her way in the woods. “But there’s a trick to it. I don’t know the path that leads to Libra. And there’s something you should see, in the Grey Dove’s computer, a message you recorded for yourself. The Vardogger is dangerous, if you stray from the path, but Hyldekrugger uses it like a gate.”
Reverberations, copies, universes opening in the pines. She was spread thin, thinning, and as she lay in her hospital bed long after O’Connor had left, she closed her eyes and saw the vortex of fire spreading from Libra like the incandescent rays of a black sun, or like a burning eye searching for her. I am an echo; the woman in the orange space suit had been reality. The woman in the orange space suit had been Shannon Moss. That woman is dead. You’re here now. Everything was thin—her body, her bed, the medication dripping through her, the clinic, the base, the world—everything seemed like wrapping paper, something she could tear away to reveal only emptiness. She peered into herself and saw nothing. She felt that if she plunged her nails into her skin and ripped open her chest, only darkness would spill from her.
Agitated, that night, insomnia as she watched the minutes of her bedside clock tick between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00, her thoughts an anxious jumble. Tossing, her pillows warm and too lumpy, but even more bothersome were the twitching phantom cramps that irritated her missing leg. The sensations came and went regularly, but affected Moss most acutely when she was stressed. Lying on the stiff hospital mattress, staring at the ceiling, she could feel that first cut the surgeons had made, felt it plain as day, across her shinbone when they had tried to amputate low to save her knee. She knew that her foot and ankle were gone—she no longer felt her foot—but it seemed the rest of her leg might still be there. It was almost as if she could reach down to touch her left knee, but there was nothing there. Blankets, sheets. Cramps in her calf, racing up her thigh, agonizing; even looking down and staring where her leg wasn’t wouldn’t help. Mirror therapy brought relief, and in the morning she asked her nurses if they could find her a long mirror, at least as long as her leg. Her nurses found a mirror hanging on the back of a closet door and brought it to her. Moss reclined backward in her bed, fixed one edge of the mirror snug against her groin. She looked down the length of the reflection. Two legs instead of one. A simple trick, one that shouldn’t work but did: her mind responded as if she had two legs again. She curled her toes, rolled her ankle, flexed her knee, scratched itches, and rubbed out cramps, touching her right leg but bringing relief to the reflection.
The nurses liked her, but they coddled her, asking if she needed help with her walker or her wheelchair, or if she could dress herself, or use the toilet. Moss seethed at the idea of helplessness, that the absence of her leg was the most present thing about her. An echo or not, I can use the bathroom by myself, she thought, and remembered all those bitter women she’d met in her support groups, the women who cursed everything and everyone, who seemed hate-filled and spiteful and loathed anyone who noticed their disabilities. Moss opened herself to some of that similar vitriol, letting it pour into her like gasoline, and she became prickly, snapping unfairly at her nurses when they offered her help in getting to the cafeteria for dinner—she knew she was being unfair, but that anger cut against her despair. An echo, I don’t exist, I’m an echo. Mobility was essential, her independence.
“I need my prosthetist from Pittsburgh,” Moss eventually told her nurse. “Laura. She’s in my files. I need her.”
Moss had developed a professional intimacy with Laura over the years, Laura the only civilian medical professional Moss visited on a regular basis. Laura understood aspects of Moss’s body better even than Moss did. She was familiar with Moss’s residual limb, knew the type of liner Moss preferred, the sensitivity of her skin, already knew the location of Moss’s bony protuberances, her body type, and where her weight would fall. Regular appointments at Union Prosthetics in Pittsburgh for adjustments and resizing, salmon walls and gray carpeting, Union like a dentist’s office except for the attached fabrication shop, a commotion of plaster and plastic limbs and equipment for cutting and sanding, sheets of carbon-fiber and anatomical models of arms and legs. Laura was aware of Moss’s peculiar circumstances and was accommodating; she had passed the government background checks, signed the nondisclosure agreement, and was often able to make the trip to Apollo Soucek at a moment’s notice for emergency refitting and repairs.
“Are you all right?” Laura asked early the following morning when Moss arrived at the examination room in her wheelchair. “That’s all I want to know. Tell me you’re all right,” she said, her riot of brown curls wrestled into a ponytail, her eyes taking in Moss’s transformation: her once-pert nose now off axis, her weight loss, the startling gaps in her teeth.
“I’m fine,” said Moss.
Chatting about The X-Files as they set to work, Laura prepared Moss’s limb, chose a liner to roll over Moss’s stump and thigh. Significant shrinkage in the limb, Moss had been compensating for the changing circumference by adding padding to her socket and wearing extra layers of socks. As Laura massaged out tension to help cast a relaxed shape, however, Moss realized just how lean her residual limb was compared to her right thigh, how bony it seemed, how shriveled.
“My leg . . . looks so small,” said Moss. “Is that normal?”
“How does it feel?”
“I think it feels all right.”
“Then it’s all right,” said Laura, swathing Moss’s limb with plastic wrap, tight without pressure over the liner, smoothing out creases and wrinkles in the wrap as she rolled. She measured Moss’s thigh with yellow measuring tape and a heavy metal caliper and wrapped Moss’s limb in bandages sopping with plaster of paris. Laura’s hands were confident, molding the cast, handling Moss’s leg without delicacy.
“I made arrangements with Booden Prosthetics. They’ll let me use their fabrication shop again,” said Laura, sliding the plaster cast from Moss’s thigh once it had set up, her mold for the carbon-fiber fabricated socket—a hollow space matching the shape of the limb.
“I’ll need another C-Leg,” said Moss.
“It took you six months to get your hands on a C-Leg,” said Laura. “I’ll be able to get you a 3R60.”
The 3R60 from Otto Bock was a stance-flexion joint, secure but mechanical. “Damn,” said Moss. Without the computerized C-Leg joint, walking would feel like relearning a stick shift after years of automatic transmission.
“I get it,” said Laura, “but if you want the C-Leg, then don’t lose yours.”
“I know, I know—”
“Besides, the 3R60 is good,” said Laura. “You’ll lose some of the mobility you had with the C-Leg, but you’ll be stable. I’ll bring the first socket to you this afternoon, have you try it out. We’ll make our adjustments, and you should be good to go by tomorrow.”
“And then you’re hitting the beach?” asked Moss.
“You think I came all this way just to see you?”
—
The new prosthetic socket gloved Moss’s thigh, but the movement of the 3R60 was different from what she was accustomed to, the knee joint a spring-loaded swing, the entire prosthesis a weight of metal. Her gait was altered, a conspicuous limp as she made her way from her food-court table to the top of the escalator, peering over the railing at the vast lower floor of Tysons Corner. She knew what Durr had been wearing when she died in the future and so assumed that the lawyer would be wearing the same blaring royal-blue suit this afternoon as well, for her lunch meeting with Dr. Peter Driscoll. Moss scanned the shoppers below, seeing the tops of their heads and their shoulders, the bags they carried, and although Carla Durr with her carroty orange curls and her blue suit should be easy to spot, Moss found no sign of her. She made her way back to her table, one she’d chosen for the clean sightlines to the Five Guys burger stand, every step tentative, having to trust her mechanical knee to lock when she needed to put her weight on the joint, to unlatch and swing when she needed to step.
“Still no sign of her,” said Moss into the microphone clipped to her lapel.
“It’s early yet,” said O’Connor through her earpiece.
But it wasn’t early, it was after three o’clock, nearing three-thirty, and Moss knew that Carla Durr’s time of death was at three-forty, approximately.
“Any sign of the shooter?” she asked. A Caucasian male in black military fatigues was all she could describe of Durr’s killer, but just like Durr’s royal-blue skirt suit, a man in black fatigues should be easy to find. O’Connor had arranged for patrol cars from Fairfax County to scan the parking lot, and there were additional county police officers in the mall as well, plainclothes officers stationed near every entrance.
“Not yet,” said Njoku’s voice through her earpiece. Njoku was stationed with another NCIS special agent in the food court, O’Connor below near the foot of the escalators.
Imagining how all this might play out: Someone would spot Durr, Moss thought, and arrest her. Or if no one spotted her in time, Moss would see the lawyer as she ascended on the escalator to the food court. Or one of the patrolmen might spot the shooter, maybe Hyldekrugger himself—the police were under orders to stop and arrest anyone fitting the description of the shooter, any male in black fatigues. By now a short line had developed at the Five Guys burger stand. Moss tried to remember, hadn’t Carla Durr already received her food when she was killed? The image of that potential crime scene flashed in her mind: Durr’s body sprawled in front of the hamburger counter, blood slicking the floor, several shots in her back and head. Carla Durr would need to get in line now to have time to order, to receive her order, and be gunned down in the next few minutes. Moss looked frantically across the food court, to spot the man in fatigues, anyone suspicious, but she saw only groups of teenage girls and mothers with strollers, middle-aged men holding their wives’ bags.
Three-forty came and went, and a few minutes after four O’Connor’s voice spoke through their earpieces: “We have to close up shop.” NCIS warrants for pre-crime intervention were written only for specific windows of time, only for specific circumstances, constrained by the constitutional rights of individuals who had not yet committed the crimes they would be arrested for. The lawyer Carla Durr had never shown. What had happened? Maybe the extra police presence had scared off the gunman, but that wouldn’t explain why Durr hadn’t made it for her hamburger meeting with Dr. Driscoll. Durr wasn’t here, Driscoll wasn’t here, there was no gunman. Something had changed from the future that Moss knew, but it could have been anything—flat tire, indigestion, Durr grown too scared to meet with Driscoll, or she was already dead. Moss was annoyed at having wasted everyone’s time, but failed operations like this were a matter of course when serving pre-crime warrants. She’d been on plenty of operations where the circumstances had changed from the expected future, and nothing was accomplished. Moss had supplied the information that led to this abortive operation, which meant paperwork, but, more important, she owed the others involved the customary rounds of drinks special agents bought when their predictions failed.
Moss woke early the following morning, anxious for her debriefing with Admiral Annesley. She dressed in a charcoal-gray skirt-suit and silky blouse, and made it to NCIS headquarters with plenty of time to go over the notes she’d prepared about her IFT and to fine-tune her statement about her request for the pre-crime warrant. A few minutes before the debriefing was set to start, however, O’Connor brought her a fresh cup of coffee and let her know that the debriefing had been postponed. “Annesley called just a few minutes ago,” he said. A relief, in some ways, being spared the scrutiny of a roomful of men, some of whom would whisper about how she looked, how she used to look.
“You’ll need to write up your reports,” said O’Connor, “and I’m sure you’ll be called in to talk eventually, but the Navy is taking over, Shannon. Not every facet of the investigation, but the thin space, Libra. Carla Durr. They’re all military matters now. We’re through.”
“I understand,” said Moss. She knew that eventually, when Hyldekrugger was captured, or Cobb, or the others, they would be held in military prisons and tried in courts-martial. She would be called on to testify, to work with the prosecution, but her role in this investigation would be finished. Even so, having the military take over the investigation before any arrests had been made was disappointing, leaving behind work only half finished.
“What about Carla Durr?” Moss asked. “If the Navy’s taking over, is she dead? Did we miss her?”
“She’s very much alive,” said O’Connor. “I talked with Admiral Annesley that first night you returned, told him your theory about the Terminus, what you’d learned in your IFT. He was keen on finding Durr. And just this morning when he called, he told me the Navy had already arrested Carla Durr. She was already in the Navy’s custody when we were out at Tysons Corner waiting for her to show. So you saved her life, Shannon. But she’s out of our hands now.”
“Where was she?”
“Staying at a hotel in Chevy Chase,” said O’Connor. “The Navy filled the parking lot with military trucks, battered down her door—D.C. SWAT handled the operation. It was all over in fifteen minutes. Someone working with the admiral questioned her for several hours and then let her go. NCIS was never involved, strictly military.”
“All the death we’ve seen,” said Moss, like she’d been punctured and deflated. “All the killing, Mursult’s children—it all led to her. And we never had a chance to speak with her. The Navy questioned her for a few hours and just let her go, and we never had a chance. What about the FBI?”
“I’m meeting with the director this evening,” said O’Connor. “They’re moving forward on their investigation into the chemical-weapons lab we discovered at Buckhannon, and so are we. Domestic terrorism, the homicides. Jurisdiction’s a nightmare on this one. We’ll be untangling strands of this investigation for years.”
She worked with O’Connor over the course of the afternoon, translating her notes into a summary to send over to the admiral’s office in Dahlgren. O’Connor remarked on how tired Moss seemed. “Take some time,” he said.
“I think I’ll head home,” she said.
“William Brock’s funeral service is scheduled for tomorrow morning,” said O’Connor. “In Pittsburgh. You can represent our office if you’re up for it.”
She was weary. Brock’s death seemed from another lifetime. “Of course,” she said.
—
Over a thousand police officers in dress uniform from cities across the nation had gathered at St. Paul Cathedral in Pittsburgh, a cavalcade of men and women standing at attention along Fifth Avenue as the family arrived in limousines. The cathedral was crowded with friends and colleagues, but Moss made her way to an open seat in a rear pew rather than shake hands with people she only vaguely knew from crime scenes. Brock’s casket was near the altar, draped in an American flag.
She spotted Nestor during the homily; he sat toward the front, his arm in a sling. Nestor might look for her, she thought, might wonder if she were here, where she was sitting, might want to sit with her, Moss a victim of the same blast that had taken Brock’s life. But when she thought of Nestor, she remembered him shooting Vivian in the woods and preferred to avoid him even if it was unfair to judge a man for things he hadn’t done. The director of the FBI and the attorney general of the United States each offered words, the director presenting Brock’s wife with the FBI Memorial Star and announcing that Special Agent in Charge William Brock would be designated a service martyr, his name added to the other engraved names in the FBI Hall of Honor. Rashonda Brock and her two daughters were led from the memorial, grieving but proud. Moss waited while the front rows cleared, mourners walking down the center aisle. Nestor looked her way, but his eyes passed over her. She thought of what she must look like now and realized he hadn’t recognized her.
She slipped out a side door to a quiet courtyard, avoiding the chance of encountering Nestor or anyone else she knew on the cathedral stairs. A motorcade had formed along Fifth. Pittsburgh’s Bureau of Police motorcycles with lights flashing guided the hearses and the escort cars away from the church, a long train of police cars following. They were headed to the airport, where the casket would be flown to Texas for the family funeral and burial.
Moss visited her mother that night. An enduring image of her mother, alone in the kitchen, only the single kitchen light on, going through her envelopes of Reader’s Digest cutouts, the rest of the house dark. Moss used to wonder if this was how she would remember her mother long after her mother had died, but now she knew that the Terminus would rob her of even this. Moss had called after Brock’s memorial and told her mother she was coming over, trying to prepare her for her injuries. She’d told her mother over the phone that she’d been in a car crash, that she would be fine, but the moment her mother saw her, she stood from the kitchen table.
“Let me look at you,” she said, angling her daughter’s chin toward the light. “Whoever he is, leave him.”
Moss sighed. “I told you how this happened. I was in an agency car, and a truck ran a red light—”
“They don’t stop,” said her mother. “You listen to me,” she said, staring hard into her daughter’s eyes. “If it’s in them, it’s always been in them and always will. He’ll destroy everything about you, he’ll take everything that was good. You’re worth more than that.”
“It’s nothing like that, I’m telling you—”
“Protect what you have, even if it means losing everything you think you want.”
Moss had aged as she traveled IFTs, even as the rest of time stood still, catching up with her mother incrementally over the years. Since her mother had been pregnant with Moss when she was young, only seventeen, Moss sometimes thought she might actually catch her mother in age, or pass her by. As her mother examined Moss’s face, however, the hot light of the kitchen lamp warming her skin, Moss had never felt more like a child. They ordered pizza and settled in for a night of television. Her mother kept the living-room lights low, and in just the harsh blue flicker of the television Moss found herself staring at the photograph of her father in his Navy whites, grinning until the end of time. They watched ABC News, her mother smoking cigarettes. The news of Brock’s funeral had been buried beneath the news of a cult in California, thirty-nine members discovered dead, a mass suicide.
“Of all the . . . you hear about this?” asked her mother.
“No,” said Moss.
“Thought the damn comet was a spaceship, so they killed themselves. They thought if they killed themselves, the spaceship would beam them up, like in Star Trek,” she said. “All wearing the same sneakers. Look at that, they’re showing one of the bodies. Look at the sneakers.”
A body draped in a purple tarp, only the slacks and black-and-white sneakers visible, brand-new sneakers, bought for the occasion of death. They watched Beverly Hills, 90210 and Party of Five, shows her mother followed, but Moss let her mind wander to the Vardogger trees, the infinite paths—to Remarque ordering her crew to self-destruct Libra and commit mass suicide like the Heaven’s Gate cult, believing that if her crew died, then the world they had wrought would die with them. Her mother had fallen asleep in her chair by the time the local news came on, her glass of whiskey still in one hand, her cigarette in the other, burning down. A house fire, Moss imagined—she wondered in how many IFTs the cigarette dropped ash to the floor, caught the carpet on fire. Moss brought an ashtray over, a clay monstrosity she’d made for her mother in first or second grade, stubbed out the cigarette.
She expected more of the Heaven’s Gate suicides on the news, wanted to hear more about the spaceship these people thought was flying the Hale-Bopp, but the news was filled instead with a different cosmic event. Images of people gathered in fields, crowding hilltops and the roofs of buildings, staring at the night sky. The Star of Bethlehem had returned, some said—the Star of Bethlehem hanging in the sky, eastward. Some said the star was pointing the way to Bethlehem, some thought it represented the second coming of Christ, though the talking-head astronomers offered differing explanations. Another comet, some said, coming into our viewing region in a cyclical manner, an unprecedented doubling of comets, the Star of Bethlehem and Hale-Bopp like twin silver lights. Others claimed that the shining celestial event was more likely a distant supernova, the light just now reaching the Earth from a star that had died magnificently several billion years ago. Moss’s eyes, however, filled with tears that spilled down her cheeks. She unlocked the side door and walked into the street and faced the east. There were already others out on the street, looking up, shielding their eyes. The event was like a shining star, a star extraordinarily bright—bright enough to seem like a nighttime sun casting the Earth in a cold glare that washed out color and heightened shadow. The moon was dim, as were other stars—as was Hale-Bopp, that silvery smudge that had hung grandly in the sky for the past several weeks. The new light felt like the brightest light Moss had ever seen, and it grew ever brighter as she stared. It meant the death of everything she’d ever known. The White Hole had appeared. The Terminus had come.
Her cell phone rang, and she checked the number: O’CONNOR.
“We’re still alive,” she said.
“We have work to do.”