The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (32 page)

It swung out of range. The man rolled from under the car. I darted in—all I needed was to skin-pop him and it would all be over—but he was trained. Snakelike, he grabbed my wrist. The world tilted as he threw me over his hip. Asphalt loomed at my face.

But I was trained, too. Using his arm for leverage, I pulled myself further into my momentum, tucking my chin to my chest. Instead of smashing into the ground with the crown of my head, I took it on my shoulders, rolling through the worst of the impact and coming to rest on my back. The sedative jarred from my hand.

Still gripping my wrist, the man twisted hard. Pain shot down my arm. He bent his knees and struck at my face. I intercepted with my forearm, fist pointed straight up, then rotated my wrist and slashed my fingernails across his eyes.

He managed not to scream. I rolled my snared wrist free of his grasp and scooted out from between the two cars. The man lurched forward, blinking hard. I began to stand and he swept out my knee. I hit the pavement again. He went for his pocket. I went for mine, rolling to clear my hip.

Two shots went off as quiet as gasps.

The man grunted and stumbled backwards. Without getting up, I fired four more rounds, downing him. Particulate blood sifted down in the yellow light and settled to the sidewalk. I stood, walked between the cars, and gave him a double-tap.

I glanced across the lot. The lights buzzed. Flies looped around them. I had to act fast. I searched the man's pockets for his keys. No luck. I walked to my car and parked beside his, leaving it running while I popped the trunk. I hopped out, grabbed the dead man under the arms, and dragged him toward my car.

Stephen Jaso cornered the building, stopped, and stared at me, puffy-eyed, clutching a massive styrofoam fountain soda and five Slim Jims.

I went very still. "It's not what you think."

"I know," he said. "It's
you
."

"You remember."

"One maniac shows up at the last second to rescue me from another maniac. I'm gonna forget that?" Stephen gazed at the body in my arms. His face had matured, become angular and acne-spotted, but I could still see the kid within it. "Is that what you're doing now? Rescuing me again?"

"Afraid so," I said. The kid stepped forward. I held up one hand, the body slumping against me. "Don't touch him."

"Why?" He laughed huskily. "Will the universe implode?"

"I don't want the police to pin his murder on you." I hauled the dead weight to my car and muscled it inside the trunk. He'd dropped his pistol. I gathered it and my fallen sedative.

"Why?" Stephen said. The stoned look had left his face, replaced by sharp-edged confusion and resentment. "What's so fucking special about me?"

I pocketed the weapons. There was all kinds of blood in the lot, but there wasn't much I could do about that. "That's what I'm here to find out."

"So what now?"

"Call for a ride. Do not get in your car."

"Just like that? You think this is easy for me?" His eyes brightened with sudden tears. "Knowing I'm supposed to be dead? And now they come for me again. Is this what I get to look forward to? Do I spend my whole life looking over my shoulder, hoping the next time they come for me, Super Blake will be there to save the day?"

"No." I opened the door to my car. "Because I'm going to make sure this is the last time."

I drove with the body out to the hills. The Pod returned us to Primetime. I ordered it to seal and preserve the body, try to identify him, but if he were one of Joachim's agents, I wouldn't get any results.

In cold fury, I prepared for another trip. The Pod spat out everything I needed. Within minutes, I was back in Stephen Jaso's world—but decades deeper into his future. This time, there hadn't been any accidents. He had attended a school called MIT. Gotten his doctorate. Taught theoretical physics at Princeton. Been hired by the government. At 63, he'd been honored with the Nobel for his revisions to Einstein's work.

I returned to Primetime, made a third jump. A hundred years ahead. Jaso was dead, of course, but his work had flourished. They'd built wormholes. Stitched together the neighboring stars.

And turned their worlds into a paradise.

I no longer cared about evidence. I had everything I needed to know. And wrath burned in me like napalm.

I returned to Primetime with a plan taking shape in my head. At the backup facility—deserted except for myself, the Pods, and the corpse of the man who'd meant to kill Stephen Jaso—I plotted the murder of Kellendor Davies.

I called a meeting with Vette. Not at the hill in the park. We'd gone there too often. Perhaps I was paranoid. But I'd come too far to take a single chance. Instead, I met her at a lake on the south side of town. I rented a little boat, the kind lovers use to pass a dreamy afternoon, and paddled us out to the middle of the water. Only then did I stop the small talk.

I let go of the oars and sat back, panting. "Can you get me a meeting with Davies?"

"No." She shielded her eyes against the glare from the water. "But one of my new friends can. When do you need it?"

I was going to need a little time to heal. "Two days."

"I'll see what I can do." Vette folded her arms. "What did you find out?"

"Nothing."

"Horseshit."

"It's better you don't know."

She snorted. "We used to work together. I've been on the sidelines ever since we came back from the apocalypse. Is it because I forgot what happened?"

I glanced across the placid waters. "It has nothing to do with that."

"I didn't know what I was doing, okay? We come back, my head feels like it's about to explode, the Pods are asking me whether I want to forget, and I think they're talking about dying, and I
do
want to forget—just the last part—so I tell them yes, and next I know—"

I took her hand. "I don't hate you, Vette. You did what you needed to do."

She laughed a bit, sniffed. "Sometimes, the look you get in your eyes, I wish to God I hadn't."

"It was a good life. If you want, I'll tell you about it sometime."

"For now, I just need to know one thing."

"Shoot."

"How often did I let you be on top?"

I smiled down at the water. Toughing through her emotions with jokes. One of the reasons I'd fallen in love. "About as often as you woke up first."

She laughed. I had already set up one message to be sent to Vette in the event I didn't make it back. Once I returned to the facility, I wrote a second. One just for her.

That finished, I climbed into the Pod. The first time I told it what I wanted, it refused me. But I knew that was protocol. I insisted. It put me to sleep and went to work. I got up groggy. My left arm was numb to the biceps. I waited for my head to clear, then programmed a destination into the Pod. I wasn't headed anywhere just yet, but after what I was about to do, I had the feeling I'd need to lie low for a while.

Assuming Vette came through with my meeting, I had a day and a half of open time. It was going to be tough. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my hands wrapping around Davies' throat.

I couldn't chance staying at my apartment, so I slept in the Pod. I'd set it up with another command. If they came for me, it would jet me off to another time—and it wouldn't bring me back for a full week. Long enough for my messages to be automatically sent to Vette. With any luck, that would do enough damage for them to forget about me.

Needless to say, I had thrown our cautious, piece-by-piece plan to the winds. Maybe that was a mistake. But I refused to let them erase one more Stephen Jaso.

Day broke. I heard from Vette. She'd gotten me into his schedule. The following afternoon. I wished it were that same day. I didn't want the extra time to think.

I thought I could make it inside Central. I wasn't so sure about getting out. But it didn't matter. This had gone on far too long.

In the end, I had the Pod put me to sleep. I awoke. Stretched. Jogged around the facility. And then it was time. I carried nothing but my wallet and my link. I dropped down to the tunnels, climbed into a zipcar, ordered it to Central. It hustled through the tunnels at impossible speed, delivering me to my fate and the platform beneath Central. Before leaving, I had the Pod dose me with a cocktail to moderate anxiety/adrenaline—Central security didn't just check for weapons, but for unusually elevated mood—and I approached the checkpoint feeling eerily calm.

The door closed behind me. Machines whirred from the walls, scanning my clothes, my skin, my brain. I stared straight forward, waiting for an alarm to blare, for sirens to whirl, for masked men to storm through the door and haul me away to the dungeons.

The machines retracted to the walls. The door opened. I stepped into Central.

The elevator carried me hundreds of feet into the sky. I was early; at Davies' floor, I gazed out the window at the city spread beneath me. I wondered if it took that much effort to keep them in the dark. I had bought into it without question, too. So easy to believe what you're told. To discard doubts. There is comfort in letting those above you lead you by the hand while you watch the sidewalk pass beneath your feet.

Davies' assistant saw me in, gave me a seat, handed me coffee. It was very good. Perhaps its flavor was augmented by the chance it would be the last thing I'd ever taste.

I laughed out loud, drawing a look from the assistant. I was being awfully melodramatic. It wasn't about me. It was about Stephen. And the untold hundreds like him. My anger surged. I was ready.

"Commander Davies will see you now," the assistant said.

"Thank you." I rose. There was an argument for killing the assistant, but I'd been in Davies' office before. It was virtually soundproof. Screaming wouldn't save him. I entered, closed the door behind me.

Davies sat behind his desk, gazing at me with his copper-flecked eyes. "Seen a lot of you lately, Din."

I settled on the edge of the chair across from him. "Are we being monitored?"

"Closed recording only. Contents of this room are too sensitive even for security."

I couldn't be certain he was telling the truth, but I supposed it was irrelevant. I'd only need a few seconds. Security wouldn't have time to react. "I'm here for Stephen Jaso."

He shook his head. "Not familiar."

"You should be. You ordered his death."

Without changing expression, Davies reached for his desk. I'd been anticipating the movement. I lurched forward, grabbed his wrist, and pulled him into his own momentum, slamming his face into the cherrywood surface. I pinned his neck with my other forearm.

"Not long ago, he was murdered. I thought it was just another Primetime psycho off to get his kicks in secret. I saved Stephen, but it turned out he was fated to die anyway. Car crash, age eighteen."

"You need to do three things," Davies said, face mushed by the desk. "Let go of me. Stand down. And—"

I twisted his arm and bore down on his throat. He choked, spewing spittle on the desk.

"I wasn't finished," I said. "I let the case go. Accidents happen. You learn to let them go. I did—until I learned about Siri Mercer. Murdered by a trespasser. Agent named Jeni Sept saved her life. Except fate had it in for Siri, too. She bought it in a plane crash. Real shame. She was brilliant, too. Could have changed the world."

Wrath roaring in my veins, I pressed down as hard as I could. Davies' face purpled. He tried to get his legs under him, but I swung around the desk and kicked out his knee. I took a deep breath and eased up enough to let him get his air.

"And she did, didn't she? Just like Stephen did. Until you erased them. Because they were leading their worlds to a future you could never let them have: time travel."

Davies laughed dully. "In minutes, you'll be dead."

"Primetime isn't a fluke. It's no accident that we're the only world with time travel. Whenever another world comes close, you send someone back to destroy it. To murder their greatest minds. And we've been doing this for years."

"It's the only thing that keeps us safe!" He shouted with such thunder I nearly lost my grasp. His eye bulged up at me. "You don't leave a weapon like that lying around. This isn't handing a pistol to a child. It's gifting a nuke to your worst enemy."

"Bullshit! You're destroying their future because you're scared!"

"You're the one shoveling shit, Agent. If we let these worlds build time travel, they could strike Primetime at any point. Wipe us out. As many worlds as they please. Instead, we cull a few lives. Leave billions in peace. And secure not just our future, but the future of every world in the multiverse."

This was mutually assured destruction-style madness, the kind of thinking that enabled humans to reduce other humans to faceless threats to be exterminated at any cost, but I let it slide. There were still a few things I needed to know.

"Is that why you partnered with Greene & Associates?" I said. "Too many assassinations for you to handle by yourself, so you decided to outsource?"

Face still pressed into the table, he snorted. "Think, fool. You think you're the first to catch a whiff of this? To turn up your righteous little nose?"

"Jeni Sept. Great cover story, making everyone think she'd moved to an island no one could ever visit her on. But you disappeared her."

"Which, for the record, I hate. Our best agents are the ones most likely to catch on. Cry foul. And force us to remove them. That's why we moved off-world. To put ourselves out of sight."

"Or maybe you were ashamed."

"To keep my world safe? To keep agents like you from getting their heads chopped off? Never."

Some of the details were still guesswork—I could only assume Korry Haltur had discovered the operation and been killed for it, though it was possible his murder, the one that had set us on this long and winding trail, had been related to G&A's more pedestrian criminal enterprises—but it was all in place now. Davies couldn't have moved Central or CR off-world without drawing attention, so he'd started a shadow wing instead.

Transporting resources from Primetime would be logistically difficult as well as obtrusive, so he'd started from scratch. Gone to Brownville's organized crime with an offer they couldn't refuse: do his dirty work, and he'd turn them into time-dancing, world-skipping gods. But instead of moving forward step by drudging step, they'd taken a shortcut. Gone back to frontier times to consolidate their power. I didn't know if that had been Davies' idea or Rupert Joachim's, but either way, it had left ripples.