Chapter 17

Vee's face is determined as she stares at the map. I'm sorry for the space I've forced between us, because the suffering is evident in the way her mouth is pinched and how she keeps curling and uncurling her fists.

"There was some evidence that Indigo could use a form of teleportation," she says. "He'd show up in different places almost simultaneously. Or he'd be halfway across the world in a day. A few times, it seemed like we had him cornered, and then he'd vanish."

"So the marks on the map are where he's been spotted?" I ask.

Vee shakes her head. "No one has actually seen him since that night. Except you. But I've been looking into whether something like teleportation would even be possible."

"And?"

"He'd need to power it. You can't tear a hole in the fabric of time and space and walk through it like a door. Before Farah was killed, he seemed to be moving around the city a lot, so I built a heat map." She flips a switch on the side of the bulletin board where the map is posted, then turns out the light overhead. The board isn't quite so simple as a corkboard after all, because now it's illuminated, and the city glows behind the paper.

"What's that?" I ask, moving closer.

"It measures low-frequency energy fluctuations across the city." She taps the paper. "Took me a while. There's so much heat and noise. But once you weed it out, you find these other bursts that can't be explained by machinery and people." She points at the pushpins on the map.

"You think that's Indigo moving around? That he's been here for a while?"

She laughs. "They could be someone turning on the coffee grinder, except the locations are always weird. At the edges of the city. In parts of town where your average hipster and her cappuccino machine wouldn't show up."

I trace around one of the big red circles. "What are these?"

Vee blows out a breath. "I don't know what those are." She points at another. "But two nights ago, suddenly the whole board started lighting up like Christmas. Like tiny bombs going off all over the city."

"What are they?"

"I can't even begin to guess. They went on all night, and they were completely unpredictable. Sometimes they'd repeat in the same place over and over, then it would move around. A bunch of them were even right here, and I can guarantee Indigo didn't make an appearance. I think it must have been some kind of interference. Something's wrong."

My heart stops, and I drag my finger from the location of the diner down the familiar streets.

"This is my house," I say.

"Yeah," she says. "I was actually really relieved when you came in earlier. I was trying to figure out a way to call you without it being awkward."

But I'm already moving on to the next location.

"Kicks. Max's bar."

Vee stares at me. "You know Max?"

But I'm moving on.

"Murder pickles." My finger circles around Jasper's favourite restaurant.

"Excuse me?" Vee asks with a laugh.

I find Walter Wolfe's penthouse, but there's no red circle. Instead, there's a straight pin with a piece of blue string tied around it.

"What's this?"

Vee frowns. "That one I don't know. It happened after most of the other ones. It wasn't nearly as big, but then there was a second pulse right after it that shorted out the wiring in the board. Took me a couple hours yesterday morning to get it going again."

My heart is beating fast. I press my finger against the head of the pin until it hurts. Slowly, I exhale a fine breath as frost gently twists around the pin. The string goes stiff, and crystals create a small circle around the hole in the paper.

"That's neat," Vee says. "New trick?"

I don't even know how to explain, so I say, "That's where Jasper died. And the second pulse was me."

"You?"

I go backward, touching each of the other red circles. "Bus. Stab wound. Pickles." I trace the outline around my home. "Indigo."

Vee's eyes go wide as she studies the map. "This was you dying?"

"Think so. Except for the one with Jasper." I trail my finger over other landmarks I don't recognize. Probably the other nights. The ones I don't remember from before. I count them, then swallow hard as I lose track and have to start again.

Sixty-four. Sixty-five . . . seventy. Seventy-one.

"How many are there?" I ask. My hands are shaking, and my heart is beating so fast. Little circles of frost form anywhere I touch and I finally have to stuff my hands in my pockets.

Vee's gaze is still on the map, unaware that anything is wrong.

"I ran out of pins at a hundred and fifty, but even before that I couldn't keep up. Like I said. It went on for hours." She puts a hand on my arm and it's there. The whirlpool that would suck everything out of her if I let it. She seems to know because she hisses and pulls back. "Those were all you?"

But I can't answer. A hundred and fifty. More maybe. We've been in here for at least six months, not sixty days. I wobble with the very idea of it. I always assumed that Jasper remembered every one of our dates, but there must have been weeks or months before he started to remember.

"What is going on?" I breathe.

"I was hoping you were going to tell me," Vee says. She taps a final pin. She's drawn a circle around it, at least three times the size of any of the other markings in the city.

"That's Ziro Labs," I say, dread vying for space against panic.

Her mouth is thin as I stand. "Yeah."

"But I never died here." Not that I remember, anyway. "So what is that?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. Figured I couldn't exactly roll up to the front gate and ask you if you had a teleportation machine in the basement."

"We don't. We've been working on..." But my words cut off as a thought occurs to me. Or half a thought. Like a toddler that asks for attention, but you can't tell what exactly it wants. My eyes go back and forth from Wench to Kicks, the pickle restaurant to my house. I try to find the subdivision where Jasper's family lives before spinning back downtown and out again to the blank space that is the Wolfe Tech complex.

"There should be a circle here." I tap the map.

"Did you die there?"

"No, but they have a—" The toddler asks for attention again.

I told Jasper if I were building a time machine, I wouldn't set it up in my basement. Who knows what would happen if it broke down?

But Walter Wolfe had plans for the something that was almost the Ziro Machine but not quite. And Ziro Labs is pulsing like an open wound for no obvious reason.

"I have to go," I say, backing away from the board.

"What?" Vee follows. "Why?"

"I need to check something out."

"At Ziro? I'll go with you."

I stop at the bottom of the stairs, and Vee nearly collides with me. "You can't," I say. "It's dangerous."

She snorts. "You sound like your mother. Never stopped me before."

"No." I put my hands on her shoulders, holding her in place. "If there's something going on, you could get killed. If I get killed, I'll come back. I'll be right here. Literally. At the same table where this always starts. And I promise to ask for your help. Right away. I promise."

She studies me, and I ache for the years I've put between us. So instead of giving her room to argue, I pull her into a hug. She tenses for a moment before she pulls me close too, squeezing fiercely.

"Be careful," she says.

"I will."

My phone rings as I'm waiting at the crosswalk. A bus rumbles by, and I wave at the driver. I pull the phone from my coat pocket.

"Hello?"

"Morgan?" It's Ezekiel. "Where are you? I just got home and you're not here."

Shit. I glance at the time and it's later than I thought.

"I have to swing by the lab."

"The lab?"

"I forgot something."

"The presentation is the day after tomorrow. You need rest."

"I'll be back soon, I promise."

I drive faster than strictly legal across town. The sun is down, and the shadows under the lights are long as I pull into my usual parking spot at the lab. I keep my head down as I go through the lobby, waving to the security guard and making a mental note to send a gift basket to our HR team for not hiring skeevy losers like Leo and Bobby.

At the elevator, I choose the down button. The sublevels for the labs are where we developed the compressors for the Ziro Machine. The walls are ballistic-rated because the first attempts caused a few meltdowns. I bypass the first sublevel. It's where most of the day-to-day work happens. Someone would have noticed a time machine. But farther down, in the third basement level, that space has mostly been abandoned. It's where we built prototypes and where Ezekiel and I used to venture down periodically to test reconfigurations. But since the machine design was finalized late last year, I haven't been down this far.

That doesn't mean no one else has, though.

When I step off the elevator, I'm greeted by the sound of footsteps, somewhere far down the hall. I hesitate, ears straining, but the sound fades. Only the minimum number of lights for emergency exits are on. There's no evidence that anyone is or has come down here.

As I turn the corner, though, I catch a glimpse of a well-tailored suit before the man wearing it goes through the door at the end of the hall, and my stomach knots up.

Ezekiel?

But he's at home.

This is ridiculous. I'm chasing ghosts and conspiracy theories. Walter Wolfe has not built a time machine in our basement.

But then the door starts to glow.

Okay, not the door per se. But a blueish light emanates from beneath it, filling the far end of the corridor. Something hums, like the revolutions of an engine. Nothing is supposed to be down here. Could it really be a time machine?

I'm so nervous as I push open the door that I leave frosty fingerprints in my wake.

It's empty. Or at least, there are no people inside. Not Ezekiel. No techs. But something is wrong. This room should be a lab like the others, but instead it's been cleared of all the standard equipment. Benches, lockers, all gone. What remains is a skeletal and scaled-down version of the Ziro Machine. Not our prototype, but not the finished version either. Like a Ziro Machine cobbled together with spare parts and duct tape. The final version we're launching at the presentation is dense and about the size of a single-family bungalow. We had to clear out an entire wing of the lab building to make room for its assembly. The one here is about the size of a minivan, and while cables that have a circumference bigger than my arm are strung from it and lead out a door on the opposite side of the room, they're too small to be part of the Ziro Machine's transmission system.

Also, if the Ziro Machine were pulsing with light the way this machine is, we'd be declaring an emergency and evacuating the building. The light is definitely what was visible under the door, and it appears to somehow be contained, even though there are open spaces in the components that shouldn't be there.

I step forward, squinting against the glow. Slowly, a shadow becomes visible, sort of like the way shapes come back into focus if you stare into a light for too long. It's a person—a woman, actually. She's wearing something that might be a hospital gown. Her hair lifts from her shoulders like she's surrounded by static electricity.

As my eyes adapt further to the glow, shapes become more distinctive. Colours start to come through. The hospital gown is green. Her skin is so white it's translucent and her hair is?—

My heart stops.

I close my eyes and turn my back on the machine and the form inside its chamber. I told Jasper that without the right parts to trap and convert collected energy, our machine could be dangerous. The void in front of me, uncontained and uncontrolled, should be getting ready to burn the building down, yet somehow, it's not. Doesn't mean I'm safe, though.

I turn back, blinking against the light. But it's fading fast, and the last of the colours are settling into place, including the deep red of my mother's hair.

She's there. Suspended. Eyes closed, but it's her, and my heart breaks and knits itself back together a million times in a single second.

"Mother?"

I stumble forward. She doesn't respond, and I'm almost glad her eyes aren't open to see how suddenly clumsy I am, my feet feeling wooden on the linoleum floor.

But she's here.

I reach for her.

And my hand goes right through her.

I gasp, jerking back. "Mom?"

Her hair floats like she's suspended in water, but when I go to brush it away from her face, my fingers slide through it too. I can almost feel... something. Not her. The air changes as I glide through the strands over and over. It feels thicker. Denser. But not solid, and she gives no indication that she feels me at all.

Vee. I need Vee. Or, if nothing else, Vee should be here. She should know. She thinks Mom's dead and... Ezekiel. He needs to know too.

A chill settles over me. I don't have to turn to know the cause. My plans and scattered thoughts all stop short because I'm no longer the only person in this room.

Like his own portable shadow, Indigo is standing behind me. His lightless shape shows off the outline of an immaculate suit. I've never been close enough to see the details, but whoever his supervillain tailor is deserves all the stars on an online review.

I don't get a chance to run, call out, or even test my fickle powers. He's already reaching for me, hand on my chest, and the burn pours in my veins as my heart stops.

I better wake up at Wench.