Four Days Ago

FOUR DAYS AGO

Emmett had never bought into the sexy Indiana Jones fantasy of academic field research, not even as a teenager. The field offered little other than a nature excursion. It was boring. Uncomfortable. Often fruitless. Yet he was here anyway because of his boss, tromping through the middle of a forest thicker than a jungle.

The danger was here and real, not a fantasy. A nightmare. He'd just killed a man. He may have looked ancient, but Isaac had entered Deadswitch at twenty-three. As far as Emmett was concerned, Isaac was twenty-three when Emmett blew him to pieces with a shotgun.

Just a kid.

Isaac had been suffering, and Emmett had put him out of his misery. But that didn't make the atrocity better. He'd cried for the past two hours, the longest in his life. He'd given himself that. Now, he had a job to do.

Soaked and exhausted, Emmett's hunt for Brock's mysterious cache continued, the note with the map from his boss in his grip. This cache could answer all Emmett's questions, and once he had answers, he would escape with Siena.

He'd hiked all night by the light of his headlamp, his skin crawling at the wilderness whispers and animal cries. And now, he was close.

At the bottom of a small shadowed gorge, a crevasse yawned from a rock wall. The map Emmett carried didn't signify the cache would be in any cave, but that would make the most sense, especially if the contents needed to remain dry. Even after a whole day's and night's worth of time to himself, he couldn't imagine what was in it. But he'd find out soon enough.

Before Siena, he wanted to be a corporate climate scientist. Cam may have called him a shill, but if that was the case, then he'd been a shill from the very beginning.

Shill, shmill. He was practical. Nothing to be ashamed of.

In graduate school, Emmett entered academia for the sole purpose of being around Siena. When he had her, and when she stayed with him despite his career choice, he no longer had to pretend academia was endgame, so he returned to the usual paid programming.

Stealing Dr. Feyrer's research had not been a part of that plan, but an opportunity to secure both his and Siena's future. A bonus for him, a grant for her. Even then, he hadn't realized COtwo—Brock—intended for him to act as staff on Siena's project if she accepted the grant. Given that stipulation, he was shocked when she accepted it, especially because Brock had implemented Emmett as a babysitter.

A large part of him—most of him—hated that Siena had taken the money. It meant if COtwo had just proposed the damn grant to her in the first place, without making Emmett sniff around, she would have taken it.

And he'd still be with her.

The gorge was silent save for his own feet on the forest floor and the occasional skitter of rodents. Emmett slid his flashlight from his pocket, clicked it on, and shone it into the crevasse. The grotto looked safe, so he turned sideways and shimmied through the crack in the rock .

Inside, his light bounced off the walls of a dry and temperate cave until it landed on a steel storage crate.

Emmett's survival instincts flared up, his subconscious worried any movement would trigger the crate to blow up or something. He knelt next to it carefully. While the crate bore no logo, a four-digit lock was built into the front. Date of Entry was engraved beneath.

Date of entry?

Emmett tugged his phone from his pocket and turned it on. August 14th. He was sure that date was wrong, given he couldn't trust his phone to have tracked the time correctly when they were trapped in the cabin. Still, he tried plugging in 0814. The latch remained locked.

If the code wasn't the day he entered the cave, then it had to be the day he'd entered Deadswitch.

He set the lock to 0713. The mechanism clicked, and he lifted the lid.

Objects filled the crate in organized stacks, the items so familiar that he almost forgot where he was. Emmett picked up and unfolded a track jacket, thumb gliding over the stain from a ballpoint pen. Up at Lake Garnet, the pen had exploded in Siena's pocket after she finished her field notes.

How had the jacket ended up in the crate? She'd brought it with her into Deadswitch. She'd been wearing it when he left yesterday.

He pressed the jacket to his face and inhaled. It still smelled like her.

Rage tore through his chest. What the hell had they done to her? Had they taken her?

Who are they ?

His head spun so fast that he couldn't calm himself down enough to make sense of anything, and then he spotted something that confused him further. Beneath Siena's track jacket, the same neatly folded garment waited. Same ink stain. Emmett made a fist around the fabric and lifted it to his face.

Same Siena.

Beneath the jackets sat a few neatly stacked Macbooks, all the same make and model. Six, seven tape recorders filled another compartment within the crate; two pairs of her hiking boots, one worn and the other destroyed beyond repair, were tucked along the edges, the crate like a costume trunk for Siena. All her extra garments and belongings tucked inside, waiting for her.

No. Waiting for him . Why was he here? Why had COtwo replicated Siena's stuff down to her very smell?

He lifted the laptops. An unfamiliar book rested beneath. It looked like something a child would have handmade in class, Siena scrawled across the spine, her name traced repeatedly with a ballpoint pen.

He flipped through the pages, all dirty with mud and dried blood. Siena's handwriting brimmed within them.

Emmett's thoughts quieted. Whatever he'd uncovered wasn't comprehensible. Turning to the center of the book and starting to read felt like submission.

The faded, smeared writing was almost illegible.

Caught me . . . a few days left . . . discovered something . . .

No dates marked the pages, but she hadn't written in the journal this trip. Maybe the one after they broke up, though it wasn't like Siena to tote around something so chintzy. She bought Field Notes journals in bulk.

A large, dark smear filled the final page, along with the line: I didn't think I'd die with so many regrets.

Some sick joke. Had to be. Emmett dug further into the crate, uncovering a row of neatly filed plastic evidence bags. Old socks, a drained pen. Dried herbs bunched together with an elastic hair tie. A knife carved from a deer antler. A homemade arrow. A Deadswitch Wilderness map. An empty tube of cherry Chapstick, Siena's favorite. Drawings of cells—bacteria—scribbled on scrap paper.

Emmett tugged free a black binder. Everything else in the crate was in various states of wear and tear, but the binder was new. The outside bore no label. He flipped open the cover, an envelope with his name on it tucked in the pocket. Behind the envelope, a printed sticker on the inside of the binder's cover read:

Variable: Siena Dupont

A plastic protector encased each binder page. Emmett scanned the first one.

Entry dates listed in Alpha Timeline. Timelines in correlating dimensions are not parallel.

Variable #01

Alpha Timeline Entry: November 11th, 1987.

Confidence: 59%

Contents:

Artifact: Sunglasses, missing left arm and hinge

Artifact: Cellphone, broken screen, missing SIM card

Field Notes: copied, processed, and annotated. See index.

Length: 76 days

Cause of Death: Exposure. Confidence: 11%

It was like reading a foreign language.

Variable #07

Alpha Timeline Entry: February 6th, 1998.

Confidence: 82%

Contents:

Artifact: Macbook, hard drive exported and processed

Photo: Crude effigy made of twigs and unknown substance. Possible biohazard.

Photo: Several reagent jars containing various berries and herbs

Photo: Tool set made of bone, for cleaning animal hide

Length: 651 days

Cause of Death: Infection. Confidence: 64%

Emmett flipped to the last page before the index.

Variable #13

Alpha Timeline Entry: April 7th, 2020.

Confidence: 98%

Contents:

Artifact: Cellphone, intact and functional, exported and processed. See index.

Photo: Misc. gear, including backpack, clothing, and first aid. Stored in #013 cache. See index.

Length: 14 days

Cause of Death: Homicide - strangulation. Confidence: 100%

His ribs clenched down on the white-hot fury in his chest. He couldn't breathe enough to think, so he instead ripped through the envelope and yanked open the folded paper.

Emmett read the letter. Then he read it again, and again. A slither of terror killed his anger until all that filled him was a dark, seeping cold.

It was a lie. It had to be a lie.