#spoospasu

By the time she had slipped into pants and a shirt, the doorbell hadn’t been rung again. As if the visitor had left already.

She paused in the hallway to the entrance. The floor was cold.

A shadow awaited outside the front door.

Her heart pounded.

When the doorbell rang a fourth time, she shuddered. Neared the door. Opened it.

A familiar motorcycle was parked in the driveway. A familiar, handsome face awaited outside—and her pulse began to calm at the sight of Valentín Ruiz and his symmetrical visage. He pulled the black beanie off his head to reveal a crop of short dark hair, and nodded in greeting.

“Grant,” he said. His big brown eyes scanned her down and up, registering the absence of socks or shoes, and the pearls of water on her flushed skin. He thrust a thumb back over his shoulder and asked, “Should I come back later?”

She shook her head and ushered him inside.

On the way into the kitchen, she spotted a note from Danielle on the counter:

JOB INTERVIEW @ TI, BACK FOR LUNCH W/ SURPRISE!!!

Dan had drawn a smiley face underneath the note.

Chloe Grant suppressed a grin and resisted the urge to crumple it up before Ruiz might read it, too.

“Can I get you anything?” asked Grant, flicking on the stove to heat up a kettle of water.

Ruiz grimaced and shook his head.

“Nah, I’m good. Just came to talk. Got some stuff to talk about, need to get it off my chest.”

Her heart skipped a beat.

He scratched the back of his head. Rolling his jaw, he looked like he was chewing on the words before he uttered a single syllable. Then his admissions flooded out without further warning.

“Shit, I don’t even know where to start, but I guess I’ll start at the top. You might wanna sit down for this.”

He gestured to an empty corner, looked around, and almost looked exasperated at the absence of chairs in her roomy kitchen.

It only now dawned on Grant that this was the roomiest house she had ever lived in. It had somehow gotten bigger in the last time shift. She wondered if Future Proof’s paychecks hadn’t also gotten bigger in this timeline.

“I know it ain’t my fault that Carter’s… dead, but I can’t help but feel like I should have done something, or more, or sooner. You know?”

She needed to marry the events of conflicting timelines. In a previous one, Ruiz’s actions and affiliation with Celava as a spy harbored a very clear connection to Carter’s death. In the current reality, however, she struggled to see the connection between Carter’s death and Ruiz.

Then again… had the Apex Predator and its biomechanical implant anything to do with Celava and Ruiz’s industrial espionage for them?

Her nostrils flared and she pinched them again.

No blood on her fingers.

The conflicting timelines were messing with her head.

What even were memories anymore? Just more confusion to wrestle with in therapy?

“I know what you’re thinking, but I came to you ‘cause I got a good feelin’ about you, Grant. I’m gonna to tell you something, confide in you, and I can only hope you hear me out to the end, and don’t jump to any conclusions. Please?”

His husky voice cracked on the last word.

She tilted her head. Her lips curled into a weary smile. The mere thought of having to repeat conversations because of temporal anomalies somehow exhausted her on a level she had never even considered before.

The tea kettle on the stove began whistling.

She talked over it.

“You leak Future Proof’s information and data to a red-haired woman named Loretta Corsino, whom you sometimes meet at a café downtown. I know.”

His chin dropped, leaving a mouth wide agape.

“You… know? How?” He snapped his mouth shut, upon which his otherwise trademark confident grin took shape. “Shoulda known. That is what Spencer hired you for, huh? Counter-intelligence? So, have you been keepin’ tabs on me since day one?”

“No, man. I spied on your spying in a different timeline—without Spencer telling me to—and you came clean when I confronted you about it. Hell, I might know more than you do at this point.”

Staring at her, he squinted. The grin faded.

The kettle’s whistling reached a fever pitch. She switched off the stove and removed the kettle. Pouring herself a cup of tea, she looked up at him. Pink color from the tea bag swirled like mist in the hot water, reminding her of her own blood circling down the shower’s drain.

“Though I don’t know what all has changed. Maybe your motivation’s different in this timeline, maybe you’re playing me, or angling for something. Wouldn’t that be a doozy?”

“God damn it, Grant. Were you going to tell me, or what?”

“Hey, I confronted you last time. The time you don’t remember because… well, it… never happened, because, well, hell, I don’t know why the hell not.” She stopped rambling into mumbling and then punctuated it all with a sigh.

She softly lifted and dunked the tea bag in her mug. The reddish mist still swirled, with all the water turned pink.

“Okay, well, what do you know that I don’t?”

She shrugged.

“Actually, not that much. Corsino plays at working for the feds, but she is actually in the private sector. Works for a UK-based company named Celava—Celava Semi-Conductors. Energy, reactors, particle accelerators, real high-tech. The works.”

“Shit. That’s more than I could figure out.”

“I can’t really take all the credit for it. Dan did the legwork. I just tailed you and Corsino a lot, didn’t learn half as much in twice the time as she did.”

“Is she… Bennett, is she still digging on us? On all of this?”

Grant licked her lips.

Dan, in fact, wasn’t. In fact, Danielle Bennett wasn’t having any of this—any of the espionage, counter-espionage, the research and development, let alone the dangerous field work and specimen containment that Grant and Ruiz and the others were conducting for Future Proof.

She could still hear Dan in her mind, urging her to quit the job. Yesterday.

“No, man. She’s outta the game.”

And Grant had been thinking about doing the same.

Indeed, she had just been thinking about it again, under the shower. Both before and after the nosebleed.

She pinched her nostrils again. No blood.

Good.

Ruiz stared at the mug between them and scratched his head again. Shook his head again.

Clearly, it was taking a bit to wrap his head around everything. His expectations had crashed face-first into Grant’s surprise knowledge.

“Celava, huh? You think they made those things? Those… Apex Predators, from the future?”

Grant shrugged.

“Might not even be from the future, for all we know.”

She said those words out loud before ever having thought them. It sent a shiver down her spine.

It’s from 2,000 years into the future. I have no earthly idea how anything on our planet would evolve this fast.

Burch’s words echoed in her mind.

Ruiz had nothing.

“It’s not your fault,” she told him. “Even assuming Celava sicced that thing on us as a hit against FP personnel, well…”

The words died before she finished uttering the rest.

Funny how Ruiz hadn’t been there when disaster struck.

His eyes glistened, glittering with sadness. Yet a hint of suspicion flashed within her mind.

Sending another shiver down her spine.

Enough with the paranoia.

She shook her head, silently arguing against herself.

“You’re dubious of Spencer, I get it,” she added. “So am I. Sometimes, at least.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. I hoped for the good in you, hoped I wasn’t makin’ a mistake by talking to you, telling you all this. Honestly, I’m glad you already knew. Makes things almost easier, I guess. Though… I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I have a family to support.”

Family?

He didn’t have a family to support before the time shift.

Ruiz continued, “I thought I could just walk away if push comes to shove. Corsino didn’t seem like the type to get me iced with wetwork, but after the thing with Carter? Shit, with what I heard about what happened down there, I’m surprised only he was killed. That thing on the autopsy table is no run-o’-the-mill dino, that thing is a fuckin’ monster. If someone from Celava or another corpo team was behind that, if they wanted people dead, shit, then I just… I just don’t know anymore.”

Grant bobbed the tea bag in her mug. Squeezed it out with a spoon, then put it aside.

She didn’t know what to say.

She didn’t think he was wrong about anything he was saying.

His waterfall of words continued. “Shit, Grant, I don’t care, but I feel like I could have at least done something. Or done somethin’ sooner. That kid didn’t deserve to clock out like he did. I don’t know—it feels like I have his blood on my hands.”

In some ways, Ruiz did. In another time, in another world.

But if she understood the changes in reality correctly, then those times and worlds had ceased to exist. Recursive changes that rippled forward through time, evolving into a new and singular reality.

In other ways: Ruiz was innocent, as far as she was concerned.

“Tea?” she asked, extending the mug to him like a peace offering.

Ruiz graciously took it. The pink liquid’s surface shimmered as it shook, as the mug shook in his hand.

He had the shakes in this timeline, too. Seemed like some things were inescapable.

She said, “Fuck it. Just quit. Dan’s right—we can’t keep doing this kinda work forever. Job’ll kill us, one way or another. If you opt out now, they’re not gonna have a lot to lord over you.”

He gripped the mug in both hands, suppressing the tremors.

She turned and prepped herself another mug of tea.

“And, no, before you ask—you can’t smoke in here.”

“How’d you—never mind.” He sipped his tea. His nostrils flared as he inhaled the steam from his mug. “I can’t just up and leave.”

He turned his back on her, to stare out into the backyard lawn of her new home.

The grass outside was perfectly trimmed, the tall fence obscured any features of the neighboring houses in this patch of suburbia, and it now looked and felt all so deeply artificial to Grant.

“I can’t,” he repeated. “I can’t. I take responsibility for my actions. We can only stop this machine from the inside. Whether it’s these Celava kooks, or Spencer and his own legion of mad scientists, I think this time Anomaly shit and messing with it is going to doom us all. Real apocalypse shit. You know that lady on the board—”

“One of the corpo horsemen of the apocalypse? Yeah, I know who.”

He scoffed with the hint of a chuckle.

“Yeah, that one. You know her cronies are engineering some kinda new bio-weapon for us to use on the specimens in the field? You know as much as I do, that ain’t gonna end well.”

Ever so slightly, the world darkened around her at the thought.

“Mhm.”

“Are we the bad guys? I think we’re the bad guys if we don’t do anything about all this shit.”

He turned. Locked stares with Grant.

His eyes glistened still, wet with a sheen to suggest tears being held back.

“I just don’t know anymore,” he said. “On good days, I’m thinking Spencer might be the good guy in all this. You know he might be from the future, right?”

A feather dropped. It shattered the mirror of reality in Grant’s mind, and she fell through it—

Something she had never considered, yet—

Ruiz added, “Corsino told me some stuff about him. I looked into it myself, and some things are pretty fuckin’ odd. Guy appears outta nowhere in the business world, all his history is so vague that nobody can really confirm it, and he ends up building an international corporation, with an HQ literally built around an Anomaly that connects the present to the future. Oh, and, uh, if you look at how he made a killing on the stock market, you’d think he knows shit before it even happens. Motherfucker invested in all sorts o’ tech companies before they got big, like some motherfucker who knew the numbers to win the lottery multiple times over.”

Another sip.

She hadn’t looked into this, but with what she knew, it checked out. For now, it made sense.

In her mind’s eye, she sat across from Spencer at the CEO’s desk, in the clinically cold corner office he occupied atop the towering skyscraper.

The man shaped like a knife shook her hand and welcomed her on board.

Malachi Spencer had always had a strange air about him. More than a sense of superiority. It was like he knew everything.

Grant jolted as if she had been shocked—the doorbell rang again. Like she had sensed it before it happened. The hairs on her neck stood on end.

An overwhelming sense of dread filled every fiber of her being.

Ruiz squinted again. He sniffed, took another sip of tea, and washed away any deeper emotions before they could fully surface. Saved by the bell.

“You expecting someone?” he asked.

“No…”

Grant wandered back down the hall, heading towards the door.

The sense of dread grew as she sensed an overwhelming presence, and spotted three shadows through the milky glass of the front entrance.

Her feet were ice cold by now.

She opened the door.

Malachi Spencer stood there, dressed in a brown winter coat, looking as sharp as ever.

Two taller men in suits flanked him—sporting sunglasses and earpieces, towering hulks of bodyguards she had never seen in Spencer’s company before.

Then again, as it now dawned on her, she had never met Spencer outside of Future Proof’s skyscraper.

“Miss Grant,” said Spencer, enunciating every syllable with a sharpness to match his exterior. “We need to speak.”

With a curt wave to his hired muscle, he directed them to wait outside and invited himself in. Grant stepped out of the way without thinking, though her ears flushed with heat, with anger welling up deep down over the audacity of him just barging in like this.

She closed the door and followed him into the kitchen—

Had he known?

Upon laying eyes on Spencer, astonishment crossed Ruiz’s face.

The words spilled out of Spencer’s lips with absolute authority and precision. “Before either of you ask—I knew you were here, and we need to speak as well, Mister Ruiz.”

Spencer straightened the collar of his coat yet didn’t deign to remove it, despite the warmth indoors. He exchanged a glance with them both.

Ruiz asked, “Did you chip us or something when we signed up?”

Spencer glowered.

“No, Mister Ruiz. You’re carrying around cell phones. It’s dead simple to know where my employees are at all times. I just need to ask Singh to trace you, and you may be found without fail.”

The expression on Ruiz’s face faded from astonishment into vexation, like he had just been punched in the face.

“Sorry,” Grant said with a tremor to the word, suggesting she wasn’t sorry at all. “But what are you doing here?”

Spencer arched a brow.

“I know enough to guess what this meeting between the two of you is about. There are rogue elements in Future Proof,” Spencer said. He raised a slender hand to shush them before either Ruiz or Grant could interject. “I know about your espionage for Loretta Corsino, Mister Ruiz, and I encourage you to keep doing what you’ve been doing. I am counting on it.”

Ruiz and Grant exchanged another glance.

It really was as if he had known everything already.

“Keep it on the downlow, though,” Spencer continued. “You two are not the rogue elements I am concerned about. I trust you both to continue doing your work inside and outside the company to the best of your abilities, and to the full extent of your conscience. That extends to Bennett.”

He peered down at the pink liquid in Grant’s second mug.

“Your tea is growing cold.”

She didn’t care about her tea right now. Pinched her nose again.

Still no blood. She hoped she had seen the last of it.

Something about Spencer felt like he was about to unload more on them. Before he could, Grant cleared her throat to get some words in.

“Well, if you’re going to play with an open hand today, how about you go all-in? The more we know, the better we can operate. At this point, I think we all know a bit too much to the point of being a liability, but not enough to really sniff out these rogue elements. I’m guessing that’s what you want us to do, right?”

“Correct. Like you, Miss Grant, I remember other timelines. Mister Sears—yes, I remember him—was one such rogue element. I wiped him from existence,” said Spencer with a clarity, honesty, and brutality that pummeled Grant in the gut like an avalanche of stones. “I discovered his trail and connection to Celava, and all the skeletons in his closet that he put in there to undermine us. I made sure he would never exist.”

She could feel the blood draining from her own face.

“Woah, woah, hold up. You’re saying you killed Sears? You—you what, you scrubbed him from the timeline? Are you insane?”

Ruiz said nothing. Sipped his tea. His hand no longer shook.

He answered instead of Spencer, saying, “No. He’s just cold as ice, and reminding us of what he’s willing to do if we mess with his well-laid plans. Ain’t that the truth, Mister Spencer?”

Spencer’s absence of a reply weighed heavier than any verbal threats he could possibly utter.

His silent, deathly stare drilled into Ruiz, then swept back to Grant.

“The important part is that we are on the same page. I am from the future, and there is a disaster that I am trying to prevent, but have not yet found out how to. Celava and its lackeys are the engineers of humanity’s destruction, and you just had a taste of that with the Apex Predator ending Carter’s life in Containment.”

Grant’s nostrils flared again, as she held back her sigh, hot air escaping through her nose.

She jutted her chin out, feeling defiant, and shook her head.

“You gotta give us more than that. I am about one push away from walkin’ away from this job.”

A lie.

More than ever before, Chloe Grant felt a sense of responsibility. A deep-rooted sense of duty. She wasn’t even sure towards what, or whom, but she felt responsible for everything that would follow from here on out.

Despite everything she had just told Ruiz about not feeling guilty over Carter’s death, she wondered how many deaths she would cause if she simply walked away from everything now.

How many lives were hanging in the balance.

But she wanted the truth. She wanted to hear it from Spencer’s mouth.

“Very well. Everything eventually points to Malcolm Wright, owner and CEO of Celava, building a colony out of time, deep in the past. He wants to control Earth’s timeline by altering events, natural resources, and even the genetic makeup of biological organisms. Worse, he is using tech that he steals from governments and organizations like our own, hoping to master the Anomalies. He is inviting disaster, more than I could ever threaten by wiping out a single rat in our organization. I’ve seen all the evidence I need, and the underhanded attack of the Apex Predator in our headquarters was the final piece of the puzzle.”

The mug was still lukewarm.

Grant chucked the teabag into the sink and took a long sip of tea.

Needed to gulp it down. Needed more time to process.

Time. Oh, what a joke.

Of course, there would be no way she could easily digest everything Spencer was dropping on them now. She’d have to slowly piece it together… and hope he was telling the truth. The whole truth.

“There’s more I will share, but for now, I want you to prepare for my next task for you. The two of you will be flying to Rome, using false identities. I need you to invade Celava’s offices there, and dig up any dirt you can. Your plane is leaving tonight. Expect a generous raise for your efforts, and all expenses are paid for.”

Ruiz squinted again. The sharpshooter’s eyes sought out contact with Grant’s again, like he was looking for someone to tell him what to do next.

Then he just grinned, like he had been told a really stupid joke.

Grant chewed on her lip.

Not because she was unsure, but because she knew exactly what she was going to do.

Loretta Corsino—she had been saying something to Grant while she was slipping in and out of her delirium. Another shredded memory that sank into a foggy oblivion.

Still, the monitor lazily beeped. Lights blinked.

The sunlight from outside felt warm on her skin. Pleasant.

Better than the throbbing underneath the bandage.

Grant knew better than to rip the IV drip out or leave hastily.

She stared at the button hanging over her bed, dithering on whether or not to buzz for a nurse. Doubtful that Celava’s sweeper team would have delivered her to a common hospital in Rome after her encounter with the Apex Predator they had kept contained in Intellitech’s basement.

The more awake she became, the more Grant’s side hurt, and the more that buzzer tempted her. The relief that pain medication might bring if she only asked.

Something told her: she only needed to press that button.

And ask.

Grounding her, her throat felt like burning desert sand. A glass of crystal-clear water on the bedside table tempted her even more than the buzzer and the prospect of pain meds.

She surrendered to that lesser temptation.

Grant grabbed the glass and sipped. Sipped again.

How good the water tasted to her now.

She winced as another jolt of pain shot through her side from all the movement.

The damned Predator had cut her. A deep wound.

It was a nice hospital. Too nice to be of the public sort.

Probably private, and most definitely under the corporate auspices of Celava.

Which only left one big, glaring question.

Why?

She had broken into their premises, and entered the country with a false identity. With the amount of resources and pull they had, Celava’s agents could have ferried her away to some black site, or simply disposed of her corpse and covered up any trail leading to them as culprits.

Any investigations into her disappearance would lead nowhere.

So… why were they keeping her alive? Nursed back to health?

She cursed under her breath and another twitch triggered another jolt of pain in her side.

The entire mission had been a failure. She had failed to get the data dump out of the building to Ruiz—so they were none the wiser on what Celava’s game truly was. And now she was sitting in one of the lion’s dens.

Left to wonder how hungry the lion was.

At the very least, Grant hoped, Ruiz had gotten away, and only she herself had been compromised.

Dark thoughts swirled once it dawned on her how little leverage she held in any upcoming interrogations, which she inevitably expected Celava agents to put her through. There probably wasn’t much they didn’t already know about Future Proof’s operations, but there was no telling how much it would take to satisfy them and let her go.

If they let her go.

The door to her hospital bedroom opened. A nurse in bright pink scrubs wheeled in a sleek black stand, crowned by a flat-screen television set.

The nurse gave Grant a weary smile. Tired, exhausted, perhaps even marked by pity—the nurse’s kindly face was hard for her to read.

“Dinner will be served soon,” she said, with heavy Italian accent. “I hope you are feeling better now.”

Grant nodded.

The oddity of it all dispelled all the dark thoughts. It all felt like she had fallen through the cracks of reality into another, parallel world.

After all—after traveling through the Anomalies, and seeing time re-written, again and again—that was the case, wasn’t it?

The nurse plugged in the TV, switched it on, and left the room with swift steps, flashing Grant another weary smile before closing the door behind herself.

The screen was on, but stayed a dark gray, with only green letters in the top corner indicating it was set to receive a signal. A tiny webcam topped the device. The shiny black bead of its camera stared back at Grant with utter coldness.

She steeled herself, prepared to see a familiar face, but not the one that winked onto existence on screen in vibrant color.

A prowling lion of a man stared at her through the television screen. Silver hair in a crew cut framed a roadmap of wrinkles, speaking volumes to a life of hard-earned power and dignified prestige. His gaze burned as it rested squarely upon Grant, as stern as the rest of his entire expression, barely distracting from a shaven jaw so sharp that it could cut glass.

Muscles on his crossed arms bulged within the confines of a dark blue three-piece suit.

Grant recognized him from the photos: Malcolm Wright. The CEO of Celava himself.

Conan the Barbarian in a designer suit, as Danielle had put it.

“Miss Grant,” he addressed her through the screen, authoritative gravitas to match his appearance. British accent, though different from the Operator’s Cockney—sounding more sophisticated and theatrical, like David Attenborough. “Welcome back to the world of the living. I hope these accommodations are agreeable, despite the unusual circumstances of our meeting.”

Though dryness still plagued her throat, she knew not what to say.

All of this—these circumstances—all of this was a far cry from whatever she had been expecting.

She took another sip of water instead of replying, and he kindly picked up the slack.

“The dossier on you has been growing quite quickly since your visit to the Intellitech premises. You must have questions.” He clenched his jaw and stared at her through the screen, reading her closely through that cold, dead lens atop the TV set.

Collecting intel on her, they likely only had data and secondhand accounts to interpret in gauging her and her motives. The less she spoke, the more he needed to rely on blind assumptions—and the more likely she might have ended up finding something useful to leverage in the interrogation she expected to follow their exchange.

Therefore, she took another sip of water. Stayed her tongue.

Wright smirked.

He continued after the prolonged pause, and the absence of any reply from Grant.

“From what I gather, you must be quite the asset to Future Proof. But with what happened at the Rome office, I’m sure that all of that has changed. The bad news is, Malachi might not see you as favorably as he once did. On the bright side, I have a job opening to a woman of your talents. There is a future in Celava for you.”

A sales pitch. And a clever move to match. The better they took care of her here, the more likely she had been compromised by the rival company—limiting her options, rendering her a persona non grata with Future Proof, and rendering her more vulnerable to whatever was bound to spill next from Malcolm Wright’s lips.

Rather than an interrogation… this was a job offer.

“I’m impressed,” she finally said. She needed to exert an air of authority of her own. Stand her ground, and angle for the best conditions. “For a moment, I thought I’d wake up on some volcano island, surrounded by sharks and lasers, while you monologue your dastardly plan at me. Well, Mister Wright, here’s your chance to show me you’re Mister Right, and not some run-of-the-mill lunatic, or… some deluded jackass who’s going to ruin the world for profit margins and a golden parachute.”

Wright smirked again.

“How very American. I admire audacity,” he said, with the last word riding on a gravelly growl. “If any of my reputation precedes me, then you know I am not one for petty formalities, nor do I give a hoot about false-hooded flattery. I’ll do both of us a favor and cut to the chase. I don’t want nor need you to act as a double agent on the inside of your former employer’s organization. I don’t need nor care about whatever insipid experiments Malachi and his lackeys are cooking up next. It’s now clear to me—we are already years ahead of the competition. The future, Miss Grant, is ours to shape.”

He had meant that quite literally. The gravity of his words echoed in her mind like rolling thunder.

The future, Miss Grant, is ours to shape.

She took another sip of water.

None of this was the kind of play she had expected. Then again, it fit the opinion pieces she had read about Wright.

Eccentric, confident, and deeply impatient. Like most in the tech industry, he believed governments and laws were posing unnecessary restrictions on brilliant and creative minds such as his own. Unlike most, he had lifted Celava up from obscurity and turned it into a successful company, though not as successful as those who cut corners or played loose with their ethical standards.

He certainly wasn’t the kind of man to suffer sycophants nor fools, and he wasn’t going to tolerate her dancing around the matter at hand.

Thus, she decided to play his game. To match the ante and call any bluffs.

“What exactly do you need me for? And would the price tag outclass whatever Spencer was paying me?”

“I’m aware of the dangerous field work you engaged in, and your excellent track record prior to employment in Future Proof. I will double whatever he was paying, all benefits included, and then some.”

She almost choked on her sip of water.

This was no idle offer.

So what was the catch?

He answered her unspoken question. “It would be the most dangerous, deadly, and rewarding work in your entire life. I can only use the smartest, the fastest, and the strongest in my entourage. You would be leaving your life behind to start anew—turning your back on the modern day as you know it, where corruption and weakness are endemic to our so-called civilization. But I assure you—you would be writing history, and your name would go down in the books with mine as the intrepid, as the warriors and explorers and scientists who went on to create a better world.”

He meant every word he was saying.

His convictions ran deep, rooted in every fiber of his being, and the zeal in his voice lent uncanny credence to his speech.

She washed it all down with another sip, hoping to finally dispel the cotton feeling in her throat.

Radiance.

Even through a screen, he radiated with the sunlight of his convictions, shining with charisma.

He meant every word. As naïve as it sounded, he was being sincere with her.

Where even in the world was he? No—when in the world was he?

Was he speaking to her through the Anomalies somehow?

Then she remembered the wasteland she had glimpsed of the future, past the Anomalies in the Crossroads she had traveled.

The doomed future Spencer had predicted, and pinned upon Wright’s back.

“You,” he said, and that single syllable placed a heavy weight on her sore shoulders. “You would lead with others of your caliber. You are educated, capable, and physically fit enough to face the challenges you would be tasked with dealing with. And you would challenge me. All I demand is loyalty, and unwavering courage.”

Another sip.

She asked him, “What if I say ‘no’? What if I want to just, you know, walk away from all of this?”

His eyes narrowed. The rest of his expression turned stony and cold.

“I would be very disappointed, and our conversation would end right here. But you are free to walk away. I will not press charges, I will not pursue you any further for your invasion of Intellitech’s privacy, though you may suffer the consequences should you choose to cross me again.”

The words sank in.

Once she walked away, back to Future Proof, Spencer and all the others would forever question her loyalty to the company. She would forever be considered a potential traitor, a double agent.

She could have asked for more details, but knew better. He also knew better, and would never divulge anything that risked the success of his operations. He wouldn’t open up about anything that might endanger… well, whatever he was plotting.

Beeping machines filled the silence between them until Wright spoke again.

“Think about it, and think carefully. I am not asking you to simply relocate to a different office in a different city, I am asking you to leave your entire life behind, and build a new world with your own two hands. It will be difficult, and there will be blood, and sweat to shed along the way.”

Building a colony out of time, deep in the past.

That was how Spencer had phrased it—what he believed Wright was up to. And with what Wright had just said, the puzzle pieces were all falling neatly into place.

“But I sense it—I sense the thunder in your heart,” he said. “Once you have made up your mind… call me. I await your response, Miss Grant, and I have a feeling you will not disappoint.”

He had leaned closer to the camera, having grown on the screen before her.

The image of Wright went dark, and with that, consigned his appearance to the digital void.

Was he already in his Promised Land, in a prehistoric era, manipulating their future from the distant past?

All dark thoughts now mingled with uncertainty and something else—with curiosity.

Some part of his offer excited Chloe Grant.

Mulling over his offer, she worried about those she might leave behind—her mother, Danielle, her friends, and her colleagues at Future Proof whom she had come to like. Even the memory of the late Max Carter and all his grumpy swearing surfaced in those swirling thoughts of those she’d leave behind.

Grant rubbed her temples, unsettled that this meant she was considering Wright’s offer in all earnest.

Some part of her was… tempted.

That part of her kept growing by the second. Like a blooming flower, blossoming in her mind.

Such warm sunlight on her skin.

What was it that kept her here? In this life? It wasn’t the money, though the pay didn’t hurt.

Was she so different from Wright? Didn’t she sometimes dream of something resembling his vision?

And could she really trust Spencer and his speech of Wright being responsible for some nebulous doomsday in the future? Or was Spencer the one who would be to blame for that horrid apocalypse, and the Apex Predators?

Then again—one of those creatures had been kept in Intellitech’s basement like a leashed hound. And her side throbbed where the Predator had almost cut her open to bleed out.

Then, yet again—she knew too little beyond whatever narrative either man was spinning. Two rival CEOs, two rival companies, all toying with the fabric of reality and time itself, by toying with the mysterious Anomalies.

And here she was, between them, at a fork in the road.

She needed to decide, and nothing would make this decision any easier.

There was no lesser evil. No certainty in doing the right or wrong thing.

Her mother would be fine. In her disappearance, Future Proof’s life insurance payout would kick in, and provide for her mother for life, beyond a shade of any doubt.

Her friends would move on. It wasn’t like their lives hung in any balance. She’s miss some of their scheduled appointments by the end of the month, and they would find out that Chloe Grant had gone missing, though her disappearance would be covered behind so much red tape that they would have no other choice but to move on.

And as much as she enjoyed the company of her colleagues at Future Proof, she felt no personal attachment to any of them. She barely knew them outside of their work life together.

That only left… Danielle.

Danielle, who had moved in with her.

But Danielle had been involved with a Chloe Grant of this timeline, while this Chloe Grant still felt alien to herself, and the timeline she returned to. Though they were the same Chloe Grant, somehow, learning of her past and actions and relationship to Danielle still felt like hearing another person’s story.

Like fiction.

And even if Wright was truly responsible for the doomed future that Spencer had predicted—could Grant not have had the best chance at changing that all by getting so close to Wright that she could literally get her hands on his throat?

He had to be there.

Then.

In his colony, in the prehistoric past.

The heartrate monitor still emitted lazy beeping, though the pace had picked up.

Reflecting her growing excitement. Anxiety, perhaps.

The sunlight from outside felt warm on her skin. Kept her calm.

Everything was falling into place somehow. Not puzzle pieces, but chess pieces. Maybe she was one of those pieces on the board, with Spencer playing against Wright. Or maybe she had the chance to become the player.

Maybe this was the right thing to do.

Grant clenched her jaw.

This was her chance to change the future.

“Wright?” she asked out loud. “I have made up my mind.”

The screen stayed dark, though the green letters in the top corner indicated it was still on.

Transmitting and receiving.

She had her answer.

Wright was going to like it.

Finally, the guard walked on. Disappeared around the next corner of the corridor, descending deeper into the bowels of IntelliTech.

Every shuddering breath hurt as Grant’s lungs flooded with desperately needed oxygen. All her frustration waned as fast as any pain subsided. After all, this guard knew nothing. Probably lived his days and nights, working security here, oblivious to the true nature of IntelliTech.

It was just one of many shell companies used by Celava worldwide. They fronted this IT provider, but all of Spencer’s intelligence pointed to IntelliTech serving as a data hub for the multinational energy corporation.

And this one, single, useless guard—well, he was just doing his job. Not well enough to have noticed the woman who infiltrated the building that night, but doing his job nevertheless.

He’d probably get fired if Grant’s invasion was eventually noticed, but that was very low on her list of concerns.

Once the guard had moved far enough out of earshot, she whispered into her headset.

“Hammy’s gone. What’s it look like out there?”

“Coast is clear,” responded Ruiz via their radio, with a soft crackle of static. “Pretty sure it’s just the one guy on-site.”

“Keep your eyes peeled. I prefer ‘definitely’ over ‘pretty sure’.”

Grant snuck out of the alcove, slipping past one of the ornate alabaster sculptures of Roman deities. She weaved her way past the other divinities, heading in the opposite direction from the security guard who had missed her intrusion.

Much to her relief, most of the building’s rooms and hallways featured clear labels. Big, black print emblazoned on brushed gunmetal plates. She followed their lead, drawing her spiraling path ever closer to the building’s server room.

Minutes ticked as she moved with the quietude of a cat. She kept her eyes peeled for security cameras, shimmying underneath any when their cold, glassy lenses looked the other way.

Ruiz asked via radio, “And you, uh, you don’t think anything’s… off? These guys got a lot of valuable data to keep private here, and security’s a little bit on the sad-sack side, don’tcha think?”

Grant paused, ducking behind a towering potted plant to wait.

To listen.

The guard was long gone, on the opposite side of the building, and unlikely to hear her.

Ruiz wasn’t wrong in his observation. She had thought the same thing.

“Yes and no. I’m guessing there’s some extra bells and whistles we haven’t noticed yet. Some less-than-obvious stuff. All the windows are bullet-proof, and some of these doors are magnetically locked with steel reinforcements. A lot of the premises are labeled, but then there’s some big mystery doors. My guess is, they have something else underneath this building—something that ain’t just plain little ol’ IT, if you catch my drift.”

A long pause.

It felt strange how this liminal space was swallowing all her whispers.

Silence filled the vacuous hallways of IntelliTech.

“You think they’re holding some specimens down there,” Ruiz said.

Grant snuck on. Set her jaw. Through clenched teeth, she replied.

“Almost a one hundred percent chance.”

Another long bout of silence followed from Ruiz. He broke it with a short and ominous remark.

“Switchin’ to point-fifty.”

She paused again, just outside a sealed door, labeled—

SERVER ROOM.

“Jesus. You gonna ready some AA missiles to go with that?”

Grant guided a stolen keycard through a reader next to the door. A red light on the device turned green and the gadget emitted a soft beep, with a loud click-CLANK to follow, as the magnetic seal on the door released, and the door slid open with a soft whoosh.

“Ain’t takin’ no chances tonight. If they got a specimen down there as a watchdog, you just line it up, and I’ll take it down.”

Grant slipped into the server room, where the hum of hundreds of fans filled the air. The whole room vibrated, and the array of server racks, all encased in metal and glass, looked like something straight out of a science fiction flick.

The door automatically slid shut behind her.

She needed access—soon—because all her movements in the building, such as opening these mag-locked doors, were likely being recorded in some sub-system. And registering it to the guy whose card she had stolen.

It had to be a matter of time.

Now locked inside a room where she was permitted to make more noise, she ripped open the zipper on her backpack. Locating the nearest server, she whipped out the device Singh had provided them with for the mission, hooked it up to the system, and booted up the sleek black laptop.

Instead of an operating system’s stock screen to greet her, a sinister-looking and slow-moving loading bar progressed on-display, while the device brute-forced its digital tendrils into IntelliTech’s—or rather, into Celava’s—data hub.

Minutes flew by to the steady whispering hum of computer fans in the room, while Singh’s hacking device worked its magic, and Grant awaited its completion with bated breath.

“How’s it goin’ in there?” crackled Ruiz’s voice via headset, now with heavier static interference. “Security guard’s out on a smoke break. Coast is still clear. If anybody knows what’s up, they ain’t showin’ jack for it.”

Grant shot a glance at the screen.

It had changed already, which she had missed because it looked almost the same: the progress bar now indicated how far the device had gotten in vacuuming up all the data it could access from this data hub.

She didn’t want to envision how expensive the unseeming sleek laptop and its hardware must have been. Then again, Malachi Spencer was footing the bill, and Future Proof’s pockets seemed to run as deep as the Mariana Trench.

“Almost done,” she replied.

79%.

She wished she could scour the data gathered here while she waited.

Grant wondered if Spencer’s suspicion would prove to have been right.

Whether or not Celava was truly funneling personnel and natural resources through the Anomalies, all with a singular and terrifying purpose: to build a colony in the distant past, in some era before the dinosaurs went extinct.

In the here and now, however, Grant only glimpsed a black screen with a white progress bar. Racking up all the data.

93% complete.

Just before her patience could wear thin, a monitor on the wall winked on, flashing brightly with electronic life.

The monitor flickered, yet refused to display any image, staying a darker shade of gray—revealing it had turned on, without casting much light. Speakers behind the device emitted a soft ringtone, like a call or message had just come in.

Then a booming voice spoke to her.

“I am the Operator, and you are very naughty,” spoke a mysterious man’s voice from the monitor’s speakers—with a playfulness to his tone, and a strong British accent. “Cease what you’re doing now, or I’ll be forced to release the hounds. And, fair warning, I do not mean electronic countermeasures.”

She played it smart. Offered no response. Nothing she could be recognized by. Like the ski mask concealing her face, a voice could lead to identification. For now, she preferred to maintain her image as the nondescript cat burglar.

96% complete.

“Not talkative today, hm? You know, the hounds usually make intruders far more chatty. Or, well, screamy. I suspect it will be the latter with you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

He sounded young and mischievous. How much of the threat was empty?

A smirk crept across Grant’s face.

Was this guy for real?

“Hah. Have it your way then. Your screams of terror will probably make for a great feature on our next instructional video. I do love authenticity. Nice never having known ya, I suppose. Ta.”

The monitor deactivated again. The gray glow vanished as its electronic life disappeared.

And nothing else happened.

Asked Ruiz on the radio, “What the hell was that?”

In case anything was being recorded in the server room, Grant stayed quiet. She looked around for bugs, microphones, cameras, anything.

She found nothing.

99%.

A man’s scream reached her, muffled through the mag-locked door into the security room.

Her only way out.

The scream endured, shifting through varying stages of surprise, agony, and horror. It didn’t end as abruptly as it started, instead petering out with indecipherable pleading in Italian, and cutting off after a bout of gurgling noises.

The security guard?

100%.

Keeping her eyes locked on the door, Grant yanked Singh’s device away from the server rack, careless of the cable she blindly ripped out of its socket in the process. She stuffed the sleek laptop into her small backpack and neared the door again.

THUMP.

Something had hit the door, leaving Grant frozen, while her heartbeat raced at a pace of a thousand miles a minute, felt all the way up into her neck, and accompanied by the rushing of blood in her ears.

There was something out there.

Silence. The shuddering breath she dared to take could not have eclipsed any sounds out there, but she felt a presence. The vicinity of something dangerous.

Of something deadly.

There were no other ways out of the server room. The only other door led to a dead end, where Grant frantically looked through, only to find a bunch of clutter in form of cardboard boxes, spare cables, a sink fastened to the wall, and other useless junk.

“Talk to me, Goose,” said Ruiz. “Can’t see anything out here. Guard went back inside, and you’re in a blind spot for me.”

She waited at the mag-locked door. Couldn’t sense any presence there now.

The deadly silence remained.

She swiped the keycard down the mag-lock reader. The device only emitted an obnoxious beep and its red light blinked.

“Uh-uh-uh,” said the Operator from the TV speakers with a mocking, singing tone to it. “I locked down everything. Consider it me doing you a favor, magpie. A sweeper team is on its way to arrest you. They’ll return the hound to its cage before you’re ripped to shreds, and you’ll get to have a nice, lovely chat with a security detail, and then some corrupt police officials, I wager. One day, you might even get a chance to look back at all of this and have a good laugh—that is, from behind prison bars, of course.”

The Operator chuckled with sadistic glee.

Grant’s anger almost gave air to a single swearword, and instead exploded into a strike of her knuckles against the metal door.

The Operator was making perfect sense. Having worked in counter-intelligence herself, she would have run the same kind of ship. Issued the same kind of intimidation and taunts as he was.

She knew better than to succumb to fear, or spiral into inaction, and knew exactly what to try next.

The Operator had responded to her attempt at opening the door with the keycard—he clearly had no eyes on the server room, only on whatever any device was ever telling him. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he could remotely open and close any mag-locks throughout the building.

She was boxed in now. And she wasn’t going to wait for some sweeper team to capture her.

Thus, Grant acted quickly. Whipped out the tiny toolkit she had brought along for analog intrusion.

She had already been detected, and something was out there—according to the Operator, ready to slash her to ribbons upon contact—so subtlety had just flown out the window. And the poor security guard guy, well, he had probably lost more than his job just now.

Her foldable crowbar snapped into full length after she retrieved it from her kit, and she used it to jimmy open the mag-lock reader.

“You need to get the hell outta there,” said Ruiz, nervous tremors swinging fiercer with every word. “There’s an Apex fuckin’ Predator in those halls. It’s trailing blood all over the place, and I think it’s lookin’ for you. That security guard is toast, and I got no eyes on the AP. It’s too fast, moved into some room. I think it loops around to where you are. Repositioning.”

Metal sheets bent and splintered until she stopped prying at the reader with the crowbar, and ripped off the metal casing. Dexterous, Kevlar-gloved fingers started eviscerating the card reader, splaying out its thin wiring, and trying to make sense of its design.

Closed system. Not anything she could simply override.

Fuck.

The swearword echoed in her brain.

She backtracked into the backroom and pursued plan B.

Her boot crashed down on the ceramic sink with a heavy kick. Upon first impact, a long crack appeared on the wall behind it.

The whole place’s design for doors and locks and computerization was modern—but being situated in the center of Rome, the building must have featured some parts that had never been modernized by its newest owners.

Another kick shattered the sink and water started trickling from a bent pipe.

She grunted and gritted her teeth as she kicked and punched at the wall until she could jam the crowbar right into the growing fissure she was creating, busting her way through the wall.

Her tiny flashlight clicked. She shone its light into the fissure.

Luckily, none of it was solid concrete. Just a bunch of old bricks behind thin plaster and white paint.

“Do you know how to play chess, magpie?” asked the Operator from the adjacent room. “If you’re smart enough—and I truly hope you are—then I’m sure you can play it in the theater of the mind. Or draw on the floor for all I care. I’m sure it’ll buff out, even if you use a permanent marker.”

He didn’t know what she was up to. No eyes on the backroom. No electronics to spy on.

Lucky.

She gritted her teeth again and pulled at the drain pipe in the wall with all her might. The metal squealed, then finally bent before snapping away where it broke. Grant grunted again and yanked a portion of drain pipe from the wall, then used it as a blunt instrument to break through the wall entirely.

She struck and struck away, widening the hole, and hammering the gap. When it found purchase and dug deeper into the fissure, she used it like a cruder crowbar to widen the hole.

The Operator rambled on in his musing, mocking tone. “I’ll even give you the luxury of making the opening move. White pawn on F-7 moves to F-5. You know… a little IT joke on the side?”

There was no way she was going engage.

“Come on, it’s funny!”

Grant continued hammering and striking away, tearing away chunks of red brick and artificial rubble till her black gloves had turned a chalky white, and until the hole had grown wide enough. A different light poured in through a hole on the other side of the fissure.

The ski mask and black attire was soaking up her sweat. She must have lost minutes already. If there was a sweeper team on its way—and she suspected the Operator had been telling the truth—she didn’t have a lot of time left.

Ruiz hadn’t spoken in those minutes. She hoped he had kept his cool, and stayed on position of the eagle’s perch a few buildings away.

She needed the sharpshooter to shoot sharp if it came down to it.

Breathing heavily, she only perceived a deceptive silence from the adjacent room.

Every further attempt at tearing open the wall came easier than the last, with all its integrity having been demolished by her incessant and systematic destruction. Whole bricks clunked down and the rest crumbled, and the drain pipe clanked and clattered when she chucked it aside to climb through the hole, clambering into an open office space.

The Operator was still talking, babbling about Chess moves and other inane tomfoolery, but her own panting, and the noises of fighting her way out of the backroom into the office drowned it all out.

Pressed up against the wall next to the office’s door, she waited again, hoping to hear something—anything—that might reveal the presence of the “hound” the Operator had warned her about.

But… nothing. Not a sound.

This was going to end badly.

She had seen those monstrosities in action before. Silent, agile, fast, and built to kill grown humans in the blink of an eye. Evolved beyond natural evolution, and as Burch had later theorized—maybe designed by genetic engineering.

The Apex Predator was lurking. Hiding. In position to ambush her.

Seconds passed, melting into what felt like an infinity. Time—a luxury—she didn’t have.

Time.

Grant considered retrieving her silenced pistol from her pack, but decided against it. Nine millimeter rounds weren’t going to do much against such a beast.

She opened the office door and crept outside.

Sprays of blood had painted the walls with gruesome splatters. The body of the security guard wasn’t even nearby. Crimson marked where the creature had dragged it along the marbled floors, around the next corner.

Grant scanned every nook and cranny, keeping in mind every single thing that Mischchenko had taught her about predatory wildlife.

Watch for the shadows. Watch for vectors along which an animal can leap. And if it can fly, or climb—such as these Apex Predators could—always look up.

And just as she looked up, following the cue of those teachings, she almost regretted it. Her heart skipped a beat. The gangly, mottled-gray body of the Apex Predator hid just beneath the high ceiling, perched atop one of those statues of a Roman deity.

“Oh no,” said the Operator, pressing out the second word with vicious sarcasm, and his voice now coming from unseen speakers in the hallway. “Quite the pickle you’re in, aren’t you? Wish you would have stayed and played some Chess now, eh?”

Bloodstained claws clicked against the sculpture’s shoulders. A guttural growl from its closed, toothy maw sent shivers down Grant’s spine. It hissed.

The Apex Predator stared at her through its spider-like array of eyes. The brain implant exposed on the top of its skull glowed with a singular red light.

A spiderweb of cracks appeared on the nearby window, and the Predator’s head whipped around, as it snarled at where the glass cracked.

“Run! Now!” shouted Ruiz via headset.

He had shot the window, and the glass withstood his .50 caliber.

Grant needed not be told twice. She dove into the next alcove behind a statue, and the Predator flew past her. Then she zigzagged the opposite way, towards where the Apex Predator had leapt from in its deadly lunge at her.

The creature screeched—turning into an alien and ear-piercing howl—as its claws scraped against marble, and it skidded along the smooth, blood-splattered floor.

Running for her life, she dove around the next corner, and the Apex Predator followed. She leapt over the dead security guard’s mangled corpse, just in time to hurtle through the next door on her way back out, and slam it shut behind her.

The Predator would have caught her, had it not slammed into that same door with the momentum of a speeding truck, and broken the door’s surrounding frame in the process—everything bent upon impact, metal deformed.

Another blood-curdling shriek pierced the night as the Predator pried its way through the door, tearing through the feeble obstruction in its pursuit of the fleshy human in the Kevlar catsuit.

Grant fled through the building, retracing her steps with little thought, and panic driving her running stride.

Glimpses over her shoulder only accelerated her footsteps and supercharged her terror, as the ferocious mutant quickly closed the distance once it had clawed its way through the door, only to crash into the next one she slammed shut in between them.

“Fuck,” Ruiz shouted. “Move!”

Her boots clanked up the metal stairwell as she fled upstairs to the rooftop from which she had gained entry into the building.

And finally, making her heart sink, Grant’s mad dash ended at the mag-locked door she had opened with the stolen keycard.

The red light on the card reader glowed a menacing red, mirroring the red glow on the Apex Predator’s brain implant.

She was trapped.

“Oh, Magpie,” spoke the Operator. “See, I could open that door for you, and set you free… but then I’d also set our little doggy free, free to roam the city of Rome, and feast upon—well, I’m not actually sure how many people it would rip apart in its rampage before we put it down—”

Metal squealed as the Predator pried the door to the stairwell open. The creature peered up to her and shrieked.

With feral fury.

“I’m sure you’re regretting your life choices now, aren’t you. Well, you can’t blame—”

“Get away from the door,” growled Ruiz on the headset radio.

“No!” shouted Grant. “We can’t let this thing out!”

The Predator stormed up the stairs with leaping bounds, skipping entire floors as it flew up the center of the spiraling stairwell.

“Oh, how very noble of you. I tip my hat, missy!”

“Down!” yelled Ruiz.

He was going to do it, one way or another—

She ducked.

The door exploded. Then it exploded again. Two of Ruiz’s rifle shots had blown football-sized holes through it. Funny how the glass withstood more punishment.

Before any dust could settle, the Predator flew over the stairwell railing and its claws cut deep. Grant’s own blood sprayed, shedding DNA that could be traced—the least of her worries now, as the blood drained from her head, and she lost all feeling in her left arm. An arm and hand that refused to obey when—

She ripped the broken door open, and fled onto the rooftop, into the sea of night, where glittering lights sparkled on Rome’s city skyline. The streets bustled with life—life that was threatened to be ended by the creature right behind her—

Grant fumbled and retrieved the pistol from her pack, just in time for the growling creature to follow onto the rooftop where she had emerged. Its brain implant glowed red like a malevolent, cyclopean eye.

It prowled towards her while the pistol slid perfectly into her grip, and she aimed at the Predator’s head with practiced precision.

It had smelled blood, and it was poised to leap again.

To kill.

The pain in her arm screamed as it hung lifelessly from her side, while she stayed silent and aimed with her right.

She aimed.

To kill.

To pull the trigger, as it leapt.

The bullets she released didn’t stop it. Couldn’t stop it. Probably even hit.

The next thing she knew, the smoking, silenced gun was on the rooftop next to her, and she was holding her side, where claws had left a deep wound, and all the warmth escaped her, pumping wet and slick and deathly.

The Predator crumpled to the ground, and echoes of Ruiz’s dampened shots were so loud that she could still hear them, several rooftops away.

Like the .50 had blown holes through the door, it had turned entire chunks of the Predator into a fine red mist. Killed the damned thing dead outright before it could kill her.

Well, almost.

Almost.

Grant slumped from her knees onto the ground, splayed out and with all strength escaping her like the blood.

Ruiz was talking to her all the while. The Operator, less audible from out there, also continued babbling.

Darkness enshrouded her field of vision until shadow swallowed all. And blinking never dispelled it fully. The starry night blended with the darkness of death.

Breaking in was the easy part. Always was, wasn’t it?

Getting out, unnoticed, unscathed—that was the hard part.

Everything hurt.

Guess this is what dying is like.

Losing consciousness, losing time, she didn’t know how long she took to fade away, in and out, until a silhouette rushed to her rescue, towering over her, and joining the darkness in blotting out the glittering night’s sky.

Not the silhouette of Ruiz, that is, but many figures. Men in black jumpsuits, armored, and armed to the teeth with firearms and batons. They sported ski masks like her own, with eyes covered by night-vision goggles.

A whole strike force of hired guns crowded around her.

They lifted her up. Not a damned thing she could have done about it.

They carried her away. Over the crumpled carcass of the Apex Predator.

All the pain went away, flared up, went away again.

Away.

Part of Grant wanted to be happy about that. About all of this.

It was good to know that Singh wouldn’t be rotting in prison, or Carter could still show up to work to be his usual grumpy self. He had shot her a few dirty looks for all her incredulous staring—it wasn’t easy to see him alive again, after having watched him die to bullet wounds in a desert.

On the other hand, it felt like her head was going to explode with all the changes in reality that had occurred. She couldn’t even begin to understand how luring the pterodactyls into some apocalyptic future had caused all… this.

And as if it all hadn’t already felt sickeningly alien, she now returned home to find it looking different, too.

The front door was painted red rather than white. She had double-checked to ensure she parked in the right driveway, at the right address.

Somebody else was inside her house.

Lights were on, and the shadow of a figure moved around in the den.

Grant’s hand, holding her key, hovered in front of the lock. She wasn’t even sure if the key would still fit.

Before another wave of nausea could make her knees buckle, she shoved the key into the lock. The key fit. Clicked into place.

She twisted it and the door yielded.

It made sense, given that she had left her keys at HQ, before even flying out to the Appalachian mountains. If reality had shifted during her time travels—or because of them—then this only made sense. The keys had to fit, because the keys would have shifted along with the rest of reality.

At least something made some semblance of sense.

The only thing that didn’t make sense was…

Herself. It was like Grant herself was out of place. Out of time. Making no sense.

With how hard her heart was pounding, her heart felt like it was a few beats away from breaking free from her chest. The rushing of blood in her ears dampened all noises coming from the stranger in the den, save for the loud monotone sound of a running vacuum cleaner.

Chloe Grant neared the shadow and vacuuming noise.

A feminine shape, a head framed by long, straight hair.

Steeling herself to meet this stranger, Grant rounded the corner and faced the person in her home.

Their home?

Danielle Bennett was busy vacuuming a particular spot on the carpet. She gasped and almost leapt away from Chloe, as if she had seen a ghost. Lids soon fluttered, blinking, as widened eyes normalized, and Dan turned the vacuum cleaner off with the tip of her socked foot.

“Hey! You’re home early,” Danielle said. The expression of shock had given way to something brighter, cheerier. Happy to see Chloe. That sentiment faded fast, turning into visible concern. “Somethin’… happen? Are you okay?”

Chloe Grant wasn’t okay.

It was too much for her.

The last straw to break the camel’s back. The last straw being Chloe Grant’s capacity to interpret how things had changed, and the camel’s back being her ability to cope with it. That last straw carried the weight of the world, because she didn’t know who to talk to about it with.

Or even what to say.

Right there and then, Chloe broke down. She ended up on her hands and knees, turning into a sobbing mess.

It would take a while for her to recover. The next thing that really sank in was them sitting on the couch, with a mug of tea in Chloe’s hand that had turned cold, a pile of used tissues on the coffee table, and Danielle cuddled up to her with a fuzzy blanket.

It was all so alien. So soft.

Some of it felt right. But not remembering how it had all turned out this way—that part felt wrong. Chloe Grant felt like she didn’t belong. Neither in the here nor in the now.

And there was no going back.

Danielle deciphered most of Chloe’s speech and broken thoughts despite her sobbing breakdown. In broad strokes, Chloe had told her what happened, and Dan now shouldered part of the burden again, like she had in the previous timeline, with helping Chloe uncover Ruiz’s espionage for corporate rival Celeva.

All of that was news to Danielle—the Danielle of this new timeline, which would beg the question—had Ruiz even come clean to Grant in this timeline?

Dan did her best to catch Chloe up on what she had missed. They had been in a relationship for the past month, kept secret from their colleagues at the company. Dan had quit Future Proof. She had been trying to convince Chloe to do the same.

The danger was too big. “That place is going to unleash hell on Earth,” was how Dan put it.

Helicopter pilot Sears remained absent from the timeline, and this version of Dan knew about that from Chloe. And, although Future Proof now had ten times the amount of field operatives on the payroll as opposed to what Chloe remembered, a dozen of them had been killed on the job—mauled by prehistoric animals, murdered, EMD malfunctions, and one person was even cleaved in half when an Anomaly closed on them while they were crossing through a Flicker.

Too many deaths for Dan’s taste.

With a shuddering breath, Chloe Grant took stock of the new reality she now occupied.

There was no going back. Deep down, she knew it.

Dan’s eyes sparkled, just shy of tears, holding back from urging Chloe again to quit the job.

Dan sensed this was not the time. And Chloe sensed that she sensed it. This gave rise to a warmer, fuzzier feeling behind the nausea. A welcome reprieve.

Another shuddering sigh escaped Chloe, softly, as Dan gingerly brushed hair from Chloe’s face, and caressed her cheek with a gentle touch.

Chloe let her eyelids fall shut, and leaned her head onto Dan’s.

She had been moments away of celebrating success after ridding their timeline of the pair of aggressive pterodactyls, only to find the timeline completely altered.

The blur continued. The warmth within triumphed, providing some solace, yet the fog remained.

She woke up that night, to a dark room bathed in silver moonlight. Sweating, the blankets were cast aside.

Dan slept peacefully on the bed next to her.

“The only thing unravelling is you.”

Like a whisper outside of reality, those words echoed forwards and backwards through time. Like a sense of déjà vu, Chloe wasn’t sure if she had thought those words before she ever heard them spoken aloud. But she would hear them, eventually, and remember them.

She couldn’t quit Future Proof. Not yet.

She wasn’t even sure about being in a relationship with Dan. It pained her, seeing Dan sleeping so peacefully in the bed, beside her. Like neither of them deserved this—Dan didn’t deserve to be hurt by someone from another timeline replacing the person she liked, and this Chloe hadn’t earned her affection at all.

Chloe felt betrayed—like destiny itself had betrayed her. Like she had never had any choice in the matter. Like it had never been her, like she was some kind of impostor, some alien, just passing as Chloe Grant.

She spent a lot of time staring at her own reflection. She looked the same as ever, though that gaze in every window and mirror had turned vacant, and more alien than ever before.

As morning dawned, she spent time sitting in her car outside the café downtown.

Ruiz was meeting with his red-headed handler from Celeva—the woman named Loretta Corsino.

Chloe took a deep breath, still sorting out how this reality had shifted. Or rather, how she needed to shift her memories to fit into this new reality.

To understand what she even needed to do. It was like she was just going through the motions of whatever she was expected to do in the previous timeline she had come from. While, now, she questioned her motives, and wondered if they deviated from the Chloe that this timeline had known all her life. Her life.

Who was she?

She caught herself staring into her own eyes in the rearview mirror. The sound of Ruiz’s motorcycle engine roaring up served to snap her out of her trance.

She didn’t know what she needed to do. Time, fate—whatever forces were at work in this universe, they had conspired to screw her over. Royally.

Why couldn’t time have changed her memories alongside everything else? Why did she have to remember the timeline that existed before?

Her mind was threatening to splinter.

This all made her think of the very image of the Anomalies themselves—glowing orbs of light, hovering, chiming brightly, like tiny suns, that had exploded into shimmering shards of cosmic glass.

That’s what it felt like now. Shattered.

Another shuddering sigh escaped her throat.

Corsino vanished into a black stretch limousine. Ruiz on his motorcycle was already long gone, likely headed to the office.

Chloe Grant readjusted her rearview mirror, fired up the engine, and did what she thought she was expected to do.

She drove to work. She drove to Future Proof’s HQ.

Her blurry trance took her down into the basement levels, where security systems beeped sharply, and red lights glowed in recognition of her clearance card.

She wandered down the eerie, cold halls of Containment Section, till she reached Doctor Solomon’s laboratory.

The head engineer and Doctor Trémaux stood together in a floating sea of light. They waved around themselves, wearing AR command gloves, pointing at the virtual objects around them, rearranging a…

“What am I looking at, here?” Grant asked.

The sight of this maze of lines and lights, projected as a hologram into the open, three-dimensional space of the room, was so engrossing that it yanked Grant right out of her trance. The fog lifted just enough for her to realize that she was witnessing the two scientists as they wrote a new chapter in human history.

Trémaux whipped her gray mane back, and waved her AR-gloved hands in the air like a sorceress, rearranging some of the floating strands.

“This is our current theory of the Tangle,” said the quantum physicist with the faintest hint of a French accent. Her gaze was locked onto the virtual construct she was busy building with Solomon. She pulled one virtual thread, bringing it closer to another, then fusing them into a glowing node with a double tap of her index and middle fingers. “This, here, for instance, would be an Anomaly.”

Solomon smiled with the excitement of a little boy playing with his favorite toys. The man in his early fifties said, “We have enough data for this model, now. Still some kinks to iron out, but it stands to reason… well, I don’t want to make any false promises. Let’s just say Spencer is bound to be thrilled about this breakthrough.”

“Augy is being modest,” Trémaux said, “because this may very well be a major milestone for Future Proof. If our calculations are right, we will become able to predict the opening of Anomalies before our detection system even pings their locations.”

Grant stared into the maze of threads, mouth agape.

Had she done this somehow? Had her interference in the timeline also somehow caused… this?

She dared not think about it too hard. Dared not dwell on it. She almost felt another wave of nausea, creeping up behind her.

Grant chewed on her lip and let their explanations stew.

Solomon chuckled, misreading Grant’s expression as stunned curiosity.

“Doctor Trémaux, how about you share your theory with Agent Grant? It’s quite the doozy.”

Trémaux ignored Solomon’s prompt. She pointed to another glowing node, fused between floating threads in the 3D-model. With a mid-air tap of index and middle finger, an array of text and data popped up, attached to the node.

Too much at once for Grant to quickly parse.

To Grant, Trémaux said, “This here is probably an Anomaly that occurred in the 200s, A.D., during the time of ancient Rome. What are the odds that people saw a dinosaur back then and… thought it was a dragon? Or a demon?”

Grant reeled. She steeled her stomach. Took another deep breath.

Was there a way to map out the Anomalies? To travel through time and make precise changes?

Where was this research headed?

“This… is… this a lot,” Grant muttered. “What… theory are you talking about, now?”

Solomon chuckled again.

Trémaux frowned.

“When I tried to explain it to your colleague, Mister Carter, he had less flattering words to share about it.”

“More like verbal flatulence,” Solomon said, still chuckling. “Please, Lucille. Your theory. I am certain Miss Grant is more receptive to it.”

Trémaux shook her head, then obliged anyway. She paused from manipulating the network of holographic threads. She turned to face Grant, and her eyes flashed with something fierce, and determined.

“I liken the timeline to a ball of yarn. Time would be like the string of yarn laid out, unraveled from the ball, with a definitive beginning and end. However, the string is not laid out flat nor straight, the yarn is all… balled up.”

Solomon chuckled again.

“Very mature, Augustus,” she said, though the corners of her lips twitched with the hint of a smile. Trémaux pointed to a glowing node in the three-dimensional network of threads—the ball of yarn. “Whenever anybody or anything tugs at different points in the string, the string throughout the ball is subject to friction. And where friction happens, the strings are touching, that is where the Anomalies occur, connecting different points along the string, even if only for a short time.”

Trémaux flicked a node with her AR glove, dissolving it. The thread parted there.

Grant tried to make sense of this. She tried to relate her brief experiences of time travel through the Anomalies, and how that all translated into wiping people or events from existence, or altering the world in other, unpredictable ways.

“What—what about, say, a time paradox? Let’s say we, I dunno, went back in time, killed Hitler before he rose to power, and changed the course of history. How would that fit in with this… uh… would this unravel, the, uh…”

“Yarn ball,” Solomon said with a straight face. He no longer chuckled.

He stared at Grant with burning curiosity.

As if sensed there was more behind her questions.

Doctor Trémaux pursed her lips. She pondered Grant’s question.

“I don’t believe there is a such a thing as ‘paradox’, as such would imply that time itself is an entity that defies change. However, any changes in the past would be cascading, both backwards, and forwards through time.”

The only thing unraveling is you.

“So, to extend your example, let us say you kill Hitler in the 1920s. If you return to your time afterwards, you would find that history played out differently, and only you would remember how it was before you killed Hitler and change the history you knew. You might have never been born as a consequence, therefore nobody would know you, yet you would continue to exist because you were born in a different version of reality. You may call that a paradox, but it is the only logical consequence I can envision, with all that we know. You remember Mister Sears, and you alone.”

“So, what you’re saying is—in theory—it would be possible to wipe out humanity by committing a single mistake in the prehistoric past.”

Trémaux shook her head.

“Not just the past, Miss Grant, even in the future. The ‘Crossroads’ you discovered behind the Anomaly in the Appalachian has shown us this quite clearly. There, Anomalies to past and future were open in close vicinity of one another. It is difficult to grasp, but the future has been affecting the past for longer than we realize. If the future is connected to the past in different ways,” said the physicist, pointing at a glowing node between threads again, “then any change in the future can also affect the past. Cascading. A waterfall of consequences.”

Now Grant shook her head in return.

“I don’t get it, though. What if you stopped whatever… whatever caused all the Anomalies to appear? To even happen in the first place? Do we even have any idea what caused this?”

“Nope,” Solomon said with strange enthusiasm and an energetic shrug. “Not a clue.”

“An interesting thought,” Trémaux said.

Grant asked, “What’s stopping the ball of yarn—what’s stopping time from unraveling?”

“I do not know,” Trémaux said, pursing her lips again. The pause that followed only filled a short beat. “All I know from yours and other previous accounts, such as that of Mister Sears vanishing from time altogether while none of us remember him having ever existed, is that time does not unravel. The thread has a beginning and end, and the Anomalies are persistent. Arguably, the only thing unraveling is you. Witnessing reality change as you travel through Anomalies should be against protocol, in my opinion. And, please forgive me if this sounds, eh… offensive? But perhaps you should check in for psychological counseling. The mental stress you must be undergoing must be quite significant.”

The last word carried the most of Trémaux’s French accent. The rest of her words echoed in Grant’s mind like a deafening series of explosions.

Had she thought them, lying in bed next to Dan, before she ever heard Trémaux say them out loud?

The only thing unraveling is you.

Grant’s blank stare burned through the void. The holographic display of the timeline’s tangled thread glowed in a cold blue, with the Anomalies bright white, all burning themselves into her retinas.

How long had she been staring blankly, rooted in place like a statue, in stunned silence?

Probably more than long enough—long enough for concern to color Trémaux’s tone.

“Not to add to any pressures, my dear, but we must be aware of our responsibility in dealing with the Anomalies. Humanity has only existed for a very short period of time in Earth’s history. It would be very easy to wipe us out entirely by accident. As such, I think it is of utmost importance that you as field operatives are in top physical and mental condition. I think you should see Doctor Chao as soon as possible, for psychotherapy. Again, I mean no offense.”

Chloe Grant wouldn’t remember the rest of their exchange that day. In a daze, she replied to Trémaux, somehow. Saying something.

It all rang hollow.

A ball of yarn.

Seeing Doctor Chao for a long conversation and an unspecific amount of therapy sessions started sounding like a good idea to her. A great idea, even.

“I’d love to tell you more,” said Doctor Solomon. The corners of his lips twitched with a hint of a smile, like a child who could barely contain himself. “But I believe everything we say here is recorded and gathered, and for the sake of our continued paychecks, I must keep our upcoming innovations confidential.”

The eccentric doctor and lead engineer in their company was doing his best to cheer up Rida Singh. It wasn’t working. Still, Singh’s face featured a brief flash of recognition over Solomon’s noble effort.

Ruiz scratched his five o’clock shadow and nodded. They all knew what Solomon was trying, so Ruiz offered his best attempt towards the same end.

“Can we get you anything in here? Everybody’s being sketchy about visiting times, and rules, and the likes.”

Singh shook his head and coughed.

“No. This place is only temporary anyway. Lawyer said, uh, I’m being transferred to some other facility next. Before the trial, yeah?”

Grant hedged so many unspoken questions for Singh. Why he had pulled the move he had to land himself here, what he had hoped to accomplish, and if he realized that his stunt had effectively gotten Carter killed.

It wasn’t the time nor place. She held her tongue.

She had almost expected Ruiz to pose those questions, anyway given he seemed to have been closer to Carter and Singh and a spy for… another agency? Company? Who knew? Bennett was still digging.

Ruiz was playing it cool. Playing the concerned colleague all the way.

Or maybe he wasn’t even playing at all.

The most convincing liars rarely lied. They drew their confidence from the naked truth, letting deceptions fall unnoticed through the cracks.

She had been watching him for the past days. She had noticed the shake in his hand. At Carter’s funeral, Ruiz had tried to hide the shaking. Not even smoking could do it.

And the man’s eyes had welled with tears at the funeral. His loss appeared profound and honest. Carter and Ruiz had been working closely together for over a year.

Grant’s inner monologue drowned out whatever superficial things the three men were talking about now.

Singh’s eyes wandered her way and she felt pressured to say something again. So she did.

“Whatever you do, don’t say anything without Spencer’s legion of lawyers to sand it down.”

He smirked. Scoffed.

“Man, I am really,” Singh started. Pausing, he ran a hand through his frazzled hair and sighed. “I don’t know, I’m just really disappointed in Spencer. He’s leavin’ me hanging here, man.”

Grant sympathized. With both Singh and Spencer.

The CEO needed to keep the ship running. The lights on, the bills paid, the progress made.

Meanwhile, Singh had only been doing his job, and if things had worked out, he might have been celebrated for his actions. Instead, Carter was dead, the US government’s team had killed the T-Rex and taken its remains, and Singh, their former head of IT, now sat in federal prison, awaiting a trial that could put him in a cell for life.

“Yeah,” she replied. Sighed. She hated that this was the best she could muster in response. “Wish we could do more.”

Singh cracked another feeble smile. He appreciated her own miserable attempt at giving him any shred of courage.

He continued pacing back and forth in his cell.

“Don’t worry old chap,” Doctor Solomon told his junior colleague. Despite the oppressive gloom of this brightly-lit prison, the elderly man beamed. “Chin up. Spencer’s a cold fish when you shine a light on him, but he rewards your loyalty when you least expect it. And speaking of fish, Bernie’s taken care of—I have him in my lab and he’s only being fed the best money could buy.”

Solomon tapped the window between them twice and gave Singh a reassuring nod.

Singh exhaled sharply and he smiled the first honest smile since their arrival.

“Thanks. Owe you one, Doc. Just, uh, don’t do anything funny with Bernie, okay?”

“I would never dream of it,” said Solomon. Then he tilted his head. “Unless you give me consent to experiment on him? See, his species would make him a good specimen for tests relating to the Devonian—”

“No. N. O,” Singh said, spelling out his denial and emitting a nervous chuckle.

None of them were sure when Solomon said things like that.

“In all seriousness,” Ruiz said, “I bet you, Spencer got Bennett and whoever else diggin’ on what really happened out over in Midland. You’ll be out in no time, then the first drink’s on me, amigo.”

Grant wasn’t convinced.

How much did Ruiz know? How much of it was in his hands? Could something he knew set Singh free?

She flashed Singh a smile so feeble that they may as well have been looking into a mirror, rather than through a glass window.

“Stay frosty and see you soon,” she said. A deep breath, and part of her composure returned. She winked at him. “And don’t bite too hard when you get any cake, might just be a file hidden in there.”

His smile widened, replete with warmth.

The three visitors remained quiet on their way out. Down the claustrophobic corridors, past the tiny blinking lights, and doors that only guards could open with their mag-lock keycards. Before long, the trio found themselves back out on the parking lot of the Carrington Federal Correctional Institute.

High fences topped with razor wire surrounded them. Only few other vehicles stood parked on the visitor’s lot.

The shadows of visors concealed the watchful eyes of prison guards, all observing their every move as the trio shuffled about on the parking lot.

The three stopped and stood in silence, all grappling with what to say next, before they inevitably scattered in the winds.

Uncomfortable in this environment, Solomon was first to speak and first to leave. He straightened the collar of his gray jacket. “Oh, well, don’t let any of this eat at you. I’m confident Spencer can pull some strings and get Singh released soon enough. He’ll be back to annoying you on comms before you know it. On a lighter note, I’m excited to share with you the details on our newest achievement. Not here, of course. I’ll see you two back at the office. Bring beverages, the briefing might take a while.”

The head engineer disappeared into his old blue Charger and drove off, leaving Ruiz and Grant behind.

Ruiz was smoking a cigarette, leaning against his motorcycle. Grant hadn’t even noticed him light up his cancer stick.

His eyes narrowed, studying one of the fence’s watchtowers. Like a sharpshooter, observing his mark, staring back at a guard up there. When he spoke, it almost looked like he was talking to the faraway guard, but the words were aimed at Grant.

“Why did you come here, anyway?”

Her heart started pounding like a huge drum. It wasn’t even like she felt caught—the question offended her somehow.

“Excuse me?”

Ruiz took a long drag from his cigarette. “You’re still pretty new to FP. I never figured you and Singh to have been close.”

This left her speechless. He must have known how his words would hit. But why? And why now?

He answered unspoken questions, answering for his offense unprompted. “Sorry. Just curious. Trying to get to know you better. You know what, though? I ain’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. ‘Preciate you’ve been here—been to Carter’s funeral, now, this—good having you… havin’ you on the team.”

Ruiz’s gaze wandered from the watchtower to Grant, locking onto her eyes with a burning stare. He took another drag. His eyes glittered something strange. His model shape looked stunning in this sunlight.

She swept her hair back, stewing on his speech, looking for the right words to counter it with.

“Don’t mention it. Least I can do.” She bit her lip. Maybe the easiest way to keep tabs on him would be to… “I know you offered Singh a drink when he’s out, but how about you offer me one sometime?”

She got into her car while he stood there, staring after her, smoking.

“Careful,” he said. Every syllable billowed out like smoke. “Don’t wanna get us into hot water for fraternizing too closely outside of work.”

Ruiz nodded, as if agreeing with himself on what he had just said. He stood still where he leaned against his motorcycle, posed like the languid statue of a post-modern deity, rivaling famous underwear models in his attractive poise.

She shot back. “Hold them horses cowboy, it’s a just a drink or two.”

His lips curled into a smile. He performed a mock salute with two fingers.

She took off, pulling the car around and driving away.

Grant shot furtive glances in her rearview mirror as she left the prison’s parking lot behind. Ruiz continued staring after her as she drove away. Then he stamped out his cigarette on the Tarmac, mounted his bike, and slipped the black helmet over his head, visor flapped down.

Then, as Grant’s car trailed around the curving road, lines of tall trees swallowed Ruiz and the prison whole.

She had a lot to think about, and she had a long drive ahead of her. Visiting Singh here was quite out of the way, and he would be transferred even farther for the trial.

Things weren’t looking good for Singh, and she wondered if she could get him off the hook… if only she gathered enough evidence on Ruiz’s espionage, and the mystery redhead he worked with—that suspicious suit he had been meeting at the café in Austin.

He had met with that redhead more than once since Grant started following him around. Grant had been stalking Ruiz, always careful not to tip him off to his tail.

She used rentals, taxis, and even set up in any inconspicuous locales where she could watch the roads he frequented throughout the city.

Grant even knew where Ruiz lived now. Downtown, fifth story of an old building that looked fit for gentrification in the near future. She wondered what his place looked like inside.

Endless minutes later, her phone buzzed, piercing the mind fog. Danielle Bennett was calling.

Grant plugged in an earbud and tapped her phone to take the call.

“What’s up, Danielle?” she asked Bennett.

“Where are you? Driving?”

“Mhm. On my way back from visiting Singh in Carrington.”

“Did he—you know what, tell me later. You’ll have to step on the gas, we got another incursion to deal with. The operative C2A is about to go out any minute now.”

Grant clicked her tongue. “Where?”

Bennett’s fingers hammered away at a keyboard with incredible speed.

“Kentucky. Appalachian mountains.”

Grant sighed. “Guess my book needs to wait. Again. I’m on my way.”

Her finger hovered near the button to hang up. More words from Danielle followed, stopping her from pressing it.

“What are you… you know what? Tell me later? Uhm,” Bennett paused for a long beat. More click-clacking at her keyboard followed. “I didn’t just call about the incursion, I, uhm, I got more on… you-know-who.”

She sounded as mousy as she usually looked. Grant knew exactly who Bennett meant.

The redhead Ruiz had been holding his clandestine meetings with.

Grant kept her eyes on the road. Traffic on the highway drifted in slow motion despite her car accelerating. “You sure this is the right channel to talk about it? The walls have ears, and all that?”

Bennett gasped. A frustrated gasp. Grant immediately regretted posing that question.

“Hey, I’m no newbie here. If I don’t want to be seen or heard, then I won’t be seen or heard.”

Grant smiled, stifling a laugh. “Okay, okay. I know. Just… we gotta be careful, okay?”

They still hadn’t informed anybody yet. As far as Grant knew, nobody knew that she and Bennett knew about Ruiz’s espionage on Spencer’s boardroom meeting. Or about the redhead.

“Do you wanna hear it, or not?” Bennett asked.

“Sure thang. Hit me.”

Bennett simmered in another long pause. The furious typing at her keyboard stayed absent for several beats, for so long that Grant almost asked if everything was alright, just before Bennett started hacking away again.

“Her name is Loretta Corsino. She is in no shape or form affiliated with the American government. She’s a consultant in the private sector. Harvard, attorney, squeaky-clean record, can’t find dirt on her anywhere.”

Grant snorted. This surprised her. Another private firm, butting into FP’s business?

It made enough sense. For now. Still, some pieces of the puzzle were missing. Frustratingly so.

“Huh.”

“She works part-time in cybersecurity at a US branch of a British company named Celava Semi-Conductors.”

“Huh,” Grant said again. “So they’re IT?”

“A little bit more than that. Get a load of this,” Bennett said. “They’re kind of a pioneer in the field of high-energy physics, developing new forms of semi-conductors, shielding, and other components for use in nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, and other high-tech projects.”

Grant’s heart started racing again. Celava sounded like competition. A rival for Future Proof. This wasn’t good.

They knew. The had to know what Future Proof was dealing in.

“The plot thickens…”

“No kidding! CEO’s a guy named Malcolm Wright, a real Conan the Barbarian-looking guy in a suit,” Bennett’s typing ceased. Her syllables drawled out as she was reading something off a screen before continuing. “Celava used to be trumpeted by the British government as an example of how their national industry was ‘moving into the future’, but then Wright caused a rift between the government and his company.”

Now, Grant was intrigued. She said nothing. Bennett continued uninterrupted.

“A year ago, there was an accident at Celava’s main research facility. Two scientists died. According to official accounts, there was some kind of explosion of super-heated steam when a faulty valve blew. The families of the two dead scientists there were given generous compensation—and, curiously, made to sign an agreement that both funerals would be held immediately, with closed coffins and no viewing of the bodies.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. You thinking what I’m thinking? This also sound very cover-uppy to you?”

“Yeah.” They knew. The Anomalies, the dinosaurs from the past, the mutants from the future, and the secret operations to keep these things from the public. “Yeah, they sure as hell know.”

“Good, glad we’re on the same page. You gotta be careful, okay? No telling how deep this rabbit hole really goes. It’s a whole other can of worms if the spy’s working for someone else in the private sector.”

“I know, I—”

“I mean it. I know you know. I know you’re going to tell me that this is the kind of rabbit hole where people disappear and wind up dead, or in closed coffins with no viewing of the bodies. I know you want to tell me to be careful, too. I know.”

“Okay. Yeah, let’s just,” Grant took a deep breath. “Let’s just play it cool, keep our cool. Keep working like we’re none the wiser. I’m starting to think we need to go to Spencer about all this, sooner than later. We, uhm. Speak soon, Danielle, I’m stopping at home before hitting the HQ for airlift. I’ll be a few minutes late.”

“You… call me Dan.”

Grant smiled.

“Okay, Dan. See you soon.”

They hung up.

Half an hour later, Grant pulled into her new driveway. Gravel crunched underneath her sneakers on the short way from the garage to her front door. The fresh coat of paint looked good.

It was a nice place.

Even with all the cardboard boxes inside, cluttering the entrance foyer, and the living room, and the kitchen, and the—

The doorbell rang. It startled her. She froze, heart racing again, in the middle of packing a bag to exchange her laundry at Future Proof’s city HQ. Just as she zipped up her duffel bag, the doorbell rang a second time.

A shadow awaited her outside. Still, calm, and looming, the tiny windows obscured everything about her visitor but the shadow.

She opened the front door.

The shadow turned out to have been Ruiz. He was standing out there.

Ruiz thumbed his lip as their gazes met.

How did he know where she lived?

“Hey,” he said. Husky, smoky, and stern. “I needed to see you. Speak to you. It’s urgent.”

What? About what? How—

She almost voiced her doubts unfiltered, then found her cool, thinking back to what she had told Danielle earlier—to keep their cool. “Is this about the incursion, or about the drink?”

Ruiz smirked. His eyes glittered something strange again. Flashing with something seductive.

“No. Getting to HQ for the job needs to wait, too. I need to speak to you. Alone.”

Taken off-guard, Grant rubbed the back of her neck, and considered her options.

He gave her no space to think.

“Can I come inside? Talk in there?”

“It’s… quite a mess. I’m still moving in,” she fired back.

“I ain’t fussy,” he said. His eyes flashed again. Narrowed. Drilling into her, scanning her up and down.

Did he know? Did he know what they knew?

“Okay, sure. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya. Let’s chat.” She stepped aside and invited him in with a sweeping gesture.

He stepped inside, swerving past the stacks of cardboard boxes, looking for a place to talk.

Grant licked her lips.

All around them, orbs of light shimmered… scintillating, glittering, blinding. Spinning, hovering, glowing, flashing, flickering. Some of them flared up, growing brighter. Others dimmed. One of the Anomalies flickered and vanished, and another opened seconds after, like an exploding sun.

Dozens and dozens of Anomalies surrounded the agents. So many Anomalies that their combined light engulfed the world around them.

The trio had landed on some kind hilly grasslands. Something resembling a blue sky almost shone through the brilliant curtain of anomalous luminescence. The light drowned out anything beyond their immediate environs.

Even their black body armor and jumpsuits looked bright gray under such brilliance.

The sights were stunning and invited Grant to ponder what this meant. Mischchenko cut those ponderings short as she yanked at Grant’s arm, helping her back up.

The three operative scrambled.

Just like the light, noise also surrounded them. Even through the helmet, the Anomalies sounded like they were singing. Like a choir of wind chimes. Amplified by their numbers in close to proximity to one another, and… eerily pleasant to the ear.

Through that soundscape, the skittering and scuttling sliced through. The swarm of mutant insects poured through the anomaly atop the hill down which the agents had tumbled. Chitinous bodies with flightless wings scampered and poured out like pulsating waves of black tar, flowing down the hillside.

Acting on instinct, Grant and Ruiz fired more shots. Their futuristic EMD rifles hurled bright blue electric blasts at the small creatures—and the Anomalies reacted. Lightning arced between the blasts and Anomaly orbs, crackling and flashing ever brighter. A pulse of pure pressure pushed the agents and insects both backwards, away from the reactions, staggering and stumbling the agents and dispersing the front rows of the living flood of insects.

Then the mad chase continued.

Ruiz swore.

The dog-sized bugs hit by blasts immediately fell, only for the living tide to wash over them and sweep them up in pursuit of the three human agents.

The volley of shots had accomplished nothing but a strange chain reaction—

Mischchenko yelled something at them; something about conserving their batteries, though her words were otherwise incomprehensible—static crackling and fuzzy clicks almost eclipsed the speech Grant heard in her headset.

The agents turned tail and ran.

They ducked past another Anomaly, swerved past yet another, and the tide chased them. The humans had no idea where to go, avoiding the Anomalies on instinct. They were just trying to outrun the insect swarm. Its horrid buzzing mixed in, tainting the pleasant chimes of the Anomalies.

The coppery taste of blood only grew in Grant’s mouth, coating her tongue in a terrible film. She wanted to spit, but couldn’t because of the helmet. And she suppressed her instinct to unload her EMD’s battery for more suppressing fire against their pursuers, as another survival instinct kicked in. Having seen the chain reaction between EMD discharge and the Anomaly cluster was almost like…

Touching the stove. She still had the scars to show from touching a hot stove as a kid.

The chain reaction now resembled that hot stove, so she wasn’t going to place her hand on it.

She was going to keep her hands off it. And like that, she stopped her finger from squeezing the trigger.

Ruiz and Mischchenko must have shared that sentiment. Their run took them outside the cluster of hovering, star-like orbs, though black spots remained in Grant’s vision, long before and after she screwed her eyes shut.

The grassy hills sloped down to a wide and serene beach of bright white sands, with no signs of humanity or life otherwise.

The mutant insect swarm chased them from the cluster of Anomalies. Their hundreds over hundreds of black bodies glistened in the broad daylight of this age—wherever, whenever they were now.

The creatures looked like a crossbreed between locusts and wasps. Sleek, deadly, and with snapping mandibles, their flightless wings glistened in beautiful rainbow colors. Had they come from the future to feast?

Once they had gained distance from the cluster of Anomalies, Ruiz decided to belay Mischchenko’s previous order. He took more potshots at the swarm, downing another handful of insects. It wasn’t even close to making a dent in the unstoppable onslaught on their heels.

All those snapping mandibles, working together, could probably strip the armor from their bodies in seconds, then eat the flesh from their bones even faster.

Mischchenko shouted, “What the hell did I just say?”

Ruiz stopped firing.

“This way!”

The team curved away from the Anomalies, running for the beach.

Without mercy, without stopping, the insects changed direction in perfect harmony, like a well-drilled army. They honed in on the three agents without fail. The living tide curved in the exact same direction, giving relentless chase.

“Water! Get… get in the water,” Mischchenko shouted, losing more and more wind as they ran and ran from the unyielding swarm.

Grant didn’t hesitate. Didn’t question it. Her mind was too busy imagining the swarm, all around her, suffocating her. Eating her alive. Thus, she ran. Mischchenko’s orders were as good as any others to secure their survival now.

The soaking sensation inside her combat boots immediately turned her socks into sponges, while water splashed up to their waistlines. In a frenzied charge into the ocean waves, the agents sloshed and splashed, all holding their EMD rifles up high to secure them from exposure while backing up from the swarm. Even so, even with how useless the weapons seemed against this menace, they all aimed at the big bugs.

The ocean afforded them time to breathe. They panted in their helmets. And their labored, winded breathing still fizzled with static.

This swarm would not follow them into the water. The living tide had stopped just short of entering the watery waves where they lapped against bright white sand. The locust-wasps scuttled up and down the beach, searching for a way to reach or find their prey, and always shying away, backing up from the wet waves like frightened animals.

The tide shook Grant, but its waves weren’t strong enough to sweep any of the agents away.

Against the coppery taste in her mouth, she had never been so glad over the stinging scent of saltwater, burning in her nostrils.

Still, the insects refused to wade into the water like the humans had.

The three field agents waited. Watched.

The insect swarm flooded up and down the beach, visibly confused over having lost their free lunch.

This finally afforded Grant some glimpses of the Anomalies. So blinding was their combined light, and so erratic their patterns of flaring up, flickering, and dimming, that Grant gave up on counting after thirty orbs.

One of the Anomalies flickered, then vanished entirely. Grant suppressed the urge to swear out loud, in case that had been the one they fell through to get here—potentially stranding them in a time millions of years ago. Or thousands of years in the future? Who knew?

Yet the many Anomalies remained.

Where did they all lead? How was this even possible?

None of the records she had pored over at Future Proof could have prepared her for this. And Grant sensed the same air of fascination from her colleagues, who, like her, stood in stunned silence.

They stood in the ocean waves of this alien beach, waiting as minutes passed them by like the elements, and the briny water soaked them, while the mutant-insect swarm slowly changed direction, dispersing, turning, and eventually leaving. They had given up on their prey.

The flood of creatures poured back uphill, heading towards the Anomalies. Were they responding to the sounds?

Only once the swarm was far out of sight, did anybody speak up.

“Good thing they don’t like water, huh?” Ruiz mumbled into their radio intercom.

Mischchenko cackled. Without doubt a stress response. Grant followed up with her own: a litany of profanities without rhyme or reason, just venting into the void of their closed radio comms, as they were stranded somewhere in another era of Earth’s history, or somewhere in Earth’s future.

The swarm crawled its way back up the grass hills, pouring into an Anomaly at the edge of the cluster, until the last ones of them vanished. Even the ones that had been stunned by EMD shots were gone, dragged along by the living avalanche. Perhaps devoured.

Hard to tell.

“I hope one of you got an idea which Anomaly we just exited from,” Grant grumbled, “because I sure as shit can’t tell them apart.”

Ruiz said, “On the bright side—sorry, pun not intended—those bugs went in a different one, right there at the edge of the Anomaly… crossroads? This is like a crossroads, huh?”

Mischchenko emitted a shuddering sigh.

“We better not waste any time—get back to those Anomalies—start knocking on different doors till we find the one back home. I don’t know about you two, but I am not getting stuck here, wherever ‘here’ is. I got family to get back to.”

Dripping with oceanwater, they slowly marched back up the beach, then the hills. Their advance started cautious, slowed by the weight of their drenching. Then courage or fear drove their pace, swifter steps into the blinding jungle of light.

The rest of the landscape around them looked so familiar and yet so alien. So untouched by mankind, so distant, yet so vibrant—its grass glistened bright green in the sunlight and the light of Anomalies.

Grant’s mind reeled with the possibilities, as to what time they had wound up in. What if there was a way to navigate these wormholes?

And she wondered how it was even possible for so many Anomalies to appear in a single spot like this. Connecting different eras, bridging disparate worlds that had existed and would exist on their planet. Crossing all through time.

Crossroads.

On cue, halfway back up the hills, an Anomaly flared up brightly. A man ran from it.

He wore armor. Ancient armor. In his hand, he clutched a sword, and sandals clung to his bloodied feet. Cloth on his body was dyed in a bright blue, while the rest of him was covered in a slick, dripping crimson. Whose blood it was would have been impossible to say, leaving no space for examination, for this stranger from the past ran headfirst into the next Anomaly, vanishing as abruptly as he had appeared.

A monster followed. Chased him.

Its appearance froze the blood in Grant’s veins. And all three field agents from Future Proof froze where they stood, standing rooted to the grassy grounds like statues.

At the size of a horse, the terrible creature chasing the ancient warrior featured four long, stalky limbs, all ending in deadly claws. Its upper torso was hunched and the silhouette of its gaping mouth revealed long, jagged teeth that could mangle and entrap their prey. This predatory beast crossed the hills in frightening, leaping bounds. It vanished into the next Anomaly that the ancient man in armor had run into, gone again as fast as it had appeared.

A streak of crimson amidst the blinding light, from the blood that had coated its gray and slender body.

“Holy what the hell?” Grant blurted out.

“My word,” Mischchenko said with trembling voice, “my cue. Let’s get the hell outta here!”

Neither Ruiz nor Grant needed to be told twice.

With EMD rifles raised, ready for any threats to leap out at them from the Anomalies, they waded into the maze of glowing orbs, seeking one atop a hill.

The eerie singing chimes welcomed them like a heavenly choir. Now, though Grant’s heart pounded like a drum, she sensed a deep resonance between these Anomalies.

A hum. A thrum, resonating with her own pulse, all the way down to her very bones.

It was both menacing and soothing somehow. Awesome in the original sense of the words. Like standing in the presence of something divine—something that could wink you out of existence by accident, and very prone to such mishaps.

“This one, I think,” Ruiz said.

“Wait,” Mischchenko answered.

Too late. Ruiz walked into an Anomaly atop a hill.

“Shit.”

They followed him in.

No crossroads awaited them on the other side of the blinding light. The resonance also felt weak here.

Fierce winds howled all around them, strong enough to shake them in their boots, and cold as ice. The sky was red and bleak, drowning in clouds of dust on the wind, and ominous thunder rolled in the distance.

Only a desert of rock and sand yawned all around them.

A monstrous shriek echoed across this wasteland.

Mischchenko shook her helmeted head and was first to back right out, returning through the Anomaly to the crossroads. The others followed.

“One down, huh,” Ruiz muttered, “how many more to go, now?”

“Shut up,” Mischchenko said, leading them to the next hill, with confidence and dread alike in every stomping step of her stride.

EMDs still raised in anticipation of the worst, they walked into blinding light.

Grant’s heart fluttered. She stifled a shuddering sigh of relief at the sight of Solomon’s new Anomaly Stabilizer, the upgraded Anomaly Locking Device.

They were back in the foggy Appalachian woods. The generator attached to the ALD chugged with merry rhythm. And no insect swarm in sight.

“Shit, I can’t believe it,” Ruiz said. “Holy shit.”

“Stay on your damned toes,” Mischchenko said. “Ruiz, you and me, quick sweep. Grant, you lock that Anomaly now.”

Wait—

Something inside of Grant screamed to rebel, to resist. She could barely believe what she herself was thinking, yet it couldn’t be helped.

They had stumbled upon something incredible. If Future Proof’s R&D department—or really anybody among humanity at large—if anybody could study all of what they had just experienced, who knew what revelations awaited them?

Grant finally gave her protest a voice. “Wait, wait, what—what about—what about the pterodactyls, putting them back, or stabilizing this Anomaly? I mean, we got everything recorded on helmet cams, but I think R&D should investigate this place.”

“Grant,” Mischchenko sighed. Shades of disappointment, grief, and despair turned her next words sharp, sharper than Spencer had ever spoken to her. “Are you out of your damn’ mind? Do you realize how dangerous that place is?”

A crossroads of Anomalies.

“Yeah,” Ruiz butted in, “you wanna hear my two cents, I say we send the big birds to containment, get this bad boy locked up. I’m with Mischchenko on this.”

“Thank you,” she replied to him.

Grant shook her head. She was torn. She agreed with them, and every fiber, every survival instinct in her was screaming at her to just lock up the Anomaly.

Yet she could not help but wonder what they might lose by losing their connection to that crossroads.

She turned to stare at the Anomaly. Much fainter than with the resonance amplified between the many of them hovering together in a cluster, the one’s solitary presence here still emitted an eerie, pleasant chime, nearly inaudible, though Grant now almost felt more sensitive to it.

A nervous laugh escaped Mischchenko’s throat. Then she said, “Shit, whatever, I know how you’re feeling, Grant. I wanna know more, too, even if it’s just so we can deal with these things more safely, hell, save more lives, maybe. And, hey, like you said, we got it all on headcams. Trémaux’s going to have a field day with it, let’s—”

Burch had warned them about the pterodactyls.

That it might only be at the last moment when the beating of their wings heralded their presence.

In line with the warning, a huge flap echoed across the mountain woods like a thunderclap, and a winged beast descended upon them.

Mischchenko was the first to react, but her EMD’s shot missed, hitting only a pine tree.

The pterodactyl screeched in response.

It wouldn’t have looked good for him if he were to shoot her in her own kitchen, but they both had sophisticated military backgrounds, and both had been working in private sectors, shrouded in secrecy. To some extent, they both had the skills and knowhow of spies, and could make each other vanish from the Earth without a trace if they just tried hard enough.

Grant considered herself a good judge of character. But in a situation like this, all bets were off.

Their previous banter, paired with the flirtatious glint in his eyes, could have meant anything. Maybe he was always just like that, using it to disarm situations and make friendly. Or maybe he was a good actor, using it all to conceal more nefarious intentions, allowing the wolf to creep closer before it pounced. Or maybe it was entirely genuine.

She found Ruiz hard to read now. His poker face gelled well with his model’s face.

Eyes still locked onto her, he finally broke the awkward silence by saying, “I never asked, did I? You aren’t from around Texas.”

“Nope,” she said, popping the single syllable like a balloon. “You never asked indeed.”

He emitted something that died halfway between scoffing and a chortle. He chased that with a wam smile.

“Okay, well, are you from Texas? Or not?”

Grant’s phone buzzed. A short message. She hesitated to check.

Instead, she countered his question. “You said the job and HQ can wait, you needed to talk. Almost had me convinced it was something serious, but now we’re small-talking in my sorry excuse of a kitchen?”

She leaned against the other counter, opposite Ruiz, and crossed her arms. She sold her words with a crooked smirk.

He bought it.

“I’m from Cali,” he said, “and figured you were too, based on how you talk. Or maybe it’s Nevada?”

Her smirk transformed into a genuine smile.

A good guess.

He was good, after all.

“Yeah. L.A. You?”

Another half-chortle, half-scoff.

“Same. People say it’s a small world, but a city like that’s big enough for us to never meet before this job a couple o’ states over. How about that, huh?”

The phone buzzed again.

“Maybe we just got around a lot,” she said, her smile fading. “Is this… going anywhere?”

His sunny demeanor also faded. With a thumb hooked into his leather pants’ pocket, his right hand hovered dangerously close to his pistol all the while.

“What? I thought you wanted me to ask you out for drinks, off the job, sometime. Wasn’t that what you implied at Carrington’s?”

“I didn’t imply anything, I flat-out said it. But tell me something, now. You go to a lady’s home first to ask her out for drinks? Is that how you roll, cowboy?” Her lips twitched until they formed another crooked smile—keeping her cool, trying to lure his motives out into the open. “How’d you find this place anyway? You following me around now? Are you stalking me?”

He tilted his head, then shook it, averting his eyes. Like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he played it off with natural charm. A wide smile revealed a perfect set of teeth, just adding to the pleasant image. And he employed a soft, smoky chuckle to punctuate it all, to downplay everything.

Her phone buzzed again.

“Yeah, okay, I admit, I followed you here from Carrington, figured I wanted to ask in private,” he said. He was good. She had not seen his motorcycle on her tail for the entire ride. Offering Grant a sliver of relief, he unhooked his thumb, removing his hand from the vicinity of his gun, to wag a finger at her—to point at the phone in her jacket, specifically, just as it buzzed yet again. “You gonna get that?”

She grinned and grimaced both.

“You know, it’s work. Our work. I’m surprised your phone isn’t blowing up right now, too.”

He shook his head, still wielding that charming smile. “I prefer to keep it off when I have more important people to see.”

Oh, he was good. If he suspected that she knew anything about his espionage at Future Proof for Corsino, he was burying it under mountains of flirting.

Under other circumstances, it might have worked.

She slowly fished the phone out of her pocket, and it buzzed for the umpteenth time, now in her hand.

New messages flashed on-screen.

“We should be getting to HQ, saddling up already. And if you’d been paying attention to our employer, you’d know. We’re headed to the Appalachian mountains? Gonna be a long ride. So, I’m flattered you rate this…” she paused, using a gesture to bounce between the two of them, “as more pressing than your seriously lucrative job, but… I, for my part, would like to see those fat paychecks keep rollin’ in.”

He raised his hands like she had him in a stickup, palms facing her in surrender. With a nod of his head, he encouraged her to check her phone.

11:59, said the display.

High noon.

She fought the urge of looking up, to keep an eye on his right hand and the holstered gun.

As expected, messages from HQ were flooding her lock screen. Two of them in between had come from Danielle Bennett—from her own private number, not work.

Where ARE you? —Dan, 11:57

Grant held up a hand before Ruiz could say anything else. He shrugged in response. She took a moment to reply to Dan’s message.

Her heart was racing, but not because Ruiz was such a heartthrob. The silvery iron on his hip still kept her nervous enough, the subterfuge put all his flirting into question, and she still considered finding a way to elegantly excuse herself, to retrieve her own piece from upstairs.

For all she knew, she was about to take a bullet. Or ten.

Grant permitted none of this to surface in any shape or form. She bit her lip and answered Danielle, not HQ.

Had to make it snappy. Had to word it just right.

Her thumbs raced at a pace to match her heartbeat, tapping out a swift reply.

If anything happens to me, he’s at my place right now, and he’s got a private semi-auto 45 ACP, not issued by FP.

Message sent.

Grant quickly stuffed the phone back into her pocket. It soon buzzed more with a flurry of incoming messages. She knew they were all sent by Dan.

Without commenting on the flood of texts that kept her phone abuzz, Ruiz only arched a brow.

He stared into her eyes.

“Listen,” he said. A deep, shuddering sigh escaped him. The sheer power of it stunned her, and made her racing heart skip a beat.

He pulled off his beanie cap and ran a hand through dark hair, ruffling it as he visibly struggled to find the right words.

That sigh had blown away all flirtatious air about him. He shifted uncomfortably where he stood, still leaning against the counter. The hand so dangerously close to his pistol, it joined the other, folding in front of him and guiding his sight to the checkered floor between them.

“I am a spy,” he said. Each soft word landed like thunderclaps. “I work for an industry rival of FP’s.”

Her stomach knotted. The pause he allowed to follow only fueled her paranoia.

Was this another play?

Was he fishing for something else? Was he onto her, trying to find out who knew that she knew, to find whom she answered to?

Her mind flashed to Danielle Bennett, an innocent face on the surface of a sea of secrets.

Emotions started bubbling up from the depths.

Social engineering and confidence plays were tricky business, and whether this was a play of his or not, it had worked wonders in robbing Grant of her cool. She couldn’t think of any cards to play, and the sheer possibility of him being this stupid made her angry. It also somehow made her angry that his flirting might have all been hot air all along.

“What the hell?” she blurted out. “Why would you tell me that? Why me? Are you stupid?”

Another sigh escaped him.

He avoided eye contact.

Between her simmering sources of anger, and the very surprise of it all, she struggled to sense any deception. It was either a very good, aggressive bluff on his behalf, or her instincts were right, and he was coming clean to her in earnest.

Still, the question lingered. It compelled her to repeat it.

“Why? Why me?”

Another sigh from Ruiz now shuddered with gravity. He finally met her gaze again. The wet glitter of sorrow in his eyes hinted at a deep ocean of its own, an untapped well of tears, and a conflicted man hidden behind it all.

Everything he’d say would feel so very, deeply honest.

“When Spencer hired you, I… convinced Singh to let me get my eyes on your file. And when I saw that, I figured you were hired to ferret out any potential leaks or whistleblowers or spies in the organization. That’s kind of your specialty, isn’t it?”

Grant clenched her jaw so hard that her teeth almost started hurting from the pressure.

The look in his eyes reminded her of a puppy dog.

This, she hated. She really didn’t like dogs, not even in such an abstract sense.

“Well, I didn’t really sign up for that,” she snapped, “but I can see why you’d arrive at that misconception.”

Averting his gaze again, he shook his head.

“You know, I used to think it was the right thing to do. Everything about our company is shady. It’s shady as all hell,” he said. The words he used somehow dulled the edge. Maybe it was the softness in it, the sense of vulnerability he projected. His gravelly voice cracked, if ever so briefly. “Who’s the good guys, really? Who’s the bad guys? Sure, the extra pay didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt one bit. But I was convinced it was better for this to be out in the open somehow, that it might be dangerous if Spencer held all this power in his hands, all this knowledge. Y’know?”

It was a lot to process. If this was a play, then he had gone all-in, put all his chips on the table, and asked to see Grant’s hand.

She had nothing. Nothing to match it.

It didn’t even feel like a play. It was probably more apt to understand it as someone who was quitting the game altogether.

Where she failed to reply, he continued speaking.

“Now? Carter was shot. Dead. We buried him after some gung-ho military asshole shot him, and I think it’s my fault—no—I know it’s my fault. And Singh’s behind bars, and this fucking shake—”

He raised his hand. His left hand—the one she had not been watching as closely, as it had been farther away from the holstered gun on his hip—now that she focused on it, she could see that it shook.

Tremors shook it.

Ruiz balled his hand into a fist but the tremors remained. His eyes sparkled brighter.

“This fuckin’ shake doesn’t go away anymore. I fucked up, Grant. I want you to turn me in or whatever, or just hear me out. Fuck. I don’t even really know you. I’m sorry I’m dumping all this horseshit on your lap. I just… I need someone to talk, I guess.”

His words fell the softest he had ever uttered. He rubbed his forehead, hiding his eyes behind his hand.

It was the least rehearsed thing she had ever felt coming from him.

This player had quit the game. He was on the verge of breaking down in her half-furnished house, in her sorry excuse of a kitchen.

She bit her lip. The ball of anger dissipated into a much milder frustration, a tinier pit, churning in her stomach.

In that moment, she decided to take him at face value. She could have gone on and continued questioning his motives and his every action, but the puzzle pieces fit into their rightful places.

Grant didn’t really know him either, but… this…

This felt honest.

“Shit, man,” she muttered, stirring as she broke free from her quiet shock, “this is so, so much to take in right now. You have no idea.”

It was her turn to release a deep sigh. Part of it was relief. She didn’t want to be cynical.

“Can I—do you mind if I smoke in here?” he asked. He blinked many times, blinking away the glitter in his eyes before he’d dare show any tears.

“Yeah, I mind. There’s no smoking in my house,” she answered with firmness.

He wiped his lips with those trembling fingers.

The gun at his hip no longer exuded a tangible threat. It just rested there. Just like the gun upstairs, in her bedroom. She would fetch it later, after he left.

“Shit, man, we got a lot o’ shit on our plate as it is. Now you come to me with… this? Like I said, it’s gonna be a long ride to the Appalachian, we need to get to HQ, and I need to think about what you said. I’ll tell you this, though, I wasn’t hired for counterintelligence,” she said, omitting the part of her having been doing that without being asked to. And as much as she disliked dogs, the look he then cast her way made her think of a kicked puppy. She swept her hair back, suppressed a groan of frustration, and the harsh tone faded from her voice altogether. Everything softened. “We’ll talk about it more, okay? But we also need to do our job—the Anomalies, the specimens and incursions—people’s lives are on the line, and we gotta hustle. See you at HQ, okay? Let’s talk shop after we get back from the field. Okay?”

Instead of tears, he broke out into another hybrid between scoffing and a chuckle. There wasn’t anything flirtatious or playful about it, instead having turned into something resembling relief.

He’d soon leave. She’d soon have packed and left as well, heading downtown to Future Proof’s towering skyscraper. And soon after that, they’d be en route to Kentucky.

They exchanged furtive, secretive glances during briefings in the boardroom and briefings in R&D, and between every step of travel where they looked each other’s way.

Grant now shared the burden of his secret. They did not speak about it at all. She felt watched all day, all night, all flight.

The tremor in his right hand remained, visible to her despite all attempts at hiding it. On the final stretch of flight into the Appalachian mountains, only Grant saw it.

Mischchenko chewed over their field operation orders from Spencer while they performed a final check on their EMD rifles. Pruitt was busy piloting the airlift chopper.

Max Carter was conspicuously absent. It felt like he should have been there. Instead, there was just an empty spot on the bench next to Ruiz.

That conversation in the kitchen had been haunting Grant all the while, all journey long. Everything else since had flowed past her in a blur. The most she remembered was trying to calm Danielle down, saying they’d sort things out soon enough.

She went through all the necessary motions. Kept to herself otherwise.

Grant kept her masked, helmeted head down, and followed Mischchenko’s instructions. Checked and re-checked her EMD rifle. Their battery packs whined as they powered their weapons up.

By the time the black, unmarked chopper swooped down over foggy Kentucky woods in the middle of nowhere, it was noon again.

The Anomaly glittered below.

That terrible, beautiful globe of splintered, slowly spinning lights, like glass shards shining with brilliant reflections of the sun…

Reports indicated pterodactyls in the area as a primary threat in the incursion. Burch confirmed the veracity of the images, and Stantz was busy having Bennett and their other minions scrubbing all video and image footage from the ‘net.

For the operators on site, the helmet visors concealed their faces. This kept the warmth inside their body armor, and it also hid all their facial expressions.

Even so, Ruiz’s stare lingered on Grant every now and then.

And she thought back to the kitchen, and how he had played his final hand, laying all cards out on the figurative table between them. It made her think of the blue-white checkered floor.

Would she tell Spencer? They needed to make a decision. A very cautious decision.

Some part of her related deeply to Ruiz. In all honesty, she didn’t trust Spencer herself. The power of these Anomalies, the power to affect time itself…

On the ground, she looked up at the Kentucky Anomaly in awe. It shimmered where it revolved mid-air, hovering inches above the frosted forest floor. This scintillating sphere was big enough to let another T-Rex escape from the past into their present.

Mischchenko was busy handling Doctor Solomon’s new variant of the ALM—what he had been so excited to share with the class. His new “innovation”.

This new variant could not only lock the Anomaly to prevent things from passing through the breaches in time—it could alternatively enforce stability. They could effectively stabilize a Flicker, what the R&D team had labeled an unstable Anomaly, which would work wonders if they ever needed to herd dinosaurs back through a Flicker again.

Ruiz returned from a sweep of the perimeter.

“No eyes on our big birds,” he reported. “But you’d think we’d hear ‘em make big shrieks to match.”

The ALM refused to lock the Anomaly. Mischchenko jiggled a cable. Slapped the side of the futuristic device.

She answered with frustration ringing in her voice—not over Ruiz’s report—but the ALM’s refusal to obey. “Burch said they’d be more silent hunters. Might not hear big wings until it’s too late.”

“These woods are pretty quiet today,” Grant remarked.

And with that, Mischchenko froze. The helmet kept her face as unreadable as everybody else’s, but Grant sensed the sudden shift in her superior’s air.

“You’re right,” Mischchenko said. “And now that you mention it, it’s too damn quiet. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Her movements turned hasty. She slapped the ALM’s metal case again, this time prompting lights to flare up on its top. The spiky sphere at its front starting spinning, and the Anomaly reacted—

The mighty, scintillating ball of light collapsed, compacting, shrinking from a huge, spinning sphere into a suitcase-sized orb, frozen and immobile mid-air.

The ALM hummed in chorus with the chugging generator wired up to it.

“Shit,” Ruiz muttered, so quiet that Grant only heard it over the radio bud in her ear. “I only now got what you mean, Mischchenko. Something’s wrong. We should be hearing… I don’t know what. It’s too damn quiet out here. I don’t hear Jack or shit.”

Mere seconds later, the chirping started. Chittering and scuttling sounds, drawing closer, ever closer. Shuffling, squeaking, and above all, chirping.

Not the chirping of birds.

Chirping of things on the ground. Buzzing.

Wings, far tinier than those of pterodactyls.

The mist around the Anomaly’s site roiled. Things emerged from it. Many, many things. Things that caused that symphony of buzzing and scuttling and chirping.

A living flood neared from every direction around them. The forest grounds teemed with life. Insects, the size of dogs, swarmed those frozen grounds.

Their three-person team was surrounded.

Ruiz shot first. Then the two women followed suit. Their EMDs flared up, discharging bright bolts of energy into the crawling swarm of weird locusts. The earth crackled with electricity, and those bugs were slowed, sometimes stunned… but the rest of the living tide swarmed every closer.

And quickly.

“Open the Anomaly back up,” Grant shouted between shots into the swarm. Then, as Mischchenko failed to comply, she repeated herself. “Open the damn’ Anomaly!”

Mischchenko stopped shooting and swiveled. She backed up, then hammered the device, shutting down the ALM.

The locked orb of the Anomaly exploded, expanding back into the brilliant, rotating sphere it had formed before.

The three field operatives continued firing shots in a futile attempt at stemming the tide, but they would never stop it like this—only slow it down, at best. Backing up all the while, shooting into these alien hordes of insect-like mutants, the light of the Anomaly engulfed them.

Pruitt was shouting over the intercom for a sitrep, but he would receive none as they shouted at each other in their desperate retreat, then all communications died.

Their EMD rifles had been set to low power output, to conserve energy and slow the onslaught of the insect swarm prior. Now, those settings were too low to incapacitate either pterodactyl outright. As Carter once put it, until they readjusted settings, the two field operatives were currently wielding glorified cattle prods.

The winged dinosaur on the ground shook its head, as if to regain its bearings in a very human fashion. It was far from unconscious, only somewhat stunned, and that sensation would wear off soon.

Its wings spread with a menacing span, matching that of the one swooping down.

All in the blink of an eye.

How was it that time ever stretched into infinity when things were unbearably slow, while being contracted into painful shortness whenever pressure was at its worst, and the danger overbearing?

Ruiz was caught off-guard, busy adjusting his rifle to maximum output. Grant saved his hide by taking a potshot at the second pterodactyl, in the split-second before it could pounce on him in its crashing descent.

This, too, was not enough to stop the beast outright. It wasn’t even enough to change its trajectory. The only good thing that came from her shot was how it alerted Ruiz to the pterodactyl in the nick of time.

He ducked. Shouted in pain. His EMD rifle went flying in a different direction than the creature as it curved back upwards with another mighty flap of its wings, another gale from the leathery thunderclap. The pterodactyl had winged him, but he had been more fortunate than Mischchenko, emerging from the hit without any broken bones.

Mischchenko’s crawling had taken her to retrieve her own EMD rifle. Unfortunately, her now broken right arm afforded her only poor aim. The shot she took at the ascending pterodactyl missed, singing the firs around their clearing.

Ruiz dove for his rifle while Grant carefully lined up a shot at the same time. The pterodactyl’s deadly shadow circled high above in the fog.

He pulled the trigger first, fast. Then he uttered a string of profanities—as sparks flew from his EMD instead of a shot, and the weapon fizzled and crackled with electricity from its short-circuiting. The dinosaur had damaged it on impact, rather than breaking his bones.

“Ground team, come in,” Pruitt spoke on the radio. Alarm shook his voice. “We lost you there for a while, what’s going on down there? Over.”

Too high and far away to understand the gravity and danger of their situation, and too distant to offer them any immediate help, answering Pruitt needed to wait.

And Grant was too high on adrenaline, too driven to survive.

Where Mischchenko missed and Ruiz was prevented from shooting altogether, she shot the flying pterodactyl. Her rifle still only had the output of a cattle prod.

The flying dinosaur therefore flinched. Once, twice, then it screeched in a pitch so high as to pierce the heavens above the wintry Appalachian forest, while completing another circle with another flap of its thundering wings.

“We need backup,” Ruiz spat in response, “Mischchenko needs evac on the double, and Spencer fucking needs to hire more personnel! Over, motherfucker!”

More shots from Grant’s EMD caused the flying creature to circle around with another angry flap of its wings, and it served to draw its ire. Yet another circle, and it screeched again.

She felt that screech, deep down, shaking the marrow in her bones, and curdling her blood.

The pterodactyl was not deterred. Its killer instinct had focused on her.

And the other one on the ground, it flapped its wings again—no longer so stunned, it responded to the flying one’s screech, and spread its wings, preparing to pounce—

Grant ran. She ran to Doctor Solomon’s Anomaly locking device.

She wasn’t thinking clearly, but could imagine no other way. She punched in the three-digit security code, and the device’s locking system shut down.

The nearby basketball-sized floating orb exploded into a big sphere of glittering light. It chimed mysteriously, slowly rotating, inches above the ground… the Anomaly once more connecting two periods in time.

The portal of the Anomaly was once again open.

Worst case scenario, even worse things could now come through. The mutant insect swarm could potentially return. Maybe the ancient warrior covered in blood, with the mutant beast chasing him, would dash through. Maybe a raging wooly mammoth would arrive, or perhaps a hungry T-Rex.

Best case scenario, Grant was going to send these dinosaurs elsewhere.

Elsewhen.

She shot at the pterodactyl in the air, then at the one on the ground, alternating between her EMD’s shots at them both. One, two, three, and a fourth shot to fully anger both “big birds”, drawing their attention towards her.

It worked without fail.

The shadow in the misty sky flew at her with deadly trajectory. The other made two leaping bounds, frozen grounds crunching after every jump. Both screeched in unison as they descended and lunged.

She had already turned. Ran.

Right into the open Anomaly. She dove into the shimmering sphere and tumbled down a sandy hill—

A sandy hill?

What had happened? A minute prior, this side of the Appalachian Anomaly had been a grassy hill near an idyllic beach in an undetermined era.

The crossroads of Anomalies, with dozens over dozens of Anomaly spheres, still hovered all above the ground here, now…

But the environment had changed. A different biome welcomed Grant on this side of the Anomaly.

She had no time to dwell on this new phenomenon. Grant had witnessed such a shift or paradox before—history changing in the blink of an eye—simply by traveling back and forth through another Anomaly. Airlift pilot Sears had entirely ceased to exist the last time it happened, and only she remembered him ever having existed.

In the new here and now, Grant rolled down the sandy dune of a hill, with neither grass nor ocean in sight. Only dust and bleached stone and cracked earth surrounded her in this new Crossroads of Anomalies.

She grunted at the final impact of her rolling descent when she crashed into a boulder and it knocked the wind out of her lungs. Further robbing her breath, a gale swept over her as one pterodactyl flew over her on this side of the Anomaly, its wings spread with frightening majesty. The other stumbled past her, then tumbled down the other side of the dune as it lost its footing after its leap through the Anomaly, emitting a pained screech when it fell with as little grace as Grant had.

The other already began circling, high above the glittering spheres of the manyfold Anomalies here.

Time froze for Grant. The look she took at her environs was short-lived yet rich in detail.

A jagged rock jutted out of the sand near the Anomaly they had crossed through. A chunk of it was broken off, dragged down with the pterodactyl that had tripped over it.

And the trails they both left in the dune’s sands pointed her in the direction of the Anomaly. Her only way back home. The trails would help tremendously in choosing the right way to go.

Time was no longer frozen and she needed to act.

Pain flared up all over her body from her many falls. The pain only centered her and spurred her on, granting her greater speed. She ran for another Anomaly—any would do, really—but she chose one that flagged in its chimes, with a flickering light that faded in and out as its stability waned.

A Flicker.

A deadly stunt to be sure, as it could trap her with the pterodactyls in a time stranded beyond humanity, but it was the only way she saw to keep these two dinosaurs out of her town time.

She charged into the Flicker, not even wasting time to check if the pterodactyls continued their pursuit of her. She gambled on it. Needed to act quickly. That Flicker could close any moment now.

She crossed the flickering, blinding light into another time.

With a pounding heart, and gasping desperately for breath, she barely managed to take in any thorough glimpse of her new environment, this new world.

Its apocalyptic vision would haunt her with nightmares beyond nightmares.

A city of ruins. Empty buildings, missing all windows, surrounded her. The street she stood on was only recognizable as such from the rusted husks of overgrown cars dotting its length.

Everything in this era was blanketed with creeping vines, and lush with abundant green. And utterly devoid of all human life wherever she could see. This was a world, a time after people.

Grant scrambled away from the glowing sphere, and without fail, one pterodactyl flew through the Anomaly, chasing her into this apocalyptic future. Its flight corrected course before it threatened to crash into a crumbling wall, swerving upwards into a dreary gray sky at the last second.

She clambered up half a wall and rolled through a window. Remnants of glass shards cracked and crunched where she landed.

The other pterodactyl followed, now flying again. It screeched—no longer in pain—but with wrath ringing in its piercing tone.

The hunter’s wrath.

Grant ducked behind the wall, staying in cover, knowing very well the first pterodactyl would locate her and pounce if she made one wrong move.

The Flicker flickered. Her heart skipped a beat. The Flicker was about to close, and she needed to dive back out, and run for it, across the overgrown street, underneath the pterodactyls circling above.

Then something howled. A blood-curdling howl, more terrifying than the two pterodactyls’ screeching in its sound.

Grant had heard it before… in the other wasteland past another Anomaly of the Crossroads. In that barren, ghastly wasteland, even more apocalyptic than these city ruins.

She had no intention of finding out what kind of future mutant creature could make such a sound.

The Flicker flickered again. Almost collapsed. The Anomaly was on the verge of closing.

Counting the breaths she suppressed, she waited till a silent number five crossed her mind, then she made her move. No second too soon, as her fear came true, and she witnessed the creature that had howled its horrific howl in these apocalyptic times.

Spindly limbs displayed uncanny strength, supporting a powerful and muscular body. Its every digit ended in deadly claws, piercing the very stone of the wall above her, roosting on the ledge, and capable of leaping down. Everything of this mutant’s body screamed one message clearly: it could and would tear her limb from limb if it caught up to her.

A strange, gray-splotched head with too many unblinking eyes crowned the future mutant’s slender frame, and a maw of jagged teeth, like a sawblade, opened.

Those teeth glistened in the gloom.

Grant glimpsed this future predator only long enough before new hell and chaos broke loose. It leapt—not at her, but at one of the pterodactyls circling above the building’s crumbling wall. It leapt with such staggering force that the two creatures crashed into a wall on the other side of the overgrown street.

And the other pterodactyl screeched in response, high above, kept out of Grant’s sight by the canyon of crumbling, overgrowing city blocks.

The Flicker flickered. The Anomaly’s subtle chimes faded.

She would not stay to witness more, to learn more. In the shadows beyond a broken wall, the future predator flew with feral ferociousness as its claws mangled the pterodactyl’s flailing wings. Blood sprayed everywhere. They screeched and shrieked and howled and thrashed.

Grant fled. She ran towards the Flicker. It flickered and blinded her as she ran through it, back through the Anomaly.

Black spots clouded her vision, but a wave of relief washed over her as her environment had changed. The Flicker flickered, the Anomaly collapsed behind her.

The relief died as the Flicker’s chimes were snuffed out with its vanished light.

She no longer stood in a desert among the Crossroads of Anomalies.

“Fuck!” she yelled into the void of this new world.

Trees swallowed any echo.

No longer grassy hills by an unknown ocean, nor was she standing among a desert’s barren dunes, either.

She stood in a jungle, teeming with life, and glowing with the light of the dozens of Anomalies all around. The Crossroads persisted, but the world had changed again.

Almost drowning out the chiming sounds from the glowing Anomalous spheres, chirping, chittering, and rustling assaulted her senses. Her heart almost leapt from her chest as she dreaded the return of the mutant insect swarm. Though the Flicker had separated her from the future predator and the pterodactyls, all manner of new danger awaited her here, now.

Nearby, another Anomaly flickered, then closed. Her heart skipped another beat, a dreadful reminder that she may become stranded in this everchanging Crossroads.

Certain death, by all her accounts.

There were no trails in the sand to guide her, no jagged rock.

Between the trees of this fresh green hell, she glimpsed no clues as to where to go.

Time froze again. Despair awaited.

Before despair could overwhelm her, a familiar figure stepped through an Anomaly. Though the helmet on his head concealed his face, she recognized his movements, his shape: Valentín Ruiz stood in the jungle, emerging from an Anomaly. He waved to her and shouted.

“Come on!”

She did exactly that.

Grant pushed past dense foliage, nearly tripping here and there, and followed Ruiz through the blinding light. She stumbled back into the Appalachian forest.

No longer were these woods foggy. Fir trees almost glowed in bright sunlight.

“God damn, am I glad you made it!” Ruiz said, EMD rifle in hand. The weapon didn’t look damaged anymore. To Mischchenko, he waved and then shouted, “Quick, lock it down!”

Mischchenko punched in the three-digit security code, and the spiky orb topping Solomon’s device clicked and clacked and reconfigured its form, aligning to seal the Anomaly. The glittering sphere of the chiming Anomaly froze, then collapsed, shrinking back into the basketball-sized orb, floating immobile, several feet off the ground.

The generator chugged, the Anomaly Locking Device hummed, and the other—

This place, this time—it too, had changed.

A sinking feeling brought Grant’s stomach low, and the world started spinning around her with an incoming onslaught of sudden nausea.

More Future Proof agents surrounded them. Unfamiliar figures. Since when did they have so many operatives to field? Dozens of spotlights were set up, other generators hooked up to power this new camp. Silvery tents had been pitched in a matter of time impossible for the short amount of time Grant had been away in the Crossroads to shake the pterodactyls, and dozens of researchers in winter jackets and Future Proof ID cards clipped to their chests now swarmed this camp that had seemingly sprung up out of nowhere.

And Mischchenko’s arm… it wasn’t broken. She had used her broken arm to operate the Anomaly Locking Device, as if the pterodactyl had never broken her arm. Mischchenko extended her now-healed-or-never-before-broken arm—to point at Grant.

“A round of applause for Agent Grant! That was one hell of a stupid move! But a bold one, and I can’t say I ain’t glad it worked out.”

Half a dozen black-armored Future Proof agents lifted their EMD rifles, no longer aiming at Grant and the Anomaly.

Grant didn’t know what to say.