I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

48. Candace

It was time for lunch. If her growling stomach wasn’t enough, her aching shoulders and stiff back took up the challenge and made it clear she’d worked long enough. She picked up a rag and wiped her hands, slumping slightly in her chair and eying the canvas critically. She still couldn’t quite see the painting, but she thought something was beginning to emerge.

She stood up and stretched. It was a sunny, clear day outside, so she’d opened up every blind and pulled aside every drape in the house to let in as much light as possible, and as a result had consented to wear a pair of paint-splattered overalls just in case some lost hunters wandered past the house. As usual when she let the light in, the house looked alien. Her father had liked things dark and dingy, private. She’d never realized just how dark and drab the house always was until she’d moved to New York.

She picked up her mug of coffee and carried it to the kitchen. The house was still her father’s. She kept meaning to plan some renovations, to modernize, but time always slipped away. She wanted to tear out the ancient kitchen with its narrow countertops and metal cabinets, she wanted to tear down a wall and install a master bath. She didn’t really have the money, but the place didn’t have a mortgage, so she thought she might get an equity line and do it that way.

Somehow, though, she woke up every morning and didn’t do a damn thing about it. She was starting to suspect she liked the house as it was, with her father’s imprint on it.

As she passed the pantry door in the kitchen she paused. With both hands on the mug, she stood very still and listened for a moment. Then she shook her head and kept walking.

The fridge only contained vegetables and a pitcher of water. This had seemed like a brilliant plan the day before, when she’d noticed an extra five pounds and a distressing tightness to her jeans. The market was a twenty-minute drive and she figured if all she had to eat in the house was salad and canned tuna, she would be forced to eat healthy. Or possibly not eat at all. Either way, her plan was to avoid the bathroom scale until Friday and then see what she had wrought.

Sighing, she gathered lettuce, a tomato, half an onion, and a cucumber and dumped them on the butcher block island. She got a bowl out of the cabinet over the sink, took a knife from the drawer, and began industriously and piously cutting up a chopped salad. When salad had been achieved, she wiped her hands on her grubby overalls and put the veggies back in the fridge.

Tuna, she thought. Dad would say I needed protein. Protein, caffeine, and beer, he always said, the most important food groups.

She smiled and steeled herself.

The pantry door stuck, and she had to put a little back into it to budge it open. It had always been that way. She leaned into it just like she had for thirty-two years, and the door scraped the floor and swung inward.

The pantry was a small room with metal shelves on each side, leaving a lane in the middle just big enough for a person to walk down. Candace paused and stared down at the trap door in the floor. Two steel bars and a padlock through an old iron hasp secured it. It led down into a tiny root cellar that they’d never used; it was just large enough for one person to be very uncomfortable in, and they’d never known what to do with the space anyway. She had a vague notion that you stored perishables in there in the times before refrigeration, but since she was living in the age of refrigeration, she didn’t see the point.

As she watched, the trap door shifted, just slightly, and a distant-sounding banging filtered up through the old floorboards. She stared at the trap for another moment, then turned and went back into the kitchen, closing the pantry door softly behind her.

####

The first glass of wine had been so relaxing she’d immediately proceeded to the second, and was seriously considering having nothing but cheese, wine, and streaming video for dinner when the phone vibrated. She watched it dance on the old warped picnic table set up in the backyard. She sat under the huge yellow umbrella and thought it was cool and soothing despite the humidity, but realized that might have been the wine. The wine had cost three dollars for the bottle and it was sweet and tasted like a headache tomorrow. Or in three hours.

When the phone stopped buzzing, she picked it up, thumbed it onto speaker, and played the message. A second later, Mike’s voice, tinny and distant.

Hey Cuddyer, he said, and she smiled. Just checking in on you. Had a moment of deja vu in an elevator this morning and almost went into a full-on panic attack. Half expected to close my eyes and open them seven years ago, you know? Anyway, that made me think of you, so I thought I’d say hey. Thinking of coming up to Manhattan again? Do. The invitation stands. Will always stand.

She sipped wine. She missed Mike. But not, she thought, in a romantic way; whatever option for romance there had once been between them had been replaced with an almost filial affection, dry and careful. She and Mike were linked. She would carry him with her for the rest of her life, but she wasn’t sure she ever needed to see him again.

I also obviously want to leave the millionth message regarding your charge. You can’t keep him in the root cellar forever, Candace. I mean, maybe he can stay there, it remains to be seen, but you aren’t going to live forever. I wouldn’t want to be the home inspector who has to deal with your root cellar after your death, probably by wine.

She snort-laughed. Death by wine. It was amazing that she’d never really known Mike Malloy—she’d only known him, in reality, for a few days at most, and they’d spent most of that time apart—but he knew her so well it often freaked her out.

Anyway, think about it. And call me, any time.

She sat for a moment, listening to the wind. She knew he was right.

They’d scrambled away from the destroyed house, bodies and destruction in their wake, Haggen tied up and tossed in the back of his truck. They’d considered destroying the box. But what was the point? Raslowski was still alive. They would build another one. Mike argued it was like nuclear weapons: They didn’t have any control over those, either, or any guarantees that some insane person wouldn’t someday hit the switch—the box was no different.

They’d found the bar in the process of being cleaned up, a new military unit in charge. They’d been arrested, but after Raslowksi had inspected his box and connected it to a small tablet computer, he’d ordered them set free.

“Really?” Mike had asked, frowning.

Raslowski sighed, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “The math has changed. No one here appears to be a threat any longer. And none of this actually happened, so technically no crimes were committed—and we don’t want or need the publicity, either.”

An hour later it was just Glen, his shell-shocked militia friends, and Jack McCoy, handing out shots of whiskey to anyone who asked, shaking his head as he surveyed the mess his bar was in.

Glen had gone home, looking old and shriveled. Werner Milson, the Sheriff, had arrived with two deputies and politely asked Todd and the others to get the hell out of town, and suddenly Candace and Mike found themselves alone at the bar. She remembered a very long, drawn out moment wherein they both just sat and stared down at their shot glasses. She remembered feeling deliciously tired, the sort of tired where you knew you would sleep for a day, maybe two, and so you could linger in the moment, just experiencing the miserable exhaustion.

“I’m struggling with reality,” Mike said.

This had set off an explosion of laughter. She’d laughed for ten, fifteen minutes, him laughing with her. Tears streaming down their faces, clinging to each other. And when they’d finally regained control of themselves, they’d sat there smiling until Mike suddenly sobered and looked at her sharply.

“Jesus, what do we do with Haggen?”

####

In the pantry, she stared down at the trap door again, feeling sluggish and sleepy. The trap wasn’t moving any more, and she couldn’t hear anything. But he was down there, she knew. And he was a constant. The only Living Constant. So he would be, forever, as far as she could tell.

THE END

I’ll be posting the whole novel as an eBook next week, kids!

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

47. Mike

For a moment, all he could articulate to himself was that Haggen looked incredibly rough, even otherworldly. There was something … off about his appearance, something that made his eye want to skip right over him and look at an interesting spot on the floor. It was an uncanny valley between the Haggen he’d known—bright-eyed, red-cheeked, filled with a nervous kind of energy—and the man who was grinning up at him with fishbelly skin and dry eyes.

I’ve run the numbers.

Mike saw the flash of metal, and twisted away as Haggen stabbed at him with a long hunting knife that landed in the floor where Mike’s foot had been a moment before. Dancing backwards, he tripped over a fallen rafter and fell, sprawling painfully.

Haggen sprang to his feet, and Mike had a moment of confusion, because Haggen looked like an extra from some TV show, something with a lot of makeup and dead people. He had been shot multiple times, and was as pale as a piece of chalk, so pale his lips looked almost black. But he was alive. Or, Mike self-corrected, he was in motion; he didn’t look alive.

“I’ve been afraid,” Haggen said. “I’ll admit it. Shit, you think you’ve got it all handled, you think you understood, but do you push that button? Change a few variables and you’re immortal—but are you going to fire a gun at your head to find out?” He smiled, and Mike flinched stupidly from the white gums almost the same color as his teeth. “Oh, I sat here, barrel in my mouth. I did. But I couldn’t do it. But then, tonight, bam! it happens. And here I am. And that makes me think the rest of my changes might have worked out, too.”

Mike thought stupidly, other changes?

Haggen leaped at him, faster than Mike could believe. It was almost like an insect, a sudden bouncing motion, and then Haggen was in the air, knife in one hand, his cold white face twisted into an expression that Mike’s fatigued brain somehow interpreted as delight.

He managed to roll to his left a second before Haggen landed, the knife sinking into the broken rafter that hugged the floor. He pushed himself up to his feet and whirled, struggling with the rifle slung across his torso, which seemed to suddenly take on a sentience and a reluctance to assist. But Haggen was struggling to pull the knife from the rafter, both hands on the polished wood handle as he put his back into the effort. For a moment Mike stared at the pattern of bullet wounds on Haggen’s back, the way they opened and closed slightly as his back muscles convulsed. Then he swung the rifle forward, toggled the safety, and pointed it at the other man.

“Jim,” he said, “I don’t—”

Haggen spun and raced towards him. Mike squeezed the trigger, the rifle jerked in his hands, and then Haggen crashed into him and all he could do was thrust the rifle up at him, deflecting the knife blade as they both crashed into the table, which collapsed under them.

Mike struggled to keep the rifle under his control. Haggen was strong, and nothing made sense. His skin was cold and clammy, and Mike’s own crawled at its touch. Mike’s brain refused to process the way he grinned down at him as they struggled.

He changed something, Mike thought, sweating stinging his eyes. He had the ghostly non-memory: This room, the Dipping Bird. It had never happened, but at the same time it had. And when it happened, Jimmy Haggen had somehow made himself superhuman.

Haggen reared back, his hand curling into a fist, and Mike ducked his head down to avoid the punch. Haggen’s fist slammed into the remnants of the table, and Mike twisted free, scrambling into a crawl. Haggen whipped out a hand and grabbed Mike’s ankle, and with a roar swung Mike to the right, skimming him over the debris-laden floor as if he weighed nothing, finally letting go and letting his centrifugal force send him sailing into the wall.

Mike lay for a moment, eyes closed, suppressing a groan as an aching pain radiated downward from his head.

“God-damn this feels good,” Haggen exulted. Mike cracked open an eye and watched Jimmy pacing back and forth in the ruined room, an animated corpse. He kept himself still, assessing the damage—minimal, he thought; sprains and pulls, nothing he couldn’t overcome with a little sheer terror and adrenalin—and biding his time.

Suddenly, Haggen stopped and looked directly at him. “I see you, you little sneak. Mike Malloy, rich and good-looking and all the goddamn time in the world, huh?” He turned and walked towards him. “Well, guess what, Mr. Malloy? I made myself a constant, you hear? Not a variable. Not a changeable value, but a fundamental.” He knelt down right in front of Mike, peering down with his cadaver smile. “Change me, the whole fucking universe will collapse, how you like that?”

Mike pulled the Beretta from his pocket and pointed it at Haggen. He tried to ignore the way his hand shook holding the gun. Haggen stopped, then smiled.

“Can’t kill me, Mikey,” he said. “Like I just told you, I’m a constant. The universe can’t do without me. So it won’t let you kill me. Shoot me all you want, I’ll still be here.”

Mike believed it, based solely on Haggen’s appearance. He was suddenly reminded of Spider Hamilton.

He’d met Spider at a bar in Kansas City, a bar that didn’t have a name or permanent address, a bar that set up someplace new every morning at about 3AM, an after hours place where bouncers and bartenders, prostitutes, dancers, drivers, bodyguards, and assorted other creatures of the night gathered to wind down and relax. He’d found his way into the movable feast with the liberal application of hundred-dollar bills and bought drinks, and had been content to simply sit on a couch and sip a whiskey and watch a colorful cast of characters dance, get high, fight, and sing.

Spider Hamilton had walked in and the place acted like the whole party was for him. Mike had watched the man make his way in like a visiting dignitary, smiling, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. He was huge, a mountain of a man, his tan skin taut over muscles, marred by plenty of scars. His nose had the off-center look of the frequently-broken, and his hands were red, raw slabs of ground beef.

He’d hung back, watching, and finally introduced himself, and discovered that Spider Hamilton was a street fighter—literally a man who engaged in illegal brawls in the street, taking on anyone who put up a purse. No rules, no protective equipment, each bout filmed and uploaded to his channel online. He learned that Spider Hamilton made a comfortable living at this, and that he’d never lost a fight. Spider, plied with expensive Scotch, had been happy to lecture Mike on the ways street fighting differed from what he called Pussy Fighting.

So Mike bought a lesson.

For five hundred dollars, Spider promised he would teach Mike some basics, give him some pointers, and leave him alive, though he did have Mike sign a surprisingly complex and well-written waiver that inured Spider against being sued for medical bills.

As it turned out, the only thing Mike remembered from his lesson, aside from a new promise to himself to never try to engage in a fistfight when hungover, was that the only thing that really mattered in a fight was pain: If you made your opponent hurt it was much better than any skill move or complicated maneuver.

“I win most of my fights,” Spider had told him, “by kicking them in the balls as hard as I can as fast as I can. I make ?em hurt.”

Make ?em hurt. It was essentially the only takeaway Mike had from the experience. He looked at Haggen, who was still smiling at him, triumphant.

“Can’t kill you, huh?”

Haggen shook his head. “’Fraid not, son.”

“Does it still hurt?”

Haggen frowned, and Mike squeezed the trigger three times.

He staggered backwards and lost his footing, arms flailing wildly as he hit the floor. For a moment he was still, not moving as Mike levered himself up, wincing as he climbed to his feet, gun still held on Haggen. But as he stood up, Haggen started twitching, and after a moment Mike realized he was laughing.

Then he flipped over. There were three new wounds in his chest. They weren’t bleeding, which Mike assumed was because Haggen literally had no more blood in his body, which raised so many questions regarding chemical reactions and basic biology his brain simply glossed over it.

“Yep,” Haggen said, slowly climbing to his feet. “That fucking hurt.” He rolled his head on his neck. “And I’m going to make you pay for it.”

He launched himself at Mike. Mike pulled the trigger again, but a second later Haggen knocked the wind out of him, and then he was on the floor, Haggen sitting astride him. He reared back and brought his fist down, and Mike had the distinct displeasure of hearing his own nose break shortly before he lost consciousness.

He came to just a moment later, dumbly watching as Haggen picked up his own Beretta. Everything seemed to be coming at him in slow, confusing waves. He couldn’t breathe through his nose and for a moment he struggled to get air, watching helplessly as Haggen rose unsteadily to his feet over Mike and pointed the gun at his head.

Just as Haggen squeezed the trigger, he twitched, convulsing. The bullet smacked into Mike’s leg instead of his head.

The pain brought him back. He convulsed, half sitting up, opening his mouth and sucking in air to scream. Blood poured from his nose down his throat, and he collapsed backwards, choking, eyes watering.

“Goddamit,” Haggen growled. Then he licked his lips, bringing the gun back up. “By the way, you arrogant piece of shit,” Haggen said, no longer grinning. “I’m going to erase you. All of you. In my world, you never existed.”

And then Haggen squeezed the trigger, but got a dry click. The gun was empty. Mike passed out again, and gratefully.

####

He came to in a rush of pain, his entire body throbbing with each ragged heartbeat. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, dizzy and hot, then cold. He could hear Haggen breathing, he could hear the occasional soft curse under the man’s breath.

Maybe I’ll just lie here until I bleed to death or he erases me, he thought.

It was tempting.

Biting his lip in agony, he raised his head up just enough to see Haggen. The only living constant in the universe was hunched over, the keyboard in his lap, the box and nearly-destroyed monitor hooked up on the floor in front of him. He was carefully splicing the wires of the keyboard back together; the cord appeared to have been cleanly sliced in half.

Mike managed, through the blurry burning pain and the hot weakness, to feel a sense of amusement. The Only Living Constant had been stymied by a lack of a fifteen-dollar computer keyboard.

He watched as Candace suddenly appeared, rising up from the floor holding a long piece of old pipe. He blinked, head trembling as he strained to keep his position.

She was covered in dust and splinters, bleeding from a deep gash on her head. But she was very much alive and in one piece, and held the pipe like a an old and very beloved baseball bat, the kind kids had in their closets, sticky from endless applications of pine tar, signed by teammates and wielded in countless epic battles. He thought she looked like a girl who’d hit people on the head with a pipe several times.

For one second, their eyes met. He blinked and tried to smile, tried to convey something, some kind of sentiment. She nodded, once, crisp and calm. Expressionless.

“Hey, Jim.”

Haggen startled and half turned around. Candace swung the pipe.

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46. Candace

She heard something, a scrape and a creak above her. Ziptied to the ancient, unused radiator against the inner wall of the room, she glanced up, then quickly down again, doing obscure existential math. She looked over at Haggen, who was hunched over the keyboard, the monitor—its screen cracked but still functioning—glowing with white code on a black background.

She heard the creak again. She didn’t know who, but someone was on the roof. It didn’t matter who it was, she thought. She was tied up and anything that would shift the balance was welcome. She needed to distract Jimmy.

Haggen was spectral. For a moment she studied his back, the oozing bullet wounds, the pallor of his skin, and marveled at the idea of an unkillable James Haggen. It ruined so many of her teenage proclamations that she would, indeed, kill Jimmy that she felt cheated, somehow. When he’d made her angry during their ill-fated love affair all those years ago—which had been more or less a daily occurrence—she’d often entertained herself by imagining how she would kill the smug son of a bitch, fuming over his latest bit of assholery. Now that option appeared to be gone, and without the option of just killing him she wasn’t sure how to emotionally deal with him.

She watched him typing. His hands shook. He was essentially a corpse that had failed to stop living.

“Is it difficult?” she asked, surprising herself with the croaking, cracked sound of her voice. She was exhausted. She felt like she’d been fighting a fierce tide for the last six years or so, beating her way back to a distant shore that kept receding no matter what she did.

He kept typing. “Dr. Raslowksi’s early work is public,” he said. “Getting some of the basics was easy enough. I took some online courses—did you know that MIT has every course it offers for free online? Shit, they even have all the materials for download. You can’t get a degree that way, but you can self-study until you pass out. I managed to dig up some other stuff—one stupid sonofabitch at the DOD left a presentation deck on an FTP site, and the Dark Web has a shitload of leaked materials. More fucking anarchist’s with security clearances than you think. And Raslowski and Azarov, for convenience and speed’s sake, based the structure of their language on existing programming languages. And the compiler is built-in. I’ve pieced together a lot of it.”

“A lot? For re-working reality, you think a lot is gonna cut it?”

He shrugged, his wounds oozing more. “I’m kinda out of time, here, Candace. I became aware six years ago. I’ve had six years to prepare. At this point, best I can do.”

Dust sifted down onto her, getting into her eyes. She blinked and twitched, forcing herself to keep talking. “And you’re … you’re okay with the risk? Jesus, Jimmy, you might delete everything. You might erase existence,” she said quietly. “I want you to just stand up, unplug that thing, and maybe destroy it.”

“They’d just build another one,” he said, twisting around to look at her. “Besides, I’ve already put all the work in: I’d written out my changes ahead of time like a good Worker Bee. It’s all in there, Candace. So here’s the last chance, okay? The final one. I press the button, everything’s gonna change. The variables will refill with new values. Those new values will ripple out in quantum states backwards and forwards in time, reality will self-correct, and we’ll all be in a new version of everything. You want to have a say in what that new version is, you want to make a suggestion, now would be the time.”

She felt tired. She felt like she’d lived the last six years twice and only gotten the sleep of three. “Jimmy, you—”

Up above her, a loud explosion made her scream, and then everything was chaos: The ceiling collapsed above her, plaster and wood coming down in chunks that shook the floor under her as they hit. There was a rush of hot, burning air and a flurry of sparks and flaming chunks of what had once been the ceiling. Bodies crashed down with the debris, bouncing on the floor. With a loud tearing noise, another section of the roof snapped, dropping down on top of the green couch.

She took a deep breath and started to try and get her feet under her. Something heavy crashed down onto her shoulders, and everything went black.

####

She came back to consciousness in slow, sticky waves, hovering somewhere between awake and asleep for a long time. She imagined she was back in New York, she imagined she was at home doing her homework, her father puttering around downstairs, irritating her because he wouldn’t just go doze off in the easy chair in front of th TV so she could sneak out. She imagined she was working a double shift at Mad One Jack’s, buzzing on caffeine and desperation, angry because of all the one-dollar tips the Great Hunters were leaving.

She knew she was dreaming, but couldn’t shake it.

She was in the hospital, then, the day her father died. He hadn’t been awake. She knew that. He’d slept the last few days, breathing shallowly, and shown no awareness of anything. He’d died without saying a word. She knew that.

But now she was back in the dark, silent room, and he was awake. She knew she was dreaming, but then what was a dream when you knew—knew, in some inexplicable way—that you’d lived a whole other life. That instead of going to New York, you’d stayed in town. That one night soldiers had detained you. And instead of having to fly in when your father took a turn, you were home, caring for him, right up until the bitter end.

And now he was awake, and telling her he was about to die. He was telling her that life didn’t have to be this way. That there were options she couldn’t see. He was smiling and telling her that she didn’t have to do things just because she’d already done them, that there were less-traveled roads. He’d always said that: Less-traveled roads, and she’d always tried to correct his quote and he’d never listened.

And then she was back in Jimmy Haggen’s destroyed safe room. The roof was missing, the trees visible, outlined by the stars and the soft glow of the unseen moon. The kerosene lamp still burned, throwing its weak yellow light. The debris from the collapse was everywhere, shingles and drywall and the huge, cracked joists, bricks mixed in. Where the couch had been, two legs emerged from a pile of wreckage, one leg bent at the knee as if the person was just taking a nap under a ton of house.

She tried to move, and a sharp pain lanced through her. Her arms were trapped, and she struggled, panic setting in. She was pinned under a huge piece of wood, ancient and cracked, almost black; she was able to breathe, but any attempt to move brought pain and futility.

Sound made her look around. Another body lay on the floor—she recognized Colonel Hammond’s short, severe blonde hair—near the couch. The box had been knocked off the table and lay on its side, still connected via a long black cable to the monitor, which was still on the table, flat on its back, and the keyboard, which had landed on the floor.

Jimmy was crawling towards it.

He was a corpse. She couldn’t think of any other possible description. He was fishbelly white, his lips gray and thin. The wounds on his back were dry and jellied, opening and closing as he pulled himself towards the keyboard. She could hear him breathing, but couldn’t comprehend how he had any blood left to oxygenate. If she didn’t believe he was unkillable before, she believed it now.

I’ve already put all the work in.

A jolt of adrenaline flooded her. The keyboard was still connected. She had no doubt the box was still operational. All he had to do was press the ENTER key and load his changes.

She clenched her teeth and closed her eyes, pushing against the weight of the rafter despite the pain that shot through her. She couldn’t let him. She couldn’t let him erase people, she couldn’t let him remake the universe as he saw fit, she couldn’t let him mess everything up worse than he already had.

She pushed. The pain became intense, a fire inside her, and she screamed. She thought the rafter had moved a fraction of an inch. Just a fraction.

She remembered, in another reality, an old-fashioned Dipping Bird.

She watched Haggen crawl another inch towards the keyboard.

Tears sprang from her eyes as the pain became intolerable. The rafter hadn’t moved at all, she was pinned under it completely. With a gasp she stopped the effort, sobs wracking her as frustration soured into horror.

In the strange silence of the ruined house, she heard a slight, sharp noise, then something like fabric rubbing. And then a man dropped into her field of vision. He was disheveled, but appeared to be unhurt; he didn’t even have much dirt on him. She recognized Mike Malloy and stared in wonder for a moment: Had he flown in? Parachuted from a plane? Materialized from another dimension?

After the day she’d had, any of it would have made sense.

She watched as Mike walked over towards Haggen. He didn’t rush. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder, but his hands were free and hung loosely at his sides as he walked.

Be careful, she thought, trying to make the words but finding her lungs locked, he’s immortal, unkillable.

When he reached Haggen, he extended one leg and gently put his foot on the younger man’s hand.

Haggen stopped crawling, sagging down onto the floor.

“I think you’ve done enough damage,” Mike said.

For a moment, Haggen just lay there, and Candace wasn’t even certain he was breathing. Then he twisted his head around to look up at Mike, and Candace could see his cadaverous face smiling.

“You know, Malloy,” he said, his voice like gravel under wheels, “I’ve run the numbers on you.”

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45. Mike

“Motion sensors,” Hammond said, killing the engine and getting out of the truck. The distant whirring noise was muted but clear in the cold darkness. “Couldn’t be helped. Mr. Eastman,” Hammond said, beckoning him to slide over behind the wheel. She held the truck’s keys in one hand and one of the familiar zipties in the other.

Eastman hesitated. He looked from her to Mike and Myra in the back seat. Myra held her gun up.

“Mr. Eastman,” she said sweetly, “I’m not much of a shot, it’s true, but you’re one foot away.”

He looked at Mike, who shrugged. “Sorry, Glen. Your heart doesn’t seem in this.”

Eastman began hauling himself over to the driver’s side. “Fuck you, Mike. You think this is going to go well for you? You’re an idiot. They’re going to let you help them, and then they’re going to arrest you, erase you, and take their toy and do whatever they want to us, to everyone.”

“Mr. Eastman,” Myra snapped, leaning forward to speak directly into his ear. “May I remind you we came here because our models demonstrated that you were a threat. You were going to contribute to an apocalyptic event. And you and Mr. Malloy were both part of a conspiracy to utilize technology you do not understand at all to make arrangements for your own profit.” She snorted. “So spare me the outrage.”

Mike blinked. Something had definitely changed in Myra.

Hammond secured Eastman’s hands to the wheel and stuffed the keys into her pocket. She opened Mike’s door and he stepped out while Myra slid out the other side. He followed Hammond around to the rear of the truck. As she lowered the tailgate, Myra shrugged off her white lab coat. Hammond pulled a large black duffel towards them and unzipped it. She pulled out a pair of black work overalls and tossed them to Myra. As the younger woman pulled them on, Hammond began extracting weapons from the bag.

“Mr. Malloy,” she said. “I realize trust may be a bridge too far between us. And I’ll be up front; if I thought I could do this without you, I would. But Haggen—even though he’s one man—has obviously been aware of his special circumstances longer than the rest of us. And he was much more aggressive.” She pulled an AR-15 from the bag and laid it on the truck bed next to it. “I’ll admit I was complacent. Even as I became aware of the divergent realities, I thought we would be able to play the same strategy. I was proud of myself for putting backup resources into place to overcome another shitshow.” She shook her head and placed two full magazines next to the rifle, and then turned to face him. “As I said, trust may be a bit much, in both directions. But I feel like I don’t have a choice. Dr. Azarov is resourceful and reliable, but she’s not trained for this.”

She studied him, and he studied her back. She was handsome, a thin, dry-looking woman with not an ounce of fat or wasted space to her, everything about her sinewy and tight.

“So, Mr. Malloy, all I’m going to do here is ask you to give me your word that once we have Haggen neutralized, you won’t screw me over. Can you do that?”

Mike smiled. “Should we pinky swear?” he said, picking up the AR-15 and checking it over. “We’ve got a shared goal right now: Get in there without anyone else, neutralize Haggen, take control of the box. Once that happens, we no longer have a shared goal, right?”

Hammond shook her head. “I say we do, Malloy. We all want to have a say in what happens next. If we agree to that, everything else follows.”

He picked up one of the magazines and pushed it until he got the satisfying click. He nodded. “Colonel Hammond, I’ll give you my word. If things go sideways, it won’t be because of me.” He looked at her. “All I want is a seat at the table. We get in, Dr. Azarov gives us access and the knowledge to do it right—without screwing everything up—and we all have a say. Fair enough.”

The annoying jingle of the motion alarms suddenly stopped.

Hammond pursed her lips, studying him, then nodded. “Very well. Mr. Malloy, I don’t know you, and yet I feel like I know you better than some people I’ve served with for years. We’re good. Let’s go have a look.”

The duffel bag contained another pair of rifles, more ammunition, some M67 grenades that Hammond took sole possession of, a brick of gray clay-like material Mike recognized as plastic explosive, and bright silver dart-shaped objects he assumed were detonators. Myra, he noted, took hold of the AR-15 with a practiced, comfortable posture, her eyes running over it with something that looked suspiciously like experience. He suspected they’d all been preparing for this moment privately, each of them nurturing ambitions and new skills in secret, thinking themselves brilliant.

He looked around at the dark, silent trees, and wondered how many people were aware of the “reset,” how many people had spent the last few years studying, training, building in preparation, certain they would be ready to seize control when the time came.

He shivered, then followed Myra to join Hammond. She was peering through field glasses.

“Haggen’s house,” she said, pointing. “About a hundred feet past the tree line. Hardened, in a way; the man obviously didn’t have any money, but he sure had a lot of time on his hands.” She handed the glasses over, and Mike slung the rifle over his shoulder and looked through them, the night lit up a sickly green. The house looked sad and small, the sort of one-story home that would contain a lot of linoleum and formica, a lot of rust-colored carpet.

“Shields over the windows,” Hammond said quietly. “He’s not connected to utilities, the house doesn’t have a basement, just a crawlspace I’ll bet he’s filled with gravel. Internal power and water collection and filtration. Motion sensors, at this line and probably another fifty feet in. Video surveillance. And if I were him, I’d have rigged up some IEDs around the perimeter. Not to mention a steel security door in the front—he’s closed up the rear entrance.”

Mike scanned the scene, impressed at how much she’d deduced from just observing the house—or, possibly, had already discovered before coming to this point, quietly laying her own foundation while she waited for everything else to fall into place.

“He knew this would happen,” he said. “The Jim Haggen I know—knew—was paranoid as hell.” He chewed his lip, studying the house. “So, he’s expecting a frontal assault. He probably expects you to come with your army,” he dropped the glasses and looked at her. “Or me to come with mine. So, a frontal assault would be a mistake.”

“I agree, Mr. Malloy. So, let’s imagine that Mr. Haggen is right now coding in his changes. He’s obviously been planning this for years, so let’s assume he has—or thinks he has—a firm grip on the syntax and the structure.”

Myra snorted derisively, but said nothing.

“So, we’re on the clock,” Hammond continued. “How do we get in there as quickly as possible?”

Mike brought the glasses back up, wondering if this was a test, if Hammond already had an assault plan and just wanted to see what he would say so she could gauge his usefulness. He studied the house again, then ticked up to study the trees. Haggen hadn’t done much to clear the land. Probably liked the natural privacy screening of the trees and brush, he thought. He looked back at the house, then lowered the glasses and looked at Hammond as he handed them back.

“Roof,” he said, gesturing. “We use the trees to avoid the motion sensors and whatever other traps he has.” He pointed. “Look at how close the canopy is. Once we’re in the branches, we can probably make it to the house without touching the ground. He put a lot of time into the walls and the ground-level defenses, but that roof looks old and worn-out. Shingles missing. A wavy roof-line that indicates rot. The chimney doesn’t look properly flashed, at least not from this distance. We hit the roof, find a soft spot, set a small charge, and we’re in.”

Hammond nodded, stuffing the glasses into her jacket. She looked up and studied the branches above us. “Good. We have some stakes in the bag that we can use to climb up. Let’s go.”

Mike blinked. He hadn’t actually expected her to just take his recommendation without augmenting it, or at least discussing it. Time was pressing, but it still felt off. He glanced at Myra, who looked back at him placidly.

They know something, he thought, reminding himself that they had at least limited access to the future, to a matrix of information that allowed them to predict what might happen. Their discovery that he might be part of the end of the world had brought them in the first place. He frowned as Hammond fished out the stakes and a small field hammer. With a shiver, he considered the possibility, suddenly very real, that they knew he would get into Haggen’s house, and they were just drafting along behind him.

He was being used.

He watched Hammond start pounding a stake into a wide tree trunk nearby. She worked with the speed and efficiency of a trained soldier, someone who’d spent her life setting up and breaking down temporary shelters and structures. When she had the first two stakes in place, she looped some rope around the tree and tied it off around her waits, then climbed the first two stakes and began pounding in a third.

He considered his options. He needed to get into the house. He had little doubt at this point that Haggen would not hesitate a moment to neutralize him, and when a man had control—even vague, untrained control—over reality itself, that didn’t bode well. So he needed Myra and the Colonel—if for nothing else to feel out Haggen’s defenses, set off a trap or two while he hung back. On the other hand, he was suddenly uncertain if Hammond wouldn’t simply wait for him to wriggle them into the house and then shoot him in the head the moment she and Azarov had control of the box again.

Myra was next to him, handing him a length of sturdy nylon rope. She nodded, and approached the tree. He was startled to see that Hammond had already made it into the branches, six stakes driven into the trunk forming a ladder of sorts, like you saw on telephone poles for the repair workers. Myra looped the rope around the trunk as Hammond had and attacked the climb like it was something she’d trained for.

Everyone had been building tunnels, practicing skills, doing research.

So had he, he realized. He froze for a moment. Where had his compulsion to learn, to travel around taking classes and paying people to teach him their trades, their secrets, their skills, come from? What had actually inspired it? Julia? That had always made sense to him: He’d felt useless after Julia’s death. He’d felt like a fraud adult, a man who’d been wallowing in his adolescent bullshit for so long, a man who didn’t even know how to administer CPR. Now he wondered: Had it been this? Some weird dimensional memory, some intuitive, baked-in knowledge in his DNA telling him that someday all these skills would be useful?

Was he his own puppet?

He walked slowly to the tree, trying to shake off the sudden sense of dread. Not for the first time, but most powerfully, he felt like he was just going through motions that had been stage-directed. Now he wondered if the invisible hand moving him like a piece on the board was himself.

He looped the rope around the tree and tied it loosely around his waist. He began to climb. As he did, feeling his muscles strain and burn, his breathing kick up, he shook off the dread. He saw himself climbing stealthily from branch to branch. He saw himself making the final short leap onto the roof. Sitting there with held breath for a moment, listening for reaction. Helping Hammond set charges around the chimney, where the worst of the rot was located. Moving a few feet off. He felt the bang of the explosive, too powerful because Hammond wanted to be certain of success, and then the whole roof caving in, the three of them sliding down into rubble. He saw himself breaking both legs. He saw Haggen walking towards him with a rifle in his hands, bloodied and bruised, but still in one piece.

He crawled out on the branch. Haggen’s roof was just a foot or so away, and easy swing. Hammond and Myra, difficult to see in their dark clothes, peered up at him expectantly. He made the last move easily, walking out on a stout branch that narrowed down over the roff, allowing him to make a simple leap.

He followed the other two to the chimney, where the roof was so badly rotted he could feel it giving under them, soft and ruined. Hammond knelt down and shrugged off her pack, fishing in it for the explosive. Mike moved off slightly to the side, making sure not to go too far or too fast, and slid his thumb under the loop of rope he still had cinched around his waist. He’d retied it to himself using a simple half hitch, and now he fed the slack out slowly until he had a loop in his hand.

The old chimney had never been rubberized or wrapped, and the crumbling brick had several iron clips embedded in it. He leaned over until he was able to slip the loop of rope over one of the clips, then tried to stand as casually as possible. He wasn’t certain how, but he knew the roof was about to collapse under them. A buzzing sense of excitement spread through him. He felt like for the first time in a long time he was in uncharted territory.

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44. Candace

There was too much blood.

No human body could possibly bleed as much as Jimmy Haggen and still live. And Haggen was not only still living, he seemed to be doing just fine. Gathering strength, shaking off five bullet wounds that should have killed him within moments.

She watched him wince in understated pain as he lifted the box onto a folding table. She knew she should be doing something, she should be hindering him, stopping him from accessing the field generator. But she couldn’t move. Not because she was afraid, but because she was stunned. She watched Jimmy Haggen endlessly bleeding to death and her brain kept demanding that he die already.

“I had access to this for a while, you know,” he said, breathing hard, the strain in his voice both obvious and underwhelming. “Y’all assumed I managed a few shots in the dark, but I actually had a pretty good idea what to do. You think of it as regular old code, it’s not so hard to see the patterns. I’m not saying I could write something from scratch, but to figure out that a variable means you? Not so fucking hard.” He picked up a cable, his hand shaking, and began working it into the rear of the box. “I took some precautions. Didn’t know if it would work, but I tried to make myself … essential.”

She blinked, heart pounding. The wrongness of Jimmy Haggen still moving, still breathing, was like an assault on her senses. It aggressively made no sense to her. Some part of her could tell on a primal, instinctive level that the man she was looking at shouldn’t be alive.

She licked her lips. “What does essential mean?”

“I linked myself to everything I could think of,” he said slowly, taking a deep breath and leaning down, reaching with one hand under the table for another cable. “To make my code difficult to remove. Like, and this is a random example, I embedded a link to me in The Moon. The fucking Moon, Candace! So, to remove me—to kill me—you’d be removing The Moon. I did that with everything I could identify that wasn’t, you know, transient. That would be around for a while. I figured it would be an insurance policy. Wasn’t sure it would work, but, well, here I am.”

Here you are, she thought. She tried to contemplate a universe where Jimmy Haggen was essentially immortal, unkillable, perpetual. Where he’d weeded his own existence into so much of the bedrock of the universe that reality simply couldn’t allow him to be removed.

Then she imagined this immortal, unkillable Jimmy Haggen with the box, with the power to rewrite that reality as he wished. Then she looked around the room again, seeking something that could be used as a weapon. She was the only one inside, the only one with access. She figured Powell was probably calling in some sort of reinforcement, but who would that be? As far as she knew, Hammond and her crew were locked down at the bar. She didn’t know where Mike and Glen were, where anybody was. For all she knew—and what she had to assume to be the case—she was the only person capable of stopping Haggen.

Her eyes stopped on a pile of tools, including one large rusty crescent wrench. Why every crescent wrench in the universe was rusty, she didn’t know. What she did know is that Haggen, if maybe unkillable, was obviously affected by his injuries, which made her think it had to be possible to incapacitate. And a crescent wrench to the head was a reliable way of incapacitating someone, even someone as famously hard-headed as Jimmy Haggen.

She watched him slowly, languorously working with the box. A pool of blood had formed under him, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and she wondered if he would simply heal up. Would the bullets remain inside him? Would his body form new veins and arteries around them, would they magically disappear?

She felt like she couldn’t trust anything. Gravity. Would gravity still work as expected in a world where Jimmy Haggen was unkillable?

“I wasn’t sure it would work,” he said, and she took a soft, careful step to her left, bringing her a little closer to the wrench. “I thought about, you know, testing it, but I was afraid. Next time through, I’ll know from the get go. But I won’t need it. I’m going to fix things.”

Fix things. A chill went through her. She took another step.

“Don’t worry, now, I’m not gonna screw you over. What would I do without Candace Cuddyer? I think I know what to do about your Dad, too. Though I can’t make any guarantees; the rule of unexpected consequences and all that. But we’re gonna try, okay?”

She took a step to her left. The wrench was near her foot.

“The rest of them I got no love for, Cuddyer. No love at all. And I know if they had their way right now they’d try to pull me out of the weave, try to erase me—not that it would work. Me sitting here right now proves it to me: If they try to change things and pull me out, the whole goddamn thing’s gonna collapse. The whole goddamn thing, you get me?” He barked an unsteady laugh. “I made myself a fundamental part of the universe, Candy! Fundamental!”

He appeared to be absorbed in setting up the box; he’d connected it to a monitor, but the signal seemed to be out of phase, the picture distorted and squiggly, constantly moving and squirming. He might be unkillable, but his wounds were obviously affecting him; he was dreamy and slow, fumbly. She lowered herself to the floor and curled her hand around the wrench.

“So let’s just say that in the new, Jimmy-centric universe, there isn’t going to be a Dr. Raslowski or a Colonel Hammond or a Glen Eastman—or a goddamn Mike Malloy. So there won’t be a box, and there won’t be any of this.” He turned to grin at her. “I’ve got it all—”

He frowned, and his face twisted into a mask of anger. She stepped forward and with one smooth motion raised the wrench and brought it down.

Haggen spun away, a spray of blood hitting her as the wrench crashed down on top of the box and bounced back, flying out of her numbed hand as a shockwave of pain shot up her arm. Sensing movement, she threw herself backwards, but Haggen caught her ankle and she slammed on the floor with a cry, teeth sinking into her tongue, blood filling her mouth. For a second she looked around at the metal-covered windows; no one was getting in and she wasn’t getting out, that was obvious.

She rolled to her right and scrambled forward and onto her feet, wincing as her arm tweaked with pain when she put her weight on it. Then she was running, off-balance, making a tight turn as she and diving behind the old green couch. She pressed herself down and scanned underneath, seeking anything that could be a weapon, the froze as the strangely familiar sound of a magazine being inserted into an assault rifle.

She rolled towards the wall just as the couch burst into an explosion of foam and trash. Heart pounding, she pushed herself up and ran along the wall. Another quick burst of fire followed her; she launched herself at the table Haggen had set up, picked up the box, and with a twisting motion that tore something vital in her back tossed it directly at Jimmy.

He dropped the rifle and raised his arms, too late; the box smacked into him and sent him staggering backwards as it hit the floor. Back burning, she ran straight at him, tripping over the box and crashing into him. She rolled off of him immediately and crawled towards the rifle, sweating dripping onto the floor as she fought for breath.

Shoulda taken more spin classes, she thought, and had to fight the crazy urge to laugh.

Her hand closed on the rifle just as Haggen’s hand closed on her ankle. She rolled again, bringing the rifle up and squeezing the trigger—she didn’t have a second of hesitation, and some remote part of her was aware that instinctively she didn’t even think of Haggen as a person any more. In some dark, deep part of her, some ancient reptilian place, she’d decided that Jimmy Haggen should have died, and this was a monster.

The rifle bucked just slightly in her shaking, sweaty hands and the shots went wide.

Haggen surged up, growling, and she shoved the rifle up at him, connecting with his nose with a crunch she felt in her arm, a lance of pain shooting up into her brain. He staggered back, lost his footing, and landed on his ass, making the whole floor jump. She pointed the rifle at him again.

They each sat, breathing hard.

“Cuddyer,” he said between gasps, blood running down his face. She didn’t know how he could have more blood in him. She didn’t know how he could be alive. She felt her sense of gravity fading away again, lost to insanity. “Candace, don’t do this.”

“I can’t let you do this, Jimmy,” she said. “Erasing people. Setting yourself up as—what? King? God? Is that it? You can’t be killed, then what?” She blinked, a non-memory hitting her. “Jesus, you wanted them to kill you,” she said quietly. “You’d put in your code, you’d changed your variables, but you had to push the button, and you were afraid. You wanted them to make the decision for you.”

He smiled, blood in his teeth. “Cuddyer, I don’t mean this mean, but you’re out of your league here.”

She shook her head. “I can’t let you do it, Jimmy. They’re good people—”

“We don’t know them. Malloy? Hammond? Tourists.”

“Glen?”

Haggen shrugged. “I brought Glen in. He tried to screw me over, so he’s out.” He took a deep breath. “You’re here, Candace. And you and me—I’m not cutting you out. This,” he gestured at himself, “this I get. I understand.” He held up his hands. “No worries. Put the gun down, let me get set up. You get input on every decision. You don’t want something—you want, what, Malloy to be okay? Okay, he’s okay. I’m flexible. I’m not crazy.”

Jesus, am I negotiating to keep people from being erased? she thought, head spinning. Her back burned in agony, her arm was weak and shaky and aching. She felt like she couldn’t catch her breath. Like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room.

She closed her eyes.

A loud, sour noise filled the air, startling her. She jumped and opened her eyes, but Haggen was already coming at her. He crashed into her, his blood soaking into her clothes, and then the rifle was torn from her slick hands and he shoved forcefully to the floor. She looked up and he had the rifle aimed directly at her, standing over her like a hunter over his kill.

They stared at each other for a moment.

“What’s that?” she finally asked.

He blinked and looked around. After a moment he stepped back, raising the rifle. “Motion sensors,” he said. Then he looked back at her, his expression terrifying. “Visitors.”

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43. Mike

“Slide over,” Hammond said.

Todd had been unceremoniously pulled from the driver’s seat. Glen Eastman pushed himself into the passenger side door, looking terrified, as Hammond slid behind the wheel. Mike was suddenly aware of Myra holding the gun in her hand.

“Boys,” she said. “Guns, please.”

Mike nodded and handed his weapon over. Eastman didn’t move for a moment, but when the Colonel turned to point her own sidearm at him he sagged a little, dug into his waistband, and produced his own gun.

Hammond put the truck into gear and started driving.

“Where are we going?” Eastman demanded.

“Haggen’s,” Hammond said after a moment. “That’s where he is, and that’s where the Raslowski Field Generator is.”

Mike frowned. “Not Jack’s for us? To be ziptied and yelled at?”

Hammond turned to look back at him. “The variables have changed. Haggen’s our main concern.”

Mike glanced at Myra. “I’m not one of the ?Four Horsemen’ any more?”

Myra shook her head. “Not according to the latest data. Something’s changed. From what we can tell, if we eliminate James Haggen, we eliminate the threat.”

“Eliminate.”

“That was always a possibility,” Hammond said. “We tried being … patient. It didn’t work out so well. And your little stunt bringing an army of assholes down here didn’t help much. You set our time table back, and we’ve got to move now, decisively, to ensure that Haggen doesn’t make things worse.”

“He fiddled with forces he doesn’t understand once and frankly we’re lucky the whole universe didn’t unravel as a result,” Myra said. “He had the box for, what, an hour last time and you know as well as anyone how that turned out. Now he’s holed up in a fortified space, and he’s had years to study and research Raslowski’s work.” She snorted. “Years to convince himself that he understands even a tenth of what Dr. Raslowski has worked out. That idiot is going to destroy reality itself.”

Mike nodded. “You had years, too, and you let him walk off with it again.”

Hammond grunted. “We didn’t see you coming, Malloy,” she said. “We knew you’d show up, we knew you’d cause trouble. We didn’t know you’d be bringing force. You surprised us. So did Haggen. A fucking tunnel. A tunnel he built years before we even selected the location.”

“You and Mr. Eastman are here because we’ve just figured out that letting any of you out of our sight is a mistake,” Myra said. “And to try to talk you into helping us.”

“Why would we do that?” Eastman growled. “Missy, you all created this dumpster fire. We’re just trying to swim through the tsunami.”

Myra looked at Mike. He sighed. “You know why, Glen. Jimmy knows—he knows—that patterns repeat.”

Eastman didn’t say anything. Mike looked at Glen Eastman’s profile, and thought for the first time he was seeing the man for what he really was: A small town mediocirity. A man who had never done much, gone anywhere, or thought deeply. A man who’d gotten used to the low, low bar of being the smartest man in Mad One Jack’s on any given evening.

“Now that Haggen has control of the box, why leave us in?” he said quietly.

“In what?”

“The world, Mr. Eastman,” Myra said. “He’s saying, why wouldn’t Haggen, once he’s created a new reality to his liking, eliminate any chance that one of us might haunt him? That we’ll just pursue the science again, build the box again, and y’all will come, claim it and eliminate him?”

“An endless loop,” Mike said, imagining it playing out, over and over again, with different people claiming the box each time. He wondered, chillingly, if this had already happened, if maybe they weren’t always aware of the resets, if he’d lived several lives and only recently become aware of the repetition.

The truck bounced along in silence for a moment.

“Right,” Hammond said, forcefully. “We’ve taken your people into custody, Mr. Malloy. As Dr. Azarov implied, we’ve learned from past mistakes and had resources in reserve in case of unexpected twists.” She glanced at Mike. “I’ll admit I didn’t expect you to take the initiative like that. But we were prepared to let you have your moment and step in with our reserve when needed.”

Mike swallowed thickly. Have my moment, he thought bitterly. He pictured Julia—this time alive, young and healthy, early days. She’d been beautiful in an off-kilter way. Not a girl you crossed a room to meet, but a girl you couldn’t get out of your head the next day. He’d always known the idea of seeing her like that again was always going to be a long shot, but it had been worth a try. One more time he offered up a wordless apology to whatever was left of her in the universe, whatever scattered atoms or variables still in some weak way represented her. He’d had an idea of making things right, and he’d failed.

He would go along. He would help them against Haggen, if they wanted his help. He would—

He paused, looking around. Something was wrong. After a moment, it fell into place.

“Why are you driving a truck?”

Silence filled the cab. He saw Hammond’s eyes flick to the rear-view mirror. “What?”

“You’ve got troops. Equipment. Vehicles. We’re heading to Haggen’s house, but it’s just you and Myra here. Not even Dr. Raslowski.”

Silence. Mike could see Eastman frowning, puzzled.

“You’re making your own play for the box.”

He heard Myra gasp slightly, and he knew he was right. Who could resist? Hammond, whatever she’d originally thought of her orders, she knew now the box was for real. She knew as well as he did that it could alter reality, change the variables that underlay your life. Everyone had regrets. Everyone had something they wanted to change—or they wanted to change everything. Why should he be surprised that Hammond let temptation get the better of her, that she was abandoning her post and making a play for the most powerful piece of technology that had ever been developed.

“No one else knows where Haggen is, do they?” he said quietly.

After a moment, Myra snorted. “No, Mr. Malloy. The only people who know where the box is right now are in this truck or in the room with it. The colonel and I have an arrangement. She gets me in the room, I can calculate and code the changes we both want.”

“Jesus Christ,” Eastman hissed. “Are you going to erase us too?”

“That depends entirely on your behavior, Mr. Eastman,” Hammond said grimly.

“Your troops,” Mike said. “How long before they catch on?”

Hammond shook her head. “Not long. They’re fully briefed, and anyone who was here … last time will have memories or whatever you call remembering something that never actually happened. Suspicion’s been running high for a while now. If I don’t check in—in person—soon, rumor central’s gonna crank up. After that, it won’t be long before they mobilize.”

“And us?”

Another heavy moment of silence. He caught Eastman’s eye, but the older man didn’t give him any sort of signal or reaction to work with.

“Haggen’s tried to fortify the place,” Hammond finally said. “And he’s proven to be tricky. You help get us in, help us take possession, we will take your desires into account when programming the box.”

Mike nodded. He didn’t think he could trust Hammond, of course—in fact, based on this new wrinkle, it was obvious he couldn’t—but he also was very conscious of having very little leverage. Hammond wanted to keep the conspiracy she was forming on the fly as small as possible. That was good sense. But she also needed soldiers, people to help with the heavy lifting. Adding Glen and himself at least gave her two people who could handle a gun. And on the flip side: With his people locked down by Hammond’s, he and Glen were in the same boat: They needed Hammond to even have a chance at getting into Haggen’s, and they would need Myra’s expertise to do anything with the box once they had it.

It was the only chance he would have to do right by Julia. If he said no, he figured he’d be shot, or knocked unconscious and then the only certainty would be that whoever wound up with the box, it certainly wouldn’t be him.

“Deal,” he said.

Myra grinned. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Malloy,” she said. “Let’s go change the world.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

42. Candace

She realized she knew him. She didn’t know him. She’d never seen him before in her life. But she knew his name was Andy Powell. She knew he was a soldier, or a mercenary, or some other term for a person who trained with weapons and wore a uniform and took orders from Colonel Willa Hammond.

She knew that in some other version of events, he’d hidden in the bathroom at One-Eyed Jack’s and pretended to be a customer just caught up in events. His ruse hadn’t worked. Apparently he’d been reassigned to a different bathroom.

“Just hang tight, Ms. Cuddyer,” he said with a soldier’s blank-faced politeness. “This all will be over and done with presently.”

She watched him checking his handgun. He was wearing body armor, and had a small arsenal with him—magazines, an AR-15, grenades, and a nasty-looking three-dimensional knife that was like three blades fused into a conical shape. He was far from the apparently frightened, friendly guy she dimly recalled from her previous existence. This was a polite, calm, assured soldier. He was absolutely confident that he was in charge and would remain so despite the fact that he hadn’t restrained her in any way, and that irritated her.

This all will be over and done with presently.

The arrogance of it. These people had been in charge the other time, and had fucked it up royally. But they thought they were in charge this time?

Time to make a choice, she thought to herself, biting her lip. Was Jimmy chasing after her? Coming in confidence through his own private space, or skulking, prepared for tricks? She could just let this happen. She could sit quietly and when Jimmy opened the bathroom door a man named Andy Powell would shoot him and take possession of the box. Was that a better outcome? A different group of people in charge of the underlying code of reality?

Her father had been fond of saying better to be in the room than out of the loop. He’d always meant it with a sense of futility: The taxes were going to go up no matter what he did, but being at the city council meetings at least meant he was aware of what was happening. She thought, better to be in the room with the box and Jimmy than locked outside it. It might not make any difference, but she might still have moves to make if she was at least in the room.

“Officer?” she said, trying to make her voice as soft and non-threatening as possible.

“Hmmmn?” he grunted, occupied with his weapon.

She took a deep breath, then leaned forward and with all her strength gave him a shove. The back of his knees hit the lip of the clawfoot tub and he fell backwards into it, gun sailing off, landing on the floor and skidding. She reached up and tore the filthy old plastic shower curtain down, then spun, picked up the gun, and tore open the door.

Jimmy was a few feet away, shadowed in the hallway, caught by surprise in mid-skulk.

“Run!” she hissed, shoving past him. Shouldn’t run with a loaded weapon, she thought, years of gun safety lectures from literally everyone she’d ever known crowding around her. She kept running, and suddenly it occurred to her that if she beat Haggen back into the little DIY safe room he’d constructed, she’d be alone with the box.

She poured on everything she had. Behind her, she heard a roar as Powell extricated himself from the tub, then an angry shout, and heavy steps.

“Candace!” Jimmy shouted, sounding so much closer than she expected. “Candace! Don’t do it! You can’t do anything with the box! You need me!”

She didn’t slow down. That was probably true. She had no experience with code of any kind, she didn’t have Jimmy’s natural hacker sensibility. Where Jimmy had always had an affinity for systems and how they could be subverted or undermined or simply used—often without any deep understanding of the concepts or workings—she’d always found even simple technology frequently baffling or simply boring. She was a tepid social media user, hadn’t bothered keeping up with the new networks her friends and co-workers kept jumping to, and her solution for just about every technical problem she encountered in the world was to turn the thing off and walk away, possibly have a cocktail. She wouldn’t know what to do with it.

But she’d be in the room. Whoever did know what to do with it would need to negotiate with her—and she wasn’t certain she would listen. Because it suddenly seemed to her that the best thing that could be done would be to simply destroy the damned thing.

She saw her father, withered and shrunken in his hospital bed. Still managing a smile for her while they waited for the hospice representative to come back with the paperwork. He was six days from death, and he smiled for her.

“Don’t worry, hon,” he’d said. “This is just bad timing. No one gets out alive, right?”

No one gets out alive.

She might re-arrange the universe to her liking. She might give her father a few more years or even decades. But no one was getting out alive no matter what she did, so what was the point?

She slipped through the doorway, spun, and took hold of the door. Jimmy was three or four steps behind her.

“Candace!” he shouted. “Candace, no!”

She put everything she had into sliding the door into place, grunting with the effort, something tearing in her back as the heavy steel door resisted. An inch away from latching, Haggen slammed into the door just as a drumbeat of automatic fire tore the air. She hung onto the door as it swung back into the room, Haggen dropping to the floor and sliding a foot or so, sprawled and bloody. She screamed, putting everything she had into pushing the door shut, and felt Powell crash into it a second after the bolts shot home.

She spun and dropped down to crawl over to Haggen. He was face-down on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, his back torn up by several bullet wounds.

“Jimmy!” she screamed, reaching for his shoulders to flip him over and then freezing, uncertain. There was so much blood. He’d been shot four, five times in the back with a high-powered weapon. He was dead. There could be no question. For a second she just knelt there, frozen, hands extended towards him. Jimmy Haggen was dead. She felt the same confused paralysis she’d felt when her father had passed. He’d been sleeping, it seemed, for a week, just a shrinking body barely breathing, mouth open, never conscious. And then she’d startled awake in the darkness of the room at the hospice, and he’d simply been gone, and for a long time she’d just sat there, back aching, staring up at the ceiling, unable to think or move or make a noise.

As she stared, Jimmy convulsed and flipped over.

Blood sprayed her face. The bullets had blown clear through him, and blood poured from the wounds. He sat up and stared at her. His face, somehow, had avoided all the gore and was like a white mask.

“Candace,” he said, his voice rough and unsteady. “Candace, I’m shot.”

She stared. It was impossible. There couldn’t be anything left of him inside. She’d seen what regular hunting guns did to a deer or an elk—and she had no doubt the 223 rounds from an AR-15 did much, much worse. He’d been shot five times. He was already sitting in a lake of his own blood.

“Candace,” he repeated, looking at her with wide eyes, his face ashen. “I’m shot.”

She nodded, running through possibilities. It was possible, she thought, possible that every single bullet had missed something vital. No organs, arteries, or bones. It was possible that she was overestimating how much blood he’d lost. That maybe he’d somehow just had the luckiest moment anyone in the history of the world had ever experienced.

She turned her head slightly. She looked at the box—the Raslowski Field Generator, the Transmorgifier.

“Oh, shit, Candy,” Haggen moaned, lifting his hands up. Blood and gore dripped from them. “Oh, fuck me. Fuck me.”

She snapped her head around and felt the paralysis break. If he was the recipient of a miracle that had saved all his vital organs, he could still bleed to death. Looking at him, she thought he would bleed to death, and fast. She’d never seen so much blood.

She spun and grabbed a handful of T-shirts from the the floor, then sank down and undid the buckle of her belt. She wadded up one of the shirts, examined Haggen for one frenzied moment until she thought she’d identified the worst of the bleeds.

“Arms, up, Jimmy,” she hissed, pushing the shirt against the gaping wound. “Hold it,” she ordered, and he silently put his hand on the shirt while she looped the belt around his torso, pulling it tight. Then she wadded up a second shirt and reached around, pushing it through the looped belt on the other side.

She leaned back, panicking; she’d staunched one bleed, but the rest of his wounds continued to seep and pulse out blood. She couldn’t do anything truly effective like this.

“Goddammit,” she spat, feeling tears rushing up. “Godammit.”

“It’s okay, Cuddyer,” Jimmy said, and she blinked; he sounded … normal. He sounded a little strained, maybe, but certainly not like a man who’d just been shot five times, a man who should have bled to death moments ago. She blinked tears from her eyes and stared at him. He was smiling slightly.

“It’s okay,” he said, looking down at himself. Then he looked back up. “I think … I think I might have made myself immortal.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

1. 41. Mike

“You’re going about this all wrong.”

Mike glanced at Myra and tried to retrieve a memory of her from the alternate life he knew he’d led. Had she been this businesslike? This sharp? He thought she’d been perhaps a little blurrier, a little nicer, although that wasn’t exactly the right word. The idea that people—people directly connected to this—might not be exactly the same as they’d been in the prior versions was infinitely disturbing. His entire plan had been based on being able to predict certain events, certain reactions. So far it had all gone about as well as could be expected when pursuing a batshit goal like this.

“How’s that?” he said, meeting her gaze as the truck bounced and lurched under the rough handling of Todd, who’d told Mike he only drove stick shift for a variety of paranoid and unspecified reasons, which in practice meant he kept trying to shift from drive into park.

She shifted around on her seat to face him, and he caught a citrus scent. She pushed a strand of red hair behind her ear with a practiced gesture. “You’re trying to control events. You’re trying to control people. Trust me, I worked with Raslowski for years. My fingerprints are all over the code, the wiring, the field generator. Hell, it was my work in quasi-strings that made the field generation possible. If I know one thing, it’s that without a server farm, complex mathematics, and a couple of geniuses analyzing the data, you can’t just predict how people will react.”

He smirked. “Well, I predicted you’d be here.”

“No,” she said, smiling, “you didn’t, did you? You knew we’d be here. It’s not the same thing as a prediction.”

He pondered that. Maybe she had point. He’d assumed he had an advantage because he knew what would happen. But he didn’t, not really. He knew what had happened in an alternate timeline. As long as the variables remained very close to the same, it would turn out the same way—but there was no guarantee that things wouldn’t diverge. Or hadn’t already diverged.

After all, he thought, this little ride never happened. We’re in uncharted territory.

“All right, my advantage is gone,” he admitted.

“Someone’s isn’t. Someone is playing this game better than you.”

“Obviously Jim Haggen.”

Mike scowled. “We call him Jimmy to emasculate him.”

Myra looked away. “Mr. Malloy, you have to understand, we’ve studied you. All of you. You may think you know what’s happening, that you’re in control, because you know a tiny bit of the data spread, and even that is compromised—and quickly becoming worthless as permutations reverberate, re-writing the math—but in actuality the people in control were the people who have all the information—or most of it. That would be—or was, until a short time ago—me and Dr. Raslowski.”

“And now?”

“And now it’s no one. We’ve got you, operating on yesterday’s information. We’ve got Haggen, who has control of the box and thus theoretically can change things as he wishes. And you’ve got me and Dr. Raslowski, who can run arrays through the servers farm but can’t actually do anything without the box.” She turned to look at him. He was aware of the forced intimacy of the back seat; they were physically close to each other—so close he could smell her perfume. The darkness and the hum of the engine made the space feel private. They were talking close, in half-whispers, leaning in to each other’s personal space. He felt like they were on a date discussing a bizarre sci-fi movie they’d just watched.

They rode for a moment in silence.

“So, “ she said. “Who are you trying to save?”

He startled. “Excuse me?”

“The four of you, you’re all here again for a reason. I think we know Haggen’s—he wants to rearrange his life to his liking. Maybe that’s Eastman, too, with a dash of politics. I think Cuddyer is hoping to save her dad—though her variables are tough to pin down, to be honest; her equations solve differently depending on what’s happened recently. So what are you going to change if you got your hands on the box?”

Mike looked away, feeling his face turning red. “You already know, I’m guessing.”

She sighed. “Julia Barnes.”

He nodded tightly. “That’s it. I don’t care about being rich, or righting the world’s injustices, or anything else. I just want to set that one thing right.”

“It’s noble, in a way, sure,” she said, her tone of voice implying to him that she didn’t think it was noble at all. “But you know what? We’re still trying to figure out the damage Haggen did.”

“You can … you’re aware of everything that happened—” he searched for the right part of speech to convey something that had actually happened and then not actually happened and gave up—“before?”

“We can see the math. We can see the variables left over, the equations that aren’t solvable. What Haggen did is messy, and the universe heals from it, but not perfectly. It’s like computer code: Screw up a line and the program might still work, but it might get buggy, start crashing.”

Crashing, he thought, a feeling of sour tension blooming in his belly.

“What you should think about is helping me,” she said. “Because one of us in this truck is trying to prevent arma-fucking-geddon, and it isn’t you.”

“Comin’ up on the bar,” Todd said suddenly. “We should have hit a sentry point by now. I’m gonna try to raise them on the phone.”

Mike studied the dark road as it slipped past. Myra’s calm, the lack of sentries—a bad feeling crept over him. Something had happened. The equations had changed. Did Raslowski and Hammond have a backup Field Generator? Were they tweaking things to their advantage? How would he know—would he remember every little thing that shifted? He’d gone years without realizing what had happened to him; up until Julia had died, his life had rolled along with no sign that it was a do-over, a divergence. Even afterwards, when the nagging sense of deja-vu and pointlessness had started to grow, it had still taken him months to even begin ?remembering’ things that had never happened. If they were adjusting reality in real time, would he even know?

He frowned. That didn’t jibe with everything Myra and Raslowski had said, past and present. They’d gone to great lengths to point out how it took a lot of time to trace all the possible problems. But then he wondered, feeling a rising paranoia he recognized from his addiction days—the same formless, shapeless dread and panic that filled him whenever his supply was running low, the urge to just run and run and run until his heart exploded—what if all of that had been window dressing? So much bullshit?

Sweat broke out all over his body. He felt the gun’s reassuring weight in his hand, took a deep breath, and turned—only to find Myra pointing a gun at him.

She smiled. “Hidden in-between the cushions two weeks ago,” she said. “We didn’t know specifically who would be in a vehicle or which vehicle, to be honest, so we hid guns in all potential vehicles involved in your matrix, Mr. Malloy, once we solved for what you were up to.”

“Listen,” he said, pointing his own gun at the roof of the car and putting his other hand up, palm forward to show no threat intended. He thought furiously, and reminded himself that they couldn’t see his thoughts, and they couldn’t predict his actions to this level—they could see what he would do over the long-term, but not in the moment.

Or at least that’s what he decided to believe.

“Sounds to me like we’re in the same boat,” he said. “We both want the box. We both want Haggen to not have the box. Our interests converge. I can help us take possession—I’ve got a small army and other resources. You can help me actually use the thing.”

Myra sighed. “Mr. Malloy, you’re missing the obvious.”

“Which is?”

She looked at him without turning her head, just a hint of a smile on her face.

“What the—” Todd said suddenly, slamming on the breaks. He twisted around to look back at Mike. “Boss, we got a problem.”

Mike peered around. Two trucks blocked the road, their headlights forming a blur of light that outlined dozens of people—uniformed, heavily armed.

Suddenly someone was at the rear door, tapping on his window. He turned and pressed the button, scrolling it down to reveal Colonel Hammond. She stared at him, her face impassive.

“Really,” Myra said behind him. “Did you think Haggen was the only one who’s been learning from past mistakes?”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

1. 40. Candace

She watched him setting up and wondered what he was going to do to her.

Not physically. Not in the moment. Even though she didn’t recognize the Jimmy Haggen in front of her in any way, even though he was more or less a stranger to her, she still had the firm sense that he wasn’t a cruel man. He wasn’t going to hurt her like that. No, she was worried about what he was going to do to her existentially. As one of a handful of people in the world who believed you could rewrite reality using a box and a kind of programming language, she wondered if Jimmy was going to let her exist.

She thought about all the times in her life when luck had simply gone her way. When an inch this way or a moment that way would have ended her. If you had the ability to change the variables, to switch something from a negative to a positive, to add or subtract some ineffable piece of the puzzle and ensure that someone you found personally inconvenient wasn’t around in the new version of the present, what would be the ideal moment?

There were plenty of candidates, close shaves and near-disasters. She’d been in a car crash when she was sixteen, a friend trying to film them all singing some stupid song while she drove, the car flipping and rolling. She’d emerged with a broken finger and some scratches. Everyone had lived to be punished mercilessly by their parents. How hard would it be to nudge a variable and see her sail through the windshield, her head smacking into a tree?

Alcohol poisoning when she eighteen.

The concussion she got when Christine Mooney cleaned her clock during the soccer playoffs, when the doctor kept her for observation.

There were so many moments that could have gone sideways, and she was suddenly queasily certain that she wasn’t even aware of most of them. How many times had she missed death because she’d been five minutes late? Early? How many times had her reflexes or intuition saved her? It was impossible—you didn’t know what you didn’t know. But Jimmy, if he mastered the box, Jimmy would know. He would be able to see every possible variable in her life. One tweak, and she was long gone before she could start to realize she’d done it all before, twice, and start to remember things that had never happened. One tweak and he wouldn’t have to worry about her complicating things.

She was freaked out. Jimmy’s house hadn’t helped.

Whatever hope she’d had that Jimmy might still be the same guy, deep down, might still be someone she could talk to, negotiate with, disappeared as they approached the old Haggen home. Candace remembered it—both in this reality and in the shadowy other world she knew she’d once lived in—as a broken-down old ranch-style house, but comfortable. Mrs. Haggen had kept the place spotless, so insanely clean that the shabby fixtures and ancient finishes had taken on a sort of weary grandeur in spite of their age and wear. Jimmy, remarkably, had been nearly as insane, and after both his parents were passed he’d kept the place in good repair, even after he’d taken it off the grid. The composting toilet and leaky rainwater collection system made the place smelly and damp, but it still felt comfortable to her. She remembered coming up the dirt driveway and that squat, off-white house with the roof shedding shingles like an old dog had always made her happy.

Now, it frightened her.

First was the gate. Jimmy had erected a pretty stout-looking wooden gate across the drive. It trailed off into the dark tree line, topped with razor wire. It wasn’t electric or automatic or anything, but when he stopped the truck and made her get out to open it up, she saw how well-built it was. She believed it would keep anything but a tank from getting in close to the house.

Walking in the cool, dark air, she thought about running. But what would it matter? Jimmy would then be alone in his fortress with the box, and she might find herself winked out of existence at any moment. Better to at least be on hand. Maybe she’d get a chance to do something, to intervene, appeal to him.

After the gate, the house itself frightened her. The windows had all been shuttered over with sheet metal. The yard, once the trim, neat province of Mrs. Haggen, had been torn up, the grass and shrubs gone, the little garden a memory. It looked like a war zone.

“Follow me exactly,” Jimmy said as they climbed out of the truck. “Exactly. One wrong step, Cuddyer, and you might go boom.”

That frightened her too.

She followed him to the door, carrying the Box and watching his feet to make sure she set her own in the same precise spots. The familiar old rotted wood front door that Mr. Haggen painted bright blue every Spring only to watch it peel and bubble through the Summer was gone. In its place was a steel security door with four massive deadbolts set into it.

“There’re better ways,” Haggen said as he handed her the keys and stepped back to cover her while she worked each lock. “I would’ve done it all wirelessly with an App, but you can’t take the risk. Anything in the cloud can be hacked. The damn NSA would be in there, one day I wake up and my whole rig is turned against me.” His voice took on a light tone. “Ironically, Cuddyer, in the modern day the best defense is old-school metal and gears.”

The door squealed as she pushed it open. He nudged her forward, and she stepped into the hot, dark interior of the place. Haggen followed her and pushed the door shut, and there was a moment of disorienting total darkness.

If you’re going to jump him, she thought. This would be the moment.

It might be her best shot. They were both blind in the dark, and he was distracted resetting all the locks. But she was disoriented. She couldn’t see anything at all, and the sense of being in a strange space without being able to see even the vaguest outlines of objects made her feel dizzy, made her feel like any step would send her falling into an abyss.

The lights came on, and the moment passed. The electric lights were dim and weak and only in the entryway. He nudged her forward into darkness, and a moment later there was a scratching noise and then a weak, greasy light bloomed. She squinted and looked around, and was afraid again, because Jimmy Haggen had gone crazy.

The house had always been small; a large front room that had served as a living room, rumpus room, sitting room, and media room, a small closed-in kitchen, a Master Bedroom that had been split into two small bedrooms with a flimsy wall and a new doorway, and a third small bedroom. One unfortunate, tiny bathroom.

She’d never known why the Master had been split, because Jimmy was an only child.

The bathroom she remembered best. The window over the tub was just big enough to wriggle through, and during the many times that Jimmy was grounded or otherwise punished they’d made a mockery of these attempts at discipline when she would park in the trees, creep up in the darkness, and climb in. Jimmy would come and convey her to his room, and later she would escape through the same route. At the time it had felt incredibly daring, grown up and dangerous.

The front room was where the Haggens had lived most of their lives. They ate their meals there, watched TV, played board games, video games, had coffee and cake, and held meetings and conversations there. She’d spent countless hours in that room, making awkward conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Haggen, watching movies with Jimmy, playing games.

It had been transformed into a cliché. The windows had been covered with metal on the outside, the room was lit by the greasy pale glow of kerosene lamps, the fuel’s sweet-sour smell making her feel sick. The walls were covered in paper—diagrams, notes, reams and reams of printouts, pages covered in the odd patterns of code. Books were strewn all over the floor, most dog-eared and well-used, covered in yellow highlighter and dense blue ink. Three beaten-up old laptops were open and running, white text on black screens, and wires ran criss-crossed on the floor. It looked like the set dressing for every bad TV show when a “conspiracy nut” was introduced.

Clothes littered the floor, along with dirty plates and trash. Old t-shirts vied for floor space with dirty jeans and socks. It took a moment to realize that the old green couch she’d spent so many sitting on was buried under a pile of trash, boxes, and clothes. The television, which had been a huge old flat screen from the days before they were thin, had been removed, and the whole wall had been turned into a gun rack and ammo dump. She stared at a neat line of AR-15s, shotguns, hunting rifles, full magazines, grenades, and knives. She began to have serious doubts about her ability to affect the outcome of Jimmy’s plans, unless she wanted to find out just how paranoid he’d become.

She turned to look behind her; the front room had once been open to the entryway, the natural place for visitors to move into. Haggen had built a wall, and put a new door in place. It was a security door, with a magnetic lock, similar to the ones she dimly recalled at the facility up the road. The magnets meant it would lock tight even if the power was cut.

He’s made himself a Panic Room, she thought. Jesus, half the house is a panic room.

“Sorry about the mess,” Jimmy said. “Also, sorry that I’m about to tie you up.”

She glanced at him and did some math. She was in the house, three feet from the box. She might be able to affect the outcome. But if she let him shut the door, seal her in, and tie her up, she’d just be a prisoner. She needed to be able to affect things. To take action.

Jimmy was between her and the door. In a moment, he would turn and shut that door, then restrain her, and then she’d just be a piece of furniture in the room, watching as he remade—or tried to remake—reality, with or without her.

She took a deep breath and launched herself at him.

She took him by surprise. He was half-turned from her as she started running, and swung back just in time for her to slam into his torso, head down and arms bent in front of her to turn herself into as much of a battering ram as possible. He lost his balance under the assault and his legs went out from under him. She crashed into the wall with uncontrolled momentum, but rolled away and slipped through the door into the inky darkness of the rest of the house.

She closed her eyes and relied on her memories of the place. She’d once known the layout of the Haggen home as well as anything else in her life. Every twist and turn, every hiding place, every spot ideal for a quick makeout while Mrs. Haggen was in the kitchen. She could hear Jimmy yelling, hear him lumbering in pursuit. She made for the bathroom, because she knew the door locked—or at least it used to—and the window didn’t.

Straight. Left, left. Spin. Grab the knob, pull the door shut. Turn the lock, throw the deadbolt. The deadbolt Jimmy himself installed on the bathroom door when he was fourteen after the third time his mother walked in on him masturbating. The deadbolt she’d mocked him mercilessly about.

She spun and opened her eyes, reaching for the shower curtain. She’d climbed in and out of the window so many times she knew the measurements by heart, but as she reached out a hand grabbed her wrist and spun her around. The other hand clamped over her mouth.

“Quiet,” an oddly familiar voice whispered. “Quiet now, Ms. Cuddyer.”

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