underlit like a Halloween campfire storyteller. The boy looked pretty guilty, it had to be said: sneaking into an old man’s house in the dead of night, armed with a wicked-looking blade. The alert changed from green to red as Riley drew closer, and the view flipped as Professor Smart sat up.
There was a little chitchat, which was impossible to make out, then Riley struck and everything went orange. End of story. QED, the check’s in the mail, the prosecution rests.
Or does it?
Chevie freeze-framed the moment when Riley lunged. It seemed a little weird. Chevie knew all about knife fights, and the boy’s stance seemed off to her. He was leaning backward while moving forward. This was not an easy thing to do. Also, the look on his face was pure horror.
Either this kid is schizophrenic, or he had a little help.
But there was no one else in the dark room. No one that she could see, at any rate.
Chevie was tempted to pound the ancient hardware.
Alt-tech, my butt. I can’t even clean up the image a little.
Then Chevie had an idea: maybe she couldn’t clean up the image on this box of bolts, but if she could transfer it . . .
Chevie pulled her smartphone from her waistband and took an HD shot of the screen. Simply transferring the image to her phone seemed to sharpen it up a bit, but it was still dark and fuzzy.
Dark and fuzzy, not a problem.
Chevie had no fewer than four photo manipulation apps on her phone, and she selected one to run the picture through.
In a way it was therapeutic to have such a mundane task to perform, which could momentarily help her to pretend she was working on a normal case.
She ordered the phone to sharpen, lighten, and boost color.
It took a few seconds, then another person appeared from the shadows, behind Riley to the right. A tall man, slightly bent, with dark, close-set eyes that were devoid of expression, like those of a corpse. The face was bland, made more so by the soot smeared across his features, and Chevie couldn’t imagine ladies ever swooning before this guy, but the eyes gave him away. Chevie had seen those dead eyes before, on the faces of serial killers in the Quantico files.
Chevie shivered.
So that’s what it feels like when your blood runs cold, she thought. I’ve heard the expression but never understood it.
This was the man Riley had spoken of, no doubt about it. Death, the magician. This guy looked capable of anything.
Yet it was Riley holding the knife. The boy was still guilty.
But . . .
Chevie double-tapped the image to enlarge it, then centered the crosshairs on Riley’s knife arm, enlarging again. It seemed conclusive. A hand holding a knife, a forearm, wrinkle shadows at the elbow.
Wrinkle shadows . . .
Chevie enlarged again until the pixels blurred and saw that the shadows were not shadows.
Not unless shadows have knuckles.
There were four long fingers gripping Riley’s arm, forcing his hand.
The boy is innocent! she thought, releasing a breath that she’d not realized she was holding.
Looking into that blackened face, with those flat eyes, Chevie was glad that this man could not, contrary to what Riley believed, make his way into the future.
All the same, she thought. Maybe I will stand guard over the pod with a round in the chamber. Just in case.
Chevie tugged the Timekey from its socket and hung it around her neck for safekeeping.
Just in case.
Special Agent Lawrence Witmeyer, her boss in the L.A. office, was a man with a parable for every occasion. Many involved a made-up Fed called Agent Justin Casey, who was always prepared and never got himself shot because he forgot to follow protocol.
Chevie snorted. Agent Justin Casey. A helluva guy.
And if she hadn’t been a little distracted by her reminiscing, she might have noticed an angry blister of red energy boiling at the heart of the WARP pod and had time to duck before the explosion.
Unfortunately she was distracted and didn’t see anything until the computers set off a warning alarm. By then it was already too late.
Garrick and Smart tumbled into the wormhole together, but as separate people. Once inside, Garrick held on to his consciousness, but Smart’s heart had already stopped beating and his brain was winding down. The effect of the self-destruct bomb was to excite some particles that were not meant to be excited and corrupt the transition, in effect merging Smart’s last neurons of consciousness with Garrick’s and