Third blinked, and she wasn’t in the warehouse anymore. She was surrounded by the default grayish-blue ceiling and walls of a standard residence bedroom. No personalization.
Her first thought was that she’d been Jumped out.
Her second thought was that Second was dead, so who would’ve Jumped her?
Her third thought was that blackouts were one of the reasons she’d had the governor chip in the first place.
She sat up slowly, unsure where she was and how she’d been treated. She didn’t feel woozy, so she likely hadn’t been taken to a hospital, but…
She carefully touched her leg, moved it. It ached a bit, but there wasn’t nearly as much pain as there should’ve been. Even her wrist was healed over, without so much as a scar. Whoever had dressed her wounds had also put her back in her street clothes—which was normal for Nameless, but who would’ve known that, kept her out of a hospital, and left her in a nondescript bedroom to wake up?
Third stood up. The regen patch on her leg buzzed in an alert that she was interfering with the injury’s healing, but she ignored it and checked the little trash can by the room’s clothes storage unit. Only item in it was a used-up regen patch—probably the one that had been on her arm.
Third looked around again, but even from that angle, she saw nothing that gave her a clue where she was, or who was hosting her.
On a whim, she opened the clothes storage unit…and found her weapons. Third donned the basics, then tapped the door panel. It slid open.
The hall was as default nondescript as the rest, except for a scent that made her nostrils tingle and a small table along the wall. Atop the table was a console—locked—and a stylus.
The table also had a drawer, which was where Third got her first hint regarding where she was: various high-grade narcotics and—if the packaging were correct—all procured legally, which meant her host had money. And liked his drugs.
She riffled through the various offerings in the drawer and found a package of jolt tabs. Third glanced around again, but she still didn’t even hear anyone nearby, so she risked opening the package and seeing if they could easily hide in a palm, like she’d seen TamLin do earlier with something he’d taken.
That confirmed, she put everything else back how she’d found it and took the newly opened package with her as she continued down the hall, away from the scent. The regen patch on her leg gave a little prick, protesting her use of the limb. Something else to be ignored.
Kitchen, washroom, relief room. The room with the DNA-encoded lock would be an office. The two doors at the end were the entrance and outerwear closet.
That left one more door that she hadn’t checked, and she followed the scent back to it. Cloves, she thought, and more. Third knocked on the doorjamb.
Silence answered her.
She frowned and knocked again.
Still no response.
Third keyed up her mods, and the spiderweb-like glow startled her as it crawled over her flesh. She’d had the governor chip for so long, she’d forgotten that she naturally had the netting.
She took the easy route of tripping the door’s safeguards in case of fire, and she stepped in as the door opened. “TamLin?”
The room was hazy with smoke, but not so much that she couldn’t see him—seated on the floor, his back against his bed in a room as bland as the one she’d woken up in. He was idly smoking a cigarillo that she assumed used cloves, but she thought she also smelled nutmeg in there, and possibly something else. Perhaps it was homemade.
His brow furrowed, and his dark eyes narrowed on her. “What?”
Third held up the package of jolt. “I—”
“No.” He stood up and strode to her. “I am not listening to this, right now.” He pressed forward, crowding her into stepping back and out of his room, and the door shut in her face.
She checked the lock. He’d set it into maintenance mode—which also meant it wouldn’t be able to open if he accidentally set a fire in there. At least there wasn’t much in there to burn, but that was still reckless.
Confused, Third scratched her head—with the hand holding the package of jolt. She paused and looked at it, looked back at the door. What had he thought her about to say?
She knew TamLin too well to think she might get the answer from him, and Janni wouldn’t be any more inclined to tell Third anything.
Janni also had been held by Nev for most of the day.
Third considered that…and started calculating a jump loop to check Janni’s rooms when she wouldn’t be able to catch Third snooping.
“You let a drug addict take your little sister!” Raleigh said baldly, exasperated that neither First nor Janni had any problem with that.
Expression flat in the manner of someone burying his emotions so he wouldn’t have to deal with them, First lowered his mug of hot chocolate and waved off the waitress before she could come refill his cup. “TamLin’s the best person to watch her when she’s injured. He knows how to treat her, and he won’t hurt her.”
“I’m sorry. Are we remembering the same reality? You do remember, just earlier today, in the alley outside his workplace, where he—”
“I can go a little psycho when I wake up after a blackout,” Janni cut in, hands fiddling with her mug, gaze not leaving the froth still in place on her untouched chocolate. “TamLin’s one of the only people I can be sure I won’t accidentally kill.”
Raleigh stared at Janni. “You aren’t Nameless.”
“No,” Janni agreed. She started lifting her mug, then stopped and slid it across the table to First, who’d just finished his. “I’m a merger-class jumper. That means I can…adjust reality around me, in certain ways. If I lose track of when I am or which universe I’m in, he can detect my response and interrupt me before I damage anything.”
“It’s related to the built-in resistance to temporal rewrites that we discussed earlier,” First said, accepting the hot chocolate from Janni. “Multiply that by a factor of, oh, a thousand, and you have TamLin.”
That didn’t exactly make sense. “If he’s that resistant to temporal rewrites, how does he jump universes?”
First tilted the mug toward Janni as Janni lifted a hand and wiggled her fingers without pulling her wrist off the table.
“Mergers,” she said outright. “Most people can Jump okay, as long as someone or something navigates, right? That’s how you got here. TamLin gets cluster headaches and other problems, which remain until certain parts of his bio-identity get keyed to the time zone he’s in. Once he’s keyed to a somewhen, any deviation from the natural progression of that somewhen will, again, trigger problems for him. But he can’t get keyed without a merger manually forcing it.”
Raleigh assumed all that would make more sense to someone more familiar with the biological and genetically inherited modifications built into the universes like Janni’s. “That still doesn’t explain why you left her alone with him. He’s beat her up before.”
Raleigh had tried to follow, herself, but TamLin had grabbed a StretSec vehicle, and she hadn’t been able to find a taxi willing to follow before it got out of sight. First had suggested hot chocolate for the three of them, and considering she had no idea where TamLin was going and First had just had his lover and unborn child murdered by his own sibling, she hadn’t good reason to refuse.
“TamLin won’t kick her while she’s down,” Janni said. “Not unless she earns it—and then he’ll do the minimum. You should see him, sometime. When he gets bored, he cross-dresses and goes down to one of the macho bars. He kicks their asses—but no matter how involved the fight gets, I have never seen him throw a punch after the opponent’s ready to quit. He just reads their body language and—snap!—makes his decision off that, even if they’re still talking smack or throwing stuff at him.”
She frowned, brow furrowing, and glanced at First. “I think your sister’s awake.”
He grunted acknowledgement.
“And…I think she’s high.”
He paused in the middle of another sip of hot chocolate and exchanged an odd look with her. “Really?”
Janni nodded slowly, still looking puzzled.
“Huh.”
The addicted TamLin had drugged Third? Raleigh pressed her palms over her eyes and wondered what in the worlds it would take for one of these people to admit the man had a problem—one that made him a person to avoid, not a person to dump an injured friend on.
And hoped she wouldn’t be gaining a newbie drug addict as a roommate.
The apartment was silent.
Keeping her bio-identity merged with the somewhen she was visiting, Third quietly slipped in and found Raleigh seated at the dining room table, tapping at a contact list on her console. Janni’s contact list, not her own.
“How do you do that?” Raleigh asked as she turned around. Embarrassment showed in the twitch of her cheek, as if she thought Third unaware of the hacks and macros she’d set up to copy their information.
“How’s your brother?” Raleigh continued, obviously not expecting Third to answer. “I’m sorry about his wife.”
Second was dead. Third didn’t let tears well.
Discomfort showed in the angle of Raleigh’s shoulders. “Janni told me about…about Lysacarly.”
It was about time. Third had suggested Janni fill Raleigh in months ago—but it had taken Second dying for her to bother.
Tasting salt, Third turned away from Raleigh, toward the Jenga game at the far end of the table. Janni would notice the residuals from the Jump. Third picked up one of the blocks and let her temporal dissonance bleed through, to alert Janni who had visited this somewhen. Leaving notice to your allies was polite.
“So ‘prime’ is what you call someone with biological modifications? And ‘null’ is someone without?”
Third glanced back at Raleigh, unsurprised that she was picking up quickly, now that someone was bothering to explain things to her.
“You said Janni had a ‘bondmate’. I didn’t know she was married.”
Bonded wasn’t married.
Third busied her hands—grabbed another Jenga block, pulled out the knife—because what Janni decided to tell Raleigh was her business.
…But lack of knowledge was dangerous. Lack of knowledge could get Nev gunning for Raleigh, who didn’t carry a weapon and who wouldn’t know the first thing about protecting herself from primes.
Third left the knife on the chair for Raleigh and held her hand out for Raleigh’s console.
“Do you know how to use it?”
A valid question, since Third didn’t own a console of her own and Raleigh knew so little about Jumping. Third let her answer show in her lack of response.
Raleigh handed over the device.
Third glanced over the setup, then got to work finding the contact person Raleigh would need.
“See a console in one universe, you’ve seen them all?”
At least Janni had explained that much. “Tablet,” Third informed Raleigh as she found the entry she was looking for. “Usually.”
“It’s usually called a tablet?”
Third nodded once and handed the console back.
Raleigh startled, recognition flaring loudly enough for Third to notice. “Is that a beard?”
Excellent save, as if the beard were what bothered her about TamLin. “Four o’clock shadow,” she said, letting Raleigh pretend. “It’s…”
Janni wasn’t going to explain the details, and Raleigh really should have been told, already. Better for Janni to get ticked off at her rather than at someone else.
“Some people naturally mix well with others, genetically,” Third said. “That…isn’t common. So they usually have…abilities, to help them adjust or freeze their appearance more easily than most, to help them hide. He likes looking a little scruffy, in clean-cut universes. Makes people underestimate him.”
She was bleeding chattiness from Janni, again.
And Raleigh was staring at her. “He exists in your universe?”
Third looked away, reminded yet again why she needed to leave TamLin alone. “Dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
The empathy in Raleigh’s voice puzzled Third, until she realized Raleigh was making assumptions about how and why he’d died. She hid tears again. “We escaped our universe. He was…unable to acclimate.”
Silence fell between them. Third glanced back at Raleigh to see her cringing with her finger over the Call button.
After a long pause, Raleigh hit it, and Janni’s TamLin answered almost as promptly as Third’s would have. “Yes?”
“I’m Raleigh,” she said awkwardly.
Third remembered her earlier question about Janni being married and realized she probably should’ve explained that.
“I’m sorry?” TamLin asked, so he knew as little about Janni’s current living situation as Janni knew about his. Perhaps less.
Perhaps less. He’d said Janni had sent him some of Third’s hair, to get her documented as a consultant for StretSec, but that didn’t mean much. Just how much had he known about her, before all this started?
Third itched to join the conversation and find out, but she restrained herself, forced herself to step back so she wouldn’t accidentally step into visual range if she acted on instinct again. Don’t get involved.
If TamLin spoke to Third via console, he’d expect her to be there when he showed up, and she was out of her native time flow at the moment. She didn’t want to give him another cluster headache.
“I live with Janni,” Raleigh admitted.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, as quick on the uptake as Third’s TamLin.
“First is missing,” Raleigh said.
Where did she get that idea?
“Second is dead. Third is…damaged.”
Since when did Raleigh know that much of the jargon? Third didn’t use it. Janni must’ve slipped again.
Raleigh let out a long breath. “Look, I don’t know how much I can say. I don’t want to get these Nameless people killed.”
“Where are you?”
“At the apartment.” She paused. “Your wife went out looking for them, I think.”
“Bondmate, not wife,” TamLin corrected—to Third’s relief, because that meant she wouldn’t have to. “We’re bonded, not consummated.”
“I thought bonded meant married.”
“In some universes. In ours…it’s more ‘betrothed’.”
“Then why don’t you marry?”
“Various reasons.”
Someone needed to explain that. “Resonance,” Third said, quietly enough that the console wouldn’t pick it up.
Raleigh stared at her.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Raleigh said quickly. “I’m sorry, but what’s your name? I mean, if you have one.”
“Call me Lin.”
Lin? That wasn’t like her TamLin at all.
She was wasting time before the jump loop she’d set would yank her back to her natural somewhen. She needed to try to find out why she’d upset him so much, so she could make sure to avoid that in the future.
She hurried to Janni’s door, double-checked that she was merged with the somewhen she was in, and adjusted her bio-identity to mimic Janni’s.
Pain pierced behind her temples, and the wooziness and black encroaching her vision caught her by surprise until she remembered her missing governor chip. Third blindly patted at her belt, feeling for something to help even though she couldn’t remember packing anything.
She still had the package of jolt tabs that she’d pulled from TamLin’s drawer.
Third hesitated, but if she remembered the effects correctly, jolt would keep her from blacking out.
She opened the package and stuck one tab on her tongue. She grimaced almost immediately as the stimulant cocktail spiked her system and tore her usual psychic blocks wide open. It was all she could do to sit without hitting anything in Janni’s room.
After a few minutes, she was able to push through the pounding migraine and mental jabber enough to start poking through Janni’s things, but she didn’t find anything, and Third knew better than to try the console. Janni would’ve loaded it with universe-specific passcodes and failsafes.
The jump loop grabbed Third, worsening the migraine and adding disorientation in the mix as it hauled her forward, a few minutes minutes past when she’d originally left the time stream, so she wouldn’t accidentally overlap with herself.
Don’t Jump, Third reminded herself. You set this up. You know which somewhen you’re in.
It didn’t feel as if she knew when she was.
Third verified she was back in TamLin’s guest room, then let herself curl up on the bed and trust that he’d locked his apartment properly. At least it was quiet. A sensate as sensitive as TamLin had to insulate his walls from temporal overflow, which also blocked psychic chatter.
The jolt caused spasms to prickle through her body, and without any nearby minds to overhear, the energy was building up and worsening her migraine. How did he like this?
The door’s buzz cut off midsound, and air moved as it opened. Her Jump would’ve triggered his sensitivity, so of course he’d come investigate.
Silence filled the room. She felt his regard as if it were a corpse weighing down her chest.
“What did you take?!”
She held the packaging for the jolt tab up far enough for him to see, then let her arm fall.
He moved well for a null. Not as quiet as her universe’s version, but close. Very close. Her skin tingled with his proximity.
“Why?” he asked.
“Was blacking out.”
He let out a quiet sound, something between a huff and a laugh. “Why the Jump?”
She didn’t have the energy to shrug, and it wasn’t her place to protest his earlier tongue-lashing.
“We have to call you Second, now.”
She’d been trying to avoid remembering that. The taste of tears filled her mouth.
“Hey,” he said gently, and she could feel his hand hovering over her. “Sorry for assuming you shared Janni’s hang-ups. May I make amends?”
She squinted at him from the corner of her eye. Nameless didn’t get apologies, much less any kind of reparation.
He pressed her shoulder—first one, then the other, to roll her onto her other side, putting her back to him. Her pulse raced, and the hair stood up on the back of her all-too-vulnerable neck.
TamLin pressed both hands to her shoulder blades, telling her where they were, then trailed them along as he went to the various nodal points along her spine and applied pressure to each one.
Her lymph system didn’t process the mods properly, the hormones processing and draining far more slowly than they built up, which was what produced her overloads. Pressure at certain node points helped alleviate that. She assumed he knew that from “Janni?”
He hesitated—only for a moment, but she felt it. “Yes.”
“Feels nice,” she blurted, likely from the stimulants. “Thank you.”
He paused again, then ran his fingers along her bared arm before resuming the massage. “If you’re open to trying alternatives, I have some ebbers.”
The offer chilled her. “Aren’t ebbers depressants?”
“Yeah.”
He wasn’t planning on following the same path of her TamLin, was he? She turned, letting her back press his hand down because it was more important for her to glimpse his face. “You hate depressants.”
His eyelids were lowered enough to mask his eyes, and he kept his expression impassive as he gave a casual shrug. The way he left his hand under her made her wonder anew why he and Janni weren’t consummated. “Janni won’t try them.”
Third’s stimulant-addled mind struggled to focus enough to process the implications of what he was saying. He had ebbers, because he’d gotten them for Janni to try. Janni had refused to take them and apparently took issue with his drug habit. “What does she expect you to do about your cluster headaches?”
His stillness, followed by a slow I-like-this grin, kept her from grimacing about the audible incredulity in her voice.
She bit her tongue against the urge to apologize for the display of emotion.
TamLin sat on the side of the bed, and he put one hand on her far hip. “I think I’m going to like you more than I do Janni.”
Breath caught in Third’s throat. Shadows—people residing in universes other than their own—usually avoided alternate-universe versions of people they’d known for good reason. “I don’t know this you.”
“And you loved your universe’s version of me.” His fingers toyed with the fasten on her equipment belt, testing how far she trusted him. “But I remind you of him.”
He didn’t care. Words, body language, tone of voice—all coincided to be proof of that.
He unfastened her belt. She lifted her hips to help him get it off her—consciously admitting that she trusted him enough to be at a disadvantage around him, even though she shouldn’t.
He studied her as he let her belt—her equipment—down on the floor beside the bed, but she didn’t flinch at the vulnerable position.
“You’re as lonely as I am,” he said.
Third wasn’t sure what to answer.
But TamLin soon made obvious that she didn’t need to.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this story!369Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZYGgVURkyI
This is the story’s “Authorized Cut” (in other words: language is adjusted to keep it to a T rating). If you purchase the e-book for this story or continue the series, you’ll be able to continue in the same version OR you can read the original NSFW Author’s Edition.
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