A Chronetic Perspective (The Chronography Records Book 2) Read online

  On the far side of the table, Zaidee Anwar was still absorbed in the tabletop diagram, pointing something out to her boss. She might possibly be an Egyptian heiress, or a cosmetician’s daughter, or both, or neither. She had so many stories about her family, it was hard for Dani—or anyone, for that matter—to separate fact from fiction.

  Silas Logan, with a ready laugh and rich brown skin the color of cattails, was closer to Dani’s age. He straightened up and caught her eyes over the top of Lexil’s head. “Fun morning?” His eyes darted toward Lexil, then back at her. He tilted his head, smiled slowly, and raised his eyebrows, twice.

  She felt the color rise in her cheeks. Why did people keep assuming things?

  Lexil looked up from what Zaidee had been showing him. “Hi, Dani—and visitors! Good to see you, Marak. Going to help us today, Jored?”

  The boy nodded happily. He loved the lab, and Dani knew he’d made friends here over the summer.

  Zaidee swooped around the table to give Jored a hug. She grabbed him by the hand and glared at her boss in mock defiance, tossing her head and sending her wavy chestnut hair flying backwards. “He’s mine.”

  Flawless olive skin, former actress with a commanding stage presence—once she’d laid a claim, Dani knew, it was pointless to argue. But her eyes always held a glint of humor and her voice danced on the brink of laughter. It was impossible to dislike Zaidee. Impossible.

  “Jored’s going to help me render waveforms into something recognizable. You two have a meeting or something, right?” Zaidee tossed the words over her shoulder.

  Lexil laughed. “Yeah, getting to be about that time. Detective Rayes wants to debrief us on the trip we took this morning. Want to tag along, Marak?”

  “You have to ask?”

  The journalist in Marak was fully awakened, the dark circles overwhelmed by the gleam of anticipation in his eyes. It would be good to get his mind off his wife’s visits with her uncle, Dani thought. And Jored would be fine with Zaidee and the others.

  “Okay then. Let’s go talk with the detective.” Lexil gestured grandly to Dani and Marak to precede him down the hall to the meeting room. “After you.”

  Detective Tom Rayes was pacing when they got there. He smiled briefly when he spotted the trio and acknowledged their arrival with a quick nod to each. But his brown eyes stopped short of their usual twinkle, and his mouth tightened as he took a long breath. He raked his fingers through graying hair.

  Dani had first met the detective through his grandson, a high school student who had assisted her with uncovering the blackmailing scheme at the institute several months before, a scheme which had fallen apart when Kat’s Uncle Royce was arrested along with most of the board members. Since then, she had seen him occasionally when her group was assisting with a case.

  Today, his normally crisp suit was rumpled, and his eyes were bleary. She wondered if he had slept.

  “There’s a complication. We have a video of Morgan speaking with a man in a gray overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, and then, a little later, being dragged by him to another vehicle. He was limp.” His voice was grim. “We’re approaching this as a kidnapping, and hoping it’s not a murder.”

  Marak leaned forward. “Morgan? Do you mean that old recluse, Drummond Morgan? Could you identify the other man?”

  Detective Rayes hesitated. “Off the record?”

  The journalist’s shoulders dropped, almost imperceptibly. “Sure, if that’s what you need.”

  “We’re running some leads, looking into some locals, following up on names of people staying at the nearby hotel, but it was late. The meeting was in the shadows and we couldn’t see much. This is not for publication, understand?”

  “No, of course not. You know me. Not a word until you say.” Dani knew Marak was good for his word.

  “Yeah, I know.” The detective grimaced apologetically. “It’s been a long night. And we may well want you to publish something later, when we know what we’re looking at.”

  “In that case, do you mind if I make a few notes? I won’t release anything until you say it’s okay.”

  The detective waved permission. “Go ahead.”

  Marak got out his tablet, and Rayes turned to the other two. “Did you find anything useful at his home?”

  Lexil shook his head. “Not much. The man was clearly a privacy extremist. Everything was made of synthetic materials if it could be, and the remaining items were stored in cupboards or containers with opaque, sound-dampening surfaces.”

  “That’s consistent with what we found in his helicar. The metal parts were all coated. Windows were plastiglass.”

  “That kind of privacy guard makes it a lot harder to help him now,” Marak said. “People don’t think, sometimes.”

  The detective snorted. “Says the journalist. To the chronography researchers and the detective. I guess our industries have nothing to do with the growth in privacy extremists?”

  Ouch, Dani thought.

  Lexil winced. “I’ll take that. But we do have one possible source—something Dani found under the couch.”

  She fished the sample bag with the button in it out of her pocket. “I haven’t had a chance to scan it yet.”

  Detective Rayes leaned forward. “That’s metal, isn’t it? How long will it take you to see what’s been stored?”

  Dani frowned. Only seconds, if she knew when to look, but the neuro hookup played recordings back in real time. “It could take days. It would go faster if I had specific dates and times to scan. Do we know when he left the house?”

  “His car’s GPS was wiped, but the video of the kidnapping—or murder—starts around 1530 two days ago. The latest he could have been at his house was 15 minutes before that.”

  “That helps a little. I’ll get to work on it and maybe it won’t take as long as I think. I’ll see how far I get by noon.”

  Lexil gestured back the way they had come. “Meet you back in the lab for lunch? I’ll go keep an eye on Jored and see what he’s taught the rest of them.”

  Marak laughed. “I’ll assume it’s okay to leave him with you, then, while I chase down a few interviews?”

  “Oh yeah. We can’t do without our most promising young scientist. We’ll get him some lunch and might be ready to give him back to you around 1600 or so.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Implausibility

  NORTH PACIFIC DOME PRISON, Pacific Ocean. 1205, Friday, September 8, 2215.

  While she was waiting, Katella Wallace let her eyes trace the faux bricks of the yellow walls for what must have been the fiftieth time. By now, she knew all the scratches and dents by heart, along with every scuff mark on the faded floor. She was the only one in the room today. On Tuesday, she had shared the space with other visitors, seated at two of the three other tables. That was a little more interesting than waiting alone.

  The room was Spartan, with no furniture other than the tables and chairs. Of course, she wasn’t really in the room at all. She was sitting in a similar chair, hooked neurologically to a hologram of the room, which she could see, hear, and smell as if she were there in person.

  The remote visitation room meant she wouldn’t be able to record anything on her worktablet. She would only be aware of the sensory input that came through her brain. Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Royce Hunter would be similarly hooked up so he could see her. He had been restricted from any communication with the outside world. Kat had had to go through an elaborate screening procedure and a series of meetings explaining what they knew about his condition, tentatively diagnosed as an empathetic deficiency. She learned they would be experimenting with treatments, and she shouldn’t be alarmed if she noticed odd behavior. Finally, she had been given clearance to see him. Not that he had even wanted her to, at first. But he came around.

  She shook her head, chiding herself for complaining. She could only imagine how hard it must be for Uncle Royce to do without the comforts and—let’s face it—luxuries that he was used to. She fel
t bad that she couldn’t bring him a good steak or fancy pastry. It would be nothing even close to the meals aboard his yacht, but she couldn’t even bring that. Holograms weren’t edible.

  The door in the room disengaged with a click, and then it whooshed open. A timer above the door lit up with a big “30:00” and began to count down.

  Royce spotted her immediately and headed for her table. She was glad they didn’t feel it necessary to chain him. That would be just too weird. With a scrape that made her wince, he pulled out the chair across from her and sat down heavily. His shoulders sagged. He clasped his fingers in front of him and studied the motion of his thumbs without speaking.

  Prison had sapped him.

  She hadn’t seen him often before his arrest, but she’d had lunch on his patio and watched fireworks displays from the deck of his yacht enough times to mark the difference between the spent old man before her and the vibrant uncle who’d always walked with a firm stride and who had never failed to meet her eyes. She felt bad for him, until she recalled that he’d brought it all on himself.

  “How could you do this?” she blurted before she could think. Her hand rose involuntarily to her mouth. Her mind flashed back to an incident two weeks earlier. What if he started yelling those incomprehensible things again? She’d just disconnect, she decided. It was pointless to visit him when he was like that.

  “I was being told to do it, Kat. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “Yeah, I know, by the board. The ones who are also in prison. But you could have said no.”

  “Not just by the board. There were…others.”

  She raised one eyebrow.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  She brushed that off. “The news has been saying it was some kind of revenge plot, that you wanted payback for a horrible childhood or something.” She had buried this for too long. She didn’t care how he reacted any more.

  His eyes betrayed pain. He curled his fingers and stared at his nails for a few seconds. She waited, unwilling to give him relief by changing the subject.

  Finally: “I did have a traumatic childhood, and I carried a lot of resentment around with me. I suppose that’s part of why they were able to convince me. I remember feeling bitter and angry, but the prison chip has changed all that, you know.” He gave her a half-hearted smile.

  “So you’re happy here?” She knew better, but she wanted to see what he said.

  He nodded briskly, but his smile grew tight and his eyes flitted upward. His expression pretty much confirmed her suspicions.

  She considered. Maybe the guards—who didn’t even live in the dome, but monitored the chips from the coast—carried enough clout that he was afraid of them. Maybe that was why he was hiding things from her. In that case, he might suffer some kind of unknowable repercussions if she managed to break through and get truth from him. She was surprised to find she didn’t really care.

  She goaded him. “So you don’t miss your home? Your garden? Your personal cook or your maid?” Her voice softened. “Your niece?”

  He winced. “Of course I miss you, and Marak, and little Jored. My thoughts and feelings are just…duller here.”

  She could believe that.

  “What about all the people you hurt?”

  His gaze hardened for a moment. Then it grew bland again, as if someone had flipped a switch. Maybe someone had.

  “I shouldn’t have done those things, no matter how much those people deserved it.”

  “Deserved it! How could you even say such a thing? What was their crime? Being desperate like your mother?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Kat. It doesn’t matter whether they deserved it or not. I can’t do anything. Don’t you see? I’ve been ‘redirected’. That’s what they call it.”

  “I don’t care if you can or can’t do anything. I care what you think.” Her fists clenched and her stomach knotted. “I don’t even know why I visit you.”

  He shrugged. “Because you’re not like me. If you didn’t come, I’d have no one.”

  For just a moment, she thought she saw panic.

  “That matters? Why? Is it so miserable here?”

  He looked at her steadily. Then he dropped his gaze.

  “I’ve adapted. I can survive here for however long they want to keep me. But there’s something else. And this—I need you to believe me, please.” Now his gaze was strong and forthright.

  A little like the uncle she remembered.

  “They’ve communicated with me again.”

  “What? How?” She knew—it had been firmly reinforced— that he could not get messages from anyone outside unless they went through the process that she had gone through.

  “Different ways. Messages on bricks that disappear after a few minutes. A lingering voice, like an echo with no source. A paper that appears in my meal slot. I couldn’t keep that either. It disappeared.”

  Was he hallucinating? They said it was a possibility. “Could those have been, I don’t know, something you…imagined?”

  A forced laugh. “That’s what I thought. But the messages started telling me things that I didn’t know yet, that turned out to be true.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Simple things. That you’d be wearing a striped shirt in shades of green when you came last week, for instance. I got that several hours before your visit.”

  Kat remembered lingering over her closet, choosing against a pale blue and in favor of the green at the last moment. It was a new shirt. Her uncle had never seen it before. Lucky guess? Or was someone spying on her in her home?

  She brushed it off, for his sake. Maybe he was confused on the time, but he obviously believed this. She could pretend to take it seriously. “Is that all they do? Play parlor tricks?”

  “No. That was just at the start. They’ve been saying that I shouldn’t be in here at all.”

  “Uncle Royce! Do you know how many people claim they’re wrongfully sentenced? Of course you’d say that.” Was he getting that desperate?

  He shook his head in wide arcs. “No. No. That’s not it. I did what I did. I blackmailed people. I took their money. I threatened to reveal secrets that would have broken their families and lost them their jobs.”

  “Then what?”

  His eyes took on a pained look. “I know it’s hard to believe. But they say—” He stopped.

  “What do they say?”

  “—that if I don’t get out, it will disrupt the timestream.”

  She flinched, but refrained from rolling her eyes. High tech excuses, designed to take advantage of her lack of expertise.

  “They say you should ask Lexil. He can see it too.”

  Oh, this was going too far. She would not ask her best friend’s boyfriend, or boss, or whatever he was. He’d think she was crazy, and so would Dani. It was bad enough that Marak was worried about her, no matter how much he tried to hide it.

  She shook her head. It was time to leave.

  She stood and opened her mouth to tell him goodbye. That was when she saw it: a message, scrawled on the bricks she had memorized from so many previous visits, in a room that no one but her uncle had entered. Of that, she was absolutely certain. But there the message was.

  BELIEVE HIM.

  Her mouth stayed open and she blinked her eyes. It was still there. He turned to see what she was looking at and whirled back to face her.

  “There! Do you see it? It will disappear in a few seconds.”

  She held her breath, waiting, and watched it vanish as quickly as it had come.

  Could everything else he said be true too?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Observability

  RIACH LABORATORIES, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 1200, Friday, September 8, 2215.

  After an hour of research, Dani had confirmed that the button hadn’t been moved for fifteen hours before the kidnapping. That meant they could listen in on anything that happened in the house from midnight on. However, when she rapid-scanned through the three ho
urs from 1215 to 1515 that day, sampling five seconds of every minute, she found only silence. If there was anything there, it would take a detail scan to find it. She regretted not having any visual content, which could have alerted her to audio content closely before or after the sample point, but she would have to work with what she had available.

  She stretched and wiggled to get rid of the kink in her neck. She hadn’t done detail scanning since she had joined Lexil’s crew, but as an intern she had been one of the best scanners in the institute. If there was something to be found, no matter how brief, she knew how to subdivide the hours and minutes until her scans hit on the right moment. And if there was nothing in all that span of time, she’d find that too. It would just take longer.

  She was glad it was time for lunch. She wondered if Lexil and the others had had more success with those equations than she had had with the button.

  She heard Jored’s yelp before she actually reached the lab.

  “I got it! Zaidee, I got it! See? Hey, you guys, I got it!”

  Dani’s mood brightened immediately. “What did you get, bud?”

  His smile widened even more—if that was possible—when he saw her. “I made the numbers match the shape!”

  She glanced sharply at Zaidee, who confirmed the news with wide eyes and a couple of quick nods. She pointed to the viewwall, where she had transferred the image. The rest of the scientists twisted away from their work to see it.

  Lexil sucked in his breath and held it.

  Dani was impressed. Jored’s equation matched the discrepancy in every particular. “Did you just happen on this? How did you know what numbers to type?”

  “I tried a bunch, and once I caught on to how they were bumping the curvy line, I made little tiny fixes until it fit.”