She Who Knows Tomorrow: a multiverse novella

First order of business in any situation was to gather data. Raleigh always felt that urge, but activating her tech made the compulsion even stronger. Thankfully she’d thought months ago to ask Janni to disable her transmitter, so she wasn’t sending the warehouse’s details to all nearby consoles. She was pretty sure there were laws that forbade unauthorized broadcasting.

Even before Raleigh separated from the others, she had finished measuring off the warehouse and comparing the actual size and composition with the blueprints on file. No notable discrepancies appeared.

Scanning the inside of the warehouse took longer because she was naturally set for a deep probe, which the warehouse had tech and physical shielding in the boxes to prevent. She quickly duplicated the original macro, stored one copy of the original, and deleted the deep-scan parts in the code of the other, so she could just skim the surface and get the layout in there. She didn’t need to know the contents of all the boxes.

Pity she hadn’t thought of telling First she could do that. Maybe it would’ve convinced him to wait. Or maybe not.

Raleigh had to adjust a duplicate of yet another macro to pick up the people, and she had to tweak it a few times for it to work properly. If the Nameless could keep her from detecting them, Nev certainly could do the same, but Raleigh had yet to meet anyone who didn’t need to breathe.

Evaluating the motion of the oxygen inside the warehouse then took even more time, enough to make her almost feel frustration despite the tech controlling her body’s current hormonal cocktail. She grabbed at patterns in the motion and assigned filters and subroutines to organize them until she had a workable, if clunky, method to locate even ‘undetectable’ Nameless.

At least, she presumed it would work even when they were in ‘undetectable’ mode.

She was debugging that code as the others exited the warehouse. She climbed down and almost told them what she’d figured out, then decided to keep it to herself. “Where’s Kitten?”

“Nev grabbed her,” Janni said sourly. “Second does know she’s the target, right? You told her?”

TamLin looked at First. First looked at Janni.

Raleigh reminded herself that Nameless were conditioned to jump directly into action, rather than pause and think things through. “You didn’t even tell her she’s being hunted?”

“I haven’t seen her,” TamLin said, his nonchalant tone a troubling indicator of the type of situations he usually dealt with. “Looks like First hasn’t, either. Dasher—I mean, Second—is a navigator, which pretty much means she can easily teleport herself precisely when and where she meant to go.”

Raleigh parsed that through the detail that they hadn’t been able to get in touch with Second. “So it’s tough to contact her when she’s busy or disinclined to be found.”

TamLin’s expression said ‘Tough? Try impossible,’ but he just shrugged.

First stared at her bleakly. “I don’t even know when she is, right now, never mind where. She likes to practice on her days off work.”

Raleigh’s active mods normalized her hormones, so she didn’t feel too empathetic at the moment, but First’s expression was able to bother her a little. “Did you leave a message?”

He grimaced. “Yeah, but she won’t check it. She never does.”

“Leave another anyway,” Raleigh said briskly. “Don’t just sit and mope. Do something. If the worst happens, at least you’ll have tried. I’ve mapped out the warehouse interior. I’ll transfer that data to your consoles and see about getting a map of the surrounding area, get pings in place to alert us when Second shows up.”

She brushed off her palms on her coat and strode away, already getting started on the data transference.

Behind her, she detected First freezing for a moment, then he pivoted and hurried after her. Janni and TamLin went the other way. She assumed they were just avoiding redundancy of effort.

“It won’t work,” he said as he caught up. “Any of it. You know that, right?”

Raleigh paused, turned, and looked him in the eye. “Until your wife is dead, I’m not going to accept that, and neither should you. You have to try, because that’s all you can do. Do you want to spend the rest of your life regretting what you weren’t able to do, or blaming your sister for what she did?”

First went still, again, evidently processing her words.

Breath left him in a whoosh, and he nodded slightly. “All right. Where do we start?”

That was better.

The ground looked wobbly. Third double-checked her balance, but she wasn’t rocking in the cage. That meant her vision was off.

She frowned and glanced around without moving her head. Gamma radiation, likely, but where was it coming from?

And how long had she been exposed? For it to be innate to the room rather than specifically targeted at her… Well, she’d likely still be getting exposed after she removed the governor chip. That did not bode well for the prospect of her survival.

Then again, a removed governor chip didn’t bode well for her continued survival, either.

Something like static tingled in Third’s ears. Her breath caught, but she managed to not show any further signs that someone was opening a Jump to their location.

Someone. Second.

Second, who was expecting First’s baby.

Third snapped her wristwire off and quickly shaped the end, then drove it into her arm, searching for the governor chip. She had to find it before she could yank it out—but in the meantime, she tried to mentally yell at Second, “It’s a trap! Stay away!”

But Third also knew better than to think Second had heard her.

Something changed in the warehouse. Raleigh grabbed the ping and followed it back, but the readings on both sides of the alert matched each other. That didn’t make sense. How could something change without changing?

“Detect something?” First asked.

She briefly described the situation, and he nodded once, matter-of-factly.

“Schrödinger’s cat,” he said. “Did you save a copy of the previous reading to your hardware?”

Raleigh pulled that up and compared it to what the software was saying had been true all along. “How does that work?”

“People—especially temporally and universally displaced people—have a built-in resistance to temporal rewrites, which delays integration. Your backup will match with the current reality in a bit. Second’s in the warehouse already, isn’t she?”

The abrupt question threw Raleigh off-kilter for a moment. “Yes.”

He let out a quick sigh and took off back toward the warehouse. Raleigh followed him—and knew before he did that they were too late.

They climbed up a fire escape and slipped through a warehouse window on second floor. They crept toward the people—and reached visual range in time to see the steam and shriveling of what she only afterward realized was Second’s body.

First froze, though he caught her when she nearly ran past him, before either of them made a sound.

Third was crouched in an elevated cage, looking disheveled and much how she had when she visited Raleigh earlier, and she was digging into her own bloody wrist. What was she doing?

Something crashed just out of Raleigh’s line of vision, promptly followed by Janni strangling Nev.

Raleigh blinked. She wouldn’t have expected quite that level of ferocity from the woman, not when facing down an alternate universe version of her own sister.

First muttered something that she assumed was an appropriately child-unfriendly curse and swung over the rail. He landed lithely on his feet, the odd yellow glow making another appearance, writhing through his body. He reached his sister just as she electrocuted Janni—whom he kicked out of Nev’s grip.

“Your beef’s with us,” he said, voice hard. “Leave that ’verse out of this.”

Nev snarled. “She attacked me!”

“She kidnap herself and lock herself in that cage over there, too?” The very casualness of the question asked, ‘How dumb do you think I am, Sis?’

Nev struck out, and he swept her wrist out of the way with his arm. The scent of ozone worsened, and Raleigh smelled the burn and detected damage in First’s body, but he barely flinched.

The yellow light strengthened, and Raleigh blinked. Some of the internal damage was already healing, along the path of that energy.

A clang rang through the warehouse.

The cage had fallen to the floor.

Nev put her hands together, and the energy running along her arms pooled into a sphere.

The newly-freed Third shoved Janni’s TamLin out of the way and took that ball straight in the side.

TamLin’s expression snapped into the “One of us will be dead shortly” kind of vengeance Raleigh was all too familiar with. “All right,” he said, fury underlying his voice. “Let’s play.”

None of them so much as glanced up toward Raleigh.

She paused and ran her foot along the grating that was the flooring beneath her feet.

No response.

They were naturally invisible to her upgrades. Might that go both ways?

Raleigh swung over the rail and landed in a crouch. She eyed the others, but they were wrapped up in the fight and evidently still hadn’t noticed her.

Third was moving, oh-so-slowly, and struggling to get up.

Nev went out of her way to kick the girl in the thigh. Something cracked. Third gulped down a yelp.

That wasn’t fighting to disable or get away. That was fighting for the sake of sadistically inducing pain in others.

Raleigh moved quietly around the fight, gripping the knife that Third had left behind when she’d Jumped back to visit the past.

And, when Nev staggered from someone’s hit, Raleigh jumped in and drove that knife into her throat.