1
Follow the evidence. In Gaspery’s years of training, from the night he called Zoey to wish her a happy birthday through the present moment, that mantra had been a compass. Present moment was beginning to seem like a nonsensical term, but every moment can be distilled to a date, so let’s call it November 30, 2203, in Colony Two, this city in the grip of a pandemic that would eventually kill 5 percent of its residents, this place that wasn’t yet Gaspery’s home and not yet the Night City, walking rapidly through the streets with Zoey to evade a lockdown-enforcement patrol.
“Here,” Zoey said, and pulled him into a doorway. Gaspery peered through the glass door beside him, into a room of shadowy tables and chairs. This place was a restaurant, or had been. All of the restaurants in Colony Two were closed now.
They stood close together in the shadows, listening. All Gaspery could hear were sirens.
“You know you broke the most important protocol,” Zoey said quietly. “Why did you do it?”
“I couldn’t not warn her,” Gaspery said.
“Okay,” she said, “here’s your situation. I’ve only done a preliminary analysis, but as far as I can tell, your decision to save Olive Llewellyn had no recognizable effect on the Time Institute.”
“Does that mean I’ll be okay?”
“No,” she said, “it means you weren’t immediately lost in time. It means your travel privileges haven’t been revoked yet, because we sank five years of training into you and you still might be useful to the Time Institute, for at least the duration of this investigation. But if I were you, I’d get that tracker out of my arm and I wouldn’t come back.” She held up her device. “I have to go,” she said. “Stay here, in this time, and I’ll try to visit.”
“Wait. Please.”
She was still, watching him.
“I know you would never do what I did,” he said. “But suppose you had done it. If you were in my position, Zoey, what would you do?”
“It’s hard for me to imagine things that aren’t real,” she said.
“Can you try?”
Zoey sighed and closed her eyes. What occurred to Gaspery in that moment, watching her, was that he was her only person. Their parents were gone. She had never married. If she had friends or romantic interests, they’d never come up in conversation. He felt a fathomless guilt. Zoey opened her eyes.
“I might try to solve the anomaly,” she said.
“How?”
Zoey was quiet for so long that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. “Hold on,” she said. “It took our best research teams a year to figure out these coordinates.” She typed something into her device, and he heard his own device chime softly in his pocket.
“I sent you a new destination,” Zoey said. “We don’t know the time, we only know the day and the place, so you’ll have to wait in the forest.” She entered another code into her device and blinked out.
Gaspery was alone in the doorway, in the right city but the wrong time. He closed his eyes and considered the course of the investigation, because that was preferable to thinking about his sister, or thinking of what awaited him if he returned to his own time. He had a new destination. He entered the codes into his device, and he left.
