4
—Two gunshots, in quick succession—
Footsteps, a man running away—
Gaspery was in a tunnel. Light at either end, not just light but snow—
No, not a tunnel, an overpass. He could smell the exhaust of twentieth-century cars. He was very sleepy, from whatever he’d just been misted with. His back was to the embankment.
Ephrem was there too, calm and efficient in his dark suit. “I’m sorry, Gaspery,” he said softly, his breath warm in Gaspery’s ear. “I really am.” He plucked Gaspery’s device from his hand and replaced it with something hard and cold and much heavier—
A gun. Gaspery looked at it, curious, and the running man—the shooter, he realized dimly—disappeared, scrambling away and out of sight. Ephrem was gone too, a passing ghost. The air was cold.
He heard a soft groan near his feet. It was difficult for Gaspery to stay awake. His eyes kept closing. But he saw two men lying nearby, two men whose blood was seeping across the concrete, and one of them was staring directly at him. There was clear confusion in the man’s stare—Who are you? Where did you come from?—but he’d passed beyond speaking, and as Gaspery watched, the light left his eyes. Gaspery was alone under an expressway with two dead men. He nodded off, just for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he was staring at the gun in his hand, and the pieces of the puzzle were drifting together. It’s possible to get lost in time, Zoey had said, in a different century. Why go to the bother of incarcerating a man for life on the moon, when that man can be sent elsewhere, framed, and imprisoned at someone else’s expense?
He sensed movement to his left. He turned his head, very slowly, and saw the children. Two girls, aged perhaps nine and eleven, holding hands. They’d been walking under the overpass, but now they’d stopped some distance away, staring. He saw their backpacks, and realized they were on their way home from school.
Gaspery let the gun fall from his hand, and it clattered away like a harmless thing. There were lights washing over him now, red and blue. The girls were staring at the two dead men, then the younger girl looked at him, and he recognized her.
“Mirella,” he said.
