“Could someone have gone back to get it?”
“I don’t…” I sighed, running a hand through my hair and looking up at the sky. It was both sunny and cloudy, and dark storm clouds loomed off to the west. If I looked closely, I could see rain falling around us, but we weren’t wet. The ghostly figures still milled about, walking or jogging or falling, everywhere I looked.
And one of them looked familiar.
“He found us!” I started to scramble to my feet, but Acacia grabbed my wrist.
“No,” she tugged on my arm, and I paused. “He hasn’t. He’s looking, but he can’t see us. If he could, he’d be here. He’d be clear.”
“Can he find us?” I sat back down.
She shook her head, then brought up a hand to rub her temple in frustration. “I don’t know. He shouldn’t be able to. He shouldn’t have been able to Walk through time. Walkers can’t do that, right?” She looked at me.
“No,” I said, “except for relativistic and sidereal changes from world to world.” Think of going from New York to LA—that’s TimeWalking in a way. But you expend a certain amount of time traveling between them, whether it’s just a few hours by a Boeing 747 or a few months by a Conestoga. “The closest we come is the In-Between, but that’s to get us from one world to another; it’s all about where we go, not when.” I had a sudden, dizzying flash of the awesome math it required just to move about outside time: to go six months forward or back instantaneously and
not wind up floating, flash frozen, in space because the Earth had moved out from under you on its merry way around the sun. Sir Isaac had had things simpler when time was serenely separate from the rest of the universe and not all bound up as part of space.
“I don’t know how to, anyway,” I told her. “No one I know knows how, unless they’ve been hiding it from me. We didn’t learn it on InterWorld.”
She scooted around so that her back was to mine and we were leaning against each other for support. I leaned back with some relief; my ribs were killing me. “What did he say?” she asked. “He said he didn’t answer to TimeWatch. What else?”
I thought—as much as was possible, anyway, with pain still clamoring at my nerve endings. “Uh…he said he didn’t need your technology. And that he was…anchored…? No. Fixed on our souls.”
“Essence,” Acacia said assuredly. “He said ‘essence.’ That he was fixed on your essence, and he’d follow it anywhere. But that’s not how we do it. It’s not TimeWatch technology. We can track people, but not like…” I felt her sit up a little straighter against me, felt her breathing quicken.
“Acacia?”
“They do that,” she said, her voice shaky. “They do that.”
“‘They’?”
“The things we’re sworn to fight. But he wasn’t—”
“A Techmaturge?”
She whirled around, and I almost fell at the abrupt lack of support. “How do you know about them?” Her stare was intense. I heard the ghostly echo of Jay’s voice: erase you…she’ll see that you’re expunged…
“How’d I know you were a Time Agent? Simple. I did my own research.” It was mostly true, and I wasn’t sure how to explain that I’d been told by the psychic imprint of my former mentor. I mean, she’d probably believe me, but it seemed better not to tell her.
After a moment she took a breath, looking up toward the foggy gray-blue sky. “Okay. He can’t actually have Techmaturge power, or we’d be dead. But he still managed to fix on our essence and follow. How?”
“Well, what else did he say?” We were both silent for a moment, thinking.
Finally, Acacia shook her head. “He just said he didn’t need our technology, and that he’d fixed on our essence.”
Something pinged in the back of my mind. “No, hold on. He said ‘we.’ He said, ‘We don’t need your technology.’”
“‘We’?” Acacia looked at me.
“J/O doesn’t talk like that. He says I, first person. He may be a cyborg, but he’s always been his own cyborg. The only robots I know of who refer to themselves in the collective are the—”
It hit me all at once, and I thought I was going to be sick again. “The Binary,” I managed, as Acacia just looked at me.
“You said he’s a cyborg.”
“He comes from a world closer to the technological end of the Arc. More advanced in science. They inject you with programming microchips the day you’re born. People live longer, are healthier, all of that.”
“Could he have been a traitor this whole time?”