“What does that mean, exactly?”
“It’s on a need to know basis,” he said. “And you don’t.”
“Fair,” I admitted, nodding for him to continue.
“Your friend was tripping all kinds of alarms, wandering around through time like that. Not only did we need to stop him, we needed to figure out how he was doing it. You Walkers can’t sail those storms, at least not without the help of an MDLF.”
Though I didn’t like the obnoxious way he said you Walkers, I had to admit he was right.
“Did you find out how he was managing it when you cleaned out the virus?”
Avery hesitated, probably deciding whether or not this counted as “need to know.” “Yes, but it was programming he shouldn’t have had. We determined that it was a supplementary drive installed in his processing center.”
“You mean, they added new software to him?”
“More like they added the hardware required to support the software upgrades, but, yes. We removed it along with the virus.”
I was a bit irritated at everyone’s apparently fishing around in J/O’s guts (or circuits, whatever) without his permission, but I understood why it had been done. Binary had done it because, hey, they’re the bad guys. TimeWatch had done it because they had the monopoly on time travel, and wanted to keep it that way.
Not that they were doing a very good job—and not that I was ruling out the possibility of them being bad guys, mind you. My friendship with Acacia aside, I had yet to meet one single Agent of TimeWatch who didn’t completely rub me the wrong way. Including Acacia.
“There’ve been two, so far.” I said.
“What?”
“J/O, and Lady Indigo. That’s two people in recent memory who have been able to do something we thought was impossible. Fixing on essence and tracking through time, specifically.”
Avery narrowed his eyes. “I said the witch created a link. I never said she fixed on Josephine’s essence.”
“But that’s what she did, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Avery admitted, watching me closely. “What do you know about time signatures and essence waves?”
“Absolutely nothing,” I said, and he looked both doubtful and suspicious. “I mean it. I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“You knew enough to call it ‘essence,’” he accused.
“That’s what J/O said when he was tracking us through time. He said he’d fixed on our essence. Acacia said that’s what the Techmaturges did.” If I thought he’d looked suspicious before, he looked downright accusatory now.
“Did she,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” I said. “But if it makes you feel any better, I didn’t hear that name from her. She was as surprised as you are that I knew about them.”
“And where did you hear about them?”
“That’s need to know,” I said, admittedly a bit more smugly than I meant to. I heard a subtle click clack coming from the hilt of his sword as he shifted his stance. “But regardless, I first heard the word ‘essence’ u
sed like that from J/O. He said he was fixed on our essences, and could follow us anywhere. Binary agents can’t normally do that. Neither can HEX, as far as I was aware, but you didn’t seem at all surprised that Lady Indigo had created a link like that.”
“The witch had grown her powers beyond those of a normal HEX agent during her time in the Nowhere-at-All. It is surprising that she was able to do what she did, but not impossible. Especially not with the powers of those she’d absorbed.”
I winced at the word “absorbed.” Those had been my friends. “Fine. So, she could do it because of that, and J/O could do it because he’d been programmed to.”
“Correct.”
“But he can’t, anymore.”
“Right.”