 
#### displaced shadows 001

# She Who Knows Tomorrow

## Cara Lee

_First Edition_

Copyright 2015

All Rights Reserved

Third's clutch escaped their home universe years ago, before any of them were old enough to legally take a name and to stop having to risk themselves to keep others alive. She's still too young for that, and the alternate version of herself that she lives with calls her "Kitten".

First and Second, the other survivors in her clutch, live elsewhere. They've been waiting longer than necessary to join the Named, so they won't leave her behind again...and they've been breaching the laws that govern the Nameless.

Now their home universe is catching up to them, and they'll have to pay the price.

(A novella that'll take about 1.5 hours to read, for the average reader.)

This is a work of fiction. All people, places, and events are made up or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Any referenced trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners, and their use speaks only to the characters' opinions, not to the product.

Jenga® is a registered trademark of Pokonobe Associates and was invented by Leslie Scott. Author enjoys the game, but she has no association or affiliation with the company.

If the e-book you're reading wasn't bought for your use specifically, please respect the author and either delete or pay for the e-book. Thanks!

**Cover Designed by the Author**

Foreground Image (C) Katie Little \- Fotolia.com

Background Image (C) Flavio Takemoto (flaivoloka) - freeimages.com

This e-book contains two versions of the story, for the sake of anyone who wants "clean" rather than "bad" verbiage.

[Author's Edition  
(rated M)](ratedM.xhtml) [Authorized Cut  
(rated T)](ratedT.xhtml)

Why the two editions?

## She Who Knows Tomorrow

###  Author's Edition

#### (rated M)

Third, called 'Kitten' by the women she shared an apartment with, kept her attention on the wooden blocks stacked on the dining room table. She wasn't sure whence the game had come, but Janni had left it, not Raleigh--Third could read that much in the wood.

Third and Janni were _technically_ the same person, just from different universes. Different lives. Janni had made Naming, for example, without ever being Nameless.

But they had their similarities, too. Logic and coordination puzzles helped them both. Settled them. Helped them focus on whichever somewhen they were in at a particular moment.

Janni lived more linearly than Third was used to, jumping universes when she needed a break from whenever she was living. Third _could_ jump universes--that was how she had escaped her own, after all--but she preferred living sequentially, skipping around linear time. That was dangerous, though, because time jumping was more likely to get her noticed by Shadow Corps. Shadow Corps feared escapees from her kind of universe, because they were usually Nameless, like her.

Nameless weren't much liked by anyone.

And sometimes time jumping let her learn things she didn't want to know--like how Second was dead and First didn't know yet and Third would have to tell him.

She froze, remembering the cage she would be in--how Second's body would self-immolate, as Nameless were designed to do at death, to dispose of their bodies.

Thanks to a slip ahead, Third had seen it once already, from across the room, but she hadn't been the girl in the cage yet--who _had_ been Third herself, not some alternate universe version of her--digging the governor chip out of her flesh with her wristwire. That was something she'd only dare do if absolutely necessary. She was _so_ close to surviving long enough to warrant a name, and she had the governor chip for good reason.

She would have to experience it all again, up close, as the girl inside that cage. In a day, no more than three, she would witness what her sister actually did to kill their sister-in-law. Poison, maybe. Nev was good with those, and she wouldn't want to risk combat with a Nameless. Later-Third had looked unwell, probably from gamma exposure. Jumpers--especially mergers, like her--were more sensitive to gamma radiation than most primes, enough that Second would be slowed by them, too, though she was navigator class and therefore not as sensitive as Third was.

Of the two of them, Third was more dangerous, anyway.

Nameless were created to be cannon fodder. A Nameless who survived long enough ended up Named, but that was more manipulation than kindness, because it gave Nameless something to work towards, so they wouldn't give up and let themselves die. As the youngest of her particular clutch of Nameless--and as one who was usually sent without any backup, because her clutch had an odd number--Third was very good at killing. Better than other versions of herself, and Janni knew it.

Third didn't let herself sigh--she'd been Fourth, once, but the previous Third of her clutch had died due to an ill-timed grunt--and pulled another block from the tower game without toppling it. The game wasn't hard--basic logic, physics, coordination--but it was solid, and that helped her focus.

Getting too deep in the memories could make her Jump, and she knew better than to let her instincts take over like that. She'd likely hop over to the tenement building across the street and slaughtering the thugs before any of the gang's hostages realized they were being freed. She did things like that, sometimes--forgetting that she wasn't in her own universe and a threat would only hurt the locals, not her or any Named from her universe. That confusion was how Janni had convinced her to stick around.

After all, who better to keep her steady than an alternate version of herself?

Surrounded by the tenement buildings that towered over the street, Raleigh glanced at the wannabe mugger's dagger, then met his gaze. "You're kidding, right?"

The man snorted, baring his teeth in a way that he doubtless intended as threatening but that reminded her of a death grimace. "No joke, little lady. Just hand over the cred, and nobody need get hurt."

He had the 'nobody' right.

"I don't carry a credit chip," Raleigh said mildly, activating the internal macro that would check if the guy had backup. Not that it would make much difference if he did. She wasn't as lethal as Kitten, but she wasn't hapless. She wasn't even all that _little_ , but the guy was big enough that his genetic code would've been stripped of growth commands, back home. Too much risk of sizing mix-ups with nutritional allotments and vac suits.

The guy scowled and drew himself erect so he loomed over her as well as outweighed her. "Everyone carry cred."

Her enhancements detected another male behind her, but that one was leaning casually against a wall. He also carried a boot knife and a pocket pistol, but both were holstered and were almost mandatory for civvies in their part of town. Just a loiterer, not backup.

"Perhaps I'm broke," she pointed out. Or perhaps she was delaying him, hoping StretSec might appear--but the public security force tended to avoid these streets. Too little respect for the law, too much violence, too many freaks like her.

The guy pointedly ogled her shattersilk trench coat. "You dress too fine to be broke."

Raleigh sighed and opened her coat so he could see the darkened veins previously hidden by her collar--veins that undulated with something beyond her pulse.

He recoiled with a curse. "Cyban!"

She pulled her coat closed before he noticed anything else, like the gills, which weren't (yet?) insertable in this universe. "Yeah," she said, as if her being a cyborg were the only reason her roommates had somehow gotten her the shattersilk.

Raleigh was unusual, living in a universe and time zone that didn't like oddities. Janni _seemed_ normal, which was what counted, and Kitten... Kitten just acted odd, though Raleigh was pretty sure that girl had some sleeper tech that stayed too far under the skin to be visible.

Raleigh tapped the closure to seal up her coat, watching the mugger in case fear made him lash out. The loiterer behind her wasn't even curious about the situation--judging from his poise, pulse, and respiration rate--so she ignored him. "How about you hand over the knife, and I'll forget we met?"

"Cybans can't forget."

Her attacker wasn't stupid, then; just foolish.

"Pretend to forget. And not give your bio-ID to StretSec." Raleigh wasn't Janni, to be able to identify someone's bio-identity without a genetic sample, but people assumed all sorts of things about cyborgs. Raleigh's chipset was good, marine-grade in her home universe, but Janni's mods were invisible to her senses and enhancements alike, which was theoretically impossible.

The guy swallowed, his gaze skittering away from hers. "What a cyban need my knife for?"

The male behind them asked, "What, and leave you to mug the next neighbor that passes through?"

Raleigh didn't recognize the voice and automatically started running it through her vocal recognition software. She turned enough to glimpse him--he looked handsome, if one liked the scruffy brunet type, but his clothes were good, so he was either one of the decent locals or a pimp. Maybe an illegal drug dealer, but dealers tended to wear precious metals, the better to fence if addicts mugged them for a fix. His suit and shoes were quality, but he didn't even have a timepiece or console.

The would-have-been mugger gulped, flung his knife at her, and ran. Raleigh's combat chipset activated to twist her out of the blade's way, landing her in a crouch. The auto-released adrenaline triggered a headache.

She winced and force-quitted the hormone-activation macro, then picked up the blade. The scanners in Raleigh's hands called it well-made, though she'd blocked most of her own memories involving combat knives. Kitten would probably like it.

But the situation wasn't over yet. Raleigh turned towards the man behind her and ran his image through her facial recognition software.

He was leaning against a nearby wall, evidently waiting for someone. His forehead looked to be taut from fighting a headache, not from any concern about her oddness, but his wry question to the would-have-been mugger had sounded unstrained, even lax.

Her software wasn't getting any more hits for his face than it had for his voice. From some other universe, maybe? Raleigh didn't understand how universe jumping worked, but she'd noticed that her sort of refugee tended to congregate near each other.

"New to the area?" She wasn't about to ask if he were new to that universe. That would've been rude.

He glanced at the door to the place she shared with Janni and Kitten. "Not really."

"You know Janni?" she asked. He looked capable of handling himself, but not nearly to the degree to which Raleigh would've expected him to know _Kitten_.

He shrugged. "I'll catch her later."

As he walked away, Raleigh glanced around the street--the few people still out were studiously _not_ looking her way--then let herself into the rental that was paid for by whichever of the three of them was able to keep a job any particular month. Most folks didn't dare live on street level, but she and her roommates could handle it.

Any way they spliced it, they were all freaks.

Raleigh entered the apartment she shared with Janni and Kitten. The latter girl was sitting at the dining room table, staring at a tower made of wooden rectangular prisms that Raleigh's recognition software told her was Jenga--a game that she couldn't ever remember seeing in that universe. She opted not to ask about it. Janni, at least, would _say_ if she couldn't answer a question. Kitten...

The auburn-haired girl--who was the youngest of the three of them, and her too-big secondhand sweater made her look younger than she already was--turned her ice blue stare on Raleigh.

Raleigh keyed her software to hide her shiver and gave a little shake of her head. No problems. Not today.

Kitten relaxed enough for Raleigh's enhancements to notice--and _just_ enough for that. She wondered if Kitten did that on purpose, somehow.

Raleigh took off her trench coat and folded it over a chair, then put the knife on the table--hilt facing Kitten, because she wasn't stupid--and slid it over.

The girl plucked the knife off the table, eyed it, then stuck it under her sweater to join the other weapons hidden in the bulky clothing. Kitten even kept a _garrote_ somewhere. Maybe that was the wire bracelet on the girl's left wrist.

Raleigh went to the kitchen. "Can I make you anything?"

Kitten looked back at the Jenga game and precisely removed one wooden block.

She was pretty sure Kitten understood the lingua franca, but she wasn't sure that the girl was completely fluent, which helped the frustration. "I'll make enough coffee for you to have some, if you want."

"Allergic."

She froze, despite the quietness of Kitten's voice. The girl spoke so rarely that getting her to say _anything_ was a challenge. Janni had commented that Kitten was actually doing very well, considering the hellverse she was from, and Janni knew far more about the various universes and time zones than Raleigh ever would.

" _Allergic_?" she asked. "You've been living with us for months, and you just say this now?"

Now that she thought of it, Raleigh was sure the girl even _drank_ coffee. Was that a code word she'd forgotten?

"We like the taste."

A full sentence. Raleigh felt like clapping, except... "We?"

Raleigh detected air moving behind her, and she whirled to see a person--a man--that her enhancements insisted wasn't actually there and that she hadn't heard come in. "What, do some universes have holograms?"

The man's blue eyes--a little darker than Kitten's--glanced between them, his stance and manner reminding her of Kitten rather _too_ much.

And suddenly, Kitten didn't show up to her enhancements, either.

Raleigh didn't know the details of Kitten's home universe. That didn't mean she couldn't recognize an assassin-from-birth when she met one. "What do you want?"

His stance kept him ready to face her, but he turned his stare to Kitten. "Second?"

Silence answered him for a long moment, then Raleigh heard the Jenga game collapse. She turned so she could keep an eye on both assassins.

Kitten neatly placed a block on the table, beside where she'd been playing the game with herself.

Raleigh sensed more than heard the man's breath catch, his throat close. He stepped back, against the wall, as if to stay out of the way to take a moment to...mourn, it seemed.

"What's second?" she asked.

Kitten swiped the Jenga pieces off the table, the movement so fast and vehement that she didn't like the question, but her stare at Raleigh was as staid as usual.

The girl then got up from the table and approached the two of them. She paused in the doorway, then strode past Raleigh to the man.

He tensed. "Third--"

"She's a null," Kitten said flatly.

Raleigh had been called many things, but never that.

The man let out a slow breath, and Raleigh's enhancements caught relief in the sound. "The...other one is a prime?" he asked.

Kitten shrugged--an ever-so-slight nudge of the shoulders, but _shrugged_. The sight would've made Raleigh choke, had she been mid-swallow.

"She..." Kitten paused, as if rethinking her words. "Her bondmate is a natural."

Raleigh was reminded of Janni, when that woman went on one of her absentminded rambles that often featured jargon from other universes.

The man gave Kitten a hard look, started to say something, then stopped. He swallowed. "Her name?"

The girl gave him a self-conscious smile. "Jannis Lysacarly. She calls me 'Kitten'."

"I thought your name _was_ Kitten," Raleigh cut in.

She froze, angled as if she expected the strange man to strike her.

The man glanced at the ceiling, then to her neck, making her want to put her trench coat back on to hide the tech, the _gills_. " _Hard_ mods?" He sounded startled.

"Apex universe," the girl commented, as if in answer to a question.

Janni had called Raleigh's home universe that, but Raleigh hadn't known she'd done so in Kitten's hearing.

The man relaxed, ever so slightly, and Raleigh felt comfortable assuming that he was from the same universe as the girl. He even seemed to be Kitten's friend, insofar as an assassin could have friends.

He turned to Kitten. "Lunch?"

The girl nodded once and led the way out.

At the door, the man paused. "If you would, please: _Never_ say my sister has a name."

_Sister?_ Raleigh blinked. The specific shades of their hair and eyes were too distinct for them to look related. "Why not?"

His wry smile made him look like a civvie--and a rather handsome one, if Raleigh were honest with herself, which she tried to be. He glanced toward the door, and Kitten pointedly stepped out and shut it behind her.

"Because she hasn't earned a name yet," he said frankly. "She's nearing the age for it, and I'd like to see her live that long."

Raleigh blinked again. "Me saying she has a name could get her _killed_?"

"Yes."

She suddenly felt very glad that her home universe wasn't anything like _that_. Her home universe was messed up--all were, to some degree--but hers wasn't nearly that bad. She couldn't imagine still qualifying as a child at twenty-five.

He turned to leave.

"Who was second?" she blurted, realizing as she asked it that their reactions had suggested his mentioned 'second' had been a person, much as he called Kitten 'third'.

The man froze, then turned with a careful precision that again reminded Raleigh of Kitten, who was ever-ready to launch into something terrifyingly lethal. (She'd seen Kitten do it.)

He met her gaze and paused, as if considering how to phrase what he wanted to say for the universe they were both in.

He quietly answered, "My wife," and left.

And Raleigh realized she had no idea if he planned to bring his sister back or not, or if _he_ even had a name. After what he'd said about Kitten and Second, she doubted she wanted to know the answer to either question.

Third led her brother to across the street from a restaurant that was that somewhen's equivalent to Greek food. First studied the building a moment, then strode into the street toward the entrance, accepting her choice. Third continued down the sidewalk and crossed the street a block down before circling her way back up. Second--if she hadn't been dead--would've cut across the street a block up, and reached the restaurant before Third did.

Old habits died hard.

Third stepped around a waitress and headed for the back right corner--that would be his first choice, with the two of them, with the back left being first choice when all three of them together, and the front corners only chosen if the back options were taken--and slipped into the seat across from her brother as the waitress took his drink order--waters, for both of them, no ice, with lemon in his and lime in hers. First was thoughtful like that, much like TamLin, who had been their clutch's keeper, before...

She blinked twice, quickly, to interfere with the tear ducts. Tears were dangerous, whether because they interfered with the identification of a threat or because they displayed that she wasn't an automaton. She focused on the table as a distraction. It was plastic, engineered to look like wood, but plastics' bio-identities were easy to recognize.

Third turned in her seat to keep as much of an eye on their surroundings as she could, though First had taken the true corner and thereby set himself as the on-duty sentinel. Firsts didn't always see themselves as responsible for their clutches--some only delegated, as if they were keepers, themselves--so Third appreciated his willingness to give her a break, when he could.

His own limitations--and choices--meant that the worst, longest, and most dangerous jobs had always fallen to Third, often by herself... She didn't need to be psy-positive to know her brother felt guilty about it. He'd been born first, before their mother had realized her children were usually unstable. He could've been Named all along, had their mother wanted that.

Third had never had that option.

First opened his menu. "Where's the chicken?"

She crisply opened her menu to the appropriate page, paused long enough for him to spot it, then checked the veal, herself.

"You have local currency?" First asked blandly. He knew she did--she wouldn't have recommended the restaurant if she couldn't pay for it--and his tone made the question rhetorical.

Janni knew how Third got her money, too, though Third was pretty sure Raleigh didn't. Their spot of town made it easy. She could rob a burglar or mug a pimp or flip a bundle of unlicensed drugs. (The last one could be the most amusing, considering dealers sometimes noticed that she was selling them their own jolt.) She had to vary her targets and processes, too, because people swapped notes, and predictability would get her killed.

But keeping the criminal element mad at her kept her from getting complacent, and it paid well, without her having to take a name. She'd fled her universe because she _wasn 't_ suicidal, so she wasn't about to do something that would get her hunted as a Breach.

Living with a Named version of herself did kinda stretch the laws thin, but Janni _was_ Named, so Third wasn't neglecting her duty. If you assumed that Janni let Third protect her from Infested--which didn't exist in their current universe, so the law only applied if you squinted.

Third liked squinting.

But perhaps that was because of TamLin. Even though he'd been their clutch's keeper and responsible for keeping them in line, he had been a sensate, naturally aware of the traces left by displaced time or universes. Gave him cluster headaches, even.

She blinked twice, quickly, to stop the tear ducts, ducking her chin to hide any glint from watery eyes. She put her menu down so First could see it, tapped her choice, then folded her menu and put it aside.

The waitress returned with their waters, and First ordered for both of them.

The woman frowned. "I think the young lady should order her own meal."

"She told me what she wanted before you came over here," First said calmly. "And don't forget the extra olives."

The waitress's frown deepened as she studied Third, who observed that the woman had acne scars--some fresh enough that she suffered adult outbreaks--and had removed a wedding tattoo from her right wrist, judging from the size and shape of that particular scar. Not enough credits to remove the blemish, probably.

"Madam?" First cut in, though Third was sure he'd noticed the removed tattoo, too. "Please take our orders to the kitchen. My sister is hungry."

"Is she mute?"

"Sometimes." His mild, dry tone mimicked TamLin, and Third had to look away again, to maintain her composure. The waitress left, and First sighed softly. "I'm sorry. I should've thought before--"

"He's _dead_ ," she interrupted, though he would've had to strike her for such disrespect, back home. "She's dead. We've both lost the reasons we ran to begin with, so it's either find something else to live for or go back home and let the zombies eat our brains."

Third didn't talk that much. She was getting...confused. She sipped her water as she adjusted her mental state to reduce the resonance--psychic influence from a nearby alternate version of herself--then let out a long sigh. "Janni."

"She's more verbose, then?"

Third shrugged. "Named." A person, allowed--required--to speak, plus from a universe that featured no Infested and more culture.

Out of habit, she scanned the restaurant for threats.

She frowned and turned to get a better look, though that would be overtly obvious. The object of her attention noticed her, and he gave her a wry, rueful smirk from across the restaurant.

"Third?" First asked, the polite request a demand for an explanation.

She glanced at her brother, and when she looked back, she was unsurprised to find the man she'd been staring at was gone. "Father," she whispered, though he wasn't _their_ father.

She turned back to the table as the waitress set their ordered meals down. First's expression asked the question he wouldn't dare say aloud. Nameless weren't allowed to care.

"Janni's father." Though Third knew he was gone, she searched the crowd of restaurant employees and patrons, hoping for a glimpse, something that would help her figure out why he was there. "I take after him."

Which made her all the more worried about why Nev would kill Second and why Third would remove her governor chip. Jumpers who knew how to use their abilities were difficult to capture. Second, as a navigator, was even harder to catch than Third was. Why was _Second_ the one who was about to end up dead?

Third had met Janni's father once before, when he slipped into her universe, and though he hadn't said as much--and though his universe preferred euthanasia over namelessness--she suspected he'd originally been Nameless, himself.

Just one more thought of the many that Third was careful to keep Janni from picking up. Janni didn't need that knowledge worrying her conscience.

Raleigh recovered her equilibrium by making coffee and preparing sandwiches to stick in the fridge, for everyone to eat whenever they got around to it. Janni came in when Raleigh was halfway through putting jalapeño kale chips on the sandwich she'd made for herself. "You okay?"

"This body is undamaged," Janni said, one of the few overtly odd things she'd say, sometimes. Brushing her brown-dyed bangs out of her eyes, she wrinkled her nose and peered at the sandwich. "I hope you have something prepped that you didn't ruin with condiments."

Raleigh pointed a thumb at the fridge. Janni promptly opened it and grabbed a plastic-wrapped sandwich and a single-serve bottle of milk.

Before Janni could ask where their third roommate was, Raleigh said, "Kitten's brother picked her up for lunch."

The milk bottle and sandwich hit the floor, and Janni was facing Raleigh before her combat chip recognized a possible threat.

Raleigh swallowed hard, pulse pounding from the adrenaline. "You look a lot like Kitten when you do that."

Janni watched her for a long moment--looking ever so creepily like Kitten--then blinked once, still as expressive as an iceberg. "Unsurprising."

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

The other woman--Raleigh _thought_ Janni was younger than she was, but it was hard to tell, and it was always possible that something in Janni's universe made aging go funky--looked irritated. "You've lived with us for months, Raleigh. _Months_. You have military-grade enhancements. Granted, your universe is apex class, not all that advanced, but... How have you _not_ noticed?"

Only Janni could pull off indignant and insulting at the same time.

"Noticed _what_?" Raleigh snapped, perhaps more irritated than she should've been.

Janni indicated her face--no, her _eyes_ , which were pale blue, much like--

No. _Exactly_ like Kitten's.

"Finally." Janni huffed, as if it were perfectly natural to assume that someone from another universe would hang out with _an alternate version of herself_. "That wasn't all that hard, was it?"

That explained why the roots of Janni's brown hair came in the precise shade of auburn of Kitten's, and Raleigh could only assume that Janni had her hair professionally styled to further promote the dissimilarity. And... "You have a brother?"

Janni's gaze chilled, and Raleigh wondered why she'd never noticed how comparable she and Kitten were. Now that she thought of it, they were most similar when one or the other was agitated. Some low-level empathic or telepathic ability, maybe?

Then Janni's eyes thawed to their usual pale blue, more water than ice. "I _had_ a brother," she said, tone the clinical one she used when discussing potentially disturbing topics. "He didn't survive to Naming, in my universe."

Raleigh stared. "Naming?" she whispered. Maybe Janni was old enough to have relearned civilian reflexes after she'd once been an assassin.

Janni crouched and waved a dismissive hand as she picked up the dropped milk and sandwich. "I wasn't handicapped. I was Named on my first birthday, which is the normal date for mods. Um, primes. Alphas?" She squinted at Raleigh. "Your universe didn't have us, but you get my gist, I think."

Raleigh blinked. "But you aren't a cyborg."

That question had come up in conversation before, though Janni never had explained how she could read people's bio-identities. Raleigh had assumed it was some freak mutation, but Kitten couldn't do that...so far as Raleigh knew.

"Not as such, no." Janni sighed. "Apex class modifications are all tech, hardware--so 'hard' mods. They end with you. No inheritance involved."

That wasn't strictly true. "I inherited a tolerance for them."

She shook her head and set her sandwich and bottle of milk on the counter. "Not the same." She quickly unwrapped the food. "Some universes, the mods are biological, inherited. That's 'soft' mods. Usually, scientists who played God that much ended up producing monsters, too, so the originally optional mods ended up necessary."

Janni took a bite, chewed, swallowed--and didn't comment on the mustard, which meant she wasn't paying attention to what she was eating. "But soft mods get...messy. They don't always take, or they cause problems. So, to make sure kids aren't handicapped, they aren't...named, aren't legally people, until they survive _x_ months. And then if something shows up before that ceremony, and you're a _cripple_..." She grimaced.

With how clearly Janni was explaining things now, Raleigh was starting to believe the woman was usually hard to follow on purpose. "Then you don't get Named?"

Janni eyed her sharply, belying her usual happy-go-lucky behavior. "No. You're either euthanized, or you're one of the Nameless." She was quiet for a long moment. "Neither option is kind. In some universes, one option is more common than the other."

"Kitten is Nameless?"

"Third," Janni said softly. "She is Third of her... I'm not sure what they call a group of Nameless. Her brother..." Her gaze went distant. "Her brother was First, for the same reason he was euthanized in my universe."

Raleigh had always assumed Janni's home universe was better than Kitten's. Now she wasn't so sure. "Your parents _killed_ him?"

"I'm not sure what his disability is... It was before I was born, and nobody thought about it, and Kitten's good at avoiding thoughts she doesn't want me to pick up."

Raleigh stared. "You're _telepathic_?"

Janni shook her head. "More...empathic," she said blandly. "I'm...a weaker psy than my alternates. I'm actually better off than the strongest me--"

"There's _another_ version of you? In _this_ universe?" Three versions of the same person seemed overmuch.

"Sometimes. Lysacarly jumps universes a lot for her job, but she's not infrequently in this one--likely due to Kitten and me, though I don't think she's noticed us yet. When you fold time and space enough to produce paradoxes like ours, well... Like attracts like."

Raleigh wondered how many versions of _her_ there were. "And when...Lysacarly...notices you?"

"She might have to arrest us--me, Kitten. Lysacarly's Shadow Corps." Janni paused, but she evidently wasn't waiting for Raleigh's reaction to discovering that a _telepathic_ version of Janni was an active member of the stay-in-your-own-universe police, because she continued before Raleigh could think of one. "What happens is my memory and thoughts can get...confused, with those of any other version of me that's in range. It's a known issue for psy-positives, and it's usually called 'resonance'. Kitten and I are fairly used to it, though she started out enough better than me that I suspect she's met herself more often than I have. Lysacarly _might_ be used to it, but she's fully telepathic, so it'll affect her worse than it does us."

The woman's casual chatting about alternate versions of herself reminded Raleigh of how, when they'd met, Janni had glanced at her gills and said, "Apex. Need a place to stay?" Only later had Raleigh realized that Janni's 'apex' was a comment on the type of universe she was from.

"What does this have to do with...First"--Kitten's brother--"taking her to lunch?"

Janni frowned, pausing. "Did they say anything about Second?"

"She was First's wife."

Janni nodded, as if she'd known that.

"And she's dead."

Janni stared at Raleigh, again resembling Kitten. Then she cursed, quietly but vehemently, for several seconds. "Dead?" she muttered. "How can _Dasher_ be..."

Raleigh assumed Second's name had been Dasher, in Janni's universe.

Janni stood, polished off her sandwich, and gulped down her milk. "Did they say where they were going?"

She shook her head.

"Did they say when they'd be back?"

Raleigh just gave Janni a _What do you think?_ frown.

Janni went on another cursing spree, running her hands through her hair. "Okay. You see them--either of them-- _call me_ , okay? This...this is not good." She pulled her console from her pocket, started scrolling through her contacts, grimaced, then pocketed it again.

And promptly left the apartment without bothering to fill Raleigh in or try to recruit her for help.

Raleigh couldn't help but wonder if that oversight was a commentary on how much Janni valued her friendship.

After eating her lunch and ordering baklava for dessert, Third slipped out, ostensibly to go to the ladies' washroom, but she continued out the door to the greenhouse out back. One of the reasons she liked this restaurant was it grew much of its own seasonings.

That and the Greek-ish menu. She was fond of Greek food.

She caught a whiff of hash and followed the scent to Janni's father, who slouched against a table--on the end with the unused clay pots that the restaurant sold with cuttings, rather than by the basil that was on most of the table--wearing blue-collar local.

Drugs tended to be legally obtainable, in this somewhen, but that didn't make them have any fewer risks or side effects. Her TamLin had used them when he could, to dull his sensitivity to Jumps, but Third had never dared try them, herself. Nameless couldn't afford to handicap themselves.

She stared at the cigar in Janni's father's hand for a long moment, intending it to be as a question--but she glimpsed what was under his skin, climbing up his hand. She froze.

He let out a long puff of smoke and flexed the hand belonging to the Infested arm. "Figured you'd notice."

She met his gaze--the blue of her eyes came from him, obviously, as did the darkness of her hair. "Janni thinks you're dead."

His slight smile was at odds with the regret in his eyes. "I am."

Those eyes would give her nightmares, later, but Third found them comforting anyway. Mergers weren't easy to kill, and if he'd been Nameless... He'd be even more difficult, than most.

And the first thing the infestation did, when creating an Infested, was remove the host's ability to kill themselves. Third had seen people try, desperate to die at their own hands so their loved ones wouldn't have to kill them. Those were the ones younger Nameless tended to train on, because the host was still lucid enough to at least fight the infestation's urge to protect itself.

It wouldn't be the first time Third had to eliminate someone she knew--and to be honest, Janni's father was a stranger she'd met, briefly, years before. But...his universe didn't have Infested.

They'd met when he slipped into _her_ universe, though.

He gave her a slight smile and nod, saying yes, she'd guessed right--that his infestation was from _her_ universe.

_Her_ fault.

"Now, don't you go thinking that," he said gently. "I was dumb. Assumed that our universes were sufficiently similar for the doctors back home to be able to handle it. Delayed the spread, but..."

Third knew. She'd seen the progression, often enough.

She checked their surroundings. People were busy taking advantage of their lunch breaks, not watching the man and girl of questionable income chatting by the basil. The two of them were weren't invisible, but they were far from the center of attention.

She sidestepped to near his side. "Message?" Still-lucid Infested persons often wanted their loved ones told some last thing. Usually sharing it got the Nameless deliverer spat upon or struck, but Third would do her job.

He shook his head. "My wife and I... We staged my death years ago, once we realized..." He looked away. "We agreed it would be easier for the kids, so... There's nobody to take a message to. Thanks for asking."

Easier for their children to think some accident had killed him, rather than his forays into another universe? Hard to think that true, for a jumper like Janni. But... "For Nev," his firstborn daughter, Third agreed.

She had been young when she'd met him, but she was sure he hadn't gotten Infested then. She could only guess why he'd intentionally Jump back into a _hellverse_.

Only guess, and remember his expression when he realized they'd have to leave her behind when they escaped her universe for theirs, and wish she didn't take after him quite so much.

"Third..." He sighed, and she waited for him to finish. "You know I wouldn't ask this of you, if I had anyone else who I could trust to do this."

She took a small step back, tucking one hand inside her sweater. "Lie." Cruel of her, to call him on that, but he reminded her too much of herself. She prompted, "Janni?"

His daughter was Named, yes, but she was every bit as capable of killing him as Third was--maybe more, because she had more control over her mods, more stability. _Janni_ didn't have a governor chip, blocking most of her abilities because they were likely to kill her, if left unchecked.

Tears welled in the man's eyes--the eyes of Janni's father, not hers; she'd never had a father. Before Third did something crueler, something that drove him to give up entirely and let the infestation take over, she plucked a knife from the belt hidden by her oversized sweater and stepped around him, stumbling into the table.

Her blade found its mark and returned to its sheath--she'd clean it later, replace the sheath--and the pots fell, some crashing to the ground, some breaking.

As he collapsed to the ground--still alive and in a lot of pain (but not for long, and the infestation would die with him because nobody from this universe would have any mods for it to latch onto)--she backed away, _into_ a passerby, with enough force to continue the chain reaction of stumbling and jostling and confusion about who had started what.

Third scurried away from the mess, as if overwhelmed by the noise, and let herself back into the restaurant hallway, breathing harder than she should've been.

First stood across the hall and a little way up from the ladies' washroom, waiting for her. He spotted her and tilted his chin in inquiry. She answered with slight shrug as she approached.

As she reached him, he turned towards the restaurant proper, and they both headed back to their table, where her lunch and two servings of coffee and baklava waited.

"I was beginning to think Nev had picked you up," he said.

"Nev?" Third asked promptly, _because_ she wasn't supposed to, so the question would get First focused on making sure none of the witnesses would necessitate her being punished for it, distract him from noticing any little tells that slipped from how unsteady she felt. She already knew their Nev would be joining them in that universe soon, if she wasn't already there.

Nev would kill Second. Nev would stick Third in a cage and poison her and leave her to watch as she killed Second.

Why would Nev kill Second?

First's expression tightened as they slipped into their seats. He knew why Third acted out--understood it, even--but that didn't mean he liked it. "I think she might be around."

And Nev would be all too happy to assume Third was a Breach. With their universe's TamLin dead, the clutch had no keeper, so Nev would be free to assume the worst and kill Third.

That still didn't explain why _Second_ would die.

"What took you so long?" her brother asked. "Smelling the basil?"

She did like the scent. Janni's father had chosen to die near the basil, so maybe that was something else the two of them had in common.

Third took a bite of the baklava, ignoring the coffee. If she were to be fighting for her life, she would need to be operating at full capacity, not woozy from her coffee allergy.

As she started on her lunch, she glanced at her left wrist. Digging out the governor chip would hurt.

Third abruptly remembered that First had asked why she'd been delayed. "Work."

He raised his eyebrows. "This universe keeps you busy, then. That's good."

Never mind that the job she'd had to do had been a holdover from their home 'verse. Considering First was about to lose his wife and Third suspected she'd be the reason for it, she was willing to let him believe what he would. Janni's father had come to _her_ , not him, when he needed death. She wondered if First remembered their father.

She took another bite of baklava, wondering whom she'd trust to off _her_ , if she ever needed killing. The only person she'd ever trusted that much was their keeper, TamLin, and she'd driven him into killing himself.

Her brother frowned, but he followed her lead and ate dessert.

Raleigh would have been the first to admit that she wasn't all that _good_ a friend to her housemates. _Good_ friends knew about allergies and families and origin stories. _Good_ friends didn't steal contact lists when the opportunity arose.

But in Raleigh's universe, taking precautions even with those she trusted was standard procedure--though her continuance of that procedure into this universe was, perhaps, influenced by the knowledge Janni and Kitten would be forgiving of such stemming-from-native-universe habits.

Sitting at the dining room table, she paged through her console's copy of Janni's contact list, trying to figure out whom the woman had considered calling. It was probably one that had been on there awhile, for Janni had grimaced like that before.

Someone was breathing behind her.

Raleigh's enhancements analyzed the height, temperature, and other details about the body suddenly behind her before she turned. "How do you do that?"

Kitten stood...stoically, Raleigh thought, now that she knew of the girl's namelessness. The ice blue eyes observed without revealing what thoughts or emotions went on behind them. The circles under her eyes were too dark to be explained by the few hours she'd been away, and she was even more unkempt than usual. Dirt smudged her right cheek, and her sweater was gone, leaving a sleeveless summer shirt that matched her eyes, and the wire bracelet was missing from her left wrist.

"How's your brother?" Raleigh didn't expect any more answer to that question, but she figured it was polite to ask. "I'm sorry about his wife."

Kitten blinked twice, quickly--as if hiding emotion, rather than as if startled.

"Janni told me about..." She wasn't sure how to broach the topic of the two of them being alternate versions of the same person. "About Lysacarly."

After a long moment, Kitten pivoted toward the Jenga game, which Raleigh had picked up and re-stacked in its tower. The girl paused, then plucked out a wooden block two levels from the bottom. Raleigh suspected it wasn't a coincidence that the action conveniently put Kitten's back to her.

"So 'prime' is what you call someone with biological modifications?" she asked--again, not expecting an answer, but she wanted to let the girl know that she'd followed some of her conversation with her brother. "And 'null' is someone without?"

Kitten turned her head enough to look over her shoulder at Raleigh, which was enough of an affirmative for her.

"You said Janni had a 'bondmate'. I didn't know she was married." Raleigh was fishing, and she knew Kitten would recognize that.

But Kitten let Raleigh notice when she relaxed--insomuch as she ever relaxed--so might just be willing to let enough slip for her to put things together. After all, Kitten was an alternate version of Janni, and if Raleigh knew _anything_ about the woman, it was that she loved dropping cryptic hints.

The girl picked another brick from the tower, then put it down on the table beside Raleigh's console. She turned her hand palm up, as if asking for the device.

"Do you know how to use it?" Raleigh asked.

Kitten didn't flinch, didn't move, didn't so much as glance Raleigh's way. Just kept her palm up for the console.

Raleigh gave it.

The girl looked the device over for a moment, then started tapping buttons as if she owned one. She didn't. Raleigh had tried giving her one, a few times, but it always ended up returned, with the money back in her account. She now wondered if that was another facet of Kitten's namelessness. No name, so no property, maybe? That would explain why Kitten only ever wore hand-me-downs and castoffs--except for her weapons and the first aid kit. Those, Kitten would buy new, if necessary, and she kept them in excellent condition.

Raleigh remembered Janni's _' I suspect she's met herself more often than I have.'_ "See a console in one universe, you've seen them all?"

Her tapping continued without pause. "Tablet," she said, voice soft and flat. "Usually."

"It's usually called a tablet?"

Kitten nodded once and offered the console back.

Raleigh took it and saw a specific address book entry open on the screen. No name was listed, but the entry had a photo, so Janni had chatted with him before--and the photo was the man she'd seen that morning, who'd spoken up when she encountered the would-have-been mugger.

She was sure Kitten had noticed her startlement already, so she asked the first thing that she could think of: "Is that a _beard_?"

The girl gave a little huff that was her equivalent of a snort. "Four o'clock shadow. It's..." Kitten glanced away, as if evaluating if she should continue, then gave her infinitesimal shrug. "Some people _naturally_ mix well with others, genetically."

She'd called the man a 'natural' when speaking to her brother, Raleigh remembered.

"That...isn't common. So they usually have...abilities, to help them adjust or freeze their appearance more easily than most, to help them hide. He likes looking a little scruffy, in clean-cut universes. Makes people underestimate him."

Kitten spoke as if she knew Janni's husband, and the paragraph was more words than Raleigh could ever remember hearing the girl string together at once, even when speaking to her brother.

"He exists in your universe?"

She looked away. "Dead."

Raleigh realized that if Janni loved one version of him enough to _marry_ him--well, Kitten had probably cared for her universe's version of him, too. "I'm sorry."

Kitten met her gaze for a long moment, faintly puzzled, before she focused back on the Jenga game. "We escaped our universe. He was...unable to acclimate."

Raleigh winced. Acclimation to another universe--where people didn't sound, look, or maybe even move like they did in your own universe--had been tough for _her_ , and her universe had been a lot less apocalyptic than Kitten's seemed to have been.

Her forefinger hovered over the _Call_ button. If she dialed, she'd be announcing that she'd taken Janni's contact list--and she'd also be officially ignoring Janni's request to be called once Kitten turned up.

But First was still out there, somewhere. If Kitten's appearance was anything to go by, her Nameless brother could use some help.

Raleigh hit the button. The call was answered a few seconds later. _" Yes?"_ the man asked, his face filling the screen.

"I'm Raleigh," she said, feeling awkward. The man was Janni's _husband_. So why did he live elsewhere? And why did Janni grimace whenever she considered calling him?

_" I'm sorry?"_

The man didn't even know who she was. She lived with _his wife_ , and he didn't know.

He'd left before she'd walked in, that morning. Maybe he didn't recognize her.

Raleigh itched to hang up and call Janni, as she _should_ have done from the get-go.

Kitten drew a sharp breath and stepped toward the console, reaching out as if to enter the call, then quickly caught herself and stepped even further back out of range, taking up her usual stance, though it seemed...tense...and she stared at the far wall rather than at her surroundings in general.

That was enough acceptance for Raleigh to say, "I live with Janni."

The man blinked, frowning. _" What's the matter?"_

So the man, whoever he was, didn't expect her to know about him unless there was a problem.

That was probably a valid assumption. "First is missing," Raleigh guessed, suspecting she was right when Kitten locked her ice-blue stare on her. "Second is dead. Third is..."--she glanced at Kitten--"damaged." _This body is undamaged_ --an odd turn of phrase she heard Janni use--and knowing what she did now, she suspected 'this body' was how Janni distinguished herself from Kitten.

The man still looked puzzled.

Raleigh let out a long breath. "Look, I don't know how much I can say. I don't want to get these Nameless people killed."

His expression blanked into the stoicism she usually associated with Kitten. It looked far less creepy on him. _" Where are you?"_

"At the apartment." She paused. "Your wife went out looking for them, I think."

From the way the visuals blurred, the man had picked up his console and started running. _" Bondmate, not wife,"_ he corrected casually. _" We're bonded, not consummated."_

If he was able and willing to converse while running, Raleigh would accept all the knowledge she could get. "I thought _bonded_ meant _married_."

He shrugged and ducked around something. _" In some universes. In ours...it's more 'betrothed'."_

"Then why don't you marry?"

_" Various reasons."_

"Resonance," Kitten said, even more softly than she was wont, as if making certain she wouldn't be heard by the man on the other end of the call.

Raleigh looked at the girl, her face warming. Janni had called Kitten better at keeping her thoughts to herself. Being unable to keep another, younger version of herself from hopping into her mind while she was...occupied... _would_ be rather problematic.

_" What?"_

"Nothing," Raleigh said quickly, not wanting to get Kitten--or Third, or whatever she was supposed to be called, since she didn't have an actual name--in trouble.

From his expression, he wasn't fooled, but he also was willing to let it slide.

"I'm sorry, but what's your name?" Raleigh asked. "I mean, if you have one."

He gave a wry half-smile, and she found herself liking him. _" Call me Lin."_

Kitten swiftly left the table, heading down the hall, and Raleigh couldn't help thinking the man's feminine-sounding name was particularly ill-fitting.

After Third and First finished eating, she led the way up on the roof of a building owned by one of the more notorious gangs in town--they were actually honorable and took care of their own, but their retaliation against threats was unusually thorough. Third tended to think of them like a huge clutch of Nameless. She treated them accordingly, and they returned the favor.

The wind tried to pull Third's hair out of its ponytail and First's out of its carefully arranged mess. Third kept her arms at her sides, tucked in the folds of her sweater, since she didn't have a coat. She had long been used to cold, due to the decrepit space habitations she'd grown up in, but appearances mattered.

And her weapons were under the sweater.

"No...beetles?" her brother asked.

"Bugs," she corrected, even as she sensed that something far worse than an eavesdropper had joined them on that roof, on the other side of the lookout post. "No."

The gang's leader wasn't from another universe himself, but his parents had been--from two different universes, if she read his bio-identity right, though Janni was better at that than she was--and he didn't give her any trouble. But by that same token, he accepted any _other_ shadows--escapees from other universes--as well.

First let himself smile a little. It even reached his eyes. "You make friends fast, don't you, Third?"

"Allies." Nameless didn't have friends.

His expression darkened, but he nodded once.

"Nice of you to worry about the laws _now_ , Breach."

First started. He'd gotten far too complacent for his own good...and Third had the sick feeling that complacency was what would be the death of Second.

" _Nev_?!" First sounded startled, as if still shocked, but he was scanning their surroundings for escape.

Third already knew where they were, what was around. She sidled toward one edge of the roof. "Not Breach," she said quietly, as their Named sister came into view.

Nev's mods were fully active, her biotech phased and plugged into a netsuit that resembled a black spiderweb worn between skin and clothes--and there was shattersilk over it, so Nev had been in this universe for at least a day, maybe two, to find that and poison the owner for it. Slow, but she wasn't stupid.

Or, at least, Nev hadn't been stupid when they were in their own universe, but now Third recognized the hardness to Nev's gaze. Nothing Third could say or do would shake her sister's conviction that a breach had occurred.

First was beyond Nev's authority to hunt--she could arrest a first, but firsts could only be hunted by keepers--so Nev wouldn't try to hurt him unless he tried to interfere.

Third took another step, ostensibly away from Nev, but it put her on the roof's edge.

First didn't look at her directly, but he did tense, so he'd noticed. "Third isn't a Breach, Nev."

Nev glowered at him, her expression admitting who had given her the hunt order: their mother. "You consummated?"

The question was directed at First, and he blanched, following Nev's meaning before Third--

" _Oh_ ," she whispered, suddenly understanding why Second was about to die, and Third herself had nothing to do with it.

Second was _pregnant_.

Nameless weren't permitted children. Childbearing defeated the purpose of _being_ Nameless.

Third leaped off the roof to drop and roll atop the neighboring building below and started running, illogically hoping she could find Second in time to save her.

Maybe the Second she'd seen die had been another universe's, or a paradox, and she could stop it if she only fought it, tooth and nail, making use of everything her original hellverse had taught her.

Or so Third tried to convince herself.

As Raleigh waited for Lin, she finished her lunch and drank some water, then kept poking through Janni's contact list, wondering who most of the people were.

The door opened, and Lin edged in, glancing around and quickly shutting the door behind him. "You shouldn't leave that open."

She frowned at the door. "I didn't." But Raleigh couldn't imagine Kitten leaving the door unlocked, either.

Lin frowned back, glanced around the room, and focused on the Jenga game. He went to it, reaching for the block the 'damaged' Kitten had put down, but he didn't touch it.

"Someone's been Jumping," he muttered, forehead scrunched as if he had a headache.

"What?"

"Time jumping," he absentmindedly clarified, still frowning, and gave his temple a brisk rub.

Kitten _had_ looked more tired than Raleigh had thought could be accounted for by a few hours. She looked down the hall, where the girl had gone--and where Raleigh now suspected she wouldn't be able to find her. " _What?_ "

"Janni was playing the game?"

"Kit--" Raleigh remembered the girl was _Nameless_. "Third."

His frown deepened. " _Another_ jumper?"

She froze. "I thought jumpers Jumped _universes_."

He shrugged. "Universes...time... Pretty similar, though jumpers tend to specialize in one or the other." He paused and glanced at Raleigh, but his tone was conversational, not critical. "I thought First was missing."

She shrugged. "Third showed up by herself, looking like something a medic had dragged in. That was a guess. Why?"

The door opened, and Kitten's brother entered, his attention focused on Lin--warily, Raleigh thought, realizing First was a bit more expressive than his sister.

"Sir," First said.

Ah. So First was _not_ missing. She wondered what Third's stare had been for.

Lin waved dismissively, scrutinizing the tower. "This me is not your keeper."

First's gaze narrowed, making Raleigh wonder if Lin's casual words were somehow insulting. "No, my keeper slit his own throat once we reached a universe without Nameless."

Lin turned sharply towards him, and the two men exchanged a long look.

"Well, then," Lin said quietly, breaking the silence. "It's a good thing I'm not from your universe, isn't it?"

Raleigh was beginning to feel as if she should make a flow chart to keep track of who all was from which universe and what their relationships were.

Lin went to the kitchen found the glasses on the first try. "You registered?"

"Nev is," First answered immediately.

Lin filled two glasses with water. "Ah, you have a Nev." He handed one glass to First, who accepted.

They each took a sip, looking eerily similar, despite being two distinctly different people.

Lin swigged the rest of his water, then fiddled with his glass. "You take a name yet?"

First glanced away. "We were waiting for Third."

Lin nodded, as if that made sense. "I'm sorry about Dasher--ah, Second. She wasn't anyone I wanted to know, in my universe, but she turns out well in the universes where she gets you."

From the startled glance First tossed at Lin, he didn't find the other man's words as insensitive as Raleigh did.

"Thank you," First said quietly, sounding...grateful.

Lin shrugged. "My universe favored death over namelessness. I look at you, I see a person."

"A sentimental TamLin." First shook his head, as if he found the concept hard to believe. "Do I make Naming, in any universe?"

Lin--which was evidently short for TamLin--gave First a steady scrutiny, then went to the sink for more water. "Damarc-Luc Waver, diminutive Marc. He's an admin in Shadow Corps." He filled his glass, then returned, giving First a quick grin as he sat back down. "We meet for drinks, sometimes."

First blinked once. "You aren't registered."

"He's administration, not field or tactical. Not required to report non-registrants." Lin shrugged. "Besides, he has to keep his doors open, if he wants to have a shot at saving his Nev once--well. Let's just say Nev's particularly ill-suited to Jumping, no matter which universe she's from."

First snorted, as if amused, but he seemed...pensive.

"This male bonding is all very nice," Raleigh cut in, "but where's Third?"

The two men exchanged an _Isn 't it obvious?_ glance.

"Fleeing Nev," Lin said mildly. "Speaking of which..." He turned to the Jenga game, picked up the block Kitten had moved, and ran it through his hands, then slid it back into place in the tower. "That's better."

Raleigh looked at him, then at the specific block that he'd been careful to touch--a block that Kitten had handled on purpose. The man also accepted First's glass and ran it through his hands on the way to set it in the sink.

She frowned. "Nev is psychoscopic?" If Janni could be a crippled telepath, why couldn't her sister be able to read objects by touching them?

The men turned towards her, Lin's dark and First's blue, and pleasure softened both stares.

Neither spoke, though.

Raleigh rallied her nerves, ones that had carried her through military campaigns that she intentionally abused her software to keep herself from remembering clearly. "So now what do we do? Janni wanted me to call her."

"No," Lin said first, glancing at First before continuing, "Janni meets that Nev, one of them will have to kill the other. I don't want... I don't want her dead."

Raleigh wondered what he'd edited out, but the answer of what to do was blatantly obvious. "So we find Nev and kill her first?"

Lin grimaced. The little emotion in First's expression vanished, and he again reminded her of Kitten.

A logistics possibility occurred to Raleigh. "With Kitten's...time jumping. Couldn't we rescue Second?"

Lin looked away, whereas First studied Raleigh, as if seeing her for the first time.

After a long moment of silence, First turned his staid scrutiny on Lin and paused. Without looking away from the other man, he said, "Time jumping has limits. We could save _a_ Second, but she wouldn't be my Second. Third would've already fetched her, otherwise."

Raleigh glanced at the Jenga game, which a future Kitten had evidently Jumped back in time to tweak, which had gotten Lin aware of the time jumping issues to begin with.

At least limitations meant that there _were_ set cause and effect, even when the cause and effect were circular. "I'm sorry."

First studied her again, and Raleigh got the impression that Nameless weren't usually treated as _people_. She remembered his earlier statement that he and Second had been waiting to take names until Third was old enough to take one, too, and if she were reading the situation right, that waiting had cost Second her life.

She felt sorry for all three of them.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

Raleigh grabbed her shattersilk trench coat and pulled it on, making sure it hid her tech, including the gills.

Even before she tapped the seal closed, First gave a slight shake of his head. "Miss--"

"Raleigh," she offered, realizing she'd never told either man her name, but feeling a little guilty for using it when First didn't have a name of his own.

"My universe's Nev would wipe the floor with you," First finished.

"With me too, probably," Lin commented, "but Nev will expect you and me to be involved. Her? Who is she?" He glanced at her. "I mean, she won't know you. Even if she's bothered to observe and discover that you live with Janni, you're..." He evidently decided against insulting her body's tech upgrades. "No offense intended."

"None taken," Raleigh said coolly, meeting First's gaze.

He still watched her sedately, but the very fact that he was scrutinizing her and not acting suggested he didn't like the idea.

"I was military, in my 'verse," she told him, tapping her collar where it hid gills. "The memories are blocked, not deleted. I can restore them, if necessary." She hoped it wouldn't be necessary.

"This me probably won't be much use in a fight." Lin paused, then amended, "Compared to your universe, I mean. But somebody has to find Janni, and I don't think you want to end up registered with Shadow Corps,"--First's grimace said Lin's assumption was correct--"so I'll busy myself with that."

Lin quickly washed the cups, set them to dry, and headed out--making Raleigh wonder why he and Janni were so estranged. He seemed nice, thoughtful.

She also found herself wishing she'd kept the mugger's knife that morning, instead of giving it to Kitten, but it was no use changing her mind now. She'd find a weapon somewhere. She headed for the door.

"Forgetting something?" First asked.

She turned. He pulled the chair by the Jenga game out from the table and picked something off the seat.

The knife from that morning.

One-handed, First turned the knife to offer to her, hilt-first, his ease and economy of motion betraying him as someone well used to blades.

Future-Kitten must've left it when she came by, but why hadn't Lin noticed it? He'd noticed the Jenga block, and Kitten hadn't _worn_ that.

First studied her, still offering the knife. "Raleigh?"

She gave herself a shake and took it. "Sorry, just... Sorry."

"Not used to time jumping, I take it?"

She shuddered as she stepped out the door. "No."

He followed and gave a slight smile, shutting the door behind him and tapping it to lock. "You'll get used to it."

Raleigh stared at his hand for a long moment. It was strong and callused, crisscrossed with faint scars like the rest of him was, though most people would have to be close to him, to see that. "I'd rather not."

Cold air burned Third's lungs as she perched on the roof of the local StretSec building--StretSec being the public security agency, and which was responsible for both resolving crimes and for answering any problem featuring freaks. It was the last thing she could think of to try to find Second--and it would work, it _had_ to work, because Third would end up in a cage nearby Second as the woman and her baby died--

Third focused on taking slow, deep breaths.

The lungs had always been a weak point of hers--of Third's, not of any of the other versions of her that she was aware of--but that was likely from all the spores she'd breathed while destroying Infested. Or so she guessed. Nev would have been the one to know, but Third had always found it healthier to avoid her older sister. The 'god' mods found in some universes reached a point wherein the mods themselves _produced_ the hellverse, because the modifications themselves triggered instincts that made people think of others as threats.

That 'kill' instinct was strongest among biological relatives. Opposite gender was okay; same gender was really bad. Third had some theories as to why, but Nameless were discouraged from being inquisitive. Ultimately, Third had always sought medical treatment from amateurs before she got it from her sister.

She flinched and hoped nobody had seen it. Someone from this somewhen might comment on it; someone from another might helpfully mention it to someone from her universe; and someone from her universe would have to punish her for the breach in composure.

Mistakes could get you Infested. Nobody wanted to face an Infested Nameless.

Third had tracked Second's bio-identity all over town, but she had yet to find the woman herself. Jumpers could hop into another somewhere or somewhen and leave you wondering where in reality they'd gone. As a navigator-class jumper, Second could easily Jump through time and space, but she couldn't hide her bio-identity all that well. Merger-class jumpers had the opposite balance--able to Jump, but far better at hiding bio-identities, which was necessary if you wanted to blend in to some universe or somewhen other than your own. Third--all versions of her--was a merger, though some versions of her were more practiced with it than others.

Being a merger was handy for hanging out on top of a local security building without the scanners picking you up. Third surreptitiously stretched her shoulders.

The StretSec operative currently leaving the building wasn't from this universe.

Third hopped back, reflexively hiding the curiosity that Nameless weren't allowed to display. She checked her surroundings again and dropped to her stomach to elbow-crawl to the edge to peek over. She hadn't noticed any mods in the man, not in the glimpse she'd gotten--but hiding mods was standard, in some universes. Even Janni could do that.

A taxi stopped, the driver calling out a promise to get the operative to his destination fast, for cheap. The operative shook his head and turned away from the street, rubbing his eyes as if he had a headache, the motion letting her see more than the back of his head and recognizing--

_TamLin_.

Third shoved herself back from the edge, her entire body cold. A TamLin. This universe's StretSec had a _TamLin_ working for them.

Curses ran through her mind. Most sensates wouldn't be able to pick out a single should-be-there bio-identity from a crowd, but most sensates weren't him. Third knew all too well how keen his abilities actually were--though he'd hidden that, in her universe, because otherwise he would've been bound to Nev, who would've then made sure to kill Third before--

The quick double-blink didn't suffice to keep the tear ducts clear. She quickly shook her head, trying again, and scurried away from the fire escape, where she heard someone climbing up--

"Third, right?"

She froze, feeling like a taut bowstring, as the soles of his boots hit the roof. He'd swung himself up the last few steps, by the sound of it.

She needed to move, to get away from him--

She needed his help to find Second.

Third took a deep breath. She wasn't supposed to engage in niceties--and asking for help defeated the _point_ of Nameless--but...TamLin was a very good ally to have. Or at least her universe's version of him had been.

She didn't let herself flinch. "You're looking for..."

Second had a name, in Janni's native universe-which was the same as _his_ , she saw, now that she was looking for it--but she couldn't remember. It had been a word, an odd one to use as a name.

"Dasher?" he supplied, with the same polite frankness that _her_ TamLin had--

No, Third told herself. She would get his help to try to save Second, and then she would be a good little Nameless and return to the shadows to protect the Named until she earned the right to claim a name of her own.

He studied her, forehead still creased with the headache that would linger as long as she was hiding herself from the scanners, and she realized this TamLin was observant, too. More so than Janni. Maybe as much as _her_ TamLin had been.

Not that her universe's TamLin ever had been hers. But he could have been. Maybe.

"I'm actually looking for Janni," he said.

Of course he was. Third knew her façade was good enough that her flash of envy didn't show, not even to someone who was watching for hints to what she was thinking. "I don't hear her." Not that she necessarily would, not without opening herself to resonance, but she knew better than to admit her handicaps.

TamLin looked away, studying their surroundings with a relaxed thoroughness. "Any ideas where she'd be? I'd like to find her before your Nev does."

"I'll be caged." Third forced herself to watch his reaction as she realized she'd spoken as if he were _her_ TamLin, who knew about her Jumping and could follow when she--

"inside thick mesh or thin?"

The question was _her_ TamLin, but the tone was...brighter, though only a little.

"Thick or thin, Third?"

"Gaps three fingers wide." She indicated three of _her_ fingers, to be clear.

He leaned back against the pillar that supported the building above the roof they were on, pulled a console from his uniform jacket, and started typing, still keeping an eye on their surroundings. "You see Janni, holler, would you?"

Third stared at him. He kept tapping his console as if he'd just asked her to do something _normal_. She glanced around, but she didn't see or sense anyone else, and she sidled back against the pillar to stand beside him and peek at his console. He was running a...cybsearch, they called it, in this somewhen.

She needed to treat him as a Named ally who was aiding her to get a specific job done. _Not_ as if he were the man she'd loved enough that she'd misbehaved on purpose just so he'd be allowed to touch her, even if that touch would have to leave bruises behind.

He'd loved her, too.

"Holler?" she murmured anyway, then looked away. She'd driven her TamLin to suicide--she was honest enough with herself to admit that much. She wouldn't sabotage Janni's life, too.

"Well, you know how I get, when focused on solving a problem."

So battle-ready that a dropped pin could get the dropper shot--unlike most Named, who tended to let their interests and focus distract them to the point that many a Nameless had died because they couldn't get the Named's attention in time to save both. Regardless of his home universe, TamLin was evidently fond of irony.

Third clenched her jaw to prevent a smile. "My job."

She heard him pause; felt him study her. The few seconds it took him to follow her meaning was a chilling reminder that, as much as he reminded her of her TamLin, he wasn't--he was _Janni 's_, and she needed to remember that.

"Ah," he said quietly. "Hellverse."

Well, they didn't make Nameless in utopias.

" _Nameless_ ," she reminded him, her tone something that her TamLin would've had to strike her for--backhand, his right hand to her right cheek, which would sometimes even crack the bone.

This TamLin didn't even lift his hand to hit her, but the sharpness that entered his gaze said he knew the laws. He wordlessly showed her his console--which featured a surveillance image of the room she remembered seeing for those brief moments, hours earlier.

Her breath caught. _This is happening._ She would watch Second die. "How did you know?"

He tapped something on the settings, adjusting the camera or maybe moving to another one, and showed Third.

A cage was hanging from the ceiling by a chain. inside it, keeping her balance by crouching as she glared at her captor who napped out of reach, was Janni.

"Any particular reason your Nev would go for Janni?" he asked, his tone too casual to be anything but feigned.

Any reason other than the natural Nev's-mods-threatened-by-sister's-mods, Third assumed he meant, but she found herself unable to look away from the security feed. "Second," she murmured.

"Hmm?"

She tore her gaze away and checked their surroundings once again. "Pregnant." _Was_ pregnant, when she died, and First might not have even known, before Nev called Second a Breach.

Silence answered her.

His lack of answer meant that he understood--or, possibly, that he didn't. Third didn't _want_ to know which it was, but she needed to.

She held her breath and looked at him.

As if that were the signal he was waiting for, TamLin frowned. "What were they _thinking_?"

He understood, then.

And Second being a Breach was something else that Third could be blamed for. "Nameless at thirty?"

That tilt to his chin was all _her_ TamLin. "Twenty-six?"

Not quite. First and Second had waited so long for Naming. Why couldn't they have waited just a while longer before they consummated, so they could do so legally?

Third found that easy to answer: Probably thought themselves safely hidden, in this universe. They'd _wanted_ children. Second was older than First. With all that Nameless went through while destroying the Infested...

She blinked quickly, twice.

If Second hadn't conceived soon, she would've lost all ability to have children.

First and Second had waited to officially join the Named so they wouldn't abandon Third again. They should've been selfish.

TamLin sighed heavily, evidently knowing Janni well enough to realize that she might've put _herself_ in that position--gotten herself captured by Nev--to interfere with Nev's ability to find Third.

Janni had probably masqueraded her bio-identity as Third's. Mergers could do that, if they wanted, and Nev was particularly susceptible to that kind of deception.

TamLin studied his console once more. "Your Nev looks scarier than mine did."

Did? "Dead?"

He shrugged. "Still in our home universe, so... Same effect. Not as though we'll see her again."

Third needed to back away from the man, to keep her distance--for her own sake as well as his.

But she _missed_ him. "Your Nev isn't scary?"

"Scattered, more like. She's a medic, grade green, so she can get a little scary when you do something stupid and she decides she has to, to keep you from getting yourself even more screwed up--but if handed a Nameless and told to apply the laws, she'd squeal and pass out." He gave her a stern stare. "I will keep you in line, if I have to. Please don't make me."

The polite tone was one person asking another, and cooler than what _her_ TamLin would have used--but the attitude, the willingness, the adherence to duty...

It was her TamLin, all over again.

_No_ , Third ordered herself. She wouldn't steal her own fiance.

Even if she succeeded, she'd just be the death of him, anyway.

Refugees from other universes evidently had a tendency toward paranoia. Understandable, justifiable, and not minded by Raleigh...except for the fact that those refugees fled when they saw First and her coming.

She triple-checked her coat--again--but her upgrades weren't showing. "Why are they running?"

First sighed and pulled something from his pocket. Unfolded it, smoothened it out, and handed it to her.

_Paper?_ Raleigh accepted it, startled before she even saw what was on it: a mug shot of First, with a brief description and a panorama of snapshots featuring him in various gruesome situations.

A sectioned-off part of her mind nonchalantly analyzed the blood spatter and the corpses and informed her that he was quite efficient and preferred methods of maximum effectiveness and minimum duration.

So... A killer, but not a sadistic one. She could relate.

Raleigh spared a brief thought for how the child of two such killers might turn out--it was something she'd considered before, in regards to herself--and handed back the paper, unsure if she was annoyed or disturbed that Janni had never bothered to introduce her to the underworld of temporal refugees. "I feel like a fish out of water."

"Depends on the fish," First answered absentmindedly. "Some don't mind being out of water awhile."

Raleigh blinked at him.

He sighed. "I'm an upper grade science teacher."

"Ah." She eyed him askance. "How does that work, with the Nameless thing?"

First's eyes jumped around as he studied their surroundings. "Doesn't." He snorted. "Third always was the smartest of us."

"Oh?" Raleigh kept her tone light, so he'd be less likely to notice that she was fishing for details. "What do you mean?"

He answered matter-of-factly, "Most people assumed she was dumb, because she earned herself so many beatings. But she never crossed the line into becoming a Breach, which would get her executed. Not even here." He grimaced. "Not even after..."

He shook his head. "Beatings had to be administered by our clutch's keeper, and...it was one of the only times he was allowed to touch her. Maybe he could've gotten past the guilt if we got out sooner, but as it was, he stayed here long enough to confirm this universe didn't have Infested, then killed himself so he couldn't hurt her anymore."

His blase attitude chilled her. "Kitten--Third--is a masochist."

"No." First glanced over at something above and behind Raleigh. "If anything, she's too smart for her own good. She knows the laws, her limitations, and just how far she can push them both without causing any lasting damage."

Raleigh wasn't sure she wanted to understand everything he was talking about. His native universe was sounding worse than hers. "Isn't intelligence a good thing?"

"When you're rigorously controlled, starved of emotional and physical needs, severely punished for any infraction, and required to risk yourself to save everyone else?" He shrugged. "Maybe not. Usually we're sent in pairs, for guard duty or killing, but that requires a clutch to have an even number. Ours doesn't. Third's been even lonelier than..."

First looked away.

Raleigh realized that he'd stopped because he'd remembered he was wrong. His clutch was down to an even number, two, because his wife was dead. Or at least his wife was about to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

She impulsively caught his arm and gave it a slight squeeze. "I'm sorry for your loss."

He froze in the middle of studying her from the corner of his eye.

His expression stayed on the wary side of 'impassive', but a yellow glow rippled from beneath his skin before it submerged once more.

Raleigh stared at his face, wondering where it had gone. Moreover, what had it _been_?

First tugged his arm from her grip and continued on his way. "We've a few more places we can try, at least."

His tone was unruffled, as if his wife wasn't dying, and it rang as false as his blase attitude about his namelessness.

For the first time, Raleigh felt fortunate for her own native universe, and the circumstances that led to her receiving her own mods. At least she had been allowed to be a person when she was off-duty.

"How are you so normal?" she asked before she thought better of it.

He glanced back at her, eyebrows raised, his expression otherwise indicating a calm readiness that called him anything but a civvie.

She got the impression it had been there all along, but he, despite his belittling of his own intelligence, was adept at hiding it. "Oh."

Once TamLin was satisfied with what he'd searched on his console, he indicated for Third to precede him back down the building's emergency stairs and toward the front door. She glanced at him, wondering what he'd do if she refused or tried to bolt. The bland expression and raised eyebrow suggested the result would be comparable to _her_ TamLin's.

She forced a swallow and refused to let herself try, to test him. _He 's Janni's_, she reminded herself.

As she reached the door, she read the energy eddies of the scanners and merged her bio-identity with their expected parameters. She entered without raising so much as a buzz.

The receptionist on the other side, however, frowned at her. Not that the expression was all that visible beneath the beard. "Who are--"

"She's with me." TamLin caught Third's upper arm in a light grip and guided her toward one hallway. "Tell Puce I have a lead on the latest entrant."

They were tracking _Nev_? She planted her feet against the tile floor and gave him a pointed stare.

He spun toward her, hand going to a hip holster as if he expected her pause to be due to a threat. His scan of the room took less than a second, and then he gave her a dark look. "I know your laws, kid. Don't make me hurt you."

_Kid_? She put her hands on her decidedly adult hips, resting her weight against the balls of her feet in case he retaliated appropriately.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, which sometimes helped with his headaches. Rarely. "All right. What's wrong?"

She jerked her chin toward the receptionist. "Nev would cut him up and feed him to Mom."

TamLin froze, reminding her whose he was. _Her_ TamLin had known what Nev put in their mother's special meds. She winced.

His throat worked for a long second. "Ribald? Send _vegetarian_ refreshments to Room Zed, please."

" _Zed_?"

"Yes." He stepped up to a door, waved his wrist at the panel, and it buzzed open.

Third slipped through behind him. "Zed?"

Her curiosity was going to get her killed, someday. She wasn't supposed to ask questions.

TamLin didn't react nor respond, just led her through the halls and stairwells and more doors, every so often rubbing his temples. She nearly winced, but if he really wanted her to stop merging with the security systems, he had only to ask.

Some of his coworkers frowned at her, some raised eyebrows, and a few smiled at TamLin. He'd built a good reputation, apparently. Good enough that he could bring a strange girl deep into the building without anyone stopping him, though he did have to sign something at a few different checkpoints.

They finally reached a door with so many different types of security before it that Third assumed it was their destination.

"So how is Janni, these days, when she isn't playing chicken with assassins from hellverses?"

His question was timed to pull Third's attention from what he was doing with the door. She hadn't seen that particular type of lock, before, combining physical keying with a specific combination of timing, energy, and authorization code that couldn't be bypassed with the normal merging or lock-picking skills.

His attempt at distraction failed, but Third saw no reason to rub it in. "She's well."

Wait. Why was he asking _her_ how his bondmate was doing?

"Glad to hear it." He gave a quick peek in the room before he opened the door all the way and strode in.

She followed and palmed the door shut behind her. He'd brought her straight into an armory that would've suited an alpha universe, pre-apocalypse. She'd never even seen a room this full of goodies back home.

Third took a tentative step toward one aisle and glanced at TamLin. He was already cycling through the shelves on a firearm rack, not looking at her.

She took that as permission and beelined for the vials. The ones out front were fairly innocuous, like liquid smoke and eye irritant. She found the rack's controls and tapped for it to drop that out of the way and to rotate the next shelf into view. The rack required an authorization code, but she easily nudged it into thinking that authorization had already been unlocked.

On the fourth shelf, she found napalm-echo. She stared at it for a long moment before helping herself to a vial. "I thought this universe was..."

TamLin rounded the edge of the aisle to join her, wielding an edition of pulse weapon that _definitely_ wasn't from that universe. "Fourth shelf's only accessible to the brass, a few shadows and shadowborn who know how to use them, and any merger who happens to be brought in this far."

For all his insistence that he knew the laws, he wasn't treating her as a Nameless. The privacy of the room gave her the courage to let out a little curiosity on purpose. "Could you get in trouble for letting me in here?"

"No. You're documented as a consultant." He scanned the shelf, himself, and palmed one too quickly for her to identify it. "Janni brought me some of your hair, for me to log in."

But he hadn't known Raleigh, so they hadn't done the same thing for her.

Then again, Raleigh, from an apex universe, would be in a lot less trouble, if the Shadow Corps found them all. Primes knew better than to go universe jumping without proper authorization. Refugees from apex universes didn't.

Third sent the vials back to the first shelf and continued down the aisle. "Thanks."

TamLin followed, not acknowledging her breach of protocol.

She let herself sigh, though she kept it silent. Two more birthdays. She just had to make it through two more birthdays, and the timer would disintegrate and she could take a name, be a person.

Third knew better than to think she'd ever get over the trauma of her origins enough to be _normal_ , but maybe she'd learn to pretend, in time. First and Second had.

Only a few years in, and they'd gotten so comfortable that Second was about to _die_ for it. Unfortunately, the personhood only applied if you took a name, and since they hadn't...

Third pressed her lips together and hoped her brother wouldn't revert to 'proper' Nameless behavior after that happened. They'd been forced to flee the first few universes they'd tried to take refuge in, because their attempts to acclimate had gone that badly. If First wanted to leave, Third would help him Jump universes, but...she couldn't be sure she'd go along. She _liked_ this somewhen.

Though, now that Nev knew their location, they'd probably have to leave, anyway.

Where would she find any miscellaneous gadgets that this universe didn't precisely know what to do with? Third considered the question for a moment, then headed for the corner furthest from the door.

She rounded the end of an aisle, and her steps faltered.

Third stared at the device before her. It was a nightmarish cross between a dentist chair and a web or claw...though admittedly some of that impression was because she knew what the spindly-looking frame did. Infants were supposed to be too young to remember them, but...

She swallowed hard.

"The brass leaves that out to help ID who's from universes like ours," TamLin said quietly at her back. "A shadowborn would take a moment to recognize it, because they'd only know it from descriptions. A prime doesn't expect to see it and therefore freezes immediately."

His bosses knew he was a shadow, then...unless he'd controlled his reaction?

She gave him an inquiring look.

He answered with a wan smile. "I'm flattered, but I can be startled as readily as the next person."

Perhaps. TamLin's mother had been a keeper for clutches, herself, so very little caught him off-guard.

He grimaced and rubbed his temples again.

Third turned back toward the corner and sought the shelf featuring miscellaneous not-from-this-universe paraphernalia.

And, to stop hurting TamLin, she let the security systems notice her and reverted her bio-identity back to its native default.

They were running in circles, hitting the same parts of town without any further effect.

When First started leading Raleigh into a fourth round, she gently asked, "Is this really accomplishing anything?"

He stopped cold, midstride, in the middle of the sidewalk, and didn't even move when passersby bumped into him.

"I don't ask that to be rude or cruel. But since this is proving ineffective, perhaps..." Perhaps what? She didn't even know enough about what was going on to know what was possible.

First rubbed his face. "I was the worst tracker in my clutch, you know? I wasn't even the oldest of us. I'm only First because I play well with politics."

Raleigh felt as if she were missing a piece of the conversation, but instinct told her that pressing for explanation would be unwise. "Is there any way to negotiate with your sister?"

He snorted. "No."

She nodded acknowledgement of his answer, and she peered up to glimpse the sky through the maze and terraces of the buildings that towered above them.

"She's Named. We're not," he added. "She has every right to eliminate Third or..."

She didn't glance at him, but she heard his voice catch.

"She's pregnant," he said faintly, voice thick. "My _wife_ is pregnant, and my _sister_ is going to murder her--and what kind of man am I, if I can't even protect my wife and child?"

"One as human as the rest of us," Raleigh said, because there was no good answer for the question. Holding her silence would only be interpreted as agreement.

"I wasn't created to be human!" he snapped.

She shrugged and tapped her gills. "Neither was I."

She looked at him, then, and he stared at her, the weird glow flickering in and out as if it were tasting the back and side of his neck.

"What's that?" she asked, in attempt to shift the conversation topic.

He scowled but followed her gaze with his hand, ultimately touching one of the yellow spots. He grimaced. "My patch is wearing off."

And he turned on his heel and strode back toward...somewhere.

Raleigh followed. "Your what?"

"Patch! My mods"--he waved at his neck--"never 'took' properly. It's why I'm Nameless, why I suck at tracking, and why my wife and sister always had to worry about protecting me when we went after zombies. I can't control this, and it's like putting candy in front of a baby. They come right for me--Infested, bigots, Nameless who want my position."

She frowned and took the time she needed to parse that. "Third can control hers." So why was _she_ Nameless?

First gave his head a single sharp shake. "She has a governor chip. She can't modulate things on her own. Without it... Suffice to say that blackouts have a way of getting you killed."

"Sure do."

From the odd glance First gave her, he hadn't expected her to agree.

"You aren't the only designed killer of the pair of us. I just have tech that lets me stick the memories in storage, to keep them from affecting me all that much. I was..." On second thought, she didn't want to pull up how she'd ended up in this somewhen. Just thinking about letting herself remember it was making her wince.

He studied her a moment, then sighed. "We could call TamLin. See if he's found anything."

Without a console, Third couldn't be called, herself.

Raleigh smiled. "Sounds like a plan."

At least it was something different and might get them on a better track--maybe something that would succeed, or _could_ succeed. Surely there had to be some way to save Second. If time were that solid, why would anyone even attempt to change the past?

He grimaced and increased his pace. Raleigh kept up easily but wondered what she was missing...and if he or any of the others would ever deign to explain it to her.

Alarms squealed, and TamLin cringed for another reason entirely.

Third could've kicked herself. She was in a high-security facility, so why had she thought it a good idea to let the security system suddenly detect her in an armory?

TamLin ran back to the door, Third following, and smacked the comms panel on the wall beside the entrance. "What the _hell_ , Puce?!"

She grimaced. "Sorry."

TamLin's eyes narrowed on her, and he tapped the comms off a moment to say, "You shut up," before continuing, "I _told_ you I had a merger with me! Turn that off!"

Argument ensued with whoever was on the other end.

TamLin won; the alarms deactivated.

"--And have _somebody_ bring our snacks before I grab Kasy and eat her arm! Thank you."

He slapped the comms off, and her across the face.

The impact--the strength behind it, the familiar shape and sting--was comforting. Third felt faintly disturbed by that, but she mostly didn't care. TamLin had _touched_ her.

And she certainly had earned that strike.

This TamLin, though, seemed every bit as conflicted about hitting her as hers had been.

_No!_ Third reminded herself. Not _as_ conflicted. Her TamLin had loved her.

"Seriously?" Incredulity sharpened the pitch of his voice. "You get off on pain?"

He _was_ a sensate.

Her face heated, and she looked away. "It isn't the pain," she admitted quietly.

Silence answered her, and she turned back to him. His brow was furrowed in a puzzled way, not pained.

"You're Nameless," he said at last. "You wouldn't have been paired with--"

He and Janni were an assigned couple? Third struggled to imagine a life where she would've warranted that.

He pivoted on his heel to the door and opened it. The type of well-padded woman that Nameless were never fed enough to become stood on the other side, carrying a tray with beverages and...

Third frowned at the oddly complicated food. This was a public security office, not a restaurant.

"Hors d'oeuvres, Kasy?" TamLin asked dryly.

The woman took a half-step back and hunched her shoulders, red tinging her cheeks. "If--if you don't want it..."

Third snatched a stick from the tray. She stared at the skewer of cucumber and carrot and... What was that? She sniffed warily.

TamLin sighed. "Eat one," he told Kasy as he took one, himself.

His coworker blinked at him. "What?"

He indicated Third. "She can't eat anything until after we do."

Kasy frowned at him. "What do you mean? Of course she can eat--"

"It's forbidden!" he snapped. "Her sister's already off murdering her brother's girlfriend because they broke the rules. _She_ isn't about to do something stupid that'll get her euthanized."

He was still upset at her for triggering the alarm.

"You had a cluster headache," Third said quietly.

"Of course I had a--" He stared at her again. "You reverted to baseline _because_ it would stop my headache?"

She nodded once.

He turned and grabbed one of the beverage cups, then stalked away. "Not from your universe. Not your responsibility."

Nor was punishing her, his. She rubbed the cheek he'd struck.

He turned back before she dropped her hand, and he grimaced. "Either leave the tray or eat something, Kasy. We're busy and have a prime to catch."

Third jerked at his word choice and abruptly remembered another reason she needed to avoid being around that TamLin too much: As a sensate--and a highly sensitive one, at that--details from her universe would bleed into his psyche. She couldn't keep her thoughts and such from leaching out, and he couldn't help but overhear them. It had led to more than one sensate being considered insane until the scientists in alpha universes realized what was going on.

Kasy took a quick step forward and plucked a skewer for herself as she set the tray on a nearby shelf. She nibbled one of the things Third couldn't identify. "Puce said I have to keep an eye on you."

TamLin gave her a flat look, one eyebrow twitching.

She skittered back, slamming her hip into a counter. "I _know_! I know, okay? But he saw the vid of your friend here and claims you're thinking with your dick."

Third understood the words and their implication, but the concept was so foreign that it took what felt like forever to process. This TamLin? And her? _Together_ -together? "I'm _Nameless_."

She realized she'd spoken aloud, and she looked right at Kasy. Why would someone so obviously terrified be picked to 'keep an eye on' TamLin?

The woman swiped some limp curls out of her eyes. "Yeah, I noticed, but Puce... He wants..."

Kasy eyed her, suddenly looking serious, sedate. More her age--which was in her late thirties, if Third was reading her telomeres right.

And then the woman let out a long breath and deflated, losing the effect. "I'm Shadowborn, okay? Sensate, grade yellow." Yellow was the bottom tier for primes, the one where sensates couldn't identify details about what they felt. They just got a niggling feeling when something was in or from the wrong time or universe or both. "And Puce wants to breed us."

"Orchestrated breeding is illegal in this somewhen," Third said automatically, though she wasn't naive enough to disbelieve the woman. She glanced at the closed door and merged into the surrounding systems enough to glitch up the cameras' audio. "Breeder?"

Kasy grimaced. Third adjusted herself to check other details about the woman's body...and realized the jitters and anxiety were biological, some kind of side effect. She wasn't afraid at TamLin at all.

Third looked at TamLin. "Why isn't Puce dead?"

"Moving against him directly will have repercussions on the others."

_Others_ , plural? Third wondered who else had come with Janni and TamLin from their universe.

But that was the kind of thing one shadow didn't ask another. Instead, she ran her hands along her clothing, recognizing the various accoutrements by feel, and let her fingers linger on the vial of napalm-echo that was under her sweater.

She hopped over to the shelf and grabbed another one, which she stashed somewhere easy and quick to get to. She'd need it. "You said you had a 'lead' on things, so we'd better go talk to him."

TamLin eyed her sharply, but she kept her expression the bland façade Nameless were required to wear.

Kasy looked from one of them to the other and back again. She let out something that might've been a weak snort or a cut-off chuckle.

"You will not touch Puce," TamLin said firmly.

"I will not touch Puce," she agreed--probably _too_ readily, but the promise fit fine with her plan for whatever evidence or blackmail material he'd collected.

TamLin shook his head and headed out. Third and Kasy followed.

Kasy even gave her a wink.

Third missed a step. Surely she wasn't _that_ easy to read, not to someone she'd only just met?

The other woman smiled and fell back behind her, so TamLin and Kasy both escorted her through the security building.

Third wondered if that was meant as a protection or as a warning.

First didn't so much as pause before entering the StretSec office. Raleigh hesitated before following. In her experience, public security didn't care for people who didn't have proper documentation.

The receptionist at the front desk was male, with ill-fitting clothes that seemed designed to hide that he was an experienced fighter. The beard kept him from seeming too unassuming, though.

First walked right up to his desk. "Is TamLin in?"

Why was he looking for TamLin at StretSec?

"You know TamLin?" the receptionist asked.

"He's helping me look for my sister and my wife."

The receptionist nodded. "And do you have a name?"

First just quietly met his gaze.

Raleigh understood why--answering either 'yes' or 'no' could cause more problems than they had time to deal with--but that was still antagonizing the man. She sighed. "We're just trying to get in touch with him. Is he in? If not, we'll just call and leave a message."

She wasn't quite sure why First had decided to come by rather than do that to begin with. Maybe he didn't have TamLin's number?

The receptionist glanced her over, then did it again--more slowly and appreciatively. " _You_ have a name?"

"Raleigh." She smiled politely. "Can you let him know we're here, please?"

He beamed back at her, probably having read far too much into her courtesy. "Sure thing. Just a--"

An alarm shrieked.

Hubbub erupted. Raleigh's chipset automatically adjusted to suit the situation--reducing the sensitivity of her hearing, improving her strength and balance, and to--

She hastily overrode that one and shut it off before she went into 'kill' mode.

First stepped aside--back to the wall, beside to the desk--and Raleigh stood near, watching the other side of the room. Near them, the receptionist was scrambling on his console and demanding someone tell him what the hell was going on.

TamLin, Third, and a woman (who had the sharp look of someone who'd been put through the breeder drugs that Raleigh thankfully had been spared experiencing back home) stumbled out from a hallway and beelined for the exit. First and Raleigh leaped after them--

And caught up in a nearby alley as TamLin shoved Third into a wall that had peeling paint and nails sticking out from the fabricated brick. "What were you _thinking_?"

The woman Raleigh didn't know had her arms wrapped around herself. She was rocking and giggling softly. Deja vu hit Raleigh, but she didn't let her chipset bring the memory to fore, to recognize the woman's reaction.

Third didn't respond, even as TamLin knocked her to the ground and brought his foot back to kick her.

First intervened, catching TamLin's foot with his own and nearly getting his own face slugged for his trouble.

"What did she do?" First asked calmly, as if watching his little sister get beaten on was normal for him.

TamLin's chest heaved. "She fucking _killed my boss_!"

"Now, we don't know that," the woman said, so calm that Raleigh's stomach lurched. It took going through the drugs at _least_ three times before somebody could manage that despite them. "We were walking away, and the office happened to catch fire. First off, who's to say she did anything? And second off, he might not be dead."

The woman tightened her arms around herself and started shivering. "I hope he is, though."

"She grabbed napalm right before we stepped out of the armory!" TamLin snapped.

"She _has_ napalm under her sweater," Raleigh pointed out, glad for her built-in scanners.

First flinched, and TamLin gave her a hard stare, his respiration and pupils telling her where at least some of the aggression and fear were coming from.

Just as swiftly, TamLin grabbed Third and ripped off her sweater, leaving her in the sleeveless summer shirt that Raleigh had seen on the future version of Third that had paid a visit.

He stared at the bottle on her belt, yanked her up and against the wall, glared for another long moment, then dropped her and stalked off.

" _What_...?" First murmured.

He sounded genuinely confused, so Raleigh glanced at the still-shaky woman still near them and said, "Your TamLin wasn't an addict, I take it."

First stared at her.

Raleigh jerked her head back towards the direction he'd stalked off in. "He's wanting a fix."

The woman said, "Puce set things up to harm others, if he died suddenly. I'm Kasy. I work with..." Kasy mirrored Raleigh's motion to indicate TamLin. "I don't think the drugs are what are making him antsy."

"They might not be the only factor, but that doesn't mean they aren't part of it or don't exacerbate the problem." Raleigh glanced at First, who still seemed dumbstruck that TamLin was an addict, to Third, who seemed unsurprised.

So perhaps their universe's version of the man had just hidden his drug habit from First...or maybe Third was just better at hiding her reaction to things.

Raleigh helped Third to her feet and watched the girl brush herself off. "You know that was abusive, right?" she asked softly. "He had no right to do that."

"Yes, he did," said _First_ , startling her. He sounded exhausted. "If he hadn't done it, I would've had to."

"It was a misunderstanding--"

"Oh," Third said matter-of-factly. Her cheek was already starting to bruise. "I napalmed Puce."

Raleigh stared at her.

"And I am much grateful to you for that," Kasy said, "but in his office? Really?"

"Where else would he keep his documentation?" Third gave a slight smile. "The scanners were glitching, off and on, the whole time I was near that building--which has been most of the afternoon. Started hours before I came in, ended minutes after I left. Not enough of a connection for them to see it's me."

"I don't hear the crime you're admitting to committing," Kasy said. "La la la. Fingers in my ears." The woman frowned at Third. "Aren't you talking too much? I thought Nameless weren't supposed to be chatty."

Third shrugged. "I'm a very bad Nameless."

"No, you're not," TamLin said from the end of the alley.

Third actually perked up to see him, which made Raleigh feel a little sick.

"You're just very bad at heeding rules that are tradition rather than outright law." He stepped forward.

Raleigh didn't see any more withdrawal symptoms. She also didn't detect any drugs in him. Puzzling. And it made her even more uncomfortable about Third's obvious infatuation with him. At least Janni had the sense not to complete their marriage.

"We found where Nev is holding Janni, at least, and it's likely that Second will be there, too." He started off, apparently no longer caring even about his possibly dead boss.

Third followed him readily.

Raleigh glanced at First. The two of them shook their heads, then looked to Kasy.

Kasy gave a little wave. "I'll just be going back in the office and start the paperwork for all of you."

And, as she headed back toward the building, Raleigh overheard her mutter, "I _hope_ he's dead."

Probably half of Third's body ached, but she didn't care. It was the familiar ache from deserved manhandling, not from killing zombies or from longing for a hug.

TamLin had _touched_ her. As she trotted along behind him, she felt like beaming or skipping or something. He had touched her, and she didn't even care that he'd left bruises behind.

She was aware that there was something very wrong about that.

"Your mods the same as Janni's?" he tossed at her over his shoulder.

As far as Third knew, yes, but Janni didn't have the "Governor chip."

He let out a quiet curse. "Boundaries?"

"Everything but merging, pretty much." She could Jump through the chip's limitations, but not easily. She wasn't a navigator, either, so her precision wasn't the best even when her Jumping wasn't being blocked.

_Second_ was a fantastic navigator.

She sighed and tried not to think about the fact that she would soon be watching Second die. Again.

"How the hell did you survive, back home?"

Third shrugged, but he couldn't see it. "Training."

He nodded once, an acknowledgement that he'd heard. "Reflexes, hand-to-hand, senses, and targeting are overdeveloped, then. Special skills minimal; social skills moderate."

The murmur wasn't intended to be heard, but her 'overdeveloped' senses caught it. He was processing what he'd told her and its implications--and arranging it to help him remember it later.

Did that mean he intended for there to be a later?

Third frowned and smacked her own bruised cheek--just as TamLin turned to face her.

He rocked back a step. "What?"

She shook her head.

"Third."

She didn't want to tell him, but...his reaction could help her quash her misplaced affection. "I like you too much."

Bewilderment flashed through his expression before he schooled it. He paused, processing her words. "I should ask you to clarify," he commented, resuming their walk, "but I get the feeling I don't want to know what you mean by that."

Third let out a sigh as a silent breath. Did he hate Janni that much? Why didn't they dissolve their bonding, then? Or was he just appalled at the thought of an infatuated Nameless?

Even her universe's TamLin had never said, but some details made Third suspect that his father had been one of the Nameless in his mother's keeping. Growing up with his mother being legally required to psychologically and physically abuse his father couldn't have done him any favors, in the 'mental health' department. Might've even been why her TamLin...

In any event, this TamLin was currently Janni's, whether he wanted her or not, and they had to rescue his girl from Third's Nev before Janni, too, paid for First and Second's folly.

A folly that would cost the lives of Second and the baby.

Third looked at her left wrist, wondering if she would end up another fatality from the situation. She had the governor chip for good reason, and nothing she'd seen had promised her she would survive removing it, escaping Nev, or crashing from the aftereffects of both.

Well, if she died, she died. Janni would escape--or so Third chose to believe, since Janni wouldn't be there when Second died--and TamLin could work things out with his bondmate. Third wouldn't have to deal with the desire or temptation to--

TamLin discreetly ran a hand up his leg and torso. Third followed the movement enough to recognize that he was grabbing another tab. He kept it hidden in his palm and rubbed his nose to hide getting it in his mouth. Anyone who didn't know his predilection wouldn't realize what he'd done.

If she did survive this, she'd have to double-check what this TamLin took, to get him some as a thank-you for helping her with Nev, because there was no way she'd be able to tackle her sister by herself.

That left the question of what, exactly, she was going to do about her Named sister. Third still hadn't come up with a plan for that.

"Not to put too fine a point on this, but does anyone have any idea what we're up to, other than jumping in and hoping we don't end up slaughtered?" Raleigh asked mildly, hoping First wasn't the type to get offended when someone pointed out a hole in his logic.

First snorted. "Nev won't touch you."

"That's nice." Did he assume she was that shallow because he had been raised to consider himself expendable, or had she given him reason to believe she valued him that little? "But that still leaves you and Third as open targets. And if Nev's taken Janni, she might go after TamLin, too, even though he isn't from your universe."

"That's our problem."

Raleigh stared at him sidelong as she strode with him. He truly was that clueless.

She stopped outright, and he kept on walking.

Well, that attempt to catch his attention failed. She huffed and jogged back up. "Jumping in without a plan might've suited whatever was wrong back in your hellverse, but if you do it now, it could get everyone killed. Nev's evidently here by herself, right? What if she's set traps?"

First gave her an odd look.

"Alert systems, tripwires, darts, lasers--there are all sorts of things she could set up so she doesn't even have to touch you before--"

"If Nev's set anything, it'll be a contact poison," First said blithely, and Raleigh shivered. "She's a medic, not a soldier. Makes her decent with assassination, but the only reason she'd likely trump us in a fair fight is none of her mods are throttled. Even not-that-great reflexes don't matter so much if you're naturally faster than the better-trained person."

Raleigh bit her tongue. She didn't understand enough about the soft mods to properly comprehend what he was saying, but...

She clutched the collar of her shattersilk coat and let herself fall back behind First. She stared at his heels as she followed.

He noticed. She knew he noticed. But didn't even pause.

Could be misogyny or disinterest in her as a person, but she suspected it had more to do with the detail that she was properly Named. So technically, by the laws that governed him, she was someone for him to protect, not someone for him to fight beside.

Raleigh grimaced. While she appreciated not being used as cannon fodder or treated as a tool, she didn't care for the ignoring of what she could bring to the coming battle and discussion. "Shouldn't we catch up to Third and TamLin?"

She was admittedly concerned that TamLin might, perhaps, be taking out his temper on Third now that the girl was without anyone to stop him. Between the drug addiction and the convoluted, horrific laws governing the Nameless...

First snorted. "I'm a First. Nev can't touch me. She'll be leery of TamLin. And Third can merge into her surroundings and keep Nev from"--he tapped the side of his head--"hearing her."

He jerked his chin forward, and Raleigh glimpsed the red glint to Third's dark hair as the girl slipped down an alley up ahead. The two of them caught up and followed, twisting around trash bins and refuse and furniture and a discarded vehicle until Raleigh nearly stumbled over TamLin and Third. The pair were inconspicuously crouched amid the mess. Their posture and positions fit perfectly with the surroundings, almost minimizing the detail that their clothing was too clean.

Raleigh thought they made a cute couple, but she had enough sense to avoid saying as much. For all she knew, even that appearance could 'warrant' Third another beating.

"They're the next warehouse down," TamLin said. "Cams put Janni along the south wall."

They were a little northwest of the building.

"Third'll merge and sneak around to let Janni out," TamLin continued. "First, you're with me. We'll see if we can distract Nev, get in a good position to take her out. Raleigh, try to stay out of the way. I'd rather not have to explain to Janni how I got you killed. Thanks."

He was trying to be polite, not insulting, Raleigh reminded herself, but she still wanted to smack him. She hadn't come along just to stand around and look pretty.

But she held her tongue and let the three of them proceed as directed.

And then, once she was the only one of them standing out in that alley, she pulled up her software and reactivated things she preferred leaving forgotten. The too-familiar metallic taste bit her tongue, and she strode around the building towards the private entrance her scans had noticed.

Nev wasn't the only fully functional representative of a violent universe at that warehouse.

The silence grated on Third's ears.

She double-checked that she was merged with her surroundings, so she wouldn't show up to a psychic scan, and cautiously slid her feet sideways as she moved south, her back to the building's western wall. Crates and netting and all sorts of junk kept visibility to a minimum, and any sound would be far too loud in the warehouse. She barely dared to breathe.

"Seriously, don't you have anything better to do than to pick on a Named version of your baby sister?" Janni's voice asked loudly from across the warehouse.

Third grimaced. Nev was stubborn and self-absorbed, not stupid. A captive who suddenly started chattering was trying to distract her from something. And how would a psy-weak captive suddenly know rescue was coming, unless that rescuer gave her resonance?

"How well would that go over, do you think, if your people back home found out you'd targeted a Named?"

"That would require anyone to find out," Nev answered coldly, her voice full of warning.

"Naw, if you were plotting to kill me, you would've done it, already. You haven't even tried. You're worried about what I have that Third doesn't."

Third had gotten close enough to overhear Nev's answer of a huff. She tried, hard, to send Janni a mental _Shut up!_ , but she knew better than to hope it had gotten through. Or that Janni would listen even if she heard it.

The cut-off yelp and scent that followed made Third freeze. She'd rather be torn by zombies than electrocuted. At least with zombies, you could keep fighting even as they chewed on you. Electrocution caused paralysis, and then you had to deal with burns, which were a lot harder to heal with what medical supplies that Nameless were permitted to use--never mind the long-term effects on the skeleton and internal organs.

She forced herself to keep moving, but her discomfort knocked her off-balance, and she bumped into something metal that gave a hollow clang.

Third immediately grabbed a breath and sprang away--too late. Nev grabbed her telekinetically by the throat before she could get out of range. She forced her pulse to steady and slow. Panicking would only make her run out of oxygen sooner.

The grip about her neck yanked her forward. Third lost her footing and barely caught herself before she struck her chin on the cement floor. Grit drove into her palms, and the impact jolted up her arms. Possible fracture in her wrist.

Third managed to grab another breath before Nev realized she'd loosened her psychic grasp, then Nev yanked her up, high enough that Third had to teeter on tiptoe to avoid putting all her weight on her neck.

Nev glared at her, the fully active soft mods glowing through her veins and swirling over her skin. "Third."

Third's usual response to that was a flippant 'Sis,' because Nev loathed being reminded that she came from stock so bad that _all_ her siblings had ended up Nameless. There had been others, beyond First and Third, but only the three of them had survived to date.

But even if Third had been able to breathe and speak, she wouldn't have been stupid enough to antagonize Nev now.

"By all that's holy," Janni said, sounding more shocked than she probably realized. "I've _never_ met a Nev who would treat me like that."

"You're Named," Nev replied icily. "Not a waste of supplies."

Janni, still crouched in the same cage Third had seen earlier, narrowed her eyes at the back of Nev's head.

Third had never felt safe or comfortable enough to do that, but she'd lived with Janni for some time, now, and she recognized the signs. "Don't!" she managed to gasp.

Nev sneered. "' _Don 't_'?" She lifted her hands, and energy jumped out of the veins and danced around her fingers.

Third adjusted her hormones so the terror wouldn't take over--carefully, gradually, because Nev could notice that kind of thing, and it was something that either Nev couldn't do or Third wasn't supposed to be able to do. Third never had been suicidal enough to figure out which, not after how Nev had reacted upon even suspecting Third could control her body like that.

Janni's glare moved to that energy Nev was playing with, and a wry smile tugged Janni's lips. "Pe- _rett_ -tee," she said, with such a soft _r_ that she was mixing _petty_ with the _pretty_ , even if that wouldn't have been obvious to most hearers.

Nev turned towards her, nose curled with contempt. " _Pretty_?"

Janni shrugged as if nonchalant, though she was too tense to truly be feeling comfortable. "My Nev doesn't play like that. Says it's a waste of energy."

Nev's focus whipped from Third so fast that she nearly fell off her feet. Third caught herself in a crouch before her knees hit the floor, and she focused on breathing quietly, on not reminding Nev that she was there, on not distracting Nev from retaliating against the insult.

Janni bit off a yelp.

Third sprang forward before anxiety could stop her, and she struck Nev about the middle. They fell together, Third on top, and she grabbed her sister's hair and slammed Nev's head to the concrete as her own intake of breath cut short.

Pain darted through her fingertips from Nev's scalp, and Nev grabbed her neck with a hand.

Third smelled cooking meat and felt her heart stop.

Male growling and muffled clanging came to her ears, sounding as if she were wearing earplugs.

Someone grabbed her by the back of her neck and flung her away from Nev. Her mind processed the feel and scent of the calloused hand, and she realized it had been TamLin just as her back and head struck something.

She managed to turn, to land on her stomach, and pain shot up her arms. _Definitely fractured._

Third smelled more burning flesh, heard snaps and grunts and thuds, but she couldn't so much as lift her head. She grimly focused through the pain to get her heart and diaphragm working again. She couldn't do anyone any good if she passed out.

Her pulse and breathing jumped straight into double-time, and she wrangled with them, seeking to get them back to healthier levels.

A hand that _felt_ as if it buzzed wrapped around her throat. Third was still having to focus too hard on her breathing to be able to move, to be able to get away.

"Take your bitch," Nev said over her. "Take her and go, or this dies."

_Test her!_ Third begged silently, though she knew they wouldn't. If she died here, she couldn't end up the girl in the cage who was digging out her governor chip.

She heard the retreat of three sets of footsteps--Janni, First, and TamLin. TamLin was limping. Nev stayed put, not moving nor making a sound.

Seconds ticked by. Turned to minutes.

When was she going to be put in the cage?

Nev snorted and pulled her hand from Third's throat. "Idiots, all of them."

Because they'd cared enough about her survival that they retreated rather than letting Nev kill her Nameless shield.

"At the very least, _TamLin_ should've known better than to... Eh, but he isn't ours, is he? Where's ours?"

The scent of burned flesh and hair tickled Third's nose, familiar yet not, because Nev usually contained this particular ability of hers. Usually had no reason to use it.

Memory fluttered up. Of coming returning early from a mission to find TamLin lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Of that very smell, mixed with salt and...

Loathing filled Third, as much toward herself as her sister. She'd left him alone with Nev more than once. He must've thought she hated him.

Her eyes stung, her shoulders shook, and she gasped with a sob.

Nev picked her up via telekinesis and threw her in the cage that had been so recently vacated by Janni. Her vision flashed black then spun, telling Third that she was perilously close to her limits.

Nev slammed the cage shut, locked it, and turned on the crane it was connected to. The cage swayed as it rose, making Third dizzy.

"It would be polite of me to thank you," Nev said. "It will be ever so amusing to watch Second try to rescue you."

Ice gripped Third.

Ice, then the wildfire of fury. Nev had planned this all along--using Third as bait to draw Second to her.

Second was navigator class, and she wasn't handicapped like most Nameless. She would come for Third.

She would come, assuming Third had been the target all along, and it would be the death of her.

And there was nothing Third could do to stop it.

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.

"Schrodinger'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.

Third blinked, and she wasn't in the warehouse anymore. She was surrounded by the default grayish-blue ceiling and walls of a standard residence bedroom. No personalization.

Her first thought was that she'd been Jumped out.

Her second thought was that Second was dead, so who would've Jumped her?

Her third thought was that blackouts were one of the reasons she'd had the governor chip in the first place.

She sat up slowly, unsure where she was and how she'd been treated. She didn't feel woozy, so she likely hadn't been taken to a hospital, but...

She carefully touched her leg, moved it. It ached a bit, but there wasn't nearly as much pain as there should've been. Even her wrist was healed over, without so much as a scar. Whoever had dressed her wounds had also put her back in her street clothes--which was normal for Nameless, but who would've known that, kept her out of a hospital, and left her in a nondescript bedroom to wake up?

Third stood up. The regen patch on her leg buzzed in an alert that she was interfering with the injury's healing, but she ignored it and checked the little trash can by the room's clothes storage unit. Only item in it was a used-up regen patch--probably the one that had been on her arm.

Third looked around again, but even from that angle, she saw nothing that gave her a clue where she was, or who was hosting her.

On a whim, she opened the clothes storage unit...and found her weapons. Third donned the basics, then tapped the door panel. It slid open.

The hall was as default nondescript as the rest, except for a scent that made her nostrils tingle and a small table along the wall. Atop the table was a console--locked--and a stylus.

The table also had a drawer, which was where Third got her first hint regarding where she was: various high-grade narcotics and--if the packaging were correct--all procured legally, which meant her host had money. And liked his drugs.

She riffled through the various offerings in the drawer and found a package of jolt tabs. Third glanced around again, but she still didn't even hear anyone nearby, so she risked opening the package and seeing if they could easily hide in a palm, like she'd seen TamLin do earlier with something he'd taken.

That confirmed, she put everything else back how she'd found it and took the newly opened package with her as she continued down the hall, away from the scent. The regen patch on her leg gave a little prick, protesting her use of the limb. Something else to be ignored.

Kitchen, washroom, relief room. The room with the DNA-encoded lock would be an office. The two doors at the end were the entrance and outerwear closet.

That left one more door that she hadn't checked, and she followed the scent back to it. Cloves, she thought, and more. Third knocked on the doorjamb.

Silence answered her.

She frowned and knocked again.

Still no response.

Third keyed up her mods, and the spiderweb-like glow startled her as it crawled over her flesh. She'd had the governor chip for so long, she'd forgotten that she naturally had the netting.

She took the easy route of tripping the door's safeguards in case of fire, and she stepped in as the door opened. "TamLin?"

The room was hazy with smoke, but not so much that she couldn't see him--seated on the floor, his back against his bed in a room as bland as the one she'd woken up in. He was idly smoking a cigarillo that she assumed used cloves, but she thought she also smelled nutmeg in there, and possibly something else. Perhaps it was homemade.

His brow furrowed, and his dark eyes narrowed on her. "What?"

Third held up the package of jolt. "I--"

"No." He stood up and strode to her. "I am not fucking listening to this, right now." He pressed forward, crowding her into stepping back and out of his room, and the door shut in her face.

She checked the lock. He'd set it into maintenance mode--which also meant it wouldn't be able to open if he accidentally set a fire in there. At least there wasn't much in there to burn, but that was still reckless.

Confused, Third scratched her head--with the hand holding the package of jolt. She paused and looked at it, looked back at the door. What had he thought her about to say?

She knew TamLin too well to think she might get the answer from him, and Janni wouldn't be any more inclined to tell Third anything.

Janni also had been held by Nev for most of the day.

Third considered that...and started calculating a jump loop to check Janni's rooms when she wouldn't be able to catch Third snooping.

"You let a _drug addict_ take your little sister!" Raleigh said baldly, exasperated that neither First nor Janni had any problem with that.

Expression flat in the manner of someone burying his emotions so he wouldn't have to deal with them, First lowered his mug of hot chocolate and waved off the waitress before she could come refill his cup. "TamLin's the best person to watch her when she's injured. He knows how to treat her, and he won't hurt her."

"I'm sorry. Are we remembering the same reality? You do remember, just earlier today, in the alley outside his workplace, where he--"

"I can go a little psycho when I wake up after a blackout," Janni cut in, hands fiddling with her mug, gaze not leaving the froth still in place on her untouched chocolate. "TamLin's one of the only people I can be sure I won't accidentally kill."

Raleigh stared at Janni. "You aren't Nameless."

"No," Janni agreed. She started lifting her mug, then stopped and slid it across the table to First, who'd just finished his. "I'm a merger-class jumper. That means I can...adjust reality around me, in certain ways. If I lose track of when I am or which universe I'm in, he can detect my response and interrupt me before I damage anything."

"It's related to the built-in resistance to temporal rewrites that we discussed earlier," First said, accepting the hot chocolate from Janni. "Multiply that by a factor of, oh, a thousand, and you have TamLin."

That didn't exactly make sense. "If he's that resistant to temporal rewrites, how does he jump universes?"

First tilted the mug toward Janni as Janni lifted a hand and wiggled her fingers without pulling her wrist off the table.

"Mergers," she said outright. "Most people can Jump okay, as long as someone or something navigates, right? That's how you got here. TamLin gets cluster headaches and other problems, which remain until certain parts of his bio-identity get keyed to the time zone he's in. Once he's keyed to a somewhen, any deviation from the natural progression of that somewhen will, again, trigger problems for him. But he can't get keyed without a merger manually forcing it."

Raleigh assumed all that would make more sense to someone more familiar with the biological and genetically inherited modifications built into the universes like Janni's. "That still doesn't explain why you left her _alone_ with him. He's beat her up before."

Raleigh had tried to follow, herself, but TamLin had grabbed a StretSec vehicle, and she hadn't been able to find a taxi willing to follow before it got out of sight. First had suggested hot chocolate for the three of them, and considering she had no idea where TamLin was going and First had just had his lover and unborn child murdered by his own sibling, she hadn't good reason to refuse.

"TamLin won't kick her while she's down," Janni said. "Not unless she earns it--and then he'll do the minimum. You should see him, sometime. When he gets bored, he cross-dresses and goes down to one of the macho bars. He kicks their asses--but no matter how involved the fight gets, I have never seen him throw a punch after the opponent's ready to quit. He just reads their body language and-- _snap!_ --makes his decision off that, even if they're still talking smack or throwing stuff at him."

She frowned, brow furrowing, and glanced at First. "I think your sister's awake."

He grunted acknowledgement.

"And...I think she's high."

He paused in the middle of another sip of hot chocolate and exchanged an odd look with her. "Really?"

Janni nodded slowly, still looking puzzled.

"Huh."

The addicted TamLin had drugged Third? Raleigh pressed her palms over her eyes and wondered what in the worlds it would take for one of these people to admit the man had a problem--one that made him a person to avoid, not a person to dump an injured friend on.

And hoped she wouldn't be gaining a newbie drug addict as a roommate.

The apartment was silent.

Keeping her bio-identity merged with the somewhen she was visiting, Third quietly slipped in and found Raleigh seated at the dining room table, tapping at a contact list on her console. _Janni_ 's contact list, not her own.

"How do you do that?" Raleigh asked as she turned around. Embarrassment showed in the twitch of her cheek, as if she thought Third unaware of the hacks and macros she'd set up to copy their information.

"How's your brother?" Raleigh continued, obviously not expecting Third to answer. "I'm sorry about his wife."

Second was dead. Third didn't let tears well.

Discomfort showed in the angle of Raleigh's shoulders. "Janni told me about...about Lysacarly."

It was about time. Third had suggested Janni fill Raleigh in months ago--but it had taken Second _dying_ for her to bother.

Tasting salt, Third turned away from Raleigh, toward the Jenga game at the far end of the table. Janni would notice the residuals from the Jump. Third picked up one of the blocks and let her temporal dissonance bleed through, to alert Janni who had visited this somewhen. Leaving notice to your allies was polite.

"So 'prime' is what you call someone with biological modifications? And 'null' is someone without?"

Third glanced back at Raleigh, unsurprised that she was picking up quickly, now that someone was bothering to explain things to her.

"You said Janni had a 'bondmate'. I didn't know she was married."

Bonded wasn't married.

Third busied her hands--grabbed another Jenga block, pulled out the knife--because what Janni decided to tell Raleigh was her business.

...But lack of knowledge was dangerous. Lack of knowledge could get Nev gunning for Raleigh, who didn't carry a weapon and who wouldn't know the first thing about protecting herself from primes.

Third left the knife on the chair for Raleigh and held her hand out for Raleigh's console.

"Do you know how to use it?"

A valid question, since Third didn't own a console of her own and Raleigh knew so little about Jumping. Third let her answer show in her lack of response.

Raleigh handed over the device.

Third glanced over the setup, then got to work finding the contact person Raleigh would need.

"See a console in one universe, you've seen them all?"

At least Janni had explained that much. "Tablet," Third informed Raleigh as she found the entry she was looking for. "Usually."

"It's usually called a tablet?"

Third nodded once and handed the console back.

Raleigh startled, recognition flaring loudly enough for Third to notice. "Is that a _beard_?"

Excellent save, as if the beard were what bothered her about TamLin. "Four o'clock shadow," she said, letting Raleigh pretend. "It's..."

Janni wasn't going to explain the details, and Raleigh really should have been told, already. Better for Janni to get ticked off at her rather than at someone else.

"Some people _naturally_ mix well with others, genetically," Third said. ** "**That...isn't common. So they usually have...abilities, to help them adjust or freeze their appearance more easily than most, to help them hide. He likes looking a little scruffy, in clean-cut universes. Makes people underestimate him."

She was bleeding chattiness from Janni, again.

And Raleigh was staring at her. "He exists in your universe?"

Third looked away, reminded yet again why she needed to leave TamLin alone. "Dead."

"I'm sorry."

The empathy in Raleigh's voice puzzled Third, until she realized Raleigh was making assumptions about how and why he'd died. She hid tears again. "We escaped our universe. He was...unable to acclimate."

Silence fell between them. Third glanced back at Raleigh to see her cringing with her finger over the _Call_ button.

After a long pause, Raleigh hit it, and Janni's TamLin answered almost as promptly as Third's would have. _" Yes?"_

"I'm Raleigh," she said awkwardly.

Third remembered her earlier question about Janni being married and realized she probably should've explained that.

_" I'm sorry?"_ TamLin asked, so he knew as little about Janni's current living situation as Janni knew about his. Perhaps less.

Perhaps _less_. He'd said Janni had sent him some of Third's hair, to get her documented as a consultant for StretSec, but that didn't mean much. Just how much had he known about her, before all this started?

Third itched to join the conversation and find out, but she restrained herself, forced herself to step back so she wouldn't accidentally step into visual range if she acted on instinct again. _Don 't get involved._

If TamLin spoke to Third via console, he'd expect her to be there when he showed up, and she was out of her native time flow at the moment. She didn't want to give him another cluster headache.

"I live with Janni," Raleigh admitted.

_" What's the matter?"_ he asked, as quick on the uptake as Third's TamLin.

"First is missing," Raleigh said.

Where did she get that idea?

"Second is dead. Third is...damaged."

Since when did Raleigh know that much of the jargon? Third didn't use it. Janni must've slipped again.

Raleigh let out a long breath. "Look, I don't know how much I can say. I don't want to get these Nameless people killed."

_" Where are you?"_

"At the apartment." She paused. "Your wife went out looking for them, I think."

_" Bondmate, not wife_, _"_ TamLin corrected--to Third's relief, because that meant she wouldn't have to. _" We're bonded, not consummated."_

"I thought _bonded_ meant _married_."

_" In some universes. In ours...it's more 'betrothed'."_

"Then why don't you marry?"

_" Various reasons."_

Someone needed to explain that. "Resonance," Third said, quietly enough that the console wouldn't pick it up.

Raleigh stared at her.

_" What?"_

"Nothing," Raleigh said quickly. "I'm sorry, but what's your name? I mean, if you have one."

_" Call me Lin."_

Lin? That wasn't like _her_ TamLin at all.

She was wasting time before the jump loop she'd set would yank her back to her natural somewhen. She needed to try to find out why she'd upset him so much, so she could make sure to avoid that in the future.

She hurried to Janni's door, double-checked that she was merged with the somewhen she was in, and adjusted her bio-identity to mimic Janni's.

Pain pierced behind her temples, and the wooziness and black encroaching her vision caught her by surprise until she remembered her missing governor chip. Third blindly patted at her belt, feeling for something to help even though she couldn't remember packing anything.

She still had the package of jolt tabs that she'd pulled from TamLin's drawer.

Third hesitated, but if she remembered the effects correctly, jolt would keep her from blacking out.

She opened the package and stuck one tab on her tongue. She grimaced almost immediately as the stimulant cocktail spiked her system and tore her usual psychic blocks wide open. It was all she could do to sit without hitting anything in Janni's room.

After a few minutes, she was able to push through the pounding migraine and mental jabber enough to start poking through Janni's things, but she didn't find anything, and Third knew better than to try the console. Janni would've loaded it with universe-specific passcodes and failsafes.

The jump loop grabbed Third, worsening the migraine and adding disorientation in the mix as it hauled her forward, a few minutes past when she'd originally left the time stream, so she wouldn't accidentally overlap with herself.

_Don 't Jump,_ Third reminded herself. _You set this up. You know which somewhen you 're in._

It didn't feel as if she knew when she was.

Third verified she was back in TamLin's guest room, then let herself curl up on the bed and trust that he'd locked his apartment properly. At least it was quiet. A sensate as sensitive as TamLin _had_ to insulate his walls from temporal overflow, which also blocked psychic chatter.

The jolt caused spasms to prickle through her body, and without any nearby minds to overhear, the energy was building up and worsening her migraine. How did he _like_ this?

The door's buzz cut off midsound, and air moved as it opened. Her Jump would've triggered his sensitivity, so of course he'd come investigate.

Silence filled the room. She felt his regard as if it were a corpse weighing down her chest.

"What the fuck did you take?"

She held the packaging for the jolt tab up far enough for him to see, then let her arm fall.

He moved well for a null. Not as quiet as her universe's version, but close. Very close. Her skin tingled with his proximity.

"Why?" he asked.

"Was blacking out."

He let out a quiet sound, something between a huff and a laugh. "Why the Jump?"

She didn't have the energy to shrug, and it wasn't her place to protest his earlier tongue-lashing.

"We have to call you Second, now."

She'd been trying to avoid remembering that. The taste of tears filled her mouth.

"Hey," he said gently, and she could feel his hand hovering over her. "Sorry for assuming you shared Janni's hang-ups. May I make amends?"

She squinted at him from the corner of her eye. Nameless didn't get apologies, much less any kind of reparation.

He pressed her shoulder--first one, then the other, to roll her onto her other side, putting her back to him. Her pulse raced, and the hair stood up on the back of her all-too-vulnerable neck.

TamLin pressed both hands to her shoulder blades, telling her where they were, then trailed them along as he went to the various nodal points along her spine and applied pressure to each one.

Her lymph system didn't process the mods properly, the hormones processing and draining far more slowly than they built up, which was what produced her overloads. Pressure at certain node points helped alleviate that. She assumed he knew that from "Janni?"

He hesitated--only for a moment, but she felt it. "Yes."

"Feels nice," she blurted, likely from the stimulants. "Thank you."

He paused again, then ran his fingers along her bared arm before resuming the massage. "If you're open to trying alternatives, I have some ebbers."

The offer chilled her. "Aren't ebbers depressants?"

"Yeah."

He wasn't planning on following the same path of her TamLin, was he? She turned, letting her back press his hand down because it was more important for her to glimpse his face. "You hate depressants."

His eyelids were lowered enough to mask his eyes, and he kept his expression impassive as he gave a casual shrug. The way he left his hand under her made her wonder anew why he and Janni weren't consummated. "Janni won't try them."

Third's stimulant-addled mind struggled to focus enough to process the implications of what he was saying. He had ebbers, because he'd gotten them for Janni to try. Janni had refused to take them and apparently took issue with his drug habit. "What does she expect you to do about your cluster headaches?"

His stillness, followed by a slow _I-like-this_ grin, kept her from grimacing about the audible incredulity in her voice.

She bit her tongue against the urge to apologize for the display of emotion.

TamLin sat on the side of the bed, and he put one hand on her far hip. "I think I'm going to like you more than I do Janni."

Breath caught in Third's throat. Shadows--people residing in universes other than their own--usually avoided alternate-universe versions of people they'd known for good reason. "I don't know this you."

"And you loved your universe's version of me." His fingers toyed with the fasten on her equipment belt, testing how far she trusted him. "But I remind you of him."

He didn't care. Words, body language, tone of voice--all coincided to be proof of that.

He unfastened her belt. She lifted her hips to help him get it off her--consciously admitting that she trusted him enough to be at a disadvantage around him, even though she shouldn't.

He studied her as he let her belt--her _equipment_ --down on the floor beside the bed, but she didn't flinch at the vulnerable position.

"You're as lonely as I am," he said.

Third wasn't sure what to answer.

But TamLin soon made obvious that she didn't need to.

## Excerpt from  
_Trust Is a Fickle Business_

#### (rated M)

TamLin outright preferred when others disliked or feared him, but as he stared at the flushed face of the petite woman lying on his guest room's bed, he felt disgusted at his own actions.

He pulled himself back from her, from the bed, and stood. "Sorry."

Third--damn it, he had to call her Second, now--propped herself up on her elbows and tilted her head so her lashes would hide her hooded eyes, but the tentative fingers she raised to feel her swollen lips said more than she likely realized. Intimacy was forbidden, to Nameless like her. Even a hug would've been foreign, and kissing went a bit beyond that.

He was an ass.

"Why?" she asked.

Why had he kissed her, or why had he pulled back? Or was she asking why he liked her, when he didn't get along with the version of her from the same universe he was?

He shook his head and plucked her equipment belt off the floor, where he'd dropped it after testing how far she was willing to trust him. He tossed it toward her and adjusted his own clothes, ridding himself of whatever rumples he'd picked up and double-checking that everything was still fastened. He thought it was, but...

He hadn't been _that_ much of an ass, to his relief.

When he looked back at the young woman, Third/Second was still holding her belt.

Her sleeveless shirt had rucked up enough for a scar on her stomach to catch his eye. He was tracing it with a finger before he realized what he was doing.

Damn pulsar. It was the safest option that helped his cluster headaches, but the reduced inhibitions weren't good for someone like him. Secrets and lies belonged in the dark, and someone had to keep them there.

For Second's part, she drew a long, determined breath, then let it out in a huff--but she belted her equipment back on. Her fingers brushed against his.

He pulled his hand back, far more reluctantly than was wise.

Third--that was to say, Second, or whatever the hell he had to call her so he wouldn't accidentally get her euthanized by her own family--lifted her chin. "Thank you."

For kissing her--right after telling her outright that he knew she was attracted to him _because_ he reminded her of her native universe's version of him, who had died? Killed himself, from what First had told him.

TamLin didn't care that she loved the alternate him. He didn't even care if she wanted to pretend he was that particular version of him. But he _liked_ what little he'd seen of Second-who-used-to-be-Third, more than he'd ever liked Janni, and affection from him could get her killed.

Her clutch's previous Second had just been murdered in graphic example of that.

He asked outright, "You have what, a year?" Until she was old enough to count as a person and maybe they could figure out if they would get along as well as he suspected they would.

She sighed so quietly that most wouldn't have been able to hear her. She drew her legs up under her chin, wrapped her arms around them. "Bit more than that."

She was even younger than he'd thought. "Fuck."

She shrugged. "I wouldn't tell if you didn't."

Even if they dared the risk, she and Janni--the version of her from his native universe--had resonance, a form of psychic bleed that happened between psy-positive alternates of the same person, when those two versions were in the same somewhen. Janni would soon know about their make-out session, if she didn't already, and she would doubtless add it to the long list of grudges she held against him.

To have a bit more than a year left before she could join the Named, _this_ woman had to be... "Twenty-five," he said aloud. "You're twenty-five."

The spiderweb-like light that was characteristic of biologically modified persons from their type of universe glimmered from beneath her skin as she studied him. "You're thirty-four."

_Janni_ couldn't read telomeres and calculate ages that quickly. Without showing his surprise, he replied, "Yes."

Second sighed and scooted aside so she could get out of the bed without stepping on his toes. "Thanks. I mean that. At least I have a start of an idea to what I'm miss--"

He had two fingers against her lips, shushing her. "You're high. Don't say anything you'll regret later."

Janni was going to be ticked off enough.

Second blinked once. "Stim."

She had taken a jolt tab for some reason, and she was learning the hard way why psy-positives had to be leery of stimulants. He had to be careful with them, himself, and he was just psy-sensitive, not psy-positive. The distinction probably wasn't as significant as they'd been raised to believe, but it did exist.

Second's consideration of his words was characteristic of the person who had been named Jannis Lysacarly, in his universe. Janni could hide her thoughts and emotions, too, but she could never quite lose an underlying hardness. Her calmness was faked, a veneer to hide an underlying calculation and chill.

Second's wasn't, with staid nonchalance being her natural default rather than a façade. He liked it.

"I am slightly more inclined to jabber and ignore the regen patch," Second commented, "but I've been doing that anyway."

He gave her a hard look.

She smiled sweetly, and the expression embodied what little he liked about Janni. Fools often mistook her for an idiot, discovering too late that she'd been playing them all along.

He was more unnerved than surprised to realize that Second had pulled off _his_ belt without him noticing--treating him to the same test that he had done to her.

She'd answered consciously that yes, she trusted him enough to let him put her at a disadvantage.

He'd answered _un_ consciously, and that in itself was an admission of how much he liked her. (It also was a hint that 'like' wasn't _quite_ the right word for how he felt, but he knew better than to name that sort of emotion. He was too sentimental for his own good as it was.)

Thankfully, she was casually eying his belt, not him, so she'd not picked up on the physiological interest.

Or maybe she was just too inexperienced to be able to recognize his lust for what it was. There was a depressing thought.

She casually eyed this belt while she let it fall to the floor, as he'd done with hers mere minutes earlier. "Well, then. Guess I'd better go before Nev shows up."

Nev being her oldest sister, who had murdered the previous Second before being killed, herself, by the woman who lived with Third/Second and Janni. "She wasn't after you."

She shrugged and rolled to her feet. "Nev is _always_ after me. She got Second because she could. Now that she's here, she'll poke around for evidence until she has enough to claim I'm a Breach."

"She's dead." Good thing, too, because he'd be even more troubled by who he was attracted to if he'd felt obligated to kill the sister who was a threat to her. Killing a lover's relatives was not conducive to a long-term relationship, even if the lover was okay with it.

Third/Second froze for a long moment, then looked him in the eye. "Dead? _Nev_?"

"Yes. Raleigh got her."

Third/Second bounced once on her toes, in a reserved expression of lighthearted exuberance that took his breath away. She was everything he'd wished Janni could be.

And she was a Nameless refugee from a post-apocalyptic hellverse, forbidden from life as a person until she reached an appropriate age--and she had a psychic link to the bondmate he never planned to marry but was still tied to, mostly because they'd both been too busy to bother with dissolving the bonding.

Life always was kicking him in the balls. "Fuck."

Humor flashed in the young woman's blue eyes. "Okay."

"I meant--" He grabbed her hand before she could do anything with it that would encourage the pulsar. "No. Hit Naming, then we'll talk, but before then..."

Her expression stayed flat, proving how she'd survived so long. Nameless weren't allowed to care. She didn't sigh again, but TamLin could tell that she wanted to.

He hesitated, too aware of the risks to truly want to tempt fate by giving reason for someone to consider her a Breach, but... With one clutchmate murdered by her sister and the other possibly suicidal from the loss of his lover and unborn child, she might need a reason to keep on fighting.

TamLin dropped a quick kiss on her lips, ran his thumb under her chin, and then retreated to the door. "Keep yourself alive, Second."

She didn't even flinch. She was too busy staring at him.

He let himself out and decided it was time to counter the pulsar with a tab of jolt, before he made any more of a fool of himself.

##### Buy _Trust Is a Fickle Business_ to keep reading!

## Thank you for reading!

A simple review, even if it's just thoughts on what you liked and disliked about a story, helps other readers find stories they like, too. Please consider leaving one.

## Also by Cara Lee:

###### "Full Rune"

### Wynne d'Arzon series

###### Thrice Uncharmed

###### Twice Bold

### Displaced Shadows

###### She Who Knows Tomorrow

###### Trust is a Fickle Business

###### The Innocence of Serpents

## About the Author

**Cara Lee** is the name used for the dystopian works of Misti Wolanski. Technology, biology, propaganda, and the moral implications of all three have fascinated the author since she first noticed how people with power often abuse it. She now writes stories that explore the boundaries where helpful becomes hurtful, and vice versa, while her cat tries to sneak sips of her coffee.

**Wattpad** : carradee

**Twitter** : @carradee

**Website** : http://mistiwolanski.com

**Blog** : <http://carradee.blogspot.com>

## Why the two editions?

People have different personal beliefs about specific words that are or are not okay to say, with various arguments about why or why not the words are appropriate.

Some believe that certain words are, by definition, what the Christian Bible calls things like "evil" and "unclean" (among other things); some understand those words as having to do with the intent and meaning of what is said rather than having to do with specific words, themselves. Some think that using certain words necessarily displays ignorance, while others believe avoidance or fear of specific words is ignorantly superstitious.

Personally, I'm of the belief that the Christian Bible only forbids me from abusing the name(s) of God (ref. Exodus 20:7 or Deuteronomy 5:11), but I'm also a visual learner. I may not mind the words that some folks believe "bad" by definition, but sometimes, I just don't want to read them. Maybe I'm not in the mood, or maybe I'm chatting with some folks who I know will be bothered if I use them.

I also happen to know that some readers would rather not see certain words. This series has turned out in such a way that well fits such dual editions.

Dual editions aren't unique. They appear in "explicit" vs. "censored" editions of songs, for example, and even some fanfic authors intentionally create "adult" and "child-friendly" editions of their stories.

I could have released these versions as separate books, but the first one, _She Who Knows Tomorrow_ , only has a handful of adjustments. Other titles have more, dependent on the narrators. Some readers will want to read or have both editions, whether for their own reading or for recommending to others. So keeping both versions in one file offers the most options for you, my reader, without affecting your pocketbook.

Read one or both versions, whichever you like, and may you enjoy them.

--Cara Lee

**Wondering where the title came from for _She Who Knows Tomorrow_?**

It's not a direct reference, but it was inspired by James 4:14.

"Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." (KJV)

## She Who Knows Tomorrow

###  Authorized Cut

#### (rated T)

Third, called 'Kitten' by the women she shared an apartment with, kept her attention on the wooden blocks stacked on the dining room table. She wasn't sure whence the game had come, but Janni had left it, not Raleigh--Third could read that much in the wood.

Third and Janni were _technically_ the same person, just from different universes. Different lives. Janni had made Naming, for example, without ever being Nameless.

But they had their similarities, too. Logic and coordination puzzles helped them both. Settled them. Helped them focus on whichever somewhen they were in at a particular moment.

Janni lived more linearly than Third was used to, jumping universes when she needed a break from whenever she was living. Third _could_ jump universes--that was how she had escaped her own, after all--but she preferred living sequentially, skipping around linear time. That was dangerous, though, because time jumping was more likely to get her noticed by Shadow Corps. Shadow Corps feared escapees from her kind of universe, because they were usually Nameless, like her.

Nameless weren't much liked by anyone.

And sometimes time jumping let her learn things she didn't want to know--like how Second was dead and First didn't know yet and Third would have to tell him.

She froze, remembering the cage she would be in--how Second's body would self-immolate, as Nameless were designed to do at death, to dispose of their bodies.

Thanks to a slip ahead, Third had seen it once already, from across the room, but she hadn't been the girl in the cage yet--who _had_ been Third herself, not some alternate universe version of her--digging the governor chip out of her flesh with her wristwire. That was something she'd only dare do if absolutely necessary. She was _so_ close to surviving long enough to warrant a name, and she had the governor chip for good reason.

She would have to experience it all again, up close, as the girl inside that cage. In a day, no more than three, she would witness what her sister actually did to kill their sister-in-law. Poison, maybe. Nev was good with those, and she wouldn't want to risk combat with a Nameless. Later-Third had looked unwell, probably from gamma exposure. Jumpers--especially mergers, like her--were more sensitive to gamma radiation than most primes, enough that Second would be slowed by them, too, though she was navigator class and therefore not as sensitive as Third was.

Of the two of them, Third was more dangerous, anyway.

Nameless were created to be cannon fodder. A Nameless who survived long enough ended up Named, but that was more manipulation than kindness, because it gave Nameless something to work towards, so they wouldn't give up and let themselves die. As the youngest of her particular clutch of Nameless--and as one who was usually sent without any backup, because her clutch had an odd number--Third was very good at killing. Better than other versions of herself, and Janni knew it.

Third didn't let herself sigh--she'd been Fourth, once, but the previous Third of her clutch had died due to an ill-timed grunt--and pulled another block from the tower game without toppling it. The game wasn't hard--basic logic, physics, coordination--but it was solid, and that helped her focus.

Getting too deep in the memories could make her Jump, and she knew better than to let her instincts take over like that. She'd likely hop over to the tenement building across the street and slaughtering the thugs before any of the gang's hostages realized they were being freed. She did things like that, sometimes--forgetting that she wasn't in her own universe and a threat would only hurt the locals, not her or any Named from her universe. That confusion was how Janni had convinced her to stick around.

After all, who better to keep her steady than an alternate version of herself?

Surrounded by the tenement buildings that towered over the street, Raleigh glanced at the wannabe mugger's dagger, then met his gaze. "You're kidding, right?"

The man snorted, baring his teeth in a way that he doubtless intended as threatening but that reminded her of a death grimace. "No joke, little lady. Just hand over the cred, and nobody need get hurt."

He had the 'nobody' right.

"I don't carry a credit chip," Raleigh said mildly, activating the internal macro that would check if the guy had backup. Not that it would make much difference if he did. She wasn't as lethal as Kitten, but she wasn't hapless. She wasn't even all that _little_ , but the guy was big enough that his genetic code would've been stripped of growth commands, back home. Too much risk of sizing mix-ups with nutritional allotments and vac suits.

The guy scowled and drew himself erect so he loomed over her as well as outweighed her. "Everyone carry cred."

Her enhancements detected another male behind her, but that one was leaning casually against a wall. He also carried a boot knife and a pocket pistol, but both were holstered and were almost mandatory for civvies in their part of town. Just a loiterer, not backup.

"Perhaps I'm broke," she pointed out. Or perhaps she was delaying him, hoping StretSec might appear--but the public security force tended to avoid these streets. Too little respect for the law, too much violence, too many freaks like her.

The guy pointedly ogled her shattersilk trench coat. "You dress too fine to be broke."

Raleigh sighed and opened her coat so he could see the darkened veins previously hidden by her collar--veins that undulated with something beyond her pulse.

He recoiled with a curse. "Cyban!"

She pulled her coat closed before he noticed anything else, like the gills, which weren't (yet?) insertable in this universe. "Yeah," she said, as if her being a cyborg were the only reason her roommates had somehow gotten her the shattersilk.

Raleigh was unusual, living in a universe and time zone that didn't like oddities. Janni _seemed_ normal, which was what counted, and Kitten... Kitten just acted odd, though Raleigh was pretty sure that girl had some sleeper tech that stayed too far under the skin to be visible.

Raleigh tapped the closure to seal up her coat, watching the mugger in case fear made him lash out. The loiterer behind her wasn't even curious about the situation--judging from his poise, pulse, and respiration rate--so she ignored him. "How about you hand over the knife, and I'll forget we met?"

"Cybans can't forget."

Her attacker wasn't stupid, then; just foolish.

"Pretend to forget. And not give your bio-ID to StretSec." Raleigh wasn't Janni, to be able to identify someone's bio-identity without a genetic sample, but people assumed all sorts of things about cyborgs. Raleigh's chipset was good, marine-grade in her home universe, but Janni's mods were invisible to her senses and enhancements alike, which was theoretically impossible.

The guy swallowed, his gaze skittering away from hers. "What a cyban need my knife for?"

The male behind them asked, "What, and leave you to mug the next neighbor that passes through?"

Raleigh didn't recognize the voice and automatically started running it through her vocal recognition software. She turned enough to glimpse him--he looked handsome, if one liked the scruffy brunet type, but his clothes were good, so he was either one of the decent locals or a pimp. Maybe an illegal drug dealer, but dealers tended to wear precious metals, the better to fence if addicts mugged them for a fix. His suit and shoes were quality, but he didn't even have a timepiece or console.

The would-have-been mugger gulped, flung his knife at her, and ran. Raleigh's combat chipset activated to twist her out of the blade's way, landing her in a crouch. The auto-released adrenaline triggered a headache.

She winced and force-quitted the hormone-activation macro, then picked up the blade. The scanners in Raleigh's hands called it well-made, though she'd blocked most of her own memories involving combat knives. Kitten would probably like it.

But the situation wasn't over yet. Raleigh turned towards the man behind her and ran his image through her facial recognition software.

He was leaning against a nearby wall, evidently waiting for someone. His forehead looked to be taut from fighting a headache, not from any concern about her oddness, but his wry question to the would-have-been mugger had sounded unstrained, even lax.

Her software wasn't getting any more hits for his face than it had for his voice. From some other universe, maybe? Raleigh didn't understand how universe jumping worked, but she'd noticed that her sort of refugee tended to congregate near each other.

"New to the area?" She wasn't about to ask if he were new to that universe. That would've been rude.

He glanced at the door to the place she shared with Janni and Kitten. "Not really."

"You know Janni?" she asked. He looked capable of handling himself, but not nearly to the degree to which Raleigh would've expected him to know _Kitten_.

He shrugged. "I'll catch her later."

As he walked away, Raleigh glanced around the street--the few people still out were studiously _not_ looking her way--then let herself into the rental that was paid for by whichever of the three of them was able to keep a job any particular month. Most folks didn't dare live on street level, but she and her roommates could handle it.

Any way they spliced it, they were all freaks.

Raleigh entered the apartment she shared with Janni and Kitten. The latter girl was sitting at the dining room table, staring at a tower made of wooden rectangular prisms that Raleigh's recognition software told her was Jenga--a game that she couldn't ever remember seeing in that universe. She opted not to ask about it. Janni, at least, would _say_ if she couldn't answer a question. Kitten...

The auburn-haired girl--who was the youngest of the three of them, and her too-big secondhand sweater made her look younger than she already was--turned her ice blue stare on Raleigh.

Raleigh keyed her software to hide her shiver and gave a little shake of her head. No problems. Not today.

Kitten relaxed enough for Raleigh's enhancements to notice--and _just_ enough for that. She wondered if Kitten did that on purpose, somehow.

Raleigh took off her trench coat and folded it over a chair, then put the knife on the table--hilt facing Kitten, because she wasn't stupid--and slid it over.

The girl plucked the knife off the table, eyed it, then stuck it under her sweater to join the other weapons hidden in the bulky clothing. Kitten even kept a _garrote_ somewhere. Maybe that was the wire bracelet on the girl's left wrist.

Raleigh went to the kitchen. "Can I make you anything?"

Kitten looked back at the Jenga game and precisely removed one wooden block.

She was pretty sure Kitten understood the lingua franca, but she wasn't sure that the girl was completely fluent, which helped the frustration. "I'll make enough coffee for you to have some, if you want."

"Allergic."

She froze, despite the quietness of Kitten's voice. The girl spoke so rarely that getting her to say _anything_ was a challenge. Janni had commented that Kitten was actually doing very well, considering the hellverse she was from, and Janni knew far more about the various universes and time zones than Raleigh ever would.

" _Allergic_?" she asked. "You've been living with us for months, and you just say this now?"

Now that she thought of it, Raleigh was sure the girl even _drank_ coffee. Was that a code word she'd forgotten?

"We like the taste."

A full sentence. Raleigh felt like clapping, except... "We?"

Raleigh detected air moving behind her, and she whirled to see a person--a man--that her enhancements insisted wasn't actually there and that she hadn't heard come in. "What, do some universes have holograms?"

The man's blue eyes--a little darker than Kitten's--glanced between them, his stance and manner reminding her of Kitten rather _too_ much.

And suddenly, Kitten didn't show up to her enhancements, either.

Raleigh didn't know the details of Kitten's home universe. That didn't mean she couldn't recognize an assassin-from-birth when she met one. "What do you want?"

His stance kept him ready to face her, but he turned his stare to Kitten. "Second?"

Silence answered him for a long moment, then Raleigh heard the Jenga game collapse. She turned so she could keep an eye on both assassins.

Kitten neatly placed a block on the table, beside where she'd been playing the game with herself.

Raleigh sensed more than heard the man's breath catch, his throat close. He stepped back, against the wall, as if to stay out of the way to take a moment to...mourn, it seemed.

"What's second?" she asked.

Kitten swiped the Jenga pieces off the table, the movement so fast and vehement that she didn't like the question, but her stare at Raleigh was as staid as usual.

The girl then got up from the table and approached the two of them. She paused in the doorway, then strode past Raleigh to the man.

He tensed. "Third--"

"She's a null," Kitten said flatly.

Raleigh had been called many things, but never that.

The man let out a slow breath, and Raleigh's enhancements caught relief in the sound. "The...other one is a prime?" he asked.

Kitten shrugged--an ever-so-slight nudge of the shoulders, but _shrugged_. The sight would've made Raleigh choke, had she been mid-swallow.

"She..." Kitten paused, as if rethinking her words. "Her bondmate is a natural."

Raleigh was reminded of Janni, when that woman went on one of her absentminded rambles that often featured jargon from other universes.

The man gave Kitten a hard look, started to say something, then stopped. He swallowed. "Her name?"

The girl gave him a self-conscious smile. "Jannis Lysacarly. She calls me 'Kitten'."

"I thought your name _was_ Kitten," Raleigh cut in.

She froze, angled as if she expected the strange man to strike her.

The man glanced at the ceiling, then to her neck, making her want to put her trench coat back on to hide the tech, the _gills_. " _Hard_ mods?" He sounded startled.

"Apex universe," the girl commented, as if in answer to a question.

Janni had called Raleigh's home universe that, but Raleigh hadn't known she'd done so in Kitten's hearing.

The man relaxed, ever so slightly, and Raleigh felt comfortable assuming that he was from the same universe as the girl. He even seemed to be Kitten's friend, insofar as an assassin could have friends.

He turned to Kitten. "Lunch?"

The girl nodded once and led the way out.

At the door, the man paused. "If you would, please: _Never_ say my sister has a name."

_Sister?_ Raleigh blinked. The specific shades of their hair and eyes were too distinct for them to look related. "Why not?"

His wry smile made him look like a civvie--and a rather handsome one, if Raleigh were honest with herself, which she tried to be. He glanced toward the door, and Kitten pointedly stepped out and shut it behind her.

"Because she hasn't earned a name yet," he said frankly. "She's nearing the age for it, and I'd like to see her live that long."

Raleigh blinked again. "Me saying she has a name could get her _killed_?"

"Yes."

She suddenly felt very glad that her home universe wasn't anything like _that_. Her home universe was messed up--all were, to some degree--but hers wasn't nearly that bad. She couldn't imagine still qualifying as a child at twenty-five.

He turned to leave.

"Who was second?" she blurted, realizing as she asked it that their reactions had suggested his mentioned 'second' had been a person, much as he called Kitten 'third'.

The man froze, then turned with a careful precision that again reminded Raleigh of Kitten, who was ever-ready to launch into something terrifyingly lethal. (She'd seen Kitten do it.)

He met her gaze and paused, as if considering how to phrase what he wanted to say for the universe they were both in.

He quietly answered, "My wife," and left.

And Raleigh realized she had no idea if he planned to bring his sister back or not, or if _he_ even had a name. After what he'd said about Kitten and Second, she doubted she wanted to know the answer to either question.

Third led her brother to across the street from a restaurant that was that somewhen's equivalent to Greek food. First studied the building a moment, then strode into the street toward the entrance, accepting her choice. Third continued down the sidewalk and crossed the street a block down before circling her way back up. Second--if she hadn't been dead--would've cut across the street a block up, and reached the restaurant before Third did.

Old habits died hard.

Third stepped around a waitress and headed for the back right corner--that would be his first choice, with the two of them, with the back left being first choice when all three of them together, and the front corners only chosen if the back options were taken--and slipped into the seat across from her brother as the waitress took his drink order--waters, for both of them, no ice, with lemon in his and lime in hers. First was thoughtful like that, much like TamLin, who had been their clutch's keeper, before...

She blinked twice, quickly, to interfere with the tear ducts. Tears were dangerous, whether because they interfered with the identification of a threat or because they displayed that she wasn't an automaton. She focused on the table as a distraction. It was plastic, engineered to look like wood, but plastics' bio-identities were easy to recognize.

Third turned in her seat to keep as much of an eye on their surroundings as she could, though First had taken the true corner and thereby set himself as the on-duty sentinel. Firsts didn't always see themselves as responsible for their clutches--some only delegated, as if they were keepers, themselves--so Third appreciated his willingness to give her a break, when he could.

His own limitations--and choices--meant that the worst, longest, and most dangerous jobs had always fallen to Third, often by herself... She didn't need to be psy-positive to know her brother felt guilty about it. He'd been born first, before their mother had realized her children were usually unstable. He could've been Named all along, had their mother wanted that.

Third had never had that option.

First opened his menu. "Where's the chicken?"

She crisply opened her menu to the appropriate page, paused long enough for him to spot it, then checked the veal, herself.

"You have local currency?" First asked blandly. He knew she did--she wouldn't have recommended the restaurant if she couldn't pay for it--and his tone made the question rhetorical.

Janni knew how Third got her money, too, though Third was pretty sure Raleigh didn't. Their spot of town made it easy. She could rob a burglar or mug a pimp or flip a bundle of unlicensed drugs. (The last one could be the most amusing, considering dealers sometimes noticed that she was selling them their own jolt.) She had to vary her targets and processes, too, because people swapped notes, and predictability would get her killed.

But keeping the criminal element mad at her kept her from getting complacent, and it paid well, without her having to take a name. She'd fled her universe because she _wasn 't_ suicidal, so she wasn't about to do something that would get her hunted as a Breach.

Living with a Named version of herself did kinda stretch the laws thin, but Janni _was_ Named, so Third wasn't neglecting her duty. If you assumed that Janni let Third protect her from Infested--which didn't exist in their current universe, so the law only applied if you squinted.

Third liked squinting.

But perhaps that was because of TamLin. Even though he'd been their clutch's keeper and responsible for keeping them in line, he had been a sensate, naturally aware of the traces left by displaced time or universes. Gave him cluster headaches, even.

She blinked twice, quickly, to stop the tear ducts, ducking her chin to hide any glint from watery eyes. She put her menu down so First could see it, tapped her choice, then folded her menu and put it aside.

The waitress returned with their waters, and First ordered for both of them.

The woman frowned. "I think the young lady should order her own meal."

"She told me what she wanted before you came over here," First said calmly. "And don't forget the extra olives."

The waitress's frown deepened as she studied Third, who observed that the woman had acne scars--some fresh enough that she suffered adult outbreaks--and had removed a wedding tattoo from her right wrist, judging from the size and shape of that particular scar. Not enough credits to remove the blemish, probably.

"Madam?" First cut in, though Third was sure he'd noticed the removed tattoo, too. "Please take our orders to the kitchen. My sister is hungry."

"Is she mute?"

"Sometimes." His mild, dry tone mimicked TamLin, and Third had to look away again, to maintain her composure. The waitress left, and First sighed softly. "I'm sorry. I should've thought before--"

"He's _dead_ ," she interrupted, though he would've had to strike her for such disrespect, back home. "She's dead. We've both lost the reasons we ran to begin with, so it's either find something else to live for or go back home and let the zombies eat our brains."

Third didn't talk that much. She was getting...confused. She sipped her water as she adjusted her mental state to reduce the resonance--psychic influence from a nearby alternate version of herself--then let out a long sigh. "Janni."

"She's more verbose, then?"

Third shrugged. "Named." A person, allowed--required--to speak, plus from a universe that featured no Infested and more culture.

Out of habit, she scanned the restaurant for threats.

She frowned and turned to get a better look, though that would be overtly obvious. The object of her attention noticed her, and he gave her a wry, rueful smirk from across the restaurant.

"Third?" First asked, the polite request a demand for an explanation.

She glanced at her brother, and when she looked back, she was unsurprised to find the man she'd been staring at was gone. "Father," she whispered, though he wasn't _their_ father.

She turned back to the table as the waitress set their ordered meals down. First's expression asked the question he wouldn't dare say aloud. Nameless weren't allowed to care.

"Janni's father." Though Third knew he was gone, she searched the crowd of restaurant employees and patrons, hoping for a glimpse, something that would help her figure out why he was there. "I take after him."

Which made her all the more worried about why Nev would kill Second and why Third would remove her governor chip. Jumpers who knew how to use their abilities were difficult to capture. Second, as a navigator, was even harder to catch than Third was. Why was _Second_ the one who was about to end up dead?

Third had met Janni's father once before, when he slipped into her universe, and though he hadn't said as much--and though his universe preferred euthanasia over namelessness--she suspected he'd originally been Nameless, himself.

Just one more thought of the many that Third was careful to keep Janni from picking up. Janni didn't need that knowledge worrying her conscience.

Raleigh recovered her equilibrium by making coffee and preparing sandwiches to stick in the fridge, for everyone to eat whenever they got around to it. Janni came in when Raleigh was halfway through putting jalapeño kale chips on the sandwich she'd made for herself. "You okay?"

"This body is undamaged," Janni said, one of the few overtly odd things she'd say, sometimes. Brushing her brown-dyed bangs out of her eyes, she wrinkled her nose and peered at the sandwich. "I hope you have something prepped that you didn't ruin with condiments."

Raleigh pointed a thumb at the fridge. Janni promptly opened it and grabbed a plastic-wrapped sandwich and a single-serve bottle of milk.

Before Janni could ask where their third roommate was, Raleigh said, "Kitten's brother picked her up for lunch."

The milk bottle and sandwich hit the floor, and Janni was facing Raleigh before her combat chip recognized a possible threat.

Raleigh swallowed hard, pulse pounding from the adrenaline. "You look a lot like Kitten when you do that."

Janni watched her for a long moment--looking ever so creepily like Kitten--then blinked once, still as expressive as an iceberg. "Unsurprising."

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

The other woman--Raleigh _thought_ Janni was younger than she was, but it was hard to tell, and it was always possible that something in Janni's universe made aging go funky--looked irritated. "You've lived with us for months, Raleigh. _Months_. You have military-grade enhancements. Granted, your universe is apex class, not all that advanced, but... How have you _not_ noticed?"

Only Janni could pull off indignant and insulting at the same time.

"Noticed _what_?" Raleigh snapped, perhaps more irritated than she should've been.

Janni indicated her face--no, her _eyes_ , which were pale blue, much like--

No. _Exactly_ like Kitten's.

"Finally." Janni huffed, as if it were perfectly natural to assume that someone from another universe would hang out with _an alternate version of herself_. "That wasn't all that hard, was it?"

That explained why the roots of Janni's brown hair came in the precise shade of auburn of Kitten's, and Raleigh could only assume that Janni had her hair professionally styled to further promote the dissimilarity. And... "You have a brother?"

Janni's gaze chilled, and Raleigh wondered why she'd never noticed how comparable she and Kitten were. Now that she thought of it, they were most similar when one or the other was agitated. Some low-level empathic or telepathic ability, maybe?

Then Janni's eyes thawed to their usual pale blue, more water than ice. "I _had_ a brother," she said, tone the clinical one she used when discussing potentially disturbing topics. "He didn't survive to Naming, in my universe."

Raleigh stared. "Naming?" she whispered. Maybe Janni was old enough to have relearned civilian reflexes after she'd once been an assassin.

Janni crouched and waved a dismissive hand as she picked up the dropped milk and sandwich. "I wasn't handicapped. I was Named on my first birthday, which is the normal date for mods. Um, primes. Alphas?" She squinted at Raleigh. "Your universe didn't have us, but you get my gist, I think."

Raleigh blinked. "But you aren't a cyborg."

That question had come up in conversation before, though Janni never had explained how she could read people's bio-identities. Raleigh had assumed it was some freak mutation, but Kitten couldn't do that...so far as Raleigh knew.

"Not as such, no." Janni sighed. "Apex class modifications are all tech, hardware--so 'hard' mods. They end with you. No inheritance involved."

That wasn't strictly true. "I inherited a tolerance for them."

She shook her head and set her sandwich and bottle of milk on the counter. "Not the same." She quickly unwrapped the food. "Some universes, the mods are biological, inherited. That's 'soft' mods. Usually, scientists who played God that much ended up producing monsters, too, so the originally optional mods ended up necessary."

Janni took a bite, chewed, swallowed--and didn't comment on the mustard, which meant she wasn't paying attention to what she was eating. "But soft mods get...messy. They don't always take, or they cause problems. So, to make sure kids aren't handicapped, they aren't...named, aren't legally people, until they survive _x_ months. And then if something shows up before that ceremony, and you're a _cripple_..." She grimaced.

With how clearly Janni was explaining things now, Raleigh was starting to believe the woman was usually hard to follow on purpose. "Then you don't get Named?"

Janni eyed her sharply, belying her usual happy-go-lucky behavior. "No. You're either euthanized, or you're one of the Nameless." She was quiet for a long moment. "Neither option is kind. In some universes, one option is more common than the other."

"Kitten is Nameless?"

"Third," Janni said softly. "She is Third of her... I'm not sure what they call a group of Nameless. Her brother..." Her gaze went distant. "Her brother was First, for the same reason he was euthanized in my universe."

Raleigh had always assumed Janni's home universe was better than Kitten's. Now she wasn't so sure. "Your parents _killed_ him?"

"I'm not sure what his disability is... It was before I was born, and nobody thought about it, and Kitten's good at avoiding thoughts she doesn't want me to pick up."

Raleigh stared. "You're _telepathic_?"

Janni shook her head. "More...empathic," she said blandly. "I'm...a weaker psy than my alternates. I'm actually better off than the strongest me--"

"There's _another_ version of you? In _this_ universe?" Three versions of the same person seemed overmuch.

"Sometimes. Lysacarly jumps universes a lot for her job, but she's not infrequently in this one--likely due to Kitten and me, though I don't think she's noticed us yet. When you fold time and space enough to produce paradoxes like ours, well... Like attracts like."

Raleigh wondered how many versions of _her_ there were. "And when...Lysacarly...notices you?"

"She might have to arrest us--me, Kitten. Lysacarly's Shadow Corps." Janni paused, but she evidently wasn't waiting for Raleigh's reaction to discovering that a _telepathic_ version of Janni was an active member of the stay-in-your-own-universe police, because she continued before Raleigh could think of one. "What happens is my memory and thoughts can get...confused, with those of any other version of me that's in range. It's a known issue for psy-positives, and it's usually called 'resonance'. Kitten and I are fairly used to it, though she started out enough better than me that I suspect she's met herself more often than I have. Lysacarly _might_ be used to it, but she's fully telepathic, so it'll affect her worse than it does us."

The woman's casual chatting about alternate versions of herself reminded Raleigh of how, when they'd met, Janni had glanced at her gills and said, "Apex. Need a place to stay?" Only later had Raleigh realized that Janni's 'apex' was a comment on the type of universe she was from.

"What does this have to do with...First"--Kitten's brother--"taking her to lunch?"

Janni frowned, pausing. "Did they say anything about Second?"

"She was First's wife."

Janni nodded, as if she'd known that.

"And she's dead."

Janni stared at Raleigh, again resembling Kitten. Then she cursed, quietly but vehemently, for several seconds. "Dead?" she muttered. "How can _Dasher_ be..."

Raleigh assumed Second's name had been Dasher, in Janni's universe.

Janni stood, polished off her sandwich, and gulped down her milk. "Did they say where they were going?"

She shook her head.

"Did they say when they'd be back?"

Raleigh just gave Janni a _What do you think?_ frown.

Janni went on another cursing spree, running her hands through her hair. "Okay. You see them--either of them-- _call me_ , okay? This...this is not good." She pulled her console from her pocket, started scrolling through her contacts, grimaced, then pocketed it again.

And promptly left the apartment without bothering to fill Raleigh in or try to recruit her for help.

Raleigh couldn't help but wonder if that oversight was a commentary on how much Janni valued her friendship.

After eating her lunch and ordering baklava for dessert, Third slipped out, ostensibly to go to the ladies' washroom, but she continued out the door to the greenhouse out back. One of the reasons she liked this restaurant was it grew much of its own seasonings.

That and the Greek-ish menu. She was fond of Greek food.

She caught a whiff of hash and followed the scent to Janni's father, who slouched against a table--on the end with the unused clay pots that the restaurant sold with cuttings, rather than by the basil that was on most of the table--wearing blue-collar local.

Drugs tended to be legally obtainable, in this somewhen, but that didn't make them have any fewer risks or side effects. Her TamLin had used them when he could, to dull his sensitivity to Jumps, but Third had never dared try them, herself. Nameless couldn't afford to handicap themselves.

She stared at the cigar in Janni's father's hand for a long moment, intending it to be as a question--but she glimpsed what was under his skin, climbing up his hand. She froze.

He let out a long puff of smoke and flexed the hand belonging to the Infested arm. "Figured you'd notice."

She met his gaze--the blue of her eyes came from him, obviously, as did the darkness of her hair. "Janni thinks you're dead."

His slight smile was at odds with the regret in his eyes. "I am."

Those eyes would give her nightmares, later, but Third found them comforting anyway. Mergers weren't easy to kill, and if he'd been Nameless... He'd be even more difficult, than most.

And the first thing the infestation did, when creating an Infested, was remove the host's ability to kill themselves. Third had seen people try, desperate to die at their own hands so their loved ones wouldn't have to kill them. Those were the ones younger Nameless tended to train on, because the host was still lucid enough to at least fight the infestation's urge to protect itself.

It wouldn't be the first time Third had to eliminate someone she knew--and to be honest, Janni's father was a stranger she'd met, briefly, years before. But...his universe didn't have Infested.

They'd met when he slipped into _her_ universe, though.

He gave her a slight smile and nod, saying yes, she'd guessed right--that his infestation was from _her_ universe.

_Her_ fault.

"Now, don't you go thinking that," he said gently. "I was dumb. Assumed that our universes were sufficiently similar for the doctors back home to be able to handle it. Delayed the spread, but..."

Third knew. She'd seen the progression, often enough.

She checked their surroundings. People were busy taking advantage of their lunch breaks, not watching the man and girl of questionable income chatting by the basil. The two of them were weren't invisible, but they were far from the center of attention.

She sidestepped to near his side. "Message?" Still-lucid Infested persons often wanted their loved ones told some last thing. Usually sharing it got the Nameless deliverer spat upon or struck, but Third would do her job.

He shook his head. "My wife and I... We staged my death years ago, once we realized..." He looked away. "We agreed it would be easier for the kids, so... There's nobody to take a message to. Thanks for asking."

Easier for their children to think some accident had killed him, rather than his forays into another universe? Hard to think that true, for a jumper like Janni. But... "For Nev," his firstborn daughter, Third agreed.

She had been young when she'd met him, but she was sure he hadn't gotten Infested then. She could only guess why he'd intentionally Jump back into a _hellverse_.

Only guess, and remember his expression when he realized they'd have to leave her behind when they escaped her universe for theirs, and wish she didn't take after him quite so much.

"Third..." He sighed, and she waited for him to finish. "You know I wouldn't ask this of you, if I had anyone else who I could trust to do this."

She took a small step back, tucking one hand inside her sweater. "Lie." Cruel of her, to call him on that, but he reminded her too much of herself. She prompted, "Janni?"

His daughter was Named, yes, but she was every bit as capable of killing him as Third was--maybe more, because she had more control over her mods, more stability. _Janni_ didn't have a governor chip, blocking most of her abilities because they were likely to kill her, if left unchecked.

Tears welled in the man's eyes--the eyes of Janni's father, not hers; she'd never had a father. Before Third did something crueler, something that drove him to give up entirely and let the infestation take over, she plucked a knife from the belt hidden by her oversized sweater and stepped around him, stumbling into the table.

Her blade found its mark and returned to its sheath--she'd clean it later, replace the sheath--and the pots fell, some crashing to the ground, some breaking.

As he collapsed to the ground--still alive and in a lot of pain (but not for long, and the infestation would die with him because nobody from this universe would have any mods for it to latch onto)--she backed away, _into_ a passerby, with enough force to continue the chain reaction of stumbling and jostling and confusion about who had started what.

Third scurried away from the mess, as if overwhelmed by the noise, and let herself back into the restaurant hallway, breathing harder than she should've been.

First stood across the hall and a little way up from the ladies' washroom, waiting for her. He spotted her and tilted his chin in inquiry. She answered with slight shrug as she approached.

As she reached him, he turned towards the restaurant proper, and they both headed back to their table, where her lunch and two servings of coffee and baklava waited.

"I was beginning to think Nev had picked you up," he said.

"Nev?" Third asked promptly, _because_ she wasn't supposed to, so the question would get First focused on making sure none of the witnesses would necessitate her being punished for it, distract him from noticing any little tells that slipped from how unsteady she felt. She already knew their Nev would be joining them in that universe soon, if she wasn't already there.

Nev would kill Second. Nev would stick Third in a cage and poison her and leave her to watch as she killed Second.

Why would Nev kill Second?

First's expression tightened as they slipped into their seats. He knew why Third acted out--understood it, even--but that didn't mean he liked it. "I think she might be around."

And Nev would be all too happy to assume Third was a Breach. With their universe's TamLin dead, the clutch had no keeper, so Nev would be free to assume the worst and kill Third.

That still didn't explain why _Second_ would die.

"What took you so long?" her brother asked. "Smelling the basil?"

She did like the scent. Janni's father had chosen to die near the basil, so maybe that was something else the two of them had in common.

Third took a bite of the baklava, ignoring the coffee. If she were to be fighting for her life, she would need to be operating at full capacity, not woozy from her coffee allergy.

As she started on her lunch, she glanced at her left wrist. Digging out the governor chip would hurt.

Third abruptly remembered that First had asked why she'd been delayed. "Work."

He raised his eyebrows. "This universe keeps you busy, then. That's good."

Never mind that the job she'd had to do had been a holdover from their home 'verse. Considering First was about to lose his wife and Third suspected she'd be the reason for it, she was willing to let him believe what he would. Janni's father had come to _her_ , not him, when he needed death. She wondered if First remembered their father.

She took another bite of baklava, wondering whom she'd trust to off _her_ , if she ever needed killing. The only person she'd ever trusted that much was their keeper, TamLin, and she'd driven him into killing himself.

Her brother frowned, but he followed her lead and ate dessert.

Raleigh would have been the first to admit that she wasn't all that _good_ a friend to her housemates. _Good_ friends knew about allergies and families and origin stories. _Good_ friends didn't steal contact lists when the opportunity arose.

But in Raleigh's universe, taking precautions even with those she trusted was standard procedure--though her continuance of that procedure into this universe was, perhaps, influenced by the knowledge Janni and Kitten would be forgiving of such stemming-from-native-universe habits.

Sitting at the dining room table, she paged through her console's copy of Janni's contact list, trying to figure out whom the woman had considered calling. It was probably one that had been on there awhile, for Janni had grimaced like that before.

Someone was breathing behind her.

Raleigh's enhancements analyzed the height, temperature, and other details about the body suddenly behind her before she turned. "How do you do that?"

Kitten stood...stoically, Raleigh thought, now that she knew of the girl's namelessness. The ice blue eyes observed without revealing what thoughts or emotions went on behind them. The circles under her eyes were too dark to be explained by the few hours she'd been away, and she was even more unkempt than usual. Dirt smudged her right cheek, and her sweater was gone, leaving a sleeveless summer shirt that matched her eyes, and the wire bracelet was missing from her left wrist.

"How's your brother?" Raleigh didn't expect any more answer to that question, but she figured it was polite to ask. "I'm sorry about his wife."

Kitten blinked twice, quickly--as if hiding emotion, rather than as if startled.

"Janni told me about..." She wasn't sure how to broach the topic of the two of them being alternate versions of the same person. "About Lysacarly."

After a long moment, Kitten pivoted toward the Jenga game, which Raleigh had picked up and re-stacked in its tower. The girl paused, then plucked out a wooden block two levels from the bottom. Raleigh suspected it wasn't a coincidence that the action conveniently put Kitten's back to her.

"So 'prime' is what you call someone with biological modifications?" she asked--again, not expecting an answer, but she wanted to let the girl know that she'd followed some of her conversation with her brother. "And 'null' is someone without?"

Kitten turned her head enough to look over her shoulder at Raleigh, which was enough of an affirmative for her.

"You said Janni had a 'bondmate'. I didn't know she was married." Raleigh was fishing, and she knew Kitten would recognize that.

But Kitten let Raleigh notice when she relaxed--insomuch as she ever relaxed--so might just be willing to let enough slip for her to put things together. After all, Kitten was an alternate version of Janni, and if Raleigh knew _anything_ about the woman, it was that she loved dropping cryptic hints.

The girl picked another brick from the tower, then put it down on the table beside Raleigh's console. She turned her hand palm up, as if asking for the device.

"Do you know how to use it?" Raleigh asked.

Kitten didn't flinch, didn't move, didn't so much as glance Raleigh's way. Just kept her palm up for the console.

Raleigh gave it.

The girl looked the device over for a moment, then started tapping buttons as if she owned one. She didn't. Raleigh had tried giving her one, a few times, but it always ended up returned, with the money back in her account. She now wondered if that was another facet of Kitten's namelessness. No name, so no property, maybe? That would explain why Kitten only ever wore hand-me-downs and castoffs--except for her weapons and the first aid kit. Those, Kitten would buy new, if necessary, and she kept them in excellent condition.

Raleigh remembered Janni's _' I suspect she's met herself more often than I have.'_ "See a console in one universe, you've seen them all?"

Her tapping continued without pause. "Tablet," she said, voice soft and flat. "Usually."

"It's usually called a tablet?"

Kitten nodded once and offered the console back.

Raleigh took it and saw a specific address book entry open on the screen. No name was listed, but the entry had a photo, so Janni had chatted with him before--and the photo was the man she'd seen that morning, who'd spoken up when she encountered the would-have-been mugger.

She was sure Kitten had noticed her startlement already, so she asked the first thing that she could think of: "Is that a _beard_?"

The girl gave a little huff that was her equivalent of a snort. "Four o'clock shadow. It's..." Kitten glanced away, as if evaluating if she should continue, then gave her infinitesimal shrug. "Some people _naturally_ mix well with others, genetically."

She'd called the man a 'natural' when speaking to her brother, Raleigh remembered.

"That...isn't common. So they usually have...abilities, to help them adjust or freeze their appearance more easily than most, to help them hide. He likes looking a little scruffy, in clean-cut universes. Makes people underestimate him."

Kitten spoke as if she knew Janni's husband, and the paragraph was more words than Raleigh could ever remember hearing the girl string together at once, even when speaking to her brother.

"He exists in your universe?"

She looked away. "Dead."

Raleigh realized that if Janni loved one version of him enough to _marry_ him--well, Kitten had probably cared for her universe's version of him, too. "I'm sorry."

Kitten met her gaze for a long moment, faintly puzzled, before she focused back on the Jenga game. "We escaped our universe. He was...unable to acclimate."

Raleigh winced. Acclimation to another universe--where people didn't sound, look, or maybe even move like they did in your own universe--had been tough for _her_ , and her universe had been a lot less apocalyptic than Kitten's seemed to have been.

Her forefinger hovered over the _Call_ button. If she dialed, she'd be announcing that she'd taken Janni's contact list--and she'd also be officially ignoring Janni's request to be called once Kitten turned up.

But First was still out there, somewhere. If Kitten's appearance was anything to go by, her Nameless brother could use some help.

Raleigh hit the button. The call was answered a few seconds later. _" Yes?"_ the man asked, his face filling the screen.

"I'm Raleigh," she said, feeling awkward. The man was Janni's _husband_. So why did he live elsewhere? And why did Janni grimace whenever she considered calling him?

_" I'm sorry?"_

The man didn't even know who she was. She lived with _his wife_ , and he didn't know.

He'd left before she'd walked in, that morning. Maybe he didn't recognize her.

Raleigh itched to hang up and call Janni, as she _should_ have done from the get-go.

Kitten drew a sharp breath and stepped toward the console, reaching out as if to enter the call, then quickly caught herself and stepped even further back out of range, taking up her usual stance, though it seemed...tense...and she stared at the far wall rather than at her surroundings in general.

That was enough acceptance for Raleigh to say, "I live with Janni."

The man blinked, frowning. _" What's the matter?"_

So the man, whoever he was, didn't expect her to know about him unless there was a problem.

That was probably a valid assumption. "First is missing," Raleigh guessed, suspecting she was right when Kitten locked her ice-blue stare on her. "Second is dead. Third is..."--she glanced at Kitten--"damaged." _This body is undamaged_ --an odd turn of phrase she heard Janni use--and knowing what she did now, she suspected 'this body' was how Janni distinguished herself from Kitten.

The man still looked puzzled.

Raleigh let out a long breath. "Look, I don't know how much I can say. I don't want to get these Nameless people killed."

His expression blanked into the stoicism she usually associated with Kitten. It looked far less creepy on him. _" Where are you?"_

"At the apartment." She paused. "Your wife went out looking for them, I think."

From the way the visuals blurred, the man had picked up his console and started running. _" Bondmate, not wife,"_ he corrected casually. _" We're bonded, not consummated."_

If he was able and willing to converse while running, Raleigh would accept all the knowledge she could get. "I thought _bonded_ meant _married_."

He shrugged and ducked around something. _" In some universes. In ours...it's more 'betrothed'."_

"Then why don't you marry?"

_" Various reasons."_

"Resonance," Kitten said, even more softly than she was wont, as if making certain she wouldn't be heard by the man on the other end of the call.

Raleigh looked at the girl, her face warming. Janni had called Kitten better at keeping her thoughts to herself. Being unable to keep another, younger version of herself from hopping into her mind while she was...occupied... _would_ be rather problematic.

_" What?"_

"Nothing," Raleigh said quickly, not wanting to get Kitten--or Third, or whatever she was supposed to be called, since she didn't have an actual name--in trouble.

From his expression, he wasn't fooled, but he also was willing to let it slide.

"I'm sorry, but what's your name?" Raleigh asked. "I mean, if you have one."

He gave a wry half-smile, and she found herself liking him. _" Call me Lin."_

Kitten swiftly left the table, heading down the hall, and Raleigh couldn't help thinking the man's feminine-sounding name was particularly ill-fitting.

After Third and First finished eating, she led the way up on the roof of a building owned by one of the more notorious gangs in town--they were actually honorable and took care of their own, but their retaliation against threats was unusually thorough. Third tended to think of them like a huge clutch of Nameless. She treated them accordingly, and they returned the favor.

The wind tried to pull Third's hair out of its ponytail and First's out of its carefully arranged mess. Third kept her arms at her sides, tucked in the folds of her sweater, since she didn't have a coat. She had long been used to cold, due to the decrepit space habitations she'd grown up in, but appearances mattered.

And her weapons were under the sweater.

"No...beetles?" her brother asked.

"Bugs," she corrected, even as she sensed that something far worse than an eavesdropper had joined them on that roof, on the other side of the lookout post. "No."

The gang's leader wasn't from another universe himself, but his parents had been--from two different universes, if she read his bio-identity right, though Janni was better at that than she was--and he didn't give her any trouble. But by that same token, he accepted any _other_ shadows--escapees from other universes--as well.

First let himself smile a little. It even reached his eyes. "You make friends fast, don't you, Third?"

"Allies." Nameless didn't have friends.

His expression darkened, but he nodded once.

"Nice of you to worry about the laws _now_ , Breach."

First started. He'd gotten far too complacent for his own good...and Third had the sick feeling that complacency was what would be the death of Second.

" _Nev_?!" First sounded startled, as if still shocked, but he was scanning their surroundings for escape.

Third already knew where they were, what was around. She sidled toward one edge of the roof. "Not Breach," she said quietly, as their Named sister came into view.

Nev's mods were fully active, her biotech phased and plugged into a netsuit that resembled a black spiderweb worn between skin and clothes--and there was shattersilk over it, so Nev had been in this universe for at least a day, maybe two, to find that and poison the owner for it. Slow, but she wasn't stupid.

Or, at least, Nev hadn't been stupid when they were in their own universe, but now Third recognized the hardness to Nev's gaze. Nothing Third could say or do would shake her sister's conviction that a breach had occurred.

First was beyond Nev's authority to hunt--she could arrest a first, but firsts could only be hunted by keepers--so Nev wouldn't try to hurt him unless he tried to interfere.

Third took another step, ostensibly away from Nev, but it put her on the roof's edge.

First didn't look at her directly, but he did tense, so he'd noticed. "Third isn't a Breach, Nev."

Nev glowered at him, her expression admitting who had given her the hunt order: their mother. "You consummated?"

The question was directed at First, and he blanched, following Nev's meaning before Third--

" _Oh_ ," she whispered, suddenly understanding why Second was about to die, and Third herself had nothing to do with it.

Second was _pregnant_.

Nameless weren't permitted children. Childbearing defeated the purpose of _being_ Nameless.

Third leaped off the roof to drop and roll atop the neighboring building below and started running, illogically hoping she could find Second in time to save her.

Maybe the Second she'd seen die had been another universe's, or a paradox, and she could stop it if she only fought it, tooth and nail, making use of everything her original hellverse had taught her.

Or so Third tried to convince herself.

As Raleigh waited for Lin, she finished her lunch and drank some water, then kept poking through Janni's contact list, wondering who most of the people were.

The door opened, and Lin edged in, glancing around and quickly shutting the door behind him. "You shouldn't leave that open."

She frowned at the door. "I didn't." But Raleigh couldn't imagine Kitten leaving the door unlocked, either.

Lin frowned back, glanced around the room, and focused on the Jenga game. He went to it, reaching for the block the 'damaged' Kitten had put down, but he didn't touch it.

"Someone's been Jumping," he muttered, forehead scrunched as if he had a headache.

"What?"

"Time jumping," he absentmindedly clarified, still frowning, and gave his temple a brisk rub.

Kitten _had_ looked more tired than Raleigh had thought could be accounted for by a few hours. She looked down the hall, where the girl had gone--and where Raleigh now suspected she wouldn't be able to find her. " _What?_ "

"Janni was playing the game?"

"Kit--" Raleigh remembered the girl was _Nameless_. "Third."

His frown deepened. " _Another_ jumper?"

She froze. "I thought jumpers Jumped _universes_."

He shrugged. "Universes...time... Pretty similar, though jumpers tend to specialize in one or the other." He paused and glanced at Raleigh, but his tone was conversational, not critical. "I thought First was missing."

She shrugged. "Third showed up by herself, looking like something a medic had dragged in. That was a guess. Why?"

The door opened, and Kitten's brother entered, his attention focused on Lin--warily, Raleigh thought, realizing First was a bit more expressive than his sister.

"Sir," First said.

Ah. So First was _not_ missing. She wondered what Third's stare had been for.

Lin waved dismissively, scrutinizing the tower. "This me is not your keeper."

First's gaze narrowed, making Raleigh wonder if Lin's casual words were somehow insulting. "No, my keeper slit his own throat once we reached a universe without Nameless."

Lin turned sharply towards him, and the two men exchanged a long look.

"Well, then," Lin said quietly, breaking the silence. "It's a good thing I'm not from your universe, isn't it?"

Raleigh was beginning to feel as if she should make a flow chart to keep track of who all was from which universe and what their relationships were.

Lin went to the kitchen found the glasses on the first try. "You registered?"

"Nev is," First answered immediately.

Lin filled two glasses with water. "Ah, you have a Nev." He handed one glass to First, who accepted.

They each took a sip, looking eerily similar, despite being two distinctly different people.

Lin swigged the rest of his water, then fiddled with his glass. "You take a name yet?"

First glanced away. "We were waiting for Third."

Lin nodded, as if that made sense. "I'm sorry about Dasher--ah, Second. She wasn't anyone I wanted to know, in my universe, but she turns out well in the universes where she gets you."

From the startled glance First tossed at Lin, he didn't find the other man's words as insensitive as Raleigh did.

"Thank you," First said quietly, sounding...grateful.

Lin shrugged. "My universe favored death over namelessness. I look at you, I see a person."

"A sentimental TamLin." First shook his head, as if he found the concept hard to believe. "Do I make Naming, in any universe?"

Lin--which was evidently short for TamLin--gave First a steady scrutiny, then went to the sink for more water. "Damarc-Luc Waver, diminutive Marc. He's an admin in Shadow Corps." He filled his glass, then returned, giving First a quick grin as he sat back down. "We meet for drinks, sometimes."

First blinked once. "You aren't registered."

"He's administration, not field or tactical. Not required to report non-registrants." Lin shrugged. "Besides, he has to keep his doors open, if he wants to have a shot at saving his Nev once--well. Let's just say Nev's particularly ill-suited to Jumping, no matter which universe she's from."

First snorted, as if amused, but he seemed...pensive.

"This male bonding is all very nice," Raleigh cut in, "but where's Third?"

The two men exchanged an _Isn 't it obvious?_ glance.

"Fleeing Nev," Lin said mildly. "Speaking of which..." He turned to the Jenga game, picked up the block Kitten had moved, and ran it through his hands, then slid it back into place in the tower. "That's better."

Raleigh looked at him, then at the specific block that he'd been careful to touch--a block that Kitten had handled on purpose. The man also accepted First's glass and ran it through his hands on the way to set it in the sink.

She frowned. "Nev is psychoscopic?" If Janni could be a crippled telepath, why couldn't her sister be able to read objects by touching them?

The men turned towards her, Lin's dark and First's blue, and pleasure softened both stares.

Neither spoke, though.

Raleigh rallied her nerves, ones that had carried her through military campaigns that she intentionally abused her software to keep herself from remembering clearly. "So now what do we do? Janni wanted me to call her."

"No," Lin said first, glancing at First before continuing, "Janni meets that Nev, one of them will have to kill the other. I don't want... I don't want her dead."

Raleigh wondered what he'd edited out, but the answer of what to do was blatantly obvious. "So we find Nev and kill her first?"

Lin grimaced. The little emotion in First's expression vanished, and he again reminded her of Kitten.

A logistics possibility occurred to Raleigh. "With Kitten's...time jumping. Couldn't we rescue Second?"

Lin looked away, whereas First studied Raleigh, as if seeing her for the first time.

After a long moment of silence, First turned his staid scrutiny on Lin and paused. Without looking away from the other man, he said, "Time jumping has limits. We could save _a_ Second, but she wouldn't be my Second. Third would've already fetched her, otherwise."

Raleigh glanced at the Jenga game, which a future Kitten had evidently Jumped back in time to tweak, which had gotten Lin aware of the time jumping issues to begin with.

At least limitations meant that there _were_ set cause and effect, even when the cause and effect were circular. "I'm sorry."

First studied her again, and Raleigh got the impression that Nameless weren't usually treated as _people_. She remembered his earlier statement that he and Second had been waiting to take names until Third was old enough to take one, too, and if she were reading the situation right, that waiting had cost Second her life.

She felt sorry for all three of them.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

Raleigh grabbed her shattersilk trench coat and pulled it on, making sure it hid her tech, including the gills.

Even before she tapped the seal closed, First gave a slight shake of his head. "Miss--"

"Raleigh," she offered, realizing she'd never told either man her name, but feeling a little guilty for using it when First didn't have a name of his own.

"My universe's Nev would wipe the floor with you," First finished.

"With me too, probably," Lin commented, "but Nev will expect you and me to be involved. Her? Who is she?" He glanced at her. "I mean, she won't know you. Even if she's bothered to observe and discover that you live with Janni, you're..." He evidently decided against insulting her body's tech upgrades. "No offense intended."

"None taken," Raleigh said coolly, meeting First's gaze.

He still watched her sedately, but the very fact that he was scrutinizing her and not acting suggested he didn't like the idea.

"I was military, in my 'verse," she told him, tapping her collar where it hid gills. "The memories are blocked, not deleted. I can restore them, if necessary." She hoped it wouldn't be necessary.

"This me probably won't be much use in a fight." Lin paused, then amended, "Compared to your universe, I mean. But somebody has to find Janni, and I don't think you want to end up registered with Shadow Corps,"--First's grimace said Lin's assumption was correct--"so I'll busy myself with that."

Lin quickly washed the cups, set them to dry, and headed out--making Raleigh wonder why he and Janni were so estranged. He seemed nice, thoughtful.

She also found herself wishing she'd kept the mugger's knife that morning, instead of giving it to Kitten, but it was no use changing her mind now. She'd find a weapon somewhere. She headed for the door.

"Forgetting something?" First asked.

She turned. He pulled the chair by the Jenga game out from the table and picked something off the seat.

The knife from that morning.

One-handed, First turned the knife to offer to her, hilt-first, his ease and economy of motion betraying him as someone well used to blades.

Future-Kitten must've left it when she came by, but why hadn't Lin noticed it? He'd noticed the Jenga block, and Kitten hadn't _worn_ that.

First studied her, still offering the knife. "Raleigh?"

She gave herself a shake and took it. "Sorry, just... Sorry."

"Not used to time jumping, I take it?"

She shuddered as she stepped out the door. "No."

He followed and gave a slight smile, shutting the door behind him and tapping it to lock. "You'll get used to it."

Raleigh stared at his hand for a long moment. It was strong and callused, crisscrossed with faint scars like the rest of him was, though most people would have to be close to him, to see that. "I'd rather not."

Cold air burned Third's lungs as she perched on the roof of the local StretSec building--StretSec being the public security agency, and which was responsible for both resolving crimes and for answering any problem featuring freaks. It was the last thing she could think of to try to find Second--and it would work, it _had_ to work, because Third would end up in a cage nearby Second as the woman and her baby died--

Third focused on taking slow, deep breaths.

The lungs had always been a weak point of hers--of Third's, not of any of the other versions of her that she was aware of--but that was likely from all the spores she'd breathed while destroying Infested. Or so she guessed. Nev would have been the one to know, but Third had always found it healthier to avoid her older sister. The 'god' mods found in some universes reached a point wherein the mods themselves _produced_ the hellverse, because the modifications themselves triggered instincts that made people think of others as threats.

That 'kill' instinct was strongest among biological relatives. Opposite gender was okay; same gender was really bad. Third had some theories as to why, but Nameless were discouraged from being inquisitive. Ultimately, Third had always sought medical treatment from amateurs before she got it from her sister.

She flinched and hoped nobody had seen it. Someone from this somewhen might comment on it; someone from another might helpfully mention it to someone from her universe; and someone from her universe would have to punish her for the breach in composure.

Mistakes could get you Infested. Nobody wanted to face an Infested Nameless.

Third had tracked Second's bio-identity all over town, but she had yet to find the woman herself. Jumpers could hop into another somewhere or somewhen and leave you wondering where in reality they'd gone. As a navigator-class jumper, Second could easily Jump through time and space, but she couldn't hide her bio-identity all that well. Merger-class jumpers had the opposite balance--able to Jump, but far better at hiding bio-identities, which was necessary if you wanted to blend in to some universe or somewhen other than your own. Third--all versions of her--was a merger, though some versions of her were more practiced with it than others.

Being a merger was handy for hanging out on top of a local security building without the scanners picking you up. Third surreptitiously stretched her shoulders.

The StretSec operative currently leaving the building wasn't from this universe.

Third hopped back, reflexively hiding the curiosity that Nameless weren't allowed to display. She checked her surroundings again and dropped to her stomach to elbow-crawl to the edge to peek over. She hadn't noticed any mods in the man, not in the glimpse she'd gotten--but hiding mods was standard, in some universes. Even Janni could do that.

A taxi stopped, the driver calling out a promise to get the operative to his destination fast, for cheap. The operative shook his head and turned away from the street, rubbing his eyes as if he had a headache, the motion letting her see more than the back of his head and recognizing--

_TamLin_.

Third shoved herself back from the edge, her entire body cold. A TamLin. This universe's StretSec had a _TamLin_ working for them.

Curses ran through her mind. Most sensates wouldn't be able to pick out a single should-be-there bio-identity from a crowd, but most sensates weren't him. Third knew all too well how keen his abilities actually were--though he'd hidden that, in her universe, because otherwise he would've been bound to Nev, who would've then made sure to kill Third before--

The quick double-blink didn't suffice to keep the tear ducts clear. She quickly shook her head, trying again, and scurried away from the fire escape, where she heard someone climbing up--

"Third, right?"

She froze, feeling like a taut bowstring, as the soles of his boots hit the roof. He'd swung himself up the last few steps, by the sound of it.

She needed to move, to get away from him--

She needed his help to find Second.

Third took a deep breath. She wasn't supposed to engage in niceties--and asking for help defeated the _point_ of Nameless--but...TamLin was a very good ally to have. Or at least her universe's version of him had been.

She didn't let herself flinch. "You're looking for..."

Second had a name, in Janni's native universe-which was the same as _his_ , she saw, now that she was looking for it--but she couldn't remember. It had been a word, an odd one to use as a name.

"Dasher?" he supplied, with the same polite frankness that _her_ TamLin had--

No, Third told herself. She would get his help to try to save Second, and then she would be a good little Nameless and return to the shadows to protect the Named until she earned the right to claim a name of her own.

He studied her, forehead still creased with the headache that would linger as long as she was hiding herself from the scanners, and she realized this TamLin was observant, too. More so than Janni. Maybe as much as _her_ TamLin had been.

Not that her universe's TamLin ever had been hers. But he could have been. Maybe.

"I'm actually looking for Janni," he said.

Of course he was. Third knew her façade was good enough that her flash of envy didn't show, not even to someone who was watching for hints to what she was thinking. "I don't hear her." Not that she necessarily would, not without opening herself to resonance, but she knew better than to admit her handicaps.

TamLin looked away, studying their surroundings with a relaxed thoroughness. "Any ideas where she'd be? I'd like to find her before your Nev does."

"I'll be caged." Third forced herself to watch his reaction as she realized she'd spoken as if he were _her_ TamLin, who knew about her Jumping and could follow when she--

"inside thick mesh or thin?"

The question was _her_ TamLin, but the tone was...brighter, though only a little.

"Thick or thin, Third?"

"Gaps three fingers wide." She indicated three of _her_ fingers, to be clear.

He leaned back against the pillar that supported the building above the roof they were on, pulled a console from his uniform jacket, and started typing, still keeping an eye on their surroundings. "You see Janni, holler, would you?"

Third stared at him. He kept tapping his console as if he'd just asked her to do something _normal_. She glanced around, but she didn't see or sense anyone else, and she sidled back against the pillar to stand beside him and peek at his console. He was running a...cybsearch, they called it, in this somewhen.

She needed to treat him as a Named ally who was aiding her to get a specific job done. _Not_ as if he were the man she'd loved enough that she'd misbehaved on purpose just so he'd be allowed to touch her, even if that touch would have to leave bruises behind.

He'd loved her, too.

"Holler?" she murmured anyway, then looked away. She'd driven her TamLin to suicide--she was honest enough with herself to admit that much. She wouldn't sabotage Janni's life, too.

"Well, you know how I get, when focused on solving a problem."

So battle-ready that a dropped pin could get the dropper shot--unlike most Named, who tended to let their interests and focus distract them to the point that many a Nameless had died because they couldn't get the Named's attention in time to save both. Regardless of his home universe, TamLin was evidently fond of irony.

Third clenched her jaw to prevent a smile. "My job."

She heard him pause; felt him study her. The few seconds it took him to follow her meaning was a chilling reminder that, as much as he reminded her of her TamLin, he wasn't--he was _Janni 's_, and she needed to remember that.

"Ah," he said quietly. "Hellverse."

Well, they didn't make Nameless in utopias.

" _Nameless_ ," she reminded him, her tone something that her TamLin would've had to strike her for--backhand, his right hand to her right cheek, which would sometimes even crack the bone.

This TamLin didn't even lift his hand to hit her, but the sharpness that entered his gaze said he knew the laws. He wordlessly showed her his console--which featured a surveillance image of the room she remembered seeing for those brief moments, hours earlier.

Her breath caught. _This is happening._ She would watch Second die. "How did you know?"

He tapped something on the settings, adjusting the camera or maybe moving to another one, and showed Third.

A cage was hanging from the ceiling by a chain. inside it, keeping her balance by crouching as she glared at her captor who napped out of reach, was Janni.

"Any particular reason your Nev would go for Janni?" he asked, his tone too casual to be anything but feigned.

Any reason other than the natural Nev's-mods-threatened-by-sister's-mods, Third assumed he meant, but she found herself unable to look away from the security feed. "Second," she murmured.

"Hmm?"

She tore her gaze away and checked their surroundings once again. "Pregnant." _Was_ pregnant, when she died, and First might not have even known, before Nev called Second a Breach.

Silence answered her.

His lack of answer meant that he understood--or, possibly, that he didn't. Third didn't _want_ to know which it was, but she needed to.

She held her breath and looked at him.

As if that were the signal he was waiting for, TamLin frowned. "What were they _thinking_?"

He understood, then.

And Second being a Breach was something else that Third could be blamed for. "Nameless at thirty?"

That tilt to his chin was all _her_ TamLin. "Twenty-six?"

Not quite. First and Second had waited so long for Naming. Why couldn't they have waited just a while longer before they consummated, so they could do so legally?

Third found that easy to answer: Probably thought themselves safely hidden, in this universe. They'd _wanted_ children. Second was older than First. With all that Nameless went through while destroying the Infested...

She blinked quickly, twice.

If Second hadn't conceived soon, she would've lost all ability to have children.

First and Second had waited to officially join the Named so they wouldn't abandon Third again. They should've been selfish.

TamLin sighed heavily, evidently knowing Janni well enough to realize that she might've put _herself_ in that position--gotten herself captured by Nev--to interfere with Nev's ability to find Third.

Janni had probably masqueraded her bio-identity as Third's. Mergers could do that, if they wanted, and Nev was particularly susceptible to that kind of deception.

TamLin studied his console once more. "Your Nev looks scarier than mine did."

Did? "Dead?"

He shrugged. "Still in our home universe, so... Same effect. Not as though we'll see her again."

Third needed to back away from the man, to keep her distance--for her own sake as well as his.

But she _missed_ him. "Your Nev isn't scary?"

"Scattered, more like. She's a medic, grade green, so she can get a little scary when you do something stupid and she decides she has to, to keep you from getting yourself even more screwed up--but if handed a Nameless and told to apply the laws, she'd squeal and pass out." He gave her a stern stare. "I will keep you in line, if I have to. Please don't make me."

The polite tone was one person asking another, and cooler than what _her_ TamLin would have used--but the attitude, the willingness, the adherence to duty...

It was her TamLin, all over again.

_No_ , Third ordered herself. She wouldn't steal her own fiance.

Even if she succeeded, she'd just be the death of him, anyway.

Refugees from other universes evidently had a tendency toward paranoia. Understandable, justifiable, and not minded by Raleigh...except for the fact that those refugees fled when they saw First and her coming.

She triple-checked her coat--again--but her upgrades weren't showing. "Why are they running?"

First sighed and pulled something from his pocket. Unfolded it, smoothened it out, and handed it to her.

_Paper?_ Raleigh accepted it, startled before she even saw what was on it: a mug shot of First, with a brief description and a panorama of snapshots featuring him in various gruesome situations.

A sectioned-off part of her mind nonchalantly analyzed the blood spatter and the corpses and informed her that he was quite efficient and preferred methods of maximum effectiveness and minimum duration.

So... A killer, but not a sadistic one. She could relate.

Raleigh spared a brief thought for how the child of two such killers might turn out--it was something she'd considered before, in regards to herself--and handed back the paper, unsure if she was annoyed or disturbed that Janni had never bothered to introduce her to the underworld of temporal refugees. "I feel like a fish out of water."

"Depends on the fish," First answered absentmindedly. "Some don't mind being out of water awhile."

Raleigh blinked at him.

He sighed. "I'm an upper grade science teacher."

"Ah." She eyed him askance. "How does that work, with the Nameless thing?"

First's eyes jumped around as he studied their surroundings. "Doesn't." He snorted. "Third always was the smartest of us."

"Oh?" Raleigh kept her tone light, so he'd be less likely to notice that she was fishing for details. "What do you mean?"

He answered matter-of-factly, "Most people assumed she was dumb, because she earned herself so many beatings. But she never crossed the line into becoming a Breach, which would get her executed. Not even here." He grimaced. "Not even after..."

He shook his head. "Beatings had to be administered by our clutch's keeper, and...it was one of the only times he was allowed to touch her. Maybe he could've gotten past the guilt if we got out sooner, but as it was, he stayed here long enough to confirm this universe didn't have Infested, then killed himself so he couldn't hurt her anymore."

His blase attitude chilled her. "Kitten--Third--is a masochist."

"No." First glanced over at something above and behind Raleigh. "If anything, she's too smart for her own good. She knows the laws, her limitations, and just how far she can push them both without causing any lasting damage."

Raleigh wasn't sure she wanted to understand everything he was talking about. His native universe was sounding worse than hers. "Isn't intelligence a good thing?"

"When you're rigorously controlled, starved of emotional and physical needs, severely punished for any infraction, and required to risk yourself to save everyone else?" He shrugged. "Maybe not. Usually we're sent in pairs, for guard duty or killing, but that requires a clutch to have an even number. Ours doesn't. Third's been even lonelier than..."

First looked away.

Raleigh realized that he'd stopped because he'd remembered he was wrong. His clutch was down to an even number, two, because his wife was dead. Or at least his wife was about to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

She impulsively caught his arm and gave it a slight squeeze. "I'm sorry for your loss."

He froze in the middle of studying her from the corner of his eye.

His expression stayed on the wary side of 'impassive', but a yellow glow rippled from beneath his skin before it submerged once more.

Raleigh stared at his face, wondering where it had gone. Moreover, what had it _been_?

First tugged his arm from her grip and continued on his way. "We've a few more places we can try, at least."

His tone was unruffled, as if his wife wasn't dying, and it rang as false as his blase attitude about his namelessness.

For the first time, Raleigh felt fortunate for her own native universe, and the circumstances that led to her receiving her own mods. At least she had been allowed to be a person when she was off-duty.

"How are you so normal?" she asked before she thought better of it.

He glanced back at her, eyebrows raised, his expression otherwise indicating a calm readiness that called him anything but a civvie.

She got the impression it had been there all along, but he, despite his belittling of his own intelligence, was adept at hiding it. "Oh."

Once TamLin was satisfied with what he'd searched on his console, he indicated for Third to precede him back down the building's emergency stairs and toward the front door. She glanced at him, wondering what he'd do if she refused or tried to bolt. The bland expression and raised eyebrow suggested the result would be comparable to _her_ TamLin's.

She forced a swallow and refused to let herself try, to test him. _He 's Janni's_, she reminded herself.

As she reached the door, she read the energy eddies of the scanners and merged her bio-identity with their expected parameters. She entered without raising so much as a buzz.

The receptionist on the other side, however, frowned at her. Not that the expression was all that visible beneath the beard. "Who are--"

"She's with me." TamLin caught Third's upper arm in a light grip and guided her toward one hallway. "Tell Puce I have a lead on the latest entrant."

They were tracking _Nev_? She planted her feet against the tile floor and gave him a pointed stare.

He spun toward her, hand going to a hip holster as if he expected her pause to be due to a threat. His scan of the room took less than a second, and then he gave her a dark look. "I know your laws, kid. Don't make me hurt you."

_Kid_? She put her hands on her decidedly adult hips, resting her weight against the balls of her feet in case he retaliated appropriately.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, which sometimes helped with his headaches. Rarely. "All right. What's wrong?"

She jerked her chin toward the receptionist. "Nev would cut him up and feed him to Mom."

TamLin froze, reminding her whose he was. _Her_ TamLin had known what Nev put in their mother's special meds. She winced.

His throat worked for a long second. "Ribald? Send _vegetarian_ refreshments to Room Zed, please."

" _Zed_?"

"Yes." He stepped up to a door, waved his wrist at the panel, and it buzzed open.

Third slipped through behind him. "Zed?"

Her curiosity was going to get her killed, someday. She wasn't supposed to ask questions.

TamLin didn't react nor respond, just led her through the halls and stairwells and more doors, every so often rubbing his temples. She nearly winced, but if he really wanted her to stop merging with the security systems, he had only to ask.

Some of his coworkers frowned at her, some raised eyebrows, and a few smiled at TamLin. He'd built a good reputation, apparently. Good enough that he could bring a strange girl deep into the building without anyone stopping him, though he did have to sign something at a few different checkpoints.

They finally reached a door with so many different types of security before it that Third assumed it was their destination.

"So how is Janni, these days, when she isn't playing chicken with assassins from hellverses?"

His question was timed to pull Third's attention from what he was doing with the door. She hadn't seen that particular type of lock, before, combining physical keying with a specific combination of timing, energy, and authorization code that couldn't be bypassed with the normal merging or lock-picking skills.

His attempt at distraction failed, but Third saw no reason to rub it in. "She's well."

Wait. Why was he asking _her_ how his bondmate was doing?

"Glad to hear it." He gave a quick peek in the room before he opened the door all the way and strode in.

She followed and palmed the door shut behind her. He'd brought her straight into an armory that would've suited an alpha universe, pre-apocalypse. She'd never even seen a room this full of goodies back home.

Third took a tentative step toward one aisle and glanced at TamLin. He was already cycling through the shelves on a firearm rack, not looking at her.

She took that as permission and beelined for the vials. The ones out front were fairly innocuous, like liquid smoke and eye irritant. She found the rack's controls and tapped for it to drop that out of the way and to rotate the next shelf into view. The rack required an authorization code, but she easily nudged it into thinking that authorization had already been unlocked.

On the fourth shelf, she found napalm-echo. She stared at it for a long moment before helping herself to a vial. "I thought this universe was..."

TamLin rounded the edge of the aisle to join her, wielding an edition of pulse weapon that _definitely_ wasn't from that universe. "Fourth shelf's only accessible to the brass, a few shadows and shadowborn who know how to use them, and any merger who happens to be brought in this far."

For all his insistence that he knew the laws, he wasn't treating her as a Nameless. The privacy of the room gave her the courage to let out a little curiosity on purpose. "Could you get in trouble for letting me in here?"

"No. You're documented as a consultant." He scanned the shelf, himself, and palmed one too quickly for her to identify it. "Janni brought me some of your hair, for me to log in."

But he hadn't known Raleigh, so they hadn't done the same thing for her.

Then again, Raleigh, from an apex universe, would be in a lot less trouble, if the Shadow Corps found them all. Primes knew better than to go universe jumping without proper authorization. Refugees from apex universes didn't.

Third sent the vials back to the first shelf and continued down the aisle. "Thanks."

TamLin followed, not acknowledging her breach of protocol.

She let herself sigh, though she kept it silent. Two more birthdays. She just had to make it through two more birthdays, and the timer would disintegrate and she could take a name, be a person.

Third knew better than to think she'd ever get over the trauma of her origins enough to be _normal_ , but maybe she'd learn to pretend, in time. First and Second had.

Only a few years in, and they'd gotten so comfortable that Second was about to _die_ for it. Unfortunately, the personhood only applied if you took a name, and since they hadn't...

Third pressed her lips together and hoped her brother wouldn't revert to 'proper' Nameless behavior after that happened. They'd been forced to flee the first few universes they'd tried to take refuge in, because their attempts to acclimate had gone that badly. If First wanted to leave, Third would help him Jump universes, but...she couldn't be sure she'd go along. She _liked_ this somewhen.

Though, now that Nev knew their location, they'd probably have to leave, anyway.

Where would she find any miscellaneous gadgets that this universe didn't precisely know what to do with? Third considered the question for a moment, then headed for the corner furthest from the door.

She rounded the end of an aisle, and her steps faltered.

Third stared at the device before her. It was a nightmarish cross between a dentist chair and a web or claw...though admittedly some of that impression was because she knew what the spindly-looking frame did. Infants were supposed to be too young to remember them, but...

She swallowed hard.

"The brass leaves that out to help ID who's from universes like ours," TamLin said quietly at her back. "A shadowborn would take a moment to recognize it, because they'd only know it from descriptions. A prime doesn't expect to see it and therefore freezes immediately."

His bosses knew he was a shadow, then...unless he'd controlled his reaction?

She gave him an inquiring look.

He answered with a wan smile. "I'm flattered, but I can be startled as readily as the next person."

Perhaps. TamLin's mother had been a keeper for clutches, herself, so very little caught him off-guard.

He grimaced and rubbed his temples again.

Third turned back toward the corner and sought the shelf featuring miscellaneous not-from-this-universe paraphernalia.

And, to stop hurting TamLin, she let the security systems notice her and reverted her bio-identity back to its native default.

They were running in circles, hitting the same parts of town without any further effect.

When First started leading Raleigh into a fourth round, she gently asked, "Is this really accomplishing anything?"

He stopped cold, midstride, in the middle of the sidewalk, and didn't even move when passersby bumped into him.

"I don't ask that to be rude or cruel. But since this is proving ineffective, perhaps..." Perhaps what? She didn't even know enough about what was going on to know what was possible.

First rubbed his face. "I was the worst tracker in my clutch, you know? I wasn't even the oldest of us. I'm only First because I play well with politics."

Raleigh felt as if she were missing a piece of the conversation, but instinct told her that pressing for explanation would be unwise. "Is there any way to negotiate with your sister?"

He snorted. "No."

She nodded acknowledgement of his answer, and she peered up to glimpse the sky through the maze and terraces of the buildings that towered above them.

"She's Named. We're not," he added. "She has every right to eliminate Third or..."

She didn't glance at him, but she heard his voice catch.

"She's pregnant," he said faintly, voice thick. "My _wife_ is pregnant, and my _sister_ is going to murder her--and what kind of man am I, if I can't even protect my wife and child?"

"One as human as the rest of us," Raleigh said, because there was no good answer for the question. Holding her silence would only be interpreted as agreement.

"I wasn't created to be human!" he snapped.

She shrugged and tapped her gills. "Neither was I."

She looked at him, then, and he stared at her, the weird glow flickering in and out as if it were tasting the back and side of his neck.

"What's that?" she asked, in attempt to shift the conversation topic.

He scowled but followed her gaze with his hand, ultimately touching one of the yellow spots. He grimaced. "My patch is wearing off."

And he turned on his heel and strode back toward...somewhere.

Raleigh followed. "Your what?"

"Patch! My mods"--he waved at his neck--"never 'took' properly. It's why I'm Nameless, why I stink at tracking, and why my wife and sister always had to worry about protecting me when we went after zombies. I can't control this, and it's like putting candy in front of a baby. They come right for me--Infested, bigots, Nameless who want my position."

She frowned and took the time she needed to parse that. "Third can control hers." So why was _she_ Nameless?

First gave his head a single sharp shake. "She has a governor chip. She can't modulate things on her own. Without it... Suffice to say that blackouts have a way of getting you killed."

"Sure do."

From the odd glance First gave her, he hadn't expected her to agree.

"You aren't the only designed killer of the pair of us. I just have tech that lets me stick the memories in storage, to keep them from affecting me all that much. I was..." On second thought, she didn't want to pull up how she'd ended up in this somewhen. Just thinking about letting herself remember it was making her wince.

He studied her a moment, then sighed. "We could call TamLin. See if he's found anything."

Without a console, Third couldn't be called, herself.

Raleigh smiled. "Sounds like a plan."

At least it was something different and might get them on a better track--maybe something that would succeed, or _could_ succeed. Surely there had to be some way to save Second. If time were that solid, why would anyone even attempt to change the past?

He grimaced and increased his pace. Raleigh kept up easily but wondered what she was missing...and if he or any of the others would ever deign to explain it to her.

Alarms squealed, and TamLin cringed for another reason entirely.

Third could've kicked herself. She was in a high-security facility, so why had she thought it a good idea to let the security system suddenly detect her in an armory?

TamLin ran back to the door, Third following, and smacked the comms panel on the wall beside the entrance. "What the _hell_ , Puce?!"

She grimaced. "Sorry."

TamLin's eyes narrowed on her, and he tapped the comms off a moment to say, "You shut up," before continuing, "I _told_ you I had a merger with me! Turn that off!"

Argument ensued with whoever was on the other end.

TamLin won; the alarms deactivated.

"--And have _somebody_ bring our snacks before I grab Kasy and eat her arm! Thank you."

He slapped the comms off, and her across the face.

The impact--the strength behind it, the familiar shape and sting--was comforting. Third felt faintly disturbed by that, but she mostly didn't care. TamLin had _touched_ her.

And she certainly had earned that strike.

This TamLin, though, seemed every bit as conflicted about hitting her as hers had been.

_No!_ Third reminded herself. Not _as_ conflicted. Her TamLin had loved her.

"Seriously?" Incredulity sharpened the pitch of his voice. "You get off on pain?"

He _was_ a sensate.

Her face heated, and she looked away. "It isn't the pain," she admitted quietly.

Silence answered her, and she turned back to him. His brow was furrowed in a puzzled way, not pained.

"You're Nameless," he said at last. "You wouldn't have been paired with--"

He and Janni were an assigned couple? Third struggled to imagine a life where she would've warranted that.

He pivoted on his heel to the door and opened it. The type of well-padded woman that Nameless were never fed enough to become stood on the other side, carrying a tray with beverages and...

Third frowned at the oddly complicated food. This was a public security office, not a restaurant.

"Hors d'oeuvres, Kasy?" TamLin asked dryly.

The woman took a half-step back and hunched her shoulders, red tinging her cheeks. "If--if you don't want it..."

Third snatched a stick from the tray. She stared at the skewer of cucumber and carrot and... What was that? She sniffed warily.

TamLin sighed. "Eat one," he told Kasy as he took one, himself.

His coworker blinked at him. "What?"

He indicated Third. "She can't eat anything until after we do."

Kasy frowned at him. "What do you mean? Of course she can eat--"

"It's forbidden!" he snapped. "Her sister's already off murdering her brother's girlfriend because they broke the rules. _She_ isn't about to do something stupid that'll get her euthanized."

He was still upset at her for triggering the alarm.

"You had a cluster headache," Third said quietly.

"Of course I had a--" He stared at her again. "You reverted to baseline _because_ it would stop my headache?"

She nodded once.

He turned and grabbed one of the beverage cups, then stalked away. "Not from your universe. Not your responsibility."

Nor was punishing her, his. She rubbed the cheek he'd struck.

He turned back before she dropped her hand, and he grimaced. "Either leave the tray or eat something, Kasy. We're busy and have a prime to catch."

Third jerked at his word choice and abruptly remembered another reason she needed to avoid being around that TamLin too much: As a sensate--and a highly sensitive one, at that--details from her universe would bleed into his psyche. She couldn't keep her thoughts and such from leaching out, and he couldn't help but overhear them. It had led to more than one sensate being considered insane until the scientists in alpha universes realized what was going on.

Kasy took a quick step forward and plucked a skewer for herself as she set the tray on a nearby shelf. She nibbled one of the things Third couldn't identify. "Puce said I have to keep an eye on you."

TamLin gave her a flat look, one eyebrow twitching.

She skittered back, slamming her hip into a counter. "I _know_! I know, okay? But he saw the vid of your friend here and claims you're thinking with your dick."

Third understood the words and their implication, but the concept was so foreign that it took what felt like forever to process. This TamLin? And her? _Together_ -together? "I'm _Nameless_."

She realized she'd spoken aloud, and she looked right at Kasy. Why would someone so obviously terrified be picked to 'keep an eye on' TamLin?

The woman swiped some limp curls out of her eyes. "Yeah, I noticed, but Puce... He wants..."

Kasy eyed her, suddenly looking serious, sedate. More her age--which was in her late thirties, if Third was reading her telomeres right.

And then the woman let out a long breath and deflated, losing the effect. "I'm Shadowborn, okay? Sensate, grade yellow." Yellow was the bottom tier for primes, the one where sensates couldn't identify details about what they felt. They just got a niggling feeling when something was in or from the wrong time or universe or both. "And Puce wants to breed us."

"Orchestrated breeding is illegal in this somewhen," Third said automatically, though she wasn't naive enough to disbelieve the woman. She glanced at the closed door and merged into the surrounding systems enough to glitch up the cameras' audio. "Breeder?"

Kasy grimaced. Third adjusted herself to check other details about the woman's body...and realized the jitters and anxiety were biological, some kind of side effect. She wasn't afraid at TamLin at all.

Third looked at TamLin. "Why isn't Puce dead?"

"Moving against him directly will have repercussions on the others."

_Others_ , plural? Third wondered who else had come with Janni and TamLin from their universe.

But that was the kind of thing one shadow didn't ask another. Instead, she ran her hands along her clothing, recognizing the various accoutrements by feel, and let her fingers linger on the vial of napalm-echo that was under her sweater.

She hopped over to the shelf and grabbed another one, which she stashed somewhere easy and quick to get to. She'd need it. "You said you had a 'lead' on things, so we'd better go talk to him."

TamLin eyed her sharply, but she kept her expression the bland façade Nameless were required to wear.

Kasy looked from one of them to the other and back again. She let out something that might've been a weak snort or a cut-off chuckle.

"You will not touch Puce," TamLin said firmly.

"I will not touch Puce," she agreed--probably _too_ readily, but the promise fit fine with her plan for whatever evidence or blackmail material he'd collected.

TamLin shook his head and headed out. Third and Kasy followed.

Kasy even gave her a wink.

Third missed a step. Surely she wasn't _that_ easy to read, not to someone she'd only just met?

The other woman smiled and fell back behind her, so TamLin and Kasy both escorted her through the security building.

Third wondered if that was meant as a protection or as a warning.

First didn't so much as pause before entering the StretSec office. Raleigh hesitated before following. In her experience, public security didn't care for people who didn't have proper documentation.

The receptionist at the front desk was male, with ill-fitting clothes that seemed designed to hide that he was an experienced fighter. The beard kept him from seeming too unassuming, though.

First walked right up to his desk. "Is TamLin in?"

Why was he looking for TamLin at StretSec?

"You know TamLin?" the receptionist asked.

"He's helping me look for my sister and my wife."

The receptionist nodded. "And do you have a name?"

First just quietly met his gaze.

Raleigh understood why--answering either 'yes' or 'no' could cause more problems than they had time to deal with--but that was still antagonizing the man. She sighed. "We're just trying to get in touch with him. Is he in? If not, we'll just call and leave a message."

She wasn't quite sure why First had decided to come by rather than do that to begin with. Maybe he didn't have TamLin's number?

The receptionist glanced her over, then did it again--more slowly and appreciatively. " _You_ have a name?"

"Raleigh." She smiled politely. "Can you let him know we're here, please?"

He beamed back at her, probably having read far too much into her courtesy. "Sure thing. Just a--"

An alarm shrieked.

Hubbub erupted. Raleigh's chipset automatically adjusted to suit the situation--reducing the sensitivity of her hearing, improving her strength and balance, and to--

She hastily overrode that one and shut it off before she went into 'kill' mode.

First stepped aside--back to the wall, beside to the desk--and Raleigh stood near, watching the other side of the room. Near them, the receptionist was scrambling on his console and demanding someone tell him what the hell was going on.

TamLin, Third, and a woman (who had the sharp look of someone who'd been put through the breeder drugs that Raleigh thankfully had been spared experiencing back home) stumbled out from a hallway and beelined for the exit. First and Raleigh leaped after them--

And caught up in a nearby alley as TamLin shoved Third into a wall that had peeling paint and nails sticking out from the fabricated brick. "What were you _thinking_?"

The woman Raleigh didn't know had her arms wrapped around herself. She was rocking and giggling softly. Deja vu hit Raleigh, but she didn't let her chipset bring the memory to fore, to recognize the woman's reaction.

Third didn't respond, even as TamLin knocked her to the ground and brought his foot back to kick her.

First intervened, catching TamLin's foot with his own and nearly getting his own face slugged for his trouble.

"What did she do?" First asked calmly, as if watching his little sister get beaten on was normal for him.

TamLin's chest heaved. "She _killed my boss_!"

"Now, we don't know that," the woman said, so calm that Raleigh's stomach lurched. It took going through the drugs at _least_ three times before somebody could manage that despite them. "We were walking away, and the office happened to catch fire. First off, who's to say she did anything? And second off, he might not be dead."

The woman tightened her arms around herself and started shivering. "I hope he is, though."

"She grabbed napalm right before we stepped out of the armory!" TamLin snapped.

"She _has_ napalm under her sweater," Raleigh pointed out, glad for her built-in scanners.

First flinched, and TamLin gave her a hard stare, his respiration and pupils telling her where at least some of the aggression and fear were coming from.

Just as swiftly, TamLin grabbed Third and ripped off her sweater, leaving her in the sleeveless summer shirt that Raleigh had seen on the future version of Third that had paid a visit.

He stared at the bottle on her belt, yanked her up and against the wall, glared for another long moment, then dropped her and stalked off.

" _What_...?" First murmured.

He sounded genuinely confused, so Raleigh glanced at the still-shaky woman still near them and said, "Your TamLin wasn't an addict, I take it."

First stared at her.

Raleigh jerked her head back towards the direction he'd stalked off in. "He's wanting a fix."

The woman said, "Puce set things up to harm others, if he died suddenly. I'm Kasy. I work with..." Kasy mirrored Raleigh's motion to indicate TamLin. "I don't think the drugs are what are making him antsy."

"They might not be the only factor, but that doesn't mean they aren't part of it or don't exacerbate the problem." Raleigh glanced at First, who still seemed dumbstruck that TamLin was an addict, to Third, who seemed unsurprised.

So perhaps their universe's version of the man had just hidden his drug habit from First...or maybe Third was just better at hiding her reaction to things.

Raleigh helped Third to her feet and watched the girl brush herself off. "You know that was abusive, right?" she asked softly. "He had no right to do that."

"Yes, he did," said _First_ , startling her. He sounded exhausted. "If he hadn't done it, I would've had to."

"It was a misunderstanding--"

"Oh," Third said matter-of-factly. Her cheek was already starting to bruise. "I napalmed Puce."

Raleigh stared at her.

"And I am much grateful to you for that," Kasy said, "but in his office? Really?"

"Where else would he keep his documentation?" Third gave a slight smile. "The scanners were glitching, off and on, the whole time I was near that building--which has been most of the afternoon. Started hours before I came in, ended minutes after I left. Not enough of a connection for them to see it's me."

"I don't hear the crime you're admitting to committing," Kasy said. "La la la. Fingers in my ears." The woman frowned at Third. "Aren't you talking too much? I thought Nameless weren't supposed to be chatty."

Third shrugged. "I'm a very bad Nameless."

"No, you're not," TamLin said from the end of the alley.

Third actually perked up to see him, which made Raleigh feel a little sick.

"You're just very bad at heeding rules that are tradition rather than outright law." He stepped forward.

Raleigh didn't see any more withdrawal symptoms. She also didn't detect any drugs in him. Puzzling. And it made her even more uncomfortable about Third's obvious infatuation with him. At least Janni had the sense not to complete their marriage.

"We found where Nev is holding Janni, at least, and it's likely that Second will be there, too." He started off, apparently no longer caring even about his possibly dead boss.

Third followed him readily.

Raleigh glanced at First. The two of them shook their heads, then looked to Kasy.

Kasy gave a little wave. "I'll just be going back in the office and start the paperwork for all of you."

And, as she headed back toward the building, Raleigh overheard her mutter, "I _hope_ he's dead."

Probably half of Third's body ached, but she didn't care. It was the familiar ache from deserved manhandling, not from killing zombies or from longing for a hug.

TamLin had _touched_ her. As she trotted along behind him, she felt like beaming or skipping or something. He had touched her, and she didn't even care that he'd left bruises behind.

She was aware that there was something very wrong about that.

"Your mods the same as Janni's?" he tossed at her over his shoulder.

As far as Third knew, yes, but Janni didn't have the "Governor chip."

He let out a quiet curse. "Boundaries?"

"Everything but merging, pretty much." She could Jump through the chip's limitations, but not easily. She wasn't a navigator, either, so her precision wasn't the best even when her Jumping wasn't being blocked.

_Second_ was a fantastic navigator.

She sighed and tried not to think about the fact that she would soon be watching Second die. Again.

"How did you survive, back home?"

Third shrugged, but he couldn't see it. "Training."

He nodded once, an acknowledgement that he'd heard. "Reflexes, hand-to-hand, senses, and targeting are overdeveloped, then. Special skills minimal; social skills moderate."

The murmur wasn't intended to be heard, but her 'overdeveloped' senses caught it. He was processing what he'd told her and its implications--and arranging it to help him remember it later.

Did that mean he intended for there to be a later?

Third frowned and smacked her own bruised cheek--just as TamLin turned to face her.

He rocked back a step. "What?"

She shook her head.

"Third."

She didn't want to tell him, but...his reaction could help her quash her misplaced affection. "I like you too much."

Bewilderment flashed through his expression before he schooled it. He paused, processing her words. "I should ask you to clarify," he commented, resuming their walk, "but I get the feeling I don't want to know what you mean by that."

Third let out a sigh as a silent breath. Did he hate Janni that much? Why didn't they dissolve their bonding, then? Or was he just appalled at the thought of an infatuated Nameless?

Even her universe's TamLin had never said, but some details made Third suspect that his father had been one of the Nameless in his mother's keeping. Growing up with his mother being legally required to psychologically and physically abuse his father couldn't have done him any favors, in the 'mental health' department. Might've even been why her TamLin...

In any event, this TamLin was currently Janni's, whether he wanted her or not, and they had to rescue his girl from Third's Nev before Janni, too, paid for First and Second's folly.

A folly that would cost the lives of Second and the baby.

Third looked at her left wrist, wondering if she would end up another fatality from the situation. She had the governor chip for good reason, and nothing she'd seen had promised her she would survive removing it, escaping Nev, or crashing from the aftereffects of both.

Well, if she died, she died. Janni would escape--or so Third chose to believe, since Janni wouldn't be there when Second died--and TamLin could work things out with his bondmate. Third wouldn't have to deal with the desire or temptation to--

TamLin discreetly ran a hand up his leg and torso. Third followed the movement enough to recognize that he was grabbing another tab. He kept it hidden in his palm and rubbed his nose to hide getting it in his mouth. Anyone who didn't know his predilection wouldn't realize what he'd done.

If she did survive this, she'd have to double-check what this TamLin took, to get him some as a thank-you for helping her with Nev, because there was no way she'd be able to tackle her sister by herself.

That left the question of what, exactly, she was going to do about her Named sister. Third still hadn't come up with a plan for that.

"Not to put too fine a point on this, but does anyone have any idea what we're up to, other than jumping in and hoping we don't end up slaughtered?" Raleigh asked mildly, hoping First wasn't the type to get offended when someone pointed out a hole in his logic.

First snorted. "Nev won't touch you."

"That's nice." Did he assume she was that shallow because he had been raised to consider himself expendable, or had she given him reason to believe she valued him that little? "But that still leaves you and Third as open targets. And if Nev's taken Janni, she might go after TamLin, too, even though he isn't from your universe."

"That's our problem."

Raleigh stared at him sidelong as she strode with him. He truly was that clueless.

She stopped outright, and he kept on walking.

Well, that attempt to catch his attention failed. She huffed and jogged back up. "Jumping in without a plan might've suited whatever was wrong back in your hellverse, but if you do it now, it could get everyone killed. Nev's evidently here by herself, right? What if she's set traps?"

First gave her an odd look.

"Alert systems, tripwires, darts, lasers--there are all sorts of things she could set up so she doesn't even have to touch you before--"

"If Nev's set anything, it'll be a contact poison," First said blithely, and Raleigh shivered. "She's a medic, not a soldier. Makes her decent with assassination, but the only reason she'd likely trump us in a fair fight is none of her mods are throttled. Even not-that-great reflexes don't matter so much if you're naturally faster than the better-trained person."

Raleigh bit her tongue. She didn't understand enough about the soft mods to properly comprehend what he was saying, but...

She clutched the collar of her shattersilk coat and let herself fall back behind First. She stared at his heels as she followed.

He noticed. She knew he noticed. But didn't even pause.

Could be misogyny or disinterest in her as a person, but she suspected it had more to do with the detail that she was properly Named. So technically, by the laws that governed him, she was someone for him to protect, not someone for him to fight beside.

Raleigh grimaced. While she appreciated not being used as cannon fodder or treated as a tool, she didn't care for the ignoring of what she could bring to the coming battle and discussion. "Shouldn't we catch up to Third and TamLin?"

She was admittedly concerned that TamLin might, perhaps, be taking out his temper on Third now that the girl was without anyone to stop him. Between the drug addiction and the convoluted, horrific laws governing the Nameless...

First snorted. "I'm a First. Nev can't touch me. She'll be leery of TamLin. And Third can merge into her surroundings and keep Nev from"--he tapped the side of his head--"hearing her."

He jerked his chin forward, and Raleigh glimpsed the red glint to Third's dark hair as the girl slipped down an alley up ahead. The two of them caught up and followed, twisting around trash bins and refuse and furniture and a discarded vehicle until Raleigh nearly stumbled over TamLin and Third. The pair were inconspicuously crouched amid the mess. Their posture and positions fit perfectly with the surroundings, almost minimizing the detail that their clothing was too clean.

Raleigh thought they made a cute couple, but she had enough sense to avoid saying as much. For all she knew, even that appearance could 'warrant' Third another beating.

"They're the next warehouse down," TamLin said. "Cams put Janni along the south wall."

They were a little northwest of the building.

"Third'll merge and sneak around to let Janni out," TamLin continued. "First, you're with me. We'll see if we can distract Nev, get in a good position to take her out. Raleigh, try to stay out of the way. I'd rather not have to explain to Janni how I got you killed. Thanks."

He was trying to be polite, not insulting, Raleigh reminded herself, but she still wanted to smack him. She hadn't come along just to stand around and look pretty.

But she held her tongue and let the three of them proceed as directed.

And then, once she was the only one of them standing out in that alley, she pulled up her software and reactivated things she preferred leaving forgotten. The too-familiar metallic taste bit her tongue, and she strode around the building towards the private entrance her scans had noticed.

Nev wasn't the only fully functional representative of a violent universe at that warehouse.

The silence grated on Third's ears.

She double-checked that she was merged with her surroundings, so she wouldn't show up to a psychic scan, and cautiously slid her feet sideways as she moved south, her back to the building's western wall. Crates and netting and all sorts of junk kept visibility to a minimum, and any sound would be far too loud in the warehouse. She barely dared to breathe.

"Seriously, don't you have anything better to do than to pick on a Named version of your baby sister?" Janni's voice asked loudly from across the warehouse.

Third grimaced. Nev was stubborn and self-absorbed, not stupid. A captive who suddenly started chattering was trying to distract her from something. And how would a psy-weak captive suddenly know rescue was coming, unless that rescuer gave her resonance?

"How well would that go over, do you think, if your people back home found out you'd targeted a Named?"

"That would require anyone to find out," Nev answered coldly, her voice full of warning.

"Naw, if you were plotting to kill me, you would've done it, already. You haven't even tried. You're worried about what I have that Third doesn't."

Third had gotten close enough to overhear Nev's answer of a huff. She tried, hard, to send Janni a mental _Shut up!_ , but she knew better than to hope it had gotten through. Or that Janni would listen even if she heard it.

The cut-off yelp and scent that followed made Third freeze. She'd rather be torn by zombies than electrocuted. At least with zombies, you could keep fighting even as they chewed on you. Electrocution caused paralysis, and then you had to deal with burns, which were a lot harder to heal with what medical supplies that Nameless were permitted to use--never mind the long-term effects on the skeleton and internal organs.

She forced herself to keep moving, but her discomfort knocked her off-balance, and she bumped into something metal that gave a hollow clang.

Third immediately grabbed a breath and sprang away--too late. Nev grabbed her telekinetically by the throat before she could get out of range. She forced her pulse to steady and slow. Panicking would only make her run out of oxygen sooner.

The grip about her neck yanked her forward. Third lost her footing and barely caught herself before she struck her chin on the cement floor. Grit drove into her palms, and the impact jolted up her arms. Possible fracture in her wrist.

Third managed to grab another breath before Nev realized she'd loosened her psychic grasp, then Nev yanked her up, high enough that Third had to teeter on tiptoe to avoid putting all her weight on her neck.

Nev glared at her, the fully active soft mods glowing through her veins and swirling over her skin. "Third."

Third's usual response to that was a flippant 'Sis,' because Nev loathed being reminded that she came from stock so bad that _all_ her siblings had ended up Nameless. There had been others, beyond First and Third, but only the three of them had survived to date.

But even if Third had been able to breathe and speak, she wouldn't have been stupid enough to antagonize Nev now.

"By all that's holy," Janni said, sounding more shocked than she probably realized. "I've _never_ met a Nev who would treat me like that."

"You're Named," Nev replied icily. "Not a waste of supplies."

Janni, still crouched in the same cage Third had seen earlier, narrowed her eyes at the back of Nev's head.

Third had never felt safe or comfortable enough to do that, but she'd lived with Janni for some time, now, and she recognized the signs. "Don't!" she managed to gasp.

Nev sneered. "' _Don 't_'?" She lifted her hands, and energy jumped out of the veins and danced around her fingers.

Third adjusted her hormones so the terror wouldn't take over--carefully, gradually, because Nev could notice that kind of thing, and it was something that either Nev couldn't do or Third wasn't supposed to be able to do. Third never had been suicidal enough to figure out which, not after how Nev had reacted upon even suspecting Third could control her body like that.

Janni's glare moved to that energy Nev was playing with, and a wry smile tugged Janni's lips. "Pe- _rett_ -tee," she said, with such a soft _r_ that she was mixing _petty_ with the _pretty_ , even if that wouldn't have been obvious to most hearers.

Nev turned towards her, nose curled with contempt. " _Pretty_?"

Janni shrugged as if nonchalant, though she was too tense to truly be feeling comfortable. "My Nev doesn't play like that. Says it's a waste of energy."

Nev's focus whipped from Third so fast that she nearly fell off her feet. Third caught herself in a crouch before her knees hit the floor, and she focused on breathing quietly, on not reminding Nev that she was there, on not distracting Nev from retaliating against the insult.

Janni bit off a yelp.

Third sprang forward before anxiety could stop her, and she struck Nev about the middle. They fell together, Third on top, and she grabbed her sister's hair and slammed Nev's head to the concrete as her own intake of breath cut short.

Pain darted through her fingertips from Nev's scalp, and Nev grabbed her neck with a hand.

Third smelled cooking meat and felt her heart stop.

Male growling and muffled clanging came to her ears, sounding as if she were wearing earplugs.

Someone grabbed her by the back of her neck and flung her away from Nev. Her mind processed the feel and scent of the calloused hand, and she realized it had been TamLin just as her back and head struck something.

She managed to turn, to land on her stomach, and pain shot up her arms. _Definitely fractured._

Third smelled more burning flesh, heard snaps and grunts and thuds, but she couldn't so much as lift her head. She grimly focused through the pain to get her heart and diaphragm working again. She couldn't do anyone any good if she passed out.

Her pulse and breathing jumped straight into double-time, and she wrangled with them, seeking to get them back to healthier levels.

A hand that _felt_ as if it buzzed wrapped around her throat. Third was still having to focus too hard on her breathing to be able to move, to be able to get away.

"Take your bitch," Nev said over her. "Take her and go, or this dies."

_Test her!_ Third begged silently, though she knew they wouldn't. If she died here, she couldn't end up the girl in the cage who was digging out her governor chip.

She heard the retreat of three sets of footsteps--Janni, First, and TamLin. TamLin was limping. Nev stayed put, not moving nor making a sound.

Seconds ticked by. Turned to minutes.

When was she going to be put in the cage?

Nev snorted and pulled her hand from Third's throat. "Idiots, all of them."

Because they'd cared enough about her survival that they retreated rather than letting Nev kill her Nameless shield.

"At the very least, _TamLin_ should've known better than to... Eh, but he isn't ours, is he? Where's ours?"

The scent of burned flesh and hair tickled Third's nose, familiar yet not, because Nev usually contained this particular ability of hers. Usually had no reason to use it.

Memory fluttered up. Of coming returning early from a mission to find TamLin lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Of that very smell, mixed with salt and...

Loathing filled Third, as much toward herself as her sister. She'd left him alone with Nev more than once. He must've thought she hated him.

Her eyes stung, her shoulders shook, and she gasped with a sob.

Nev picked her up via telekinesis and threw her in the cage that had been so recently vacated by Janni. Her vision flashed black then spun, telling Third that she was perilously close to her limits.

Nev slammed the cage shut, locked it, and turned on the crane it was connected to. The cage swayed as it rose, making Third dizzy.

"It would be polite of me to thank you," Nev said. "It will be ever so amusing to watch Second try to rescue you."

Ice gripped Third.

Ice, then the wildfire of fury. Nev had planned this all along--using Third as bait to draw Second to her.

Second was navigator class, and she wasn't handicapped like most Nameless. She would come for Third.

She would come, assuming Third had been the target all along, and it would be the death of her.

And there was nothing Third could do to stop it.

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.

"Schrodinger'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.

Third blinked, and she wasn't in the warehouse anymore. She was surrounded by the default grayish-blue ceiling and walls of a standard residence bedroom. No personalization.

Her first thought was that she'd been Jumped out.

Her second thought was that Second was dead, so who would've Jumped her?

Her third thought was that blackouts were one of the reasons she'd had the governor chip in the first place.

She sat up slowly, unsure where she was and how she'd been treated. She didn't feel woozy, so she likely hadn't been taken to a hospital, but...

She carefully touched her leg, moved it. It ached a bit, but there wasn't nearly as much pain as there should've been. Even her wrist was healed over, without so much as a scar. Whoever had dressed her wounds had also put her back in her street clothes--which was normal for Nameless, but who would've known that, kept her out of a hospital, and left her in a nondescript bedroom to wake up?

Third stood up. The regen patch on her leg buzzed in an alert that she was interfering with the injury's healing, but she ignored it and checked the little trash can by the room's clothes storage unit. Only item in it was a used-up regen patch--probably the one that had been on her arm.

Third looked around again, but even from that angle, she saw nothing that gave her a clue where she was, or who was hosting her.

On a whim, she opened the clothes storage unit...and found her weapons. Third donned the basics, then tapped the door panel. It slid open.

The hall was as default nondescript as the rest, except for a scent that made her nostrils tingle and a small table along the wall. Atop the table was a console--locked--and a stylus.

The table also had a drawer, which was where Third got her first hint regarding where she was: various high-grade narcotics and--if the packaging were correct--all procured legally, which meant her host had money. And liked his drugs.

She riffled through the various offerings in the drawer and found a package of jolt tabs. Third glanced around again, but she still didn't even hear anyone nearby, so she risked opening the package and seeing if they could easily hide in a palm, like she'd seen TamLin do earlier with something he'd taken.

That confirmed, she put everything else back how she'd found it and took the newly opened package with her as she continued down the hall, away from the scent. The regen patch on her leg gave a little prick, protesting her use of the limb. Something else to be ignored.

Kitchen, washroom, relief room. The room with the DNA-encoded lock would be an office. The two doors at the end were the entrance and outerwear closet.

That left one more door that she hadn't checked, and she followed the scent back to it. Cloves, she thought, and more. Third knocked on the doorjamb.

Silence answered her.

She frowned and knocked again.

Still no response.

Third keyed up her mods, and the spiderweb-like glow startled her as it crawled over her flesh. She'd had the governor chip for so long, she'd forgotten that she naturally had the netting.

She took the easy route of tripping the door's safeguards in case of fire, and she stepped in as the door opened. "TamLin?"

The room was hazy with smoke, but not so much that she couldn't see him--seated on the floor, his back against his bed in a room as bland as the one she'd woken up in. He was idly smoking a cigarillo that she assumed used cloves, but she thought she also smelled nutmeg in there, and possibly something else. Perhaps it was homemade.

His brow furrowed, and his dark eyes narrowed on her. "What?"

Third held up the package of jolt. "I--"

"No." He stood up and strode to her. "I am _not_ listening to this, right now." He pressed forward, crowding her into stepping back and out of his room, and the door shut in her face.

She checked the lock. He'd set it into maintenance mode--which also meant it wouldn't be able to open if he accidentally set a fire in there. At least there wasn't much in there to burn, but that was still reckless.

Confused, Third scratched her head--with the hand holding the package of jolt. She paused and looked at it, looked back at the door. What had he thought her about to say?

She knew TamLin too well to think she might get the answer from him, and Janni wouldn't be any more inclined to tell Third anything.

Janni also had been held by Nev for most of the day.

Third considered that...and started calculating a jump loop to check Janni's rooms when she wouldn't be able to catch Third snooping.

"You let a _drug addict_ take your little sister!" Raleigh said baldly, exasperated that neither First nor Janni had any problem with that.

Expression flat in the manner of someone burying his emotions so he wouldn't have to deal with them, First lowered his mug of hot chocolate and waved off the waitress before she could come refill his cup. "TamLin's the best person to watch her when she's injured. He knows how to treat her, and he won't hurt her."

"I'm sorry. Are we remembering the same reality? You do remember, just earlier today, in the alley outside his workplace, where he--"

"I can go a little psycho when I wake up after a blackout," Janni cut in, hands fiddling with her mug, gaze not leaving the froth still in place on her untouched chocolate. "TamLin's one of the only people I can be sure I won't accidentally kill."

Raleigh stared at Janni. "You aren't Nameless."

"No," Janni agreed. She started lifting her mug, then stopped and slid it across the table to First, who'd just finished his. "I'm a merger-class jumper. That means I can...adjust reality around me, in certain ways. If I lose track of when I am or which universe I'm in, he can detect my response and interrupt me before I damage anything."

"It's related to the built-in resistance to temporal rewrites that we discussed earlier," First said, accepting the hot chocolate from Janni. "Multiply that by a factor of, oh, a thousand, and you have TamLin."

That didn't exactly make sense. "If he's that resistant to temporal rewrites, how does he jump universes?"

First tilted the mug toward Janni as Janni lifted a hand and wiggled her fingers without pulling her wrist off the table.

"Mergers," she said outright. "Most people can Jump okay, as long as someone or something navigates, right? That's how you got here. TamLin gets cluster headaches and other problems, which remain until certain parts of his bio-identity get keyed to the time zone he's in. Once he's keyed to a somewhen, any deviation from the natural progression of that somewhen will, again, trigger problems for him. But he can't get keyed without a merger manually forcing it."

Raleigh assumed all that would make more sense to someone more familiar with the biological and genetically inherited modifications built into the universes like Janni's. "That still doesn't explain why you left her _alone_ with him. He's beat her up before."

Raleigh had tried to follow, herself, but TamLin had grabbed a StretSec vehicle, and she hadn't been able to find a taxi willing to follow before it got out of sight. First had suggested hot chocolate for the three of them, and considering she had no idea where TamLin was going and First had just had his lover and unborn child murdered by his own sibling, she hadn't good reason to refuse.

"TamLin won't kick her while she's down," Janni said. "Not unless she earns it--and then he'll do the minimum. You should see him, sometime. When he gets bored, he cross-dresses and goes down to one of the macho bars. He kicks their asses--but no matter how involved the fight gets, I have never seen him throw a punch after the opponent's ready to quit. He just reads their body language and-- _snap!_ --makes his decision off that, even if they're still talking smack or throwing stuff at him."

She frowned, brow furrowing, and glanced at First. "I think your sister's awake."

He grunted acknowledgement.

"And...I think she's high."

He paused in the middle of another sip of hot chocolate and exchanged an odd look with her. "Really?"

Janni nodded slowly, still looking puzzled.

"Huh."

The addicted TamLin had drugged Third? Raleigh pressed her palms over her eyes and wondered what in the worlds it would take for one of these people to admit the man had a problem--one that made him a person to avoid, not a person to dump an injured friend on.

And hoped she wouldn't be gaining a newbie drug addict as a roommate.

The apartment was silent.

Keeping her bio-identity merged with the somewhen she was visiting, Third quietly slipped in and found Raleigh seated at the dining room table, tapping at a contact list on her console. _Janni_ 's contact list, not her own.

"How do you do that?" Raleigh asked as she turned around. Embarrassment showed in the twitch of her cheek, as if she thought Third unaware of the hacks and macros she'd set up to copy their information.

"How's your brother?" Raleigh continued, obviously not expecting Third to answer. "I'm sorry about his wife."

Second was dead. Third didn't let tears well.

Discomfort showed in the angle of Raleigh's shoulders. "Janni told me about...about Lysacarly."

It was about time. Third had suggested Janni fill Raleigh in months ago--but it had taken Second _dying_ for her to bother.

Tasting salt, Third turned away from Raleigh, toward the Jenga game at the far end of the table. Janni would notice the residuals from the Jump. Third picked up one of the blocks and let her temporal dissonance bleed through, to alert Janni who had visited this somewhen. Leaving notice to your allies was polite.

"So 'prime' is what you call someone with biological modifications? And 'null' is someone without?"

Third glanced back at Raleigh, unsurprised that she was picking up quickly, now that someone was bothering to explain things to her.

"You said Janni had a 'bondmate'. I didn't know she was married."

Bonded wasn't married.

Third busied her hands--grabbed another Jenga block, pulled out the knife--because what Janni decided to tell Raleigh was her business.

...But lack of knowledge was dangerous. Lack of knowledge could get Nev gunning for Raleigh, who didn't carry a weapon and who wouldn't know the first thing about protecting herself from primes.

Third left the knife on the chair for Raleigh and held her hand out for Raleigh's console.

"Do you know how to use it?"

A valid question, since Third didn't own a console of her own and Raleigh knew so little about Jumping. Third let her answer show in her lack of response.

Raleigh handed over the device.

Third glanced over the setup, then got to work finding the contact person Raleigh would need.

"See a console in one universe, you've seen them all?"

At least Janni had explained that much. "Tablet," Third informed Raleigh as she found the entry she was looking for. "Usually."

"It's usually called a tablet?"

Third nodded once and handed the console back.

Raleigh startled, recognition flaring loudly enough for Third to notice. "Is that a _beard_?"

Excellent save, as if the beard were what bothered her about TamLin. "Four o'clock shadow," she said, letting Raleigh pretend. "It's..."

Janni wasn't going to explain the details, and Raleigh really should have been told, already. Better for Janni to get ticked off at her rather than at someone else.

"Some people _naturally_ mix well with others, genetically," Third said. ** "**That...isn't common. So they usually have...abilities, to help them adjust or freeze their appearance more easily than most, to help them hide. He likes looking a little scruffy, in clean-cut universes. Makes people underestimate him."

She was bleeding chattiness from Janni, again.

And Raleigh was staring at her. "He exists in your universe?"

Third looked away, reminded yet again why she needed to leave TamLin alone. "Dead."

"I'm sorry."

The empathy in Raleigh's voice puzzled Third, until she realized Raleigh was making assumptions about how and why he'd died. She hid tears again. "We escaped our universe. He was...unable to acclimate."

Silence fell between them. Third glanced back at Raleigh to see her cringing with her finger over the _Call_ button.

After a long pause, Raleigh hit it, and Janni's TamLin answered almost as promptly as Third's would have. _" Yes?"_

"I'm Raleigh," she said awkwardly.

Third remembered her earlier question about Janni being married and realized she probably should've explained that.

_" I'm sorry?"_ TamLin asked, so he knew as little about Janni's current living situation as Janni knew about his. Perhaps less.

Perhaps _less_. He'd said Janni had sent him some of Third's hair, to get her documented as a consultant for StretSec, but that didn't mean much. Just how much had he known about her, before all this started?

Third itched to join the conversation and find out, but she restrained herself, forced herself to step back so she wouldn't accidentally step into visual range if she acted on instinct again. _Don 't get involved._

If TamLin spoke to Third via console, he'd expect her to be there when he showed up, and she was out of her native time flow at the moment. She didn't want to give him another cluster headache.

"I live with Janni," Raleigh admitted.

_" What's the matter?"_ he asked, as quick on the uptake as Third's TamLin.

"First is missing," Raleigh said.

Where did she get that idea?

"Second is dead. Third is...damaged."

Since when did Raleigh know that much of the jargon? Third didn't use it. Janni must've slipped again.

Raleigh let out a long breath. "Look, I don't know how much I can say. I don't want to get these Nameless people killed."

_" Where are you?"_

"At the apartment." She paused. "Your wife went out looking for them, I think."

_" Bondmate, not wife_, _"_ TamLin corrected--to Third's relief, because that meant she wouldn't have to. _" We're bonded, not consummated."_

"I thought _bonded_ meant _married_."

_" In some universes. In ours...it's more 'betrothed'."_

"Then why don't you marry?"

_" Various reasons."_

Someone needed to explain that. "Resonance," Third said, quietly enough that the console wouldn't pick it up.

Raleigh stared at her.

_" What?"_

"Nothing," Raleigh said quickly. "I'm sorry, but what's your name? I mean, if you have one."

_" Call me Lin."_

Lin? That wasn't like _her_ TamLin at all.

She was wasting time before the jump loop she'd set would yank her back to her natural somewhen. She needed to try to find out why she'd upset him so much, so she could make sure to avoid that in the future.

She hurried to Janni's door, double-checked that she was merged with the somewhen she was in, and adjusted her bio-identity to mimic Janni's.

Pain pierced behind her temples, and the wooziness and black encroaching her vision caught her by surprise until she remembered her missing governor chip. Third blindly patted at her belt, feeling for something to help even though she couldn't remember packing anything.

She still had the package of jolt tabs that she'd pulled from TamLin's drawer.

Third hesitated, but if she remembered the effects correctly, jolt would keep her from blacking out.

She opened the package and stuck one tab on her tongue. She grimaced almost immediately as the stimulant cocktail spiked her system and tore her usual psychic blocks wide open. It was all she could do to sit without hitting anything in Janni's room.

After a few minutes, she was able to push through the pounding migraine and mental jabber enough to start poking through Janni's things, but she didn't find anything, and Third knew better than to try the console. Janni would've loaded it with universe-specific passcodes and failsafes.

The jump loop grabbed Third, worsening the migraine and adding disorientation in the mix as it hauled her forward, a few minutes past when she'd originally left the time stream, so she wouldn't accidentally overlap with herself.

_Don 't Jump,_ Third reminded herself. _You set this up. You know which somewhen you 're in._

It didn't feel as if she knew when she was.

Third verified she was back in TamLin's guest room, then let herself curl up on the bed and trust that he'd locked his apartment properly. At least it was quiet. A sensate as sensitive as TamLin _had_ to insulate his walls from temporal overflow, which also blocked psychic chatter.

The jolt caused spasms to prickle through her body, and without any nearby minds to overhear, the energy was building up and worsening her migraine. How did he _like_ this?

The door's buzz cut off midsound, and air moved as it opened. Her Jump would've triggered his sensitivity, so of course he'd come investigate.

Silence filled the room. She felt his regard as if it were a corpse weighing down her chest.

"What did you take?!"

She held the packaging for the jolt tab up far enough for him to see, then let her arm fall.

He moved well for a null. Not as quiet as her universe's version, but close. Very close. Her skin tingled with his proximity.

"Why?" he asked.

"Was blacking out."

He let out a quiet sound, something between a huff and a laugh. "Why the Jump?"

She didn't have the energy to shrug, and it wasn't her place to protest his earlier tongue-lashing.

"We have to call you Second, now."

She'd been trying to avoid remembering that. The taste of tears filled her mouth.

"Hey," he said gently, and she could feel his hand hovering over her. "Sorry for assuming you shared Janni's hang-ups. May I make amends?"

She squinted at him from the corner of her eye. Nameless didn't get apologies, much less any kind of reparation.

He pressed her shoulder--first one, then the other, to roll her onto her other side, putting her back to him. Her pulse raced, and the hair stood up on the back of her all-too-vulnerable neck.

TamLin pressed both hands to her shoulder blades, telling her where they were, then trailed them along as he went to the various nodal points along her spine and applied pressure to each one.

Her lymph system didn't process the mods properly, the hormones processing and draining far more slowly than they built up, which was what produced her overloads. Pressure at certain node points helped alleviate that. She assumed he knew that from "Janni?"

He hesitated--only for a moment, but she felt it. "Yes."

"Feels nice," she blurted, likely from the stimulants. "Thank you."

He paused again, then ran his fingers along her bared arm before resuming the massage. "If you're open to trying alternatives, I have some ebbers."

The offer chilled her. "Aren't ebbers depressants?"

"Yeah."

He wasn't planning on following the same path of her TamLin, was he? She turned, letting her back press his hand down because it was more important for her to glimpse his face. "You hate depressants."

His eyelids were lowered enough to mask his eyes, and he kept his expression impassive as he gave a casual shrug. The way he left his hand under her made her wonder anew why he and Janni weren't consummated. "Janni won't try them."

Third's stimulant-addled mind struggled to focus enough to process the implications of what he was saying. He had ebbers, because he'd gotten them for Janni to try. Janni had refused to take them and apparently took issue with his drug habit. "What does she expect you to do about your cluster headaches?"

His stillness, followed by a slow _I-like-this_ grin, kept her from grimacing about the audible incredulity in her voice.

She bit her tongue against the urge to apologize for the display of emotion.

TamLin sat on the side of the bed, and he put one hand on her far hip. "I think I'm going to like you more than I do Janni."

Breath caught in Third's throat. Shadows--people residing in universes other than their own--usually avoided alternate-universe versions of people they'd known for good reason. "I don't know this you."

"And you loved your universe's version of me." His fingers toyed with the fasten on her equipment belt, testing how far she trusted him. "But I remind you of him."

He didn't care. Words, body language, tone of voice--all coincided to be proof of that.

He unfastened her belt. She lifted her hips to help him get it off her--consciously admitting that she trusted him enough to be at a disadvantage around him, even though she shouldn't.

He studied her as he let her belt--her _equipment_ --down on the floor beside the bed, but she didn't flinch at the vulnerable position.

"You're as lonely as I am," he said.

Third wasn't sure what to answer.

But TamLin soon made obvious that she didn't need to.

## Excerpt from  
_Trust Is a Fickle Business_

#### (rated T)

TamLin outright preferred when others disliked or feared him, but as he stared at the flushed face of the petite woman lying on his guest room's bed, he felt disgusted at his own actions.

He pulled himself back from her, from the bed, and stood. "Sorry."

Third--no, he had to call her Second, now--propped herself up on her elbows and tilted her head so her lashes would hide her hooded eyes, but the tentative fingers she raised to feel her swollen lips said more than she likely realized. Intimacy was forbidden, to Nameless like her. Even a hug would've been foreign, and kissing went a bit beyond that.

He was a jerk.

"Why?" she asked.

Why had he kissed her, or why had he pulled back? Or was she asking why he liked her, when he didn't get along with the version of her from the same universe he was?

He shook his head and plucked her equipment belt off the floor, where he'd dropped it after testing how far she was willing to trust him. He tossed it toward her and adjusted his own clothes, ridding himself of whatever rumples he'd picked up and double-checking that everything was still fastened. He thought it was, but...

He hadn't been _that_ much of a jerk, to his relief.

When he looked back at the young woman, Third/Second was still holding her belt.

Her sleeveless shirt had rucked up enough for a scar on her stomach to catch his eye. He was tracing it with a finger before he realized what he was doing.

Pulsar was the safest option that helped his cluster headaches, but the reduced inhibitions weren't good for someone like him. Secrets and lies belonged in the dark, and someone had to keep them there.

For Second's part, she drew a long, determined breath, then let it out in a huff--but she belted her equipment back on. Her fingers brushed against his.

He pulled his hand back, far more reluctantly than was wise.

Third--that was to say, Second, or whatever he had to call her so he wouldn't accidentally get her euthanized by her own family--lifted her chin. "Thank you."

For kissing her--right after telling her outright that he knew she was attracted to him _because_ he reminded her of her native universe's version of him, who had died? Killed himself, from what First had told him.

TamLin didn't care that she loved the alternate him. He didn't even care if she wanted to pretend he was that particular version of him. But he _liked_ what little he'd seen of Second-who-used-to-be-Third, more than he'd ever liked Janni, and affection from him could get her killed.

Her clutch's previous Second had just been murdered in graphic example of that.

He asked outright, "You have what, a year?" Until she was old enough to count as a person and maybe they could figure out if they would get along as well as he suspected they would.

She sighed so quietly that most wouldn't have been able to hear her. She drew her legs up under her chin, wrapped her arms around them. "Bit more than that."

She was even younger than he'd thought. "I'm sorry."

She shrugged. "I wouldn't tell if you didn't."

Even if they dared the risk, she and Janni--the version of her from his native universe--had resonance, a form of psychic bleed that happened between psy-positive alternates of the same person, when those two versions were in the same somewhen. Janni would soon know about their make-out session, if she didn't already, and she would doubtless add it to the long list of grudges she held against him.

To have a bit more than a year left before she could join the Named, _this_ woman had to be... "Twenty-five," he said aloud. "You're twenty-five."

The spiderweb-like light that was characteristic of biologically modified persons from their type of universe glimmered from beneath her skin as she studied him. "You're thirty-four."

_Janni_ couldn't read telomeres and calculate ages that quickly. Without showing his surprise, he replied, "Yes."

Second sighed and scooted aside so she could get out of the bed without stepping on his toes. "Thanks. I mean that. At least I have a start of an idea to what I'm miss--"

He had two fingers against her lips, shushing her. "You're high. Don't say anything you'll regret later."

Janni was going to be ticked off enough.

Second blinked once. "Stim."

She had taken a jolt tab for some reason, and she was learning the hard way why psy-positives had to be leery of stimulants. He had to be careful with them, himself, and he was just psy-sensitive, not psy-positive. The distinction probably wasn't as significant as they'd been raised to believe, but it did exist.

Second's consideration of his words was characteristic of the person who had been named Jannis Lysacarly, in his universe. Janni could hide her thoughts and emotions, too, but she could never quite lose an underlying hardness. Her calmness was faked, a veneer to hide an underlying calculation and chill.

Second's wasn't, with staid nonchalance being her natural default rather than a façade. He liked it.

"I am slightly more inclined to jabber and ignore the regen patch," Second commented, "but I've been doing that anyway."

He gave her a hard look.

She smiled sweetly, and the expression embodied what little he liked about Janni. Fools often mistook her for an idiot, discovering too late that she'd been playing them all along.

He was more unnerved than surprised to realize that Second had pulled off _his_ belt without him noticing--treating him to the same test that he had done to her.

She'd answered consciously that yes, she trusted him enough to let him put her at a disadvantage.

He'd answered _un_ consciously, and that in itself was an admission of how much he liked her. (It also was a hint that 'like' wasn't _quite_ the right word for how he felt, but he knew better than to name that sort of emotion. He was too sentimental for his own good as it was.)

Thankfully, she was casually eying his belt, not him, so she'd not picked up on the physiological interest.

Or maybe she was just too inexperienced to be able to recognize his interest for what it was. There was a depressing thought.

She casually eyed this belt while she let it fall to the floor, as he'd done with hers mere minutes earlier. "Well, then. Guess I'd better go before Nev shows up."

Nev being her oldest sister, who had murdered the previous Second before being killed, herself, by the woman who lived with Third/Second and Janni. "She wasn't after you."

She shrugged and rolled to her feet. "Nev is _always_ after me. She got Second because she could. Now that she's here, she'll poke around for evidence until she has enough to claim I'm a Breach."

"She's dead." Good thing, too, because he'd be even more troubled by who he was attracted to if he'd felt obligated to kill the sister who was a threat to her. Killing a lover's relatives was not conducive to a long-term relationship, even if the lover was okay with it.

Third/Second froze for a long moment, then looked him in the eye. "Dead? _Nev_?"

"Yes. Raleigh got her."

Third/Second bounced once on her toes, in a reserved expression of lighthearted exuberance that took his breath away. She was everything he'd wished Janni could be.

And she was a Nameless refugee from a post-apocalyptic hellverse, forbidden from life as a person until she reached an appropriate age--and she had a psychic link to the bondmate he never planned to marry but was still tied to, mostly because they'd both been too busy to bother with dissolving the bonding.

Life always was kicking him when he was down. "The rules are ridiculous."

Humor flashed in the young woman's blue eyes. "Agreed."

"I meant--" He grabbed her hand before she could do anything with it that would encourage the pulsar. "No. Hit Naming, then we'll talk, but before then..."

Her expression stayed flat, proving how she'd survived so long. Nameless weren't allowed to care. She didn't sigh again, but TamLin could tell that she wanted to.

He hesitated, too aware of the risks to truly want to tempt fate by giving reason for someone to consider her a Breach, but... With one clutchmate murdered by her sister and the other possibly suicidal from the loss of his lover and unborn child, she might need a reason to keep on fighting.

TamLin dropped a quick kiss on her lips, ran his thumb under her chin, and then retreated to the door. "Keep yourself alive, Second."

She didn't even flinch. She was too busy staring at him.

He let himself out and decided it was time to counter the pulsar with a tab of jolt, before he made any more of a fool of himself.

##### Buy _Trust Is a Fickle Business_ to keep reading!
