“It’s fine.” But it wasn’t. Not at all. The holo room loomed on our horizon and if I went in this distracted, both of us were leaving the facility in sample jars.

“Would you feel better if we walked a little?”

Probably not, but that was exactly what we needed to be doing—exploring the halls. I’d only ever seen a few areas and the farther I roamed, the more new timeghosts I’d find. One of those could lead to the answers we needed or at least more clues on Darren’s research.

The futures of us in the holo room loomed dark and bloody. Focusing on them made my head throb, but didn’t give me any idea how to avoid us getting tranqued or caught or killed or tortured or—

Too many choices flickered around and random Tair ghosts of all ages and possibilities were choking everything up. Hopefully, I’d get a better read as we got closer, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

Nerves hummed up and down my arms. “Walking is good.”

Tair kept his distance as we exited the sim room. The two guards inside the door merged with the two outside, plus a new pair decked out in body armor. Six Black Helix goons the size of war gods for two of us. “I must be so dangerous.” The worst I could do was tell the blond one that his wife was cheating on him.

“Maybe they’re for me.” Altair shrugged back into the lab coat he’d shed for our shooting match. In his glasses and coat, with shiny black shoes he didn’t look so much a threat.

But the other version of Tair—

Tair’s combat boots hammer the tiles of a shapeless corridor. He draws a gun from one of the holsters strapped across his chest, and two sword hilts peek over his shoulders. All in black, sprinting, his eyes deadly serious. He pulls the trigger and a gunshot echoes. A body starts to fall somewhere in the distance. Another shot sounds. And another. And another as Tair runs relentlessly toward his goal.

In the present, I rubbed my hands against my arms.

That Tair?

I wouldn’t want to be standing between him and whatever he was running to. So maybe the guards really were for him.

As we walked the corridor, I shifted thoughts of Tair to the side and tried to focus on the ghosts of lab workers flicking in and out. Where they were going. What they were doing.

Figures in long coats blurred and passed through each other and overlapped, chattering about downregulated proteins and new trials and synapses in fragments of conversations. All the information in the world was here, but it was useless if I couldn’t find the right moments in the past.

And there were a lot of fricking moments to sift through.