This was the man Riley had spoken of, no doubt about it. Death, the magician. This guy looked capable of anything.

Yet it was Riley holding the knife. The boy was still guilty.

But...

Chevie double-tapped the image to enlarge it, then centered the crosshairs on Riley’s knife arm, enlarging again. It seemed conclusive. A hand holding a knife, a forearm, wrinkle shadows at the elbow.

Wrinkle shadows...

Chevie enlarged again until the pixels blurred and saw that the shadows were not shadows.

Not unless shadows have knuckles.

There were four long fingers gripping Riley’s arm, forcing his hand.

The boy is innocent! she thought, releasing a breath that she’d not realized she was holding.

Looking into that blackened face, with those flat eyes, Chevie was glad that this man could not, contrary to what Riley believed, make his way into the future.

All the same, she thought. Maybe I will stand guard over the pod with a round in the chamber. Just in case.

Chevie tugged the Timekey from its socket and hung it around her neck for safekeeping.

Just in case.

Special Agent Lawrence Witmeyer, her boss in the L.A. office, was a man with a parable for every occasion. Many involved a made-up Fed called Agent Justin Casey, who was always prepared and never got himself shot because he forgot to follow protocol.

Chevie snorted. Agent Justin Casey. A helluva guy.

And if she hadn’t been a little distracted by her reminiscing, she might have noticed an angry blister of red energy boiling at the heart of the WARP pod and had time to duck before the explosion.

Unfortunately she was distracted and didn’t see anything until the computers set off a warning alarm. By then it was already too late.

Garrick and Smart tumbled into the wormhole together, but as separate people. Once inside, Garrick held on to his consciousness, but Smart’s heart had already stopped beating and his brain was winding down. The effect of the self-destruct bomb was to excite some particles that were not meant to be excited and corrupt the transition, in effect merging Smart’s last neurons of consciousness with Garrick’s and some of his physical characteristics too, which the WARP pod would rebuild around his altered DNA.

A new being with accelerated evolution. All the gifts that millennia of adaptation would bring.

For a length of time that was immeasurable and yet instant, Garrick felt himself disembodied in the wormhole. He could not see anything and spent the time flicking through Smart’s memories.

I have killed both father and son, he realized, and wished that he had received payment for the second murder.

This thought of payment set Garrick thinking about the shady cove who had contracted him for the murder of Charles Smart.

Did he know, Garrick wondered, about all of this magic?