—
Quinn’s Honda Clarity is making no secret of the fact that it is not excited about being overridden by a human right now. Not only is traffic bordering on anarchy, but a tropical depression parked over the Mid-Atlantic has dropped enough rain that the subsystem responsible for evaluating road conditions is increasingly concerned about hydroplaning. There is an undismissable dialog box flashing in the corner of the heads-up display projected against the windshield, implying that Quinn is showing exceedingly poor judgment by not allowing the car to pilot itself through such uncertain and treacherous conditions.
But Quinn is in a particularly contrary mood right now. And she still does not fully trust her car around navigational anomalies like checkpoints. Lack of full situational awareness and insufficient training data usually manifest themselves as twitchiness, and twitchy vehicles do not exactly endear themselves to U.S. Marines.
Checkpoints are one of the first things governments put in place after terrorist attacks. That, and increased security at airports. It makes them feel like they are back in control of a world they were never really in control of in the first place. Quinn has already driven through one checkpoint and will probably go through at least two more before she gets to Langley. They are guarded by pissed-off-looking soldiers who have the luxury of acting tough because they are deployed in Northern Virginia, and here purely for show, and don’t really have to worry about things like snipers and suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices. This isn’t how Marines at checkpoints in the Middle East look. Quinn hasn’t seen them in person, but as part of an assignment to help train neural networks to identify and neutralize approaching threats, she’s analyzed hours of footage and, unfortunately, dozens of attacks. When Marines are so far from home, despite their dark ballistic eyewear, the heavy body armor, and the assault rifles they cradle, you can see that most of them are still just kids. That they have parents at home who wear T-shirts saying that they are proud parents of Marines, and that their bedrooms in their childhood homes still haven’t been converted into offices or craft spaces or guest rooms just yet. No matter what, it is too early. You can’t put their stuff in storage or sell it all in a yard sale, because they might be coming home soon. But also, because they may never come home again.
If there is one thing Quinn has learned from everything she has been through—from losing her daughter and her husband, and from dedicating herself to an uncertain career—it is that the most impactful thing most of us will ever do is raise our children. Inspire them to help build the kind of world we want to leave behind. For most of us, they are our true legacies—our only real shot at immortality.
But for others, they are not. Some of us have that privilege abruptly revoked and must therefore select from what desperate and vengeful options remain. Quinn now realizes there are two fundamental opportunities to contribute to the future: The first is through the sacred creation of life, and the second is by taking it away.
—
Quinn remembers very clearly the moment it hit her that it might all be real. Everything the Elite Assassin told her in that bright white concrete bunker blasted into the Swiss Alps. Two moments, really. Twin gut punches in rapid staccato succession. The first was hearing the words “time transmission” come out of her ex-husband’s mouth—the realization that all the craziness she was trying to escape had somehow found its way to him. And the second was the alarm erupting beside her on the bed, followed by the emergency alerts manifesting faster than her phone could render them.
The insanity had not just found James; it had taken him.
How the two events are connected—the attempt by someone Quinn has never even heard of to demonstrate time transmission and what may prove to be the deadliest terrorist attack in history—she does not yet know. Nor does she understand why these previously inconceivable themes keep intersecting with her life. But she will. She will solve it all no matter what it takes. No matter how long, and no matter what sacrifices she must make along the way.
But first, she needs to know if what the Elite Assassin told her is true. Not about the Epoch Index having come from the future. To her, that’s a minor detail in a much deeper narrative. What Quinn needs to know right now more than anything else is whether there is a future in which she is capable of condemning so many innocent people to such disturbing and violent deaths.
The key to knowing will be in Ranveer’s “proof”—the story about her final moments with her father. If Quinn can find references to it in the shadowphiles, then she will know for sure that he is lying. That his account of her as some sort of reluctant but fierce hero is bullshit. But if she can’t find anything—if Quinn is unable to explain how the Elite Assassin came to know her most personal and closely guarded secret—then only one explanation will remain: that she added it to the Epoch Index herself. Or, rather, that the world will continue to bend toward an unimaginably brutal future in which she will.
Twice she’d written queries to see what she could surface, but she did not run either one. Her hand hovering above
