Kira Vex's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Kira Vex crouched behind a grain cart in the Takala market and counted the seconds between her heartbeats, because the thing that had followed her through the tear was counting them too. She had come back forty years to kill a war before it started. She had been in this century for eleven minutes. The tear had closed above the river at dawn. Something came through with her. She had felt it in the water, a second shadow under her own. Now the market smelled like wet straw and smoke, and every vendor she passed went quiet a beat too late, as if a cold hand had brushed their necks before hers. She pressed her back to the cart and checked the blade strapped inside her sleeve. Standard issue, future alloy, useless if she did not know what she was cutting. Her orders had been simple. Reach the archivist. Learn the name of the man who would build the weapon. Kill him while he was still a boy. None of it worked if she died in a market on her first morning. A deer walked out from between two stalls. It should not have been there. One flank was clean brown fur and a bright dark eye. The other flank was gone. Ribs stood open like a cage. Muscle hung in gray strings along the bone. It stepped toward her on two living legs and two dead ones and made no sound on the stones. The vendors did not see it. A woman walked straight through its shoulder and shivered and kept going. Kira understood then. It had not followed her. It had been sent. A tracker, grown from the seam she had torn in time, half in the world and half out of it. It was looking for the shape of her, the wrongness of a body that did not belong to this year. She stopped breathing. She let her hand go slack on the blade. She thought of the cart, the straw, the woman with the basket, anything local, anything native. The deer's living eye swept past her. Its dead side twitched, uncertain. A boy dropped a crate of apples behind it. The deer's head snapped toward the noise. It walked after the sound and was gone between the stalls. Kira waited until her hands shook, then longer. She pulled her hood up. The blade under her sleeve was useless against a thing with no throat. She needed something this century understood, something with a name in this century's mouth. She needed a hunter, or a priest, or whoever in Takala still remembered what to call a beast that walked half dead. She stepped out from behind the cart and moved deeper into the city, in the opposite direction the deer had gone. The mission could wait one more day. Staying alive could not.