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.

Kira ran until the market noise died behind her. The deer had her scent now. She could feel it the way you feel a hand under thin ice, close and patient. Her suppression was slipping. Sweat cut through it. Fear cut through it worse. She had maybe two hours before it caught her in the open. She needed walls the thing could not walk through, and time to think. At the edge of the city she found it: a tower left over from some older century, tall and rust-streaked, its elevator shaft dark behind cracked glass. Antennas leaned off the roof like broken fingers. The door hung on one hinge. She went in and pulled it shut and jammed a length of pipe through the handle. Inside smelled like dust and old wiring. She climbed the stairs two at a time, past dead panels and pale green lights that still blinked for no one. On the third landing she stopped. She drew the weapon from her pack. It was a wide butcher's blade with two laser emitters seated along the spine. She thumbed the switch. The edge lit pink, then steadied. The battery would give her one clean cut. Maybe two. She kept climbing. She needed height. She needed to see the thing coming. The top room was a ring of dirty windows. She pressed her forehead to the glass and looked down at the street. Empty. Empty. Then not. A figure stepped into the open below. Not the deer. A man. He stood in the middle of the road and looked up at the tower as if he had been told exactly where to find her. She knew his face before he lifted it. She knew the line of the jaw and the set of the shoulders because they were hers. Same height. Same dark hair cropped short. Same small scar above the left eye that she had gotten at fourteen in a training yard she would not be born near for decades. Her hand went numb on the handle. The blade dimmed. He raised one palm, slow, the way you calm an animal. In his other hand he held something small and matte black. He pressed it. A soft pulse went out from it. She felt her own wrongness fold flat inside her chest, tucked away, gone. Somewhere past the tower, she heard the deer stop running. Heard it turn. Heard it walk off in another direction, chasing nothing. He had masked her. From the street he mouthed one word up at the glass. Down. Kira stepped back from the window. Her hands shook. The tracker was off her. She was alive for the next hour. And a man wearing her face was waiting at the bottom of the tower, holding technology that should not exist in this century, and he knew her name before she had given it.

Kira stood at the top of the tower with the blade in her hand and a man wearing her face waiting on the street below. The tracker was gone for now. He had done that. It did not mean he was safe. She had one hour of cover and one question she had to answer before she used it: friend, or trap. She went down slow. She kept the blade lit and low against her leg. On the ground floor she pulled the pipe from the door and stepped out. He had not moved. Up close his face was worse. Same scar. Same mouth. He was maybe ten years older than her, lines at the eyes she did not have yet. He held the small black device out flat on his palm so she could see it. His other hand stayed open at his side. "I have two minutes of talk in me," he said. "Then we walk. The mask on you drifts." His voice was hers, pitched lower. It made her stomach turn. "Name," she said. "You already know it." "Say it." He said her name. He said the training yard where she got the scar. He said the name of her handler, a name she had never spoken aloud in this century. Any of it could be a lift from her head. She had been briefed on that. Trackers were not the only thing a tear could push through. She raised the blade. "Prove it costs you something." He looked at her a second. Then he crouched and set the masking device on the ground between them. He stepped back from it. Three paces. Four. Her wrongness bloomed back into her chest like a held breath let out. Somewhere across the rooftops, an animal noise turned toward her again. Hooves on stone. Not fast yet. Coming. "Pick it up," he said. "Or don't. But I'm not armed and I just gave you the only thing keeping you alive." She stared at him. A tracker would not do that. A trap that wanted her would not do that. She grabbed the device. Her wrongness folded flat again. The hooves out past the buildings slowed, confused, drifted off. Something small moved at the corner of the tower. A dog. A shepherd pup, one eye scarred shut, ribs showing. It watched them both and did not bark. He did not look at it. He was watching her. "Walk with me," he said. "I'll tell you what you came here to stop. I'll tell you who sent me after you and why they lied to you about the boy." Kira lowered the blade. She did not put it away. "Talk while we move," she said. She followed the man with her face into the street. The pup fell in behind them, quiet, three steps back.

They walked three blocks before Kira stopped him. The street was empty. The pup padded behind them, quiet as smoke. The man with her face waited, hands still open. She had followed him this far on words. Words were cheap, and her handlers had proved cheap words could kill innocent people. She needed something she could test. "Stop talking," she said. "I need proof, not a story." He nodded like he had expected it. "Then pick a test." She thought. A tracker copy could lift facts from her head. It could not know things she did not know. If he was really from her future, he had lived past this week. He had memory she had not made yet. "The archivist," she said. "The one they sent me to find first. Where does he keep his records?" He did not hesitate. "He doesn't. There is no archivist. It's a bot. Century-old body, gears showing through the chest plate. It stores the files. They gave you a person to look for so you'd stop looking at the boy." Her stomach dropped. She had never questioned the word archivist. She had pictured a man. "Where." "Two streets over. Basement of the corner shop with the green door. It walks at night to charge. You'll know it." She pointed at an alley mouth. "Wait there. Hands on the wall. The pup stays with you." He went. She watched him press his palms flat to the brick. She left the mask device on a crate between them so his hands stayed clean of it. She moved fast. Two streets. Green door. A shop shuttered forty years too early for her century. The basement hatch was unlocked. She went down with the cleaver lit. It was standing in the dark, plugged into a wall socket by a frayed cord. Metallic body. Elegant joints. A cage of brass gears turning slow behind a cracked chest plate. Its lens rotated to her and focused. It said her handler's name in a calm voice and asked for her authorization code. She gave a wrong code on purpose. It answered anyway. It began to recite her mission file. The target's name was not the boy she had been briefed on. It was a different name. A girl. Fourteen. Lived on the coast. Kira cut the power cord. The lens dimmed. The gears wound down. She climbed back to the street with her hands shaking. He was still against the wall. The pup sat at his heel. "You told the truth," she said. "Part of it." "The girl. On the coast." "They'll send someone else now that you've stopped. We have maybe a day." Kira picked up the mask device. The hooves started again, far off, turning toward the sound of the cut wire.

Kira crouched by the alley wall with the mask device in her palm. The hoofbeats faded, then circled back. The man with her face watched the street. The pup pressed against his leg, one ruined eye tracking nothing. "The coast is two days on foot," she said. "We have one." "Less," he said. "They'll drop the next operative near her, not near us." She ran the math. No vehicle. No contact she trusted in this century. The tracker would follow any fast movement she made. The girl would be dead before Kira cleared the town limits. "You came back from further than I did," she said. "You know a way." He hesitated. That was answer enough. "Say it." "There's a shack at the edge of the marsh. Half sunk. A jump pad under the floor. One charge left. It was mine. I saved it for the trip home." She looked at him. He had already given up the mask. Now this. "Where does it land?" "Coast. Close enough. You'll walk in from a mile out." "And you?" "I stay. I draw the deer. Without the mask I light up like a fire. It follows me, not you." She wanted to argue. She did not. He was right, and the girl had hours. They moved. The marsh started where the last houses ended. Mud sucked at her boots. The shack leaned on rotten posts, boards warped, one window a black square. The pup would not step in the mud. It sat on a stone and watched them. Inside, he pried up three floorboards. A metal disc lay under them, dull, the size of a dinner plate. A single green light held steady on its rim. "Stand on it. Hold the mask. Don't drop it on the other side." She stepped on. The disc hummed. She felt the pull start in her teeth. "Wait," she said. "Your name." He smiled, small. "Later." He pressed the center of the disc. The shack tore away. Salt air hit her face. She stood in wet sand under a low sky. Gulls. A line of shacks a mile off along the water. The disc under her boots went dark and cracked down the middle. She stepped off and ran. Half a mile in, she saw the smoke. Not a house fire. A signal fire. Small, controlled, on the roof of a fisher's shed. Someone was already there. Someone who knew a fourteen-year-old girl on this coast was worth burning wet wood for. Kira dropped flat behind a dune. She had made it. She had beaten the operative by hours, maybe less. But she had spent her ride home to do it, and the person tending that fire was not her handler's operative. It was a girl. Waiting for her.

Kira lay flat behind the dune and watched the girl feed the fire. The smoke stayed thin and gray, the kind you made when you wanted to be found by one person and no one else. The girl looked fourteen. Dark hair pulled up. A brass disc on a chain around her neck that she kept touching. Cargo pants. Boots too big for her. She fed the fire like she had done it before. Kira ran the three options. Target. Decoy. Ally. Wrong guess killed a child or opened her throat. She drew the cleaver from her hip and held it flat against the sand so the pink emitter would not flash. One charge left. Maybe two. The girl spoke without turning. "You can come out. I've known you were there since you crossed the tide line." Kira did not move. "The compass finds people," the girl said. She lifted the brass disc off her chest. "It's been pointing at you for an hour. Before that it pointed at a man with your face, up the coast. Then he went dark." Kira's grip tightened on the handle. Only two people knew the doppelgänger existed. Her, and him. "Stand up slow," Kira said. "Hands where I see them. Walk ten steps toward the water." The girl obeyed. No weapon on her belt. No bulge under the jacket. She stopped at the wet sand and waited. Kira came up behind her with the cleaver low. "Name." "Kayla. I fix things. I find things. A man paid me two weeks ago to light a fire on this day and wait for a woman with a scar under her jaw." She tilted her head so Kira could see her own scar reflected in the girl's brown eye. "He said if I did it right, a bad thing forty years out doesn't happen. He said you'd want to kill me before you believed me." "Describe him." "Your face. Older. Tired. He left me this." Kayla reached slow into her jacket and pulled out a folded page. Handwriting Kira knew because it was her own. Kira took it. Three lines. Her handler's real name. The name of the girl she had been sent to kill. And an address, two miles inland, where that girl was hiding right now. The fire was not a trap. It was a relay. He had set it before he ever met her in Takala. Kira lowered the cleaver. "How far can that compass reach?" Kayla touched the disc. The needle swung inland and held. "As far as I need. Who are we finding?" "A fourteen-year-old girl," Kira said. "Before someone else does." She kicked sand over the signal fire until the smoke died. The next operative would drop somewhere on this coast within hours, and now they had a heading and no ride but their feet.

The signal fire was dead, but the dune road was open ground. Kira crouched beside the wet ash and made Kayla crouch too. Two miles inland meant a long walk with no cover if they picked wrong. Pick wrong, and they'd walk into whoever the doppelgänger's enemies had waiting. "Show me the needle again," Kira said. Kayla lifted the brass disc. The needle held steady, pointing past the dune grass toward a low ridge of pine. "That's her. Sitting still." "And behind us?" Kayla turned a slow circle. The needle stayed locked inland. Then she frowned and thumbed a small ring on the disc's rim. The needle jumped. It swung north up the coast, then south, then north again. It kept twitching. "What was that," Kira said. "Second setting. Finds anyone looking for us." Kayla's mouth went tight. "Three of them. Spread on the coast road. One's already past the shacks." Kira's stomach dropped. The next operative wasn't hours out. He was already here, and he'd brought help. Walking straight inland would put them on the same line as at least one hunter. She pulled Kayla flat behind the dune. "Can it show me ground they can't see? Gullies. Dry creeks. Anything low." "It finds people, not dirt." Kayla thought. "But I've run these flats since I was nine. There's a drainage cut a quarter mile south. Runs inland almost a mile. Walls above your head. It stinks and it floods, and nobody uses it." "Nobody watches it either." "No." Kira ran the math. South put them off the compass line their hunters expected. The cut would hide them for the worst mile. After that, open pine, but the compass would show any watcher before a watcher saw them. "We go south first," Kira said. "You call the needle every hundred steps. If any of those three moves toward us, we stop and I decide." Kayla nodded. She tucked the disc inside her shirt so it wouldn't flash. They moved low along the back of the dune, then dropped into the cut. The walls were sand and clay, taller than Kira. The air smelled of salt rot. Kira drew the cleaver but kept the emitter dark. One charge. Maybe two. Not enough for three men. Half a mile in, Kayla stopped and pulled the disc. The needle steadied inland toward the girl. Then she thumbed the ring. Two of the hunters were drifting north, following the dead fire's smoke trail. The third had stopped. "He's thinking," Kayla whispered. "Let him think. Walk." They walked. The cut carried them under the coast road and kept going. Kira had her route now, and a girl who could see the hunt before it closed. The target was still two miles ahead. So was the third man, and he wasn't drifting. He was waiting.

The cut ended at a lip of broken clay. Kira stopped Kayla with a hand and crawled up to look. Open pine flats stretched inland, sand and needle mat and low scrub. Somewhere in that quiet, a fourteen-year-old girl waited, and one hunter waited too. Kira had a compass that found people and a girl who had run these flats since she was nine. She did not have a map of the ground between. "Draw it," Kira whispered. She smoothed a patch of clay. Kayla scratched lines with a stick. "Cut ends here. Two ways in. Straight line runs up a sand rise. Open. Fast. He'll see us before we see him." She drew a second line curling south. "Old bog trail. Goes past a sunken shack, cuts through alder, comes at her from behind. Slower. Wet." "Which one does a hunter watch?" "The rise. Always the rise. Bog stinks. Nobody goes." Kira pulled the brass disc from Kayla's shirt and thumbed the ring herself. The needle jumped, steadied, jumped. The stationary hunter sat north of the rise. Not on the bog line. She turned her body until the needle showed him at her right shoulder. He was maybe six hundred yards off. "Bog," Kira said. "You lead. Every hundred steps." They dropped off the lip into black water that came to Kira's knees. The smell hit like a slap. Kayla moved without splashing, foot flat, weight slow. Kira copied her. Halfway through the alder, Kayla froze. Something moved at the base of a rotted stump. A frog, or what was left of one. Its skin hung in green rags. One eye dangled on a wet string down its cheek. It did not hop. It watched. Kira felt the cold under her ribs she knew from the deer. A tracker. Small. New. "Don't sweat," she breathed. She pushed the wrongness down inside her chest and held it there. Kayla did not move. The frog's good eye rolled toward them, then past them, then away. It sank into the mud. Kira exhaled once. "Walk." They cleared the alder into a stand of pine behind the sunken shack. Warped boards, half in mud, roof caving. Kayla checked the needle. The girl's line pointed through the shack's back wall, close. The hunter's line still pointed at the rise, unmoved. "He's watching the wrong door," Kayla whispered. Kira nodded. She walked around the shack low and fast. A pale face lifted in the black doorway. A girl, thin, fourteen, eyes wide, a knife shaking in her hand. Kira showed empty palms. "Your name is on a page I wasn't supposed to see," she said. "Come with us or the next one who finds you won't talk first." The girl looked at Kayla. Kayla nodded once. The knife lowered. Kira had her. Behind them, in the bog, something small began to croak.