Harmonic (4 page)

“Well?” he demands as I check my phone.

“It's fine,” I say, irked at his display of chauvinism. “Everything here checks out—the frequency's steady. No inversions, no breaks.”

But there should be. This Echo was scheduled for cleaving. It should be so dissonant that I throw up. I should see inversions everywhere I look; hear breaks in every direction. The pitch of this world should seesaw as wildly as a child at her first violin lesson.

I listen again, deeply absorbing the Echo's pitch, taking its sound and its secrets inside me. On instinct, I part the surface of this reality with my cold, wind-reddened fingers. Even though my movements are clumsy, I can feel the threads, and their song is rich and true.

I scroll through the report, looking for the paperwork every Cleaver fills out prior to putting an Echo on the Repertoire. The forms will explain why this world was slated to be unraveled—and why it wasn't.

“They canceled the job,” I say. “According to this, the Free Walkers appeared before the Cleavers made the first cut. When the team came back later, the Echo had stabilized.”

“That doesn't make sense. Maybe you targeted the wrong frequency,” he suggests. My glare has him backpedaling. “Or maybe the team did. They could have mixed up the numbers. Or their readings were wrong to begin with.”

“Or maybe the Free Walkers tuned it,” I say, and his eyes narrow. “It's possible to fix an Echo. Adjust the breaks and inversions so they stabilize. If you tune a world, there's no need to cleave it.”

“Cleaving's our duty,” he says. “The Consort—”

“I've heard the spiel,” I say dryly. “The point is, this world was damaged. Now it's not. Why did they do it?”

But I already know the answer. Free Walkers don't approve of cleavings. “They must have gotten here at the same time as the Cleavers and scared them off, then tuned the world.”

“And hoped nobody would bother to finish the job?”

“Do you know how many cleavings we complete in a day? There aren't enough hours to handle them all. I guarantee you, any team that heard this place would skip it and move on. We don't have time to waste on worlds that aren't a threat.”

Garnett isn't listening to me. Instead, he's striding across the parking lot with short, jerky steps, head cocked to the side.

“What are you doing?”

“How long ago were they here?”

“Two months, give or take.”

He scowls, holding his hand up for me to be quiet.

“You're not seriously going to try and track them, are you? There's no way their trail is still audible.”

His flat hand turns to a fist and he hisses. Startled, I fall quiet as he prowls across the parking lot. Eliot's map won't help—it tracks pivots, not individual signals.

I follow Garnett through a pivot alongside a trash can and into a strip mall. We stop in a sub shop, where he curses. “Lost it.”

“How could you hear a trail that old?” I ask. The best trackers I know can't follow a signal after a few weeks. It's why Monty was never able to find Rose.

He shrugs. “Everybody has strengths.”

“And yours is tracking?” Suddenly his presence makes sense. Garnett isn't here only for security. He's here to hunt.

“Let's head back,” I say. “I'm freezing, and we're not going to find them tonight.”

He nods curtly, and in the time it takes us to pivot back to the Key World and return to the SUV, he's shed his steely intensity and gone back to affable Garnett.

“I need a more recent trail if we're going to track them,” he says.

I tap the armrest, thinking. “If they're stopping cleavings in order to tune worlds, we can look for any Echo on the Repertoire that was canceled.”

“That happens?”

“Sure. We monitor plenty of Echoes—ones that fall within acceptable parameters but are considered high risk. Sometimes they've gotten worse, and we cleave them. Sometimes they stabilize—but almost never to this degree.”

“And if we can find those worlds . . .”

“Walkers like consistency,” I say. “If the Free Walkers were tuning worlds two months ago, they're tuning worlds now. I'll find one, you'll track them, and we can locate a cell.”

“And use the cell to find the leader.” He grins. “You're as good as Lattimer says.”

I smile back. “I'm better.”

•    •    •

Only when we get back to the office do I realize what I've signed up for. We need to review every cleaving scheduled for the last two months. It's a staggering amount of data—and I'm still not certain of the connection I'm looking for.

I need someone to look at the situation with fresh eyes, someone skilled enough to find what I've missed and smart enough to know what it means. I need an archivist. Someone I can trust.

I need Laurel.

Saying those words six months ago would have saved me all sorts of trouble and heartache. Saying those words six months ago would have saved
us
.

But Walking isn't time travel, and some things, like some worlds, can't be saved.

C
HAPTER SEVEN

T
he past is kept at sixty-four degrees and 40 percent humidity. But my hands are sweating as I cross into the cool hush of the Archives the next morning, and no amount of climate control can turn back the clock.

Luck can be good or bad, but I don't know which I've got when I find Laurel sitting at her desk, fingers flying over the keyboard, head swiveling between paper and screen. I step toward her, stop myself, and she catches sight of me.

She goes instantly still, her eyes wide and startled, and her lips part as if she's going to speak. Then she presses them together with the barest hint of a sulk.

I wipe my damp palms on my skirt. “Hey.”

She doesn't reply.

“I . . . um . . . I was wondering . . .” She's giving me her professional face, the same one she uses when people come in with lazy, truly idiotic questions. It looks like mild curiosity, but it's really veiled contempt.

She's never used it on me before.

“I'm sorry,” I blurt, staring at the floor. “For yesterday. I didn't mean to . . .” To what? Drop a bunch of books? Show up on her turf without warning? Leave without saying good-bye? Break her heart?

I am an idiot.

She doesn't say a word, and a chill steals over me, wondering how badly I've blown this.

“I need some help with a project.”

She props her chin in her hand and waits. Apparently, I'll have to grovel.

“I can work with somebody else, if you'd rather. But this is a big deal, and I'm asking you to put your personal feelings aside for the good of the Consort.”

Even that doesn't move her—in fact, it probably offends her. Finally, I drag in a deep breath and say the heart of it. “I need someone I trust. I need the best, and that's you. Please.”

I've said more than I meant to. Made it personal instead of work, and yet managed to make it sound like all that matters is the work, which was always the problem with us.

She sighs, and I brace myself.

She pulls out her earbuds. “Could you repeat that?”

Her eyes glint, and I am 80 percent sure she heard at least some portion of my plea. She's got the upper hand, and she knows it.

“I have an assignment from the Consort, and I need some help searching the Archives.”

“Looked like you said a lot more than that.”

“You're busy,” I say stiffly. “I didn't want to waste your time.”

She taps a finger against her mouth. Her nail polish today is a vibrant coral, matching her lipstick perfectly.

I look down at the desk, feeling myself flush.

“I can get one of the archivists to help you,” she says after a moment, and reaches for the phone. “Green should be on the second level.”

“No!” I put out a hand to stop her. She's going to make me work for it. “I asked you.”

“A Consort assignment should be handled by a Senior Archivist, not an apprentice,” she says.

“It's my assignment,” I say. “They gave it to me, and I call the shots.”

“Really?” she says, sweetly disbelieving. “That's not how I remember it.”

I look up, catch the hint of a smile curving her lips, and suddenly I'm remembering too, and something inside me catches fire.

Her dimple flashes. “Assignment?” she prompts.

Assignment. Right. The reason I came down here.

“I don't want some random archivist,” I say. “I want somebody smart. Somebody I can trust.”

“I can recommend someone. We're all expected to have a modicum of intelligence, and we took the same oath you did.”

“I want you.”

Her eyes widen, then slide away, not meeting mine. The dimple is gone. “We all want things, Addison.”

I fold my hands and don't reply.

She sighs again. “And I want to stop working on data entry, so . . . fine. How may I be of service today?”

I can handle flirtatious, and seductive, and smug. I can handle Laurel in any one of her infinite mercurial moods—or at least, I can try. But this Laurel, smooth and cool and impassive as marble, formal as a stranger, is new, and there's nothing to handle.

My throat closes, but I force the words out. “I need to pull some records from the past two months.”

Long enough to cover Simon's anomaly, since the Consort is blaming the Free Walkers—but I can ignore his effect, and, instead, focus my attention on the worlds Del and I didn't deal with before.

With a few keystrokes, Laurel pulls up the files and sits back with a satisfied air. “Done. Every Walk reported in the past sixty days. Send it to your e-mail?”

I shake my head. “Is there a way to filter out worlds slated for cleaving?”

“Yes,” she says, as slowly as if she were speaking to a small child. “Pull the Repertoire for any given day. You can do it from your desk.”

“I don't want the ones that were cleaved.”

“You just said—”

“
Slated
for cleaving. Not cleaved. I need the ones where the teams went in and decided not to follow through.” There's no way to search for that from my end. Laurel has access—and a talent for seeing the world differently.

She considers this. “Heard you were on desk duty.”

I groan. “Everybody knows?”

“Depends,” she says. “Am I everybody?”

“Not to me,” I say. What I don't say is that she's the only one, but she hears the words hidden in the silence.

Laurel's skin hides her blush, but I know her. If I curved my palm over her cheek, I'd feel the heat rising.

“Funny thing,” she says, deliberately nonchalant. “If you're doing grunt work for Lattimer, why did your security clearance go up?”

“Who says it did?”

She asked, I realize. She knew something was up and she asked around. I have a lot of colleagues. I work well with others. I demonstrate an aptitude for leadership. I have a ton of connections in the building, thanks to my parents' influence and my own performance.

Laurel doesn't have connections. Laurel has
friends
. In every department, at every level. She's charming and cheerful and talking to her is like standing in a patch of sunlight. All she has to do is to look puzzled and people fall over themselves to make the pieces fit. She
asked
. It matters to her, what I'm doing, even after six months of radio silence. The thought goes to my head like champagne, and my defenses slip.

“It's not exactly desk duty. More like a special project.”

“Oh?”

I take a breath. “I'm tracking down Free Walkers, and I think they're targeting Cleavers. Have you seen any reports like that?”

She shakes her head, curls bouncing. “The Senior Archivists handle anything related to the Free Walkers. Green would have entered those reports.”

I already have those files. I want something else. Something I'm not seeing. The back of my neck prickles, and I don't answer, sorting through the tangle of my thoughts.

“What's wrong?” Laurel asks softly.

“I don't know.”

“Okay,” she says, and points to a nearby chair. “Explain it to me. From the beginning.”

And just like that, I do. I tell her about Lattimer's offer and Garnett's cabinet of death and Monty's refusal to see me. I tell her about the cut sites we visited yesterday, and the Echo that should have been cleaved, but wasn't. I tell her about tuning, and Garnett's preternatural tracking, and Del's withdrawal. The only thing I don't tell her about is Simon—a secret that felt too dangerous to tell.

By the time I'm done, my throat is scratchy and our knees are touching.

“So the Free Walkers attacked the Cleavers
while
they were cutting the strings?”

“In some cases.”

“But those cut sites are sealed. The Echoes aren't broadcasting a frequency. They didn't change anything.”

“I know. They're attacking for no reason.”

“I thought the Free Walkers were against cleavings,” she says.

“Where did you hear that?”

“Around,” she says vaguely. “People talk about them openly now. The anomaly changed things.”

“I'm aware.”

She pulls up one of the files on her computer. “The Consort team never went back. It must have been the Free Walkers who finished the cleaving, but why would they do it?”

I shake my head. “I have no idea. It makes zero sense.”

“Unless this was a special situation. An unfinished cleaving could damage the parent Echo. Maybe this is the only way to contain the damage once a cleaving starts.”

They were
helping
.

Laurel had seen what I was missing. I take things at face value: reports, people, orders. Laurel looks far deeper. I used to wonder what she saw in me. Now I wonder if she still does.

“The Free Walkers aren't trying to harm the Key World, are they?” I ask.

“If they wanted to go after the Key World, all they'd have to do was let a cleaving unravel on both sides,” she says. “They wouldn't have to do anything, actually, once they'd scared off the Cleavers. They could sit back and watch it fall.”

“That explains why they're tuning worlds. It's faster, it keeps the Echo intact, and they don't have to worry about engaging the Consort.”

She straightens. “That's why you wanted to know about canceled cleavings. You think those worlds were tuned.”

“Yeah. I'm hoping we can find a more recent one, and Garnett can track them down.”

“But how are they beating the Cleavers there?” she asks. “How are they picking their targets?”

We're silent as we mull it over. Laurel smells like sunshine and the stacks, an impossible, wonderful combination that makes it hard to focus.

“The Repertoire,” I say after a long moment. “They're choosing worlds from the Repertoire.”

The Consort approves the Repertoire each morning, but if the Free Walkers are reaching the Echoes first, they must be getting an earlier version. Which means they're accessing records. Which requires high-level clearance.

Laurel puts it together as quickly as I do.

“But that means . . .” She glances at her computer, eyes wide.

“They've got somebody on the inside.”

“There's a mole? You're telling me the Free Walkers have a mole inside the Consort? With that kind of access?”

“Or they hacked the system. It's not hard. Eliot—”

I break off. Laurel doesn't need to know about Eliot's ability to wander freely around the Consort's computer system.

It's a mistake to have brought her into this. If the Free Walkers have a mole, who's to say it's not one of the archivists? Green might look like a sweet little old lady, but Monty looked like a daffy little old man, and look what he did. What if pulling up these files has put Laurel in danger?

“I should go.” I stand up, knocking my chair over in the process. Laurel frowns as I fumble to pick it up.

“Now I'm missing something,” she says. “Addie—”

“I'm sorry,” I cut her off, grabbing my tote and fumbling with the papers, shoving them into the bag. “This was great. This was incredibly helpful, but I've got it from here. Thanks. Really, Laurel. You're amazing.”

“I know,” she says, annoyance clear in her voice.

I should be good at this by now, leaving her behind. I should be used to it, at least, but there's a feeling just behind my stomach like a line pulling taut; an awful, excruciating tension I have to fight against with every step.

She doesn't say anything until I'm halfway to the elevator. “So you didn't want the list of tuned Echoes?”

Damn it. I stop and turn around. She's standing at her desk, hand on hip, smug again.

“I was about to e-mail them to you,” she says, and pats her monitor affectionately. “But if we're concerned about the security of the network, I'd prefer not to transmit that kind of data electronically.” Her finger hovers over the delete key and she shrugs. It's easy to be nonchalant when you're holding all the cards. “That is what you're worried about, right? You're afraid working together makes me a target.”

“We're not working together,” I say, annoyed by how easily she reads me. “This is my project.”

“Yeah, you and the Enforcement guy with the big . . . arsenal.”

“He's nice,” I protest.

“Great. But he's not the one helping you analyze records. You came to me, Addie, and that means we're working together.”

“The Free Walkers are dangerous,” I say. “If they find out you're involved—”

“I'm already involved. You involved me when you came down here and gave your big speech. Now we solve this. Together.”

I cringe. “You heard the speech.”

She rolls her eyes.

I sigh and cross to her desk. The horrible tension ebbs, but the path feels as inevitable as gravity—and just like that, I've fallen again.

I don't think I ever stopped falling for Laurel. Every time I've tried to fight it, to slow the momentum, I've only ended up hurting myself.

And her.

“So,” she says as I take my seat, “what's next?”