Sideswiped

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  CHAPTER

  ONE

  There was a mouth-breather four feet behind him, and it was starting to bug Silas. Shifting on the hard-backed chair, he hunched lower over the scratched testing tablet, trying to concentrate on his final exam. But someone was tapping their stylus, and another kept changing their answer, the click, click, click distracting. The sighs were incessant, and the frustrated tension rose with the sour smell of sweat in the high-ceilinged room, ornate from a more elegant past.

  Silas sat back, stretching his wide shoulders, feeling the fabric of his white collared shirt pull. His suit coat lay carefully across the seat in front of him, the empty instructor podium a good six rows beyond that. Most of the desks were occupied, but he didn’t know anyone, having been shoved in here with an undergrad class to take his final because the security was good and it was easier than arranging a proctor just for him.

  Outside, through the row of glass windows high above head height, he could hear the shouts of someone on the commons celebrating the end of their classes, but in here, it was all nervous tension. Grimacing, he bent back over his exam, feeling cramped. It wasn’t that the station was small. He was just a big guy.

  The activity of synaptic linkages able to resonate to time can be directly influenced by: diet, training, trauma, synaptic fatigue, ambient noise, drugs. Check all that apply. Silas used his stylus to check all of them, then undid diet, though he’d swear his undergrad students did better after lunch. He just hadn’t had an opportunity to prove it yet, and the last time he’d challenged his instructor, he’d lost a full grade.

  Bored, he slumped to stretch his long legs out under the desk, trying to decide how much trouble he wanted to make. Head lolling, he squinted at the glowing orb on the ceiling. It was a bright red, indicating all incoming and outgoing communications were being blocked. Opti loved its gadgets, almost as much as it loved catching students trying to get around them—encouraged the activity, even as punishment for getting caught was harsh and swift.

  Smirking, he sat up and tapped the diet icon to add it. He’d contest it if anyone gave him flak. He had only one more semester with which to finish his thesis, and then he’d have two sets of letters after his name. Silas’s smile faded. He was going to lose her after graduation. Summer was more than a girlfriend. Four years of shared sushi over a lab table and informal challenges at the shooting range had turned into a quiet intimacy he couldn’t bear to lose. He felt good when he could make her laugh, and she brought his frustrated turmoil to calm when the work was bad. Even better, she was the only woman whose height kept him from looking like an ape beside her. He needed her, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

  But once working, drafters seldom maintained long-term romantic relationships with anyone outside of their anchor partners. Come this fall, she’d be assigned her first real anchor, and it would be over.

  With a sharp crack and cascading tinkle, one of the upper windows shattered. Silas looked up, barely having time to recognize the manhole-size drone before it careened into a light fixture and ricocheted toward him.

  “Look out!” someone shouted, and then it struck him, knocking his head back.

  “God bless it!” he exclaimed, hand to his forehead as the drone hit the floor and slid to a halt. The Opti logo caught the light, but it was a safe bet the drone had been misappropriated.

  “Hey, are you all right?” someone asked, but no one moved, afraid if they did, their exam would be invalidated.

  “Yeah.” Silas grimaced at the smear of blood on his hand. On the floor, the drone hummed, clicked, and stopped working. There was a small crackling at the window as a slight, petite woman vaulted into the broken frame. A remote in her hand, she crouched there, assessing the students looking up at her. Facial-recognition deterrent caked her face, making her eyes black holes and her chin more narrow than it probably was. Standing up in the broken window, she tucked the remote into the waistband of her skintight black athletic wear, then jumped the five feet to the floor, landing lightly to look like she was a sexy black cat.

  “Excuse me,” she said, her voice surprisingly low for such a small frame. “Be out of your hair in a sec.”

  Silas leaned back, his chair creaking. Irritation and anger swept over him, and he crossed his iron-pumping arms across his chest as she wove her way through the stunned class, arms swinging confidently.

  He didn’t recognize her under the face paint, but her hair was short and black, and her chin angular. She was athletic without being blocky, with a narrow waist, ample hips, and a small chest. Her arrogant poise said she was in the field agent program. His best friend, Allen, could strut like that, and Summer had that same undeniable grace.

  He cracked his knuckles as she stopped at his desk, her eyes going to the swelling bump on his forehead. “Sorry about that,” she said as she scooped up the drone. Her fingernail polish was metallic, the latest rage. Her eyes were hazel, and her safety glasses were Gucci. He hadn’t known they did safety glasses, and he made a mental note to look into it. Clearly the woman had money, had had it her entire life, by the look of it—too much to be here learning how to be a weapon.

  Silas clenched his hand to hide the blood on it. “You going to draft to fix it?” he asked belligerently, and she smiled to show small, very white teeth, clearly pleased he’d recognized her status.

  “You’re awfully big to want me to kiss your boo-boo away. You’ll heal.” She leaned over his tablet, clearly curious as to what he was taking. Slim finger jabbing out, she changed the icon of diet back to false. “Trust me on this. It’s secondary, not direct.”

  “Hey!” he exclaimed when the tablet’s rim became red, recognizing it wasn’t him and shutting down. “You just invalidated my exam!”

  She winced, the tips of her hair swinging as she turned to a sudden noise in the hall. “Sorry. I didn’t know they were biometric. Ours aren’t.”

  Taking a running hop, she raced to the broken window. The class erupted in noise, and Silas stood, gasping when someone stuck out a leg and tripped her. The woman tried to recover by diving into a roll, but there were too many desks and she slammed into one, dazed as her arms and legs sprawled. Someone laughed, and Silas’s face burned in anger.

  The door to the room was yanked open, and a professionally dressed small Asian man and an older woman strode in. Seeing his professor, Silas sighed at his defunct test.

  “Someone pick her up. Who is that?” Professor Woo demanded, and then Silas stiffened as vertigo spilled through him. The light streaming through the windows flashed blue, and the shock of an utter absence of sound shook him.

  She’s drafting, he thought as time was yanked back five seconds.

  With a startling flicker, the light returned to a warm yellow. The door to the hall was still shut, and he was again sitting at his desk. People were shouting, oblivious that they were replaying the last five seconds in time.

  “Look out!” he exclaimed as he stood—not knowing why—but she’d remember both timelines until they meshed and her psyche rubbed them both out.

  Giving him a surprised grin, she leapt over the foot even before it was extended. Like an exotic rock climber, she jumped for a handhold, using the decorative trim to swarm up the wall until she reached the broken window frame—just as the door was again yanked ope
n.

  Brow furrowed in anger, his instructor walked in, the small man silent this time, hands on his hips as he scanned for whoever had drafted.

  And then the light flashed red as time meshed. Silas took a slow breath, habit making him scan the room for a response, but clearly everyone but his professor was oblivious to what had happened. Even the woman herself had forgotten what she’d done, only knowing by a chunk of missing memory that she’d made a mistake that needed to be rubbed out. She met Silas’s eyes, winking at him before she dropped down. Gone.

  Unclenching his thick hands, Silas looked at his defunct exam. No one in here was a potential anchor. Not even a blip of déjà vu. Opti’s students went on to the FBI, CIA, and mall security. It was only the top one percent who continued in the program to become Opti agents, and then one percent of them became the gods and goddesses of time.

  “Silas.”

  He ignored Professor Woo as he came forward, depressed at the thought of Summer and their grand, sophomoric plans. He could have been an anchor, being good at recognizing drafted timelines and even better at fixing them back into a drafter’s mind. Too good, actually, to risk in the field. Blaming it on his size, they shoved him into theoretical, where he excelled in meshing the surety of electronics to the vagaries of the human mind. He already had one doctorate degree in psychology, gained before he found out he had the ability to be an anchor. Earning another in drafter studies was easy, seeing as he was adding to the technologies as he went.

  “Silas.” Professor Woo was closer this time, and, seeing his professor’s inquiring glance, Silas shrugged. He didn’t know every drafter, just most.

  Scowling, Professor Woo turned to the instructor who’d come in with him. “Go see if you can find out who that was,” he said, and, nodding, the older woman paced quickly back into the hall.

  Students were beginning to stand, questions rising, and Professor Woo held up a hand. “Sit down. Sit down!” he said in perfect midwestern English. “Or all your tablets will be invalidated.” Eyebrows high, he looked at Silas’s red-framed tablet. “Doctor?” he questioned.

  “She touched my tablet,” Silas said sourly, wondering if he could find out who she was that way.

  Professor Woo squinted in concern as he pulled a handkerchief from his suit coat pocket and handed it to Silas. “It looks like she touched your forehead, too.”

  Silas dabbed at it, relieved the blood had slowed.

  Taking up Silas’s tablet, his professor typed in his instructor code and the flexible screen went dark. “You can retake it tomorrow,” he said as he rolled the tablet into a tube and tucked it away.

  Annoyed, Silas glanced at the window. There was shouting coming in from beyond it, but he doubted the woman would need to draft again. She was good, exceptionally so, and probably a freshman, since he hadn’t seen her before. “Why?” he said, taking his coat as Professor Woo handed it to him. “Can’t you reset it? It was just a bump.”

  But his professor shook his head and gestured at the door. The instructor had returned and was addressing the class, trying to get them settled and explaining how they were going to adjust the time for the interruption.

  “I was coming to get you,” Professor Woo said as he put a small hand on Silas’s shoulder and got him moving toward the door. “Professor Milo’s assistant took a bad hit this morning in training and broke his wrist. They need someone to monitor the slick-suits in his finals. Now.”

  Professor Milo? Silas’s pace slowed to a halt. The man was a prejudiced prick. “Can’t you get one of my students—?”

  Smiling, Professor Woo shook his head and pushed open the door. Echoes from the hallway slipped in. “Busy with finals or gone for the summer, and no one needs extra credit that badly. Just do it, Silas,” the smaller man coaxed. “You never know when you’re going to need a favor. And besides, you might get more data for your thesis if someone drafts.”

  The chances of that were pretty good, and, feeling the pinch of avarice, Silas let the testing door shut behind him with a small click. The expansive hallway was open to the courtyard at both ends, and he looked for any activity, seeing nothing. Getting more data would be worth it, and he went still as he remembered that tidy little draft, wishing she’d been wearing a slick-suit at the time so he could have seen her reach. It bothered him that he didn’t know her by sight, but he’d been letting his students do most of the slick-suit fittings lately, and so he didn’t know everyone anymore.

  “Fine, I’ll do it,” he said, and Professor Woo brightened, slapping him across the shoulders. “Where are they?”

  “Thank you, Silas.” His professor reached into his suit coat’s inner pocket for an envelope. “If you’d said no, I would’ve had to do it, and I don’t know how to fix the suits if there’s a problem.”

  Silas took the extended envelope. There were too many eyes and ears in Opti’s academy to risk saying aloud where this year’s drafter/anchor testing was, not when every student vied for any advantage.

  “He’d like you there by eleven tonight to set up. You’re a lifesaver,” Professor Woo said. Then, giving Silas a last nod, he turned and strode briskly back to the testing room.

  “Lifesaver,” Silas grumbled, not agreeing as he opened the paper. Sighing, he folded it back up and stuffed it away.

  God bless it, I’m going to have to wear my good tie.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Electronic dance music thumped through the walls. It made the swelling on Silas’s head throb as he sat in the club’s cramped security office. The outdated wood paneling and metal furniture from the ’90s made him loath to touch anything, and he twitched his new Dolce & Gabbana suit coat clear of the cigarette burns and chip crumbs.

  “Skinny-man models,” he muttered as his thick fingers skated competently across his tablet. You had four, maybe six years of lanky adolescence, and then it was gone. Why were all the models, and therefore all the suits, stuck there? Real men had shoulders and arms.

  Thinking he was talking about the meat market/dance club visible through the club’s grainy monitors, Professor Milo’s secondary assistant chuckled. “Me, I like eating,” the man said, casting envious glances at Silas’s state-of-the-art glass tablet spilling data in a crystalline, unending stream. Silas had justified getting it because of his work, but the truth of it was he just liked having the best.

  The semitransparent data phased out, and Silas thunked the tablet against the desk to phase it back in. Even if it doesn’t work all the time.

  Behind them, Professor Milo cleared his throat, and Silas focused on the biofeedback data rather than the screens. Per tradition, the anchor/drafter finals were not on Opti’s training floor but in a real-life situation involving people oblivious to the fact. The electronic dance club was loud, noisy, and rife with distractions: the perfect microcosm of reality.

  By rights, he shouldn’t be here, seeing as he was close to two of the participants; Allen and he had been friends for years, and he and Summer had been living together for nearly as long. But it was still an exercise, meaning they had light pistols and slick-suits under their clubbing attire. Since he had designed both the suits and the basics behind the light pistols, he was the logical choice to be in the cramped back room monitoring them. A room far too small for someone to have eaten garlic bread at dinner, he thought, wincing.

  Allen’s and Summer’s goal was a four-piece ribbon-tied box of chocolates sitting at a distant table, already in the possession of the first team on site, but Silas was tempted to text Allen to bring back a handful of mints from behind the bar instead. Possessing the chocolates was one thing; getting out with them was another.

  The dish of rusted paperclips on the desk before him rattled in time with the music, and Silas moved it to a stained coaster. Satisfied with the data coming in from the four students’ slick-suits, Silas shifted his weight on the rolling office chair
to reach for his gum. The plastic crackled as he punched a square out, then he handed it around in a show of friendly impartiality. Professor Milo brusquely waved him off, but his assistant took one with a sheepish, knowing smile.

  “Thanks,” the assistant whispered as he scooted closer, his eyes on the club’s grainy monitors. “You don’t know who the blonde is, do you? Damn, she looks good.”

  Silas smirked, his fingers adroitly flashing over his tablet to log in the incoming data. Summer looked more than good in the flowing slitted skirt and blouse, the slick-suit a glistening hint under it from her neck to wrists to ankles, her hair cut to a short, safe length. She was an Amazon goddess in the spinning lights, sipping her orange juice and flirting as she waited for Allen to get into position before making a play for the box of chocolates. “That’s my girlfriend.”

  The technician jerked in surprise. “Oh,” he said, eyes flicking over Silas’s iron-pumping physique. “Lucky you.”

  “You got that right.” Contentment pulled him straighter as he checked his tablet. Allen’s pulse was up, but Summer was an even metro­nome. Karen and Heidi across the dance floor were elevated as well, but that was not unexpected, seeing as they had the chocolate and were on the defensive.

  He settled back, not liking the way the walls were rattling. He’d be getting no data for his thesis tonight. No one was going to draft—not with two teams on site. The chance someone might draft within a draft was too great. Double-drafting wasn’t fatal, but it hurt. No, tonight would be decided by wits and the light pistols they all had, each shooting a harmless stream of particles that immobilized the section of slick-suit it impacted. It mimicked a gunshot, and Silas didn’t like that Opti had taken his synaptic isolation technology and turned it into a gun.

  A slow chime of warning from his tablet drew him forward. One of the resistors on Allen’s suit wasn’t reading right. After adjusting it, Silas leaned back again, his thick arms crossed over his chest as he tried to hide his concern that Professor Milo lurked behind him. It made him feel as if he were on trial as well.