Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (31 page)

Kavanaugh frowned. Haltingly, he admitted, “I dreamed about that recently, too.”

“Did your dream end when I walked out of the mountain?” Raena asked. “Or do you remember Gavin being there?”

Kavanaugh stared at her.

“You do remember that, don’t you?” she prompted.

Kavanaugh confessed, “In my dream, Gavin walked into the tomb. He carried a torch pointed down at his feet, so I couldn’t really see his face. But he walked straight over and hugged you, which was weird because—”

“It didn’t really happen that way,” Raena finished for him. “You came up to the moon with me and Gavin’s security goons. Gavin didn’t recognize me at first. He accused me of being an impostor, sent to fool him by Ariel or one of his ex-wives.”

“How did you know Gavin was in the tomb in my dream?”

“He was in mine, too,” she said. “Did yours end when we left you to take care of your men?”

Kavanaugh nodded.

“You’re lucky, then. Mine ended after Gavin took me off the Templar’s world. He turned his yacht around in the atmosphere and nuked the archaeological encampment from the air. He said Thallian’s brother would torture your men in an effort to find me. ‘This is kinder,’ Gavin said. ‘At least, this is quick.’ I’m glad you don’t remember getting nuked by Gavin.”

Kavanaugh’s mouth went dry. He raised the glass of sickly sweet liquor in his hand and choked down a swallow.

In the real world, Kavanaugh had gone up to Gavin’s base with Raena expressly because he expected Gavin to do what she’d dreamed: wipe out the encampment, kill the men, erase all evidence that Sloane had funded the grave-robbing. Kavanaugh had been stunned and happily surprised when Sloane decided instead to bribe the men into silence. That is, he’d been happy until Thallian’s men started finding the grave robbers and torturing them to death …

Raena sipped from the bottle of xyshin and added, “In my dream, I shot Gavin for killing you. That woke me up. In fact, I’ve shot Gavin almost nightly in my dreams, or I’ve beaten his head in, or I’ve broken his neck, or I’ve thrown him out an airlock …”

She shook herself, had another swig from her bottle, and said, “For a long time, all my dreams had Gavin in them. Then there were some that didn’t. Those were the worst. But I talked to Ariel a couple of days ago. She’d shared some of the dreams I’ve had, including the day I rescued her from the
Arbiter
. In fact, all this started when I dreamed that Gavin drugged me and hauled me away from the souk on Kai. He snatched me before Thallian’s men attacked, like he knew the attack was coming and wanted to get me out of the way first. Ariel had a dream exactly like that.”

Vezali interrupted. “Is it normal for humans to share dreams at a distance?”

“I never heard of anyone sharing dreams like this,” Kavanaugh said. “What does it mean?”

“When it was just me, I thought I was going crazy. But my insanity wouldn’t cause you and Ariel to have similar dreams. How could it? I can’t dream across time and space.”

“You don’t have any theories?”

“I have a theory, but it’s the maddest thing yet. I don’t want to get to it right away. First, I want you to know that I dreamed that Gavin met me at
this
ship on Kai the same day that Thallian’s men jumped us in the souk.”

“Wait a second. He met you at this ship after he carried you away from the souk?”

“Yeah. This was a new dream, one I had almost a week later. It’s like Gavin just keeps coming at the problem in different ways … Anyway, in the real world, I didn’t know where the Thallians had parked their ship, so I let the youngest member of the attack team go—he was one of Thallian’s sons. The dream went just the way I remembered, until I found Gavin waiting at the
Raptor
when Jain and I got here. Gavin grabbed the kid, held him at gunpoint. And in the dream, I knew if Gavin shot the kid, I would never find Thallian. I would never be able to kill him. I would have to flaunt where I was even more than having Mykah send videos of me to his kids. I would have to drive Thallian to come to me in person, after he’d exhausted all his brothers, all his sons, trying to capture me first …”

As if hearing the slightly hysterical ring to her voice, Raena had another slug from her bottle of xyshin. Kavanaugh noticed that her hands trembled.

“In my last dream,” Raena said more calmly, “Gavin said he had come back from the future. He said that was why he knew which ship I’d be coming to, even before I knew myself. The weirdest thing was that he was really
old
in that dream. His hair had almost completely gone. His face was all crumpled up. He looked ancient, Tarik. He looked like he really had come from the future.”

“It was a dream,” Kavanaugh argued.

“Was it? What if it was an alternate timeline?”

He actually laughed at her. Afterward, he wondered that he had the courage, but at the time, it seemed like the only appropriate response. Everyone knew that time travel only happened in stories.

“Do you really think Gavin has a time machine?” he asked. “Where would he have gotten it? He pretty nearly bankrupted himself looking for you on the Templar world and buying off the archaeological team after we found you. He had some money squirreled away, and Templar artifacts to sell, but if such a thing as a time machine really existed in the universe, it would be extremely expensive to access. Gavin wouldn’t have the funds.”

“What if it was Templar tech? What if it was something your team dragged out of the tomb?”

Kavanaugh had a moment when he considered the possibility, but the truth was obvious: “Nobody knows how Templar tech worked.”

“Vezali could probably figure it out,” Raena said. “She can make almost anything work.”

“You’re flattering me,” the tentacled girl said.

“That doesn’t make it less true,” Raena answered.

“Okay,” Kavanaugh interrupted, “let’s say you’re right: Gavin has a Templar time machine and somehow got it to work. What is he trying to do?”

“Go back in time and rescue me. He’s trying to save me from having to hunt down Thallian and his family. He’s trying to keep me with him.”

The stunning narcissism of that statement silenced Kavanaugh. He looked to Vezali, but she was calmly sipping her xyshin through a straw. Finally, he asked, “Why would he keep doing it over and over?”

“Because there is no happily ever after for us. I’m older now, wiser hopefully, and a lot less quick on the trigger. Unfortunately, every time Gavin freaks out one of my younger selves, she panics and kills him. That was how I dealt with pretty much everyone while I was on the run. It’s amazing to me now, looking back, that I didn’t kill him from the get-go on Nizarrh. Or I didn’t kill you and Doc and Skyler. Or Ariel on the
Arbiter
… I was a frightened little girl. The only way I knew to protect myself was to do what Thallian taught me: strike first and leave your enemies too shattered to return fire.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. If Gavin really is going back in time and trying to right things to be with you, why wouldn’t he keep going to the same time? Why would he hop all around? If he’d already been in a specific time and things didn’t work out, why wouldn’t he keep coming back to the same point in time? Why wouldn’t he keep redoing the same moment until he got it right?”

“Maybe he can’t. Maybe he can’t interfere with himself. Or maybe, once he’s dead in a certain timeline, he can’t come back from the dead. He’s erased on that timeline, going forward.”

Kavanaugh had another drink. Damn, he hated the hyper-sweet kids’ liquor. He wasn’t sure why he’d let her suggest it. If they were going to be imagining Gavin as a time-traveling super villain, Kavanaugh really wanted to be drinking something much stronger. And probably more bitter.

“You know this all sounds crazy, right?”

Raena clenched her teeth in a smile. “It
is
crazy. It’s
making
me crazy. But that doesn’t make it less real.”

“All right. So let’s say Gavin has a time machine. He’s traveling back in time to rescue you. Why is he concentrating on the window of time between when you ran away from Thallian until you got off of Kai? Why doesn’t he buy you from the slavers before Ariel’s family gets you?”

“Actually, he tried that. I was eleven. I strangled him after I caught him peeping at me.”

Kavanaugh was so aghast that it took him a moment to come up with another question. “Why doesn’t he go back to your childhood?”

“I don’t know, Tarik. I’m trying to figure this out from inside the middle of it. Maybe he can only go to times and places that he knows something specific about. Gavin knows when I was born—he’d seen my birth record—but he would have had to find my mom, who was in hiding with a group of Humans First! terrorists. We were always on the move. I never went to school. I don’t even know where all we lived before my mother sent me away. I couldn’t go back in time and find myself. Did you ever tell him about dropping me off on Barraniche? The where and when of it? He knew when you opened the tomb, so he could be there. He knew when the attack was coming on Kai, so he could head it off. He knew when he’d rescued me from the
Arbiter
, so he could show up a little earlier than he had the last time and spring me. Ariel probably told him when her dad bought me from the Viridians. ”

“So, wait … If Gavin is really changing the past, wouldn’t our present be wiped out? Wouldn’t we all be switched over to a new timeline and continue on there? Why would we remember how things used to be at all?”

“I think you and I and Ariel, we’re all continuing on our original path. I think the dreams signal when something is being changed, when time splits off from the track we’re on.”

“Why would we dream about them?”

“I think they’re like bubbles in the stream of time. I think that when the dreams wake us, the bubbles pop. Time has been changed, but we’re snapped back to our original lives. And the new timeline goes on with our mirror selves in it, none the wiser.”

“We need to be drinking more,” Kavanaugh groaned.

“The whole crew probably needs to be drinking more,” Vezali said. “This is starting to make a scary amount of sense.”

“It is?” Raena asked, surprised.

“Coni and Mellix have been researching the Messiah drug. What you’re describing is how it was theorized to have worked.”

“What’s the Messiah drug?” Kavanaugh asked.

“Coni probably knows more about it than I do,” Raena told him.

“Mellix knows the most,” Vezali corrected. “Maybe he’ll meet us in the galley and tell us about it.”

There was a moment of awkward silence, then Vezali added, “If you fall asleep, Raena, we’ll hustle you back in here.”

“I appreciate it.”

“So you
want
to be locked up?” Kavanaugh asked. That might have been the most difficult thing he’d been asked to believe yet.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone. I was sleepwalking the other day and it freaked me out. I want them to keep me from doing any harm to them, myself, or the ship.”

Mykah opened the door from the outside. “Come on down to the galley so Mellix and Coni can fill us all in.”

Mykah had put the coffee on. The warm smell of it filled the room as it brewed. Raena took the center of the bench along the wall. Kavanaugh slid in beside her. She was amused. He was always more comfortable with his back against a wall, even if it meant sitting next to a serial murderer who had sleepwalking hallucinations. Being a veteran was funny that way.

“Anyone hungry?” Coni asked. “I bought moon cakes while we were out.”

“I love those,” Raena said, surprised. “I haven’t had them in ages.”

Coni took a tray from the cooler and brought them to the table. Then Mykah added a handful of mugs and the coffee carafe. Everyone settled in.

“Everything you told us earlier about the Messiah drug seems to be true,” Coni told Raena. “It appeared during the Borderlands War, after the human Empire started trying to expand into Templar trade space. The drug appeared on planets where the local government had collaborated with the Empire. Several times, the governments fell, to be replaced by the Empire, and eventually overthrown by more, ah, open-minded Coalition governments.”

“Meaning: nonhuman?” Raena asked.

“Yes. From what I can uncover, only humans were ever accused of using the Messiah drug and they mostly—though not always—used it against other humans. Which is what led to the theory that humans were manufacturing and distributing it.”

“Humans in league with the Coalition?”

“Well, that’s what I wondered, too. As you said, it doesn’t make sense for the Empire to be involved, since it seemed to have worked exclusively to their detriment. In the aftermath, the Empire made a convenient scapegoat, because they weren’t around to defend themselves. The drug seems to have vanished about the time that the Empire fell, and besides, why would you trust the word of a government that was known to have intentionally unleashed a genocidal plague? The timeline is exceedingly muddy, though. From everything I can find, Messiah’s usage declined before the final days of the Empire, though, long before Thallian was identified as spreading the Templar plague.”

Raena took one of the moon cakes and bit into it. It was every bit as sweet and perfect as she remembered. She had lost track of meals, since she’d been locked in her cabin. Had she eaten anything since Mykah’s post-Capital City feast?

Mykah poured her some coffee and, after a sip, Raena dragged her thoughts back to the conversation. “Have you been able to connect Messiah to the Templars?” she asked.

Coni’s lips stretched into something that might have been a smile, but Mellix answered for her. “You’re not the first person to suggest that—there are several pharmacological theorists who proposed it—but beyond the novel I was telling you about, there’s no evidence to support a Templar connection, other than the timing. The drug disappeared almost exactly the same time as the Templars began to die out.”

“And Outrider was never found, was he?” Raena asked.

Kavanaugh interrupted. “Who is Outrider?”

“I met him through Gavin on Nizarrh,” Raena said. “Gavin had been sent by Coalition Command to bring me in—that’s what he said, anyway—but first he had an errand to run. He took me through the tunnels under the city to a warehouse where extremely elderly humans were lying in little cubbies. Outrider was very proud of his crop of Messiah junkies.”