Gifted

By Keira North

EVER SEEN A WALL TRY TO TIE ITSELF INTO A KNOT?

Lynn Reid has, and that’s not even the weirdest thing that’s happened to her in the last ten minutes.

Lynn’s ability to see things outside human perception makes her the ideal candidate to join the multiverse police. However, after a bungled first mission and an unfortunate encounter with a basketful of anchovies, Lynn starts to wonder if she’s really cut out for multiversal work. When she turns to her copy of the Field Agent’s Manual for reassurance, she stumbles across a faded note that leads her to a cover-up spanning two decades and several worlds.

Now, Lynn must work to uncover the damning secret behind the note before the next End of the World, Amen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Keira North
• Release date: Dec 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005913229

Book preview

1

THE F*CKENING

There are three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and my way.

LYNN REID – INTERVENTION, 7-315

---

"What’s the hold-up, chief? This place stinks like the south end of a north-bound–"

"No movement yet. Stand by."

The comm went dead, but not before Rachel blew a raspberry to let us know just how she felt about ‘standing by’.

Nikki didn’t comment on the breach of protocol. We all felt the same way, I suspected. So far, my first mission out in the field was death by boredom with a side dish of yesterday’s catch. Even my gun smelled of anchovies.

Then again, I did have the privilege of smelling dead fish on another world, which was something, I supposed. Far be it from me to complain too much.

My team and I were tracking a Blank – an artificially rendered human that could carry vast amounts of data embedded in its Code (or, in the undying words of Tony Cassidy, genius, a ‘living, breathing memory stick’). What this Blank was doing here, in a small fishing village just off the coast of N16 Italy, was anyone’s guess. Our orders were to copy any data it contained, then quietly dispose of it.

The Blank had the kind of face you’d flounder to describe if it were right in front of you. The word ‘plain’ might have come to mind, if your mind even made it that far. It was currently gawking at a stall of pastries in the village market and hadn’t moved from its spot for the past half-hour. Zack, who was closest to it, was stuck nibbling on fish-on-a-stick a couple stalls over. If he didn’t already hate fish, he probably would after today.

The comm clicked again. "How’s that scan coming along, Tony?" Nikki asked.

"Slow."

Tony was the guy who answered a one-sentence question with a three-paragraph dissertation, footnotes not included. A one-word reply meant he was in a sour mood.

"Lynn?"

I looked in Nikki’s general direction and gave a thumbs-up. Still here, chief, I whispered.

Not that he couldn’t see me from where he was leaning against a whitewashed brick wall, arms loosely crossed. His studied pose wasn’t fooling anyone, though. The black suit was a dead giveaway in the Mediterranean heat. He might as well have put up a sign that said, ‘I’M ON A MISSION, DON’T LOOK AT ME’.

A beetle strolled up to my shoe, poked it with the tip of its antenna, then waddled back the way he’d come. A clump of glyphs trailed behind it, looking like someone had tried to sketch another beetle out of tiny words and symbols that gave off a faint glow. I recognized some of them, even though I was only just starting to learn their meanings. Years ago, in another life, I’d called them firebugs…

"Blank’s carrying a time-delay Code bomb, chief, Tony said over the comm before I could dwell too much on the before time. Nasty one, too. Something like that could wipe out the whole place."

Are you sure? I asked. I remembered time-delay Code bombs from basic training. They weren’t just bad news. They were we’re-all-gonna-die news.

Tony scoffed. "Of course I’m sure. I had to work through the mother of all encryption keys just to be sure. Whoever wanted to hide this thing knew exactly what they were doing."

"There a shutdown switch?" Zack asked. Watching him mumble into his sleeve was mildly amusing, like seeing a toddler fall over.

"Not yet. I did find a timer, though. There’s plenty of time left, but…"

"But?" Nikki prompted.

"This whole thing, it’s built all… wrong. The most important bits are practically hanging out, so to speak, and the basic stuff is buried deep."

Rachel chuckled over the line. "Thanks for the visual, Tony."

Guys, I said. Something’s happening.

The Blank jerked up, like someone had pulled on an invisible string. It froze like that for a few seconds, back straight, arms half-raised – then, just as abruptly, it turned and walked my way. I flattened myself against the wall and pretended to be interested in something across the square. The Blank strolled past, staring straight ahead. A string of afterimages trailed after it, like sketches from an old animation reel. That was new.

We should probably move in, I whispered.

The Blank stopped. It might have heard me, or maybe a different facet of its programming had kicked in. Its head turned towards me until our eyes met. There was no humanity in that stare – only darkness and, beyond that, a mass of glyphs cycling so fast they were almost a blur. I felt myself falling forward, even though I knew my body hadn’t moved. The Blank’s inner Code swirled and multiplied in hypnotic patterns, shapes melding and reforming into other shapes, like an ever-expanding kaleidoscope that threatened to engulf everything…

I blinked and found myself staring at an empty space. The Blank was sprinting away with no trace of its earlier clumsiness. I took off after it, fumbling for my gun. We’d been issued projectile weapons for this one, so I couldn’t risk taking a running shot. If a stray bullet so much as grazed one of the locals, Civilian Affairs would have all of our–

I slammed into a woman carrying a wicker basket almost as big as she was. A torrent of fish spilled to the ground. I tripped and fell, then floundered back to my feet and raced on as a storm of curses erupted behind me and someone screamed, "Pistola!". Explaining this was going to be fun – assuming we lived that long.

My comm crackled. "I found the switch! I just need one more minute…"

Make it a quick minute, Tony! I gasped. My lungs were on fire.

The Blank ducked into an alley so quickly I would have missed it if not for the trail of glyphs. I turned the same corner just in time to see it slam against a door with a white crucifix embedded in the middle. The door was made of solid wood; it didn’t so much as creak.

I pointed my gun straight at the Blank. My hands were shaking, but I knew I couldn’t miss. Not this close.

"Oh, no," Tony said.

I felt a hard lump in my throat. ‘Oh, no’, what?

"I think I might have set it off."

Oh, no.

The Blank turned and spread its arms, fingers curled inward. Its mouth opened inhumanly wide, but no sound came out. Tendrils of Code flickered in all directions. We were out of time.

I took the shot.

The Blank toppled forward, its face registering no expression other than mild surprise. Time slowed as I watched it fall. The shimmer of Code around it scattered like broken glass when it hit the ground at last.

The door opened, and an ancient woman in white robes walked out, a ray of sunlight glinting on the silver crucifix around her neck. She saw me and screamed – or, at least, it looked like she did. The shot was still ringing in my ears. Someone’s hand covered mine and pressed down with gentle urgency, then I felt the weight of the gun leave my hands.

There was a faint clamor now. Above it, I heard Nikki telling me it’s time to go. I finally tore my eyes away from the almost-human form on the ground, which was slowly fading into nothing, string by string.

To make a trans-dimensional jump, you stepped through a beacon. Then, your body decomposed into its basic Code bits and passed through a conduit to a beacon on the other side, where a reintegration method put you back together. It happened so fast your senses didn’t have time to catch up, but knowing it was bad enough. Some people got used to it straight away. I was the other people, the ones who felt like death every time. ‘Rookie fever,’ Rachel had called it once, and then everyone had laughed at my misery. I’d have laughed too, if I didn’t feel like my prefrontal cortex was being ripped apart by a merry imp with a hacksaw.

The jump sickness was gone, but I still felt like crap. I couldn’t shake the memory of what I’d done. There was no guilt, because a Blank wasn’t a person any more than a statue or a hologram. That said, a number of civilians had seen the Blank evaporate, which meant I’d just outed us to a world that wasn’t supposed to know we exist – a deadly sin in the book of Civilian Affairs.

No-one liked to deal with Civilian Affairs – not because of what they did, but because of the woman who ran the place. Tony had joked once that Katrina Eftimova was a dragon in disguise, and even Nikki seemed wary of her. I’d only met her once, on my first day, but she’d struck me as someone whose mental space was so ordered that the world around her had no choice but to fall into place. She was all about the rules. To break the rules was to get on her bad side, and therein lay doom.

To ease the dread of waiting, I unhooked my comm and went to brush my hair. I’d always found it soothing, even when I ended up with a brushful of knotted orange hairs and a sore scalp. This time, though, it didn’t work. I stared at myself in the mirror. First damn day on the job and you just had to fuck it up, didn’t you, Lynn.

My wrist computer buzzed once. A message. I opened it and read, ‘You’ll be fine. I can talk to Katrina. Let me know, OK?’ The message wasn’t signed, but the field ID was Zack’s. I decided to pretend I hadn’t seen it. I was perfectly capable of making things worse on my own, thanks.

I was still going through all the awful things Katrina would do to me when a small LED on my comm blinked amber. I let it wait long enough to tie my hair back, then took a small breath and listened to the message:

ATTENTION. 7-315 to Civilian Affairs. 7-315 to Civilian Affairs, please.

My common sense tried to reassure me. My anxiety ran circles around it and called it names. Well, I thought as I took in my room one last time, at least they’d said ‘please’.

I caught up with Nikki in front of the elevators that went up to the executive floors.

How bad? I asked as we stepped inside.

Nikki swiped his palm chip over the scanner and keyed in the floor. Don’t worry, he said. He looked worried.

I stared at my toes for the duration of the trip, then followed him outside and through a maze of titansteel-plated corridors to Katrina’s office. Before we went in, he turned to me and said, No matter what she says in there, I want you to know you made the right call. Any competent agent would have done the same.

Thanks, chief, I said. Then, fainter, Hope the she-dragon feels the same.

The Blessed Mother of Civilian Affairs didn’t look up from her datapad as Nikki and I filed into her office. You were a mess out there, she said. What happened?

The Blank we were after was carrying a time-delay algorithm, Nikki said. Tony thinks it might have been a Code bomb.

That’s not possible.

That’s what happened, ma’am, I said past a dry throat. It was about to go off when I killed it.

Katrina wrinkled her nose at me. "When you destroyed it. You can’t kill something that’s not alive. She turned to Nikki. Frameworks have safeguards in place, don’t they? An unidentified time-delay algorithm should have been quarantined straight away."

This one wasn’t, Nikki said. Tony and Zack are still going over the logs to figure out how that happened. Their working theory is that this was a security glitch.

Katrina tapped her lips with the tip of a blood-red nail. A security glitch…? It’s been a while since we’ve had one of those. You do remember the last time – right?

I was there.

I know. Katrina steepled her fingers together. We can’t let that happen again, Nicolas. Once was bad enough. Twice could bury us.

I looked from one to the other. There was something heavy about their shared recollection, something that had nothing to do with what I’d done today.

Intel noticed a marked increase in stray Blanks over the past few months, Nikki said. None of them were carrying any consequential data. One theory is that someone is testing our defenses before they try something bigger. Every incident we recorded happened on a low-tech Node–

One moment. Katrina turned to me. Agent Reid, have you done your compliance training?

…Yes, ma’am.

Katrina tsk-ed at the hesitation. You’ll do it again. As of right now, you’re on probation. Nicolas will assign you a supervisory agent in the field. No guns until one of us says otherwise. Is that clear?

Yes, ma’am, I said again.

She nodded, an infinitesimal twitch of her head which meant she was satisfied – for now. You’re dismissed. Nicolas, you stay.

I turned on my heels and walked out, dizzy with relief. The office doors closed behind me like the gates of Hades. I’d made it through. Still… I couldn’t help but wonder what she and Nikki were talking about in there. Whatever it was, I had a feeling it was bigger than all three of us.

On my second day, I’d rendered a bookcase and planted it at the head of my bed, promising myself I’d fill it with paper books and read them all. So far, I hadn’t even made it through the field agent’s handbook, let alone the Manual, which was a tome of monstrous proportions that consisted of everything there was to know about Third.

The handbook was a digital booklet, thirty pages in all, and was mostly filled with policies and procedures. The Manual, on the other hand, was a paper book rendered from a self-updating template matrix, which meant if anyone, anywhere, wrote something on a page, all other copies updated in real time. It was full of scribbles, sketches and annotations, like a tie that bound Third’s coven of rookies, past and present, across time and worlds.

As soon as I came back from Civilian Affairs, I flopped on the bed, shoes and all, and reached for the Manual. An hour later, I was still leafing through it in search of any recent security glitches that Nikki might have been involved in. Paper books had no search function, so I was doing this the old-fashioned way, page by page. How anyone learned anything in the days before content had gone digital, I’d never know.

There was nothing under Security or Blanks, but someone had taken the time to sketch a Blank they’d encountered in the field which they swore up and down had two heads instead of one. The section on Access Levels was a four-page long table with a rambling handwritten poem running alongside it. The author had chosen to rhyme coral with vocal and amoral and, miraculously, they’d made it work. Still no word about any security incidents, though.

I was about to give up when I spotted a note crammed in the corner of a paragraph about time-delay Code bombs. The letters were shaky and the ink had faded in places, but I could still make out some of it:

---

SD32.04-04(N37-3007-15-02)

Darragh, Griffin, Sobol, Rayfield

We fucked up. 

---

There was another line underneath, but it was too smudged to make out anything but the odd letter here and there. The first two letters might have been an R and an I. The last one was probably a V – or maybe it was a U, or even a W. I stuck out my tongue and skimmed through the rest of the page, then the entire section, but found no mention of anything related to N37.

Before I could dig any deeper, I heard a quick rap on the door. My first instinct was to ignore it and hope my uninvited guest (who was probably Zack) would get bored and go away. After a while, the rap came again, the knocks slightly louder this time. It occurred to me that Zack would use the buzzer, because Zack was the kind of guy who’d press a button if there was one just to see what it did.

I shuffled up to the door brushed my palm against the panel that opened it.

Rachel! I said, surprise mingling with that not-quite-settled feeling I had whenever I was around people who were better than me at things that mattered. Sorry – I was… I gestured vaguely to the inside of the room. What… ’s up?

Nikki wanted me to talk to you. I couldn’t tell where she stood on the wanting-slash-not wanting to talk to me continuum, but she was probably closer to the latter. He seems to think you need someone to supervise you. Apparently, I’m it. She punctuated the statement with a quick sigh, which I felt wasn’t entirely uncalled for. Zack said he’d do it at first, but Nikki said no.

Thank reason. I didn’t even try to pretend I wasn’t relieved. The less time Zack and I spent interacting, the better for both of us.

Let me make something clear from the get-go, Rachel said, crossing her arms. I don’t think you need supervision. The last guy did, for all the good it did to him. Care to guess how long he lasted with us?

How long before… He’s not dead, is he? I’d tried to laugh it off, but the look on her face had me worried for real.

Close enough. He transferred out, said he didn’t think he was made for field work after all. She grinned. Go on, have a guess.

A month?

Nine. Days. And here’s the kicker: he graduated top of his year at the Academy, came to us with the most solid references you could imagine, and could finish a tactical sim in half the standard time. Amazing, right?

Having performed with astonishing mediocrity in all my tactical simulations, I stuck to a