The stranger came into our house when I was fourteen.
It was a hot, sticky August evening in 1997 when it happened, the sunlight thick and golden like honey, humid Georgia air settling into the creases in my skin each time I moved. The time was close to 7 PM; my twin sister Addie and I were lying on our beds like a pair of big drowsy cats. Our lips were slick with lip gloss we'd stolen from our mother's room, the backs of our pink cotton t-shirts damp with sweat. The cloying scent of sweet citrus and stale air lulled us both closer to sleep.
Mama was working the night shift in the hospital; we were alone, and we'd thrown our summer homework on the floor a while ago. Instead of studying, we'd gone into Mama's room to take her makeup bag, and the expensive perfume she wouldn't let us use—a last gift from a father we'd never met. Addie had been against it at first, a meeker girl than I was at the time, but the ticklish touch of the lip gloss brush had her giggling right away.
We got drunk on the cheap sweetness of our lips, on the honey air, on our mother's perfume. I tried to imagine my father giving it to her, stroking her cheek lovingly, leaning in to smell it on her, but I couldn't picture his face. Mama hoarded all photos, all memories of him like a jealous dragon. She had him and us. Addie and I only had each other.
I was drifting into a half-dream, smearing sticky red on my pillow, when I heard my sister's whisper from the other bed.
"Vicky?"
"Mmm?" I didn't bother with words.
"Vicky," Addie whispered again, and something in her voice made me open my eyes a little wider. "I think someone's in the house."
I blinked. "What?"
Addie's voice broke when she said, "I think I just heard the creaky step make a noise. Jesus, Vicky, someone's coming up the stairs."
I sat up, batting long mouse-brown locks out of my eyes. I hadn't heard a damn thing. "Don't be dumb, Mama locked the door," I said, not whispering back.
My sister's wide eyes, beginning to fill with tears, and her trembling red lips told me she didn't believe me. She still slept with a night light at the time. Five minutes younger than me, she was, but it might as well have been five years.
I was about to lay back down when I did hear a sound, and it went straight through my chest. Footsteps in the hallway outside our room. Soft and cautious like a cat, but the old floorboards creaked no matter who stepped on them.
Mama never walked that carefully.
My heart jolted painfully in my chest, then jumped into a mad gallop. I clutched at the front of my t-shirt, and felt a drop of sweat roll down my neck until it met cotton and soaked into it. I saw a burglar, a murderer, something worse, maybe. I had no idea what could be worse than murder, but I had no trouble imagining a man with some kind of dark intent creeping up our staircase. There had been talk of things like that happening in the area, not long ago, not at all.
The footsteps grew louder, and I shivered in the hot air. Addie whimpered.
"Shh!" I hissed, as softly as I could. "Under the bed," I mouthed at my sister, and shaking like a leaf, she obeyed me.
I still don't know what the hell I was thinking, but I didn't hide with her. I stood up, snatched up a pair of Mama's sewing scissors from my nightstand, and I held them in front of me like a sword. I had to protect Addie. I had always been the one who protected her. Slowly, with soft barefooted steps, I went to the door and opened it.
I screamed.
The woman in the white mask stood right there on the threshold, motionless and imposing, in a black coat despite the heat. Tall, thin, hands like a pair of pale spiders, her right holding the pair of gleaming shears Mama used to trim our roses. The mask was a simple dome with two round holes for eyes, smooth as an egg. Long, unkempt brown hair hung over her shoulders. Her eyes were the same color as mine.
It happened so fast. I thrust the scissors at her. She grabbed my hand and twisted it with a smooth, expert motion that forced me to my knees. The shears in her hand clacked together once. Then she let go and I fell to the floor, howling in agony. There was nothing left where my right index finger had been, just something I don't like thinking about.
When I looked up through my tears, the woman in the mask was gone. Someone was screaming. Someone was sobbing. I don't remember which one was Addie and which one was me.
My sister disappeared three days later from our backyard, the very first time she dared to take a step outside after what had happened to me. We never found her, not even a body, and I was sure the woman with the shears took Addie.
Mama never believed me about that: she thought me and my sister had made up the story to conceal whatever accident had cost me my finger. And after a while she stopped caring, too busy grieving for a daughter that she never got to bury. When I was seventeen, I got myself emancipated from her. It was done with mutual agreement.
I kept on living with nine fingers and an Addie-shaped void inside me.
If you can call it life.
***
"An interesting story," the man in the suit said mildly, wiping his mouth with a delicate motion on a thick, feather-soft white napkin. I leaned back and lit a cigarette, holding it carefully with my four-fingered right hand.
The soft murmur of conversation and the warm glow of paper lanterns filled the restaurant's courtyard. It was the kind of place where I would have been asked to leave if I set foot inside in my usual frumpy jeans and scuffed sneakers. My brand new red dress was uncomfortable, way too tight on my stomach rolls. From the way it had been poking my back all evening, I'd guessed a while ago that I'd forgotten to take off the clearance sale tag.
I turned my head to blow out my cigarette smoke when he said that, even though I wanted to breathe it in his face, make his eyes sting and tear up. My hand trembled.
"That's my sister you're talking about, you son of a bitch," I said almost gently, and he smiled. Dark-haired, graying at the temples; forty if he was a day, but the firm set of his mouth and the bright green of his eyes made him better to look at than I was comfortable with. I was twenty-nine, and I had enough daddy issues to last me a lifetime. Hell, I had enough issues, period. I looked away from those pretty eyes.
"You told me you had information about Addie," I continued. "Don't act slick with me."
"I do," the man said. He'd told me to call him X when he'd sent me the first message on the unsolved crimes forum, but I refused to play along with the coy secret agent bullshit, so man in the suit he was. If he hadn't been the only one to respond to my masked woman story, I wouldn't have come to this place to meet him.
Suit Man straightened his shoulders and gave me a once-over, not in the come-hither sense, more like he was searching for something. Whatever he found made him nod to himself and lean forward. "Miss King, take me somewhere private and I'll tell you everything I know."
What the hell?
"This isn't some ploy to get in my pants, is it?" I asked slowly, willing my voice to stay even. "You say you can tell me about Addie, then you bring me to a posh restaurant in this fucking straitjacket of a dress—"
A passing waiter gave me a disapproving look, and I glared at him until he shook his head and moved on.
"—and now you say you want to be alone with me? If you lied to me about my sister, I'm going to wreck you, man."
"Calm down, please," Suit Man said, holding up a hand. "I'm not lying. I brought you here first because I needed to make sure you're the person we are looking for."
"We?"
Those bright green eyes flashed at me. "Not here. If you don't want to get deeper, you can still walk away. But if you do that... have fun never finding out what happened to your sister, and who that woman was."
"You piece of shit," I said between clenched teeth, and he shrugged.
"I'll own up to that. I don't have all day, Miss King. What do you say?"
A silence fell between us then, delicate as a raindrop. I looked at him, and he looked back. It felt almost like the conversation around us died down when our eyes met.
I broke first. "My motel room good enough?"
Suit Man beamed at me. "It's perfect."
***
The motel room wasn't perfect, actually, but it suited me way more than my fancy red dress: small, stale, with the white bedsheets having a gray tinge to them that should have probably made me more uncomfortable than it did. I'd slept in worse places.
Suit Man clearly didn't share that thought, judging by the way his eyebrows rose almost to his hairline when he stepped in and smelled the damp air. "Very, uh, homely," he said, clearing his throat.
"Made for me," I replied, and he looked away. I liked seeing him get awkward about something, it made me feel less like he had the upper hand. Even though he did.
I sat down on the bed, and patted the gray sheets next to me. "Come on."
Suit Man blinked at me. "You know, I'm rather starting to feel like you're the one trying to get in my pants," he said slowly.
I gave him a dark look. "As you may have noticed, the chair isn't even good for kindling. So either you sit on the floor, and I won't take responsibility for the state your clothes will be in if you do that... Or you sit on the bed and spill the beans. Now sit the fuck down. I don't have all day." I almost winced when I realized I was echoing his words, but he just smiled.
"Very well." He sat next to me, the narrow bed forcing us closer than I'd have liked; I kept my eyes away from his face. I was here for Addie, not for anything else. Suit Man didn't look at me either, and I saw from the corner of my eye that he was giving the ugly wallpaper a long look.
Then he spoke. Softly, each word measured.
"Miss King... How much do you know about time travel?"
***
One year later, when I looked in the mirror, I wasn't seeing chubby, sour little Vicky King anymore. I saw a pale, gaunt husk of a woman, with a hard set of the mouth and unkempt mouse-brown hair. It had grown twice as long as it had been before I'd met the representative of the invite-only, donor-backed organization most know as the Tenebris Foundation. Our cover story is that we're a think tank, and we sink a lot of money and effort into ensuring that people don't look behind it. The reality is different. We deal in time travel.
Suit Man's real name was Mark, he'd told me right then and there, and he'd told me a lot more about himself, but I hadn't slept with him that night in that run-down motel room. I hadn't slept with him until much later, and it had fizzled out faster than a glass of champagne left out in the sun. That was not important, anyway; what was important was that he'd gotten me into Tenebris, too.
A myth: time travel is a science-fiction invention.
A truth: time travel is real.
A myth: if you happen to somehow become a time traveler, you just hop in your time machine and pop out wherever your little heart desires.
A truth: if you make it to your destination in one piece, you're one lucky son of a bitch.
A myth: anyone can be a time traveler.
A truth: if you think astronauts had it tough with the training, man, do I have news for you.
A myth: time travel is a fun frolic.
A truth: we only do it because some things need to be stopped before they happen... or after they have. Anything we can do to keep the fabric of time and space intact is fair game. Anything.
***
I stand before the gateway and put on the featureless white mask, smooth as an egg. My spider-like, bony hands are shaking. Trainer Hu would punch me in the stomach if she saw that, any nerves before heading out into time are verboten, but I can't suppress it. Not now. I've stopped murders from happening, broken up time loops and ended wars before they began; this is different. I had to pull more strings than a knitting convention to have this mission approved, and I only have one shot at it. I can't travel to the same location in spacetime twice through the same gateway, unless I want to rip a few holes in reality.
I have twenty-four hours to bring back a piece of flesh or bone from Addison Esther King, age fourteen, so we can ID and locate her when she disappears from her own backyard on the date of August 28, 1997. I wish I didn't know why they need that, but it doesn't matter.
It has taken me sixteen years, but I'm going to find her.
"Ready, Agent K?" the lab tech, Chase, asks; I just nod because I don't trust my voice. "Go ahead," he says, gesturing towards the gateway. The coordinates have been set carefully to my mother's little house in Georgia, three days before Addie's disappearance. All I need to do is step through.
I do and I vanish into d u s t.
***
Disintegrating into atoms and reforming sixteen years ago is exactly as pleasant as it sounds. When I'm done vomiting into the grass, I put my mask back on and start towards the back porch, my footsteps soft as a cat's in the lush green of our backyard.
I don't feel anything at first. Hot, yes, sweaty, very, but I'm calm, my heartbeat settled in a nice afternoon stroll's tempo. I can't afford to feel, that was the first thing my trainers taught me. It's a lesson learned through a lot of pain, a lot of tears, but a lesson learned well. I push away the memories of the sensory deprivation tanks and the upside-down suspension harnesses. Getting nostalgic won't help me right now.
And yet, when I see the garden shears tossed into the grass with a few dry rosebush branches, my stomach clenches up. I have to look away for a long moment... but in the end, I take the shears anyway.
"Addie, honey, I'm so sorry," I whisper to myself, fighting back tears in our empty garden. A few of them escape anyway, mingling with the salty sweat dripping down my face underneath the mask. "I'm here to help you, I swear." I let the tears flow for a minute or two so they won't distract me later on, then I wipe my eyes under the mask and choke back the rest. I'm wasting time. The one thing I need to be careful with.
I knew what to do when Mark—my tight-lipped, unfriendly ex at that point—handed me a folder last month, regarding a present-past link for a certain Agent King's travel to 1997 from the year 2013. I've attempted this mission before, in another timeline. But it was my own finger I ended up cutting off instead of my sister's.
What went wrong that time? Did I panic? Did I forget something about the mission parameters?
Did I do it so I would get myself on Tenebris's radar with my unsolved mystery?
Nobody at Tenebris knows that, because Agent King never gave a testimony. She didn't come back to 2013 with that piece of flesh or bone. The general consensus is that her trip back to HQ had glitched somehow, smearing her across the years between.
She vanished... like Addie.
I don't know if I can save either of us because I have no idea what went wrong, what will go wrong, but I have no more chances for this. I have to try.
The sunlight glints on the shears as I walk towards the house.