Fifteen years earlier

Bridge tasted blood when he licked his lip. His mom wasn't going to be happy about that. His right cheek hurt too, but it didn't feel warm and he fervently hoped that meant it wouldn't bruise. The rest of him was dusty from being pushed to the ground and his hands were all scraped up from catching his fall. At least he still had his stuff with him. Danica could have taken it like the other kids sometimes did. She was the biggest girl in the fifth grade; she could have easily stolen his pack and run away with it, or chucked it over the fence that the teachers were always warning students not to jump. The older kids did it anyway, disappearing into the woods behind the school and coming back with stories about killer snakes that would eat you if you were too small or too annoying. Bridge planned to cross the fence one day too, but since it wasn't clear how small was too small, or how annoying was too annoying, he was glad it wouldn't have to be today. Danica had left him, and his stuff, alone after a couple of shoves he wasn't sure what he'd done to deserve, aside from being a lowly second-grader.

He carefully straightened his Ninja Turtles backpack, then turned around to look at the spot where Danica had pushed him. To anyone else, it would have looked like nothing, just a random, empty stretch of the pathway that led around the side of the school, past the trash bins and "the Barn" where they kept the lawn mowers. But to Bridge, it was a stage without actors, and he was the only one who could lift the curtain.

Slowly he raised a hand in front of his face, fingers splayed and his palm carefully turned outward the whole time because everyone knew scrapes didn't start hurting until you looked at them. He moved his hand in an arc through the air, drawing an imaginary window through which he saw a vision of his past self from just a few minutes ago walking by with hunched shoulders and tightly gripping his backpack straps as he tried to ignore Danica's taunts. The image was translucent and a little flicker-y like old movie reels, but otherwise very clear since the energy was so fresh. These time shadows were always clearest for the stuff that happened most recently and sometimes the things that people felt most strongly too. Their color wasn't part of the normal light spectrum, and he wondered if it was the color of time itself.

Hey freak, I'm talking to you!

Past Danica appeared at the edge of the vision. When past Bridge kept walking, she caught up with long, stomping strides and grabbed his shoulder, spinning him around. That was when he got his split lip and dusty clothes, in that order.

He also got some of her memories, absorbed in the moment when her fist touched his face, and now he knew why she was so angry all the time. Her parents were divorcing and whenever they saw each other now, they spent the whole time arguing, not knowing or caring how it made her feel. Her older brother, once her favorite person in the world, was never home anymore, always finding reasons to stay with friends and giving their parents one more thing to argue about. And her teachers at school, unaware of any of this, kept nagging her to try harder in class because they thought she was being lazy instead of realizing she was really upset inside.

All of this raced into Bridge's brain in the split-second that Danica touched him, leaving him blinking in the dust as his mind tried to catch up and sort it all out. He avoided looking the bully in the eye because he knew that would make things worse, but looking at the sick, muddy green color of her aura all around her wasn't much better. It was darkened from all the hurt and the hate she felt, and was as awful to see as it was to feel so close to him. It was like a melted crayon, or spoiled pea soup.

Repelled and distracted, he stood up without thinking, and Danica, mistaking his distraction for defiance, pushed him down again more roughly than before. He fell back several feet this time, landing on his rear and feeling little rocks bite into his hands when he planted them to keep from bowling over completely. The sudden, sharp heat in his palms brought him back to the present, and the first thing he noticed was that even Danica's shadow, which stretched towards him in the afternoon sun, was bigger than he was. The shadow started to come closer and he threw up his arms in front his face to guard against another attack, but it never came. Instead, Danica—and her shadow—stalked past him without looking back, and that was where the vision ended.

The kids at school thought Bridge was a mind reader, a brain-peeping weirdo who eavesdropped on their thoughts whenever he was in the room. He wasn't, and he didn't, but what he really did do was too hard to explain. He could see auras, the colors around people that told him what they were feeling, but not what they were thinking, except sometimes the two were the same. If someone touched him, he would see things that they had seen before, and sometimes would hear what they were thinking too. The time shadows, unlike the auras, didn't show unless he looked for them, but some were so strong that he saw them anyway without trying.

That was the hard part—when things didn't happen the same way. Somehow that seemed worse than what the other kids thought, so even if he could explain to them the truth, he would be afraid to. When he tried to ignore the stuff he shouldn't know, or only watched the shadows of things he had seen for himself, he still always got the uncomfortable feeling that he was doing something he shouldn't be doing.

Present time

Jack and his companion left the bar sooner than Bridge expected, so soon in fact that had it been any sooner, they wouldn't have had a reason to leave at all, assuming Bridge was correct in thinking he was the reason. It was the girl who'd done it. Bridge could feel the alarm emanating from her as soon as she returned from the restroom and saw him sitting there beside Jack. Catching the eye of someone who was already on edge seemed like a bad idea, so he only got fleeting and mostly partial looks at her. What he did manage to glimpse though, he didn't forget. Careless brown hair, a cropped leather jacket, combat boots without any laces. Gold hoop earrings and shrewd brown eyes. Whoever she was, she was someone who didn't like to be fooled and didn't give you the opportunity to. Only when she and Jack had their backs turned did Bridge risk looking at them openly, but they were out of sight in a second, vanishing into the hallway the girl had just come from.

There were no exits down that way, but Bridge wasn't surprised when they didn't come back. The real question was how much of a head start he should give them. Too little time and he might come up too close behind them, but too much time would just be irresponsible. Unless they left New Tech City, which he knew they weren't, they wouldn't be going very far, and so long as they were within the city's borders, he felt sure he'd be able to track them easily. And so long as that was true, he didn't think Sky would be too bothered if he allowed a potentially irresponsible amount of time for them to get a jump on him, because they wouldn't be. Also, it was Sky after all who had declared Jack off-limits with no provisos given, and Sky could be very particular when it came to many things.

Bridge gave it ten minutes. By then, he had managed to down half his beer, which was enough to make things a little strange, but not enough to impair anything. He waited until he was outside the bar to remove his glove and pick up Jack's temporal trail—what he had called "time shadows" as a child. The trail was so fresh that he didn't even have to look for it. As soon as he lifted his hand, it was there, the vision of Jack's car leaving the parking lot ten minutes ago overlaying the present in that smoky, unnamed color that his visions were always in.

He left the glove off as he drove down the highway so he could continue to see the trail. If anyone passing him had preternaturally acute vision, they might have been able to see the slight distortion of energy around his fingers, schlieren in the medium of time. Sky said it looked green to him, if he had to give it a color, and when he could see it at all. He didn't always. To Bridge, it had no color, only movement and intensity.

It wasn't too long ago that he might have refused to use his powers this way. His parents, after gaining that first inkling of what he could do, had drilled into him the importance of respecting other people's privacy, a lesson that stayed with him even when he reached the age where questions became more imperative than consequences, and the gray area of what he should or shouldn't do became even grayer.

Then he came to New Tech City and met Sky, who didn't do gray. The Serpent leader had a simpler lesson for him: If you had a power, learn to use it. Otherwise, you had no say in the morality of what you did or didn't do with it.

If you don't have control, you don't have a choice. You're in a corner.

It was a compelling argument made by someone who lived by it every day. One of the first things Sky had made him do was get comfortable with tracking people using his ability to see the past, and Bridge didn't like to admit that he hadn't needed much convincing.

Following someone while driving was trickier than following someone on foot, but tonight, Jack's trail was as clear as one could ask for, being not even an hour old, plus it was leading a cut-and-dried path back into town. Bridge decided he could afford a minute's distraction to check in with Sky.

"What happened?" the other man asked as soon as he picked up the phone. Pleasantries had never been high on Sky's list of priorities.

"Your brother did," Bridge said. "The drop happened earlier than we were told, and Jack was the receiver. He had the package with him—disguised of course—when I walked into the bar, and then he and his girlfriend left in a hurry. Not girlfriend girlfriend, I mean, but girl friend. You know, a friend who's a girl, or a girl who's a friend. I think she might have known who I was, if I am who she thought I was. And still am." He frowned as he puzzled over the correct tense agreement, until Sky cleared his throat loudly on the phone. "Right. I'm following them now, on the highway going back into town. What do you want me to do?"

"Find out where they took the drop, then call me back. Don't engage anyone."

That seemed sensible enough. "On it."

Jack's trail took him down the highway for several more miles before exiting just inside the city border. From there, it snaked through side streets and around half-developed plots with the confidence of someone who knew those routes well, and Bridge wondered if the elaborate detour was meant to throw him off—meaning Jack had expected to be followed this evening—or if Jack was just used to going as unseen as possible in his line of work. Avoiding the major boulevards meant bypassing lights, traffic cameras, and eyes, while skirting construction sites meant using roads that possibly wouldn't be there in the future. Bridge felt mildly impressed as he went around a condominium-in-progress, one that shimmered with the reflection of the moon off of its newly installed window panes, and with a flickering vision of the Italianate building that had once stood in its place.

Eventually his quarry led him to a complex of disused, dockside buildings by the southern bend of the river. There were no lights and no signs of any other people in the area, so when Bridge saw Jack's car slowing down, he decided to park his own car out of sight and follow the remainder of the trail on foot.

He passed by two shuttered warehouses before coming to a wide, empty lane that serviced all the buildings right on the river's edge. These were bigger than their inland neighbors, standing two stories tall, twice as long as they were wide, and clad extensively in beige metal siding. Outside one of these sat Jack's car, not too far from where a personnel door glowed with a faint yellow light.

Bridge frowned as he surveyed the building from across the lane. The only entry points he could see were that personnel door and the roll-up beside it—the windows that lined the monitor roof two stories up didn't count on practical grounds—and the immediate perimeter was completely exposed. He would be caught instantly if someone happened to come out while he was investigating the ways in. With no convenient way to determine what was going on inside, he decided to stake out the door for a bit and see if Jack and his companion emerged soon.

The logical place to hide would have been the narrow alley between the buildings across the lane. However, the large, dark sculpture that loomed in front of one of them looked far more interesting. Its presence in the otherwise unadorned landscape made more sense when he got closer and realized the property behind it had once been a smith shop. The sculpture was all curving iron and rivets, probably a piece meant to demonstrate the prowess of the proprietor. Bridge liked it because it reminded him of the rib cage of some elephantine beast.

The cover wasn't perfect, but he'd be invisible enough in the night if he stayed still. The alley was a leap away if he needed it. He hoped he wouldn't have to wait too long.

A few minutes later, Jack and his companion emerged from the building still carrying the sack he had used to camouflage the drop parcel. He held the bag much less carefully now, leaving it to swing by its handles at his side. It swung easily, Bridge noted, suggesting that it had been relieved of some of its burden. The two also seemed more relaxed than they had been before, trading jibes on the way to the car though they did survey the darkness around them before getting in. When they drove away, they didn't go back the way they had come.

The light had been left on behind them. Bridge didn't sense anyone inside the building anymore, but nor did it feel like it was empty. Intrigued by the contradiction, and not terribly good at resisting its draw, he left his hiding place and moved closer. He skulked down the long side until he reached the rear of the building, where he found the only set of windows at ground level. They were grimy and cloudy from age, but he could make out a small interior room with a desk inside, perhaps an office of some sort. The door into the room from the main space was open, but it was too dark to tell what lay beyond it.

Unsurprisingly, the windows were all locked or rusted shut, so he moved on, rounding the corner to face the back side of the building. The sound of the river dominated here, its water lapping tirelessly at the short, rocky embankment not thirty paces away. A low chain-link fence marked its edge.

There was a personnel door on this end too, and after a moment's deliberation, he decided it was going to be his way in. He listened for sounds inside first and when he heard nothing, he deftly picked the lock—an old pin-tumbler job—and eased the door in. Still no sounds and no sense of anyone inside. He peered around the edge of the door carefully and gauged the scene.

Aside from some modular rooms in the corners, including the one he had seen through the window, the interior was one big cavernous space full of industrial racks and shelving that rose at least fifteen feet high. The overhead lighting was wan and patchy, flickering valiantly in some places and entirely absent in others. He noted where the deepest shadows were so he could avoid them.

He stepped out from behind the door, slipped it shut, then quietly headed towards the pallet racks that began deeper inside the building. Despite the abundance of storage space, only a few rows were being used, and those were only moderately stocked. There didn't seem to be any kind of organization scheme in place. Wooden crates, metal trunk boxes, and other parcels wrapped all sorts of ways cohabited randomly across the shelves with some things no one had bothered to wrap at all. He paused beside a transparent globe that contained what looked like metal shavings from one angle and solid obsidian from another. One section over, two large pallets wrapped in plastic listed severely in opposite directions, as if they were being repelled by the immaculate silver cube that sat between them.

All of the curios admittedly distracted him for a good several minutes, but as he came to the end of the row, he remembered what he had come for. He started to reach for his glove so he could find exactly where Jack had left the drop parcel, and that's when he heard a strange metallic chitter behind him.

He turned and ducked just in time to avoid getting clocked by a figure shrouded entirely in black. Even their face was covered, never a good sign, but more ominous than that was the fact that he couldn't feel their presence whatsoever, and he was looking straight at them. Every being, as far as he knew, had some type of mental signature, a minimal level of there-ness that he was able to detect, even through walls, and so he usually always knew when someone was nearby. To see someone—or something—so obviously physically present, yet have the rest of his senses tell him nothing was there was more than a little disorienting.

At least it explained how they'd managed to sneak up on him, and that empty-yet-not-empty read he'd gotten on the building earlier.

The figure, whoever they were, swung at him again, and this time he caught their arm. He meant to throw them off, but the arm turned out to be solid, stiff, and superhumanly strong. He let go at once before they could pull it back and take him with it, then retreated several steps to rethink his strategy. The figure chittered at him some more, a series of synthesized noises whose meaning was lost on him, but did follow a discernible speech pattern. He might not understand what they were saying, but they were obviously saying something.

"Uh…" As he considered how one might reply in such a situation, he slowly inched a foot in the direction of the aisle beside him, as if he meant to make off that way. The figure bought his feint and lunged forward immediately, like a bloodhound on the scent. He sidestepped their hurtling form and shoved them with all his strength into the corner struts of the rack. The resounding clang was unmistakable. Either his foe was clad head-to-toe in a metal suit, or they were potentially nothing but. The stiffness of their limbs and choppy movements didn't suggest any kind of organic being.

Not wanting to squander the brief upper hand he'd gained, he grabbed the figure again and swung them around hard into the neighboring rack. They still didn't fall, but they were clearly malfunctioning now, unable to straighten up from their awkward slump against the rack and scissoring their arms fruitlessly in front of them. He wanted to pull off their hood so he could see who or what he was facing, but more chitters sprang to life around him, this time from all directions. He looked up sharply, almost afraid of what he'd see.

Four more figures, all fully swathed like the first, had appeared and they were boxing him in—one to either side of him, one at the far end of the aisle he stood beside, and one above him, standing like a sniper on the very top shelf.

And these were all armed.

He swore as he sprinted down the narrow aisle, straight toward the stinger-like weapon being pointed at him, then at the last second sprang into the rack on his right, just as the first laser blast streaked by. He rolled across the shelf all the way into the next aisle, wincing as the wooden slats dug into his shoulders and elbows. He hit the floor hard, but managed to keep moving until he got his hands and feet under him. In the same breath, the figure who had been guarding the first aisle leaped into this one, and he quickly knocked their legs out from under them before scrambling to his feet.

Now he was running down the center of the warehouse towards the door he had entered through. Two more figures—or were they the same ones?—stood in his path, weapons aimed, and there was nowhere to dodge their fire unless he veered off into the shelves again, which would provide cover, but prolong his escape. The steel constructions, which had seemed cool at first in all their towering uniformity, now started to resemble a sinister jungle gym, one he was ready to get out of.

He stayed his course, knowing he'd have to be fast. He tugged his left glove loose, then stripped it off with his teeth so he could scan the air with one hand while he reached for his stunner with the other. It wasn't the past he was looking for this time. This time, the vision that sprang to life over everything was of the future. He saw the shots that would be fired, their sequence and their deadly paths. Two figures were behind him as well as in front, forming a mirror image of each other.

He'd have to be curveball fast. Heartbeat fast. Hair's width fast.

The first shot came from the fore. He cut sharply right, returning fire as the yellow laser blast streaked past his ear. Then he zagged the other way, dodging simultaneous blasts from behind and ahead, and fired at the remaining figure in front of him. Two down. He spun around, squeezed off another shot, then dropped down hard. A laser blast sailed over his head as his shot picked off number three.

His next shot missed.

Without enough leverage to get back on his feet quickly enough, he threw himself sideways to avoid the next blast that came for him. It burst into a shower of sparks when it hit the concrete, leaving a scorch mark where he had been not one millisecond before. He rolled onto his stomach and raised his weapon. It was a terrible vantage point, and a terrible angle that hurt his shoulder if he raised his arm too far. He could only sort of see his last target, who blended into the shadows in their black garb, and the spots in his eyes from the fireworks of the last blast certainly didn't help.

His final shot was all prescience, no actual sight, and it hit home.

He flopped down onto the ground with a huff that felt like his first breath since that initial sprint. It may or may not have actually been; his awareness of time diminished whenever he watched two times at the same time, but it didn't seem like the fight could have lasted that long. Either way, he was glad breathing wasn't something he had to remember to do in order to do it, on top of everything else he'd been doing.

He picked himself up, keeping his glove off and his stunner out even though he hadn't seen any more surprises coming. The two figures who had blocked his path to the door had fallen in a heap together, yet their black coverings had somehow managed to stay in place. He went and crouched down beside them and carefully pulled the hood off of one of their heads.

A silver mask studded with large black circles in a vaguely face-like pattern shone dully in the dim light. An equal-sized red bulb, more convex and reflective than the circles, was set into the forehead. With the butt of his stunner, he lightly rapped on the side of the mask, then did the same against the collarbone, or where the collarbone would have been had the figure been human. They were an automaton of some kind, made of metal through and through. He wasn't terribly surprised, not after what he'd seen of them. Still, he reached over and pulled the hood off the second figure, just to be sure. An identical silver mask stared out at him.

Despite wanting to know more—he'd been into robots since he was a little kid—he stood up and left the figures where they were. Tonight was not the time to indulge in curiosity. Or, at least, not any more than he already had. That didn't mean, however, that he had to leave empty-handed. With one final scan of the air, he found the place where Jack left the drop and scooped the box up. It took some effort not to get mesmerized by the intricate, baroque-esque curves of the metalwork covering its surface, and he suspected that was the very intent of the design. There was a similarly disquieting energy around the chest too, one that made him feel squirmy, like the touch of shag carpet on his skin, or too much paisley. Luckily the feeling didn't intensify from holding the chest, but it did deter him from opening it. Sky had already told him what was inside anyway—crystals of extraterrestrial origin, and he figured the weird energy had something to do with the frequency at which they resonated.

He made it back to his car without incident, where he wedged the chest in between some toolboxes in the trunk. Either the distance or all the metal or both dampened the energy so he couldn't feel it anymore when he was inside the car, and that was a relief. He called Sky back using the car's interface, and the other man wasted no words.

"So?"

"I have the drop," Bridge said. "Jack took it to Dock 23, in the southern bend."

"And you just took it back?"

"No, but technically maybe yes because I technically didn't run into any people. There were these robots dressed all in black, and they were like—" He started to mimic the metallic chittering noises they had made, but then realized that that probably wouldn't mean much to Sky. "Yeah, so they showed up and I had to take them out to get me out."

"I thought I said not to engage anyone."

"Technically they engaged me."

There was a brief silence in which Bridge could feel Sky's exasperation even through the phone.

"Robots, huh?" the other man said. "What were they like?"

"Their heads look like whiffle balls." Bridge had been holding onto that thought since he first saw the figures' faces, and it felt good to finally verbalize it. "They're strong, but not very flexible, in their movement or their programming. They didn't adapt very well to a moving target. Their shooting's so-so.

"Hey, did I just find John's storehouse?" he added.

"I think you did. One of them, anyway."

"I didn't expect that, mostly because I wasn't expecting anything at all, but I guess I should have since that's who Jack works for."

"Does Jack know you took the drop back?"

"I don't see how he could. Yet, anyway. I waited until he and his girl friend left before I went in."

"Good. I'm still at the club. Bring the drop here."

"Be there in fifteen, give or take a few depending on road maintenance, and how many stoplights are in flashing mode, and whether any trains come in because Pacific Union does tend to run more at night, and that would add more than just a few minutes since—"

Sky hung up.

Bridge stared at the flashing "call ended" icon for a moment before putting his car in gear and taking the most expedient route he knew to the club. One of these nights, he wanted to try Jack's style of traveling by discreet roads, but it'd have to wait until he had some leeway for experimentation. Maybe a lot of leeway. For someone who could read time backwards and forwards, he had a terrible sense of direction.