When she got home from work that night, 5 was waiting for her. She didn't notice him right away. Seated there patiently waiting in the shadows, one leg tossed over the other, ankle resting on his knee. She realized it too late as she felt for the switch that would illuminate his presence.

She never reached the light. 5 was on her before her fingers could make contact with the wall wasn't exactly surprised. She'd been waiting for it, really.

"I'm sorry," was what he said, as he clamped his hand over her mouth. He even kind of looked like he meant it.

CHAPTER ONE

5 had taken to calling her 7 because of the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Exactly seven of them. Like the Pleiades. Those freckles were dotted in the precise arrangement of the Seven Sisters. He didn't think Vanya would mind his reassigning her number, and it was fitting. The girl had become a kind of constellation for 5 - a waypoint in every timeline. She'd be older or younger, but always there, wearing those freckles and some ridiculous wig that never quite fit her face.

She was at the turn of a corner, or a glimpse in a crowd. In the Wasteland she was mirage. Never far, but still out of reach. No matter how hard he tried - how diligently he applied himself to the task - she was merely a breath to him, there and gone. A whisper on his lips, softly spoken and not tasted. Yet always persistently, unnervinglythere.

It's her he was thinking of when he propped himself up on a barstool at the Star Lounge. There were a handful of these gin joints occupying the street. Dallas was ripe with them. A sign of the times, they were all fashioned after the same spacey theme - Orbit Lounge, Rocket Lounge, Space Lounge. More trash than new age treasure. Places 5 never thought to find himself, but he'd started that day with a family reunion and ended it in failure. Now he was forced to contemplate committing a handful of axe murders in a spit-shake deal with the one person in the known timeline who's word he knew he could never, under any circumstances, trust.

By the time he'd shuffled down the main strip it was dark and half-past defeat, and 5 was in need of a stiff drink. Not gin - too sweet. He ordered a scotch - neat - made it a double, and told the bartender to keep them coming.

It was tacky, the Star Lounge. All dark walls and dusty leather and cigar smoke clinging to its patrons. Someone painted the barback to look like a knockoff Milky Way, but it rather resembled the gang graffiti of an unskilled child. It was certainly no Pleiades. No representation of the incarnate 7 taking up residence rent free in his troubled mind.

For once, 5 wasn't consumed by the quantum physics of having seen her - the how and why of her deliberate reincarnation. Instead, he was worried because he hadn't. It had been days since his arrival and she'd yet to materialize. As much as he'd thought that her reanimation left a buzz in his ear, not seeing her consumed him. She'd become his companion. His only constant in an infinite unknown. His lucky number 7.

He wasn't foolish enough to deny that the thought of her had turned his head toward a seedy gin mill in a row of cosmically laughable establishments. He might have even subconsciously entertained the notion that the universe so labeled the place as a destination. X marks the spot, so to speak. The unfortunate truth was that he missed her.

5 drained his glass at that realization, and slid it over the glittered counter for a refill. The bartender shot him a sideways glance, much like the one he'd had when 5 walked in. But what he lacked in aesthetically-marked maturity he made up for with a surly disposition and a well-placed scowl. No reason to think this round would be any different. When his glass was returned to him, however, the sharp snap of his favorite Black and White was watered down with ice. He was just about to lecture the barkeep on maintaining the integrity of the malting process when he was driven to distraction.

Places like this boasted scintillating songbirds and they rarely ever delivered. But the voice in his ear - a soft, smoky caramel thing with grit underneath - was a rarity. 5 straightened at the sound, afraid to look, anxious at the same time. Because it must be, had to be her. In any dimension he simply couldn't accept an alternative possibility. He turned.

And it wasn't. It was a cheap trick with a Marilyn haircut and a predictable red dress. 5's stomach dropped and the scotch soured there like well whiskey. He'd accepted from the moment he sat down that he'd lowered himself to heartsick schoolboy, but the reality of that debasement manifesting itself physiologically was a bitter pill to swallow. He glowered at the dirty blonde over his ruined drink, displacing his ire.

His eyes narrowed to focus on her pouty painted lips, noting a slight incongruence. They pursed when they should have parted, and her tongue caressed her peroxide teeth too gently and much too late. She was out of sync, he realized. Singing, to be sure. Quite well if you were relying on the codgers leaned out of their seats for assessment. But she wasn't singing tohim. And yet, someone was.

5 abandoned his glass to go off in search of the source. He was Odysseus, steering his ship toward the siren's song without concern for the jagged rocks. He cut through the heavy black of the lounge like a razor and ducked into a sidelong corridor to listen. He was on the right track now, the echo intensifying, nearly drowning out the pretender back on stage. He dove deeper, pressing a palm to the wall as he went, feeling his way toward the voice now ringing in his ears.

He found her in a back room repurposed with plumbing and retrofitted with large commercial basins for the towers of soiled glasses and too-full ashtrays piled beside. The dishwasher was a girl, trim and pixie-like with long nimble fingers, and black hair cropped to her shoulders that was too shiny to be real. And she was singing.

He knew it was her. She didn't even have to turn around for 5 to confirm it, and he wished she wouldn't. He'd never managed to get this close before and if she saw him there she might disappear again. He didn't dare risk it. Just stuck to the perimeter, avoiding her peripheral. He was her captive audience, her wallflower. Her anything was better than nothing, and he couldn't bear the thought of slinking back to his barstool without that voice.

He knew it would haunt him eventually, wake him in the night with a cold, lonely sweat. But not now. In this moment he simply leaned back against the particle board wall, closed his tired eyes, and relished the sound.

When he opened them again it was like waking from a dream. His eyes fluttered and he must have looked like an absolute idiot when she saw him for the first time, and fuck if that didn't feel damn awful. In all his sightings of her she not once appeared out of sorts. Now here he was in her sightline looking like either a lost drunkard or your average run-of-the-mill predator. Or worse, a boy with a crush.

"You're not supposed to be back here," she said to him, and he nearly choked because he'd never heard her speak before. A reaction that only fueled his fear of her thinking him puerile.

This close, he could spot those ethereal freckles with startling clarity. Count each one as she continued to stare at him. Her eyes were milky blue, almond-set in her delicate, heart-shaped face. She was near enough for 5 to catch her scent and it was liquid soap and dishwater. But lingering just underneath it was black currant and orchid, with base notes of patchouli and fir. He wanted to breathe her in, commit it to the deep recesses of his memory. In spite of his cleverness, he couldn't devise a way to accomplish this without her calling for security.

Which she did anyway.

Randall apparently was his name and he was twin to the shitty bartender. Or hewasthe shitty bartender, 5 couldn't be sure. In any case, he was quick to throw him through a hidden side door and out on his ass in the muck of a dank alley.

5 didn't bother brushing himself off. He'd met her, for Christ sake. Stood so close he could have reached out and touched the seven stars glittering atop her nose. She spoke to him, and he couldn't muster the wherewithal to grunt in response. For all his travels, experience, knowledge and skill, he hadn't expected to be a complete dud with the ladies. Certainly not with such impeccably coiffed hair, although he supposed he should rethink the Academy uniform (not like a three-piece suit would have done him any favors in his present circumstance).

Shit. The more he thought about it the worse it got. And sure, any sane person would have cut his losses, tucked tail and ran, but 5 had never been burdened with that label. He figured he might as well stay. After all, she wouldn't be in there forever. No. She would retire for the night eventually and was likely to exit out the same door he'd been roughly tossed through. And he had every intention of being half hidden behind the dumpster when she did.

It was three in the morning when she finally showed. 5 had wandered enough timelines to tell the hour without the convenience of analog. He'd learned to feel time. Its steady tock of minutes over seconds, ticking over hours was its own comfort. Events, happenstance, even bodies stop and start like shifting sand, but time... time never changed. Even when he was base jumping back and forth through its layers with all the finesse of an escape artist. Time was still time.

Which is why the soft toe of her tennis shoe nudging his ribs to jolt him awake was all he needed to recognize the three o'clock hour. 5 was slumped crookedly, lodged between dumpster and brick when 7 emerged from her cave. Had he not been snoring, she may not have noticed him there, and he would have missed her altogether.

"Hey," she whispered.

"Hey," he grinned dumbly, fully aware of it but enjoying the fuzzy view too much to care.

"If they catch you out here they'll murder you."

"I wouldn't worry," he said, amused at the thought of his attempted murder with so many failed plots under his proverbial belt. "Something tells me I'll be okay."

"Okay then," she muttered, seemingly unconvinced.

5 popped up, fueled with the sudden urge to prove it to her. Good old Randall would do. Let him come out to play.

"We've met before," she said, sticking a pin in his bravado.

"I was in the bar," he answered, instead of addressing the elephant in the alley and recounting his exact whereabouts at her back that evening.

"I mean before-before," she shook out. "Or at least you seem very familiar to me."

"It's plausible."

"But why do you seem familiar to me?"

"I don't know."

"I think you do."

"Maybe I just have one of those faces," he suggested, stuffing his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels - a nervous tic.

"You don't," she insisted, pressing him.

"Fine," he tested her. "What if I told you we've crossed paths a likely incomprehensible number of occasions inside infinite variations of time and space?"

She considered him, her mind turning several circles behind her angel eyes before she answered.

"Come with me?"

It was hardly a question. Not with every fiber of his being pulsing an unequivocal yes.