Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(59)

James watched the city below him slip underneath his feet. He had been in Boston once while on a salvage. A rich patron had wanted to recover many of the priceless works from the Boston Athenaeum before the war destroyed half the city, and then the Hurricane of 2153 finished the job. There were five million people here the night he jumped in and less than two million by the next morning.

How many ghosts lay here; how many deaths were beneath his feet? James shook his head and pushed those thoughts out of his mind. For the first time since he was a teenager, he had to worry about another living being. After years of being alone, he had someone else to fight for again. He just hoped it didn’t end up like the first time. James gritted his teeth. This time would be different.

He reached their camp, a small fifth-floor room on the eastern side of a building facing one of the main streets that was now a slow-flowing river. Elise was gone. The fire had been reduced to glowing embers, and most of the supplies they had unpacked remained untouched, but she was nowhere to be found.

“Elise,” he called out.

She’s not here, Sasha, sitting in the spot Elise had slept, said. I guess you lost her like you lost me.

Grace, who was sitting behind Sasha, combing her hair much like she did in his dream, tsked. You have a habit of carelessly misplacing important people in your life, pet.

James’s heart seized. What was Sasha doing here? Could it actually be her? When he first saw her with Elise back in 2097, he had written it off as the stress of the moment, but now here she was. He reached out for his little sister, afraid that his hand would pass right through her, but even more afraid that she was actually there. He pulled back just short of touching her. Sasha gave him a sweet smile as Grace continued to braid her hair.

“What is wrong with me?” he muttered.

You’re going crazy. Grace grinned. Possibly too much lag sickness.

That was possible. Temporal miasma pills, due to their highly addictive nature, were the only things chronmen didn’t have free access to. Responsibility for distribution of these pills rested on the medical wards at the ChronoCom bases. James just had his regimen before the jump, but he had missed the previous few, and it usually required several doses to overcome the sickness. That could be affecting his senses. Sasha and Grace must be figments of his imagination from the lag sickness.

And what about Elise? Did she just wander off? Was she captured by monitors? There were always wasteland tribes around, indigenous savages that still resided within the husks of the buildings, using the bones of the dead city as shelter against the elements. Maybe one of them had taken her. James clenched his fist. Black abyss help them if she was injured. Afraid to call out too loudly, he tore his eyes away from Sasha and searched the area. He combed up and down the floors, his fear growing by the second.

Elise didn’t have an exo, so her movements would be limited. These buildings had been crumbling for hundreds of years now, and many of the structures were unstable. She could have fallen or a section of the ceiling could have collapsed in on her. Dozens of scenarios flashed through James’s head, each more terrifying than the last. He didn’t sacrifice his entire existence for her so she could die a meaningless death.

Wait, the comm band! He reached out to her through it, hoping she would know enough to answer back. He cursed when he realized that the channel was empty. He had told her to shut it off before he left her, for fear of the monitors tracking her. Now, he had no way to find her in this massive concrete jungle.

Well, James was determined not to rest until he found her alive and well, or touched her lifeless body one last time. He pulled up his AI band and set the point he was standing on as the center of his hunt, and then he began to tear through this dead city looking for its one living soul.





TWENTY-TWO

AUDITORS

There was a knock at the door and two auditors walked in. Levin spared just a glance their way as both sat down on the opposite end of his desk. The original class of auditors made an effort always to keep an open door for their brothers. Most auditors still remembered their chronmen days and were far too private to follow this policy. Levin was one of the few who held on to this mostly symbolic gesture for the sake of tradition.

He didn’t trust the two auditors who had just come into his office in the slightest. The one on the left, Geneese, was a floater—an auditor who, without a permanent station, was used wherever and whenever his skills were needed. Levin had worked with him previously on a few retrieval jobs in the Ship Graveyard. The man was a by-the-books auditor, excelling at orders but rarely creative enough to deviate from directions when the situation required it. This made him the perfect auditor for half the responsibilities of the chain and the worst for the other half. He would have to be leveraged carefully.

Shizzu was even more of an unknown. He was probably the most unheralded Tier-1 chronman that Levin had known in his lifetime. He was surprised to hear of the man being raised to the chain. If a chronman had not been raised to auditorship by his eleventh year, he probably would never make it. Shizzu had been a chronman for fifteen. That made him ancient by auditor standards.

Regardless of what he thought of them, they were his brothers now. Shizzu was just a few years short of earning out and could have just floated his way to retirement. Whatever circumstance allowed him to join the chain, he took the auditorship rather than the easy way out. Levin could respect that, even though he had doubts about the man’s worthiness.