A DECORATED SEAL BROKE MY RIBS IN A FULL MESS HALL — THEN MY DEAD MOTHER’S VOICE CAME THROUGH THE PHONE

Chapter 19

I rode north on Route 17 with my father’s headlights behind me and my mother in the passenger seat of my car, which was the strangest thing that had happened to me all day, which was saying something.

I had not invited her. She had walked past me to the car, gotten in, and buckled her seatbelt like a woman catching a bus, and I had stood on the gravel for four seconds deciding whether to argue, and by the fourth second I understood that arguing would cost more time than it saved.

The truck at the end of the road pulled out behind us and stayed exactly two hundred yards back.

Route 17 at midnight is a two-lane black strip between dark fields, with the occasional sodium light and the occasional house. We found Bramwell a mile past a shuttered gas station, standing in the gravel on the shoulder with a state trooper’s jacket over her shoulders and no shoes.

She was covered in mud to the knees. Her hair had come out of whatever it had been in and hung across her face in wet ropes. There was a cut over her right eye, already closed and drying, and she was holding a paper cup of coffee that somebody had given her, and she was not drinking it.

She saw my car and she started walking toward it before I had fully stopped.

I got out. “Commander Bramwell.”

“You’re Vance.” Her voice was scraped raw. “You’re Vance, you’re real, you’re actually real—” She grabbed my forearm with both hands, hard enough to bruise. “They made you. They made a version of you and they’ve been using it for three days, I saw it, I saw her walk past my office window and I thought it was you and it wasn’t, it was—”

“Bramwell.”

“—and then somebody came to my house and I ran out the back and I’ve been walking for nine hours because I didn’t know who to call, I didn’t know who to call, do you understand, I’ve been in that building for six years and I don’t know a single person I can call—”

“Commander.”

She stopped. Looked at me. Looked at the state trooper, twenty feet away, watching us. Looked at my car, and at the woman in the passenger seat.

And went absolutely white.

“That’s—” She took a step back. “That’s the woman. From the window. That’s the woman in the gray jacket.”

My mother opened the car door and got out.

She did it slowly, with her hands visible, the way you approach a spooked animal — and I understood, watching her, that this was not improvisation. She had done this before, in another country, in another life, with people who were running from worse things than Iris Bramwell was running from tonight.

“No,” my mother said. “That’s my daughter’s jacket, and my daughter’s build, and my daughter’s hair, and somebody has been borrowing all three. Look at my face, Commander.”

Bramwell looked.

“Now tell me her name.”

“Elena. Vance.”

“And mine.”

“I don’t—” Bramwell’s mouth worked. “I don’t know.”

“No,” my mother said gently. “You don’t. Because I have been dead for seventeen years. Which is exactly why somebody chose my daughter’s face and my jacket and put a woman who looks like me in the walkway outside your office three days running.”

Bramwell sat down in the gravel.

The trooper stepped forward and I held up a hand. He stopped.

I crouched in front of her. “Bramwell. Do you know who cut the orders?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I did.” She was crying. “I processed them. That’s why they came for me. I processed the packet that changed your reporting time, and the routing code was wrong, and I flagged it, and I sent it up to be corrected, and it got corrected, and then this morning it turned out the correction had never happened and the packet had gone out with the wrong—”

“Who did you flag it to?”

She looked up at me.

“Halloway.”

I heard my mother exhale slowly, ten feet behind me.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“Gone.” Bramwell wiped her face with the back of her hand. “He left this morning on a medical appointment. He told me it was a colonoscopy. He told me not to mention it to anyone because he was embarrassed.”

“When exactly?”

“Nine-forty.”

Which was eight minutes after Marcus Thorne told me the captain in the archive wing had been a woman in a gray jacket. Which was fourteen minutes before somebody walked into a vault with my father’s credentials. Which was—

“Bramwell.” I made my voice very flat. “He told you the packet needed correction. And then he told you to sit on it.”

“I didn’t sit on it. I sent it up.”

“To him.”

She went still.

“To him,” she said.