Page 190 of Hunters and Prey

Not A Damned Thing I Can Do

BLACK HOVERED OVER a monitor set in the brushed steel table, scowling.

Separation pain coiled in his light.

He wanted to be in his apartment.

He wanted to be with his fucking wife.

His eyes scanned the transcripts from the Barrier jumps his seer infiltrators had been conducting all afternoon. They’d been looking at Miri’s light more or less all day, some of them starting before she left the conference room.

His consciousness split, he’d been keeping a part of his mind over her for most of that same period, but he got distracted when the senior infiltrators started pelting him with the results of their deeper scans.

Black was still poring over them, looking at the imagery recorded by the rudimentary Barrier capture device they’d cobbled together, when Yarli put those results into words.

“I’m not sure it’s teleporting,” she said.

Black looked up from the screens, staring at the dark-skinned seer with the near-black eyes. Seeing his expression, she clicked under her breath, her mouth pinched right before she amended her words.

“Well… not exactly teleporting,” she said. “Or maybe not only that.”

“What does that mean?” Dex said.

Although human, he’d opted to stay in here with the rest of them, and help Alisha, one of Black’s human tech experts, with the recording side of things. Like a lot of the humans on his team, Black knew Dex was frustrated with feeling at a disadvantage now that he’d been thrust into working with so many seers.

Black made a mental note that he had to remember that, and remember that his team, especially the senior members, were used to having a hell of a lot more control.

The thing with Miri only highlighted that; it didn’t create it.

Remembering Miri’s face when she’d gotten up to leave the conference room, he winced, covering it by wiping a hand over his face.

Yarli was already talking to Dex though, and Black found he’d missed the beginning of her answer to his question.

“…so almost like she’s puddle-hopping between different dimensions,” she was saying. “It’s like she creates a portal. Like a miniature wormhole. Then she just…” Yarli made a sweeping gesture with one hand. “…falls through it. That’s what it looked like. The structures she has doing it are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, even on the Sword and Bridge.”

Black fought not to roll his eyes.

He was pretty sick of them bringing up the Sword and the Bridge all the time. Most of the new seers in his leadership team had worked with the two intermediaries in some capacity, before they’d come to this version of Earth, so he supposed it made sense.

It was still annoying.

He had to remind himself how new to this world all of them still were.

It had only been about six months… maybe seven… since that portal opened in New Mexico. Unlike Black, Charles, and a few hundred “legacy” seers––as Black was beginning to think of them––they hadn’t come through gradually, but all at once.

Black might not have been born here, like Miri, but he’d lived on this version of Earth pretty much all of his adult life. He was probably one of the few seers on the planet, in fact, who’d been here longer than he’d been in that other world, if only because he’d been younger when he got here.

He’d arrived on this version of Earth in 1953.

Refocusing on Yarli, he heard her add,

“…I don’t know how teleporting generally works. But Miri’s not disassembling in any way. She’s remaining intact, as far as we can tell––”

“She looked like she was,” Black blurted, drawing both sets of eyes over to him. “Disassembling,” he clarified. “She was fading. I saw her growing insubstantial.”

Yarli frowned.

He felt the light, feathery touches of her light, and saw her eyes shift out of focus as she looked at the specific memory Black was referencing.

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