Vee stares at me. “You know Max?”
But I’m moving on.
“Murder pickles.” My finger circles around Jasper’s favourite restaurant.
“Excuse me?” Vee asks with a laugh.
I find Walter Wolfe’s penthouse, but there’s no red circle. Instead, there’s a straight pin with a piece of blue string tied around it.
“What’s this?”
Vee frowns. “That one I don’t know. It happened after most of the other ones. It wasn’t nearly as big, but then there was a second pulse right after it that shorted out the wiring in the board. Took me a couple hours yesterday morning to get it going again.”
My heart is beating fast. I press my finger against the head of the pin until it hurts. Slowly, I exhale a fine breath as frost gently twists around the pin. The string goes stiff, and crystals create a small circle around the hole in the paper.
“That’s neat,” Vee says. “New trick?”
I don’t even know how to explain, so I say, “That’s where Jasper died. And the second pulse was me.”
“You?”
I go backward, touching each of the other red circles. “Bus. Stab wound. Pickles.” I trace the outline around my home. “Indigo.”
Vee’s eyes go wide as she studies the map. “This was you dying?”
“Think so. Except for the one with Jasper.” I trail my finger over other landmarks I don’t recognize. Probably the other nights. The ones I don’t remember from before. I count them, then swallow hard as I lose track and have to start again.
Sixty-four. Sixty-five . . . seventy. Seventy-one.
“How many are there?” I ask. My hands are shaking, and my heart is beating so fast. Little circles of frost form anywhere I touch and I finally have to stuff my hands in my pockets.
Vee’s gaze is still on the map, unaware that anything is wrong.
“I ran out of pins at a hundred and fifty, but even before that I couldn’t keep up. Like I said. It went on for hours.” She puts a hand on my arm and it’s there. The whirlpool that would suck everything out of her if I let it. She seems to know because she hisses and pulls back. “Those were all you?”
But I can’t answer. A hundred and fifty. More maybe. We’ve been in here for at least six months, not sixty days. I wobble with the very idea of it. I always assumed that Jasper remembered every one of our dates, but there must have been weeks or months before he started to remember.
“What is going on?” I breathe.
“I was hoping you were going to tell me,” Vee says. She taps a final pin. She’s drawn a circle around it, at least three times the size of any of the other markings in the city.
“That’s Ziro Labs,” I say, dread vying for space against panic.
Her mouth is thin as I stand. “Yeah.”
“But I never died here.” Not that I remember, anyway. “So what is that?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Figured I couldn’t exactly roll up to the front gate and ask you if you had a teleportation machine in the basement.”
“We don’t. We’ve been working on...” But my words cut off as a thought occurs to me. Or half a thought. Like a toddler that asks for attention, but you can’t tell what exactly it wants. My eyes go back and forth from Wench to Kicks, the pickle restaurant to my house. I try to find the subdivision where Jasper’s family lives before spinning back downtown and out again to the blank space that is the Wolfe Tech complex.
“There should be a circle here.” I tap the map.
“Did you die there?”
“No, but they have a—” The toddler asks for attention again.
I told Jasper if I were building a time machine, I wouldn’t set it up in my basement. Who knows what would happen if it broke down?
