Raleigh recovered her equilibrium by making coffee and preparing sandwiches to stick in the fridge, for everyone to eat whenever they got around to it. Janni came in when Raleigh was halfway through putting jalapeño kale chips on the sandwich she’d made for herself. “You okay?”

“This body is undamaged,” Janni said, one of the few overtly odd things she’d say, sometimes. Brushing her brown-dyed bangs out of her eyes, she wrinkled her nose and peered at the sandwich. “I hope you have something prepped that you didn’t ruin with condiments.”

Raleigh pointed a thumb at the fridge. Janni promptly opened it and grabbed a plastic-wrapped sandwich and a single-serve bottle of milk.

Before Janni could ask where their third roommate was, Raleigh said, “Kitten’s brother picked her up for lunch.”

The milk bottle and sandwich hit the floor, and Janni was facing Raleigh before her combat chip recognized a possible threat.

Raleigh swallowed hard, pulse pounding from the adrenaline. “You look a lot like Kitten when you do that.”

Janni watched her for a long moment—looking ever so creepily like Kitten—then blinked once, still as expressive as an iceberg. “Unsurprising.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The other woman—Raleigh thought Janni was younger than she was, but it was hard to tell, and it was always possible that something in Janni’s universe made aging go funky—looked irritated. “You’ve lived with us for months, Raleigh. Months. You have military-grade enhancements. Granted, your universe is apex class, not all that advanced, but… How have you not noticed?”

Only Janni could pull off indignant and insulting at the same time.

“Noticed what?” Raleigh snapped, perhaps more irritated than she should’ve been.

Janni indicated her face—no, her eyes, which were pale blue, much like—

No. Exactly like Kitten’s.

“Finally.” Janni huffed, as if it were perfectly natural to assume that someone from another universe would hang out with an alternate version of herself. “That wasn’t all that hard, was it?”

That explained why the roots of Janni’s brown hair came in the precise shade of auburn of Kitten’s, and Raleigh could only assume that Janni had her hair professionally styled to further promote the dissimilarity. And… “You have a brother?”

Janni’s gaze chilled, and Raleigh wondered why she’d never noticed how comparable she and Kitten were. Now that she thought of it, they were most similar when one or the other was agitated. Some low-level empathic or telepathic ability, maybe?

Then Janni’s eyes thawed to their usual pale blue, more water than ice. “I had a brother,” she said, tone the clinical one she used when discussing potentially disturbing topics. “He didn’t survive to Naming, in my universe.”

Raleigh stared. “Naming?” she whispered. Maybe Janni was old enough to have relearned civilian reflexes after she’d once been an assassin.

Janni crouched and waved a dismissive hand as she picked up the dropped milk and sandwich. “I wasn’t handicapped. I was Named on my first birthday, which is the normal date for mods. Um, primes. Alphas?” She squinted at Raleigh. “Your universe didn’t have us, but you get my gist, I think.”

Raleigh blinked. “But you aren’t a cyborg.”

That question had come up in conversation before, though Janni never had explained how she could read people’s bio-identities. Raleigh had assumed it was some freak mutation, but Kitten couldn’t do that…so far as Raleigh knew.

“Not as such, no.” Janni sighed. “Apex class modifications are all tech, hardware—so ‘hard’ mods. They end with you. No inheritance involved.”

That wasn’t strictly true. “I inherited a tolerance for them.”

She shook her head and set her sandwich and bottle of milk on the counter. “Not the same.” She quickly unwrapped the food. “Some universes, the mods are biological, inherited. That’s ‘soft’ mods. Usually, scientists who played God that much ended up producing monsters, too, so the originally optional mods ended up necessary.”

Janni took a bite, chewed, swallowed—and didn’t comment on the mustard, which meant she wasn’t paying attention to what she was eating. “But soft mods get…messy. They don’t always take, or they cause problems. So, to make sure kids aren’t handicapped, they aren’t…named, aren’t legally people, until they survive x months. And then if something shows up before that ceremony, and you’re a cripple…” She grimaced.

With how clearly Janni was explaining things now, Raleigh was starting to believe the woman was usually hard to follow on purpose. “Then you don’t get Named?”

Janni eyed her sharply, belying her usual happy-go-lucky behavior. “No. You’re either euthanized, or you’re one of the Nameless.” She was quiet for a long moment. “Neither option is kind. In some universes, one option is more common than the other.”

“Kitten is Nameless?”

“Third,” Janni said softly. “She is Third of her… I’m not sure what they call a group of Nameless. Her brother…” Her gaze went distant. “Her brother was First, for the same reason he was euthanized in my universe.”

Raleigh had always assumed Janni’s home universe was better than Kitten’s. Now she wasn’t so sure. “Your parents killed him?”

“I’m not sure what his disability is… It was before I was born, and nobody thought about it, and Kitten’s good at avoiding thoughts she doesn’t want me to pick up.”

Raleigh stared. “You’re telepathic?”

Janni shook her head. “More…empathic,” she said blandly. “I’m…a weaker psy than my alternates. I’m actually better off than the strongest me—”

“There’s another version of you? In this universe?” Three versions of the same person seemed overmuch.

“Sometimes. Lysacarly jumps universes a lot for her job, but she’s not infrequently in this one—likely due to Kitten and me, though I don’t think she’s noticed us yet. When you fold time and space enough to produce paradoxes like ours, well… Like attracts like.”

Raleigh wondered how many versions of her there were. “And when…Lysacarly…notices you?”

“She might have to arrest us—me, Kitten. Lysacarly’s Shadow Corps.” Janni paused, but she evidently wasn’t waiting for Raleigh’s reaction to discovering that a telepathic version of Janni was an active member of the stay-in-your-own-universe police, because she continued before Raleigh could think of one. “What happens is my memory and thoughts can get…confused, with those of any other version of me that’s in range. It’s a known issue for psy-positives, and it’s usually called ‘resonance’. Kitten and I are fairly used to it, though she started out enough better than me that I suspect she’s met herself more often than I have. Lysacarly might be used to it, but she’s fully telepathic, so it’ll affect her worse than it does us.”

The woman’s casual chatting about alternate versions of herself reminded Raleigh of how, when they’d met, Janni had glanced at her gills and said, “Apex. Need a place to stay?” Only later had Raleigh realized that Janni’s ‘apex’ was a comment on the type of universe she was from.

“What does this have to do with…First”—Kitten’s brother—“taking her to lunch?”

Janni frowned, pausing. “Did they say anything about Second?”

“She was First’s wife.”

Janni nodded, as if she’d known that.

“And she’s dead.”

Janni stared at Raleigh, again resembling Kitten. Then she cursed, quietly but vehemently, for several seconds. “Dead?” she muttered. “How can Dasher be…”

Raleigh assumed Second’s name had been Dasher, in Janni’s universe.

Janni stood, polished off her sandwich, and gulped down her milk. “Did they say where they were going?”

She shook her head.

“Did they say when they’d be back?”

Raleigh just gave Janni a What do you think? frown.

Janni went on another cursing spree, running her hands through her hair. “Okay. You see them—either of them—call me, okay? This…this is not good.” She pulled her console from her pocket, started scrolling through her contacts, grimaced, then pocketed it again.

And promptly left the apartment without bothering to fill Raleigh in or try to recruit her for help.

Raleigh couldn’t help but wonder if that oversight was a commentary on how much Janni valued her friendship.