The man seated across from Janni tapped the tabletop. He cycled through each work-roughened finger, one per second, then skipped a second for the scarred thumb, which faced her—the print had been seared off, suggesting the rest of his fingertips were similarly modified—before he restarted.

The off-kilter pattern was doubtless meant to discomfit her.

Janni smiled.

He paused, then resumed his tapping. “Who are you?”

His questions didn’t affect the cycle, so he had a better sense of time and coordination than most nons. That took training, except for the rare savant.

“Where are you from?”

She waited.

“Why are you here?”

They had repeated that cycle for the past hour or so—felt longer, but that was normal for monotony—and before that, she’d spent a solid two hours sitting here, in this chair, with her wrists shackled behind her. They’d given her a nice lead on the chain, though. Not so loose as to leave her able to wriggle out, but not so tight as to hurt her.

Not once in the past hour had irritation flared in his dark eyes or face—dark from birth, not sun.

Her interrogator abruptly stopped tapping, sighed, and stretched his neck and shoulders. “You could keep this up all week, couldn’t you?”

The mild question sounded intrigued, almost amused, and not at all annoyed.

Janni liked him. She let her expression soften.

He folded his fingers over each other—from the glimpse she caught, all his fingerprints were indeed seared—and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. “All right. What will you tell me?”

The question made her want to grin, but that wouldn’t be appropriate, so she sucked in her lips, cleared her throat, and schooled her face into a polite smile. “Not ‘What are you?’”

He returned the expression. Both eyes crinkled at the edges, too, so the smile was likely genuine. “Human. Obviously.”

She scrutinized him, but the fingertip scars suggested he was a shadow-type operative. No tech besides the communication jack behind the ear, and no bio-mods that she could—

She dropped her psy shielding long enough to catch that he was a grade-orange sensate—the equivalent of a receptor dish for strong emotions—and she raised her eyebrows. He was a mod, not a non. “Shadowborn.”

Shadows were people from universes other than the one they were in. Any descendants who inherited knowledge or abilities from another somewhen were called shadowborn.

He raised a single shoulder and dropped it in a half shrug. “Maybe.”

She kept her eyebrows up. She hadn’t realized this universe had already started genetic engineering.

“So?” he pressed. “What will you tell me?”

She leaned forward, elbows on the table, mirroring his position although her shackles added weight to her wrists. How much did he know about his origins? She intentionally used the jargon of Shadow Corps, the organization that policed people like her, as she calmly said, “White shadow in smallville attempting godhood.”

He blinked once, and his gaze went up and to the left as he processed her words. “Shadows are supposed to be dark,” he said slowly. “So ‘white shadow’ is one of you that’s…a criminal?”

Janni ignored his identification of her as from another universe—that was irrelevant, at this point—and translated what she’d said: “You have a shadow in one of the suburbs who’s engaging in human experimentation to try to produce alpha mods. ‘Alpha mods’ being the ones that ultimately result in everyone with them longing to kill all their siblings of the same gender due to ingrained loathing.”

He blinked again. “You killed your sisters?”

“No.” She could kill her sister if she had to, but Nev was older, stronger, and her mods were better integrated. Nev just didn’t have the wherewithal to kill someone she knew, even if that person had become a zombie out to eat her brains.

Granted, that had only happened once, but Janni hated to think about what would’ve resulted in the universes wherein she hadn’t happened to be there, to destroy the parasite before it reached the virulent stage. She’d never actually visited one of the zombie apocalypse hellverses, but she knew people who had.

Her bondmate was currently—and wittingly—not-dating a version of her from one such universe, in fact. The poor girl was younger than Janni and a far better match for TamLin than she herself had ever been.

Her interrogator rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand. “So we have someone trying to illegally modify themselves in a way that’s known to produce insanity?”

His belittling of alpha mods triggered a sense of insult and indignation, which Janni promptly squelched. He wasn’t talking about her—and her interest in him was premature. She didn’t even know his name, yet.

“I’m pretty sure he’s a mass murderer who’s fled his universe to escape retribution.” Or a mob boss who was taking a temporary hiatus from his native universe while he sought to destroy her ex-bondmate. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

Her interrogator’s right hand went through a tapping cycle. “What would it take for your ‘pretty sure’ to be ‘all sure’?”

Interesting question. He had dealt with more than his share of shadows, then, which made her suspect this somewhen was on its way to becoming a convergence…and that was something she should’ve been able to tell, upon entering it. So why hadn’t she?

She held out her left hand as far over the table as the chain would let her, and gave the answer that would be true if she were actually the grade red she’d always aimed to test as, rather than the level of merger she actually was. “Touch.”

His eyes smiled again, and he stretched his arm out to touch three fingers against hers.

Janni made use of her core mods, which were hidden from view by further mods, some of which had been installed by her sister. What she gained in discretion, she lost in power, so she wasn’t nearly the strongest version of herself she’d ever met.

But the stronger versions of her were far more vulnerable to psy overload, so she found the trade-off well worth the cost.

Janni held their touch for several seconds longer than necessary, because it was always safer to let others underestimate you than for them to know the full extent of your abilities. (She suspected that particular feeling was part of the mod-ingrained paranoia, but she didn’t see any harm in it.)

She withdrew her hand and twisted her wrists, adjusting the way the shackles lay against her skin. “You’re from this universe; never been to another one. You have, however, been involved in a temporal anomaly, which put you back in time slightly, but it remained within your time zone—that is, within the zone of time wherein you naturally live, so it was between your birth and the date when it happened, for you.”

He chuckled. “It set me back thirty minutes.” Smiling, he glanced at the mirror. “And my comrades are freaking out over how the Ford you can know that.”

She frowned.

“Sorry. Book reference—Brave New World. I’m a fan of the dystopian classics.”

Janni nodded. “I’m more of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning fan, myself.”

He frowned.

“Poet, eighteenth century Earth?” She shrugged. “Not sure why.”

He raised his own eyebrows, apparently surprised by her choice in literature, but he was polite enough to refrain from ridiculing her over it.

Or, possibly, just smart enough to avoid irritating a woman who could probably kill him without breaking a sweat. Nice people didn’t go universe-hopping.

More accurately, nice people didn’t have the hutzpah, wherewithal, or wits to be able to do it and get away with it.

“You have alpha mods, yourself?” he asked.

She met his inquisitive expression with a bland stare.

He answered with a smile. “Fair. You seem sane enough to work with.”

Indignation welled up again, and it got stronger than she liked before she managed to stomp it back under control.

‘Sane’ was such a relative concept.