Janni and Samstag left the grouchy grandfather in the hall outside the interrogation room, and Samstag took her to a large room with a series of desks separated only by empty space. He set his coffee down on one—his desk, she assumed, and its position at the edge of the pack was probably a perk of his position. Whatever his position was.

“So how does one go about finding a…‘white shadow attempting godhood in smallville’?” Agent Samstag asked mildly as he unlocked his desk drawer and paged through the file folders.

Janni shrugged, oh so casually, and didn’t let on that she noticed the six different agents watching her. “Depends on the resources that are available at one’s disposal. In this situation, our first step to take is obvious.”

“Is that so?” Annoyance seasoned his voice.

That meant he wasn’t enjoying the coyness, so she dropped it. “Figure out which part of town he’s holed up in. You figure out the quadrant, you can then narrow things down to the bolthole.”

“Okay.” He sipped his coffee. “And how do I do that?”

Oh. He’d been asking how he could track Puce. Her smile wobbled. “That’s what you need me for.”

Samstag restrained his frown. “So you use your…ability for that?”

“Of course not,” she answered. “Why wear myself out to track down the time-space residuals for which quadrant of town he’s in, when a little leg work can find that out?”

“How are we supposed to find his quadrant, then?”

Considering the level of technology in this somewhen, she probably needed to make sure… “You have some way to display recent missing persons reports?”

“We have a pinboard.”

Janni checked his thoughts of what, precisely, a pinboard even was. “That’ll work.”

The sidelong glance he slid her way said he’d caught that this somewhen was primitive compared to where she usually lived.

So how had Samstag gotten stuck in a temporal anomaly when the universe hadn’t even developed the ability to detect ripplers yet? Ripplers were like Schrödinger's cat, in the sense that they didn’t really affect anyone incapable of understanding what they were. If you couldn’t detect them, they wouldn’t affect you, because the very process of detecting them was what brought them into a somewhen.

“Hmm,” Janni said.

Samstag cast another glance at her. She shrugged dismissal of his wordless query for what she was thinking. He accepted that and showed her to a room with a large board of cork spanning much of the wall, behind a small table.

“Heather,” Samstag said to a woman that couldn’t be anything but a secretary. “Get us a map, would you? And then a printout of all missing persons for the area in the past…six months? Would that be enough?”

“Better go a few years,” Janni said, considering the cork board and push pins and recognizing that they were going to have to plot this out manually. Ugh. “He’s comfortable here, so he’s been hopping back and forth for a while.”

“You know of other universes he visits?” Samstag asked. “Why not pursue him there? We’re not equipped for this sort of takedown.”

The secretary returned so quickly with the map that surely they had a stack in an office supplies closet, just waiting to be used.

“They aren’t, either,” Janni said, taking a push pin from the container and considering it. Her psy abilities let her know what they were, thanks to the surface thoughts of other people around her, but that wasn’t the same as having actually used one, herself.

“So why us?” Samstag asked. “Why here?”

The secretary unfolded the map and put it up with the brisk ease that came from long practice. Janni watched her put a few pins in.

“Because here,” she said, carefully adding her own pin to support one of the sides, “he isn’t in charge.”