As Janni did what she could to help Samstag and the few officemates he’d recruited to help him map out the missing persons reports, starting from the most recent, she marveled that police in these types of somewhens caught as many criminals as they did.

Considering what she was overhearing from other in-progress investigations, that success rate might’ve been mostly a matter of general stupidity from the average criminal, but still. There were only so many hours in a day, and they were taking so long to map this out…

She did a double-take at the map and moved to check it from another angle before she said, “Stop! Stop! We don’t need any more than that, thank you. You can all go back to whatever crime you were working on solving. We have this now, thanks.”

Samstag looked at her with surprise. “We only have two months on here.”

“It’s enough.” Janni grabbed a legal pad and stylus, realized what she was holding, then swapped the stylus for a pen. She diagrammed the basic structure and set about finding the golden helix.

She finished that and ripped the page off the pad in time to see Samstag considering the stylus she’d handled with a bemused expression.

“What?” she asked, setting the page upside-down on the table.

“Precisely how primitive is this universe compared to the one you’re from?”

“The one I was born in or the one I live in?” she replied promptly, repeating the diagram and calculations she’d just made on a fresh page.

Samstag took a few sips of coffee before answering, “The one you live in.”

“Not too far behind this one. A century at most.” She finished the duplicate calculation, then picked up the first page and compared her results. They matched.

Relief that she wouldn’t have to announce that particular defect just yet settled in her bones. Math relating to merging came naturally to her, her instincts letting her follow the numbers in a way that most folks couldn’t comprehend. Navigators had the same problem, but their view of numbers focused on reaching a destination, rather than on blending with one, so navigators and mergers tended to not understand each other that well, either.

The end result was that both types of jumper-class primes had difficulties with normal math. The repetition of the problem was her particular check method. Whatever answer she got from two out of three attempts to solve a problem was the right one. Usually.

She pointed to the spoke of the golden helix with her pen. “Here. He’s somewhere in this neighborhood.”

Samstag nodded and tapped the pages—each index finger applied to a single page. “Dyscalculia?”

Janni’s face went hot with what was surely a flush.

He raised his hands in placation or surrender. “No offense intended. These things are just useful to know.”

She took the few seconds she needed to wrangle the instinctual revulsion and indignation under control so she wouldn’t lash out in temper. “Not exactly. The nuances of it are unique to jumpers, so far as I know.”

“Jumpers? As in time jumpers?”

“Jumpers, as in…” Oh, he was a sensate. He needed to know this. “As in people genetically engineered to have the ability to hop somewhens. There are two main variants: navigators, who are best at crossing to a particular somewhen; and mergers, who are best at enabling others to survive the crossing.” That was one way of describing the difference, at any rate.

“What type are you?” Samstag asked. “Navigator?”

She usually didn’t admit this, but what the hell. “Merger. So if you run into another rippler, I can keep you from going into temporal arrest, but I can’t ferry you to a particular somewhen very well unless there’s already a path set up.”

“Temporal arrest?”

“Laws of conservation of mass and energy don’t like it when people fuck with them,” Janni said dryly, though that particular turn of phrase rolled awkwardly off her tongue.

She wondered if she’d be returning back to her somewhen only to discover that TamLin had added Kitten to the list of people he’d started on a drug habit. She surmised she was supposed to feel grateful that at least he procured his narcotics legally.

Janni sighed.