Janni was plopped unceremoniously in a hard metal chair, her wrists lashed behind it. Sounded as if Samstag got the same treatment, a bit to her left. The hostility felt aimed more at her than him, though.

“Why are you really here?” someone male asked as the blackout bag was yanked off her head.

Adjusting her eyes to the bright light took a moment’s conscious adjustment of her irises. The speaker wasn’t the tweaker but was obviously some sort of biological relative—father, uncle, cousin… Janni didn’t have enough interest to expend the energy to read the direct relationship from the bio-identity.

“I told your tweaker,” she said. “Ask her.”

“I did. She said you were hiding something.”

Janni gave the man—a prime of some sort, though she wasn’t about to go fishing to figure out which type—a flat look. “So are you.”

“Ah, but I hold the advantage here.”

She casually broke the rope, brought her hands forward, and nonchalantly rubbed her palms together, watching the man all the while.

He didn’t flinch. Gave a little smile, even.

“What about your friend?” he asked, tone polite. “He isn’t doing the same.”

Of course not. Samstag wasn’t stupid, assuming he was even conscious. She was the target, so his best bet was to stay quiet and watch for openings to escape while they were focused on her.

She smiled pleasantly. “Shadow kills native? Sounds like the sort of thing that gets Shadow Corps’s notice.”

The man’s eyes narrowed at her. “He’s shadowborn.”

“Native,” she insisted, though the man was probably correct, judging from Samstag’s low-grade sensate abilities.

“And what would an alpha care for a neg?” the man asked softly. “Jannis Lysacarly Keller?”

Oh, shit.

All this time of knowing an alternate version of herself was a Shadow Corps operative, and it hadn’t occurred to her that others would have met the woman. And possibly bear grudges from the meeting.

And most sensates and jumpers weren’t sensitive enough to distinguish the difference between two comparable-yet-distinct universes, just that someone was close enough for horseshoes.

Janni knew her smile weakened and her forehead furrowed with worry, but she never had been able to rid herself of all her tells. She never had gotten the nerve to ask Kitten how she’d done it, herself. “I think we might’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.”

“Is that so?”

“I’m not Shadow Corps. I take it you’ve had some run-ins with—”

“You killed my son.”

Crap. “No, that would’ve been Lysacarly—”

“You don’t even have the guts to take responsibility for what you did,” he cut in, face and voice laden with contempt.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “If I killed your son, I would admit it—and I certainly wouldn’t have come waltzing into your territory without—” a sacrifice.

Her psy abilities warned her that finishing that sentence would’ve been very bad for Samstag’s continued survival, since it could be interpreted as offering him to appease her captor for the loss of his son—and that interpretation would be insulting, since she and Samstag didn’t have a relationship comparable to a man and son.

She let out a huff of breath. “Look, I came to this somewhen because I was following someone.”

“Really. And what did this person do to you?”

She didn’t dare lie, but she had to be careful how she phrased what she said, to keep from handing him fodder to reinforce his own opinion. “He’s giving Shadow Corps too much reason to notice the somewhen I’m living in.”

That was really the core of her interest in the matter—that and maybe getting back in her allies’ good graces a bit sooner than she otherwise would. They liked when she went out of her way to help someone who wouldn’t directly benefit her.

His upper lip curled. “Going rogue doesn’t bring my son back.”

“I’m not Lysacarly,” Janni repeated. “I haven’t even met her.”

“You’ve never met yourself.”

“I’ve never met that me,” Janni specified. “One of my friends back home is a Nameless version of me. She’s creepy enough that I really don’t want to meet Shadow Corps–me.”

Janni didn’t offer to be scanned. At her level of merger talent, she could easily feed a scan what she wanted them to see. If they knew that from whatever they’d experienced with Lysacarly, any such offer would be seen as an insult if not an attempt to trick them.

The man glared at her.

She just stared back. Jumping back to the somewhen she lived in would leave enough trace that it would probably send Puce running, but she could do it, if necessary. The main downside to being a merger rather than a navigator was that she couldn’t hide her transit itself, just the aftereffects once she was on location.

Well, that and it took her longer to calculate hops between somewhens, and there was a significant chance that emergency jumps would land her in a different somewhen than she intended, unless she knew the route between somewhens really well or found a clear path left by others. Misdirected jumps were even more likely if she tried hauling a passenger along—something that mergers found difficult even when they had a firm grip on their passenger and plenty of time to calculate things out. Far easier to snatch someone just as the jumper crossed somewhens, but that was also one of the most dangerous methods, since it had to be timed and set up just right.

Janni frowned. Puce—if it was Puce, but she figured she might as well assume—had made a path from this somewhen to the one they lived in. If she grabbed that, she could jump even faster than usual, though she wouldn’t be able to take Samstag through a hard edge. Sensates were particularly susceptible to the potentially lethal side effects. Maybe if he had a bit of training, enough to consciously avoid using that…

No, she could only focus on getting herself out, and the bridge’s point of entry in this somewhen would be the simplest, most accurate, and fastest route to take back home.

But how to find that? She didn’t know where either endpoint was, and she didn’t sense any residuals of the person or persons who had jumped. Tracking down gates and paths was more of a navigator-class skill, anyway.

Almost made her wonder if the navigator of Kitten’s clutch had been murdered, earlier that week, because she was a navigator and therefore poised to sabotage what someone was planning.

And the man currently holding her captive was still scowling at her.

“Yes?” she asked pleasantly.

“We don’t have blockers here. You could’ve left at any time. But you’ve stayed.”

“Yes,” she agreed, wondering why he sounded disgusted by her obvious preference to keep her allies alive.

“You say the other-you isn’t Shadow Corps, either.”

“She isn’t.”

He nodded, and she had a bad feeling even before he signaled for his people to release her but not Samstag. “Prove it.”

Else your friend won’t live was the unspoken threat, and she knew better than to doubt that the man meant it.

“I don’t often mess with sequential time,” she admitted, figuring he would be familiar enough with jumping to know the terminology for how someone experienced time when they hopped directly to various points of it. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

Her had-been captor’s expression turned mild. “You have one hour.”

“One—” That was too small of a window for her to be able to calculate, so she’d have to jump until she hit it—or weave a jump loop, which she wasn’t that practiced with and would have to keep her grip on or it would probably fling her into another somewhen, and probably one close to Second’s.

Either option would catch Puce’s notice, whether he was using alpha or apex methods to guard himself.

And for once she’d planned this visit to be linear enough to avoid this sort of thing.

But what else was she going to do, let herself be set up to take the fall for the murder of a public security officer?

Janni clenched her jaw. “One hour,” she acknowledged, and she started weaving a jump loop to slingshot her back. If it failed, she could always jump herself out of whatever somewhen she ended up in.

She reached into the threads of probability that tied her to the somewhen she’d come from and the other-her that lived there, and she took advantage of psychic resonance to help her force a path. A navigator could’ve done that mid-jump, but a merger who tried to define their destination while in transit tended to land in somewhens quite Other from what they intended to aim for. Could be fun for vacations, but could also be extremely dangerous—as she’d learned the hard way when one such jump dropped her into a battlefield with chemical warfare that sought mods’ genetic markers.

Janni still wasn’t sure how she’d survived that one. TamLin had been furious when she’d woken up—several days later, in a somewhen far more primitive than she liked.

He was gonna love that she’d gotten his Nameless girlfriend caught up in this mess.

She met her blackmailer’s glare with a scowl of her own and jumped.