Janni had forgotten that jump loops disoriented her until she was in the middle of the one taking her and guests back to Samstag and his captors, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever known that they also gave her migraines. She’d thought that was just bond bleed from TamLin, whose natural reaction to jumping was incapacitation from pain—but she was no longer bonded to him, so this particular pain was innate to her, not him.

Even if he was incapacitated from pain at the moment.

Of course, some degree of ‘incapacitation’ came down to willpower or experience, and TamLin had enough of both to be able to stab someone well past the point that most people would just be whimpering in the fetal position.

Which he was about to make clear now, to the gang members moving in on her collateral.

“Wait!” she snapped to her blackmailer before his followers could learn the hard way why TamLin was a danger to civilized society. “I couldn’t grab the Nameless girl before the jump loop kicked back in”—more like, before she lost her grip on it, but whatever—“but she’ll come for him.”

The man’s eyes narrowed, and he studied her. “Which ‘him’?”

And that was why Janni would’ve tried to grab both Misha and TamLin together even if she hadn’t been in too-close proximity for her to separate them.

Some things would’ve been so much easier, had she been a navigator.

But had she been a navigator, she wouldn’t have been able to merge TamLin’s bio-identity with the somewhen they were in, to keep him from suffering a…stroke? Aneurism? Something like that. Sensates had more issues jumping than most, and grade blacks like TamLin pretty much couldn’t survive jumping without an upper-grade merger helping them.

She smiled at her blackmailer and let that be the answer to his question.

His frown deepened into a scowl, but he didn’t press. Perhaps he realized she’d only answer as much as she wanted, even if he applied the types of pressure he had the stomach for.

He was obviously willing to engage in violence or blackmail, and he wouldn’t have his position in the gang if he weren’t willing to dispose of problems. But willingness to torture required either a predisposition towards or acceptance of malicious sadism, and she didn’t sense either from him. His desire to kill Samstag stemmed from a desire for vengeance on her, not out of any real problem with local public security. She had the sense that he usually got along pretty well with law enforcement, which made her wonder about the usual purpose behind his gang.

Misha jerked awake with a little meep.

TamLin, his bio-identity more-or-less reoriented for the current somewhen, slanted him a glance. “Congratulations on your first successful crossing to another somewhen. For our next trick, we’re going to find out why my ex decided that endangering you was a good idea.”

How melodramatic. She rolled her eyes. “Our host thinks I’m Shadow Corps.”

Blatant confusion filled Misha’s face.

TamLin’s expression went even flatter than it already was.

Pain was pulsating in her side and TamLin was pinning her to the floor before she could respond to that warning.

He slammed her head into the manmade stone. Concrete? Asphalt? She never could remember the difference.

Misha yelped. “Lin!”

TamLin’s hands were on her neck.

Panic welled. She shunted the instinct aside—he was holding her head to the ground, not applying pressure to her throat.

Dizziness hit her anyway.

“You’ve baited Second to a pulse zone?” he asked, so evenly that fear welled in her stomach.

TamLin had never actually tried to kill her. Had she stumbled into what would make him try?

“What the hell is a pulse zone?” Misha asked softly, agitated enough to both speak up and be hesitant about it.

“Don’t you want to get home?” she managed to ask. Killing her would not be conducive to that.

She felt him pause, evaluate what her question indicated about what she was thinking, and realized he hadn’t been thinking about a lethal resolution. Not yet.

“He doesn’t need you for that.”

The voice startled her—she’d expected Second to take a bit longer to catch up.

Judging from the reactions from the gang around them, Second had startled them, too.

Nervousness welled in Janni. This situation could oh so easily turn to ash.

TamLin got off her, let her up, and his eyes were smiling at Second.

…Or maybe he was just pleased to see the somehow empty chair that was where Samstag had been, which Second had just dropped some rolled-up rope on.

“I jumped the sec outside,” Second said, apparently to the gang’s leader. “Figured you wouldn’t want a native involved.”

She was years younger than Janni was, and Janni had never managed to microjump. How could she?

“Your alternate called you Nameless,” the man responded.

He didn’t say outright that she wasn’t sounding like a Nameless, at the moment.

Janni cringed. She’d forgotten that her chattiness bled into Second, in situations like this.

“Did she,” Second said blandly, her words pitched as ‘That’s nice.’

The Nameless girl locked gazes with TamLin.

“He’s who you’ve come for, then?” asked gang leader, self-satisfaction thick in his voice.

Second’s gaze jumped to him, so she heard it, too. “I’m here for them both.”

“Jannis Lysacarly Keller murdered my son.”

Second gave as little response as a person might expect from someone used to death and the potential ramifications of it. Or maybe her lack of reaction just came from being used to having to kill zombies that had developed out of people she’d known.

After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Misha hopped in the conversation to say, “Well, we’re sorry about that, but what does that have to do with us?”

“I want her dead.”

The thought of killing the Shadow Corps edition of herself set Janni laughing, though even she wasn’t quite sure what she found so funny about the prospect.

“You want to kill a Shadow Corps operative? That would mean death, deportation, or conscription for every shadow and shadowborn in this room,” TamLin said outright.

“That means your niece,” Second said, and her webbing flashed in and out of sight as it crawled and pulsed through her skin. “Also your son, four rooms away.”

Now she was just showing off. Janni scowled.

Second ignored it.