Chapter 9 - The Missing Month.

Getting the man back to the cabin was a pain, given that he weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. Carrying wasn’t an option, so Jane settled for dragging him by his feet. Did she entertain herself by pulling him over as many large rocks as she could find? She did.

Halfway down the driveway, Cooper came running toward her from the cabin, and her heart did a few happy backflips. Letting the man’s legs drop with a thud, she fell into his embrace.

They stayed like that for a while. Cooper was shaking.

“I’ve never been that scared in my life,” he said.

“You? I was terrified.”

“Let’s never split up again. That plan sucked.”

“Agreed.”

She quickly recounted what she heard the man say, and Cooper’s face melted into a frown with the explanation.

“We’re on a game show?” he said. “What even the entire hell?”

Jane pointed. “Let’s get him into the cabin and figure this out.”

Together, they hoisted him to his feet and walked him through the front door. No single room in the cabin screamed “perfect interrogation spot,” so they settled for tying him to a kitchen chair. Cooper made coffee while she secured the man with zip ties. As she worked, she remembered to check for an earpiece. Sure enough, she found a transmitter device tucked behind his earlobe, which she pulled out and crunched beneath her heel on the kitchen floor.

“You hit him pretty hard,” Cooper noted, taking a sip of his coffee.

“I was annoyed.”

“He’s been out for nearly half an hour. You probably gave him a concussion.”

“Good.”

“Let’s speed this along.” Cooper poured a glass of water from the sink and dumped it on the man’s head. He groaned and started to stir. Jane felt her pulse quicken, and her hands itched with the desire to punch him a few more times. Finally, she had someone in front of her who was responsible for the past few days of insanity. If she had to break every single knuckle in her hand to get answers, well then, that’s what she’d do.

Cooper calmly sipped his coffee as the man blinked himself awake. He registered his situation as he looked around—tied up, dripping water, Jane and Cooper standing over him.

“Oh shit,” he groaned.

“Yup,” Cooper agreed.

“I—” was as far as the man got before hunching forward to be noisily sick on the kitchen floor. Jane stepped away and let him get it out of his system. She’d definitely given him a concussion.

After a few moments, the man was left breathless, chest hitching. He groaned.

“I feel awful. You two are the worst.”

“Who are you? Why are you after us? Who are the people attacking us?” Jane moved closer and closer with each question. She screamed the last one into his dumb cow face, enjoying the way his smug, polished veneer shattered into fear. The words fell from his mouth in a tumble.

“I told them this would never work. We should have moved on, but noooo, they had to have their way. Don’t hurt me, okay?”

“Friend, I’m going to need you to start making sense,” Cooper said. “Before I lose my patience.”

“Sure. Whatever.” The man looked defeated, beat. Looking at him, Jane had the smallest tickle of memory. A part of her knew him.

“You did something to us,” she said. “The missing month. Our memories.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Who are you?”

The man gave a shaky breath. “You can call me Brian.”

She frowned. “Is that not your name?”

“No, Brian is my name.”

“Then why did you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like, ‘You can call me Brian.’” She made her voice go deep to imitate his.

“How should I have said it?”

“Like a normal person,” she said. “You only say, ‘You can call me Brian’ if your name isn’t actually Brian. Like if I said, ‘You can call me Sarah’—it’s not my name, but hey, you can call me that.”

Whatever-his-name-was looked over at Cooper with raised eyebrows. “I forgot how monumentally aggravating you both are. My name is Brian. My real name. Sorry I didn’t say it perfectly enough for you. God.”

“Okay, Brian.” She intentionally put air quotes around his name. “Start talking.”

“It would be easier if I just showed you. Last time it took ages for you both to wrap your heads around this. This is a dumb universe.”

“Show us what?” Jane tried to ignore the sliver of fear that had found a permanent home inside her body. More than anything, she was tired of this feeling, and tired of being tired. For a moment she entertained herself with thoughts of just leaving this alone. Not finding out all the answers. Just walking away. For once in their stupid, weird, chaotic lives, they could just walk away.

But Brian kept talking.

“I need to reach into my pocket. We put memory dampeners in your heads. I can turn them off; you’ll remember everything.

“Or it will kill us,” Cooper said. “No deal, friend. You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Look at her,” Brian said, gesturing at Jane with his chin. “She knows. I can see it in her face.”

“I can see dumb. In your face,” Jane snapped back, but her heart wasn’t in it, and even Cooper cocked his head at that less-than-impressive comeback.

“You won’t kill me,” Brian said, gaining back some of that smooth confidence that Jane found herself despising. “Because that would mean not getting any answers. Either way, I’m fine to sit here. I’m sure my team is on the way to get me right now. We got you once. We can do it again.”

Jane didn’t like the way they’d already lost control of this situation. Even though Brian was the one tied up, with a huge welt forming on his cheek where Jane slugged him, he’d regained his entire composure.

She could tell when people were lying, and whoever this Brian person really was, he didn’t believe himself to be lying. And Jane was so exhausted from not knowing. That missing month was an unacceptable intrusion into her psyche, and she wanted it back. It was her memory, damn it. It belonged to her.

“Check his pocket,” Jane said to Cooper.

Cooper gave her a look that said, are you sure?—another testament to how rattled they both were. They never asked “are you sure” when they were working. She nodded sharply at him.

Cooper fished around in Brian’s pocket and pulled out a small rectangular device with an incomprehensible display that didn’t look like anything Jane had ever seen in all her years of duty. This guy had access to tech that made their stuff look like Lego toys.

“Press the icon in the upper right corner that looks like a circle,” Brian said.

Cooper followed Brian’s instructions until they got to a menu screen that said “restore.”

“The process will be a bit disorienting,” Brian said. “I’d sit down.”

Jane exchanged grim looks with Cooper, and they pulled chairs out from the kitchen table with loud scrapes. She sat down and braced herself.

“Ready?” Cooper asked.

“Ready,” she said.

Cooper pressed the button.

Her memories returned.

**

Jane handed the binoculars to Cooper as she tried to register what she was seeing. They’d tracked the signal to this place in the middle of nowhere, no towns or cities for miles, this deep ravine cut through the dry, rocky terrain. And in the middle of the ravine, a huge structure, easily two hundred feet tall, dominated the landscape.

It looked like a portal.

**

Jane gasped as her memories returned, chaotic and frantic, like a Rolodex thrown into the air, the information coming to rest on the ground in random sequence. Cooper was likewise feeling the effects as he bent over and grabbed his head.

She remembered everything.

They had bots set up to alert them anytime anyone did a search on their names. The bots started going haywire six months ago, and they traced the source to a remote location in Idaho. They saw the giant portal. They saw people coming in and out of it. They were captured.

And she remembered Brian.

“You’re… from another universe,” she gasped, trying to recover from the experience of having a month’s worth of memories jammed back into her skull. The words made no sense coming from her mouth, but she believed them nonetheless.

“The Janes and Coopers trying to kill us are… us?” Cooper said. “Not mimics or clones or anything. They’re us.”

“You from other realities, yeah,” Brian said.

“But why?” Jane exploded. “You never told us why? I remember coming on your camp and seeing the portal. There was a fight? I think? You captured us and forced us to erase any evidence of our trip and then… what?” She pressed her hands to her temples. “It’s so hard to remember.”

“We didn’t tell you,” Brian said. “Production thought it was pointless, and since we were going to erase your memory anyway, why bother? For what it’s worth, I told them I didn’t like this idea. I thought you two made terrible candidates. I mean, a Jane and Cooper version who are so sociopathically paranoid that they discovered we were researching them? We’d never had a version like you two.”

“Candidates?” Jane seized on the word. “Candidates for what? You’ve done this before?”

Brian grinned, and Jane found herself wanting to slap the smarm right from his mouth. He cleared his throat and in an overly dramatic announcer’s voice said, “In a universe full of alternatives, the most dangerous person is… yourself. From the twisted minds that brought you Extreme Sibling Rivalry, Who Would You Guillotine, and Celebrity vs. Celebrity comes the ultimate death match: Jane and Cooper Kill Jane and Cooper. How far would you go to reclaim your life? Would you risk it all and kill the one person that means the most to you? Could you kill… yourself?”

He finished his speech with a smug, proud air, and Jane, unable to control herself, punched him in the nose. It seemed fitting.

“Ow!” His head snapped back, and blood poured down his lip. “What the hell?”

“We’re on a game show?” Cooper goggled. “A fucking game show? That’s what this is all about?”

“How?” Jane breathed. “How does this even work?”

The words falling from his mouth were the most objectively lunatic thing she’d ever heard, but Brian didn’t seem like he was lying. He spoke blandly, almost bored, as he told them what he knew.

“It’s pretty straightforward. We find Janes and Coopers who aren’t doing that great. Usually convicts. We offer them access to a new reality, a fresh start. All they need to do is kill a version of themselves. It takes us a few months to set up a show. We have to find a decent reality, set up the equipment, launch a few dozen satellites so we can see everything, and on and on. It went to hell the second you showed up.”

“That’s what you consider straightforward?” Cooper asked.

Jane was almost dizzy with confusion and took a breath to steady herself. “After we found you, you took our memories?”

“Yeah,” Brian nodded. “It’s too expensive to pull the plug on an episode, and our producers thought this would be a neat angle—a military-trained Jane and Cooper. Our ratings have been through the roof.”

“We’re a famous game show?” Cooper said, stunned, seemingly unable to move past the point.

“Well, I wouldn’t say famous. We’re closer in popularity to your show Property Brothers. The one about the two Canadian twins who sell houses?”

“You did all this for a show that’s not even well-watched?” Jane asked.

“We’ve all got to start somewhere. This series has been doing great, if that’s any consolation. It’s enormously popular with the mid-twenties demo.”

“It explains why they’re all so bad at fighting,” Cooper said. “They’re… people. Just normal people. And we killed them. God help us.”

“They signed the waiver. They knew what they were getting into.”

“Why us?” Jane asked.

“Why not?” Brian responded. “We’ve been doing this for ages, and there are only a couple thousand people like you.”

“What do you mean, ‘like us’?”

“Every universe has a Jane and Cooper. Every single one. It doesn’t matter what universe we travel to; we always find you. Sometimes you’re alone, but mostly you’re together. That’s why we knew this show would work. Production calls you ‘the ones the fates couldn’t touch.’ Personally, I find that a bit too poetic, but you know how creatives are.”

Cooper stood up, pushing his chair away to clatter across the kitchen floor. “This is absolute lunacy. You have access to travel the multiverse, and this is what you use it for?”

Brian nodded. “This, and pornography, yeah. You’d be surprised how many people want to have sex with themselves.”

Jane had heard enough. She pushed her chair back and grabbed him by the collar. “I don’t care about any of this. I want it to stop. How do we stop it?”

“I don’t think you can,” Brian said. “The show is going to keep escalating the attacks until you’re dead.”

“How do you keep finding us?” she snapped. “We got checked for implanted trackers the second we lost our memories. We’re clear.”

“Our tracking technology is a little more advanced. It’s a mesh fiber woven directly into your bicep. It’s essentially part of your muscle. We use the satellites to track your movements and use long-range hearing devices to listen. I’m sorry. There’s nothing you can do as long as they can find you.”

Cooper’s face, ordinarily calm and placid, had gone red. He trembled with pent-up aggression. With a cry, he lurched to his feet and punched the wall, putting his fist through the drywall. Before Jane could stop him, he pulled a gun from behind his waist and put it against Brian’s head.

“Tell them to stop,” Cooper said.

“I can’t. You took my means to communicate with them.”

“What if we let you go? Can you stop it?”

“I can try,” Brian shrugged. “I don’t think they will though. Where I come from, people don’t even believe you’re real. Would you stop playing a video game?”

Jane had stopped listening. It was like their voices had been replaced with a roaring white noise. A single phrase stomped through her brain, jumping up and down, demanding her attention.

There’s nothing you can do as long as they can find you.

As long as they can find you.

“Cooper,” she blurted, grabbing her husband by the shoulder. “How many tasers do you have?”

Cooper glanced at her, gun shaking against Brian’s head. She could see how much self-control he was exerting.

“What?” he whispered.

“I need you to come back, Cooper,” she said gently. “Holster your weapon.”

Her tone got through, and he blinked and gave his shoulders a rough roll before tucking his gun behind his back. He took a deep breath through his nose.

“Three,” he said. “I’m positive I have three tasers.”

“Okay.” She bit her lip, trying to work out the math in her head. Forty thousand volts. It should do it.

“What are you thinking?”

“What dipshit over here said.” She hitched her thumb over at dipshit. “We can’t stop this thing unless they can’t find us. And as long as we’ve got those mesh trackers in us, we’re screwed.”

Understanding was slow to dawn in Cooper’s face, but when it arrived, a slow smile appeared on his lips.

“Right,” he said slowly. “As long as the mesh is in our bicep, they can find us. You’re saying we should cut our own arms off. I like it. I’ll get the hacksaw.”

With a thumbs-up, he walked toward the kitchen door. She yelled to stop him.

“Cooper. No. Stop. That’s not what I meant, although it’s not an unworkable backup plan. The tasers. We can take them out with the tasers.”

Cooper shook his head. “It’s no good. Tasers are all current, no voltage. They won’t fry electronics.”

“They won’t,” Jane agreed. “But they absolutely fry muscle.”

Brian gasped, his face going pale.

“See?” Jane pointed. “Dipshit here knows.”

“You’re insane,” he whispered. “It would take multiple attempts, not just one. It would be agonizing. Excruciating.”

Jane and Cooper both stared at him. Cooper coughed.

“And?” Jane finally said.

“You can’t possibly be that fucking crazy?” Brian shouted.

Jane crouched down so she was eye level. “Brian. Cooper just suggested cutting off our arms, and I agreed that was a half-decent backup plan. What on earth makes you think we will have any problem with tasers? Now shut up for a second, so I can talk to my husband.”

She straightened and took Cooper over to the other end of the kitchen and lowered her voice.

“There’s one more step, love,” she said.

Cooper nodded, his face grim. “We have to kill him.”

“Oh.” She snapped her fingers. “Okay. Two more steps. There’s one more after him.”

“What?”

“We disappear. For real this time. Not the fake stuff we’ve spent the last six months doing.

The authorities are going to find our bodies in Montreal. Our actual, real bodies. Every agency will think we’re dead. We can really make a go at this. A normal life.”

“We probably should change our names this time.” He nodded, rubbing his chin. “I’ve always liked Rock. Like Rock Hudson.”

She gave him a pat on the cheek. “We can absolutely keep workshopping names. I love the energy.”

They gave each other a long look. She was so glad he was with her. Brian said that not every

Jane had a Cooper. Her heart went out to all those women. Everyone should have a Cooper, she thought.

“Are we ready to do this?” he asked.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Hey, what do you think all those other Janes and Coopers are like?” he asked. “In all those other worlds?”

“I don’t know, love. But I’m sure someone will tell their story. Come. Let’s go start our new lives.”

Cooper nodded and pulled his gun.

They walked toward Brian.