chapter two
The room is full of corpses. This should probably freak Green out more than it does.
When Green wins—which is always—her eyes move to the horizon. There’s always another mission waiting for her. She escapes back downthread to the future she’s fighting to protect, watching as pieces of it shatter in front of her and using those to motivate herself as she scampers back upthread into the past, searching for tiny weaknesses that she can exploit into victories for the Cosmos. There’s peace in the repetitiveness of it. In alleviating tensions in one place just to cause unrest in another. In tearing the world to pieces so that she may remake it in her image. She pretends there is, at least. It’s better than the alternative. She’d never rest if she let herself consider that.
She prefers not to stay somewhere that she’s already crushed. What’s the point? There’s nothing to learn from victories other than that she needs to replicate that pattern. There are no mistakes to ensure she never makes again because Green doesn’t make mistakes. Her line of work doesn’t allow her to be anything less than deliberate in all her dealings.
Based on the bodies’ outfits, Green figures she’s somewhere late in the twentieth century—perhaps early in the twenty-first. When you visit as many eras as Green does, everything starts to blend together. The mortuary sits in the middle of a small town, one that’s small enough that by all rights, they shouldn’t even have a mortuary. It’s situated between the library and the town’s one bank, warning everyone who visits that if they were to spend eternity here, at least they would be taken care of well.
Must be a disproportionate amount of death there in the first place. Green tries not to think about that too hard.
It should have been a routine research investigation. In and out, swabbing one of the bodies with bacteria to make it look like that’s how she died, then vanishing without a trace There’s a disease ravaging one of the futures the Cosmos want to claim for themselves. It’s killing agents who had long careers in front of them. Ones they can’t bear to lose. There should have been a forensic pathologist there. He comes in once a day to run an analysis on anyone who may have been offed through…less than legal means, to say the least. His insight would have given Green and therefore Cosmos the chance to start working on a cure before that disease could destroy them once and for all.
But when Green arrived, there was nobody there. No morticians. Certainly no forensic pathologist. No signs of life beyond another vial boasting a label printed with another cheeky message: THE ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE INSIDE. A swab lies next to it.
Green doesn’t know how to conduct an autopsy. But she knows how to cut someone to pieces and search for answers within them.
So, Green wields a bone saw with an adeptness that reflects how little time she has spent in this world. It’s messy. A hack job, at the risk of making a joke. The shards fall in the shape of letters, one forming at a time. Green grasps a pen with one hand and the saw with the other, scrawling letters onto a paper towel, not caring how the soft material tears beneath the nib. The body mars beyond recognition. She hopes the family had requested that this person be cremated.
Green reads. A laugh jumps from her throat as though it has been torn out of it instead. She’s not used to being outwitted; though she must admit, it’s not something she necessarily wants to become acquainted with. Defeat should make her humble, but it just makes her want to hasten her pursuit. She plants the seeds of opportunity in the hole dug by this failure, nurturing the little sprout so that it will grow up stronger than those that surround it. She will improve because of this.
She must improve because of this.
Though, she supposes, that’s just what her dear enemy wants.
After the letter is finished, Green tears the paper towel into a thousand little pieces. She feeds the shreds to one of the fresher cadavers, lifting the body so it’s pressed up against her ribcage and massaging its throat so that the pieces disappear into the stomach. Someone may find them one day. She hopes this war is long over by the time they do.
Once Green is gone, a seeker steals into the room. She searches the room, pawing through viscera until she slices her finger open on sharp glass. The pain doesn’t faze her. She dips the swab into the vial and rubs it along the sensitive skin inside her own cheek.