Chapter 1
Peggy picked at the skin around her timer.
It was an idle, horrible habit that she had picked up sometime during the war, pick-pick-picking at her skin until it was quite raw but never quite picking at the numbers themselves. By the end, they had been nothing more than dashes etched a dark, burnt out tarnished silver. That had been terrifying.
Common wisdom knew that a person couldn’t die before their timer went off. Sure, they could die within seconds of that bright, blinding flash, but they wouldn’t die until after it went off. Many soldiers had used that as a metric of their life, and those whose timers wouldn’t go off for another year, five years, ten years would often jump into the war, knowing that they wouldn’t die. Peggy hadn’t been one of them, but she’d known soldiers who had. She’d known, too, those whose timers had changed during the war – the time left until that flash shortening or lengthening, some of them shortening until they went off during the war, and then ones so sure of living beyond it died in an instant.
That was one of the many problems with these so-called soulmate timers: they were unpredictable, even as they counted down the time to when you should meet your soulmate.
Peggy’s had always been steady, counting down without freezing, without stuttering, without rearranging, until the moment when Steve Rogers jumped over that bomb, huddling his scrawny little body over it as though to shield everyone else from its potentially devastating blow. It had been foolish. Even if it had been a real bomb, they didn’t work like that. What little body he had would have been blown apart in mere seconds, and it would have done nothing to protect the people scurrying away from him.
And yet.
The worst of it was that the blinding flash of her timer made some of the new recruits think the bomb really had gone off, and they’d passed out from the sheer fear of it. Some of them had thought when they woke in the nurses’ station later that they were in heaven and that their nurse was an angel. One or two, having finally been brought face-to-face with that terror, wanted to change their minds and leave, but by then they’d given up that option. Their teeth had chattered every time they came face-to-face with another bomb.
That wasn’t her problem. Her problem was that her timer went off for Steve, but his was still tick-tick-ticking away. She’d found out later that his timer already went off once for one of his fellow recruits – one Bucky Barnes, who had seemed a bit like the frat boys she’d seen around Oxford. His heart, at least, was in the right place, even if his cock wasn’t always. Fortunately, Steve’s timer had gone off again – this time for her – later on, just after the experiment, just as she opened the door and stared at the body that suddenly wasn’t as small and scrawny as it once was.
Then Bucky died.
Then Steve—
Well.
Then the war ended.
And Peggy was still alive.
Alive and alone.
But that didn’t matter. Unlike so many other soldiers who had timers yet to go off for their soulmates and who had that to look forward to after all of the horrors they had seen in the war, Peggy had herself, and that was really all that mattered. No matter what her timer said, she didn’t need anyone else. She just needed herself.
Peggy picked at the skin around her timer, and she thought about Steve, and she thought about Bucky, and she thought about America and the new job where she would soon be stationed, and she felt something whirring under her skin like a second heartbeat, but faster, so fast it might as well have been the heartbeat of a mouse, running so fast that it was more of a thrum than a beat, and her brows furrowed, and she glanced down—
No longer dashes etched into her skin, signaling the finality of her predicament. Now numbers – new numbers – days on days on days, and hours, and minutes, and seconds, and milliseconds going so fast that she could only pick out a number every now and again, counting down to—
To what?
Another soulmate.
Peggy’s brow furrowed even deeper as she stared at the numbers betraying her. She didn’t need another soulmate. More to that, she didn’t want another soulmate. Her fingernails, sharp and painted, moved to pick at the numbers, only to stop, hovering just above them. Common wisdom also said that nothing could make the numbers stop, outside of reaching zero and zeroing out. No one yet had figured out how to remove a timer without amputating the arm just above the wrist where it resided (or elsewhere, for those who were born without the appendages where a timer was normally found). Picking at it wouldn’t fix anything. It would only be a movement of that old habit.
So, instead, Peggy took a deep breath, scowled at the numbers etched into her wrist and still whirling down, and picked at her skin instead. A bad habit. A nervous habit. One that she hoped her new soulmate, whoever they were, wouldn’t have.
Perhaps they might even be able to calm it.