Chapter One

Jessie Moynihan knew she might as well face the cold, hard facts. She didn't want to get married. Marriage sounded boring. Marriage sounded like a long, slow lingering death of the spirit. How wonderful could it possibly be to wake up every morning staring at the same slack-jawed, drooling, unshaven face?

And it wasn't just the idea of marrying her fiancée, either. It was marriage, period.

She still didn't know how she'd ended up engaged to Eddie Gardner. Well, she did, but that was neither here nor there. She needed to find a way to tell Eddie nicely that she really didn't want to get married--didn't love him.

Jessie's head hurt. It wasn't just your average garden-variety headache. This was a pounding, aching, sickening, just-as-soon-die-now headache. Well, she'd better get over it because her mother was taking her shopping for her trousseau.

She'd tried to tell her mother that she didn't want to marry Eddie. The walls listened better. At least when she talked to the walls, they didn't talk back.

It didn't matter to her that Edward Millhouse Gardner the Fourth, thank you, was considered quite a catch. He was under the size limit as far as she was concerned. That fish could just go back in the lake for someone else to net.

She didn't even know for sure how she'd caught his attention. Well, she did, and that was part of the problem.

Her mother and his mother had worked a scam, and she and Eddie were the suckers. Her mother and his mother had put their heads together and decided the family fortunes needed to be protected. What better way to do that than to hook up their only progenies?

The country club was already bracing for the wedding of the decade, and it was still nine months away.

Nine months. Lord. She'd already been engaged for nine months. Why hadn't she found a way to end this farce?

Okay, she knew that answer, too. She didn't want to hurt Eddie's feelings. Eddie was a sweet guy in a teddy-bearish sort of way. And that had been her downfall.

He was sweet.

Sure, he was a six-two, broad shouldered, blue-eyed Norse god with the best-aligned smile money could buy. He wore the best clothes, drove the best automobiles and showered twice a day. But he was still Eddie.

And there was nothing exciting about Eddie. Nothing.

He kissed her, and she barely noticed the lip contact. How could she ever go to bed with him? He never batted an eye when she told him she wanted to wait for their wedding night to consummate their relationship. If he'd protested, she would have had that as a reason to call it off. But, noo. Not Eddie.

Eddie calmly nodded his agreement to celibacy. Jessie didn't buy it. Eddie was a nice guy, but he wasn't a self-sacrificing hero. He'd sneak some on the side if he got the chance, and she knew chances came looking for him. She heard the talk, and she simply didn't care.

If she didn't care now, she knew it was unlikely she'd care in twenty years. It wasn't a good way to start a marriage.

A car horn beeped out front. She peeked out the window. It was her mother. Beeping the horn to have her come out was another sore spot. Her mother refused to set foot in her little townhouse for fear of cockroaches.

She did not have any sort of bug or rodent in her home. The owner's co-op paid a small fortune to an exterminator to come and spray every month. No, it was just Audrey's way of making her point. Jessie was living well below her station.

Jessie grabbed her purse and jacket and put on a smile. She slipped into the Bentley Azure her mother had insisted on purchasing. Jessie had no idea what the car cost except that it was a lot more than the classic 1984 Chevy Monte Carlo SS she drove that her mother wouldn't ride in.

Excuse me all to hell for having gutter taste.

"Hi, Mom. What's shaking?"

"Jessica, really. Must you use those slang expressions?"

"Yes, I must. Normal people talk like that, Mom. Normal people."

Her mother took a deep breath. Jessie knew why. She'd heard this same speech for thirty years. Here it comes. The Lecture.

"Jessica, the Moynihan's are not normal people. Your great-grandfather is descended from French nobility. Your great-grandmother is a member of the Royal Family, albeit quite far removed now. Your grandfather, my father, co-founded one of the largest banks in the northeastern United States. You have a respectable pedigree. I do wish you'd take that into consideration when you make decisions in your day-to-day life."

It was just too much.

The heat, her headache, the full moon and only heaven knew what else--it was just too much. She wasn't jumping through the marriage hoop. She wasn't going to become a clone of her mother. She wasn't doing anything she didn't whole-heartedly want to do.

And she'd listened to her mother's spiel about her 'pedigree' for the last time.

The.

Last.

Time.

"You know, Ma, I'm real tired of the word 'pedigree.' I am not a fucking poodle."

"Jessica!" The Bentley took an unfortunate swerve, the right side tires dropping off the pavement.

"Mother! Pay attention to the road, or let me drive this ostentatious piece of shit!"

Audrey stared at her, open-mouthed.

"Watch the fucking road!" she yelled at her mother. Oh, Lord. She'd have to apologize for that. Later.

Audrey jerked the car back into its lane then pulled over, her lips pursed so tightly Jessie clamped down on her tongue to keep from asking what was so sour.

"Perhaps you'd like to explain yourself, Jessica."

"Nope. I'm done, Mom. Finished. I'm not going shopping. I'm not marrying Eddie. I'm not living my life by anyone's standards except my own."

Jessie hopped out of the Bentley.

"I'll just walk home from here." She slammed the car door and started walking, ignoring her mother's shouted pleas for reason.

Heck, it was only three miles. She could pace that off in a little under an hour. By then, Eddie would be on her front porch, duly summoned and willing to do his duty--calm her down and make her see the light.

That wasn't going to happen. Not this time.

She started lining up her arguments, one step at a time.

Cade Reston stared moodily at his computer terminal and sipped his bourbon-laced fake java. Lord in heaven, what he'd give to be able to pour a shot of bourbon and sip it straight in plain view of God and all witnesses. Outlawing whiskey--again--was one of the most pathetic examples of government gone awry that he could think of.

Things had been different back in The Year of Our Lord 2179. Very different. Sagan Delaportus, the idiot who brought about the Liquor Reforms had been just that--an idiot. Too stupid to realize that the Matrix led to more than one timeline.

And he'd invented the fucking thing!

Delaportus had been a stupid, undisciplined, illogical, tunnel-visioned idiot with no clue as to how to maintain accurate data and methodology.

When he'd brought back evidence that Lorenzo d'Selle, the greatest peacemaker mankind had ever known, the man who'd united Earth, Proxima, and Centauri as brothers, had been killed by a drunken mob, well, it had been easy to outlaw anything alcoholic.

What the stupid fucker had missed was that d'Selle only died in one of the thirty-one possible timelines that existed. Correction--of the thirty-one layers of time they could reach into. Einstein was right. There were infinitely more, but no one had mastered the way into them, himself included.

That had been over a hundred years ago. What a waste, all the way around, except for the Matrix, of course. Cade had stepped through the Matrix into places where he could walk right into a bar and order a drink without fear of arrest. A good enough reason to hope the computer would spit out a year prior to 2175 for his next assignment. He really craved a decent drink. His office door opened.

"Cade. How's it going?"

"Slowly, slowly." He gulped the rest of his pseudo java, burning his throat. He didn't want to drag his best friend, Hector Chen, down if he was unfortunate enough to be apprehended with bourbon in his drink.

Death was such a huge penalty for such a small infraction.

"I've run through nineteen timelines. The lower eight were brutal, as you'd expect. The three Georgian layers were almost as bad." Cade sighed. The eleven layers of time most distant from reality never yielded much.

Those timelines had diverged, splintered, so long ago and so many times that they barely resembled even cheap imitations of reality. No one had ever found an event in the lower eleven layers. Some even speculated they should be considered a separate reality and closed off. Cade didn't necessarily agree.

Just because they'd never found an event there didn't mean one hadn't happened. Some time.

"Well, it's good you didn't find anything then." Hector stared at him. "You didn't find anything, right?"

"No, no. I didn't find anything until I hit seventeen."

"Sweet. You'll be past the event layer by twenty-three."

Cade turned a serious gaze on his friend. "I have to run all thirty-one. You know that."

Hector squeezed his shoulder. "Don't run the Genghis lines without help. Swear to me, man. Call me so I can run backup."

Hector's offer to help was sincere, and Cade knew it. He knew the validity of having backup for the top seven timelines, the ones they called the Genghis lines in honor of Genghis Khan, the leader of the Mongol horde that swept Eurasia back in the year 1223.

Old Genghis would be right at home in layers twenty-five to thirty-one, yessiree. Hell, his descendants probably still ruled in current day Genghis. No one, including Cade, had ever lingered there long enough to find out.

"Okay, buddy. Thanks. I'm going to run to twenty-four then call it a night. I'll be pretty sure of where I'm headed by twenty-four. Why don't you come by about mid-morning tomorrow, and we'll run the top timelines."

"Sure. Why don't you come over for dinner? Sanya is cooking tonight, not me."

"Thanks, but no. Tell Sanya he can put a plate into freeze for me, though. I'm going to be here until late."

"Just be careful, Cade. Even the quick sometimes go missing."

Cade grinned at his friend. "I'm the quickest of the quick, Hector."

Hector shook his head sadly. "That arrogance is going to do you in. And I'll miss you when it does." He closed the door, leaving Cade alone.

Three hours later, Cade pulled his illegal flask from his jacket pocket and lifted it to his lips. Let the Conformers see him, if they watched. Death would be better than where he was headed.

He checked and re-checked the most prominent timelines, layers twelve through twenty-four. These were the layers that included his own, the layer of reality that was reality. The event was there, teasing him. He set aside his promise to Hector and kept going. The event was there in twenty-five. And twenty-six. Then it vanished, sending his stomach into a queasy roll.

He'd steeled himself for the worst possible findings and ran timeline twenty-eight. It was back. The event was there in each of them. Not for the first time, Cade knew in his gut that there were timelines beyond Genghis.

Fucking hell.

Rock 'n roll, tattoos, petroleum dependency.

Attila the Hun, ozone depletion, global warming and stock car racing.

Human immune deficiencies, cancer, nuclear weapons and, God help them all, television.

Layer twenty-seven. The worst of the Genghis timelines.