Chapter 4 : Unwilling Passenger
The saline drip stops being relevant at 11:47 PM.
That's when Cole crosses the facility, and Rowan has approximately four seconds of warning before the world stops cooperating.
The connection between his sternum and wherever Cole is doesn't build gently this time. It snaps taut like a cable under sudden load, the whole cord going rigid in one jerk. His body moves toward the window before he can brace. The IV line—still in his hand, still threading up to the bag on the stand—pulls with him, and then the needle tears free, and then there is nothing in the universe except cold, and the crushing wrongness of being dragged through a space that wasn't built for dragging.
Baltimore.
He landed on wet concrete in a loading dock behind a building he didn't recognize, both knees and both palms, and the IV line dangled from the back of his right hand with a small bead of blood where the needle had torn loose. Cold autumn air hit him—late evening, 2015—and he was wearing a hospital gown under the dead man's coat with a bruise spreading where the IV had been placed two hours ago.
Everything ached. The temporal displacement had the specific quality of being inside a vehicle driven by someone else at speed, with no warning for the turns.
He pulled the trailing line free, pressed his palm to the puncture until it stopped, and looked around.
The loading dock opened onto a street with functioning streetlights. A bar across the road had actual music coming out of it. Two people waited at a crosswalk in clothes that weren't patched together from necessity. A bus passed.
2015 hit differently every time he arrived in it.
He took stock: the dead man's coat—the only thing not obviously medical—identification documents from 2043 that were completely useless here, and the radiation burns still working through the borrowed tissue under their bandages. No money. No phone. No cover identity.
Street signs. He found them. Baltimore—two blocks east of the harbor district. The tether pressed him north-northwest at roughly two miles, which put Cole somewhere in the city's financial corridor.
Cole was hunting Goines. He could go find him. He could insert himself into that operation, leverage the meta-knowledge, get in the way of something that was already moving in the right direction.
Or he could use the four hours he had to do something Cole wouldn't think to do.
He found a CVS, bought a disposable camera and a bottle of water with the emergency twenty he kept folded in the coat's lining—a habit established in 2043, which proved useful—and walked to the city's register of corporations.
The records office smelled of dust and institutional ambition unfulfilled. He worked through four hours of corporate filings and subsidiary registration documents at a table near the window, methodical and deliberate, building the chain from Markridge's public holdings down through three layers of shells until he hit the anomaly.
The Memory Stack worked cleanly here. Everything he read went in and stayed in—documents, letterheads, registration numbers. Not passive retention. More like everything carved directly into him, permanent and retrievable. He could read an address once and reconstruct it months later with no degradation. Markridge's corporate structure moved through his eyes and stayed there: legitimate pharmaceutical operations on the surface, three subsidiary layers underneath, and one holding entity at the bottom—Meridian Bio-Systems LLC—that appeared nowhere else in any public document except as a single line item in an environmental compliance quarterly report.
One address in a Pennsylvania industrial park that had no corresponding public facility.
He photographed the relevant pages and walked out at 1:30 PM.
[JAMES COLE — Markridge Corporate Building, Baltimore]
Six hours at the same post, and Cole had the rotation memorized.
Three delivery trucks, known plates. Standard corporate foot traffic, no patterns worth noting. Nothing from the Army. Nothing that suggested an active cover-up in progress—but then, active cover-ups were supposed to look like nothing.
The man who came out of the municipal building across the street at 1:42 didn't belong.
It took Cole three seconds to place him. Splinter's medical block—the dying scavenger Jones was keeping under observation, who had spoken words Jones didn't share with him and who now appeared, alive and upright and carrying a stack of documents under his arm, in the middle of a 2015 Baltimore street.
Cole moved.
The alley was narrow, dead-ended at a loading bay. Cole came in behind him and said: "Stop."
The man stopped. His arms went out slightly—not raised, not aggressive. Visible, which was a choice.
He turned around without moving fast.
"The face from the cell," Cole said.
"Yes."
"Jones had you under guard."
"She did."
Cole closed the distance. The man didn't step back, which was either confidence or calculation. His eyes were steady in the way that came from practice, not from actual calm—Cole knew the difference.
"How are you here."
"I follow your jumps." The voice was level. "When you splinter, I come with you. No choice, no consent. I know how that sounds."
"Tell me something that sounds better."
"I found something useful." He held the documents out—not offering them, showing them, which was a distinction. "Corporate chain. Markridge subsidiary structure. There's an address at the bottom that doesn't match any public facility. Three layers deep. Pennsylvania industrial park. I think it's what you're looking for."
Cole took the papers. His eyes moved through them fast—corporate names, registration numbers, the annotated margins in neat handwriting. Someone who knew what to look for had done this in an afternoon.
"Meridian Bio-Systems," he read.
"Environmental compliance quarterly report. One address too many."
Cole turned to the second page. The address was there with those four words next to it: one address too many.
He looked up. "Who sent you."
"Nobody." A beat. "Nobody who could have predicted I'd land in Baltimore instead of Philadelphia."
"Then who are you."
"Rowan Shaw."
"That's a name. I asked who you are."
The man opened his mouth and paused.
And Cole saw it—the tiny fracture in the level composure. Not fear, not guilt. Something more like a man who'd just been asked a question he hadn't let himself fully consider. Cole was good at reading people. He'd had to be for a long time.
"Rowan," the man said, finally. "That's the honest answer I have right now."
Cole folded the documents and put them in his jacket. He didn't hand them back. "Don't get in my way."
He walked out of the alley without looking back. His shoulders didn't itch with crosshair-awareness, which was about as much as he was giving a stranger on no notice.
The address looked right. More right than six hours of surveillance had produced.
The tether settled back to its ambient hum around four in the afternoon—soft, present, the cord going slack. Cole was stationary somewhere. Settled.
Rowan stood at the mouth of the alley with the photocopies still in hand and considered his situation.
He was in 2015 Baltimore in a hospital gown under a coat in the wrong city, having just handed his best intelligence to a man who'd taken it without thanks and walked away, and he was going to have to stand somewhere until the jump home arrived.
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but close enough to function as one.
The tether stirred.
His arm ached where the needle had torn free, and his lungs still produced that quiet accompaniment to breathing, and the thought that surfaced was both simple and specific: please land me near the medical bay this time.
The alley dissolved.