Dissonance: An Echo Trilogy Novella (Echo Trilogy, #2.5) Read Online Free PDF

Right
before my eyes, some false version of the past was playing out in an echo that couldn’t exist. Unless .  . .
    I froze the impossible echo and turned to face Dominic. Our hands
were linked, enabling us to maintain our connection in the echo—a necessity now
that the At was far from stable. “It could be a false
echo,” I told him. “Someone could’ve created the whole thing.”
    Dominic pressed his lips together, thinning them further, and scanned
the paused scene surrounding us. “Possibly, but it does not have the feel of a
false echo,” he said. And he would know. We both had the somewhat rare ability
to manipulate the At —create cloaks to hide something
in an echo or fabricate whole, new echoes entirely—but Dominic had a lot more
experience with the skill, more than four centuries’ worth of experience.
    “ Well .  . .” I pursed my
lips and moved them from side to side as I thought. A drizzle of rain trailed
within arm’s distance in front of me, and I reached out to tap the delicate
strand of frozen-in-time water, what looked like the most delicate icicle in
existence. “If someone created a false echo in this time and place, for
whatever reason, it’s much more likely that they altered the echo because of my
presence, not because of Dr. Ramirez’s, don’t you think?”
    Dominic nodded slowly. “Considering you’re not only Nejerette but the Meswett , yes,
I’d say that’s a fair assumption.”
    “Good, that’s good,” I said, some of the threads of worry that had
wrapped around my heart loosening. This was about me, not Dr. Ramirez. For
whatever reason, that made me feel better. And yet, those strands of worry were
still there, intermixed with doubt and dread. I offered Dominic a wan smile.
“Still, wouldn’t hurt to check how far this thing reaches”
    Dominic frowned, just a little, but before he could say anything,
I jumped forward an hour. The echo darkened as the day grew later. It was no
longer raining, but the street and sidewalks were still wet, the red, blue, and
white police and ambulance lights reflecting on their shimmering surfaces.
    Because according to this echo, the accident had still happened.
My heart clenched.
    Abandoning this location, I switched my focus to Dr. Ramirez
himself. Like my grandfather, Alexander, I was a tracker—if I focused on any
specific person or object, I could track said person or object through the
entire span of time the person or object had existed. Finding when Dr. Ramirez
popped back into existence seemed to me the simplest way to figure out how far-reaching
this mangled portion of the At truly was.
    Except Dr. Ramirez supposedly didn’t exist during the rest of the
day of the accident, or the day after. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes
and squeezed Dominic’s hand. On our own, we were each extremely powerful
Nejerets, thanks to Set’s almost pristine bloodline, but when our bas worked
together, when we pooled our Nejeret power, our collective control over the At was pretty damn flawless. And with the At’s current instability, that was something I needed right
about now.
    I pushed forward in time, keeping my focus on Dr. Ramirez. He
continued to not exist the days following the accident,
and the week after. He didn’t exist a month out, or two months
.  . . or three.
    “This can’t be happening,” I said, panic making my voice thready . “Nobody would go to the trouble to erase him like
this—it would take forever to do this.”
    “It’s been done before,” Dominic said, his thickening accent
telling me that he was battling his own growing concern.
    “Yeah, but that was Hitler. Apep wanted
the chaos he would bring to the world .  . . but
Dr. Ramirez is just a professor of archaeology. What could he possibly do in
the future that would make someone— anyone —want to
hide his actions by erasing his existence from the day of the ‘accident’ on?”
    “It is impossible to see that which has been hidden,”