The cold mist roiled thick about them.

"Do I have your agreement?"

A single word: "Yes."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Life returned in a nauseating rush.

There was no dark tunnel to traverse, no celestial stair to ascend, no gradual awakening—simply cacophony assaulting and overwhelming his senses. A blinding glare, tangled with meaningless sounds, wrapped in textures he could not identify. He struggled through the web, seeking something concrete to cling to, until he latched onto the brightest sensation within his awareness: A steady, intense beam locked into the back of his…

What was that? There was a word for it, he was sure… Head? Skull?

Yes, that was it. Right at the base of his skull. He could feel it, now, faintly, a steady pressure connecting him to the sensations around him. Strange that he hadn't felt any of it before.

But then, he hadn't felt anything for quite a while.

Ianto tried to open his eyes, and then realized they must already be open; the visual information he sought was mixed in with the rest of the noise. It was too bright, the lights and hues bleeding out of their boundaries like watercolors. He squinted against the harsh glare and tried to make sense of his surroundings. White tile, stained in places, stretching away in a high curve.

Autopsy bay?

Gradually the sensory chaos resolved into words and familiar voices, and he clung to the one he had most wanted to hear the last time he had heard anything at all.

"Ianto?" Jack's voice, nearer than the others, artificially steady. "Ianto, can you hear me?"

He could, but didn't seem to be air in his lungs to reply. His lips moved sluggishly, and all he managed was a rasp deep in his throat.

"Shh, it's okay. I'm right here. Time?" He heard the shrill note in Jack's last word. It sounded wrong. Frantic. Jack rarely did frantic.

"Um…" Fumbling hands. "Twelve seconds." Gwen's voice, underscored by a faint, familiar ticking. Jack's stopwatch? Someone must have taken it from his pocket.

Ianto tried to speak again, concentrating. Breathe in, constrict muscles… "What's happened?" he croaked.

"You were shot," Jack answered.

Ianto could see Jack clearly now, leaning over him. Even though Jack's face was inverted from Ianto's perspective, and cast into shadow by the ceiling lights, Ianto recognized the tightness about the lips that meant Jack was withholding something. "What else?"

This time Jack flinched visibly. "You died, Ianto," he said softly. "I've brought you back with the glove." The energy driving through the back of Ianto's skull flared as Jack shifted his fingers.

Dead. He was dead. The memory came back to him: Searing pain in his chest, breath failing, lights dimming, Jack's voice breaking on his name, receding into silence… Ianto scanned the room frantically. He was laid out on a table in the autopsy bay, his colleagues waiting awkwardly in line to say their final farewells. He was the guest of honor at his own bloody wake.

Ianto couldn't decide whether he wanted to engage in a bout of violent swearing or an hysterical breakdown, but after a moment's consideration he decided he didn't really have the energy for either. "Time's short then," he murmured practically, suppressing the panic by force of will. "Gwen?"

"What is it, love?" Gwen stepped forward, hands clutched tightly to her chest. Bless her, she had tears in her eyes. Ianto looked significantly at her hands, and she followed his gaze to the stopwatch clasped between them. "What? Oh! Er, thirty-four seconds." She looked to Jack, wide-eyed. "How long will he…"

"Pen and paper," Ianto rasped. They were pressed into his hand almost immediately, and Ianto glanced up at Owen in surprise. "Thanks."

Jack peered across his body. "What are you writing?"

"The new backup codes for the secure archives. Hadn't had time to copy them over to you."

There was the light pressure of a hand on his arm, and Toshiko's voice reached him. "Ianto, that's not important right now…"

"Not right now, no, but will be next time you need to access the archives." Ianto strained to think of anything else he needed to share with the team in the seconds remaining. Most of what he had committed to memory was in the database if they looked for it; Tosh would likely be able to find the records. And Jack knew the passwords to nearly everything…

Jack. Ianto looked up and met Jack's gaze. For the first time he noticed the dried blood and dirt on Jack's face. "What happened to you?" he asked reflexively. Jack's expression softened, and he shook his head. Ianto had to agree that it wasn't the most practical question, not when he had mere moments to live. Or… not live. Whatever.

"Sixty seconds," Gwen announced. Her eyes widened in surprise as Ianto reached over and took the timepiece from her fingers.

"Stopwatch is my job," he said gently. "You can't take over until I'm properly gone."

Tears welled again in Gwen's eyes, but she made a valiant effort to return his smile. "Wouldn't dream of it."

Jack glanced around at the team. "All right, everyone, if you have something to say, say it quick."

Toshiko was the first, bending over Ianto with tears on her cheeks. "I'm going to miss you. Thank you for always taking care of me. Of all of us."

"It was my pleasure," he replied with a genuine smile. It had been, at least where Tosh was concerned.

"We won't forget you," Gwen promised.

"Thanks." Ianto clutched the stopwatch tightly, its soft ticking oddly comforting even as it measured away his remaining moments.

Owen remained uncharacteristically silent until Jack prompted him with a sharp word. The doctor shuffled forward, glancing off to one side. "Sorry, mate," he said flatly.

Ianto waited for him to reference something specific, but apparently that was as much as he was going to get from the good doctor. Well, he could be just as vague as Owen, and as sincere. "Yup. Me, too."

The watch ticked on. Ianto lifted his eyes to their leader, still bending over him. "Jack?"

Jack's face tightened, and he reached his free hand forward to squeeze Ianto's shoulder. "I want you to be prepared for this. Don't be afraid."

"I'm not." That was a lie, and Jack probably knew it. But that wasn't important now; there was more, much more that needed to be said, if only he could find the words. "Jack, I…"

But Jack wasn't looking into his eyes any more; his gaze had moved down to Ianto's hands. He was frowning. "Gwen, you reset the stopwatch before you started it, right?"

Gwen brushed at her eyes and sniffed. "I did, yeah."

Before Ianto could react, Jack reached forward and snatched the timepiece from his fingers. "How are we at three minutes?" He glanced down at Ianto, brow furrowed. "No one has ever lasted that long."

"Except Suzie," Owen put in.

Jack shook his head. "Suzie was a special case. This is abnormal."

Ianto stared back at him, stunned. "Sorry to have upset your schedule."

"Something feels off." Jack flexed his fingers and Ianto's vision swayed, his head rocking in the grip of the metal gauntlet. "Tosh, Owen, take some readings, see if you can figure out what's going on here."

The tender feelings Ianto had been struggling to express a moment before evaporated. "You're the one controlling the glove," he snapped. "If keeping me here is an inconvenience to you, by all means, pull the plug."

This time Jack had the grace to look chagrined. "Ianto, I didn't mean…"

"No, it's fine. I don't fancy being kept around as a science project, anyway."

Gwen cleared her throat. "I'll just go help Tosh, then," she murmured, and fled up the stairs after the other woman. Owen hunched over his desk at the far side of the bay, his back to them.

The lack of audience seemed to soften Jack's demeanor. He set the stopwatch on the corner of the autopsy table and pressed his free hand to Ianto's cheek. "You know that's not true. The last thing I want is for you to go."

The metal table magnified the ticking of the watch, and Ianto turned his ear away from the loud noise. The movement pulled him away from Jack's hand. "I'm not sure why you brought me back at all."

Jack was silent for several seconds. At last he sighed deeply. "Ianto…"

"Jack!" Toshiko's voice broke in. Ianto tilted his head until he could see her at the top of the stairs. "I'm not getting readings on the glove."

"You mean the levels are normal?" Jack frowned. "It doesn't feel the same, though."

"No, I mean I can't get a reading on the glove. Any reading. It's as though it's not operational."

"But Ianto's awake, so it has to be working." Gwen's face appeared above the railing beside Tosh. "Doesn't it?"

"Actually, I'm not sure." Jack wriggled his fingers again, jarring Ianto's head. "I don't feel anything from it right now."

Ianto closed his eyes and concentrated on the place the beam of energy had entered his skull. "For that matter, neither do I." He shifted his head experimentally. "Jack, take your hand away."

Jack's lips thinned. "If I do that, it'll break the connection. You'll die."

"Already dead," Ianto corrected with remarkable sang froid, even by his own standards. "And I can't be sure there's any connection to break. I don't feel a thing."

"You're sure about this?"

Ianto nodded and braced himself, but as Jack slipped the gauntlet out from under his head, there was no discernible change in his sensory perception. He was left in even less doubt as to his physical presence; as Jack released him, his head dropped to the table with an audible crack.

Jack winced. "Sorry! I'm sorry, didn't mean to drop you. You okay?"

"Didn't hurt," Ianto replied automatically, then frowned. "That really didn't hurt. It sounded as though it should have."

"You're still here." Jack stared at the gauntlet, flexing his fingers in wonder. "I'm not using the glove. How are you still here?"

"Dunno. Help me up?" Ianto struggled upright, Jack supporting his shoulders, until he could swing his legs over the side of the table. Gwen appeared at his side and took his arm, while Toshiko went to Jack and began probing the resurrection glove with some kind of scanning device.

"Owen?" Jack called. "What've you got?"

The doctor tossed his hands in the air and swiveled his chair to face them. "Nothing. No readings. According to all bio scans, he's still dead."

"As I thought, the glove is definitely inactive," Toshiko reported. "Just reading as a lump of alien metal, now." Tilting her head thoughtfully, she adjusted a dial and turned the portable scanner on Ianto.

Owen returned to the table and began a more thorough medical examination. Ianto frowned as the doctor flashed a light into his eyes. The brightness washed out his vision, but it wasn't as painful or as unpleasant as he had expected. He didn't even flinch. "Why didn't it hurt when I banged my head just now?"

"Probably because you're dead, mate," Owen returned, though it lacked his usual venom. He shook the wrist he was holding for emphasis. "No pulse. Probably no nerve impulses, either."

"But I can feel you doing that. Sort of."

"Can you? Interesting." Owen reached back to a tray behind him and palmed something. "Close your eyes," he instructed. There was a light pressure on Ianto's leg. "Can you feel where my hand is?"

"Mid-thigh. Any higher, and you'll owe me dinner."

"You're not my type, teaboy." The sensation moved. "How about now?"

"Closer to the knee, now. Though… it feels like you've still got a finger or something in the first spot."

"Open your eyes, Ianto."

Ianto did so, and looked down at his leg. Owen's fingers were still pressed just above his knee. A hand's breadth higher, a large-gauge needle had been stabbed vertically into his thigh. "Oh."

"Looks like you have limited sensory awareness. Some touch, but not pain. Probably a good thing for you, considering that hole in your chest." Owen pulled the needle free. Ianto braced for the pain, but he felt less than a finger-flick. "Whatever part of you that glove brought back, it wasn't the part that keeps your body ticking."

"There's no sign of alien biology, either," Toshiko added, tapping some buttons on the scanner interface. She angled the screen to show Jack. "He registers as completely human. Minute traces of rift energy, but no more than the rest of us. Probably just casual exposure from working here. Although…" She frowned and fiddled with the device again. "There's a high-frequency fluctuation that might be some kind of energy signature, but I can't identify it. I'll have to expand the oscillation range and manually recalibrate the scanner to isolate whatever it is."

"Do it," Jack said. "The sooner the better. Gwen, grab that instrument tray." He wrenched his hand out of the gauntlet, which he wrapped in a towel and dropped on the tray. "Seal this thing in a stasis box until Tosh is ready for further testing. I don't want anyone touching it until we know exactly what it's capable of."

"On it," Gwen said. She balanced the tray carefully as she climbed the stairs, trailing Toshiko.

Jack massaged his hand as he watched the medic work. "Owen, any estimate as to how long this will last?"

"No idea. Could be a minute, could be a year."

"Best guess as to what's causing it?"

Owen shook his head. "No medical cause that I can find, not without a lot more testing. He's conscious, but not alive. He doesn't seem to be healing like Suzie did—though what with you being immortal, I don't know how that would work. It's not like he could drain your life the way she did to Gwen." He squinted thoughtfully at Jack. "Could he?"

Jack shrugged. "You got me. I don't even fully understand how my immortality works. Sometimes I heal, sometimes I don't, sometimes I can transfer life energy, sometimes I can't."

"Might be useful to pin that down some time," Owen mused. "We could do some testing, see if we could bottle whatever you've got. A shot of immortality would make a hell of a field kit."

"Later. Bigger fires to put out right now."

"Right." Owen picked up one of Ianto's hands and experimentally pinched the skin. "This was a different glove to the last one, and we never really understood how that one worked in the first place, so we don't have much to go on. Anything I tell you at this point is going to be pure guesswork."

"That seems to be the order of the day," Jack muttered. "Recommended course of action?"

Owen shrugged. "Don't leave him out in the sun too long?"

"He is sitting right here," Ianto interjected. "And if it's not too much to ask, he would really like to clean up and get into some fresh clothes." Ianto picked at his stained shirt in disgust. His suit was crusted with blood and rank with a stench that didn't bear thinking about, and now that he had gotten past the initial shock of waking up dead, his immediate concern was restoring whatever was left of his dignity. Besides, that ominous nine-millimeter hole just to the left of his necktie was really starting to trouble him.

Jack's brow furrowed. "I really can't let you leave the Hub. Not until we have a better idea of what's happened."

Ianto resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "I keep a change of clothes here," he said, though Jack knew that full well—not only because Ianto's spare clothes were stored in his bunker, but because he was usually the reason Ianto needed them. "I think we'll all be more comfortable if I go put them on."

Jack glanced at Owen, who shrugged. "All right. Go clean up, and then report back to Owen for medical observation."

Ianto pushed himself off the table, bracing against it until he regained his balance. His body felt heavier than usual, like weight returning to limbs after rising from deep water. "Can I use your shower?"

"Of course. Can you make it on your own? You need some help?"

"I think I can manage, thanks."

"Try not to get the wound too wet. And you'd better stick to cold water," Owen added thoughtfully. "Heat speeds up the onset of rigor mortis."

Ianto braced for Jack to make a tasteless remark about cold showers or stiffening anatomy, but he only stepped closer and put a hand on Ianto's shoulder. "It's good to have you back, Ianto."

Ianto smiled weakly. "Hardly feels like I've been gone, sir."

But as he made his way across the catwalks toward Jack's office, feeling fractionally more distant from the familiar things around him, he wondered just how far gone he really was.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

For the first time since the crack of Copley's fatal shot had split the night, Jack allowed himself a moment of stillness. He leaned against the edge of the autopsy table and took long, steady breaths. The air filling his lungs was so easy to take for granted, but after watching Ianto's chest fall and fail to rise again, he was almost painfully aware of each breath. Of the blood pounding in his ears. Of all the signs of life so precious to those around him, but which he couldn't shed, no matter how many times he died.

The increase in oxygen loosened some panic-fueled knot that had been coiling in his gut for hours, and as it unwound Jack began to feel the aftereffects of crisis management. The back of his skull twinged with the birth pangs of a splitting headache. He glanced down at his fingers and clenched them to hide the post-adrenaline tremble. He should probably drink some water—but it would also be a good idea to let his knees resolidify before he attempted to make it to the kitchenette. Bad form, collapsing in front of one's subordinates.

Jack looked over at Owen, who was frowning in his general direction. "What?" Jack demanded, and the doctor jerked back to awareness. Apparently the frown hadn't been for Jack, then.

"You said for Ianto to report back to me for observation, but I've no idea what I'm supposed to be observing. What are you hoping to find?"

"Anything that helps explain what's going on. Give him a full medical workup. Run tests, radiation scans, infrared…" Jack waved a hand toward a panel with lots of buttons. "Use whatever that machine is over there. Do what you always do."

Owen squinted at him. "So… you want me to treat him like an alien, then?"

Jack's head throbbed more insistently. "Just get to the bottom of this," he said evenly. "We have to know what's keeping him alive before we can decide what to do about it."

"He's not alive, Jack. All the evidence indicates that he's quite dead."

Jack tamped down the urge to seize him by the lapels of his lab coat. It wasn't Owen's fault that Ianto had been shot, nor that Copley's aim had been too accurate for the doctor's frantic efforts to save him. "You know what I mean. Get Martha in if you need help. She should still be at her hotel."

Owen rolled his eyes in a manner expressing exactly how likely he thought it was that he would need another physician's help, but he wisely held his tongue. For once, Jack thought wryly.

"Jack!" Toshiko's voice bounced eerily off the curved ceiling of the medical bay. "You might want to take a look at this. I'm getting some strange readings."

Jack bolted up the steps, glancing automatically toward his office, into which Ianto had disappeared. "Is the glove active again?"

"Not the glove." Toshiko looked back at him from her workstation. Gwen was already leaning over her other shoulder. "The rift monitor. Look at these shifts."

Jack scanned the graph on the monitor she turned toward him. Rift activity was charted in a cardiograph-like series of spikes and troughs. The energy patterns weren't unusual, except that everything seemed doubled—each change in level was followed a fraction of a second later by an identical shift. "Never seen that before. It could be a hardware stutter. Is the monitor functioning properly?"

"Already checked." Of course she had; Toshiko would have analyzed the entire system within seconds of noticing an anomaly. "There's nothing wrong with the equipment calibration or the graphing software. Each spike is reading as two separate but identical events, a few milliseconds apart."

"Could it be an echo of some kind?" Gwen put in. "The rift energy being reflected back to the sensors, or something?"

Toshiko shook her head. "We've had some feedback before, but nothing with such perfect consistency across the entire system. Any ideas, Jack?"

"Nothing jumps to mind. What else is going on in Cardiff? Anything else out of whack?"

Toshiko's fingers flew over her keyboard as she brought up a half-dozen other monitoring systems. "Nothing obvious… Wait, here's something." A window enlarged to replace the rift graph on the monitor. "It's minor, but there's some weird energy being picked up near Llanedeyrn."

Gwen frowned. "Isn't that where we just were? Near the Pharm?"

"You're right, it's not far from there. This looks like it's centered in a local park. It's reading almost like some sort of temporal displacement."

"You mean like that bunch of Picts we picked up last week?" Gwen wrinkled her nose. She had been tasked with wrangling with the woad-covered horde until Jack could retrieve a temporal anchor to send them home again. "Can I sit this one out? I'd prefer to keep 'wrestling smelly men in body paint' off my CV."

Jack couldn't resist the soft pitch. "What, you've never been to a frat party before?"

"It's not a localized incursion like that." Always on point, Toshiko ignored their bantering and focused on the problem at hand. "It's more of a widespread…" She frowned at the readings. "Fuzz."

Jack blinked. "Tosh, you surprise me. Where did you pick up a swear word from the thirty-fifth century?"

"What? What are you talking about? I didn't swear."

"Oh? Never mind, then. Go on."

She shot him a sideways look before calling up a graphic representation of the readings on her screen. "Look. The readings aren't particularly unusual, just a little bit fuzzy. Indistinct. Nothing's really out of its time, but the whole area is sort of showing a tiny bit off. Like the edges are blurred."

"But you can't blur time." Gwen glanced at Jack. "Can you?"

Jack squinted at the numbers. "Can you display these readings the same way as the ones for the rift monitor? You know, the kind of graph with the lines?"

"You mean a line graph?" Toshiko grinned. "Of course I can." After a few keystrokes, the image appeared on the screen, an unremarkable pattern of squiggles that seemed to repeat in a few places.

"Now overlay the rift graph for the same time period."

Toshiko worked her magic, and a slice of the rift graph appeared on the same chart. The doubled peaks and valleys of the rift activity lined up perfectly with the repeating sections of the other chart.

"Ooh, that's interesting," Gwen murmured. "Good thinking, Jack."

"That's why I'm the boss," he replied automatically. "All right. Gwen, with me. Tosh, you coordinate from here. We'll check in when we get to Llanedeyrn. Keep an eye on the readings and let us know if anything changes. Meanwhile, keep working on the glove. That's our top priority."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The ostentatious hulk of the Torchwood SUV lurched to a halt, one wheel mounting the pavement. Gwen unclenched her fingers from the armrest and flexed them until she was confident that she could operate the door latch, breathing a silent thanks to whatever genius had invented safety belts. Jack's driving habits were risky when he was in a good mood; when he was under stress, his driving was an outright threat to public welfare. And when he was legitimately frightened, Jack plus automobile could collectively be classified as a weapon of mass destruction.

At least she had a fair guess as to why he was driving like a maniac this time. If Gwen had ever questioned whether Jack's interest in Ianto Jones was anything more than a convenient office fling, her doubts had been left somewhere along the A4161, along with most of the tread of the SUV's rear passenger-side tire. Jack had hardly spoken the entire drive, and judging by his driving, he must be out of his mind with anxiety. He had certainly been out of his lane.

She stepped gingerly out of the vehicle and glanced down at the dented remains of a low metal fence beneath the SUV's tire. "Jack," she called, "you've run over a barricade."

"Don't care." Jack slammed the door of the SUV.

Gwen saw a parking warden stalking toward them, pad in hand, but the woman drew up and scowled as she spotted the TORCHWOOD name incised into the car's fenders. Gwen shrugged apologetically and hurried to catch up with Jack, who was already striding into the park, coat flaring like the cape of some last-century comic book hero.

"So what are we looking for?" Gwen asked, zipping up her leather jacket. The breeze flecked cold droplets of rain in her face. She rubbed water from her eyes, trying not to smear her mascara.

"No idea. Anything unusual, I guess. Tosh?" Jack tapped his comm unit, and Gwen's earpiece activated with a beep as it connected to the Hub's network. "We're in the park. How are things looking?"

"Same readings as before," Toshiko's voice intoned in her ear. "No clear temporal anomaly, but definitely not at normal levels. Still mirroring the rift patterns."

"Okay. We'll look around and let you know what we find." Jack muted the comm and gazed around the park. "See anything?"

Gwen turned in a slow circle, studying the people around her, assessing their movements the way she would have done as a police constable. She shielded her eyes against the rain and squinted at each of them: A middle-aged man walking his dog, shoulders hunched against the wind. A small knot of teenagers, alternately chatting and checking their mobile phones. A couple of kids kicking a football around. After a moment she shook her head. "They all look pretty normal to me."

"Do they?" Jack squinted at a couple strolling nearby, then looked around again. He flipped open his wrist strap and touched some buttons. At least, Gwen assumed they were buttons. There was no keyboard or display that she could see, and none of them had ever figured out how the device conveyed its information to Jack. Half the time she wondered if he were just fiddling with it to look impressive, and then making things up.

"Can you get BBC3 on that thing?" Gwen grinned, waiting for Jack's customary smart response.

"Too much static," Jack muttered.

Gwen was about to suggest he adjust the rabbit ears, but when she glanced over, the tension in the line of Jack's jaw stopped her. "What is it?"

Jack snapped the wrist strap shut. "Can't get a fix on any of them," he growled. "There's some kind of interference."

Ah, so he hadn't heard her joke after all. "You think someone is jamming us?"

Jack shook his head. "It's more like… You know how, with early broadcast television, when the reception was bad, the picture would go all fuzzy?"

Gwen blinked. Had he been listening to her, or…? Then she realized. "Wait, that's just how Tosh described the readings. Fuzzy. Like a blurry picture."

"Huh." Jack closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. "Interesting."

"What is?"

"Gwen, look at that guy over there. With the dog."

She squinted over to where he was pointing. "What about him?"

Jack turned to look at her. "You're squinting. Are you having trouble seeing him?"

"No, it's just the rain got in my eyes."

Jack scanned the park again. "Can you read that sign over there?"

"All pets must be leashed, no skateboarding on footpaths… yeah, I can read it."

"It isn't hard to see at this distance?"

"No, it's fine. I have perfect vision, you know."

Jack nodded toward the kids with the ball. "What about them?"

Gwen watched them play for a moment, then caught herself squinting again. Her eyes widened. "Wait a minute…"

Jack nodded. "Now you're getting it."

"But the kids aren't any farther away than the sign. Why is it harder to focus on them?"

"They're moving. Look around—everything that's holding still is in sharp focus. But the things that are moving, they're just a teensy bit blurry."

Gwen watched as the dog paused to hike a leg on a bush. While it held still, it was easy to see, but as soon as it trotted off again it became less distinct. "What's causing that?"

"I think we're seeing two moments in time overlapping." Jack did something with his wrist strap again. "They're really close, probably just a fraction of a second apart."

"And that makes them blurry?"

"Imagine you have two prints of the same film. You line them up exactly on top of one another, and you can't even tell that there are two pictures. But offset the film by a few frames, and you'll see a double image appear around anything that's moving in the scene. A ghost effect."

"Because the motion is actually happening twice, a split second apart," Gwen concluded. "But anything that's not moving will still be in focus, because that part of the image overlaps perfectly in all the frames."

"Exactly." Jack aimed his wrist strap at the kids playing football and tapped a button. A blue light flickered on the device's interface, and he frowned.

"So what could make two timelines exist at the same moment?"

"No idea, but it usually triggers some kind of paradox if it goes on long enough." He touched his earpiece. "Tosh, I think I have an idea what our anomaly is."

"Go ahead, Jack."

Before Jack could speak, one of the children kicked the ball, which rocketed directly toward the SUV. Just as the ball reached the car, Gwen's vision seemed to double—she clearly saw the ball bounce off the side panel of the car, rolling back toward the children. But she could have sworn she also saw the ball fly into the street, where another car was passing. A squeal of brakes echoed in her ears, but the passing car continued without stopping.

The squeal became very real an instant later, as Gwen heard an alarm sound on one of Tosh's computers. "We just had some kind of spike in the readings," Toshiko's voice came over the earpiece. "Did you see anything there?"

"Yeah," Gwen answered, still staring at the SUV. There was a smudge on the side where the ball had bounced. "It was weird. Did you see that, Jack?"

Jack didn't answer, and Gwen turned to see him staring off at the horizon. His brow was furrowed, his eyes squinting and shifting minutely as though trying to focus on something that kept moving. Gwen followed his gaze, but couldn't find anything in the gray sky.

"Jack?" she repeated, and finally touched his arm. "Jack! What are you staring at?"

Jack blinked a few times, then glanced over at her in surprise. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing." He glanced around the park once more, then snapped his wrist strap closed. "Let's get back to the Hub. Tosh can analyze the readings while we're on the road."

"But we just got here!"

"And I don't think we're going to find anything else useful, so staying is a waste of time." He hunched forward to protect his neck from the mist that was closing in. "Come on, it's getting late."