Convergence Point by Liana Brooks

she lied to reporters. “You think she’ll let you go?”
    â€œShe doesn’t know I’m out.”
    â€œShe knows. She’s hunting you. She’s going to find you.”
    â€œUnless I go with you?”
    â€œThat’s about the shape of it.” Donovan’s smile returned. “One little heist. One little trip back in time. You go your way. I go mine. No one ever finds us again.
    â€œYou’ll be the first criminal to ever escape Detective Rose.”

 
    CHAPTER 6
    We do not know what effect traveling through time has on the human body, let alone the human soul.
    ~ activist Dr. Annie Lowell speaking at the Conference for Time Theories I3-­ 2071
    Wednesday March 19, 2070
    Florida District 8
    Commonwealth of North America
    Iteration 2
    S ome ­people kept statues of the Madonna in their house. Little altars to the saints who cared for the small ­people. Ivy didn’t pray to any god. Her altar was built to a living hero, living, but no less distant than the gods.
    She stopped in her morning routine to look at the poster of her hero. It was the eyes that always got her. The dark eyes filled with fear, sorrow, and a newborn, burning rage, like the look of a child who finally reaches for their abuser’s hand to stop the next blow.
    Ivy’d seen the look a few times in the Shadow House before the city took her. The look of flowering hatred as the children there realized what their names meant. That the name Shadow was a death sentence for all but the lucky few.
    Until the day the real Jenna Mills died, that had been her future. One day, the workers in white coats would come take her away from her group to a small room where her last sight would be a cold needle plunging into her arm. Her organs, genetically identical to those of Jenna Mills, would be harvested to repair the real Jenna Mills. If she was lucky, she’d only wake up with a limb missing. Most shadows never woke up at all.
    Then the real Jenna Mills died.
    The coroner said it was instantaneous. The driver of the car—­the reports never said who had been driving—­fell asleep at the wheel, and the whole family was killed. Police came to the Shadow House. She was sold to the city as a drone under the only name she’d ever known: Jenna’s Shadow.
    Now she was legally Ivy Clemens, police officer. She stopped to check her uniform in the mirror, brushing her fingers along the rough embroidery of her chosen name. And then, like the ritual it was, she looked back at the woman on the poster.
    Agent Samantha L. Rose, the first clone to ever hold a bureau rank. Her brief speech on humanity had won the hearts of the clone population, maybe even swayed the hearts of the uterus-­born idiots who still thought slavery was a good idea.
    â€œI am not a thing. I am not your possession. I am a human being,” Agent Rose had said when accosted by reporters at the Atlanta airport last summer.
    Ivy had watched the speech live. When the poster with Agent Rose’s stern visage and the words I AM NOT YOUR POSSESSION emblazoned went on sale, she bought it. The very first piece of art for her tiny apartment that was now, finally, legally hers.
    Her phone buzzed. “Officer Clemens.”
    â€œThis is Dispatch Operator Bogumil. We have a report of a dead body floating in the water south of Twenty-­seventh Avenue Park.”
    â€œGreat, why aren’t you calling a patrol car?”
    â€œI did, they told me to have a drone take care of it. A drunk swimming into a riptide is a waste of an officer’s time. That’s a direct quote.”
    Taking a deep breath, she looked at the angry-­eyed poster. What would Agent Rose do? Silly question. Agent Rose would handle it. Agent Rose could handle anything.
    S am sat at her desk glaring at the dates on Henry’s request forms that Dr. Morr had sent over from the lab. Something about them was troubling her, and she couldn’t quite put