Resonance by Erica O’Rourke Page A

A mother and a musician, happiest in her work and in her home. Happiest with my grandfather, certainly.
    And yet she’d run.
    People—Originals and Walkers alike—are contradictions. They hold within themselves a jumble of impulses and beliefs; circumstances polish some facets and chip away others. But amid the jumble lies their heart, diamond hard and incontrovertible. Like a kaleidoscope, the aspects of a person can shift and reform, but the center holds true.
    It was easier to see in Originals, because we could compare versions. I’d met countless Simons, and no matter how different he appeared, each at their core was strong and sharp and challenging. Walkers were fixed, their alternate, contradictory selves existing only in imagination.
    Or in stories.
    The woman in this journal was more than a contradiction. She was a careful construction of a life, a tale meant for an audience.
    She was a lie.
    â€œRose knew the Consort would read these,” I said, fixing myself a cup of coffee. “They’d analyze the Walks she took, same as we’re doing.”
    Eliot looked up. “So they’re either fake, which means we’re wasting our time, or they’re genuine, which means they’re useless. Which means we’re wasting our time.”
    â€œRose was a medic,” I pointed out. “She shouldn’t have taken this many Walks.” Walker medics served multiple teams, so they usually stayed in the Key World unless called out for a specific emergency.
    â€œFakes, then.” Eliot pushed the laptop away. “But why bother making up an entire book of bad data? Why did Monty send us here?”
    I stared at the scatter of pages in front of us. Two hundred Walks. For a medic, that alone was suspicious. “Maybe it’s not completely fake.”
    Eliot started to pace around the island, pencil spinning. Ifrowned into my mug and waited, but the pacing didn’t stop. His lips moved silently.
    I finished my coffee and poured another cup. He kept going.
    â€œHey—” I said, but he held up a hand to silence me. “You’re going to wear a groove in the floor.”
    Impatient, I pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and listed Rose’s Walks again—just the numeric frequencies. There was no pattern, no cluster of worlds or range of pitches she seemed to favor, and I huffed in irritation. When I was done, I had a list of random numbers and Eliot standing over my shoulder, smelling of pine sap and buttered popcorn. “Solved it yet, Genius Boy? Because I’m stumped.”
    Wordlessly he pulled the pen out of my hand and drew a thick black slash through two of the Walks.
    â€œHey! I actually worked on that, you know.”
    â€œDel, look.” He ran down the paper, crossing out the duplicate frequencies. “Signal to noise. The real information is here, but you have to dig through a lot of meaningless stuff to get at it.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œThe Consort would have read these journals, same as us. So it means anything obvious is probably useless—like Echoes she went to more than once. The Consort would assume they’re important, but their true purpose is to throw Lattimer off the trail and obscure the real data.”
    I studied the remaining frequencies. “Those are the Walks she actually took?”
    â€œSome, yes. But I’m betting we need more exclusion criteria.”
    â€œI don’t speak genius,” I muttered. “Translation?”
    â€œWe need another filter. Other ways to separate out which frequencies are important and which are camouflage.”
    â€œShe took this one with Monty,” I said, pointing to one of the numbers at the bottom. “According to his notes, it was their last Walk together before she left. Is it important?”
    â€œHe said her story was the one that mattered, right?”
    I nodded and stuffed another Oreo in my mouth.
    â€œIf we cross out