BRODHAM WAS SPEECHLESS.

He'd been poring over the security footage from the CIA compound, and each time he rewound it to watch it again, it seemed to get more and more bizarre.

He knew one thing: His hunch had been right. He'd been knocked out of the way before the rifle blast had hit him.

When he'd first gotten to that part, he'd tried rewinding the tape and then going through frame by frame, just as Vickers had done.

Even that hadn't convinced him. Not fully.

So he'd rummaged in his desk for a Scotch tape dispenser.

The interrogation room on the monitor was set up like a basic rectangular box, about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide. Walls, floor, and ceiling a stormy dark gray. The gunmetal door was set about three-quarters of the way down one of the long walls, and in the long wall opposite the door was a twelve-foot-long mirrored window that hid an adjacent observation room.

Roughly in the center of the floor, a dozen feet to the left of the door, was a dull metal interrogation table, its joints welded rather than bolted so prisoners couldn't discretely secure a weapon in a loose screw or rivet. And completing the somber decor, two matching gray, straight-backed chairs. The whole ensemble gave an atmosphere of being designed by robots. Which in a way, Brodham considered, it had.

There were two cameras in place to record interrogation sessions: One mounted to the wall inside the chamber and one on a tripod facing through the mirrored wall.

The inner camera was secured in the upper corner that connected the wall to the right of the door and the wall opposite the door. It offered a giant's-eye view of the prisoner's face as he was being questioned, allowing analysts to review the footage later for telltale ticks or signs of dishonesty.

It was the feed from this camera that Brodham was reviewing with red-eyed religious zeal.

He pressed rewind for the umpteenth time and the characters in the play zipped in reverse at an almost comic clip, like an old Chaplin film.

Medical techs, dropping Brodham off a stretcher into a pile on the floor. Five armed guards skipping out of the room. Two cloaked men, backing into the door, weaving around like caffeinated flies, then exiting in mirrored crouches, rear-ends first. Brodham, flying off the floor to a standing position facing Petar. Correction: Facing where Petar should have been.

Brodham mashed pause and the image froze. He squinted at the monitor in front of him. Tapped a key. Gerry and the other guard skittered forward a pixel. The precursor to a smile jumped onto Gerry's lips. Each keystroke Brodham made was moving the action forward ten frames.

Brodham peeled a fingernail strip of Scotch tape from the dispenser and stuck it straight to the monitor, right over the image of his throat. Framed forward. Brodham's body pivoted off the tape strip. He peeled it off the screen and stuck it over the new position of his throat. Framed forward again. A blue glow appeared from a shadow behind the doorway.

Next frame. Gerry was on his way to the floor, collapsing underneath a dull spray of red.

Brodham backed up and used the computer mouse to change the skip function to move only one frame for every stroke.

Clicked again.

Two things changed. First, the blue glow expanded into a white-hot flash. Second, a crimson rose bloomed from Gerry's throat. Within the same frame.

Backed it up one. Smiling Gerry, blue glow. Forward one. Bloody Gerry, white flash. No visible projectile. Brodham leaned back in his chair and shouted through the open door.

A moment later, a red-headed AV technician bounded into the dark office.

"What's the framerate on this camera?" Brodham asked.

"Which one?" The tech ran a hand quickly through his hair and leaned in closer.

"Interrogation room C7. S Block."

"That'd be a hundred and twenty frames per second. All the internal CC cams are one-twenty. Observation cams are sixty."

Brodham leaned back to the monitor, the tech forgotten. A hundred and twenty frames per second. Each time he tapped a frame forward with the changed settings, the time-frame inside the room was moving forward by less than a hundredth of a second. He rummaged through the drawer of the flimsy pre-fab desk again and came out with a thick plastic disk. Walked out of the room.

When he reentered ten minutes later, he flopped into the wheeled chair and dug a pencil and pad of paper from the same drawer.

The next five minutes were silent but for the thin scratch of graphite on paper as Brodham scribbled down a column of figures.

Finally, he leaned back, squinted at the computer monitor, squinted down at the sheet of scribbled figures, and sighed.

There was no way that was possible.

Brodham knew from his military training that an M4 carbine, like the rifles the guards at this facility carried, fired their standard rounds with a muzzle velocity of about 3,000 feet per second. That meant that when the firing pin hit, the bullet was out of the barrel fast enough to cover ten football fields in one second. That was faster than sound.

When Gerry had been shot, he'd been farther in the room than the other guard, ten feet by the measurement Brodham had just gone and tape-measured off. Ten feet from door to impact. If an M4 had made the shot, the bullet would have traveled the distance in .003 seconds. Faster than the devil, by all accounts.

But not faster than this devil. Brodham ran through his numbers one more time. Shooting a hundred and twenty frames per second, every frame captured by the camera encompassed .0026 seconds.

There should have been at least one frame between the muzzle flash and the impact bloom when the round struck Gerry in the back of the neck.

Of course, Brodham considered, there were rifles that fired faster than an M4. Even excluding high-velocity heavy artillery, like the rounds found in aircraft and tanks, this shot could be done. In the '30s, Winchester put out their .220 Swift rounds, which held the record for fastest muzzle velocity at 4,600 feet per second. Brodham knew that the intruders hadn't used .22 rifles, which were typically used for hunting rabbits and small game, but he plugged the numbers in anyway.

.0022 seconds. That would have gone from muzzle to neck in one camera frame.

But that didn't exactly solve the whole problem.

Brodham switched the playback settings back to ten-frames-per-click.

Gerry falling. Petar's empty chair sliding back on its own. Gerry's partner, hit before Gerry's knees made contact with the ground. Himself, standing stock still with an expression of dumb surprise on his face.

Finding what he was looking for, Brodham reversed once and then set the feed to move forward one frame with each keystroke. He repositioned the sliver of Scotch tape on the monitor, square across his bulging throat.

One frame. Two frames. Gerry was dropping like frozen molasses. Even gravity lost its hold at a hundred and twenty frames per second. Brodham noticed another quirk and logged it away for later. He had to know this with absolute certainty.

Three frames. Both guards were now in a cockeyed limbo. Funny how a human body collapsed.

Four frames. There!

Brodham watched with fascination as, over the course of five more frames, his feet left the floor of the interrogation room. He looked like a poltergeist – soles of his shoes several inches off the floor, arms beginning to splay out at his sides, head rocking backward. He was just floating, a little up and a little back with each frame.

At frame ten, a familiar white flash exploded from the steady blue glow in the doorway. Brodham took his hands off the keyboard completely and stared. One side of the room was illuminated in the rifle's glare. Halfway across the room, near the far wall, a plume of blood had erupted from Brodham's chest. And half a foot in front of the entry wound, a greenish shimmer caught the light like a ghost halfway to the afterlife. A second squirt of blood shot up from the shimmer.

Brodham blinked. His eyes felt like they were wrapped in wool from the hours in front of the glowing monitor. He forced himself to concentrate.

Picking up the pencil he'd used to scratch out his calculations, he held it horizontally along the computer screen. The yellow edge connected the center of the white rifle flare perfectly with the wound on his chest. And lined up in the middle, the sliver of Scotch tape that he'd carefully used to mark the position of his throat. It was now about six inches – in real space – below the current position of his throat, hanging as he was in mid-air.

Brodham let his breath out with a whoosh.

It had actually happened. The kid had saved his life. Brodham was a hundred percent convinced of it. He didn't know how he'd done it, or how he'd disappeared, but Inmate #4231 was the reason he was alive today.

A sense of eerie unease settled over Brodham like a smog. He was staring at the moment of his death, only reality had shifted and death had missed its mark. It was an unsettling thought. Brodham rolled his chair away from the computer desk and stood. He needed to stretch, take a walk. Get his mind off this. Coffee. A meal.

He needed to go home and make love to his wife.

Instead, he rolled back into place and picked up the pencil again.

During his short trip to interrogation room C7, he'd also measured his own distance from the door when he'd been shot. Seventeen feet.

For a .220 Swift, the second fastest rifle round on consumer shelves, that would have taken a blistering .0036 seconds.

Achingly slow, compared to the camera's .0026 seconds per frame. As with the M4 round at a distance of ten feet, there should have been two frames between flash and hit.

But there wasn't. The hit was instantaneous.

It wasn't entirely impossible, but it was close.

Thanks for reading my story! Please VOTE and let me know what you think of it so far, then check out Chapter 17!