Edge of Nowhere Read online

  Edge of Nowhere

  Felicia Davin

  Copyright © 2018 Felicia Davin

  All rights reserved.

  To Lis and Kristin

  Contents

  1. Cats

  2. And Dogs

  3. A Qualm or Two

  4. Don't Throw Me Away

  5. Suspect Loyalties

  6. Secret Plan

  7. Look Out for Each Other

  8. Every Person for Themselves

  9. Intentions

  10. A Tremor

  11. The Hand That Feeds You

  12. Tough Crowd

  13. Dimensional Prions

  14. Adrenaline

  15. Not a Thing

  16. Complicated

  17. Alone

  18. Tea

  19. Nobody's Area of Expertise

  20. A Bad Deal

  21. Not Quite Familiar

  22. Selfish

  23. Flaws

  24. Spend Some Time

  The series continues…

  Also by Felicia Davin

  Thornfruit

  About the Author

  1

  Cats

  Months of strange incidents at Quint Services Facility 17, and it was the cat that had done it. Emil wished he’d just let the poor thing wail for his dinner, but there’d been no telling when Lange would return to feed him. So he’d walked to the lab in the middle of the night. He’d never regretted a kindness more. Emil had spent twelve years in the Orbit Guard—eight years active duty, four in the reserves—but somehow twelve weeks at QSF17 had landed him in more trouble.

  He didn’t sigh. He kept his tone even. “As I said in my report, I was standing in the hallway when the lab door blew off and hit me. It knocked me unconscious. I don’t know what happened in the lab before or after that.”

  Emil’s interrogator was some higher-up at Quint Services, but not the billionaire himself. He’d given his name as Kristian Auer. Black suit, short grey hair, judgmental expression. He stared Emil down across the table and said, in a voice that could preserve corpses, “You were found inside the lab, Mr. Singh.”

  Because the Nowhere doesn’t follow the laws of physics. Emil knew better than to say that. He waited for a question. If Auer wanted to accuse him of some wrong, he’d have to make that accusation in words.

  “If something caused the door to blow off and hit you while you were standing in the hall, then why were you found inside the lab?”

  “I don’t know how I ended up there, sir. I was unconscious at the time.”

  Auer had laid a pen and an old-fashioned paper pad on the table at the beginning of this meeting, but he hadn’t touched either. The first page was still blank. Emil had known this interview would be useless—he knew so little, and he’d already written a report—but Auer’s hopes had been higher. Or maybe he was using his unnatural stillness to creep Emil out. “Did you know Dr. Lange well, Mr. Singh?”

  “No, sir.” Emil’s bruised face still ached. They’d given him stitches to close the cut through his right eyebrow. The black eye needed more time to heal. Contusions purpled his arms and legs. And the rest of Emil was still reeling. They’d transported him to Franklin Station and de-orbited a pod to get him to this interrogation, worried that a trip through the Nowhere would cause him further distress. Re-entry in the pod hadn’t exactly been buckets of fun, but the space elevator would have been far too slow.

  Not that Quint Services cared much for Emil’s time. He’d been recovering in a featureless room for four long days, forbidden from looking at screens, supposedly because they were worried he had a concussion. He’d been hit in the head pretty hard. But still, his alleged concussion had been a convenient reason to keep him from communicating anything to his team about what had happened six days ago, or why he’d been whisked back down to Earth for questioning without a word.

  Emil still wasn’t sure what he’d witnessed before the door hit him.

  “You and Dr. Lange lived in the same isolated facility together for months.”

  “It wasn’t really possible to know him, sir. He kept to himself.” The Orbit Guard had had its share of grouchy assholes, but none of them held a candle to the head scientist at Quint Services Facility 17. Emil had never met a more cantankerous recluse than Dr. Solomon Lange. Not even Chávez and Beck could get him to smile, and everybody liked Chávez and Beck. Emil’s team avoided Lange, which meant Emil was the one who always got stuck telling him to go lie down, or eat something, or feed his damn cat.

  “And yet you were in the lab with him on the night of the incident,” Auer prompted.

  “I was passing by, sir. Sometimes Dr. Lange needed to be reminded to eat and sleep. On that particular night, Dr. Lange’s cat was crying for food. I went to tell him.”

  “Are those not the actions of a friend?”

  “As I’ve said, sir, we weren’t friends. I was keeping him alive. I knew he was crucial to the mission. And Dr. Lange’s room is right next to mine. His cat’s yowling was keeping me awake.”

  The fucking cat was named Niels Bohr. When Emil’s team had first arrived at QSF17 and found that famous physicist Solomon Lange was a cat lover so passionate that he’d refused this post unless his cat was allowed to accompany him, they’d been charmed. Niels Bohr himself was a charming creature, a plump, dapper tuxedo cat who was always ready to give and receive affection—unlike his owner. After learning the cat’s name, Dax had laughed and asked why, if the cat was going to be named after a famous physicist, Dr. Lange hadn’t gone for broke and named him Erwin Schrödinger? Lange had given Dax a stare that promised violence. For one long, fraught moment, Emil had wondered if his first act at QSF17 was going to be breaking up a fistfight. The whole team had breathed a sigh of relief when Lange had simply turned on his heel and walked away.

  Emil didn’t share any of that with his interrogator. It wasn’t relevant. He didn’t want to find out if Auer’s disapproving frown could get any deeper.

  Auer didn’t drum his fingers on the table or fidget in any way. Emil was beginning to wonder if the man ever blinked. “Do you have any notion of what Dr. Lange was working on at the time of the incident?”

  “Only in the most general terms, sir. I know he studied the Nowhere and that he wanted to… open a door, I think, was the metaphor that one of the other scientists used to explain it to me. A way into the Nowhere for people who weren’t born runners.”

  “Which other scientist?”

  “Dr. Heath, sir. She’s working on the runners, on what biological differences make it possible for them to go into the No—”

  “I am aware of Dr. Heath’s work with Dr. Winslow, Mr. Singh,” Auer said, his voice even crisper and more clipped than usual. “Do you believe that Dr. Lange was trying to open this door on the night of the incident?”

  “I don’t know, sir. As I said, I was just passing by. I was knocking on the door of the lab when I heard this loud, ripping sound. I thought Dr. Lange was in danger but the door—”

  “The details of the incident are in your statement, Mr. Singh. There is no need to repeat them here. Let me rephrase my last question. Based on what you saw in the aftermath of the incident, do you believe that Dr. Lange succeeded in opening a so-called door?”

  “There wasn’t… there wasn’t a hole in the lab, if that’s what you’re asking. It didn’t feel like the Nowhere.” Emil repressed a shudder. He would have noticed that. But he couldn’t explain how he’d ended up inside the room after the door had blown off its hinges and thrown him backward into the hallway. He wanted to say I think it was both an explosion and an implosion. Then Auer would ask him why he thought so, and he didn’t have an answer except that he’d ended up inside the lab. Some force had propelled him there, sinc
e the lab door had still been half on top of him when he’d woken. If Emil said that, they’d be right back at the beginning. “It just looked like an explosion had happened. Everything broken or flipped over. The walls were still intact.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Singh. Now, regarding your statement, I’m still unclear on a few things. Did you see Dr. Lange die?”

  “I don’t see how a human being could possibly have survived an explosion like that, sir.”

  “But did you see him die?”

  “No, sir. It was impossible to see anything. As you can see,” Emil gestured at his black eye and his stitches, “my injuries are consistent with my statement.”

  “And after the incident, did you find his body in the wreckage?”

  There had been a blinding light, a burst of pain, and then blood rushing into Emil’s right eye. An instant of unconsciousness. Emil had woken up to emergency alarms blaring and Dr. Heath and Dr. Winslow rushing into the lab, both in their pajamas, lifting the door off his body and dragging him out. Emil could remember the sight of the lab in disarray, smashed tables and broken glass on the floor, but he couldn’t remember seeing Dr. Lange’s body. Maybe he’d blocked out the sight. “No, sir.”

  “Dismissed, Mr. Singh. You’ll be sedated for transport back to QSF17 tomorrow. For now, you should report to medical for your regular treatment.”

  2

  And Dogs

  The trick to making money was never asking questions. Clients didn’t pay him to talk. They paid him to transport parcels thousands of miles in an instant. Kit could navigate the Nowhere with ease and he didn’t worry about what exactly he was delivering. That had won him a reputation as the most discreet and reliable runner out there.

  Unfortunately, today’s parcel had an attitude. Kit had to break his own rule.

  “You didn’t sedate her?” Kit held the squirming dog at arm’s length. For a tiny thing, she had a lot of fluffy white fur. And sharp claws. Kit never feared crossing the Nowhere, but this yappy little dog would put his leather jacket and pristine black-and-silver t-shirt in serious danger. Animals—and most humans—reacted badly to the trip. Kit was one of the rare people who didn’t.

  He felt sorry for the dog, but he was more worried about the clothes. The t-shirt was programmed to shift its abstract silver pattern every few minutes and was one of his favorites. He’d bought the jacket in Tokyo. It was designer, for fuck’s sake. He’d saved for months and made a special trip and it was the perfect shade of bright green to clash with the Virulent Violet dye in his artfully tousled hair.

  “Arielle has an all-natural diet,” Carl said. The dog’s delicate name sounded funny in his deep, scratchy, tough-guy voice. Carl Akins was a local mob boss whose mistress lived states away in Inland New York, and their long-distance relationship was making Kit richer by the week. The mail and regular delivery services were slow, fraught with corruption, and subject to scrutiny by state police. Like any criminal with two brain cells to rub together, Carl didn’t want to expose his business to that. Since he could afford Kit’s fees, Kit’s talents as a Nowhere runner had become essential to his underworld empire and his personal life. There were no border patrols or customs agents in the Nowhere. Kit just wished Carl’s preferred love trinkets tended more toward diamonds and less toward sending Miss Tallulah an entire menagerie.

  At least the parakeet had been in a cage.

  “Arielle’s gonna all-natural yarf on my jacket and it’ll cost you extra,” Kit said.

  “There won’t even be time for that.” Carl waved his hand dismissively. “You’ll be there in two seconds.”

  Kit resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “It doesn’t work like that. Time passes differently in the Nowhere.” In truth, Nashville to Inland New York only required a few minutes traveling through the void, but a few minutes was more than enough for Arielle’s special diet to end up on Kit’s favorite distressed-to-perfection fitted black jeans and limited-edition red sneakers.

  “What’s with you today? You never talk this much. I don’t pay you for physics lessons, kid.”

  “Not a kid.” Kit was twenty-one years old and most days, it felt like a lot more. “Seriously, Carl, this poor animal’s gonna have a rough time in there. You sure you don’t want to sedate her?”

  “And send my Tallulah a sleeping lump of a dog? And have her message me shrieking about chemicals and toxins and whatever the fuck else? I don’t think so. Do your damn job and bill me when you get back—which should be four seconds from now, if you get going already.”

  Like most people, Carl hadn’t ever been in the Nowhere. And if he had, he wouldn’t have wanted to go back.

  Kit wasn’t most people. He could feel the Nowhere all around him, no matter where he was, currents of tension in the air, pulling him closer. All he had to do was focus for a moment and he could step right into the void. He’d been able to since he was eleven years old and it came so naturally that he had a hard time believing other people couldn’t. It was right there. You just had to want it.

  One second he was standing in Carl’s warehouse arguing, and the next, he and Arielle the dog were soaring through the airless black of the Nowhere. Kit propelled them forward, feeling powerful and free. Arielle yelped and scraped her claws down his face and chest, shredding his t-shirt. Then, as predicted, she vomited.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, glancing at the wet mess on his t-shirt. Poor dog. No more live packages—at least, no more live packages that weren’t sedated.

  It was the easiest kind of trip, going to a place he’d been before. The Nowhere was directionless, a pulsing expanse of darkness, so runners navigated by feel. Most people worked the same routes over and over again, but Kit didn’t like to limit himself. If the price was right, he’d go anywhere.

  The remaining moments of his trip through the Nowhere weren’t as carefree and weightless as he wanted them to be, since he was feeling sorry for the dog and for his clothes. But the trip was short for him and shorter for everyone on the outside, since he arrived in the lobby of Miss Tallulah’s high-rise apartment building only one second after he’d left Carl in Nashville.

  The doorman eyed his disheveled state and gave him a dirty look. Yeah, fuck you too, buddy. “Delivery for Miss Tallulah,” Kit said. She had a last name—Miller—but it was too mundane for her career as a famous spiritualist and she’d once squawked at Kit for using it. She was real stuck-up for a goddamn scam artist, but her criminal boyfriend was paying for Kit’s rent and his taste in clothes, so he kept his mouth shut.

  The doorman nodded and accepted Arielle as gravely as anyone could accept a motion-sick lapdog. He messaged Miss Tallulah—of course she wasn’t waiting in the lobby for her delivery, no matter how instantaneous—and a minute later, the elevator dinged and she exited in a flutter of floral-printed silk bathrobe and hair curlers. A blindingly pink cocktail sloshed out of the glass in her right hand. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Kit could have appeared directly in her apartment. Depending on the parcel, sometimes that kind of privacy was necessary. But Miss Tallulah claimed he emanated “negative energies” and would throw a fit if he showed up at her door, so he used the lobby. She was probably right about him, in a way. Kit put off all kinds of negative energies when she was around.

  She squealed at the sight of Arielle, took the dog from the doorman, and kissed her head. “Oh, but what’s that smell?” she asked, cradling the dog in one arm and the cocktail in the other. When her gaze landed on Kit, she scrunched up her sharp features in disgust.

  He wanted to ask if her cocktail was all-natural. He didn’t. Kit could sometimes get away with rolling his eyes at Carl, but if he so much as blinked wrong in Miss Tallulah’s presence, he’d lose this very lucrative line of commerce. So he said, as neutrally as possible, “Arielle didn’t enjoy the trip.”

  “Oh, poor baby,” Miss Tallulah cooed, pressing her nose to the dog’s. “Well, we’ll get her settled, won’t we? Yes we will! Oh, sweet thing, come up her
e with Mama…”

  She went back to the elevator without a thank-you or a goodbye. Kit did roll his eyes then, and the doorman caught him, but the man was too dignified to respond with anything other than offering Kit a tissue to wipe up the dog barf.

  “Thanks.” It didn’t help much, but the thought counted for something.

  Before the doorman could say goodbye, Kit was back in Nashville, awaiting payment and trying to look as steady as possible. Even two quick trips through the Nowhere left him drained.

  Carl frowned at him. “Guess you were right about Arielle.”

  “Yeah,” Kit said, holding out a hand, expectant. “You owe me five percent extra for damages.”

  “The fuck I do,” said Carl. “Your fee’s high enough as it is, you little freak. Five percent! Jesus. You’ll bleed me dry.”

  “Five percent extra or our arrangement is over,” Kit said. Carl didn’t usually insult him like that, but it wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. The law-abiding world feared runners, a class of people who couldn’t be caught or imprisoned, and sometimes the criminal world did, too. The only difference was that Carl needed him.

  Carl sighed and handed over a stack of cash, dollars as green as they’d ever been, even if commerce between states had been more difficult since the institution of border patrols. Tight border security was great for Kit’s business but bad for everyone else. Kit counted the money and nodded, satisfied.

  “You comin’ in on Monday?”