Edge of Nowhere Read online

“Disrespecting the game!” Lenny said. “The every-man-for-himself aspect of hockey soccer is a cherished part of our tradition.”

  Miriam, Chávez, and Dax shared a dark glance.

  “Apologies. I meant to say the every-person-for-themselves aspect.”

  “Negative one thousand to Miriam Horowitz, disrespecting the game; negative one thousand to Lennox Malcolm Beck III, being kind of an asshole; five hundred to Lennox Malcolm Beck III, apologizing with grace and style,” Chávez said.

  “If ‘being kind of an asshole’ is against the rules, this game ought to be scored wildly differently,” Miriam said.

  “Negative one thousand to Miriam Horowitz, disrespecting the game!” Lenny boomed, pointing at her. She cocked her head and stared him down, unrepentant.

  Emil walked between the two teams, placed the puck on the court, and said, “Start already.” Then he got out of the way fast.

  Chávez kicked it down the court before the other team could blink, but as she pushed past Lenny, Lenny grabbed her by one shoulder and leapfrogged over her head. This was Emil’s favorite part of this absurd ritual—turning the artificial gravity down low to allow for inhumanly high jumps. Lenny came down in seeming slow-motion, cradling his beer to his chest. He caught the puck with the edge of his foot and turned its progress around by sliding it to Caleb.

  Their new friend looked delighted to be included, but Jake got in his space and stole the puck before he could get far. Jake passed to Miriam, who sent it sailing down the court into the soccer goal at the end.

  “Two thousand to Jacob McCreery for cat-burglary levels of stealth, three thousand to Miriam Horowitz for that beautiful shot, five hundred to Caleb whatever-your-last-name-is for bringing some fresh-faced optimism into this tragically jaded crowd, and ten thousand to Lennox Malcolm Beck III for leapfrogging me and not spilling a drop!”

  “My last name is Feldman,” Caleb said. “And how come only Lenny gets a middle name and a suffix like that?”

  “Because he’s three times cooler than the rest of us,” Chávez said, retrieving the puck as the others rearranged themselves mid-court.

  “If you’re wondering if it’s a conflict of interest for one of the players to officiate and announce the game like that,” Dax said in an aside to Caleb, “it is.”

  “Disrespecting the game!” Chávez and Lenny said in unison. Chávez added, “Negative one thousand to Dax Strickland.”

  Dax took a drink, which was really the only thing to do in that situation, since shaking their head or rolling their eyes would likely have resulted in further penalties. They played another point, and Caleb, having caught on, managed to leapfrog Miriam and take possession of the puck. There were cheers all around. He passed to Dax, who scored a goal. That would have tied the match in any normal game, but Emil knew better than to point that out.

  “Refill,” Chávez called out and left the court. She sat at the table with Emil and took her time getting a second beer. “You alright?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Dunno. Did something happen with that purple-haired runner? I haven’t seen you look at anybody like that since I caught you being a maudlin drunk looking at photos of your exes. And I don’t see him around today…” Chávez let this sentence hang in the air like a question.

  He didn’t sigh, even though he wished she’d never seen him looking at pictures of Lucas. Or had it been Rose? If he’d been drunk enough, it had probably been both.

  “Maybe I’m not alright because our head researcher is missing or dead and the whole damn facility feels haunted,” Emil said. It was a transparent attempt to change the subject. Chávez was trying to make him feel better, offering him a chance to talk about his feelings. But Emil didn’t have feelings to talk about. Or he didn’t want to have feelings, which wasn’t exactly the same, but they’d go away if he ignored them. This was a wiser course of action than seeking advice from Chávez, who fell into bed so easily that she was sleeping with Dr. Heath.

  “So you admit you’re not alright,” Chávez said.

  It would be stupid to mope about Kit, a person he’d known for just over twenty-four hours. A person you kissed, his brain reminded him, but he shoved that thought away. Emil smiled, huffed, and shook his head. “I’m fine. Go play your game, Chávez.”

  “Ignoring a friendly attempt to check on your emotional wellbeing, negative one thousand,” Chávez said, wagging a finger. But she left Emil alone.

  There was more aerial play in the third point as Caleb got the hang of the low gravity. He scored “an elegant and worthy five-thousand point goal,” but spilled his beer in the process, which carried a penalty of “negative five thousand points and shame heaped upon you from all sides,” and he shot a look of sympathy at Emil as he began to understand how rigged the game was.

  “Can I assign points for things?” Caleb asked.

  “Of course,” Chávez said. “Just follow the rules.”

  “Uh huh,” Caleb said, skeptical.

  Emil watched them play a few more points and completely lost track of the score. But it was a pleasant, if ridiculous, distraction, and he liked watching his friends enjoy themselves. After Chávez’s little chat, the rest of them came over on their refill breaks, one by one, to speak with him about different things. This wasn’t so different from other Sunday afternoons. Their regular match provided reason enough to be together—everyone, including Heath and Winslow and their six lab techs, had been invited to hockey soccer in the beginning, but its chaotic and arbitrary nature drove away all but the core mission team, who happened to be Chávez and Lenny’s closest friends. Emil knew that was probably by design, and in his role as the team’s grown-up, he ought to guard against the forming of cliques at the facility. It could lead to tension among the residents.

  But there was tension among the residents now for other, far more urgent reasons, and if these people were a clique, they were his clique, and today it was convenient that nobody else wanted to be around them. The echoing basketball court covered up these private conversations, such as when Dax informed him that Lenny was going to jump the two of them into Lange’s lab at four in the morning.

  “Don’t come,” they said. “We’ll be in and out as fast as we can. I’m just letting you know in case of emergency.”

  “I’d rather go with you,” Emil said.

  “Lenny can only jump one person at a time and a regular break-in will be harder to hide,” Dax said. “I’m the one who can come closest to understanding Lange’s notes and Lenny’s the one who can get me in and out. It makes sense. Don’t argue.”

  Emil frowned at them. “Fine.”

  “I’m hoping to find out more about the poltergeist,” Dax added.

  Jake, who’d just arrived at the table where they were sitting, shook his head. “I can’t believe that name stuck.” He filled his cup. Dax returned to the court, letting Jake have his turn, but Emil didn’t expect him to take advantage of the opportunity. Jake usually just got another beer and gave Emil a friendly nod.

  Today he had something to say, though. “They’re not scary.”

  “Wait, ‘they’? Why do you think there’s more than one polt—”

  Lenny walked up right at that moment, just in time to overhear. He clapped Jake on the shoulder. “Uh huh. You’re not scared of ghosts. Good for you, Jake. You’re the manliest of all.”

  Jake grimaced and walked back onto the court without saying anything. Had he been on the verge of elaborating? Emil wondered what else he’d wanted to say.

  “It’s different when you can see them,” Lenny said, defending himself to Emil.

  “It’s pretty creepy when you can’t see them, too,” Emil admitted. “All the weird noises, all the things falling over, I think I got used to telling myself it was no big deal. I learned to shrug it off. Then witnessing Kit’s reaction reminded me how eerie it is.”

  “Yeah. I wish I’d gotten to ask him more questions.” Lenny glanced at Caleb, currently being chased down
the court by Jake and Miriam, and then back at Emil. “What do you think of him?”

  Caleb’s arrival in the kitchen last night had spurred Kit’s departure, and all the worst parts of Emil resented him for it. “He seems sweet. Maybe even naive. I’m not planning to reveal any secrets to him, but I don’t think he’ll harm us.”

  “He’s a fucking star on the court,” Lenny said, raising his voice so he could be heard across the room and lifting his beer toward his teammates.

  “Stop talking and get your ass over here!” Dax demanded.

  “Yeah,” Caleb said. He beamed at Dax, then pointed at Lenny. “Abandoning your teammates to chat feels a lot like disrespecting the game!”

  “Sustained! Negative one thousand points to Lennox Malcolm Beck III!” Chávez yelled. Lenny laughed and ducked his head and ran back to the court, where play resumed. Emil smiled, but he couldn’t keep his focus on the court. He’d have to get up at four in the morning, just in case Dax and Lenny needed him. And he’d have to approach Jake privately and ask him what it was he’d wanted to say about the ghosts.

  9

  Intentions

  Kit stepped into the Nowhere, but he wasn’t fast enough to dodge the monster. The big one slammed into him and they popped right back into the world. Or Kit did, anyway. The monster didn’t follow him out. Kit pushed himself upright and rubbed the back of his head. The white walls and floors looked the same as the rest of Facility 17, so he assumed he hadn’t gone far. The room was a wreck. There were overturned tables and broken computers on the floor. One wall must have had a series of rectangular windows looking out into the hallway, but the glass had all been smashed, and now there was just brown paper taped over the empty spaces. There were signs on the metal door with warning symbols. Keep closed at all times. Across from Kit, the back half of the room was open, with no tables or chairs or debris. There were two large metal instruments, curved like parentheses, the opening one on the left and the closing one on the right of the room.

  All the wrongness he’d sensed elsewhere in Facility 17 was concentrated there. The currents he could normally feel in the Nowhere slowed to a crawl and became irregular. He reached out with a hand—here, he could feel them, but six inches to the left, they were gone.

  Or he thought it was six inches. His hand and his eyes disagreed. He saw his hand move six inches, but he felt it move way farther than that. The space inside the room was distributed all wrong, stretched in some places and squeezed in others.

  This was Dr. Lange’s lab.

  It was as though the explosion that had rocked this room had fragmented the Nowhere. Now invisible shards of it hung all around him. Kit shuddered to think of what it might feel like on the other side of the large room, in between those menacing instruments. Luckily, the other side of the room might as well have been ten miles away.

  Had the thing brought him here? Did it have intentions? Or was it just some glitch in the Nowhere resulting from whatever had gone wrong in this room? Kit didn’t know and he didn’t care to find out. He’d promised to get Aidan and Laila out of Facility 17, and the stomach-knotting wrongness of this room wasn’t helping him toward that goal. This wasn’t his problem.

  He took a breath to settle himself, closed his eyes, and reopened them in the Nowhere—only to get tangled with the thing and forced back into the world, somewhere bright and loud and full of people. A terminal? A mall? Kit blinked, disoriented. Just as in the lab, he had a moment of wondering if the thing had been trying to follow him out. He had a strange sense-memory of… as if it had tried to grab him and hold on. But it had no hands. Or did it? Its shifting, ghostly form did seem to have appendages sometimes, and it felt solid enough when it attacked him.

  No matter. It was nowhere to be seen. Kit left before anyone could ask if he needed help getting up from the floor.

  The thing had to be waiting for him. It was on him in an instant. Kit kicked and shoved, trying to get away and free himself, but only ended up twisting himself around and getting forced, face-first, back into the world somewhere. He flailed, grappling with a monster that was no longer there. There was sunlight and blue sky and air—and Kit would have been grateful that there was air, since getting popped out of the Nowhere and into the void of space seemed more and more likely, but there was only air.

  No ground, no trees, no buildings, no nothing. He was falling. The wind ripped at his clothes. He risked a glance down and saw a city in miniature below, its tiny grid of roads and structures a blip in the surrounding green farmland.

  Shit.

  There was only one choice: back into the Nowhere. The strain of it dragged at every muscle and his brain groaned in protest, but it saved him from splattering on the ground.

  It didn’t save him from the thing, which attacked again. Kit wanted to scream, but he’d jumped into the Nowhere five times in a day. He didn’t have the energy to run from the thing, let alone scream at it. They spent what felt like days hurtling through the void—sideways, forward, backward, up, down, Kit couldn’t tell—until they plunged into a different kind of darkness, the icy water of some unknown ocean. Kit struggled, thinking the thing might have come with him into whatever world this was, but there was only the water and the darkness and the pressure, pushing into his lungs. He couldn’t see anything, but reaching out with all his limbs only got him tangled in some ropy, slimy plant. It didn’t get him any closer to air. Which way was the surface? Was there a surface? He needed air too much to think. He’d die if he didn’t open his mouth, but there was only water.

  When he blinked back into the Nowhere, he was alone. The sudden lack of pressure let his lungs expand, but he still couldn’t seem to breathe or focus. Soaked, shivering, none of his senses or his limbs working, his brain a quivering mass of useless jelly, he let himself drop through the void.

  Kit materialized in mid-air in Emil’s room and thudded to floor with a squelch. Emil dropped his book and jumped out of bed, crouching over Kit, who was freezing to the touch and wrapped in some kind of kelp. Seawater puddled beneath him.

  “Kit!”

  Kit coughed up water. Emil began chest compressions, firm and steady, clearing his brain of anything except the count. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. He tilted Kit’s head back, pinched his nose, covered his mouth and blew into it. Another round of compressions. Another breath. Then Kit’s arms shot up and pushed at him, and he rolled to the side and coughed up more water on Emil’s floor. He gasped for breath, his purple hair dripping into his face and his whole body trembling.

  No time to consider it. Emil pulled off his waterlogged boots, peeled him out of his clothes, toweled his hair and the rest of him as best he could, and deposited him in bed. He stripped and crawled under the blanket, pressing himself against Kit, reassuring himself with the sound of his heartbeat and his breath. Where on Earth—or maybe that was the wrong expression. Where had he been? It had been a whole day since they’d last seen each other in the kitchen. Why had Kit jumped back here? What had brought him so close to drowning?

  The thing. He must have run into it again. Emil lifted his head slightly and looked over Kit’s shoulder to his room beyond. In the wet pile of Kit’s things left on the floor, there was a long rope of some kind of dark green-brown seaweed. He’d have to examine it once he could be sure Kit wasn’t hypothermic. Kit felt so small curled against him, freezing. He wasn’t quivering anymore and instead was perfectly still. Emil wanted to rub his hands into Kit’s cold skin, but he’d been trained not to. Kit had to warm himself up slowly. So Emil resisted his impulses and tried to feel secure in the knowledge that Kit was alive.

  “You scared me,” he murmured, unsure if Kit could hear him. Kit was certainly drowsy and out of it, if not fully asleep. “But I’m so glad you came back.”

  Kit had come here in a panic, fearing for his life. When they’d returned from the desert together, he’d brought them both to his own room, but tonight he’d come here. With no chance to plan or time to focus, his first thought
of safety had been Emil. Even with Kit’s chilled body pressed into him and leaching out his body heat, the thought made Emil warm. Kit had sidestepped Lenny’s question about whether it was possible to jump to a person, but his arrival tonight was answer enough.

  “I missed you,” he told Kit. “I know you were only gone a day and we barely know each other, but… I missed you. Please be okay.”

  He could never have said that while looking Kit in the eye and worrying about how he’d respond. But lying in bed, under the soft light of his reading lamp, with Kit facing away from him, it was easy to speak the truth. In this suspended, anonymous moment, it was even possible to lean over and impulsively drop a kiss on Kit’s temple.

  When he settled back into bed behind Kit, his heart was hammering. He shouldn’t have done that. Why had he done that?

  Emil stayed quiet, listening to Kit’s body in the silence of his room. Resuscitating Kit had terrified him and Emil was too worried and wired to fall asleep, but he could stay here with an arm slung over the dip of his waist and a hand against his heart. Kit was asleep now, not about to vanish again, and Emil let his thoughts drift.

  I haven’t seen you look at anybody like that since… Chávez had said. It was funny to hear it, since Emil didn’t feel like he’d looked at his previous partners any particular way. And Kit had nothing in common with either of them. He was so much younger, first of all, and instead of having a professional career, he made his living in a shadowy, cash-only criminal underworld. Rose and Lucas had both been Emil’s age. Rose had been a graphic designer and Lucas had been a doctor. His parents had been delighted with both of them—proof that Emil was on the right track at last.

  Rose and Lucas weren’t the only people he’d ever had relationships with. There’d been two people in the five years since Lucas dumped him, but Chávez didn’t know about Ella and Marco. They’d both been casual, no-strings arrangements in the year after the break-up, and Emil’s nightmares had featured broken condoms and broken hearts during and after those liaisons. He wasn’t cut out for casual.