Edge of Nowhere Page 13

  “If they want to touch you, they’ll have to go through me.”

  While flattering and a little bit thrilling, that didn’t entirely settle Kit’s stomach. There was too much uncertainty.

  Kit recognized the papered-over windows of the lab from the outside. He could see shadows silhouetted against the paper and at least one of them was frantically waving its arms. He counted three people inside, having a conversation in urgent whispers. That was already bad—Emil had only mentioned Dax and Lenny. Who was the third person?

  Emil knocked softly at the door and the whispers stopped.

  Then he tried the door handle and the door swung open, unlocked. He walked inside and his team regarded him in silence. Their expressions changed when Kit entered, and they took in Kit’s outfit—the too-wide collar of his t-shirt made it easy to see the marks on his neck—without a word.

  The third person in the room was the big, quiet, blond guy. Jake? For some reason, he was holding a fat tuxedo cat. Its pupils were huge and its fur was standing on end, but it didn’t meow.

  “Why was the door unlocked?” Emil said in a low voice. “And what is Jake doing here?”

  “We were asking the same thing!” Dax hissed.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kit cut in. “Y’all have to get out of here now.”

  “Why?” Dax asked. “I haven’t had a chance to go through Dr. Lange’s notes yet.”

  “Can you not see how fucked up this room is?” Kit asked. “Watch.” Maybe they hadn’t noticed yet. The room was contaminated by the Nowhere, but it was uneven. Some of the space behaved normally. But Kit had been here earlier and he could still feel those pockets of stretchy space.

  The mess in the lab served him well, since he could just pluck a notebook from the floor. There was something obscene in the way it had been lying there with its pages fanned out, folded at odd angles, and Kit couldn’t stop himself from smoothing them and closing the cover. But then he raised his arm and lobbed it into the air. There was a pocket of disturbed space in front of him, about seven feet off the ground, and the notebook hung there for ten seconds before falling back to the ground in a rustle of crumpled pages.

  “Holy shit,” Lenny said. “The Nowhere is leaking.”

  “This is like a fault line,” Kit said, seeking an analogy. “And we ran over here because I felt a tremor. Probably when you jumped into the room.”

  “So let’s get out of here,” Emil said. “Jake can explain about the cat later.”

  Dax picked up the dropped notebook and then started opening drawers and pulling out others. “Lange didn’t trust anyone,” they said. “Everything unpublished is on paper and only paper.”

  Emil knelt next to them and picked up some of the stacks piling up on the floor, and Lenny followed his lead. Kit shifted. What part of get out of here now didn’t they understand? He should run, and yet he stayed.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of blue light. The cat in Jake’s arms let out a loud meow. Kit whipped his head to stare at the back of the room, but there was nothing. When he turned back to check on Emil’s team, Lenny was staring at him. “You saw that, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kit said.

  “What is it?” Emil asked. “The poltergeist?”

  “It was big,” Lenny said quietly. It was almost drowned out by the cat’s frantic meowing.

  “Jake, get that fucking cat out of here!” Emil said. “I still don’t understand why you brought it here in the first place!”

  “More like the other way around,” Jake muttered. “I’ll go, but if Niels Bohr mauls my fucking face off on the way out, it’s on you.”

  There was another flash of light, then a rip and a crash with no obvious origin point that left the walls vibrating, and an alarm began to blare. Niels Bohr the cat screeched, launched himself out of Jake’s arms, and ran across the room. To the eye, it looked like the back wall was thirty feet from the wall nearest to them. The cat was dashing at full speed and still hadn’t reached the halfway point. Jake had moved to follow it and Emil had bounced up and grabbed him to hold him back.

  “It’s just a cat, Jake. We have to go.”

  A flash. The door slammed shut. Another flash and one of the overturned tables flew across the room. Emil was herding Dax toward the door. They both had their arms full of notebooks. Lenny had his hands on the door handle and was yanking hard, but it was stuck. Jake was standing next to him, not helping, his eyes on something at the back of the room.

  Kit saw it too: Niels Bohr jumped up, hovered for a second, and vanished.

  He was rooted to the spot, the Nowhere reverberating all around him. The alarm blared. The door was still wedged shut. Could Kit jump? He wasn’t even sure he could take a step.

  “Lenny, get Dax out!” Emil ordered. “Jake and I will work on the door! If we’re not out in five minutes, come looking.”

  Lenny grabbed Dax and all their papers in his huge arms and they disappeared. The room lit up again, and this time, Kit thought he saw a shape framed between the two metal parentheses of the instrument. It was the same damn thing that had been chasing him all day. Only here, in the world, it almost had a form.

  It almost looked like a person.

  The edges blurred and it was hard to keep the form in focus. It was like looking for a shape in the clouds, but Kit thought he could see a person: arms and legs spread wide, head tipped back, mouth open in a scream.

  Kit stared in horror for such a long moment that he didn’t hear Emil shouting his name or see the monitor sailing across the room until it was too late. Emil tackled him. The monitor hit Emil between the shoulders. It tumbled to the floor along with the pair of them, starburst cracks through its screen. Kit pushed Emil off and shoved himself up. Emil groaned, still on the floor. There was a long cut down his back. Blood seeped into his t-shirt.

  The thing appeared in flashes all around the room, closer and farther away, and everywhere it went, furniture flipped into the air or broke in two. Jake yelled, “Stop!” as if that could have any effect on the chaos.

  For a moment, there was a lull. Jake used it to wrench the door wide with one hard pull. Then he ran back to Emil, lifted him over his shoulder like it was nothing, grabbed Kit by the hand, and they both ran out the door. The alarm blared behind them.

  There were alarms all over the facility, but the halls were still empty as Jake strode out of the lab with Emil over his shoulder in a fireman carry and Kit hurried after him like some kind of stupid lost puppy. They’d shut the door behind them but he could still feel that room. Walls couldn’t contain the problem. What if that… breach, or whatever it was, got bigger?

  “Jake, I’m fine, I’m conscious, I can walk, please put me down,” Emil was saying. Jake ignored him until they reached a medical exam room where he could deposit Emil in the examination chair. “Message Dax and Lenny that we’re out.”

  It had been a short distance from the lab door to the exam room. Unfortunately, they didn’t make it without being seen. Kit paused in the hallway. “Caleb?”

  That was the voice he’d heard when he’d been trapped in the closet. He didn’t really know Caleb, so it was hard to recognize him when he wasn’t stuck to Aidan’s side. He was brown-haired and blue-eyed, fit and handsome in a sort of inoffensive, interchangeable way, like someone in an advertisement.

  “Kit? What are you doing here?”

  Caleb was a lot bigger than him, but Kit grabbed him by the wrist, pulled him into the exam room, and shut the door behind them. Jake and Emil looked at both of them in surprise. “I could ask you the same thing,” Kit said, stepping forward so that Caleb was backed against the door. “Did you betray Aidan?”

  “What?” Caleb said. “What do you mean? Why would you ask me that?”

  Kit narrowed his eyes.

  “As I recall, you don’t even like Aidan,” Caleb said. “What do you know about him? Do you know what happened to him?”

  “He’s here,” Kit said.

  “I
fucking knew it,” Caleb said to himself. Then, louder, “Where? Is he okay?”

  “I don’t know where exactly. I jumped in and then jumped out.” Kit glanced at Emil. “I think it’s in that part of the map you told me was unused space. And no. He’s not okay. But he’s alive and we can find him.”

  “And what the hell is going on out here?” Caleb said to Emil. “Are you hurt? Let me see that.”

  Kit got out of his way. Now that he had some assurance that Caleb hadn’t been the one to sell out Aidan, he sat down on the floor—collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. He was so fucking hungry. And tired. He couldn’t tell if he wanted food or sleep more. He let his head rest against the wall and watched Caleb work.

  Emil turned around so Caleb could examine his back. He made a soft sound of protest as he lifted his arms up so Caleb could peel off his t-shirt. Jake turned aside, displaying a modesty that bordered on suspicious. A shirtless man was nothing he hadn’t seen before. Then again, the shirtless man in question was quite a sight. There would be no point in Kit pretending disinterest in Emil, since he’d shown up at the lab wearing Emil’s clothes and his hickeys, so he looked as much as he wanted to. Emil’s back was basically a work of art, broad shoulders and narrow waist and all that smooth skin in between.

  There was a shallow laceration between his shoulders and to the side of his spine. Caleb put on gloves and began to clean the cut. Emil winced.

  “Still waiting for an explanation,” Caleb said as he worked.

  “Me too, actually,” Emil said. He was facing away from all of them. “Pretend I’m making serious, concerned eye contact with Jake.”

  “Niels Bohr wouldn’t stop crying,” Jake started.

  Emil cut in. “Niels Bohr is a cat belonging to Dr. Lange, Caleb. Not a person, as you might have assumed without context.”

  “I fed him and tried to get him to play but he wouldn’t settle down, and it was the middle of the night and he kept scratching at the door, so I let him out and I followed him to the lab. And he wouldn’t stop scratching at that door, either. So we went in.”

  That was the most words Kit had heard Jake say at one time. Like most of Emil’s team, he was intimidating at first glance. No amount of glances would ever make the woman who’d slammed Kit into the wall and pressed her arm against his windpipe less intimidating, but a second glance was all it took to see that Chávez, Lenny, and Dax were alright. Well, Dax was too smart for their own damn good, and Chávez was involved with that scientist, and Lenny believed some weird shit about runners, but Kit wasn’t afraid of them. Jake, though, his softheartedness revealed itself more slowly. He’d liked the cranky scientist that everyone else hated, and he was still taking care of the guy’s cat.

  And he’d carried Emil over his shoulder despite Emil’s protests, and Kit strongly suspected he’d done it just because it was funny, and that was a good sign.

  “The lab was unlocked?” Emil asked.

  Jake scratched the back of his head. “It was after I unlocked it.”

  “Dr. Lange gave you access to his lab? And you kept that to yourself this whole time?”

  “I swear I didn’t know! The door scanned me and just let me in. I’d never tried to go in there before, so I had no idea.”

  “I see,” Emil said. “And you found Dax and Lenny already there.”

  “Yeah. Looking for Lange’s notes, they said.”

  “They’d better find a way to fix whatever’s wrong in there,” Kit said. “It won’t be long before something comes out.”

  Caleb looked suitably horrified by that prediction, at least. “What the fuck is this place?” he asked. “Talk to me about how we can get Aidan out.”

  “If I had another runner with me, we could both jump in and get Aidan and my friend Laila out—assuming the Nowhere is working,” Kit said. “It wouldn’t take any time at all. Except I can’t seem to get anywhere lately, and there’s no way I can make another run today without resting first, and also I’m gonna fucking collapse if I don’t eat soon.”

  “So stoic,” Caleb joked.

  “Fuck off,” Kit said with feeling.

  “We’ll get you taken care of,” Emil promised. “And we’ll get Aidan and Laila out, too. Maybe it’s best to break in using more conventional methods, since the Nowhere has been so risky lately. Let’s plan. How are they keeping Aidan and Laila in one place?”

  “Starvation,” Kit said. “And sedation. They were cuffed to their beds, too, but that shouldn’t be an issue for a runner in good shape.”

  “Okay, so we’ll bring them some food,” Emil said. “Describe the room as best you can. How can we get in?”

  Kit thought back to that room, its white walls and floors, the two hospital beds separated by a plastic curtain, the long counter with its cabinets full of medical supplies, a little partition off to the side where people could change into gowns. But there was something he hadn’t noticed. “There’s no door.”

  “What do you mean, no door?”

  “I mean exactly that. There’s a door to a bathroom, but no exit.”

  “That’s not possible,” Emil said. Then he grimaced. “Unless they excavated a whole different part of the asteroid. But how would anyone get in or out?”

  “Quint Services has at least one runner working for them,” Kit said, and then realized he’d failed to include himself in that count. “Well, they had two, but at this point there’s no way they’ll pay me. And I freelanced one thing—they must have someone on call.” Kit had a sinking feeling he knew who it was. Travis Alvey had come looking for him at a strange time of day, and it just so happened to be the day Kit was late with a Quint Services delivery.

  “They were always nosing around Aidan’s business,” Caleb said. “They hated the idea of the union, but they wanted his contact list. They were always trying to persuade him to come to their side. It’s how I got my job, actually. I lied and said I’d put in a good word with him.”

  “So this runner… this person comes up here just to transport Heath or Winslow or whoever into that room?” Emil asked. “That’s an expensive proposition.”

  That partitioned area wasn’t meant to protect anyone’s privacy while changing into a gown. It was to keep Aidan and Laila from seeing the runner who brought the researchers. “Quint Services built a secret facility in an asteroid to explore the possibility of entering other realities. Money’s no trouble for them. You should see what they offered me to bring you back here.”

  Money he’d never see now. And it was Monday, so he was missing his regular appointment with Carl. There was no way he could jump back to Nashville, feeling the way he did. He couldn’t jump into the hallway. He couldn’t even stand. He was awake only by the grace of adrenaline, and he could feel that wearing off.

  “So either we need sledgehammers or runners to get in,” Emil said. “Runners are more discreet—provided the Nowhere doesn’t spit them out somewhere deadly. In order to save Laila and Aidan, we need to solve our other problem. Next time you encounter that thing, you should fight it. Capture, subdue, or kill it.”

  “Kill it?” Jake said, and even in his solemn, deep voice, Kit detected alarm. He hadn’t expected big, tough, built-like-a-wall Jake to be such a pacifist. That was probably his own prejudice—straight men made him nervous—and he regretted it. Jake was mysterious, but he was kind.

  “You’re assuming too much, Emil. Who says it can be killed? And even then, who says I can kill it?” Kit asked. He was glad that Jake was alarmed out loud. It meant he could be alarmed in private. Kit was afraid to speak aloud what he’d seen—a man, trapped and screaming—because it sounded so crazy. And yet this was his life: teleportation, asteroids, other realities. What was one more thing in the mix? Why not a tortured ghost?

  “If Dax and Miriam put their heads together, the two of them can figure out how to kill anything,” Emil said. The weight of his gaze was heavy on Kit. “And that thing has already tried to kill you, so I don’t feel much sympathy for it at
the moment. I’m not sure why you do.”

  It looks like a person, Kit almost said. I think it’s—they’re in pain. But he’d had his fill of creepy novelties for the day, and as Emil had pointed out, he didn’t have much reason to feel charitable toward the thing in the Nowhere. So he kept his mouth shut.

  Something changed, and it took Kit a moment to put together that the alarm had stopped blaring.

  “That means Heath and Winslow are out there,” Emil said. “We’ll have to hide you from them.”

  Kit sighed. “I can put in one more run. It’s just to the kitchen.” That was all bravado, and nobody was convinced. Kit couldn’t be sure he’d make it to the kitchen. If he was lucky, the Nowhere would swallow him and he wouldn’t have to feel the gnawing in his stomach or the pounding in his head anymore. “I could take you with me, probably,” he added, looking at Emil.

  “Absolutely not,” Emil said. So sharp. So stern. But Kit had seen the fear in his eyes. Emil cleared his throat. “Jake and Caleb, can you two go talk to Heath and Winslow while I get Kit to the kitchen? We can’t go forward with any part of this plan until Kit’s able to jump again—safely.”

  “And tell them what?” Caleb asked.

  “Don’t worry, I got this,” Jake said. He took Caleb by the elbow and steered him into the hall.

  Kit and Emil heard raised voices in the hall. “We didn’t do anything, sir,” Jake was calling. “I promise!”

  “Why were you here in the first place?” That was an older man. Kit had heard him in the hallway when he’d been stuck in the closet with Emil. It was probably Winslow. Judging from his severe tone, he was very unhappy.

  “We were walking the cat, sir,” Jake said.

  “Walking the cat,” Winslow said, incredulous. “In a restricted laboratory that was recently the site of a dangerous accident?”

  “I believe he sensed something, sir,” Jake said. “He wouldn’t stop crying. I opened the door for him—I didn’t know I could do that, Dr. Lange must have given me access without informing me—and he ran right in. He jumped into the air and disappeared. Then things flew all around the lab and the alarm went off.”