Nowhere Else Read online

  Jake let go of his indignation and brought the conversation back to what mattered. “I’m not much of an expert on unfolded space, though. That’s all you. Your machine made a door into the Nowhere, and now we need you to close it.”

  “Fine,” Lange said. “Take me there and I’ll close it.”

  “Uh huh,” Jake said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Take you there and you’ll throw yourself in, more like. How about I bring Dax in here and you tell them how to close it instead?”

  Dax Strickland, the other physicist remaining at Facility 17, had been Lange’s junior colleague. They were brilliant, but they hadn’t been able to repair the damage done by the accident on their own.

  Lange responded to the question with silence. Maybe it was stubbornness. Maybe he didn’t know the answer.

  “I’m sorry for how things went down just now. I don’t want to do that again. You wanna apologize for throwing me at the wall?” Jake said, pressing his luck. He wasn’t in the habit of asking, but habit didn’t cover any part of this situation. Lange wasn’t in his right mind. He wouldn’t hurt anybody if he were in control of himself. At least, Jake wanted to believe that. An apology would be a sign. A real historic moment—Jake’s first-ever apology from somebody who started a fight with him. They could throw a parade.

  Lange offered him half a second of cold eye contact, then looked away. After long enough that Jake thought Lange would change the subject and move on, Lange said, “I regret harming you.”

  Maybe not parade-worthy, but better than expected. Still a damn long way from promising not to do it again, but just like with a shitty Christmas present, the thought counted. It was enough for Jake to say, “Good. You could shower and change your clothes and act just a little bit more like a human being. I’d accept that as a peace offering.”

  “I will shower and change. Acting is beyond the scope of my abilities.”

  “You know I meant behaving, not performing. You can get nitpicky with me when you smell better,” Jake said, tossing a bath towel at Lange. The towel hung in the air, untouched, and Jake sighed. Lange was full of shit, acting like he wasn’t human. So he could juggle with no hands these days, that didn’t make a difference. His bad attitude alone qualified him.

  He offered Lange a hand up from the bed. There had been toiletries in the room before the team had removed all the small, hard, throw-able objects. Later, Jake had removed all the large, hard, throw-able objects. There wasn’t much to be done about Lange flinging people. Lange’s previous efforts had been a little gentler. He’d just sort of slid the other team members backwards out of the room and forced the door closed. Jake was lucky enough to get special treatment, apparently. His bruised shoulders throbbed.

  Lange had apologized, Jake reminded himself. He unclenched his jaw and clung to that.

  Jake walked Lange to the facility’s shared bathroom and neither of them said anything, which was fine. Silence was good for thinking about the upgrades Jake would make to Eliza. Version one of the probe moved on treads, but he wanted more versatility. Version two could hover, maybe.

  If the team ever stopped asking him to check on Lange, Jake would have time to make the changes.

  Sure, they’d all been switching off shifts outside Lange’s door, worrying. But when it came time to talk to him, that fell to Jake.

  Ridiculous. Jake didn’t even know the guy. Felt a kind of frustrated sympathy for him, sure. Weird loner, better with science than people. Jake knew that song. It didn’t make them friends.

  He’d thought for a while that it might. Lange was interesting. Jake wasn’t interested in him—Jake wasn’t much for that kind of interest—but buried under that lethal coldness was a brilliant mind. Someone Jake might have enjoyed talking to. It wasn’t that Lange had rejected his friendship. Jake had made a few tentative overtures in their first few months living in Facility 17, and then Lange had—well, not died, exactly. But he hadn’t been around.

  Lange was back now, and he was a mess, and Jake was even more of one, because sometimes he still wanted to be friends. He thought about hugs, for fuck’s sake.

  It was the social equivalent of standing on a high precipice and looking over the edge. A jump would end in brutal, painful disaster, but those moments of free fall in between—no. Jake was not fucking doing this. The void could stop calling him right the fuck now.

  Jake found a clean washcloth and a bar of soap and turned to give them to Lange, who leaned against the wall, brooding, still fully dressed.

  Someone quicker with a joke might have teased him—I know it’s been a while since you bathed, but the usual thing is to take your clothes off—but Jake’s throat closed up at the thought. Instead he warmed up the shower and said, “It’s ready. I’ll, uh, wait over here. Yell if you need anything.”

  Lange pushed off the wall, jerked his shirt over his head, then dropped it. Jake spun on his heel after catching a flash of brown torso. He probably should have watched Lange totter into the shower to make sure their best chance at fixing the universe didn’t slip and break his neck, but he couldn’t move. Jake didn’t turn around again until he heard the metal stall door latch.

  Lange had left the towel and the set of clean clothes hanging on hooks opposite the stall. His discarded clothes lay crumpled on the floor, next to the soap and washcloth Jake had given him. As Jake watched, the toiletries rose from the floor and floated under the stall door.

  The power itself was weird, and weirder still was how quickly Lange had adapted to it. He no longer thought to reach for things with his hands. Since his return, Lange acted like his body was some alien punishment that had been forced on him. He didn’t welcome sensations of any kind, even ones Jake thought of as pleasant—clean sheets, hot coffee, a friendly pat on the back. No wonder he’d put this off for so long. The shower was probably making him miserable.

  Maybe he really does feel bad about hurting me, Jake thought, and then a spray of warm water jumped out of the stall and splattered his face. He blinked, water catching in his lashes and dripping down his nose to wet his shirt.

  “Very funny.”

  “Oh, did that hit you?” Lange’s delivery was as dry as ever. “I was experimenting.”

  Jake wiped a hand over his face, pushing his wet bangs up. “How about you finish up your experiment and we get back to solving the real problem? You know, the one where your machine ripped open the Nowhere and now it’s spilling?”

  The water cut off. Lange’s towel levitated from the wall hook into the stall. “You’ll have to take me to the lab. I can’t solve a problem I can’t see.”

  The lab. Not my lab. Lange kept doing things like that. Divorcing himself from his former life.

  “Promise me you won’t hurt anybody, including yourself. And jumping into the Nowhere counts as hurting yourself.”

  “Remaining here is far more painful.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t know,” Jake said, frowning. Lange was unhappy, but who wouldn’t be, after being trapped in the Nowhere for weeks and then stuck in that empty room with nothing to do? He hadn’t realized Lange was suffering. What a fucking mess.

  “It is not my intention to hurt you or anyone else,” Lange said after a long pause. “But in my… condition, my intentions are worth very little.”

  “No,” Jake said. “They’re worth a lot.”

  There was only the sound of water dripping onto the floor.

  “Lange, I know things really suck right now, and I’m sorry. If you just hold off on hurling yourself into the void for a little while, I will work with you to make things suck less. You stick around and I will too. Okay?”

  “You’re the first person who’s said that.”

  “What?”

  “That things… suck. Everyone else has been determined to assure me that everything’s okay now.”

  “Oh. Well. Clearly it’s not.” Was that gratitude in Lange’s tone? Jake hadn’t done anything but acknowledge reality. He took a breath. “Listen, you fix the wo
rld and I will help you fix yourself. Or at least, make sure you’re not in pain anymore. I’m good at fixing stuff. It’s why I’m on the team.”

  Jake was good with wiring. Pipes. Engines. Robots. Hardware. Anything mechanical, he could take it apart and put it back together better than he’d found it. People didn’t work like that—and they never wanted him around, so he didn’t know much. But his gut twisted at the idea that Lange was so miserable he wanted to throw himself back into the Nowhere, so Jake had to say something. Lange didn’t deserve to live like that.

  There was a long silence as Lange dressed inside the stall. Instead of responding to Jake’s offer, he said, “You don’t know for certain that I am capable of ‘fixing the world.’”

  “Yeah.” Jake blew out a breath. “You know someone better qualified, you give them a call.”

  “I don’t,” Lange said. The door swung open, his cool regard zeroing in on Jake. “Neither do I know anyone capable of ‘fixing’ my problem.”

  Jake could only shrug. It had been easier to talk to Lange with his face out of sight. “Guess we’re stuck with each other.”

  2

  The Sound

  Lange had underestimated the value of cleanliness. Having eaten and washed, he couldn’t say he was enjoying himself, but the odor of his body no longer bothered him, and the sharp pain in his stomach had decreased. Not being filthy and hungry had improved his condition.

  So had talking to McCreery.

  Who knew it would mean so much to have the reality of his situation acknowledged? Absurd. It shouldn’t matter if other people believed him or not; the truth was the truth.

  He moved toward the lab with halting, unsteady steps. He’d declined McCreery’s assistance. Lange didn’t like any bodily reactions, but the increase in his heart rate when McCreery touched him was particularly distracting and unwelcome. Lange had other problems to solve.

  Soon he’d be close to the breach. Already it hummed against his skin, its presence a promise. He could return to the Nowhere, where he belonged.

  And yet—

  Lange didn’t care for the world. He didn’t owe it anything. But McCreery had been kind to him despite everything. Whatever happened to Lange, McCreery would continue living here, in the world Lange had endangered. He ought to examine the problem, at least. Perhaps he could help.

  The lab door, papered over with menacing red warning signs, slid open when McCreery touched it.

  In order to plan his escape, Lange had spent his waking hours supplementing his fragmented memory by compiling a mental spreadsheet of the seven people living in Facility 17, so he was able to identify the person who met them in the lab as Dax Strickland.

  Features: young, white, redheaded, nonbinary, medium height and build.

  Profession: physicist.

  Loyalties or attachments within the crew: unknown.

  Frequency of appearance in his room: low (two known visits).

  Attitude: reserved.

  Ability to enter the Nowhere: none.

  Ability to hinder his plans: low.

  It was possible Dax had come to his room more than two times. Lange had been numb and stupefied for the first few days, physically unresponsive but telekinetically volatile.

  Strickland jerked a thumb at their chest, clad in plaid flannel. “I’m Dax, in case you don’t remember. Doctor Strickland if you’re going to throw anything at me.”

  Lange was too distracted by the constant high-pitched whine in the lab to respond. Two whines. No, three—though the third was faint. Couldn’t the others hear the sound?

  “Doctor Lange? You there?”

  “It’s been a hard day,” McCreery said softly. Was that meant as a defense of Lange’s silence?

  “It’s okay. Let’s talk about what’s going on here.”

  Strickland gestured at the lab space, which had been stripped bare of broken glass and overturned furniture—oh. A memory. Lange had been here before.

  The accident everyone spoke of in hushed tones had occurred here. An explosion of sorts. Hence the wreckage he remembered.

  There was no trace of that. The lab was an empty expanse of grey walls and flooring. The windows that would have looked out on the hallway had sheets of brown paper held in place with duct tape instead of panes of glass.

  His eyes stung and he blinked to clear his vision and bring things back into focus, but it wasn’t him. It was the space. Something was wrong here.

  At the far end of the room, the two silver parentheses of the machine stood.

  They whirred and keened, but Strickland and McCreery hadn’t noticed the noise. Lange said, “Have you tried turning it off?”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “Doctor Lange doesn’t make jokes,” Strickland said, which made McCreery grimace for some reason. “And no, it’s not still on. It went into automatic shutdown twenty-four hours after your accident, as designed. I only left it on that long because we were hoping you’d reappear.”

  That word again. Accident. It was true that turning on the machine had unforeseen consequences for Lange, but if it was an accident, it was a happy one. He’d learned what it was to live in the Nowhere, unencumbered by his body.

  “‘Have you tried turning it off,’” Strickland muttered, offended. “It’s been weeks.”

  “But I can hear it,” Lange said. The noise. It had to be the machine, didn’t it?

  “I don’t hear anything,” Strickland said, at the same time that McCreery made concerned eye contact and asked, “What are you hearing?”

  “Three constant, whining sounds,” Lange said. The loudest one hovered at the pitch of A flat, irritatingly dissonant with the G of the second loudest. At times, he could detect a C, but it was significantly quieter. The buzzing cluster of pitches didn’t coalesce into a chord. Long-ingrained habit silenced these details, which McCreery and Strickland would only find puzzling. Lange couldn’t remember much, but he knew that.

  “Could it be the breach?” McCreery asked. “Maybe it’s another ability you developed in the Nowhere, being able to hear whatever’s wrong in here.”

  “Where’s the origin of the sound?” Strickland asked.

  Lange slid his gaze toward the opposite wall. The air shimmered. Yes. He was hearing the breach, or the Nowhere, or something related to those two.

  Shouldn’t it sound more enticing?

  “You think whatever you’re hearing is coming from the breach?” Strickland asked.

  “Something like that,” Lange said. “If I could get closer—”

  “No,” said McCreery, speaking at the same time that Strickland held up a hand.

  “Wait right here. Don’t move.” They dashed out of the lab and returned holding three tennis balls. “Here’s why going over there is a really bad idea.”

  Strickland dumped a tennis ball into their hand, then threw it toward the machine. Halfway between their position and the machine’s, the tennis ball vanished.

  Strickland waited a beat. The tennis ball didn’t reappear. They threw a second one down the left side of the room. It disappeared even earlier in its trajectory, then popped out of the air on the right side of the room like it had tunneled through some invisible space.

  The first one might never return, and yet the second one had. Fascinating.

  Being in this room brought back memories of his grant proposals for the project. The original goal of the machine had been to establish a permanent door into the Nowhere, meant to allow more research into the void and perhaps to democratize access to instant travel. Most people couldn’t enter the Nowhere. Those that could travel through it—runners—were a tiny fraction of the population, often feared and mistreated by those around them.

  Lange hadn’t thought he could change that, not really. But building a door had seemed worth a try.

  Instead, the accident with the machine had produced this unstable breach, which was now affecting the space around it, as evidenced by the unexpected behavior of the tennis balls. A sort of
oil-spill of unfolded space.

  Strickland bowled the last tennis ball along the floor. Its path toward the machine was strange—straight enough, but its speed changed seemingly at random, as though it were passing through different terrain. But it never disappeared. It trundled along for ages, making it seem like the other side of the room was a kilometer away. The ball slowed to a stop just short of the base of the machine.

  “So crawling along the floor would get us there,” Lange said. He’d be able to hear the sounds more distinctly if he were closer. Then he’d understand them.

  “Still risky,” McCreery said. “If we need access to that half of the room, we can send Eliza.”

  “Eliza?” Strickland asked.

  “Uh. One of my robots.”

  “You name them? Jake, that’s so cute. Why haven’t you ever mentioned it?”

  Judging from McCreery’s expression, he hadn’t mentioned it because he was hoping to avoid a reaction like Strickland’s. These observations and the subsequent realization gave Lange the sense of having solved a difficult equation at last.

  “I’d hate for you to lose Eliza, though,” Strickland continued. “I know you design them to go where we can’t, so it’s her job, but it would be a loss. The whole room is a mess—you’d have to track the path of that tennis ball exactly to get over there.”

  McCreery nodded, held up a hand, and left the room.

  He returned with more tennis balls and a can of black paint. He dipped the first one in, coating it, and pitched it along the floor, trying to follow the path of the previous ball. It left a black trail as it rolled.

  A trail that ended abruptly when the ball disappeared.

  “Good call,” Strickland said. “We’ll be able to map out where some of the dangers are if we cover the room like that. I’ll get the others, it’ll go faster that way.”

  “Wait,” Lange said. “There’s no need for that.”

  The shimmer he could see between the parentheses of the machine repeated itself elsewhere in the room, two dozen fluttering distortions of the light that burned his eyes. But he could see them. They matched the incessant buzz and whine burrowing into his ears.