Edge of Nowhere Page 3

  The route rolled past tobacco fields and empty pastures. The hills loomed in the darkness and the increasingly narrow roads dipped and wound around them. Kit slowed down to take a curve, and realized he’d gone far enough now that he should be at his destination.

  There was nothing out here. Just hills. And trees. How could this be the place?

  He pulled off the road and killed his engine.

  A second later, in a place he could have sworn was foliage, a massive door slid open. A square of black yawned in the hillside. It was foreboding and, Kit had to admit, kind of cool.

  A man in a black suit appeared in the space. Kit could only really see the brilliant white of his shirt collar and the long oval of his face, as though they were floating in the darkness. His grey hair was short and styled like a helmet. He wasn’t smiling.

  “Kit Jackson.”

  Kit hadn’t been born with that last name, and sometimes people looked at him funny when it came up. They stared at his face and tried to reconcile his name and his heritage. Kit never answered their questions, if they bothered to voice them. Never mind that he didn’t know the answers. It was none of their goddamn business that he’d taken Zin’s last name for himself. Zin had always guessed he was multiracial, because she was multiracial herself and it made her feel connected to him, but she’d never specified what she meant by that. Talking about racial or cultural background meant talking about family, and Kit didn’t have one. And he wasn’t fool enough to take a DNA test, not when he suspected there were people out there who’d do terrible things to get biological samples from runners.

  But the man in the suit didn’t seem to care what Kit looked like or what his name was. Or if he did, it didn’t show. Kit parked his bike just inside the secret door and followed the man down a long, concrete corridor. It sloped downward. They were heading underground.

  Despite growing up in the undercity, Kit didn’t like being underground. It was a silly fear, since he could escape at any time just by thinking about it. But still. It was different in the undercity, where it was just freeways above you and there were streets branching off in every direction and people everywhere and you could always find the sky if you looked for it. Out here in the country, going underground, Kit felt like he was walking into a tomb. He’d spent his whole life checking for exits. Maybe that was why it was so easy for him to get into the Nowhere.

  The man in the suit wasn’t talkative. He walked in front of Kit, suit hanging off his wiry frame and his long legs carefully unhurried. What kind of salary was Quint Services paying him, and why wasn’t he spending it on better tailoring? Kit didn’t wear suits, at least not businesslike black ones, but if he did, he’d make sure they fit him better than that.

  The concrete corridor ended in double doors that led into another corridor, fluorescent-lit and linoleum-tiled. The place felt like a high school or a hospital, but empty. And secret. And underground. What the hell was this job, anyway? Kit hadn’t seen anything that looked like a parcel. The place was sterile, not an object in sight.

  He could take anything he could carry into the Nowhere. Weight wasn’t an issue, just volume. He had to be able to wrap his arms around whatever he was delivering, or at least get a really solid grip. A few times, he and Laila had worked together to deliver larger objects—usually fancy tech destined for the space stations, big electron microscopes or rovers or whatever, things one person couldn’t really grab solo. But that was dicey, working with another runner. Laila had been his most reliable partner.

  What did Quint Services want him to deliver?

  The man in the suit stopped in front of a door. There was light coming out of the bottom, but the narrow rectangular window at eye level had been papered over, so Kit couldn’t see inside until the man opened it.

  What the fuck.

  There was a man sitting on the floor, legs splayed, back leaning against one white cinderblock wall. He was blindfolded.

  “He’s sedated,” the man in the suit said. It was the first time he’d spoken since saying Kit’s name. “We understand that makes the trip easier. The blindfold is a precaution against disorientation, in case he wakes up during the trip.”

  “Yeah,” Kit said. He didn’t say usually people sedate themselves after consenting to be transported somewhere. The man in the suit made him wary. Jesus. This wasn’t what he’d been expecting. The hairs on the back of his neck had been standing since he’d walked into this place, and now his heart was hammering. Hadn’t he just promised himself no more live packages? Think of the money.

  The man on the floor had at least one ugly, visible bruise on him. The purple tail of it was peeking out from under the white linen blindfold. What would it take to beat up a guy that big? Shoulders like that—Kit wasn’t even sure he could wrap his arms around the guy. What had they used to sedate him? Horse tranquilizer? Fuck, this had gone way past weird. Kit should get out now.

  Silk sheets. Champagne. Zin’s mortgage.

  But who was he? Where was Kit taking him?

  Kit tried to figure it out from context, but the whole thing was too bizarre. The sedated man’s clothes—a black t-shirt and sweatpants—gave no indication of who he might be. He looked more like he was dressed for bed than anything else, but he had on sneakers. White ones with no personality. So new they were shiny.

  That was a strange detail. Had they never been worn? How had this man come to be here? He was fit in a way that made Kit think of soldiers, but his black hair stuck up wildly—maybe a result of the blindfold, but his haircut looked too long and uneven to be military. His skin was about the same shade of light brown as Kit’s own, except for that bruise on his face.

  Kit had been staring for too long. “Where are we going?” he finally said. It was a funny way to ask his usual question—what’s my destination?—and he couldn’t say why he’d phrased it in a way that emphasized the two of them. It wasn’t like he felt any connection to this unconscious stranger. For all he knew, Quint Services had knocked the guy out for being an asshole. Maybe they’d done him a favor.

  At Kit’s question, something happened to the man in the suit. His face moved in imitation of a smile. It didn’t look happy or amused or natural, and Kit found it hard to look at. But he couldn’t let that show.

  “Up,” the man said, his face still an uncanny mask of human emotion. He rattled off six coordinates, numbers Kit knew had to represent a location in space, but they couldn’t possibly be in Earth’s orbit.

  Kit had been to both U.S. civilian space stations, Franklin and Sojourner, plus one U.S. military station and a dozen foreign ones. He was well-fucking-traveled. And those coordinates didn’t mean a damn thing to him except space. That wasn’t a place he wanted to go, so he had to break his rule and ask another question.

  “We’re not gonna end up as space debris, right? These coordinates go somewhere with pressure and breathable air?” Of course, if they did lead to the vastness of space, Kit could just jump right back. But then he wouldn’t get paid.

  “Yes,” Suit Creep said, still with that plastic smile. Smarmy motherfucker. “Quint Services has a facility inside an asteroid that was deliberately drawn into lunar orbit almost a century ago as part of an experiment long since completed. I’m not at liberty to say much about it, and I must ask that you spend as little time there as possible. We chose you for this job because you have a reputation for making prompt, uncomplicated deliveries. You’ll receive payment in full upon your return here.”

  Prompt, uncomplicated deliveries. Sure. Kit had a reputation for not having any ethical qualms. He was starting to think he didn’t deserve it—he’d found a qualm or two tonight. Maybe he should have developed them along the way. Say, before ending up in this secret underground facility, taking orders from a creep in a suit, agreeing to deliver an unconscious man who seemed very much like a prisoner into some unknown location in space.

  Then again, there was all that money.

  Getting the sedated man off the floor would pro
bably be the hardest part of this whole job, Kit told himself. Sure, lunar orbit was a long run, but he could push himself. And if he collapsed when he got there, well, he’d just stay the night and they could dock his pay accordingly. They could take twenty percent if they wanted—he’d still make plenty.

  The suited henchman watched in silence as Kit crouched next to the sedated man, leaned forward, and awkwardly wrapped his arms around the guy’s chest. Jesus, where did this guy shop? You couldn’t buy off the rack with arms like that. His poor t-shirt was stretched almost to its breaking point.

  Yeah, okay, Kit, calm down. Not the time or the place to let his thoughts wander in that direction. Suit Creep was still watching. Kit could struggle to stand up while lifting a man twice his size, or he could just hold on tight and vault them into the Nowhere from right here on the floor. He picked option two.

  He always thought of it as stepping into the Nowhere, or jumping, but he didn’t actually have to move his body to get there. It was a question of mental focus. On a day like today when he was already tired, taking a physical step might have helped smooth out the transition from reality to void. But he didn’t think he could haul Biceps McGee upright, and he wasn’t in the mood to become Suit Creep’s entertainment, so they had a rough takeoff. Even sedated, the man jerked in his arms as they entered the Nowhere, startling Kit and causing them to tumble head over heels into the black. Kit managed to flip the two of them upright again—not that it mattered, since there was no up or down. But he’d already been vomited on today, so he might as well keep this guy’s body oriented in its usual direction.

  Moving through the Nowhere was a little bit like swimming. That was the only thing Kit could compare it to, not being able to fly. He could feel the Nowhere pulsing around him like water—and not like water at all. He kicked his legs to go forward, although forward was just as much nothingness as backward, or sideways, or any other direction. There was almost no resistance. Moving wasn’t strictly necessary, but just like a physical step could make it easier to focus on the mental step into the Nowhere, when Kit moved his body, it helped him channel his thoughts into finding the exit point.

  The Nowhere wasn’t alive. But Kit couldn’t help but feel that it wanted things. It would push him in one direction or another. Once, Louann had asked him how it was that he’d never ended up stuck in a wall or occupying the same space as some other object, and Kit had only been able to shrug. He couldn’t say it out loud to Louann, but when he was here, it made perfect sense: the Nowhere didn’t want that. They had a cooperative relationship, insofar as a man and a void could have any kind of relationship at all.

  Kit had never been anywhere in lunar orbit—Jesus, he was basically jumping to the fucking moon—but he knew the coordinates, and that was all he needed to feel it out. It would take longer to get to this secret Quint Services asteroid than it had to get to Inland New York this morning, but it was less a physical traveling through the Nowhere and more of a meditative few moments of nothingness. Kit only moved—kicked, swam, whatever—because it felt right to move. He concentrated on his destination. As exhausting as it was, it was often his favorite part of the day.

  Or it would have been, except something huge and blindingly bright came zooming toward him. Kit dodged out of instinct, but the thing changed course to follow him without slowing down even a little. It crashed into him and an instant later, instead of whizzing through the Nowhere, Kit and his passenger were spit out and slammed into hard ground.

  Emil woke blindfolded with the sick wrongness in his bones that could only come from travel through the Nowhere. He ripped off his blindfold and found himself staring at the sky. It was daytime. He had no idea how long he’d been lying on the hard ground. The last thing he remembered was being sedated in an exam room at a Quint Services facility somewhere underground. He was still dressed in the clothes they’d provided.

  There was an unconscious person on the ground next to him.

  The person in question—short and slender, purple-haired, tan-skinned—was young and androgynous. Unconscious, but alive and seemingly unharmed, as long as Emil didn’t count that eye-searing combination of color in the outfit as a form of violence. Logic told Emil this was the runner Quint Services had hired to take him back to QSF17.

  The runner certainly didn’t look like anyone else who worked at Quint Services Headquarters, given the hair, the tight black jeans, and the t-shirt with orange slashes across the chest. Come to think of it, the runner didn’t look like anyone else Emil had ever seen. Emil studied the angle of the cheekbones and the small, rounded point of the nose as if they might offer clues. The runner had a nice face, but one that resisted categorization.

  Who knew how Quint Services found runners? Emil didn’t know many, but the ones he’d encountered usually lived on the fringes of society. Some would say that was their choice, but it was hard to get a normal job if anyone knew you could access the Nowhere. There was a general feeling of mistrust surrounding runners, a worry that they’d abuse their power to take you for all you had. A few high-profile crimes, like the Franklin Station Bank robbery, hadn’t helped dispel that prejudice. Emil didn’t subscribe to that bullshit, but he couldn’t help feeling a certain curiosity and fear.

  Maybe more curiosity than fear—the runner was pretty cute.

  Emil shouldn’t be thinking about that. He had problems to solve. They were in a desert unlike any he’d ever seen. Somehow the runner had brought them here, and more importantly, now they needed to get back.

  Emil put his hands on the runner. “Hey,” he said. “Wake up.”

  Two large, strong hands gently gripped his face. “I need you to open your eyes,” said a deep voice. “And tell me your name.”

  There was so much authority in that tone—so much command, such a promise of safety—that Kit didn’t even consider blurting out his other questions, which were what the fuck happened, where the fuck are we, and who the fuck are you, in respective order of importance. Who the fuck are you was least important because when a man that gorgeous was touching his face, Kit left well enough alone. So instead of asking questions, with barely a thought in his head other than meeting that steady, dark gaze, Kit said, “Kit.”

  “I’m Emil. Are you hurt, Kit?”

  He was lying on hard, sandy ground and the sun was so bright it hurt to look at anything other than Emil’s beautiful, bruised face. The out-of-focus background was colored in reds and oranges. Even working with only a fraction of his wits, Kit could tell this wasn’t a base inside an asteroid. And it had been nighttime when they’d left Tennessee. They’d missed their destination by a long way. Something had hit him. He ached all over. But that would heal. The exhaustion from too much time in the Nowhere in one day, though, posed a problem. How were they going to get out of here? Wherever here was? “No. Tired, hungry.”

  Even with Emil’s hands on his face and Emil’s eyes looking deep into his soul, Kit’s eyelids threatened to shut. He was shaking a little. Not the look he wanted to achieve.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Emil instructed. “Full name, pronouns, birthday, hometown, that kind of thing.”

  “Kit Jackson. He, him.” Kit pretended he hadn’t heard the rest. “Same for you?”

  Emil nodded. “I’m usually more prepared for survival situations,” he apologized, a note of humor in his voice. The blindfold was now hanging around his neck. His long, disheveled bangs almost covered his black eye. “But we’ll make do. Can you walk?”

  Walk where? Kit blinked and squinted as he looked around. It was all sand and rocks as far as he could see. He tried to push himself into a sitting position to get a better view, but his vision spotted black. Emil grabbed his shoulders.

  “Never mind. Save your strength,” Emil said and scooped him off the ground. Kit would have complained, but it felt too good to close his eyes and let his head rest against Emil’s chest.

  The next time he woke up, he wasn’t sure how much time had passed. He was propped up aga
inst a large rock, his legs extended in its long shadow. Emil was gone. Kit was so hungry his stomach felt like it might cave in. He couldn’t possibly control a run through the Nowhere in this state. Especially not if something was going to slam into him like that. What the fuck had that been?

  When Emil walked back into view, he was carrying something in a fold of his t-shirt, exposing his absurdly toned abdomen. His sweatpants were slung low enough that Kit could see the trail of dark hair leading down from his navel and the angled tops of his hipbones. At least if Kit had to die of starvation while stranded in the desert, Emil’s beautiful brown hips could be the last thing he ever laid eyes on. A small consolation.

  “I ate a handful of these about two hours ago as a test and nothing has happened to me yet,” Emil said, kneeling in the vee of Kit’s legs. He’d stretched out his t-shirt to hold a couple of pints of some unfamiliar berry. They were smooth and reddish-purple. “They don’t taste like much, but I think they’re safe. And you need the calories if we’re going to get out of here.”

  “Where are we,” Kit murmured, too sleepy to intone the question. “What happened.”

  “I don’t want to alarm you, Kit, but I have to be honest. I don’t know the answer to either of those questions.”

  “Oh.” It didn’t matter much that he didn’t know where they were. Kit needed to know a destination when he jumped, but his origin wasn’t important. He could get to the Nowhere from anywhere. Emil was working so hard to reassure him and keep him alive. Kit should tell him the good news. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Emil touched his cheek. “You’re pretty out of it. That jump really wrecked you, huh?”

  Kit didn’t want to answer yes to that question. “There was… a thing. In the Nowhere.”

  Emil nodded. “I thought I remembered… light. There isn’t normally light, is there?”