Out of Nowhere Read online

  “It won’t,” he said. He had to believe it. Oswin Lewis Quint wouldn’t go unpunished.

  “I know you’re trying,” she said gently. “But buying up news outlets is like swatting flies for Quint.”

  “There’ve been a few articles,” he protested. “No results, though. I don’t know how to get people to pay attention. A major corporation fucking violated two innocent people. Why isn’t everyone pissed?”

  “Innocent,” Laila repeated ruefully. “It’s been a while since anyone’s described me like that.”

  “Me either. Shit. You think that’s why no one cares? Because this happened to us?”

  From Laila’s apologetic expression, Aidan could tell she’d suspected that for a long time. She hadn’t had the heart to tell him.

  “Sorry, Aidan. Haven’t you seen those campaign ads with the grainy security footage of me robbing Franklin Station Bank? All those ‘the only thing that stops a runner is a bullet’ asshole politicians love to use me to justify their bills. And you’re not exactly a beloved public figure. Quint knew what he was doing when he picked us.”

  “But the principle—”

  She patted his shoulder and he gave up on that argument. How fucking disheartening. The public was fine with torture as long as it was happening to people they didn’t like.

  “I hate it as much as you do, but the world’s not fair. People like us don’t get justice. Quint can bury journalists all day long. There’s no criminal investigation yet because there won’t ever be one.”

  “So let’s get him another way,” Aidan said. “Quint’s just some guy. It’s the money that gives him all that power. If you were going to rob him, how would you do it?”

  She snorted. “I got caught last time, remember? Also, all my previous thefts were planned around my ability to fucking teleport. If I could access the Nowhere, I’d already have punched Quint in his stupid plastic face. And then I’d have jumped somewhere nobody could find me because—and I cannot emphasize this enough—I am not fucking going back to prison.”

  “Humor me,” he said.

  Laila met his eyes, and hers were wide. “Shit,” she said. “I was just venting when I said that thing about punching Quint. You want our two sorry asses to rob a trillionaire.”

  “I heard we’re a pair of hardened criminals. You’re a bank robber. I’m a terrorist. We can do this.”

  Laila raised her eyebrows. Aidan’s “terrorism” mostly consisted of jumping into places he shouldn’t—the stage behind the president’s podium, the board room of any organization that opposed runners’ rights—and getting tackled. The media were always sure he planned to hurt someone, even though the most he’d done was point aggressively at the president’s chest while yelling. Then the Secret Service had tackled him and he’d had to jump back to safety.

  “The first step is to get access to the Nowhere again,” Aidan said.

  “Can we change the first step to be breakfast?” Laila asked. “I like to start small.”

  3

  The Reality Next Door

  Caleb woke up on a cot in one of the facility’s exam rooms. He was on his back and there was something strapped to his thigh. Come to think of it, all of his clothes weighed on him, stiff and unfamiliar. Or maybe the weight lay in his limbs. He didn’t remember falling asleep. He’d been drugged.

  The door opened and in walked Dr. Jennifer Heath. Caleb jerked upright in alarm—she was supposed to be in prison so she couldn’t experiment on anyone else—and she laid a hand on his shoulder. He wrenched out of the way.

  “I gave you your treatment,” she said, tucking the offending hand behind her back without commenting on his reaction. “I can’t give you too many more, so we’ll have to be careful. I know you’re worried about jumping and getting stuck somewhere, but I’m worried about you getting the shakes. Anyway, I went ahead with today’s, since I found you in here taking a little nap. God knows what you get up to on your missions, Caleb. I swear you look like you just fell out of somebody’s bed. If we ever do encounter other sentient life forms, I’m sure you’ll flirt them into submission.”

  Treatment? Missions? Caleb touched his arm, where she’d pushed up the black sleeve of the jacket he was wearing and taped gauze over an injection site in his elbow. Don’t panic, he thought, panicking. No matter his angle of approach, things looked bad. He’d woken up in his double’s clothes—including the thigh holster, but excluding the gun it had contained—with an unscrupulous scientist who ought to be in prison, talking about how she’d injected him with some unknown substance.

  His double had kissed him. And then knocked him out somehow. Caleb touched his neck. There was probably a needle prick there, but no bandage. Where had his double gone?

  Or maybe the better question wasn’t where he’d gone, but where he’d come from.

  The Dr. Heath he knew was in prison. Caleb had met his own double, so maybe he was meeting hers. She certainly thought she’d met him before, based on all that talk about giving him some kind of treatment regimen. This version of Jennifer Heath was a researcher just like the other one, but Caleb’s double wasn’t a nurse. He was some kind of agent.

  He’d taken Caleb’s place and left Caleb here.

  So much for not panicking. He had to get out of here and he didn’t even know where here was. Caleb was rapidly coming to the unwanted conclusion that his double had jumped him to some other reality. His double must be a runner, in that case. But Caleb wasn’t. He couldn’t get back.

  “Are you feeling alright?” Heath asked. “I know the treatment sometimes has unsettling side effects, but I’ve never seen you react to it.” She smiled at him in a way that did nothing to settle his stomach or any other part of him. “You’re our most successful runner.”

  She reached toward him.

  He reacted without thinking and caught her by the wrist before she could touch him again. Shit. She was staring and now he had to talk his way out of this awkward moment. His double was a sleazy jerk, at least in their brief encounter, so he ran with that.

  “Thanks, Jen, but I’m good. Maybe later.” He offered her his oiliest, smuggest smile and then raked his gaze down her body for good measure. She’d better find this convincing. He didn’t know what she’d do if she figured out he was a stranger, but if this facility was like the one he knew, it had secret prison cells.

  “Ugh,” she said, yanking her arm out of his grip. “Get out of here.”

  Caleb stood up and brushed past her before their conversation extended beyond his ability to fake it.

  The hallway outside met his expectations exactly, dimly lit white flooring and grey walls in familiar dimensions. The floor plan must be identical. But the lab across the hall no longer had brown paper taped up over its broken windows. There were no windows at all. The room, situated at the center of the asteroid, was surrounded by thick walls and equipped with a door that would have been better suited to a bank vault.

  The walls weren’t enough to muffle the wailing.

  The keening sound seized his whole body and he flinched like he’d been plunged into ice water. His half-formed plan to hole up and figure out how to get back home evaporated. Caleb swallowed. He’d been right about the cells. But who—or what—was on the other side?

  The thought silenced everything. He lost his vision. Felt weightless, dizzy, like he might pass out.

  He stayed conscious.

  Caleb hadn’t lost his sight. It was dark because he’d entered the Nowhere.

  Shit. You’re our most successful runner, that was what Heath’s double had said. That injection she’d given him must be a reliable version of what Heath and Winslow had been trying to create, a serum containing dimensional prions that could grant anyone access to the Nowhere. His double was a runner, and now he was, too.

  Caleb had been in the Nowhere before, always with Aidan. Every previous trip had turned him inside out with physical and psychological misery. The pain had been incomprehensible, like being crushed into
a tiny airless space and stretched out on a rack at the same time. It was so seared into his memory that he hadn’t recognized the Nowhere without it.

  This must be what it felt like for Aidan. Painless. Free. His panic subsided. The Nowhere was silent and calm. No one could find him. He’d escaped.

  There was only that instant of freedom from panic, the moment before it occurred to him that he didn’t know how to get out. No one could find him, fuck.

  He stepped back into the world an instant later. It should have been a relief, but he found himself in a darkened vault with panes of some transparent material—he wasn’t fool enough to assume it was glass—separating him from the other half of the room. He’d jumped himself to the other side of the cell wall, but the mysterious wailing had stopped. Both halves of the room were stripped bare of furnishings. Not so much as a sign pinned to the walls. However, the half opposite Caleb contained something.

  A set of medical scrubs.

  Floating ten feet in the air.

  Caleb squinted to make sure he’d seen things correctly. He had—but he’d missed the naked man lying on the floor, staring up at the clothes. He must have been the source of the sound, but he’d stopped when Caleb had appeared. The man began again, letting loose a wordless wail of agony. He gave no other sign of having seen Caleb.

  The man was raggedly thin. His tight black curls were flattened on one side of his head and sticking out unevenly on the other. Dark stubble covered the brown skin of his face.

  Caleb had never met Solomon Lange. The man had disappeared into the Nowhere before Caleb’s arrival at Facility 17. But Lange was brilliant and famous. Caleb had packed a used paperback copy of The Physics of the Nowhere in his luggage, and while he hadn’t read it yet, there was a professional black-and-white headshot of Lange on the back cover.

  The man in the cell was distraught and unkempt, but Caleb recognized his sharp cheekbones. Sharper, now.

  Lange could have a double. He probably did. But what were the chances of that double being here in this state? Lange’s stint in the Nowhere had caused both his suffering and his strange new ability. Caleb would bet on it.

  The bolt of the door clanked as someone on the other side slid it open. Shit, shit, shit. Panic pinched inside his chest and made it difficult to breathe. He had to hide and there was nothing in the room. He had to leave, but there was only one door.

  He’d come here via the Nowhere, but it had been an accident. He couldn’t reproduce it. He didn’t even know if the injection he’d received was enough for more than one jump.

  Aidan would have known what to do, Caleb thought, and just like that he was standing in his room again.

  Laila wouldn’t talk about robbing Quint until Aidan had agreed to get out of bed, take a shower, change clothes, and go to the kitchen with her. She’d thought she was driving a hard bargain. She’d underestimated how much he wanted to destroy Quint.

  They had just reheated that morning’s leftover pancakes when Caleb materialized in the middle of the kitchen, ashen and white-eyed. Aidan jumped up from the table to go to him, but froze while his brain flipped through a gymnastics routine: Caleb. Not Caleb. Caleb’s not a runner. Caleb wasn’t dressed like that last time I saw him.

  “Who are you?” Aidan finally asked. Laila was still seated at the long metal table and from the corner of his eye, he saw her face scrunch up in confusion. “If you’re really Caleb, say something that proves you know me.”

  “You once got sent to the principal’s office after raising your hand in Mr. Preston’s history class and saying ‘this country was founded on genocide and slavery and everything in our textbook is a lie.’”

  Oh, thank fuck, it was him.

  “As I recall, you got sent to the principal’s office right after me,” Aidan said. “For standing up and yelling ‘you can’t do that to him.’ I was in the hallway at the time, so I can’t confirm the part about you leaping out of your seat.”

  Caleb laughed. A hint of color returned to his face. Laila released the stiff set of her shoulders as the two of them talked, and Aidan could feel himself letting go of the fear that had pierced him.

  Caleb sat down heavily on the bench and said, “And then when no one was looking, you jumped us out of the principal’s office and we spent the rest of the afternoon lying around the park drinking bright blue slushies from the drugstore.”

  There was no further need for the story, but it was soothing to amass so much evidence of their shared past. And the next detail was too good to pass up. “You threatened to pour yours down the back of my shirt if I didn’t shut up about how compulsory public education was meant to deaden our minds in order to further the evils of capitalism.”

  “And I’d do it again,” Caleb said. “Alright, I’m me and you’re you. And this is Quint Services Facility 17, a secret research lab in an asteroid that was brought into lunar orbit decades ago and then forgotten? Until recently you were being tortured in a cell here?”

  “Yeah. You wanna tell me how you walked out of your room an hour ago, changed into different clothes, and got into the Nowhere?” Aidan asked. Caleb was wearing a black jacket Aidan had never seen before. Earlier he’d been in blue scrubs. “Also, is that a thigh holster?”

  “In my room an hour ago—oh God. What did I—he do?”

  So there were two people who looked like Caleb. That was both disturbing, for its gigantic impact on Aidan’s understanding of reality, and reassuring, because it meant the weird encounter he’d had earlier hadn’t been with his Caleb. Paradoxically, the universe had been set to rights and turned upside down all at once.

  Aidan slid his untouched plate of pancakes in front of Caleb, whose attention had suddenly fixed on the food. He wasn’t making puppy eyes on purpose. Aidan knew from experience how hard it was to pay attention to anything other than that overpowering hunger right after a run. Caleb wouldn’t.

  “You were in the Nowhere. You need to eat. I’ll talk.”

  Caleb dug in without making any polite protests. Aidan had been right, then. It was bittersweet to see his own lost ability manifest in Caleb. He didn’t want to be jealous; he didn’t seem to have a choice. His jaw clenched, unbidden.

  Then again, if Caleb could become a runner, so could Aidan.

  The break in their conversation gave him a moment to reflect on how to answer Caleb’s question about what had happened with his double. Aidan decided to elide a detail or two. His own compromising position and what he’d been doing immediately prior. The other Caleb’s hand on his thigh. Little things. “He didn’t do anything. But now that I know it wasn’t you, it makes more sense. You—he was being pretty cagey. Asking a lot of questions you should know the answer to. Especially interested in the breach. Why are you making that face? What happened to you?”

  Caleb chewed his last bite, set his silverware on the empty plate, and swallowed. “He took me by surprise. Knocked me out. I woke up in his clothes with a creepy facsimile of Heath looming over me. She injected me with what I suspect was a serum containing dimensional prions, which is how I got back here.” He paused and then rushed to add, “And I think I saw Solomon Lange.”

  “Wait, what?” Laila said. “Our Solomon Lange? The guy who was trapped in the Nowhere and maybe trying to kill Kit?”

  “I guess I can’t be sure it was our Solomon Lange. But yeah, that’s who I mean.”

  “So everyone has a double,” Aidan said. If there were two people who looked like Caleb, and two people who looked like Jennifer Heath, it stood to reason there were two people who looked like Oswin Lewis Quint. He could work with that.

  “Not everyone,” Caleb said. “Not based on what we know about runners. You’re much less likely to have one. But most of us, yeah. Probably more than doubles. We just ran into the reality next door, so to speak. There are infinitely many.”

  “Have you actually read that copy of Lange’s book I saw sticking out of your suitcase?” Laila asked.

  “I’ve read the back cover ve
ry attentively.”

  “We should tell Kit and Emil about this,” Laila said. She stood up without waiting for their input. “I’m going to get them.”

  In her absence, the atmosphere of the room shifted. They’d been sitting side by side on the bench, their elbows touching. Aidan swung so they were face-to-face and inadvertently knocked his knees into Caleb’s.

  An accident. No reason to blush. Did they always sit that close together? Aidan glanced away and cleared his throat. “Sorry. You okay?”

  “Are you asking because you bumped into me or because I was briefly abducted into an alternate reality where I was injected with something none of us understand?”

  “Oh, fuck off. The latter.” Caleb was treating it like a joke now, but Aidan had seen him right after he’d jumped. “I’m worried about you.”

  “Yeah? What’s that like?”

  “Caleb. Are you okay?”

  Caleb smiled—bright-eyed, sanguine, nothing like his double—then gave an easy shrug and said, “Time will tell, I guess. As for right now, I know I ate all your food, but I’m still pretty hungry.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Aidan retorted.

  “Hey, you gave it to me!”

  “You’re welcome.” Aidan got up and went to poke through one of the two giant fridges. Most of the contents were meticulously labelled as ingredients for future meals, meaning they were off-limits. He pulled out a block of cheddar and then searched the pantry until he found a couple of apples. By the time he’d sat back down to slice them, Laila had returned.

  “Well, this is an unexpected development,” Emil said. He and Kit joined Laila on the other side of the table. “Are you alright, Caleb?”

  “I’m fine,” Caleb said. “But keep in mind that every time any of you see me, you should make sure it’s me and not somebody who looks like me.”