Nowhere Else Read online

  This place was uncomfortable enough without more people entering it.

  McCreery and Strickland were watching him, waiting for him to explain himself. With his hands hanging at his sides, Lange lifted a second tennis ball from the canister Jake was holding, dipped it in the paint, and then set it rolling across the floor. Manipulating the ball required the most control he’d exercised yet. He bit his lip in concentration.

  The ball swerved left around a distortion, a smear of black paint marking the border, and then Lange drove it straight for another few meters. It jerked and zigzagged along the floor until it reached the base of the machine.

  “Wow,” McCreery said. “So that’s how we get there.”

  “That’s a way, but we’ll need another,” Lange said. He sent a third tennis ball floating through the room, following the painted path, and left it hovering in the air a few centimeters off the ground. “There’s a distortion just above where the ball is. Nothing taller can pass.”

  He moved the tennis ball, outlining the ragged shape of the distortion. Something about the gesture tripped a switch in his memory: a classroom, a board with a diagram, and a laser pointer in his hand.

  Fast on the heels of that memory, another followed: he’d never liked or been good at teaching. Other people were far too frustrating.

  This feeling, at least, marked an overlap between the person he’d been and whatever he was now.

  Strickland and McCreery were both attentive, their gazes trained on the floating tennis ball. The tip of Strickland’s tongue caught between their teeth.

  “You can see the distortions,” McCreery said. “And you can use your ability to show us where they are without getting too close. Let me call Eliza and together, we can get her over there to collect some data.”

  Lange shook his head. “It has to be me.”

  McCreery’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”

  “You can’t hear what I’m hearing or see what I’m seeing. The robot won’t be able to record it. I need to get closer.”

  “To do what?”

  “To listen,” Lange snapped, and as he did, the tennis ball he’d been hovering in the air plummeted into the distortion below it.

  It popped out of sight like a stone dropped into a lake. Its disappearance crackled, interrupting the buzz in the room. Then the sound resumed.

  McCreery and Strickland stared in wide-eyed horror, first at the place where the tennis ball had been, and then at Lange.

  “Yeah, let’s take a step back and think this through first,” Strickland said, and the three of them retreated to another lab, one where Lange almost couldn’t hear the sound.

  Jake followed Lange and Dax to another lab, one free of freaky space-time distortions, even though there was no reason for him to hang around while they conferred over Dax’s laptop together. He had no idea how to run the machine they’d built. His usefulness had hit its limit after the three of them had drawn up schematics for the lab itself, pushing Lange to identify where the distortions were so he wasn’t the only person with that knowledge.

  Those plans, drawn on paper, lay on the lab bench in front of Jake. Finished. The last useful thing he’d done, taunting him.

  Dax’s laptop screen was covered in line after line of coded equations. Jake didn’t recognize most of the symbols. It might as well have been an alien language. Even Dax and Lange’s spoken argument, though technically in English, was pretty hard to follow.

  “I think what happened on the night of your accident is best understood as constructive interference,” Dax was saying.

  “Yes, obviously,” Lange said. “That doesn’t help us reverse it.”

  “Wait,” Jake said. He’d understood those words. “The normal kind of constructive interference? Like when two waves come together into a bigger wave?”

  “Yes,” Dax said, at the same time that Lange said, “No.”

  “Uh. Okay.”

  “Basically nothing in the Nowhere works like you think it would,” Dax said gently. “So yes, there are waves, or there are things we call waves, but no, they’re not like the waves you’re thinking of. They’re not limited to being longitudinal or transverse, for example. But if you want to think of what happened on the night of Lange’s accident as a rogue wave, you can. A freak occurrence that happened right as he tested the machine. He had really, really bad luck.”

  “That much I knew,” Jake said, and opted to retreat from the conversation.

  He couldn’t bring himself to retreat from the room. He didn’t trust Lange not to hurt himself.

  By Lange’s admission, he wanted to throw himself into the breach. Dax didn’t know that. What if Lange’s urge to self-destruct ended up hurting them all? So now Jake was leaning against the lab bench, pretending he could help, listening to their conversation while waiting for Lange to let slip some clue that he was secretly sabotaging all of Dax’s work. They’d turn the machine back on and the whole damn multiverse would disintegrate.

  “This is elegant,” Lange was saying, his gaze on some passage on the screen. His knowledge of the equations and the code had come back to him far more easily than his knowledge of his own life, and he’d been almost eager—as eager as he ever was, these days—to read through Dax’s work.

  “Thanks,” Dax murmured. They were so pale that any tinge of color showed in their face, and the unexpected compliment made them glow pink.

  Come to think of it, that comment was probably the nicest thing Lange had ever said in Jake’s presence. Naturally, it wasn’t about Jake.

  “We have to rewrite this next part, though,” Lange continued. “I can already see that it will worsen the dimensional shear. That’s unacceptable.”

  “You think it’s shear stress? Not tensional?”

  “Look at the readings. We’re obviously dealing with multiple kinds of stress,” Lange said. The tablet Dax had left lying on the bench rose into the air and then dropped back down, the telekinetic equivalent of an impatient wave of the hand. Lange’s eyes remained on the code. “It will take us hours to pick apart this mess.”

  “Right,” Dax said, resigned. “Mess.”

  Well. That was why you couldn’t rely on an asshole like Lange for your self-esteem. He’d just as soon cut you down as build you up. Jake should know better than to want Lange’s compliments. Lange couldn’t even be nice to the second-smartest person in the room for more than three words in a row. Jake had no chance.

  “What are you still doing here?” Lange asked, turning toward Jake. “Go… fix the plumbing. Make a robot. Whatever it is you do when you’re not hovering.”

  Jake snatched the plans and left without a word. Fuck him, anyway. Jake would warn Dax later, when Lange wasn’t around to be such a dick.

  He went back to Lange’s lab. The open can of black paint was still sitting on the floor, an accident waiting to happen. Way less of an accident than the invisible rest of the room, though.

  That gave him an idea. He called Eliza to him and she came trundling in on her treads.

  She was a squat, square little thing, mostly grey metal and exposed wires, with a platform, a camera, and four movable arms stacked on top. Jake was aware that regular people wouldn’t find her adorable, so he didn’t talk to regular people about her. They didn’t deserve her, anyway. Eliza always came when he called, no matter what he needed, which was a rare quality in robots and humans.

  Jake might not have telekinesis, but for his purposes, Eliza would work just as well. It didn’t take very long to mount the paint can on top of her and affix a paintbrush to one of her arms.

  He taught her to dip the brush into the paint, drag a streak along the floor behind her, and then reload the brush. The movement was new to her. Paint blobbed and dripped on the floor the first few tries, and he had to go get rags to clean it up, but after maybe eight or nine attempts and adjustments—not too bad, really—she had it.

  Robots were sweet like that. If you were patient, they’d cooperate eventually.
/>   Eliza beeped. She didn’t talk, but she could make a small array of sounds. This was her “yes, I can do that” affirmation.

  “You’re well on your way to a career as a forger,” he told her, and then felt bad. “Or a regular artist, I guess. Didn’t mean to assume you couldn’t make original work.”

  Jake spread out the plans on the floor and got to work, directing Eliza to outline all the invisible dangers, giving each one a wide berth. She couldn’t delineate how high the distortions hung in the air, but she could at least tell people where they shouldn’t walk. Her path meandered all over the room, a wild contour drawing springing up behind her.

  “Good girl,” Jake told her after she’d come back to him, inordinately proud of her for picking up a new skill. He rolled his shoulders, aching from his fight with Lange, and was startled to discover Lange and Dax standing behind him.

  And here he was, crouching on the ground, talking to the robot he’d just used to turn the whole room into a cartoon maze. Shit.

  “We’re going to recalibrate the machine and turn it back on, see if we can close the breach,” Dax said. “Have you been in here this whole time?”

  Jake nodded.

  Dax smiled. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”

  Lange was staring, motionless as usual. “You’ve missed a few.”

  “The ones in the air? Some of them overlap. I just tried to outline where people shouldn’t walk.” God, why was Jake defending his actions at all, let alone in such a mumble? Lange’s opinion didn’t matter. Jake had done something useful, and it would be useful whether Lange acknowledged it or not.

  “It’s a good idea.”

  Jake nearly fell out of his crouch and landed butt-first on the floor. He caught himself and then stood up, as if he could salvage the moment. “Pardon?”

  “There’s the obvious safety issue,” Lange said. “The readings from the machine only give the size of the breach, not these smaller pockets of space, and besides, they don’t have the same impact as your painting.”

  “Oh.”

  Dax had carried a tablet and two laptops into the room. “What happened to the table that used to be in here? Can we set it up again?”

  “It’s in storage,” Jake said. “The two of us can go get it.”

  They both walked out of the lab toward the storage closet across the hall, with Lange following slowly. The closet door slid open, and before either of them could lay hands on the table, it levitated. Jake and Dax both wisely got out of the way. The table floated through the door and into the lab, twisted in the air so its legs were facing down, and then dropped. It was a gentler landing than Lange had managed previously. Jake’s shoulders hurt at the thought.

  “Right,” Dax said, after shaking off the strangeness of that display and walking back into the lab. They hadn’t seen Lange move things as often as Jake had. “And we should tell the others that we’re going to run the machine.”

  “Why? They won’t understand,” Lange said.

  “Yeah, but we’re a team. This is a big decision,” Dax said. “I’m going to get them.”

  Without Dax in the room, the silence between Jake and Lange might as well have been one of the distortions, stretching two meters into twenty.

  “You still hearing noises?” Jake asked after a moment.

  Lange nodded. “I still want to investigate.”

  “But you helped Dax rewrite the machine’s software so it will close the breach,” Jake said, pressing. Please say that’s what you did. Lange was a lot of things, but he wasn’t usually a liar.

  “I did,” Lange said. “I hope it will make the sound go away.”

  “It’s unpleasant? The sound?”

  Lange nodded again.

  “And your grand plan to throw yourself back in?” Jake asked. He hated to bring it up, but there was no way around it. “If you close the breach, you lose your chance.”

  “It will close slowly,” Lange said. “We determined that the risk of forcing it closed too fast is worse than the risk of allowing it to remain partially open for another few days.”

  Jesus. There were more ways they could fuck things up. “So you’re still thinking about going back.”

  “It is impossible not to.”

  “I don’t understand why you helped Dax. Why help any of us, if what you want is to go back into the Nowhere?”

  “I—” Lange started, and then closed his mouth as the others came in.

  Why was he helping? Lange could invent something about ethics. Duty. Altruism. Perhaps even remorse over his own actions. Any lie would sound less absurd than because you told me to.

  That would be true whether Lange said it or not.

  McCreery didn’t need to know that. If he knew, he’d assume—perhaps rightly, which was troubling—that he could get other concessions out of Lange. He’d undoubtedly use his power to try to get Lange to stay. Out of the question. Lange had to go back to the Nowhere. This wretched physiological confinement couldn’t be all there was.

  Strickland was explaining to the people who’d entered the room that they planned to turn the recalibrated machine on in the hope of reversing the damage it had done the first time.

  Lange consulted his mental spreadsheet about the first person who’d entered the lab.

  Name: Emil Singh.

  Features: approximately thirty years old, of South Asian descent, black-haired, tall, athletic, cis man.

  Profession: unclear; de facto leader of remaining Facility 17 residents.

  Loyalties or attachments within the crew: romantic and sexual attachment to Kit, last name unknown.

  Frequency of visits to Lange’s room: medium.

  Attitude: calm, friendly, authoritative.

  Ability to enter the Nowhere: none.

  Ability to hinder Lange’s plans: medium.

  “Thank you, Dax,” Singh said once he’d received Strickland’s report.

  “Festive new decorations aside, this place still gives me the fucking creeps,” said Kit, last name unknown.

  Features: background unknown, likely alien parentage on one side (see: Ability to enter the Nowhere), light brown skin, violet hair (dye, black roots visible), young, short, thin, cis man.

  Profession: likely a courrier or a smuggler (see: Ability to enter the Nowhere).

  Frequency of visits to Lange’s room: zero.

  Attitude: wary.

  Ability to enter the Nowhere: innate.

  Ability to hinder Lange’s plans: high.

  As a born runner, Kit could use the Nowhere to teleport himself anywhere in or out of the world, in this reality or others, almost instantaneously. Why he was enduring the misery of embodiment instead of floating in the void remained a mystery. If Lange could blink himself into the Nowhere, he would already be gone. But Lange’s only access to the Nowhere was the breach on the other side of the lab—a place Kit could stop him from going, should he decide to interfere.

  Kit continued, “Whatever you need to do to fix the breach, do it.”

  He was strangely familiar. Lange couldn’t look away, and it had nothing to do with the electric blue pattern on that jacket and the way it clashed with his hair. What was it McCreery had said? You almost killed Kit.

  Lange didn’t remember. As an explanation, it was both repellent and inadequate, only giving rise to more questions. Why would he have done that?

  He didn’t feel like a person who would have done that—but he didn’t feel like a person at all.

  There were three other people arrayed behind Singh and Kit. Two of them nodded at him. They were Clara Chávez (Latina, mid-twenties, cis female, lanky, athletic; profession: unknown; frequency of visits: medium; attitude: friendly; ability to enter the Nowhere: none; ability to hinder plans: low) and Lennox Beck (Black, mid-twenties, cis male, large, athletic, glasses; profession: aerospace engineer; frequency of visits: medium; attitude: friendly; ability to enter the Nowhere: unknown; ability to hinder plans: unknown). Chávez and Beck spent most of th
eir free time together but were not romantically involved—Chávez was a lesbian—and he’d gathered from eavesdropping that their close friendship was founded on a mutual love of sports and card games. They laughed a lot. Lange’s brain was in disarray and had made space for this irrelevant trivia.

  Chávez and Beck smiled at him, which he had not done anything to merit. It stirred up a vague memory that they’d both attempted to befriend him, before. He’d been unresponsive. He’d expended his lifetime quota of trust and could not afford strangers.

  The third person was Miriam Horowitz (white, mid-twenties, cis female, short, muscular; profession: security of some kind; frequency of visits: medium; attitude: vigilant; ability to enter the Nowhere: none; ability to hinder plans: medium). Lange appreciated the simplicity of their relationship: she did not smile at him and he was not expected to smile at her. He hypothesized that she never smiled at anyone.

  Lange opted not to think further about these three people, in case it turned out he had also tried to kill them.

  He didn’t like the thought, which didn’t make sense. None of his feelings made sense. It would be a relief to be rid of them.

  “There’s just one more thing,” Strickland was saying. “Lange says he can hear something in the room. Possibly the breach. Kit, I wanted to ask you if you can hear it, too?”

  “Hear and see,” Lange clarified. “The breach and the smaller spatial distortions around it.”

  Kit shook his head. “This place makes my skin crawl, but it just looks like a room. When Lange and the cats were trapped, I could see them sometimes, but I don’t see anything now. I never heard anything. Right now I don’t hear anything but us and the ventilation system.”

  Beck nodded. “I know I’m not a born runner, but I could see the cats sometimes, too. Nothing now, though.”

  (Lange updated Beck’s file. Ability to enter the Nowhere: contingent on injections of dimensional prions; implies an ancestor with innate ability. Ability to hinder plans: high.)