Nowhere Else Read online

  So neither runner could confirm his observations. Lange waited for the inevitable dismissal of his experience—unreliable, untrustworthy, crazy—but it never came.

  “What do you think it means?” Singh asked him. “Do you want to wait? Observe it?”

  “I want to record it before we turn the machine on to see if it changes,” Lange said.

  “How can you record something nobody else can hear?” Kit asked.

  “By making note of the pitches,” Lange said, declining to elaborate so he could press his advantage. “I want to know if I can determine their origin more precisely. I need to get closer to it.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” McCreery said, fixing Lange with a look. His brows had drawn together and there was tightness around his mouth. Lange could perhaps have interpreted this expression to identify the underlying emotion. He chose not to.

  “Since my return, I have a sense of the Nowhere,” Lange said, speaking over whatever McCreery planned to say next. “As Doctor Strickland said, I can tell where the pockets of disturbed space are. And now the floor is marked as well. I should be able to get across the room safely.”

  “Why don’t you think it’s a good idea, Jake?” Singh asked. They were all so familiar with each other, using names and nicknames. As if that wasn’t enough, McCreery was naming his robots. Lange’s spreadsheet was already complicated enough.

  “Lange isn’t rational right now,” McCreery said flatly. “He’s a danger to himself.”

  “Is that true?” Singh asked, his thick brows drawn together like McCreery’s, his lips pursed, his brown eyes unwavering in their focus.

  “It was. McCreery and I had an altercation this morning. I confided in him. He… changed my mind.”

  Every person in the lab went wide-eyed, McCreery most of all.

  “If you insist on going closer,” McCreery said, “I’m coming with you.”

  The others seemed to accept that, so Lange acceded to the condition. It was insulting that McCreery meant to follow him around like a sheepdog. Lange had been honest; he wanted to investigate the sound. His desire to dive back into the breach hadn’t robbed him of curiosity.

  Besides, he’d have time to revisit the breach later, without McCreery intervening.

  It wasn’t possible to cross the room at full height. The distortions shimmered high in the air, catching the light like oil slicks. Even on his hands and knees, he’d be too tall.

  Lange got down on the floor and began to crawl along one of the paths, smearing the wet paint. If walking was exhausting, crawling was far worse.

  The other side of the room is ten meters away, he told himself, knowing it wasn’t true. His eyes and his mind contradicted each other.

  McCreery followed him, struggling far less with the exertion. From the sound of it, he held still much of the time, waiting for Lange to move.

  Lange stayed low and made painful progress, his hands slick with sweat and tacky paint.

  As the other side of the room drew closer, the breach tugged at him. It hung between the two curving sides of the machine, perceptible in blinks and brief glimpses, piercing the lab with its dissonance. Waiting to swallow him and everything else.

  A chill raced over his skin.

  He wanted to go back, didn’t he?

  Lange kept lifting his head to confront it, but there was only the wall of the lab. Clean and dull, with not one speck of paint.

  McCreery’s robot hadn’t made it all the way across the room. The floor was covered in tracks, and every other wall had suffered a few splatters, but the wall beyond the machine was white.

  No encroaching darkness. No vast empty nothing waiting to tear him apart.

  His heart tripped over a beat. What? No—he remembered the Nowhere as peaceful. Pure. Weightless. Free. Compared to his itchy, achy, fleshy existence, it had been infinite. Perfect.

  Why was it so hard to breathe?

  Lange squeezed his eyes shut and stopped moving.

  “Lange?”

  McCreery’s voice was soft, probably too soft for the others to hear. With the room stretched to several times its usual size, would the sound travel? Lange could only hear the scream of the breach now. The A flat. The G. The relentless dissonance had a shine to it, like the oily glimmers in the air.

  He couldn’t remember why he’d come here.

  McCreery said his name again.

  The sound—a real sound, a vibration that originated in McCreery’s body and filtered all the way through Lange’s ears to his brain, not the eerie echo of the universe falling apart—eased the tightness in his chest.

  “I’m fine,” he told McCreery, and kept crawling.

  He must be delirious from exhaustion. His time in the Nowhere had been heavenly, and this was hellish. That was true. That had to be true. What could be worse than being condemned to frailty and suffering in this tragic, faulty, mortal body? Existence in the Nowhere had been better than the endless noise of clicking joints and burbling organs. Lange clung to that truth and dragged himself forward along the floor, ignoring the shifting edges of the distortions around him, ignoring the keen of the breach ahead.

  He had reached the base of the machine. The space above him was clear of distortions, so he pulled himself up slowly, leaving dirty handprints on the cool metal. McCreery rose to his feet behind Lange, careful not to move too quickly.

  Then Lange glanced beyond the machine. The breach, previously a nearly colorless shimmer in the air, yawned open. Between its ragged edges—the screaming A flat and the G close but refusing to mesh—lay a slash of darkness. A wound.

  A memory: sharp pains all over his body, thousands of tiny hooks digging into him and turning him inside out, stretching him until he snapped. No, that wasn’t right—he’d been crushed, smashed into a small, constricting space, and it had been suffocating and scratchy-dry—no, wet—and freezing—no, scorching. He’d been compacted and blown apart all at once, and again, and again, every instant. He’d died. But he’d lived. But he’d died.

  A howl split the air.

  3

  Leave

  Jake had never heard anybody wail like that. Nothing changed in the room, but Lange went boneless, his consciousness gone like he’d flipped a switch on himself. Fainted dead away. Jake caught him before he concussed himself and lowered them both to the ground.

  “Lange. Lange. Solomon.”

  Lange blinked awake an instant later, thank fuck. He mumbled, “Only my family calls me that.”

  “You fainted,” Jake said. “You alright?”

  “No. I can’t—we can’t—we need to go.”

  “Breathe in,” Jake said and counted to four out loud. “And out. And again.” After that he stayed quiet, watching Lange re-establish steady breathing.

  Something had really scared him, but Jake couldn’t tell what. They’d gotten closer to the machine and the breach, supposedly. Jake couldn’t sense the breach. The space between the two silver parentheses of the machine just looked like air to him, with a white wall beyond. That didn’t mean he was eager to reach an arm out and test it. He believed the others. He believed Lange. The breach existed whether Jake could see it or not.

  But Lange had wanted to go closer to the breach, hadn’t he?

  Jake didn’t ask. Hard to say if Lange would share with the class. Sitting on the floor, his back leaning against the machine like he couldn’t support himself otherwise—he couldn’t, Jake knew, but it was rare to see him so open about it—Lange had set his face in an expression of grim determination. He marshaled the rhythm of his breath.

  “You need to remember this,” Lange said. “The A-flat pitch and the G are the loudest, but from here, I can also hear C. The C is different. It comes from somewhere else.”

  “Okay,” Jake said. He didn’t ask why Lange couldn’t remember that on his own. It was only a few pieces of information, and it meant a lot more to Lange than it did to Jake.

  Lange closed his eyes and hummed.

  Jake
very patiently didn’t ask what the fuck he was doing.

  “It’s not so bad, with the E,” Lange said, mostly to himself. “A flat major seventh.”

  “Okay,” Jake said again. “So… you got what you came for?”

  Lange had opened his eyes and his attention was now fixed on some nearby point. There was nothing there—nothing that Jake could see. Lange was still humming. Jake hadn’t known it was possible to hum desperately.

  Crumpled against the base of the machine, its long curve towering over him, Lange looked small. The smooth form of the machine had nothing in common with the robots Jake built, which might not be as elegant, but they were comprehensible. They had moving parts. You didn’t have to be a rarefied genius to know what they could do and how they worked. The machine that Lange had designed was an unreadable monolith. Right now its casing was marred by a couple of Lange’s sweaty handprints and a small streak of rust right where it met the floor—huh, Jake would have to check on that later—but the machine was otherwise as unblemished and mysterious as ever.

  Lange, still humming, was easier to decipher.

  Jake said, “I take it you don’t want to jump back in?”

  Lange lurched forward and grabbed a fistful of Jake’s t-shirt. “No. No. It’s too close. We need to—”

  “I know, we need to go,” Jake said. He gently worked Lange’s hand free of its death grip and then wasn’t sure what to do with it. It seemed rude to drop it, and Lange didn’t pull away, so Jake just kept Lange’s hand between both of his own. “I’m working on it. Can you crawl?”

  Lange exhaled a shuddering breath, his shoulders slumping further.

  “It was hard work,” Jake said. He was in fine shape and it had sucked for him. It must have been awful for Lange. “How about walking? Can you walk?”

  Lange made a noncommittal noise.

  Jake hadn’t expected much more than that. Since coming back, Lange walked like his movement algorithm was still in the trial-and-error phase. He deliberated over every movement, tottering from one foot to the other. They’d have to try something else. He stroked his thumb over Lange’s knuckles. “You can see where… where things are wrong, right?”

  “Sort of.”

  If Jake hadn’t already known Lange was fucked up, that casual mumble would’ve been a blaring alarm. “Can you tell me where to go? If I stand up and carry you, I mean. I’ll follow the marks on the floor and you can tell me where to duck. Is there a path?”

  “Maybe.”

  Yes would have put his nerves at ease, but that was too much to ask. “Can you think of a better plan?”

  Lange grimaced and shook his head. Jake got into a crouch and then scooped him up, coming slowly to his feet. “Okay. You’re in charge. Tell me where to go.”

  In between the tracks Eliza had made, there was empty space. It looked like he could simply follow the lines on the ground, but Jake was conscious of all the things he didn’t know. He’d hate to get his torso sucked into another dimension.

  “Step forward, and then to the left,” Lange said, and as Jake moved, he shouted, “Not that far to the left!”

  Jake froze, one foot in the air, and returned carefully to his previous position. “Okay. Smaller steps, then. Left and then what?”

  “Twist to the side so my feet are pointing forward. There’s a narrow passage between two distortions. Keep your head down. We’ll fit if you’re careful.”

  “Well,” Jake said, taking a deep breath. “Then I’ll be careful.”

  Time stretched and clung to itself like taffy between his teeth. It probably hadn’t been hours, but Jake was too exhausted to tell.

  The last few meters of the room were impassable except at a crawl, but by then, Lange had calmed down and Jake trusted him to make it out, even if it took a painfully long time. Jake focused on Lange like he had telekinesis, like he could pull Lange out of there just by thinking about it.

  He did pull Lange out once the other man got within arm’s reach. Jake grasped his hands and dragged him out of the maze and then up to his feet. Less impressive than telekinesis, but it got the job done.

  Everyone was staring at them.

  “Turn the machine on. We’re going to Lange’s room,” Jake said, before anyone could dictate otherwise. If Emil had really wanted to talk, he could’ve caught them in the hallway. They weren’t exactly making a break for it. But no one followed.

  The paint on Jake’s clothes was drying into a stiff mess. He shouldn’t have used all his bargaining power on making Lange take that shower earlier. What a waste. He’d never get another concession that big out of the guy, and besides, Lange didn’t look like he could stay on two feet that much longer.

  Lange took a slow step past his own door. “I need to wash my hands. Or perhaps my forearms.”

  Jake hadn’t even had to trick him into it. He followed Lange to the bathroom, where they did the best they could at rinsing the paint off. The sink filled with soapy grey water and Lange sagged against the counter.

  “Good enough,” Jake said, shepherding Lange back to his room before he collapsed.

  Lange stripped before getting into bed. Jake turned away, but not before getting an eyeful. He almost said maybe a little warning next time, but couldn’t get the words out. And why did he care? Nakedness shouldn’t bother him. It didn’t mean anything.

  By the time he turned around, Lange was dressed again and seated in bed.

  Jake risked sitting down next to him. Nothing flew across the room and hit him in the face. Lange didn’t fling him onto the floor.

  “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it,” Jake said.

  “Correct.”

  “When I walk out of this room, the others are going to ask me what happened. What do you want me to tell them?”

  “I suppose some traumatic memories resurfaced.”

  So detached and hypothetical. Like he was describing an imaginary case study instead of the last few hours of his own life. But at least Jake had an answer now. Getting close to the breach had reminded Lange of his time in the Nowhere, and it hadn’t been good. He didn’t want to go back after all.

  “I hear that happens sometimes. People block out what they went through because it was too awful. The brain protects itself.” Jake stopped himself. He needed to tread lightly. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to lose consciousness and remain that way for as long as possible.”

  “Okay,” Jake said. “I was thinking more longterm, but you’re right. You should rest. We’ll talk later.”

  Lange really did have extraordinary eyes. Deep brown and startlingly warm. Jake had never seen him look so forlorn.

  “You did a good thing in there,” Jake said. “A brave thing.”

  Lange looked at Jake like he wanted to believe that. Or Jake wanted to believe that Lange wanted… well. The moment was over already. Lange was shaking his head.

  “I’m really sorry for everything you went through,” Jake said. With anybody else in the world, Jake might have put a comforting hand on their arm or their shoulder, but Lange wouldn’t like that. Jake wasn’t a touchy-feely guy, not usually, but Lange’s aversion made him hyper-aware of all the things he couldn’t do.

  So all he did was add, “And everything you’re still going through.”

  Lange jerked his gaze away and Jake felt something invisible push at his body. “Leave.”

  “Okay,” Jake said, standing. He put his hands up, palms out, to demonstrate surrender.

  “I neither desire nor require contact with other humans,” Lange said, as if Jake hadn’t had that point hammered home by the force shoving him out the door.

  Unconsciousness eluded Lange. The room was dark and silent after he exiled McCreery to the hallway, but not dark and silent enough. He lay still on the bed, as still as he could in his quivering, fitful flesh.

  He had little enough control over his body, and none at all over his mind.

  Already his thoughts had raced to their co
nclusion: his time in the Nowhere had been ceaseless suffering. Driven out of his mind with pain, he’d latched onto Kit. He’d wanted to escape, and he hadn’t cared if escape meant dying.

  He hadn’t meant to cause harm. He hadn’t meant anything. There had only been pain.

  Hurting Kit wasn’t the only terrible wrong he’d committed, but somehow it seemed the simplest. Certainly, it was the easiest to sum up. You nearly killed Kit.

  He’d nearly killed all of them by opening the breach.

  His unlikely survival—through the initial implosion, through all those days stranded in the Nowhere, until now—haunted him. It would have been so much easier to die.

  He had died, he thought. He wouldn’t ever be the other Solomon Lange, the one who’d lived his whole life before going into the breach. That man was gone.

  Lying here in the dark was a different person, a new person, one he didn’t know yet.

  I have to be this person all the time now, he thought, and nearly laughed at how banal it sounded, the unbearable burden of his whole existence. I have to live with this.

  He shouldn’t have driven McCreery away. The man was a good distraction. Lange couldn’t imagine calling out for him to return, even though he knew McCreery or one of the others was just outside the door. They granted him privacy, but they never really left him alone. As well they shouldn’t, he supposed. He’d been a danger to himself and, inadvertently, to all of them.

  McCreery would come if Lange called. It was one of very few things Lange was sure of. McCreery would come, and he would do his best to be kind no matter what. Lange didn’t know what he would do if McCreery was kind to him right now, but he suspected there might be crying involved. The thought was enough to keep him from calling.

  Paws thudded on the floor near the bed, and Lange recognized the low meow of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. A moment later, the cat’s full weight was pressing against his sternum as he settled into position.