Edge of Nowhere Page 7

  “I did,” he agreed. “We weren’t on any continent I knew.”

  Behind her glasses, her green eyes went round. “Jesus. Emil.”

  “I know, I know, I should have told you earlier. Honestly, I’m still not even sure it happened. And I can’t prove anything.”

  She opened a drawer, pulled out some plastic bags, and started bagging his clothes and his shoes right then. Relief that he’d stashed the best of the evidence with Chávez flooded him, but he tried not to let it show. Maybe Heath would prove herself trustworthy at some point, and then he’d tell her.

  “That kid brought you to some other world and you just let him pop out of our lives!” she said, gesturing with one of his shoes in a plastic bag. “God damn it, Emil, you just ran our first mission by accident—unsanctioned—with some random kid, and now he’s not even here to answer questions. The treatments haven’t been working and the door was a pipe dream. We need that kid.”

  “What happened to all your objections to born runners?”

  “Don’t paint me with that brush. They weren’t my objections,” she said. “Just because the goal of my work is making more runners doesn’t mean I hate the ones we already have.”

  “Then whose objections are they, exactly?” Emil had been told that his team couldn’t have any born runners on it. He hadn’t questioned it until he’d been in a conference room with Oswin Lewis Quint’s face smiling down at him from one of the wall displays. Emil had been honored to meet him—live video was as close as he could hope to get to the real thing—until everyone’s favorite billionaire had uttered the phrase suspect loyalties without hesitation. Quint had cast aspersions on a whole group of people based on an accident of birth. Thinking back on it, that moment was the first time Emil had ever worried about his work for Quint Services. It didn’t sit right with him. He’d been on the receiving end of too much prejudice not to recognize it in other forms. But he’d comforted himself with the thought that he could do good from the inside. Besides, his team had all signed up and he couldn’t abandon them. It had been too late to go back.

  “It was Lange’s theory that gave rise to it,” Dr. Heath said. Dr. Lange had called born runners a people from Nowhere and speculated that they might be at ease in the Nowhere because their origin lay somewhere on the other side of it. His speculation had stopped there, but the higher-ups at Quint Services had extrapolated. Perhaps born runners belonged to a different reality—a reality they might prefer, if they could ever return to it. Perhaps they really were from Nowhere, and if that were the case, how could they be trusted? For this reason, no born runners worked at Quint Services Facility 17. “But I think that was a kind of Darwin and Social Darwinism thing, you know? I don’t think Lange meant for Quint or anyone else to take what he said in that direction. I can’t see Lange giving a damn about patriotism or whatever you want to call it.”

  Emil tried to keep a neutral expression. But his hands, resting on the edge of the examination chair, clenched the vinyl beneath them. She hadn’t answered his question. She’d excused herself and Dr. Lange from blame. But if they didn’t believe that born runners weren’t trustworthy, who did?

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter much now. That hypothesis benefitted my work. And you and your whole team. If Quint trusted born runners, do you think you’d be leading the team?”

  “It’s a disgusting idea,” Emil said, ignoring her question. Kit hadn’t even known other realities were possible. He’d spent his whole life in this one. To question whether he belonged here, whether he’d choose the world with all his friends and family and every person he’d ever known, over some abstract concept of a homeland, was absurd and xenophobic.

  “I didn’t see you shouting that at Quint when he said it. Instead you thanked him for the honor of participating in this mission.”

  Emil grimaced. He felt a frisson of shame. It was true that he’d let that aspect of Quint’s vision slide. This issue hadn’t seemed so pressing until he’d met a runner he really liked.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it. We’re doing good work. And anyway, it makes no difference to me where that kid is from. We need him.”

  “The treatments are your life’s work. And there have been some encouraging signs. You’re not giving up on that, are you?”

  “Of course not. Stop trying to distract me, Emil. How can we get that kid back here so I can examine him? I’m sure Vaughn will want a look, too.”

  It was strange to hear her refer to Dr. Winslow by his first name. Emil wasn’t close enough to any of the researchers to talk to them like that, and he had a feeling they liked it that way. By the same token, it irritated him that she kept referring to Kit as that kid, but he didn’t correct her. He didn’t want Kit’s name in her mouth. “Maybe we could recruit some born runners, you know, people we’d vetted. Kit doesn’t even know how he did it. It was that thing that ran into us. He doesn’t want any part of this, Jennifer.” If she could use his first name, he could use hers.

  “He wants you.”

  “What on Earth—”

  “I saw it, Emil. For God’s sake, the two of you held onto each other for ages after you arrived.”

  “The Nowhere is disorienting.” And so was Chávez’s room.

  “For you, maybe,” she said. “Not for him. You could convince him to work with us. Bat your eyelashes a few times.”

  “Dr. Heath.” He was too horrified to say anything else. He wouldn’t do that to Kit. And he didn’t want to discuss sexual ethics with a researcher who was sleeping with one of her research subjects. Emil pushed himself down from the chair and planted his bare feet on the floor, looming over her. “This conversation is over.”

  “You have no authority to tell me that,” she said. “If you won’t bring me that kid, you’re my only test subject. I have to be thorough. Did you eat anything while you were there?”

  He didn’t want to answer that.

  “For the good of the mission, Emil. For science. Come on. Cooperate.”

  “Yes,” he said, deciding to share a portion of the truth. “Kit needed food before he could make the jump again. I found some fruit that seemed edible and non-toxic. A berry of some kind. I only ate a handful—I just wanted to make sure they wouldn’t kill him. There wasn’t time to test them in a safer way.”

  “I want a blood sample, in that case. Urine and stool, too. Did you shower after your return?”

  Emil had been her patient—or test subject—for months now, and this was the first time he’d ever resented it. But it was part of his contract with Quint Services. “Yes, I showered.”

  “Damn. I wish you’d come back sooner. Everything’s probably contaminated beyond use by now. Oh well.” She waved a hand at him. “Go on.”

  She’d bagged up all his clothes. She was going to make him walk back to his quarters in this damn hospital gown. Before today, Emil wouldn’t have suspected her of anything other than being too absorbed in her work to notice or care, but now it felt pointed. He’d embarrassed her and she was giving as good as she got.

  “Jennifer,” he said. She raised an eyebrow. He gestured at the gown. “We’ll call it even after this, yeah?”

  She shrugged. “That depends on you.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t mention it to anyone,” he said. “I meant it. As far as I’m concerned, I didn’t see anything.”

  “Hmph,” she said, and Emil didn’t try to argue with that. He left the exam room, his gown flapping behind him.

  6

  Secret Plan

  Emil almost made it to his room without incident. He could see his door. Unfortunately, he could also see Miriam Horowitz standing in front of him with her hands on her hips. Her eyes were round with surprise. Other than that, she looked like she always did, in dark jeans and boots and a jacket, with her curly brown hair forced into submission, braided tightly, and pinned into a bun on top of her head. Everything about Miriam was severe, from the thick slashes of her eyebrows to the set of her mouth. She mi
ght have been pretty in some other context, but the impression Miriam preferred to make was ferocious.

  “Where have you been?”

  She nailed that impression every time.

  Emil took a breath. “Can we do this when I’m not wearing a hospital gown in the middle of the hallway, Miriam?”

  “You tell me, Emil. If I turn away for a second, are you gonna up and vanish?” Her mouth was set into a hard line. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  It was complicated, choosing a team for a mission to parts unknown. Who knew what they’d face? He’d had to select people who’d be excited about the novelty and the danger, but who’d be cautious and who’d look out for their teammates. It was hard to say what skills would be useful, but Emil had been inclined to choose people with scientific or technical expertise. Dax had somehow acquired a doctorate in physics by the age of twenty-three. McCreery had served with Emil and he had training as a paramedic. Beck—Lenny, Emil really should think of him as Lenny by now—was an aerospace engineer and he’d never met a machine he didn’t want to take apart and put back together, which was a pastime that Dax also loved. What mattered was that they all had a gift for solving previously unforeseen and unimaginable problems.

  The only two who didn’t have a background in the hard sciences were Chávez and Miriam. Chávez could fly anything you put in front of her, but more importantly, she was warm and friendly and she had a graduate degree in cultural anthropology. She had a deep interest in linguistics, but her real focus was conflict studies. If Emil had to defuse a bomb, he’d ask Lenny and Dax, but if he had to defuse an argument, he’d ask Chávez.

  Chávez was there to make peace. Miriam was there to make war.

  She was resourceful, loyal, tough, and her eyes lit up when she talked about space, but in terms of what she alone brought to the team—well, Miriam Horowitz was fearless. She had good reason to be, since Emil had never seen her miss a target, no matter what kind of weapon she was wielding. She was formidable with and without weapons. She could fuck up a man twice her size. Emil knew because he’d been that man on a couple of occasions in the gym.

  The rest of them could fight, too, but Miriam was something else. When Emil had to choose who to take into the unknown with him, not knowing what threats he’d face, Miriam’s name was the first one out of his mouth.

  For all of those reasons, he wasn’t thrilled to be the object of her glare now. “I swear I’m just going into my room to change. You can follow me in if it matters that much to you.”

  “You don’t fucking leave us here, Emil,” she said in a low voice. “You just don’t.”

  But she stepped aside to let him pass. The door was programmed to respond to his touch, which was good since he didn’t have a damn thing on. Miriam followed him inside, and as he was shutting the door behind them, she leapt into action.

  Emil looked up and she was pressing Kit against the opposite wall, her upper arm across his throat. “Who the fuck are you and how did you get in here?”

  “Stand down, Miriam,” Emil said. His mind was racing. He’d told Kit to leave. Kit had said he would leave. He’d thought Kit had left. What was he doing here?

  “You know this guy?” Miriam asked, indignant. She was already unhappy with him and now she felt like he was keeping secrets. Where was Chávez when Emil needed her?

  “Yes. He’s the runner who brought me back. His name is Kit. Please let go of him.”

  She backed off slowly and Emil watched the two of them stare each other down. Miriam was a little taller and a lot heavier than Kit. They were a study in contrasts. Kit was decked out in teal and hot pink. Emil would be surprised if Miriam own a single article of clothing that wasn’t black, grey, or very dark green. Her underwear drawer was probably full of knives.

  “Now, if the two of you will promise not to kill each other for a minute, I’m gonna put some clothes on.”

  It wasn’t awkward to get dressed with Miriam in the room. Emil didn’t know who she was interested in—if anyone—but he knew he wasn’t in that category. Chávez and Lenny teased him all the time about working out, about whose attention he was trying to get, and one time when they’d been waxing ridiculous about chiseled abs or whatever, Miriam had interrupted with, “Would you two shut the fuck up? The only thing that matters about a man’s abs is whether they’re a comfortable surface for napping.”

  It had been so unexpected it had rendered them all speechless for a second. Terrifying Miriam Horowitz, a cuddler? By the time Chávez recovered enough to open her mouth, Miriam was glaring and blushing and stomping out the door.

  Emil hadn’t known she was capable of blushing until that moment. He knew she wasn’t going to blush now. Miriam simply turned her head and waited. Kit, on the other hand, might not be looking, but Emil couldn’t help but be aware that he was in the room. He pulled on boxers, jeans, and a t-shirt as fast as he could. A second too late, he noticed that the t-shirt had the Quint Services logo printed in black. So many of his clothes did. But it would be strange to take it off now, so he just left it. He turned around to face her, still unsure what he planned to say.

  “I promise I’ll explain, Miriam, but I’d rather just do it once. Do you think you could find Chávez, Lenny, Dax, and Jake and bring them here? As discreetly as possible?”

  “Here?” Miriam looked around his room, which was identical to Chávez’s in its furnishings. One single bed. One metal desk. One chair. One closet. The space already felt crowded with three of them. Seven people would be overwhelming. “Not the common room?”

  “Not the common room,” he confirmed, and her eyebrows went up and she nodded. Maybe it was a foolish precaution. It wasn’t like his bedroom was secure. All it would take was one person putting their ear to the door. But Emil had to move fast and real secrecy would take time.

  Given a moment alone with Kit, Emil said, “I thought you were leaving?”

  “Couldn’t,” Kit said. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest, a pose that might have been drawn from a magazine, nonchalant and sensual. An act, Emil suspected. He needed the support of the wall.

  And then Chávez arrived from her room next door, ending their conversation. Her short brown hair, usually neatly asymmetrical, was still mussed from what she’d been doing with Dr. Heath not long ago. She was almost as tall as Emil, but of a completely different body type, one that Lenny had once described as “90% skeleton.” She shuffled in more sheepishly than she normally would have. It wasn’t being caught having sex so much as being caught having sex with Dr. Heath that had Chávez studying the floor tiles so carefully. The Quint Services research ethics committee would have a fit if they found out—or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe Quint Services wouldn’t know ethical behavior if it bit them in the ass.

  Lenny came into the room next, and his grin at seeing Emil was outsize even for him. “Hey, you’re alive!” He banged his shoulder into Chávez’s and she winced. Broad-shouldered and big-bellied, Lenny had been the star of his high school football team. He sometimes forgot his own strength. He was as friendly as Chávez, but far less focused. His glasses were always smudged or crooked or both, and he was always cajoling his mother and other family members to mail him fresh spices for new culinary experiments. “Told you he was alive.”

  “I never bet against that,” Chávez said. “All I said was Winslow’s story about a family emergency was bullshit.”

  That’s what Dr. Winslow had told his team? The man didn’t have a clue about them.

  “Yeah,” Lenny said. “Every time I make a mail run to Franklin, there’s another package of those cashew things Mrs. Singh always sends up, and everybody loves them, and her, and I know Emil would have told us if something had happened to our cashew-thing hookup.”

  “AKA his mom,” Chávez said.

  “Kaju katli,” Emil said, supplying the name of the sweet. “And she goes by Professor Singh.”

  Chávez and Lenny smiled at that. Emil didn’t correct their a
ssumption that his mother sent the care packages, even though she was far too caught up in her writing to do any such thing. It didn’t escape him that Kit was listening intently to all of this information about his family—and his team, who were almost one and the same. And Chávez and Lenny had kept up their buddy routine rather than ask any questions about Kit. He hoped it was a sign of trust: if Emil wasn’t worried about this person, they wouldn’t be, either. “And my mother is just fine, as of last week. So is the rest of my family.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. What happened to the last box of those, anyway?” Chávez asked, a sly smile on her face.

  “You ate them,” Lenny said. “Right in front of me.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I beat your ass in hockey soccer and won eternal glory and the sweet, sweet cashew spoils of victory.”

  Hockey soccer was sort of like soccer, but played by kicking a hockey puck across the basketball court, with the facility’s artificial gravity lowered to make the puck slide more easily. Lenny and Chávez hated this comparison and any time Emil brought it up, they claimed he was being “disrespectfully reductive” and didn’t understand the beauty of their masterpiece. The game had hundreds of obscure rules known only to its inventors. Emil broke new ones by accident every time he participated. Lenny and Chávez played hockey soccer religiously, always with a beer in hand and always for high stakes—like the sweets in Emil’s care packages, which he himself didn’t eat.

  Lenny was black and straight and had grown up in a very white town in rural Arkansas. Chávez was a Puerto Rican lesbian from Inland New York. Either despite or because of these disparate experiences—Emil could never be sure—Lenny and Chávez were basically inseparable. Not coincidentally, they were the two warmest members of his team, the two who slapped backs and shook hands and gave out hugs and big grins the most easily.