The silver cap of Ezra’s cane tapped along the Sears showroom floor. He ducked, one of his hips frozen stiff, under a twisted braid of orange electrical cable. The dead escalators were just ahead.
“Ziggy,” Nessa said. “As in ‘Stardust’?”
He chuckled. “I was born in 1960, but musically, I’m a child of the seventies. We were working the same theory as Carolyn: hunting for thin spots around the globe, hoping we could use them for our interdimensional research. Places like this one. Our scouts found a roadside attraction, out in Montana, where they charged five dollars a head to witness ‘the man who fell to Earth’—a mummified astronaut in a space suit unlike anything of this world.”
Marie heard the clanging of her ghostly sickles against Savannah Cross’s spear-tipped tendrils. You’re birds of a feather, the mad scientist had told her. You and the spaceman. You’ve got the same blood running in your veins.
“We acquired the astronaut and the site where he was found.” Ezra led the procession up the escalator steps. Ridged metal clanged under their feet, the old belt unsteady but holding for now. “As I’m sure you can guess, he wasn’t from outer space. He was from other space. His suit was a prototype form of powered combat armor, equipped with electronics we’d never seen before—but overlapping many of my twin’s schematics. Overlapping them enough that we could begin to reverse engineer the designs and patch the gaps in our understanding.”
“Mummified?” Marie asked. “How old was the suit? How long had he been there?”
“That was our first question. As it turned out, less than a month. The suit’s pilot had been jaunting between multiple parallel realities. On his last jump, just before coming to our world, he’d picked up a nasty bug. Sort of a…necromantic virus. The occult contagion aged him five hundred years in the space of a minute or so.”
Behind them, Rosales added, “It’s sheer dumb luck that the virus burned itself out before anyone cracked his helmet open. If it hadn’t, bye-bye planet Earth. And that’s why we don’t fuck around with this stuff.”
On the west side of the store, in what had been the electronics section, daisy-chained generators chugged and hummed under dimmed lights. This was the heart of the tangled electrical web, where cables twisted in knots and dipped down from screws hammered into the overhead tiles, running along the ceiling.
“Call me crazy,” Daniel said, “but I don’t think this place is up to fire code regulations.”
“Needs must,” Ezra replied. “This is a brand-new facility, and we’re slowly getting up to speed, bringing in equipment a piece at a time as we’re able to free it up. Our main test site is out in Nevada, at Pyramid Lake. Money isn’t an issue, but we’ve found that certain government elements frown upon the kind of research we’re doing, so we have to be as discreet as possible.”
On the far side of the store, the aisles had been cleared, shelves carried off and shoved against the boarded-over windows in order to make some space. At the heart of the open floor stood a circle of solid stone, five feet across and a foot thick. Elaborate sigils wormed across its face, scarred deep into the rock, a bizarre mingling of a Renaissance alchemist’s textbook and the pattern on a circuit board. Tripods stood at three points of the circle, aiming long black canisters down at the stone. More cables snaked along the dirt-smeared tiles; a cord jacketed in bright hazard orange ran straight into the side of the rock, plugged into a carved-out channel.
Bran stood bracketed by a U-shaped cluster of tables, buried behind a tall console and flipping switches like a DJ preparing for his next set. The Irishman wore a pair of headphones, dancing in place as he worked, bopping to one side and swinging his hips as he scribbled down notations on a clipboard. Paper scrolled through a machine on his left, set on an endless loop while a needle scratched out a more or less steady line, like a seismograph on a calm day.
“The suit was equipped with a transdimensional drive.” Ezra gestured to the circle of stone. “It was my idea to refit the technology in the form of a standing doorway, so we could move more than one person across the wheel of worlds. It helped that he’d designed it in a modular fashion. Each place he’d traveled, as far as we could tell, corresponded to a physical key.”
The sleeve of Ezra’s white suit slid back as he raised one hand and twirled his fingertips. Now he brandished a card, slim and black, embossed on one side with a raised pattern of golden circuitry.
“We call them bookmarks,” he said.
Nessa and Marie shared a sidelong glance. Marie’s hand tightened over the mirror bag. The “bookmark” was a virtual twin, on the circuitry side, to the tarot card they’d found at the Bast Club.
“The pilot left notes. Scraps, maddeningly incomplete. His pet names for the worlds he crossed, mathematical extrapolations. And his intent, ultimately, to find his way to our Earth and pay a house call to his dear friend Carolyn. He would have succeeded admirably, if he hadn’t gotten himself killed on the way here.”
“Carlo,” Nessa said. “He was the pilot.”
“Indeed. And his final bookmark was infused with his own blood. He theorized that the blood of the first story’s characters had unique properties, that it could sing out across the wheel of worlds. Like calling to like. He just hadn’t quite mastered the how of it. And I can’t say much, because neither have we. Yet.”
“What about his home world?” Marie asked. “I mean, I assume he didn’t build the suit and the drive on his own. Maybe he had a support team, just like you.”
Bran had finally noticed them. He kept his headphones on and the music pumping, but he flashed Ezra two thumbs up as he danced behind his console. Ezra responded with a tired wave.
“That’s the one destination on his itinerary we haven’t visited. The drive is plug-and-play; slot the right bookmark, it opens a space-time distortion keyed to the target location. His fail-safe, though, which would bring him home in an emergency, is hardwired into the suit’s engines. We haven’t been able to safely extract it, and considering it could very well be a one-way trip for anyone triggering the fail-safe, I’m not about to risk one of my people’s lives on the journey. We’ve had…quite enough of that sort of thing already.”
“Hard to find good help these days,” Daniel said.
“Indeed. Our world, I’m finding, is a small bastion of relative safety in a malevolent universe. Of the original skunk-works team, Rosales and Bran are all I have left. The parallel Carlo called ‘Wuthering Four’ looked like an idyllic and empty countryside; then Dr. Bush brought back a phantom made of sentient sound that laid waste to our entire Nebraska facility. Killed everyone on site and we were damn lucky to contain it. ‘Devlin Two’ was an endless plain studded with massive stone monuments engraved in an alien language. Dr. Jackson was our chief linguist on that project. He spent eight months encamped there, trying to decipher what the monuments said.”
“What did he learn?” Nessa asked.
“We don’t know.” Rosales spoke up, frowning at the circle of stone. “One morning, he apparently cracked the code. Then he butchered every member of his team, cut his tongue out with a surgical saw, then went to work on his own fingers. Bled to death before he finished.”
Ezra coughed into his hand. “We…haven’t been back. ‘White Nine’ was worse.”
“We don’t go to White Nine,” Rosales said.
“An entire team lost within forty minutes of arrival on the other side. All we recovered was the video footage. We scrambled a rescue team, but…”
“I told you we were throwing their lives away,” Rosales said, her voice hard. She looked to Nessa. “We don’t go to White Nine.”
Ezra strolled across the cleared floor, his cane tapping as he walked. He swept it out toward the circle of stone, reminiscing.
“We’ve been plagued since the beginning. Dr. Keynes was brilliant but greedy, tried to blackmail me, threatening to go public unless I paid him a fortune. I had to…regrettably, I must say, have him dealt with. Dr. Burton was brilliant b
ut too adventurous for her own good. She decided she’d rather play a real-life game of Dungeons and Dragons than advance the cause of science. Last I heard, she’d gone native, setting herself up as a warlord in some primitive frozen hellhole. Cross and Bloch stole our research and struck out on their own. God knows where they ended up—”
The suspicion brewing in Marie’s gut ever since she saw Bran’s goggles clicked into clarity.
“Savannah Cross?” she asked.
“You know her?” Ezra’s eyebrows lifted. “Yes. She and Bloch headed up our biomedical team, studying Carlo’s remains. She was the one who hit on the magical properties of his blood. When they packed up and left, they were working on synthesizing it, so they could continue running experiments without using it all up.”
“Are you familiar with a street drug called ink?” Nessa asked him.
“Only what I hear on the news.”
“It’s got a secret ingredient,” Nessa said. “And apparently, the ingredient is Carlo Sosa.”
The implication dawned on him. The tip of his cane thumped against the floor, once, and stood still.
“Oh,” Ezra said. “That’s…that’s not good at all.”
“Hey, boss,” Bran called over, “we gonna spin this baby up or what?”
That put some color in Ezra’s cheeks and a showman’s spark in his eye.
“Indeed we are, my good man. Friends, please step back and clear some room, just for safety’s sake. Bran, target lock on Deep Six.”
“Deep Six, comin’ right up.”
Bran went to work, hunched over his console and pounding the keys like a church organist on speed, as Ezra waved everyone back to the edges of the room.
“Of all Carlo’s bookmarks,” he said, “we found one I’d consider relatively safe for human habitation. One that may prove vital to our work.”
The generators on the far side of the store went into overdrive. They chugged like locomotives careening down a one-way track and the air went hot, almost stifling. Static electricity cascaded across Marie’s skin like droplets of oil sizzling in an iron skillet.
A crackle of blue lightning flashed across the face of the stone circle. Then another, jolting along the carved channels, lighting the ornate sigils on fire.
The iron canisters on the three tripods lit up, projecting beams of red, green, and blue down onto the stone. Bran called out, “Geomantic shift. Telemetry lock in three, two—”
The colors strobed from projector to projector, dancing in sequence, faster and faster. Then they changed. Green became tangerine, red became glittering pink, blue became something paler than moonlight. The colors painted an archway of solid light, stronger and more vivid by the second, as the generators whined.
The archway became an open door. And on the other side, a span of cobalt steel lit by the shifting ripples of light upon water.
“Five by five, boss,” Bran said. “You got twenty minutes of stable hookup at least. Maybe forty if the generators don’t start crappin’ out. You done showing off, or…?”
“Not in the slightest,” Ezra said. He gazed upon the doorway with pride in his eyes and raised his cane. “Ladies, sir, I feel inclined to take an after-dinner stroll. Would you care to accompany me?”
Thirty-Five
Marie and Nessa walked through the door hand in hand. One step—one flash of heat, then bitter cold, then heat once more, all in the space of a single held breath—and they stood in a different world.
Their shoes echoed on a floor made from a single, endless sheet of blue steel, arcing into the distance under a webwork of bridges and catwalks. To the left, along a curving wall, yellow glyphs in an alien language seemed to offer guidance accompanied by barbed arrows pointing in every direction. Green growth bloomed in metal planters, the soil a chalky white. The plants themselves were tangled and twisted, vines with broad leaves and scarlet flowers.
To their right, lay the ocean.
The entire right side of the complex, at least sixty feet up to the ceiling, was a solid wall of glass marked every twenty feet or so by raised support struts. Schools of luminous fish, neon yellow and hot pink, swam by the windows and then darted out into the inky depths. Wherever they were, it was too far down to see the surface, or any hint of the sun. Electric beacons strobed in the distance like traffic signals on a lonely country road, thrumming against the watery depths.
Ezra raised his cane and his open hand to the ocean. He regarded the wall of glass with his face tilted back, beatific, a convert in a foreign church.
“Welcome,” he said, “to Deep Six.”
He turned toward them and set his cane down. The hollow thud of the silver tip on the plated floor sent echoing ripples through the broad and silent gallery.
“Not its real name—I assume—but that’s what Carlo dubbed it in his notes. You can see why.”
Marie shot a nervous glance over her shoulder. The return archway held firm and steady, and she could see the dirty tiles and boarded windows of the Sears on the other side.
“So…how far down are we?” she asked.
“Well, that’s hard to answer. This facility is five levels deep, and the bottom floor aligns with the seabed. My men found a few airlocks they could use to send out a submersible with recording devices, but so far they’ve been unsuccessful.”
Ezra stared out, and up, at the ocean.
“There doesn’t seem to be a surface,” he said.
“There has to be a surface,” Nessa told him. “Even if this entire planet is covered in water, it has to end somewhere.”
“We lose contacts with our probes before they get that far. And the local wildlife is, well…here. You see those lights, out in the distance?”
He pointed with the tip of his cane. Marie and Nessa leaned close to the glass, following his lead.
Something moved out there. Marie saw it in the momentary blink of the beacon. Her breath trapped in her throat, as her eyes went wide. It was a tentacle. Uncoiling, sliding rubbery and boneless through the depths, hunting for prey.
A tentacle the size of an ocean liner.
The beacon flicked off, plunging the patch of water into blackness, sparing her from seeing any more of it. She turned her back to the glass, fast, before the light came back on. “What is it?” she asked. “What…what is it attached to?”
“We may be happier not knowing,” Ezra replied. “Fortunately, whoever built this place came prepared for the challenge. Those beacons emit some sort of repulsion field. Not sure how, and I’m hardly going to risk tampering with them, but that…thing has been out there since we found Deep Six and it’s never come any closer than the lights. Doesn’t stop smaller predators, but they can’t get through the glass. One stretch of the base is flooded; we send explorers down when we can, but we generally keep it sealed off for everyone’s safety.”
“Uh,” Daniel said.
“But the facility itself isn’t the real triumph,” Ezra told them. “The builders came here with a purpose. Deep Six was constructed over an existing site, one which—”
“Uh,” Daniel said, pointing. “Excuse me.”
They turned. A woman was floating outside the window. She was impossibly beautiful, carved like a marble statue from ancient Greece, with her golden hair flowing behind her in the brine. At the waist, her flesh faded into a ripple of scales, all the way down to a fish tail that swayed sinuously.
“As I said, the smaller predators get through the beacons.” Ezra sighed and turned his back to the glass again. “Mermaid. Don’t make eye contact. It just encourages them.”
“So how old is this place?” Marie asked.
“The materials we’ve sampled defy our carbon-dating techniques. This isn’t simple steel and glass; they’re incredibly strong, durable materials built to withstand incredible ocean pressure, and they simply can’t be created using the techniques and elements of our world. At this rate we’re going to have to quadruple the entries on the periodic table.”
As Ezra s
poke, Daniel drifted toward the window, pulled like a man sleepwalking. His eyes were locked on the mermaid’s and she begged him with her beckoning hands, with her body, calling him to dance with her. They stood close, so close, only inches apart.
Her face tore and erupted, splitting like a cheap rubber mask and blossoming outward, turning to petals of flesh lined with piranha teeth. Two serpentine tongues twisted in her razor-lined maw as she snapped at the glass, going for Daniel’s throat in a frenzy of hunger. He staggered back and fell, landing hard, then skittered backward on his hands. The mermaid gave the glass a half-hearted punch and then pushed herself off, swimming up and away into the dark.
Nessa, Marie, and Ezra stared at him. He stared back.
“Told you,” Ezra said.
Daniel pushed himself to his feet, brushed himself off, and tried to salvage his wounded pride.
“As old as we think this place is,” Ezra continued, “it’s nothing compared to what’s down on the seabed. The entire reason this facility was built, insofar as we can tell. Perhaps some ancient scientists, doing the same work as us. And we have a chance to succeed where they failed. Here, let me show you.”
He walked around the shimmering doorway. Against the wall and under a patch of alien script, a bank of monitors stood on folding tables.
“We’ve set up cameras throughout the facility,” he explained. “Whenever a team is conducting research on site, security forces stand watch from here, just in case. We’re fairly certain the complex is safe, relatively speaking, but we must never forget that this is not our Earth. We are not at the top of the food chain here.”
His fingertips rattled the keyboard. The monitors shifted from views of the cold ocean depths and empty corridors to a vast, dry chamber cast in the hard white glow of standing floodlights. At the heart of the vault rose a cyclopean structure of glistening green stone, gnarled and ancient. Not a product of human design, but its ornate towers and steepled roof still evoked a response deep in the base of Marie’s primal brain.
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