“She has to be real,” I whispered to myself, surprising both Lena and I that I had even spoken.
The room became quiet again for what seemed to me a really, really long time before she finally sat in a chair beside me, put a hand over the back of mine, and spoke.
“I’m starting to believe in your Nova,” she said.
I continued my silence, my forehead still pressed against the table, then finally, reluctantly, spoke.
“Really?” I said, not convinced.
“It’s hard to accept that there could be such passion tied up in a hologram, or an hallucination. You talk about her with such… love.”
I lifted my face, and stared at her, wanting to believe. The prevailing hypothesis was that I had fallen onto some lost, alien artifact that provides a holographic entertainment experience for the user—after somehow disintegrating said user and uploading their physicality and consciousness. It didn’t answer all the questions, like how I was scarred, or why something as complex as a disintegration process was needed for ‘entertainment’. But it made more sense to them than that I’d been inside a hollow Earth. Go figure.
Lena smiled at me, and I returned a weak smile of my own. She patted my hand and stood, taking up her purse to go.
“Would you like to stay with me, tonight?” she asked. “At my place?”
“They’d allow that?” I asked.
“Well… there would be guards outside. But only outside.”
I studied her, and realized it was a sexual offer. I shook my head.
“You know…” she said, treading carefully, “Iain and I are officially divorced, now. For some time, actually.”
I stared at her blankly. Hadn’t she been listening to my story? Hadn’t she heard everything I’d said about Nova? Repeatedly?
“Thanks,” I said. “But, no. They’ve brought me a cot. Not that I’ll use it.”
She stared a long time in silence. Then her eyes showed a deep sadness.
“You should sleep,” she offered, sounding genuinely concerned.
At last she walked away from me, across the office, and opened the door to leave. She paused with her fingers on the handle.
“It does make me wonder if you could have loved me with that same intensity,” she said before exiting, and closing the door behind her.
I sat in the dim light and silence for quite a while, trying to understand everything that had happened to me. Nothing made sense. Nothing made more sense. I’d been there. To Pangea. I’d really known an actual woman named Nova.
Hadn’t I?
I stood and walked over to climb atop the pad for maybe the thousandth time since my return, dragging the chair I was cuffed to with me. Standing quietly atop the center, I tried to think of anything that might get it to work. I searched the room and scraped through my brain once more about my last moments in Pangea. Closing my eyes I fought away memories of Nova screaming up at me, terrified for me, afraid of losing me—the thing she’d told me she feared most.
This room had a pad, but none of the equipment from that other room—the one the Grigori queen had sent me from. I’d seen her activate things, and then watched as she …
“Oh, my God…” I said.
I ran to the exit, stumbling with my ball and chain wooden chair, and threw the door wide. Lena was at the far end of the hall, nearly out the building in the direction of the parking lot. She turned at the sound of her office door banging against the wall. Both guards were still there, turned and pulled their guns from their holsters, pointing them directly at me.
“LENA!” I called, cocking my head, summoning her toward me, then ran back inside to stand once more on the pad.
I shattered the chair against its surface, still cuffed, but less constrained, and jumped over the links so my hands were in front of me as the guard ran over, gun still drawn and pointed at my nose.
“Hey, hey!” he said. “Stop that!”
I ignored him, and knelt, pressing my palms and fingertips to the smooth, polymer surface of the weird pad, replaying my last moments in Pangea before the Grigori sent me home.
Lena raced back in through the door with more guards behind her, their guns also still drawn.
“Tell him to stop doing that!” the guard nearest to me yelled, speaking to Lena, but aiming at me.
“Come around here to the opposite side of the thing,” I told Lena.
“Why?” she asked, doing so.
“When I arrived, you were all on that side, and I was associating it with the same side the Grigori had used. It wasn’t. This is.”
I pointed to where she was walking.
“Get off of there!” the guard yelled.
“In a minute,” I said, hoping I’d never be getting off the pad, ever again.
“But the sides are all the same,” Lena said, ignoring the man with the gun, stopping where I’d told her. “There’s no difference.”
“No, there is!”
“Get down from there,” the guard snapped, stepping closer and pointing angrily. “Now!”
“It’s like you told me once last year,” I said to Lena, calming my voice, hoping it would settle the guard, “about sifting through the information from WISE, sorting out all that satellite imagery. Finding difference in a lot of things that look the same. It’s easier to see from my angle up here, but you’ll get it. Look carefully.”
She did, touching its smooth surface, bending over and examining it from the side.
“It’s slightly raised,” she said, getting it.
“That’s the control panel,” I told her.
She pulled her hand back like she’d been burned.
“Are you sure?”
I smiled, and nodded.
“Listen!” the guard yelled, now focusing on Lena. “Stop messing with that thing. Stop doing what he tells you! I mean it!”
“But how do we turn it on?” she asked me, ignoring him.
“It’s already on. It was on when Milton and I fell on it while we were inside the mole, and somehow activated it. This is the remote pad. I’m guessing it’s always on. We were wishing we had controls that we don’t need.” I pointed at the panel. “Touch it in the lower right hand corner—your right hand corner—as if you’re going to pinch it, then hold your fingers there, and draw back like you’re pulling a string.”
“How do you know that’s what I’m supposed to do?”
“Because that’s what the Grigori did.”
She looked up at me, startled.
“You remembered.”
She looked at me strangely, and I wondered if she was really starting to believe me, or was simply humoring me. Whichever it was, it didn’t matter. She pulled her fingertips as I’d told her to. The cop had stopped focusing on me, and was watching her, carefully.
The panel lit up, and she gasped. So did he.
“Oh, Jesus,” the guard said. “I mean it, lady! Stop what you’re doing!”
“Don’t listen to him. Keep pulling. About a foot up. I was watching the Grigori carefully, waiting for it to attack me, and after all those buttons it pushed on the wall, I didn’t realize it was still operating controls of a different kind on the pad itself. Sensor controls.”
Her fingers reached a point about a foot above the panel, and all around me the pad ignited with light, just as it had back in Emibi.
“Son of a bitch,” the guard said, his hands beginning to shake. He pointed the gun right into my face, and seemed on the verge of hysteria. “Get off that thing or I will shoot you!”
“The pad in Pangea is the main control,” I told them both, “This is just a receiver, or a sender. That Grigori probably had a number of pads it could send me to. That’s what the other controls were for. She probably thought she was sending me to wherever you found this one.”
“The bottom of the Gulf of Mexico,” Lena said.
“Where I’d be dead and out of her hair. If she had hair.”
The guard, apparently tired of waiting, cocked his pisto
l.
“How do I turn it off,” Lena said.
“No!” I said, my eyes darting nervously between her and the security guard. “No. Now form a flat palm and push all the way down to the panel.”
“What,” she said, aghast? “No, Brandon, I can’t. This is the discovery of a lifetime! We have to make plans, we have to organize…”
And that’s when the guard shot me. He hit me in the shoulder. I’m not sure if that’s what he was aiming at, but it was effective. I screamed and fell to my knees.
“Lena, please!” I said, my eyes dancing between her and the nervous man with the gun, now shakily aimed at my eye. “Milton needs me. Elia needs me.”
She stared at me, and the reality rushed in on her, quite suddenly. It was all true. Everything I’d said was true, on some level, even if it was just some kind of game machine. Her eyes locked on mine in abject wonder, and I thought I saw the beginnings of more tears.
“Nova needs you,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“And I need her,” I answered.
Lena smiled at me, sadly, very sadly, and formed her hand into the palm shape I’d told her to.
“STOP!” The cop snapped, leaping up onto the panel. “DOWN ON THE GROUND! LADY, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING!”
“Send me something back,” Lena said to me, quietly, “so I’ll know. Know you’re safe, and…”
“GODDAMMIT!” The cop screamed, grabbing me, pressing the gun to me temple, and cocking it again.
“That it’s real?” I asked Lena.
She nodded.
“Promise,” I said.
Lena pushed her palm all the way to the control panel, as the guard pulled the trigger.
I KNELT IN THE CENTER of a different pad, in a different room. Different in all ways. Different than Lena’s office. Different than the one the queen had sent me from back in Emibi. The guard still had his gun to my temple, the shots having somehow not harmed me. He no longer seemed to be aware of my presence as he looked nervously back and forth at our weird surroundings.
Slowly, overly excited because I was actually back—really and truly back in Pangea—I stepped down from the pad and began to laugh.
“Where…” the guard asked, “where the hell are we?”
“Pangea,” I laughed.
“It looks real,” he said.
Forcing myself to focus, I checked my bullet wound, which hurt like hell, but didn’t seem to be mortal. Ignoring it, I—like the guard—took in the room.
There were great grooves dug deeply into the floor, and a massive hole in the wall. I spent a minute or two wondering what had happened here when it dawned on me that I was in the room Milton’s mining machine had been transported to when the pad first brought us here. The rumbling mole had apparently slipped off the impenetrable surface of this pad’s alien polymers, and careened about the room before boring straight into a wall. Control panels that once filled that partition were now nothing more than useless scrap metal, rent plastic, and shredded wiring. When Milton and I had thought we were digging into the Earth, we were actually digging out of a subterranean room deep beneath Pangea.
If I followed that trail, I would wind up in the exactly spot where we’d first come out on the surface of this crazy world.
The place where I’d first met Nova.
Excited, and desperate to get back to her, to Milton, to Bruk, to Kiga, and all the rest, I was about to run into the mole-made fissure when I realized it was impassable. Most of it had either been filled in behind the efficient digging machine, or become blocked when the earth above it had collapsed. I would have to find another way to the surface, and back to my friends.
I’d just begun searching the room for a corridor, or stairs, when the guard stopped me short.
“Is that outer space?” he asked.
I turned to him, and saw he was looking up. I raised my own eyes to the place he was studying, and was awed. The entire ceiling of the room was made entirely of a transparent material, filled wall-to-wall with a mind-blowing view of the blackness of space.
Space.
Stars. Asteroids. Planets. I could see movement through the window, a small tumbling rock to one side, and a shift in light that indicated we were orbiting a star. But it couldn’t be. Milton had been so certain. We were inside the Earth. The Earth was hollow.
“You idiot,” I said to myself. “You aren’t inside the Earth. This is a Dyson sphere! You’re inside a goddam spaceship!”
“I’m not an idiot,” the guard said, irritated.
“No, I…”
I heard a small noise behind me, and spun instantly. Just entering the room through an open doorway was a Grigori; dark green, sleek and just as ugly as I remembered. It looked around, surveying the damage, and didn’t notice us at first.
“Holy, mother fucking…” the guard said, as the Grigori turned, noticing him.
It moved so fast neither of us had time to react. Fortunately for me, it went for the guard, first. His sudden scream was stopped cold in his throat as his head snapped away from his body. Blood sprayed over me, over the walls, the floor, the pad, the panels, and the Grigori was on him, ripping, snapping, chewing, shredding until the guard’s body was nothing more than meat and ruined blue cloth.
Satisfied that the guard was no longer a threat—as if he ever was—the Grigori bitch turned to me, fury and rage still clouding her eyes.
I clinked my handcuff chains, and just smiled.
* * *
PROOF
* * *
“So what happened next?”
“Well, I’ve just gotten a few of the other security recordings forwarded, the last that were made before the electronics in the room failed. Or were shot. Maybe they’ll tell us something.”
“Bring ‘em up.”
Onscreen, Lena backed up away from the alien pad, and essentially collapsed into a chair, her eyes like balloons, mouth so wide you could practically see down her throat.
She sat silently, just staring at the thing in disbelief. The guards were all near, weapons still drawn. One of them moved closer to her.
“Where did he go?” he asked her, quietly.
“I…” she said, considering the question, “I don’t know.”
“Is he in another room?”
“No,” she answered, her voice barely audible. “I don’t think he’s even in this building.”
She looked lower, at the center of the pad.
“Or maybe he’s inside that thing,” she said. “I have no idea.”
“Like a trap door?” the guard asked.
“No,” she said, and nearly laughed. “No, I don’t think so.”
There was the sound of a door opening in the distance ‘Good cop’ Officer Ransom raced back in, entering the video frame near the pad with the agent whose name no one could ever remember, mostly because he never talked to anyone. Both were carrying cups of coffee.
“We heard shots.” Ransom asked. “Where’s Mack?”
“I don’t know,” Lena said, absently, still staring at the pad.
Ransom studied her a moment, then looked around the room. Not seeing Mack anywhere, he turned his attention back to the pretty female astrophysicist.
“What do you mean, ‘you don’t know’?” He said, confused.
“He got on that thing,” one of the guards interjected. “Then she waved her hands all around, the whole place lit up, and Mack just fuckin’ disappeared along with Germaine.”
Ransom’s eyes widened, as did the agent’s, and the two of them stepped closer to the device.
“It worked?” Ransom said. “For real?”
“For real,” Lena repeated.
“So… what does that mean?”
“I don’t know, yet. So far all it means is that Brandon is gone.”
Ransom’s face fell, anger slicing through his normally ‘good cop’ demeanor. He set his coffee cup down and walked around the machine to glare at Lena.
“All right, Dr. Mizellier,”
he said. “I need some answers.”
“You what?” she asked, as if suddenly becoming aware that he was even in the room.
“I let it go because I didn’t want to compromise you in front of your husband, or your ex-husband, or whatever he hell you two are these days, but you need to start leveling with me.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, already knowing what he was talking about, and becoming nervous.
“I’m talking about a half hour of missing time in Mack’s story!” he snapped, “I’m talking about how you and Pompaneau are the only ones who know about this damned weird, alien pad-thing, and then I come looking for Mack because he killed someone, and you and Mack had a relationship neither of you mentioned, and then he vanishes because of the pad! Twice!”
There was a stunned moment of silence while Lena considered exactly what he was saying.
“You think…” she said, horrified by his logic, “I helped him escape… last year,” she shook her head, disbelieving, “and just now… with this… this device? Because of our… because we’d had… a relationship.”
“This goddam facility has cameras everywhere, so when Mack’s story didn’t gibe with the sequence of events I checked some of those security recordings…”
“I got Mack’s MRI back,” Pompaneau said, entering the room, seeming excited, though daubing his lip where he’d bitten it when Mack slammed the table under his chin. He waved a manila folder in his other hand. “They actually found something inside his skull. Can you believe it?”
Ransom stopped leaning in toward Pompaneau’s ex, stood and faced the newcomer. Then he turned his eyes back to the attractive scientist he was fairly certain had helped Brandon—both times.
“Do you want me to discuss this in front of him?” he asked Mizellier, walking toward his laptop near the interrogation table.
“What’s going on?” Pompaneau asked, sniffling blood.
Ransom grabbed his case and waited, not taking his eyes from Lena’s. Not blinking. She, in turn, never took her eyes off Ransom.
“Show him,” Lena said, quietly. “I don’t care.”
The Hollow World: (Pangea, Book 1) Page 31