by Rachel Caine
He smiled, and it was a sad, sweet smile, the sort that broke her heart. “Oh, Claire,” he said. “You think me a far better man than I am. That’s kind, and flattering.”
“Are you saying that you—”
“Doughnuts!” Myrnin interrupted her, and darted away, to zip back in seconds with an open box. “Chocolate glazed. Your favorite.”
She stared at him, helpless, and finally took one. They were fresh, so he’d actually gone out and gotten them. She could imagine how that had gone over at the local doughnut shop, especially given what he was wearing today. “Myrnin, have you been hunting?”
He raised his eyebrows and bit into a jelly-filled doughnut. Raspberry jam oozed out, and Claire swallowed hard.
After he licked his lips clean, he said, “Let’s look at your latest breakthrough, shall we?”
She followed him across to the back of the lab, where her own much saner-looking circuitry was sitting on another table, under another sheet. He’d made some . . . additions, she saw, in his usual nontraditional style. She couldn’t imagine how copper pipes and old-fashioned springs and levers were supposed to improve her work, and for a second she felt righteously angry. She’d worked hard on that, and like a bratty little kid, Myrnin had ruined it.
“What did you do?” she asked, a little too sharply, and Myrnin turned around slowly to stare at her.
“Improved the design,” he said, and this time his voice was cool, and not at all amused. “Science is collaboration, little girl. You are no scientist at all if you can’t accept improvements on your theory.”
“But—” Frustrated, she bit into her doughnut. She’d spent weeks working on this, and he’d promised he wouldn’t touch it while she was gone. She’d been so close to making it work! “How exactly did you improve it?”
For an answer, he reached over to the power cord—still modern, thank God—and plugged it into the outlet at the side of the table.
The computer monitor—LCD, perfectly good—had been given the Jules Verne treatment, too. It was almost invisible in a nest of pipes and springs and gears . . . but it came on, and Claire recognized the graphic interface she’d designed for him. She’d made it steampunky, of course, because she knew that made him happy, but with the ornaments on the outside it looked half-crazy.
Perfect for Myrnin, then.
She went through the touch-screen menus rapidly. Town security, town memory control, town transportation . . . Transportation and memory control had been the two things that hadn’t worked, but now, at least according to the interface, they did. She pressed the on-screen button for town transportation, and a map popped up, with glowing green spots for each of the stable doorways—like wormholes—that ran between Founder Houses in town, and throughout most of the public buildings. There were two at TPU, and two at the court-house, one in the hospital, some in places that she didn’t recognize.
But just because they were green on the screen didn’t mean they actually worked, of course.
“Have you tested it?” she asked.
Myrnin was finishing his doughnut. He wiped red from his lips and said, “Of course not. I’m far too valuable to waste on experiments. That’s your job, assistant.”
“But it works?”
“Theoretically,” he said, and shrugged. “Of course, I wouldn’t recommend a first-person test just yet. Try something inorganic first.”
Despite herself, Claire felt a little thrill of excitement. It’s working. Maybe. Transportation and memory control had been two impossible problems, and maybe, just maybe, they’d actually solved one of them. That meant the second wasn’t insurmountable, either.
She tried to keep that out of her expression, nodded, and walked to the wooden cabinet that covered the doorway that led to the lab. She tried to slide it. It wouldn’t budge. “Did you lock this in place or something?”
“Oh, no, I just stored some lead inside,” Myrnin said cheerfully, and with one hand he slid the heavy beast out of the way. “There you go. I forget you can’t actually move mountains; you do such a good imitation of it. I’ll move the lead to another location.”
She wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a compliment, so she said nothing, just focused on the portal in front of her. He’d put in a new locked door to cover it, and she had to go in search of the key to the padlock, because of course it wasn’t hanging on the hook where it was supposed to be. It took twenty minutes to locate it in the pocket of Myrnin’s ratty old bathrobe, which was hanging on an articulated human skeleton wired together in the corner of the lab—one of those old teaching tools, she hoped, and not a previous occupant of her own job.
Once she’d opened the door, what was beyond was an empty, dark space, leading . . . well, potentially to a horrible death.
Claire reached over and grabbed a book from a nearby stack, checked the title, and decided they could do without it. Then she concentrated, imagining the living room at the Glass House. It was harder to project that image into the portal than before, almost as if there were some kind of force fighting not to open the connection, but then the image resolved through with an almost audible pop and color spread out in front of her. Blurry at first, then slowly coming into focus.
“My God,” she breathed. “He actually made it work.”
Facing her was the back of the battered couch at home. She could see Michael’s acoustic guitar still propped up in his chair off to the side. The TV was off, so obviously Shane wasn’t up yet.
She flinched as a shadow walked in front of her, but it was only Eve, who crossed between the TV and the couch, still fastening her pigtails as she headed toward the kitchen.
“Hey!” Claire called. “Hey, Eve!”
Eve, puzzled, stopped and turned around, staring up toward the second floor, then looking at the TV.
“Over here!” Claire said. “Eve!”
Eve turned, and her eyes widened. “Claire? Oh, are the portals working?”
“No, stay there. I’m testing it.” Claire held up the book. “Here. Catch.”
She tossed the book through the open connection, and on the other side she saw Eve raise her hands.
The book hit Eve’s palms and crumbled into dust. Eve, surprised, let out a little squawk and jumped back, shaking the dust from her hands.
“Are you okay?” Claire asked anxiously.
“Yeah, just surprised. And filthy.” Eve held up her smudged palms. “Not quite there yet, right? Unless you wanted to pulverize people.”
“Not exactly.” Claire sighed. “Thanks. I’ll keep working on it. Sorry about the dirt.”
“Well, it’s not like we don’t have that on the floor. Michael was supposed to sweep; do you really think he’s done it?” Eve grinned. “Nice try with the weird science, but for now, I think I’ll stick with walking.”
She blew Claire a kiss, and Claire waved and stepped back. The color faded out again, turning Eve and the room to black-and-white, and then to just a sea of liquid darkness.
Myrnin was standing by her elbow when she looked over. He was tapping a finger on his lips. “That,” he said, “was very interesting. Also, you owe me a third-edition Johannes Magnus.”
“You have six of them already. But the important thing is, it’s almost working,” Claire said. “The stabilization’s off. But the connection’s working. That’s a huge step forward.”
“Not much of one if it turns us to ashes upon arrival. I can do that all on my own by strolling long enough in the sunlight. Well, it’s your problem now, Claire. I’m working on the other part.”
“What other—Oh. Wiping people’s memories when they leave Morganville.”
“Exactly. I’m actually getting quite close, I believe.”
“But you’re not going to use a brain. Other than your own, I mean.”
“Since you insist, I am trying it the hard way. I am not optimistic at all that this will ever work,” he said, and produced the box of doughnuts again, with a magician’s flourish. “One more?”
> She really couldn’t resist, when he gave her that smile.
THREE
Over the next three days, Claire didn’t go home for long. She was obsessive when she got into a problem, and she knew it, but this was so cool. She went to the store and bought cartloads of cheap plastic toys, which she spent hours tossing through the portal to an increasingly bored Eve, then Michael, then Shane. They had their own supply of toys, too, and pitched them through in the opposite direction.
All she got out of it, for two and a half days, was dust—so much of it that Shane told her she was on permanent vacuum duty at home, if she ever came home again. She knew that he was grumpy, both because it was boring pitching toys back and forth, but also because she’d barely seen him for days, except to come home, shovel in food, and fall into bed. She was grumpy about it, too, but there was something inside of her that was locked on target about this stupid problem, and she couldn’t walk away from it. Not until something worked, or she broke.
She didn’t break.
On the third day, Shane was still on catching duty. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the back of the sofa and wearing one of those white cotton breathing masks. He’d bought it in self-defense, he’d told her; he didn’t want to be breathing in plastic toy dust and coughing up a lung.
She didn’t blame him, but it did make a funny picture, at least until she’d realized the same thing on her end and gotten a mask out of Myrnin’s jumbled stash of supplies. And goggles. Shane now envied her the goggles.
“Hang on,” she said, after her last attempt at pitching a neon plastic ball through had turned it to dust on the other end. “I have an idea.”
“So do I,” Shane said. “Movies, hot dogs, and not doing this anymore. Like it?”
“Love it,” she said, and meant it. “But let me do this one thing, okay?”
He sighed and let his head fall back against the sofa. “Sure, whatever.”
She really was a terrible girlfriend, Claire thought, and raced across the lab, careful of all of Myrnin’s various scattered trip hazards that she couldn’t seem to convince him were dangerous. She arrived at the worktable, where her circuitry (with Myrnin’s incomprehensible additions) quietly hummed away.
She shut the power off and checked the connections again. All of the voltage was steady; there was no reason why the other end would be unstable, unless . . .
Unless it was something Myrnin had done.
Claire began tracing the piping, which led to a spring, which led to a complicated series of gears and levers, which led to a bubbling ice-green liquid in a sealed chamber. . . .
Only it wasn’t bubbling. It wasn’t doing anything, even when she turned the power on. She distinctly remembered him explaining that it was supposed to bubble. She had no idea why that was important, but she supposed that maybe the bubbling created some kind of pressure, which . . . did what?
Exasperated, she thumped the thing with her finger.
It started to bubble.
She blinked, watched the whole thing for a while, decided that it wasn’t going to blow up or boil over, and went back to where Shane was pretending to snore on the other side of the portal.
“Heads up, slacker!” she said, and pitched another neon ball at him, hard.
Shane’s reactions were really, really good, and he got his eyes open and hands up at the same time . . .
. . . and the ball smacked firmly into his grip.
Shane stared down at it for a second, then stripped off his mask as he turned it over in his fingers.
“Is it okay?” Claire asked breathlessly. “Is it—”
“Feels fine,” he said. “Damn. Unbelievable.” He pitched it back to her, and she caught it. It felt exactly the same—not even a little warm or a little cool. She threw it back, and he responded, and before long they were laughing and whooping and feeling incredibly giddy. She raised the ball over her head and jumped around in a circle, just like Eve would have, and made herself dizzy.
She whirled around to an unsteady stop, and Shane caught her.
Because he was here, in the lab with her, instead of on the other side of the portal. Her brain sent a message of Oh, he feels so good, just about a half second before the logical part kicked in.
Claire shoved him backward, appalled and scared. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What?” Shane asked. “What did I do?”
“You . . . you came through?”
“The ball was fine.”
“The ball doesn’t have internal organs! Squishy parts! How could you be so crazy?” She was literally shaking now, deeply terrified that he was about to burst into a dust cloud, melt, die in her arms. How could he be so insane?
Shane looked a little off balance, as if he hadn’t really expected this kind of reception, but he looked back at the portal, the piles of dust, and said, “Oh. Yeah, I see your point. But I’m fine, Claire. It worked.”
“How do you know you’re fine? Shane, you could die!” She rushed at him, threw her arms around him, and now she could feel his heart beating fast. He hugged her, held her while she tried to get her panic under control, and gently kissed the top of her head.
“You’re right; it was dumb,” he said. “Stop. Relax. You did it, okay? You made it work. Just . . . breathe.”
“Not until you go see the doctor,” she said. “Dumb-ass.” She was still scared, still shaking, but she tried to get the old Claire back, the one who could face down snarling vampires. But this was different.
What if she’d just killed him? Broken something inside him that couldn’t grow back?
Myrnin came in from the back room, carrying a load of books, which he dropped with a loud bang on the floor to glare at the two of them. “Excuse me,” he said, “but when did my lab become appropriate for snogging?”
“What’s snogging?” Shane asked.
“Ridiculous displays of inappropriate affection in front of me. Roughly translated. And what are you doing here?” Myrnin was genuinely offended, Claire realized. Not good.
“It’s my fault,” Claire said in a rush, and stepped away from Shane, although she kept holding his hand. “I . . . He was helping me with the experiments.”
“In what, biology?” Myrnin crossed his arms. “Are we running a secret laboratory or not? Because if you’re going to have your friends drop in anytime they please—”
“Back off, man; she said she was sorry,” Shane said. He was watching Myrnin with that cold look in his eyes, the one that was a real danger sign. “It wasn’t her fault, anyway. It was mine.”
“Was it?” Myrnin said softly. “And how is it that you do not understand that here, in this place, this girl belongs to me, not to you?”
Claire turned cold all over, then hot. She felt her cheeks flare red, and she hardly recognized her voice as she yelled, “I don’t belong to you, Myrnin! I work for you! I’m not your . . . your slave!” She was so furious that she wasn’t even shaking anymore. “I fixed your portals. And we’re leaving.”
“You’ll leave when I—Wait, what did you say?”
Claire ignored him and picked up her backpack. She led the way up the stairs. Three steps up, she glanced back. Shane still hadn’t moved. He was still watching Myrnin. Still between her and Myrnin.
“Wait,” Myrnin said in an entirely different tone now. “Claire, wait. Are you saying you successfully transported an object?”
“No, she’s saying she successfully transported me,” Shane snapped. “And we’re leaving now.”
“No, no, no, wait—you can’t. I must run tests; I need to have a blood sample.” Myrnin rooted frantically in a drawer, came up with an ancient blood-drawing kit, and came toward Shane.
Shane looked over his shoulder at Claire. “I’m seriously going to kill this guy if he tries to stick me with that thing.”
“Myrnin!” Claire snapped. “No. Not now. I’m taking him to the hospital to get him checked out. I’ll make sure you get your sample. Now l
eave us alone.”
Myrnin stopped, and he actually looked wounded. Oh stop it, Claire thought, still furious. I didn’t kick your puppy.
She was almost at the top of the steps, and Shane was right behind her, when she heard Myrnin say, in a quiet voice that was like the old Myrnin, the one she actually liked, “I’m sorry, Claire. I never meant—I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I am thinking. I wish . . . I wish things could be like they were before.”
“Me, too,” Claire muttered.
She knew they wouldn’t be, though.
Getting Shane seen by a doctor was trickier than she’d thought. Claire couldn’t exactly explain to the emergency room what might be wrong with him, so after a complete fail at the ER, she went in search of the only doctor she knew personally—Dr. Mills—who’d treated her before, and knew about Myrnin. He’d actually helped create the antidote to the vampires’ illness, so he was pretty trustworthy.
She still didn’t explain about the portals, but he didn’t push. He was a nice guy, middle-aged, a little tired, like most doctors usually seemed to be, but he just nodded and said, “Let me take a look at him. Shane?”
“I’m not dropping my pants,” Shane said. “I just thought I’d say that up front.”
Dr. Mills laughed. “Just the basics, all right? But if Claire’s concerned, I’m concerned. Let’s make sure you’re healthy.”
They walked off toward his office, leaving Claire in the waiting area with piles of ancient magazines that still wondered whether Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston would stay together. Not that she read that stuff anyway. Much.
She was still mad at Myrnin, but now she realized that it was mostly because she’d been so tired and stressed out. He hadn’t been any worse than normal, really. And how much did that suck?
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. I did something amazing, and nobody got hurt. She knew they’d both been lucky, though. It still turned her cold to think what could have happened, all because she hadn’t thought to tell Shane not to come through the portal, no matter how safe it seemed.