Lange considered pushing him off. He was heavy and disruptive, one more reminder that Lange was stuck here in this body, never going back to the Nowhere. But there was comfort in that thought. As bad as it was to be here, it had been worse in the Nowhere.
He’d survived that. He could survive this, too.
The cat’s purr rumbled against his chest. Lange lifted a hand and let it sink into the softness of the animal’s fur. It was good to touch something pleasant, something warm and alive, something that tied him to the world and to his life. He wanted to pet his cat. This small first step in wanting something led the way to a second one: he wanted to call his parents.
An unexpected cheer went up as Jake exited Lange’s room. When he reentered the lab, Lenny came to greet him.
“I got this, I’ll sit outside his door and make sure he’s okay,” he said, patting Jake’s shoulder and leaving the room before Jake could even thank him.
Everyone else was crowded around one of Dax’s laptops.
“It’s too soon to tell,” Dax was saying. “We don’t have enough data.”
“But the readings are better,” Emil said.
“Marginally better.”
They’d turned on the machine, then. “How long will it take to close the breach?” Jake asked.
“I haven’t established the rate of change yet,” Dax said, adjusting their glasses, sounding tired of being asked questions they couldn’t answer. “But we were aiming for a week. I’ll have a better sense of things in a few hours—or tomorrow.”
Emil nodded. “Still. It’s progress.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. It’s not a failure yet, but let’s not call it success, either,” Dax said.
“Okay.” Emil turned to Jake. “How’s Lange?”
“He’s sleeping it off,” Jake said.
“And you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Do you know what happened to Lange? Did he hear… whatever it was he was hearing?”
Jake nodded slowly. “He told me what notes he was hearing. I think he wants to see if they’ll change as the machine runs. As for what happened—earlier today, he wanted to go back.”
“To the Nowhere?” Emil asked.
“Yes. He doesn’t like it here. But something about getting close to the breach… well, when I asked him, he said ‘traumatic memories resurfaced.’ He wasn’t interested in elaborating.”
“So he remembered his time in the Nowhere,” Chávez said. Beside her, Miriam raised her eyebrows and nodded. “And he’d repressed it before?”
“It must have been bad,” Emil said, his expression drawn taut. He’d survived his own walk into the breach, but he’d been prepared in ways that Lange hadn’t, and he’d only spent a brief time in the Nowhere. Lange had been trapped for almost two weeks. “I can imagine that recovery will be a long process.”
“Guess that sorta explains why he doesn’t really remember us, even those of us he maybe tried to murder a little bit,” Kit said.
“I know it sucked for you, but can we not talk about it like that, please? He was suffering and he needed your help,” Jake said.
“I don’t mean to be too negative,” Miriam said. “But how do you recover from something like that? As far as we know, it’s never happened to anybody in human history.”
Jake shrugged. “Time and therapy would still probably work. And I think we have to get him out of here. Away from the breach. Down to the surface would be best.”
“But we need him to fix his mistakes,” Miriam said. “This isn’t over. Dax, I know you’re doing your best and you did make progress, but you shouldn’t have to do all the work here.”
“He can’t fix anything in the state he’s in,” Jake shot back.
The room went silent. He’d never spoken like that to anyone on the team. And he’d chosen Lange of all subjects for his first time getting into an argument. Christ.
“You both make good points,” Emil said, smoothing things over. “And we did make progress. We just need to keep an eye on it while it’s closing.”
“Caleb’s double found us because of the breach. We’re lucky he’s the only thing so far,” Miriam said. “Closing is not the same as closed. Something else could come through.”
“If anybody else up here had been through what he’s been through, you’d all be understanding,” Jake said. “I know he’s difficult, but try to put that aside. Whatever happened to him in the Nowhere, it really fucked him up. He probably won’t be okay for years, or maybe ever. I’m just asking for a few days. A week.”
Emil held up a hand to stop anyone else from speaking. “Alright. I hear you—both of you. We all agree it’s important to close the breach as fast as possible, but I see Jake’s point about giving Lange some time away from it. Let’s revisit this in two days and see if the readings are good.”
“And if they are?” Jake asked.
“Then he can go. Kit, do you think you could take Lange down to the surface?”
“He can’t go through the Nowhere,” Jake interjected. “He can’t handle that.”
“If you want me to act like a human being,” said Lange, who had appeared in the doorway with Lenny shrugging apologetically behind him, “you should start treating me like one.”
Fuck, how long had he been there? What had he overheard?
“Glad to see you’re feeling okay,” Emil said. “Please come in.”
“McCreery is correct,” Lange said, not moving.
There was a sentence to set the world on its head. Jake’s stomach went tight.
“I still have a house on the surface,” Lange continued. “And since McCreery is so certain that more time in the Nowhere will further fuck me up, he can fly me down himself.”
Hours later, Jake was fiddling with one of the many half-built robots strewn around his workshop when Emil knocked cautiously on the doorjamb.
“Come in,” Jake said, setting the robot down on his workbench and stripping off his gloves. He hadn’t really been making progress, anyway. He felt too shitty about trying to speak for Lange.
Emil came in, glanced around and realized there was no second chair, and moved as if he was going to lean one shoulder against the wall. He couldn’t. The magnetized panel was covered in wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers. The only stretch of wall not festooned with tools was the floor-to-ceiling window on Jake’s left. With his work light on, the view was only darkness, but if Jake turned it off and let his eyes adjust, the field of stars was spectacular.
Instead of leaning against the wall, Emil ran a hand through his dark, already tousled hair, crossed his arms over his chest, then dropped them to his sides instead.
“I tried to talk to Lange,” he said. “He told me to leave him alone. Lenny and Chávez are playing cards outside his door now.”
“Sorry,” Jake said, even though he hadn’t done anything. Privately, he thought telling someone to fuck off was a huge step up from throwing them into a wall, and he was proud of Lange. Was that weird? It was probably weird.
“He used words instead of pushing me out the door, so it’s progress,” Emil said, echoing Jake’s thoughts. “And I think if he’s up, walking and talking, then he’s doing well, all things considered.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve helped him a lot,” Emil said. “We asked a lot of you—too much, maybe—but you’re the only one he’ll talk to.”
“Or I was, anyway.” Screws and other hardware were scattered all over the workbench. The mess had never bothered him before. Jake grabbed a jar and started sorting. Each screw clinked into the pile below it, filling the jar and the silence.
“We’ve been friends a long time,” Emil said. “You know you can talk to me about anything.”
Jake supposed that was true, though he’d never tested it. He’d come to friendship late in life, when he’d moved to Franklin Station and started working Search and Rescue with Emil at the age of eighteen. Jake had done nothing to make their relationship happen except to shrug and go alo
ng with it whenever Emil invited him out for a beer after their shift towing broken-down spacecraft to safety. This accumulated time together transmuted, after crossing some unidentifiable threshold, into friendship. He’d lived it and still it bewildered him. There wasn’t any good reason for Emil to want to spend time with him. But other people extended invitations to strangers so casually. They talked about their lives—their feelings—with such ease.
Jake had known Emil for twelve years. Hell, he’d followed Emil here, to this secret research facility in lunar orbit. It wasn’t like he didn’t trust Emil. Or any of the other people Emil had collected and brought to Facility 17, strangers turned coworkers turned sort of friends, too, maybe. Jake just wasn’t much for talking, that’s all.
So Jake had raised his voice in the meeting for the first time ever. They didn’t have to open an investigation into it.
“I don’t have anything to say,” Jake said after a length of time that had probably been uncomfortable for Emil.
“Okay,” Emil said slowly, like he was trying to give Jake a few more seconds to change his mind and spill his guts. “Today was rough, and it’s been a hard few weeks. If you need a break—or if you don’t feel prepared to fly him down—”
“I do,” Jake said. “Feel prepared, I mean. I don’t need a break.”
He’d promised to help Lange. Flying him down to the surface was a concrete task. Lange had asked him for something specific and relatively easy, and goddammit, Jake was going to provide.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Emil said. “I mean that.”
And then he took pity on Jake and left.
Jake picked up the half-built robot he’d set down and went back to attaching manipulator arms to its squat body. By the time he heard the next knock, his workbench was cluttered with hardware again.
“Come in,” he said, reluctantly setting his work down. It must be Emil again. The only other person who came around with any regularity was Lenny, because he’d worked as an aerospace engineer before coming here and he liked taking stuff apart and putting it back together as much as Jake did. But Emil had said Lenny was outside Lange’s door playing cards with Chávez, so it couldn’t be him.
The silence made him look up. Lange was standing in the doorway, or leaning against it, his posture heavy with fatigue. He’d changed into a different pair of soft grey sweatpants and a clean white shirt. His feet were bare. The large orange cat was twining around his ankles.
It was strange to see him outside the room. Every time Jake had offered to go somewhere with him—just a stroll to the kitchen or the greenhouse, anything to get him out of bed—Lange had refused. And here he was, unaccompanied. What had he said to Chávez and Lenny, that they’d let him come here alone? Jake hoped Lange hadn’t knocked their heads together or pinned them to the hallway floor.
“What—” Jake started.
“I told them I wanted to speak with you,” Lange said.
And they’d treated him like a capable adult. Right.
“I’m sorry for how I talked about you earlier,” Jake said. “I shouldn’t have tried to decide things for you. If you want to yell at me, you can. Actually, if you want to telekinetically slam me into a wall again, you can do that, but we should probably pick a room with fewer sharp objects.”
Lange blinked. “I don’t want either of those things.”
Wow. Jake wasn’t sure what was happening, but he didn’t want to ask and fuck it up.
“I was angry, and I don’t want you to do it again, but you weren’t wrong,” Lange continued. “I need to get out of here and I can’t go through the Nowhere. Both of those things are true. And I know I’ve been… difficult, and I appreciate you keeping me alive through my… distress and—”
“If you’re gearing up to apologize for generally being, uh, out to lunch, and also kind of a dick, you don’t have to,” Jake interrupted. “You went through some shit. I get it. I mean, I guess I don’t get it because I don’t know what you went through, but I get that it was bad. Makes sense that you weren’t totally present this past week.”
“I wasn’t going to apologize,” Lange said haltingly. “Is this one of those moments where I’m meant to understand that your dismissal of the apology I didn’t provide is, in fact, a request for an apology?”
“Uh… no?”
“Oh,” Lange said. “Good.”
Lange remained in the doorway, silent. Jake got the feeling that neither of them could navigate their way out of this maze.
At last, Lange said, “Today’s discovery changed my perspective, and I have decided to conduct myself differently.”
“Okay.”
Lange scanned the array of tools on the walls, the discarded bits of wire and metal on the workbench, and the towering piles of junk on the floor and said, with subdued horror, “This is where you work?”
Jake knew, from packing up Lange’s room, that the man was beyond neat. The only thing messy about him was his inscrutable handwriting. His closet had been sorted by type and by color, for fuck’s sake. Jake couldn’t be mad that Lange was judging him because he was so relieved to have such a nice, harmless thing to talk about.
“You don’t like mess,” Jake said. He’d spent his conversation with Emil nervously sorting hardware, but now he had a perverse urge to tip over one of the jars of screws just to see what face Lange would make.
“I suppose not,” Lange said.
It was sort of sweet that Jake’s might-need-that-some-day-you-never-know collection of old parts had caused Lange to rediscover this lost piece of himself. Jake hadn’t known his piles of junk could do something like that, which was one more good reason to keep them around. You never knew.
The orange cat left Lange’s ankles and came to sniff Jake’s shoes. It headbutted his shin and rubbed its face and body all over his legs for a long, mesmerizing moment. Jake had no idea if this was normal cat behavior. The animal’s affection, if that’s what it was, felt excessive. He didn’t know what to do with it, but he reached down and scratched behind its ears. The cat purred louder, slinking between his legs for more, and then it flopped on the floor and showed its extravagantly fluffy belly.
“He doesn’t do that for everyone,” Lange said.
Jake retracted his hand from the cat’s fur like he’d been caught committing a crime. “Um. Did you need something?”
“Yes, actually. They said you were the one who moved my things. I want my tablet. I’d like to talk to my family.”
“Oh,” Jake said, even more embarrassed. He’d never meant to make Lange feel like he couldn’t have access to his belongings. He just hadn’t wanted anyone to get hit in the face. Worse, Jake had assumed Lange was like him, with nobody to talk to down on the surface, and he’d been wrong. “Shit. Of course. I put all your stuff in one of the empty rooms upstairs. I’ll show you where it is.”
The cat followed them all the way there.
4
Fugue
His parents had called him Solomon in their call last night. Of course they had. It was his name. But it had been strange to hear it, nevertheless, since he’d been stuck here with people who didn’t have permission to address him that way, and he hadn’t been thinking of himself as Solomon. It had been hard enough to think of himself as a person, let alone one with a whole lifetime’s worth of memories. Hearing his parents’ voices had called up a tide.
A message could travel from Earth to lunar orbit and back in about two-and-a-half seconds, so live conversation was possible, if stilted. He hadn’t felt ready for that. Instead he’d sent them a recording, and they’d responded promptly with one of their own.
His mother had also called him “Sol.” And asked why his recording didn’t have video enabled. And reiterated many times over that she loved him and that he should come home.
He hadn’t explained it to her, the accident and its aftermath. He’d said that he’d missed their calls because he’d been “caught up in work,” which was technically true. Rega
rdless, she’d known something was wrong. His assurances that he was fine had done nothing to persuade her, and she had only stopped worrying aloud when his father had intervened on his behalf.
The only thing stronger than his desire to go see them was his fear of hurting them. They were in their sixties, happily retired, frequently visited by family members, including Lange’s many small cousins. It would be emotional, seeing all those people again. Overwhelming. If he accidentally pulled or pushed or hurt one of them—no, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t go until he could be sure it was safe.
What he needed was some time to himself.
Lange hadn’t known he wanted to get away from the breach until he’d heard McCreery say it, and then it had been the only thing he could think about. As the next two days’ readings indicated that the breach was decreasing in size, a strange loosening happened in his chest. In his jaw.
It still sounded hellish in the lab, the screeching wrongness of the A flat and the G jostling each other for space, but it was quieter. Perhaps the sound would die off as the breach closed.
Lange left the lab lighter. As they suited up and loaded the pod with luggage, emergency gear, and perishables, McCreery’s various objections and conditions slid off him. Lange had to get in touch with “people” once they’d arrived. He couldn’t be left alone, but it would not be McCreery who acted as sheepdog. McCreery was willing to take Lange down to the surface, and possibly to fetch him back to the facility, but he had no intention of staying.
“That’s fine,” Lange said. He brought the ventilated carriers into the bay, floating them toward the pod one after the other. It didn’t matter how gentle he was. There were still cries of protest emanating from inside. “And I won’t be alone.”
“No. Absolutely not,” McCreery said. “You want me to put three cats in this pod with us? Nobody’s gonna enjoy that.”
“They go where I go,” Lange said.
“They don’t have suits. It’s breaking safety protocol.”
Lange had already said his piece. It had taken him two hours and forty-five minutes to cajole Niels Bohr, Lise Meitner, and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar into their carriers. Afraid of injuring them with his ability, he’d resorted to using his hands. He was exhausted and clawed all over. But the cats themselves had failed to resist his will; McCreery’s protests were laughable in comparison.
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