All three cats were still yowling. Lange strapped the carriers down in the back of the pod without another word and then got into his seat behind McCreery’s. This elicited a defeated sigh, almost inaudible amid the feline wails.
The cats made conversation difficult. They meowed until long after the engine had switched from thrusting to coasting. The change in gravity, like their imprisonment in carriers, was cause for complaint. It took another hour until they settled.
Lange had never minded silence, and he was pleased that McCreery wasn’t interested in interrupting this one. It was the correct accompaniment for gazing at the distant stars. Lange had infinite patience for such observations.
He’d created a false memory of his time in the Nowhere. He hadn’t meant to, but his mind had protected itself from the truth. He’d remembered it like this: tranquil drifting through the dark.
The Nowhere hadn’t been tranquil. Lange squeezed his eyes shut, but ghost pain lanced through him anyway. His heart seized.
“Lange,” McCreery said. “You okay back there?”
“Fine.”
“Now that the cats are asleep and we’re coasting, I can hear you breathing. Nothing else to listen to.”
Lange had no interest in analyzing his own respiration. It was troublesome enough to have a body, especially one so weak, but to know that other people were studying it was worse. McCreery listening to his breathing like he was a faulty engine was too much to bear. Lange forced down his unpleasant feelings and changed the subject as sharply as possible. “I can hear you turning pages. I didn’t take you for someone who’d insist on paper books.”
“Eh.” McCreery shifted in his seat, suit rubbing against the straps. Lange couldn’t see much of him, but he imagined a shrug. “I read whatever’s around, mostly. But this is a book of puzzles. I like to be able to scribble on it with a pencil.”
“Puzzles?” Lange wasn’t sure what he had expected. Technical nonfiction about machines, perhaps. Robots. That was all he really knew about McCreery. Lange had never considered what else the man might be interested in. Even before his time in the Nowhere, other people had been like aliens for Lange, their interests and desires a code with no cipher. Now he was alienated even from himself.
“Crosswords,” McCreery specified. “You want to help?”
“Memory loss,” Lange reminded him. “And I suspect my knowledge of popular culture has always been limited.”
“I bet you can help me with some of it,” McCreery said. “Here. Five across is ‘unit of energy.’”
“That could be anything. Joule. Kilojoule. Hartree.”
“It’s only three letters.”
“Try ‘erg,’” Lange said.
“That works,” McCreery said. “That means five down starts with E. It’s a first name. The clue is ‘Zinnia Jackson songwriter, blank Holl—’”
Lange didn’t need to be told how many letters were in Evelyn Holland’s first name. “Evelyn.”
“For someone with limited pop culture knowledge, you were pretty damn quick on that one.”
It wasn’t pop culture knowledge for Lange, but he couldn’t bring himself to say so. The memories were fresh, elicited by the sound of her name and the sound of his mother’s voice on the video recording she’d sent, and they were too precious to share just yet.
The first time he’d met Zinnia Jackson, he’d been intimidated. Not because her reputation as a singer preceded her, but because he’d been about six years old at the time and painfully shy. Even without her gowns and feathers and sequins, she was always in the spotlight. She had light brown skin and dark red curls and when animated, she laughed with unrestrained joy. Her voice swooped from the height to the depth of her five-octave range in conversation as well as in song.
Adults usually ignored him, beyond asking how old he was and if he was in school, and he liked it that way. That summer, as his mother and Zinnia wrote and recorded demos for an album that would later go platinum, he’d spent a lot of time lying on his belly in a carpeted hallway just outside the recording booth, scribbling pictures of Saturn and rocketships in washable marker. Strains of melody had emanated through the door, interspersed with his mother’s warm, smooth contralto.
“Zin. Zinnia. Stop this. That take was perfect. The last six takes have been perfect. I know you know this.”
He remembered that so easily because his mother had often said “Zin” and ”Sol” in the same tone: I love you, but I’m warning you. It had inspired solidarity between them.
In retrospect, it was unexpected that a globally famous, furiously driven perfectionist diva had time in between sessions to crouch down and interview her creative partner’s six-year-old son about his passion for space, but Zin had been a dedicated listener. Other than his parents, she was the only grown up who always wanted to hear what he had to say. It had won him over quickly. He could remember sitting in her lap, which was as expansive and luxurious as the rest of her, her arm wrapped around him so he was snuggled into the soft contours of her body. She’d asked him, “Solomon, did you know your mama is the smartest woman in the whole world?”
“Yes,” he’d said, because nothing could have been more obvious to him at age six. At age thirty-five with a half-dozen prestigious prizes awarded to his research, he was still certain of it.
“You make sure everybody knows that Evelyn Holland writes the best songs,” Zinnia had continued.
“And that you’re the best singer.”
Never modest, she’d said, “Oh, everybody already knows that,” and then laughed and kissed his head.
He hadn’t seen Zin in more than twenty years, since she’d withdrawn from public life and stopped recording, but he knew she still called his mother every week.
It had been hard, declining his mother’s invitation to come home. Evelyn Holland had a quieter, more serious presence than the star whose discography she’d composed and produced. He missed her so much. His eyes stung. Coming back from the Nowhere had left him raw and full of feelings, and calling his family had made everything worse. Ridiculous. Unbearable. Right now his mother was probably peering over her reading glasses at one of her students at the community music center, making it clear she knew they hadn’t practiced. She was in Milwaukee and she was perfectly fine. There was no reason to get emotional.
The few tears he’d produced floated up from his lashes. He closed his eyes and willed his body to stop this nonsense. It was good McCreery was seated in front of him and couldn’t see.
“Keep going,” Lange said.
McCreery’s pencil was scratching against the page. “I’m glad you knew that one. I don’t think I would have gotten it by myself. Emil is a huge Zinnia Jackson fan, did you know that? He probably would have known her songwriter’s name. Even though we’ve worked together long enough that I’ve heard him put on every single album, I never really got into it. But if you’re into her stuff, maybe—”
Could a man not have a sudden revelation of childhood memories in peace? McCreery’s turn toward chattiness made Lange grit his teeth. Lange couldn’t handle talking about any of this. “Tell me the next clue.”
“Uh. Okay. Six down is ‘see stars,’ which I think in this case gives us ‘reel.’ Seven down is ‘macroeconomics stat,’ so that’s ‘GDP.’ Those all make sense, right?”
“Yes.” McCreery’s protests aside, he clearly didn’t need Lange’s help. Yet he’d asked for it anyway.
McCreery narrated the puzzle. “Oh, the double L formed by ‘Evelyn’ and ‘reel’ is the ending for ‘Carroll,’ author of Through the Looking-Glass, so now we’ve got that, too. And underneath ‘erg,’ I’ve got V-E-D. Oh, the clue’s ‘inamorata,’ that means ‘beloved.’ How about ‘Johann Sebastian Bach creation’? It’s five—”
“Fugue.”
“Fits,” McCreery said, approval in his tone. “How’d you know that?”
Rubbed raw, Lange almost said everyone knows that, how it is possible not to know that, but he bit his tong
ue. It was self-preservation rather than niceness. They had three hours remaining in this pod. It would be best if McCreery didn’t eject him into space. “I like all kinds of music. I play. Or played. I don’t suppose I could now.”
He glanced down at his gloved fingers, which would no doubt be useless at fretting and plucking.
“What’d you play? I’m sure you could pick it up again with practice.”
“Guitar. Underneath the V-E-D of ‘beloved,’ you should have E-E-P, yes? What’s the clue for that?”
“Damn, you’re holding all that in your head?” McCreery asked. “I’m good at crosswords, but I still need to look at them.”
Lange braced for further discussion of all the ways in which he was an aberration.
Instead, McCreery let it go. “I didn’t know that about you playing guitar. Did you take lessons as a kid? Is that why you knew that songwriter thing? The clue is ‘not easily understood,’ by the way.”
“Deep,” Lange said. If they discussed any of that, he risked producing more tears. “That was too quick to be satisfying. Give me another.”
“I like music but I don’t know how to play anything,” McCreery said. He waited, his silence an obvious invitation for Lange to contribute a personal tidbit of his own.
It took eighteen seconds for him to give up and provide the next clue. Lange counted.
Lange’s silence lost its edge and lulled him to sleep soon enough. He woke when McCreery turned on the thruster to guide their craft into low Earth orbit, then let his attention drift. He amused himself with the math: they’d slowed from 27 kilometers per second to a mere 7.8 kilometers per second, a change that he could calculate but not feel.
He felt it when they entered the atmosphere.
The cats felt it, too, screeching in protest as the ship rattled. The roar of the atmosphere soon drowned them out. The air inside the ship heated and Lange was forced against the straps of his harness.
He didn’t hear the console beeping, but a warning light blared orange. McCreery was in front of him, piloting the craft, and at first, Lange couldn’t tell which warning light.
Then he heard McCreery yelling over the din.
“The heat shield is cracked!”
Ah. The orange light was the temperature sensor.
Not that Lange needed a machine to sense the temperature; his body was adequate to the task. It was hot in the craft. If the heat shield fell off the underside of the pod, they’d burn up.
The cats. McCreery. Incinerated. His whole body rebelled at the idea, his spine straightening and his insides twisting. He couldn’t let it happen.
Lange closed his eyes and thought of the ceramic panel insulated with a layer of aerogel that was bolted to the exterior of the pod. The two materials were distinct in his senses, the aerogel an empty framework, the ceramic impossibly heavy. He could feel the fine crack running through it, threatening to split it in two.
“Lange! Lange, did you hear me?”
“Yes, the heat shield is cracked,” Lange said, and then repeated himself at a louder volume until he was sure McCreery had heard. “Maintain attitude control.”
The heat shield only protected one side of the pod, so if they flipped, Lange’s efforts would be wasted. At this velocity, the heat caused by the friction of the atmosphere meant certain death.
McCreery shouted, “It won’t matter how good of a pilot I am if we lose that—holy shit, are you holding it?”
“Maintain attitude control, McCreery,” Lange repeated.
“If you got the heat shield, I got this,” McCreery called back, his unhinged laughter only a ghost of a sound within the roar. “We’re not gonna roll over and die. Not today.”
That was the last of their conversation for what felt like hours. Lange thought only of the heat shield, its single solid panel vibrating violently, but not breaking. His head ached. Perspiration left damp tracks down the inside of his suit.
Something coppery trickled over his lips—a nosebleed.
They slowed and slowed until their velocity could no longer be measured in kilometers per second, the noise and heat thinning, but the ride grew no smoother.
The woods came into sight as a swath of green interspersed with white, larger and larger in his view until they were individual pines tipped with snow.
“Gonna be a rough landing,” McCreery yelled.
With fatigue bearing down on him, Lange almost didn’t have the energy to brace himself. His fingers slipped inside his gloves as he tried to grip the straps holding him in his seat. The air thundered around the pod, buffeting its sides, and Lange clenched his teeth and forced aside all the sensations rattling in his body so he could concentrate on the heat shield. Their little pod jolted and lurched until it slammed into the ground.
5
Cabin
Jake raised the pod’s canopy as soon as they’d stopped moving, letting the trapped heat dissipate. His whole body throbbed with the impact of the landing. He unbuckled his harness, tossed his sweaty helmet to the floor, and jumped out of the cockpit. The cool air from the woods was a shock to his lungs, but a welcome one.
“Lange? You okay?”
Lange’s eyes were closed. Condensation fogged his helmet.
Jake hoisted himself back into the pod and leaned over Lange. It was tight quarters back there since the narrow pod only had two seats. It got tighter when Jake bent to unclip Lange’s helmet to make sure the guy was still breathing. He was, though he didn’t look great. A sluggish trickle of blood ran from one nostril. Jake wasn’t sure Lange was conscious until he opened his eyes, which he did as though his eyelids weighed five hundred kilos each—that would put their total at roughly the weight of the heat shield, which Lange had held together with his mind.
Jesus.
“You were amazing,” Jake told him. “You saved us. Are you okay?”
Lange’s weak nod wasn’t convincing. His eyelashes were all wet and clumped together. His face was such a mess that Jake couldn’t tell sweat tracks from tear tracks, and it seemed rude to ask for specifics. Hell, Jake had just about cried during that descent. Had just about pissed himself.
“You’re really okay?” Jake asked again.
“No,” Lange said. “But we’re not dead.”
Jake reached for the buckles on Lange’s harness, hesitated, and then went for it. Lange hadn’t objected to the removal of his helmet, and he seemed too dazed to get himself free.
“Let’s get you out of here and then just take a minute.”
He helped Lange out of the pod—Lange accepted his gloved hand without recoiling—and then put the cat carriers and Eliza on the earth and just left them there. He and Lange sat on the muddy ground, far enough from the pod to feel safe, slouched over, heart rates slowing.
The caterwauling from the cats would have been unbearable in any other situation, but right now it made Jake feel alive.
Which he was.
He’d brought the pod down in the flattest, most open space he could find. Wooded mountainsides surrounded them. The pod was damaged and the cabin Lange had sworn he owned was nowhere in sight, and Jake couldn’t care because he was too thrilled to be breathing.
He stood and stretched. Snow crunched under his feet every time he moved. “Okay. Who’re we calling? Whoever’s coming to stay with you can come get us.”
Lange’s brown eyes focused on some distant point in the pines. He scanned their surroundings as if he’d never seen any of this before—not merely like they were lost in the woods, which Jake hoped they weren’t, but like he’d never been on the surface or seen a pine tree.
Jake tamped down the first flutters of panic. Fear was no good to him now. They might not have burned up in the atmosphere, but they weren’t safe. Not yet.
“Lange. You do have someone who knows you’re here, right?”
“Yes,” Lange said, finally coming out of his daze. “I called my parents, who undoubtedly told the rest of my family, and I also called my aunt Cora.”
“My parents live in Milwaukee and they’re both sixty-seven years old, McCreery. No, I didn’t ask them to travel to the Alaskan wilderness to babysit me. My cousins have jobs and children and lives. I don’t intend to trouble them with this. Cora lives an hour from here. I will get in touch with her if I need something.”
If they weren’t coming, there must be someone else Lange could call. A friend. An amicable neighbor. An ex who didn’t hate him. A polite coworker. A letter carrier he tipped really well.
As Jake went through his increasingly desperate mental list, his shoulders slumped. He paused to wonder who he would call, if he needed someone to stay with him for a few days while he was recovering from an inexplicable near-death accident that had left him telekinetic.
Emil, maybe. Someone else on the Facility 17 team. The list wasn’t long.
Fuck. Jake was the polite coworker. He repressed a sigh. “You told me you wouldn’t be alone.”
“I never specified,” Lange said. He got to his feet. “You asked if I would be alone and I said no, which is the truth. The cats will be with me. That’s how I prefer it.”
“I asked about people,” Jake said, already too tired to have this argument. He couldn’t be angry at Lange for lying by omission about the depressingly friendless state of his life. The whole thing was too damn sad. And truth be told, he’d been eager to believe Lange’s answer. Let somebody else deal with this shit for a while.
So of course he’d stranded himself in the remote wilderness with the guy. Of course.
Nope. No more of that. He’d have plenty of time to regret his choices after they found shelter.
Jake said, “Where are we headed? Which way’s your place? You remember, I hope.”
Nowhere Else Page 6