He had imagined, naively, that he could make this moment easier. He had known it was coming. If he felt less for Jake, he would hurt less when Jake was gone. What was a feeling but some cocktail of hormones, a few synapses firing? It only had meaning if he gave it meaning. Unacknowledged, it was a bodily reaction, no more important than a rash or a runny nose. It would pass. Silence would allow him to exert control over himself, over the situation, over the inevitable suffering. Fear of pain had kept him silent; his silence had not protected him.
Jake was gone, and Solomon had never told him even a fraction of how he felt.
It hurt like hell. There was something freeing in that. He was hurt and afraid and he was right to be both of those things. Solomon was not more than the sum of his parts. He was all synapses, all adrenaline, a body awash in feelings, and he would not have traded away one single drop of sweat to lessen his own reaction. He didn’t want distance or control. This was the body that Jake had touched and kissed and adored, and it was Solomon. He was here and alive with his heart pounding in fear. It was awful. It was necessary. Inside his skin was a delicate, complex branching of nerves, every last one lit up with emotion, all the way up his spine and into his brain, and he was going to use absolutely all of it to get Jake out.
The first step of a plan had already come to him.
Solomon opened his mouth and discovered that though it was a complicated operation to vibrate his vocal folds and shape sounds with his tongue, it was easy to say, “I can’t do this alone. I need your help.”
The whole team—minus Jake—gathered in the common room, after Solomon had meticulously checked the remainder of the facility for invisible interdimensional hazards.
Outside his lab, there was only the one. It was one too many.
He surveyed the six people in the room. They were leaning on each other (Chávez, Lenny), standing at the ready (Emil, Miriam), industriously pumping water into the coffee maker in the absence of plumbing or gravity (Dax), or somehow affecting a careless, slouched posture even while weightless (Kit).
It should not shock him that they wanted to help. It was well established that they all liked Jake. But there was something in their faces, something in the way Chávez had touched his shoulder on her way into the room—Solomon couldn’t think about it, not if he wanted his throat open and his eyes dry.
He was terrified, and yet there was calm in it. He poured all of his focus into the plan.
“The simplest option, and thus the first one we should try, is for Kit to retrace Jake’s steps,” Solomon began, his voice steadier than he’d thought.
“Yeah, sure,” Kit said and was gone before Solomon could finish.
The space Kit had vacated quivered with his absence, the wall too bare, the floor too grey. Despite an entire career specializing in the physics of the Nowhere, Solomon had not spent a great deal of time with runners. There were so few of them in the world, and they tended to stay well away from anything resembling scientific research. Still, he suspected that even for people who’d spent their whole lives around runners, it was difficult to accustom oneself to their sudden vanishings. His heart had jumped at Kit’s disappearance, seized with a potent combination of shock and hope. Maybe Kit would come back with Jake.
He didn’t.
Kit reappeared alone and shrugged in apology, displaying his empty palms, the gesture revealing a pair of outrageously frivolous black lace fingerless gloves at the end of his spacesuit sleeves. “Sorry. I went to the hallway, but there’s nothing there.”
“What do you mean there’s nothing there?” Solomon asked.
“No distortion, no Jake,” Kit said. “I walked all over in regular space and nothing happened, and then I checked the Nowhere just to be sure, but he wasn’t there, either.”
If the distortion that had swallowed Jake had already disappeared, that boded ill for finding him. “So the distortions are unstable,” Solomon said. He’d known that already, given that one had moved into the hallway.
Kit said, “The Nowhere’s unpredictable, especially around the breach and all these distortions. I know it’s only been minutes since Jake walked in, but he could be anywhere. It took me days to find and catch your cats.”
“You could try again later. Or ask Laila for help,” Chávez said to Kit, because for her, asking for help was an everyday occurrence. So was optimism.
“Sure,” Kit said. “I could ask every runner I know for help. But the Nowhere is… if you’re not using it for instant travel, it’s different. It’s hard to explain. Imagine an ocean. That’s how hard it is to search. When Lange was trapped, I only ever knew where he was because he kept slamming into me.”
This was not an accusation, but an observation, and accordingly, Solomon did not flinch. He didn’t move at all.
“We’re cool now, you already said sorry, it’s fine,” Kit said, flicking a black-gloved hand in the air. He addressed Chávez and the rest of the room. “I’m not saying I won’t look again, or that I won’t ask for help. I’m saying it might not work even if I do.”
“I hate to interrupt with more bad news, but all of this assumes that Jake is in the Nowhere, trapped like you were,” Emil said, nodding at Solomon. “Can we be sure that’s the case? Isn’t it possible that he might have gone through?”
There was so much in those few sentences worth despairing over—trapped like you were—that for a moment, Solomon could only nod, his throat closed. “Yes. It’s possible Jake passed through the Nowhere and is now on some other planet, or in some other reality, or already dead.”
Most of the people in the room recoiled, but Solomon didn’t see any point in euphemism. Death was a highly likely outcome. The best way to survive the experience was not to have it.
They were past that point.
“If that is the case, obviously our chances of rescuing him are so infinitesimal as not to be worth considering,” Solomon said.
Before assembling everyone into this room, he’d been grateful for the intensity of his feelings. The force would carry him through. Now that he was presenting his ideas to six other adults, he wished his face felt less like a dam holding back a flood. Cry later, he told himself, think now.
“We know very little about what happens when non-runners encounter the breach or its attendant spatial distortions. One thing we do know is that the Nowhere, in its usual condition, ejects non-runners. If Kit were to let go of a passenger mid-jump, they wouldn’t be trapped, as I was. They would simply reappear in normal, folded space—usually exactly where they had been. Evidently, this has not happened to Jake.”
“So maybe he’s not in the Nowhere,” Kit said, catching on.
Solomon nodded. “I think the distortions might constitute their own, separate phenomenon. They may be pockets of space, unconnected to the Nowhere.”
“Well, it’s easier to search those than the infinite rest of the multiverse, right?” Lenny asked.
“I can probably get into them,” Kit said.
“Perhaps you can,” Solomon agreed. “But there were 19 at last count—no, there were 20, we miscounted. I suppose there are 19 now, if the one in the hallway is gone. Either way, that is more jumps than you can safely make in a day. We should narrow down our options first.”
If Jake were dead, their options might already have narrowed to nothing. But it wasn’t death that worried Solomon the most. Jake might be alive, but crushed or stretched by the volatile space around him. Sol sucked in a breath, the memory of his own torture in the Nowhere piercing his senses.
He had to get Jake out now.
18
Linked
As grateful as Solomon was for the team’s support, he was also relieved to find himself in the lab with only Chávez, whose company he liked very much, and Kit, whose company still mystified him, but whose ability could be crucial to rescuing Jake. Lenny and Emil had gone to work on the gravity generator. Dax, as the only other person with a sense of how Lange’s machine worked, had been tasked with buildi
ng a new sensor to measure the breach, and they’d taken Miriam with them to help. The two of them had wisely decamped to another room for this purpose, leaving Solomon to compare the original hand-drawn map of the distortions with the lines that he and Jake and Eliza had painted on the floor.
Eliza had not followed Jake wherever he’d gone. She’d been in the hallway outside. She was at Lange’s heels now, as though she’d latched onto him in Jake’s absence.
Jake had annotated his original map of the room, assigning each distortion a letter. Solomon froze at the sight of Jake’s handwriting, block capitals that had nothing in common with his own impatient scrawl. Jake’s crossword puzzles had looked just like that. Solomon had watched Jake enter the answers when they’d done them together in the cabin, but he could picture the one they’d done together in the pod, the one where Solomon hadn’t seen the page and Jake had complimented his ability to hold the whole shape in his mind’s eye.
Useless. None of that would save Jake’s life.
There were 23 distortions at first count, so Jake had lettered them A through W. Last night when they’d repainted the lab, they’d thought H, K, M, and P had disappeared. From the original placement, Solomon suspected that it was distortion M that had drifted into the hallway and caught Jake. And now it was gone just like H, K, and P. Solomon hadn’t seen them in his check of the facility, and he’d been as thorough as possible. And yesterday he and Chávez had convinced themselves that maybe the alien was working to repair things, which might mean the distortions were vanishing.
But what would happen if one vanished with Jake inside?
“Looks like a fucked-up jigsaw puzzle,” Kit said, observing the painted lines.
Solomon was trying to think, and he didn’t appreciate being interrupted with inanities, but before he could say so, Chávez spoke.
“Really, just a regular jigsaw puzzle before you put it together,” Chávez said. “Sucks that we can’t move the pieces around.”
“To make what, exactly? Another breach?” Kit asked.
Chávez shrugged. “I dunno, I’m just here for moral support. The physics is all Lange.”
“Yeah, I don’t get that part, either,” Kit said. “I learned to play by ear.”
Chávez laughed and said, “You know, the way Jake lettered them on that page, it kind of reminds me of signs in a subway station. Except we don’t know where any of them go.”
“I would have said ‘all signs point to the Nowhere,’ but I guess maybe they don’t,” Kit said.
“Wait,” Solomon said, something about this conversation nagging at him. “Stop talking. Say that again.”
“Contradictory instructions, my friend,” Chávez teased. “But sure. Um, we talked about jigsaw puzzles, moving pieces around, and, uh, subway station signage?”
Solomon turned all of that over in his mind. There was something there. He put his head in his hands. He needed more time to think this through, and there was none.
Distortion M had moved as a result of what the organism had done yesterday. What he and the organism had done yesterday.
What else can you move? Jake had asked him that when they’d been down on the surface. They’d experimented with solid objects. Solomon had also moved liquids. When they’d discovered the air leak, he’d briefly stopped the flow of air just to see if he could. He’d been too limited in his thinking. Yesterday, working with the organism, he had changed the shape of space itself.
“We did move the puzzle pieces around,” Solomon said. “And maybe they do fit together. What if the distortions are connected? They don’t lead to the Nowhere, but they might lead to each other. Bring me all the tennis balls you can find. And some permanent markers.”
Kit nodded, and then he and Chávez left.
Hurtling toward the Earth’s surface in the pod with the cracked heat shield, all Solomon had known was that he had to hang on. This was exactly the same. He’d had an idea and he would see it through.
With no one else in the lab, the sounds of the breach and the organism pierced his brain. Every time he thought himself accustomed to it, the strangeness of it struck him anew. This sound that wasn’t sound, this hearing that wasn’t hearing—it was connected to how things moved.
I learned to play by ear, Kit had said. The phrase fit Solomon’s new ability even better.
All of that wanted more reflection, but Kit and Chávez had come back not only with supplies, but with Dax and Miriam, who were carrying a laptop and a new sensor, respectively. The device was lopsided and had all its wires showing, so it looked significantly more homemade than its sleek chrome predecessor, but Solomon had no doubt it worked.
“Heard you were gonna toss some tennis balls into Volatile Discrete Spatial Distortions and I wanted in,” Dax said.
“The Dax Strickland technique,” Solomon said.
“Is that a joke? I can’t tell with you anymore,” Dax said.
Solomon couldn’t bring himself to smile, not when Jake was still in danger, but he did feel a certain appreciation for Dax. Maybe even affection. So instead he said, “You’re smarter than I was at 23. And a lot less prickly. And probably the best scientific collaborator I’ve ever had—of any age.”
“I think this might be worse than when all you did was occasionally grunt criticism at me,” Dax said, their face scrunched up in distaste, but pink all the way up to their ginger hairline.
Chávez laughed at both of them, then reached into the basket of tennis balls in her arm and threw one at Solomon. who caught it, grabbed a marker, and wrote “A” on it.
Solomon looked at the four people who’d gathered in the lab to help him. “Can one of you take notes?”
“I can try. What are we doing exactly?” Miriam asked.
“Making a map,” Solomon said. “Jake’s original map is still on the table. Can you copy it?”
“Sure,” she said.
While she worked, Solomon maneuvered the tennis ball in a curving path through the room until it disappeared into the distortion that Jake had labeled “A.”
It didn’t reappear, but that didn’t trouble him. “The ball we sent into distortion A didn’t come back. Mark an X.”
Miriam dutifully noted that on her copied map. Dax, Chávez, and Kit caught onto Solomon’s plan quickly, though they served more as moral support than actual help. None of them could see the distortions, and Solomon could manipulate the tennis balls in any direction he wanted. Help or no help, their presence comforted him. He did not have time to investigate that.
Distortions B and C returned nothing, but the ball he sent into distortion D floated out of distortion J a moment later. It blinked out of view for a few seconds and then reappeared in a seemingly unrelated location, its path defying all the usual understanding of how an object ought to move. There were tunnels between the distortions. Chávez’s subway analogy wasn’t so far off.
“Yes! Write that down,” Solomon said. “There’s a tunnel between D and J. Draw a line between them.”
“Not that I object to this,” Miriam said, “but I wouldn’t mind knowing why we’re doing it.”
Solomon said, “Jake walked into distortion M, which has since vanished. Jake is not in normal space—the hallway—and Kit didn’t see him in the Nowhere on his first check, so the collapse of distortion M didn’t spit him out in either of those places. But some of these pockets of distorted space are connected to each other, so there is a chance we will find Jake in another one.”
“Oh,” Miriam said, her brunette head bent studiously over the map she had copied. She did not ask any questions about what might have happened if Jake had not exited distortion M before it collapsed and vanished, which Solomon supposed was a small kindness.
The five of them were quiet. The work went quickly, which was good because it left less time to dwell on how infrequently they discovered connections. Distortions E and F were connected, but they were right next to each other, and neither was close to where Jake had disappeared. Distortion I a
lso connected to both E and F, but that was no use to him.
Distortions H and K were two of the vanished ones. Solomon tried vainly not to hope for anything as the alphabet approached M, but he inhaled sharply when distortion L was a dead end.
When it came time to throw something into distortion N and the air was bare of any sign of a glimmer, his whole body stopped moving—muscles, heart, lungs, everything. On any other day, reality returning to its normal parameters would be a comfort. He’d spent all of yesterday trying to achieve exactly that.
Today, Jake was gone. They’d found almost nothing useful and the pockets of distorted space were collapsing right in front of him.
Solomon forced himself to say, very steadily, “Strike distortion N from the map.”
Chávez came up to him, nudged his shoulder with her own, and said, “We still have almost half the alphabet left. And even if we get to the end without finding him, Kit can look again. It’s not over.”
Solomon took a deep breath, searched the lab for that telltale glimmer in the air, and felt his stomach drop. “Strike distortion O from the map.”
Distortions H and P had vanished yesterday. The whole cluster around distortion M had collapsed.
“You don’t know,” Chávez told him, and he thought she might be reassuring herself, too. “You don’t know which ones are connected. It might not matter that these are close together.”
Q, S, and V were connected, while R and T were dead ends. Only U and W remained. Solomon had almost stopped breathing. There were no thoughts in his head, only the action of his hand dragging the marker in a long semi-circle over the curved felt.
The tennis ball he threw into distortion U disappeared.
“Mark distortion U as a dead end,” he said, his voice flat.
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