Jake was relieved until he turned and a beam of light from his suit fell across the unfamiliar, lumpen objects strewn across his workbench. In the crunch, the hardware and loose parts that had been scattered there had fused together. A vertical seam of contracted space ran up the wall, marked by wrenches and pliers that had melded with each other.
He shuddered. Thank fuck he hadn’t reached for Sol that time.
It only took one glance around the room to be sure that everyone else had seen it, too.
“Everyone out right now,” he said.
22
Resonance
Dax was the only colleague Solomon had ever worked with who could truly keep up, and when they were alone in the hallway together, Solomon said so.
“I know I was difficult to work with, and I’m sorry. It was a sort of armor I adopted after years of—”
“People not respecting you and trying to take your work,” Dax said. “Plus, for all you knew, I was exactly as much of a piece of shit as the other scientists who worked for Quint. That’s a damn good reason to be rude.”
“Yes,” Solomon said, marveling at being so easily understood. “I regret that we weren’t friends—I see now that we could have been. I trust your work as much as I trust mine, and you should know that. Whatever happens here today, the choice I’m making is my own, and you’re not responsible for it. And regardless, everything that’s in that lab—our lab—is yours.”
Behind the glass visor of their helmet, Dax blinked back furious tears, then said, “Fuck you, I hate this,” and clamped him in a hug.
Solomon lifted his arms to return the gesture. He and Dax had never talked about anything other than the physics of unfolded space, so it was easy to forget that Dax was twenty-three years old. Twelve years and one lifetime younger than him.
“You’re going to have an incredible career,” Solomon told them, patting them on the back and letting go. “You already do. Get to the pod on time.”
Then Solomon went back into the workshop while Dax and Chávez left to salvage what they could from the labs. He watched Jake and the others finish assembling the instruments and waited for the next spatial contraction.
It crashed down right on time. A painfully chaotic shriek and boom that only he could hear exploded an instant before the movement, and then the world burst into real, gut-churning sound.
The contraction’s effects were more easily visible than the others—and more disturbing, buckling the walls and leaving objects materially entangled like they’d been melted and reformed. Solomon was grateful. That meant everyone would hurry.
Jake, Emil, and Kit left the workshop with him. They rushed down the hallway in the direction of the dock, which was the only sensible direction to go. The pods were the only safe escape route.
Solomon watched them, standing in the hallway with all four instruments hovering in the air around him.
“Sol,” Jake called. “We have to go.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m staying. I need to see this through.”
All three of them shouted in surprise.
Jake ran back and grabbed him by the wrist. “No. We made the instruments. You don’t have to be here. You can do this from far away. From the passenger seat of the pod.”
“Each instrument has to be positioned precisely,” Solomon said. “Including me. Dax and I did the math. We can’t risk screwing this up, Jake. I have to stay.”
“No,” Jake said. “We’ll find another way. You can’t stay here, you’ll die.”
It would be grisly to stay in folded space and get compacted into an unrecognizable tangle of flesh, which was why Solomon wouldn’t be doing that. To have any hope of remaining intact long enough to see this through, there was only one place he could go. He’d known it even before he’d seen Dax’s simulation, but it was hard to think about, let alone say out loud.
Solomon said, “I’m not staying here, exactly.”
The betrayal on Jake’s face was a punch to the gut. “You’re going back into the breach.”
“I don’t want to,” Solomon said, his voice thick with tears. He removed his wrist from Jake’s grip. “I swear I don’t. But it’s the only way to be sure. I’m sorry, Jake. You have to go. I need you to take three of the instruments down to the dock with you. Dax has the coordinates. They’ll tell you where to go. You have to hurry. Another contraction is coming, I can hear it.”
“Fuck that, I’m not leaving you.”
“I don’t want you here,” Solomon said and shoved him back.
It was only a small push, but it was enough to put Solomon out of arm’s reach. From their previous struggle, he knew that if Jake grabbed him, he’d lose.
Jake planted his feet and glared.
Solomon took a step back, widening the distance between them, angling himself toward the hallway that would lead him to the breach. He caught sight of Emil, several meters behind Jake, frozen with concern.
Kit wasn’t with him. When Solomon turned to leave, Kit was blocking his way, still quite small even fully suited up.
“So,” Kit said, raising his hands with their palms up. “I didn’t want to interrupt, but… what if I go with you? Jump you out at the last second? Nobody has to die?”
“I can’t ask you to do that. There’s still an overwhelmingly high chance of death. Having two of us stay most likely means both of us will die.”
“You’re not asking, I’m offering,” Kit said.
“You’d… do that? Were you not listening?”
“Ugh. How many times do we have to go over this? We seriously don’t have time. This is the best solution.” Kit raised his voice and yelled down the hall, “Emil and Jake, get the fuck out of here. Meet me at Zin’s, okay?”
“Kit,” Emil said, distressed. He didn’t make any other protest.
“I love you,” Kit called. He waved one gloved hand, jarringly casual. “See you later if I’m not dead.”
Sol wished he could kiss Jake one last time, but the dwindling air supply meant taking off their helmets was a bad idea. He closed the distance he’d put between them and squeezed Jake’s hand.
“Don’t do it,” Jake said. “Get in the pod with me and we’ll fly somewhere really far away. Forget this place, Sol. I’d rather have you than the universe.”
“There won’t be anywhere really far away if I don’t fix this,” Solomon said. “I’m sorry, Jake. I love you. I want you to be safe and happy. Please get out of here.”
Jake hugged him fiercely, choked out “I love you,” took three of the cubes he’d built in his arms, and then—thankfully—departed. Eliza rolled after him.
Solomon could feel the devices long after he lost sight of Jake. Ever since Jake had routed the thin tube of catalyst fluid through them, they’d hummed in his other hearing, waiting. He sensed it when Jake distributed two of them to the other pods, and he knew when the pods had departed. They’d surround the asteroid, allowing him greater reach.
The fourth one hovered by his side. It was coming with him.
With them.
Kit was standing with one hip cocked. It was the bored posture of someone waiting outside a coffeeshop, checking their messages. The spacesuit ruined the illusion, but still. Kit didn’t seem terribly solemn about, or interested in, noble self-sacrifice. Nor did he radiate optimism, which was good, since Solomon would have found that unbearable.
Solomon liked him, he realized. They didn’t have much in common, and their history was complicated, and maybe they’d never be close—walking into the breach together guaranteed that they’d never be close—but Kit was weird, and irreverent, and while his outfits were all garish eyesores, Solomon respected his commitment. As usual, this realization came far too late. Kit wasn’t going to make it to twenty-five, and it was Solomon’s fault.
“You don’t have to do this,” Solomon said. The pods might have departed, but Kit was a runner. He could be safe on the surface in an instant. He didn’t have to go back into the Nowhere with someon
e who’d attacked him. “I don’t understand why you’d want to.”
“Well, obviously I don’t want to. I hate going near that thing. But give me a little credit—I also don’t want you to die for no reason. You’re trying to save the multiverse; I’m not a complete asshole. We don’t have time to call someone more heroic.”
“Yes, ah, just one question. When you said ‘meet me at Zin’s’ to Emil, what—”
“Oh my God,” Kit groaned. “The world is ending, I don’t wanna waste time indulging someone else’s fan fascination with Zinnia Jackson. Yeah, she’s my mom, okay? I’ve lived with her and Louann for ten years.”
“That would explain why you seemed familiar even though we’d never met,” Solomon said. “It’s been twenty years since I saw Zin in person. My mother is Evelyn Holland.”
“Oh,” Kit said, recognition dawning. “I—uh—weird. We going or what?”
Solomon nodded.
They entered the darkened lab, where the lights in their suits illuminated the walls pulsing with the organism. Even in its solid form, it dripped now. A thin film of its slick, quicksilver-like secretion coated the floor.
Kit recoiled. “You didn’t tell me it was gonna be gross.”
Solomon suspected that was a joke, but nothing seemed funny, so all he said was, “Apologies.”
The vibrations were so overwhelming that it was like being tumbled inside of a drum. The room had constricted. It would only take a dozen steps to cross from where he stood into the breach.
The distance daunted him, but he strode forward anyway. It was easier to concentrate on taking steps than to think about the cacophony of pitches in his head and wonder how he could possibly sort through them, or to look forward into the jaws of the breach and know, in every particle of his being, that this was going to hurt.
He remembered, on the day he’d tried to run away from Jake, having to think through every motion of walking. Movement came more naturally to him now, but he wished it didn’t. He wished walking occupied all of his thoughts. He wished he hadn’t made it this far. He wished Jake would tackle him from behind and tell him not to do this.
Except he didn’t wish that, because he didn’t want Jake anywhere near this place.
“Can I help or is this like, a you thing?” Kit asked, picking his way carefully across the ooze-slick floor.
“The latter,” Solomon said. “But if you can get us out alive, that’s more help than I had hoped for.”
“No problem. How will I know when it’s time?”
“I don’t know,” Solomon said. “I’m assuming either it will be obvious or we’ll be dead.”
“Great.”
“If I… relapse,” Solomon started, and then had to take a deep breath and try again. “That is to say, if I lose control and hurt you, get yourself out.”
Kit held his gaze, searching, and then said, “Yeah, okay.”
Even through the roar of the room, Solomon could tell his voice quavered. It was the first time Kit had shown any fear, and it stung that it had nothing to do with the breach or the alien or the Nowhere and everything to do with Solomon.
A moment later, Kit said, “I don’t think you will, though.”
Solomon couldn’t speak.
“The first time, all you wanted was for me to get you out,” Kit continued. “And I’m gonna do that, I promise.”
He smiled, and Solomon offered him a tentative nod in return.
They’d reached the edge.
Solomon didn’t know what Kit could see, but this close, his own vision blinked between the grey, dirty floor and a shifting, lightless gash in the world. How could he ever have thought he wanted to go back? He swallowed down acid.
“Would you laugh if I said ‘once more unto the breach’?” Kit asked.
“No.”
“Just checking,” Kit said, then wrapped his arms around Solomon and hurled them both in.
Jake and Emil distributed the devices and saw the others safely on their way. There was only one pod remaining. Mercifully, the craft hadn’t been squashed or fused with something else in all the tremors.
Jake checked it methodically anyway, just to have something to focus on. When he crouched down, he realized it was the same one he and Sol had flown down to Alaska. He could still see the tiny seam where he’d repaired the heat shield.
If they got hit by another micrometeoroid on the way down, Sol wouldn’t be there to hold things together. He and Emil would die in a fiery crash.
That should scare him, but it didn’t.
“Jake?”
Jake shook it off and stood. He popped open the canopy and started to boost himself up, but Emil put a hand on his arm and stopped him.
“No offense, Jake, but I’m gonna fly us.”
“What?”
“I said your name four times and you didn’t hear the first three,” Emil said.
“Oh.”
“I think I’m like fifty percent less fucked up than you right now, which is saying something, because I’m not doing great. But after all that, I can’t let you crash us into the surface because you’re crying too hard.”
“Fuck you,” Jake said, and it sounded listless even to him. He wasn’t crying. He sort of wished he was.
He got into the back seat without further complaint. Emil pressed the little machine into his hands.
“I have anti-anxiety meds, if you want,” Emil said as he got into the cockpit. “Including some that’ll knock you right out. You can be unconscious for this.”
“No, I… I need to see it,” Jake said. Sol deserved a witness. He deserved a million witnesses, or more, but he wasn’t gonna get that. So Jake would watch.
They departed the asteroid that housed Facility 17. It was the last time he’d ever see it, and he didn’t care. Jake had lived a lot of places in his life and he’d been glad to leave most of them. He wasn’t given to nostalgia and he didn’t have any particular love for this place—except that Sol was in it.
Or maybe by now he wasn’t. Maybe he’d jumped back into the breach.
Kit was with him, and Kit had been so easy about the whole thing, like it was a quick trip to the grocery instead of a plunge into the unknown. Jake hoped Kit had the right of it, not Sol.
Emil positioned them according to whatever coordinates Sol and Dax had provided. They had a clear view of the asteroid, the long side of its roughly flat, oval form. Nothing was happening. Despite the shock of all those contractions that had warped the inside, the outside looked the same.
The machine in Jake’s lap was inert. He laid his hands on its sides. Unable to hear or sense whatever it was that Sol could—some higher-dimensional vibration—Jake wouldn’t know when Sol was using it. He touched it anyway, wishing he wasn’t wearing gloves so he could feel the cool metal growing warm from his hands.
Outside, the asteroid flickered.
No, it hadn’t. That was his brain trying to make sense of something that didn’t, couldn’t make sense. The asteroid had shrunk. Unevenly, and only a little, but unmistakably.
“What the fuck,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Emil agreed.
That wasn’t good. From what Sol had said, it wasn’t supposed to shrink in sudden, noticeable movements. What they’d witnessed was another tremor.
His palms were damp inside his gloves. He clutched the instrument. Time seemed to take forever, an age between each beat of his heart.
The day he and Sol had crawled close to the breach, back when Sol still thought he wanted to follow the call of the void, Sol had experienced such a spike of fear that he’d fainted. The breach terrified him. He’d suffered in there in ways he still couldn’t talk about.
And he’d gone back in.
It was an insult to his courage to wish he hadn’t. Watching the asteroid, suspense stretching his whole body to the point of pain, Jake couldn’t help it. A treacherous little part of him wished Sol had just run.
But there’d be nowhere to run. Jake knew that. The bre
ach was unstable. New space would spill out of it, old space would get sucked into it, and it would grow until it ripped everything apart. Its existence rendered the future unlivable.
Sol’s absence would render the future pretty fucking shitty, though.
Not unlivable. Jake had made it thirty years on his own, and he had better friends now than he’d had for most of that time. He could go down to the surface and make a life for himself. It would hurt a lot, remembering Sol—and every day would be constructed out of reminders—but he could do it. And he’d rather have those memories than not. So few other people would know what Sol had sacrificed so everyone else could live. Jake would have that knowledge, at least, even if he couldn’t have Sol.
Being alive is like that. It hurts, but it’s good.
Ah, fuck, it sucked to cry in zero g.
Solomon only barely remembered to push the last instrument into its position directly outside the breach.
The Nowhere flooded his senses, its viscous, impenetrable fluid pulling and pushing him in every wrong direction. It crushed him. Freezing and burning, it hurt in impossible, familiar ways. His body did not belong here. He knew every equation that proved it, and he knew it far more intimately than that. He wanted to curl into a ball and whimper, to scream and spasm, to kick and cling to Kit until Kit got him out, everything else be damned.
But he could feel Kit holding him, and that one solid, real sensation broke through his panic. He knew where he was and what was happening. This time, there was a chance he’d get out. But even if he didn’t, he’d come here with a plan, and he didn’t intend to die without trying it. He owed the world at least that much.
Being in the Nowhere was agony, but he had lived this agony for days. All he needed now was a little time.
Solomon could not recall if it had been so loud last time. Constant high keening like he’d heard in the lab, a cluster of pitches jostling and elbowing each other. Tumbling down the scale, there were bigger, blunter sounds. Thunder everywhere. Muffled booming, like being dragged underwater and hit with wave after wave. The organism had upended everything, and they were caught in its chaos. How could he hear what he needed to hear in this?
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