He focused instead on the quiet of the untouched device sitting just outside the breach, a short but impassable distance away. The small machine that Jake had assembled with such steady hands. The three others just like it, far from here, tranquil in the silence of space.
The noise diminished.
The organism had noticed him, he thought. He never knew if he was ascribing too much sentience to it. But it had responded to him before, and he suspected it was doing so again. In answer to his silence, it had ceased its work.
Maybe it was fanciful to think of a creature so alien as doing anything like waiting. Listening. But he’d brought himself to the edge of death for this. A little extra absurdity was harmless.
A flat, he thought. G. C. E flat.
All four devices, positioned perfectly, rang out with the chord. Pitches that shouldn’t fit together but did. Pitches that sounded better together. The whole transforming the parts into something unexpected, a little bit crooked, just right. Dissonance shimmered at the heart of the chord, haunting and alive. It overtook him. He swam in it, this sound that wasn’t a sound, this feeling of resonance everywhere.
The organism answered him with a sound powerful enough to drown in, but it was the same chord.
The organism probably thought it was the only chord he knew. He’d thought nothing was funny earlier, but he could almost laugh at that.
Yes, just like we did before, he wanted to say. Carefully, slowly, together. But the only communication they had was in music, so instead he played quietly, drawing down the rumbling chaos into something calm and patient. The organism followed him, and as it did, the violent sloshing of the Nowhere lulled.
The alien had grown in size so rapidly and abruptly after they’d repaired the distortions. Perhaps it didn’t know its own power.
His heart squeezed in sympathy. Solomon hadn’t understood his ability at first, either. It had terrified him. He’d hurled things on impulse. The new hearing and the telekinesis had struck him as separate skills, but they weren’t. Everything moved to its own music.
Out in space, the devices orbited, their distant harmony pulling taut the ragged edges of the breach. The sounds around him ebbed.
He’d closed his eyes, he realized. When he opened them, there was silver streaming everywhere.
The alien, going home.
Jake had resolved to bear witness, so he blinked until he could see again and trained his vision on the asteroid. It hadn’t flickered again, not after that first one, but he couldn’t put much stock in that. The tremors had been coming every thirty minutes or so, and it hadn’t been that long, even if it had felt much longer.
He stared at it like he was the one who could move it with his mind. Move it, turn it inside out, whatever. He stared like he could make it give Sol back.
“Jake, look,” Emil said.
“I’m looking.”
“It’s getting smaller.”
“Is it?”
Jake held up his hands, keeping them as steady as possible to mark the boundaries of the asteroid in his vision. The process was so gradual that it was imperceptible, but the asteroid shrank away from his palms.
“Holy shit.”
Sol had succeeded. He’d communicated with the alien, gotten it to stop thrashing around. They were working together.
If that was working, then maybe…
Jake couldn’t hold his breath. The change was too slow, and he didn’t want to pass out. He kept breathing, and watching, while hope ran through him like caffeine.
The black void surrounding the asteroid grew and grew until the asteroid was a tiny point at its center, and then it was gone. No matter how gradual, the ultimate disappearance shocked him. He’d left Sol in there, and now it didn’t exist.
Sol is in the Nowhere, he reminded himself. He’d never expected that thought to be a comfort. It wasn’t much of one.
“Is it gone?” Emil asked, and it took Jake a moment to parse that he was talking about the breach, not the asteroid itself. “How will we know if it’s gone?”
“I could see the breach after I got stuck,” Jake said. “Like a big, rippling, warped gash. It had kind of a shine to it. There’s nothing like that now. I think it worked.”
The uninterrupted darkness of space should have eased the tightness in his chest, but it didn’t.
23
A Sure Thing
When Kit had said “meet me at Zin’s” before walking into the lab with Sol that afternoon, Jake hadn’t known that “Zin’s” referred to either a rundown dive bar in Nashville owned by retired pop star Zinnia Jackson and her wife Louann or the apartment above said bar that was inhabited by the two of them and, apparently, Kit. Jake didn’t know Kit very well. And he couldn’t recall either Kit or Emil ever mentioning that one of Kit’s adoptive moms was global icon Zinnia Jackson.
Zinnia Jackson, crossword clue. Zinnia Jackson, whose hit songs had been written by Evelyn Holland. Sol’s mom.
Neither Sol nor Kit was present at Zin’s.
It was the middle of the night, so the bar was shut down. Jake and Emil were in the apartment above it, and nothing felt real.
“Meeting her freaked me out, too,” Emil told him, handing him a pillow so he could sleep on the couch. “But it’s definitely not a ‘never meet your idols’ situation, don’t worry. She’s actually better in person.”
Jake didn’t idolize her. He didn’t know any of her songs. What he knew about Zinnia Jackson fit into a very short list: she was famous, but judging by her modest apartment, either not rich or not ostentatious about it. The dizzyingly bright decor in her apartment suggested the former. It had been a couple decades since she’d been arena-concert, weeping-crowds-of-fans famous, so she was probably fifty or older, but she was round-cheeked and youthful-looking, her brilliantly purple silk robe and matching bonnet setting off her light brown skin and deep red eyebrows. She’d let them into her apartment in the middle of the night, hugged Emil, made them both tea, shown distress but not surprise when she learned that Kit wasn’t with them, offered Jake the use of her couch, and then yawned and excused herself back to bed.
And she had probably known Solomon Lange since he was born.
Jake wanted to ask her about that, but it was late and she was already back in bed.
“Everybody checked in,” Emil said, looking up from his tablet. “Everybody except, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“I bet we’ll hear from them soon,” Emil said. “See them, even. Kit said to meet them here. All we have to do is wait.”
“You make it sound easy,” Jake said.
For a born runner like Kit, travel through the Nowhere was instantaneous. The breach had been closed for hours. They should be here by now.
“I’m gonna go upstairs to Kit’s,” Emil said. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Night,” Jake said, and settled in for a long, restless one.
In the morning, Jake had coffee with Zin—she insisted he call her that—and her wife Louann, a calm, unassuming white woman in paint-spotted coveralls with grey in her short brown hair. Louann said a grand total of five words over breakfast. (Morning. Coffee? No problem. Thanks.) She still managed to make him feel welcome, which he appreciated.
“I can’t say I’m sorry to hear that place is gone,” Zin told him. She had said a lot more than five words. Her dark red curls were free this morning, but she was still wearing her purple silk robe. “I don’t know what was going on up there—all secret, I know—but I never liked it.”
“Your instincts are good,” Jake said. He picked up his mug and discovered it was empty.
Louann poured him a refill without being asked, and he nodded in acknowledgement. It was a strange little scene, him in his half-zipped spacesuit, taking up too much space in their narrow kitchen.
“I didn’t like Kit being involved, but he’s grown and he never listened to me anyway,” Zin lamented. “You know how hard it is to raise a child who can teleport?”
>
“It sounds hard,” Jake agreed.
“It’s the best thing I ever did,” Zin said, a wobble in her voice. Louann patted her hand on the table.
Jake wished he could say he was sure Kit and Sol would both show up soon, but he wasn’t any good at lying, so he nodded in sympathy and cautiously turned the conversation away from the present and toward the past. “I don’t know if you were aware, but one of the people working in the facility was the physicist Solomon Lange.”
“Oh, Solomon,” she said, clasping her hands around her mug and smiling. “Evelyn and Tom’s baby.”
Jake had prepared more things to say, nothing invasive, just a prompt or two to see if Zin remembered Sol. He didn’t need any of it.
“A real bright kid. A serious one, too. Evelyn and I kept in touch over the years even after we both retired, but I haven’t seen him in person since he was about fifteen—you know that age, all legs and arms, braces and frowns, so shy it made me melt. He was very polite, though, Evelyn made sure of that. Even though we’re not in touch, I see him in the headlines whenever he wins an award. I’m not surprised at all, you know. Evelyn is the smartest songwriter I ever worked with, and Tom is quiet, but once you get him talking, you realize he could think circles around anybody. They must be so proud.”
She dabbed at her eyes.
Shit. Jake had thought he wanted this—had lain awake longing for it—and now his throat had closed up. It was too much. Learning anything new about Sol made him feel like he’d pressed his thumb directly into the center of a bruise. Tender. Aching. He’d wanted to know more about Sol, a whole lifetime’s worth of more, and now this casual sketch of Sol as a coltish, awkward teenager might be the last new thing he ever got. And thinking about his parents being proud—fuck. Jake had to look up at the ceiling and blink until he wasn’t in danger of crying in front of two people he’d just met.
To be fair, at least one of those two people was on the verge of crying in front of him.
“Oh, look at me,” Zin said, straightening suddenly like she’d been nudged under the table, which maybe she had. “You didn’t even ask me a question and I said all that. I’m sorry, honey. I get carried away. Is Solomon a friend of yours?”
Jake managed to say, “Yeah.”
She studied him. “He’s with Kit, isn’t he?”
He nodded.
“The waiting never gets any easier,” she said. “You let us know if there’s anything we can do.”
“This might be a weird question,” Jake said, as it dawned on him that there was another stretch of miserably empty hours in front of him. “But is there anything around here that needs fixing?”
Zin burst out laughing. “Have you seen this place?”
Louann smiled, stood up, and gestured for him to follow her. Jake spent the rest of the morning with her, moving between the tiny bar kitchen and the dark basement, figuring out where the clog was in the pipes. Nasty, necessary, hard work. It was almost enough to make him stop counting the hours since the breach had closed—sixteen—and wondering how long was too long, and at what point did holding out hope become irrational.
He was on his back under the kitchen sink when he heard Emil say, “Jake? They’re here.”
Jake sat up and nearly smashed his forehead into a pipe.
“They got thrown off course and ended up somewhere else, that’s why it took so long,” Emil said. “They didn’t have any way to contact us. But they’re okay.”
Jake wiped himself off as best he could, took the stairs to Zin and Louann’s apartment two at a time, and careened into the living room.
Sol was there, enveloped in Zin’s ample embrace, tears streaming down his cheeks. He raised his head, laid his bloodshot gaze on Jake, and smiled. It hit Jake like a malfunction in the gravity generator, pinned him right to the floor. There was so much power in his presence. Of course Solomon Lange could reshape reality according to his will. Nothing made more sense.
Jake was wildly in love with him. The feeling was too big for his chest, but it fit there all the same. His face split with a smile. A couple tears leaked from his eyes.
Zin let go of Sol and he turned toward Jake, and then they were hugging. Jake didn’t remember crossing the room and maybe he hadn’t, maybe he’d floated, maybe Sol had pulled him in, and nothing mattered but the way their lips met, the small, closed, intimate space of their mouths, how warm and wet and alive they were.
There was a trace of salt to the kiss. Sol had been crying, and fuck it, Jake was crying, too.
“You smell,” Sol told him and then hugged him tighter.
Jake laughed wetly. “So do you, but it’ll take more than a little stale sweat to make me let go.”
“I love you. Come home with me.”
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
The short fuzz of Sol’s beard brushed Jake’s cheek and neck as Sol sagged against him, letting Jake take all of his weight. Jake was happy to carry him.
Four days later, Solomon lifted his head from Jake’s chest and announced, “I am tired of lying in bed and doing nothing.”
“Mm?” Jake said.
Usually it was Solomon who dozed off while they were lying together—cuddling—since the Nowhere had leeched all the energy right out of him. But this morning Jake had removed a dead tree from the drive by hacking the fallen trunk into firewood. Then he’d restacked the entire store of wood. Solomon knew all these things because he’d sat on a camp chair and watched. So it was only logical that Jake had fallen asleep when Solomon had demanded company in bed.
Solomon poked him in the chest. “I want to lie in bed and do you.”
That woke Jake up. Solomon estimated his reaction was half lust and half worry. The worry was obvious—Jake surveilled his every movement, lest he carry a bowl of soup to the sink and faint from fatigue—but then again, so was the lust. Jake had refrained from asking for sex, but he’d taken a conspicuous number of showers over the past few days, and Solomon knew he was not conditioning his hair.
Jake said, very carefully, “You sure you’re ready to, uh, exert yourself?”
“You can do the exerting, if you insist,” Solomon said, like this was a magnanimous compromise.
“Oh, I see,” Jake teased. “You’re gonna make me do all the work.”
“I could fuck you while you fuck me, if you want,” Solomon said.
Jake scrunched his nose in confusion. “Is this some kind of higher-dimensional math shit that can only be seen with a computer simulation?”
“No, it involves a dildo.”
Solomon rolled over and opened the top drawer of his nightstand, where there was a colorful array of lube and toys. Mostly dildos, a couple of butt plugs, a prostate massager. As with everything he owned, they were all objects that would function for solo use.
Jake sat up to get a better view of the contents and his eyes got round. “That’s... a lot.”
It was only one drawer. Still, it tickled him to make Jake stare. All those years of only having no-strings-attached sex with experienced partners, Solomon had been missing out on moments like these. “I don’t think you should be scandalized, considering how quickly you repurposed essential safety equipment for sex in zero g.”
Jake reached around him and lifted a dildo out of the drawer. It was medium-sized, dark red, flexible, and ridged down to its flared base. He’d grabbed it by the base, and above his fist, the length flopped back and forth. “Who says I’m scandalized? I was deep in thought.”
“About?” Solomon asked. He stripped off his pajamas. That was another nice thing about having sex with someone who lived with him and liked him. It didn’t have to be a show every time. Not that he minded a show, but he’d never had the option of this kind of sex before. Easy, comfortable sex.
“This can’t move by itself,” Jake said, pointing the dildo at him. “Which means you’re intending to move it telekinetically. So when I asked if you were propositioning me with some higher-dimensional math shit, you should’
ve said yes.”
It was impossible not to grin back at him. Another thing Solomon couldn’t recall doing with previous partners, or anyone else ever: being silly. “Are you registering an objection?”
“Hell no,” Jake said. He pulled his shirt over his head and then shucked his underwear. “Based on past results, you can put pretty much anything you want up my ass, with or without the use of your hands. But promise me that if you don’t feel good, you’ll tell me so we can stop.”
“You worry too much. Of course I would tell you. Can you imagine me keeping my opinion to myself?”
Jake pursed his lips. “Good point.”
Solomon pushed him flat on his back and sat between his spread thighs. He slicked his fingers with lube and pushed in. Jake relaxed beneath him, his eyelids fluttering shut. It seemed a waste that they’d spent four days not doing this, but then again, it had been four days of Jake cooking for him, bringing him food in bed, and then kissing and holding him, all things that made Sol feel squishy and vulnerable and cherished. It felt a little unreal, to be given so much and to give nothing in return, but every time Solomon mentioned it, Jake kissed him on the temple and said, “For a genius, you sure do need this concept explained a lot. It makes me happy to do things for you. Because I love you.”
Solomon understood it perfectly when he thought of himself doing things for Jake. It was the asymmetry of their circumstances—the nagging worry that he might always be the one taking, never the one giving—that troubled him. But perhaps the two of them formed a shape whose contours could not be so easily described.
He slid the toy into Jake and savored the sound Jake made as he did. Preparing himself required less time, and he was eager to feel Jake rather than his own fingers, but when he crawled forward and made as if to straddle Jake, Jake put a hand on his chest to stop him.
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