by S Breaker
“So, what—you’re just going to sulk here on the sidelines forever? Super lame, man,” Berry-AI remarked, shaking his head. “You need to tell her. Tell her what you are.”
“No,” Noah snapped. “She’s free to choose. We both are.”
Berry-AI was still shaking his head. “You’ve both already chosen. You just don’t want to admit it.”
Noah clenched his jaw and waved him away. “Don’t you have some work to do?”
“Actually, I just got the discharge forms.” Berry-AI held up the piece of paper. “I’m about to tell them. Don’t you want to come in?”
Noah simply grunted his reply and moved to walk away in the opposite direction.
“Suit yourself.” Berry-AI shrugged as he turned to head into Laney’s room.
“Berry!” Laney cheered when he entered.
“Hi guys,” Berry-AI greeted with a smile. “Good news! Laney can go home now.”
Laney’s eyes lit up instantly. “What?”
“What?” Maia and Kevin’s eyes were wide too.
Berry-AI was flustered. “Oh, oops, I mean,” he said, holding up the piece of paper. “She’s being discharged.”
“Oh.” Laney’s face fell.
Berry-AI made a sheepish face, smacking his forehead with his palm. “I’m so sorry. I can be such a doof sometimes.”
Laney chuckled, shaking her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she dismissed. “Anyway,” she said. “I told you guys I was feeling much better.” Then she looked up at Berry-AI again, frowning. “I’m just still sad about P.T.”
Berry-AI put his hand on Laney’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about P.T.,” he assured. “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
Laney turned to him with an amused look. “Is that a ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ reference?”
Berry-AI’s expression was blank. “Six million what?”
And Maia and Kevin exchanged puzzled looks.
Laney bit back her mirth as Kevin assisted her off the bed. “Never mind.”
“Hey, I thought Berry-bot short-circuited when he got shot too?” Maia wanted to know.
“Its power cell just overloaded,” Berry explained through Berry-AI. “So it’ll have to be deactivated as soon as we get it back to your lab. I’ll need to construct a new regenerative power cell for it. In fact, this temporary battery is dying out already so I’ll have to sign off now.”
“Okay, Berry,” Maia bade.
“Tell Noah I’ll call again on Maia’s lab’s holo-phone to discuss next steps,” Berry-AI said to them, before he blinked his eyes closed, even as he kept walking with them, headed out the room and down the hall, going back to the main University wing.
Laney was watching Berry-AI walk with his eyes closed. “That is so bizarre,” she remarked.
“Even more bizarre than what you’ve just gone through?” Maia prompted, her eyebrows raised.
Given the circumstances, but only to a certain degree, Maia and Kevin had been let in on what had happened and who had been responsible for Laney’s abduction.
“If you hadn’t told me yourself, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Maia said.
“The question is: are you sure you’re safe now?” Kevin asked, looking concerned.
Laney was still anxious. “Probably…” She happened to glance up to spot Noah as they walked past the south side of the building.
He was standing by the little courtyard behind the University all by himself.
“Hey guys,” she began. “Why don’t you go ahead first? I’ll just go deliver Berry’s message.”
Maia made a face. “Noah doesn’t look too happy, does he?”
Laney huffed. “I’m starting to get used to it. He scares everyone.”
“He doesn’t scare me.” Kevin met her gaze to give her a reassuring smile.
Laney bit back her smile, even as her stomach fluttered at his response.
Maia smirked. “You know what? Kev and I are going to go get you some waffles,” she said. “You deserve a treat for finally being out of the hospital.”
Laney laughed. “That sounds great. Thanks.”
“See you later, Laney.” Maia waved her away with a grin. “This way Berry-bot.” She gestured for Berry-AI to follow them into the building.
And Laney shook her head in mirth before she turned around to walk toward the courtyard where Noah was.
Noah was looking up at the statue, as though in deep thought himself.
Laney followed his gaze, an inkling of a memory coming back to her. She pursed her lips. “I do know this place, don’t I?” she prompted from behind him.
Noah didn’t seem surprised that she was there. He simply nodded. “This is where I proposed to Eleanor last year,” he relayed.
She took a deep breath and nodded herself. “I think…I was there.”
He shot her a look, taken aback. “What?”
“I had a dream about this place last year,” she explained. “And you. And…that,” she noted, referring to the proposal. “I think I must have been seeing through Eleanor at the time, in my dreams.” She nodded again. “I was there.”
Noah’s mouth had dropped open.
“Hey,” Laney piped up, changing the subject. “Berry said he was going to call you on Maia’s lab’s holo-phone to discuss next steps—whatever that means.” She shrugged. “So we’d better get going.” She motioned for them to go back inside.
Noah stared at her for a moment, before he snapped to alert, and moved to follow Laney into the building.
***
“Alright, Mister Wizard,” Laney prompted Berry’s big talking head on Maia’s lab’s holographic videophone. “Now that I have my memory back, what next?”
Berry raised his eyebrows. “Now we find your yellow brick road,” he replied.
Laney grinned. “I can’t believe you understood that reference.”
“Please, that was a pre-cascade bomb movie—another classic,” Berry dismissed.
She chuckled, glancing back over at Noah who had resumed his regular programming, having donned a stoic expression on his face, and looking down to tinker on his HUD.
Laney’s smile faded a bit in recall of the information that Jacob had relayed with regards to the HUD, and which sorts of people actually carry them. She fidgeted slightly, her stomach churning in apprehension, but she ignored the thought for the moment.
She averted her gaze to look around the empty lab.
Maia and Kevin were still out and the rest of Maia’s lab staff had been sent on lunch break so that Berry could discuss the next steps with Noah and Laney without worrying about anyone overhearing.
Berry had noted Noah’s expressive silence again as, as per usual, an indication to move on. “Uh, right.” He straightened up. He looked down to read something from his console. “Well, the good news is, if I’m reading this right, The Alliance was actually onto something. They’d also figured out, just as I had, that the cause of The Bleed was the initial tracking solution that Eleanor had dosed you with.”
“Oy, it’s like the gift that keeps on giving.” Laney sighed, exasperated.
Berry grinned. “Basically, traces of the tracking solution that Eleanor had used on you when she was running those experiments last year are attracting all your other selves like a homing beacon,” he explained. “So we have to flush it all out of you.”
“Great!” Laney remarked. “So we just need to extract all the traces of this tracking solution thingy from me and we’re home free?” she asked, already looking relieved.
“Um, it’s not quite that simple,” Berry said, wrinkling his nose.
Laney’s face fell. “Of course not.”
“You were right,” Berry told her. “Their biobed was an adaptation of Maia’s machine. It isolates and modifies targeted proteins too, except in Maia’s version, she only flushes out the tagged memory enneagram blockers that we had planted eight months ago, whereas The Alliance’s machine is trying to flush out all the exotic particles o
f Eleanor’s original tracking solution.” He went on. “But the problem was their implementation. The Alliance wasn’t able to flush all the exotic particles out of you fast enough before your atomic structure depolarized completely. That’s why it hurt so much and you almost…” He cleared his throat instead of finishing his sentence.
Noah shifted, looking uncomfortable, but he didn’t say anything.
“So their approach is too slow,” Laney concluded.
Berry nodded. “What you need is a strong, sudden shock.”
“Great,” she piped up. “So what do we need to do?”
“Well…” Berry began. “I have a theory.”
And Laney rolled her eyes. “Fantastic, another one of those.”
“The math is all there,” Berry defended, looking confident. “The preliminary models all support my theory. We just…don’t have enough dense mass to create what we need artificially under lab conditions. And—the closest source is about six hundred light-years away.”
Noah’s eyebrows rose. “So you have figured out what level of exposure she’ll need in order to reverse the effects of the ‘bleed through’?”
Laney narrowed her eyes. Everyone was speaking in English, but again, as always, it seemed like nobody was. “Huh?”
“To put it plainly,” Berry began to Laney—supposedly plainly. “When you were displaced, you were exposed to high levels of dark energy. And I think what your system needs is a hyper-intense shock exposure from the opposite kind of energy particle. Such as coming from a…” he trailed off hesitantly.
She blinked. “A what?”
Berry still looked hesitant.
“What, Berry?” Noah pressed, his eyes wide with impatience.
“A supernova.”
Laney’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “A wh-what?” she sputtered out. “You—want to expose me…to a supernova?”
Berry shrugged. “Just for a second,” he put in, as though it made the matter lighter.
She shot him a look of mocking ridicule. “Oh. Okay.”
Just then, there was a loud banging noise coming from behind Berry on the holographic video feed.
“What was that?” Laney wanted to know, squinting to study Berry’s background on the screen.
It looked like instead of a lab at GNR, he was inside a large indoor chamber, bathed in soft wavy sparkles of blue light.
“Hell’s bells, Berry. Are you on the mobile submersible lab right now?” she prompted.
Berry met her gaze with a smile. “You are correct, Miss Carter. As a matter of fact, I’m on my way there. See you all soon.”
***
FREE YOURSELF
Selfless · Book 3
Fold
Three days from today
“Well, hell’s bells. That was close.”
Laney flinched in surprise when she heard the familiar voice. She tried to look around but even as she was sure her eyes were open, she could see nothing but blackness.
Then she heard someone else speak. Someone whose voice she didn’t recognize.
“We’ve got her, Berry.”
“Thank goodness.”
“What? Who is that?” Laney rubbed her eyes. She thought she could almost glimpse something, only everything was blurry. She started to heave, feeling the beginnings of panic.
She tried to feel around for Noah since she couldn’t hear him coughing to recover from the quantum shear jump as usual. But she could grasp nothing but thin air.
Then Laney heard another voice. Female. With a strange but vaguely familiar cadence.
“AG levels nominal.”
Laney felt a sudden but brief wave of nausea and she blinked hard just as her eyesight finally began to focus. She blinked a few more times, trying to gain her bearings.
The dim blue light in the room adjusted slightly to illuminate her surroundings.
“Noah?” she called out. Her throat felt raw. She tried to clear it. Her head snapped up when she heard a short hissing sound and when she looked up, she saw a hazy image of someone.
A big guy with deep brown skin had taken off a pressurized helmet. He was standing a few feet away as he unclipped his hazmat suit, or spacesuit, or something, tucking his helmet under his arm.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his dark eyes looking a bit concerned that she looked like she was about to scramble away in alarm at any moment.
Laney’s eyes moved around warily.
A few feet away, metal crates and boxes were stacked in tidy rows, almost as tall as the moderate headroom. Closed locker doors were recessed into the gray panel walls lining both sides of the room. The rest of the place was bare, muted, with a minimal, sterile aesthetic. She could hear muffled thumps from underneath the floor and above her head, and on and off, there was a sort of shushing sound.
She clenched her fists. “Who are you? Where am I? What is this place?”
The over-polished, hollow feel of her surroundings made Laney think she might be underwater, back in Berry’s submarine.
“Hey, Laney,” the disembodied voice of Berry came on.
Her eyes lit up. Berry?
“Guess where you are.”
Hearing Berry’s familiar voice again put her at ease and her posture relaxed a touch. She craned her neck to look around and then spotted the window at the far end of the room.
She had to squint to see outside. Then she held her breath in astonishment.
The darkness could have indicated night. There were definitely stars outside.
But there was no mistaking that the bright wispy clusters outside the window weren’t simply clouds.
Laney’s stomach did a tumble as she realized what the hollow feel of the strange place indicated. “I’m in outer space,” she murmured her awed reply.
She glanced back to meet the gaze of the big guy, whom underneath the spacesuit she could see had on a shiny jumpsuit uniform that had a blue spiral logo on the chest and important-looking patches on the sleeve.
“Miss Laney Carter.” His smile widened. “Welcome to the Dauntless. We’ve been expecting you.” He held his hand out to help her up. “I’m Dek, the Science officer.”
Laney straightened up from the grated metal floor, already heading straight toward the small curved window to marvel at the view, her jaw dropping in wonder at the endless sea of stars set against the blackness of space.
“Where are we exactly?”
Dek paused as if to calculate. “We’re still in the Milky Way, about three hundred and fifty light-years from Earth.”
“Wow,” Laney whispered, her heart pounding in excitement, unable to tear her gaze away from the void.
Despite everything that had already happened to her since discovering the existence of parallel worlds, Laney had never once considered that her path would take her this far out of the solar system, not to mention the planet.
Then again, she hadn’t exactly been having a normal last couple of weeks. Nothing that had happened could be further from her average teenage life back in New England.
Dek was watching her with a small smirk. “See something interesting?”
Laney grinned. “Let’s just say last year’s school trip to the planetarium pales in comparison to the real deal.” She looked around eagerly. “Where’s Berry? Where’s Noah?”
“I’m on the comms, Laney.” Berry’s tone was reassuring, even as his voice crackled a bit coming over an overhead speaker. “As you’ve probably inferred, I’m not actually on the ship, or in the dimension.”
She blew out a breath. “Oh boy, you have no idea how glad I am to hear your voice. How did you escape The Alliance?” she wanted to know, a sudden urgency creeping into her tone. “What’s going on over there?”
Berry’s reply sounded somber. “I’ve been hiding out at Rui’s sister’s lab in the Pacific Ocean for the last couple of days. They have quite a sophisticated security grid so I’ve been able to avoid The Alliance.” He paused, sounding hesitant. “I’m still waiting to hear abou
t what’s happened in the city, but—”
Laney was already making a face.
“Preliminary reports haven’t been good,” Berry finished.
She furrowed her eyebrows in concern. “Is Maia okay?”
“I’m sorry, Laney. I haven’t heard from her yet. I did hear that the University was attacked but don’t worry, I’ll let you know as soon as I get word.”
She nodded in reluctant resignation. There was nothing she could do about the situation in the other parallel world. She had a more important mission to be getting on with and as always, she was running out of time.
Laney cast another look around. “Where’s Noah? Did he arrive earlier than me again?”
Dek looked perplexed and Laney thought he looked like he didn’t know who she was talking about.
She gave him an expectant questioning look. “Come on. Dr. Noah Donovan,” she supplied with a brief waving gesture. “Arrogant ninja spy scientist? Very bad social skills. Broods a lot?”
A shadow fell on Dek’s face.
Laney tensed, already feeling dread as she realized the real reason for his pause. “What? Where is he?”
“Berry,” Dek called out his suggestion. “Maybe it’s better you tell her.”
Laney’s heart pounded in her chest again. “Tell me. Tell me now.”
Berry sounded like he took a deep breath before he spilled it. “The Alliance managed to intercept your quantum jump. In fact, they almost got you both. I’m so sorry, Laney.”
She swallowed hard, her chest constricting. “Oh my god.” She looked up at Dek again. “Is he still alive?” she pressed. “You know where he is, right? There’s some sort of plan. We’re on our way to rescue him right now?”
“Um…” Dek’s eyebrows rose before he could formulate a response, another female voice came over the PA system and Dek looked up in alert.