An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  That was too unpleasant to think about, so I closed my eyes and began drifting back to sleep. I was vaguely aware of Ben hitting the bed beside me, and even moved slightly to give him more space.

  “I’ll ge’ dressed ‘n a minute,” he mumbled. “Too tired…” He fell asleep before he even finished the sentence, and I learned two new things.

  The first was that Ben’s snoring could have been measured on the Richter scale.

  And the second was that even the snoring wasn’t enough to keep me awake after teleporting, being blown up, and being sedated twice.

  I woke, not nearly long enough later, to sunlight, movement, and a shrill female voice. Pried my eyelids open.

  It was Annelise, standing in the bedroom door and telling off Ben with the kind of fluency she generally reserved for making up fantastic explanations to anybody who accidentally saw us in action. There seemed to be somebody behind her, but I wasn’t focusing all that well yet.

  There’d been some minor movement while we were asleep. I was lying on my side, Ben was curled up behind me, and one of his hands was cupping my breast. Also, the shirt he’d lent me was rucked up far enough to expose my lack of underwear.

  I could sort of see why Annelise might be upset.

  I peeled Ben’s hand off and tugged the shirt down. “Annelise. It’s not what it looks like.”

  “On the contrary,” said a cold, hard voice behind her, “logic suggests that it is exactly what it looks like.”

  Lensky.

  Just when I was thinking things couldn’t get any worse.

  Annelise stopped upbraiding Ben long enough to explain how they had, in her word, “caught” us. It hadn’t been difficult. When Ingrid came to work that morning, knowing nothing about how I’d used her for a cover story, naturally she gave away that she hadn’t seen me at all on the previous evening and I hadn’t even slept at the apartment last night.

  Lensky got worried and checked my cell phone location.

  “I didn’t even know you could do that when I wasn’t talking on it,” I said, momentarily distracted.

  “Clearly,” he said, “or you’d have left your phone elsewhere.”

  Finding that the location of my phone matched Ben’s address, Lensky had invited Annelise to ride with him. She had a key. And just in case Ben was alone, Lensky didn’t want to burst in on him and surprise him.

  “Not that I really believed he would be alone,” he added.

  “And he was so right!” Annelise said. “We walked into the living room and there you were in the bedroom.”

  “In flagrante,” Lensky added, still in that impersonal, distant voice.

  As soon as I got some coffee, I needed to talk to him about times when it was totally inappropriate to show off his legal Latin.

  “You hadn’t even closed the door!”

  Ben was awake too, now, and he made the mistake of trying to be rational. “Annelise. Be reasonable. Nothing happened between me and Lia!”

  “We did not sleep together,” I added, just to make it crystal clear.

  “Don’t bother,” Annelise said. “It’s perfectly clear what happened, and I for one don’t need to hear any excuses from a lying cheater like you! Brad, I’ll be waiting in your car.”

  She stormed out, and Lensky stood looking down at me. “It was always Ben, wasn’t it? I should have known,” he said. “I was a fool to trust you. I’ll put your clothes and makeup outside my front door, so you can get your stuff without coming in. I don’t think we have anything more to say to each other.”

  And then he was gone too, and I was dazed.

  I couldn't understand what he had been saying. The words made no sense. And now he’d gone away, leaving nothing behind but the ugly echo of ugly words. Words heavy as bricks, sharp as broken glass. Words I dared not remember, much less understand, because - he couldn't have said them, could he? Not to me... but who was I, then? Evidently not the person I'd thought I was. Because Lensky loved and trusted that person and would never have said... thought...

  "Lia?" Someone put his arm around me. Not Lensky; he'd gone away. Somebody taller. Ben. "Lia, don't look like that, it's going to be all right. He's crazy! When he calms down he'll realize how he got everything wrong."

  Annelise had said similar things to Ben; why wasn't he crushed like me? I stared into his myopic brown eyes, trying to make some sense of the world in which I'd found myself. I must have asked the question aloud, because he answered it.

  "Annelise is mad at me half the time anyway, only usually I don't know what set her off. This time is actually better, because I know why she's mad and I also know she's too bright to believe it for long. We'll make up as soon as she calms down enough to listen to the explanation. It'll be the same way with Lensky. You'll see. In a few days we'll all have a good laugh over this misunderstanding."

  "You and Annelise, maybe. Lensky? I don't think so." I moved away from Ben, sat on the edge of the bed. I felt sore and creaky as an old woman. "I need to go... no. I need to borrow something to wear. So I can go home."

  "Once we’re dressed," Ben said firmly, "we'll go out for breakfast, which we both need after a night like that. Then I'll drive you wherever you decide to go - the office, the condo... All right," he stopped himself at the look on my face, "not the condo. But you're going to have to talk to him about this some time, you know."

  He was wrong about that, but it wasn't worth arguing about.

  Finding decent clothing for a short girl in the wardrobe of a tall man was a challenge, but one I could handle. Another of Ben's good shirts, with the sleeves rolled up, was as long as a dress on me. With a knot at the waistband, his boxers worked as baggy underpants. And his only tie, a really terrible one, was so bright it could be used as a colorful sash. His flip-flops were way too large for me, but other than that it was a passable outfit for breakfast at Cisco's.

  Ben worked his way through a platter of chorizo and eggs with refritos, sausage and biscuits while I poked at a serving of migas. Every so often, when Ben got worried because I wasn't eating, I took a bite. Each bite brought the additional challenge of swallowing. I’ve never chewed scrambled eggs so thoroughly.

  My head was still cloudy with the remains of the hospital sedative, so I didn't give Ben any argument when he announced he was going to drive me home now; I couldn't have teleported to save my life. I just had to make sure he understood that home meant the apartment I still, nominally, shared with Ingrid. Not the condo, Lensky's condo. Never again, that.

  "Take some ibuprofen," he advised when I crept out of his car in front of the ochre brick building. I was still moving like a very old woman. "I hurt all over too, you know. Blast trauma."

  Good advice, probably. I was too tired even to teleport into the apartment. Instead I fished out the spare key from its home under the stone turtle, stumbled upstairs to the apartment and got as far as taking the ibuprofen out of the bathroom cabinet before I forgot what I was doing.

  Food and sunlight and movement had whisked away the last clouds of sedative. Now I was fully, unbearably conscious of everything that had happened, and I thought it was going to break me then and there. A whirling cloud of black misery spun around me. It was full of jeering voices, harsh as the cries of grackles. Who do you think you are anyway?... You're not even a real person... All you ever were was a brain, a math whiz, and now you're not even that... Phony mathematician, imitation person, nothing, nothing... That's why he could throw you away, you were never real anyway... Just a shadow, a reflection, you disappear in sunlight...

  Those voices had been around me a year and a half ago, when my gift for mathematics had failed me. For a while Rick's insistence that he loved me had pushed them into the background, but when he dumped me they came back stronger than ever, full of unholy glee. Told you, told you, told you so!

  Somehow I'd climbed out of that black pit of despair, holding onto Ben's support and friendship, and to the pure intellectual joy of exploring our discovery. Even if I couldn't
keep doing conventional mathematics I could do this strange, quirky, offbeat research at the edge where pure mathematics meets physical reality, and that nourished my spirit just as mathematics had.

  I didn't think I could climb out of despair again.

  I'd let down too many defenses when I let Lensky into my life. A fatal error; one I would not recover from.

  Wasn't at all sure I wanted to recover, this time.

  Before, I'd faced a world without my only skill, and then a world without Rick. But I'd found this new skill. And a world without Rick had actually been a fine place to live, once my bruised ego recovered.

  Now, though... It wasn't just a world without Lensky I faced, though that was bad enough. It was a world forever and irredeemably without love, without trust, without faith, without any human connection whatsoever. Because it had now been demonstrated conclusively, hadn't it, that I could not and never would inspire any of those emotions in any real person. Of course I couldn't. I was just a shadow and it was high time I learned my place, stopped trying to fall across other lives.

  I was crouched on the bathroom floor, still holding the unopened bottle of ibuprofen, when Ingrid came home after work. With Jimmy.

  You cannot let him think he has broken you

  Chapter 24

  There was a certain amount of fuss to which I paid as little attention as possible, ending with me sitting on the edge of my bed and swallowing ibuprofen tablets with the water Ingrid brought me. In the background, I was vaguely aware of Jimmy DiGrazio moving around Ingrid’s bedroom, collecting things. Shortly after I got the last tablet down he appeared in the doorway.

  “I, uh, it might be better if I go back to my place tonight.”

  A tiny portion of my brain skittered around the words. Jimmy had spent last night here? And probably Saturday night as well. How interesting. At least, it would have been interesting if I still gave a damn about anything.

  “I can’t go back to work,” I told Ingrid after he left.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not going anywhere tomorrow. You should see your cuts and bruises!”

  I’d meant ever, but it was too much trouble to explain.

  “Are you up to telling me what happened? It must have been earth-shaking, for you to wind up in bed with Ben!”

  I looked up, surprised, and she actually colored. “I mean, that’s the story going around the Center. Naturally I said there must be some mistake, but Annelise said…”

  I groaned. “Well, she’s got it wrong. I may have been asleep in a bed where Ben was also asleep, but I was not in bed with Ben.” A distinction that was, apparently, too fine for Lens – for some people to grasp.

  “What did happen, then? Tell me everything. You owe me,” she added when I only stared at the wall. “Using me for an alibi. Not even warning me, so that I looked like a total idiot this morning!”

  “Tried to warn you.” My throat felt as scratched-up as the rest of me; I drank the rest of the water she’d brought. “You weren’t answering your phone. Neither was Jimmy.”

  Ingrid colored even more. “Yes, well, never mind that now. I want to know what you were doing last night!”

  Slowly, with a lot of pauses to gulp more cold water, I gave her the history of the previous night, from the anonymous text on Ben’s cell to our escape from the hospital and subsequent collapse.

  “I can’t believe you two were dumb enough to chase after an anonymous message saying, “Meet me in a deserted place, at night, come alone and don’t tell anybody!” she exclaimed when I finished. “In books…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. A flashing neon danger signal. But that’s in books, where you know the author’s manipulating the plot to put the heroine in danger.” Both Ingrid and I probably read too much romantic suspense. Enough, anyway, to recognize all the tropes of the genre.

  “You don’t realize the incredible temptation of such a message in real life. A chance to get rid of Myers permanently? We couldn’t pass it up. As for the ‘tell no one,’ part, who exactly were we going to tell? You and Jimmy were unavailable. Ben was still mad at Annelise and Colton over the way the party ended, so he wasn’t willing to talk to either of them. Meadow’s been fired. And I’d have been out of my mind to tell Lensky; he’s too protective to go along with such a scheme.” That didn’t sound quite right. “Was too protective,” I corrected. Had been. Now, he’d probably be delighted if I did something that caused me to vanish permanently from the face of the earth. No, not delighted; indifferent. I blinked rapidly.

  “This morning,” Ingrid said, “he was protective enough to raise holy hell when he found out you’d been missing all night. Protective enough to get on the phone to his agency and demand they locate your cell phone.”

  “Yeah, well, that was before he actually found me,” I said wearily. “Ingrid, I need to sleep.”

  I managed to sleep for something close to sixty hours, not counting short breaks to go to the bathroom or to stare at the ceiling until my eyes burned. Unconsciousness was vastly preferable to facing the devastation of my life. I might have opted for permanent unconsciousness if Ben hadn’t intervened.

  “It’s too damned early,” I mumbled when he waved the cup of coffee under my nose, but I sat up anyway. Then memory crashed over me like a tidal wave and I lay down again with the pillow over my head. “Go away,” I mumbled from under the pillow.

  “I gave you a pass for two days,” Ben said, taking away the pillow. “Today you’re going to get up, get dressed, come to work and demonstrate that you don’t give a damn what that ass Lensky thinks.”

  “Can’t,” I told him, pulling the sheet over my head.

  This time he yanked the sheet and blanket off the bed. “You can and you will,” he told me. “Remember saying you owed me for standing by you when you first discovered you could move things without touching them? Well, now I’m collecting. You are not going to let Lensky or anyone else think they’ve broken you.”

  “He has.” But I sat up again and looked around for my black jeans, mainly to shut Ben up.

  “If you’re looking for the clothes you were wearing,” he reminded me, “they cut them off you at the hospital.” He tossed me a pair of blue jeans and a Sex Pistols T-shirt that I’d dropped on the floor some time ago.

  “Not that one.” I went to the bureau and pulled out a Nightwish shirt. Not exactly vintage, but it suited my mood better.

  “Food first,” Ben said, disgustingly cheerful, “then work.”

  He waved a bacon and egg breakfast taco at me. I stumbled to the kitchen and tried to take a bite. It seemed to be fighting back. Ben took it away, unwrapped the deli paper that I’d been trying to bite through and dumped the entire contents of the plastic cup of salsa on the taco.

  I did like salsa with cilantro, and I was beginning to notice that I hadn’t eaten in… well, in quite some time. I finished the taco in about three bites and didn’t even get salsa on my shirt, which ordinarily would have been enough of an accomplishment to make me happy. It certainly woke me up. “Ben, I don’t think I can teleport.” I might never work a visualization again. Look where it had got me.

  “Not a problem,” he said. “My car’s outside. I didn’t want to teleport both of us and get there desperate for doughnuts. Annelise seems to have forgotten that part of her job.”

  When he stopped talking, I became aware of an unusual silence in the apartment. I checked my watch. “Ingrid?” At this hour she should have been showering and singing.

  “At Jimmy’s. You know how she feels about PDA’s.”

  Actually I didn’t, but it certainly fit her personality that she wouldn’t want to sleep with Jimmy when anybody else was in the apartment – even if the other person was practically comatose. This might be a problem later on, because now I had no other place to stay.

  I straightened my shoulders. I was not going to look weepy and defeated in front of my colleagues.

  “That’s my girl,” Ben said, too heartily. “Comb your hair and let�
�s go.”

  A silence fell over the third floor when I came up the stairs. “Hi, everybody,” I said breezily. (Ben had been rehearsing me all the way over.) “How’s the research going?”

  Ben took my arm and we walked the Möbius path into the private side. I wasn’t sure I could do even that without his help.

  I wanted nothing more than to hide in my office with the door shut, but Ben grabbed a chair and followed me. Then he closed the door.

  “Now,” he said firmly, “we’re going to work. I refuse to believe that any trauma could make you forget how to do general topology.”

  Under his prodding, I solved problems on topological vector spaces for two hours. Then, after my brain started to function, I remembered something I’d been meaning to ask him. “You never did tell me how you expected Riemann surfaces to help you generate light.”

  “It starts with working at the molecular level – which, by the way, we ought to study more. Unfortunately, if you remember, I got fire rather than light when I tried to get anything brighter than those colored bubbles.” He spelled out the relevant mathematics, which I’m not going to detail here; the last thing we need is ambitious topology students starting fires all over the mathematics department.

  It did make sense, though neither of us could work out how to change it to make a nice, cool light instead of starting a fire. But by noon, after several hours of hard mental work, I was able to make the transition from the private side to the public side by myself without using the new door.

  Lensky’s office door was closed. That was the first thing I noticed.

  “Now,” Ben said firmly, “we’re going to go over to the Student Union, buy a couple of sandwiches and something to drink, and come back here to eat. You’re going to show that ass that he hasn’t defeated you if it kills me.”

  It seemed more likely to kill me, but I trailed after him anyway. I could always refuse to return.

  He took longer than usual to get the sandwiches, but who cared? All I had to do was sit and wait for him. That, I could manage.