“I think he wants help,” Jake said. “He’s trying to get out and he doesn’t know how. If he’s in pain, he’s probably not thinking clearly, right? He’s latched onto you, Kit, because he thinks you can get him out. Maybe he recognized Emil the first time you two were together in the Nowhere, and that’s why he came for you.”
“Hmph,” Kit said and closed his eyes again. Emil didn’t blame him for skepticism. It was hard to feel charitable toward Solomon Lange even when you’d known him as a human being. When you’d only known him as a ghostly, would-be perpetrator of accidental manslaughter in the Nowhere, it was impossible.
“How’d you get the cat out?” Emil asked.
“Like you said. If you run, you have to run forever. You told me to grab it, so I grabbed it.”
“Well, I guess we know what we have to do to get Lange out,” Emil said, and Jake nodded. Kit said nothing, so either he was already asleep, or this was his way of dismissing them. Emil headed for his own bed with the impression that Kit was mad at him, but he had no idea what he’d done.
13
Dimensional Prions
There was work to do in the garden, he had an appointment with Dr. Winslow later in the day that would likely turn into a debriefing, he really ought to take the seaweed that had been caught in Kit’s clothes into a lab for examination, and normally he’d have been up and in the gym by now, but Emil was wrecked. He lay down in his bed, which still smelled of sex and seawater, and managed to catch three hours of sleep before someone knocked on his door. He got up right away and answered, hoping it was Kit.
It was Dax and Lenny. Dax’s nest of red hair perfectly complemented their wild, delighted expression. “Lange’s private journals were a goldmine,” they said reverently.
“They’ve been pacing my room, alternately reading and talking nonsense for hours,” Lenny said, pointing a thumb at Dax. “I told them it was time to share with somebody else.”
“Might as well get Jake, Chávez, and Miriam in here,” Dax said. “And Kit, if you want him.”
“Let him sleep,” Emil said. “If it’s important, I’ll catch him up later. I’ll message the others. Let’s meet in the greenhouse. I have work to do in there anyway, and the machinery makes a lot of ambient noise.”
Emil slipped his shoes on and poked at his watch to contact the others.
“Ask them for coffee,” Lenny said, and Emil did.
“What about that nurse Caleb?” Dax asked, their hand hesitating on the doorknob. “Do we trust him?”
“He patched me up this morning and helped Jake distract Winslow and Heath,” Emil said. “But let’s wait.”
The greenhouse was Emil’s favorite part of Facility 17, a vast, glassed-in space divided into subsections that he kept at different temperatures. There was a dazzling view of the cosmos above and rows and rows of his own personal space garden below and it was magic. Emil grew the usual kitchen garden herbs and vegetables—various greens, squashes, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, basil, and so on—and some things that most people didn’t put in their backyards, like wheat and rice. It had been tricky, designing the bed for the rice, but Quint Services wanted to ship as little as possible to the facility, so they’d told him that cost was no object in laying out the greenhouse. He’d sectioned off part of the greenhouse into an orangery. It had probably been complicated, shipping all the fruit trees he’d requested up here, but he’d never asked. Maybe they’d used runners.
They’d certainly used runners to build other parts of the facility.
That thought dimmed the happiness he felt at entering the greenhouse. No matter how lush, it had been paid for by people who did terrible things.
Jake and Miriam were standing in the far corner of the main space between the end of one row of plants and a floor-to-ceiling window. They were staring out at the universe. Earth wasn’t currently visible, but the facility orbited the moon fast enough that it would come around soon. Miriam, hardly turning away from the window, reached behind herself and plucked a handful of ripe berries from one of Emil’s raspberry bushes. She offered her open palm to Jake, but he shook his head, so she ate them all herself.
There was a soft ding, indicating that the sprinklers were about to come on in this space, so Jake and Miriam opened the glass door that led into the orangery. Emil, Lenny, and Dax followed them in. Chávez arrived a few minutes later with a pot of coffee and some mugs jammed onto a tray. “You’re a true friend, Clara Chávez,” Lenny said, lifting a cup off the tray and pouring himself coffee. He shook his head at Jake and Miriam. “No thanks to either of you.”
“I’m not your intern,” Miriam said, glowering. “You’re perfectly capable of getting your own coffee.”
“As I was saying, Clara Chávez, you’re a beautiful genius with the heart of a saint, absolutely irreplaceable, and you’ll make some woman very lucky some day,” Lenny said. He luxuriated in his first sip.
There were two benches and a low table in the center of the orangery. Chávez laid her tray on the table and began to pour coffee for the rest of them while they took their seats.
“Why limit myself to just one?” Chávez said, smiling beatifically and passing out mugs. “There are so many women out there who need to get lucky.”
Jake was waiting patiently for this to end and Dax was rolling their eyes, so it was time for Emil to step in. Miriam, Jake, and Lenny had taken one bench. Emil joined Chávez and Dax on the other. He was glad not to host this meeting in his room, where Kit’s discarded clothes and boots were still in a pile on the floor. “We have things to discuss.”
“Yeah, I came here to talk about physics,” Dax said.
Emil smiled at them, then said, “News first. Kit caught our poltergeist—or one of them—and it turns out it was one of Dr. Lange’s cats. It had been involved in an accident, similar to the one that happened here. We now have reason to believe that Dr. Lange himself is trapped in the Nowhere, and that it might be possible to get him out.”
“Great,” Dax said, tapping the piles of notebooks in their lap. “Then he can explain this to me.”
Emil told all of them everything he could—the breach in Lange’s lab, Laila and Aidan being held in an inaccessible cell on the asteroid, that other runner Travis showing up with Winslow and attempting to take Kit away—and shock and dismay crossed their expressions.
“Shit,” Chávez said.
“I always knew Quint Services was a little shady, but I thought it was, you know, tax evasion, regular billionaire stuff. I didn’t think they were kidnapping people,” Lenny said. “You think Heath and Winslow signed off on that? And we’ve been making small talk with them this whole time?”
Chávez’s face turned green. She’d been doing a lot more than small talk.
“That’s a lot of problems for us to solve,” Miriam said, stepping past emotional concerns and heading right for the practical. “What do you suggest we tackle first?”
“If we have two runners in good shape, it shouldn’t be hard to get Laila and Aidan free,” Emil said. “The Nowhere has been risky lately, but I think this is worth the risk.”
“I’m game,” Lenny said. “Kit can help me get there and back.”
“Can’t we fix the Nowhere? That’s on our to-do list anyway, right?” Miriam asked.
“It’s on the list,” Dax agreed. “Saving Dr. Lange will make it far less dangerous, but what we really need to do is repair the breach. I’m not sure how to do that yet. Laila and Aidan are suffering now, so we have to get them out first.”
“That room has plumbing and wiring and ventilation,” Chávez said. “Even if there’s no door, it’s connected to the rest of the facility somehow. You sure we can’t break in any other way?”
“It’s not a question of taking a sledgehammer to some drywall,” Lenny said. “It might be solid ore between here and there.”
“Quint Services must have excavated another part of the asteroid to make that space,” Miriam said. “We could suit up and e
xamine the outside.”
“Speaking of the room,” Emil said, “we can’t just get the prisoners out. We also have to make sure that Quint Services can’t replace them with new prisoners.”
“Destroy the room,” Miriam suggested.
“Threaten to go public,” Lenny said.
“Knock Heath and Winslow’s fucking heads together,” Chávez said, her jaw clenched in anger.
Emil raised his eyebrows at her. “All good ideas. Miriam and Dax, you work on concocting something that’ll destroy that room—without, say, blowing the rest of us into space. Jake and Clara, pull together something that can go to the press if we need to. Photos, video testimony, text, whatever. Lenny, you’re on call to jump in there. Be ready in a few hours. When Kit wakes up, we’re doing this.”
“And what will you be doing?” Chávez asked.
“Distracting Heath and Winslow somehow,” Emil said.
“Let me help you. With Heath.”
“Are you sure—okay,” he said, stopping mid-question once he saw her face. “I could use the help, in that case.”
Chávez offered him a crooked smile. “You know me. A real femme fatale.”
“Nope, sorry, that role is taken. If anyone around here is a femme fatale, it’s Miriam,” Lenny assured her. “In the most literal sense of ‘fatal.’”
“I don’t know if that was a compliment, but I choose to accept it as one,” Miriam said.
“Oh, it most definitely was,” Lenny said cheerfully. And then a small miracle occurred: Miriam smiled at him. Seated between them on the bench, Jake furrowed his brow in puzzlement.
“Right,” Emil said. “So that’s the plan for now. Dax, tell us what you found.”
“If I hadn’t spent three months being Lange’s beleaguered assistant, I’m not sure I could read these notes at all. He writes for himself and only himself. No real sentences and huge logical leaps. But here’s what I got,” Dax started. “We start with a relatively common premise, although one that’s not accepted by everyone. The Nowhere is unfolded space.”
“In addition to being a membrane between realities?” Emil asked.
Dax nodded. “Think of it this way. There are more dimensions than we can perceive—ten, according to some. We perceive three spatial dimensions, plus time, but the others are all folded up. All matter in our reality, let’s call it Reality A, is folded in a particular way. But in another reality, let’s go wild and call it Reality B, everything is folded differently. In between these two realities is the central hub of unfolded space that we call the Nowhere.
“Folded matter likes to remain folded. It’s more stable. That’s why, if you’re a normal human being, having a runner drag you into the Nowhere is miserable. Being unfolded is not fucking fun. But runners can handle unfolded space just fine. The question has always been why.”
“Isn’t that more of a question for people in biology, like Heath and Winslow?” Chávez asked.
“Everything is physics,” Dax said airily. “What I found in Lange’s notes can’t really be called a hypothesis, but it’s speculation. As we know, Lange thinks it’s ancestry. In his notes, he specifies that he thinks runners are created when one parent crosses over from another reality and has sex with a local. Remember how I said that Reality A and Reality B have different foldings? The resulting child has both in their body. One foot in each reality. It gives them access to the unfolded space of the Nowhere.”
“So runners can pass into the Nowhere because they have something in their bodies that’s similar?” Emil said.
“Yes,” Dax said. “They can withstand being unfolded and refolded better than the rest of us.”
“And why is it possible to turn some of us into runners, but not others?”
“Ancestry again. Born runners most likely have parents from different realities. But you can imagine a born runner who settles down in Reality A and starts a family with somebody from Reality A, so their children have less of Reality B’s particular folding in their bodies. And if those children stay local, their children have even less of it,” Dax said. “The heredity of it isn’t perfectly regular and predictable. But according to Lange, through his help, Heath and Winslow have stumbled on a way to increase the amount of differently folded matter in someone’s body, if there’s any to begin with. That is to say, if someone had a runner ancestor.”
“So it was my great-grandma!” Lenny said, beaming at Dax. “Glad to know I’m on the same page as one of the most brilliant people alive. Oh, and Lange, too.”
It was easy to make Dax blush.
Chávez raised her mug. “And here’s to Ms. Alice Desjardins and her mysterious ways.”
“So that means she—or rather, one of my great-great-grandparents was… really not from around here,” Lenny said.
Dax nodded. “And every born runner we know has a parent from some other reality. Lange theorized that some people fall through—those are his words. That sometimes there’s a weak spot in the membrane between realities and someone crosses over by accident. He actually thought accidental crossings were common, but survival was rare. Anyway, if the accidental-crossing survivor has a child with a local, that child can cross over on purpose.”
What would Kit think of that? He hated being asked about his absent biological family. Emil would be hesitant to bring it up, even though it might interest him.
“I think,” Dax continued, “and I’m not reciting Lange’s notes anymore, these are my own thoughts—that what went wrong for Lange was this. He only had the example of runners to go on, and they make it look easy. He thought all he needed was access to the Nowhere. A door. But crossing the Nowhere has two steps. First, you get unfolded. Second, you get refolded. Lange managed the first step with his door, but not the second.”
“So what happened to Lange and the cats, getting stuck in the Nowhere, that could happen to any of us who walk through the door,” Emil said. “Except the runners.”
“Yes. We can all walk through the door into the Nowhere. Crossing the threshold back into the world—any world—is the hard part.”
“Kit saved the cat just by grabbing it and holding on,” Emil said. “Maybe the solution will be that simple for Lange, too.”
“I’m guessing there’s nothing in there that will help us close the door, or else you’d have said so by now,” Lenny said.
Dax nodded. “We’ll have to think on that.”
“What does this mean for Heath and Winslow’s experiments on us? If they haven’t worked already, they won’t?”
“Oh, Lange had a lot to say about that,” Dax said. “Once he had the idea that what makes a runner is a combination of matter from Reality A and Reality B, Lange got interested in Heath and Winslow’s work. And by interested, I mean ‘judgmental.’ But anyway, according to him, you put enough Reality B matter in a Reality A resident and you should end up with a runner. Ideally, the matter will be something like bone marrow. It makes blood cells. It’s generative.”
“Being paranoid and kind of a jerk, I’m guessing Lange didn’t share ideas with either of them,” Emil said. “Because we all love getting months and months of regular injections and mystery pills.”
“And x-rays and every other kind of scan,” Lenny said.
“Don’t forget all the peeing in cups,” Chávez joked. “That’s my favorite.”
“As far as I can tell, he didn’t share the idea,” Dax said. “But bone marrow transplants aren’t exactly pleasant. And since I just pointed out that marrow is ideal because it’s generative, you’re all invited to think for a second on which kinds of cells are most generative.”
“Eggs,” Jake said. “And sperm.”
Everyone grimaced, but it only lasted a second before the comments and questions started.
“Well, they’ve never asked me for that kind of sample, at least,” Lenny said.
“If a woman is pregnant with a runner, does she get runner abilities for the period of gestation?” Chávez asked.
“Should we assume Quint Services is doing fucked-up things to embryos in some part of this facility?” Miriam asked.
“Back on topic,” Emil said. “Lange might not have shared this idea of putting matter from born runners into normal people to give them abilities, but it didn’t stop Heath and Winslow from kidnapping born runners. We can assume they came to their own conclusions.”
“I wasn’t quite finished,” Dax said, a note of apology in their tone. “For now, there’s just one more thing I have to tell you. Do you know what a prion is?”
“A misfolded protein,” Jake said. “When they come into contact with other proteins, they cause those proteins to misfold as well. It’s the cause of Mad Cow Disease.”
“Yes,” Dax said. “Lange wrote about something he calls dimensional prions. Like misfolded proteins, except they contain folded space. If they come into contact with matter that is folded differently, they alter its folding to match their own.”
“Are these theoretical?” Emil asked.
Dax took a breath. “No. Lange made some in his lab.”
“I sense an ‘and,’” Emil said.
“He thinks Heath and Winslow stole them.”
“They’re using them on us,” Lenny guessed. “Somehow, that’s what made me a runner.”
“A bone marrow transplant would be a lot more straightforward,” Jake said.
“The dimensional prions work faster than that, in theory. And there’s no hospitalization required, just an injection,” Dax said.
“Isn’t there a problem with prions, though? The Mad Cow problem where they change the folding of everything?” Jake asked. “So eventually, a person with dimensional prions from Reality B isn’t a runner anymore. They’re just a regular Reality B person.”
Emil was seated on the bench across from Lenny, so he had a good view of his disconcerted expression, his brown eyes wide behind his glasses.
Edge of Nowhere Page 16