“Laila, get out,” Kit murmured. “Lenny, you too.”
Lenny had the detonator. He could blow up the whole room. He knew it, Kit knew it, and Laila knew it. Travis didn’t. But Kit wasn’t going to leave Travis in here to die, no matter how wrong things had gone between them. Kit might be a career criminal, but he wasn’t a murderer. If they were going to leave this room, Travis was going to come with them. That meant disarming him. Kit glanced at Lenny, wishing he could transfer his thoughts without speaking them aloud. Of the three of them, Lenny had the best chance of wresting that gun from Travis’s hands.
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do,” Laila said.
The distraction was perfectly timed: Travis’s gaze slid to her for just a second, but it was long enough for Lenny to tackle him. Kit heard a blast and didn’t wait to find out how wildly off Travis’s aim was. There was a bullet coming. He jumped.
15
Not a Thing
Laila would have his liver for leaving her after he’d promised not to. He hoped she would, anyway—every recent trip into the Nowhere had felt like his last.
At least this time when the ghost showed up, he expected it. Lange, he reminded himself. Not a thing, not a monster, not a ghost.
Lange hadn’t gotten that memo and he slammed into Kit with as much force as always. Kit tried to calm the panic that choked him. Lange wasn’t malicious. He wasn’t trying to kill Kit. Emil and Jake had agreed on that.
That was cold fucking comfort as they went tumbling through the void together. Kit struggled, trying to get a grip on Lange. He’d pulled that cat out of the Nowhere and it had instantly been a cat again—shouldn’t the same be possible with Lange? But Lange pushed and pulled against him wildly, fighting him and making it impossible to direct them anywhere.
Kit had chased the cat for ages, and he’d only caught it when it had chosen to come to him. It hadn’t been hard to pull the cat out of the Nowhere because the cat had let him do it. Lange wasn’t letting him do anything. Every time Kit thought he had a hold, Lange shifted and Kit was grabbing nothing. There was no logic to his actions, not that Kit could perceive. He was driven by fear. He didn’t want to submit to Kit’s hold on him, but he didn’t want to be alone in the Nowhere, either. He beat against Kit with everything he had. Maybe Emil and Jake had been wrong. Maybe he was trying to kill Kit. How long had it been? How far had they fallen? If Kit stepped back into the world, where would he be?
Too tired to fight any longer, Kit let Lange send them sailing through the Nowhere. When he dropped back into the world, he landed on his back in something cold and wet.
16
Complicated
Emil spent his afternoon in a medical exam room with Winslow, answering every question in meticulous detail and at great length, letting Winslow prod him and take all the samples he wanted. He tried not to think of how Chávez might be distracting Heath, and he especially tried not to think of what Heath and Winslow needed distracting from. Was Kit okay? Had the rescue been successful? Would he hear the explosion when it happened?
“What’s this cut between your shoulders?” Winslow asked, parting the back of his hospital gown and peeling back the tape and gauze with no gentleness. “It looks newer than your black eye.”
“I hurt myself in the gym,” Emil said. He twisted around to face Winslow. He could have answered most of the man’s questions in a conference room, with both of them fully dressed, but Winslow had wanted him here, vulnerable. Powerless. He’d put himself in a position of authority. And so far, Emil had let him do it. He’d undressed and sat calmly and answered all the questions and breathed in and out when he was told to.
Winslow’s watery blue stare said he didn’t believe a word of what Emil had just said, but he didn’t press Emil for more information.
“Mr. Singh,” he said, at length. “I realize there has been some tension in the air since the incident, and I’d like your opinion on how we could resolve it. There are ten weeks remaining in the experiment, and assuming all goes well, your team is supposed to run a mission after that. I don’t want to live under a dark cloud of suspicion for ten weeks, and I assume you and your team don’t either. What can we do?”
Stop kidnapping and torturing runners.
“I think the team would like more transparency,” Emil said. He’d spoken many similar, suitably professional and polite sentences on behalf of his team in the past. The words had never tasted so much like dirt. But he hadn’t heard anything like an explosion yet, and that meant the mission wasn’t over. “They were unhappy not to be told about the incident, and I can’t say I was happy to be kept from communicating with them in the aftermath.”
“That was for your safety. You had a concussion.”
“Surely some accommodation could have been made,” Emil said.
“Perhaps you’re right.”
“And I think it’s clear to all of us that Dr. Lange didn’t return to Earth for personal time,” Emil said. “How can there be trust without honesty?”
“An excellent question,” Winslow said. “Perhaps you’d like to be a bit more honest about how you’ve spent the past two days.”
“First, I think I’m owed an explanation of why you lied to my team about what happened to Lange,” Emil said. He was still perfectly calm. He might be half undressed and seated in the exam chair while Winslow stared him down, but when it came down to it, they were two men alone in a room, and one of them was sixty-something and never went to the gym. Emil could have his power back whenever he wanted it.
“Ah,” Winslow said, as if he’d just come to the same conclusion. “The situation is delicate, you understand. We didn’t want to alarm anyone.”
“My team signed up to travel to other realities. They’re not easily alarmed.”
Winslow turned away and began to open drawers and rifle through them. The gesture betrayed nervousness. If he’d given up on appearing collected, he must be looking for something he could use against Emil, a drug or a weapon of some kind. As casually as he could, Emil stood up. He was ready for anything Winslow could do to him.
Neither of them was ready for the sound of the explosion.
It was muffled by the wall of rock between them and the secret room. On Earth, they might have mistaken it for thunder. But they were not on Earth. Emil could see Winslow’s face in profile going from fear to shock to outrage. However the rescue mission had gone, this moment signaled the end of Emil’s career. Before Winslow could turn, Emil grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back.
“You’re coming with me.”
The greenhouse supply closet wasn’t an ideal place to hold prisoners, but his team had blown up the only ideal place to hold prisoners on the asteroid, and Emil was grateful for it. He brought Winslow to the closet, where Chávez was waiting with Heath. Heath was furious. Chávez looked bored. She tossed Emil a pair of handcuffs, and he cuffed one of Winslow’s wrists, threaded the cuffs around part of the heavy metal shelves, then cuffed the other.
“This is mutiny,” Winslow was saying. He’d been spouting some version of this the whole time Emil had marched him down the hall. “You’ll all be fired. You’ll be ruined.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Chávez said. She’d cuffed Heath to the other end of the shelves. Emil wondered what kind of distraction she’d provided, and then hated himself for wondering. Chávez had volunteered to provide a distraction, and she’d done it, and that was enough. When she looked at him, her usual smile was gone. “I’ll stay with them. Go find the others.”
They were in Lange’s room. Dax had hacked the lock on his door earlier so they could feed Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar after Kit left, and then it had seemed useful to have an empty room. Emil felt his pulse pick up as he walked. He’d get to see Kit again. He wasn’t supposed to be excited about that. Kit was upset with him. But if they could just see each other again, if Kit would just look at him, maybe they could—but no. Emil quashed that train of thought. He and his team were rescuing prisoners and attempting mutin
y. He was too busy to worry about what one prickly, irritating, and bizarrely alluring twenty-one-year-old criminal might think about him.
And yet his heart kept beating faster.
The team wasn’t in Lange’s room. It was Dax, Miriam, and on the bed, that runner who’d tried to take Kit away. He was unconscious. Dax had their arms crossed and Miriam had her hands on her hips. “We should tie him up. It can’t hurt.”
“It won’t do any good,” Dax was saying. “Sedation is the only way to keep a runner in one place.”
“Hi,” Emil said. “What’s going on?”
“Things went a little bit sideways in there,” Dax said.
“Caleb is treating Lenny and the other two runners in one of the exam rooms,” Miriam said. “Jake is with them. But anyway, this piece of shit tried to kill them, so Lenny tackled him, hit his head, and took his gun. But they didn’t want to leave him in the room to die.”
Miriam clearly disapproved of that last decision.
“Caleb injected him with a shot of something and said he should be out for a while,” Dax added.
“Chávez and I, uh, subdued Heath and Winslow and left them in the greenhouse supply closet,” Emil said. He wanted to ask where Kit was. Why hadn’t either of them mentioned him? Miriam had said the other two runners but Emil couldn’t tell which ones she meant. “She had handcuffs from somewhere.”
“Aidan filched them from the secret room,” Miriam said. “He’s a smart one.”
“When they got back from the secret room, we all stumbled on Chávez and Heath having one hell of an argument,” Dax said. The tips of their ears were red. “It was… personal.”
“You could have heard it from Mars. Didn’t seem staged, either,” Miriam observed. The two of them exchanged a glance, then looked at Emil, and he put on what he hoped was a convincingly bewildered who-could-possibly-have-guessed expression. “Anyway, Aidan gave Chávez the handcuffs then.”
“So we’re watching this runner for the moment,” Dax said.
“It’ll be challenging to keep him hostage,” Miriam said.
“Ethically challenging, too,” Dax said.
“He shot Lenny!” Miriam shouted, throwing her hands up.
“Whoa, I think you two might have buried the lede,” Emil said. “Lenny got shot?”
“He’ll be fine,” Dax said. “Caleb is taking care of him. Lenny even said he thought the gun went off by accident when he tackled Travis.”
“Bullshit,” Miriam said. “This asshole jumped in there and pulled a gun on them. It’s not an accident that he threatened their lives. And Lenny only said that so I wouldn’t murder this piece of shit on the spot.”
Dax and Emil exchanged a glance.
“And it… worked?” Emil asked. In mission simulations, Miriam followed orders as well as the rest of his team, but orders came from him, and he made them as unambiguous as possible. Lenny saying it was an accident wasn’t an order, not by a long shot. Emil had never known Miriam to be sensitive to other people’s requests.
Miriam gestured sharply at Travis, unconscious but alive in Lange’s bed. That hadn’t been the point of Emil’s question—he’d been far more curious about why Miriam perceived Lenny saying it was an accident as please don’t murder him, and why she’d listen if she didn’t believe the accident part—but he decided to let it go.
“Well, this whole thing is a challenge,” Emil said. He’d made a plan for the rescue, but had failed to think through the consequences of staging a mutiny and occupation of the facility. He didn’t say that out loud, though. They needed him to be in charge, and he’d already expressed too much doubt. “If you’re keeping an eye on him, then I’ll go check in with the others.”
Emil was only in the hallway for a few minutes, but it was enough time for his foolish heart to start hoping again. Maybe Kit was one of the other two runners that Miriam had mentioned. Maybe one of the others had simply gone home. But when he stepped into the exam room, Kit wasn’t among its occupants. Instead he saw Caleb bandaging a wound on Lenny’s arm, Jake trying to stand off to the side as unobtrusively as a man of his size could, and two young people sitting on the ground, slumped against the wall and each other, sharing a blanket. They were both wearing hospital gowns, and until this moment, Emil had forgotten that so was he. Chávez, Miriam, and Dax hadn’t mentioned it.
Emil recognized one of the people as Caleb’s friend, the agitator Aidan Blackwood, although he didn’t look much like the notorious photo of his altercation with station security. In the photo, he was wiry and wild-haired—not quite handsome but memorably sharp-featured. A victim, but one who might fight back. The young man on the floor was too thin and too pale. Even his black hair looked dull, as if they’d starved him of color as well as calories. His eyes were closed.
The young woman with her head on his shoulder looked similarly beaten down by her experience, although she wasn’t dangerously underweight like Aidan. She had light brown skin and, judging from her roots, underneath all that pink dye, her hair was black. Aidan’s head was resting on hers. Unlike him, she was awake, her brown eyes trained on Emil. She was sucking something out of a little plastic pouch and she didn’t stop to introduce herself.
This must be Kit’s friend Laila. In normal circumstances, she must be stunning. Was that why she looked familiar? Had she been an actor or a model at some point? Emil couldn’t place her, but he knew he’d seen her before.
He’d already spent too much time staring. He turned his attention to Lenny. “Miriam and Dax told me you got shot. It sounded fairly heroic, actually.”
“Y’all would’ve done the same,” Lenny said.
“It was heroic,” Caleb confirmed. “And we’re very lucky you don’t need surgery.”
Lenny grimaced at the word lucky, or maybe it was Caleb’s touch. But he didn’t comment. He focused on Emil and said, “I don’t know where Kit is. Sorry.”
As Emil was working out how to respond, Laila finally spoke up. “That little shit promised to stay with me and then he just fucking vanished.”
“He was getting shot at,” Caleb said mildly, not looking at her.
“Whatever,” Laila said. “He’d better come back soon. If he’s dead, I’ll kill him.”
It was something about her sour, flippant “whatever” that made the gears turn in Emil’s brain. Laila looked familiar because she was notorious, just like Aidan. He’d seen her picture in the media years ago, when she was the fourteen-year-old Franklin Station Bank robber.
Emil tried to keep this realization off his face. He focused instead on Laila saying he’d better come back soon. That was good news. Kit and Laila were friends. Kit didn’t want to see Emil again, but he would come back for Laila.
“Are there more of these?” Laila asked, waving the pouch in the air. “Or real food?”
“Take it slow,” Caleb advised her. “But yes, there should be more in the pack.”
“Aidan and I ate them all.” Laila nudged the empty backpack with her foot.
So much for taking it slow. Emil smiled, thinking of Kit informing Lenny that yes, he could eat all of that. “I’ll take you to the kitchen,” Emil offered. “And I’m sure we can find you some clothes and a place to rest.”
Aidan opened his eyes halfway. “I just want to sleep.”
“You can take him to my room,” Caleb said, keeping his focus on Lenny and not turning to face Aidan. “I won’t be there for a while.”
Caleb had taken the last empty room on the first floor, at the far end of the facility from Emil’s. Heath and Winslow had rooms on the second floor, as did their six lab techs. Those people represented another problem, although Emil hoped that once presented with evidence of wrongdoing, they’d come around to his point of view.
“I’ll take him,” Jake said. He’d been so quiet that Emil had almost forgotten he was in the room, as tiny as it was. “I don’t think anyone’ll give us any trouble.”
Emil nodded. “Good. And then go give Chávez a bre
ak from guard duty in the supply closet.”
Emil helped Laila to the kitchen, sat her down at the table, and rummaged through the fridge. No wonder food had been disappearing faster than normal for all those months. Heath and Winslow had been feeding Travis Alvey. And then these past few days, he’d been trying to keep Kit alive. He put a carton of orange juice on the table. “It’s looking a little ransacked in here. I’m not much of a cook, but I can handle scrambled eggs, if that sounds okay?”
“Literally any food sounds okay to me. You could offer me a whole pig and I would eat it,” she said and then drank straight from the carton. After a long gulp, she put it down and sighed. “That adrenaline wore off fast. I’m not gonna be able to run for days.”
“Aren’t you allowed to eat non-halal stuff if you’d starve otherwise?” He was guessing her reference to pork was about religion, and coming from the infamous Franklin Station Bank robber, that was a surprise. But he tried not to show it. People were multifaceted, and they could change. He started cracking eggs into a bowl and didn’t stop until the carton was empty. Eggs and meat were the hardest things to get up here, and it gave him some pleasure to give such a precious resource to Laila.
“Are you Muslim?” she asked, surprised. “And I was joking. Kit’s probably told you, we eat barbecue whenever I’m in Nashville.”
“Kit doesn’t share that kind of thing with me. And I’m not Muslim, but a lot of people in my neighborhood were, and as a kid, I asked too many questions,” Emil said, rueful. “My grandparents were Hindu. My parents are atheists. Unless you want to count academia as some kind of religion. I don’t know what I believe. The more I know about the universe, the harder it is to figure out.”
“I didn’t grow up religious, but after I got out”—Emil assumed she meant out of juvenile detention—“some people took good care of me, and they were religious. So it’s… I don’t know about the institutions, and I certainly don’t know about the divine, but I know those people. And they’re good people. I don’t follow their rules or live like they live, but sometimes I wish I did.”
Edge of Nowhere Page 18