“I tried to pay her, you know. She fed me and I said ‘where do you wanna go?’ and Zin looked at me, like… I don’t know. My whole life, nobody has ever looked at me like that. Like I was the best and the worst thing that ever happened to them all at once, like I’d broken her heart and put it back together again all in one sentence. And I’ll never forget what she said. ‘Sweetheart, I’ve already been everywhere.’”
Kit stopped. He hadn’t meant to imitate Zin’s slow, honeyed speech, but it was impossible to imagine that sentence in anyone else’s voice. The words lingered in the darkness, their presence another kind of blanket.
After a moment, Kit continued, “I got worried right after she said it, because I knew I couldn’t pay her any other way, but she just smiled and said, ‘I’m happy right here. Are you happy?’ and I was so stunned I don’t even remember what I said, but I guess it was yes. I ended up staying there for years.”
“I’m glad you found her,” Emil said. “She didn’t tell me that part of the story.”
“She probably doesn’t know it,” Kit said. “I never told her how important it was to me. How important she was.”
Emil’s arm was a solid weight against him, giving him a firm hug. “She knows.”
“Still,” Kit said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I first got stranded here. That I was going to die without ever having said ‘I love you’ to Zin or Louann or… anyone.”
If Emil noticed Kit’s awkward pause, he was too polite to comment. “You’ll get a chance to tell them.”
“You know I’ve never taken them anywhere?” Kit asked. “Not Paris or London or Inland New York. They’ve never asked. Not even to see what it’s like in the Nowhere.”
“Maybe they’d rather not know,” Emil said, sounding like he wished the same for himself. “And if they know how the Shaws treated you, I’m sure they’d never ask.”
“I never told them. Only you.”
“Like I said before,” Emil said. “She knows.”
Sweetheart, I’ve already been everywhere. Somehow, Zin had figured it out just from looking at him. He was so grateful he’d never had to tell her. Maybe he’d taken her perception for granted. Just because somebody already knew something didn’t mean they didn’t want to hear it said out loud.
“Thank you for telling me, Kit,” Emil said. It was fully dark in their tent now.
“Thanks for… you know, jumping into an unknown rift in space to save my life, being stupidly brave, perfect, whatever,” Kit said. Emil shifted beneath him, like something Kit had said made him uncomfortable. “It’s a bad deal for you, really.”
Emil squeezed him again and kissed the top of his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not.”
21
Not Quite Familiar
Emil woke a few hours later to Kit whispering his name in his ear. They’d separated in their sleep and were now side by side.
“It’s so cold,” Kit complained, his voice sleepy and muffled. “Come back over here. I don’t understand how I didn’t die last night. Thought I was going to.”
There was a thought more chilling than the air. Emil spooned him and Kit snuggled against him.
“You’re perfect,” Kit said, and Emil recoiled. That word again. “How come you flinch every time I call you perfect? It’s not an insult.”
“I’m not perfect,” Emil said. “And my last two partners told me I was—just before they left me.”
“Shit,” Kit said. “Who would leave you? What was wrong with them?”
“According to them, something was wrong with me,” Emil said. “They didn’t think I loved them. Rose slept with someone else. And Lucas felt like I was choosing my career over our relationship. I think that was what drove Rose away, too—and it was a little bit true.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. I don’t miss them, although sometimes I wish I could have explained to them why I am this way, but if they’d wanted to know, they’d both had years of living with me to find out.” Emil stopped. Only a few days ago, Kit had been opposed to sharing their life stories. He’d divulged parts of his past earlier, but Emil didn’t want to presume. It was hard enough to tell the story to someone who actually wanted to hear it.
“I want to know,” Kit said after a pause. “If you want to tell me.”
Emil let out a breath. He wanted to put a leash on his hopes and hold them back. He couldn’t read too much into Kit wanting to hear one story. “I do want to tell you, but maybe some other time. You should rest. We’re, uh, not out of the woods yet.”
“Nerd,” Kit said with what Emil hoped was affection. “You might as well tell me now. The suspense will keep me awake.”
From the way Kit wriggled against him, if Emil didn’t tell him the story, he might ask for a different kind of entertainment, and that was a far worse idea. They needed rest. Emil was amazed, after all he’d put himself through, that his body could even respond. Kit gave him all sorts of reckless impulses, from casual sex to risking his life.
His last reckless impulse was paying off so far, but he silenced that voice in his head. Kit had finally opened up about himself, and now he wanted to know something about Emil. Too bad that something would be a big disappointment.
“It’s not much of a story,” Emil warned.
“Good, it’ll put me to sleep.”
“When I was about thirteen, I drove my parents to desperation. I skipped school constantly—to shoplift and smoke weed and play video games. When I did go to school, I talked back and got detention. My grades were dismal. I figured out every possible way to sneak out of the house at night. Anything they didn’t want me doing, I was determined to do.”
“Thirteen-year-old you sounds way cooler than present you,” Kit interrupted.
“He wasn’t,” Emil said, irritated.
“Alright, alright, keep telling the story,” Kit said. “But wait—you had parents. Weren’t they… involved?”
Kit didn’t sound heartbroken, but that pause broke Emil’s heart all the same. All of Kit’s adolescent bad behavior had been driven by a need to survive. No one had been watching out for him. In contrast, everything in life had been handed to Emil, and he’d spit on it. He closed his eyes as if he could stave off the guilt. His poor parents. “They were involved. They didn’t want to be strict with us, since their parents had been strict with them. They wanted us to have dialogue. In theory, it was a great idea. My adolescent self didn’t want any part in it. Eventually, I forced them to impose rules on me, which I then applied all of my most determined efforts to breaking.
“Anyway, at that age, if I could have convinced anyone to have sex with me—or even kiss me—I’m sure I would have been doing that as often as possible. Probably not safely or wisely or even discreetly. But I hadn’t had my growth spurt yet, or discovered personal hygiene, so it was a lost cause. Braces, pimples, bad facial hair, baby fat—you name it, I had it.”
“Aww,” Kit said. “I wish this story came with pictures.”
“I don’t.”
“This is the most endearing thing you’ve ever told me, and it warms my heart to think of you as a chubby adolescent boy with authority problems.”
“Stop.”
Kit must have heard something in Emil’s voice that alarmed him. “Okay.”
“It gets a lot less endearing,” Emil said. “I think part of the reason I was such a bad kid—and this isn’t an excuse—is that I knew I could never live up to my sister, so it seemed better not to try.”
Even when he’d decided to tell this story, even when he was committed, it was still hard. He paused. Kit was probably making the connection between this story and then moment in the kitchen when he’d asked Emil if he had any siblings. Emil had hesitated.
“Zora was good at school, good at sports, good at music, good at making everyone happy. She even loved me. She was a star and I was the family fuck-up—not just of the two of us, but out of all the cousins—and w
e still got along great. Zora made me feel like I was great company, just the way I was. She never said I had ‘potential’ or any of the other things my parents and teachers were always saying to try to turn me around in life. She just liked being with me. She didn’t like to shoplift or steal, but she’d play Galaxy Race with me. I always won, and we’d laugh about how it was the only area of life where she came in second. That might sound like a mean joke to you, but it never felt that way between us.
“Anyway, around this time, my delinquent friends and I got into real.”
“Holy shit, you weren’t kidding,” Kit said.
At last, Emil had managed to convince Kit that he’d been a true fuck-up. Real was a drug not even fearless Nowhere runners would mess with. “No,” Emil said, shaking his head. “I wasn’t. I took it twice, had a bad experience, and swore off it. But the dealer, a guy we all called Greens who was a few years older than me and who’d dropped out of school—he was good-looking. I don’t know if I understood then why I wanted to be around him so much, but I did. And then one day when it was pouring rain and Greens was too busy to give me a ride, I messaged Zora to come pick me up. And they met.”
“Oh,” Kit said. “Shit.”
“It’s so stupid, you know? I remember being mad then, that Greens had seen my pretty sister and now he wasn’t ever going to look at me again. As if I’d had a chance. And everybody loved Zora, so of course Greens loved her. I guess she was looking for an escape from something, because they started going out. Even though I was jealous, it was kind of awesome at first. My perfect, good-at-everything sister and her cool, older boyfriend were letting me hang out with them. I saw Zora smoke for the first time ever and it blew my little mind. That went on for a few months.
“And then one night, Zora drove Greens’s car home. She got pulled over because one of the taillights was out, but the backseat was full of his stash of real. When the cops called and said they were holding my sister, I remember feeling just… totally bewildered. My parents were, too. It was supposed to happen to me. I was the slacker, the screw-up, the one who ended up in jail. We went down to see her and I had to look at my sister through the glass and I burst into tears.
“You know what she told me over the phone? She said, ‘You know what this means, right? I’m better at being the fuck-up than you. I win—first place in everything except Galaxy Race.’ And I tried to laugh, but it came out like a sob. She kept right on talking. ‘You have to be the good one now, Emil. Mom and Dad can’t have two fuck-ups for kids.’ God, I was so scared. Meanwhile, Zora was a seventeen-year-old in jail and she was just sitting there, calmly mentoring me. It was so lonely and strange at the house without her around. She wrote me letters while she was in there and I slowly pulled my shit together. All the energy I’d been spending on breaking rules, I applied elsewhere. My parents telling me to pay attention in school and make something of myself had never worked, but for some reason, my sister’s letters and calls from prison did. She’d always wanted to go to space, but she’d never be selected with a criminal record, so I decided I’d go for her. I joined the Orbit Guard. For her. Can you imagine?”
“No,” Kit said. “But the way you told the story, I’m glad she’s only in jail and not a real addict on life support or dead in a ditch or something.”
“She’s not in jail anymore. She did two years, went back and got her high-school diploma, wrote dazzling college application essays about her time in jail, and became a biomedical researcher studying the effects of real on the brain. Meanwhile, I’m stranded in another reality and when we get home, I’ll be out of a job.”
“So she went to jail and you’re still the fuck-up,” Kit said, amused.
“She’s prettier than me, too,” Emil said.
“I’d like to know what kind of family this is where you’re the ugly one,” Kit said. “Actually, can I ask you a dumb question? I hate when people ask me about my name, or where I’m from, but I’m so curious. Emil Singh is an unusual combination of names. Why is your name Emil?”
“That’s easy. My mom is a comparative literature professor. Zora and I are named after writers she loved,” Emil said. “She wanted my name to be ‘Émile’ but my dad insisted they anglicize it. Honestly, I’m amazed she conceded even that much. Sometimes people ask me why she didn’t pick famous Desi writers ‘to go with the last name’ but I’ve never known how to answer that.”
He didn’t ask a question, but it hung in the air.
“I don’t know what name I was born with, or where I’m from,” Kit said. “People at the orphanage always called me ‘Kit’ as a nickname, maybe because I’ve always been small, and it stuck. Zin calls me ‘Christopher’ as a joke sometimes, but that’s not on any official documents. Not that I have any.”
“So you were just… found? And nobody knew anything about you?”
Kit nodded. “They wrote my date of birth as January first, figuring I was maybe six months old when I was left at the Home in June. Obviously I don’t remember any of it. Do you know how annoying it is when people ask ‘no, but where are you really from?’ and you genuinely don’t know?”
“It’s annoying even when you do know the answer, since nobody ever wants to believe me when I say Schaumburg, Illinois,” Emil said. “So I guess it’s worse for you.”
“I always just say Nashville,” Kit said. “But I’m not officially anything. I’m from nowhere.”
Emil didn’t comment on the pun, if it was one. “You’re not American? I guess you did say you had no official documents.”
“As you can imagine, the care at the Home wasn’t that great. Some of us slipped through the cracks. It’s sort of what I’ve spent my life doing, if you think about it,” Kit said. “Zin and Louann pulled together what they could over the years, but mostly we learned to stay out of trouble and do things in an unofficial, cash-up-front kind of way.”
“You haven’t done a great job of staying out of trouble.”
“Neither have you,” Kit said.
“True,” Emil said. “You know the thing you said, about being from nowhere… Lange has this theory about how runners are born. He thinks sometimes people cross through the Nowhere by accident, end up in a reality that’s not their own, and then somehow survive long enough to have a child with a local.”
“And that kid grows up to be a runner,” Kit guessed.
“He hypothesized that crossing through the Nowhere was hard on people who weren’t runners, and that a lot of those people died young,” Emil said, a note of apology in his voice. “Or possibly they crossed back through, and that’s why so many runners don’t know both of their parents.”
“Laila’s mom died when she was little,” Kit said. “She remembers her, though. But she never knew her dad. And her mom had people in Detroit, you know, relatives and friends. And there are records of her. Her dad just…”
“Appeared out of nowhere?” Emil suggested.
“And then disappeared,” Kit said. There was a beat of silence, and then he sighed. “It used to make me jealous. That she got to know her mom, at least.”
“I’m sorry you never got to know yours,” Emil said.
“Yeah,” Kit said. He sighed again. “I guess one of my parents was from really far away, if this is true.”
“Yeah. Not the kind of place you get on a plane to go visit for three weeks every summer,” Emil said. “Although I guess in your case, you wouldn’t need the plane.”
“Do you think they were… human?”
“Yes,” Emil said. “And so are you.”
There was a pause, and then Kit said, “We should sleep. We have more trouble to get into.” It was too dark to see, and Kit was facing away from him, but Emil was sure he was smiling. “How are we gonna get out of this?”
It was a funny moment to use we. This wasn’t Kit’s mess. I’m not part of your team. He wasn’t obligated to clean up. And Emil didn’t want him in danger, not when he’d already been through so much and Zin was probably crying o
ver him right now. “You can get out as soon as we’re back. You don’t even have to take me back to Facility 17—it’s too risky, anyway. You get us back to Nashville, I’ll get myself to Quint Services, and whatever happens, I’ll deal with it.”
“Right,” Kit said. A long time passed with no sound but the uncanny, not-quite-familiar rustle and trill of the forest at night.
22
Selfish
Emil had felt better. Still, he was able to get out of bed, nudge Kit awake, and dismantle the tent. Compared to the threat of death, a little fatigue, an ache or two, and some dizziness was nothing much. Kit’s eyes were ringed with shadows, and he’d groaned in complaint when Emil had woken him, but he was upright.
“You think we can make it back?” Emil asked.
“Depends more on Lange than on me,” Kit said.
“Cross your fingers that Jake is distracting him,” Emil said, and Kit didn’t look enthusiastic about that. Emil checked their campsite, making sure they weren’t leaving trash from another reality on the forest floor. With everything packed, he turned to Kit. “Ready when you are.”
Kit had been quiet since they’d woken. It was a contrast to all that they’d shared last night. Maybe he regretted telling Emil about his childhood.
Emil’s thoughts were cut off as Kit grabbed him and the void enveloped them. Emil had withstood the Nowhere yesterday thanks to a brief moment of having three different foldings of matter in his system, but the dimensional prion had done its work. He no longer had enough to make a difference. The Nowhere was as miserable and wrong as ever, stretching and restricting his body all at once, a mixing up of inside and outside that abstracted everything except pain.
The trip seemed longer than usual. He gasped for air when it was over, relishing the normal confines of his body and the space around it. Taking in his surroundings was the work of several long minutes. They were in a large, industrial space of some kind. Concrete floor, cinderblock walls, fluorescent light. There was a garage door behind Kit, and parked next to that was a motorcycle. Behind Emil, the corridor ended in double doors.
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