It hurt. It hurt so much. The two Noises together, so close, so hotly shrill—it was like a sword driven through the top of my head and into my spine. It wouldn’t stop. I had to make it stop. I dived at Faraday, snatched the relay out of his hands and started fumbling with it.
“Alison, no!”
He grabbed my arm, just as my thumb found the depression on the relay’s side. Its whine cycled up into an ear-bleeding pitch as the device slipped out of my fingers, hit the ground—
And exploded, with a sound like the end of the world.
PART THREE:
TOUCHING TOMORROW
SIXTEEN (IS OVERWHELMED)
I’d felt pain before, but nothing like this. It felt like I was being eaten alive by horseflies and regurgitated one chunk at a time through a glass tube the diameter of a baby’s hair—only the tube seemed to go on forever and the horseflies never stopped biting. Long after I should have lost consciousness, the agony went on and on, my soundless shrieks ringing in my nonexistent ears. Then the tube vomited me out on the other side, and I landed in a messy heap.
For three skipped heartbeats, I thought I was dead. Then, as air shuddered into my lungs and a world of unfamiliar colors, scents, and sounds crashed in upon me, I wanted to be.
“Alison! Are you all right?” Even whispering, Faraday’s voice scalded my mouth like hot cocoa. His every breath was a tidal roar, and my head ached with the slamming of his heart. I felt the texture of his clothing as surely as though I were wearing it myself—but worse, I could sense the shape/taste/smell of every other surface, every object, in the entire room. The brushed metal walls. The stacks of gray foam packing crates. The relay fixed to the ceiling above our heads, still blaring its tangerine scream . . .
And I could feel energy. Pulsing inside the walls, vibrating through the floor. An intricate web of connections stretching out as far as my senses could reach, like the biggest computer network on Earth.
This could not be happening. It wasn’t real. I was having a complete mental breakdown somewhere in Red Ward, and everything that had happened to me in the past twenty-four hours was a schizophrenic delusion. I let out a little sob and covered my face with my hands.
Faraday reached for me, but I rolled away, curling in on myself like a withered leaf. The lightest touch was more than I could endure right now. All I could do was block my ears, hide my eyes, and pray for the agony to stop.
Fortunately, Faraday seemed to understand. He slid away from me and sat with his back against one of the crates, giving me the space I needed. I huddled on the floor, breathing shal-lowly, terrified that I’d be stuck this way forever, that this unbearable awareness would never end—
But just before the panic could engulf me completely, the Noise from Faraday’s transmitter stopped. The relay went quiet. And the chaos of my senses began to subside. My limbs felt weak and shaky, as though I had just wakened from a long illness, but in another few minutes I was able to sit up again. And when Faraday touched my shoulder I felt no pain, no overpowering impulse to fight or flee. I turned to him and buried my face against his chest.
He stroked my hair, murmuring words I didn’t recognize, and then pulled back to look at me. “What happened?” he asked.
“It was . . . like it was after Tori died. Disintegrated. Only worse.” I drew a slow breath and let it out again. “But I’m all right now.”
And I was, but it was the strangest feeling. I could still sense everything around me, a consciousness broader and deeper than I’d ever experienced before. I could have walked through the storage room blindfolded without hitting a single crate and then described the contents of every one. I could tell that Faraday was frowning even though my eyes were shut; I could smell his worry, his guilt, his uncertainty. But the constant stream of information didn’t overwhelm me anymore. Instead of struggling against the current, I felt like I was flowing with it.
But what had made the difference? Had something changed inside me, or was it some other factor beyond my control?
“I need to get you home,” said Faraday. “You can’t stay here.” He let me go and climbed to his feet, looking up at the relay above us. “The question is, can we reverse the process from here, or . . . ?”
I knew he was only trying to help me. But the prospect of taking that agonizing journey again, especially so soon, was unbearable. “Wait,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He’d already started dragging crates across the floor, stacking them into a makeshift ladder.
I got up awkwardly, nerves still buzzing with remembered pain, and looked around. Apart from us, there was nothing to see but the boxes and the relay. No windows, no portholes, no obvious way to prove that we weren’t just in some bunker or storage shed back on Earth. Yet if Faraday’s story was true, we’d just been reduced to a stream of information and transmitted through a dimensional rift to rematerialize in some far-off region of the universe. And after what I’d just experienced, it was hard to disbelieve him.
“Someone’s cut off the connection to the central computer,” said Faraday, climbing back down. “I’ll need to reestablish the link. Stay here.” He jumped off the last crate and headed for the exit.
“Wait,” I said, louder this time.
He stopped. “What is it?”
“I know I shouldn’t be here,” I said. “I know this is all a gigantic mess, and you’d like to fix it as soon as you can. But this is your chance to prove everything you’ve told me about yourself. Aren’t you going to at least show me around?”
Faraday looked pained. “For someone with paranormal abilities,” he said, “you’re the most skeptical person I’ve ever met.” He came back to me and took my hand. “As it happens, I would love to show you around. But I’m not sure that would be a good idea. It’s going to be enough of a shock for my fellow scientists to see me again, without introducing them to you as well. And if they find out I’ve brought you here, there could be . . . difficulties.”
“You mean,” I said, “they might dissect me in the interests of science?”
I’d been joking, however feebly, but Faraday’s grip on my fingers tightened. “No,” he said. “Believe me, Alison, I won’t let them do that to you.”
The implication that they might try was enough to send eels down my spine. Suddenly the idea of staying here in the storage room, or whatever it was, didn’t sound so bad after all. “Okay,” I said.
Faraday bent and kissed my forehead. Then he tugged the door, and with a metallic crack, it popped open. I caught only the briefest glimpse of the corridor beyond—narrow and dimly lit, lined with doors on either side—before he slipped through and shut it again, leaving me alone.
I sat down on one of the crates and tried to be patient, but after a few minutes I was up and pacing. What if something happened to Faraday, and he couldn’t get back to me? What if the other scientists decided they didn’t trust him, and shut him up in a cell somewhere? I could be stuck here for days, and nobody would know. I could die of thirst before anyone found me. . . .
And that was the paranoia talking, which was a bad sign. I’d already missed my evening pill, and my medication was still sitting on my night table at home. In another few hours, I’d be shaking and nauseated if Faraday didn’t get me back to Sudbury in time.
But if he did manage to get the relay to work, I’d have to suffer through that horrible journey all over again . . . and compared to that, withdrawal didn’t seem so bad after all.
I sat down and got up again several times before I couldn’t bear the silence anymore. I went to the door and pressed my ear against it, listening with all my senses. All seemed quiet. I grabbed the door handle and pulled.
The clunk of the mechanism made me cringe, but it opened easily enough. Before me stretched the same door-lined hallway I’d seen when Faraday left—still silent, still empty, still bland as porridge. But now I could see there was also a second corridor running perpendicular to the first, curving gently away in both directions. I stepped over the thr
eshold, the door of the storage room swinging closed behind me. . . .
And naturally, locking me out. I spent a futile moment pushing and pulling at the handle, then rested my forehead against the wall and let out a little moan of despair at my own idiocy.
I was still cursing myself and wondering where else I could hide when something shifted in my awareness. About ten meters to my left, just around the curve, another door had cracked open, sending air currents swirling along the corridor in ribbons of peach-tinted warmth and periwinkle cool.
Faraday coming back? But no, the smell was all wrong for that, and the shape in my mind wasn’t right either. It smelled like blood and sweat and the burnt-coffee stench of anger, with an undertone of something metallic. Like a weapon.
And it was heading toward me.
I backed away down the right-hand corridor, too distracted to watch where I was going. Which was how I tripped over something large and warm lying across my path, and then fell on top of it.
Not it. Him.
“Faraday!” I gasped, turning him over. His eyes were shut, his chest rising and falling slowly. He didn’t seem to be injured, but he was definitely unconscious. I ran my fingers along his neck and found a swelling just beneath his jaw, as though something had stung him. “Faraday, wake—”
Someone grabbed me by the shoulder, twisting me off balance and slamming me down. I fell hard, breath whooshing out of my lungs, as my attacker shoved my face into the floor and dropped a knee onto my spine. I was still struggling to get away when something bit into my neck with a serpentine hiss, and I blacked out.
. . .
I woke to the taste of stale marshmallows, feeling like a moose had kicked me in the head. My mouth was a drought, and my stomach churned. For a moment, I could hardly bear to open my eyes, in case I found myself back at Pine Hills.
But I wasn’t in Red Ward, or at least it didn’t look like it. I was lying on a spongy sort of mattress in a room with dust-gray walls, facing a rectangular alcove that might have once been a window but was now opaquely black. Fighting dizziness, I turned over. . . .
And there she was, sitting cross-legged in front of the door, looking like a rebellious angel. She was wearing the same lacy sweater and blue jeans in which I’d last seen her, but her nose had a crook in it that hadn’t been there before, and the hollows beneath her eyes were dark with bruises.
“You broke my nose, you know,” said Tori Beaugrand.
“I’m . . . sorry,” I said, so hoarse that I could hardly get out the words. The relief of seeing Tori alive, of knowing without a doubt that I hadn’t killed her, was incredible. And yet to find her here like this, when I’d only just begun to consider the possibility that she might not be dead after all . . . it was hard to believe she wasn’t just part of some elaborate hallucination. Especially since she wasn’t making the Noise.
“Apology not accepted,” Tori said. “Because, as it turns out, you popped an artery and I just about bled to death. But I’ll give you the chance to make it up to me.” She unfolded herself and got to her feet. “Getting me back home would be a good start.”
Home. I sucked in my breath. “Faraday. Is he all right? Where is he?”
“Your boyfriend?” The last word was lemon-iced with sarcasm. “Don’t worry, he’s fine. After he finished tearing me a new one for using sedatives without a license, he got tired of waiting for you to wake up and went off to look for an antidote.”
Faraday, losing his temper? I was sorry to have missed that. But if he’d felt comfortable enough to leave me alone with Tori, the two of them must have come to an understanding. “So . . . you talked to him, then?” I said. “How much did he tell you?”
“Pretty much everything,” Tori replied, her tone casual although the taut line of her shoulders was anything but. “He kind of had to, because I was threatening to smash his head in with my tool kit if he didn’t.”
This conversation was not going anything like I expected. “Your . . . what?”
She nodded at a gray mesh bag lying beside the door. “I got so bored after the first couple of hours, I was going to start climbing the walls if I didn’t do something. So I’ve been collecting whatever tools I could find lying around. I figured if I could learn how to use them, I might be able to break into the rest of this place.”
“You mean you haven’t talked to anyone, or seen anyone, all this time? You’ve been alone until now?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m not sure if I’m a prisoner or a lab rat or just stuck in quarantine, but anyway I’ve had enough of it. I’ve been here about eighteen hours, and—”
“What?”
Tori’s expression was almost sympathetic. “I forgot to tell you that part,” she said. “For you, it’s been months since we saw each other. But for me, it’s been less than a day.”
Until that moment, the idea that time might be moving differently here than it did on the other side of the rift had never occurred to me. My first impulse was to deny it—but how could I? The bruises under Tori’s eyes were still fresh, and so was the ugly scratch across her cheek where my ring had cut her, even though we’d had our fight nearly ten weeks ago.
But if the time difference between here and Earth was that great, then there was no way I could get back to Sudbury before anyone noticed I was gone. Already I’d been missing for hours, or even days. So even if the police hadn’t been looking for me before, they definitely would be now. . . .
“Anyway,” Tori said, “let me tell you the rest of the story.”
As soon as she came through the relay, Tori had been confronted by a suited and helmeted figure, who’d injected her with the same sedative she’d used on Faraday and me. When she regained consciousness some time later, she’d found herself lying on the same bunk I was using now—broken nose fixed, bleeding stopped, and the pain and swelling in her face mostly gone.
“I waited for a while, thinking a nurse would show up, but nobody came,” she said. “And when I got up I found the place just like it is now—all quiet, with most of the doors shut, and no obvious way out. I ran around yelling for help, but nobody answered, and the only rooms I could get into were empty. I mean empty, as in bare walls, nothing in the closets. Like they’d all moved out days ago.”
Once Tori had calmed down enough to explore her surroundings more carefully, she’d found a box stocked with food, drinks, and medical supplies—so whoever had taken care of her injuries had taken her other needs into account as well. “But the outer corridor’s sealed off on both ends,” she said, “and the inner one, the straight one, doesn’t seem to connect to anything. So I’m still trying to figure out how to get out of here and find whoever did this to me.”
“You don’t have any idea what they want with you?” I asked.
“No, but I’m pretty sure I know why they brought me here,” she said. “After you broke my nose, they realized I was going to bleed to death if they didn’t do something fast, so they zapped me back here to fix it.”
She spoke so casually, as though it made perfect sense that her vital signs were being broadcast across time and space to a group of alien scientists. I stared at her, baffled and more than a little disturbed—
And then the mystery started to solve itself, one clue at a time.
That golden hair, with its faintly metallic gleam. The peachy glow of her skin, so different from the skin tones of her parents, or anyone else I knew. Those amazing eyes, a turquoise almost as unusual as Faraday’s violet . . .
And the transmitter in her upper arm, just like his.
“So,” I said, clearing my throat, “you know you came from another planet?”
“Of course,” Tori replied. “I’ve known it for thirteen years.”
. . .
“Why do you think I freaked out when you started telling people I was adopted?” Tori continued as she led me down the corridor, her tool kit slung over one shoulder. “The last thing I wanted was anybody wondering where I came from. But what I don’t g
et is how you knew.”
“About you being . . . from this place?” I said. “I didn’t. I only just figured it out.”
Tori scowled at me. “Oh, right. So ever since seventh grade you’ve been staring at me in class like I was some kind of monster, avoiding me in the halls, getting all jumpy and hostile whenever I talked to you, and all of that meant nothing?”
Her accusations left me flabbergasted. I knew we’d misjudged each other, but I’d had no idea how much.
“You scared the crap out of me,” Tori said. She quickened her stride, moving so briskly that I had to scramble to keep up with her. “The way you acted whenever I was around, I was sure you knew I wasn’t human. My parents had a fit when I told them. My mom wanted to pull me out of school—”
“Your parents knew? About you?”
“Of course! They were the ones who took me to the doctor when I was a kid, and then paid him off to keep quiet about all the weird stuff he found. They thought I’d been part of some twisted medical experiment . . . until they found the chip in my arm. Then they got really scared, because it was made of this liquid metal stuff that had grown right into the muscle, and no technology on Earth could make something like that.”
She stopped at the formidable-looking barrier that blocked the end of the hallway, and dropped her tool kit in front of it. “For a while my parents wanted to move away, thinking it might keep whoever had abandoned me as a baby from finding me again. But as soon as they drove out of the Sudbury Basin, I started having seizures—big, scary, life-threatening seizures. So once they realized they couldn’t move without killing me, they decided the only solution was to hide in plain sight. We’d all act like I was an ordinary kid, and then maybe everybody else would believe that I was ordinary, too. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it seemed to be working . . . until you came along.”
For years I’d envied Tori her popularity, her accomplishments, her seemingly unassailable self-confidence. Only now was I beginning to realize how fragile all those things had been—and how hard she’d worked to keep them. “Okay,” I said. “But if you were that afraid of me, why go out of your way to make me your enemy?”
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