Caleb caught Emil as everyone left the kitchen. “Hey, uh.”
Concern crossed Emil’s face. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. It’s not your job to go on dangerous missions.”
“No, it’s not that,” Caleb said. Heat crept up his neck. Aidan and Laila had paused in the hallway, waiting for him. “I’ll find you in a second,” he told them, and addressed Emil again. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”
Emil nodded and together they walked to the greenhouse. After days in the enclosed, lifeless spaces of the rest of Facility 17, the expanse of the greenhouse was exhilarating. The invisible vastness of space rose above them, sunlight spilling into through the UV-filtered windows and rousing green, earthy aromas from the long, rectangular garden beds.
Unlike the rest of the team, Caleb hadn’t dreamed of going to space. He’d only come here to find Aidan. So far, his experience of space had confirmed his desire to go back down to the surface.
Except here.
The greenhouse was the only place on this awful grey asteroid worth seeing. In full sun, as they were now, the filtered light cast a red glow over everything, a match for the warmth of the air.
Emil smiled at him, understanding. “I like it here too. What was it you wanted to talk about?”
Emil walked to a bunch of basil plants and began to pluck their budding flowers. Caleb stood opposite him, imitating his behavior.
“I know we don’t know each other that well, and this is really personal, but… you’re gay, right?”
“Bisexual,” Emil said gently. He moved down the bed and picked dead foliage off another plant. “But ask whatever you want. We might not have known each other long, but we’ve been through some things together.”
“Oh. Um. Yeah. I guess I was just wondering how you knew.”
“I knew because I developed a crush on a guy when I was a teenager,” Emil said. “He was older than me, and probably straight, and I was hopelessly awkward. But the symptoms were obvious enough that even at fourteen, I got it.”
Shit. Caleb crushed a basil flower between his fingers and let it drop into the soil. “So it was obvious. You knew for sure.”
“It’s not like that for everyone. And I know lots of bi people who took their time. I certainly got the societal message that it was normal and good for me to like women, which I do, and I think for a lot of bi guys, they stop there. No need to examine things.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said, because something in that sounded familiar. “And girls are just—I mean, they’re everywhere, and it’s so easy to get their attention, you don’t even have to try. They’re always offering themselves as dates or girlfriends or casual sex partners.”
“You’re funny.”
“Wait, what?”
“You weren’t joking?”
“No,” Caleb said, surprised enough to turn toward Emil at last. “You know what I mean, right? You go to bars and they buy you drinks or pull you onto the dance floor and make you offers. Same thing at parties. You go to the grocery and women drop their phone numbers in your cart. You go out for coffee or to do your laundry or take a walk or get on the train and… there they are.”
Emil was smiling with his lips pressed together, trying not to laugh. “I think your experience might be outside the norm.”
“Women don’t do that to you?” Caleb would’ve thought Emil—Emil, with his smooth brown skin, tousled black hair, strong jaw and incredible abs—turned down offers all the time. “But you’re…”
Caleb gestured, then bit his lip, questioning how and why he was so sure that Emil was an exemplar of masculine beauty. It was the sort of thing he’d always known about men, but never thought much about. Everyone noticed that stuff. They had to. It was obvious.
“Vain?” Emil finished with a smile. When Caleb opened his mouth to protest, Emil waved him off. “The team reminds me all the time, and I can’t say they’re wrong. I do spend a lot of time in the gym. And sure, I get hit on. More often by men, though.”
“Oh. Um. Do you think that happens because they can tell?”
“That I’m queer? Well, most of the instances were in gay bars, so yes, the men who hit on me knew they had a chance.”
Caleb’s double had thought the same thing. They’d been in the hallway, not a gay bar. Caleb frowned.
Emil came around so the table was no longer between them. He was very good at apportioning his attention: first a little bit of reassuring eye contact, then a little bit of poking at the plants so Caleb felt soothed instead of scrutinized.
It should have been working, but it wasn’t. Maybe it was all the light in here making Caleb dizzy.
“Caleb, does this have anything to do with your doppelgänger?”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know,” Caleb said, unable to give voice to the real answer. He kissed me and I liked it. “I wasn’t ever expecting to have this conversation. But some things have happened lately that… I don’t know.”
“He’s not you,” Emil said.
“It’s hard to ignore what we have in common, though,” Caleb said. “This sounds totally irrational, but I’m worried that injection might be changing me.”
“In other ways than giving you access to the Nowhere?” Emil didn’t manage to mask the skepticism in his tone.
“You don’t think it’s possible?”
“Who can say what’s possible anymore? I recently put a lot of alien matter in my body and crossed into a different reality,” Emil said. “But I don’t feel like a different person. Not straighter or gayer, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Having his unspoken question answered so plainly made Caleb blush. It was a silly idea, and he shouldn’t have said anything. Caleb’s double had kissed him before the injection. If Caleb had enjoyed that kiss, it was all him.
“I don’t want you to think that I think there’s anything wrong with being gay, or bi, or anything, because I don’t,” Caleb said hurriedly. “Aidan has been my best friend my whole life and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him! Or you, or Chávez, or anyone else! I just—you understand why it might freak me out, to feel like some fundamental part of me was changed or is changing without my consent? And it’s not the sexuality thing, really, but more like… what else might it be changing? Will I still be myself when it’s done?”
Emil put a hand on his shoulder. “You know everyone here has been undergoing various treatments, similar to the one you received, for months. And I think we’ve all maintained our sense of self.”
The treatments at Facility 17 had only produced one successful test. Lenny had learned to access the Nowhere. The other team members, Emil included, hadn’t changed. Caleb had read the files. Emil had rescued Kit through a combination of wild risk-taking and luck, but his access to the Nowhere had been a one-time thing. He’d survived his walk through Lange’s door. He wasn’t a runner.
Caleb couldn’t put all that into words. He was too distracted by the warm, heavy, male hand touching his shoulder. Why had he never noticed how he responded to men’s touch before? It had to be new. Otherwise he would have known. He wouldn’t have waited until he was twenty-six years old to have this revelation about himself.
Emil dropped his hand.
“Yeah,” Caleb said, trying to remember what they’d been talking about. “Thanks for this.”
“Sure,” Emil said. “Any time. You don’t have to figure it out right away, you know. Or ever. You can just be you. Do what feels good.”
Caleb thought about the forceful kiss his doppelgänger had given him, the hot sweep of his tongue and the scrape of stubble beyond his soft lips. He turned away. Whatever was on his face, he didn’t want Emil seeing it.
While Caleb was talking to Emil, Aidan took his leave of Laila, slipping down the hall to Heath’s lab. He didn’t have any more evidence to record, but he guessed correctly that Dax might be working there now that the space was vacant. It wasn’t Heath’s notes spread out on the bench in front of them, but Lange’s. Heath’s notes were chillingly organized. Lange’s were inscrutable, at least to Aidan. Based on the furrow in Dax’s brow as they studied the minuscule handwriting tracking across one page, they weren’t having an easy time of it.
Dax was standing at the lab bench, shifting their weight from foot to foot while they read, and they didn’t react to Aidan’s arrival.
“Hey.”
Dax ran a hand through their already-messy short red hair, turning their curls to frizz. “Hey. What are you doing here?”
“I hear you’re an all-purpose genius,” Aidan said. “I need to get a message to someone on the surface, and I don’t want any record of it.”
Aidan had taken meticulous care when he’d been sending out photos, using encryption and covering his tracks, but all that information had been destined for the public. Calling an emergency Runners’ Union meeting required even more rigor than usual.
To their credit, Dax didn’t complain about being interrupted or ask any questions. They picked up a tablet and started tapping, while mumbling, “I’m a physicist. You just happened to get lucky that I know how to do this.”
“Thanks.”
“For the record, I’m helping because I know who you are and I like what you do,” Dax said. “Not because you called me a genius. Who are we contacting?”
“I’ll give you the number, but you can’t keep any record of that, either.”
The member he was contacting, Lisa Hendricks, was a surgeon in Chicago and undoubtedly had public information available, but Aidan provided her private number. Like many of the union’s members, no one in Lisa’s life knew she could access the Nowhere, and Aidan wouldn’t jeopardize that by contacting her publicly, even if his message was harmless.
Such secrecy was only an option for people whose abilities had manifested privately in their adolescence. More often than not, young runners made involuntary jumps and got caught. It was hard to become a surgeon, or hold down any job, if the rest of the world was too suspicious to house or hire you.
There was tension between members who lived openly as runners and those who didn’t, and Aidan never knew how to manage it. But he liked and trusted Lisa, and he could rely on her to spread the word to their decentralized membership and get someone to pick him up.
“Actually, let’s send this to one more person,” Aidan said. It was always good to have backup. He provided Craig’s number from memory.
He guarded the names and locations of his members with ferocity and entirely justified paranoia, never recording contact information digitally or on paper. It resided solely in his brain.
When he’d woken up in the cell in Facility 17, he’d been sure Quint was after his mental address book. He’d thought Quint’s scientists were planning to starve him until he gave up his comrades. Then they’d brought in Laila, and his theory had fallen apart. Laila didn’t have a list in her head.
Laila had been right. Quint had chosen them for their infamy. The public wouldn’t miss them if word of their deaths got out. Aidan knew that now.
Dax had paused in their typing. “Okay. What’s the message?”
“We’re meeting at the usual place at 3:17am. Send Facility 17’s coordinates for that time. Then say ‘the canary can’t breathe.’”
Dax’s mouth quirked as they recorded that sentence, but they didn’t ask. Union members had come up with a few lines like that, encrypted warnings and requests. They’d giggled about it while proposing codenames, but Aidan didn’t feel like laughing now.
Dax sent the message and waited for confirmation, which came only a few minutes later. Aidan didn’t make small talk, and neither did Dax.
“Thank you for this.”
“Are you coming back?” Dax asked. “Or is this goodbye?”
“It’s not goodbye. You won’t even know I was gone,” Aidan said. He had to come back here and train Caleb tomorrow so he could put the plan in motion. This meeting was the first step of many. “Neither will anyone else.”
It wasn’t Lisa who came to get Aidan, but another runner, a stage actor named Anna. Funny enough, Aidan had met her because she and Caleb had dated. She’d been his favorite of Caleb’s rotating cast of girlfriends even before she’d joined the Union.
Anna popped into Caleb’s room at 3:09am, eight minutes before the meeting time. Even in the darkness, her silver mini-dress shimmered. She was Canadian, of Ojibwe descent, but she’d been working in Inland New York for years. Aidan liked her—Caleb never seemed to take the end of any relationship too hard, maybe since women floated through his life like leaves in the wind, and Anna had been gentle with him—and if she wasn’t moderately well-known, they might have been friends. Instead Aidan stayed out of her way in the city, not wanting to endanger her career by association. They only saw each other at Union meetings.
Aidan’s chosen career had robbed him of so much. Regular friendships. A home.
The last real home he’d known had been with Caleb’s family, the second floor of an old brownstone on a quiet, tree-lined street. It was no good to dwell on it. There’d never be anything like that again.
“Are you okay? What’s going on?” Anna asked, squinting to find him. Aidan, with his vision already adjusted, could make out the dark slashes of eyeliner highlighting the angle of her eyes and her cheekbones. Her heels clicked against the floor when she took a step forward. “Sorry, I came right from the cast party. Lisa made it sound urgent.”
“I’m okay,” he said, getting out of bed. “Let’s go.”
“This place is so creepy. Aren’t we basically on the Moon?” Anna asked. He’d declared himself fine, so now her curiosity was getting the better of her. “Everyone thinks I took a cab home, and instead I’m in space. I was magnificent tonight, by the way, not that you care.”
“Shh,” Aidan said. On the mattress on the floor, Caleb was stirring in his sleep.
“Oh my God, is that Caleb? We’re in space and you’re finally sleeping with Caleb?”
That was the opposite of being quiet. Besides, Caleb was clearly using a different bed. Aidan glared at her. She probably couldn’t see it, but it was also possible she was ignoring it.
“I’ve missed you.” Anna wrapped her arms around him and rocked from side to side in her excitement. She smelled like citrus perfume and champagne. Her hug transitioned instantly into travel, and after a passage through the Nowhere, they showed up in the unglamorous meeting location, a church basement in Omaha. In the middle of the low ceilings, dim lighting, and four long tables arranged in a square in the center of the room, Aidan’s sweatpants and rumpled hair looked more at home than Anna’s sleek updo. The scents of cigarettes and stale coffee were woven into the carpet and painted on the walls.
Anna let go of him, then kissed him on the cheek. “I want to hear everything.”
“You will,” Aidan said darkly. These meetings rarely lasted longer than a few minutes, especially when they were called with so little notice, but Aidan might need more time to explain himself. Everyone understood the necessity of meeting in the middle of the night so they didn’t have to rent a room and record their location, but no one liked it, and he hated to keep people there.
Lisa was already present, her springy black curls covered by a silk bonnet and her infant daughter in her arms. She gave Aidan a tired smile. “I was up anyway.”
The other union members were wearing whatever they’d slept in, if they were coming from nearby timezones, or whatever they’d worked in if they were coming from farther away, so Anna’s silver dress stood out even more. No one stared. Meetings were always motley.
Still, this one lacked the small-talk chatter that preceded the others. The silence was apprehensive. They’d all been following his communications from Facility 17; they knew what he and Laila had been through at Quint’s hands. The experiments. His powerlessness.
A few more people materialized, and when Aidan did a headcount, he came up with thirty-seven. The Runners’ Union had a hundred and seventy-eight members, but they never all met in one place. Thirty-seven was an impressive showing. He wished it were a better occasion.
It would have been thirty-eight if he’d brought Laila, who was a new but enthusiastic member. But she didn’t need this warning.
“Let’s get started.”
Aidan’s chosen career put him in the public eye all the time. Speaking to crowds didn’t make him nervous. Still, he wasn’t enthusiastic about announcing his own failures.
He took a breath. Fiddled with the hem of his t-shirt. He should’ve brought Caleb. Caleb wasn’t technically a member and thus couldn’t be present at meetings, but Aidan really wished he was here right now. If he were here, he would squeeze Aidan’s shoulder and give him a reassuring smile. He’d point out that Aidan hadn’t failed. Not yet.
“Everyone here is aware of my efforts to expose Oswin Lewis Quint and bring him to justice through the press. There’s no shortage of evidence, but the articles that have surfaced so far haven’t received the attention I expected.”
“Every time one pops up, it disappears a few days later like it was never published. No redaction. Nothing. He’s burying them,” Lisa said.
Aidan nodded. She kept her eyes on him, willing him to go on.
“What will you do?” Craig asked. Thin and freckled, with sandy blond hair, Craig was one of the oldest members, both in age and in how long he’d been part of the union.
“I have a plan, but it’s unorthodox. First, what I need you all to know,” Aidan said, bracing himself for the shock, “is that we recently discovered that the Nowhere is not only a conduit to other places in our reality, but also to other realities, including one very similar to this one, where there are people who look nearly identical to people you may know.”
“Doubles?” Lisa asked. “Does everyone have one?”
“Something like that, and no, as far as I can tell, we tend not to. The proposed explanation is that we’re usually born from a union where one parent had crossed through the Nowhere accidentally. We have matter in our bodies from more than one reality.
“That’s why so many of us grow up without one parent, or as orphans—one of our parents accidentally crossed through the Nowhere, and it damaged their body in some way. They didn’t live long after that."
Most of the room gave solemn nods in response to that. Aidan had never known his father. He felt lucky to have known his mother for twelve years, even though her absence hurt that much more because of it. His whole life, she’d struggled with an illness no doctors could explain. Aidan stared down at his trembling hands, splaying his fingers and then closing them into a fist, wondering if he’d been the explanation all along.
He glanced around. He knew these people and their stories, and in this room, knowing one of his biological parents—getting to spend twelve years with her, no less—made him an outlier. Not only that, but Caleb’s family had taken him in until he was eighteen. Aidan had suffered, but he knew what it was like to live with a loving family. Plenty of people in this room only had the Union. Aidan couldn’t protect them from their pasts, but he could make sure Oswin Lewis Quint didn’t threaten their futures.
Aidan said, “It’s only people who aren’t born runners who have doubles.”
“What do you mean, born runners?” Craig asked. “What other kind are there?”
“They seem to be able to give people access to the Nowhere,” Aidan said. “I don’t know how it works, but they recently did it to my friend Caleb. A lot of you know him.”
People nodded.
“This doesn’t answer the question of what we’re gonna do about it,” Anna said. “So you know a way to get your ability back, maybe. That still leaves us the problem of Quint Services.”
“Yes,” Aidan said. “It does. I don’t want this to be official union business. It will be dangerous, and I can’t pretend it’s not personal. But I hope some of you will be willing to help anyway.”
“Of course,” Anna said, her dress shimmering in the fluorescent light as she sat up straighter. “Whatever you need.”
“I’m going to find Quint’s double and get him to confess to Quint’s crimes,” Aidan said.
Instead of the volley of questions he’d expected, there was a beat of silence.
Trying to pretend he wasn’t daunted, Aidan continued, “I don’t think they use the same currency as us, so I can’t pay him in money, but I bet they still value the same rare elements. Gold. Platinum. I’ll figure out some kind of compensation, and hopefully Quint’s double will want it. If he agrees, it will only be the work of a moment to switch him out with the real Quint before the police arrest him, provided I have enough runners helping me.”
“What if he’s already rich and doesn’t want what you’re offering?” Craig asked. “If he’s Quint’s double, won’t he be a trillionaire, too?”
“So far my experience suggests that people resemble their double, but their personalities diverge,” Aidan said, shoving away thoughts of Caleb’s double touching his thigh. “I’m hoping that either Quint’s double will be motivated by a reward, or, possibly, that he’ll be moved to help me when he hears what Quint has done.”
“You think people will pay attention to Quint—or someone who looks like him—confessing, even though the articles haven’t produced a criminal investigation?” Lisa asked.
“They will if you do it with enough drama,” Anna said. “You need a platform of some kind.”
“Yes. I’m hoping we can all use our connections to find one. And I’ll need logistical support, since I can’t access the Nowhere myself. Like I said, I don’t want this to be official Union business, but I wanted everyone to be aware of my plans. Participating is optional.”
“I’m in,” Anna said, and several other people nodded and murmured their agreement. “Quint hurt you and Laila. I don’t want him to get away with it.”
The whispering woke Caleb up, but by the time he was awake enough to process language, Aidan and whoever he’d been talking to had vanished.
If Aidan wasn’t getting up in the middle of the night to rifle through Heath’s papers, he was disappearing for Runners’ Union meetings. Caleb’s recommendation that he rest had gone unheard.
Caleb closed his eyes, hoping for sleep, but none came. The secrecy surrounding the Union meetings was necessary, he knew that. And even though he’d helped Aidan found the organization, he wasn’t a runner and couldn’t attend.
Except he could have taken Aidan to this one. It would have been good practice. He could’ve waited outside the room and not listened to the meeting.
When Aidan came back, Caleb caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and some kind of perfume. It was too dark to see the runner who’d delivered him, but after a moment of squinting, Caleb could make out Aidan’s outline. He stood rooted to the floor like he’d been caught.
“Union meeting?” Caleb asked. He already knew the answer. It wasn’t his intention to act like a parent waiting up for a delinquent kid, so he kept his tone friendly.
“Security check first,” Aidan said, half-apologetically. “Tell me something only the real you would know.”
Caleb tried not to bristle. They’d agreed to this policy, and it was logical, even though Caleb had been in bed the whole time. Aidan was the one who’d run off in the middle of the night.
He might as well take the opportunity to tell an embarrassing story.
“Fine. Some time in eighth grade, we went to a bodega—not ours, but one in another neighborhood—and shoplifted as many Zings as we could stuff into our pockets. It was your idea. It’s a miracle we didn’t get caught, laughing like we were. Afterward, back in my room, I said ‘I don’t even really like these, they’re too spicy’ and you thought I was daring you to eat all of them. You ate like twelve in a row and ended up rolling on the bedroom floor moaning in pain. I’ve never seen anyone turn that red.”
Aidan gave a rueful laugh. “Yeah. Turns out I don’t really like them, either.”
“I bet,” Caleb said. “You believe it’s me now? Willing to answer my question?”
“Yes, I was at an emergency Union meeting.” He paused for a long time, still standing at the foot of Caleb’s mattress, obviously wrestling with how much to reveal. Finally, he said, “I have a plan. But it’s dangerous.”
God, he was a stubborn idiot. Caleb threw off the sheet and went to him. Shaking his shoulders would be overkill, but that didn’t stop Caleb from wanting to. “Aidan. Do you think me lying my way up here to bust you out of that cell was safe?”
Caleb couldn’t make out his expression, but he heard Aidan swallow. He waited for a response, but none came.
Giving in and grasping Aidan’s shoulders came so naturally it was a relief. “I can help you, Aidan. Let me help you. I know it’s dangerous. Why are you willing to let everybody in the Union take risks, but not me? I used to think it was because I wasn’t a runner, but that doesn’t apply anymore. Do you not trust me?”
“No. It’s not that.”
Aidan sounded miserable. Caleb would’ve thought he was afraid, except Aidan lived for reckless risk-taking. Even before he could access the Nowhere, he’d always had a penchant for sneaking into forbidden places and pissing off bigger kids. Caleb had seen Aidan leap out of tall trees and skateboard down flights of stairs without blinking. Caleb was the reluctant, fearful one. Not Aidan.
Caleb slid his hands down, intending to let go. Instead, his hands came to rest on Aidan’s upper arms. His skin was smooth and surprisingly cool to the touch.
“I do trust you. Of course I trust you,” Aidan said.
“So whatever it is you want to do, let’s do it together,” Caleb said. He let his hands travel farther down, his fingers pausing at the insides of Aidan’s wrists. His pulse beat light and fast, possibly a lingering symptom of dehydration. Caleb set aside the flicker of worry that lit in him. He couldn’t cajole Aidan into taking better care of himself right now, not if he wanted Aidan to accept other kinds of help.
Caleb brushed the pad of his thumb over the knuckles of Aidan’s left hand, the round knobs of bone under chapped skin, and thought about how every articulation of the skeleton was its own little miracle. Every branching vein. Every fingerprint whorl. Caleb had a double, but there was only one Aidan. What would it be like to kiss him?
Caleb dropped his grip and stepped back so abruptly that his heel caught on the mattress.
It had been a long time since either of them had spoken, but as soon as Caleb moved, they both felt a need to fill the silence.
“Sorry, I—”
“Yeah, okay, let’s do it,” Aidan said, speaking quickly. “I figure if you have a double, then Quint must have a double, right? So let’s find him and see if we can convince him to confess in Quint’s place. That’ll get the public’s attention. I just need you to help me retrieve him and then I’ll do the rest. Should be simple.”
Not a single one of Aidan’s suggestions—starting with their childhood climb up the school fire escape and continuing right up to this present moment—had ever been simple. This one certainly wasn’t.
And yet Caleb said, “Sure.”
“And then, you know, when this is over, things’ll go back to how they were.”
Caleb had no idea why Aidan sounded so grim about that, but he felt like the rope he’d been tugging on had suddenly gone slack, so winning and falling on his ass were one simultaneous action. He wasn’t used to persuading Aidan.
Then he felt the inexorable pull of a smile. He knew what he had to say next. Aidan had said it before their ill-fated shoplifting and countless other misadventures. “Get in trouble with me?”
Aidan’s soft laugh was a mercy. “Yeah. Just this once.”