It took Caleb two trips to return from the other reality to Facility 17, one with Aidan and one with Oz, and he collapsed as soon as he and Oz materialized in the room. Oz stood there, useless, so Aidan had to rush forward to catch him. He dragged Caleb to the bed, an ungainly movement. Oz didn’t offer to help.
Caleb opened one eye as Aidan was pulling his shoes off. “You didn’t ask.”
Their little personal security system. “I think you remembering that is good enough for now.”
“Deb’s favorite doll,” Caleb said, closing his eyes, “was named Lulu.”
“You’re right about that. Get some sleep.”
Caleb didn’t need to be told twice.
“Stay there. I’ll be right back,” Aidan said to Oz.
He went to retrieve Laila. Unfortunately, Laila wasn’t in her room, but in the kitchen sitting across from one of the Facility 17 team members, a rangy woman with short brown hair named Clara Chávez. Aidan didn’t really know her, and his dismay must have shown on his face because the smile she offered him was cut short.
“Laila, I need your help with something,” Aidan said.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Laila demanded. “Kit came back almost twelve hours ago. He brought Lange back by himself. And now you just walk in and say you need my help?”
Right. He was being an asshole. Caleb reminded him about this sometimes, that he focused too much on his own plans and forged ahead without accommodating other people. “I’m sorry we worried you. And I’m glad that Kit and Lange made it back safely.”
“That doesn’t answer her question,” Clara observed.
He’d been standing here for minutes and Oz was back in the room waiting for him. Aidan wanted to shift his weight from one foot to the other, or huff and roll his eyes, but he had to put Clara off the trail without antagonizing her.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I just have a question for Laila about... our shared experience. In the cell.”
There, that was private enough, wasn’t it?
“What else could there possibly be to say about it?” Laila asked.
“Laila,” he said through gritted teeth.
“It seems important,” Clara said, stretching an arm across the table and laying her hand over Laila’s. “Go talk. I’ll be around.”
Laila relented and they took their leave. As soon as they were in the hallway, she elbowed him in the side. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“I wouldn’t have needed to lie if you’d just come with me the first time!”
“Next time you’re flirting with someone cute, I’m gonna ruin it,” Laila muttered, but she followed him back to the room. When he opened the door and ushered her inside, she stopped in her tracks and said, with no effort to keep her voice down, “Who the fuck is that?”
“Uh, hi,” said Oz. He gave her a funny little smile that landed somewhere between embarrassed and hopeful. Aidan would bet all of Oswin Lewis Quint’s trillions that the executive had never made that expression in his life.
“His name is Oz and he’s the key to everything,” Aidan told Laila. “And Caleb’s sleeping, so be quiet.”
“Oh, right, we’re being quiet because Caleb is sleeping, and not because you have some harebrained scheme involving a Quint lookalike,” Laila said. Aidan was only guessing, but something about her intonation suggested she didn’t believe him.
“Do you think you could make him look more like Quint?” Aidan asked. He knew she could. He’d made a point of learning what all the runners in the Union could do in addition to being runners. He had some practice avoiding facial recognition himself, but his makeup skills were rudimentary.
To disrupt the algorithm, you had to treat your face like the canvas of an abstract painting, and Laila did museum-quality work. Aidan always thought of her personal style as fuck you, I’m wearing makeup. But she could do other, more subtle kinds, too. That was what he needed for Oz.
“I was really hoping you weren’t going to ask me that,” Laila said. “I was hoping you were going to say ‘harebrained scheme? what harebrained scheme? I don’t have a harebrained scheme!’ and instead you were like ‘hell yeah, harebrained scheme! I’m all in on that!’”
“It’s going to work,” Aidan said steadily. “We just have to do it right.”
“You activists and your optimism,” she said. “But sure, fine, I’ll do what I can. I don’t have anything here with me, though. I need supplies. And even then, if you want him to look like Quint, you need a kind of tailoring I can’t afford.”
“I’m hoping we can get into Quint’s closet for that.”
“You’d need to know where he lives—or where one of his many houses is, I should say. He’s secretive as fuck. Most rich people are. They know we’d be coming for them with pitchforks, otherwise. And I’m just now remembering that I can’t get into the Nowhere, and you can’t get into the Nowhere, and Caleb’s exhausted, and this plan seems to involve transporting a lot of people down to the surface.”
“It won’t be a problem.”
“No. I don’t care how much that boy loves you, you will not ask him to make three consecutive jumps down to the surface. Especially considering we don’t know anything about the injection he was given and how long its effects will last. You need more people. We’re telling Kit about this—and the rest of the team.”
Aidan shouldn’t have flinched when she said “loves.” She meant it in a best-friend, brotherly kind of way. But paired with the accusation that he was exploiting Caleb’s feelings for him, it hurt.
He wasn’t doing that. Caleb had offered to help, and now his part in the plan was done. Someone would take him back down to the surface where he’d be safe.
Besides, even if Caleb did love him, there was nothing singular about it. Caleb loved everyone, and everyone loved him. He wasn’t in love with Aidan. It wasn’t going to break his heart when Aidan left, because he had so many other people in his life. Happier people. Easier people.
Some of those people were the people Laila wanted to tell right now. Kit’s friends. They had no reason to like Aidan. Kit didn’t—he’d refused to join the Runners’ Union for years—and he wasn’t alone in his dislike. At best, non-runners viewed Aidan as a shit-stirrer, and at worst, they wished him harm.
If these people wished you harm, they wouldn’t have rescued you, he thought, and in his head, it sounded like Caleb’s voice.
Fine. He’d talk to them.
And Laila had a point. Even with support from the Union, Aidan could use help here. Facility 17 was, as he well knew, an ideal prison.
“You’re bossy,” Aidan said.
“What I am is right,” Laila said. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Caleb woke up to a hissed argument in his room.
“He doesn’t need to come,” Aidan was saying. “Let him sleep.”
“He’s part of this. You can’t exclude him now,” Laila said.
Oz was standing apart from the two of them, wary and wide-eyed and silent.
Caleb swallowed to ease his scratchy throat and tasted sourness. He didn’t know how long he’d slept, only that it wasn’t long enough. He tried to lift his head as surreptitiously as possible, but his cheek was half-stuck to the pillow.
“Hi,” Aidan said, his tone suddenly gentle. “You alright?”
Caleb sat up as proof. He repressed a yawn and refused to rub his eyes. Thankfully, he was fully dressed—still in his double’s black clothes, since he’d fallen asleep that way. “What’s going on?”
“Aidan’s going to explain his plan to Emil and Kit,” Laila said, and added, pointedly, “I thought you should be there.”
“Yeah, of course,” Caleb said, and got out of bed to follow the three of them to the common room, hoping his face and hair didn’t look too obviously slept-on.
The common room was empty when they arrived. Oz sat down in one of the armchairs. Laila, bless her, marched right to the counter in the back of the room and started a pot of coffee. Caleb hovered behind her, useless and needy, until she turned around and touched his shoulder.
“Sit,” she said, and all but pushed him toward the couch, staying close until he was settled on the stiff cushions. He caught a whiff of coconut scent from Laila’s hair as she straightened. She cast a glance toward Aidan, who was pacing, the tread of his sneakers muffled by the grey carpet. “I know better than to tell you to sit. I’m going to get the others.”
Aidan was agitated, but Oz’s presence kept Caleb from asking about it. Revealing doubts in front of Oz might make him reconsider his participation. So Caleb listened to the percolating coffee maker until Laila came back with Kit, Emil, and one of the other team members, Jake, in tow. The big orange tom cat—Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar was its name, since it belonged to Solomon Lange—trotted at Jake’s heels as though it was attending the meeting.
The cat was the only one who didn’t stop to stare at Oz.
“He’s not Quint,” Laila said quickly. “Aidan will explain the rest.”
Emil and Jake frowned at the same time, identical expressions creasing their faces. Kit’s gaze sharpened with interest. He didn’t need to be told that the blond man relaxing in the armchair wasn’t the trillionaire. The real Quint wouldn’t be caught dead with a stain on his shirt.
Kit sat on the other end of the couch from Caleb, while Jake and Emil remained standing. Laila crossed the room, retrieved a mug of coffee, and handed it to Caleb. Then she sat down in the middle of the couch and briefly leaned against him, the soft warmth of her body a gift.
Caleb didn’t object to being comforted, but he wondered what had happened to make Laila worry about him.
“Everyone, this is Oz,” Aidan said. “Quint’s double from another reality. He’s agreed to help us put Quint away by publicly confessing to Quint’s crimes. We’ll switch him with the real Quint just before he goes to prison.”
Emil sized up Oz. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m sure you understand why I have to ask a few questions. What made you agree to any of this?”
“Money,” Oz said easily. “Also, I don’t have a lot going on at home.”
“So you’re not him and you know barely anything about him. Have you ever acted? Do you have any background in this kind of thing?” Emil asked.
“No,” Oz said. “But one of you will coach me through what to say, right? You write the speech and I’ll muddle my way through. I can read, at least, I’ve got that going for me.”
“I can teach you,” Caleb said. It came out too loud and startled everyone, but he had to say it. Now that they’d returned, Aidan would be in touch with the Union. He didn’t need Caleb to get into the Nowhere anymore. Caleb refused to be sidelined. “To act like Quint, I mean. I’m good at that.”
Aidan paused in his pacing to pull a grimace, but before he said anything, Laila patted Caleb’s shoulder and said, “I think we should all wait to hear about how we’re not going to end up in prison before we volunteer ourselves for this plan.”
“Uh,” Oz said. “Don’t you know, like, dozens of people who can teleport?”
“Didn’t help us last time,” Laila said.
“Which is the reason we’re doing this,” Aidan said, his jaw tight. “So Quint can’t hurt anyone else. The public here doesn’t know about other realities yet. That’s why we have to do this now.”
“But we just got Lange back,” Jake said. He didn’t say much, but Caleb was always struck by how soft-spoken he was, for such a big man. “He’s not in great shape. And there’s still the problem of the breach.”
“We do have a lot on our plate,” Emil agreed.
“So you’re saying it’s not time to go haring off?” Laila asked, smirking at Aidan when he glared at her.
“There’s a lot of people at this facility,” Aidan said. “Surely we can tackle more than one thing. And Lange’s presence is how we’re going to get Quint up here.”
Jake’s shoulders shot up and Emil said, “What?”
“Call Quint,” Aidan said. “Tell him Lange is exhibiting heretofore unseen symptoms and that you think he should come up here personally to observe. He’ll want to be the first to study these interesting new effects, and he’ll be the only one who can truly understand the full extent of their consequences. Say something flattering like that.”
“You want Oswin Lewis Quint—the man at the head of the corporation that had you kidnapped and tortured—to come up here?” Emil asked.
“I need him out of the way. This reason for getting him off the planet has the benefit of being true. Lange is exhibiting heretofore unknown symptoms. Quint will be excited about that.”
“You’re gonna throw Lange under the bus?” Jake asked. “You know what Quint’s willing to do.”
“You’ll keep an eye on him,” Aidan said. “Show him Lange, but don’t let him do anything but observe. Then if you could, say, break your comms for a week. And disable all your pods. And have your runners mysteriously absent or otherwise out of commission.”
“You want us to keep Quint in a space prison,” Kit said.
“It won’t be anything like what he did to me,” Aidan said. “But yes. Hold him here for a week, out of touch with the news.”
Unexpectedly, Kit said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna lose any sleep over that. We’re good. I like this plan and I’ll do what I can to help.”
Some silent conversation passed between Kit and Emil, a series of expressions Caleb could perceive but not interpret, and then Emil said, “Okay.”
“Okay what?” Aidan asked. “You’ll help?”
“Yes, we’ll keep Quint here for you,” Emil said. He glanced at Jake. “And we’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt Lange.”
“Lange can defend himself, last I checked, which was when he almost killed me,” Kit said. “Maybe we could just leave him and Quint alone together and see what happens.”
“No,” Aidan said firmly. “If Quint dies, someone at the company might continue his work. The world won’t be any safer.”
“You sure we can’t kill him? Dump his body on the other side of the Nowhere in a place no one’ll ever find it? It sounds nice.” Laila smiled wistfully, like she was talking about a beach vacation instead of a murder. Then she frowned. “You’re being so reasonable.”
“I’m not,” Aidan said. “I want to burn down everything he values—his company, his fortune, his name, his power, his freedom—and stomp on the ashes. And I want him to watch.”
Right after the meeting, as everyone filed out, Kit caught Aidan by the elbow. The two of them stayed by the door, waiting for the others to leave.
Kit’s posture and expression suggested a sulky penitence; his outfit left nothing to suggestion. Aidan could see his hipbones through his pants. He ignored that—it wasn’t easy to ignore anything in that shade of electric blue, but Kit wasn’t his type—and met Kit’s eyes instead.
“I can help,” Kit said. His arms were crossed so tight he was hugging himself.
Kit had been the first to support his plan in the meeting, and he was a runner. Aidan was already counting on his help. Kit must mean something else, though.
“Good,” Aidan said. “We need all the help we can get. What are you offering?”
“You want a platform for your fake Quint to make a shocking confession, I know someone who can give you one.”
Aidan’s mouth dropped open. He’d been running through everyone he knew in the Union in his head, trying to figure out which of them might have that kind of connection. He could have run through that list a thousand times without ever guessing that neon-splattered, unfriendly, criminal Kit would know someone with a legitimate public career. Maybe the connection was through his adoptive mothers, since one of them had been a pop star in her youth. That felt tenuous, but Aidan couldn’t conceive of anything else. “You know a news anchor?”
Kit curled his upper lip. “Not exactly. But she’s got a big audience, and I know where she lives.”
Shit. Aidan had just convinced a room full of people to go along with his plan, and here he was, stunned, thinking this might actually work. He walked back into the room to sit down on the couch and gestured for Kit to join him. If Aidan looked anything like he felt, his grin was feral. “Tell me more.”