His idiot science-fiction twin had robbed him. Some cash and his tablet, nothing too important. There was more cash and an unloaded CX-93 locked in the bottom drawer of his desk, but neither the gun nor its ammunition had been touched. Caleb would bet all that stolen cash and more that his alternate self didn’t know how to shoot.
He didn’t know how to cover his tracks, that was for sure. The door log didn’t show any new entries, which meant he’d used the Nowhere, at least. But A Tale of Two Cities had been lying face-down, open to the last page he’d read, and now it was closed, its black-and-gold cover face-up and as good as a signature. Someone who had the inclination and the time to flip through his book mid-robbery, but not pick the lock on the desk drawer in search of better loot. An idiot.
More of an annoyance than a real crime, the robbery still pissed him off. And those people on the other side, they’d fucked with him first. Going through that rift they’d ripped open had made his shakes worse. And they’d stolen the telekinetic from his cell. Spying was justified. Retrieving his stuff and scaring the shit out of his dumb twin would be a bonus.
So he’d crossed over. It had taken him days to get any traction. His first few visits to that other reality, his double hadn’t been anywhere in sight. A search of his room—undetectable, because he was fucking good at his job—had produced the stolen tablet, abandoned now as if it was worthless, which it was, over here.
He’d spied on the other occupants of the asteroid, which they called Facility 17, enough to learn their names and jobs and a lot of other shit he didn’t care about. For people who were destroying space-time, either accidentally or on purpose, they were boring. There were a couple of hushed, concerned conversations about the rift, but nobody took action. They mostly talked about someone named Quint, a name that meant nothing to Caleb. They didn’t like this Quint, and Caleb, not liking them, figured the enemy of his enemy was a useful person to know. He wasn’t stupid enough to make friends.
A tablet for a tablet, then. Stealth came naturally to him after years of practice, but he hardly needed it to steal a tablet from these people. Living on an asteroid, they weren’t accustomed to worrying about petty theft, and they left their belongings in the common room all the time.
His twin’s room was empty, the mattress that had been on the floor removed to somewhere else. His twin and the scrawny guy who’d been sleeping in here had left, and their absence felt permanent. They’d obviously done something down on the surface of his world, since they’d stolen cash, although not enough to get by for long. That meant they’d probably crossed back over.
On his newly stolen tablet, Caleb attempted a search: Oswin Lewis Quint. The same name he kept hearing in whispers over here.
At first, there was no signal, which struck him as unlikely. This was a high-tech facility in space; even if something went wrong with the array of antennae, they wouldn’t leave themselves without communications for long. A broken connection might be the result of tampering. If the problem was physical, he was fucked. He wasn’t equipped to go outside and fix the array himself.
Luckily, it wasn’t physical. It still took him forty-five goddamn minutes to hack his way around it. This search had better be worth it.
Quint was rich as fuck in this reality, but his double was nobody. That meant Caleb’s double was trying to run a scam. Interesting. He hadn’t struck Caleb as the type. Too trusting. Too dumb.
There were a lot of videos in his search results. The one with the most views was behind a paywall, but whoever owned this tablet had a credit card stored in its memory, so Caleb charged it to them and watched, of all things, a psychic.
Caleb had once been sliced open in a fight and had to stuff a gleaming, bloody handful of guts back into the wound before he could jump back to Heath and have her patch him up. That hadn’t fazed him. It was the job.
This video on the other hand… He didn’t give a damn about Quint, or telling the truth, or love, or much of anything, but there was something disgusting about it.
His own face, looking like that, and it wasn’t even real.
Caleb dredged up a reluctant admiration for his double’s skill. He’d thought the other Caleb was a naive idiot, but instead, the man was so slick at lying that it made his skin crawl. Christ.
Caleb didn’t want anything to do with that. His double wreaking havoc on a stranger’s reputation wasn’t his problem. The whole fucking multiverse was falling apart, and more importantly, so was he. When it came to the shakes, no amount of gritting his teeth and holding his guts in could save him. He didn’t have time to fuck around.
The first time he’d encountered Aidan, Aidan had said something about not being a runner anymore. Either these people had a way to fix the multiverse, and possibly him, or they didn’t. Caleb erased his browsing, wiped the tablet down, and stole back into the common room to return it to where he’d found it.
He was about to jump when he heard shouting in the hallway.
“You can’t keep me here!”
“Seems like I can.”
Caleb didn’t recognize the first voice—male, imperious—but the second voice belonged to the short, purple-haired guy, Kit, one of the few people at the facility he hadn’t immediately known. He was a born runner and had no double.
Kit continued, his tone nasty, “Or maybe you’d prefer I take you elsewhere? There’s a whole lot of space out there, if you’re feeling cooped up in here.”
“One injection of suppressant and you’ll never touch the Nowhere again,” the other man said, quiet and icy. “You’ll be just as stuck as me. Then we’ll see how brave you are.”
An injection that could un-make runners. Holy shit. Aidan had been telling the truth. These people had a cure for the shakes and they were using it to threaten each other. Caleb risked a peek into the hallway and was confronted with a face from the video he’d just watched, but redder and more disheveled. Oswin Lewis Quint.
“Uh-huh,” Kit said, affecting nonchalance. The mention of the injection had scared him. That must mean it worked. “Good luck with that. We destroyed it all. Shot it right out the airlock with the rest of our trash. I’d be happy to demonstrate.”
Caleb had to get his hands on that suppressant. Quint knew about it. He waited for the sound of their bickering to recede down the hallway, marking which way they went, and then crept after them. When Kit came back from locking Quint into his room, Caleb ducked into a storage closet only to discover a makeshift surveillance room. One of the screens showed the telekinetic lying motionless in an empty room and another showed Quint pacing a sparsely furnished bedroom. The telekinetic—Lange—was of interest to Heath, but she’d want a cure for the shakes just as much as he did.
It was worth a jump to get into Quint’s room. He made sure to turn off the security camera first.
Caleb startled Quint, but he played it off, smoothing his suit jacket and radiating cool disdain. “You. The nurse.”
“Whoever you think I am, you’re wrong,” Caleb said. He’d dressed in his double’s scrubs for this visit, just in case anyone saw him, but now Quint needed catching up, which was irritating. “There are other universes with people who look identical to the ones here. They’ve got your double down on the surface, pretending you committed a bunch of crimes. There are videos everywhere.”
“Everywhere except here, where communications have been down since I arrived,” Quint said. “Who are you?”
“Someone who wants to make a deal,” Caleb said. “You know how to make a suppressant for runners. I want it. In exchange, I can get you out of here and help you disrupt the scam they’re running on the surface.”
Quint had gone perfectly still. “Who are you? Why do you want the suppressant?”
A stupid question, he thought, and then came to the sudden realization that none of these people knew about the shakes. They’d developed a suppressant for the sole purpose of grounding people who’d been born runners.
Sinister shit, but that shouldn’t bother him. So this world wasn’t a nice place. Neither was his.
“None of your business,” Caleb said. Quint wasn’t getting an itemized list of his weaknesses, Jesus Christ. “We both know you’re not getting out of here without me. Can you get me the suppressant or not?”
“I can,” Quint said. “How soon can we leave?”
Caleb woke up desperately hungry, which was at least becoming familiar. Someone was pounding on the bedroom door. Not Oz, then. He would have just barged in.
“Kit’s here,” Laila called. “Meet us in the kitchen.”
Caleb sat up. Aidan was still pressing his face, glasses and all, stubbornly into the pillow. Caleb poked him. “Come on.”
Aidan turned over, his cheek marked with pillow creases, and Caleb’s whole world wobbled. Holy shit. They’d slept together. And then… really slept together, pillow creases and all.
If this was an experiment, he’d confirmed his hypothesis. I’m bisexual, he thought, trying it on like a new set of clothes. It fit. After all his hand-wringing, it was nothing like getting injected and developing new senses and abilities. He didn’t feel different.
Caleb glanced at Aidan, the messy nest of his black hair and the long, pale stretch of his naked back. Well. He felt something.
Emboldened, he slid one hand from Aidan’s shoulder blade down to his hip. When Aidan made a pleased, sleepy noise into the pillow, Caleb felt the same pulse of satisfaction as when he’d touched other partners. It was a familiar cocktail of emotions—pride, tenderness, yearning to do it again—and yet it was new, too. He liked sleeping with men. He liked sleeping with Aidan.
Aidan hadn’t spoken of the future, beyond putting Quint away, and he’d only offered to fool around in private while they were also fooling the public. They’d be putting Quint in prison in a matter of days, and then there’d be no need for their romance act. A week wasn’t long enough. Last night had been so good. Caleb wanted more of that.
To judge from Aidan’s languid smile, so did he. Heat washed over Caleb’s skin and he hurried out of bed. He finger-combed his hair into something halfway presentable and figured he’d leave the question of real clothes for later. Behind him, Aidan groaned and got out of bed.
Kit was seated on one of the bar stools at the kitchen island, wearing an atrociously green leather jacket and some kind of metal-mesh face veil, its headband buried in his violet hair. The veil was probably meant to deter the smart house’s facial recognition, but since he was half-lifting it out of the way so he could drink a cup of coffee, Caleb wasn’t sure how reliably it would work.
“Good morning,” Laila said. She was standing by some very shiny appliance that must be a coffee maker, dressed all in black again, with makeup scrolling across her face like calligraphy. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please,” Caleb said. He almost blurted I’m bisexual, because it felt momentous, worth sharing, but he couldn’t say it here. They’d told the house Aidan was his boyfriend. Maybe the AI couldn’t catch discrepancies in what they said to each other, but for all he knew, the tech was predicated on remote human observers. A distressing idea. His disappointment at not being able to tell Laila outweighed his concern. He would’ve told Kit, too, even though they weren’t that close. Everyone in the kitchen was some flavor of queer, and Caleb wanted them to know he belonged, too.
“You okay?” Laila asked.
“Yeah.”
Laila pulled a lever and the coffee machine whirred, and a second later she pressed a mug into his hands.
“Good morning to both of you.”
“Morning,” Aidan said. He perked up when Laila offered him some coffee.
“Kit scared the shit out of me this morning, nearly made me scald myself,” Laila said, nudging him affectionately. “He hasn’t told me why he’s here yet.”
“Why else would I be here? I’m here to talk about Q—”
“House,” Aidan said loudly. “Where are the spatulas?”
Some of the under-the-counter lighting blinked, indicating a drawer. Aidan pulled it open and then gave Kit a significant look.
“Ugh,” Kit said at this reminder that they were being watched.
While Kit contemplated how to rephrase whatever it was he wanted to say, Aidan kept opening cabinets and drawers. He looked just like he had in the other Heath’s exam room, ransacking her drawers for possible antidotes, except here he was just hunting through a fridge. After a while, he must have found what he was looking for, because he turned to Caleb and said, “You want breakfast?”
“You’re… cooking?”
Caleb had never seen Aidan cook. He’d never had a kitchen of his own—unless Caleb counted the six months Aidan had spent living with Brian, the ex whose name they never spoke. Caleb didn’t know much about that period of Aidan’s life. Maybe it had been domestic bliss. Maybe he and Brian had cooked gourmet meals for each other every night.
Even as Caleb recognized the absurdity of the thought, he had to swallow the sour taste it put into his mouth.
Whatever had happened with Brian, the rest of Aidan’s adult life had been spent as an itinerant couch surfer. When he crashed at Caleb’s apartment, it was literal. He was always on the verge of passing out. It fell to Caleb to cook for him.
Caleb wasn’t a great cook, only an adequate one. He could keep himself—and Aidan—alive.
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” Aidan said. He pulled out a mixing bowl and started measuring dry ingredients.
“Some of that better be for me and Kit,” Laila said.
“Of course,” Aidan said. “Solidarity and all that. Wouldn’t let you go hungry.”
“You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I think I’m—what, Kit, don’t look at me like that,” Laila said.
“Can we leave aside all this stuff about solidarity and personal anecdotes for a second?” Kit said. “I’m here to tell you that you need to move faster. Things haven’t been going great for us.”
They’d had Quint in space for four days and something had already gone wrong. A whole interview’s worth of questions came to mind, but Caleb couldn’t ask any of them. He stayed silent and sat on one of the barstools at the ridiculously large marble island in the center of the room, watching in fascination and trepidation as a pat of butter sizzled in the skillet and Aidan mixed pancake batter in a bowl. A sight rare enough to relish.
Caleb didn’t want it to be rare.
“You know that… cat we adopted?” Kit asked, interrupting his thoughts. “The one with the shitty attitude?”
“Yeah,” Aidan said. “Thanks for giving it a home.”
“I’m not so sure we made the right choice,” Kit said. “It’s a little bastard and it wants out. Worst of all, I think it’s about to figure out how to open doors and cause real trouble.”
“Shit,” Aidan said, flipping a pancake wrong and smearing batter across the skillet. “We’ll be done soon, I think. We’re, uh, moving some things around. But we’ll be happy to take that cat off your hands in a few days and give it a forever home. Thursday, probably. Friday at the latest.”
“It is Sunday fucking morning,” Kit said tightly, like the number of hours in the day really mattered. “This has been the longest four days of my life and it’s only been a week and a half since I got stranded in the wilderness and nearly froze to death. Bad mood doesn’t begin to cover it. If you make me put up with that cat much longer, I’m gonna eject it into space.”
“Okay, okay,” Laila said, putting a hand on his arm. “We’re all a little on edge. You can have the first plate.”
“Fuck off. You’re playing house down here and we are trapped up there.”
Caleb stared at the counter, guilt closing his throat. He had been enjoying himself. It hadn’t even been half an hour since he’d dreamily wondered if he and Aidan could prolong this week somehow. That wasn’t fair to Kit and everyone else at Facility 17 who had to deal with Quint.
“Where is… Quint?” Caleb asked, glancing around like Oz might pop out at any moment. The grand floor-to-ceiling windows were open this morning, letting in brilliant daylight and offering a view of the mansion’s manicured lawn. The trees surrounding the ground were a mixture of evergreen and yellow-orange fall foliage. The wind rattled their branches, showering the lawn with leaves.
“Asleep, I think,” Laila said. “He keeps weird hours. Not that I’m one to judge.”
“What was it you wanted to say earlier?” Aidan asked Laila. “You said you’d been meaning to tell us something.”
She set her mug on the island and stretched luxuriantly. “I’ve been feeling good these past few days. Better. Like I could go anywhere I wanted.”
“Because you’re taking some kind of medication?” Aidan asked.
She shook her head. “No, I think it’s more of a ‘time heals all wounds’ situation. Things going back to normal. You don’t feel it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, staring down into the skillet.
“That’s really good news,” Kit said to Laila.
Aidan plated some pancakes, then passed them to Caleb along with silverware and a bottle of maple syrup.
“And mine?” Kit asked.
“They’re almost ready, hold on a second,” Aidan said, waving the spatula at him.
“Uh huh.”
As Aidan was serving Kit and Laila, Oz walked into the kitchen with a jewelry box in his hand. He grinned. “Didn’t know we were all doing brunch together this morning! Look what just came in.”
He opened the jewelry box and pulled out a necklace so brilliantly yellow it could only be 24-karat gold. Everyone stared, and he winked in response. “I ordered a lot of these, among other things. Easier to transport, you know?”
“Smart,” Caleb said, although the maple-syrup aftertaste in his mouth had suddenly turned sickeningly sweet. Was it just Oz’s resemblance to Quint, their real target? Or was it something about the necklace he was casually tossing up and down?
Kit had already finished his pancakes. He pushed his plate away. “I have to go. But I’m coming back tomorrow, and I hope you have good news for me by then.”
He vanished, and Laila sighed. “You want a cup of coffee, Quint?”
“Sure,” Oz said, cheerfully oblivious to the tension in the room. Aidan grimaced and plated some more pancakes, then turned off the stove. “How was your date last night?”
Caleb struggled to control his face at the mention of last night. “Good,” he said. “Public.”
He’d almost forgotten the part where he gave away stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Aidan had eclipsed the rest of his memory. “We gave away a lot of cash. Is there more in the house? I think it would be good to keep that up. We can go out again this afternoon.”
Oz frowned. “It doesn’t seem necessary. We’re doing all these interviews. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“It can’t hurt,” Aidan said. “It’s pocket change to you, anyway. What does it matter?”
Oz had stopped tossing the necklace and was now curling his fingers carefully around it, like one of them might snatch it out of his hand. “Sure. Of course. Why not? I’ll withdraw some cash for you.”
Oz left without eating, and the four of them shared a moment of silence.
“He’s in a hurry,” Caleb said, trying to lighten the mood. They could handle Oz. They could handle Quint, too. Things were okay. Things were good, even. Here he was, sitting in this palatial kitchen, eating pancakes and carrying out a scam with his best-friend-maybe-something-else-now, and strangest of all, it seemed to be working.