Aidan chewed a mint and paced around the green room while they waited to go on set. He couldn’t sit on the couch next to Caleb. The loneliest place in the world, he’d discovered, was six inches from the person you’d hurt.
This interview would be a live broadcast, something they hadn’t done since working with Miss Tallulah, but it should be similar to the other recent interviews in content. It would only be different because he’d upset Caleb.
It was too quiet in the room, only the sound of his shoes scuffing the carpet. Caleb hadn’t flipped a magazine page in ages, and Oz was so absorbed in his tablet that he might as well not have been there.
“Are you going to to do it today?” Caleb asked, his eyes on the magazine, like he was talking about going to the grocery instead of getting dumped on television.
Fake dumped. They weren’t really together.
“No,” Aidan said. God, that made him feel like he’d swallowed a lump of ice. “It’s too soon.”
“Hm.”
Oz would turn himself in on Friday, five days from now. With Caleb treating him so coolly, it would be an eternity. The bed’s big enough that we won’t have to touch, he thought, and his throat closed up. He stopped pacing and dropped into an armchair. That wasn’t what he wanted at all.
It didn’t matter. He had always known this would hurt him.
He hadn’t realized that it would hurt Caleb. All those ex-girlfriends, he’d always bounced back from them in a couple of days. This wouldn’t be any different. More importantly, it would be worth it, because nobody would be coming to abduct Caleb. Nobody would ever hold him hostage in exchange for Aidan. Nobody would torture him for information.
You’ll be safe, he wanted to say to Caleb. Somebody else will love you. History had demonstrated that over and over. Caleb was easy to love. He could have anyone. People would line up for their chance.
It just can’t be me.
Aidan would explain all that later, when Oz wasn’t in the room. Right now, they had to go on TV and pretend.
Aidan prayed Caleb was in the mood to cooperate. He was the best at this and they all knew it. Most of the questions would be the same. Quint would get asked about his change of heart and his plans for the future; Caleb would get asked about his heroics. If they were lucky, the host would ignore Aidan or only ask him softball questions about being in love with Caleb. If things got too close to a touchy subject, Caleb would slip in and turn the conversation toward some likable story—if he wasn’t too pissed at Aidan, that was. He had such a talent for it. Aidan mostly remembered their wild adolescent hijinks as embarrassing and frustrating to the adults around them, but Caleb could make anything cute.
Aidan owed him so much.
As they exited the green room, Caleb rolled the sleeves of his blue-grey button-down to expose his forearms. Aidan didn’t want to stare appreciatively—didn’t have the right—but he couldn’t help himself.
“Yeah,” Oz said. “Do that in front of the camera and everyone’ll love you.”
“Fuck off,” Aidan said.
They filed onto the set, where there was a leather couch at an angle to their host’s wooden desk. His name was Ken Garnett and he stood to greet them, unfolding his legs from his chair and striding over. His suit emphasized the long lines of his body. He wore glasses and was grey at the temples, handsome and well-coiffed in a non-threatening, politician way.
Or, Aidan supposed, a talk-show host way.
Aidan shook his hand, trying not to inhale in the scent of his cologne, and then the three of them settled on the couch. Caleb slung an arm over the back of the couch, his hand landing on Aidan’s shoulder.
Oh, thank fuck, he was in the mood to act. This would be easy. Aidan tried not to let his relief show while he listened to Oz’s usual story about how he’d seen the error of his ways.
“Yes,” Garnett said, something cool in his tone. “Interesting how quickly you turned around on the subject of runners. Do you still feel that they pose a threat to society? That was your position until recently, wasn’t it?”
“I—”
“And for you to be associating with Aidan Blackwood now, it’s very strange, isn’t it?”
Caleb removed his arm from the back of the couch and sat up straight. He squeezed Aidan’s knee, presumably as a sign not to engage with this hostile line of questioning. Aidan didn’t need a reminder, but he understood why he’d received one. He’d always been most likely to start a fight.
“I don’t know what you’re implying,” Oz said, once he’d collected himself. A good answer. Not confirming anything, but forcing Garnett into the light. “I have a great deal of respect for Aidan and I think runners are a valuable asset.”
Aidan would have gone with valued members of society, but Oz was playing a recently reformed trillionaire, so maybe his word choice was more convincing. Regardless, it made Garnett lean in like a predator who’d smelled blood. He reached under his desk and pulled out a slim file.
Aidan’s stomach flipped. He should have known one of these goddamn talk-show hosts would want to play investigative reporter. He couldn’t afford to respond in his usual way—he had to be fucking likable, or their whole scam would fall apart. Christ.
If Aidan’s access to the Nowhere was ever going to come back, now would be the time.
Garnett slid his fingers into the file and opened it with exquisite slowness. “Mr. Quint, I have here a list of Aidan Blackwood’s inflammatory rhetoric and acts, perhaps I could—”
“Excuse me.”
“Yes?” Garnett asked. Aidan tensed. What could Caleb possibly say to defuse the situation? There was no anecdote cute enough.
“Who’s the most famous runner you can think of, other than Aidan?” Caleb asked.
Garnett wasn’t expecting to be questioned. He spread his fingers and drummed them on the open file while he thought. “Fehim Terzi, I suppose. Or maybe the Franklin Station Bank robber.”
“And what became of Fehim Terzi after the whole world celebrated his Istanbul-New York run?”
“Nothing much. He died young, didn’t he? Most runners do.”
Garnett’s nonchalant bullshit made Aidan rage. He had to know what had happened to Terzi. Everybody knew. What was Caleb doing? This wouldn’t help anything. They couldn’t talk about this; people didn’t like him. People didn’t like runners. He’d founded the Union with that in mind.
Instead of fidgeting, Aidan tried to project calm authority, like he knew exactly what Caleb was going to say, like they’d expected and prepared for all of this—or better, like he knew Caleb so well that he had perfect faith this would all work out. It was good to focus on something other than Garnett’s smug, punchable face.
If Aidan could still jump, he would already have landed a hit.
“Yes, runners do have a shorter average life expectancy than non-runners,” Caleb said acidly, not taking his eyes off Garnett. “In part because they’re frequently the targets of hate crimes. Terzi—the most famous runner in the world, by your own account—died because he was murdered. Assassinated, even. Strange that you don’t seem to know that, when you were about to present yourself as an expert on the subject of runners.”
“Oh, yes, I do recall something about that now. But it’s been decades, and it happened on the other side of the world. And it seems a bit of a stretch to call it an assassination.”
“The world is a lot smaller than it used to be.”
Aidan shivered, and he couldn’t say if it was fear or excitement. He’d never heard Caleb—sweet, sunny, solve-all-the-playground-fights Caleb—sound so icy.
Caleb regarded Garnett, and then the audience, and spoke in a measured tone. “Fehim Terzi, the first runner to reveal himself to the world at large and a symbol of hope, was assassinated. He was poisoned. The killer’s apartment was full of long-distance surveillance photos and equipment for listening to everything Terzi did. There was evidence the man was part of an organization that wanted to exterminate all runners, but he killed himself shortly after murdering Terzi and his contacts were never discovered. This all happened decades ago, and it’s been forgotten by the world at large, but runners know it.”
Aidan shouldn’t be surprised. Caleb had cheered for every speech. Caleb had helped him found the Union. But it was still amazing, this proof that he’d really been listening. And he was willing to stand up for runners, even after Aidan had pissed him off. There was something in Aidan’s throat.
“So that’s one unfortunate incident. A violent crank. You don’t have any evidence of an organization,” Garnett said. “Meanwhile, there’s plenty of evidence of crimes committed by runners. After all, I just said the two other most famous—infamous—runners are Aidan here and the Franklin Station Bank robber.”
“If you saw someone shouting for help, would you scold them for being so loud?”
“No, not if they really needed it,” Garnett said, obviously resenting this line of argument. Caleb had wrested control of the conversation.
“Runners can be denied jobs or housing just for who they are. Our society forces them to the margins and then pretends it’s their fault. Do you know how many of the runners I know have been homeless at some point? Three-quarters, at least. That’s appalling. We should all be outraged, and yet hardly anyone talks about it. When Aidan protests, people notice. He’s doing the right thing.”
“Is he? If there are so many homeless runners, shouldn’t he be helping them instead?”
“He is. He does. Aidan is a hero.”
Well. That was excessive. He opened his mouth to dismiss it, and Caleb cut him off with a hand signal. Aidan felt strange, sitting here in silence while Caleb argued. He’d never experienced anything like this. Caleb had been so serious and determined the whole time.
It didn’t feel like a performance.
Aidan liked it way, way too much. He shouldn’t. It wasn’t making either of them seem harmless and cute. This wasn’t what they’d come here to do.
It’s not believable that I would dump him after this, he thought, an absurd flicker of panic. Worse, Caleb was making himself a target. Even if Aidan jilted him in front of the whole world, you couldn’t say this kind of stuff in public without repercussion. Nasty articles and news segments. His defaced image on protest signs. Hate mail. Someone had once thrown a brick through the window of a house where Aidan was staying, after a photo of him entering found its way to the darker corners of the internet. Any of that could happen to Caleb. They would come for him too, now.
Caleb knew that.
Caleb had witnessed the aftermath of the abduction, categorically the worst thing that had ever happened to Aidan. He knew it could happen again—especially if they failed to put Quint in prison. He knew it could happen to him.
Aidan had tried to shield him from that. Had tried to choose for him. This was Caleb choosing for himself.
Aidan had hurt him and here Caleb was defending him despite everything. Caleb was on TV using his platform to talk about runners’ rights.
“I understand you have a rosy view of Aidan, but surely you agree the Franklin Station Bank robber is a criminal?” Garnett said, desperate to regain some ground. “You can’t argue that she’s innocent.”
“Yes, let’s talk about her,” Caleb said. “She was fourteen at the time she attempted the robbery. Do you know what happened to her?”
Panic overtook excitement. They shouldn’t talk about Laila. She didn’t deserve to be dragged through the public consciousness again, and more controversy was bad for their fragile plan.
“She went to prison, as people who get caught robbing banks usually do,” Garnett said.
The audience was still, and the six-piece house band across from them hadn’t produced so much as as a ba-dum-tss since they’d come on set.
All Aidan had to do was reach out and squeeze Caleb’s knee. He’d get the message and back off as gracefully as possible. Maybe they couldn’t salvage this interview, but they could wander around the city handing out thousands of dollars in cash to passing strangers. That would turn public opinion in their favor again.
Despite the nervous energy racing over his skin, Aidan’s hands might as well have weighed two tons each. He couldn’t move them. He was as rapt as everyone else in the studio.
Caleb stared down Garnett and said, “And how did they keep a fourteen-year-old girl in prison?”
“Not a girl. A runner.”
Caleb ignored this. “Starvation, Ken. Starvation and sedation. That’s torture. She was fourteen years old.”
“She planned and almost succeeded in carrying out a bank heist. She was a dangerous criminal and she had to be stopped.”
In the silence, Aidan could have sworn the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Caleb raised his eyebrows. “You support torturing kids?”
If they were going to blow it all up, at least it would be righteous. Caleb was brave as fuck. More passionate about the cause than Aidan had realized.
No, not just the cause.
Holy shit. He’s in love with me.
Caleb deserved so much better than what Aidan had offered him. Aidan owed him the whole truth, every last terrified bit of it, from Brian and his surveillance photos to the nightmares where he was still in the cell. Caleb deserved to know how Aidan felt.
Aidan gave up on controlling his own facial expression and watched Caleb’s instead. He’d narrowed his eyes at Garnett. He looked ferocious. Sure of himself.
It was hot as hell. Aidan shouldn’t be thinking about that now.
Garnett spread his hands on his desk like his suit and his set could lend his horrific position some gravitas. He addressed the audience smoothly. “I support controlling a dangerous segment of the population. Extreme means are necessary. There are monsters among us.”
“Unconscionable.” Caleb nearly spat on the carpet. “I already told you how hard it is to get a job or an apartment in this country if anyone knows you’re a runner. It’s no wonder that some of them need to steal to eat. Runners made it possible for us to construct a space elevator, to build a civilization in orbit, and in turn, we’ve stood idle while radical ideologues hunt them down and murder them. We’ve used vile, abusive means to torture and imprison them. Worse, people like you have encouraged that.”
Caleb paused and Aidan thought he was storing up to launch into another rant. Instead he slung one arm around Aidan, the other around Oz, dragging them close. He glared at Garnett and said, “Laila Njeim was a desperate fourteen-year-old girl who made a bad choice. You’re a monster.”
And the three of them disappeared.
Aidan caught him before he hit the kitchen floor. Caleb stayed still and waited for his vision to come back. The jump shouldn’t have been so hard—even with two people, it was the first time he’d entered the Nowhere all day.
It sounded strangely loud in Quint’s house. Maybe the jump had screwed up his hearing.
Aidan pulled him fully upright. Caleb blinked. There were twenty people in Quint’s kitchen.
What the fuck?
When he looked at them, still fuzzy and trying to figure out why they all had masks or makeup or veils on, they burst into cheers. Most of them had beers or wine glasses in hand, but a few of them were raising whole bottles. The specially insulated, glass-fronted wine rack under the marble island, he noted, was empty.
Someone pushed through the crowd. At least it was the one person whose strange makeup Caleb recognized, even with tears running down her face. Laila hugged him hard enough to hurt.
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to th—”
She squeezed him sharply. “Shut up.” She loosened her hold and then yelled toward the ceiling, “Someone get this man a drink!”
Another cheer went up. Shit, were they chanting his name? He was too dizzy for this. Caleb said mildly, “It’s a little early for that, for me, I think.”
“I heard the world is a lot smaller than it used to be,” Laila said.
A moment passed. Why had she said that? She looked so expectant. “Are you quoting me?”
She laughed. “My point stands. ‘It’s five o’clock somewhere’ is extra true when you can teleport.” She kissed his cheek and let go of him. He wobbled, still dazed, but Aidan appeared at his side an instant later, a steadying presence. “If you don’t want one, it’s fine. But the rest of us are going to drink as much of Quint’s cellar as we can.”
“Fine with me,” Oz yelled, hoisting a bottle of champagne over his head to more cheers.
Someone pressed an open bottle of champagne into Caleb’s hand. He stared at it without drinking.
“Let’s go back in the living room and watch it again,” someone shouted. The voice was familiar. Without faces to match, it was hard to place people. Most of the Union members filed out of the kitchen and it quieted down.
“How did they all find this place?”
“I told them where it was,” Laila said. “I started getting messages during the interview. And I was sitting in that giant living room alone and I thought, well, why not have some company?”
From the living room, Caleb heard his own voice, the recording turned to maximum volume. A cheer drowned out the recording. He blushed.
Laila patted his shoulder. “I have a party to attend. See you later.”
“What’s happening?” Caleb asked Aidan after she was gone.
“We don’t get many victories, so we celebrate even the smallest ones,” Aidan said with a shrug. “The Union is choosing to see this as a victory.”
“You don’t think I blew it all up?”
“Well, whatever else happens, we’ve given away a lot of money and we’re about to trash this house. That wasn’t really my goal, but it’s something.” Aidan walked one hand along the length of Caleb’s shoulder, his fingers resting against the side of Caleb’s neck. “And we got a handsome, charismatic man to give an impassioned speech about runners’ rights on Sunday with Ken Garnett.”
“Yeah? Who was that?”
Aidan rolled his eyes, smiled, and averted his gaze. “It occurred to me that I was kind of an asshole earlier.”
“Oh?”
“I know that’s been… a pattern, and I’m sorry. We should talk about it. There are some things I should tell you,” Aidan said. He tilted his head toward the living room, which was now booming with music. “But maybe not with all these people here. And I don’t want to gloss over your moment. I really was moved. It was good, what you did.”
“It’s not really my moment. I just said things you’ve been saying for years.”
Aidan made a stop talking gesture. “You wouldn’t let me protest being called a hero earlier, so you’re not getting out of this. You did the right thing. Take credit for it.”
A bunch of strangers chanting his name did nothing for him, but a couple of sentences from Aidan could make him weak in the knees. Caleb hid his reaction as well as he could. He hadn’t forgotten this afternoon. “What did you want to talk about? You can’t tell me we need to talk and then put me off till later. It’s cruel.”
One of the guests walked into the kitchen.
Even with a black veil slanted stylishly over her face, Caleb could recognize an ex-girlfriend. “Anna?”
Her smile dimmed from brilliant to sheepish. “There are some things I probably should have told you.”
“That’s becoming a theme,” Caleb murmured. There was only one reason Anna would be in Quint’s mansion right now. “You’re in the Union?”
“Yeah. Please don’t feel hurt—it’s not that I didn’t tell you I was a runner, it’s that I didn’t tell anybody. Not even Aidan. He guessed.”
“I get it,” Caleb said. After all, he’d just ranted at a TV host about the difficulties of living openly as a runner. Whatever small hurt he felt at not being told, it drifted to the bottom of the sea of other emotions swirling through him. “It’s good to see you.”
“Thanks. I’m really happy for you. Both of you. I had a feeling this would happen, and I’m glad it finally did. Cheers.” Anna gave them both hugs and then left them alone.
Caleb had lifted the bottle he was holding, but he let his hand drift down without taking a drink. He still felt strange from his earlier jump.
Just like Deb, Anna had been expecting Caleb and Aidan to get together. She’d said as much when she’d broken up with Caleb, but he hadn’t understood. She’d been right about him back then; she still was. It made him wonder what it was Aidan wanted to say, and whether this was the first time he’d tried to share it.
“Hey, let’s go out there and say hi to everyone, and then you can go lie down if you want,” Aidan said, nudging him toward the living room. “You look like you might need that.”
“What I need is for you to spit out whatever it is you want to tell me.”
“There won’t be any spitting.”
“Aidan.”
“Oh, it’ll be mostly me acknowledging that you were right and I was wrong, followed by a lot of groveling. Don’t worry, you’ll enjoy it.”
“Groveling, huh? What does that involve?”
“You gotta be awake for it,” Aidan said. “I’m not wasting my groveling efforts on someone who’s about to pass out. One victory lap and then you can collapse.”
This many jumps would be hell on his body. He’d tried to get Quint to give him some suppressant up front, in the interest of not getting all of his matter unfolded, but Quint was too shrewd a negotiator for that. He needed a runner, and Caleb was the only one he had. Quint would keep him around as long as he could. Caleb took comfort in the fact that he could dump Quint in the ocean as soon as he had the suppressant, if the whim took him.
Caleb had spent a day and a half trapped with Quint. He was feeling pretty fucking whimsical.
He was standing motionless in the one corner of Quint’s room that was invisible to the recently installed security camera. Caleb could have disabled the camera, but he didn’t want to alert anyone else to his presence. Oz would text them at any moment, and then they’d be gone.
“How did you become a runner?” Quint asked, not for the first time.
Quint was relentless. Caleb was finally bored enough to answer. “Look, I don’t know shit about the science, I just get the injection every two weeks and it works.”
“Tell me everything you can,” Quint said.
“Fine. I’ll start at the beginning because I don’t know how much you know—”
“A lot,” Quint interrupted.
“—and we need to be on the same page, so you know what kind of questions I can and can’t answer. It’ll be mostly can’t, I’m warning you now.” He took a breath. “People perceive three dimensions, plus time, but there are more than that. The others are all folded up. All matter in this reality, your reality, is folded in a certain way. In my reality, it’s folded differently. It makes no difference to our everyday lives.”
“Except that the Nowhere is unfolded space, and anyone with two or more different foldings in their body can pass through it easily and painlessly,” Quint said. “You can skip ahead a few steps.”
Just to spite him, Caleb slowed down. “So you get the principle of how to make a runner: something in their body, doesn’t matter what, that’s folded differently. It has to be a significant amount of matter. Born runners get it from having their parents come from two different realities. I get it from the injections. The serum that Heath gives me, it has a dimensional prion in it. You know what a prion is?”
“A misfolded protein, but in this case, you mean matter that changes the folding of everything it touches,” Quint said. “But we tried that and only had limited success. Why did it work for you?”
Caleb did actually know the answer to that. Heath had mentioned it, once, that not all dimensional prions were created equal. You needed a slow-acting one to ensure that the recipient had multiple foldings of matter in their body for a meaningful amount of time. In his case, it was two weeks. Instead of saying that, he shrugged. “Beats me.”
Some people had spiritual crises about becoming runners—if this injection refolds all the matter in my body, what does that mean, who am I, am I just my atoms, do I have a soul, blah blah—but he’d only cared about access to the Nowhere. He hadn’t bothered to learn any of this shit until he’d started showing symptoms of the shakes. It turned out the human body couldn’t sustain having all its matter refolded every two weeks, if you hadn’t been born a runner.
Caleb didn’t share that with Quint, who was obviously after the serum. It was useful to know what people wanted, and Quint might not want the serum if he knew its long-term effects. Caleb had no plan to divulge his condition, either. As far as Quint was concerned, Caleb wanted the suppressant for the same reason Quint did: to ground any runners who were personally inconveniencing him.
“Every two weeks, you said?” Quint asked.
“The tablet’s buzzing,” Caleb said. It would be Oz’s message.
They’d discussed the plan at length. It wouldn’t be hard to make the switch, but they had to pick their moment. Oz had to be able to slip away unnoticed. Caleb had to make three long jumps back-to-back. Minimizing the amount of time Quint’s room was empty meant minimizing their risk of getting caught. Yesterday’s endless arguing between Oz and Quint had made the whole thing feel like that riddle about how many ferry trips you needed to get a wolf, a rabbit, and a head of lettuce across the river.
Oz was the head of lettuce, that grasping coward. It had taken nothing but the promise of more money to flip his loyalties.
Caleb listed the steps in his head: down to the surface with Quint, up to space with Oz, back down to the surface to get the suppressant Quint had promised him. He’d be in dire need of it.
Then he’d crash somewhere out of the way until he regained his strength. He didn’t trust Quint enough to sleep in one of the man’s absurd palaces, but after three jumps to and from space, his body might not give him a choice. He’d play it by ear. Once he was able, he’d go home with as much suppressant as he could get his hands on and never come back to this place.
“They’re having a party in my house,” Quint said, staring at Oz’s message, then muttered, “Runners,” like Caleb wasn’t standing right there. Like his whole plan didn’t depend on Caleb.
Like he didn’t desperately covet the ability for himself.
Quint continued, “Oz will meet us in the garage. Have I described the location accurately enough that you can get us there?”
“I’ll get us there.”
The first jump was unpleasant. He felt the Nowhere’s strange push-pull more keenly that usual, and knew it was only a taste of what was to come. Hard to say how long he had until the glitching started. More than two jumps, he hoped.
The five-car garage was quiet except for the muffled sound of a raucous party happening on the other side of the wall, just as Oz had said. The din made Quint frown, so Caleb was fine with it.
Oz met them with a half-empty bottle of champagne in hand, tie loose and hair mussed. Wasted. He raised the bottle in greeting.
“You’re not supposed to be drunk,” Quint said, not so much emanating disapproval as whipping it directly at his double. “I’ve been in prison.”
These two definitely weren’t going to kiss. They might kill each other, though, and Caleb would happily watch that.
“I’ll hide it,” Oz said. “I’m a good actor.”
Caleb waited while they switched clothes. Even after Quint methodically messed up his hair, it was still amply clear which one was which, but Caleb knew them way better than he wanted to. If they weren’t side by side, it would be harder to tell.
When it was done, he grabbed Oz and said, “Don’t fucking throw up on me.”
Experience had taught him to warn passengers, especially drunk ones. The Nowhere was unkind to non-runners.
It wasn’t all that kind to him, either. The few seconds in the void speared through him, leaving pain in places he didn’t know he could feel pain. Christ. This might actually kill him.
They emerged into the room at Facility 17, which had been empty a scant few minutes since his departure with Quint. Caleb’s vision spotted black and his breath came in irregular gasps. He let go of Oz, who stumbled toward the bed.
Caleb didn’t step back into the Nowhere so much as collapse into it. It was only his determination not to show weakness in front of Quint that kept him on his feet when he reappeared in the garage. Fuck, he ached. Needles all over his skin, weight on all his joints, and the persistent, unsettling sensation that everything inside him had been disassembled and put back slightly wrong.
“At last,” Quint said, the ungrateful bastard. “Let’s go in.”
Quint could walk into his own home freely. Everyone inside would assume he’d stepped out for a moment alone and come back in, now that Oz wasn’t there to confuse matters. Caleb would have to be more circumspect. He wasn’t in a state to take risks.
“I’ll wait here and you can bring me the suppressant.”
“You have to come in,” Quint said. “The suppressant’s not here, anyway. We’ll get it tomorrow.”
God, his whole body was on fire. He was going to murder Quint as soon as he found the strength. “You lied.”
“I didn’t lie, I just didn’t give you all the details. I need you for a few more days. Help me expose their crimes and I’ll get you all the suppressant I have.”
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“I’m offering new terms. Stick around for a few more days, pretend to be your double, and if you can get me some samples of the serum, I’ll give you the formula for the suppressant so you can manufacture it yourself.”
Caleb was in so much pain he had to drum his fingers against his thigh just to stay focused, to feel one sensation that didn’t hurt. “Where will my double be, while I’m pretending to be him?”
“I don’t know. Get rid of him. Isn’t that what you do?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Quint, I’m not a contract killer. I’m not going to murder an innocent person just because he’s an inconvenience.”
“He’s not innocent,” Quint said coldly. “None of them are. If you don’t want to come in, you can sleep out here. I’ll find you in the morning.”
He walked up a set of three stairs and entered the house.
Caleb caught his breath for a moment in the silence of the garage, nothing but the ocean of poured concrete under his feet and the five huge, sleek cars. He quashed an urge to break all their windows out of spite.
It was a huge house. He could find somewhere to sleep without being seen. Everyone inside was drunk, so it would be easy.
He mounted the stairs, every step more awful than the last, and slipped into a hallway. At the opposite end, there was laughter and music and shouted conversation. Caleb crept down the hallway, checking each room for people, weighing his options.
Some paranoid need to survey everything propelled him to the end of the hallway where he could peek into the giant living room without being seen. He pressed his back to the wall and craned his neck to count twenty-three people, with Quint making twenty-four. His double wasn’t in sight.
That should have been a relief. On the other hand, if he’d been there, at least Caleb would have known where he was and what he was doing. The unknown nagged at him.
He was just about to inch back down the hallway when someone said, “Caleb?”
Shit. Aidan. He was carrying a bin full of empty glass bottles and he set it down on the floor.
“Did you… change your clothes? Never mind. I thought you were going to bed. Are you okay?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Disappearing wasn’t an option. Neither was his gun. In other circumstances, he might’ve just punched the guy, but he was injured and trying not to draw attention and he hadn’t expected anyone to hold his hand.
Or touch his face and peer at him like—like—whatever that was. No one had ever made that face at him. He didn’t want to think about what it was or why he’d never seen it before or why he was reacting this way. Not even the pain had fucked him up like this.
“You’re really out of it,” Aidan said.
“Yeah,” he said, seizing the excuse. “I should go back to bed.”
He slithered away, more reluctantly than he’d ever admit out loud, and went back down the hallway the way he’d come. But he didn’t make it far.
“Caleb?” Aidan cocked his head toward the living room. “Our room’s that way.”
Where his double was asleep, no doubt. Shit.
“Maybe I should walk you there,” Aidan said carefully, advancing until he could take Caleb’s arm. He turned them toward the party. “What were you doing in this hallway, anyway? Going through the recycling?”
“I don’t know,” Caleb said. It wasn’t hard to sound bleary and confused.
There was nothing to do but follow Aidan’s lead. They cut through the party, and once it was quiet again, Aidan said, “Caleb. This is important. Did you jump there? I didn’t see you walk through the living room. If you jumped in your sleep or by accident, I need to know.”
“No, no, I walked. I just… I sleepwalked or something. I didn’t jump. I’m too tired for that.” That was true.
“Okay,” Aidan said. When they arrived at the closed door to the bedroom, he chewed his lip and said, “I guess I should have done a security check.”
Caleb already knew how unsecure the house was. “Mm.”
“I know you’re tired. I don’t need much. Maybe just… tell me what we talked about earlier.”
Oh, that kind of security check. God fucking damn it. After a split-second of panic, some combination of training and instinct kicked in. The hand-holding, the face-touching, the concerned questioning, that look. Things had changed since he’d last run into Aidan and the poor guy had been scandalized by a hand on his thigh. His double and Aidan had fucked. Recently.
Caleb could work with that. He didn’t need a gun or the Nowhere to solve this problem. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t at full strength. He knew how to use his face.
He conjured up a smile. Stalling for time, he drew a finger along the underside of Aidan’s jaw.
“You said…” he started, and then stopped. He couldn’t provide any actual words. Better to be vague. “You made me a promise.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
Jackpot. “About when we were alone together,” Caleb added, growing more confident. He slipped his finger under the collar of Aidan’s shirt and traced the delicate stem of his clavicle.
“I also said it should wait until after you’d rested,” Aidan said.
Caleb yawned, taking advantage of his natural inclination and turning it into something theatrical. “You were probably right. Go back to the party. I can find my way from here.”
He pushed lightly on Aidan’s shoulder. Tried not to think about how warm he was. The sooner he was away, the better, since Caleb had to wrangle his goddamn double once he got in the room, and who knew what that would sound like.
“Okay. Get some sleep.” Aidan pressed a kiss to his mouth. It was quick, over before Caleb knew what was happening, and then Aidan was gone.
Caleb touched his lips, like an idiot, and then shook it off and went into the room to find his double.