This whole damn place made him uneasy. Kit could have named a dozen reasons: the awkward arrival, the scientists eager to examine him, the tight-knit group of strangers he’d managed to offend, the attractive man who wouldn’t even look at him… but it was the Nowhere that troubled him. Not just those things, whatever they were, but something about the void itself. No matter where he was, Kit could feel the Nowhere, and it felt the same everywhere—except here.
He had a stupid urge to tell Emil that something was wrong, but he didn’t think he could explain it.
So he kept quiet and followed Emil out the door.
Kit had a good memory for maps. He wasn’t sure if it was a cause or an effect of being a runner. Either way, he remembered the hand-drawn map and he knew Emil’s room was on the right side of the first floor, near the end of the asteroid that Emil had drawn at the top. The kitchen had been at the bottom of the map. Because there was only one hallway that wrapped all the way around, they could go left or right and still end up at the kitchen, but going left would be shorter. They’d pass the gym, the basketball court, and the common room on their way.
But when Emil peeked out the door, there were people to the left. So they went right, which took them past a lab space in the center of the facility. Kit didn’t need a tour guide to know that it was the site of the accident. It had once had windows looking out into the hallway, but the glass had been replaced by brown paper.
And it felt wrong.
Kit hurried past the lab, around the end of the hexagonal loop of hallway. There was a storage room and more lab space on the right, followed by the massive greenhouse.
They heard voices coming from down the hall. It was the same group of people Emil had tried to avoid earlier. They must have cut through one of the central rooms and come out the other side.
Kit recognized one of the voices as Dr. Heath. The other belonged to an older man. The other scientist everyone kept mentioning?
It didn’t matter. Emil grabbed him and pulled him into a closet before anyone could see.
Emil pulled him into the small space so quickly that they rattled one of the metal shelves. It was too dark to see, but Kit heard… ceramics? Oh, they were next to the greenhouse. This must be a supply closet full of gardening tools. He sniffed—that was definitely the scent of potting soil.
They stayed near the door, listening. Kit could feel space behind them, a corridor between shelves on either side, so he knew it wasn’t necessary for them to be squeezed together. If he were feeling spiteful, he’d point that out. But he wasn’t. He felt hungry, tired, confused, afraid, and tense, and having Emil next to him made him feel a little less of all that, which he liked. And if he said anything about it, it would end.
As a rule, Kit didn’t like talking about these things. Especially not since his last talk with Emil had gone so badly. So for now, he was happy to pretend that circumstances had forced this closeness upon them and there was nothing to be done about it. So, apparently, was Emil. This moment of contact in the dark—his back to Emil’s chest, where Emil’s heart beat just a little faster than it should—was all they could have without talking about it. Was it wrong to enjoy it? Kit didn’t care. He wasn’t getting paid for this shit job, so he might as well get what he could.
It wasn’t a crime to think about how their bodies fit together, or how big and warm and solid Emil felt behind him. It wasn’t wrong to take pleasure in the way Emil had gripped him and pulled him in here like he weighed nothing, or in the way that, even now, Emil had one hand on Kit’s hip and the other on his shoulder. Had Emil thought about where he’d put his hands? Had it been conscious? Or was it instinct? The touch was light, but ready. Ready for what, Kit didn’t know. To pull or push him out of the way of danger, probably, or to hold him still and keep him quiet if someone came close to the door. Rationally, Kit knew that was what Emil was preparing for, but his brain suggested all sorts of other possibilities. Emil could pull him closer, lean down, and drag his teeth and tongue along the side of Kit’s neck. He could let his hand wander down from Kit’s hip…
They were both angled toward the door, listening, but Kit hadn’t heard a word. Dr. Heath and that other scientist could be out there talking about how they wanted to vivisect him for all he knew. They were in danger. He really ought to pay attention.
Dr. Heath and her companion were still chatting out in the hallway. Kit heard a third voice in the mix. Another man. That one sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Not any of the people he’d met in Emil’s room today. And he didn’t know anyone else up here, so how could he recognize the voice? Hunger was making him hear things.
Dr. Heath and the older man were saying their goodbyes to this new person, wishing him a good night’s sleep and telling him they’d see him tomorrow. He said a few pleasantries of his own, and then at last, Kit heard their footsteps moving down the hall back toward the quarters where everyone slept.
He waited for silence before reaching for the doorknob. Instead of silence, he heard scratching.
It sounded like there was an animal outside the door, dragging its claws down the metal until it shrieked. There was no room to back up, but Kit backed up anyway. His shoulders tensed hard. “Please tell me that’s the cat you mentioned.”
“That’s the cat I mentioned,” Emil said, totally unconvincing.
“You didn’t even try.” Kit spoke this complaint into the darkness, trying to pretend his pulse wasn’t hammering from fear. It wasn’t the cat. Was that blue light slipping in under the door?
He felt Emil shrug. “It’s been happening the whole time I’ve lived here. It’s kind of creepy, but no harm ever comes of it. It’s mostly scratching noises, or things getting knocked off tables. We call it our poltergeist. Clara’s been agitating to name it ‘Quint.’”
“You’ve all lived here for months with some invisible thing that knocks objects off tables and drags its claws down walls, and you want to give it a nickname? Jesus fucking Christ.”
“It would be different if anyone had ever gotten hurt.”
“Oh, and us getting knocked off course into a different reality, that doesn’t count?”
“You think it’s the same thing?”
“I don’t fucking know, Emil, and I don’t want to find out! How can we get away from it?”
“Move to the right and walk between the two shelves. You’ll hit a door at the end of the closet that opens into the greenhouse. The lights should come on once we’re in there, and we can walk back out into the hall.”
Kit took a step in the darkness. He felt for the shelves on either side. The storage closet seemed remarkably neat—was it Emil who kept it that way?—and there was an easy, open path down the middle.
Had the scratching stopped or had Kit just stopped paying attention?
A blur of light appeared in front of his face, so bright and blue it made him squint. The stacked pots rattled. The blob of light shifted, and a stack went crashing to the floor. Emil grabbed him in both arms and pulled him back as the pots shattered. Shards slid everywhere. Kit felt one hit the side of his boot.
When he looked up again, the thing was gone.
“Are you alright?” Emil said, his voice a low hum in Kit’s ear.
“Fine,” Kit said, heart pounding and a droplet of cold fear-sweat running down his side. He was too startled to string together the sentence it scared the everliving fuck out of me, and besides, he didn’t want to admit it. “You still want to give it a nickname?”
“Not really,” Emil said. “Let’s go.”
He kept a hand at the small of Kit’s back as they moved.
By the time they reached the kitchen a few minutes later, Kit was so adrenalized that he could almost ignore how hungry he was. It was fear carving into his gut. That fucking thing with its creepy scratching could move through the Nowhere. It could come out. There wasn’t a safe place in the world—or out of it, since Earth was currently several million miles away.
Was it the same thing that had collided with him and Emil and knocked them into the desert? Or was there more than one? God, how was he supposed to live with the knowledge that the whole universe was full of scratching, glowing, hovering… ghosts?
We call it our poltergeist. Emil’s whole team was fucking bonkers. Then again, they’d signed up to subject their bodies to a long-term science experiment and were planning a potentially lethal mission to unknown worlds. And none of them, not even the one who was a runner, seemed to be able to feel how eerie and wrong this place was. The Nowhere was all fucked up. Kit needed to get away from here.
But first he needed to eat.
Facility 17 was equipped with a gleaming industrial kitchen, spacious and brightly lit with a spotless, long metal table in the center of the room. It was the opposite of the cramped, dingy space where Zin prepped bar snacks every afternoon.
God, Zin. He had to get back before she freaked out about his absence.
Lenny and Dax were already in the kitchen. Dax was leaning against the counter while Lenny was pulling a casserole dish out of one of the ovens. He set it on the stove and lifted a metal spatula as though he were going to cut it apart into servings.
“You don’t have to do that,” Kit said. “You can just give it to me. The whole thing.”
Lenny eyed him, then looked back at the dish. Kit could see now that it was mac and cheese. It could have been wilted spinach and his stomach still would have rumbled, but the sight made his mouth water.
“If you say so, kid. You know there’s other food around. You could have a balanced meal.”
“Not a kid,” Kit said reflexively. He sat down at the table next to Emil. “And I don’t care. Aren’t you a runner? You should know.”
Lenny picked up the dish and a fork and put both down in front of Kit before seating himself across from them. Dax sat down next to him. Kit dug in without waiting.
They all watched him in amazement for a few silent minutes, but Kit was long past caring. It felt so good not to be painfully hungry. He wanted so badly to be strong enough to run.
“I’ve only been a runner for a few months,” Lenny said, shrugging one shoulder. “I don’t really know what I’m doing. And I’ve always been hungry.” He patted his belly and smiled.
“Lenny’s an amazing cook,” Emil offered. “He makes that mac and cheese from a recipe he invented.”
“Tweaked,” Lenny said. “You can’t really invent a recipe for something people have been eating for hundreds of years.”
“Take the compliment,” Dax said.
They’d redirected the conversation away from the interesting subject while Kit was wolfing down food. The casserole was one-third gone by now. He was still too hungry to choose talking over eating, but Lenny brought the conversation back to runners anyway. He said, “I have so many questions for you. Do you know a lot of other runners? Is there like a club or something? Did you have to practice running or have you always been naturally good? And can you only get somewhere by thinking about coordinates or maps? Or can you jump in other ways—like jumping to a person without knowing where they are?”
Kit swallowed his bite. That was a lot of questions. “I know a few other runners. Or I did. There’s no club.” Kit thought of Aidan Blackwood coming by every week, talking up his union, trying to get Kit to join as if Kit would ever sign up to be in a group of other people. Laila liked Aidan and his ideas, and every time she and Kit were out at Winfield’s barbecue joint after a job, she’d tried to soften him up. We have to look out for each other because no one else will, she’d said. Then Laila had disappeared, just like Aidan, and Kit had known exactly who was looking out for him: no one.
“Running came naturally to me,” Kit said. “But I have gotten better with practice. I’ve never tried to jump anywhere by thinking about a person.” That was a little bit of a lie. He’d thought he could make it to Emil’s bedroom on feeling alone. But he’d been wrong and he didn’t want to discuss it. He ate a few more bites, then took a break to say, “How’d you become a runner?”
“The experiments.”
“Well, I know that. I mean, why didn’t the experiments work on anyone else?”
“I think if Heath and Winslow knew the answer to that, they’d have a team of six runners instead of one,” Dax said. “Sometimes science is a lot more blundering around in the dark than people think. They tried a variety of approaches—”
“I always figured it was my great-grandmother,” Lenny said softly, like he hadn’t meant to interrupt Dax. He’d just taken his time putting that thought into words. “She was a witch.”
Dax made a dismissive noise.
“You live on an asteroid circling the moon, you’re trying to cross into some other reality, and there’s a fucking poltergeist, but witches are a step too far?” Kit asked.
“The poltergeist thing is a joke,” Dax said.
“I’m not laughing,” Kit replied.
“We had an encounter on the way here,” Emil said, smoothing things over. “Some pots fell off a shelf in the greenhouse supply closet.”
“See? Not so scary when you put it like that,” Dax said.
“And what were you doing in the closet?” Lenny asked. From the way he waggled his eyebrows, it was meant to be funny.
Emil didn’t catch it. “Avoiding Heath and Winslow,” he said with a grimace. “They were with someone else. Is there a new person here?”
“Yeah, a nurse,” Dax said. “Hopefully he’s got better bedside manner than Heath.”
Kit choked on a cough and went back to eating mac and cheese. He knew way more than he wanted to about Jennifer Heath’s bedside manner. Emil shot him a warning look. He pretended not to see it, but he did want to change the subject. Still chewing, he pointed his fork at Dax and said, “And fuck you for acting like it wasn’t scary. I’m a normal goddamn person, and when an incorporeal blue glowing thing menaces me, I react.”
“Wait, what?” Dax said, eyes wide, just as Emil said, “You saw it? I didn’t see anything.”
“I fucking told y’all!” Lenny said. “I told y’all I saw something and y’all made a joke out of it but now Kit’s vindicating me!”
“Sorry,” Dax said to Lenny. “It’s not that we didn’t believe you. Just that we couldn’t really do anything about it. We still can’t, I guess, but it seems like maybe runners can see this thing. These things?”
“Not sure if there’s more than one,” Kit said between bites. “It’s hard to compare what happened in the Nowhere to what happened here, but I think the one in the Nowhere was bigger. This one was maybe this big.” He held his hands just over shoulder width apart, then rotated them, keeping the dimension the same.
“Mine too,” Lenny confirmed.
“The one in the Nowhere was bigger than me. So either there’s one and it can change size, or there’s more.”
“Fascinating,” Dax said.
Kit didn’t agree. He looked at Lenny. “Can you tell how fucked up it feels here?” he demanded.
“Uh,” Lenny said. “I don’t know? Everything feels weird to me these past few months.”
“Weird how?” Dax said. “Fucked up how?”
Kit shrugged. “Hard to explain. I feel the Nowhere everywhere. Like… currents in the air around me. Like a pulse. It moves all the time, but it’s always… evenly distributed, I guess? There aren’t any places where I can’t feel it, just like there aren’t any places where it feels especially strong. That’s what makes it so perfect for traveling, I think—it touches everything. But that’s not how it feels here.”
Lenny was rapt. If he’d just become a runner and he’d been living here the whole time, he had no comparison for how strange it felt. Kit could see questions forming behind his eyes.
“It’s not evenly distributed here, you mean.” Dax was interested, too. They leaned across the table, focused.
“Right,” Kit said. Emil hadn’t said anything in a while, but he was listening intently. Maybe Kit should have tried to tell him earlier. “Think about a piece of fabric.” He held his hands out in front of him, his fingers woven together. “The threads are like this. But if you pull one part of it really hard—”
“You could make a hole,” Dax said. “And then the rest of it would be all bunched up and uneven.”
Emil was nodding. “Dax, you think this is connected Lange’s research.”
“I do,” Dax said. “We have to get into his lab.”
Kit finished the last of the mac and cheese. He felt almost sated. “You mentioned other stuff to eat?” he asked. “Or drink? That might be better, actually. Juice, milk, coffee, literally anything with calories. And no, I’m not joking. I have a long run ahead of me, and there might be a fucking ghost trying to kill me.”
Lenny nodded. “Sure.”
Zin would fucking kill him for his manners. “And thank you,” Kit added. “It was really good.”
“Thanks. Just a slightly different version of what my grandma used to make.”
“The witch?”
“That was my great-grandmother,” Lenny said. He moved to stand up, but Emil got there first.
“I’ll get it,” Emil said. “You keep talking.”
Emil went to the fridge. He pulled out a container of juice, crossed the room, and offered the whole thing to Kit. Their fingers brushed. On purpose? Kit wasn’t thinking about that. He opened the bottle and took a drink.
“I didn’t really know her,” Lenny was saying. “She made it to the age of 93, but she passed when I was about three. I guess she was born in… 1977?”
“Fehim Terzi did Istanbul to New York in 2058,” Dax said, referring to the first publicly acknowledged runner. “So your great-grandmother lived most of her life in a world where no one knew about runners.”
“Except runners,” Kit pointed out. Terzi was the first to make a spectacle of disappearing into the Nowhere and reappearing somewhere far away, but he was far from the first runner. Kit couldn’t prove it, but he knew it in his bones. Runners had always been here. They’d just been quieter about it.
“I don’t know for sure that she was a runner,” Lenny said. “Like I said, I didn’t know her, and if she ever mentioned it to my grandma or my mom, they didn’t pass it on. My aunts and uncles and cousins are always saying things like ‘if you had a problem, Alice could always help’ or ‘she had a way about her.’ Hard to say what it means. But I always wondered.”
“You think it runs in families,” Dax said. “Interesting.”
Lenny shrugged. “I wouldn’t claim to know. But when it happened that I was the only one of the six of us who took to it, I started wondering what was different about me, and every time, I came back to her. Alice Desjardins. She was born in Louisiana, and so was my grandmother, but they moved to Arkansas after a hurricane destroyed their house.”
“But nobody else in your family is a runner,” Emil said.
“I feel sure I would have been in a lot more trouble as a teenager if my mom could have sneaked up on me like that. So no, I don’t think she is.”
He looked at Kit, and as he opened his mouth to ask the question that Kit hated most in the world—what about your parents?—Kit said, “Don’t.” He’d never been able to answer that question. At this point, he didn’t even want the answer. He just wanted people to stop asking.
Unexpectedly, Emil put a hand on Kit’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything or even look at Kit. The touch didn’t feel illicit or thrilling and it didn’t make Kit’s insides light up and dance around. It was calming and comforting without being smothering. Kit relaxed a fraction. It almost made him feel like he could stay here.
Lenny didn’t tangle himself in knots over Kit snapping at him, which Kit appreciated. Plus, he was a good cook. Kit should try harder not to be rude to him.
“So we’ve got a theory about why Lenny’s trial was a success, a little bit more information about the poltergeist, and a lead on Dr. Lange’s work,” Dax said. “Not bad for a midnight meal.”
“Is it a meal if I’m the only one who ate?”
“You ate enough for all of us,” Lenny said, which was a line Kit had heard plenty of times, but he let it slide.
“I haven’t even started asking questions,” Dax said. “Tell me more about the other—”
They stopped abruptly at the sound of footsteps approaching the door. Better the sound of footsteps than the sound of scratching, but still, that was Kit’s cue to leave. He let the Nowhere take him.
Kit was going to be trapped in this fucking facility for the rest of his life. He’d seen one of the ghosts again—not the one from the supply closet, but the first one, the one that had knocked him into the desert. Kit hadn’t wanted a repeat, so he’d ducked back into the world without a thought for where he was going. And now he was blinking in the too-bright light of a room that was definitely somewhere in Facility 17. It had the same flooring, the same windowless white walls. There was a counter and a row of cabinets running along one wall, and on the other—
“Holy shit,” Kit said.
There were two hospital beds in the room, separated by plastic sheeting hanging from the ceiling. He couldn’t tell who was in the more distant bed, but he recognized the occupant of the closest one.
“Aidan Blackwood.”
Aidan’s eyes slitted open so that Kit could see green irises between the black fringes of his lashes. He was sedated, with an IV line in his arm. That was the only explanation for why he hadn’t already come fully awake to chastise Kit about not joining the union.
No. Kit shouldn’t be unkind. Something was very wrong here.
Aidan was even paler than usual, and his black hair was matted like he’d been lying in that bed for days. He’d always been wiry, but now he looked thin and sickly. The arm with the IV line in it was also handcuffed to the bed. Restraints couldn’t hold runners. Sedation and starvation could. Aidan was a prisoner.
“Aidan,” Kit hissed. “What’s going on? What are they doing?”
“Get out before they come back,” Aidan said.
“And leave you here?” Kit didn’t enjoy Aidan’s company, but he wasn’t going to leave him in this hellish facility. “And whoever that is? No, I can’t.” Kit shook his head. He stepped toward the other bed and pulled back the plastic sheeting. He sucked in a breath.
Laila. Of fucking course it was Laila. She hadn’t flaked on him. She never would have. A curious feeling of relief—Laila really was his friend—mixed with his horror at seeing her forcibly sedated in bed. Unlike Aidan, she hadn’t come awake at all.
“She fights,” Aidan said. “So they keep her under almost all the time. I fought them for the first few days—then I decided I could do more damage if I was awake at least some of the time.”
Laila’s hair, which she colored cotton-candy pink and kept styled in big, bouncy curls, was flattened and limp. None of her funky, asymmetrical makeup, which she wore every day to avoid facial recognition cameras, was on her face. That made Kit’s eyes sting with tears. She’d hate that. She’d hate the stupid, pale blue hospital gown, too. God, how dare they. Kit hoped she’d screamed and kicked and scratched and bitten anyone who’d touched her.
He’d been angry at her. He’d thought she’d abandoned him. He was a fucking fool.
Laila had dark circles under her eyes. She wasn’t as fat as Zin, but she wasn’t wiry like Aidan—Kit usually thought of her as soft, a word that went well with her pink curls and her hugs, and not so well with her combat boots or the rage that lit her from the inside out. The world had hurt Laila and she was always ready to hurt it back. He wasn’t surprised that she’d fought her jailers, or that the only way they could keep her from fighting was to knock her out completely. A few days of this treatment hadn’t made Laila look as awful as Aidan did. But she still looked sick. Kit laid a hand on hers, which was cooler to the touch than it should have been.
“How do you feel about being in here with a criminal?” Kit asked Aidan. They didn’t have time for this conversation, and yet he couldn’t keep it inside. The urge to needle Aidan was too strong. And in his heart of hearts, Kit knew he could only save one of them at a time. When he picked Laila first, he wanted to be able to tell himself it was because Aidan was a dick.
“You know there are arrest warrants with my name on them. I care about justice, not laws,” Aidan answered. “What does it mean to be a criminal when the law is unjust? And Laila needs a union more than any of us. She knows that, even if you don’t.”
Aidan was stubbornly refusing to be a dick. Him and his stupid idealism. “I’m just saying, she kinda ruins your whole ‘runners aren’t criminals’ thing. Me too, I guess.”
“Laila was a child when it happened.”
“Fourteen,” Kit argued. It was dumb that Aidan would say when it happened like the whole thing had been some accident, like fourteen-year-old Laila Njeim hadn’t planned and executed a massive bank robbery all by herself. He was a little insulted on her behalf. She’d gotten caught and served time and hadn’t kept a cent, of course. The two of them never brought up the subject now because she was embarrassed. But Kit still thought she was—and always would be—a fucking badass.
Laila’s time in juvenile detention might have been something like this. They’d have had to keep her hungry and tired all the time in order to stop her from getting out. The thought made Kit clench his jaw—suddenly fourteen seemed a lot more like childhood. At what age did it become ethically acceptable to starve a person?
Aidan ignored Kit’s argument. “And the laws that make you a criminal are equally unfair. We need a new legal framework that won’t penalize runners for our abilities.”
No new legal framework would put emptying other people’s safety deposit boxes on the table, and Laila had proved that runners excelled at that. Kit didn’t think border controls or customs agents would disappear from the world any time soon, either, which meant he’d be a smuggler for the rest of his career… if he ever got out of this damn facility.
Kit had to get Laila and Aidan out of here. But he hadn’t meant to come here in the first place, he couldn’t carry both of them at once, and those things were still waiting in the Nowhere.
“How long have you been here?” Kit asked Aidan.
“A week, I think. Hard to keep track. They brought Laila in after me.”
“How did you get here?”
Aidan shook his head. “Don’t know. Whatever it was knocked me out. But it had to be a runner. There’s no way they’d risk using the elevator or anything more official for this.”
“Another runner brought you here?” Kit’s mouth fell open. Aidan was a dumb idealist and Kit had no time for comradeship, but still. He wouldn’t betray other runners like that. It’s exactly what you did to Emil, a little voice inside him whispered. Would you have done it to Laila if Quint Services had offered you enough money?
“The only question that remains is who. I’m sure it’s someone both Laila and I know—that would have made us complacent. Unfortunately whatever they used to knock me out has left that whole day blurry.”
“That’s awful,” Kit said. Quint Services had hired a runner that Aidan and Laila trusted and then paid that person to anesthetize them and bring them here to be experimented on. If Laila and Aidan both knew that person, chances were high that Kit knew them, too. Chances were higher, in fact, since Kit knew exactly who was in the business of not asking questions. And when he’d finally made it home from that other reality, Zin had said your tall friend came by earlier this morning.
Travis Alvey wasn’t Kit’s friend.
Especially not if he’d been the one to bring Laila and Aidan here. Kit didn’t have proof, only suspicions. “Do you think the person might have messaged you beforehand? Is any of your tech in here?” Kit asked. “Maybe we could figure it out.”
“They took it somewhere. I’m sure it’s locked up far away from this room.”
“Shit. I’m gonna get y’all out,” Kit promised. “I just need to think.”
“This place has fucked up the Nowhere somehow,” Aidan said. “I didn’t even know that was possible.”
“I know. I feel it too. And there are these… ghosts. Or something. I keep getting knocked off course.” Kit frowned. “But I feel okay now. I could try to get one of you out.”
“If you only take one of us, they’ll know something’s up. They’ll cover their tracks and move elsewhere,” Aidan said. “Come back with someone else and take both of us at the same time. We can make it a few more days. We’ll look out for each other.”
That was what Laila had always said Aidan wanted to do with his union. Maybe Kit could stand to listen for once.
“Okay,” Kit said. He tilted his head toward Aidan’s IV. “You want me to take that out?”
Aidan shook his head. “They’ll know if you do. And I’m fighting it.”
“I’ll be back as fast as I can.”