It would never stop freaking Emil out, the way runners could just vanish. He’d been cavalier with Kit about their encounter in the supply closet, and he didn’t like to show fear in front of his team, but the truth was that the Nowhere scared him. He’d been worried, these past few months, that this secret cowardice was somehow preventing Heath and Winslow’s trial from working on him. As if the Nowhere could sense his weakness, and it was rejecting him.
Worst of all, Emil was privately relieved by this rejection. He didn’t want to spend any more time in the Nowhere.
And yet he was envious of Kit’s ease with it, and Lenny’s successful trial. It was a foolish kind of pride. He’d turned himself into an A student and a winning athlete. Why was he failing at such an important goal? Why couldn’t he be the one who’d gained superpowers?
The footsteps that had caused Kit to run kept approaching, and eventually their owner came into sight. He was a young man Emil had never seen before, with wavy brown hair and blue eyes. He was strong-jawed and handsome in the way of classic movie stars, his face symmetrical and masculine, his shoulders square. He wasn’t as tall or as big as Emil, but few people were. He would have looked at home in the Orbit Guard, but instead he was at Facility 17, presumably working for Quint Services.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Caleb Feldman. I just transferred here. I’m a nurse.”
A stranger showing up meant it was time for Emil to be Team Leader. He’d been enjoying just sitting and listening to Kit—but Kit was gone. “I’m Emil. Please join us. Are you hungry?”
Caleb shook his head. “Just wired. Couldn’t sleep and heard people talking. I hope I’m not interrupting?”
He was, but it wasn’t his fault he’d landed in the middle of a mess. Emil opted for friendliness. “No, just a late-night chat among friends. This is Lenny and this is Dax.”
“Where’re you from, Caleb?” Lenny asked.
“Inland New York,” Caleb said. “My grandparents hate it when I call it that and always complain that it’s not ‘the city’ and it never will be. But it’s also safe from the tide.”
“Ha,” Dax said. “So this’ll feel pretty small, then.”
Lenny laughed. “I’m from rural Arkansas and this place feels small.”
“Even though you can look out the window and see the vastness of space?” Caleb asked. “Or the Moon up close?”
That was a good sign. Anyone who was romantic about space could probably get along with his team. And until they found evidence that they absolutely couldn’t continue with the mission, Emil wanted harmony. “You’re right,” Emil said. “Can’t beat the view. The people are alright, too. You wanna join us for hockey soccer tomorrow afternoon?”
“I’m sorry?” Caleb said, obviously fighting off a smile.
“Low-gravity asteroid hockey soccer,” Lenny said, in his most serious voice. “Or as I like to call it, the beautiful game.”
“Isn’t that what people say about actual soccer?” Caleb asked.
“Shh,” Dax said. “Don’t tell him.”
“Lenny is one of the originators,” Emil said. “It can’t really be explained, only experienced.”
“It also can’t be won,” Dax warned. “So don’t get your hopes up.”
“We’ll see about that,” Caleb said. “So that’s what you do for fun around here? Hockey soccer?”
“And science,” Dax said.
“You get paid for the science,” Lenny said.
“Still fun, though.”
“Is it hard to be so far away from your friends and family?” Caleb asked. “What’d you say to them when you took this post?”
Emil was friends with his team. Sure, he had family on Earth, and a few old friends, but they were accustomed to him serving in the Orbit Guard. His parents and Zora knew they only got to see him occasionally, and that sometimes he couldn’t tell them things. This was hardly a change at all.
Dax shrugged. “Most of the people I care about in the world are here.”
Lenny nudged their shoulder, then fist-bumped them.
“We all signed up for an eventual mission to go even farther away,” Emil said. “So we’re not exactly a good sample. But I think it’s natural to feel homesick. Are you missing someone in particular?”
Caleb lifted one shoulder. “Not really. I get along with my parents and my sister, but we’re not that close. We’ll be fine with some mail or a virtual visit every few weeks. When I told them I got this job, they congratulated me.”
“‘Sorry, Mom, I love space more than you,’” Dax joked.
“How long have you been working for Quint Services?” Emil asked.
“A few months,” Caleb said. Emil was surprised by that, since Facility 17 was such a secret that only the highest ranks of Quint Services employees were aware of it. “I got a great evaluation and then pestered my supervisor about where the really exciting research was happening, and then just kept being so damn great at my job that finally they relented and sent me here.” He flashed them a winning smile, and Dax and Lenny both returned it. “I’m so curious about Heath and Winslow’s research. I did a lot of reading before I transferred up here, but it will be different to witness it in person. Are there any born runners up here to train you, in the event that the trials succeed?”
“No,” Emil said as blandly as he possibly could. He hoped to God that Kit had made it out for real this time, for his own safety—even though that might mean never seeing him again. “Just us.”
“That’s a strange choice on Quint Services’ part, don’t you think?” Caleb pressed.
It was a touchy subject for a stranger to bring up in their first conversation. Dax and Lenny were reticent, waiting to follow Emil’s lead. He was suspicious of this stranger, but he couldn’t trust Quint Services, and honesty would keep things simple. Eventually, he said, “Yes. It is.”
“Are you sure they didn’t bring any runners in? As consultants or something?”
Caleb hadn’t picked up on their reluctance to talk about this. Why was it so important to him? “Not to my knowledge,” Emil said. “But I don’t know everything.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Caleb said, gracing them with another easy smile. He was a good-looking man, and Emil wondered if he knew how charismatic he was. “Just wondering, you know. I had this friend, and back in the city—well, you know, Inland—they were always sending people around, trying to persuade him to join up. I thought they must be doing that all over. It’s actually how I got interested in Quint Services in the first place. My friend didn’t want anything to do with them, but after a while, the recruiter came around so much that I asked if they had any openings for medical personnel.”
“Your friend was a runner?” Emil asked. The news that Quint Services was trying to recruit born runners was an interesting development, but he wasn’t ready to let Caleb know just how interesting.
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “Just a guy I know, really. We were roommates for a while. Aidan.”
“Wait, Aidan Blackwood?” Dax asked. “That agent provocateur type? Quint Services tried to recruit him?”
Emil didn’t miss the flicker of interest in Caleb’s face. It was gone by the time he replied, nonchalantly, “Oh, you’ve heard of him.”
“I think he came up in my research on runners,” Lenny said. “Kind of an agitator, right?”
“You don’t know him from the news?” Dax asked Lenny and Emil, disapproving. “Just because we’re not on Earth doesn’t give us license to ignore everything that’s going on. Aidan Blackwood was in that photo that was circulating all over Elevate and other social media last month, the one of a young man getting knocked out by a cop. He jumped into Franklin Station wearing a t-shirt that said ‘BORDERS DON’T EXIST’ and started making an unauthorized speech in the commons.”
“Yeah, that’s Aidan.” Caleb glanced at the three of them, suddenly uncomfortable. He must have realized that Emil and Lenny were former Orbit Guard personnel. It had never been his job to bust runners, or Lenny’s, but Miriam had worked station security. She’d spent most of her time dealing with bomb threats made by Adamah—a religious extremist group that didn’t believe humans should live in space—but she’d probably encountered her fair share of runners.
When Dax had described that photo of Aidan getting knocked out by “a cop,” they’d meant Orbit Guard station security. Miriam wouldn’t have done that to Aidan, if she’d been the one on duty. His memory flashed to her elbow pressing into Kit’s throat, and he frowned. But she hadn’t really hurt him, and she’d been trying to protect Emil from a perceived threat. Still, he gained some sympathy for Caleb’s discomfort.
Emil had always found the anti-runner attitudes of others in the Orbit Guard distasteful, and he didn’t like being lumped in with them. Would Kit feel the same way as Caleb or Aidan? Would he have reason to fear and distrust Emil?
“I think what he’s doing is important,” Emil said, and Dax and Lenny nodded their agreement.
Caleb still looked like he regretted bringing it up.
“It’s late,” Emil said, offering him an exit strategy from the conversation.
“Yeah,” Caleb agreed. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
“Hockey soccer is always played with a beverage in hand,” Chávez explained to Caleb while Lenny uncapped his beer and handed it to him with as much ceremony as possible. “An empty beverage is a penalty of negative one thousand points.”
Caleb raised his eyebrows.
“Not drinking is also a penalty of negative one thousand points,” Chávez continued.
“Hockey soccer is more of a drinking game than a sport,” Emil said to Caleb.
“Disrespecting the game!” Chávez intoned. “Negative one thousand points.”
“How is that disrespecting the game? It’s just the truth,” Emil said.
“Implying that hockey soccer is not a sport is disrespectful,” Lenny said. “Implying that drinking games are somehow inferior to sports is also disrespectful.”
“So that’s negative two thousand points,” Chávez said. She tsked. “You are not starting this game off well, Mr. Singh.”
“Emil holds the all-time low score,” Miriam said to Caleb. “I think it was negative forty-seven thousand.”
“A low score like that is only possible in one-on-one. Hockey soccer is usually played in teams, but players are scored individually, and a team can vote to disavow players who damage their scores,” Chávez said, adopting her most officious tone. “Three-on-three is traditional here at Facility 17.”
Emil had offered to sit this game out to make the teams even, but apparently that didn’t exempt him from receiving his usual punitively low score. Chávez and Lenny just liked to razz him because he was team leader—and because early on, he’d made the mistake of revealing how competitive he was, which meant they’d never, ever let him win. Since then, Emil had lost points for all of the following: drinking too slow, drinking too fast, spilling his beer, kicking the puck out of bounds, kicking the puck perfectly straight, sighing, having “beautiful, glossy, shampoo-ad-worthy ebony locks,” laughing, not laughing, having “distractingly chiseled abs,” and breathing. Lenny and Chávez had also once docked him points for “being too scrupulous a rule-follower, which is against the spirit of hockey soccer, and therefore disrespecting the game.” But they’d also once awarded him one thousand points “for trying adorably hard” and five thousand “for being so fun to fuck with.” So he still played. Besides, there was nothing else to do at Facility 17 on Sunday afternoons. And they were his team.
Today, the six people on the court had split themselves up into two groups. Chávez, Jake, and Miriam were on one team, while Lenny, Dax, and Caleb were on the other. Lenny finished distributing their beers and they arranged themselves on the court.
“It might start as three-on-three, but it always becomes one-on-one because there’s a rush to betray each other at the end,” Miriam warned Caleb.
“Disrespecting the game!” Lenny said. “The every-man-for-himself aspect of hockey soccer is a cherished part of our tradition.”
Miriam, Chávez, and Dax shared a dark glance.
“Apologies. I meant to say the every-person-for-themselves aspect.”
“Negative one thousand to Miriam Horowitz, disrespecting the game; negative one thousand to Lennox Malcolm Beck III, being kind of an asshole; five hundred to Lennox Malcolm Beck III, apologizing with grace and style,” Chávez said.
“If ‘being kind of an asshole’ is against the rules, this game ought to be scored wildly differently,” Miriam said.
“Negative one thousand to Miriam Horowitz, disrespecting the game!” Lenny boomed, pointing at her. She cocked her head and stared him down, unrepentant.
Emil walked between the two teams, placed the puck on the court, and said, “Start already.” Then he got out of the way fast.
Chávez kicked it down the court before the other team could blink, but as she pushed past Lenny, Lenny grabbed her by one shoulder and leapfrogged over her head. This was Emil’s favorite part of this absurd ritual—turning the artificial gravity down low to allow for inhumanly high jumps. Lenny came down in seeming slow-motion, cradling his beer to his chest. He caught the puck with the edge of his foot and turned its progress around by sliding it to Caleb.
Their new friend looked delighted to be included, but Jake got in his space and stole the puck before he could get far. Jake passed to Miriam, who sent it sailing down the court into the soccer goal at the end.
“Two thousand to Jacob McCreery for cat-burglary levels of stealth, three thousand to Miriam Horowitz for that beautiful shot, five hundred to Caleb whatever-your-last-name-is for bringing some fresh-faced optimism into this tragically jaded crowd, and ten thousand to Lennox Malcolm Beck III for leapfrogging me and not spilling a drop!”
“My last name is Feldman,” Caleb said. “And how come only Lenny gets a middle name and a suffix like that?”
“Because he’s three times cooler than the rest of us,” Chávez said, retrieving the puck as the others rearranged themselves mid-court.
“If you’re wondering if it’s a conflict of interest for one of the players to officiate and announce the game like that,” Dax said in an aside to Caleb, “it is.”
“Disrespecting the game!” Chávez and Lenny said in unison. Chávez added, “Negative one thousand to Dax Strickland.”
Dax took a drink, which was really the only thing to do in that situation, since shaking their head or rolling their eyes would likely have resulted in further penalties. They played another point, and Caleb, having caught on, managed to leapfrog Miriam and take possession of the puck. There were cheers all around. He passed to Dax, who scored a goal. That would have tied the match in any normal game, but Emil knew better than to point that out.
“Refill,” Chávez called out and left the court. She sat at the table with Emil and took her time getting a second beer. “You alright?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Dunno. Did something happen with that purple-haired runner? I haven’t seen you look at anybody like that since I caught you being a maudlin drunk looking at photos of your exes. And I don’t see him around today…” Chávez let this sentence hang in the air like a question.
He didn’t sigh, even though he wished she’d never seen him looking at pictures of Lucas. Or had it been Rose? If he’d been drunk enough, it had probably been both.
“Maybe I’m not alright because our head researcher is missing or dead and the whole damn facility feels haunted,” Emil said. It was a transparent attempt to change the subject. Chávez was trying to make him feel better, offering him a chance to talk about his feelings. But Emil didn’t have feelings to talk about. Or he didn’t want to have feelings, which wasn’t exactly the same, but they’d go away if he ignored them. This was a wiser course of action than seeking advice from Chávez, who fell into bed so easily that she was sleeping with Dr. Heath.
“So you admit you’re not alright,” Chávez said.
It would be stupid to mope about Kit, a person he’d known for just over twenty-four hours. A person you kissed, his brain reminded him, but he shoved that thought away. Emil smiled, huffed, and shook his head. “I’m fine. Go play your game, Chávez.”
“Ignoring a friendly attempt to check on your emotional wellbeing, negative one thousand,” Chávez said, wagging a finger. But she left Emil alone.
There was more aerial play in the third point as Caleb got the hang of the low gravity. He scored “an elegant and worthy five-thousand point goal,” but spilled his beer in the process, which carried a penalty of “negative five thousand points and shame heaped upon you from all sides,” and he shot a look of sympathy at Emil as he began to understand how rigged the game was.
“Can I assign points for things?” Caleb asked.
“Of course,” Chávez said. “Just follow the rules.”
“Uh huh,” Caleb said, skeptical.
Emil watched them play a few more points and completely lost track of the score. But it was a pleasant, if ridiculous, distraction, and he liked watching his friends enjoy themselves. After Chávez’s little chat, the rest of them came over on their refill breaks, one by one, to speak with him about different things. This wasn’t so different from other Sunday afternoons. Their regular match provided reason enough to be together—everyone, including Heath and Winslow and their six lab techs, had been invited to hockey soccer in the beginning, but its chaotic and arbitrary nature drove away all but the core mission team, who happened to be Chávez and Lenny’s closest friends. Emil knew that was probably by design, and in his role as the team’s grown-up, he ought to guard against the forming of cliques at the facility. It could lead to tension among the residents.
But there was tension among the residents now for other, far more urgent reasons, and if these people were a clique, they were his clique, and today it was convenient that nobody else wanted to be around them. The echoing basketball court covered up these private conversations, such as when Dax informed him that Lenny was going to jump the two of them into Lange’s lab at four in the morning.
“Don’t come,” they said. “We’ll be in and out as fast as we can. I’m just letting you know in case of emergency.”
“I’d rather go with you,” Emil said.
“Lenny can only jump one person at a time and a regular break-in will be harder to hide,” Dax said. “I’m the one who can come closest to understanding Lange’s notes and Lenny’s the one who can get me in and out. It makes sense. Don’t argue.”
Emil frowned at them. “Fine.”
“I’m hoping to find out more about the poltergeist,” Dax added.
Jake, who’d just arrived at the table where they were sitting, shook his head. “I can’t believe that name stuck.” He filled his cup. Dax returned to the court, letting Jake have his turn, but Emil didn’t expect him to take advantage of the opportunity. Jake usually just got another beer and gave Emil a friendly nod.
Today he had something to say, though. “They’re not scary.”
“Wait, ‘they’? Why do you think there’s more than one polt—”
Lenny walked up right at that moment, just in time to overhear. He clapped Jake on the shoulder. “Uh huh. You’re not scared of ghosts. Good for you, Jake. You’re the manliest of all.”
Jake grimaced and walked back onto the court without saying anything. Had he been on the verge of elaborating? Emil wondered what else he’d wanted to say.
“It’s different when you can see them,” Lenny said, defending himself to Emil.
“It’s pretty creepy when you can’t see them, too,” Emil admitted. “All the weird noises, all the things falling over, I think I got used to telling myself it was no big deal. I learned to shrug it off. Then witnessing Kit’s reaction reminded me how eerie it is.”
“Yeah. I wish I’d gotten to ask him more questions.” Lenny glanced at Caleb, currently being chased down the court by Jake and Miriam, and then back at Emil. “What do you think of him?”
Caleb’s arrival in the kitchen last night had spurred Kit’s departure, and all the worst parts of Emil resented him for it. “He seems sweet. Maybe even naive. I’m not planning to reveal any secrets to him, but I don’t think he’ll harm us.”
“He’s a fucking star on the court,” Lenny said, raising his voice so he could be heard across the room and lifting his beer toward his teammates.
“Stop talking and get your ass over here!” Dax demanded.
“Yeah,” Caleb said. He beamed at Dax, then pointed at Lenny. “Abandoning your teammates to chat feels a lot like disrespecting the game!”
“Sustained! Negative one thousand points to Lennox Malcolm Beck III!” Chávez yelled. Lenny laughed and ducked his head and ran back to the court, where play resumed. Emil smiled, but he couldn’t keep his focus on the court. He’d have to get up at four in the morning, just in case Dax and Lenny needed him. And he’d have to approach Jake privately and ask him what it was he’d wanted to say about the ghosts.