The Light Between Us

by Katie Khan

  About the Book

  Thea and Isaac first met at University. Theirs was an instant connection, but it never went further than friendship.

  Because, then and now, Thea only has eyes for her work. Not only her course, but also a private project – Thea is determined to prove that time travel is not just the stuff of science fiction. And she has never told anyone the reason why.

  When one of their friends goes missing in an experiment, Isaac and Thea must work together to find her – forcing them to re-examine their own friendship. Is it really as platonic as they used to think?

  The Light Between Us is a story of unrequited love and second chances. It begs the dangerous question: what could have been?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  An Alignment at Dusk

  I: The Glass House

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  II: The Unknown Woman

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  III: A Prism Full of Light Years

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  An Alignment at Dawn

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Katie Khan

  Copyright

  The Light Between Us

  KATIE KHAN

  For Katy,

  who showed me true friendship

  can feel like falling in love.

  An Alignment at Dusk

  Oxford, October 2010

  The planets were moving towards each other in the night sky when Isaac and Thea first met. It was a rare conjunction, the type that happens only once a decade – and, at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, the Astronomy Club was meeting to observe the curious celestial event.

  Their numbers were bolstered that night by random observers hoping to snatch a quick glimpse through the telescopes. Not many understood exactly what they were looking at, but they’d been told Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars would align, tracing an arc across the sky shortly after twilight. It was a sight rarer than an eclipse and there was a hum of excitement out on the grass as students and professors mingled, huddling in groups for warmth as they waited with a tangible expectation they could almost taste on the cold wind.

  It wouldn’t be too much longer.

  Those who knew what they were doing moved around fixing telescopes trained upwards, spaced out across grass glistening with dew. Thea Colman recognized many students conscripted in from the Philosophy Department; compulsory attendance, they’d been told. Thea was sure they were only asked to attend because looking out at the universe will make any human feel improbably small.

  Hands stuffed into coat pockets, her chestnut hair tucked into her scarf, neck straining to look up at the sky, Thea’s attention was fixed on the pale pools of light pouring towards her, strengthening each minute.

  ‘Here –’ a student Thea hadn’t met before pushed a hot drink in a red plastic cup at her – ‘take one. It’ll warm you up.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, taking her hand from her pocket to hold the cup against her, absorbing its heat. Around them, various people peered into the lenses of telescopes, while those waiting stamped their feet against the cold, similarly clutching steaming red cups.

  ‘I hate these cups,’ she murmured.

  ‘Oh?’ the same person said, still near her. He was tall with a shock of dark hair brushed away from his forehead; waves that threatened to explode into all-out curls at any moment. ‘Why’s that?’

  Thea swirled her hot toddy, gazing into it as though she could read tealeaves. ‘Well, who brought them here? Almost certainly an undergrad who’s spent time in the States, gorging on American culture, who has very misguidedly thought the Oxford Astronomy Club would be the right place to cultivate a derivative fraternity vibe.’

  ‘Is that right?’ he said, starting to laugh.

  ‘I mean, are we supposed to play a game of beer pong, right here on the grass …?’

  ‘Oh, good!’ came a voice. The Philosophy professor stood behind them, beaming. ‘You’ve met. Two of my “half” students who, lamentably, I only get to teach for half the time. The rest of the time you’re corrupted by other subjects, and other professors.’

  Thea smiled politely, as did the person next to her.

  ‘You’re both looking rather contemplative,’ said the tutor. ‘Pondering the otherworldly light from the heavens?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Thea said.

  ‘And what do you think light is?’ he enquired. ‘Colman?’

  She raised her eyebrows: the question was too easy. ‘An electric field, tied up with a magnetic field, blasting through space at great speed.’

  The tutor smiled. ‘You like that definition. I can see it in your eyes.’ He tilted his head. ‘What about you, Mendelsohn – what do you think light is?’

  She watched the curly-haired student next to her consider before he spoke. ‘Well …’ His gaze flicked towards Thea, not quite meeting hers before snapping back to the professor. ‘“A certain slant of light” is poetry. A spectrum of seven rainbow colours is a symbol of pride … And I suppose when we, as humans, look in a mirror – we can find our own truth, within that reflection made from light.’

  ‘Do you see?’ the professor said, sadly. ‘How your other studies corrupt you. Though that was very lyrical, Mendelsohn – what a shame I don’t get you in my Philosophy class full-time.’ He brightened. ‘Perhaps you’ll be a good influence on Thea, here. Get her out of her scientific ways of thinking.’

  The student took a leisurely sip from his red cup. ‘I’m more inclined to think someone that logical will be a good influence on me.’

  She regarded him briefly; that secret moment when you instinctively like someone you’ve just met and must consider whether it’s admiration or attraction.

  Or both.

  ‘You were saying something about hating the red cups?’ he said, turning to her as their professor made his excuses and moved away.

  She smiled. ‘I don’t think we’ve met before, have we?’

  ‘I’ve been abroad,’ he said. ‘I spent a year studying in the States.’

  ‘How did you like America?’

  ‘I loved it.’ Around them, people began to ooh as the remaining daylight dispersed and the planets became more visible in the dark. He pointed to Mercury, closest to the horizon, and Venus with its whiteish light sitting just above the moon, the three entities forming the beginnings of a curved line. In only a few minutes those brightly coloured dots would be joined by three more, arching in the sky above them, a line-of-sight trick making them look impossibly close.

  ‘I stayed with a fraternity in Princeton,’ he continued. Then, when Thea didn’t say anything: ‘You could say I gorged on American culture.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked at him soberly. ‘You brought the cups.’

  He grinned. ‘I’m Isaac,’ he said, holding out his hand, waiting as she jostled her red cup to the other hand so she could shake his.

  ‘I’m sorry. I said something rude. I tend to lack—’

  ‘A filter? That’s not a bad thing.’ He smiled. ‘So you’re Thea. The scientific one.’

  ‘And you’re Isaac,’ s
he said, as their gaze returned to the skies. ‘The poetic one.’

  It was nearly time.

  She could see his profile in the corner of her vision, but when their eyes met they both quickly turned their attention to the emerging conjunction of the planets. They only looked like they were close together because of where they were standing; their viewpoint on Earth tonight would deceive their eyes, and though, for a brief moment, the planets would appear near to one another in the solar system, they were still distinct and far apart – lone lights in the dark.

  Thea turned something over and over in her pocket, feeling the shiny, hard surface of glass against her palm as she contemplated the starlight.

  Above them, faintly, shone brownish Saturn and pinkish Mars, and far out to the left was yellowish Jupiter. The sound of the groups became louder, as though someone had turned up the volume. ‘Do you see it?’ People around them began to murmur excitedly.

  ‘The syzygy,’ Thea said, and she saw Isaac glance at her as he drank from the blasted red cup.

  ‘That’s right,’ the Astronomy tutor said warmly. ‘Three or more celestial bodies, all in a line. And this syzygy is special, because the curved line the five planets fall on is the …?’

  Thea stopped herself answering, remembering to let other people have their turn, and instead took a sip from her cup. But when nobody spoke, she bit her lip.

  ‘It’s the ecliptic,’ she said, tracing the line of lights in the sky with her hand. ‘An imaginary line that marks the path of the sun.’ More quietly, she continued: ‘It’s what makes it look as though we’re standing on the edge of the universe. As though we could wave, and the other planets might see.’

  Isaac wore a look of surprise, and as the group chattered and the professors posited further questions, moving among the crowd, he turned to her. ‘You’re into astronomy?’

  ‘I’m studying Physics and Philosophy.’

  ‘Suddenly it makes sense.’ He raised his cup in cheers. ‘I’m Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics, myself.’

  ‘Keeping busy.’ Thea grinned.

  ‘I spend more time in the library than is entirely good for the soul – there’s a hell of a lot of research.’ He grimaced. ‘Hard science has always been my Kryptonite.’

  She took a sip of her drink, smiling into the cup. ‘Better not let me tell you my idea for a PhD, then.’

  ‘In Philosophy?’

  ‘No – God, no.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Physics.’

  They stood together, staring at the moon ringed aglow, the planets like bright map pins they could reach up and unfasten from the sky.

  ‘When you see the solar system laid out in front of us like this,’ Isaac started, ‘when you can really see the other planets … it makes me think there’s no one else out there, in the universe, but us.’

  She knew she’d met someone she’d want to talk more with, when he said that.

  ‘Would I be able to follow it?’ he said. ‘Your PhD idea.’

  And whereas Thea would usually reach for every principle under the sun, every technical word to prove her intelligence through the great wealth of fact and theory she’d stored up over the years, she didn’t want to lose her new friend’s attention – and she didn’t want to make him feel bad, if he couldn’t grasp it. ‘Yes,’ she said. She reached into her pocket, feeling for the comfort of the multifaceted glass that dug into her hand. She brought it out and he looked at it, bemused.

  ‘A crystal?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing quite so woo-woo,’ she said. ‘This is a glass prism.’

  Isaac eyed her speculatively. ‘And what are you going to do with this prism, during your complicated PhD research project I haven’t a hope of understanding?’

  Thea twinkled. The ecliptic stretched out overhead, a curved line of the solar system’s major players, the rarely beheld formation making an imaginary line real to the naked eye once every ten years. ‘It’s about light,’ she said, forcing herself to sound casual. ‘The theory is, if you were to travel faster than the speed of light, you could – technically speaking – arrive somewhere before you left.’

  Isaac raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘It’s a theory.’

  ‘But isn’t the speed of light inordinately fast?’

  ‘It is.’ Thea twisted the prism so it caught the moonlight, throwing beams and spectrums across the ground. ‘But not if you were to slow it down. Trap it, somehow.’

  Isaac looked to the glass prism, and back at his new friend. ‘You could arrive somewhere before you left.’

  She gave him a conspiratorial smile. ‘I’m going to prove that time travel is possible.’

  I

  The Glass House

  One

  Oxford, 2018

  EIGHT YEARS LATER

  Thea watches the light of the day wash away. Golden hour comes and goes; she watches from the window as the amateur photographers of Oxford lift their camera phones to capture the sandy stone of college towers, basking in the milky daylight that makes their images softer and their hearts a little warmer.

  She watches.

  And she waits.

  The golden light dilutes down to dusk. From her window, Thea observes the figures on the street outside hurrying as the warmth dissipates, twilight’s blue tinge announcing the coming dark. She turns the glass prism over and over in her hand, her thumb bearing a mark from all the years she’s held it – a callus on her skin caused as much by the imprint of her determination as by the hard surface of the glass.

  Still she waits.

  The lampposts outside flicker on in the gloom. The evening is swollen with anticipation: tonight’s the night … and it’s been a long time coming. Tonight Thea will break the rules.

  The University said no to her time travel proposal, firmly directing Thea’s PhD studies towards more academic, more ‘suitable’ research. Which she accepted, at first. But after a while the professors’ unwillingness to even listen made her angry … the way they threw Einstein and Hawking in her face, as though someone like Thea would never be able to match them. Yes, the best men that science had to offer established infamous equations and theories about light and time, but their satisfied faces, and the idea there was nothing more to say on the matter, simply urged young scientists like her to prove them wrong. So she’s going to.

  The professors have forced her hand, in a way. Because Thea knows in her gut that she is right – and tonight, with or without permission, she’ll prove it. The University Physics Department has something she needs, so tonight she’s going to borrow it.

  As darkness finally crawls across the city, Thea starts work. In size order, she packs a large holdall with three small industrial-looking photographic lamps and three tripods, a camera, and a battery pack for her phone. She picks up an artist’s portfolio case and puts it by the door, her arm tensing a little at the weight. Then she returns to her desk by the window, overlooking the dark street.

  The phone in her hand chirrups three times and she blinks from the artificial brightness of the screen. Without thinking, she hopes it will be a message from Isaac, but then she remembers he’s in the States and they haven’t spoken in a year. She could have done with having him around tonight.

  He’s lived in New York for the five years since he graduated, and at first they’d spoken daily – after all, a friendship stretched across an ocean is still a friendship. But when Thea finished her Masters, then returned to Oxford for her PhD, and her anger grew as the professors and college didn’t listen to her, she knew he’d tired of her battle.

  Single-minded, he’d called her, the last time they talked.

  Small-minded, she’d called him in retort.

  She regrets it most days, the recoiling hurt she’d seen flash across his face on Skype before she’d slammed the laptop shut, disconnecting them for good.

  And though they aren’t close at the moment, it’s only right that, before she does this thing, she speaks to Isaac. He’d want to know
, she thinks. She wants him to know.

  She taps a message then reads it back, deleting the last character – a full stop – and retyping it three times while she considers if she really wants to send this text to him at all.

  She hits send. She doesn’t expect a response – he’s five hours behind in New York, and probably at work.

  Maybe she should have added a smiley face at the end, to help with tone.

  Thea nearly jumps out of her skin as the phone buzzes in her hand with a video call from Isaac Mendelsohn. A photo of his smiling face from years ago fills her screen as it vibrates. She hates video calls and the artificial closeness they engender: you’re either with someone in the same room, on the same side of the world, or you’re not. The inventor of the video call would have been better off focusing their intelligence on the invention of a teleporter. She wipes away the tiredness from her eyes; the three rings on her left hand flash in the light as she answers. ‘Hello, Isaac.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Tonight’s the night”? You’re really doing this?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘I have to.’ His hair looks darker on the screen, almost black. He looks like he’s been working hard – and probably eating too much New York pizza. ‘You’ve been eating too much pizza,’ she says, unthinking.

  He doesn’t even blink. ‘This is crazy,’ he says. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I need it to test the theory—’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ he says, his eyes hard. ‘You’re so obsessed by the theory you’ve forgotten to evaluate everything else. That is terrible science, Thea. You’re a terrible scientist for doing this.’

  She blinks, wounded. ‘I shouldn’t have messaged you,’ she says, her voice hollow. ‘I mistakenly thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Know that you’re risking everything? Thea, they could throw you off your course.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she says.

  ‘Getting your PhD at Oxford … wasn’t that your dream?’

  ‘It is. It was.’

  Isaac leans forward. ‘Wasn’t it your parents’ dream?’