by Joe Hart
But things were different now, she reminded herself. She and Anton had seen to that.
Almost immediately after her and Carrie’s reunion, she had begun work. Work funded by NASA and partially, she assumed, by the UN in exchange for her silence. There had been a major reordering in the hierarchy of the teleportation project after the disaster and loss of the space station as well as every soul on board. Over a period of several weeks, she was given enough resources to begin splicing her neurological mapping breakthrough with treatment hypotheses. Thankfully, all her findings, which also backed up her account, had arrived shortly before she did, and the leaping-off point for researching a cure had been so much more promising than ever before. With Anton’s constant help, they were able to eventually formulate an enzyme that, when paired with the luciferase-luciferin compounds, targeted and dissolved the neurological tangles created by Losian’s.
And it hadn’t come a moment too soon.
By the time their trials and testing had concluded, Carrie had lost much of her short-term memory capacity. Countless times Gillian had held her upon the little girl’s waking, calming her panic-stricken questions about where they were and what was happening. And even as she and Anton raced to a finish line that was promising but promised no certainty, Carrie’s long-term memory had begun eroding as well.
The fugues had come more frequently.
The anger and violence a familiar aspect of each day.
But the Lindqvist Enzyme Treatment, or LET, changed everything. Gillian had insisted on naming the breakthrough after Birk. And even knowing the tens of thousands of people the therapy would save, it was a small consolation to everyone who had known him. She couldn’t count how many times she’d glanced up as someone entered one of the labs, fully expecting to see the huge man there, to hear him mangle yet another idiom. To see his smile.
Carrie’s hands touched her arms, and Gillian came back to the present.
“Mom? You okay?”
Gillian smiled, wiping at the sheen of moisture coating her eyes. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry. I just . . . I’m okay, you know? You don’t have to worry.”
Gillian pulled her daughter close and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I know I don’t. But that’s what mothers do.”
Carrie gave her a half smile and turned away to gather a few items on the counter that had spilled free of her overflowing purse, and Gillian caught a glimpse of the stainless-steel port set in the back of Carrie’s skull. It was barely noticeable most days, especially when she left her hair down. But when it was wet from a shower or she tied it up on the top of her head, the small injection port was visible.
That was the only drawback to LET. It wasn’t really a cure but a treatment.
The enzyme dissolved the neurological tangles and prevented cell death, but it didn’t cure the underlying cause of Losian’s. Gillian’s theory on the disease, concerning several neurotoxins that had an inherent effect on genetic coding, was still being circulated in the medical communities. Most industry leaders were in agreement that the rising air and water pollution was to blame, but the exact poison had yet to be identified.
So the solution was an injection every two years through permanent cranial ports in patients who had the disease. It kept the effects at bay, and though it wasn’t what Gillian had hoped for, it was infinitely better than watching the person she loved the most in the world become a stranger.
“Okay, I’ve gotta go,” Carrie said, zipping the bulging purse closed.
“Do you have enough masks?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Oh, and Winston and I are going to dinner tonight, so I’ll be home late.”
“And when exactly is ‘late’?”
Carrie rolled her eyes, coming across the kitchen. “Mom, you do know I’m almost an adult now.”
Gillian smiled and hugged her daughter close. “I know. But you’ll always be my little girl.”
They stayed that way for a long time before Carrie said the word Gillian was waiting for. The fact that she wasn’t too old to say it, and maybe never would be, created a new wave of warmth in her chest.
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
Carrie stepped back from her, giving her a last smile before heading out of the room. “See you tonight.”
“Okay. See you then.”
Gillian watched out the window as Carrie jogged through the rain to her car and climbed inside. She made a quick turn in the driveway and then was gone in a fleeting flash of taillights.
Gillian busied herself for a few minutes in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and handwashing several of the larger pans from their dinner the night before. When the chores were done, she stood silently for a moment, listening to the drum of rain before returning to her chair in the sitting room.
She let her thoughts wander for a time. Traveling over the past like a historian layering events with critical detail. As she relived the last hours on the station, a craving for a hydro rose, expected but also surprising in its intensity. It had been over eight years since she’d had one of the little pills, but the strength of addiction never failed to amaze and frighten her. But she knew exactly what had caused the spike of need. It happened every time she returned to the moment before Ander’s machine had taken her apart and sent her across the expanse of space at the speed of light.
Because she’d lost something in that second. And no matter how hard she tried to find it again, it was utterly and truly gone.
Carrie’s birth. The happiest day of her life, erased as if it had never been.
She remembered trying to hold on to it as consciousness had slipped away from her in the unit, trying to grasp the best and brightest memory she had in case it was her last chance to do so. But now there was only an empty hole where the day should have been. Looking back, it made some dark, cosmic sense that there was a parallel between her discovery of unlocking the hippocampus through a memory and what shifting took away. One allowed the mysteries of the mind to be charted while the other was payment for trying to break an unyielding law of the universe. She barely recalled the elation of re-atomizing at NASA. What she did remember was severe disorientation, like falling asleep without meaning to and waking up hours later, groggy and bewildered, but tenfold.
Only three and a half minutes, but it had felt like so much longer. Somehow she believed Mr. King had come very close to the truth in his short story.
Maybe more than three and a half minutes had passed for her. Maybe a lot more.
Gillian sighed, sitting forward to rest her elbows on her knees. She shouldn’t do this to herself. Shouldn’t retrace the steps taken while wondering if she could have done something different, and if she had, perhaps Carson, Leo, Lien, and Easton would still be alive.
Birk would also still be alive.
She let the tears come, let them fall and mirror the rain outside. When they had tapered off, she gazed at the windswept clearing knowing that deep down the guilt and loneliness would never leave. Because in a way, she was still trapped, not on a ship or a space station, but in the web of her choices that had led her here.
Her phones were tapped along with her e-mail. She had to wear dark glasses and a hat every time she left the house and was watched closely via satellite as well as by a UN representative who was stationed nearby with orders to apprehend her if it appeared she was about to break her silence or reveal her identity.
Because that was the tradeoff for her research, for saving Carrie and countless others who had been afflicted by Losian’s: her silence. Eighteen thousand–plus people worked for NASA, and most had knowledge of her part in the mission as well as its downfall, but very few were aware she was still alive. If word got out, it would raise countless questions about how. People would learn about Mars and the biospheres and Ander’s failed teleportation units and Proxima b. They would know how little time they had left on this dying planet. They would know that the pollution
masks and expensive water-filtration systems wouldn’t save them. That NASA was decades away from perfecting another method of transporting people the distance to Proxima b, and when it was possible, a “brave explorer,” as Ander had put it, would be needed. Someone to take the risk and go there first. So many variables for an indeterminate future. If humankind knew everything, they would realize the end was coming and there was no stopping it.
She only wished she could tell Katrina the truth. Tell her she and Carrie were alive. But revealing the truth would mean the same restricted life for Katrina and Steve and their son, Avery, now a vibrant seven-year-old she had never met. And she didn’t have it in her to do that to their family, no matter how much she missed them.
Black energy coursed through her. She stood and paced, walking into the kitchen, then to the dining room, and back to where she’d began.
Her hand hovered over her phone at one point, and she nearly picked it up and dialed her sister’s number, nearly threw everything away just to speak to Kat, to hear her voice. But she set it down and moved to the dresser in the hallway, where she pulled the top drawer out and looked down at the object within.
Her mother’s rosary. It had shifted successfully as well, and she’d worn it for several years before finally tucking it safely out of sight. It had saved her life, more than once, but now she had other plans for it. She imagined the day, maybe a few years from now, when she’d be able to slip a package in the mail without her tail seeing, away from the prying eyes in the sky. She saw her sister receiving it, observing the lack of return address, and opening the box to find the rosary within. And she hoped Katrina would understand, would still have enough faith left to believe in miracles.
Gillian shut the drawer and returned to the picture window. The rain had tapered off, and she was considering going for a walk on one of the trails that cut through the hundred acres surrounding the house when her phone rang. She picked it up, recognizing the area code.
NASA.
“Hello,” she said, not knowing who or what to expect on the other end of the line. It had been nearly two years since anyone from the UN or NASA had contacted her.
“Gillian. It’s Jones.”
She had to swallow her surprise. The last she’d read, Anderson Jones had been confirmed as NASA administrator by the Senate. He was the last person she’d expected to call.
“How are you?” he asked, filling in her stunned silence.
“I’m . . . fine. Fine.”
“That’s good. I’ve been briefed regularly on your and Carrie’s status. Are you still enjoying the mountains?”
“Anderson, why are you calling?” she asked, slightly unnerved now for a different reason. Jones had treated her with respect after her sudden appearance in Ander’s lab, and she’d learned from several sources that he had been instrumental in clearing her research in exchange for her complicity in the lie the general public was living. The man had always been restrained and composed and conducted himself with quiet, self-assured ease. But now she could hear an undercurrent in the administrator’s voice, and if she wasn’t mistaken, it sounded like excitement. That or fear.
“There is car on its way to pick you up. A jet will be waiting at Jefferson County Airport.” Jones paused for several seconds, and she could hear his quiet breathing. “I have something I want you to see.”
Gillian was escorted through a back alley to the administration building’s wing, her sunglasses and hat firmly in place. Even here, especially here, on NASA campuses, her identity had to be kept secret.
The last four hours were a blur, from the black luxury sedan and silent driver who picked her up from the house to the unbelievably fast flight to the Shuttle Landing Facility on Merritt Island, where she was transferred to another car and deposited in the alleyway to be guided into the building by two men wearing expensive suits. If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve guessed they were Secret Service, but that was an absurd thought since she wasn’t visiting the president, only the administrator of NASA.
Her anxiety rose another notch when the suited men escorted her to a small boardroom with only a wide touchscreen mounted in the center of a short table flanked by two chairs. There were no windows in the room, and a single camera watched her from one corner.
Minutes later, the door opened, and Anderson Jones strode inside. He had aged little since she’d seen him, the only sign of the years a speckling of white invading his dark hairline at the temples to match his beard.
“Gillian, very good to see you, and thanks for coming on such short notice,” he said, shaking her hand.
“Did I really have a choice?”
Jones smiled without humor. “No, I guess you didn’t. But that’s the situation we find ourselves in, isn’t it?”
She was about to ask if he had to disguise himself whenever he went outside his home, but bit back the comment.
“Please have a seat,” he said, waking the screen before them with a touch. “I know you’ve traveled a long way, and you’re probably tired, so I won’t delay any longer. What I’m about to show you is completely classified, and to be honest, I had quite a fight on my hands when I voiced my request to have you view it. But honestly, I believe in the coming months and years, we are going to need your expertise. And in any case, I felt you of all people had a right to know.”
Jones opened a file, and a video appeared. In an instant, she recognized the room in the frame. It was the teleportation area in the space station. Jones hit “Play,” and the video jumped into motion.
Gillian watched herself enter the room and fight against the fluctuating gravity as the station lost altitude. Watched herself make the selection on the unit’s pedestal screen and remove her jumpsuit. Thankfully someone had edited the video, blurring her nudity as she crawled inside the tube and it closed. In that instant, she was back inside the tunnel, feeling the station shuddering around her, bleeding, and terrified those were her last moments alive.
“How did you get this?” she asked.
“Automatic data uplink once the space station went into failure mode,” Jones said, a grim look on his face.
“I . . . I don’t know why you’re showing me this,” she said.
“Please. Watch.”
She saw herself go limp, having passed out from the vacuum created inside the tube.
A second later, the flash. And when the video cleared of its white blindness, she was gone. The time stamp ticked by as the room began to shake harder, a cabinet falling and smashing to its face in silence, the glass barrier between the room and hallway shattering. She was about to ask Jones again what she should be looking for when she saw it.
Movement in the lower portion of the screen.
Someone crawling. Leaving a smear of blood behind as they pulled themselves into the room.
Easton.
It was like seeing a ghost.
“Oh my God,” she said, bringing a hand to her mouth. “He was alive.”
Easton struggled to his feet, swaying as if on the deck of a ship in a tempest. He fell forward and caught himself on the unit’s control pedestal.
One of his fingers stabbed at the display, and the unit’s door opened.
Easton disrobed, tearing at his clothes, and she saw a line of blood running freely down one of his legs before he crawled inside the tube.
The door swung shut.
The room shuddered, the camera’s view jittering violently as static rushed across the screen and ate the last of the video into darkness.
But not before an incendiary flash lit up the entire room.
The video stopped.
Gillian, eyes wide, looked at Jones, who was nodding slightly. “Easton made it out?” she asked.
“Yes. He did.”
“Where is he? Why didn’t I see him? He was only a few minutes behind me.”
She watched Jones, a million questions swirling inside her until they slowly quieted, a dawning beyond anything she’d ever experienced settling over he
r.
Gillian sat back in her seat. Stunned. Numb.
“He didn’t shift here, did he?” she asked finally.
Jones shook his head and went to work on the touchscreen. “Yesterday at around seven p.m. Eastern, we received this message. We estimate it was sent shortly over four years ago.”
Jones touched the screen.
A video began to play.
It was dark at first, only a sullen red glow at the top of the screen before the view flipped suddenly. A distortion, then focus.
Easton’s face filled the view pane.
He looked exactly as he had moments before she left him to fight the approaching station crew in the hallway: intense and steadfast, ready to avenge the deaths of his friends.
Easton blinked and looked away from the camera at something past the lens. And in that moment, she could see the person who had told her he was willing to go farther than anyone had gone before. The brave explorer.
“This is Mission Specialist Easton Sinclair, Discovery VI.”
Gillian leaned forward, noticing something in his eyes. A reflection.
It was a bright orb, not green and not really blue. She guessed there wasn’t a word to describe the color in the human language yet. Not yet.
“Transmitting from Dr. Eric Ander’s exploratory ship in the Alpha Centauri system, and . . .”
His voice trailed off as Gillian moved closer to the screen, closer to her friend, catching another clear reflection of the strange new world he was looking at in his wide eyes.
Easton laughed. “And you won’t believe what I’m seeing right now.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks as always to my wonderful family. Your support allows me to keep doing what I love. Thank you to my editors, Jacque Ben-Zekry, Liz Pearsons, and Caitlin Alexander, for helping find the shape of the book in the block of stone. Big thanks to my agent, Laura Rennert, for always going to bat for me as well as for all the insight and support while Obscura was being born. Thank you to Dr. Thomas Edwards at NASA for the excellent suggestions and for injecting some reality into my wild ideas. Many thanks to Sarah Shaw, Mikyla Bruder, Jeff Belle, and everyone else at Thomas & Mercer, who are some of the very best people in the business. Thanks to Blake Crouch, Richard Brown, and Matt Iden for the great feedback while writing. And thanks to all the readers who’ve given life to my career and the books over the years; your kind words mean more than you could imagine.
