“I have no idea what you’re talking about. How much time does my friend have—?”
“Time.” Byrne laughed, his voice oddly full and thick for so thin a frame. “Time does strange things here, that’s for sure. Take the mast behind us. When time meets it, each quanta of moment—the very constituent particles that move events along—they split in two and then split again. All those particles pass through the slits, propelling this magnificent collection of metal and men forward. Ingenious. Almost Bern-like to have been crafted by Humans. And for one such as myself, who the eons have made impatient, that makes this such a wonderful spot to rest. To usher events along.” He looked over at Cole. “If you wanted to live forever, you would just need to spend a few hours a day up here, letting time split around you, undoing the decay. Or, if you wanted to meet your end faster, in mere moments even, try your luck on the other side.” Byrne smiled.
“I don’t understand,” Cole said.
“Why don’t I tell you a story?”
“Is it more riddles? Are you going to kill me afterward?”
“It’s a simple story. And, no.”
“Good. To both.” Cole leaned back in his chair. He made a show of crossing his arms, defiant and mocking at once. “I hope it’s not a long one, then.”
Bern laughed in his deep, throaty way.
“In many ways, it’s the longest story,” he said. “But don’t worry. We have plenty of time.”
17
Molly groped in the darkness for Walter, but the hands that groped back weren’t his. They were too strong to be his. They wrapped around her, and she screamed at the top of her lungs, cut off when a hand clamped down on her mouth. She felt herself lifted off the ground, her back pressing up against someone’s broad chest.
She kicked back at her captor’s shins and tried to shake her head free, but it felt like being back in Byrne’s arms, like struggling inside a vise. The dim alley turned to complete darkness as she was pulled through a doorway and into one of the buildings framing the alley. A thick door slammed shut and another opened, filling the small foyer with light. She found herself dragged backward and into a larger room, trembling and confused.
“Whatcha got?” someone asked.
“Don’t know yet,” a voice said close to her ear. “She’s a feisty one, though.”
The man holding her turned around, giving her a sweeping view of the room. It looked like a small warehouse that had been transformed into a triage unit. High tables were arranged in a grid with people on at least half of them. Cords and tubes ran out of the figures, and tables of medical utensils sat to their sides. Molly tried to reach up for the hand over her mouth as another man approached. He was short and bald but with a dark beard that ran from ear to ear. He wore a white blood-splattered apron over a traditional business suit.
“Oh, very pink,” the man said, looking Molly up and down. He grab-bed one of her wrists and twisted her hand around violently. Molly tried to pull away, but the guys were too strong. The man with the beard bent back one of her fingers to inspect her swollen pads; he wrenched the digit nearly to the point of breaking, the sudden jolt of pain taking her breath like ice water.
“You a local?” he asked Molly.
She grimaced and shook her head as much as the other man’s grip would allow. She could feel her eyes widening, tears of terror pooling up. She had to force herself to blink, her eyelids swiping the blurriness out of her vision.
“Yeah, you don’t look like a local. Shame.” The short man looked up at the figure behind her, and then pointed to one of the tables. “Number fifteen,” he said. “Find out where she’s from and get started. Oh, and don’t nab any more. I told the wife we wouldn’t be pulling a late shift tonight.”
“Yeah, boss,” the man holding her said. He carried her toward one of the tables. Molly twisted her hips, trying her best to squirm away, but the guy had one of his massive arms wrapped around her elbows, pinning them to her side. Even though she’d once taken out a male Drenard warrior with her bare hands, she felt absolutely powerless against such strength and in that position.
Another large guy looked up from a distant table. “You need help with that one?” he asked.
“And split the commission? Flank you, Randie, I’ve got this one.”
The other guy laughed and went back to tightening leather restraints across another person, who moved and grunted through a gag of some sort. Molly’s heart raced in panic—she couldn’t get enough oxygen through her nose.
Her captor released her mouth and reached down to grab one of her knees. He squeezed it painfully. Molly screamed as loud as she could as he picked her up and lifted her to the cold, metal surface. She continued screaming as he held her down with one hand. There was a busy street nearby; she just needed someone to hear her.
“Shut up!” the man said through clenched teeth. He struggled to hold her down as she squirmed and continued yelling. As he leaned over to grab a set of restraints, she got her first look at the brute. Human, with a head as big as a bull’s. He chewed on his lower lip as he tried to work one of the straps together with a single hand.
Molly yanked one of her arms free and swung at his blocky, stubbled face. The man blocked the blow, and she got a slap across her own cheek for the effort, hard enough to see spots of light. While she was stunned, her cheek on fire, the brute corralled both of her hands together and held her wrists in one of his fists. He pinned them against her stomach while he leaned across her legs with his torso.
Molly resumed screaming bloody murder, as high-pitched and pierc-ing as she could. She twisted her torso back and forth, trying to break his grasp.
“Okay! A little help!” the man yelled.
The other guy lumbered over and held her legs with both hands while the first guy got a strap across her arms.
“You got this one, huh?” the second man asked, laughing.
“Let me go!” Molly yelled. She screamed at the top of her lungs.
The first guy reached to the small table nearby and grabbed a rag, covered in blood. He forced it into Molly’s mouth. She gagged immediately, her head convulsing, her throat seized by spasms as it tried to eject the foul thing. She couldn’t help but taste the coppery bitterness, feel the wetness of someone else’s blood on her tongue. One corner of the rag fell back on her gag reflex, triggering it over and over.
Coughing into her own mouth caused a corner to flap loose. It wiggled against the deep reaches of her tongue, partway down her throat. As she gagged and sucked air through her nose, she began to panic with the possibility of breathing the thing in deeper, sucking it down where the choking would become total.
Molly quickly found herself as close to death as she had ever been. She couldn’t get enough air into her lungs. She forgot about the men and the restraints and the other bodies, and just concentrated on the obstruction in her mouth. She forced her tongue over—it wouldn’t obey—she finally got an edge, curled her tongue around it—that nasty taste—and pushed the rag forward just a little bit.
Again. Concentrating, working her tongue, forgetting the slick and wet, ignoring the rank on her tastebuds, wrapping her tongue around the back side, collecting the drooping piece that threatened to kill her, the raw taste of it making her gag over and over—
There.
She had the offending piece corralled, but the abhorrent taste made her feel like vomiting; her mouth was full of foul saliva, too much to swallow. She very nearly worked the entire rag out of her mouth, almost had it past her teeth—her entire being had become mouth and tongue and cheek, working them all with the force of several limbs—
A strip of adhesive went across the rag, holding it in place. Molly flexed her arms and legs and found she’d been locked down tight, several straps cinched across her body. She strained, arching her back, grunting and moaning with frustration, but she couldn’t move. And somehow, having been in that exact position before, the depressing familiarity of it all—it made the terror and panic and unfairness even worse.
“Thanks,” one of the guys said, punching the other one playfully. Molly lifted her head and watched the two men as the panicked fog from the rag ordeal melted away. She tried to give them her widest, most beseeching eyes, but they weren’t paying her any attention. The second guy, who also wore a smattered apron but over a jumpsuit, lumbered back to his work. The man from the alley stood by her side. He crisscrossed the sash of his own apron around his back before knotting it right in the middle of an old, dull stain.
“You’ve been a busy voter,” the man said, looking down at her scabbed and raw hands. He pulled something from the table. Molly tried to get a glimpse of it before he slid it over her finger. She couldn’t see it, but she knew what it was as soon as the padded clamps gripped her knuckles.
Molly moaned into the blood-soaked rag, anticipating the pain before the needle hit. It felt like a rod the size of a coin shooting through the raw pad of her index finger. She felt herself grow dizzy, then gag again, nearly vomiting in the back of her throat. She started coughing, the useless reflex muffled and hollow. The bloody rag fluttered inside her cheeks, touching her tongue and the roof of her mouth, dabbing them with metallic nastiness.
“Okay, now, let’s see where you’re from,” the man said, studying a small screen as if routinely taking her temperature.
Walter pressed his ear to the door and looked down the length of the dark alley. He’d heard a scream as he rounded the corner, but couldn’t tell where it had come from. The Wadi stood on his shoulder, scratching at the metal door with its claws.
Walter stood back and pounded on the door again, but the slab of metal sounded like it was a foot thick; his fist hardly made a noise. He turned to the other side of the alley and scrambled for the Wadi as it tried to jump off his shoulder.
“Sstay put,” he told it. He shoved it into one of the hidden pockets he’d sewn into his flightsuit—the one right across his belly big enough to steal most anything worth having.
The other door, the one on the opposite side of the alley, made a normal sound as he pounded it with his small fist. Surely Molly would’ve had the good sense to go through this one. He continued knocking until the door cracked, letting out a wedge of light framing someone’s head.
“The flank you want?” the person asked.
“Hi. I’m Walter. I’m looking for—”
“Entrance is in the front, you freak!”
The door slammed shut, startling Walter.
He frowned and looked down the dark alley, toward the glow of civilization at the far end where fast, moving things zipped past. There were only two doors, and he had knocked on them both. He pressed a hand against his stomach to stop the Wadi from squirming and set off toward the bluster of happening things. If the entrance was in the front, he’d have to look for Molly there.
18
“This is the story of our universe,” Byrne said.
“Your universe?” It was the second time Byrne had referred to it like that.
Byrne nodded. He glanced over at Cole, then out at the white lines created by the hyper-fast snow as it streaked across the dark ships beyond. “Not by conquest or fiat, mind you. I’m not being lordly, just stating a fact. It’s ours because we made it.”
“You mean hyperspace? Is that what you made?”
Byrne laughed. “No,” he said. “I wish we had, but this is the first time around we’ve even discovered it.” He gazed toward the bow of the large, moving village. “Everything will be so much easier from now on,” he said quietly. He shook his head and looked at Cole, who could feel the muscles in his forehead ache from keeping them furrowed in constant confusion.
“No, when I say we made the universe, I mean the one you are familiar with. We made the last several thousand of them—”
Byrne paused and frowned at the blank stare Cole must’ve been giving him. “I apologize,” he said. “I forget how limited your cosmological theories are. When I look at you, at any of you Humans, it’s like looking at a mirror. So few differences . . .” Byrne crossed his legs and seemed to settle back in his strange, metal throne. “Why don’t I start by explaining how the universe works, how it moves and operates. Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re on your home planet—”
“Gladly,” Cole interrupted.
Byrne smiled. “If you don’t get this lesson, my friend, the rest of the story will be lost. Now, imagine yourself on Earth, anywhere you like. Pretend you can walk across water and over any mountain. If you were to set off in a straight line in any direction, where would you end up?”
“On the other side,” Cole answered quickly, hoping to move the story along. “No—” With his index finger extended, he drew a circle in the air in front of him and focused on it through his goggles. “You’d end up where you started. Right?”
“Only if you stopped there.” Byrne had taken the tone of a teacher guiding along a favored student. He smiled at Cole, and for the first time, Cole realized Byrne didn’t have on goggles and didn’t seem to need them.
“You could keep going forever, if you liked,” Byrne said. “And that’s how the universe is shaped, only one dimension higher—”
“Well, you’re wrong about our cosmology, then. We’ve known this for a long time. If you travel in a straight line anywhere in the universe, you’ll end up where you started. It curves around on itself.”
“Oh, you’ve got the shape right,” Byrne agreed. “You’ve had that nailed for hundreds of years. However, your cosmologists don’t seem to appreciate the consequences, even though it’s completely obvious.”