The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. “Yeah. Me neither.”
“You’re not fooling me. You’re an educated man. I think you love this job.”
They walked together to the end of the corridor, their footsteps echoing. Vikram shined his beam in a pattern of arcs up ahead of them, like someone on the beach marking the sand with a long stick. He felt bolder in Kabir’s presence than he did when completing these rounds alone, but he missed the up-prickle of the hair on his arms, the tingle of alertness.
Kabir opened the door to the fire stairs and waved Vikram in. “After you, Professor.”
They cleared four in silence.
On three, Vikram said, “This is where it was coming from last time. You didn’t see any glow from out in the lot, did you? I know I didn’t.”
“No,” Kabir said.
“Then you can relax. We would have seen it already.”
They left the stairs and entered the third-floor corridor. “It’s so dark,” Kabir said. “I should have brought my flashlight too.”
“Are you always this jumpy?”
The last days of any month meant lots of renters all over the city moving in and out of their apartments. In the self-storage business, that translated to new tenants getting units and old tenants emptying them out. Sometimes, people just stopped paying; after the deposit ran out, the storage company hired someone to haul away the junk, selling whatever looked valuable first, disposing of the rest. During the day, this hallway they traversed would be crowded with customers hauling boxes, pushing dollies, fumbling with padlocks, yelling at each other to hold the doors of the keycard-operated elevator. These people with their stuff—an amount, a sheer volume of possessions none of the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand had yet had time to accumulate. During open hours, the doors would be open, some of the units packed tight with neat boxes or jammed full of black plastic trash bags. Other units held instrument cases, collections that took up too much room in tiny apartments, antiques people didn’t want but couldn’t bear to sell, shrouded canvases belonging to artists who couldn’t hang all their work.
As they approached the bend in the hallway, he thought he saw it. It was as tenuous as the horizon in the east an hour before sunrise. They rounded the corner, and it was unmistakable now, emitting from a center unit on the left-hand side. Kabir clutched at Vikram’s arm and they stopped, still yards away. The light seemed to reach toward them from the crack under the door, blue like the phosphorescence of some eerie deep-sea organism. Blue like the Gate itself.
Kabir began to speak, but Vikram shushed him before he could get out any words. He clicked off his Maglite and they waited together in the glow. There was no sound, besides the creak of Kabir’s shoes as he shifted his weight and Vikram’s own rapid breathing. No sound from inside the storage unit.
They waited there until the light turned off, dropping them into darkness like a bucket into a well. Vikram remembered the silent children’s ward inside the old mental hospital.
“I’m going to break the door down,” he whispered.
“No.”
“I’m going to do it.”
“You can’t,” Kabir said. “It’s against the rules. It’s against the law. It’s trespassing.”
Everything he said was true.
Equally true was this fact: part of Vikram didn’t want to know what was on the other side.
Klay drove them to the boarding school. Defunct for three-quarters of a century, the estate had been sold at auction, then passed from owner to owner until a group of weavers and ceramics artists took it over for a gallery and studio space. Klay hadn’t been able to reach anyone on the phone, but the gallery’s website confirmed that the house was open to the public today, still appointed with its original, historic furnishings.
Klay’s SUV was an older, boxy model of Buick called a Rendezvous and its interior, which could seat seven, seemed cavernous to Hel. One hundred thirty klicks north of the city on the Taconic Parkway, a yellow sports car swerved into their lane without signaling and almost ran them into the ditch, then zoomed ahead. “A cancer on you, you fucker!” Hel yelled after it. She’d been told repeatedly that this was not an acceptable way of cursing in this world, but she hadn’t stopped saying it. She fumbled for the button to roll down the window, but was too slow to make the gesture she intended; the car sped off in a cloud of dust. Across from her in the driver’s seat—enormously far away—Klay smiled. Her two front teeth were very slightly crooked, one overlapping the other in a way Hel might have found charming under other circumstances. “Your people can’t drive,” Hel told her.
“That’s exactly what everyone says about UDPs, you know.”
“Really?” The Rendezvous’s general shape, its blocky angles, reminded Hel of a huge version of her own beloved pod, a two-person 2010 Kusama Kinetic with a forward hatch, bought new. It got twenty-one kilometers to the liter. She’d kept the Kinetic clean, swept the upholstery once a week. It never even lost that new smell. She wondered who was driving it now—whether it was sitting in the rented parking space where she’d left it, hopelessly irradiated, or whether an enterprising survivor had gotten it started and driven it west. She hoped so. West toward California. How far might they have traveled?
“How did you afford a car, Teresa?” Where Hel came from, even a used pod would have been out of reach for an unguilded young person without a proper profession.
The GPS on Klay’s phone spoke. She followed its directions off the Taconic and onto US 44 toward the Connecticut border. She tapped impatiently on the center console with her free hand, in time to nothing. “Let’s get in there and get this over with.”
“I’m not trying to waste your time.”
“I’m sorry,” Klay said. “I guess I’m being rude. It’s nothing personal. I just have other things to do. Meeting with Ayanna at three.”
“What’s she like to work for?”
“Smart, organized, it’s a great opportunity. I don’t know. How about that guy with the pinchers? What’s he like to work for?”
“Oliveira? They’re pincers, not pinchers.” She stared through the window. “He knows how to get things done. And I don’t work for him.”
“I thought he sent you to the party.”
“No. It’s my idea, this whole thing. He’s actually not very into it.”
“But that article that quoted him, last month. That Ostalgie thing.”
Hel remembered. A reporter covering the adjustment of UDPs as a human-interest story for the upcoming third anniversary of their crossing had published an article in the New York Times blog. The reporter compared the feelings of the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand to the mourning of some East Berliners for their lost culture after the fall of the wall, whatever that was. (Despite the lack of a physical barrier in her own divided Western Europe, some of the same things had happened—a phone call between the AMFR and the Germans, the visit of an American president—but it had all unfolded at a much faster pace. The Latin American communists had stayed out of it for once, and everyone from Braunschweig to Bucharest had been wearing blue jeans and listening to Detroit-crafted pop music as early as 1974.) “UDPs are refugees from a place that no longer exists,” the Times piece read. “Many of these people still think of their true home as the past, a past that is so utterly inaccessible, it exists now only in their memories.” Then, the reporter had quoted his words directly: “As Dr. Oliveira puts it, ‘There is nowhere for us to go back to.’”