They never recovered her body. Any of the bodies. Ostap saw the images, the way whole swathes of earth had been carved up and carried off by some invisible hand. He fantasized, for a little while, that Alyce had only been transported away, which meant she could return. But he thought that was only masochism.
The linkwear syncs. A familiar body presses against him and Ostap’s heart skips a beat. The proportions are right. The height, the shape. He reminds himself it could be saved data. A glitch. Feedback error.
He squeezes Alyce’s hand, and she squeezes back hard.
“Ostap Bender.” Ostap enunciates this time. “I’ve got some questions about the Nguyen-Bohr lab.”
Doctor Anunoby is on East Africa Time; hopefully she doesn’t realize it’s the middle of the night where Ostap is calling from.
“I’ve given statements already,” she says. “Use those. Don’t call my personal line.”
Ostap is standing on the tape marks again, still wearing the shirt and gloves. The last whisper of pressure came hours ago, but he doesn’t dare remove them. “I’m not a reporter. I found the line in Alyce’s contacts. She was my…” Ostap’s throat clogs dry. He didn’t ask. He’d been planning to ask in Mombasa. “Alyce Kerensky was my partner.”
“Oh.” A pause. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“You worked with her right up until last year,” Ostap says. “Same project. Right?”
“That’s right.”
“She told me a little about it.” Ostap inhales. “About the Slip.”
“Some of us called it that, yes.”
“It was the FTL theory. About how particles could skip, at the right energy levels.” Ostap has some of the literature in his left goggle, but he can barely wrestle through the abstract. In his right goggle he’s trawling the conspiracy forums, the ones he swore off, where people think the scientists were taken by aliens or kidnapped by government agents. “They would disappear and then reappear farther along the beamline. Like they were going into some kind of pocket and coming out again.”
There’s a long pause before Anunoby replies. “We don’t know what happened to Alyce and her team. We have no idea. The instruments were compromised. Half the hardware, just gone. There’s no precedent for it. It’s going to take years to try to sort out what happened, and if we ever do we’ll have local government up our asses about safety measures for, I don’t know. For rapture.”
“I think they’re in the Slip,” Ostap blurts. “I think they’re alive. At least, Alyce is. I felt her in our linkwear.”
“Oh.” Anunoby’s voice cracks slightly. “There’s a trauma group. For friends and family. I can send you the information.”
“That’s not what this is,” Ostap says. “She took the linkwear with her the day it happened. I mean. I think she did. And tonight I felt her squeeze my hand.”
“The amount of energy you need to put a particle in the Slip would vaporize human tissues.”
“Pretend I’m not losing my mind.” Ostap flexes his fingers in the gloves. “What should I do? If it happens again?”
Anunoby sighs. “Be ready for it. Try to backtrace the signal. Try to communicate with whoever’s on the other end. I’ll send you the trauma group info in the meantime.”
“Thanks.”
When it happens again Ostap is sprawled on the couch, half submerged in a dream, a caffeine spray still clutched in his hand. Alyce’s fingers against his chest make him turn his head instinctively, searching for her lips. He doesn’t find them. He jerks fully awake and his eyes fly open.
Alyce’s fingers drop away save one; it feels like her index. Ostap holds perfectly still, hardly breathing, as she draws a circle on his chest. A serpentine curve follows it, and he realizes it was an O, not a circle, and now she is finishing the S and starting the T. He waits until his name is complete, until she places the dot of the question mark:
OSTAP?
Ostap’s hands are shaking. He reaches until he phantom-feels Alyce’s torso, then writes back on her ribcage:
YES
She hugs him, wrapping both arms around him hard and clinging there. Ostap hugs back. The embrace is tight and desperate and he wants it to never end. She used to cling to him like that after sex sometimes, weaving her legs around him too and swearing she wasn’t an octopus, telling him she definitely only had four limbs and to disregard any extras he might feel.
Right now Ostap feels nothing but relief, an endorphin wave crashing over him. Alyce is alive. He looks over at the screen of his tablet, which is hooked up to the linkwear GPS node. According to the trace, Alyce’s signal is coming from nowhere at all. Cold slithers through his warm.
He finally peels an arm free and starts the next message. He gets the R backwards; hopefully she understands it anyways:
WHR U?
Then he stays perfectly still, concentrating as her invisible finger traces a reply.
LAB. NEVR LEFT.
Getting the linkwear through airport security is nerve-shredding—extra scans, extra interrogations—but Ostap makes it onto the plane without them confiscating anything. He stows his bag in the overhead, then slides past a white-haired woman to get to his seat. She gives him a curious glance as he loosens the seatbelt to fit it over his padded shirt. The pillow around her neck is so plump she can barely see over the top of it.
“Is that a comfort vest?” she asks. “One of those things that hugs you if you start having an anxiety attack?”
“Yes,” Ostap says, because that’s more or less how he explained it to security.
“No shame in that,” she says. “I get nervous still. I’ve been flying, what, fifty years. Still get nervous.”
“There’s always ginger ale,” Ostap says. “I think the ginger ale helps. And watching cartoons.”
He finds Alyce’s phantom hand, how he’s done every few minutes since they established contact, and squeezes. She gives two back.
He keeps picturing her in the Slip. She described it to him in painstaking detail, switching from drawing letters to tapping out Morse code that Ostap needed his goggles to translate. She says she’s still in the observation room, or at least somewhere that looks like it. But with some differences.
She’s only been there for a day at most. Her last memory is unexpected activity on the third beamline. Color is muted, everything a soft cold blue. Light and motion warp in strange ways, leaving misplaced reflections and lingering blurs.
Sometimes she thinks she sees flickers of the other scientists, of Bagley, Chiozza, Xu, and the rest, moving around the observation room. She can’t interact with them. Aside from the linkwear, none of her personal electronics work. None of the lab tech works.
She can’t detect air currents. She’s breathing, but she held her breath for just over seven minutes and showed no ill effects, meaning she might not need to. She is not sure—and this is where Ostap had to stop her and hold her—if she is still alive, in the strictest sense of the word. He told her he would take undead Alyce over dead Alyce any day. And that Dr. Anunoby would figure out a way to get her out.
“Been to Kenya before?” the white-haired woman asks. “I’m visiting my son. He’s on the coast.”
“I haven’t,” Ostap says. “I’ve been planning it for a long time, though.” He pauses. “Hujambo.”
“Oh, you’re going to blow them away. Where are the cartoons?”
Ostap helps her scroll through the kid’s channels until he finds her The Almost Adventures of Terry the Tardigrade. Then he puts his earbuds in and settles back in his seat, tapping his finger against Alyce’s palm:
OMW.
Dr. Anunoby is taller than he imagined her, spindly limbs in a black pantsuit, flyaway hair. She picks him out of the arrival rush and Ostap removes his glove to shake hands. His palm is already slick with sweat from the brief walk through the tarmac-shimmering heat between airplane and airport. Alyce warned him it was hot in March. Told him to bring good sunblock or he’d spontaneously combust on the beach.