Dr. Anunoby asks the perfunctory questions about his flight as she steers him to the exit, and Ostap can tell she has never been tardy in her life. A boxy black Chinese rental is waiting for them outside. He slides gratefully back into air conditioning. Dr. Anunoby slides in after him, eyeing the linkwear.
“So you’ve been communicating entirely by touch.”
“Yes. Well, Morse code. Haven’t thought up anything better.”
“May I?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Ostap peels off his right glove and hands it over. She puts it on, flexing her fingers, and he guides her hand to Alyce’s shoulder. For a terrifying instant he thinks Dr. Anunoby won’t feel anything, that she’ll frown and gently confirm that he is losing his mind. But then her eyes widen slightly. Ostap pulls up a Morse code translator for her and watches in silence, his bare hand clenched tight on his thigh.
“What are you saying?” he asks, when he fails to keep track of her pulses.
“Asking a very specific question about how we met,” Dr. Anunoby says.
“Just to be sure it’s not an elaborate hoax?”
She nods. “You don’t seem like the type for an elaborate hoax. But I need to ask. For my own peace of mind.”
Ostap watches out the window while he waits. They’re on the highway now, parallel to the Mombasa-Nairobi raised rail, driving in its shadow. Passenger pods flash like silverfish along the retrofitted magnetics. The soil is rust red and the trees are a lush dark green. When the car pulls off onto a smaller road, they have to drive through a scanner gate.
“Thank you,” Dr. Anunoby says, returning the glove. “It’s incredible. It’s really incredible.”
Ostap puts the glove back on and gropes for Alyce’s hand, interweaves his fingers with hers. “So?” he asks. “How are we going to get her back?”
Dr. Anunoby purses her lips as the car glides to a halt. “There’s something I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you until I was sure.”
Ostap’s stomach churns. The tiny knots are back, coiled tighter than ever, carouseling. “What?”
“We’re starting to find bodies.” Dr. Anunoby pushes open the car door. “Come up the hill.”
She gets out and Ostap stumbles after her. The sun is too harsh for his flimsy airport shades; he squints his eyes behind them. The heat beats him around the head and shoulders as he follows her over gravel parking lot to a slope of red-brown earth. His knees are weak and watery, but he climbs it anyway. A breeze ruffles his hair and cools his sweaty forehead as they near the top.
When they crest the hill, he sees the damage the drone photos didn’t do justice. The external hub of the Nguyen-Bohr lab, now charred rubble, is large enough on its own. But the facility extended for miles beneath the surface, and has now been sectioned out in huge swathes by some unseen surgical blade.
For a moment Ostap’s eyes rebel at the scope of the scene, the unnatural composition. It looks more like effects, like something he would render in his goggles, than anything real. He can see layers of packed dirt, concrete, wiring, all neatly sheared to the same exact proportions. The electrical fires were a sideshow. The real damage was done by something else. Or maybe by nothing at all.
He looks at the massive pit where the observation room once was. There’s an emergency crew down there, reflective jackets gleaming in the sunshine. He can see them loading something onto a stretcher.
“The first one showed up just after you called me,” Dr. Anunoby says. “Bits of skeleton and muscle all mixed up with chunks of the floor. With metal and wiring. They scraped enough DNA to identify it as Dr. Simmons. Xu followed the same way about an hour ago. It’s like the… the Slip… is spitting them back out. But not intact.”
Ostap’s tongue is too dry to talk. He tries twice before he gets the first word out. “We can bring her back safe. Somehow.”
“We’re ants,” Dr. Anunoby says. She nods her chin at the destruction. “We don’t understand how this happened. No other facility in the world has the tech to run the test again, not even CERN, and if they tried it might end up even worse. We made a mistake.”
Ostap sinks to his haunches, spreads one hand in the hot dust for balance. His vision constricts like black rubber. He dimly feels Dr. Anunoby crouching beside him, pushing a water bottle into his free hand. He feels Alyce give his arm a questioning squeeze. His breathing slowly returns to normal.
“I can be the one to tell her,” Dr. Anunoby says, with a tremor in her voice. “If you want. It can be me. I think she already suspects.”
“Then why would I get to talk to her again?” Ostap demands, anger going off in his chest like a flare. He surges to his feet, wobbling only once. “If it’s for nothing? If there’s nothing I can do?”
For the first time, the linkwear feels like a straitjacket. He wants to rip it away and hurl it off the hill. Alyce squeezes his wrist again, tighter now. She knows something is wrong.
Dr. Anunoby shakes her head. “I’ll wait down there,” she says, and starts back down the hill.
Ostap barely hears her. He paces a tight frantic circle. He beats his hands against the ground; stops, flinches, wonders if Alyce can feel it. He shouts no particular word and the wind strips it away. Finally he sinks down to his knees and goes still.
Alyce’s finger presses against his chest. He repeats the letters aloud, wrestling each one out of his windpipe, and watches her message form in his goggles.
No way back.
He waits for the question mark, but it doesn’t come. He runs his hands over the parts of her body he can reach, caressing her neck, her shoulders, her arms. He moves his finger to her palm.
No.
She pushes back, tap press press. He waits. Waits. The last letter forms and he chokes on a laugh.
Well fuck.
He hugs her as tightly as he can, closing his eyes, imagining the brush of her hair in his face, her temple against his neck. She clings back. He realizes, with a sick feeling all through his body, that he can ask her now. It will be grand and symbolic and mean nothing, because she’s not coming back. Not alive. It will be a farce. She’ll say yes because there is nothing else to say at the end of the world.
Ostap tells her about the bodies. Alyce is still for a long time, long enough to put panic in Ostap’s throat. Then she has messages for her parents. For her friends. Observations for Dr. Anunoby and her colleagues. She etches them out with trembling fingers and Ostap transcribes them all. It’s slow. Painstaking. The tension is piano-wire taut, because Ostap knows each letter might be the last one. He knows she might be the next barely body to arrive. The question is building up in his mouth.
The messages trail off, and Ostap tries to imagine what she’s feeling but can’t. He has his overshirt draped over his head to shield him from the sun, but it’s cooling off now. The sky is slowly turning red for sunset. Dr. Anunoby is still waiting, like a statue, beside the car. She is an ant. Ostap is an ant. Alyce is a particularly good ant. So he supposes it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Shaking badly, he starts to write:
Made history.
He waits.
Yes.
He writes again, heart thumping out of his chest. It’s slow, so slow. On each letter he thinks of a dozen other things he could turn it into.
We should