Quicksilver

  Tick.

  “What was that?” asked Milo. He sounded alarmed. I couldn’t blame him.

  “It’s not going in,” I said distractedly, wiggling the probe around. It ought to reach right into the relay’s quicksilver core; it was certainly long enough. But something was blocking its path.

  A defense mechanism, to prevent unauthorized tampering? But I’d tinkered with the relay before with no difficulties, so what had changed now? I pulled out the probe, gripped the top half of the device, and tried twisting it open. It wouldn’t budge.

  Sebastian cleared his throat. “It wouldn’t let me open it either,” he said. “I suspect it’ll only respond to a technician.”

  Milo looked surprised. “You don’t know? I thought you helped design this thing.”

  “Before my time,” said Sebastian. “I know how to use it, but that’s all.”

  I looked down at my gloved right hand. Did I dare? My pulse was beating fast in my throat, but I reminded myself that I’d touched the device bare-handed before. I peeled off the glove and lowered my fingertips tentatively to the relay’s surface. It warmed to my touch, as though in greeting.

  Once again, I slid the probe through the top half of the casing, touched it to the core—and felt the faint tingle of connection. I’d done it. “Okay, Sebastian,” I said, backing off and wiping my damp palms on my jeans, “we’re good to go. Do you want to start up the transceiver and run some diagnostics now?”

  “I can do that perfectly well on my own,” said Sebastian, swinging his laptop bag off his shoulder, “so there’s no reason to keep you. Why don’t you and Milo walk back to the bunkhouse, and I’ll see you at breakfast?”

  I had an uncomfortable feeling that he was setting me up, probably hoping I’d take the advice he’d given me last night. Well, maybe it was for the best. Maybe it was time for me to stop keeping Milo at arm’s length, and let him in.

  1 1 1 0 0 0

  By the time Milo and I reached the bunkhouse the sky had lightened to the pale grey-blue of Alison’s eyes, with a few white streaks of cloud along the horizon. The air was cool, and mist hung over the nearby lake.

  “Too early for breakfast,” said Milo. “Let’s check out the beach.” He jogged down the trail to the weed-dotted sand, scooped up a flat pebble, and flicked it out across the shallows. It skipped—once, twice, three times—and sank with a soft bloop beneath the surface.

  There was a pair of Muskoka chairs by the shore, their cracked and flaking seats beaded with rain. I wiped one dry with my sleeve and lowered myself into it.

  “Tough night?” Milo asked, picking up another handful of stones.

  “Could have been better,” I said. The morning was eerily quiet, our voices echoing in the stillness. From the other side of the lake came the lonely, warbling cry of a loon. “You?”

  Milo sank three more pebbles one after another, then crunched up the beach and sat beside me. “Look,” he said. “Can we skip the small talk? I’m not blind, Niki. I can see how worried you are. Whatever we’re doing here, it’s a lot more serious than you’ve been letting on.”

  My fingers tightened on the arms of the chair. I still wasn’t ready for this conversation. But it had to happen sometime, and I couldn’t put it off forever. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “It is.”

  “I know there’s some weird connection between you and the relay,” Milo persisted, “and you didn’t build the transceiver just because Sebastian needed it. This is more about you than him, isn’t it? You’re the one that Deckard and the people at Meridian really want. They only chased Sebastian because they thought he could lead them to you.”

  The treetops were glowing now, the mist over the lake swirling and lifting in tendrils as the sunlight burned it away. I nodded, not yet ready to speak.

  “And I heard what you said to Barry about the transceiver—68 million kilometers.” He was watching me closely now, unsmiling and intent. “This computer you’re trying to shut down, the one that controls the relay—it isn’t in some underground laboratory, is it? It’s in space.”

  I nodded again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about any of this?” Milo’s voice rose. “Did you think I wouldn’t help you? Did you think I’d be too scared to get involved if I knew how powerful Meridian really was?”

  That was my cue to say it: There is no Meridian. To tell him about Dr. Gervais and Deckard on one hand and the wormhole and Mathis on the other, and to admit that everything I’d allowed him to believe about me was a lie.

  But I couldn’t do it. Because the first and most important lesson my parents had drilled into me was that I should never tell anyone about the chip in my arm or my weird blood type or any of the other things that made me abnormal. I could talk to Sebastian and Alison about it, because they already knew—but when I opened my mouth to tell Milo, the words froze on my tongue. Especially that word, the one I couldn’t speak even to my parents.

  Alien.

  “No,” I blurted, hating the quaver in my voice and the way my eyes prickled when I said it. “Milo, you’ve been amazing, and I trust you as much as I trust anybody. I just didn’t—I wasn’t sure how to explain.” And once Sebastian had started spinning his fairy tale about Meridian, I couldn’t bring myself to contradict him. Especially once I’d seen how willing Milo was to believe it. “I figured that since you already knew I was in danger, the details weren’t important. Just that you knew there was a risk, and you were still willing to help.”

  “Oh, yeah.” His tone was bitter. “I’ve been a super big help on this trip.” He smacked the arm of the chair and shoved himself back to his feet. “What am I doing here, anyway? Why did Sebastian ask me to come when it’s obvious I can’t make the slightest difference?”

  It was a good question. At first I’d thought it was because Sebastian didn’t like the idea of being cooped up in a truck with me for eight hours while I nagged him about Alison. But I’d already apologized for that before we left, yet he’d texted Milo and asked him to join us anyway. “Because it would look weird if he showed up with only one assistant?” I guessed. “Especially if that assistant is female?”

  “Great, so I’m here to keep Dr. Ashton from looking like a perv. Nice to know.” Milo scooped up a stick and flung it savagely into the lake. “But you’ve got to know there’s more to it than that.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because he’s been pushing the two of us together since the beginning, that’s why. You should have seen the text messages he sent me the night after he ditched us at the café—about sticking close to you and making sure you had whatever you needed, and how he’d make it worth my while—”

  “Are you trying to shock me?” I asked. “Am I supposed to feel horribly betrayed? Because if so, it’s not working. I’m not surprised Sebastian made you that offer. But I also know that’s not why you did it.”

  “Are you sure?” His voice was flat, his face turned to the lake. “I told you I needed money for university. And I’m going to need it even more once my mom finds out I’m going to Laurentian, because I’m pretty sure she’s not going to pay for me to do the opposite of what she wants. You think you know all about me. But you’re not the only one who can pretend, Nicola.”

  It was possible that there was something deeply twisted in my psyche, because the roughness in his voice and the shake in his clenched fists turned my insides to caramel. Except I wouldn’t have felt that way if I’d thought, even for a second, that Milo meant it. He wasn’t trying to hurt me; he didn’t think I cared enough about him to be hurt. He was trying to protect himself.

  “I don’t know everything,” I said, “but I know this much. You didn’t hang around me for the money. You did it because you liked me and because you felt sorry for me and because you were curious about what was going on. And because you’re a fundamentally decent and honorable guy, even if you are pretty frustrated with me and Sebastian right now.”

  “No kidding,” he said, but the acid had gone out
of his tone. “All I want is a straight answer, and neither one of you seems to know what that is.”

  I got up from the chair with difficulty—the seat was deep, and it hadn’t been built for short people. I walked behind Milo and slid my arms under his, hooking my hands up around his shoulders. Then I leaned my cheek against the warmth of his back and said quietly, “I’m sorry. You deserve a better pretend girlfriend than me.”

  “I didn’t know we were still pretend-dating,” he said, trying to sound offhand. But I could feel his heartbeat quicken, and I knew I’d startled him.

  “I don’t know how to be anything but pretend,” I replied, and it ached in me how true that really was. “But if I could be real, I’d be real for you.”

  He turned slowly, looking down into my face. He didn’t kiss me, but I knew he wanted to. All I had to do was tilt my head up, raise my eyes to his, and it would happen. Mouth to mouth, skin on skin, an intimacy I might not even mind too much as long as he didn’t slobber like Brendan. It would make Milo feel good and me less like a failure. If I couldn’t give him the truth he deserved, at least I could give him this.

  But I was tired of dishonesty, and kissing Milo now would be just another kind of manipulation. There was only one truth I could offer him right now, and I wasn’t even sure he’d appreciate it. I bowed my head against his chest and drew a shuddering breath.

  “I’m so scared, Milo,” I whispered. “If the transceiver doesn’t work—”

  “It’s okay,” he said, his arms tightening protectively around me. “I’m here. I’m not going to let anybody hurt you.”

  As if he could stop the relay from beaming me back to Mathis, if it came to that. How could anyone stop a device that could turn itself invisible, move under its own power, and disintegrate anything that got in its way?

  But Milo meant well. And it felt good to have someone solid and normal and uncomplicated to lean on, if only for a little while. So I closed my eyes and let him hold me, and I didn’t say anything at all.

  1 1 1 0 0 1

  We ate breakfast with Sebastian, Dr. Newman, and his staff—although Jacques was looking a little bleary and didn’t say much, probably because he was nursing a cold. There was a lot of talk about gravitational microlensing and radar ranging and what it would take to prove that Sebastian’s “anomalous object” was a wormhole, which made me glance uneasily at Milo. But he only looked blank for a moment before shrugging and reaching for another piece of toast.

  “I knew Sebastian had talked them into helping him somehow,” he said, when I caught up with him in the corridor afterward. “If they’re happy to believe all that sci-fi stuff, I’m not going to argue with them. I could tell that guy Brian was skeptical, though.”

  “Skeptical is fine,” I said. “I’m more worried about suspicious.”

  “I don’t know why,” said Milo. “It’s not like you’re beaming a death ray into Siberia. You’re just sending a radio signal to switch off a computer on some satellite they probably don’t even know exists.”

  Because it doesn’t, I thought. But there was no point trying to say so after my failed attempt at honesty this morning. So I just smiled and headed for my room.

  As I opened up my laptop to check my e-mail, it struck me that that incident by the lake wasn’t the first time I’d been unable to go against my parents’ orders. I’d thought I was stronger than that—no, I knew I was stronger. Sure, I respected Mom and Dad, but that shouldn’t have stopped me from making my own decisions.

  So what had stopped me in the hallway of the makerspace and kept me from confessing to Milo? It hadn’t felt like fear or even guilt: it was more like a mental block. As though outright disobedience to the rules I’d been raised with simply didn’t compute…

  Then I spotted Alison’s message in my inbox, and the thought vanished from my mind. Did she hate me for leaving her at Deckard’s mercy? Was she angry that I’d known Sebastian was back and hadn’t told her? Holding my breath, I clicked the e-mail open. Thank you, it read. I can go on now. And yes, I forgive you.

  1 1 1 0 1 0

  The rest of the morning and the afternoon that followed passed both quickly and not nearly fast enough. First, Dr. Newman gave us a tour of the radio antenna—including a chance to walk right out onto its uptilted dish, which made me feel like a mosquito in a birdbath. Then we went back to the control building, where Brian, Jacques, and I started hooking up the new transceiver.

  Strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be my device that was sending the signal: that would be handled by the transmitter in the focus cabin of the antenna. Given a few extra hours, they could have winched the new transceiver up to replace it, but that would make it difficult or impossible for Sebastian to retrieve the relay on short notice. So he’d decided to route the signal through our unit to the observatory’s unit instead, which caused a bit of head-scratching once Dr. Newman and his staff realized what we were doing.

  Jacques was too stuffed up and semiconscious to care about anything but getting the job done, but there was a brief clash of wills between me and Brian, who was just as possessive about his equipment as I was about mine. We argued for a while about cabling and signal loss, but once Brian realized I’d built the new transceiver myself and knew what I was talking about, we came to a grudging agreement.

  Meanwhile, Sebastian and Dr. Newman murmured to each other about azimuth and elevation and all the other calculations involved in directing the antenna. Milo sat in the corner with his laptop looking studious, but he had one earbud in, and when I sneaked a glance over his shoulder, he was reading up on the NBA playoffs.

  We’d packed lunches before we left the bunkhouse, and since it was a beautiful day everybody went outside to eat them. But I could barely swallow a single bite. I went back to the control building, opened up the transceiver, and double-checked every circuit board, every wire. I ran my own set of diagnostics, including the incoming and outgoing feeds from the relay—something I hadn’t dared to do when Brian was looking over my shoulder. Only when I was convinced that everything was in order did I back off and close it up again.

  I’d dropped into a desk chair and was breathing into my hands, trying to get my nerves under control, when the others returned. Jacques wasn’t with them—they’d taken pity on his wretched state, Sebastian said, and sent him back to the bunkhouse. But there wasn’t much work left to do now anyway. Forty-five minutes later the radio telescope was in the correct position, the transceiver was online, and Sebastian’s so-called experiment was ready to go.

  “One minute fifty seconds and counting,” he said, watching his computer screen. His fingers flashed over the keyboard, tapping out commands too quickly for me to read them. “Everyone ready?”

  I got to my feet, moving closer to the console for a better view. I wanted to keep an eye on the spectrum analyzer, which would display our signal as it went out.

  “One minute,” Sebastian announced. I rubbed my goose-pimpled arms and tried not to shiver. Milo came up behind me and put a hand on my back, reassuring.

  I wanted this to work. I needed it to work. Not that my troubles would be over if it did—I still had Deckard and GeneSystem to deal with. But it would be a colossal weight off my mind not to have to worry about Mathis anymore. To know that I still had a chance of making a life for myself in this world, instead of being snatched away to another one.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  Milo’s arm circled my waist, drawing me against him. I covered his hand with mine as I mouthed the countdown, watching the seconds tick past one by one.

  “Ten,” said Sebastian. “Nine. Eight. Seven.”

  I could tell the drama was a little much for Brian, who glanced sourly at Sebastian as if to say, Are you kidding me? We’re not launching a spaceship here. But Dr. Newman looked delighted as a boy on Christmas morning, and his voice joined Sebastian’s on the final count:

  “Three! Two! One … Mark!”

  The spectrum analyzer spiked into peaks, and Brian yelpe
d and snatched off his headset—this wasn’t the signal he’d been prepared for. A noisy burst of what sounded like static but was actually Sebastian’s quantum-encrypted transmission, rippling through the atmosphere and shooting out into the black emptiness of space. It softened to a hum, then faded away.

  “You were expecting whale song?” asked Sebastian, as Brian shot him a glare. “My apologies.”

  “Now what?” said Milo.

  “We wait,” I told him and turned to Dr. Newman. “How long before the signal reaches the—uh—anomaly?”

  “Just under five minutes,” he said. He was frowning at the readings, obviously puzzled by the signal Sebastian had sent. “Of course, it’ll take at least that much time again before we receive any kind of confirmation…”

  Which made sense, because even the most powerful radio signal couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light. But the relay’s internal communication system was of a different order, and it shouldn’t take nearly that long to find out if our plan had worked or not…

  Except that the wormhole, as Sebastian had reminded me, was temporally unstable. So there was no telling how long it would be before we got a response. Feeling queasy, I detached myself from Milo and went to the window, staring up at the antenna as though I could see the radio waves bouncing off its parabolic reflector. Probably Alison could. I wished she were here.

  When I focused on the glass, I could see Dr. Newman’s faint reflection behind my left shoulder. He’d joined Brian by the spectrum analyzer, and the two of them were talking rapidly in low voices—no doubt trying to figure out what Sebastian was really up to. I was starting to have my doubts about whether we’d get away with this when Milo said quietly in my ear, “Look at Sebastian.”

  I turned around slowly, so as not to attract attention, and looked. He was sitting with his back to us, the screen of his laptop gripped in both hands. Lines of data were scrolling down the left side of the screen, and the waveform in the right—the one that monitored the relay—was oscillating wildly. Yet I’d never seen Sebastian so rigid or so utterly still. And when he slapped the laptop closed, yanked out the network cable and stood up, the face behind his smile was white as a dead man’s.