Quicksilver

  “Excellent!” he said, too brightly. “I believe that’s all we need for the moment. Thanks so much for your help.” He seized Dr. Newman’s hand and pumped it, then dragged me and Milo forward to do likewise. “Niki, would you have a look around and make sure we haven’t left anything behind? Must dash—please excuse me—” And with that, he swung his laptop case over his shoulder and hurried out the door.

  Milo and I looked at each other, and I could see my own apprehension mirrored in his face. Whatever Sebastian had just found out, it couldn’t be good. But there was no way to explain that to the observatory team. As far as their own readings were concerned, we couldn’t know yet whether the experiment had succeeded or failed.

  I could have murdered Sebastian for running out on us like this, but I couldn’t afford to show it. Dr. Newman and Brian were suspicious enough already. All Milo and I could do was grab the relay and get out fast—and hope they didn’t stop us and demand an explanation.

  “Dr. Ashton’s a little eccentric, you might have noticed,” I said to the two scientists with an apologetic smile. “And I think, uh, there might also be a little bladder issue when he gets excited. Please don’t take it personally.”

  Milo made a strangled noise, but I pinched his arm and he turned it into a cough. He pulled out his earbuds and started packing up his laptop. As soon as the others were distracted, I dropped to a crouch next to the transceiver and popped the hidden panel open. I thrust the relay into the pocket of my sweatshirt, resisting the instinct to fling it away from me and run. Then I picked up my tool kit and stood up again with all the professional calm I could muster.

  “Thank you again,” I said to Dr. Newman. “It’s been very educational. I hope the new transceiver will be an asset to your work.”

  “Wait.” The older man started forward. “What’s going on?”

  “Sorry!” I grabbed Milo’s arm. “Can’t explain now. Got to go. We’ll call you.”

  Then I sprinted out the door and went after Sebastian.

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  When Milo and I burst into the parking lot, Sebastian was in the truck with the engine running, and a look of furious concentration on his face. “Hey!” I shouted. “Wait!” But he wrenched the wheel around and sped off without looking back.

  I stopped and stared after the truck’s plume of exhaust, unable to believe Sebastian had just ditched us. Then, angrily, I hefted my tool kit and started off in pursuit—but Milo stopped me.

  “I know it’s not too heavy for you,” he said, reaching for the case. “But if I stuff it in my knapsack, we can run faster.”

  Fair enough. I let him have the kit and we started off again, pelting down the road in Sebastian’s wake. Every now and then I glanced over my shoulder for signs of pursuit, but there were none. Probably Dr. Newman and Brian were too busy analyzing our data, trying to figure out what we knew that they didn’t.

  Ten minutes later, breathless and sweaty, Milo and I reached the bunkhouse. Sebastian had stopped the truck by the edge of the parking lot, but he hadn’t gotten out. He’d shifted into the passenger seat and was hammering away at his laptop.

  I slammed my fist against the window and yelled through the glass, “WHAT IS GOING ON?”

  Sebastian flinched and set the computer aside. His eyes closed, as though he were praying for patience. Then he rolled down the window and said heavily, “I’m sorry, Niki. It didn’t work.”

  Ice needled my stomach. “How do you know?” I demanded. “You got a signal through the relay? What was it?”

  “Call it an error message,” he said. “Or a fail-safe. Either way, we’ve been locked out.”

  I blew out my breath, slowly. Then I braced my arm along the top of the door and rested my forehead on it. “Does Mathis know?” I asked him.

  Sebastian didn’t reply.

  “He does, doesn’t he? You tried to hack into his system. He’s going to trace that signal back to the relay, and when he does, he’ll know—” Bile rose in my throat. I shoved myself away from the truck and whirled to run, but Milo flung out an arm and caught me.

  “Hey,” he said, gripping my shoulders. “I told you, we’ll get through this together. There’s got to be another way to stop him from finding you.”

  “You can’t stop him,” I said miserably. Even if the chip in my arm was gone, the relay still had my biodata on file. Eventually it would track me down, no matter how fast I ran or what obstacles I threw in its path. “Nobody can. We’ve lost, Milo.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Milo. Then he grabbed the front pocket of my sweatshirt and shook it, and the relay dropped out into his hand. I tried to snatch it back, but he held me off with one arm, raising the silver sphere high with the other.

  “What are you—” Sebastian began and then in rising alarm, “No! Don’t—”

  But Milo had already pushed me away and sprinted to the edge of the trees, where the blue lake glimmered between the branches. He leaned back with one leg raised, putting all his weight into it, and pitched the relay straight out over the water.

  “There,” he said, as he came panting back to join us. “If this Mathis guy wants to dive for it, he can go ahead.”

  I wanted to grab him and shake him until his bones rattled, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was my fault Milo didn’t understand what kind of technology he was dealing with. And he’d turned away too soon to notice what I had—the flashing silver dot arcing toward the surface of the lake, then stopping abruptly in midair and winking out. The relay had gone invisible, and there would be no finding it now.

  Not until it found me.

  “You fool,” said Sebastian in a low voice that was all the more terrifying for being so quiet. “You have no idea what you’ve just done.”

  “Really?” retorted Milo. “Then maybe you should explain it to me. Because as far as I could tell, the only good use for that relay was to help you send the signal to Mathis’s computer or satellite or whatever. And you just told us that didn’t work. So what’s the point of carrying the thing around anymore, when all it can do is hurt Niki?”

  Sebastian started to argue, but I cut him off. “Let it go,” I said. “It’s done now. If it comes after me, then it comes.”

  “But without being able to monitor it, we’ll have no way of knowing—”

  “I said, leave it,” I snapped. “Who appointed you my Lord Protector, anyway? Because you’ve done a pretty crappy job of it so far. And I’m tired of being lectured and jerked around like this is all about you, when I’m the one with everything to lose.” I nudged Milo, none too gently. “Come on, let’s pack up. We’re going home.”

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  As I stuffed clothes into my bag, I had an uneasy feeling that I’d pushed Sebastian too far. That when Milo and I got back outside, the truck would be gone. But when I came out of my room, Sebastian was waiting, his pack slung over his shoulder. He didn’t speak or look at me, just stood there with his eyes on his battered loafers until Milo rejoined us. Then we all headed out to the truck.

  I took the back seat, not feeling up to sharing my personal space with anyone at the moment. Sebastian gave Milo a hard look as he got in, but all he did was push the CB toward him and say, “Same as last night. Channel 23, every kilo-meter,” before we drove off. As we sped toward the crossroads, I watched anxiously for the entrance gate, half expecting to find it shut and padlocked, and Dr. Newman waiting for us with folded arms. But the gate was wide open, and there were no other vehicles in sight.

  The logging road was muddy from last night’s rain, ruts slick and potholes brimming. We wallowed and bumped along with what seemed to me agonizing slowness, until the observatory sign and its yellow flashing beacon were lost to view. Soon after that, a narrow metal-grille bridge carried us over a set of churning rapids, but memory warned me that it was the last solid piece of construction we’d be seeing for a long time.

  Overnight the swamps had risen even closer to the road, in places even washing r
ight over it. I could hear water hissing through our wheel wells as Sebastian drove, and a muddy trickle crept along the floor beneath my seat. Milo sounded hoarser every time he picked up the CB, and Sebastian was muttering words under his breath that I didn’t care to interpret. But nobody talked otherwise: we were all too focused on the road. It felt like decades in purgatory before we reached the gate out of the park and another six months until we left the gravel road behind and lurched onto paved highway again.

  “Made it,” I breathed, as the truck’s laboring engine settled back into a steady roar. I hadn’t thought either of the boys in the front seat would hear me, but Milo turned to look at me, his mouth set.

  “All right,” he said. “Explain to me what’s going on with the relay,” and then in true Canadian fashion he added, “Please.”

  “I … I don’t know how,” I said. “Sebastian—”

  “Pull yourself together, Niki,” said Sebastian, not taking his eyes off the road. “He’s your boyfriend, not mine. Time to tell the truth for a change and see where it gets you.”

  As though I hadn’t tried this morning to do exactly that, and failed. I had never hated Sebastian more than I did at that moment. But I sat up straighter and forced myself to try again.

  “You were wrong about the wormhole,” I said stiffly to Milo, wondering how much of the story I’d be able to get through before my tongue seized up on me. “It’s real. Artificially generated and kept open by a steady influx of exotic matter from a machine on the other side. That’s why we needed the transceiver to send a signal to those coordinates. To shut off the wormhole stabilizer.”

  “And we needed to do this,” prompted Sebastian, “because…?”

  “If the wormhole closes,” I stammered, “the relay won’t be able to beam anything to or from Mathis’s lab anymore. Because its sister relay and the computer that controls them both will be too far apart to communicate. And Sebastian, you’re going to have to tell him the rest, because I can’t.”

  Sebastian slanted a look at me in the rearview mirror, and I could see he was skeptical. But he said, “If you insist. What else do you want to know, Milo?”

  “So if the wormhole is the shortcut from Point A to Point B,” said Milo slowly, “then how far away is Point B?”

  “There’s no way to be certain,” said Sebastian. “But at the best estimate, I’d say the two ends of the wormhole are at least a hundred light-years apart.”

  “Light-years—” Milo spluttered. “You can’t be serious. How is that even—” He waved his hands in a vague, incoherent gesture. “You said the relay came from Meridian! I thought they were the ones who wanted Niki! Are you trying to tell me—”

  “There is no Meridian!”

  I hadn’t meant to say it so loudly, much less yell it. But I couldn’t bear to let this charade go on. I put my hands over my face and went on hollowly, “Sebastian made them up. And I went along with it. I lied to you. I’m sorry.”

  “Then…” Milo looked angry and more than a little nauseated. He turned on Sebastian. “That article on the website. You wrote that?”

  Ahead of us the road sloped into a long descending curve, with a towering rock face on one side and a sheer ten-meter drop on the other. A lake lay at the bottom, dark blue and apparently inviting, but there were no boats on its surface, no cottages on its shores. No signs of life at all.

  Just like Sebastian’s eyes, watching mine in the mirror. Did he want me to hate him? I was beginning to wonder.

  “Yes,” I said. “He did. He created the whole website, just for you.”

  “Why?” asked Milo, hushed, and Sebastian answered, “Because Niki needed someone to look out for her, and I needed to give you a story you could believe. At least until you were ready to hear the truth.”

  “What truth?” Milo spun around to me. “Niki, what is going on?”

  If I didn’t get the words out now, I never would. “I’m not—” I croaked. “I’m—” In desperation I tried to say adopted, but that was just as impossible. “I’m an—”

  “Tell him,” said Sebastian, low and firm. As though he had the right to give me an order. Or maybe he just wanted to make me so furious that I’d blurt out the truth without thinking about it at all.

  Either way, it worked. “Alien!” I spat out and slumped back into my seat.

  Milo froze. “What?”

  “She is,” said Sebastian, “as I am, a visitor from the other side of that wormhole.” He paused, then added more briskly, “Though I came here the first time of my own free will, being young and stupid enough to think beaming myself to an unknown planet was a splendid idea. Whereas Niki was sent here as a baby by my old lab partner Mathis, who considered himself well rid of me and wanted someone more cooperative to experiment on. Does that answer your question?”

  Milo took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he gave a crackling laugh. “Well. That explains a lot.”

  “I’m sorry,” I began, but he cut me off.

  “Don’t.” He closed his eyes briefly, as though I’d given him a headache. Then he slid his glasses back on and looked at me. “Do you know what Deckard told me, when I accused him of being your stalker?”

  I shook my head.

  “He told me you were a pathological liar. He told me your parents were con artists who had made their money by manipulating people and that your family had Mafia connections. He told me you were good at making people like me feel sorry for you but that everything about you was fake. And he said I shouldn’t get too attached to you, because you were the kind of person who’d abandon her friends in a second to save her own skin.”

  It was like looking at the truth through warped glass. But maybe that was how Deckard saw it. Maybe that was how Lara and Brendan and the others I’d left behind saw it too. I wanted to tell Milo that it wasn’t like that, but why should he believe me? Why should he believe anything I said to him now?

  “There’s another thing you should know,” Milo went on. “You know when Deckard got your cell number from Jon? It wasn’t when he came into the store on Friday night and questioned everybody. He got it the next day, when Jon called him. Because Jon’s aunt owns the Cakery, and he was working in the back when you and I came in together. So that was when he realized you’d been using him all along. Just like Deckard said.”

  The words wouldn’t have stung so much if they hadn’t been true. “How do you know that?” I asked. “Why would Jon tell you about—”

  “He didn’t. But when I got into work on Saturday, he grabbed me and said, ‘Tell your girlfriend I hope she had fun making a fool out of me.’ Once I remembered who his aunt was, it wasn’t hard to do the math.”

  Sebastian was so quiet that he might have been invisible. This wasn’t about him anymore, if it ever had been. This was between Milo and me.

  “Alien, you say.” Milo let out another humorless laugh. “I guess that explains the asexual thing? Don’t want to get too close to the humans. Might get some kind of disease.”

  Sebastian’s brows went up, and his eyes flicked questioningly to mine. Asexual?

  “No,” I said. “It has nothing to do with that. Milo—”

  “Don’t,” he told me again. “I don’t want to hear any more of what you think is the truth. I don’t want to hear it even if it is the truth.” He turned away and added quietly, “I just can’t believe you’ve been lying to me all this time. I thought you were better than that.”

  Anger surged inside me. “Oh, yeah? Well, I guess it’s easy for you to judge, seeing as you’re such an expert on being honest with the people you care about. When were you planning to tell your mom your plans for September again?”

  I waited, but Milo didn’t speak. He just sat there with his back to me, shoulders stiff and his head unnaturally straight. Then he screwed his earbuds in and turned up his music so loud I could make out the lyrics from the back seat.

  I knew, then, that I’d lost him.

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/>   By the time we reached the gas station half an hour later, the silence had become toxic. Sebastian pulled up in front of the pumps and got out without saying a word. Milo disappeared around the side of the building, presumably looking for the washroom. I climbed the wooden steps to the convenience store and looked for something to fill the aching hole inside me, but the thought of putting anything sugary, salty, or chemically enhanced in my mouth made me sick. I wandered through the aisles, staring blindly at one shelf after another, until Sebastian came up behind me and said, “Never mind. We’ll get something to eat in North Bay.”

  He pulled two water bottles from the fridge and went off to pay the cashier. I took out my phone and looked at it. There was reception here, so I could call my parents if I wanted. But I didn’t have the heart to talk to them right now. I felt as though a single word of rebuke or kindness would break me.

  So I texted:

  –Heading home. See you around 11. Love you.

  Then I shut off the phone.

  When I followed Sebastian outside, the truck was parked by the edge of the road, with the tank filled and the cab empty. The tarp that had covered our baggage was loose, one corner flapping in the breeze, and Milo’s pack was gone.

  “Where is he?” I asked, whirling to look for him—but Sebastian put a hand on my shoulder.

  “He’s not coming with us,” he said.

  “But—”

  “I know. But he can find his own way home from here, and maybe it’s for the best.” Sebastian sighed. “Though I’d hoped this would turn out differently.”

  So had I. I’d hoped that Milo would understand why I’d lied to him, that he’d give me a second chance. But he’d reacted just the way I feared my parents would, if I ever told them. Shock, disappointment and, finally, rejection. I pressed my fingertips against my eyes, warding off the sting of tears. Then I opened the door to the truck’s front seat and climbed in.