Jamie nodded.
Olaf peeled the homemade DANGER sign off the card reader, and waved his ID over the panel. Magnets clicked and the door lock thumped. Its pistons hissed as they dragged it open.
The only sound on the main floor was the low rasp of the warning lights as they spun in their housings. The ants scurried out with image after image, comparing them to the current room. He couldn"t see anything that had changed.
"I don"t see anything different," said Jamie. She walked next to Mike, studying the room. Anne followed in their footsteps, looking at everything with her wide eyes.
"Me, neither," he said.
Sasha waved them away from the door. They walked around a tool chest and onto the main floor. Something crunched under Jamie"s shoe. She glanced down and lifted her foot. One of the green c.o.c.kroaches dragged itself away on its front legs.
"Hope n.o.body"s got a thing about bugs," Mike said.
Roaches covered the main floor. A few hundred of them scurried back and forth. They darted out from under the workstations and toolboxes and the oversized resistors. Some of them crawled over the ramp and the platform. As the red light pa.s.sed over them they turned black, then back to green.
"f.u.c.king roaches," said Sasha. "They"ll even survive a hole in reality."
Anne raised an eyebrow.
"We should be grateful they"re not carnivorous or something," said Jamie. "Zombie roaches."
"Thanks for putting that out to the universe," Olaf said.
"Multiverse," said Mike.
"Even better."
One of the roaches stopped in front of Mike and Anne. It wiggled its antennae in their direction. The tips seemed to glow, like fiber-optic threads. Then it dashed away.
They stepped over and around the roaches and moved toward the rings. Mike watched for any ripples in the air, but there was nothing.
He couldn"t shake the feeling that the rings were waiting for them to get closer.
- THE RINGS LOOMED over Sasha up on their platform. They"d never looked quite so big before. She thought about how they called them mouths, and then about how she was standing in front of a huge, open mouth of copper and steel.
She set one foot on the ramp and paused. Mike had offered to do the high bolts, but as the only engineer left, she"d insisted. She counted to three, hoped she wouldn"t end up like Bob, and took two quick steps up onto the platform.
Sasha stood there for a moment, feeling the dance of static electricity on her skin. The warning light from the other Site B flashed in her eyes and she stared through the Door at the other room. "So do you think..." She glanced down at the others. "Is Neil still alive over there?"
"Don"t get distracted," Olaf said.
"He might be alive."
"He might not be," said Mike. "And it doesn"t matter, because he still wouldn"t be our Neil."
"I don"t think any of us are "our" people anymore," said Jamie.
Sasha tore her eyes away from the sights on the other side of the rings. "Okay," she said, "there and there." She used her socket wrench to point at a hex nut for each of them. She settled her tool over a higher one and cranked it four-five-six times. The sound always made her think of New Year"s Eve noisemakers. Always. Even when she was little and her father worked on cars. He"d give her a small socket wrench and she"d spin it in the air.
That"s my memory, she thought. All mine. So I"m still me.
She spun the nut off the last half inch of threads with her fingertips. Then she popped the thick washer off and dropped both bits in her pocket. Odds were they"d never be rea.s.sembling the rings, but old habits were tough to break.
She glanced down. Mike and Jamie almost had bolt seven off. Olaf had eight, one of the tough ones that had to be wrenched off all the way to the end of the bolt. Anne was holding the other side of it still with her own ratchet.
Over on Site B, the sun moved out from a heavy cloud to a thinner one, brightening the room by a slight amount. Sasha"s eyes flicked up, and for a moment she thought someone had left the blinds open on a window, because she could see straight through the other building to the field of sand and scrub behind it. Although there were very few plants growing, and the few she saw were withered and gray. It looked like everything behind Site B had been dead for ages.
Then she realized that Site B didn"t have a window. Definitely not a panoramic one that gave the outside world a view of the rings. And it crossed her mind that the view had switched to the real Site B, a wreck of a building filled with gaping holes that was going to be condemned as soon as someone official saw it. But just as fast, she realized the rings on Site B no longer worked, and she was looking somewhere else. Somewhere where something else had destroyed the other building but left the rings standing.
And then something beyond the shattered wall moved. Something tall and lean, wrapped in a ragged cloak. There was a flash of eyes beneath a rough cowl.
Sasha took in all of it between two heartbeats.
Then she blinked, and when she opened her eyes Site B-the undamaged Site B-filled her view. She glanced down and saw Anne staring at the rings. Through the rings. Her eyes were wide, her lips hung open. "Did you see that?" Sasha asked.
Anne"s brow wrinkled. Her head went up and down once, as if she didn"t want to end the moment by speaking or looking away. She stared through the Door, willing the ruined world to appear again.
Sasha"s eyes drifted back to her own bolts and she blinked. The inside nut was still in place. She thought it had come off a little too easy. Her wrench had just been spinning air and she was too on edge to notice.
Or had it? The matching bolt on the other side of the plastic carapace was gone. Had she pulled that one and moved on without thinking? She didn"t think she"d done two already. But she patted her thigh and felt hardware.
She fitted the socket over the bolt, checked to make sure it was solid, and cranked the handle back and forth. The wrench clattered and pulled, clattered and pulled, and then the resistance faded and she tugged it free. She grabbed the nut between her thumb and two fingers, spun it off the threads, and dropped it in her pocket.
It slid against her thigh and clunked against the other bolt. They felt too heavy. Something wasn"t right. She scooped everything out of her pocket and looked at it.
She had three of the heavy silver hex nuts, even though she"d only taken off two of them. She looked at the bolt she"d just freed up. The one she thought she"d done before.
It had a silver nut on it, backed with a washer.
The air tingled and her pulse jumped in her chest, hard enough that she felt the shift. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.
Sasha set the wrench over the bolt. She tugged the lever, felt the nut loosen and give, heard the ratchet click-click-click as she swung it back to tug again. The wrench turned again and again, moving the nut along the threads toward the end of the bolt. She pulled the socket away and worked it off with her fingers. The washer b.u.mped off, shaking along the threads.
Behind the washer was another silver nut. And another washer. She glanced over at the matching point. It was bolted again, too.
"What"s taking so long?" They all jumped at Arthur"s booming voice. Sasha glanced up at the booth.
Below her and to the left, Jamie coughed. "I don"t know about you guys," she said, "but I think I"ve got a problem."
Sasha looked down. "f.u.c.k," she said. "I think we do."
Jamie looked up and their eyes met. "What"s wrong?"
"Your hair," Sasha said. "It"s changed color."
Olaf looked over at Jamie and frowned. Jamie grabbed a lock of hair and pulled it around in front of her face. She squinted. "It has?"
"Yeah," said Sasha.
"No," said Anne. "It hasn"t."
"Yes, it has. It"s platinum blond."
"It was always like that," Jamie said. "Always has been."
Sasha shook her head. "You just switched." She glanced at Mike. "Tell her."
Mike pressed his mouth into a line. "Jamie didn"t change," he said.
"Yes, she did." Sasha stopped and stared past Mike. The warning light was still spinning on the main floor. But it had changed color. Instead of a deep, orange-amber, it was fire engine red.
She looked at Jamie again. "The safe word," she said. "It"s Spock, after your cat, right?"
Jamie didn"t answer. Neither did Mike or Olaf. Anne stared at her.
"Ahhh, f.u.c.k," Sasha said.
FORTY-TWO.
They stared at Sasha and the bright streak of white running through her hair. The Rogue stripe, Mike had heard kids call it. It started above her left eye and stretched back across her scalp.
Sasha looked back at them. Her eyes were wide, but her breathing was still even. She studied each of their faces in turn.
Mike gave her a moment. "You going to be okay?"
She focused on him. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I"m okay."
"Not to sound cold," Olaf said with a glance at the others, "but I think this emphasizes that we shouldn"t spend too much time in here." He gestured at the bolts. "Is anyone having any luck with these things? I can take them off, but new ones appear right under them."
"Same," said Jamie.
Anne nodded, but her gaze was focused through the rings again.
"I"ve taken off three," said Sasha, double-checking her hand.
"I think they"re bleeding through," Mike said. "Overlapping. We"re taking off bolts from every version of the Door."
Arthur"s voice rang above them. "So we can"t disa.s.semble it?"
"Maybe not this way," said Sasha. "We could try the other side. It might be a localized effect."
She stepped across the platform while the others worked their way around the ramp. Sasha slipped her socket over the nut at point eleven and the wrench chattered while she levered it back and forth. It was one of the stiffer ones, and she had to use the wrench the whole way. It inched out to the end of the bolt and she shook it free of the socket.
"f.u.c.k me," she said.
Another hex nut held the washer in place.
"The same?"
She looked up at the booth and nodded.
"Is there something else we can do?" asked Mike. "Some other way to remove them?"
Sasha shook her head. "We"ll have to break them off."
"Is that safe?" Anne asked.
"Should be." Sasha banged her wrench on the off-white carapace. "None of this was intended to be high-end protective. It"s just enough to slow people down if someone tried to sneak in and get a look at the tech."
Jamie glanced around. "Cables we could unplug? Fuses we could pull? Anything?"
"We did it all a couple days ago, when the Door first stayed open," Sasha said. "The only things still hooked in are the feeds to the computer."
"Without those, we"ll have no way to monitor the Door except looking at it."
"It won"t change anything," said Jamie. "All our readings have been flatlined for days."
Mike stared out at the room. Then he looked left and right, craning his head around equipment. Jamie watched him and followed his gaze. "What"s up?"
"All the roaches are gone."
They looked around. Every one of the green bugs had vanished. The floor was empty.
"We must"ve scared them away," said Olaf. "So?"
He glanced at the barren floor again, then up at the booth. "Unless you"ve got an idea," he said to Arthur, "I think we should get out of here and regroup. We shouldn"t just stand here next to it."
"Fine. We should-LOOK OUT!"
Something moved in Mike"s peripheral vision. A splayed shape. It lunged fast. Jamie and Sasha turned to look. Olaf and Anne leaped back.
It had leaped from nowhere, appearing out of...
It had appeared out of the Door.
It landed on the floor by Jamie with a noise like pasta breaking, a baker"s dozen of hard clicks in a row.
The figure straightened up as Mike turned his head. It was tall and thin, dressed in a one-piece garment of pale leather that seemed to be half tunic, half cloak. One of its shoulders sat higher than the other, like a hunchback without the hunch. It held a long thin spear in both hands. The ants pulled out a series of images comparing it to a javelin, or maybe a harpoon. He swept them away. The hands were shiny and gray. They reminded Mike of raw oysters.
It had bare feet with the same wet-gray skin. Its toenails were thick and pale. The ends were cracked and jagged. They looked b.l.o.o.d.y in the red light. The nails curled around the figure"s toes like claws, or maybe hooves.