Chương 2: The First Crossing

We didn't go through right away. I'm reckless, not stupid. The difference is a matter of planning. First we analyzed the air through the aperture. Breathable. A nitrogen-oxygen mix with trace elements our sensor labeled "various-untoxic," the atmospheric equivalent of a food label that just says "and natural ingredients." Then we sent the robot. On our shoestring budget, it was a modified RC car, a GoPro, an air quality sensor, and a Geiger counter duct-taped to the top. V drew a face on it with a Sharpie.

We named it Rover because we are not creative people. Rover went through. It came back. A beach. Strange flour-sand. Green water. Simple plant life. No obvious ways to die immediately.

"The readings look clean, and the portal is stable," I said. V raised an eyebrow.

"Define clean."

"Not immediately lethal."

"Put that on the brochure.

'Moss-Ashford Interstellar Travel: Not Immediately Lethal.'" But I was already putting on my boots. We had finally poked a hole in the universal tablecloth to somewhere else, and I fully intended to be the first engineer stupid enough to file the field notes. V watched me. Something moved across her face, too fast to read, there and gone. Hungrier than worry. With math behind it. She's excited, I thought. She's calculating the value of what we've found.

In hindsight, I'd give a lot to know which calculation was running behind those eyes.

"Are you sure about this?" she asked.

"Nope."

"Good answer." V's hands stilled on the keyboard.

"Morgan, be careful, alright?" Something in her voice. My shoulders pulled in, a tension I registered and dismissed in the same breath. She's worried about you. That's what friends do. I should have listened more carefully. I was already turning toward the airlock. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Ten minutes," I said.

"If I'm not back, open a beer and start writing my obituary. Make it funny."

"It'll be the funniest obituary in the history of interdimensional travel."

"That's a low bar, V. We're the only ones." She smiled. It looked right. The same smile she'd given me a thousand times before. I stepped through. * The wormhole felt like walking through a car wash made of static electricity. Every hair on my body stood up, my teeth buzzed, and for exactly one and a half seconds, I could taste colors. Blue tasted like a nine-volt battery. Green tasted like fresh grass. Purple tasted like the hum of a transformer on a quiet street. Deeply unpleasant.

Also the most incredible sensory experience of my life, which says something about either the wormhole or the quality of my life up to that point. Then I was on the beach. The soft and powdery sand whispered under my boots. Warm air hit my face, warmer than the garage, and that metallic tang was everywhere, coating the inside of my mouth like I'd been sucking on pennies. The sky was lavender.

Two moons hung above the horizon, so close and so large they looked fake, like someone had taped fancy paper plates to the ceiling of the world. I turned around. The wormhole was there, a shimmering disc of blue-white light about six feet across, hovering two inches above the sand, its edges flickering with torn energy. Through it, I could see the garage. My workbench. Our whiteboard, covered in my handwriting. V, standing at the console, hands on the keyboard, watching me. I gave her a thumbs-up.

She gave one back. I took a couple of steps forward. Solid ground, slightly warm. I knelt, scooped a handful of the soft sand, and watched it run through my fingers. Real. Physical. Atoms forged in a different star, and they still poured like sand. The universe reuses its good material. I stood up and turned back to tell V that the sand was weird, that the air tasted like batteries, that this was the greatest moment of my entire... The wormhole was smaller. An inch, maybe two. Nothing you could see with your eyes.

But I'd been staring at that aperture for months, and I knew its dimensions the way I knew my own hands.

"V?" I called. She was still at the console. I could see her. But she wasn't looking at me anymore. She was looking down at the controls.

"V, the aperture's contracting. I'm coming back." Walking. The wormhole shrank by another few inches. Walking faster.

"Victoria." She looked up. And there it was, the expression from earlier, the one I'd been too busy to read. Clear now, through the shrinking window between worlds. It was the look of someone watching a door close and calculating what the world looked like with it shut. Running. The wormhole was the size of a window. Then a porthole. Ten feet away. Five. I reached out... Light folded in on itself like a closing eye. Gone.

My hand hung in the air, reaching for a door that no longer existed, on a planet that didn't have a name, under a sky that wasn't mine. My fingers wouldn't close. They stayed open, reaching, as if the tendons had made a decision my brain hadn't approved. Wind stirred the sand around my feet. Somewhere above me, the twin moons continued, not caring.