A couple of things about Daniel suddenly make sense. He takes after Ahdi in ways that Ahdi probably does not want or intend. She wouldn’t be shocked if Daniel is an accidental assassin the way Ahdi is an accidental head of a cabal. If Ahdi is hard to kill, then Daniel must be nearly as hard. Or, at least, throwing him out a window won’t do the trick. Of course, he doesn’t let on about that even when it’d be useful for Ellie to know. Daniel is practically her brother, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t days when she thinks he’s too stupid to live.
Ellie stares at Ahdi. Daniel is casual again, leaning against the wall. Apparently, he sees nothing weird about Ahdi circling the room like a giant lizard and feeling the baseboards.
“Ahdi.” Ellie pauses to choose her words even though there’s no good way to ask. “What are you doing?”
“Ellie, study the structure of this room.” Ahdi doesn’t look up. “What do you think I’ve changed about it?”
What’s different isn’t obvious. It takes Ellie a minute, or maybe Ahdi’s question makes time flow like pitch.
“Chirality.” She nods her head slowly. “You’ve rotated the molecular structure of the studs and baseboards.”
“I have left-handed wood!” Daniel bristles and glares back when Ellie and Ahdi both turn to him. “What?”
“Anyway.” Ahdi grins. “This should stop anyone who needs to understand the structure of a place first. At least until they study this room again. Speaking of which.”
He looks pointedly at the two of them. Daniel is tapping on his cell phone.
“Oh, I did that already.” He doesn’t look up. “I’m just telling Belt what’s up, so he’ll take the Metro the next time he wants to show up.”
Ellie’s jaw clenches in concentration. Studying the room is like being dropped into the ocean. The body hits something that should be soft but isn’t when you’re falling that fast. For a moment, she can’t breathe. Chirality is not the only thing that’s changing. Uncannily, the room is a rectangular box with eight too many corners before it suddenly has the right number again. Everything snaps into place and becomes something she can contain in her mind.
“How are you doing that?” Ellie lets the wonder fill her voice.
“I can show you.” Ahdi gestures for her to come over.
“Is this really the right time?” Daniel puts his phone away. “Isn’t there a conspiracy of maintainers rewriting the laws of the universe that we need to unwind or something?”
“I will say”—Ahdi stands up—“the changes they’re making are perverse.”
It’s a moment before Ellie remembers. Very little changes in the skunkworks without Ahdi noticing.
“Perverse?” Ellie asked.
“It’s a lot of work for so little effect.” Ahdi’s words are slow and careful. “They’ve bolted a lot of machinery on existing mechanisms. A sufficiently high-energy particle collider might reveal a tiny difference in the mass distribution of collisions. No one else would notice any change in the universe at all.”
“So they’ve really ‘leapt on’ to these changes?” Daniel’s jaw drops when both Ahdi and Ellie glare at him. “What? That’s funny!”
“After I finish with the apartment, there’s a hunch I need to check out with some folks in the universe surrounding ours regarding their skunkworks.” Ahdi looks at himself, then brushes off his shirt and pants. “In the meantime, I need you two to do me a favor.”
“Sure.” Daniel rubs his hands in anticipation. “Anything you ask.”
“Daniel, at least wait to find out what I want first.” Ahdi closes his eyes and masters himself before continuing. “I need you two to go to the isolationists’ archive. It has the most complete change records that exist. They’re undoubtedly recording changes right now. Go there and figure out what this cabal is trying to do.”
“The isolationists’ archive?” Ellie asks, her mind stuffed with her sister’s tales of murdered maintainers.
“Drop my name. They’ll let you in.” A tiny cube of intricately folded planes of air materializes in his hand. “Show them this.”
Ellie waits a beat before taking the cube and stuffing it in a pocket. A sharp corner digs into her skin.
“Any hints on what we should look for?” Ellie asks.
“What they’re doing is technically somewhat interesting. Their machinery more or less doesn’t function given the current physics of the skunkworks. Change the physics of the universe that’s one level out—the one that our skunkworks lives in—and their machinery will kick in and the physics of our universe will change. So I’m going to ask around—”
Ellie and Daniel exchange glances. Neither one says anything.
“The physics of that universe has already changed some.” Ahdi is stating a conclusion, not asking a question.
“That’s the root cause for the hold-time violation I fixed before I dismantled the contraption trapping Mom,” Ellie says. “The logic was fine, but the physics of the universe that the skunkworks lives in changed out from under it. Signals propagate a little more quickly in the skunkworks now.”
