“Then the sooner we find out what they’re up to and why the better. No time for any of us to lose.” Ahdi points at the door. “Go.”
Before Ahdi finishes speaking, Daniel has opened the window and thrown himself out. He breaks into glowing particles. They swirl through the window and disappear in a flourish.
“He knows where he’s going, right?” Ellie’s gaze is stuck where Daniel had been.
“I’ve taken him there before.” Ahdi sighs. “Wherever he ends up, you’d better be there to keep him out of trouble. People have never been his strong suit.”
If Ahdi is trying not to sound resigned, he’s not trying very hard. He waves goodbye, then goes to the kitchen. That weird sense of cabinets and the counter changing but remaining exactly the same pervades Ellie.
The living room shatters around her. It breaks into shining particles that scatter in all directions. In the void left in their wake, a slim shimmering thread extends away from her. Daniel, to his credit, when Ellie didn’t immediately follow him, thought to lay a trail.
The first time Ellie followed a trail, it was a thick, knotted rope. She was twelve and her mom had laid it for her to follow. There is no “where” in the void between universes, but Ellie felt her mom envelop her, guiding her through the transformations along the trail. She felt like a matrix being inverted or transposed. That odd sensation faded over time, over many trips to the skunkworks.
Following Daniel’s thread feels like that first time, except the cold void is where Mom’s reassuring presence once was. The system of equations that is Ellie in the void is being transformed in ways she has only ever studied, not experienced firsthand. Wherever Daniel is leading her, it is distant and distinctly alien.
CHAPTER 17
Ellie is suspended in a dim haze. A lattice of bookcases surrounds her. Up, down, left, right, ahead, behind, some number of other orthogonal directions that don’t exist in her own universe. The bookcases form a complex, nested pattern that stretches to infinity. She gasps and the air seizes into a solid inside her throat and lungs. It’s fluid again in the next instant and she meters it out of her nose and mouth. Faint eddies of turbulence whirl around her.
The haze should be nowhere near viscous enough to support her weight. It does so anyway.
Ellie pushes against the air, like a mime trapped behind a make-believe wall. The air pushes back and holds like a sheet of plasterboard. Her fingers fatten and her palms spread against the pressure. As she lets up, her hands break through. Her body pitches forward. She slams into a hardened haze that dissolves into nothingness the instant it stops her only to harden again an instant later.
Her feet lose traction. They slip out from under her. Her body rotates. The haze tenses into a solid and relaxes back to a fluid as she falls. Wisps of haze circle around her as she crashes through what feels like layer after layer of balsa wood. She flails her arms out. As she does, she’s struck by a thought. It would have worked so much better if she’d stretched out her arms smoothly and pushed. Instead, she keeps crashing as the haze solidifiesand dissolves around her until gravity pushes her directly into the air.
Ellie is upside down, supported by her arms. Blood rushes to her head. An ache works its way from her fingers, through her palm, and past her wrist to her vibrating forearms. The only thing that could make this more humiliating would be Daniel trying very, very hard not to laugh.
Daniel, however, is nowhere to be seen. Not that she trusts her eyes to parse so many dimensions at once.
“Ellie, are you here?” Daniel’s sandpaper voice drifts toward her from some direction her brain keeps insisting is impossible.
“Where are we?”
“I think we’re in one of the stacks.” Daniel’s voice does not exude confidence. “I mean, we’re literally surrounded by documentation. If so, that would be bad. The isolationists don’t exactly invite people to skulk around their stacks without permission.”
“Lovely.” Ellie lets out a long sigh. “Where are you? Talking to a disembodied voice I can’t place is going to freak me out.”
“The bookcases are all marked with their coordinates. Let me know where you are. I’ll come over.”
“You move one inch and I’ll flambé you whenever I reach you.” Ellie is not going to be defeated by some non-Newtonian fluid in a universe with too many physical dimensions. “Tell me where you are.”
Daniel rattles off a long string of numbers. The bookcase next to Ellie is one of who knows how many, all nearly identical. Tall, broad, and deep, they are all gray fastened to equally gray backing. The paint has flecked off the bookcase next to Ellie, exposing the dull, bare metal underneath. Motley collections of books alternate with pristine planes of air on the shelves. A sign with a set of numbers is riveted to one of the sidewalls. Daniel’s not that far away. Some of the numbers even match.
One by one, she marches her hands up. Her body cantilevers from upside down toward horizontal. Five steps in, she reaches out and feels nothing but air. Her body drops, then stops as the sudden movement hardens the haze below her. She wouldn’t call it falling, but she’s upside down again, her weight balanced over her arms.
She stumbles back into the handstand several times before she manages to walk her hands upright. The trick is to move smoothly except when she shouldn’t. She hasn’t figured out all of the haze’s properties. Who knows what’s supporting her weight, but she’s upright now and can walk. Mostly.
Ellie teeters into a bookcase. It doesn’t budge. Magnets and control logic line the sides of the shelf. Magnetic suspension locks it in place, equidistant from all of its neighbor bookcases.
“You’re moving away from me, Ellie.”
Ellie stops. She clings onto one of the bookcase’s shelves. Her stomach sinks and it’s not due to the weird properties of the air around her.
“You can see me?”
“Sure. You’re not exactly far away.”
“So you saw me flopping around.”
