Ellie is caught dumb for a moment. Daniel has never mentioned this before. Even Belt looks stunned.
“Your… suicide attempt?” Ellie treads carefully.
“You try living as a gay boy with my parents sometime. Sure, it wasn’t a very good attempt, but I didn’t deserve to be mocked. She was sarcastic and disdainful, laughing as she taunted me to try again. I’ll never forget it.” Daniel is completely casual about all of this. “After I met Ahdi, I told him about her, who told Aunt Vera, who couldn’t believe him, just like she couldn’t believe you.”
Belt tries to hug Daniel, but he steps out of the way and waves Belt off. He doesn’t want to be hugged at the moment.
“I’m so sorry, Daniel.” Ellie struggles for words that are at least adequate. “I had no idea.”
“Of course not.” Daniel is warm and kind. He hands her phone back. “You were like six. No one should have told you.”
“It’s like I said, though. Mom’s dead, and she no longer feels the pressure to be the best daughter.”
“Who texts their sincere, heartfelt apology?” Daniel puts his arm around Belt’s waist. “At least make the phone call.”
“He has a point.” Belt stretches his arm across Daniel’s back. “And if she really is sorry, there’s no reason to tell you to come over right now.”
Daniel looks oddly at Belt for a moment. His eyes widen and his jaw drops. He disentangles himself from Belt, sits down, and studies the note.
“Ahdi always explains himself. Sometimes to a fault. So I can decide for myself.” Daniel stands, folds the note into quarters, then slides it into a pocket. “I don’t think he wrote this. I mean, it’s his handwriting but it’s not his writing. I don’t think he’s the one who doesn’t want us to go to him.”
Ellie can’t not hold on to the hope that Chris is finally ready to be her sister. Still, Belt is right. The Chris who has changed will wait.
“Then whyarewe still here?”
Daniel waves goodbye to his boyfriend, then throws himself at the wall. Rather than bouncing off or, more likely, crashing through the wall, he melts into it.
“OK, that’s a lot.” Belt whistles. “I am never doing that.”
“The last time he left here, he threw himself out the window.” Ellie shrugs. “See you later, Belt.”
Ellie does not aim for the wall. She dissolves into the air, like a normal person.
CHAPTER 22
As Ellie falls to the floor of Neeson’s office, a few thoughts blur through her mind. Who would end a trail twelve feet off the ground? Actually, she knows who. How does someone end a trail twelve feet off the ground? It’s one thing if you haven’t gotten it completely together and you have problems with reentry. It’s another if you’re Ahdi, who has it several orders of magnitude more together than most maintainers if not all of them. That leaves Ellie’s last thought in less than six feet of falling. Why would someone end a trail twelve feet off the ground?
Daniel is right below her. He crashes into Neeson from above. This has the effect that one might expect when a mountain materializes in midair and gravity does its thing. The victim crumples like a beer can.
“Daniel, keep him down!” Ahdi shouts from the other side of the room. “I’ll explain in a moment.”
Ellie rolls off of Daniel and lands crouched on all fours next to him. Neeson struggles in vain beneath Daniel, who is way more diligent than he needs to be. His hold on Neeson is never going to break, but Daniel screws up his face and keeps his body taut as though if only he can maintain control until the end of the period, he can beat the world champion in Greco-Roman wrestling on points. From his dedication, one might think it’s a challenge to keep Neeson under control. One would be wrong. His casual easy breaths are a dead giveaway.
“Ellie, I have to make some changes to the structures of thisoffice.” Ahdi points at the door. “Meanwhile, I need you to stop anyone from coming in. If you can do that without killing them, that would be preferable.”
Ellie’s not sure whether that last sentence says more about Ahdi, what Ahdi thinks of her, or what she has gotten herself into. Nevertheless, now’s not the time to figure that out. The commotion of two maintainers falling to the ground has alerted whoever is on the other side of the door. Footfalls pound. Loud words fall over each other. Some sort of high-pitched whine floats above all that.
A nickel coating makes the door and the jamb promising enough to look into. Just as Ellie hoped, every once in a while Neeson also needs the door barricaded for his own reasons. Underneath the nickel coating, two layers of rare earth alloy lie in concentric rectangles, one surrounding the door, the other surrounding the jamb. It’d only take a nudge to turn the alloy into a magnetic one. Neeson had a door installed here that one of his minions can stick shut.
Ellie lurches past Daniel. Her hands slap the door. That’s close enough for her to give the alloy the push it needs to become magnetic. The door binds to the jamb. The footfalls stop. The door rattles or at least it tries to. It also muffles the swearing from the other side. Someone pounds on the door but the sound is more of a dull thud than the splinter of wood. There’s every possibility that the door will hold for a bit. Hopefully, whichever builder Neeson normally keeps around to bind and unbind the door is busy in the skunkworks wrecking physics. Either way, they’ll still have to track that builder down and that might take a minute or three.
“OK, I figure we have a few minutes.” Ellie leans against the door. “Ahdi, what is going on?”
Ahdi leans against a desk on the other side of the room. His thick, meaty arms are folded against his chest. He smiles pleasantly, waiting. The silent countdown running in his head becomes obvious when it reaches zero and he nods.
The changes to the structure of the office explode in Ellie’s mind. She slumps to a sit, still pressing against the door. Ahdi has manipulated the curled-up dimensions beyond the third but only within the walls. Ellie makes a mental note to ask him what he’s done and how at some appropriate time, which is not now. Daniel still has Neeson crushed under him. The former still looks determined and utterly unaffected. The latter spasms for a moment, for all the good it does him.
“Everyone OK?” Ahdi smiles when Ellie and Daniel both nod. “Excellent. You two have helped me win a bet I made with the honorable Mr. Neeson here.”
