Ultraviolet (21 page)

“After all that nonsense about sending them back through the wormhole, I was beginning to wonder if I could rely on you. That Earth girl’s quite devoted to you, isn’t she? What are you going to do with her? Keep her as a pet?”

“Don’t be vulgar,” said Faraday, but the reproach was mild. “I owe her a great deal for helping me find the relay again. I’d like to see her treated well.”

“Ah, yes. The relay.” The amusement in Mathis’s voice faded. “When your transmitter stopped working, I thought you were dead. I scanned for days, trying to find the signal again, but there was no trace of you. If I’d known it was just a malfunction . . .”

He was lying, and for a moment I wondered why. Then realization inched up my brain stem, and my skin began to crawl with horror.

“No need to explain,” said Faraday. “It’s all in the past. I’m more interested in what you were doing with Tori. It can’t have been easy convincing the others to go along with your idea of sending her to Earth, after what had happened to me.”

But the other scientists hadn’t known what had happened to Faraday. He had just disappeared, and Mathis had pretended he knew nothing about it. I wanted to fling the door open and shout at Faraday to get out of there, but I’d promised not to interrupt, and he’d asked me to trust him. I could only hope that Mathis wasn’t carrying a weapon underneath that tailored uniform.

“It wasn’t easy,” Mathis said. “But eventually they came around. Still, we’d only been observing her progress for a few years when we got the order to suspend the Earth project. The other scientists were prepared to give up on Tori’s part of the experiment, since she was still a child and we didn’t know if she’d survive to maturity. If I hadn’t come up with the idea of accelerating the mouth of the wormhole . . .”

Faraday drew in a sharp breath. “So
that’s
what happened. You increased the time differential between the two relays, and collected years’ worth of information in—what? A matter of weeks?”

“Exactly. I’d meant to continue my observations until she reached adulthood. But when the readings spiked and I realized she’d been injured, I had to activate the relay and retrieve her a little earlier than planned. Still, she’s close enough to maturity that it hardly matters. I think it’s safe to declare the experiment a success.”

“I should think so,” said Faraday, with a dryness so subtle that even I nearly missed it. “So now you’ve got Tori, what’s going to happen to her?”

“Well, the war’s going to make it difficult to do much with her right away,” said Mathis. “But obviously we’ll want to examine her and do a few interviews, and put her through a number of medical and psychological tests.”

“And after that?”

“Who knows? It’s not my decision. But her conception was unlicensed, she’s mixed-class, and she’s had no proper education. And with that feisty attitude of hers, I doubt the Meritocracy will think it’s a good idea to release her—she’s likely to just go off and join the uprising. So once we’ve got all the information we need from her, I imagine she’ll just be terminated.”

My stomach knotted. I clutched the edge of the door, clenching my teeth against the impulse to cry out. If Mathis realized that I’d not only been eavesdropping, but that I’d actually understood what he said, Tori and I would be in even more danger than we were already.

“That seems a little excessive, doesn’t it?” asked Faraday.

“Maybe,” said Mathis. “But why waste time fretting over things that can’t be changed, especially when you have such a great future ahead of you? Think of it, Astin—you’re the first scientist ever to visit another planet. Not only did you make contact with the natives and live among them for years, you brought one back for us to study. If I didn’t have Tori, I might envy you.” He chuckled, and for a moment he reminded me of Kirk. “We’re both about to become very famous men, my friend. So why don’t we forget these unnecessary details, and go and have a drink to celebrate?”

The taste his words left in my mouth was so thick and foul I wanted to vomit.
Don’t go
, I pleaded silently with Faraday.
Don’t trust him.
. . .

“I should probably see how Alison and Tori are doing first,” said Faraday.

“Why?” asked Mathis. “It’s not as though they can go anywhere.”

“True,” Faraday replied. “All right, then.”

My legs felt shaky, and my head swam with nausea. I was afraid to let go of the door, in case it made a sound when it closed. But when I risked a glance through the porthole the two of them were already rising from their seats, and I had no more time for caution. I held my breath, slipped my fingers out of the crack, and ran.

“Don’t worry,” she said without looking at me, “I won’t break it.”

“I was more afraid you’d beam yourself into space.”

Tori snorted derisively. “Accidentally on purpose? Thanks, but I can think of better ways to go.”

I watched her tease the relay open, prying apart its outer shell to reveal the workings within. “That’s what I thought,” she murmured, and then with a deft twist she detached the silvery ball from the ceiling and climbed back down with it in her hand.

“What are you trying to do?” I asked.

She looked at me bleakly. “I’m not sure. I guess I’m just not ready to give up yet. Everyone and everything that matters to me is back on Earth. There has to be a way to get the wormhole open again, no matter what Mathis says.”

I wanted to tell her what else Mathis had said, but the words stuck in my throat. What good would it do for her to know that she was probably going to die? It couldn’t make her any more determined than she already was, and if we couldn’t open the wormhole again she’d find out soon enough. “I hope you’re right,” I said. “This place . . . we don’t belong here.”

“You’re really pale,” said Tori. “Even for you, I mean. Are you okay? Where’s Sebastian?”

That name still felt so intimate to me, I could hardly speak it without blushing. Even knowing it wasn’t really his, it summed up everything I felt about him, all the things I wanted when he touched me but was afraid we’d never have the chance to share. How could she just throw it out like that, as though it had no significance at all? “He’s with Mathis,” I said. “They’re . . . talking.”

“Then why do you look so scared?”

I rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes. “It’s probably nothing. Faraday knows what he’s doing. But I don’t trust Mathis.”

“I don’t either,” said Tori. “Anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to stick a chip in a baby’s arm and beam her off to an alien planet, just to see if she survives? Not a nice person.” She peered into the relay for a few more seconds, then closed it up and dropped it into her bag. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Inventory,” she said cryptically, and off we went.

We spent the next half hour or so exploring the station, particularly the side that had been closed off to us before. Tori stopped to open every box and inspect every piece of equipment we came across, muttering to herself all the while. What this was supposed to achieve was a mystery to me, but at least it gave me something to do other than worry, and by the time we’d completed our circuit of the outer corridor and headed back up to the observatory, Tori was in better spirits.

“There’s still some good stuff left around here,” she said. “We should be able to do
something
with it. I just don’t know . . .” She stopped, frowning at my stiff body and unfocused eyes. “What?”

I could feel him coming up the passageway behind us, the air around him seething with bitterness and barely restrained anger. There was blood on his knuckles, sweat on his skin, and something metal in his hand.

“Something just happened.” My voice was tight. “Something very bad.”

“To who?”

“Faraday,” I whispered, and then he walked in.

“There you are.” Faraday sounded as affable as ever, but his eyes were dark. “Tori, may I borrow you for a moment? I need you to lock a door.”

“Which door?”

“The one Mathis is currently sleeping behind. You can have this back now,” he said, and tossed her the injector he’d been holding. The capsule plugged into its base was nearly empty.

“You drugged him?” I said.

“Seriously?” said Tori.

Faraday didn’t answer. He led us back to the outer corridor, where an open door led into a set of living quarters twice the size of any we’d seen before. Inside, Mathis was sprawled unconscious on the matting, his bronze hair in disarray and blood seeping out of his nose.

“I’m afraid I had to hit him first,” said Faraday.

Tori’s face lit up. She tugged the door shut, dumped out her tool kit and set to work, prying open the mechanism and shifting the beads into the locking pattern. “He’s not going to get out of there any time soon,” she said as she snapped the panel closed.

Faraday looked at me. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

“I know why,” I said. “Because he’s a liar. He never really lost the signal from your transmitter. He left you on Earth on purpose, because you were smarter than he was and he was sick of working in your shadow. He tricked you into thinking he was your friend, and then he betrayed you, to serve his own ambition. And if you hadn’t stopped him, he would have done it again.”

We were all silent, looking at the closed door. “So,” said Tori at last, “now what?”

Faraday straightened up with a visible effort. “Now,” he said, “we go to the infirmary so I can get the transmitter out of your arm, and give Alison something to help with her withdrawal. Then we’ll see if we can’t find a way to open that worm-hole again, and get the two of you back home.”

As she wiped the back of her hand across her brow, I could still see the mark on her arm; according to Faraday, it would take a few months before the transmitter dissolved completely. But it was deactivated now, as was his, and I’d never have to hear either of them make the Noise again.

“Excellent,” said Faraday, not turning around. He’d called up a blueprint of the station on the overhead screen—it looked like a wheel with two spokes and a bubble in the middle—and was studying it intently. “Fortunately, he hadn’t yet gotten around to dismantling the wormhole stabilizer, and I think we might be able to put together a quantum impulse generator from the components we have left.”

“So you can do it?” I asked, hope and dread warring inside me. “You really think you can open the wormhole again?”

“We may be able to open
a
wormhole,” corrected Faraday. “But the likelihood of getting the right one on the first try, or even the second or third, is infinitesimally small. I can calculate the right coordinates for the rift, but when it comes to finding Earth again—that’s going to be the tricky part.”

“I don’t care,” said Tori. “At least we can try. You tell me what you need, and I’ll figure out how to make it happen.”

Faraday smiled at her. “I know you will.”

“What about me?” I asked. “How can I help?”

The glance that Tori and Faraday shared was a conversation in itself, and it didn’t take me long to realize what it meant. “Never mind,” I told them, backing away. “I’ll just watch.”

The two of them lost no time in getting to work, Faraday checking readings and making adjustments to the controls while Tori dashed around setting up equipment. From the determined way they both went about their tasks, they seemed to have rejected even the possibility of failure.

I wished I could do the same. But as I sat there and watched them, all I could think about was what would happen if this didn’t work. As long as Faraday had at least pretended to be on the same side as Mathis, there’d been a chance that he’d be welcomed back by his fellow scientists, and that he could protect Tori and me with his influence. But now that he’d turned against his former ally and staked everything on getting the two of us back home, there was no telling what the future would hold for any of us.

Faraday must have sensed my worried gaze on his back, because he turned and looked at me. “How do you feel?” he asked.

I rubbed the tender spot on my shoulder where the injection had gone in. Faraday had said it would help my withdrawal symptoms, but I still felt tired and a little queasy. Maybe it was just the stress. “I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “Go and lie down. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

I didn’t want to leave him. But I didn’t want to be a distraction, either—not when what he and Tori were doing was so important. Reluctantly I got up and headed for the door.

I stirred, blinking, as Faraday’s voice warmed my spine. When I lay down, I hadn’t expected to sleep at all, let alone so deeply. But now I sensed that I’d been out for at least—

I sat up. “How long have I been asleep?” Faraday turned his wrist over to look at his watch, but I spoke first: “Three hours and forty-six minutes.”

“How did you know that?” asked Faraday, and I tasted the ripe-tomato burst of his surprise.

“I’ve started to see time as a spectrum,” I said. “When I went to sleep the time was sage green, and now it’s lavender.”

“Your synesthesia’s changed again?”

I nodded. “And it’s not just the time thing. I can smell emotions now. I can sense the shape of things, feel their texture, even tell you what color they are, without looking at them. And when you sent me out of the observatory, so you could talk to Mathis in your own language . . . I didn’t recognize any of the words, but I understood what you were saying.”

Faraday exhaled slowly and sat down next to me. “I wondered,” he said. “The way you looked at me, when I told you I’d knocked him out . . . it was a little too knowing. And a little too relieved, as well.”

“I was so afraid for you,” I whispered, leaning against his shoulder. “After what he said about Tori, how he didn’t even seem to care if she lived or died . . . I couldn’t believe you’d go off with him like that. Especially when he’d already tried to kill you once.”

“He’s not a murderer, Alison. He’s just like I was before I came to your world, too full of his own ideas and ambitions to think about anything else. He didn’t want me dead, only out of the way.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Faraday didn’t answer. He just sat there, smelling of soap and sorrow—and that was when I knew what he’d come to tell me.

“You couldn’t open the wormhole,” I said.

“Actually, we did. We tested the impulse generator, and it worked perfectly. But . . .” He looked down at his lean, chemical-stained hands. “We have no way of detecting what’s on the other side, no way to tell whether we’ve found Earth’s solar system or some lifeless region of space. The most crucial component of the long-range scanner is missing, and even if we could rig up a replacement, it would take days to calibrate.” He slid an arm around my waist, dropping his cheek against my hair. “Days we don’t have. I’m sorry.”

The fragrance around him was duskier than regret or melancholy. It was despair. Which meant that we couldn’t just transmit ourselves to some far-off hideaway or join the uprising against the Meritocracy. Faraday had already considered all the alternatives he could think of, and saw no way out of this situation for any of us.

So Tori would be handed over to the scientists for testing. Faraday would have to answer for what he’d done to Mathis— assaulting a fellow scientist, attempting to sabotage his work. And I’d be trapped on an alien world, a prisoner for the rest of my life. I knew I should feel something—scared, upset, maybe even angry—but I couldn’t. There was just this empty space in the middle of my chest, like a black hole, swallowing everything.

“I’m sorry,” Faraday said again, his arms tightening around me. I buried my face against his collarbone and clung to him, tears pricking behind my closed eyelids. We held each other for the space of several heartbeats, and then he slipped a finger under my chin and tilted my head up.

A feverish warmth flooded my body as I realized what was about to happen. I’d dreamed of this moment, but I hadn’t wanted it to be like this, all tangled up in grief and the desperate need for comfort. Yet as Faraday’s lips whispered along my hairline, grazed the curve of my cheek, and brushed across my lashes, all my resistance melted. I couldn’t pull away.

His mouth hovered over mine, an unspoken question. I breathed a silent
yes
, and as we kissed his hand spread warm across the small of my back, right where his voice touched me.

Comet trails of indigo and violet streaked through my inner vision, and electricity sparked all over my skin. Our breaths mingled, quick and shallow, while my lips melted open and the blood pounded through me in a pleasure so intense it was only a shade away from pain. I had never been this close to another human being, yet I ached to pull him even closer, to merge into him like one drop of water into another and lose myself, even if only for a little while.

It was so tempting to give in. To lie down and pull him over me like a blanket, to bury myself in the weight of his body and the touch of his lips and hands. To shut out the rest of the universe and abandon myself completely to sensation, for as long as I could make this moment last.

But I couldn’t, because this wasn’t just about me. It was my fault Tori was trapped on this station right now, and it was my responsibility to do everything I could to help her. And the words Faraday had spoken just a few moments before he kissed me—
we have no way to detect what’s on the other side
—kept rewriting themselves more and more insistently in my mind.

I caught Faraday’s face between my hands and broke off the kiss, breathless. “I’ve just thought of something,” I said. “Something we haven’t tried.”

“There’s a lot of things we haven’t tried,” he said, “but I’m going to refrain from the obvious, and assume you’re talking about the wormhole. What is it?”

“My synesthesia,” I said. “I know it’s probably impossible, but—when I was at Pine Hills, every time I looked at the night sky, I heard music. Always the same music, but totally different from the song that the stars sing out here. I’d know that song again. And there’s the relay, too—it’s still sending out a signal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s incredibly unlikely that you’d be able to sense Earth at such a distance,” Faraday said. “Even with all the help I can give you. And yet—” His voice brightened with excitement. “You’ve never really tested the limits of your abilities, have you?”

“No. I’ve always been afraid of opening myself up too far, in case . . .”

In case I lose my mind
. The thought scared me so much, I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the sentence. And yet if I couldn’t do this now, with my senses fully at my command for the first time ever, and all our lives at stake . . .

I took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I want to try.”

As I lowered it over my head I braced myself for discomfort, but it felt surprisingly light, more like a motorcycle helmet than the heavy fishbowl I’d expected.

“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” asked Tori.

I looked down at the crate I was sitting in—seven feet long, three feet wide, and lined with spongy foam. “No, but I do have a fear of being buried alive.”

“We’re not going to bury you,” she assured me. “There’s plenty of oxygen in there, and you can take the lid off yourself if you want to. It’s just to keep you from getting distracted.”

I lay down gingerly, lowering my arms to my sides. “Okay,” I said.

“I can close it up now?”

I licked my dry lips. “Yeah.”

“Good luck,” said Tori, and she fitted the lid into place.

It was dark. It was silent. The box cradled me gently as God’s own hand, its soft interior molding itself to the shape of my body.

“Alison?” said Faraday’s voice in my helmet, warm and chocolaty as ever. “I’m going to switch on the feed now. Are you ready?”

“Ready,” I said, and when I opened my eyes I was looking at a field of stars, bright and shallow as glitter on black paper. “This is it?” I asked.

“It should be. Is there a problem?”

“No, but it’s sort of . . .” I squinted. “Flat.”

“Oh, of course, I forgot your tetrachromacy. My apologies.” My visor flickered and the star-field shifted into three dimensions, all its missing hues and subtle mid-tones sparking to life. “I just added in the ultraviolet range. Is that better?”

I didn’t answer. I was speechless with awe. A tapestry of iridescent light unfurled before me, star-jeweled and shimmering with all the colors of the spectrum and beyond. I’d seen the aurora borealis once and been entranced by its otherworldly glow; but this was a billion times lovelier—and more dangerous.

“Alison? Are you still with me?”

“The rift,” I whispered. “I can see it.”

“Excellent. I’m going to increase the magnification,” said Faraday. “Let me know if it gets too much.”

And with that I found myself drifting closer to the rift, until my whole vision filled with its rippling magnificence. Dreamily I lifted my hand to touch it, and only when my fingers bumped the lid of the crate did I remember that I wasn’t actually floating in space.

“Tori,” I heard Faraday say, “is the impulse generator ready?”

“Ready,” she replied.

“All right, Alison. Here we go.”

Until he said that, I’d thought I was prepared. But now I felt as though someone was scooping out my insides with a melon baller. I grabbed at the helmet, about to yell at Faraday to stop—

But it was already too late.

A needle of purple light streaked across my vision and pierced the delicate fabric of the rift. Darkness bloomed before my eyes, licking through the rainbow veil to expose a glimpse of unknown space beyond. Then the shockwave hit, and a roaring flood of synesthesia swept over me.

Ice-hot stabbing eighty-seven sour crimson slashes suffocating wet ochre thickness pounding dizzy hideous triangles fifty pulsating opaque acrid zigzags crushing white fire hurthurthurthurthurt—

My self-control shredded like tissue paper, flaying my emotions bare. I screamed and bolted upright, throwing the lid open.

“Whoa!” Tori grabbed the helmet out of my hands before I could hurl it to the floor. I collapsed back into the box, one forearm thrown over my burning eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “I can’t do this. I can’t.”

“Alison.” Faraday knelt beside me, his face drawn with concern. “What happened?”

“The wormhole—close it—please—”

Faraday got up quickly and touched something on the console. Within seconds the terror receded, and I could breathe again.

“So what’s going on?” Tori demanded. “What’s wrong with her?”

“It seems to be something to do with the impulse generator,” Faraday replied. “As soon as we fired the beam to open the wormhole, her synesthesia became unbearably intense, and as soon as we shut it down she felt better again. But what about the generator could possibly be affecting . . .” He stopped, his violet eyes widening. “Exotic matter.”

Tori frowned. “What?”

“That’s what your scientists call it. The matter we use to keep the wormhole stable once it’s open has properties unlike any other kind of matter in the universe, and there’s a great deal about it that we don’t understand. I’m wondering if somehow, between her synesthesia and her tetrachromacy, Alison is sensitive to exotic matter—and the more of it she’s exposed to, the stronger her abilities become.”